The Appearance and Actuality of Prejudice.

[sibelian]

10. "There is always underlying meaning of some type"

There is sometimes underlying meaning and that underlying meaning is the property of the person speaking, not the person listening.

I don't agree that context is not "everything", context is secondary, not primary. Content is primary. If someone says to me "I don't have a problem with gay people" and then it turns out that they don't like going to gay bars, I'm not going to re-interpret their original position and accuse them of homophobia because I have no privileged access to their thoughts.

If someone is explicitly disbarred from the right to be believed when they say something (and from what you've posted you seem to be suggesting that one has a right to believe whatever one wants about what someone else means no matter what they actually say, I think your language seems very wide-reaching), then I can see no point in having any sort of dialogue with them at all. One may as well be talking to a wall on which one paints what one wishes was said. There are acts where secondary, covert agendas may be identifiable behind contradictory or misdirective behaviour, whether conscious or unconscious, but to avoid wilful misinterpretation these have to be supported by phenomena external to the act, otherwise you're just making stuff up. If that's what you mean, then I think in some sense we agree, but my position is that one believes them first and suspects alternative interpretations second, and when this is done it should be for good reasons. Randomly twisting people's words into patterns that affords one the opportunity to treat them as a lightning conductor for the charge left over from previous conflicts is just abusive.

I'm sorry, but nobody really has the right to assume that they know what someone else is thinking.