Topics Language

Question How malleable is meaning? Example: can we take a word that is commonly understood to mean/refer to a specific thing and give it an entirely new meaning (or at least one that, despite its slight similarity is still significantly removed from the original)? Example: referring to a traffic light as 'autistic' (given that it operates in one way, without change) without meaning this metaphorically.

Accepted:
March 9, 2006

Comments

One way to put the questions is in terms of intention -- what role does the intention of the speaker play in establishing the meaning of the speaker's words. At one extreme is the position Humpty Dumpty stakes out in the works of Lewis Carroll In a conversation with Alice, Humpty Dumpty says "there''s glory for you" and when Alice expresses puzzlement, he explains that by "glory" he means "a nice knockdown argument." On Humpty Dumpty's theory of meaning, the intention of the speaker seems to be all that matters for meaning. In response to this, there's a strong temptation to say: but "glory" does not mean "a nice knockdown argument"! So at the other extreme, someone might argue that speaker's intentions don't matter at all for meaning -- words have meaning independent of any individual speaker's intentions, and the speaker locks on to that meaning when making an utterance.

You might think that the right answer lies somewhere inbetween these two extremes. A lot of philosophical work is being down to figure out exactly what that right answer is.

Or, just following up on Amy's response, maybe the right answer is 'both'. Rather than thinking of the meaning of 'glory' in Humpty's mouth, we might think of what the word meant in Humpty's idiolect and what the word meant in English. Many linguists and philosophers (including Noam Chomksy) have doubts about whether there really is such a thing as English, because there are no very significant linguistic features in common among all and only those whom we call 'English speakers'. But even if that's right, we can still distinguish what 'glory' meant in Humpty's idiolect and what it meant to those he was addressing. It was easy for him to change the menaing of 'glory' in his idiolect. But that didn't suffice to change the way anyone else understood it.

I think the issue of how malleable meaning is depends on how many people are involved. It's easy to change the meaning of a word in your own idiolect. It is a little harder to change the menaing of a word in a bit of language shared by two people or a small group. But that's not very hard. We could just agree to use 'autistic' to mean *confined to rigid patterns of operation* or somesuch. But a lot more needs to happen if the meaning of a word is to change in such a way that the change gets registered by dictionaries. Still, that does happen quite a lot.