To understand Carnap's quote requires a bit of background:
Carnap was among a group of influential thinkers known as the Vienna Circle. This group met on Thursday nights in post-WWI, pre-WWII Vienna where they discussed ways of knowing and developed the school of thought known as Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism claims that in order for a statement to have meaning it must be able to be shown to be true or false. What's more, the meaning of a statement is essentially the way in which its truth or falsity can be demonstrated. As such, abstract, or metaphysical claims which can not be related to any means of verifiability are literally meaningless. To speak of such things is to say nothing.
The Vienna Circle (VC) (and much of subsequent Western Philosophy) was heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's (LW)* work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tractatus is written as a series of propositions which culminate with the seventh and final proposition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."** My interpretation of this is as follows; If something can not be articulated clearly with the language one is using then it should not be said. To approximate things is to do them a greater injustice than to simply pass over them in silence.
So, the VC took LW's work and developed from it Logical Positivism. Metaphysics concerns itself with that beyond the physical (meta = beyond, physics = the physical) and thus with things that can not always be demonstrably true or false or subjected to sensory-related tests of validity. The metaphysical is thus better left unsaid. However, music may evoke the such unsayable things, and do a better job of communicating them than language. Hence, the quote from Carnap.
Hopefully my choice of a new nom de blog makes it clear that I do not fully agree with the Logical Positivists.
So I ask you, the reader; Does precision in language elucidate or obscure communication?***
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*Ludwig Wittgenstein was a thinker who will likely come up a lot on this blog, so I will tell you a bit about him here. LW published only one work during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He wrote it while fighting in the trenches of WWI and managed to protect the manuscript from his captors during his time as a prisoner. In this slim volume of fewer than 100 pages he intended to say all that was to be said on Philosophy. LW was invited to join the Vienna Circle, and he attended several meetings. Apparently unhappy with what the VC was concluding from his work, LW was reported to sometimes stand up, face the wall, and read poetry during the meetings he attended. After inspiring this major philosophical movement LW went on to renounce Tractatus and to inspire post-modern philosophers, which he also subsequently renounced.
**This is immediately preceded by proposition 6.54 which begins, "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: He who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless..." Thanks, LW.
***Answers needn't, and probably shouldn't, adhere to the either/or framing of the question.
‘If something can not be articulated clearly with the language one is using then it should not be said. To approximate things is to do them a greater injustice than to simply pass over them in silence.’
ReplyDeleteTibetan is rich with words that describe cognizance. There is: lo, rigpa, namshe, shepa, sem, semjung and the list goes on. As English ‘equivalents’, we readily suggest cognition, awareness, consciousness and mind. But beyond that, we must:
employ (awkward and unsatisfactory) phrases like ‘mental event’
draw upon archaisms (at the risk of obscurity)
or re-use one of the aforementioned ‘equivalents’, in which case the notion of (one-to-one) ‘equivalence’ is exposed for the sham that it is
Does that mean we should refrain from trying to convey these concepts to an English audience? Should the insights of this foreign culture remain forever out-of-bounds?
Were they alive, Dignaga and Dharmakirti, great Indian epistemologists from the 6th and 7th centuries, would argue that language can only ever approximate things for, words are signifiers, not the thing itself. Or, in the words of Gregory Rabassa, translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, “A word is nothing but a metaphor for an object.”
To insist on silence where absolute precision is not possible strikes me as militant. Flawed and fruitless too. Flawed because it presumes perfection where none is possible. Even if one could perfectly put one’s thoughts into words, who’s to say they’ll be perfectly understood? And fruitless because if we allow imperfection to frustrate our attempts at communication we never draw closer to understanding.
Why not be more practical? Language has a utilitarian function. It’s value lies in how it’s used and for what ends. Language is a vehicle to convey meaning. Just because a ferry has no use once you’ve crossed to the far shore of a river doesn’t mean you should refuse to use it to cross the river.
It is said, ‘The perfection of wisdom is indescribable, inexpressible and inconceivable’ and yet the Buddha’s words on it fill volumes. They may only approximate the perfection of wisdom but in doing so they serve an important function. The far greater injustice would be for him to have remained silent.
Pay no mind to me, Dan. Your words and thoughts are like germs, blossoming and exploding in all directions! Wonderful!
"Even if one could perfectly put one’s thoughts into words, who’s to say they’ll be perfectly understood? And fruitless because if we allow imperfection to frustrate our attempts at communication we never draw closer to understanding."
ReplyDeleteYes and yes!
Even with the most precise articulateness I do not think that I could achieve a perfect mirroring ing your mind of my mind using language for all things. There are some physical phenomena for which this may be possible, but even those statements must be encumbered by qualifications or margins or error, which don't so much rid them of imprecision as they do quarantine it. However, even if one accepts that it still leaves vast areas of human experience unsaid.
I think that these other realms of experience can be discussed with some success. In these cases we can sometime do better to evoke then to state directly. Consider an Impressionist painting and how much more effectively it stirs the recollection of an experience than a high-definition photo of the same scene could.