The IFD Disease: Semantics and Sanity

When a child points to a balloon and says, “Look! A balloon!” there is little chance that English-speakers will misunderstand to what he or she is referring. The word “balloon” is a symbol that represents a tangible object in the physical world; thus, the word has extensional meaning. Words with extensional meaning do not necessarily need to be physically present in order to be extensional: we do not need to be in a city along the Charles River to understand what the word “Boston” denotes.

Words and expressions can also have intensional meaning. This is the meaning that is connoted inside one’s head. If we were to describe the city of Boston from memory or attempt to characterize the nature of a balloon based on past experiences, we would be giving the intensional meaning of these words.

Words that have no intensional meaning – or symbols that conjure no connotation within our mind – are meaningless sounds. For example, if you were to listen to a conversation between two people who speak a different language from your own, their words may have extensional meaning, but because they are using a system of symbols that are unfamiliar to you, there is no way for you to construct intensional meaning from their dialogue.

Likewise, there are certain words that hold intensional meaning for us, and yet, these symbols point to no extensional meanings. For example, words like “beauty,” “power,” “depression,” or “success.” Such words have meaning, but they cannot be seen, touched, measured, or photographed. Of all classes of words, it is these – the intensional, but not extensional – that are the most dangerous and pose the greatest threat to human sanity when they are misused.

In his early work, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein recognized the confusion that arises from words that lack extensional meaning. Taking an extreme position, Wittgenstein suggested that in the interest of clarifying language, humans ought to reduce their communication to systematic, verifiable statements. Near the close of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he wrote, “If the answer cannot be put into clear words, the questions cannot be put into clear words.” And though he later recognized the impracticality of creating a perfectly logical language and repudiated the idea with the posthumous publication of his Philosophical Investigations, his original point remains cogent: before helpful answers can be generated, we must first have suitable questions. And those questions that are not suitable must be discarded as nonsensical.

It is for this reason that the man who asks his co-worker, “What is the secret of your success?” ought to be met with silence – or better yet, a condescending stare. By its very nature, this question is unanswerable until we first have a clear understanding of what is meant by “secret” and “success.” Clearly what the questioner desires is some intensional idea of “success,” but he has no understanding of what this success is composed of – much less how it is obtained. Psychologist and semanticist Wendell Johnson says such questions are symptomatic of what he calls the IFD Disease. “I” is for Idealization; “F” is for Frustration; and “D” is for demoralization. Taken together, the IFD Disease is a process in which each element leads naturally to its successor.

For example, a girl who says, “I want to be beautiful,” has created an Idealization that holds intensional meaning but no extensional meaning – that is to say, she has an idea of what she means by “beautiful” in her mind, but the language does not clearly delineate the specific qualities that make up her perception of “beauty.” Because the language of her goal is vague, the goal itself lacks clear scaffolding for her to measure her progress toward it. As such, she might diet, work out, whiten her teeth, put on make-up, buy new clothes, and have elective surgeries, but because the original goal is unclear, she will never truly feel as though she is making real progress. Thus, Idealization becomes Frustration. And this Frustration will become Demoralization unless she revisits the language of her goal: she must either go through a dehumanizing transformation of physical self in order to align her appearance with her intensional understanding of “beauty” or she must deconstruct and reevaluate what she means by “beauty” and adopt a more realistic, actionable, measurable goal. This is the same dilemma that is faced by the new bride who must decide whether she must abandon her new husband or her Hollywood-engendered definition of “husband” in order to be content in marriage. Or the corporate leader who must reconsider his understanding of “success” if his quest for it makes him inclined toward unethical business practice.

This is also the case of the student who claims, “I’m not good at reading.” While we can recognize the physical act of reading when we see it (e.g. someone looking at a book in such a way that it appears they are able to understand the symbols on the page), the extensional meaning of the word is nebulous. “Reading” ought to connote a complicated process. When one reads, they are decoding the symbols on the page, recognizing morphemes, connecting words and phrases for purposes of comprehension, applying fix-up strategies to make sense of confusion, visualizing narrative and conceptual elements, interpreting the contextual significance of the language, and relating the read material to prior understanding. In such a complicated procedure, it is possible for a student to struggle with one aspect – say, visualization – while remaining fairly competent in many of the other isolated pieces of the process. However, if that same student has an Idealized intensional understanding of “reading,” she may not be equipped to distinguish her weakness in visualization (a problem that can be easily solved through targeted exercises) from a weakness in “reading” as a whole (a problem that is unsolvable without further definition). In the Frustration that arises out of this Idealization, the student creates a self-imposed label of being “not good at reading” – something that could have been avoided if she was trained to question the semantics of her goals and obstacles.

Many dilemmas that humans categorize as work-problems, relationship-problems, learning-problems, or image-problems are, in actuality, language problems. Just as problems of the science laboratory must be clearly stated in order to be solved, we must also approach problems outside of the sciences in the same manner. When we create goals – whether they involve a desire for beauty, success, reading, or happiness – we must ask, “What procedure will provide us with reliable, factual steps to reach this goal?” And the times when no such procedure exists, we must have the fortitude to revise the language of our goals in order to make them more sane, or we must discard the goal altogether as nonsensical.

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