Chapter 3 - Language

Summary

Wittgenstein said that there can be no private language. If on a deserted island I bump my toe on a stone and call the darned thing ‘clink’, and the next time I call it ‘clunk’, there is no one to correct me. My reference to things with a word can fly off in all directions. If I think something I cannot ‘unthink’ it. It is, Wittgenstein said, like having pain: it is odd to say that you ‘think’ you have a pain.

I accept from G. H. Mead (2011) that language started out with bodily gestures and expressions and vocal gestures such as cries and shouts. Gestures and language are needed to learn from interaction with people, in communication, sharing and opposing meanings of words and gestures. As Mead argued, we develop a sense of self and consciousness by expressing ourselves, observing reactions of others, reacting to those and observing our reaction. Perhaps that is why young people flock together and find it difficult to observe the corona rule against proximity. On the other hand, distance contact by telephone rather than bodily proximity has also increased distance. Gestures and facial expressions are still important in communication, so that during the lockdown due to corona, communication in writing only did not suffice and we had to bring in visual contact, via applications like Zoom. But to many that is a poor substitute for physical proximity and bodily contact.

The old idea of meaning was that it is reference. With the word ‘chair’ we refer to an object of that nature, or all objects of that kind. This leads to the issue of knowledge and truth as correspondence of ideas with items in reality. As discussed before, Kant raised fundamental doubt on this. From the Kantian view, it is very dubious to claim that words, linguistic expressions, actually do refer in that sense.

Reference, I proposed earlier, is intentional, not ontological: people intend to refer to reality, leaving aside whether, or in what sense, and to what extent, they actually do. However, words are not always only intended to refer.