Semantic equivocation cannot be reduced to a contingent imperfection of ordinary language. It possesses a structural dimension, insofar as it proceeds from the inscription of every utterance within a determinate form of life. A word is never a simple signifier available in the abstraction of a lexical system. It is always caught up in a set of practices, norms, expectations, interpretive gestures and recognition criteria that condition its intelligibility.
From this perspective, meaning can no longer be conceived as a substantive entity attached once and for all to the word itself. It must rather be understood as a function of use, or more precisely as a position within a network of socially and historically situated operations.
Language games and forms of life
This thesis, of which a decisive formulation is found in Wittgenstein through the notion of language games, engages a major theoretical displacement. The problem of meaning no longer belongs primarily to a semantics conceived as a stable relation between sign and signification, but to a pragmatics of uses inscribed in forms of life.
From this point on, the apparent identity of vocabulary by no means guarantees the identity of meaning. Two interlocutors can employ the same term in analogous syntax while inscribing it in distinct language games — that is, in practical configurations where the relevant objects, normative expectations, modes of validation and purposes of utterance all differ.
Misunderstanding should not be thought of as a secondary accident occurring despite a prior community of meaning. It can constitute the normal effect of the heterogeneity of the pragmatic frameworks in which words take on function.
Regimes of meaning
By regimes of meaning we understand relatively stabilised frameworks within which a term receives its relevance, scope and conditions of use. Each regime is characterised by four dimensions: a certain type of admissible or relevant objects; specific criteria of success or validity; distinct modes of proof; and a horizon of expectation — a certain practical or cognitive aim of the speech act.
Terms such as justice, pain, proof, time, truth or responsibility circulate between several regimes of meaning without maintaining a strict functional identity. The word justice, for example, does not refer to the same legitimation procedures, the same expectations, or the same evaluative criteria depending on whether it is inscribed in moral discourse, a legal apparatus, or political critique.
Science as operative framework
The sciences do not merely define certain terms of ordinary language more rigorously. They institute operative frameworks within which concepts can receive controlled use. A scientific concept should therefore not be understood as a mere referential label, but as a functional node in a network of methodically regulated operations.
The scientific requirement of definition constitutes the very condition of rigorous communicability between subjects whose experiences, presuppositions and interpretive habits may differ substantially. The reduction of equivocation proceeds less from an absolute purification of language than from the institution of a common framework of operations and validation.
Equivocation as heuristic index
Equivocation should not, however, be viewed from an exclusively negative angle. For while it constitutes an obstacle to immediate comprehension, it can also play a decisive heuristic role. Equivocation reveals the boundaries between regimes of meaning. It forces interlocutors to make explicit presuppositions that remained implicit. It makes visible the operations, norms and expectations that lay buried in the deceptive evidence of ordinary usage.
Inter-regime translation
The decisive question is not merely what a term means within a given framework, but by what operations a content formulated in one regime can be taken up, transformed, validated, limited or reconfigured in another.
This translation never operates through simple lexical equivalence. One does not pass from one regime to another by substituting one word for another, but by constructing an intermediate space within which heterogeneous objects can become at least partially commensurable.
Six translation operators
Formalisation: a lived experience, a norm or an intuition must often be reformulated in a syntax compatible with the receiving regime. Formalisation is both a bridge and a filter.
Objectivation through indicators: for an experimental regime to accommodate content from a clinical regime, observable, comparable and repeatable markers must often be constructed. None of these indicators is the thing itself. They are merely partial mediations.
Institution: between the moral and the legal regime, mediation occurs not only through concepts but through stabilised social devices. Law does not directly translate morality. It selects, filters, codifies and hierarchises.
Procedure: two regimes can communicate not because they share a common substance, but because they accept a common sequence of treatment.
The interpreter or expert mediator: hybrid figures who know how to circulate between several frameworks without wholly conflating them. Validity brokers.
Boundary objects: certain objects are precisely elaborated to be usable in several regimes without having exactly the same meaning in each. A pain scale, a medical record, the notion of harm, the category of consent often function as boundary objects.
Models of passage
One may distinguish the reduction model (one regime is converted into another at the cost of some of its specificity), the correspondence model (partial equivalences), the controlled translation model (explicit passage rules and admissible losses) and the dialogical model (each regime preserves its autonomy while accepting to be modified by contact with the other).
SYNTHESIS
Communication between heterogeneous regimes does not rest on a prior identity of meaning, but on the construction of operative mediations allowing partial, localised and revisable compatibility between distinct frameworks of validity. The true question is not how to abolish the gap between regimes, but how to institute forms of passage that are at once operative, critical and non-violent toward what they translate.