Communication, semantics, and linguistics are all aspects of our daily lives that often receive little to no forethought. Except, when there’s a break down, and miscommunication occurs. Then, an analysis of what was said, the speaker’s intent, the listener’s perspective, and context all come into play.
Academics interested in this have presented a variety of theories and explanations for what takes place when we communicate, and the variety of perspectives and circumstances surrounding our experiences.
One take is known as situationalism:
[S]ituationalism suggests that our behavior is often a function of situational variables more so than it is a function of internal stable dispositions. So, basically, a character-oriented person might suggest that a person being generous would mean that the person is reliably generous, regardless of the situations you place that person in. As such, by this way of construing character, situations play little role in determining behavior — character does. The situationalist argues that changing variables in situations can make a generous person (say) act in a non-generous way, so that at the very least we start to see that there is a great deal of inconsistency across situations. As a result, we then are led to believe that situations drive behavior, not character traits. The result: the claim that there are no stable “global” character traits. No one is “generous” in a way that would suggest that the person has a pre-situational stable disposition that “plays out” across the different situations that the person finds himself in. (source)
[S]ituationism says that people make choices from the totality of their situation, internal and external. In other words, if I were in your situation, including your entire life history, I would do as you do. It is a statement of nonseparation, of compassion. (source)
Continuing along the same path, then, “[a]ccording to situationalism, [statements] should incorporate the idea that truth is relative to a situation.”
Other perspectives include:
- Contextualism: In some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context, and is thus considered “context-sensitive.”
- Minimalism: “Minimalism can be characterized, roughly, as the view that the constituents of the
statement expressed must be triggered by syntactic elements present at the surface level of the utterance and directly conveyed by the meaning of the expressions appearing in the utterance.
These theories are just the tip of the iceberg. If this has made you curious to explore more of this topic, I recommend reading Contextualism, minimalism, situationalism.
