A good place to start Philosophy Mondays is language. After all, I will be using, well, language, to write the posts. A huge amount of philosophy is about language because it is so central to the human experience. In my book The World After Capital, I make the argument that written language was the decisive breakthrough which allowed humans to accumulate knowledge, which is the source of our power. Throughout this post I will use language as synonymous with human language (as opposed to say computer languages).
So what exactly is language? My own working definition is as follows: Language is a socially constructed communication system with a high degree of compression. There are several elements here of importance. First, as a communication system it must be capable of conveying information. There are many requirements for that but crucially language is not random but has structure. The socially constructed part is important because language isn't defined top down but a kind of dynamic equilibrium that shifts over time. This aligns with Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of "language games" and his observation that "meaning is use" - words acquire their meaning through how we collectively use them, not through rigid definitions imposed from above. And finally the part that I believe is most often overlooked is that language involves a high degree of compression, by which I mean something akin to what scholar Alfred Korzybski famously expressed as "the map is not the territory."
In my own reading of philosophy, I have found two profound failure modes in how language has been approached.
The first is to take language itself as a fundamental source of truth. This leads down a path of obsessing about the meaning of words. Ludwig Klages termed this tendency "logocentrism" - the, in my view erroneous, belief that words contain fundamental truth rather than being tools we use to navigate reality. Practically there are many languages that have allowed people to live their lives. These have widely different alphabets, words and grammars. That alone should be an indication that digging too deep into any one word, or the difference between several words, in a specific language is maybe parochial. It is mistaking the map for the territory.
The second is to want to leave the messiness of language behind entirely and substitute the precision of mathematics for it. This was the hope of Bertrand Russell and others. But of course we now know that this doesn't get us to a promised land of certainty or truth. Paradoxes abound. And since Kurt Gödel we have formal proofs that show fundamental limits to mathematical systems. We cannot escape the messiness of language through formalism and that happens to be a fundamental feature of the world rather than of any particular language.
None of this means that philosophy should ignore language. It just means that our approach to language needs to be pragmatic. Language is beautifully rich with an ability to convey deep emotions. Anybody who has read a moving book can attest to that.
Language is also wildly powerful. Not just in the sense that it forms the basis of human power through knowledge but also that it encodes and reflects existing and historical power within and across societies. Michel Foucault's work has deeply explored this relationship between language, knowledge, and power. One example from my native German is that historically "doctor" was "der Arzt" and "nurse" was "die Krankenschwester" clearly coded as male and female according to who was carrying out these respective roles. Another great example are the differences in English between the words for animals and the meat from those animals. For example the meat from a "cow" (German "Kuh") is called "beef" (French "boeuf"). In many other languages such a difference does not exist. This has been traced back to the Norman conquest of England where the rulers who ate meat used their original language (French) to distinguish themselves from the commoners who were herding the animals.
I want to come back to the notion that language involves compression. The word "chair," for example connotes a class of objects that people sit on. It is possible to use more precise words that give the reader or listener more information, such as "armchair, recliner, ottoman" or by adding a separate word, such as "office chair." What people sometimes don't realize is that there may be more words in a different language for a concept that has only a single word in their own language. Put differently the rate of compression may differ among languages. For instance in English "love" is widely applied to many different circumstances, but in Ancient Greek there were six distinct words, including Agape which goes more in the direction of affection and Eros which is more explicitly sexual.
Another aspect of compression, as I mentioned above, is that language is the map whereas reality is the terrain. Jorge Luis Borges illustrated this brilliantly in his short story "On Exactitude in Science," where he imagines an empire creating a map so detailed it was the same size as the territory itself - rendering it utterly useless. The same is true for language. Having to describe the details of a chair every time down to the most minute detail would make it impossible to have a conversation or write a book. It would simply take too long. The concept of reality will be the subject of next Monday's post. This will then set up a discussion of how language may or may not influence our perception of reality, touching on ideas like linguistic relativity that Benjamin Whorf explored (though we'll need to be careful about some of his stronger claims).
So what will my approach to language be? Pragmatic, in the tradition of philosophers like William James and John Dewey who emphasized practical consequences over abstract theorizing. I don't overestimate language as a source of truth but I also don't dismiss it as a messy muck to be left behind. I respect its power. I enjoy learning about the origins and history of words and expressions (the field known as etymology). I strive to become better at wielding language. I take care to be mindful of how others are wielding it. This pragmatic approach raises important questions about how we navigate truth claims given language's compressed and socially constructed nature - a topic we'll explore further in future posts.
Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.5 based on this post.
