Importance Of Misunderstanding In Communication

Misunderstanding is an inevitable aspect of communication. We often find ourselves saying, “That is not I meant when I said…” or “let me explain it in other words…” and so on. Ambiguity, faulty definitions, jargons, and other unaligned components of a natural language are taken to be the culprit for such awkward situations. But why is it misunderstanding anyway? Why not wrong understanding? Perhaps that is so because the speaker knows that the sentences uttered by him could have meant something other than the thought he believed the sentence would project. Consequently, an understanding of the sentence, would be to know the thought that caused the utterance. But before trying to postulate something like: meaning of an expression is the thought or idea that caused the expression, one needs to be sure of meaning itself.
A commonsensical …show more content…
The signifier does not express the (supposed) meaning and neither the signified has any motivated connection with the signifier. Rather, "the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary". An object could be signified as well by ‘cake’ as by ‘river’ while the same signifier could be said to mean ‘four candles’ or ‘fork handles’. Importantly, art and poetry often play with these connections by isolating signifiers from their conventional environment. We might have thought that a signifier referred straightforwardly to its signified but new contexts can bring new associations thereafter relegating the ‘straightforward’ meaning to the background. This is because, for Saussure, meaning is not about connections of the signifier with the external world, but contrasts within the closed sign system. That is, signs are formed by their value relationships with other signs. This multiplicity of signs form contrasts among themselves and because of these contrasts only signs derive their meaning and the multiplicity is what makes any language