Table of Contents

• Context And Meaning: First Context, Always Context…
  • The Start Of Persuasion
• Context And Meaning: The Great Misunderstanding of Meaning
• A Quick Aside About Reading
  • Ooh…Did Somebody Say “Games”?
  • Context And Meaning: The Slippery Nature Of Truth
• Context And Meaning: A Love Affair

Context And Meaning: First Context, Always Context…

Okay, so I’m gonna try to keep this short, so I can use it to reference back to when the topic comes up. And this one certainly comes up. A lot. I’d say even to a tiring degree. So this then.

There is a simple reason that I do not like to debate people about pretty much anything important at this point in my life. (If you had a run-in with the younger debatier me in years past – sorry, I probably came off as a dick…not sure why though…) What’s the best album of 1994? Sure, I’ll hop in on that debate because (a) there is no actual right answer and far more importantly (b) the point of the “debate” isn’t to come to some sort of accord around principles or policies, it is simply to have a bit of nostalgic fun with some friends. But important things, like actual principles by which to live or the policies or courses of action that either express or violate those principles? Nah dawg, I’m good. I’ll discuss those things, sure, but not debate them.

And understand this isn’t about wanting to be in an echo chamber and only wanting to hear things that support my point of view. I am very aware that almost nobody I ever talk to shares my worldview completely (or even all that close most the time) about pretty much any of those things, and so almost everything I hear or see from other human beings is outside of my personal echo chamber. Honestly, not a big deal to me. Really.

The Start Of Persuasion

My problem is that, at least to me, the point of debating or arguing in general (arguing – offering proof for statements; not fighting – that’s a totally different kind of “arguing” that I am not talking about right now) is to try to persuade others to your position. Fair enough. Then why not debate? Don’t you want to persuade others to your position? Very much so, which is exactly why I don’t debate or argue with people. Obviously.

Okay, but seriously I am being serious. I do not think that almost anyone is ever persuaded by arguments or debates. Sure, people get persuaded during debates or impassioned speeches, sometimes. But is it because of the words or statements laid out cleanly and neatly in propositions connected with logical precision to conclusions that no longer can be denied due to the speaker’s linguistic prowess? Maybe, I guess. But how much does the rest of the context matter? All that social psychology and group dynamics stuff? Idk but I’d guess a fuck-ton.

Context And Meaning: The Great Misunderstanding of Meaning

The reason I don’t debate is a certain kind of context besides the ones like body language, crowd dynamics, empathy, etc – even though any of them should be enough to make the point, they just aren’t my concern here. Btw there is a ton of excellent scholarship on this type stuff and if you’re interested you should definitely check it out, but what I am harping on about is language itself. The very shape and function of it – or the very essence of language itself, if you will – is so misunderstood in our society at the most fundamental level that from where I’m sitting almost all “debates”, including most I’ve ever been a part of (and believe me, as a former know-it-all type kid I debated plenty about all types of nonsense), consist almost completely of people talking past each other and getting caught up on simple misunderstandings. 

Ok, then – what’s the big fundamental misunderstanding that got my panties all in a twist? Well, so you get where I’m coming from I should tell you that when it comes to the nature of language, I am a Wittgensteinian. That is, I think the general schema first laid out by Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most accurate reflection of how language actually works that we have working for us. He’s definitely worth reading if you are interested in the philosophy of language or how people make sense of their world in general. But fair warning, he does mostly write in an aphorisms (similar to Nietzsche, and pretty much for the same reasons), which can lead to some sizable gaps between what he is trying to say and what his reader is understanding him to mean (also similar to Nietzsche). Like pretty much everything else in this world, reading aphorisms is a skill, and one that I doubt is taught in any sort of rigorous way – I could be wrong about this, but…

However even if reading aphorisms isn’t your thing and you don’t care enough about it to make it your thing, I still think reading Wittgenstein is worthwhile, because although you may not be getting everything he hoped his reader would get, I think that most readers would still get a lot out of his work. And if you are just more interested in the actual theory of language presented in straightforward prose, then I suggest reading the work of Stanley Cavill, who I think does a better job than anyone else I’ve read of putting Wittgenstein’s theories about language into a coherent and accessible system. Also, Cavill’s literary analyses are excellent in their own right, too, if you enjoy talking about books. 

Anyway, the crux of Wittgenstien’s (and consequently my own) views on the nature of language is that context is always the most important thing. Or really that context is the only important thing for understanding meaning. Real actual meaning that people actually use, btw, and not just a “dictionary definition”, which just so you know does not in fact supply meaning at all, but instead gives you guide posts for determining meaning. I know, it sounds like a quibble, but the difference is so incredibly huge and important. 

Ooh…Did Somebody Say “Games”?

Wittgenstein referred to this kind of linguistic context as language games – and like other games if you change the rules of a game you change the game, simple as. Seriously, any game is simply the rules that the players agree on – and just like in other games, some language games the players make up the rules as they go while others have rules that have been agreed upon for generations. This can be confusing because unlike say chess or basketball, you aren’t always aware what game you are playing at a given time (although most humans are incredibly adept at intuiting which language game is being played at any given time, while some are extremely adept and some others still are just fucking clueless, and I bet everyone can come up with examples of people they actually know who fit all along this range. And the term “code switching” refers to this process for particularly broad games (oh yeah, there are games within games within games – inception gone wild type shit fr) that also generally have significant social and/or political dimensions). 

Here’s the real heart of the issue: different utterances (words, phrases, statements, whatever) mean different things in different language games. Wittgenstein referred to the rule sets of individual games as their “grammar”, but he also referred to a word or phrase’s “grammar” to mean the types of language games it can show up in and what it means in those language games. Cavill actually does a really good job with laying out these two very central uses of the term “grammar” in Wittgenstein’s thought – honestly if you’re interested at all in this stuff Cavill’s work on the concept of grammar in Wittgenstein would be stop number one along that path if I were your tour guide. Even if you’re only somewhat interested in this stuff, I bet you’d enjoy a quick look-see anyway.

Context And Meaning: The Slippery Nature Of Truth

Anyway, what this boils down to is that words and even whole statements get a large part of their meaning from how it’s being used in a specific language game. (and people like me who love to reference other completely separate uses from totally unrelated language games – like works of art and storytelling – those meanings can be brought along to carry all types of layers of meaning for all types of purposes depending on how it’s being referenced. what can ya do?) Which in turn means that just because a statement is true in a certain context does not mean it will be true in literally any other context. Of course, a particular statement might be true in pretty much every context you can think of – but let’s be honest, individual humans have very limited capacities to imagine these kinds of contexts. Heck, even collectively we are still very limited in this regard, and to me that’s just fine because it means that there is more room to explore these things than any life could possibly come close to exhausting. Faust’s dream is silly when taken literally, no one could ever know everything – but as a way to articulate the hunger that is human curiosity? Well, it’s hard to put it better imho.

Okay, so this next point is so super important. To me, it’s probably the number one most important thing about language. It should be the first thing that everyone is taught, but alas! is generally the last thing anybody seems to realize: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNIVERSAL MEANING – FOR WORDS OR STATEMENTS OR ANYTHING ELSE! There is not a single thing that you or I or any other actually existing or even purely hypothetical person could say that would mean the same thing in every context. Not a single freaking word or statement. Because it is not possible – for the single simple reason that this just ain’t how it works. Meaning just does not work that way. Why can’t I just flap my arms and fly like a bird? Because arms just don’t work that way. Sure, you can list all the details of why arms don’t work like that, but again, those would just be in support of the one simple reason that arms just do not work like that. Same exact thing happening here – there are lots of details as to why meaning doesn’t work like that (Wittgenstein’s language games and grammar are a part of that story, but only a part – a lot of humans in a lot of different times and places in our species’s long history have given thought to the nature of language; some of that thought survives as philosophy or poetry while much more of it as the logic behind certain turns of phrase and in the morals of all those wonderful stories that we’ve been telling children since before there was a fireside to sit around.), but again, what it comes down to in the end is that meaning just doesn’t work like that.
 

Context And Meaning: A Love Affair

You can only and I mean fucking ONLY determine the meaning of a word or statement by looking at its context. And the more context something has, then the more you’re gonna need to know of it before you even come close to being accurate in your assessment. That’s just the way it works. Always and without exception, ever. And remember that whole “language game within a language game inception gone wild” nonsense? Well, that complicates things a whole damn lot, because a lot of those sub-language games, let alone the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-etc type variants, don’t always play nice with each other. Like at all. To the point that saying something in one context means the exact opposite of what the same thing would mean in other contexts. Think about politics and the way it is discussed more and more, these days: the shared meanings are diverging so rapidly in so many mutually antagonistic directions that pretty much everyone is talking past each other these days without even realizing it or the importance of it. Or caring maybe? 

Either way the outcome is the same and it sucks and is the reason that I do not debate or argue about political or social issues. I will, however, occasionally discuss certain issues with people who mean pretty much the same things by them as I do – but that is different. Often necessary and also quite often enjoyable. Like, way more enjoyable than trying to prove to somebody why giving a shit about X is good actually. Thanks, but I’m good with that kind of thing these days. 

Arguing for the sake of seeming right is a young person’s sport and I am way too tired for all that. Simple as.