A., who is sceptical about philosophy, asks me what a philosopher would have to say about her new haircut. Fortunately, I'd just read this:
If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure]).
A. finds this unintelligble, and says what she had in mind was something like:
Ok, Bob says 'I need a haircut', and Mary says to Bob 'You need a haircut' - how should semantic theory account for the similarities and the differences between these two statements?