WordMeanings

Quora Answer : Can you believe a statement is true without understanding the meaning of the statement?

Apr 10, 2014

Sure. If you misunderstand the meaning.

For example, I say "Sally is beautiful". For your aesthetic taste, that's true. Sally is a blonde and you find blondes beautiful. You readily concur.

However, when I made the statement, I was talking about Sally's high cheek-bones and facial structure and don't care about her hair colour. You didn't understand what my statement "meant" but you do believe it to be true.

Now you might think that this is a silly case because obviously you just have a mistaken meaning. But in practice, everyone has slightly different understandings of what words and sentences mean. We all have idiosyncratic associations we make, slight colourings to the positive or negative. There's no sentence in the world that doesn't have a crack in it that can allow a slight ambiguity to creep in. And when it does, it's always possible for someone to pick up and firmly believe themselves to agree to a statement without having the exact understanding of what the speaker intended by it.

Even if it's a statement you formulated yourself. "I have a good life" you think to yourself. If someone asked you to unpack that notion of good life you might point to your salary, your comfortable house. But in practice, what you really enjoy is the care and affection from your wife, the fact that you aren't hungry or suffering chronic pain. Counterfactually, were you to be in a smaller house at half the salary, you wouldn't notice. But without the wife, or enough food or your health, your life would be a misery. Once again you firmly believe something without fully understanding the criteria that make that belief true.