My Remedy to the RIDL of Unnecessary Misunderstanding

Yes, RIDL is distinctly spelled...

Rhetoric is the study of misunderstanding and its remedies. - I.A. Richards

My Generalist, Integrated Remedy for Mitigating Misunderstanding

I’ve now spent over a decade studying, training, teaching, and researching in 3 disciplines: applied linguistics, English composition, and rhetoric and writing studies. Each offers me a unique perspective for solving language problems in the real world, or solving real-world problems via improved communication practice. This interdisciplinary approach might be called a generalist or integrated perspective that makes novel connections across related or disparate domains of knowledge possible. David Epstein might call this range. Or at least, I’d like to think so.

Through applied linguistics since 2012, I have helped college students and second-language English speakers acquire new languages. It’s not a stretch to say that I can help you acquire the written and phonetic structures of any of the 7,000 languages that exist in our world today. From English composition, I help students acquire academic discourse and practice research methods. Whether it’s drafting a critical analysis, or conducting discourse analysis, I help university students build new knowledge in rigorous, technical, and scientific ways. From rhetoric and writing studies, I can teach the history of writing and how changing modes and genres and technologies shape us rhetorically every time we text, post online, or get dressed for the day.

Everything is rhetorical because everything we do communicates a message of some kind to someone for a specific purpose. Language can start or end conflicts; in the least, language and writing shape the conflicts, and shape us, too. From the vantage point of all 3 fields of study, not to mention my BA in English literature (2010), I see how every discipline or culture, business or person, uses language and writing in its own distinct way. I also see why, because of rhetoric, ideology, discourse, and language itself, each specialized discipline, culture, or person talks past each other.

We fundamentally talk past each other, even when sharing the same language, in part because of the very confounding and constraining structure of language. More fundamentally, we misunderstand each other regularly, daily, and with seemingly increased frequency via social media…directly because of the shared nature of language words to describe unique and singular instances, people, things, etc. This is the case not least because scholars estimate English contains between 600,000 to 1 million words (including unused, outdated words). Or because the average native English speaker knows 20,000 to 30,000 of the 170,000 common words in current use. But, it’s because we share everyday domestic or workplace words to navigate getting out of bed, eating, and working, thus concealing distinctions and deceiving ourselves into easy epistemic comfort so that “language is the house of being” (Heidegger). So, the 7,000 meaning-making systems we call language help us connect our otherwise imperceptible subjective perceptions of external and internal worlds with others.

Yet, as Friedrich Nietzsche points out in On Lying in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), we ironically sacrifice a measure of distinctness and complexity when we rely on words to form intelligible concepts and connect with people. We average unique experiences into a generalized, taxonimized form or concept. He argued that via language:

we make unequal things equal (lns. 98-112)

He uses a leaf and the word ‘leaf’ to illustrate. He means to say that no two leaves are materially the same, yet our word ‘leaf’ conceals their distinct natures from their obvious visible appearance so that we humans pass them and do not notice them. This is due to categorical knowledge facilitated by the shared word leaf we associated with that leaf and leafy shape formed in our minds via past memories. Two people with the same first and last names on Facebook may appear equal yet obviously signify totally different people, bodies, lives, histories, and profiles that are unequal in almost every way. We speak through language, yet language speaks through us too. Imperfectly so…

Lastly, during a conversation, if someone doesn’t challenge or oppose our use of a word, then we immediately proceed as if they accepted our definition of it. This all happens in a split second. They assent to our version of it, and us to theirs unless someone disagrees or asks for clarification. Such disagreement reveals we aren’t just arguing differing definitions, we are arguing reverberated past associations based on distinctly lived experiences; lived experiences so profoundly diverse that it’s a mystery to me we agree on any meanings or definitions of shared words at all. Richards’s abridgement of the context (misunderstanding via dead metaphors) resonates with this concept of past associations, and Bakhtin likewise speaks to them thru dialogic heteroglossia (misunderstanding via thousands of past threads of meaning, accent, social status, cultural context, etc.) whereas Aristotle’s enthymeme (misunderstanding via remote premises that don’t connect w/conclusion) also speaks to past associations.

So, my poster shows how language works by demonstrating how language doesn’t work.

OMCC and the RIDL Model

OMCC/RIDL Model - Project Luminas: Associationary

To visualize how the language patterns we use work against us as much for us, or paradoxically produce misunderstanding by clarifying and concealing via lived associations, I created the poster above titled The Origins of Misunderstanding or Common Communication (OMCC). In this model, I present 4 communicative filters through which we misunderstand - or differently understand - an event or speech utterance (from mundane personal conversations to political addresses).

The 4 Filters are:

1. Rhetoric

2. Ideology

3. Discourse

4. Language Structure Limits

Together, they constitute the RIDL of Misunderstanding. Sounds kinda cool, right? All the more because the acronym was quite accidental. I could configure them in several orders worth discussing later. For now, this one works well.

Languages contain thousands of words and patterns to learn and acquire, and they afford us interpersonal/collective understanding and constrain us (generalize differences). Discourse uses language in particular patterns to combine with or express identity. Ideology represents ideas that appear in speech that are yet unrealized or interpreted quite inaccurately from reality. An ideograph nicely represents how multiple rhetors can easily use an ideogram (shared word) for such vastly different purposes (war, equity, God, etc.). Rhetoric describes the more conscious use of or application of communicative moves to effectively persuade or identify with interlocutors as formed within previous determining filters (ideology, discourse, language).

Via millions of past associations present at any one time, any utterance carries the potential for endless combinations of new associations: for endless understandings and misunderstandings. Can this model somehow predict what associations will be assented to or win out (if I can use machine learning and natural language processing…maybe)? It can at least provide an analyst the means to create a quite comprehensive or more complete account of why misunderstanding occurred in any given situation.

In short: misunderstanding is fundamental to our personal, professional, and national conversations. That we achieve clarity at all is nothing short of a miracle. And I use this RIDL model to mitigate unnecessary misunderstanding and reduce the impact of incomplete knowledge in communication, as I did here and here to explain how American corporate media used one word - ‘parent’ - as they covered 2021 parent protests of K-12 school policies in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, Virginia.

Read my description and rationale of the OMCC poster below; otherwise, please share this, comment, and subscribe.

The OMCC Poster

You’ll notice a vertical vanilla bar that effectively separates the poster into a third section to its right and a two-thirds section to its left. To its right appears a red explosion-shaped object I labeled Event/Speech Act. I think the red explosion subconsciously represents any word or event at all but also the concept of trigger words or microaggressions so common to our cancel culture era.

Productive Rhetorical Responses (PRR) are contained in a white font in the shape of a vertical half-circle almost as though multiple productive angles and approaches could be used, or are required, to most completely understand the red event/speech act. I wanted this red to contrast sharply with the gray-blue scale behind it to signify how we commonly focus on what is said without understanding why it is said. All the dark blue font to the left is divided into 4 Filter columns: rhetoric, ideology, discourse, and language structural limits. I bordered each column’s title in red to subtly signify its interpretive and constructive connection to the red explosion speech act or event.

The Event/Speech Act, the Filters, and the PRRs complete the cultural context that constructs the event from the observer or participant’s perspective. By placing the act off-centered to the right of the poster, it visually attempts to depict just how much of our preceding linguistic pasts via discourse, ideology, and rhetoric inform and construct every speech event. I believe there is no utterance that has not been influenced by aspects of prior linguistic history or lived human experience. When multiple people are present, multiple splintered, branching pasts convene to comprehend, in fact create, what is said at present. Linguistic forms, rhetorical genres, modes, and fluency all collide or flow. Inherited linguistic structures from an iterative, Jackson Pollok-esque mesh of Unrealized Linguistics Constructors. Our past linguistic selves (and ancestors) constructed future linguistic probabilities and confusion as much as understanding, an inheritance we forward so profoundly ignorant of the vast multitudinous connections and associations every utterance contains and makes.

No wonder rhetoric can be the study of misunderstanding and its remedies.

In upcoming posts, I will explain each column and profile each linguist or theorist and their RIDL-relevant term. I’ll even introduce my 3rd subproject: Associationary.