Labelling, language and ethics

A recent twitter exchange reminded me that I have often been in discussions or even arguments where 'labelling' is thrown out at some point. It is often thrown out when one party feels that nuances are being lost or sometimes when someone is attempting to play a variety of victimhood trump card. The tweet that started me off re-musing about this was this:

Twitter / Notifications: Are all labels as attempts to describe another essentially acts of judgement? Label free speech?

To which I replied:

Of course: but 'judgment' understood as 'attempted discernment' vs 'prejudce'; some = self-take

And then also:

Meaning what by 'label'? Where does noun end & label begin? Speech acts by def are ltd gestures

What I was trying to gesture at with these necessarily brief responses (hey, they're tweets!) is that labels are, viewed from one angle, a way of referring to someone else. They are nouns. Sometimes they are nouns which those who are referred to are comfortable with or even choose for themselves. Sometimes, however, they are nouns that the refered-to dislike and would prefer not to be used. I sense that often 'labelling' is used to refer to this latter kind of noun-use. This is because nouns don't only have dispassionate meanings but also have emotional connotations which are part of their use-meaning and if the connotations are disparaging then they cannot be used equally by all parties to the dialogue equally: the use of a disparaging term will constantly be alienating and tension-building to at least one party.

The problem with the term 'labelling' is that it can get used as a catch-all term to try to disallow an(y) attempt to briefly characterise something that someone would rather not talk about at all even when there is no real negative connotation.

The solutions to the snarl ups, I think, are to find mutually acceptable terms where there is a genuine issue about a term and to remain aware that labels are 'limited gestures' and to be prepared to learn more fully and sympathetically about their referents.

Finding mutually acceptable terms is important. The solution here is not to disallow using any term at all: clearly if something is to be talked about, ways of refering need to be agreed. All language is about a communal agreement in order to carry meaning from mind to mind; it is mind reading by mediation and the mediation has to be a communally agreed instrument (vs Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's story). In fact languages are constantly in the process of being agreed, misagreed and disagreed, and it is in that dynamic linguistic-communal dialogue that accusations such as 'labelling' themselves make sense. They are a bid to steer the terms of the rhetoric.

Mutually acceptable terms is a way to recognise the bona fides of the parties in the discussion. To insist on using a disparaging term against objections is, in effect, to communicate contempt for the other. But note that the alternative is not to cease to give a label for that would mean ceasing to talk about the matter. No, the alternative to a disparaging label is to find a noun which is able to serve as a helpful token in conversation towards mutually-satisfactory ends.

The other dimension I mentioned above is to recognise the limitedness of labels. Actually, this is to recognise the limitedness of language and that 'labels' are actually a particular kind of noun (signifier, if you will). In short, what I mean by this is that I cannot convey to you the fulness of what is in my mind when I speak or write. Language is like using a two-dimensional artefact to try to convey a four-dimensional reality. It is 'lossy'.

To use language we have to choose a focus from the total of the (already limited) reality we are aware of and we have to find verbal gestures to help someone else find our focus. We then (in actual fact simultaneously) have to choose further dimensions of related bits of reality (usually our attitudes and reasons for interest are involved) to incorporate into the verbal gesturing. We do this drawing on the presumption of shared information in order to achieve the compression necessary to make a message. In effect we are hoping each time that from the limited information we can convey, the other mind will be able to reconstruct enough of our intentions for a part of our mind to be read through the medium of our speech act.

So it's no surprise that labels do not convey fully the reality of what is referred to. And since we are also inevitably conveying something of our attitudes, it is no surprise that in any community-crossing conversations, we may have to recognise that attitudes or beliefs encoded in our own usual use of the term may have to be challenged and re-negotiated for the purposes of civil and civilising conversation. Clearly this implies that the the problem is not the label itself, it is our unwillingness to be challenged and to accommodate others' views. In that we are at the edge of attitudinal matters to do with stereotyping, contempt, self-justification etc.

In the light of what I've just written, the "act of judgement" issue in the original tweet can be understood more clearly. Any use of language involves us in judging what to focus on, what is relevant, what attitudes to 'it' we convey, where lines of demarcation are to be drawn etc etc. We cannot speak without such judgements, or as I put it in response, "discernment". The question is what attitudes are being conveyed (and that includes both sent and received)? And it is the attitudes that are really in view. The problem is that the labels can themselves become the rhetorical point at issue rather than the attitudes. The easiest way around this is to try to remove the label by agreeing terms: either not to use a particular term or to mutually accept a term on the understanding that it is being used in a certain way.

Of course, part of the problem is that we hear linguistic usages in a sense through the ears of the communities we know. So the individual conversation also has to take account of the wider social context. So, while you and I might agree to use a term in a relatively neutral fashion for the sake of advancing our understanding, we also have to conduct the conversation knowing that others may hear it differently. And so, for the sake of taking the fruits of our better understanding (I would hope that might be the outcome) to our wider communities, we may be best to agree to use terms (labels) which would be best received by our respective communities and yet also have the best chance to convey to them the better understandings we arrive at and also to foster those communities in a wider inter-communal conversation.

So, in the conversation that began this reflection, I was eschewing the terms "conservative" and "liberal" in (popular) ecclesiological contexts. I was doing so as an attempt to agree different terms for conversation because I feel that these terms do not help me to think about the issues. They sound Political to me and that jars: I may be 'conservative' in terms of accepting a reasonably orthodox interpretation of Christian faith, but I tend to think that doing so implicates me in taking a far from conservative view of social matters. On the other hand "liberal" may better describe many of my attitudes to social issues, but not how I view doctrine, scripture, the relationship between God and world etc etc. So I tend to use the terms "orthodox" and "open" to try to signal that what I think is a linkage in the wider world between "conservative" faith and "Conservative" politics and between "liberal" politics and "liberal" faith is not in operation here.

I judge it is harder to change the terms in the wider world (for a variety of reasons) so it is easier to change my own self desgination and then to try to have the conversations about why I would want to do that. To me that is better than to have a sense or even the experience of being written off because of the label or of being unwittingly co-opted also because of the label. (It's embarrassing or anxiety-provoking to find oneself wanting to challenge someone who assumed that you shared some viewpoint of theirs).

I guess, with reference to the original tweet as presented above, that I do not think that "judgement" is necessarily negative or disparaging. It is possible to label positively and to judge in favour. It is not the act of judging that is the problem in reality. it is judging to the detriment of others, to do so unfairly on the basis of a characteristic that is not inherently negative and to refuse to revisit the issue of the fairness of the judgement. We need to focus on the attitudes not the act of judgement.