Imagine trying to communicate with a native of an Amazonian tribe. It’s hard that we don’t have common symbols, although we have capacity. Our communication is alike to an Amazonian first contact when we discuss abstract concepts and theories. Yes, we have more in common, yet symbols can also be obstacles instead of supports to our communication. In fact, we often barely communicate, and pretend that we communicated to the full extent.
How are we able to communicate in the first place? It was gestures and simple sounds just like all animals. It’s still simple sounds that we produce, just the connotations, that is to say conventions have increased. We started multipliying and multi tasking for the simple signs, that weren’t enough for the messages that we intended to. At the end there was a conceptual mess, a confusion that we even confused reality with words.
Any argument consists of two autonomous elements, a subject and a message. The message is always an encryption, some arbitrary symbols to picture what the subject says. These symbols are conveyable when they’re corresponding to concrete objects. On the other hand when they’re abstract concepts, the message becomes vague and even meaningless for the others due to impossibility of picturing a noncrete, phantomous word. The subject is another autonomy that bends and reflects the words for its liking. The subject and the words have their own autonomous power projection, subject changes the meanings of the words for its purpose and the words were changed by the environment of the subject beforehand. Besides, subject and the environment can change the meanings afterwards, in other words they’re open ended.
Even the names- concepts- of concrete objects such as car, food, weapon have changed over the course of history. Let alone the abstract concepts such as philosophy, god, state have transformed to become the opposites of what they were and. This is due to the features of language that are 1.Vague 2. Ambiguous 3. Open ended.
Features of Language
- 1. Vague: It’s never clear what we mean by words, consider even one meaning words such as justice. Everyone produces a different image with the word.
- 2. Ambiguous: Ambiguity involves uncertainty about mappings between levels of representation with different structural characteristics, while vagueness involves uncertainty about the actual meanings of particular terms. Consider the word “check.” The society used the sound to mean examine, stop, verify, inspect, agree, control, prevent, neutralize and so on… It shows the economic attitude towards the sounds.
- 3. Open ended: Even if we clarified all meaning and eliminated any vagueness and ambiguity, the language is open ended. In other words, it will chage. The people will use, manipulate, multiply and use the words for different purposes than the original intention. It was in the first place the open endedness of language that made us available to convey conceptual details.
Intellectual Conversation
It’s really hard to have an intellectual conversation even with yourself. It’s the features of language that enable and disable us in intellectual conversation. Thanks to vagueness, ambiguity and open endedness we have words like justice, love, freedom, free will in addition to food, cave, weapon; thanks to the same features we’re a traditional improvised theatre on the most important values that govern our life.
