Who gets to decide what a word means, or if a meaning is legitimate?

The Philosophy of Language is a fascinating field, and, when it comes to communication, a very important one to know something about as it can help you understand a bit more why a conversation sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

What do you think of when I say ‘red’? Can you be sure that your ‘red’ is exactly the same as my ‘red’? What about your experience of ‘pain’... How can I be sure that what I experience as ‘pain’ is what you mean when you tell me that you feel ‘pain’? Words like ‘red’ and ‘pain’ are labels for what is in our minds, and in our minds we might have different experiences when we think of these words.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Language is formed in something called linguistic (or speech) communities, and it has to do with speech characteristics (sounds) and interpretation of what is communicated (meaning).  A linguistic community had similar norms and terms for communication – these communities can be small, like the family you grew up in or a friendship group, or big like the region or country you live in or the whole group of people who speak English around the world. The meaning we attach to certain words can very much be defined by what we have learned in the different linguistic communities we function in.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: ‘Meaning is use’, which indicates that as long as a linguistic community uses a word ‘red’ in a particular way, it has that particular meaning.
This also indicates that if a different linguistic community uses the same word ‘red’ in a different context, there might be a different meaning attached to it.

 So what does this mean for the way we communicate? Well, many things but I’d like to highlight one thing in particular.

 Based on our different interpretations of a word, we could say that there is a ‘speaker meaning’ (that what is meant by the person who talks) and an ‘audience meaning’ (that what is heard by the listener). The ultimate goal of communication is for this speaker meaning and audience meaning to match up nicely, so the person who talks and the person who listens give the same meaning to what is said. However, when these meanings don’t match, this causes confusion, which can play a big part in miscommunication.

Many conversations go off-track because of this ‘meaning confusion’. This is important to realise and recognise, so you can take control of the situation. One way of dealing with this confusion is to ask questions, and they can be as simple as: ‘When you say ‘red’, what exactly do you mean by that?’, or: ‘To me, ‘pain’ means this; is that what it means to you as well?’ When asking these questions you have to be open to the idea that you both might have to agree to disagree on the meaning of a word or sentence, but a further understanding of these different interpretations makes it more possible to have a healthy conversation.

If you assume that every person you talk to gives the exact same meaning as you to everything you say, then you are very much at risk of having an increased number of ‘difficult’ conversations. Assuming that the other person understands you is not going to help with having healthy conversations, but a few simple questions here or there can really help with keeping the conversation on point. So go ahead... next time when there is confusion, go ahead and ask for clarification. It can make a world of difference.