On The Conceptual Scheme Of Being ‘Woke’

There are many examples of how language and meaning change over time. To call someone ‘nice,’ originating from the Latin nescire, was an insult for its first two thousand years. It meant ignorant or foolish.

Now, it means the opposite: someone who is agreeable, pleasant and kind. But even with a complete 180 in meaning, there is no ambiguity attached to the word. When someone is described as ‘nice’, it’s a compliment, albeit a somewhat vanilla one.

At one point in the U.S., identifying as a ‘Republican’ meant you supported liberal policies, whereas calling yourself a ‘Democrat’ was to espouse conservatism. These terms are now switched, and like ‘nice,’ there should be no confusion about the meaning of these terms. When today’s GOP claims Abraham Lincoln as their own, they are acting in bad faith. The 16th president was elected as a leader of the newly formed Republican party, which at the time was far more ideologically aligned to today’s Democratic agenda.

Can we add ‘woke’ to this list of words whose meaning has been reversed by time? A term whose definition is opposite to what it once was?

One of the first known appearances of the word in the press is in the original fall 1942 issue of Negro Digest, a magazine focused on positive stories of the Black community. Loosely, the idea behind the use here is if someone is aware of the truths that authority does not want them to know, then they are ‘woke.’

PdxHighlights from the Gates Collection of African American History and Culture

A similar definition for the word can be found two decades later in a New York Times headline, stating, “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.”

This understanding of the word, a broad awareness of societal injustices, continued to be the complete understanding of ‘woke’ well after these brief publications. A 2008 song by Erica Badu titled “Master Teacher” melodically mentions that to ‘stay woke’ is to dream of a world where Black people are treated with equal respect.

A growing and loud pack prefers to drive this term down the same path as ‘nice,’ ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ by totally inverting ‘woke.’ It is not someone tuned in to the world but someone cut off from it and creates a huge fuss over nothing. It is to be ridiculed rather than praised, as it once was.

But, this is not a universal change. In fact, many people entirely reject this idea of ‘woke.’ Clearly, the meaning is ambiguous, differentiating it from the other terms mentioned.

One can respond: the term is in a purgatory state. The meanings of concepts do not change overnight. Words, like animals and viruses, evolve.

However, the inconclusive definition of ‘woke’ goes beyond the simple reason of time passing. The term is understood within two separate conceptual schemes. Therefore, using it will always be divisive and should be avoided by any leader hoping to unite rather than divide.

Davidson and Conceptual Schemes

Similar to today’s political climate, the last century of academic philosophy is marked by a divide. On one side is analytic philosophy, trying to merge the discipline with other empirically based sciences like psychology and biology. On the other side is continental philosophy, trying its best to display how different philosophy is from any empirical science. For continental philosophers, their subject is art.

One of the few philosophers of the last century to overcome this hindering divide was Donald Davidson, a longtime Berkeley professor of philosophy. The universality of Davidson’s work, mainly focusing on the philosophy of mind and language, was clearly recognized by his peers, as his fellow philosophers elected him to serve as the president of the American Philosophical Association in the early 1970s.

Aside from more mundane tasks, the APA president gives the opening remarks at the association’s annual conference. Davidson took this opportunity in his 1973 speech to speak on the idea of conceptual schemes. Later, the remarks were aptly published as “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.”

“Conceptual schemes,” Davidson tells us, “are ways of organizing experiences; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation…There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterpoints for the subscriber of another scheme.”

In other words, conceptual schemes are not languages but how languages are organized to express our thoughts. According to Davidson, a French and Japanese philosophy professor who only speak their respective native tongues will have no trouble communicating; they speak within the same conceptual scheme. It is only a matter of trivial translation.

On the other hand, a contemporary French philosophy professor and a 9th century French serf will never understand each other, even when both speak a rough version of French. They could be using the same word and talking about two completely different subjects.

This is exactly the current discourse on ‘woke.’ Two sides speaking to each other in separate conceptual schemes, necessarily unable to understand each other.

Divisiveness is built into the word. Use it at your own risk.