The Word Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

(Expanding on something Eugie wrote about and we used to talk about a lot)

People do not speak the same language. Sometimes it is obvious: English vs Japanese. Sometimes, it is less so. You might speak English, and I might speak English, but that doesn’t mean what we say means the same thing to the other person. I’ll skip most of the implications of that for now, and just focus on the fact that people seem not to understand this, and so, spend most of their time arguing (in the philosophical sense—if you don’t like that word, try “debating” or “discussing”) unrelated concepts while believing they are talking about the same thing. People don’t seem to understand that language is not an unchanging, basic entity. Two recent example of this in online political/social arguments have stood out for me.

The first in a discussion of racism. A woman who counts herself as a member of marginalized groups (both by gender and race, though some questioned if her subset of Caucasian was really marginalized) claimed that her statements could not be considered racist, because she could not be racist as a member of marginalized groups. Racism must have a social structural component. This was followed by many, many comments by others that attacked her simply saying she was a racist, so how could she say she wasn’t. What (almost) no one in this thread understood is that she had defined her term, so indeed, she was not a racist. She had defined the term “racism.” It didn’t matter what meaning they happened to have for the word “racism.” It is, after all, just a word, and she’d defined it. So their great argument with her was simply yelling at her that she was wrong and was a racist. They were not using the word the same way. In arguments, your terms should always be defined because in natural language, words have multiple, and vague meanings. She happened to take a definition held by many in marginalized groups, though not the most common definition in use in society at large.

The proper statement for those who disapprove of her behavior was to agree, she was not a racist by that definition. She was, however, prejudiced and discriminatory. Nothing in her definition disallowed that. (Better still to define “prejudice” and “discrimination.”)  For those people, the trick is not to allow their normal connotations of the word “racist” to come into play, but only those that apply to the denotation that is being used. So for many in this discussion, racism from an individual (as opposed to by society as a whole) is no longer an important moral concept. The important moral concepts were prejudice and discrimination—charges to which she had not adequately answered. I’m not stating who is correct in this case, simply that in this way, they’d be talking about the same thing, and not arguing about different concept with the same word.

The second case was more fun for me as it was so demonstrative of people’s inability to understand language, plus, I was in this discussion. Making it more vague, as the specifics do not matter, my “discussion” went like this:

Me: “In our current climate, that term is not good to use for that concept.”

Him: “How can you attack that concept. Only someone who is incapable of understanding would not admit to the existence of that concept.”

Me: “No, no, I am not attacking the concept. I know the concept exists. I’m saying we should use a different term for it”

Him: “There you go again you slime, claiming the concept doesn’t exist.”

Me: “I agree the concept exists. I just think we should use a different term.”

Him: “Who are you to attack the concept?!”

Me: “Again, I’m not attacking the concept. I agree the concept is important. We just should use a different term.”

Him: “How dare you attack the concept. Only your type would do that.”

Me: “No, really, I accept the concept. It is just ineffective in conversation to use that term for it. To better express that concept, we could use a different term.”

Him: “Hah. You reject the concept because it hurts your feelings. You are just like Brad Torgersen.”

It was hard not to laugh. He just couldn’t understand the difference between a concept and the word used to express that concept. He was unable to fathom this. OK, he was kind of belligerent (which means he’d double down before admitting he had made a mistake) and he isn’t the brightest bulb, but still, this is pretty basic stuff, and necessary if you actually want to talk with people. Less necessary if you want to talk at people.

Most internet arguments are just confusions of terms. Humans—surprising poor at communicating. It’s sad.

And funny.