Someone, somewhere coined the powerful phrase “meaning is use,” but the expression as we know it is from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Among other things, it causes a great deal of headache, which includes figuring out what in the world it means. Regardless of whether it’s right or even what it means exactly, we can still say something about what it does not mean. This becomes important when “meaning is use” is employed to sweep away established definition in an argument, which unfortunately happens from time to time.
It’s often said that examples of sweeping away can be found in postmodern (or “Pomo”) circles. This is well-known. A fashionably disheveled French intellectual smoking a cigarette and firing off pseudo-profundities like “reality is a text on which there is no final verdict,” or something to that effect. Regardless of origin, it has bled into contemporary discourse. It’s a trope for a reason and generally speaking not worth fighting over. But we should push back when people try to deputize Wittgenstein into this way of thinking.
Getting to Meaning
“Meaning is use” states that meaning emerges through actual usage in language, not in some preestablished or essentialist package. There are no conditions out in the world that are both necessary and sufficient that can override usage. The meanings of words can change over time, even if the world stays the same. The dispute here does not involve disagreement over necessary and sufficient conditions, (over essentialism), or over anything that would fix word-level meaning permanently. This is about how far to take it.
The Biblical scholar Dan McClellan takes it too and past the limit. McClellan is a liberal religious scholar, liberal both politically and in terms of debunking the historical claims made by traditional religion. This is yeoman’s work and should be applauded. But in the course of his work, he employs concepts from the philosophy of language in a way that calls for intervention.
McClellan invokes Wittgenstein’s idea of a language game. This concept points to the fact that we cannot nail down one essential element at the core of all games, so instead we rely on a family resemblance concept to identify groupings and meanings. The idea is interrelated with other Wittgensteinian insights like forms of life, rule-following, and the impossibility of a private language. All are pervaded by the hypothesis that meaning is use.
In line with this pervasive guidance, McClellan rightly points out that meanings change over time – that there are no linguistic categories sent down from heaven. But to finally get to the critique, at times he goes so far as to say stuff like this: “There is no sense in which ‘meaning’ somehow resides within blobs of ink, pixels on a screen, in the light reflecting off of hand signs, or in sound waves … All meaning a person ever perceives is constructed entirely within their own mind.”
The problem is, if there is no sense in which meaning resides in the mediums we use, be it in blobs of ink, pixels on a screen, sound waves, or even morphemes or phonemes, then each linguistic act would require a fresh reinterpretation of the whole language. Otherwise, McClellan would have us believe that we keep the entire language in our heads all at once.
So, there must be more than no sense in which meaning resides in mediums of use (like language). In fact, there is a significant sense in which meaning is actually stored in the mediums. It’s not that the signs and symbols of any of the mediums of communication are intrinsically meaningful, because of course they’re not, but that they take outsourced labor, stabilizing to the degree that successfully commands deference for a more-than-trivial period of time. A vast majority of what’s happening in language is mutual deference to the meanings already attributed by countless other people to the tools we employ (otherwise meaningless blobs of ink, morphemes, etc.), rather than a conscious recommitment to the entire network of meanings with each attempt at communication.
Perhaps McClellan was only being hyperbolic? That’s one possibility. Ultimately, seeing how McClellan puts his view to use will show that we have reason to take him at his word when he says there is literally no sense at all in which meaning resides in the mediums of communication. For example, he employs the radical position when pushing back against the policing of who does or does not count as Christian (McClellan being a Mormon likely gives him a special interest here). This is not to take a firm position in any dispute on where that line is, but McClellan’s tactic is to wash away any public line, leaving only self-identification in a given moment as the standard. McClellan states “There is no person or group of people on the planet who are in charge of who gets to call themselves a Christian.”
That would be a fine point if mobs were roaming the countryside telling people they aren’t Chrisian even as the community recognized them as such, but in McClelland’s hands, the statement is in support of raw self-identification. In that context, McClelland’s statement is simply false, because there absolutely is a group of people on planet earth with the authority to articulate what makes a Christian, and that’s competent language users.
Individual self-identification cannot automatically, in any given moment, override general linguistic practice, and general linguistic practice carries normative (even if not ultimate) authority in the area of meaning. Denying this would be like denying that police carry authority, simply because their ultimate status relies on a more complex political reality, in the end governed by social norms, etc., etc. This would be true on some level but in most contexts would be incredibly trivial to assert.
Another way to put it is that if it’s to be illuminating, the fundamental academic divide between prescriptive and descriptive understandings of language cannot be a dichotomy. Neither alone can fully account for the way language functions. Suffice it to say, prescriptive understandings can’t account for the way language developments and changes, while any purely descriptive account would neglect the necessary authority users enact on one another within a language. There’s no use is avoiding it; normative authority actually does constrain meaning. Language is fluid and rule-governed at the same time.
McClellan emphasizes only fluidity by employing a meta, long-term view of meaning “from a thousand miles up” and imposes it on the object level, where meaning is highly outsourced to signs and symbols, and change is somewhat constrained by factors like the size of the linguistic community, the time it takes for new uses to circulate, the willingness or lack thereof of other users, and so on. Agreeing with the big-picture view of ‘meaning as use’ does not necessarily lead to agreement of how things work on the ground. In actual life, the constraining side of normative authority is needed for settled, consistent meaning.
Going Pomo
Self-identification might succeed, over time, in getting a new definition included with the old one, or in transforming the old one, given sufficient uptake and deference among other members of a linguistic community. It is not written in stone that this cannot happen. But this is far from self-identification alone setting meaning (or else, people can self-identify without participating in meaning, which again would be too trivial to point out and wouldn’t be a bulwark against the linguistic authority of the community like McClellan wants). Without the agreement in practice among other users, linguistic activism is moot. As for new definitions that pop up in actual life, before sufficiently widespread adoption of a novel use, one appropriate response to the novel use is “that’s not what that means.”
Sometimes McClellan’s concern is phrased as in who “gets to” tell other people how to use words. But this is a sleight of hand. We can all agree now, let there be no law against using words per se, no matter the level of accuracy or adherence to custom. The question is not whether to criminalize someone for using words however they want, but if they get to establish their idiosyncratic use as meaningful to others.
In McClellan’s case, he’s expanding the common use of “Christian” to include even standard believers in Islam or Hinduism. The common understanding of what a Christian is involves a belief in Jesus as the Son of God, divine, born of a virgin, killed and then resurrected after 3 days, and as the way to God the Father in heaven (please note, I am invoking the current conception). Mormons believe all of this; therefore, they are Christian, according to most common definitions.
There is intense debate about whether Mormons count, but that’s often because of the unorthodox nature of Mormon doctrine. Mormons are not trinitarian, for example. Their godhead contains three separate beings – the father, son, and holy spirit. There are levels of heaven in Mormon doctrine, modern prophets, additional scripture and miracle stories, and so on. No one would argue that Mormons are a typical example of Christianity, at least not as commonly understood.
There are often boundary cases at the edges of categories. Perhaps even liberal theologians and clergy are themselves in a gray area because they tend to ascribe only allegorical value, rather than literal truth to the miracle stories in the Bible. But in those cases, at least we’re talking about people firmly within a form of life, building their lives and moral beliefs on the foundation of the church and within the historical Christian tradition.
What McClellan’s view would mean is that even someone who is a literal believer in another religion, even a non-Abrahamic religion, or even a militant atheist, could simply declare themselves a Christian and that would make the declaration count as membership in the category. The word would lose all its current sense, and the rest of us would have no legitimate claim against that linguistic state of affairs. But this is quite simply mistaken. There is no getting around the fact that McClellan is either asserting individual authority to override the usage of the community, or, saying something completely trivial in pointing out that people can utter whatever they like without counting as meaningful.
For now, it seems more chartable to avoid assigning merely trivial meaning to McClellan’s take, and that charitable interpretation involves the mistake of viewing any established, public definition as vulnerable to being overridden by any use anywhere and prioritizing that alleged vulnerability. But established definition doesn’t necessarily require an essentialist meta-interpretation. In other words, even if use decides meaning ultimately, it takes time for meaning to shift. Day-to-day operations in a meaning-as-use world would look a lot like an essentialist world (the latter would involve language passively reporting meaning from core essences in the external world).
McClellan might push back against the assertion that he is privileging any assertion anywhere over established usage. But he cannot sensibly do that and deny the existence of any authority to set identity meanings, which is what he’s done by saying no person or group of people on earth are in charge of what it means to be a Christian. What’s more, usage does not have to be dull. It can contain requirements for membership that, when articulated, end up sounding quite rationalistic and/or complex, and those requirements can serve as the standard for the entirety of a particular usage’s incumbency. It is wrong to say that a lack of ultimate boundaries indicates that there is no constraining limit in settling meaning in a given moment.
Post-Analytic, not Postmodern
We could argue about whether use is sufficient to account for the fullness of meaning in language, but McClellan is offering even less. Boundaries in meaning may be tough to articulate at times, and even when they are describable, the boundaries can be fuzzy and edge cases can arise. This is a far cry from there being no boundaries at all, because that would literally mean everything can count as anything. Usage has not given us that license.
As for Wittgenstein, he emphasized shared forms of life as the key to meaning, not usage alone, separated from agreement. It was crucial to Wittgenstein that people have “‘agreement in definitions but also (odd as it may sound) in judgments…” (PI § 242). “Use” has an indispensable social element that is not automatically met by any and all interpersonal utterances.
Wittgenstein is a key figure in the turn to post-analytic philosophy, an intellectual approach in the Anglo-philosophy world. As the name suggests, this way of thinking comes out of the analytic tradition, which is much more common in the Anglosphere, as opposed to on the continent of Europe (see the Analytic vs. Continental divide). Analytic philosophy is concerned with precision, logic, and so on, while Continental is concerned with broader issues like the human condition. Those are the broad strokes, at least.
Each approach has a shadow side, or drawback, as it goes. Analytic philosophy can be pedantic, and Continental can be a little mushy, especially in its postmodern manifestation. Postmodernism might have penetrating insights, but it also has its absurdities in regard to objectivity and meaning. Suffice it to say, at its worst, it dismisses any handle we have on justified belief about the world.
The post-analytic approach falls somewhere in between. This results in a writing style with a rigorous, analytic feel, while sharing with postmodernism a rejection of essentialism and certainty. But that doesn’t mean the post-analytic view collapses into postmodernism.
Again, we could argue over whether Ludwig Wittgenstein (the proto-post-analytic) gave us a sufficient account of meaning. But McClellan’s account is even weaker, so whether we need a stronger account than Wittgenstein’s is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say, “meaning is use” is now well within the post-analytic bloodstream and has enough constraint to exclude the possibility of constantly shifting meaning. Meaning would constantly shift if we were to give immediate equal weight to any proposed understanding at all.
A Look Ahead
As a non-believer with leftover affection for the liberal mainline tradition of my youth, I hope with McClellan that the common definition of “Christian” expands. But I do not share his vision that would have it expand to near senselessness. Furthermore, those who work toward this expansion will have to put forward plausible accounts of linguistic change in the process, rather than expanding the circle by the default of lost meaning.
I suspect McClellan means his radical approach only insofar as it staves off “conservative” interpretations, but it won’t hold when he wields his expertise to correct those who contradict what he views as the central moral message of Jesus. In other words, he’ll present clear and constrained meaning to those who forget that we were once strangers in a strange land, and that the person of Jesus is found in the sick, the hungry, and the imprisoned. But based on what McClellan has told us so far, this is incoherent, because it would require some people somewhere with enough authority to make a claim on the linguistic behavior of others.
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