Topics Language

Question Something occurs to me: Different people understand the same words differently. So, for example, to my parents, "therapy" might be a self-indulgent activity that only weak people engage in. To me, therapy might be a meaningful activity designed to strengthen myself. Now, if my parents ask me: "are you in therapy", and I knew their understanding of the word, it occurs to me that I would not be lying by saying "no". No - I am not engaged in a self-indulgent activity that only weak people engage in. Now, if what I've said is true, it would seem to have implications for logic. The "if p then q" universe seems threatened or at least loosened if neither "p" nor "q" meant the same thing to everyone. 1) To what extent would my presuppositions entail a weakening of the importance of logic? 2) To what extent are my ideas correct? 3) Is there any reading I can do on this topic?

Accepted:
October 8, 2009

Comments

Thanks for your thoughtful question. People often have different conceptions of the same phenomenon. This doesn't prevent them from talking about one and the same thing. One person might think that Venus is a star while another think that it is a planet. In spite of these wildly divergent views, these two people might still be able to disagree about Venus rather than just talking past one another. For instance, one might think that Venus is shining right before dawn, and the other might deny it; they can still have a substantive disagreement. So too, I suspect the same is true of 'therapy': two parties might have different views of what therapy is but can still have the same thing in mind. How can you tell? One way would be to see if the two parties can agree on putative example of therapy. If they can agree on most or all such cases, then we can be confident that even if they have different *views* about therapy, these are views about one and the same thing.

Accordingly, it would be either misleading or a lie to reply as you envision: "I would not be lying by saying "no"." It seems to me that you either would be lying, or would be very misleading unless you add the elaboration you mention 'I am not engaged in a self-indulgent activity...'

This is not to deny for a moment that all too often people *do* talk past each other in spite of using the same words. This failure of communication is common and can be difficult to detect precisely because the words that the interlocutors use are the same.

But we can either explicitly stipulate what we mean by our words, or work on a reasonable presumption that in some cases those words refer to the same thing even when we attach different associations to the things that they refer to, or to the words themselves. When either of these conditions is met, logic can still do its thing.

For further discussion it might help to read about Gottlob Frege's distinctions among reference, sense, and coloring or words. Those distinctions are discussed in various places including textbooks like Lycan's _Philosophy of Language_ (Routledge).

Mitch Green