Tag Archives: philosophy of language

Linguistic Pragmatics and the Uselessness of Truth

Try as we might to appear objective, empathetic and intelligent, human language limits us to making statements about ourselves. Everything you say is a statement about you. Understanding this limitation is liberating rather than restrictive.

The way we use this language is complicated. Even when decoding the most simple, commonplace statements, our minds have to perform a threefold operation. To make sense of the statement:

“The flower is beautiful.”

  1. We must understand what each of those words mean
  2. We must consider the order in which we hear these words. (If you switch the “is” to the beginning of the sentence, the meaning changes drastically.)
  3. We must consider what speaker actually meant. (Were they merely stating a fact, dropping hints that they want us to give them the flower, being sarcastic… ?)

These three steps are considerations of semantics, syntax and pragmatics respectively. These terms may sound daunting, but we generally perform these steps with ease. (I’m not sure about the order they’re actually performed in, but that’s not important here.) I want to quickly consider the question of linguistic pragmatics in a little more detail.

What a person says is often different to what they mean. Metaphors and rhetorical questions are obvious examples of this, but everyday speech is filled with others. When a person asks “Do you know where the photocopier is?”, we know that they want to find the photocopier. Even though the question is set up to receive a yes/no  answer, we understand that either of those words would not be an appropriate response. The questioner could have said “Where is the photocopier?” instead, but this might be perceived as rude. (Perhaps we are less likely to offend the listener by asking the question in a manner that positions them as a gatekeeper of information.) Breaking down the question “Do you know where the photocopier is?” to “Where is the photocopier?” takes us a step closer to the intended meaning of the question, but I believe we can get even closer. While the phrase “Where is the photocopier?” appears as a question, it is actually telling the listener something. “Where is the photocopier?” really means “I want you to tell me where the photocopier is.”

Questions are just a polite way of making statements. Interrogatives, imperatives and exclamations don’t exist as separate metaphysical entities to declaratives. They are just fancy ways of telling the world about ourselves. Many of the words and sentence structures we use serve only to present our intended meaning in a socially appropriate manner.

When I say “Turn it down please.” I mean “I want you to lower the volume of the music.”
When I say “Where is the washroom?”, I mean “I want you to tell me where the toilet is so I can relieve myself.”
When I say “Jesus Christ!”, I mean “I am surprised.”

When I was in college, I travelled to Norway for a conference on the nature of truth.  It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. After a few hours of listening to old lads talking nonsense, my friends and I left the conference and went to the cinema to see the new Terminator movie. For a long time afterwards, I avoided thinking about truth. It seemed too complicated. About a year ago, I started thinking about it again. I don’t think it’s complicated anymore. I think it’s meaningless.

In light of what I have discussed above, every uttered statement is true.

Truth theories, particularly correspondence ones, assume that human language can accurately describe the world. Pah! The idea of a statement being true or false represents a grossly undeserved faith in the nature of our language.

As I have discussed above, the meaning of many statements is not limited to the words of which they consist. Interrogatives, imperatives and exclamations can be reworded to appear as declaratives. When presented as thus, their truth value is immediately apparent. When I say “What time is it?”, I really mean “I want to know what time it is.”, and I would not be uttering this statement if it was not true. When I say “Give me the book.”, I mean “I want you to give me the book.”, and again, I would not be saying this if it were not true.

But what about lies? I have claimed that all statements are true. Well, if you think about what any specific lie actually means this problem will work itself out. When I say “I have a brand new Mercedes.” what I really mean is, “I want you to believe that I have a brand new Mercedes.” This statement is true, regardless of what I actually own. Mistakes are off the hook too. When I said, “I will be there on Friday night.” but failed to show up, I really meant, “I plan to be there on Friday night.”, and this was true when I said it.

Everything you say is true, but that doesn’t mean that everything you say provides useful information.

In a previous post, I discussed E-Prime, the version of English that entirely omits the verb “to-be”. Perhaps we can imagine a version of English that abolishes all statements that don’t begin with the first person pronoun, along with all questions, orders, and exclamations. This version of English might sound tiresome in comparison to the way we normally speak, but it would be a more honest way of conversing.

This post might seem cynical, but I reckon language deserves it for convincing us that we are smarter than we really are. Language does not really describe the world. It is limited to describing the speaker and their perceptions and beliefs. I don’t believe we should try to formulate every utterance as a declarative beginning with “I”, but I think philosophers and linguists need to pay close attention to the limits of the language we use if they are to make sense of anything.

 

E-Prime: A Linguistic Exercise to Avoid Confusion and Clarify Meaning

Aristotle opens the 4th book of his metaphysics with the claim that “There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be’ “. The verb ‘to be’ is perhaps the most commonly used verb in the English language, but we rarely contemplate the fact that it is used in drastically different ways. A thing being a chair is very different to a thing being late. (The former being is the ‘being of identity’, but the latter is the ‘being of predication’.) It has been argued that the different uses of the verb ‘to be’ are so potentially hazardous to human understanding that the verb should be abandoned entirely. I want to take a look at this argument and the implications and possible benefits of to-be’s abandonment.

Not, I guess.

Oxford Dictionary defines General Semantics as “A system of linguistic philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), which explores the arbitrary nature of words and symbols and attempts to refine ways of using language.” Encyclopedia Britannica says that “Korzybski and his followers sought a scientific, non-Aristotelian basis for clear understanding of the differences between symbol (word) and reality (referent) and the ways in which words themselves can influence (or manipulate) and limit human ability to think.” I think the main idea of General Semantics can be summed up by saying that the language we use affects how we think. The followers of General Semantics believe that by changing the ways we use language, we can change the ways we think and respond to our thoughts. This seems pretty similar to the concept of idea of strong linguistic relativity, but apparently Korzybski came to this idea by himself. (Some of his followers have even gone so far as to refer to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski hypothesis.) I know that linguistic determinism is passionately refuted by many scholars, but I’m sure most people will accept the claim that the words we use can affect how we think. I haven’t read Korzybski’s books, but I sense that there’s some sense behind his ideas. This doesn’t mean these ideas are accurate or reliable though, and academics have been suspicious of General Semantics for more than half a century.

In Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957), Martin Gardener notes that Korzybski and his followers accepted their own ideas too readily and that one follower of General Semantics even claimed that sufficient linguistic programming could lower the amount of acid in a person’s saliva. Gardener explains that General Semantics is basically a mish-mash of other people’s good ideas and doesn’t really contain anything revolutionary. He also notes that the actual practice of GS isn’t effective in changing its practitioners. Gardener does concede that GS may have some merit, but he doesn’t really elaborate on what that merit might be.

I want to examine English Prime or E-Prime, an idea born within the realm of General Semantics, to see if it is of any merit. E-Prime, put simply, is the English language without the verb ‘to be’ or any of its conjugates. That means no ‘be’, ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘being’, ‘was’, ‘were’, or ‘been’. E-Prime was first put forward by David Bourland, a follower of Korzybski. It has its roots in Korzybksi’s distinction between word and referent, a distinction summed up in his mantra, ‘The map is not the territory.’ The idea here is that words are not things they refer to. The word ‘dog’ is not a dog. It’s a word. A dog is a dog. It’s a simple idea, but we forget it fairly regularly.

When we say something like Rob is a teacher, the idea in our heads looks like this:

Rob = a teacher

But the equal sign should be reversible. When we say that 2+2=4, we can also say 4=2+2. The above equation implies that “a teacher = Rob”, but that is obviously incorrect. There are lots of teachers that are not Rob. When we remove the verb ‘to be’ from the statement, we can clarify our meaning. Instead of saying “Rob is a teacher.”,  we should say, “Rob teaches for a living.” or just “Rob teaches.” This might not seem hugely improved, but there are examples where avoiding this type of ‘is’ make things easier to understand.

Opinions are more clearly delineated from objective truths in E-Prime. Instead of claiming that ‘Metallica are the best band in the world’, a person speaking E-Prime would say, ‘I prefer Metallica to all other bands.’ Instead of saying that the dress is blue, they would say that the dress appears blue to them. These statements express opinions without inviting argument.

Robert Anton Wilson, an advocate of E-Prime

I first came across E-Prime in a book called Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson (an author I have written extensively about elsewhere), and while the title of that book and the reputation of its author might have some (arrogant) academics rolling their eyes, it was Wilson’s description of E-Prime that convinced me of its usefulness. Instead of saying that a photon is a wave or a particle, Wilson claims that scientists should avoid trying to identify the photon and should instead try to describe it. Instead of saying a photon is a particle or a wave, it is more accurate and less confusing to say that the photon acts like a particle when measured by certain instruments and that it acts like a wave when measured by other instruments. Schrödinger’s cat dies if the atom decays. The cat lives if the atom doesn’t decay. No problems.

Isness has long been recognised as a source of philosophical confusion.  E-Prime abandons it and avoids this confusion. The disagreement of Parmenides and Heraclitus can’t be expressed in E-Prime; this form of English allows reality to change while staying the same. This approach might seem like avoiding the topic, but in my view, the problem of existence is either far too complicated to discuss meaningfully or it is actually a non-issue, a philosophical phantom, created by the limitations of our language. ‘I think, therefore I am’ put through E-Prime becomes ‘I think, therefore I think.’ It’s a redundant statement, but it’s not philosophically confusing.

E-Prime delineates opinions from facts, it can make science less confusing and it bypasses philosophical nuisances. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. My main concern is that it doesn’t go far enough. ‘To be’ is a verb, and I am convinced that it is a troublesome one, but every single noun in the English language implies an ‘isness’. If we are getting rid of the word ‘is’, perhaps we ought to get rid of implied ‘isness’ too.

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

But is a rose really a rose? Roses, like most other plants, consist of mainly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. These atoms and their particles incessantly interact with the atoms in the air and soil surrounding the rose. To which sub-atomic particle can we point and say ‘This is where the rose ends and the soil begins?’ To delineate one object from the objects surrounding that object may make day-to-day human experience seem more manageable, but no thing can ever exist independently of its surroundings. Things can’t really ‘be’ in and of themselves, but nouns operate in such a way that they make us think that things “are”. If language becomes more accurate by omitting all forms of the verb ‘to be’, does it follow that its accuracy will be further enhanced by avoiding all words that imply ‘being’?

No. A language without nouns falls apart pretty quickly. Verbs have no subjects or objects to latch onto, and pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, articles, and prepositions become meaningless without nouns. I write this not in any sincere effort to get people to abandon language, but to suggest that language is not designed to accurately describe the actual physical word. It is designed to make sense out of human’s subjective experiences of that world. Our language is built to set up to help us find food, shelter and mates. It’s not really equipped to describe the objective nature of existence.

What of E-Prime then? Should we be satisfied with a means to increase the accuracy of our language knowing that it falls short of complete linguistic clarity? Does it do any good?

Robert Anton Wilson wrote that “when baffled by a problem in science, in “philosophy,” or in daily life, I gain immediate insight by writing down what I know about the enigma in strict E-Prime.” I’m not convinced E-Prime would be useful enough to warrant adopting it in our day to day lives, but I do think that it can be a useful strategy to help think about things. It forces the use of active verbs, and I have personally found that it can help clarify ideas.

When I started researching for this post, I came across a lecture on youtube given by Dr. Daniel Zimmerman. I was expecting a deeply academic analysis of the philosophy behind E-Prime, but thankfully it was more a practical presentation on the use of E-Prime as a means to revise academic essays. Zimmerman claims that it sharpens his students’ language and makes their meaning clearer. In English Teaching Forum, online (Volume 41, Issue 3), “a quarterly journal published by the U.S. Department of State for teachers of English as a foreign or second language”, John C. Herbert, a professor of English as Akashi College, advocates using E-Prime to strengthen ELL learners’ written English, claiming that “E-Prime shows great potential for transforming standard English sentences into more creative and clearer statements of description.” Even David Bourland, the father of E-Prime, referred to his creation as a “tool for critical thinking”, and I think that this is exactly how we should think of it. E-Prime is a tool to help clarify things; it’s not an instant deliverance to linguistic enlightenment.

I haven’t used E-Prime in my own classroom yet, but that’s only because I am currently working with lower level ELL students. I definitely intend to try out an assignment in E-Prime with higher level students in the future. I didn’t write this post in E-Prime, but I did use it to refine certain paragraphs and sentences that were getting a bit slippery. I don’t believe that it’s necessary for us to entirely abandon the verb ‘to be’, but I do think that E-Prime can be used as a tool to help clarify meaning in argumentative, philosophical and scientific writing.

The other posts on this blog have focused on one or two books. This one involved a good bit of reading, so I’m going to include a disorganized bibliography for my own future reference.

Bibliography:

Quantum Psychology – Robert Anton Wilson
https://www.britannica.com/science/general-semantics
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Martin-Gardner-Fads-and-Fallacies-in-the-Name-of-Science.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20061007112531/http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol41/no3/p26.htm
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/56091/what-is-the-difference-between-the-is-of-predication-and-the-is-of-identity
https://web.archive.org/web/20130204204954/http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/articles/etc/46-3-bourland.pdf
https://www.generalsemantics.org/the-general-semantics-learning-center/overview-of-general-semantics/basic-understandings/
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/general_semantics
http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/16/e-prime-change-your-life
https://youtu.be/sl4UZDLFNT0 – Zimmerman
http://www.textjournal.com.au/april16/frazer.htm
The other posts on this blog and any book I read for them
http://www.nobeliefs.com/Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski.htm
http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20080103161605/http://www.esgs.org/uk/art/epr1.htm
http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/articles/etc/47-4-kellogg-bourland.pdf

Linguistic Relativity and Determinism: The Differing Approaches of Linguistics and Philosophy

When I started studying linguistics a few years ago, I was surprised at how close some of the topics in linguistics sounded to the stuff I had encountered in the philosophy classes I had taken years previously. I am currently interested in the area where these two disciplines meet, and I have just read a book that has helped me identify one of the boundaries between linguistics and the philosophy of language.

through the language glass.jpg

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher is a book about linguistic relativity. Linguistic relativity is the idea that the different languages spoken around the world affect the thoughts of their speakers in different ways. Apparently this idea used to be fairly widely accepted, but it went out of fashion for a good half century. In this book, Deutscher gives several examples of how different languages affect how their speakers think, but he makes it very clear that while languages can affect the thoughts of their speakers, they do not limit these thoughts. Languages aren’t static, so even if a language comes across something that it can’t express, it can always create a way of doing so or borrow a way from a different language.

The specific concepts that Deutscher uses to explain how different languages affect the thoughts of their speakers are colour, gender and direction. Through experiments, scientists have shown that our thought patterns relating to these concepts are actually affected by the language that we speak. For example, people who speak Russian are slightly faster at differentiating shades of blue because their language has different words for light blue and dark blue. The actual differences between how different language users think about colour, gender and direction may seem small, but think about how foundational these concepts are to how we perceive the world.

One must also consider the fact that setting up reliable experiments to prove these differences is extremely tricky due to the almost infinite amount of variables that might interfere. If comparing people’s ability to differentiate colours is complicated, imagine how difficult it would be to set up an experiment to reliably test the effects that different languages have on individuals’ abilities to solve complicated word problems. We’ll never know if certain languages are conducive to philosophy. One might be tempted to put forth German and French as candidates due to the immense volume of philosophy written in those languages, but one could also argue the exact opposite point.

Deutscher’s thesis is that different languages cause their users to think in different ways. This is not to say that the concepts of any one language can’t be expressed in another. While he accepts linguistic relativity, Deutscher steers clear of linguistic determinism, the idea that our language limits our thoughts. At one point in the book he says, “there is one toxic fallacy that runs like quicksilver through all the arguments we have encountered so far, and this is the assumption that the language we happen to speak is a prison-house that limits the concepts we are able to understand.” Hang on there Deutscher, it sounds like you’re contradicting my much beloved Wittgensteinian view of language! In fact, Deutscher goes on to say that the aforementioned assumption is based on “a premise as crude as it is false, namely that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,””. That’s a quote from the Tractatus! Don’t worry Ludwig, I won’t let him get away with this!

Either Deutscher is deliberately mispresenting Wittgenstein’s ideas because the quote fits his paragraph or he has misunderstood Wittgenstein’s point. For the sake of argument, I shall assume the latter. Examining this misunderstanding will make clear the differences between linguistics and the philosophy of language.

Do Wittgenstein’s thoughts add up to linguistic determinism? Taken at face value, it seems that way, but surely any Wittgensteinian worth their salt will point out that it’s a foul move to bring up a point of philosophy in a game of pure linguistics. While Deutscher is concerned with comparing and contrasting different languages, Wittgenstein was talking about language in general (I’ve previously used the phrase Language with a capital L). Wittgenstein did not mean to say that a German speaker’s world is limited by the German language; he was speaking more generally. Human perception is limited by human linguistic capabilities, not the limitations of any specific human language. As a philosopher, Wittgenstein was attempting to view language from the outside in an effort to see its limits. (He ultimately concluded that this task was impossible.) Deutscher, as a linguist, is fully immersed in language and is measuring the phenomena from within. The way Deutscher writes about Wittgenstein’s idea is a really good example of how easy it is to mix up language games

This is a very minor point in Through the Language Glass, and it doesn’t really take away from the message or efficacy of this insightful and entertaining book. I just found it an illuminating point that helped me understand how the disciplines of linguistics and philosophy approach the same topic.

 

Some Thoughts on Wittgenstein: Are Language Games just Playing on Words?

wittgenstein.jpg
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas had a huge effect on the way that I think about language, and I felt the need to revisit these ideas and to look at them a little more carefully before I delve any deeper into the study of linguistics. The summaries of his ideas in the first two parts of this post were written as an exercise of refamiliarising myself with Wittgenstein’s philosophy. There’s probably clearer explanations of these ideas elsewhere online, but I think I’ve done a passable job.

Part 1 – The Tractatus

In his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein puts forth his picture theory of language. The basic idea here is that language corresponds to reality by picturing it. When we say or think of the word ‘flower’, a picture of a flower appears in our mind. By ordering words (and the pictures they bring to mind) into sentences, we construct a mental image of what we’re hearing. Unfortunately, this really only works properly for straightforward sentences about physical objects in the real world.

“The flower is on the table.” or “My dog is swimming in the river.” are fine. These statements will call similar images into the minds of different people, and the differences between our mental images can be decreased by adding descriptive language to our sentences. Our capacity for image forming allows us to imagine things that we have not actually seen. Sounds pretty good, right?

But what picture comes to mind when you hear a sentence like, “Phenomenology is a presuppositionless science of essences that proceeds through pure intuition.”? Maybe you can form an image of this sentence, but you will concede that it is very unlikely that anyone else will form the same or even a similar image. Statements about philosophical issues don’t form neat little mental images. Wittgenstein’s solution to this problem? Don’t talk about philosophical issues.

I love Wittgenstein.

Now, do human beings find it difficult to express philosophical truths because:

(a) our language is not complex enough to discuss certain philosophical issues,
or
(b) because these philosophical issues are actually illusory phantoms that only appear because of the limits/shortcomings of human language?

To put it another way, are philosophical issues genuinely outside the realm of human comprehension, or are they actually non-issues that only appear because our language is imperfect?

For example, whether or not God exists is a popular philosophical debate. Is the lack of a resolution to this debate due to the fact that our language is simply not developed enough to express/comprehend the divine, or is it because we only ever postulated a God to answer odd questions that have no sensible corresponding mental image like, “why are we here?” or “why does evil exist?”?

I don’t know the answer. I’d say it’s a mix of (a) and (b). I’m sure that there are certain topics that our language just isn’t equipped to deal with. Doesn’t quantum physics show that a thing can be two places at once? Our language won’t make talking about that easy. Language changes though, and there’s always hope that what we can’t talk about today, we’ll figure out tomorrow. There has to be limits to language though, and those limits are going to be very difficult to pin down. I was listening to a podcast on Wittgenstein, and Barry Smith pointed this out. He said that “He (Ludwig) was worried about how we actually describe limits without breaching them, without being outside them”. If we don’t know where the line is, how can we ever know that we’re about to cross it and fall head first into pseudophilsophical nonsense?

Part 2 – The Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein believed that his Tractatus had solved the problems of philosophy or that it had at least come as close to solving them as was possible. After writing this monumental work, he quit philosophy and became a school teacher. After a few years, he changed his mind. He no longer believed that language was merely a means of painting mental pictures. In his later work, he claims that meaning derives from how words are used instead of from their correspondence with the physical world. To put it more simply: what a word means depends on how it is being used. (The usage is its meaning.) To explain how this is, Wittgenstein introduces his concept of language games.

Ludwig posited that language has a myriad of uses. We don’t just use it to make empirical claims about the observable universe such as “The chair is red” or “The boy is 5 foot tall”. We also use language to pray, to express frustration, to condone, to accuse, to insult, to exaggerate and so on. Think of how the word red is being used in the following sentences:

  1. The ball is red.
  2. Her favourite colour is red.
  3. He was caught red handed.
  4. I’m seeing red.
  5. Boy, is my face red?!
  6. The Reds won the game!
  7. The Reds won the election!
  8. This curry is red hot!

To native English speakers, these sentences are easily understood. In the first sentence, red is being used to describe a physical object. In the second, it’s redness itself and not a red object being discussed. In the third sentence, red is being used to imply guilt. In the fourth, it is being used to express anger. To a language learner, this will be very confusing, and Wittgenstein’s picture theory can’t really account for these different uses of the same word.

The different uses of the word red above represent different language games. Language games is just a name for the many different uses of language. Expressing emotion is a different language game to describing a physical object. The difficulty is that both of these language games use the same words. Wittgenstein now claims that the problems of philosophy (and many other problems) are caused by people not understanding which language game they should be playing.

Although the sentence ‘Are you Irish?’ looks like a lot like the sentence ‘Are you free?’, the process of answering these questions is very different. The only visible (or audible) difference between the sentences are the words ‘Irish’  and ‘free’, both of which are adjectives. Whether or not I am Irish is an empirical issue. I can answer this question by producing my passport. Whether or not I am free is far more complicated – first of all, I must figure out if the person asking the question is asking me if I am currently free to grab a cappuccino at Starbucks or if they are asking a deeper philosophical question that will require a resolution to the apparent conflict between determinism and my true will. The verbal similarities between the two questions leads people to think that they can be answered in a similar fashion, but this is obviously not the case.

While the main point of Wittgenstein’s picture theory seems to be negated by his later ‘usage theory’, I believe that a lot of what he said in describing the former theory is still very relevant to the latter. In fact, with regards to the specific element of his work that I’m interested in, Wittgenstein’s later ideas serve as a development on his earlier ones rather than a refutation. Philosophical problems remain very much the product of the shortcomings of language.

Just as a game of soccer is not played on a chessboard, a discussion of the compatibility of free will and determinism should not follow the same rules as a discussion of ones nationality. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein does not put forth a set of rules for the philosophical discussion. I think Ryle did a pretty good job of providing the rules for that particular discussion by marking category mistakes as a foul, but the rules for other philosophical discussions and even the possibility of these rules sensibly existing are still rather unclear.

Part 3 – More Investigations

I have previously discussed three potential causes of philosophical problems:

1. People using language poorly. (This includes Rylean category mistakes such as the mind/body problem)
2. Language simply not being equipped to deal with certain issues. (What is the meaning of life?)
3. Philosophical bogeys arising as people encounter the limits of language. (This is like a combination of the first two issues.)

To emphasise the linguistic basis of the problems of philosophy, I want to return to Wittgenstein’s concept of language games.

Language games appear in the Philosophical Investigations to give an example of an incomplete picture of language. Imagine two immigrant bricklayers working together. Both of these men are from different countries and speak different languages, but their work is relatively simple. One of them, let’s call him A, actually builds the wall, while the other, a chap named B, provides A with the necessary materials to do so. Maybe sometimes they switch roles so they don’t get too bored. The only three things that they ever use are bricks, mortar and a trowel. (This is not the exact analogy that Wittgenstein uses, but it’s close enough for you to get the idea.) Given the simple nature of A and B’s relationship, the only things that they ever need say to each other are commands that indicate the need for a brick, some cement or the trowel. Although they don’t speak the same language they agree on arbitrary sounds that correspond to these commands. For A and B, the utterance ‘gah’ means ‘Give me a brick.’, the utterance ‘mah’ means ‘Give me some cement.’, and the utterance ‘bah’ means ‘Give me a trowel.’ When A says ‘gah, B gives him a brick. When B says ‘mah’, A gives him some cement.

Now it’s quite obvious that real world relations are never this simple, but as a hypothetical situation, this isn’t particularly difficult to imagine. Some philosophical arguments require people to imagine such absurd scenarios that they become infuriating, but Wittgenstein’s idea of the two construction workers is easy to follow because similar situations are probably a fairly common occurrence amoungst immigrant workers.

The idea of these two workers and their direct but very limited ability to communicate is supposed to emphasise the shortcomings of Wittgenstein’s earlier picture theory of language. In the very simplistic “language” of these two men, words might very well represent pictures. When A says ‘bah’, both he and B momentarily hold an image of the trowel in their heads. The problem for Wittgenstein is that the picture theory of language only works if we view all language as being as simplistic as the communication between the two bricklayers. While these men may have developed a system of communication that allows them to build walls efficiently, neither man can express his fondness for the other, his appreciation for the fine walls they have been building or the existential angst that builds up when one spends all day on a construction site. Wittgenstein seems to concede that these men may have developed a language but that their language does not represent all that Language (with a capital L) is.

While Wittgenstein’s actual point is that Language is far more complex than the system of communication developed by A and B, I’m still fascinated by how much the two systems have in common. Yes, our language has more words, but our vocabulary is also finite. An English speaker with a high vocabulary supposedly knows about 50,000 words. The men who have three words can’t talk about the weather or where their kids go to school, and while 50,000 words makes a lot more possible for us, this level of word power doubtlessly has limits too. We can’t possibly explain everything. It won’t matter how smart we are or how hard we try; we just don’t have the words to talk about certain things.

And it’s that idea that brings us back to the eerie yet beautiful final line of the Tractatus, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” While Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations points out the shortcomings of some of his earlier ideas, it strengthens the argument for others. The final message of the Tractatus is safe, and it’s that line that has always seemed the most potent for me. I remember reading the Tao Te Ching for the first time and being shocked with the similarity of its opening passage with the closing line of the Tractatus. Compare “The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” with “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” I later discovered that many others have also noticed this similarity, but I still think it’s interesting enough to mention again. Considering the millennia, thousands of miles and radically different cultures that separated Wittgenstein and Lao Tzu, they make a surprisingly similar point – language can’t do everything we want it to do.

 

I’m going to leave it there. The notion of writing a 2300 word essay on Wittgenstein in my free time would have seemed very unlikely to me a few years ago, but I’m almost more surprised that I still have lots to say about him. I’m quite sure his ideas will pop up on this blog in the future. To write with full disclosure, I must admit that although I have attempted to read both of Wittgenstein’s major works, I have read neither in their entirety. Despite several attempts, I’ve only ever made it through a few pages of the Tractatus before being completely unable to follow what was going on. I fared quite a bit better with the Philosophical Investigations, but it’s quite dense and quite repetitive, and I gave up before I got half way through. That being said, I’ve read several books and papers on his writings, listened to a bunch of lectures about his work, and watched this cool documentary and the Derek Jarman film about him several times. I’m confident in saying that I have a pretty good idea of what he was talking about. I’m not an expert on this though, and if I have misunderstood something or if what I’m saying is really dumb, I would be genuinely appreciative of any feedback.