From Distributed Understanding to Collective Meaning: Division of Linguistic Labor in Institutionalized Vocabularies

Institutionalized meanings are not simple aggregates of individuals’ understandings. Instead, there is a division of linguistic labor such that specialists are largely responsible for forming and changing meanings, which most individuals only use. This is enabled by vocabularies serving as collective tools, like train systems enabling most people to get where they are going without needing to understand how to operate a train system themselves. Most individuals can be vocabulary users, getting by with understandings of surface meanings, rather than the more complete, deep meanings that specialists understand and help construct. This account relates institutionalized meanings to individuals’ understandings and suggests there is less shared across individuals and less that is widely known than prior accounts imply.