The purpose of meaning

… is to get stuff done.

The typical rationalist view is that the purpose of language is to state facts and theories.¹

Prototypes for these uses might be “the mass of solar system object #134340 is (1.303±0.003)×10²² kilograms” (a fact about Pluto) and “congruent parts of congruent polygons are congruent” (a theorem of Euclidean geometry). The logical positivists discovered that language was bad at stating truths (for the many reasons we covered in Part One), declared it broken, and adopted mathematical logic instead.

But that is mostly not what language is for. Nor would we be better off if it were. Stating truths is only occasionally useful, and usually only as a means for accomplishing something else. Language is not a defective approximation to an ideal formal language.

Language is the right tool for dealing with the kind of world we live in: one that is nebulous, localized, and meaning-saturated.² It is not that we should admit everyday language is “good enough” in the sense that—although a properly precise language would be better—everyday language is minimally adequate and is for some reason all that is available; or what ordinary people use out of foolishness or ignorance. It is precisely adapted to its proper function, which is getting reasonable work done.

Let’s consider an alternative prototype of language. I was having breakfast with a friend, she noticed I was looking around the tabletop, she said “jam?”, I nodded, and she passed it to me.

Different prototypes lead to different ontologies and understandings. Starting from “congruent parts of congruent polygons are congruent” leads naturally to an ontology of propositions, beliefs, truth values, logical quantifiers, and “meanings” of sentences composed from the meanings of their parts. None of those metaphysical spooks are relevant to “jam?”. It is not a proposition or belief; has no truth value, parts, or quantifiers; and has no meaning out of context.

The logical positivists hoped to start from a theory of meaning developed for mathematics and extend it first to science, then to other academic subjects, and finally to rectify the language and thought of ordinary people.

The Eggplant performs an ethnomethodological flip, and aims in the opposite direction. We’ll start from the ordinary use of “jam?”, and develop first an ontology that covers reasonable activity broadly (in Part Two), and then an understanding of science and mathematics (in Part Three).³

This may seem backward: if we want to understand science, shouldn’t we start there? But as human beings, we don’t start with science. As babies, we start with people feeding us. Our ability to science rests on our ability to breakfast, and that’s where our understanding of sciencing has to start too.

Jam?

Here are some features of “jam?” that we’ll take as prototypical of reasonable language:

• Speaking the word was a part of observable, concrete activity, involving two particular people on a particular occasion in a particular place.⁴ This contrasts with the rationalist prototype of sentences as nonphysical sequences of words, not spoken, written, heard, or read by anyone in particular, but existing in a formal realm outside of time and space.

• The meaning of “jam?” is entirely dependent on the material and social context and on the purposes of the participants. It would mean something somewhat different if it were a waiter speaking, and radically different if it was the CEO of a condiments company quizzing the CFO about the monthly financial performance report. The meaning might not even have anything to do with jam (as we’ll see later in this chapter).

• “Jam?” was a tool used in the course of a collaborative activity. Whereas rationalism implicitly takes cognition as typically solitary and in service of individual goals, our view will be that human activity is almost always social. Even when you are in a room by yourself, what you are doing is usually meaningful only as a part of ongoing group activities.

• “Jam?” was surrounded and made meaningful by nonlinguistic, physical interactions (my glancing around and her passing me the jam). Language is, prototypically, interwoven with the rest of life, not a separate domain.

• “Jam?” was a tentative account for the meaning of my gaze direction, which I accepted with a nod. Accounts given within a situation explain the current meaning of the situation, but then also become themselves part of the ongoing situation, and subsequent activity typically takes them into account.

Is there any water in the refrigerator?

A: Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B: Yes.
A: Where? I don’t see it.
B: In the cells of the eggplant.

Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?

It depends.

And, it’s the wrong question. “True” and “false”—in the rationalist sense—are rarely meaningful or relevant in concrete activity.

“Is there any water in the refrigerator?” means different things depending on why you are asking. If A is looking for something to drink, the answer “yes” is… maybe not false, exactly, but definitely wrong. It might be technically true, but it’s not meaningfully or usefully true.

More to the point, it’s unreasonable. It’s accountably unhelpful, deceitful, irritating, and stupid.⁵ It’s apparently a failed attempt at a put-down joke, prioritizing B’s social status motivation above A’s practical one. It violates norms, and it would be reasonable for A to tell B off.

On the other hand, if A and B are in a biochemistry lab, and A is intending to store a reagent that degrades in the presence of trace quantities of water, B’s reply might be a helpful warning: an eggplant releases tiny amounts of water vapor into the air, making the refrigerator too moist for this use.

“In the cells of the eggplant” might also be a reasonable answer even if A is looking for something to drink. Perhaps the two have been lost in the desert and come across an abandoned shack with no running water… but there’s a scraggly eggplant bush growing in the broken, doorless refrigerator lying on its back on the ground. “We’re saved! Squeeze it out!”

There are, in other words, unenumerable contextual factors that could make a “yes” or “no” answer the reasonable one. Each of these depends on one’s background understanding of what is relevant and why.

Anything anyone says to you has unenumerably many possible meanings, but usually you hear only one, and it’s usually the right one. Just as seeing-as allows you to visually perceive the meanings of material objects and events, hearing-as allows you to perceive the meanings of linguistic utterances. (And reading-as allows you to perceive the meanings of written language.) In the case of vision, I could sketch a mechanistic theory of how that may work. For language understanding, I don’t think cognitive science has much to offer.⁶ Fortunately, The Eggplant is not about things-in-your-head. Instead, we can rely on what I jokingly call:

In most situations, we recognize that someone asking “is there any water in the refrigerator” wants to drink it, and we are not aware of considering other possible meanings. Discussions of this phenomenon often use the word “interpretation,” which is useful but potentially misleading.

• “Interpretation” is often taken to be subjective. There’s “what the sentence objectively means” and then there’s “your interpretation,” which is a mere opinion. (This impression may be left over from high school English teachers explaining some simplistic theory about how to read poems.) This suggests that the objective, literal meaning is genuinely true or false, but interpretations are squishy and metaphorical, so they aren’t really meaningful and should probably be ignored by anyone who’s rational.⁸ But the objective/subjective distinction isn’t helpful here. In most situations, every reasonable observer would agree that “is there any water in the refrigerator” means “water to drink,” and this is as objective an account as is possible. Insisting that the “objective meaning” is “at least one water molecule” is not rational; it’s irrational.

• “Interpretation” is often taken as “processing” of language itself, with context sometimes brought in as an afterthought to disambiguate if necessary. It seems instead that we perceive the overall meaning of an activity ongoingly, and fit whatever anyone says into that contextual meaning.⁹ Language interpretation is not a distinct process subject to its own rules. It’s an inseparable part of the whole activity, so we bring the unenumerable relevancies to bear. It’s necessarily improvisational and one-off in the same way all merely-reasonable activity is.

• “Interpretation” is normally understood as explicitly reasoning about possible alternatives. Those may be involved in some unconscious process, but ambiguities are rarely noticed, much less reasoned about, consciously.

• “Interpretation” is not mainly a matter of choosing between well-defined alternatives, even if unconsciously. A rationalist might say that “water” has several distinct meanings, and it is absolutely true that there is water_chemical in the fridge but absolutely false that there is water_drinking. The next section addresses this argument.¹⁰

The eggplant is a straw hat

Linguists recognize that words have different meanings in different contexts. They distinguish three phenomena: polysemy, metonymy, and metaphor. If a word has several standard, distinct meanings, selected by context, that is polysemy. If a word with one meaning is used to refer to something else that is associated with it in some way, that is metonymy. If a word is used to refer to something else that is similar in some way, that is metaphor. Are these valid, separate categories?

One dictionary lists, among several meanings of “fruit,” “any product of plant growth useful to humans”; “the developed ovary of a seed plant”; and “the edible part of a plant developed from a flower.” In “the eggplant is a fruit,” which one is the meaning? This does not seem a meaningful question. The meanings run into each other; they are not clearly distinct. Polysemy is not a useful framing; but neither metonymy nor metaphor is involved either.

“An eggplant dish” might be analyzed as metonymy: the china container is used to refer to its contents. Or, it might be analyzed as polysemy: some dictionaries give “a particular preparation of food” as a meaning of “dish.” “The fruit of your labors” might be analyzed as a metaphor (the poem you wrote is the delicious product of an organic growth process you nurtured), or as polysemy (some dictionaries list “anything produced or accruing” as one meaning of “fruit”).

So polysemy, metonymy, and metaphor are all nebulous and run into each other. (Speaking of running, the Oxford English Dictionary’s 645 different definitions of “run”—mentioned in Part One—can’t represent 645 different concepts. They are different ways of using the word in different contexts, but not clearly distinct.) “Polysemy, metonymy, metaphor” may be useful for analyzing poetry, but seem dubious in understanding everyday language use.

Let’s start over.

We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”?

We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room.

A homophobic waiter might say “the eggplant is a fruit,” meaning “ostentatiously gay”—and a gay waiter might say and mean the same thing, but with a side serving of irony.

We naturally use whatever words are adequately unambiguous and obvious in context to describe things for which “literal, objective” terms would be ambiguous, unavailable, or inconvenient. It doesn’t matter what “the word means”; it matters that the right customer gets their moussaka.

Hearing the meaning of “is there any water in the refrigerator?” is not a matter of determining which type of water was asked about, water_drinking or water_chemical. If you want to be helpful, you need to know what the questioner wants to accomplish. Unenumerable factors of the situation are relevant to that—rather than to “disambiguating the word.” It may matter, for instance, just how thirsty they are, and what they like to drink:

Is there any water in the refrigerator?
Yes.
Where?
Oh, I meant the lemonade, I figured that would do. It’s not very strong.

There is no algorithm, no general method, for interpretation. You improvise using whatever resources are ready to hand. There’s nothing magic about this; it’s mundane and obvious stuff we do constantly, mostly without even noticing. But no human capacity or activity is not potentially involved.