Who Decides What the Words We Use to Understand Ourselves and the World Mean?

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty says, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” Alice objects, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” Humpty Dumpty replies, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Alice’s conversation with Humpty Dumpty begins as an argument about language, but quickly becomes an argument about power. Alice is concerned with whether a word can be made to mean so many different things. For Humpty Dumpty, there is no such problem: meaning is determined by whoever is powerful enough to establish it.

At first glance, he appears to proclaim a radical kind of freedom. If a person decides for themselves what their words mean, no one else can impose a ready-made understanding on them. But Humpty Dumpty’s freedom is not the freedom to investigate meaning. He does not test meaning together with his interlocutor or try to make experience more intelligible. He assigns meaning and expects Alice to accept his rules.

Outside the Looking-Glass world, words are not neutral labels either. Along with language, a person receives ways of distinguishing right from wrong, normal from strange, success from failure, maturity from weakness, care from selfishness. These meanings help make sense of what is happening, but at the same time they help shape who a person can see themselves as and what actions seem possible to them.

If the desire to choose one’s own life is called ingratitude, a person has to defend themselves not only against someone else’s demand, but also against a definition that has already turned their choice into a moral failing. If constant submission is called kindness, refusal may be experienced as cruelty. If external achievement is recognized as the only form of success, another way of life becomes invisible before a person has even had the chance to assess its meaning.

The question of words therefore bears directly on Human Self-Formative Capacity: can a person independently rework experience if the meanings through which they understand it have already been established by others?

Through the Looking-Glass is not used here as a source of the concept of HSFC or as evidence of its scientific validity. The conversation with Humpty Dumpty serves as a literary lens through which to examine a narrower problem: how language becomes material for self-formation, a means of influence by others, and a possible object of independent reconsideration.

When a Word Does More Than Describe — It Also Directs

Words rarely remain separate from action. They enter into the way a person perceives a situation before a decision is even made.

The same refusal can be called a boundary, selfishness, cowardice, or responsibility. The same decision to keep going can be called persistence, loyalty, stubbornness, or an inability to admit a mistake. These words do not merely label an event after it has already taken shape. Each of them highlights a particular aspect of what is happening, connects it with an evaluation, and pushes toward a different subsequent action.

A person who considers themselves weak asks how to become stronger. A person who sees caution in the same reaction may ask where it helps and where it turns into avoidance. One word has changed — and with it, the question a person can ask themselves has changed as well.

But this does not mean that every difficulty can be made to disappear simply by renaming it. Calling fear caution does not mean understanding it. Calling dependence love does not make a relationship free. Calling defeat “a new opportunity” does not erase the loss or guarantee development.

The meaning of a word can open up experience, but it can also conceal it. For HSFC, therefore, what matters is not simply the appearance of a more pleasant definition, but whether it helps a person recognize what is happening more accurately, relate it to themselves, and shape a course of action that corresponds to reality.

Language becomes formative not because words possess an independent power to change a person. It becomes formative because through words a person distinguishes the meaning of experience, defines their own relation to it, and organizes what they do next.

Who Gets to Name What Is Happening

In life, power over meaning rarely appears as openly as it does with Humpty Dumpty. Usually, no one directly declares themselves the master of words. Definitions come to us as something self-evident: “that’s just how people talk,” “everyone knows what that means,” “normal people behave that way.”

Parents may call a child’s independence disobedience and their compliance good character. An organization may call constant availability dedication to the job and refusal to work overtime a lack of team spirit. A political group may define doubt as betrayal. A closed community may treat asking questions as a lack of faith. In each case, the word does more than describe behaviour — it also establishes the cost of stepping outside the norm.

A person may disagree with the demand and still continue to evaluate themselves in the language of their environment. They refuse — and think of themselves as selfish. They leave — and experience the decision as betrayal. They question an accepted explanation — and come to see their own thinking as a defect.

External power then no longer requires constant coercion. It continues to operate within the person through the meanings they use to describe themselves.

This is precisely why the power to name what is happening is a formative force. Whoever determines what counts as maturity, normality, success, or guilt also partly determines the direction in which a person will try to change themselves.

But it does not follow that every socially shared meaning is imposed or false. Without a common language, it would be impossible to communicate experience, argue, or build coordinated action. Many definitions we receive help us see things we could not have discovered alone. The problem is not that a meaning came from outside, but whether it can be examined and revised.

Why Humpty Dumpty Is Not an Inner Author

It may seem that Humpty Dumpty embodies inner authorship taken to its extreme: he allows no one else to determine the meaning of his words. But his independence is deceptive.

Independent reinterpretation requires examining experience, reasons, and consequences. Humpty Dumpty examines none of these. A word must mean whatever he assigns to it simply because he considers himself the master. His position does not free meaning from power — it merely transfers all power to a single speaker.

If every person can make words mean anything at all whenever they choose, language ceases to be a space of understanding. Another person can no longer test a claim, because meaning changes according to the needs of whoever is speaking. A contradiction can be removed by a new definition, responsibility by a convenient renaming, and another person’s disagreement can be declared proof of their failure to understand.

This way of using words may create the appearance of inner freedom, but in fact it protects a person from confronting reality. They do not rework experience; they make the description conform to the conclusion they want to preserve.

HSFC therefore cannot be reduced to the ability to give everything one’s own name. Inner authorship does not mean: “words will mean whatever I decide they mean.” It means: I am not obliged to accept automatically the definition I have been given, but my new understanding must withstand examination against experience, reasons, and consequences, and remain capable of being understood by others.

Freedom from someone else’s language without responsibility to reality becomes arbitrariness. Submission to a common language without the possibility of revision becomes dogma. Self-formation emerges in the tension between the two.

When a New Word Opens Up a Possibility

Sometimes the existing language really is insufficient. The experience is already there, but a person cannot clearly distinguish it because the available words describe it inaccurately or only from the perspective of their environment.

What was previously experienced as something being wrong with oneself becomes recognizable as a mechanism. Scattered events begin to connect. A person gains the ability to see repetition, name an influence, and formulate a question they could not previously ask.

But a new word does not create truth simply by appearing. It offers a way of seeing. It still has to be tested: what exactly does the concept explain, what distinctions does it make visible, where does it stop working, and does it risk becoming yet another ready-made formula?

This applies to Human Self-Formative Capacity itself as well. The name HSFC does not prove the existence of a distinct psychological construct, nor does it turn every personal change into a manifestation of a new capacity. It proposes a distinction that can be investigated: between change produced by circumstances and a person’s active participation in reworking the formative significance of those circumstances.

If this distinction makes it possible to analyse real processes more precisely, formulate testable hypotheses, and notice what is lost in other descriptions, then the concept is doing its work. If it begins merely to rename what is already known or explain everything in a way that cannot be falsified, then the same thing happens to it as to Humpty Dumpty’s words: meaning becomes dependent on the wishes of its author.

Creating a new concept therefore requires not less responsibility, but more. An author does not issue a command that others must accept the meaning. They offer a basis for testing: here is a phenomenon that may not yet be sufficiently distinguished; here are the boundaries of the concept; here are the signs by which we can determine whether it helps us understand reality.

The author of HSFC may name the distinction they have identified, propose the structure of the concept, and define its initial boundaries, but they cannot require reality to conform to the word they have created. If further research shows that the boundaries were drawn inaccurately, that the proposed processes do not form a single capacity, or that existing concepts explain the phenomenon without substantial loss, HSFC must be refined, revised, or limited.

Such willingness does not mean giving up authorship. On the contrary, responsibility for a concept one has created lies not only in the ability to formulate and defend it, but also in the willingness to allow evidence to change it. An idea remains an expression of its creator’s inner authorship not when it becomes untouchable, but when the creator continues to work independently with criticism, new data, and discovered contradictions.

In this sense, the development of the concept itself may follow the process it describes: recognizing the significance of new material, relating it to an already formed understanding, reworking it independently, making a decision, and changing the subsequent direction of the work.

A new word becomes a source of development not when it defeats the old one, but when it makes more precise understanding and action possible.

To create a new concept is to give a question form. To make it knowledge is to allow the answer to be determined not by the authority of the author, but by the investigation of reality.

When Renaming Becomes Inner Work

A person does not choose the language through which they first come to understand themselves. They receive words from family, culture, education, religion, profession, and the relationships around them. But the meanings they receive do not have to remain final.

Independent reworking begins when the meaning of a familiar word stops seeming self-evident. What exactly do I call success? Why do I regard a particular refusal as selfishness? Whose criterion of maturity am I using? What kind of action lies behind the word “patience” — deliberate endurance or fear of changing the situation?

Such questions do not destroy a shared language. They bring back into view the work that meaning is already doing within a person.

The next step is to distinguish the experience itself from its familiar label. Perhaps the word still describes what is happening accurately. Perhaps it is only partly accurate. Perhaps it was absorbed together with someone else’s judgment, one that no longer withstands examination.

A person can then refine the meaning, choose a different word, or keep the old one while now understanding why they consider it appropriate. What matters is not the act of renaming itself, but the change in one’s relation to what was previously perceived automatically.

A new formulation becomes part of self-formation when it affects one’s position and subsequent action. A person does not merely stop calling their refusal selfishness. They define the boundary of their own responsibility and learn to act in accordance with it. Nor do they simply replace “failure” with “experience”; they determine what exactly they need to change after the setback and what they are unwilling to repeat.

In this way, language changes from an unnoticed source of direction into material for inner work. A person does not invent themselves outside culture, but participates in determining which of the meanings they have received they will continue to reproduce, which they will refine, and which they will no longer allow to serve as final definitions of their life.

Shared Meaning and One’s Own Understanding

Words have to be shared if people are to understand one another. But no ready-made definition can fully contain an individual person’s experience. A tension therefore always remains between socially shared meaning and personal understanding.

If a person completely subordinates their experience to ready-made words, they may stop noticing what their environment does not yet have a name for. But if they regard any meaning of their own as sufficient, they lose the ability to test themselves in conversation with others and to distinguish a new understanding from a convenient illusion.

HSFC does not eliminate this tension. The capacity for self-formation is expressed precisely in working with it: accepting language as material one has received, recognizing its influence, testing meaning against experience, reworking it independently, and maintaining a connection with shared reality.

Sometimes the result will be a new definition. Sometimes it will be a return to an old word with a more precise understanding. Sometimes a person will discover that the problem lay not in the label, but in their unwillingness to acknowledge what it was accurately showing them.

Inner authorship, therefore, is demonstrated neither by obedience to the dictionary nor by defeating it. It is revealed in the ability to take responsibility for the connection between word, experience, and action.

Who Is the Master Here?

Humpty Dumpty reduces the argument to a single question: who will be the master. But language does not remain alive if meaning can have only one master.

A word acquires meaning through its history of use, shared experience, relationships between speakers, and the reality they are trying to discern. Neither an individual nor a system can fully appropriate it without consequences.

When an environment declares its own definition to be the only acceptable one, language becomes an instrument of submission. When a person demands that words serve only their own wishes, language becomes an instrument of self-justification. In both cases, the space in which meaning can be tested and changed disappears.

Self-formation requires a different relation. A person is able to stop before a familiar word and ask: What does it allow me to see? What does it conceal? Who taught me to understand it in this way? Does this meaning correspond to my experience? And what will my action become if I continue to accept it without examination?

The task is not to become the master of all words. It is to prevent words from quietly becoming the masters of your understanding.

A person does not create language from nothing. But they can participate in determining which meanings will continue to shape them — and which new distinctions may one day become available to others through their work.

Inner authorship is not the power to make words mean anything at all. It is the capacity not to let someone else’s power quietly decide what they must mean for you.