Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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       Chapter Three Do You Know What I Mean?

      Parents like to think that they give their children clear, unambiguous instructions. They are puzzled as to why their children seem not to understand them. ‘Be home by 10 p.m.’ does not have a suffix of ‘or whenever it suits you’. It comes as a surprise to many parents to discover that children, like adults, do not hear what is said to them. What their brain registers is not what the parent says but what the brain interprets of what the parent says. This is the disability under which we all labour. All we can know is our interpretation of a communication, not the communication itself.

      Different generations live in different worlds. Each generation’s world contains a past, present and future that are different from the pasts, presents and futures of other generations’ worlds. Teenagers, and those of us who can remember what it felt like to be a teenager, know how, when in conversation with our parents, we suddenly see the gulf that separates our world from our parents’ world. In that moment, we experience the loneliness of living in our own individual world.

      This kind of loneliness is often called the loneliness of being. It is a very valuable loneliness because it allows us to think deeply, to become absorbed in meditation, or in the contemplation of nature, or the arts, or in some form of creativity. But, when we feel that intense loneliness of being unloved by those we want to love us, or of being with people who are so absorbed in themselves that they ignore us except when they want to use us, to be told that the loneliness of being is inescapable can mean that the loneliness we feel is unendurable.

      Even when we are with people who love us and are interested in us, we find that our conversations always involve misunderstandings. This too is inescapable in our own individual worlds.

      Here is a list illustrating the kinds of complaints people make about a conversation in which they are or have been engaged.

      ‘You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean.’

      ‘He can’t get it into his head that he has to do what he’s told.’

      ‘She just pours out all her feelings.’

      ‘He gave us his thoughts about this proposal but they proved to be rubbish.’

      ‘I can’t grasp his meaning.’

      ‘I gave him a piece of my mind but he just closed his ears to what I was saying.’

      ‘He never takes my advice.’

      In each of these sentences something is being said about a thing. To speak about a thing we use a noun or a noun clause. The things talked about in these sentences are ‘idea’, ‘what he’s told’, ‘feelings’, ‘thoughts’, ‘rubbish’, ‘meaning’, ‘what I was saying’, ‘advice’. Each of these sentences contains the metaphor of something being passed from one person to another. The linguist Michael Reddy called this the ‘conduit metaphor’.¹ We think of conversing with one another, be it in actual conversation, or writing to someone, or reading a book, or watching television, as a process of passing something from one person to another. The means of passing something from one person to another is along some kind of conduit. The thing launched does not always reach its objective, as in ‘His words fell on deaf ears’, or ‘That idea has been floating around for a long time.’ The conduit metaphor assumes that the communication one person sends along the conduit reaches its target complete and intact. What you receive is what I send.

      The conduit metaphor lies behind Richard Dawkins’ idea of the meme, which he defined as any kind of information which is copied from one person to another. The meme I send you is the one you get. Memes, Dawkins argues, replicate like genes. To explain why one person misinterprets the ideas another person gives him, Dawkins says that, like genes, memes are not always copied perfectly, and so give rise to new memes. He likens the memes he disapproves of, such as religious beliefs, to viruses, and thus they can be dangerous. His colleague the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote, ‘Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable.’² Richard Dawkins used to occupy the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. It is somewhat ironic that the person whose task it is to assist the public in understanding science does not understand himself how human beings communicate with one another.

      Dictionaries define the words we use. If I do not know the meaning of a word you use, I can look it up in a dictionary. However, a dictionary cannot tell me the connotations you have given to that word. Connotations are the meanings we attach to words and phrases. Your connotations for a word are unlikely to be the same as my connotations for that word because your connotations are drawn from your past experience and my connotations from my past experience. Dawkins’ and Dennett’s connotations for the word ‘meme’ would be along the lines of ‘good’, ‘intelligent’, ‘indubitably right’, while my connotations for ‘meme’ are along the lines of ‘what rubbish’.

      Everything we say has unstated implications. The person listening to what we say tries to guess the implications for the speaker of what they hear. The invented implications are rarely the same as those of the speaker, unless the listener СКАЧАТЬ