Disclaimer: This post is unresearched and contains no links as I’m just working from an idea I had this morning. I’d love to hear if I got something wrong, but I’m going fast to stop myself from getting stuck on this.
In the beginning was the word
Language developed long before we wrote it down. But I think as soon as we started speaking to one another we had the problem that it is possible to say things that are different from the way things actually are. This is unlike in-person pointing and grunting, where we are restricted to the way things are in the world. We can’t point at an object that doesn’t exist, but we can speak of it.
This is a wonderful advancement because it allows use to communicate things like plans for the future or relate stories about events which happened in the past. It’s also the entry point to abstract thought and math. On the downside it allows for a whole set of possibilities in subterfuge. It allows us to promise things we have no intention of doing. It allows us to lie.
I think to balance this in a positive direction, we have developed great social pressure not to be caught in a lie. But when all communication is oral, there is an out – you can deny what you said. It is understood that we have imperfect recall, and therefore a defence like “that’s not what I said” is somewhat defensible.
Then we started writing things down
As soon as we developed writing, the recall component of deniability was weakened. It’s harder to argue that the writing was altered than to argue that someone is remembering wrong. But I think that social interaction requires a certain amount of wiggle room, so we started to focus on the nuance of context to retain deniability. When confronted with a written record of what we said, we can claim that it was quoted out of context, that something said before or after was left out, which changes the meaning. Or we can say that the written word doesn’t capture the nuance of inflection and claim that we were using an ironic tone of voice.
Of course, it is also possible to write words which weren’t ever spoken. In this case, we can claim that the reader lacks crucial information which changes the way the words should be interpreted. “Yes, I wrote that, but you misunderstand what I meant”.
Now we record everything
The recent elections in America have shown that even our current recording technology, where we record the voice and the image of the person speaking, doesn’t make things any more solid. It appears now that language itself is being called upon to allow the differences of interpretation which used to be restricted to arguments about what was said behind closed doors. Trump can say clearly and repeatedly in front of a camera that he intends to build a wall between America and Mexico, and people can interpret this as some kind of metaphor rather than a statement of intent.
I predict that the more exact and expansive we become in recording what people say, the less we will be able to point at those recordings themselves to understand the meaning, because the language will be called upon to allow for different interpretations. Perhaps a certain amount of wiggle room is a fact of communication, and we will find a way to introduce it.
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