Conventional wisdom views language as a device through which thought is actualized into spoken or written word, as a tool that simply assists in the representation of something that precedes it. To paraphrase a science mentor and dear friend of mine, “We do not create the world through language. Language and explicit knowledge are the poor symbolic systems we use to try and communicate about the real creator of the world: implicit rules and knowledge that are metasymbolic.”
I disagree with this assessment and see an important, fundamental feedback between metasymbolic, implicit rules and knowledge on one hand and language on the other. Understanding language formally as a symbolic, self-contained system that is governed simply by syntactical and grammatical rules is narrow and fails to recognize that language does not only express thought but also guides it. Such a failure underestimates language’s potential to both enrich and stifle thought. With this in mind, the belabored arguments below are meant to support a single simple statement:
The task of developing rich (and ideally multi-) language skills should be undertaken not only by language or creative writing majors but by all, since one’s level of linguistic skill provides the basis for critical and creative-thinking development, which is fundamental to all human endeavors.
By the time in our lives that critical thinking and reflection have become prominent aspects of our being, both the use and understanding of language have themselves become implicit, creating the illusion of a given language’s “naturalness.” Those who speak and write fluently in more than one language often discover aspects of thought and feeling that are much more accessible in one linguistic scheme or another, destroying this illusion. I, for one, think and feel differently, express myself differently, and focus on different aspects of my experiences depending on whether I "function" in Greek, English, or German. I can think of several words that exist in one language and not in another (especially words with subtle shades of meaning) that not only suggest differences in how thoughts are expressed but also support the formation of different future thoughts. For example, there is no Greek noun that can capture the meaning of the English "privacy," while the English "hospitality" and the equivalent Greek "filoxenia" (literally and clumsily translated as “friendship towards strangers”) clearly put emphasis on different aspects of the concept they describe. In both cases, the linguistic differences reflect and support attitudes towards privacy and guests that are fundamentally different between the two traditions.
The drawbacks of formal approaches to language come to the forefront especially when trying to address prosody and metaphor, linguistic devises that account for a large portion of communicated meaning and of language use and creation in general. All the formal “substitution” theories of metaphor accomplish is to create a model that is “Ptolemaic” in its complexity and uselessness, trying too hard to stick to existing ideas, simply because embracing different ones would require thinkers to enlist the help of unfamiliar intellectual traditions. But I will reserve this topic for a future post.
Winograd and Flores (1986) observe that even sophisticated linguists are puzzled by the suggestion that the basis for the meaning of words and sentences cannot ultimately be defined in terms of an objective external world. Words correspond to our intuition about “reality” simply because our purposes in using them are closely aligned with our physical existence in a world and with our actions within it. But this coincidence is the result of our use of language within a tradition (or as some biologists may say, of our “structural coupling” within a “consensual domain”). As such, this reality is based on language as much as it reflects it.
Ultimately, language, like cognition, is fundamentally social and may be better understood if approached as a “speech act” rather than a formal symbolic system, a move that introduces the importance of “commitment,” as described in speech-act theories of Austin and others. Both language and cognition are relational and historical, in the larger sense of the word. As Winograd and Flores note, the apparent simplicity of physically interpreted terms such as "chair" is misleading and obscures the fact that communication through words such as "crisis" or "friendship" cannot exist outside the domain of human interaction and commitment, both of which are intricately linked to language (as speech act) itself. This apparently paradoxical view that nothing (beyond simple descriptions of physical activity and some sensory experience) exists except through language describes the fundamentally linguistic nature of all experience and motivates me to approach moments of understanding (i.e. “understanding” experiences) as the achievements of explanatory (i.e. linguistic) acts.
The power of language to create, rather than simply express, thought and meaning may actually be more easily recognized through an examination of the relationship between explanation and understanding. The writings of Gadamer (1960), Ricoeur (1991), and others, have expanded our conception of explanation, illustrating that it cannot be approached as simply the result of and subsequent to understanding.
Explanation and understanding are both products of thought, “moments” of knowing that constantly interact in a productive feedback. This feedback is manifested as communication, reflection, etc. and has explanation, rather than understanding, at its center. In this scheme, explanation is linguistic in nature (whether as discourse—with someone or within—or text) and understanding is cognitive/phenomenological (whether as thinking or thought). Explanation (interpretation) is not seen as a post-facto supplement to understanding but as belonging to understanding’s inner structure, an integral part of the content of what is understood. I see Gadamer’s efforts to recover the importance of application (“understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation’”) as evidence that application is the ultimate explanatory act. As an "explanatory achievement," understanding is the fruit of explanation, "being realized not just for the one for whom one is interpreting but for the interpreter himself." This essentially argues that understanding is “explaining to self.”
If, along with Gadamer, we conceive every statement as an answer to a question, what we understand as a statement’s meaning is an answer, an explanation. And even though the moment of understanding often seems to occur without explicit interpretation/explanation, it is always preceded by an explanation to self, motivated by the hermeneutic question that has to be asked and be answered in any event of understanding.
The understanding/explanation dialectic parallels the one between thought (understanding) and language (explanation). A thought that cannot be “explained” linguistically (to self or others) is better approached as intuition, not as understanding. The revelatory moment of experiencing a work (linguistic or otherwise) that manages to say to us what we could only intuit is what transforms our intuition into thought, helping us escape the prison of our previous language (and thoughts), and being verbally reconstituted through our new language, enriched through our encounter with the work. Our interaction with the work gives us the tools to explain our intuition to ourselves and turn it into a thought, with our newly found understanding being the culmination of an explanatory moment, however “implicit” or “concealed” this moment may seem.
This is just a blog post rather than a piece of academic writing, so I will allow myself the luxury of closing with strong words: Language must be recognized as our means of formulating thought, with all understanding viewed as the result of explanatory moments whose ontology is linguistic. Explanation and understanding, in turn, must be recognized as being tied into a continuous and dynamic feedback loop that develops through the initiation of acts of explanation. With Winograd and Flores, I reject cognition as the manipulation of knowledge of an “objective world,” recognize the primacy of action and its central role in language, and conclude that it is through language that we create our world.
References
Gadamer, H. G. (1960). Truth and Method. 2nd edition (1989). New York: Continuum.
Ricoeur, P. (1991). A Ricoeur Reader. M. J. Valdes (ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley, Pearson Foundation.