Meaning and Misunderstanding: Prototype Theory and Clouds of Meaning

Greetings, friendlies. :)

Ever been on retreat, maybe the teacher is talking about dependent origination, and the frustration is clear in the tone of the Q&A: “Wait. Is Saṅkhāra a kind of Saññā?” “Is Citta Viññāṇa??” “How is Vedanā different from Nāmarūpa???”

It seems to me that a lot of dukkha in dhamma teachings stems from confusion about the underlying structure of human meaning. We tend to think that semantic categories are fixed buckets. You’re either in or you’re out. You’ve either got it, or you don’t.

Cognitive Linguistics says something else. Evidence suggests that categories don’t exist in the human mind as fixed buckets; they are something more like Clouds of Meaning. The technical term is “Prototype Theory”.

Any particular cloud has a center that is more-or-less solid, we call this an “exemplar”, and it diffuses out to edges that are more or less “fuzzy”.

An example: is a robin, a bird? Of course. For many of us, a robin-like-thing is the exemplar for the category “bird”. Ask a child to draw a bird, they will probably draw something robin-esque.

What about an ostrich? Okay… sure? Wings, feathers, lays eggs. Sure. An ostrich is a bird.

What about an archaeopteryx? Ooooh. Now we’re getting to an edge case. There’s wiggle room out here, and we’d be okay if someone said yes and someone else said no.

How do these Clouds of Meaning come to be? We are first met with an exemplar, perhaps a single-parent child learns the word “mother”. Initially this word is not a category; it’s a proper name. Mother with a capital-M.

Eventually the child sees another adult taking care of another child. It hears the word “mother”. It learns that “mother” is not a name but a category: an adult that takes care of a child. Later it hears the word “father”; “mother” is again clarified to include gender presentation. And so it goes. [1] There is an exemplar, Mother, around which a cloud of meaning develops. The edges are still fuzzy. For some people, a transgender woman who adopts a child fits soundly in the category “mother”. For others this can be more or less of an edge case.

Our experience of meaning, of language, of concepts, is not bucket-like, it is cloud-like. And these clouds have more-or-less solid centers diffusing out to more-or-less fuzzy edges.

Holding Clouds of Meaning as a framework can take a lot of the dukkha out of unfamiliar categories. Saṅkhāra, Saññā, Viññāṇa… rather than being frustrated because we can’t grasp a concept, we open to category building as process. If we are confused by a new term, or feel resistance to a novel translation, gnashing of teeth is unnecessary. We can hold disagreements more lightly, get curious about where centers and edges overlap. We can practice softening our view.

***

[1] Thanks to Douglas Hofstadter for the metaphor.