https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rY2NqD4mtUg
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to talk to you about today is words and the meaning of words. Now you may have noticed I do not have slides. I do have a whiteboard and I’m going to subject you somewhat to my terrible handwriting if you can make it out in the video and if not that’s okay. I’ll go through all of it and hopefully it will be understandable to you. So as with all of my videos these are going to be my definitions. This is the way I’m making sense of the world and I’m hoping that I can explain it to you in a way that you can use it. So if you don’t like my definitions throw them out. If you do use them. Better yet modify them for your own use. All we’re trying to do is come to understandings about things. Maybe they’re common enough that they’re useful. We can start conversations. Get people rolling in the right direction towards better deeper interactions. So a lot of people seem to be under what I would call the mistaken impression that words have meaning. Words can’t have meaning. Words don’t even have single definitions. So it seems kind of silly to me that people would say words have meaning. By themselves words don’t mean anything at all. You can’t even use definitions. And this is easy to illustrate actually. It’s sort of surprise shockingly easy. It’s surprising how simple it is to demonstrate this. If I say a word with a certain tone in a certain context the definition of the word can be reversed completely. Completely the opposite of what the definition is. Usually we refer to this as sarcasm or sometimes irony. There’s forms of irony that seem to operate this way where the meaning that you’re conveying is out of alignment with the physical definition of the word whether that be tone or context or both. Usually it’s both. And so what I’m implying here is that there’s a lot to words with relation to meaning. So what do words have? Words have content. They have definitions. And almost all words have multiple definitions. So just the definition doesn’t really help us. So how do we know which definition to adopt? And how do we know our relation to that definition? Well that I would argue is context. So hopefully you can read it. But if you can’t I’ve got my triangle and basically at the bottom is content. And the content of a word is the definition roughly speaking. And then at the top as we go up we have the context. The context are all the other words around it. But there’s also other contexts like tone. And there may be settings around the words. We may make gestures and faces. All of these things affect. They’re part of the context. And then from the content and the context what emerges is meaning. That’s where the meaning comes from. It pops out of these other the interaction between these other two things. It’s probably transjective which is a term that John Verbecky uses. So I’m going to argue that meaning is transjective from content and context. That’s how we arrive at the meaning. But context is so difficult because it’s not just the other words. It’s not just the sentence. It’s not just the tone. It’s not just the body language. It’s all of these things together. And one or more may be missing. And see I’ll argue that part of the loss of meaning is this thing. Yes. And the platforms in general that use text. Because when you’re using text you don’t have total content. It’s gone. There’s no tone in text. Often we’re taking shortcuts when we’re engaging with text. And those shortcuts are often causing us to use fewer words. And so we’re reducing the amount of information contained in the context. And so as you reduce the amount of information in the context you simplify the number of ways that people can interpret the meaning of the word within that context. And so we’re sort of shrinking the realm of meaning if you will. Right. We’re taking the sphere of meaning from this and we’re really shrinking down because there’s no body language. There’s no tone. This is true on Facebook. This is especially true on Twitter. Jordan Peterson talks about this. You know maybe maybe you can’t convey enough positive positivity in 240 characters. Yeah. Almost certainly true. Which is not to say it’s useless or it can’t be used in some good way. But using it in every way not going to work. I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis. I’m not sure that it’s true. I’m just saying it’s a reasonable thing to think. And so the reason why this is important is because people seem to be searching for meaning. And often when they say meaning they go for words immediately because for some reason they don’t associate meaning in words pretty tightly. But as I hope I’ve demonstrated words don’t have meaning. The meaning is not there. The meaning is this transjective thing that happens. It emerges. It’s it’s an emergence from an interaction from an activity and the the culmination or the the coming together of a bunch of these different things types of context definition or content. Right. And how that’s presented the presentation of the whole thing all plays into the emergence of the meaning. And that’s really important. And I really like this way of conceiving of words and meaning because it gets to the heart of what the problem is with the conversation. If we put meaning inherent in a text conversation I think we’re making a grave mistake because the number of meanings that we could have mathematically have dropped dramatically by orders of magnitude because the context is reduced. And you kind of see this in something like Clubhouse. So people in Clubhouse are like we have great conversations are way better than the stupid conversations I have on Facebook. And people say this all the time. All kinds of different people in the rooms I’ve been in the past few weeks in Clubhouse. And the reason for that is you at least have tone. Now you may not have body language but you’ve got tone. And tone is really important. Like tone really gives you that flavor for how important things are. Another component is the speed at which you are talking. Now I’ve used the term when talking with Paul VanDukely my second conversation with him enchantment. And enchantment for example is a word full of meaning for people automatically. They know exactly what enchantment is. They’ve got this definition. They’re using Tolkien’s definition. My definition is not incompatible with his by the way as near as I can tell. I’ve had some good conversations with Sally Jo who’s absolutely brilliant. And she sort of helped me work through that. When we’re dealing with enchantment maybe we shouldn’t be enchanting other people or at least maybe verbal enchantment is not the way we should be persuading people. Right. Like maybe that’s dangerous. I think a case can be made. I’m not going to say never use it. Never use enchantment on people. I don’t think that’s right either necessarily. But if that’s your primary mode then there’s a problem. I think that you have to use arguments that are convincing emotionally and not just tonally. Right. Not just through manipulation of tone. I don’t think that lowering your voice, speaking slowly and rounding out your words is the way to go either. Like a lot of people will use that and then they’ll sound very convincing to people. But they’re not making rational arguments anymore because they’re able to convince people without rational arguments and without assigning emotion. Right. They’ve actually stripped the emotion out by doing that. And they’re more putting you towards a hypnotic or hypnagogic state or something. And I think that’s very dangerous. And I would argue that bad people have used that before to do bad things. And let’s not go back there. So that’s what I mean by enchantment. And again I’m using meaning and a single word just to give you a flavor for how pernicious meaning is because it’s there. Like we think we know what enchantment means. But enchantment out of a specific context is just a word that’s hard to get your hands around because we do have different ideas of what enchantment is as a default way of thinking about it. And it might be the Tolkien definition. Right. It might be. Oh yeah. Tolkien talked about enchantment. The elves enchanted things. That’s what they did. The elves enchanted things. Not people. Right. And they did do that. And it makes sense what Tolkien was saying. The elves were also leaving Middle Earth. Cowards I would argue at least in the beginning. And I’m not sure that that form of approaching the world is a complete enough form to get us to where we need to be. Because when we talk about words like enchantment, when we talk about words that have a deep meaning to us already, when other people use them, we get the false impression that we know what they’re talking about and we fail to look for that context. And when we don’t discuss the context, then we lose the meaning. And you may say, oh no, I have my meaning and maybe they have their meaning. But we can resolve that. Not unless you have the conversation around context. That’s when you can really start to understand. And in order to do that, you need to have shared relationships and shared meaning. Because when we’re communicating, we want to have a shared meaning with the terms that we’re using so that we really have understanding and relationship and participation with one another. A part of participation is using all of the context available to us. All the other words, all the sentences, all the framing, right? All the tonality, all the body language. You want all of it there, all the emotion. You want it all in there so that you can get as much involvement and engagement with that other person as possible. And then you can get better agreement or more clear disagreement. Because when you add context, you can find out where you disagree instead of the fact that you disagree. The fact that you disagree is not important. It’s really pernicious. Because if you disagree and it’s just a fact, then it becomes a binary thing. It becomes this false dichotomy. Oh, you disagree with me and therefore you really want to get to the point of the disagreement, to the nuance of the disagreement, to the nature of the disagreement. Right. You want to know what disagreeing with that person about this word means. And again, that pernicious meaning comes right back. What does the disagreement mean? It means that, oh, I’m thinking of a word in a certain context and you’re thinking of it in a different context or maybe a different frame or maybe from a different perspective. So from the perspective of somebody who’s been pulled over by the police way too many times for doing absolutely nothing wrong, that would be me. The police are heavy handed and they need to get it straight. They shouldn’t be pulling people over or walking along the street doing nothing wrong. And, you know, I may share that perspective with other people for entirely different reasons. But from the police perspective, hey, you know, we’ve got a woman who was assaulted and you’re out here walking at night, man, and you kind of wear the same sorts of clothes. It’s nighttime, sort of hard to tell, but we’ve got to stop everybody in case you’re the one. So what does it mean to have proper policing? What does it mean to stop proper, proper people? Well, if I’m innocent, I know I’m innocent. The cops don’t know that. They have a different perspective on what proper policing means given the context. And until it’s explained to you, no, no, no, woman was assaulted two blocks down that way 10 minutes ago. Now it makes sense why they pulled me over or didn’t pull me over. I was walking, but stopped me and made me, you know, give ID and all that. The meaning of a term like proper policing is important. Or in this case, just proper. What’s a proper thing? I doesn’t mean anything by itself. We think we know what proper means. Nobody knows what proper means because once you put it in context, it means something completely different. And it’s sort of these higher level words abstract abstractions, these higher level words. We kind of, oh, I know what proper means. I know what proper means in this context. But I don’t know what you mean by it. And that’s where we get the miscommunications. And again, it’s about adding this flavor back to the language with gestures, with excited tones, with flavorful emotional appeals, as well as with lots of other words. You may think, wow, Mark, you just went on quite a bit about words and meaning. Yeah, I did. And I think it was necessary. And I’m hoping that that helps you to understand how you can engage with people and not assume that their meaning is the same as your meaning or not assume that their meaning is different from your meaning that might be the same. It’s always hard to tell. A lot of times people quote on different sides of the political alley, which I don’t think exists because there still seems to be three three types of voters and not two. They will make an assumption that, oh, when you say cut the budget, you know, you mean to hell with the poor people. Right. When, in fact, sometimes those very same people who mean cut the budget mean cut the military budget, which is something you might actually agree with. So you never know until you talk to them and ask and find out the context, not just the content and really dig into the meaning and what disagreement is. What disagreement means in this case, because having a disagreement is a huge problem. But disagreeing on a small part of something is a small problem. And that’s something that you can resolve, probably just the two of you. And it’s not so bad agreeing to disagree when your disagreements are small. All right. Then it’s like, oh, well, we’re basically going towards the same thing. Maybe the common good, hopefully. And so these little nitpicky things are not a big deal. So I’m hoping that helps you to understand the importance of why words, in my opinion, don’t have meaning and why we should consider that as a serious way of engagement with this topic and how we can help other people, you know, by extending them a little grace and trying to get to the nuance, to the context, to the small part of the issue. And I hope that helps you to understand the smaller disagreements, why that might be useful for us and for them. And as always, I really appreciate you watching. I hope you find this useful and helpful. And thank you very much for your time and attention.