Linguistic Fuzziness

Linguistic Fuzziness

It’s the Infusion of Meaning into words, phrases and sentences that may not carry as cleanly as the literal words and phrases.  Like the fuzz on the surface of a tennis ball causes the ball to carry differently than a ball that is identical, except has a smooth surface.

I imagine a tennis ball that is entirely smooth white rubber.  It is a clean, non-porous material, and is constructed from simple compounds that are “atomic level” ingredients.  It’s just a plain, white, rubber ball.  In language, maybe the equivalent is “blue dog eats chicken”.  Pretty simple compounds, not much room for misinterpretation. Blue. Dog. Eats. Chicken. This phrase does not need to make sense any more than a “smooth, white, rubber, ball”.  It only gets complicated when we project additional information into the compound because for some reason or other, we believe, based on a priori knowledge, that we think it belongs there.  This projection of additional information, may or may not correspond to the meaning that was “infused” (or not) by the speaker of these words.  It is this layer of potentially ambiguity that I think of as the fuzzy green stuff found on the outside of a new tennis ball.  The base compounds are underneath, but are layered over with a “fuzziness”, which is what we will always come into contact with first. As the ball moves from A to B, this fuzziness can cause, or be used to cause, behaviors that would/could not exist if it were just a “smooth, white, rubber, ball”.  A tennis ball left outside for long enough will eventually lose its fuzziness. And just be a ball.  The context has “worn off”.  The same is true in communication.

In my example I was attempting to demonstrate that “meaning” is a layer of communication which sits above words, phrases, sentences, etc.  Simple statements can be understood by different people, with different backgrounds to mean very different things.  I was saying that I think someone’s background, and current state, can be evaluated by questions that have no definitive right or wrong answers, and in some cases, can cause total confusion because the question is understood, but how to answer it is not, and can through the interviewees brain into something of a loop.  It’s in some ways a more conversational style of word-association.

So yes I understand that Linguistic Semantics is the Title of this Group, and that it is also a field of study, but I am also saying that it a mechanism for evaluation, and therefore potentially the basic structure for Psychological evaluation tools.  Not that LS needs to be used that way, just that it can be.

My Blade Runner citation seemed an appropriate example of how the meaning of a construct of words and phrases can be understood, or not, and the resulting reactions to the realization (or not) of the meaning, can be used to begin to “frame in” the Psych profile of the interviewee.

Expression through language will always have a “sender”, and generally have a “receiver”.  It is one thing to understand what was meant by the Sender, it is another to understand the meaning perceived by the Receiver.