Imperfect Communication

As for perfect communication, it should be obvious that it simply doesn't work. The failure of perfect communication between liberals and conservatives should show that clearly. The fact of that failure is so prominent in cognitive science and linguistics that it has even become the subject of a best-selling self-help book—Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. Tannen, a former student in my department and now a distinguished professor at Georgetown University, is just one researcher in a field of thousands studying the nature of human discourse and its difficulties. (Sec References, A4.)

One of the principal results in this discipline is that differ­ent people have different principles of Indirect speech. Some people are understates, who say less when they mean more, stop short of the punchline, and let the hearer draw his own conclusion. Others are overstates, who exaggerate and never miss a punchline or stop short of a conclusion. Different people even have very different views of what constitutes polite conversation. For some people politeness means being indirect, asking a question rather than making a direct re­quest, for example. For others politeness means directness, saying exactly what you mean, no more, no less. And once one gets into the details, the differences in conversational strategies get far more complex than this. Add to this all the meaning variation introduced by framing, world view differ­ences, metaphor, radial categories, fuzzy categories, and prototype-based reasoning, and you can see why communi­cation is so very far from perfect.

Thus we can see that none of Strict Father morality's re­quirements for what the human mind must be are actually met by real human minds functioning in real discourses. Strict Father morality is simply out of touch with real minds. Moral absolutism is not true because conceptual absolutism is not true. And moral training by enforcing obedience cannot work because people are not just simple reward-punishment machines.

Relativism

Does the failure of moral absolutism mean total moral rela­tivism? Not at all, no more than the failure of conceptual absolutism means total conceptual relativism. As we saw in our study of the metaphors for morality, those metaphors are not arbitrary or random. They are strongly constrained by what morality is fundamentally about: promoting human well-being. The basic forms of well-being—health, strength, wealth, and so on—constrain the possibilities for metaphors for morality. Even basic forms of parenting-experience— Strict Father and Nurturant Parent—seem to provide a lim­ited range of versions of the overall forms of moral systems. Research in cognitive science on the embodiment of mind shows that, despite enormous possibilities for variation, the variations are not unlimited and not random. They are con­strained by various aspects of our biology and our experience functioning in the physical and social world. For an in-depth discussion of why conceptual variation and change does not lead to anything like total relativism, see References, A2, Lakoff 1987, chap. 18.

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