Saturday, April 16, 2005
Vagueness in Language and Philosophy
In his preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Bertrand Russell asserts:The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts.
In the same context, he discusses the vagueness of language and the exactitude of mathematics, geometry and the ideal language before passing to the notion of atomic facts and one of Wittgenstein's core points, that we could know everything once we had the totality of the basic facts from which to construct the emanating complex facts.
As I sit and write, I am only capable of having one thought at a time, more or less. I can think about this essay, or the color of the desk at which I'm typing or the sunshine mocking me as I sit inside. But I'm limited in how much I can take in.
If I'm alert or take full stock, I might notice myself taking in a bit more than I let on. In talking, for example, I process my interlocutor's gestures and expressions, the tone of his voice, his stance and more, even as I process my own reactions and decide on my responses.
Both the complexity of my thought, versus pure symbolism, and its simpleness versus the complexity of the world, throw monkey wrenches into the effort to connect language and reality. But there's an even bigger problem lurking, and that is the falseness of the first statement from Russel that I cite.
By considering the purpose and the practice of language, we can start getting at man's thought. This will give us another key to seeing the value of vague knowledge and the utility of relative truth in a world whose complexity exceeds the limits of our full comprehension. By the time I am done, I hope to have made clear that the most difficult problem with Wittgenstein's seventh proposition -
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence -
is not how much it excludes from our investigation, but that it ultimately excludes everything. We will see, in fact, that the only languages capable of meeting the criteria for an ideal language - one whose propositions are all logical - is one that is entirely self-referential, while Wittgenstein's distinction between propositions that state and language which shows is irrelevant, since the only language worth using is that which shows. Finally, we will make an effort to connect all these dots in order to show how the common vagueness of our language and senses and the faculties we've developed to account for them actually put us in a better position to discover meaningful truth than if our language could attain the precision of the logician's symbology.
1. Language does not exist for stating, but for communicating. It is a form of communion, of causing things to be held in common. Language does not exist unless there is an interlocutor, someone prepared to engage it. Even if this is only the author of the thought, that author will have ever so slightly changed by virtue of having written or spoken, such that the thought is given a new hearing.
As I type, I strike many keys. The code-breaker might guess at which key I strike the most by consulting a letter frequency table. Or he might count. But I'm willing to bet that only a psychologist could guess which key I've struck the most as I've typed today: the delete key. We do this in speech, too, with our umms, our ers, our restatements.
Even now, I'm communicating with myself, first about what I think, second about what I wish to say to you, the reader (even if that you, right now, is me!). If I were a logician, I could write a series of logical propositions with precise symbols. There would in this way be no need for me to go back and say, "Do I really want to say it that way?" But there would also be no point in saying it. If you knew the symbols and the ways of juxtaposing them, I'd only be telling you what you already know. If you didn't, you wouldn't get anything from it.
Socrates said we can only be taught what we already know (see the Meno), but this is not strictly true. Rather, we can only be taught what can coexist with and build upon our prior knowledge, including our a priori knowledge. That is, we learn by combining what we've already learned and what we sense. Were we so constituted as to be able to sense everything, identifying Wittgenstein's every "simple," there'd be too much to take in. We'd never learn anything because too many things would be contingent upon too many other things at too many and too complex levels.
What holds true for our thinking holds true for our speaking. Neither language nor thought can be all-encompassing. It is already thought that a single human brain is more complex and unpredictable than the working of the sun at the center of our solar system. In spite of this, there is at least one complexity it cannot handle: itself. We do not judge parking spaces to the nearest quarter inch but leave margin for error. The same is true of our thinking, which works to locate not perfection but an acceptable margin of error.
We know that the way we are wired works for parking cars - most of the time, anyway. It gets us through tasks like catching baseballs, cutting out recognizable circles and lots of other things too. Is it good enough for philosophy though?
Philosophy, of course, is the love of wisdom. Let's toss out a proposition: Moderation is good while excess is wasteful. Surely this proposition also applies to knowledge, sensation and wisdom. If we need not slice our bread to the nearest millimeter, neither need we split hairs to the nth degree. It is unwise, then, to go to extremes in our formulations of and researches into philosophy. This does not mean that we limit our inquiry, but it does require that we acknowledge our limitations. Our language was not created to decode the world for its own sake, but so that we could share our experiences within it.
Later in his career, Wittgenstein disavowed most of the Tractatus and began looking at the problems inherent in language. His work on "The Privacy of the Senses" sheds a lot of light on the difficulties two human beings will have communicating something such that the speaker and listener are left with exactly the same impression. But our language doesn't exist, as I've said, to assert the true or deny the false. It exists to help us commune, to share our experiences in ways that will be meaningful among interlocutors. Because different things have different meanings for different people, conveying exact facts or even sensations would be useless; they would still fail to match up because they came to be only within the contexts of different existences. But the privacy of the senses bring us something wonderful: an ability to create our own conception of what a person is trying to share. This is better than symbology. Instead of transmitting or replicating meaning, it goads the creation of new meaning founded on the old.
If human beings actually stumbled upon a symbolic language that perfectly replicated ideas among individuals, we would stagnate. Imagine if Aristotle had been able to convey things in such a way that Descartes knew exactly what he was saying. We never would have got "Cogito ergo sum," because Descartes would never have suffered unease at something in Aristotle not quite resonating. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, pace Liebniz, but we live in a pretty good one and one that is growing better. Ours is a world where we're even smart enough thanks to developments in quantum physics to realize we're back to square one, knowing more than ever about what we know about but less than ever about things we realize we need to learn about.
Human progress follows a process that is not thesis, antithesis, synthesis but more like peeling Zeno's onion. Over time, the universe lets us peel off a leaf and we see something wild, new and fresh beneath. Then we use the dialectic to talk about what we've seen. But the next serious bit of progress comes when we pull of the next leaf. The thing is - and this is why I call it Zeno's onion - beneath each leaf is another half the size of the previous one but with twice as many veins. Ad infinitum. The more we refine, the stranger and curiouser are the things we find to explore. This will let us grow forever - or at least till the last trump sounds or the sun goes out - whereas a supposedly ideal language would ultimately strand us in a world that truly conformed to Wittgenstein's seventh proposition in the Tractatus: There would truly be nothing left that we could talk about.
posted by gbarto at 10:47 PM