The War of the Words

I'm sitting in a theology class right now engaging in a discussion about the nature of death. The professor said something which reminded me about the importance of semantics.

In conversation, and especially in conversation on specific topics, we often minimize the importance of semantic arguments. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words. In particular, we revolt in conversation against people who make careful use of words. We think that such care is a violation of one of the common rules of discourse, namely, that we make an attempt to understand communicators on their own terms, trying to discern what they mean by what they say. In other words, people who nitpick definitions often frustrate us because we feel like they're not trying to understand what we're saying, or, if you prefer, that they are belaboring something when they know full well what we mean.

That said, however, I'd like to suggest to you something along the lines of an apology for semantics in everyday conversation. It is critically important. He who makes the definition controls the discussion. A few years ago, I made a list of ways to cheat in an argument. Nearly all of the ways to cheat and turn a conversation have to do with some sort of twisting of the meaning of words. Using the same word multiple ways is a classic way to cheat in a discussion, and in fact, if you're one of those people who constantly loses arguments when you know you're right (there are few things more frustrating), you're probably giving too much ground on the meaning of words.

Philosophers of language have made much of these types of choices. Wittgenstein, for example and his "ordinary language theory" suggests that language has no innate meaning and means only what its user intends and/or what the receiver understands from what is said. In other words, to most modern philosophers, words don't have any meaning--they simply mean what people mean when they use them. There is a common usage for words, and they hold meaning only as they are used: Wittgenstein calls this a "language game." This is a rejection of the idea of Platonic forms and "ideal language" where a word has a meaning, and people can stray from the meaning of it. Any abstraction in word use, at any level, will necessarily be confusing, according to Wittgenstein, because people have no immediate frame of reference for its use. As an example, take modern conceptions and arguments about love or justice. Ordinary language theorists maintain that these words don't "mean" anything other than how they are used. So, people use the words to get what they want or say what they mean, the words themselves hold no inherent meaning.

If you hold to these modern linguistic theories, all conversations become a game, or a means of saying whatever you want, and definitions are dynamic--they change all the time. It then becomes extremely simple to move the way language is used: all you have to do is just use the word in a different way and redefine it, and for you, the word no longer means what it just did. If you can convince anyone else to use your definition (even if it happens only as people talk to you), you have succeeded in redefining the term. At that point, so far as you can get someone to agree with you, you can redefine anything to mean anything. There are benefits to the conscious if you can convince yourself to believe your own definition as well.

If you maintain the ideal theory of language or the correspondence theory of language, namely that words correspond to reality, and the correct usage of the word is the one that reflects the actual state of reality. In this view, ANY departure from this actual reflection of reality is a violation of the language, no matter what we mean when we say it. As it relates to the situation in the paragraph above, the ideal language folks would say that you can call something whatever you want, but it doesn't change the definition. First, they would say you're using the word wrong, and secondly, they'd say that you're deluding yourself and that your doing violence to the language.

There is a war on between these two schools. In short, the "ideal language" people are trying to make a standard definition for words, while the "ordinary language" folks are saying that language is inherently subjective. How you fall on this matter will say much about how you talk and how you expect others to use the language. I tend to be of the opinion that for language to mean anything, we must have at least some common understanding of what the words mean. If language is a game, then every time we sit down, we have to make our own definitions and have out the war of words each time we want to have a meaningful discussion. I think it's easier to simply admit that whether we like it or not, words have meaning assigned to them by society (or perhaps by a force beyond it) and that we should endeavor to use them correctly.

For more on the philosophy of language: see the Wikipedia article here.