Original post on LinkedIn here.

How does something mean something?

All questions concerning meaning occur in language—it’s this concern with language which threads together Klaus Krippendorff’s 2003 paper ‘The Dialogical Reality of Meaning’.

More pointedly, Krippendorff proposes that things do not have intrinsic meaning; rather, meanings are attributed to artifacts by people who use them in “particular situations, at particular times, and in interaction with other people,” and these attributions occur in language.

Krippendorff weaves together three notions into an explanatory framework for how issues of meaning arise, that is to say, how artifacts could mean something. First is an account which includes the observer in the description of the observed, as advocated by second-order cybernetics; second is the notion (attributed by Krippendorff to Gregory Bateson) that multiple descriptions of phenomena add to our understanding and are “often necessary to develop insights about a phenomenon of interest”; third is the concept of dialogue, the recursive constructions of meanings (including that of others) through interactions which call on openness, indeterminacy, and acknowledgement of others’ agency.

Together, these related notions suggest how “issues of meaning arise in the con-sensual (jointly sensed) experience of things.” The comparison prompted through the multiple description of world constructions in the social domain realises second-order understanding. It is this “interlaced understanding” which Krippendorff understands to constitute social reality.

On the basis of this framework, Krippendorff encourages us to move “from abstract objectivist theory to self-reflective human-centered accounts of our social worlds”; to “abandon the idea of describing others in observer terms, as to who they are, without acknowledging their use of language, and instead grant them the same capability of understanding that we imply capable ourselves.” At issue is not an understanding of others, but an understanding of the understanding of others “as manifest in what they say and do.” This second-order understanding—understanding understanding:

“means acknowledging that the worlds of others could be radically different from our own. But because we cannot literally enter [the world of an other] with all of its sensory affordances, their world is an opportunity to reflect on our own, make our own world transparent, understandable, appreciable, without considering it superior. Without the worlds of others, we would not be able to reflect on our own. Second-order understanding always entails a struggle against our temptation to think that everyone understands as we do, unwittingly making us oppressors, controllers, and engineers of others’ lives.”

Krippendorff's emphasis on the dialogical reality of meaning challenges designers to move beyond the notion of fixed meanings—held through institutionalised objectivism which assumes that things mean the same “for everyone, at all times, and under all circumstances”—and embrace the dynamic and evolving nature of interpretation. It encourages designers to grant others the same capability of understanding that we assume for ourselves:

“[Given an ethical imperative to fairly acknowledge the world constructions of others], acknowledging that we cannot escape our own world constructions, that we cannot literally enter the worlds that others see, in order to respect the cognitive autonomy of observed others requires us to set aside a space within which they can construct their own world and in their own terms – without claiming superiority and without insisting on our theories or models of their constructions. Insisting on the latter would be a first-order understanding and enforce our way of being at the expense of that of others. This would not be dialogue but instruction.”

Link to article: https://core.ac.uk/reader/214164160