Pi in the Sky

Emotional semantic

Posted on May 31st, 2008 at 8:00am by Pi.
Categories: Unimultiverse.

To me, language is a barrier. We have ideas going around in our head, and we have to find the appropiate words or expressions to communicate those ideas. Many of us have found ourselves in the situation where a feeling, a sensation or an idea is clear in our head, but we found difficulties in expressing it verbally in a clear way.

This happens because language is limited. There’ll always be a concept or feeling which can not be described directly with the existing words in the language, and we have to resort to circumlocutions and ad-hoc expressions to be able to transmit it. An example is the word “love”, which comprises many kinds of love: fraternal, passionate, romantic, etc.; to which one should always put in a specific context or with an extra adjetive so it means what we want to say.

So many times, a word has many possible meanings; what formally is known as semantic content. Depending of the context in which it’s used, a word or an expression (or even a symbol or a colour) have a different semantic content. But this semantic, although absolutely arbitrary, is common to all the users of one language. If it weren’t so, the language wouldn’t serve to communicate between ourselves.

In a basic example, the word “table” has a semantic content pretty defined. An horizontal wood piece placed with several vertical sticks. When we use the word “table”, everyone knows what it means. Even with the variated denotations of the word “table”, the context allows to understand the semantic content: we could say “I sat to the table to have lunch” or we could say “he was accepting money under the table”. We understand what these sentences mean because everyone of us give to these words the same semantic content.

It would be a huge problem if each one would give to words a different semantic content. If for me “table” would mean “asfixiation feeling” and for you it would mean “tropical fruit”, when I used the word table, we wouldn’t understand each other. The language, within its limitations, works because we give the same semantic contents and agreed commonly.

In our childhood, we learn the meanings of words and we add them to our vocabulary. But not all of us know the exact meaning of all the words. We don’t get to primary school and get a huge dictionary with all the formal meanings. We get along learning vocabulary due to experience with words. That way we learn the semantic and also the pragmatic, which is the way the context influences the semantic content of a word.

This actually involves a problem, because our experience with words isn’t always the same. Many matters could have infuence such as the time when you grew up, the social class of your family, the geographical origin of it, adherence to a religious group, etc. When acquiring experience with language, even ourselves give specific connotations to certain words, eliminating other semantic contents which are correct and common. This implies that there are words for we never learnt more than a specific and arbitrary semantic content, which could be different to the formal semantic content, or the arbitrary semantic content which other people could assign to them.

For example, the word “racism” means the assignment of specific characteristics to a person depending of their ethnicity. The American Heritage dictionary defines it as “the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.” However, many people doesn’t assign this semantic content; racism is emotionally associated with hate, the jew holocaust caused by nazis, the persecution of black people in the United States, etc. As to say, many people understands or feels that racism is something “very bad”, to the point that in places like Wikipedia (supposedly with a great reputation of neutrality), it’s stated that “racism has as primary objective or as result, the reduction or nullification of human rights in the discriminated people.” Here the semantic content of racism and xenophobia it’s already mixed.

Moreover, people not only usually has their own semantic, but they also think that it’s more exact, more right than other formal semantic or someone else’s semantic. This is what I call “emotional semantic”, in which the assignment of semantic content to words happens through an emotional learning process, instead of formal. It has nothing to do with the semantic of emotions; that’s a linguistic problem. The emotional semantic happens to avoid negative labels, or to assign negative feelings to labels which don’t agree with our own beliefs or ideas. The problem enlarges when there are more people who share a common emotional semantic.

But when mixing different semantic contents in a conversation, the speakers have problems to communicate. The function of language is broken. It’s true that language and semantic evolve with time, but this evolution usually happens in a parallel and convergent way. With the emotional semantic, this evolution is divergent, because each group of people acquires a remarkably different semantic than the one of other groups.

Although emotional semantic happens due to an instinctive learning process, and might look as if it happened along all the history of humnanity, is in recent times when society has been subdued to a massive information attack which has caused an increase of semantic divergence. Before, the semantic content of the words didn’t change, even if they caused various emotional reactions, be them positive or negative; there was an assignment of “good” or “bad” to the concepts. Now, the semantic content is changed so its possible to keep the same emotional reaction, avoiding the contradictions or disadvantages of being associated to a specific label, while the same ideology or emotional situation is kept. The assignment of “good” or “bad” is not anymore to the concept, but to the semantic label which defines it; when the definition is changed, and assigning “good” or “bad” to the word, the concept and the word are separated in a very comfortable and useful way.

There’s also a similarity with meaning tergiversation, technique used in media manipulation, demagogy and sectarism. The difference is that in the emotional semantic, it’s the own person the one who decides to assign a semantic content depending of the emotional reaction provoked by the word; in tergiversation and exacerbation of meanings, this semantic content is imposed from the outside based in repetition, and works as a remote brainwashing.

People give incorrect semantic contents to the words to assimilate them in their experience. Very often unconsciously, semantic has changed to accomodate it to our ideology. In the case of racism, many people have assigned it a semantic content far from their own ideas, because the racism is seen as something “very bad”; this way, these same people are able to keep being racist, without carrying the negative burden of racism as they understand it.

But talking with these people about racism, the communication problems arise. Due to these people giving to the word a different meaning, they don’t feel related to it. Here the problem is not about if racism is good or bad, but about what is racism, and if that word can be applied to the people who use it. You can talk about scientist racism, or more correctly, pseudoscientific problem; about hidden racism (which is the cause and effect of this elusive emotional semantic), etc. But people don’t see themselves as racist anymore, when the simple fact that thinking that there are different races with different characteristics is in itself the essence of racism. The emotional semantic allows them to keep believing the same thing, without the negative weight of labels. When the labels are disgusting, their meaning is changed and done. But it’s like alleviating the symptom of an illness instead of healing it.

Another example is a conversation I had with a religious person about the meaning of the words “agnostic” and “atheist”. This person insisted that an agnostic couldn’t believe in a god, while the god must believe in a god to be able to deny it. No matter how much religious education this person stated to have, it’s obvious that he assigned to those words some meanings absolutely different than they really have, based only in his own personal experience and the feelings which those words provoked in him. I didn’t bother to tell him my interpretation of those words, my opinion about the meaning he gave to them, not even to tell him where to find the formal meaning of the words. If I did that, probably he would have indicated the wrongness of such documentation or sources which were giving a formal meaning different to the emotional semantic he was using, instead of saying “ah, I thought they meant something else.”

Thus, emotional semantic is not as much a linguistic problem than a social problem, as the actor-observer bias could be, entering the category of cognitive prejudice. People use their absolutely arbitrary and personal emotional semantic to hide the disgusting facts and the censorable attitudes, to reinforce their own feelings and diminish the others’ feelings, to, definitely, exacerbate the egocentrism.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to solve the problems caused by emotional semantic. People “feel” that their definition of a word is better than other possible definition, even if that other definition were the correct, formal and majoritary, and they will argue endlessly to see which is the real meaning of a word. Emotions impose over logic and rationalization, so using these tools to fix the emotional semantic is quite complex. Unless these people are shown irrefutable proofs of the meaning of a word, i.e. “racism” in a dictionary. And even in that situation, many people would keep arguing about the truth or precision of such definition, because it collides with the arbitrary and emotional definition they chose to be more comfortable for them.

However, it’s possible to fix this tendency at personal level, simply having some care and thinking about what you say. This doesn’t mean you need to stay glued to the dictionary before saying a word; but it means to be aware when you see that in a conversation, the speakers seem to give a different semantic content to an important word in that conversation. Let’s think about if the meaning we give to that word is the formal one or the emotional one; and if we don’t know it, we shut up. It’s better to shut up and look as dumb, than speak and prove it. And it’s better to think everything we say than to say everything we think. And when we are sure of the formal meaning of a word, and that the other speakers are giving a different semantic content which is distorting the conversation, it should be put over the table, with patience and calm, the formal meaning, and invite the speakers to consider that meaning. In the event that speakers can’t agree in something as simple as the meaning of a word, the best thing is to abandon the conversation, because it’s rather improbable that they can agree in more complex subjects.

It’s also possible to acquire certain tolerance towards emotional semantic which people could use to communicate with us, and focus more on what people mean instead of what they say; but without arguing about it. When anticipating the possible existence of an emotional semantic opposite to formal semantic or to our own emotional semantic, we can have more clear what people communicate even without wanting.

In conclusion, emotional semantic is another barrier which exists in an instinctive manner to complicate even more the problematic of communication between people. Knowing its existence and seeing the problems it causes is an important step towards overcoming this barrier at personal level. But as in the case of other cognitive prejudices, the most we can aspire is to live with it, more than solve it.

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