Pistis Christou

One of the pressing themes of analytic philosophy, starting from Gottlob Frege and continuing onwards, is to try to establish the relationship between language and reality.  At the very beginning, Frege attempted to establish a philosophy of language rooted in his mathematical background, where he defines meaning as having a sense, which approximates to our notion of the concept a word refers to, and reference, which relates to the actual thing we are trying to describe in our language. Frege did not want these meanings, particularly reference, to be psychological; otherwise, how can one retain a view of access to an “objectively” true world we can known if all meanings are “subjectively” psychological. This “hyper-objectivity” of later positivism sought to undergird empiricism with philosophical legitimacy, suggesting we do have access to the object world. Bertrand Russell dismissed Frege’s sense, thinking one only needed a reference to do the job of language; through this, Russell represents the attempt to arrive at a formal language that allows for an objective and logical account of reality. Theology, metaphysics, any other usage of language that doesn’t refer directly to empirical reality or access specific, definitions and  logical relations, are to be construed as nonsense.

Then, it was Russell’s student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who intially carried out this project of aversion to metaphysics in his Tractatus, suggesting that philosophy is often times wrangling over the confusion of definitions that commonly amounts to nonsense rather than having any substantive say. But, it was the later Wittgenstein who turn everything on its head and say that language has meaning by the rules of its usage, which is well-known as language games; there is no clear, fixed meaning or definitions of words except how they are used. Furthermore, he rejects the idea that meaning can ever be held by a single person, and thus, therefore, language is a product of socially agreed upon meanings and not a direct representation of reality. Which leads to the fundamental question: isn’t to say the meaning of a word is how it is used to ultimately psychologize language, which undercuts Frege and the concern for objectivity?

So does language access an objective reality? Early on with Frege the answer would entail a yes, but with the later Wittgenstein the answer moves towards no. I am left siding with Wittgenstein in the end, albeit for different reasons that undercuts some of his philosophy.

There has been a common assumption within later, Western philosophy of thought and language; that our thinking is determined by language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism proposed that all human thinking is limited and determined by language. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that the unconscious is structured like a semiological system. We can perhaps see a similar, albeit more muted, version of this assumption started with Frege, that the thinking done in language is structured like a mathematical system, which itself is a specialized language; the thinking of normal language is structured by a higher-tier language of math.

But what if thought is formed by and stuctured through a blend of various different sources of human cognition, including perception of internal and external sensations, memory, language, etc.? When I am talking to a person, my sense of who this person is structured by the language my culture gives me to describe people, such as the language of kindness, and the language she and I used together, such as the lyrics to the songs we enjoy. But it is also influenced by perception of what is happening in this very moment, such as her visible signs of excitement, and my memories of past engagements with her, such as when we played sports together, even if I can not clearly articulate and express in language all the relational dynamics that are at play now and in the past. My thinking is an emergent phenomenon of a blend of different sources, including but not limited to the semantics of words.

In this case, language can be connected to a sense of reality, but by the middle, mediating phenomenon of human thought. As my thinking is formed to my perceptions, my language is used to describe my thinking, including the parts of my thinking formed by my perception. When I use language, I can have the intentions to refer to some intersubjective reality that is shared between my friend and me, such as words in the Bible we both read. But I select the words to talk about because those are the words in my own mind and thinking, perceived through sensation and recalled through memory.

Nowhere does my language ever function to provide a direct access to reality, but all my language is pointing something within my own thoughts. Language is effective only to the degree there is common perceptions, shared memories of the same or similar events, shared attention, and similar pairings of words/signs to semantics/concepts. Only my perception may be said to provide a potential access into what is “objectively” real, but because my thinking is formed by both perceptual sensation and language, I can never truly isolate the boundaries between objective sensation and subjective conceptualizations to say “this is objective” and “this is subjective.” And so, insofar as we are able to use language to describe our thinking, we can never be certain as to what degree we are being objective.

Instead, language functions as a virtual reality, blending together the various semantic structures embedded in our neural networks to imagine something in our minds, whether there is anything in our sensory perception that corresponds to our imagination or not. Insofar as these semantic concepts are formed by direct perceptual experience that we then give language to, we can suggest our language approximates a representation of reality, albeit imperfectly. However, the more we use language to manage our life, to communicate, to cooperate and fight, the more language structures how we think while decreasing the role sensation plays in structuring thought, such that our language makes us increasingly live within what amounts to a low-definition virtual reality; we create new concepts not simply from novel sensory experiences but also from the emergence of meaning from the combinations of words. We increasingly move into a world of Jean Baudrillard’s simulcra.

If all of this is correct, then reality is never accessed by language itself. I do not come to an objective understanding of the world through reading and hearing other people speak. However, by reading and hearing, I may be moved myself to act, think, and pay attention in certain ways that can direct me towards having my thoughts formed by perception more and language less. I can imagine through language how the world might work and then mathematics my attention and action to engage in the world to see if this is true, to experience what I have heard or read. But forming my understanding into greater conformity to reality itself and less into the linguistic imagination only comes when I direct my attention and action to perception, which is formed by my sensation of certain aspects of reality (such as vision, audition, inner physiological states, etc.) I must put what I imagine through language into action for it to become more than simply a virtual reality, but a blend of virtual and actual reality.

And so, I would argue that analytic philosophy can never through an account of language give us confident, direct access to reality. It may be able to directly and indirectly guide us into a way of knowing that puts us in attune with objective reality, but the analytic philosophy of language is itself just a simply extended language game that is often times more about a wrangling of definitions than it is discussing substantively true propositions about reality. Wittgenstein movement away from the earlier, more objective views of language with Frege and Russell emerge in large part due to the virtual reality that language engages us in.

However, there is the possibility of novel meanings and uses of words that occur in what is an initially private meaning; when I perceive something new and try to use language to describe it, my thinking operates as a blend of the semantic concept of the word I use and the perception, leading to novel shades of meanings that are not immediately shared by others. Then, through the sharing of perception, memory, attention, and language those private meanings may eventually become public meanings. Because we are in touch with and think about reality through sensory perception and because thought is a blend of semantic memory and present perception, there is the possibility of private semantic meaning. This at the heart of non-fictional prose, where we describe what we have seen. Furthermore, we can try to describe our experiences through different words than is customarily used, which leads to novel, private meanings; then these novel meanings become public through the sustained attention of others to reconstruct. So much poetry is but the expression of this semantic novelty.

By recognizing that thought mediates the relationship between perception and language by being a blend of perception and language (among other sources), we can simultaneously a) allow that there can be an objective reality that we can study, observe, and think about while b) recognizing that language itself doesn’t convey this reality but only allows us to imagine it. But this relationship between the two makes any attempt to formalize the relationship between language and reality futile, as the degree to which we are focused and engaged with the perceptual and linguistic sources of thinking will determine how much language represents reality.