Common belief tells us that language carries the meaning in order to communicate. Like a boat would carry merchandise. Wrong. Love doesn’t mean anything. Sky doesn’t mean anything. Meaning doesn’t mean anything. Language does not carry the meaning, rather, it triggers a response in the mind of the recipient. And it is this response that we call meaning. Language is the electricity that turns up the light, not the light itself. And this perspective changes everything.

What do you mean? 🤔

But first, what is meaning? Meaning can only exist in a mind, you don’t see meaning hanging out here and there in the world. It is made up of all our experiences, sensations, feelings and a little bit of what we were born with. Since we’ve been living in the same environment as saber-toothed tigers, scarce food supply and other vital or deadly stuff we had to deal with, we evolved making sense out of it. Our minds developed the ability to conceptualise a rock or an iPhone to create the idea of it, and tell the difference between deadly snakes and friendly fellow humans. This is the world of meaning, where our minds are at.

Then, people had a great idea, to put labels on these concepts. We invented language. So this liquid that I need to drink to stay alive, let’s call it water. This way, when I find a lake I can alert the whole tribe and tell them to grab their towels and bikinis to go for a swim. Language, thank you. But now, since humans are more concerned by the philosophy of consciousness and the composition of an atom than escaping lions, this get tricky. The problem we face is what I call the reality dissection fallacy, but let’s call it the Scalpel Mania.

The greatest confusion 🦁

Here is the trick. A lion is not a definite entity. What we call lion is the idea that we have of a lion, but this concept doesn’t exist in the real world. When you say “lion” you want to wake up the idea of a lion stored in the other person’s mind. The issue with this is that people tend to mistake language for meaning. Since our language has a word to talk about lions, we tend to think that lions exist in nature as fundamentally separate from the rest. We tend to think that the word “lion” is what we think it means, the animal. Except it isn’t, it is just an arbitrary word.

First, remember the meaning will depend on the person hearing or reading the word. Maybe they’ll think about the king of the jungle, maybe the movie Lion, or their favorite stuffed animal. The meaning varies from person to person, proving that it is not intrinsic to the word itself. Let’s take our previous diagram and apply it to an example. John talks to Tim about the great movie he just saw. Tim immediately thinks about Leo, his stuffed Lion.

Second, a lion is not separate from the rest of reality. Ok, I admit it’s pretty easy to differentiate a lion from anything else. But what about a more abstract or complex concept like revenge? What is the difference between revenge and justice? Between justice and corruption? Between corruption and business? When we define a word, we do a couple things: we create a box with everything that’s designated by the word, and we create another box with everything that isn’t.

“Revenge: the action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.” — Oxford Dictionary.

So, what we do in our mind is say that everything that fits to this definition goes into the Revenge box. Everything that doesn’t goes into the Not Revenge box. This is the Scalpel Mania. This is of a tremendous impact on our way to view the world.

Language is a scalpel 🔪

Of course, language and meaning are intimately intertwined, always influencing one another. Languages are influenced by the culture of the people that speak it. It is no coincidence that Eskimos have hundreds of words for the snow, they simply deal more with snow on a daily basis. We use the vocabulary that we need to label what we deal with in our environment. And the more we deal with snow, the more variations in language we need, the more words we come up with.

Vice versa, language influences the way we think. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis even states that depending on the language we speak, we have a different way of viewing the world. For instance, the Russians have two words for blue — one for light blue and another for dark blue. Therefore, they tend to process them differently, like we think of green and red as two different colours. We think in terms of boxes all of the time because of language, and this comes out on our way to think about the world.

Buddhist philosophy tells us that reality is fundamentally indivisible. Even the sense of self is an illusion. We often say words can be weapons. That’s true; like weapons divide people, words divide reality. So here is today’s epiphany: reality is continuous, unique and unified. And what do we do with language? We dissect reality with our scalpel words, we cut it open into pieces before putting them into arbitrary boxes. We can’t help ourselves from labelling things by introducing arbitrary differences. We create our realities, whereas there’s actually only one. That’s exactly what racism, homophobia or antisemitism are all about. We tend to believe that, since we have a word for jew, there must be something out there that fits the description, fundamentally different from the rest of people. Except there isn’t, jews are not radically distinctive from the rest, it is just an illusion. But don’t get me wrong, we all live in this illusion, as victims of the Scalpel Mania. Nazis just pushed it way further than most people.

Look how reality is being cut open by our friends languages.

The thing is, language is just a model that helps us evolve in our environment by communicating with our peers. It works the same way as our physical or mathematical models that help us explain and predict the weather, the trajectory of a bullet or the mechanics of a plane. But they are only models to explain reality, they are not reality itself.

Don’t mistake the map for the territory 🗺

Here’s a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan: