We often speak about language as if it were a system for transferring thoughts from one mind to another.
A speaker possesses an idea.
The idea is converted into words.
The words travel outward.
A listener receives them and decodes the original message.
Communication appears straightforward.
Thought becomes signal.
Signal becomes thought again.
The process feels natural because it resembles familiar technologies.
Telegraphs transmit messages.
Computers encode information.
Phones send signals.
The same image is then projected onto language.
Language appears to be a code.
Yet familiar metaphors often conceal familiar assumptions.
The inherited construal
The inherited picture often assumes something like this:
- thoughts exist privately within individuals
- language encodes those thoughts
- words carry meanings
- listeners decode those meanings
- communication succeeds when the original meaning is accurately transferred
The image feels intuitive.
Meaning begins inside one person.
Language transports it.
Meaning then arrives inside someone else.
Words become containers.
Communication becomes transportation.
Meaning appears to behave like an object moving between minds.
Yet something curious appears once we look more closely.
The hidden assumptions
Where exactly is meaning while it is being transmitted?
Does it exist inside the words themselves?
The same words often mean different things in different situations.
A sentence spoken sarcastically may communicate the opposite of its literal wording.
A joke can fail entirely outside the context in which it makes sense.
A single phrase may be affectionate in one relationship and insulting in another.
The words themselves remain identical.
Yet the meanings shift.
One might then suppose that meaning exists inside the minds of speakers.
But this creates another difficulty.
How would entirely private meanings ever become shared?
If meanings originate independently within isolated individuals, communication begins to resemble an impossible puzzle.
How could one ever verify that what leaves one mind is what enters another?
The apparently simple model begins to wobble.
The fracture
A further problem emerges.
People do not ordinarily communicate by transferring ready-made packages of meaning.
They communicate through ongoing activities together.
Children do not learn language by decoding messages.
They learn through participation.
Conversation constantly depends upon shared situations, histories, expectations, relationships, and social practices.
Meaning does not simply arrive intact through words.
Meaning emerges through relations.
The supposedly transported object begins to disappear.
Perhaps the problem lies in imagining language as a code.
The inversion
Suppose language is not primarily a system for encoding and transmitting meanings.
Suppose language is a resource for construing experience and coordinating social relations.
On such a view, meanings do not exist as objects waiting inside speakers to be packaged into words.
Nor do words contain meanings waiting to be extracted.
Meaning emerges through relations among people, situations, histories, and social activity.
Language would not transport meaning.
Language would participate in the ongoing actualisation of meaning.
Communication would not involve moving meanings from one location to another.
It would involve coordinating acts of construal.
The inversion appears subtle.
Yet its implications are substantial.
Consequences
If language is relational rather than code-like, then communication changes character.
The question is no longer:
How accurately was the message transferred?
The question becomes:
How are meanings being jointly construed?
Misunderstanding also changes character.
Misunderstanding no longer appears merely as failed decoding.
It becomes a divergence in the organisation of meanings.
Even words change their role.
Words cease to function as containers carrying meanings from place to place.
They become resources through which meanings are continually actualised.
The world begins to look slightly different.
Conversations remain.
Books remain.
Languages remain.
But perhaps words never carried meanings through invisible channels.
Perhaps meanings were always emerging between us rather than travelling from one mind to another.
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