278.
Talking to the natives
How can one talk to the natives? How to understand
people who are native to a different culture or tradition, rooted in a
different language game concerning life, humanity, reason, society, or justice?
Here I return to the theory of language and meaning
that I used in this blog. There, I employ the notions of reference and sense, but
with a twist. In reference one intends to refer with words to some thing or
some class of objects. I rendered the notion of sense as the way in which one
arrives at reference, at identifying something as an individual or as belonging
to a class.
An underlying problem is that of realism. We aim to
refer to things in the world but we cannot know them as they are in themselves.
Our concepts are constructions that are realistic only in the sense that they
arise from success experienced in coping with the world. Thus, people coping in
different conditions conceptualize the world differently.
Reference is social and sense is individual. We
achieve common reference from sharing practices, mutually correcting language
use, in a shared language game. Sense consists in features one associates with
things, collected from experience along one’s individual life trajectory. So,
while reference is largely shared, underlying sense varies between people even within a community.
Commonality of meaning, in shared reference and overlapping
sense, decreases with differences between traditions and the contexts of their
development. This can yield incommensurability: reference that mutually does
not make sense.
Now I bring in another part of this theory of
language. Concepts arise in generalization from individual cases and
abstraction from specific contexts. In the process, they lose specificity,
richness of detail. To apply the concept, richness of specific context needs to
be added again. Then meanings move from the general to the specific in
connections between words in the structures of sentences in action contexts.
Meaning of the parts depends on the meaning of the whole. Meanings are not the
same between different contexts. Intersubjectivity, in common reference, is
preserved when contexts of application are shared. Nothing works better for
mutual understanding than shared projects.
Even within a culture, meanings shift in their
application, moving from one context to another. In this blog I analysed that
in terms of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (in items ….), and I will not repeat that
here. I have indicated poetry as the most salient case of upsetting, cutting
adrift, twisting or shifting established reference in surprising constructions of
sense.
Given all this, then, how can one talk with a native
from a different tradition?
Read what he/she says as you would read a poem. If you
do not grasp intended reference (‘what is he talking about’), delve for
underlying sense: what connotations does it carry along? And see how that moves
with context. See how the hermeneutic wheel turns there, in moving from context
to context.
As I indicated in the preceding item in this blog, that
is greatly helped by participating in practices in the native context. There, what
is tacit or hidden in sense is likely to shine through.
In trying to embed your own concepts, abstractions, in
local context, witness how they fail to fit, and glimpse how native concepts work
better, arising from local contexts.
Then, in trying to build up communication, use
metaphor that fits local practice, trying to explain one’s concepts in terms of
those of the native.
Be careful with judging the native before you have
done all this.