In John Locke’s essay his overarching
argument is the imperfection of language and the ways it fails us. Locke
believes that the use of words is for recording our own thoughts and then
communicating these thoughts with other. However, Locke notices a problem with this
because words can have many different meanings and people can associate many
different ideas with a single word. This
for Locke is where language fails because if “any word does not excite in the
hearer the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker” than
communication is not being successful because the hearer is not fully
understanding the speaker (Locke 817). Now to take it back to Walter Ong's "The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction" which states authors create a fictional audience when writing. Writers use this
fictional audience in order to help them imagine whom they are writing for thus
appealing to them. “If a writer
succeeds in writing it is generally because he can fictionalize in his
imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from
earlier writers who were fictionalizing their imagination audiences they had
learned to know in still earlier writers” (Ong 11). Locke and Ong both have
strong views on language, but do they connect?
Ong understand that writers can not please all of their readers. Writing has a very large reach in space and in time, therefore an author can never predict who will read their text and when. Ong says “Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawal” because an author can not address a specific person or type of person if they want many different people to read it (Ong 10). This is where the fictionalized audience comes in for Ong because the writer must construct an audience in their mind and cast them in a role. The audience then is responsible for playing out this role when reading. For example, if an author is writing a book for entertainment, the audience would play the role of entertainment seekers. Ong notes that “Readers over the ages have had to learn this game of literacy, how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read.” (Ong 12)
Now to intersect the two texts… Ong gives the audience much more credit than Locke does. Ong believes that readers/audiences members can understand the language being used or can interpret the meaning of the author/orator. If Locke were to adopt this idea and have faith in audiences he would see that language does not fail. Communication itself is successful despite the different meanings and interpretations people have. Our beliefs are still being communicated effectively, hence why language has survived so long. Both Ong and Locke can agree that meanings are derived from experiences, which vary from individual to individual. If Locke entrusted the relationship between speaker and hearer as Ong does between writer and reader than he would see that each of our differences in ideas is what strengthens language and the world of communication.
- Cailyn Callaway
Hi Cailyn,
ReplyDeleteI think the stance you took at the end of your post is really intriguing, and I'm having trouble deciding whether or not I agree. I would love to believe that trusting the relationship between the speaker and the hearer would strengthen our language and communication, but I can't seem to reconcile that belief with the world we live in.
You said that Locke believes language is incomplete... I’m not sure that he believes language is incomplete, but I do think he is arguing that the signification process behind language can be. That is, we can say exactly what we want to say in as many words as we want, but that doesn’t mean our audience will understand completely what we meant. It’s the meaning that gets tangled, not the words themselves. I think this is partly because, as Locke would argue, we often assume that a word stands for a physical thing, rather than an idea. But because we do in fact interpret meaning based on our own individual experiences, we often interpret words to signify something different than the speaker intended.
I’ll use another example that you mentioned in your own post: the difference between Ong’s idea of the audience (the reader) and Locke’s idea of the audience (the hearer/receiver). Ong seems to believe that readers can assume their assigned roles easily, and therefore understand what the writer means when he uses certain words. Locke, however, says language is abused when the speaker assumes that the audience knows exactly what is meant when certain words are used. This is one of the ways, according to Locke, that the signification process can fail, and the meanings of words can become obscure or unknowable. In their very definitions of the idea of ‘audience,’ these two men have given us a perfect example of how people can understand one word to mean two different things, and that is why I think that Locke is probably right when he says that language is imperfect.
After all, if language was perfect for communication, and if our differences really did strengthen our ability to understand each other, it seems to me that our world would be able to find a kind of harmony that we don’t have now. (I think there would be far fewer wars and a much lower divorce rate, just to name a couple of examples.) What do you think?
-Jessica Gonzalez
Caitlyn,
ReplyDeleteI think the connection you have made between Ong and Locke is interesting. I didn't even think of Ong when I read Locke's essay. However, I can't say that I agree with you completely.
Firsty, I think Locke was speaking more about the inconsistencies that people may have when they use words and in their patterns of communication. The language evolves and so do the words that people use. They gain different meanings after a while. And so it is hard to keep up. The only time I think that Locke referred to context was when he spoke about the civil and philosophical discourse. Otherwise, I think he was mainly concerned with our difficulty to attach meanings to words that so often are experienced differently.
Additionally, I think Locke discredits the encoder of the message rather than the decoder. He didn't mention the man who was receiving the message, but more the one who failed to "excite in the hearer the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker" (Locke 817). He bashed the limitations of the language itself and the complexities of the words in the language.He complained more about the barrier that the language imposes on communication and the encoder of the message.
-Kelli