Almost everyone needs to use or interpret language on a daily basis. That makes the epistemology of language a matter of everyday relevance alongside many other aspects of epistemology, in spite of the seemingly minimal or almost nonexistent effort that is consciously put by many people into philosophically understanding words. Few ever seem to come to the conclusion that there is no inherent meaning to words [1] without someone else specifically coaxing it out of them, and the rarity of this means bickering over personal communication styles and word choice might be common for some people even to the point of overlooking the concepts supposedly behind the words. For those who do get past this, though, an important distinction needs attention.
Just because no word has inherent meaning does not mean that words never have objective meaning. In this case, inherent and objective refer to distinct qualities, with the former referring to an intrinsic nature and the latter referring to the fact that it is objectively true that words mean whatever they were intended to mean. If I use a word, it objectively means whatever I intend for it to communicate to others or represent to myself in the case of an introspective self-conversation using words. It is still objectively true that words have no link to specific concepts or experiences on their own, with even the most consistent usage of a word in reference to a concept having nothing to do with any inherent meaning.
Thus, a text like the Bible does have objective linguistic meaning, albeit not in a sense entailing that words are anything more than arbitrary sounds or letters with no fixed definitions. The meaning of the words therein are not up to the whims or perceptions of readers; they are set in stone by whatever the authors meant by the words at the time of writing. This is how all oral and written language functions. People can pretend like the words of the Bible or some other text mean whatever they want them to mean, but this contradicts the truth of how the author's intentions fixed the meaning.
Concepts are objectively knowable in that even concepts that cannot be proven to be true can be known to logically necessitate certain conclusions. Every individual who uses language can think about concepts directly and can even have the words of others, spoken or written, prompt thoughts of new concepts despite the fact that the intentions behind the words of others are ultimately unknowable. Even though the authorial intent behind a text like the Bible cannot be known with absolute certainty (due to a host of epistemological barriers preventing direct knowledge of historical events and the existence or content of other minds), there is still a great deal of evidence that the authors meant certain things by using specific words.
This is the truth of the matter behind the epistemology of language as applied to the context of analyzing specific books like the Bible. There is no subjective meaning of the text, no shortcut to understanding the meaning by means of assumptions or emotional guidance. There is also no way to truly get around the logical fact that just because an author had a very specific meaning in mind when using a particular word does not mean that the word has that same meaning when used by other people. It does not even matter if the other people are from the same generation or a later one; regardless of the era in which they live, their words are their own.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-relativity-of-language.html
No comments:
Post a Comment