Wow, this I felt intuitively already since a long time, but now I got the term for it. Hermeneutics.
When I wanted to go to the school for journalism, there was a waiting list. Rather than waste a year, I enrolled in a Dutch language program to bridge the gap. I was good at writing and storytelling, and I read books as if my brain depended on it. That, and music. Anyway. What happened is this: one lecture detailed the concept of sending a message and someone receiving it. But not just that, more whether that message had any impact. Whether it had an influence, or triggered a specific reaction. The feedback loop would tell something about the success of the message transmission. Whether that interaction succeeded perlocutionally.
OK. Beautifully big and difficult words. My vocabulary expanded during my studies. And, like the word “fibrinogen” in biology class, it stuck. Not that I have ever needed to know that fibrinogen is a precursor protein of fibrin, converted by thrombin. I’m not a doctor. But I do remember it’s to do with blood clotting, and the way it stops bleeding when you get a scrape and then the wound heals. Your body is an amazing self-repairing piece of biological ingenuity.
But, interesting as it may be to some, that’s all beside the point.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation. Hermeneutics is not just an academic exercise; it is essential for effective communication and understanding in various fields, including literature, law, and theology. It’s what stands between us and endless misunderstanding.
I bring it up because someone took the effort of making a video and posting it online. I did not know the word, but I knew the concept.
In marketing, it’s something we deal with every day. There’s a product that needs to get sold, preferably now, at full price, to someone who didn’t know they needed it until we told them so. My job is to engineer a message that travels from a boardroom decision into a stranger’s limbic system and comes out the other side as a purchase. That job, stripped to its bones, is to put words into strangers’ heads and hope those words rearrange into money. And, according to management, ChatGPT can do that in three seconds.
But… Hermeneutics, as explained in the video, come into play, and it says how brilliant I thought my messaging was is not really something to brag about. Because, simply put, anything I say is being received differently than I intended it to land. Perlocutionally successful or not.
“Every conversation you have ever had was slightly wrong. Not because anyone lied, but because language doesn’t work the way you think it does”.
The way it was explained, is that words don’t transfer meaning; they trigger it. Think about that for a second. When you speak, you’re not sending your thought directly into someone else’s mind. You’re producing a signal, and the other person’s mind uses that signal to construct whatever meaning it has the architecture to build. The meaning they receive is built from their history, their associations, their emotional state, their version of every word you used. It is never exactly what you meant to send. There’s this thing called the interpretive gap. And that gap is always there.
At Yiist, Jan van der Spoel and I talked about the Kiwi Model to explain how emotions, experiences, events, and interactions lump together in the brain where no words exist. There’s meaning to the vocabulary, but it’s not the cognitive kind that can express reality in the form it’s perceived. Fascinating stuff, really. But too academic to explain why the creation of a buyer persona and the development of a message tree for marketing-communication takes a bit more effort than what many marketeers would like you to believe. In the era of AI, where we can prompt our way out of this sometimes difficult field of expertise, it becomes more important to understand how it works, and, paradoxically, less valued.
So, hermeneutics. What is the point I’m trying to make? What is the message I intended to relay into your brain? Honestly? Nothing really. I just wanted to express my joy of learning there’s a word for something I’ve worked with for so long without the academic definition.
And whatever you just took from this, I guarantee it wasn’t exactly what I meant.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hermeneutics-the-extrapreneur-bipme
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