I was talking about ideas we don’t have words for. If you don’t have a word for it, how can you have it at all? If you can’t explain it, how can you be so sure you know it? You’re going to say that’s your business - you have your thoughts in the language of thought. That’s the topic for today.
There are certainly things that exist, like shoogly tables, for which there ought to be a name, but there isn’t. Our mental lexicon is full of such gaps. So far as I know, there isn’t a word in English for the burnt remains of faded cut flowers. There could be a name for such a concept - what about petalash? - there just isn’t one right now. But, note this carefully, the idea existed nonetheless.
There are also named things that exist, but we have forgotten (or never knew) their names. Things like sextants and hods, to name but two. You can even be in that horrible tip-of-the-tongue state where you have the concept but can’t get hold of the name. Mind you, I’m at a loss to know what have actually means in that sentence. You can easily imagine circumstances where it might be necessary to say, “Pass me my sextant, please.” Circumstances where the reply, “What the hell’s a sextant?” could get you keel-hauled, although I understand that practice has been discontinued. It’s our fault we don’t know the name. Who has not guiltily eyed the dictionary wondering whether there’s name for everything?
Of course, things are tangible. If you’re a bricklayer, tripping over your hod is all in a day’s work. Knowing what the damned thing is called will not ease the bruise - that would be magical thinking. Language can’t get out into the real world and mess around with things, can it? To claim that seems completely fanciful. Even if we concede that language allows us to cut reality at its joints, surely its action is symbolic, metaphorical - not actual? So I’ll pose the question for you: Do objects become different simply by painting them with words? Tell me: yes or no?
Let’s say the answer is yes. And let’s say we avoid the next step – that language can work real magic, actually conjuring things into being. It bears on rather a lively debate going on at the moment about teaching children how to write. We’ve begun teaching English primary school children the names of parts of the language they use. This has scandalised poets, novelists and professional wordsmiths. Children, they claim, should be left free to use their language, cataloguing parts of speech being ludicrously remote from the act of creation. They argue (and in this they are surely correct) that you can deploy a fronted adverbial without knowing its name. They go further: forcing the infant brain to make linguistic distinctions conscious is, they claim, nothing less than intellectual child abuse. I’m not so sure about that. What if the answer to that innocent question was indeed, “Yes”?
The philosopher John Locke claimed we use words to name, or signify, our ideas – it’s arbitrary, there isn’t any essential, connection between a word and its corresponding idea. That is, there isn’t anything “tree-like” about the word tree. You use the word hod simply because that’s what speakers of English call that particular thing. Oddly enough, for a speaker of French the same thing is called /oiseau/ or possibly /hotte/. There’s worse: the object in which Santa carries his French presents is called hotte. And Santa, in common with birds, has a habit of flying about. Now there’s a thing: if you’re a French poet, this object comes trailing all kinds of things in its wake – feathers, beaks, claws, and so on - quite unknown to English hod-users. English brickies don’t make you think of Christmas (well, they didn’t until today) and there isn’t any easy way to fix that fact. At a stroke, translation seems not simply difficult, but impossible. My language gave me the means to name my ideas, but in so doing trapped me inside its own hermetically sealed bubble.
Locke’s idea was that language is used to name ideas (or perceptions) with just the correct degree of specificity. There was a kind of rationing – one word for each, with just enough to go round. But it was the ideas that represented our access to reality, not the words. When you observe the world of objects you perceive the miracle of a hod in all its infinite variety. This activity goes on inside your head (I shall have to say inside your mind soon). Clearly there is something out there (just don’t press me as to what exactly): something that I can name, something that captures what all those innumerable aspects have in common. As I learn my trade I graduate from, “Pass me that thing, will you?” to, “Hand me that hod, my good man.” All the same, this naming business is slippery. The perceptions of objects inside my head (I will say my mind soon, I promise) vary infinitely with changes in distance, orientation, colour, brightness, shape and so forth. Should there be a special word for a hod on its side, coloured slightly red in the sunset at the end of a working day? I suppose setsunhod might come into being that way. I rather like it. Then again, a hod abandoned late in the day upside down in the rain? You can see where this is going can’t you? Things are going to get out of hand.
If language allows us to name (or one could say categorise) the world of objects, it would be as well to know beforehand that different languages are dealing with the same world. Perhaps, as David Hume said, the world is no more than, “The rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done … the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died.” What if language is creating a world as well as categorising it?
Jorge Luis Borges illustrated where that might lead us with reference to a “certain Chinese encyclopedia,” entitled "Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge." This unknown (and probably invented) text offered the following taxonomy of animals. “They are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”
Borges writes, “The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns,” adding the laconic comment, “Even though we are conscious they are not definitive.”