Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur is quietly dismantling the fantasy that meaning lives inside words like a sealed product you can unbox. “Ordinary language” is his chosen battleground because it’s where philosophy most often cheats: we smuggle in abstract definitions, then act surprised when lived speech refuses to behave. His claim is almost disarmingly modest - the “conditions of meaning” are “easy to recognize” - but the modesty is strategic. He’s not conceding that interpretation is simple; he’s insisting that the evidence is public. Meaning shows up in use, in the patterned ways an expression becomes intelligible across situations, not in a private mental glow or a dictionary’s authority.

The phrasing “classifying the contexts” signals a methodological pivot: interpretation as disciplined attention rather than metaphysical excavation. Ricoeur is close to the ordinary-language tradition (think later Wittgenstein or Austin) while keeping his hermeneutic edge: contexts don’t just clarify meaning, they constrain it, fence it in, make certain readings irresponsible. That matters because his broader project is about how symbols, narratives, and texts generate surplus meaning without dissolving into “anything goes.”

The subtext is a critique of both crude positivism (meaning as fixed reference) and romantic subjectivism (meaning as intention). Ricoeur threads the needle: meaning is neither locked in the speaker’s head nor floating free; it’s stabilized by social practice. “Employed in a meaningful manner” is the tell. We learn what counts as meaningful by seeing how communities treat expressions as apt, off-key, ironic, or incoherent. Philosophy, for Ricoeur, starts by respecting that choreography before it dares to theorize it.