Why none of us quite know what we're talking about

Photo by Douglas English (circa 1902) / Flickr

It would be hard to find an adult native speaker of English who was anything less than absolutely certain that they knew the meaning of the word mouse. It is, after all, a word that is perfectly at home in children's storybooks, and certainly nothing anyone would ever think of as a difficult technical term. About as many native speaking adults would also feel the same about the word rat, but not all of them could say with confidence how exactly a mouse differs from a rat, or apply their implicit understanding of what these words mean to distinguish say, a juvenile rat from an adult mouse. The average person knows a lot of things about these animals but not necessarily enough to tell them apart in every single case.

There's a whole genre of commonly confused animal terms in English with which we could make a similar observation: monkey vs. ape, alligator vs. crocodile, turtle vs. tortoise, rabbit vs. hare, frog vs. toad, crow vs. raven, and so on. Many of us struggle with at least some of these distinctions, or if not these particular examples, then others. In such cases, it's safe to say that our mental representations of the meanings of the words involved are not completely fleshed out despite whatever confidence we may have that we know what each of these words means individually. Of course, if our dinner depended on being able to tell various animal species apart, we'd probably do far better, but unless a distinction is relevant for something, we usually content ourselves with the thought that the details are known to somebody somewhere and that we could easily look them up if necessary.

There is a sense then, that our mental representations of the meanings of even very familiar words are an ongoing concern subject to refinement, not just during our early years but throughout our lives. Not knowing every shade and nuance of a word's meaning certainly doesn't stop us speaking about whatever it refers to in ways that actually convey information though. Indeed, we don't have to have any idea at all about what a word means to achieve this. We could for instance, go around informing each other that Jill has a narbit, which she keeps in her living room, and that this narbit used to belong to Bill, who won it in a poker game in Islington, and so on, without having any idea what a narbit actually is. And we could go on talking about narbits for years without ever getting the full story and still manage to communicate useful things about them in the process.

This peculiar situation arises because of our natural inclination to assume that all of the words we encounter have full-fledged meanings even if we're not yet personally acquainted with them. This seems like a reasonable assumption and one that we might expect evolution to have primed us to make given that there is generally some truth to it, but it's vulnerable to hacking. A language faculty that operates under this assumption is susceptible to infestation from parasitic junk words whose shtick is to exploit it to worm their way into our vocabularies and propagate from person to person without actually getting around to meaning anything to anyone.

And some words are especially good at endearing themselves to us in a way that encourages us to use them even when we aren't all that sure what they mean. Consider a word, let's not give it a form but just call it X. Suppose we're told various things that people believe to be true of X but not what X actually is. We might hear for example, that X is something that makes human beings special, that it is possessed by all human beings and not by inanimate objects or non-human animals, and it is by virtue of possessing X that it is morally wrong to take the life of a human being. Many people will already be lining up to defend the existence of X because of the way these claims flatter us, but suppose we learn that X is just the desire to play schmaltzy Christmas albums made by cash-strapped musicians at full volume. In that case, we'd have to take issue with some of the claims made about X like it being a thing that makes it immoral to take the life of a human being. It isn't the sort of elevated quality that people would normally claim gives humans special status in the universe but if we never got around to spelling out what X actually was, these kinds of claims could never be evaluated one way or the other.

The reader no doubt recognizes that many of the claims made about X are similar to those made about concepts like the soul and free will, both of which are suspiciously difficult to define. Indeed, their meanings are so vague that there doesn't appear to be any test that we could devise to tell whether a given object possessed either of these things, or even whether we could subjectively determine whether we ourselves possess them. Nevertheless, our habit of thought leads us to describe concepts like the soul and free will as mysterious rather than meaningless under this problematic assumption that words have meanings even if we don't yet know what they are, and even if no one at all knows what they are, as if their meanings are out there somewhere just waiting to be discovered, existing independently of any minds.

(As an aside, note that to suggest that the term free will lacks meaning is not a way of denying the existence of free will. If the term is truly meaningless, then so is any claim made about it including, in equal measure, both the claim that we possess it and the claim that we lack it.)

It's so much easier to use words than to explain what we're doing when we use them. Like riding a bicycle, our knowledge of word meanings is implicit, so our beliefs about what they consist of aren't necessarily accurate. Given this, it shouldn't be too surprising that we might not notice when we're using a word without ever having attached any meaning to it. As I've noted elsewhere, I think it's quite likely that the majority of lay people who have internalized the idea that the Solar System has eight planets and that Pluto isn't one of them don't actually know what kind of objects qualify as planets under the definition they've supposedly accepted for the word, but it's probably never even occurred to many of them that they could be saying things about planets without knowing what the word means.

The assumption that all words have meanings is so intellectually compelling to the mind that the alternative is almost unthinkable but, especially in the context of philosophical discussions that have raged for centuries on end, we ought to consider the possibility that some of our terms are nothing more than hollow shells that people have merely been pinning various hopes to.

If you liked this post, you might also like:
Knowing, believing and thinking clearly about word meanings