Stephen Martin (section 4)
"Language is not an infallible guide, but it contains,
with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you
begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on."
C. S. Lewis
Language is at the heart of all who we are as a people.
Culture, community, civilization, all come from first having communication. Or more
specifically understood communication. What in today’s society would exist had
we not developed a common language? Surely we would have no great structures,
no bridges or skyscrapers, no vehicles or electronics. But what about religion?
What about philosophy? Ludwig Wittgenstein especially had some interesting thoughts on this matter. He uses the phrase 'meaning is use'. If you want to understand what a word means, look at what the speaker does with the word and the context in which it is used.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a
scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who is to be master. That is all.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who is to be master. That is all.”
Lewis Carroll
So the rules of language are subjective, because even though the words we use have a precise definition, it is not necessarily the meaning we are trying to get across. Wittgenstein suggested this by explaining how we interpret language. when someone says a word to you, you take that word and form it into a picture in your mind. the difficulty comes when while by definition all of our mental pictures are correct, they still may differ. If I say 'hammer', though some people may imagine a tack hammer, while others a sledge hammer, most likely we all will have a relatively similar picture of a hammer in our minds. However if I were say 'house', this is a much broader subject, in fact the image in your mind will come from what you know most, so if you grew up in a modest single room cottage, that will probably be the image in you head, while others may picture a mansion, or even others a hut. These are all houses but suddenly our language are slightly different.
"In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be
sacrificed to conciseness."
Oscar Wilde
"Language is a public tool to understand private
life."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
"A public tool to understand private life" - notice that you can't turn that formulation around, and use language the Humpty Dumpty way. A private language is really no language at all, unless you're content only to engage in private soliloquy. So meaning is the use we collectively find for our various words and sentences, and that turns out to be a much broader field than the young Wittgenstein had realized.
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