Language, Culture, Morality, and Cohesion in the Philosophy of Integration
Language is how we communicate with each other. It’s how we make plans, share meaning, help each other, and protect each other. But it is not neutral. The instant we put a label on something it stops being the full experience and becomes a category.
If I say “tree” you immediately have a picture of a tree in your head. That tree probably doesn’t look the same as the one I have in my head. Language works because those images overlap enough for us to function, but they are never identical. That gap is where linguistic neutrality becomes impossible.
Shared meaning through language is what creates culture over time. Culture can be understood as socially reinforced interpreted meaning that guides behaviour across large groups without each person needing to constantly re-evaluate what is happening in the present.
Culture creates pre-interpreted meanings of events so that people don’t have to re-live the experience or determine their own meanings from scratch. Culture or shared meaning is not inherently distorted. Distortion only occurs when inherited meanings continue to guide behaviour in ways that no longer align with present conditions.
Morality is created through shared culture. Morality emerges when shared interpreted meanings about behaviour stabilize within a culture and begin guiding action without each situation being re-evaluated through what is actually happening.
Here is the progression in the framework:
Real situations occur in groups of people.
Certain behaviours produce stability, safety, or cooperation.
Interpretations form about those behaviours.
Those interpretations are shared through language.
They are repeated across generations.
They become expected.
Expectation hardens into moral language such as “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” “should,” and “shouldn’t”.
At that point, people are often no longer responding primarily to the situation itself. They are responding to inherited interpreted meaning about the situation. When people stop paying attention to what is happening and rely only on pre-interpreted meanings, dysfunction and distortion begin to appear.
Culturally, we are beginning to fragment because the meanings are no longer shared across the entire population. We no longer agree on the pre-interpreted meanings of certain types of experience. This creates the perception of a fracture in a society that believes it is dependent on shared meaning to maintain cohesion.
Are we as dependent on those shared meanings for cohesion as we believe ourselves to be?
We often assume that social cohesion depends on shared meanings. If we no longer agree on what events mean, it feels as though society itself begins to fracture.
But the framework suggests something more precise.
Cohesion does not require shared interpretation. It requires shared reference to observable reality.
People can disagree strongly about what something means and still remain coherent with one another as long as they are responding to the same thing that actually occurred.
The strain begins when interpretation becomes the primary reference point and the observable event becomes secondary. At that point, people are no longer relating to the event. They are relating to what they believe about the event.
From this perspective, shared meanings are extremely efficient for coordination. They make life easier because they remove the need to constantly re-evaluate experience from scratch. But they may not be as necessary for cohesion as we assume.
Cohesion may depend less on agreeing about what things mean and more on continuing to reference what actually happened.
When that shared reference point is maintained, disagreement about meaning does not necessarily produce fragmentation. When it is lost, even agreement about meaning cannot preserve cohesion.
So the question shifts.
It may not be that we are dependent on shared meanings for cohesion.
It may be that we are dependent on shared attention to observable events, and shared meanings have simply been the most convenient way to maintain that attention at scale.
The strain we feel socially may not come only from disagreement about meaning, but from disagreement about the moral interpretations attached to those meanings. This creates a much deeper rupture than interpretive variation alone.
When two people disagree about the morality of an observable event, conversation becomes difficult. The disagreement is no longer about what happened or even what it means. It begins to threaten identity, belonging, and legitimacy.
At that point, having a shared interpretation of the event is no longer enough to preserve cohesion. Once identity is engaged through differing moral frameworks, the shared reference to the event itself loses much of its stabilizing power.
A clearer answer to whether we are dependent on shared meaning for cohesion may be this:
Shared meaning alone does not threaten cohesion. Shared meaning fused with moral judgment does.
When interpretations carry moral weight, disagreement no longer remains at the level of understanding. It moves to the level of legitimacy. And once legitimacy is in question, cohesion becomes difficult to maintain regardless of how clearly the event itself is understood.
Language gave us the ability to share meaning. Culture allowed those meanings to stabilize. Morality gave those meanings force.
All of these are remarkable human tools. They allow large groups of people to coordinate without having to constantly rediscover reality for themselves.
But when these tools become the primary reference point instead of the events they were originally meant to describe, they begin to pull us away from the very thing that holds us together.
We may not be as dependent on shared meanings for cohesion as we think.
We may be far more dependent on a shared willingness to keep looking at what is actually happening, even when we disagree about what it means, and even more so when we disagree about what should be done about it.
Cohesion may not come from agreeing on interpretation.
It may come from refusing to let interpretation replace the event.