What is language? What are the different forms
of language? What is connotation, and how do discrepancies among perceptions
of connotative meaning affect our communication? Is language itself a dynamic
entity with an evolutionary tract of its own, or is it molded by the social
being? To what extend does an individual have control over language? What
is a metaphor? How is it that synonyms mean the same thing, yet differ
in meaning- what does synonymous mean? The most effective means
of communication differs from person to person; some most easily derive
and express meaning via representations, others find solace in speech,
still others are most comfortable with written words. . .Why? What are
the components of language which make analysis of it so complex?
Unto the Breach . . . Once More
Name withheld upon request
Every language (pause) has its own silences. And as British actor Ralph Richardson once observed, "The most precious things in speech are pauses." Meaning, one might say, lies in the breach.
As a lifelong stammerer, I've cultivated some defensively fanciful notions about the hesitations, the stranded syllables, and the involuntary repetitions that characterize impedimented speech. If thought is made in the mouth (though doubtless there are a gifted few who can think without moving their lips), how truly . . . disappointing that thought generally is. Like Eliot's Sweeney, "I've gotta use words when I talk to you." Uh . . . unfortunately.
Hesitations in speech are often interpreted as struggles to "gather one's thoughts"--as if articulating an idea were somehow akin to collecting flowers in a thorny meadow. But might the primitive "uh" itself signify the "limits of my language, . . . the limits of my world"? Does the awkward pause point to all that "we must consign to silence"? And, if so, are such hung syllables and uninvited ellipses therefore the truest indicators of thought? Blessedly terse, Wittgenstein reserved further comment.
Marshall McLuhan (baffling as ever) characterized language as "a form of organized stutter." French playwright Antonin Artaud insisted that all "true language is incomprehensible"--without insisting on a definition of "true language." Rejecting the Johnsonian metaphor of language as the dress of thought, Carlyle chose instead to describe language as "the flesh-garment, the body, of thought." Meanwhile, Harpo Marx simply squeezed an old bicycle horn and sought refuge in music.
And so I recommend none of the above as fit topics for today's discussion
on language. Instead, with some (customary) hesitation, I urge you to read
T. S. Eliot's
"Little Gidding." Or, uh, re-read it.
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pigsty to the dull facade
And the Tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.
Skimming the Surface
By: Carol Linskey
Dr. Noble once began a class by saying that he heard a profound thing-that education is learning vocabularies and what they mean. Later in my career, Dr. Arens taught a history of East Central Europe with a format grounded in the division of these cultures by common language, making cultural boundaries easier for us to grapple with. But as I turn to the task at hand, presented with questions on the nature of language, such as the connection between signifier and signified, the dynamics of language, communication, and (my favorite and yours) metaphors, it seems to me that language, as in personalities turned self-conscious, misconstrues itself. Language is an intricate part of being human, defined as both rational and social, so I was not a little surprised to read in my Encyclopedia of Philosophy that "There is no single specialist work on the history of the philosophy of language." So perhaps I shall do as Perseus and use reflection to conquer my Gorgon, and begin with a historio-philosophic approach.
About a year ago or so, Dr. Nordqust gave a faculty lecture addressing our feelings about computers and the fact that they're here. He used, for example, Socrates' distrust of the writing-a "fad" two and a half millennia ago. Criticizing that writing would only ruin our minds and make thinking lazy, Socrates never wrote. Plato, perhaps mindful of his master's position on the subject, made Socrates the star of his dialogues. In Cratylus, Plato defines names as an "instrument of teaching and distinguishing natures" (388c). Plato argues that names or words are neither arbitrary nor conventional, but "ideal," or fitting the "universal form" of the thing named. The problems presented by ideal language are still being worked out, as evidenced in our current mindfulness of "politically-correct" speech.
Language cannot be "real" to Plato, dynamic and fluctuating as it is, so Aristotle set out to give some stability to language with his work on categorizing symbols and developing logic to a form that has a long and enduring legacy. He says words are the signs of ideas, and ideas the sign of things. However, for centuries logic can only be talked about in terms of universal categories. Quantification is a very recently devised tool, useful in the discussion of particulars, but it needed a "particularly-minded" world view.
Aristotle's groundwork found a fertile place in Medieval times in the work of the Scholastics such as Aquinas, Averroes, Ockham, and Duns Scotus. Here we see the propositions for the sake of argument, definitions of terms in the propositions, and logical conclusions based upon these definitions. The writings could be said to be at the same time profound and taxing. So by the 17th century, hordes of thinkers were turning away from Scholasticism toward science (I think, the reason Voltaire called this historical period the "Dark Ages" is directly because of his distaste for this method of teaching). Sir Francis Bacon is credited (by Russell in his History of Western Philosophy) as being the first to say "knowledge is power," yet he warns against the "Idols of the Marketplace" which construes language as reality. Goethe's Faust changed John 1.1, "In the beginning was the word" (or mind or spirit), and replaced it with "In the beginning was the act!" Another John, John Locke, wrote that words were the substitutes for ideas (in Lockean terms, the primary, unchanging objects of the mind). It may seem to go without saying that "a group of words forming no idea(s) is incoherent," but he said it. And remember, when we hear the words, "We hold these words to be self-evident. . ." we can thank Locke.
Metaphors. . .wait. Wittgenstein said we cannot think without language. This may be true, but need I know the word "tree" when I have the experience of one? Now, isn't the word "tree" a metaphor of my experience, and if a metaphor is literal, why is it a metaphor? Similarly, knowledge is not the same as understanding or we wouldn't have two different designations. A. J. Ayer wrote, "a statement is held to be literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable." So what about the statement "God exists"? Is it meaningless to have mystery and to believe in the existence of something before it has been defined for you as "something which nothing greater can be conceived" (Anselm).
So are words the same as language? What about music, or gestures? How about the electrified sensation of silence? And finally, what about the sensation of hearing or saying something profound? Can you put words to that, ideal words, and increase the profundity indefinitely?
Written language, while sharing the same symbolic content as spoken language, is rarely as rich or subtle as it's verbal counterpart. Humans depend upon a thousand nonverbal and verbal clues imbedded in the speech and mannerisms of those around us. One can read Shakespear, but to truly get the full effect, it must be seen, each performance imparting some subtly different meaning as the actors interpret the words of a play whose original subtle meaning may be as dead as the man who wrote them.
This, of course, leads to misunderstandings, quite frequently for me, although perhaps not as often for others. People read meaning into the written word as if it were spoken, and when the writer has a sarcastic bent, such as I do, problems arise. More than once a letter or note I have left for friends has been met with irritation as the sarcasm of my words was overlooked, and my meaning taken literally.
How often has the tone of voice that you use been misconstrued? Words intended to be humorous or funny are read instead as being sarcastic or serious as others interpret the tone of voice differently than was intended?
How effective is language for conveying meaning? Philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and writers often go to great lengths to define words that they use, not because the words have no previous meaning, but because they have such a plethora of meaning that , if merely tossed out to the reader casually, they would cause more confusion and argument than if the works had been written in some entirely new language.
One can not go around defining all of the words that they use in common, everyday speech, however. Many of the words that we bandy about with such ease, if asked, we would be hard pressed to put a firm definition to, let alone explain the additional meaning added by our tone, stance, the tilt of a head or wink of an eye.
Indeed, most of the communications shared by people are, at best,
mutually shared symbols, with no guarantee that both parties share the
same meaning. We fill in blanks in context and meaning almost automatically,
correcting for spelling or pronunciation errors, and assigning meaning
to phrases, whether the meaning attached was intended or not.
What do you mean, mean?
By: -t.
Noam Chompsky (for whom, i admit, i held much contempt during my advanced grammar class) said that the point of language is "the free expression of thought." What is "free"? What is "expression"? And what is "thought"? You may be thinking, "frankly, scallop, I don't give a clam" (Pinkard and Bowden)-but what does that mean?
The act of communication is necessarily social. What meaning would communication itself have if not for our fellow Homo Sapiens? Many philosophers believe that the dynamic social being, through its traditions, customs, and evolution, determines both how we "ought" to communicate and how our means of expression will be construed by others. Tones, gestures, body language, layers of connotations and associations, and countless other attributes which contribute to meaning, vary among cultures, communities, or even individuals.
What is the unification which allows us to continue communicating
while maintaining individual, unique means of doing so? If our use of language
is socially determined, how free is our expression of thought? If
we accept or acknowledge this social influence upon us, is it solely our
means of expression which the social being subjugates, or are our thoughts
themselves to some extent determined by it?
It is not just our use of language that is interesting, but also
our understanding of it. If someone tells us "The cats are hungry," how
is it that we perceive, in the terminology of J.L. Austin, the locutionary
act-the expression of the proposition that the cats are hungry, the
illocutionary act-the expression of the belief that the cats are
hungry, and the perlocutionary act-the attempt to cause belief in
the listener that the cats are hungry? Further, a tone of voice, facial
expression, etc. may suggest to the listener that he or she is expected
to act upon the proposition, i.e., feed the poor darn hungry cats. (We'll
consider how we knew the cats were hungry at some other time. . .) Or perhaps
the Cats are a sports team and "hungry" is meant to refer to their desire
and drive to win rather than to eat, in which case the listener
would not, generally, be presented with a problem requiring some corrective
action. Context, context.
Are semantics (grammatical meaning) and ontological meaning (being) related? Are they related in that without one we cannot have full comprehension of the other, and if so, is that relation reciprocal? Asking what the word "rose" means lexically or connotationaly is not the same as asking what it means to be a rose. We can say that a rose is a flower that grows on a shrub of the genus Rosa, or that it represents love, fragility, beauty within a finite temporal space, etc. But does the rose itself have meaning. . . and from where do our associations originate? How do denotations and connotations last and evolve? What makes an effective metaphor effective? What makes a statement "profound"?
To tie back into the introduction, as is the custom, "Frankly, scallop,
I don't give a clam" is a fishy way of expressing cold disinterest. But
what does that mean? (For the intelligent derrieres: that. (thät).
Relative pronoun. Being the one indicated or implied.) For the rest
of us-who are never sarcastic-perhaps we can get together and freely
express our thoughts on the matter, provided we can circumvent determinism
successfully enough to have our own thoughts, whatever those might Be.
Fall Meeting Schedule
All meetings, held at 8:30 p.m. in Gamble Hall, room
106, are free and open to everyone.
Wednesday. . .
September 24
October 8 & 22
November 5 & 19
Announcements
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Erik Nordenhaug, 921-7322. E-mail: nordener@pirates. armstrong.edu.
Student president: Tiffanie L.C.
Rogers 1-888-964-9543 (punch in your # at the beep)