If you have an idea and I have an idea and we don’t agree, we can find ourselves in an impossible situation if we ignore the one idea everyone has in common: truth. Pursuing truth in a conversation is distinctly different from having the truth beforehand. Seeking the truth between us is an act of humility; barking the truth at each other is an act of aggression.
Misunderstanding has its moral roots, of course; I can deliberately intend to disregard pursuing truth and choose instead to assert what I believe simply because it is what I want to believe. What misunderstandings there are between us, however, may also have roots in the misuse of language, when our technical grasp of the way words work is less sure than our own and our community’s intellectual well-being require.
The first step—the very first step—in thinking through an idea with someone is to be clear about what it is we’re talking about. That’s properly called the theme of a discussion, though we more often call it now the subject. In grammar the term subject refers to what we’re talking about clause by clause. Every clause has a subject working in concert with a verb, and the two together make an assertion. Assertions are the stuff of conversations, and a grammatical subject can announce itself in the form of a single word (politics), a phrase (modern politics), or an entire clause (modern politics can be a raucous affair). It’s imperative, therefore, to be able to recognize the function of these basic grammatical structures.
All of this linguistic matter is essential to critical discourse—to thinking maturely to discover, develop, and determine the ideas we talk to others about—because very often it’s not clear to the persons involved what it is exactly they’re discussing. Conversational thinking, called dialectic in the classical tradition, moves back and forth: I say this, you say that about what I said, I next say this, and you next say that about it—all with the reasonable hope and serious intention that between the two of us, we might make a few steps together toward truth. But that peculiarly human activity of not taking things at face value often necessarily begins with vague notions because we’ve decided to engage a complex theme in order to understand it better. The danger lies in either of us accepting imprecise notions as the final truth.
Thus, to our rational mind which thinks critically and dialectically, the world is made up of things and those things in turn are made up of more things. Right here, moreover, is where understanding grammar can offer some material help as we have real conversations with others. Grammar is in good measure a science, the science that explains how words are arranged in a particular language to signify meaning, and one of the fundamental structures to understand in order to avoid mere muddled opining is the way a noun and an adjective (often a noun that is being used as an adjective) combine to form an idea. If I tell you, for example, that I have to buy a warm winter coat this fall, what exactly am I talking about: a coat or a winter coat? Or if I tell you (in a delusional moment) that I called my bank yesterday and asked to speak to someone in wealth management, did I wish to speak with the management of the bank? In both these phrases, winter coat and wealth management, the adjective and noun that make up each phrase work together to name one thing I have perceived mentally, and that one compound thing is what I will build out from as our conversation proceeds. (Note, incidentally, that the nouns winter and wealth are being used as adjectives to form these compound nouns, and one does not place a comma between them and their respective nouns coat and management. The adjective directly before the noun it modifies is never separated with a comma.)
Those are elementary examples, but what about subjects more consequential? If I tell you that I believe our democracy is endangered by radical elements, what in the world do I mean by the noun elements? Indeed, how can I know if those elements are radical if I can’t be more specific as to what I am actually referring to? And if I can’t be more specific, well then, the better response is to wish me well and walk on in search of a wiser soul. So much depends on the question What are you talking about? and so much power for the good, for truth, can be accumulated if we settle for nothing less than a clear answer to that question in every serious conversation we involve ourselves in—for our neighbors’ sake and for our own. Our minds spin language as a spider its web. The trick is not to get caught ourselves.
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