Wordy

I've been out of town for a bit (hence the recent gap in posts) and so spent some time catching up on LinkedIn this morning. One of my contacts reposted a link to a YouTube video about four ways to find meaning in life, drawing on the life experience of Doctor Viktor Frankl. The video never defined "meaning." An old manager of mine linked to a New York Post article decrying Woke movie reviews. I was pretty sure that the author had no idea of what "Woke" meant (or rather, was intended to mean), other than people whose politics they found to be too liberal/not patriotic enough.

The lack of a clear definition for "meaning" in articles that talk about how to find it is something I've gone on about before, so I won't bore you with it again.

What I'm really interested in is how people consistently use language in a way that implies that whatever definition they're using (or expect) for a term is universally held. Part of this is simply the way that language evolves; a given usage of a word makes it into everyday language and it crowds out previous usage in an informal process of substitution. While it can be alleged that the bastardization of the term "Woke" by Right-leaning commentators is part of a broader campaign to discredit their political opponents through linking their slogans to negative ideas (after all, Christopher Rufo has been quite open about wanting to link the term "Critical Race Theory" to policies that the general public would find frightening), the fact of the matter is that most people don't learn how language is used from reading dictionaries. Rather, they copy the usages that they encounter other people using when dealing with unfamiliar terms.

And this creates a phenomenon that can be described as definition without definition. The video on Viktor Frankl and meaning was vaguely inspirational and uplifting, the sort of mishmash of carefully selected anecdotes from a person's life that are trotted out when a certain image of the person is to be put forward. So while it never defines "meaning," it's inaccurate to say that to doesn't attempt to get across an idea of what "meaning" is, at least as far as the video's narration is concerned. It's the same thing with the complaining about Woke movie reviews. The article, rather than define Woke and then show how the reviews fit into that framework, makes attributions about people the author considers Woke, and leaves the audience to infer the contours of a Woke mindset from that.

But in either case, it leaves the audience without a clear understanding of any actual definition. When I ask people what is meant by "meaning," they tend to have a hard time coming up with anything other than the word itself. It leans towards the famous "I know it when I see it" standard.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

And from there, people's confidence in the objectivity of their own perceptions and worldviews takes over. But, as philosophers are often quick to point out, there's no way of knowing what is in other people's minds. And this leaves open the possibility that even if we all know meaning or Wokeness when we see it, that we don't all see the same things.