Matter and the Limits of Skepticism

 

 

The skeptic questions whether we know the external world exists, purporting to provide a proof that we don’t know that it does. The proof takes the form of describing a possible alternative to what we normally assume. Thus it is suggested that a deceiving demon is a possibility, or that we might be dreaming, or that we might be a brain in a vat. Since these are real logical possibilities that we can’t rule out, we must conclude that we don’t know that the world is as we normally take it to be. For instance, I don’t now know that I am sitting at a desk looking at a tree. It might all be one vast illusion or hallucination. It is important to this argument that the skeptical alternative be a real possibility, which must be accepted as such, or else we could simply reply that no such thing is possible, so there is nothing we need to rule out in order to know what we think we know. If the skeptic suggests something impossible, or not clearly possible, his argument is toothless; and the usual suggestions satisfy this condition, since they do describe real logical possibilities, often rooted in familiar facts (people can and do deceive us, we do dream, and we do suffer illusions and hallucinations).

            But what about our belief that matter exists? This is not the belief that the external world exists as we customarily think of it, but just the belief that matter of some sort exists. If I am a brain in a vat, then what I take to be the external world is all illusion, but matter still exists in the form of vats and brains. If I am in bed dreaming, then my material bed and body exist even if what I dream about doesn’t. The evil demon can be as material as you like and still deceive me. So the question of matter is very different from the question of the external world as normally conceived. Is it possible to be a skeptic about the existence of matter? Can the skeptic show that we don’t know that matter exists? Can he give a proof of this analogous to his proof that we don’t know the external world exists? Clearly he can’t do this by suggesting his usual logical possibilities, since these all presuppose the existence of matter, so they are not alternatives in which there is no matter. He needs a real possible world in which mind exists but there is no matter of any kind, in order to provide such a proof. He needs to provide a logical possibility that we can’t rule out.

            This is a much more difficult thing to do than the usual exercises in skepticism, because there is nothing familiar he can rely on—no actual cases in which we have mind without matter (as there are actual cases of sense impressions without external objects of perception). What has to be claimed is that it is possible to have disembodied minds in a wholly non-material world. And the problem is that this is not clearly possible and may well be quite impossible, so the skeptic has not discharged his obligation to produce a genuinely possible alternative to what we normally take for granted. We do not therefore need to listen to his argument; he has no argument against our belief that our minds exist in a world of matter. Nothing he has to say proves that we don’t know what we take ourselves to know. So this belief about the world beyond the mind is not vulnerable to skeptical challenge of the standard (distressingly convincing) kind.

            To clarify the point, let’s consider two other types of skepticism regarding the non-mental world, concerning time and space. Suppose the skeptic says that we don’t know that time exists: we have impressions of time, but there may be no objective time corresponding to these impressions. This, he contends, is a real possibility—that minds can exist without time existing. We would be within our rights to reply that this is not a real possibility: minds exist in time and must do so. For minds change and change requires time—our consciousness consists of temporally successive states. So the skeptic has not provided an indisputable logical possibility that is an alternative to the way we normally takes things to be; at best he has suggested a highly questionable metaphysical theory, namely that minds can exist without time existing. He has certainly not proved that this is a possibility. So he has not undermined our claim to know that time exists by pointing to a logically possible alternative in which we have the same impressions of time but there is no time.

Now consider space: the skeptic claims again that we don’t know that space exists, despite our impressions of space. The reason is that it is logically possible for minds to exist without space, and we can’t rule out the possibility that our minds are like that. But again, we can reply that it is not logically possible to have minds without space—minds necessarily exist in a world of space. Certainly the skeptic has not proved that his supposed alternative is logically possible.  [1] We might argue against him that minds cannot be individuated without space, since space provides the indispensable basis for establishing the numerical distinctness of minds—your mind is not identical to my mind because our minds are in different places. The skeptic might engage in a metaphysical argument with us about this, but he has certainly not suggested an indisputable possibility that we are obliged to accept. So we are not in the same epistemic predicament with respect to our belief in space that we are in with respect to our belief in the external world (as distinct from the world of matter). We are not vulnerable to skeptical doubt in the same way, viz. by exhibiting a clear logical possibility that our evidence fails to rule out.

            Similarly with respect to matter: if the skeptic says that there could be minds without matter, we can reply that we don’t agree with that, since minds require brains. These brains may not be as we normally conceive of them, but there has to be some material basis for minds—they cannot be purely immaterial. The skeptic may engage us in metaphysical argument at this point, but what he can’t do is point out that we ourselves accept his alleged possibility as a real possibility—as we do for the brain in a vat possibility. Whether we can prove that mind requires matter is not to the point; the question is whether he can prove that minds can exist without matter. For that is the possibility he needs if he is to show that we don’t know that matter exists. He needs a certain metaphysical possibility to undermine our confidence in what we ordinarily believe, but it is not clear that he has one—or rather, it is clear that he does not have one. So there is a significant asymmetry between this type of belief and the type of belief the usual skeptic questions. The usual skepticism does not then generalize to these further beliefs—in time, space, and matter. Our claim to know of the existence of these things has not been undermined, even granted that our claim to know the existence and nature of the external world has been undermined.  [2]

            It may be thought that this is a disappointing result, since we have made no inroads against the skeptic on his favorite territory: for all I have said, we still don’t know we are not dreaming, not a brain in a vat, and not the victim of a deceiving demon. But this is too pessimistic (or perhaps I should say too optimistic) because we have established a definite limit to the corrosive power of skepticism: there are beliefs about the non-mental world that are immune to skeptical challenge (at least of the usual kind). For all that the skeptic has said, we do have knowledge concerning the world beyond the mind—he has said nothing to undermine our confident belief in objective time, space, and matter. His skepticism is thus confined to a certain subset of beliefs about objective reality. I count this a strong anti-skeptical result, even if it falls short of what we might ideally hope for.

 

  [1] The skeptic can point out that we know of cases in which a sense impression has no corresponding object and then ask how we know this is not always the case, but he cannot likewise point to cases of minds without time, space, and matter and ask how we know our minds are not in this position. There are no such actual cases to point to. 

  [2] That is, our belief that we sense external objects and are not subject to massive illusion: this belief isundermined by the skeptic. But he has not undermined our more general belief in things outside the mind. 

                                                Intention and Possibility

 

 

How does the idea of possibility enter our thought? It is generally agreed that perception is not its source: we do not see possibility—we don’t think of possibility because our senses present it to us. A more likely view is that imagination is the progenitor of the idea of possibility: it is because we imagine that the idea of possibility occurs to us. What is imaginable is possible and what is unimaginable is impossible. We find ourselves imagining things and therewith we introduce the idea of what could be. More strongly, we could not come up with the idea of possibility in any other way—imagination is our only access to the realm of the possible. Perception is certainly not, and what else is there? This theory has the result that a creature without imagination would be modally blind: it would have no use for the concept of possibility and no means of acquiring that concept. If the concept of the possible simply is the concept of the imaginable, then we cannot have the former without having the latter; but even if the connection is weaker, imagination is essential for the recognition of possibility.   

            The view is not without difficulties. Can we not imagine the impossible (water without H2O, disembodied minds)? And aren’t there possibilities that we can’t imagine simply because of our imaginative limitations (four-dimensional space, infinite time)? But I won’t discuss these well-worn issues; instead I will propose an alternative theory that I think has some merits. This alternative allows possibility to enter thought without benefit of the imagination, so that modal thinking can exist in the absence of imagination; the concept belongs in another matrix of interconnected concepts. The central concept in this matrix is intention: the concept of possibility is bound up with the concept of intention. This is because we can intend only what we believe or know is possible. If I believe it to be impossible to jump to the moon, then I cannot intend to jump to the moon. I can intend to do what I believe to be improbable, but not what I believe to be impossible. This is clearly true for logical or metaphysical impossibility, but it applies also to nomological impossibility: I cannot intend to do what I know to violate the laws of nature (as with jumping to the moon).

Thus when forming an intention I must be cognizant of possibility, implicitly or explicitly. This is a conceptual truth: it is conceptually impossible knowingly to intend the impossible. Accordingly, I cannot intend to intend what I know to be impossible, since that is itself impossible. To have the concept of intention is to know that intentions must concern the possible. If someone orders you to perform the impossible, you can rightly reply that you cannot form any such intention. You cannot be punished for failing to intend to do what you know it is impossible to do. This is simply beyond the power of your will. Thus the concept of intention embeds the provision that while you can intend a great many things you cannot intend what you know to be impossible. To have intentions is to be aware of this fact, and hence to have a grasp of the concept of possibility. It is not so for desire: you can desire what you know to be impossible, because desire does not have to reckon with the facts of the world. But intention is the intention to act and action perforce takes place in the world of possibility—hence you have to believe that your actions could realize your intentions. Even a cat gauging a difficult jump has to consider the possibility of success, and if it judges that success is impossible it will neither jump nor intend to. For reflective humans, understanding the nature of intention brings with it a grasp of possibility and impossibility. Thus we naturally contemplate possibility when we form intentions; we may even reason about possibility when deciding what to do.

But what should we say about more abstract and theoretical ideas of logical and metaphysical possibility? Here we can deploy the idea of a superior agent: logical impossibility is what God cannot intend to bring about. Even God could not intend to square the circle: his will is limited by his knowledge of modality. It isn’t that he can’t imagine doing this; it’s that he can’t intend to do it. And he knows he can’t intend it, whatever may be the case for his knowledge of what he can imagine. The impossible is that which cannot be intended—even by God. The concept of possibility is inextricably linked to the concept of intention, because intentions are modally sensitive—they must track what is possible and impossible.

The nice thing about this theory is that it locates modal concepts in something basic and practical. These concepts do not have to be seen as transcending the empirical world, as objects of pure intellectual apprehension; they arise from basic facts about agency.  [1] We think this way because we are agents with intentions, and intentions must respect possibility. Any intention-forming agent must be sensitive to the modal facts: the limits of intention are the limits of the possible. The concept of the possible is the concept of what can conceivably be intended, while the concept of the impossible is the concept of what cannot conceivably be intended.

 

Colin McGinn    

  [1] These basic facts include the concept of ability—what an agent is able to do. No agent can intend to do what he knows he is not able to do, for one reason or another. So modal concepts have their roots in the concept of ability, which can be extended to different types of agent with different types of ability, up to the case of God. They are not quite as unworldly as they can be made to sound. In a certain sense abstract metaphysics has its roots in practical action.

                                               

 

 

 

Language as a Tool for Thought

 

 

A typical tool must meet two requirements: it must be able to be used by its intended user, and it must perform its designated function. Often the tool must be firmly gripped and manipulated, so it must fit into the human hand, while its other end performs the task in question. If we think of spoken language as a tool for communication, we should expect the same duality: it must be both usable and effective. What this comes down to is that the words of the language must be pronounceable and audible. The speaker must be able to utter the words and the hearer must be able to hear them. These are nontrivial requirements, familiar as they are: words could be pronounceable yet inaudible (mere whispers) or they could be audible yet not pronounceable (not conform to the human vocal system). Spoken human languages, as we find them, combine these two characteristics, so they are both usable and effective. True, words can be hard to pronounce and fatigue can set in, and ambient sounds can drown utterances out; but generally words meet the two necessary conditions of a successful communicative tool. We can imagine situations in which they don’t, where nothing pronounceable is audible and vice versa (a noisy planet and inept voices). Then there would be no such thing as a spoken language–or a sign language, if visual conditions were not conducive (perpetual thick fog).

            But what about language as a tool of thought—what design features would we expect to find built into language that performed this function? It would need to be mentally manipulated and it would have to serve the purposes of thought. Thus it would need to consist of storable, segmented, manageable words that combine to produce complex novel constructions. It’s no use if the complex constructions consist of parts that the mind can’t handle (the analogue of words that can’t be pronounced), or if the parts can be easily handled but can’t form complex constructions like sentences. But natural languages meet the two requirements for being a cognitive tool quite neatly: the human mind can store, process, and manipulate words; and words can combine into phrases and sentences that can express an infinitude of thoughts. The basic architecture of natural languages thus suits them to be tools of thought, since they can be both used by the thinker and also serve the purpose of thinking, viz. encoding complex novel thoughts. The lexicon plus the grammar can be mentally manipulated, and the products of this manipulation serve to encode thoughts, which can enter into reasoning, practical and theoretical, which can lead to action. Without this finely wrought tool thought would not be as effective as it is (it might not exist at all in anything like its present form), and luckily an effective tool exists that can also be handled by the thinking mind. If words could not exist in internalized form, then language could not perform the cognitive function it now performs—at best we would have to speak out loud whenever we entertained a thought. Words and syntax can exist both internally and externally, and because of this language can serve as both a tool of communication and a tool of thought.

I am stating truisms. I have simply set the basic property of language in the context of the notion of a tool—language as a finite stock of discrete digital elements that can be combined by syntactic rules into an infinite array of structured hierarchically organized complex expressions. I have said that this formal object satisfies the two conditions on being a tool of thought: it is both mentally accessible and functionally effective. If it were not finitely based, it might still serve the purposes of thought as a potentially infinite system, but it would not be accessible to finite minds such as ours–while if it could not express a potential infinity of thoughts, its mental accessibility would not help in performing the task at hand. Many animals have access to symbolic systems of some kind (bees, whales), but these systems do not permit the kind of recursive unbounded scope we find in human languages. And the gods might speak languages matching or exceeding ours in expressive power, but are beyond our capacity to master (perhaps because of memory limitations). The design features of a tool are suspended between the two requirements, reflecting those requirements, and are sometimes compromises between them. They are best understood as the joint result of limited human capacities and a desired objective—possibly being a trade-off between the two. There is no point in designing a perfect tool that can’t be used, and usable tools can be effective enough without being perfect.

With these preliminary points in mind, then, I wish to make my main positive proposal: human languages make effective tools of thought (partly) because they permit the formation of conceptual distinctions. Words enable us to formulate distinctions that would not be possible without them—not possible given our contingent psychological nature. They may not be ideal tools for this job—no tool is ideal for any job—but they perform it well enough, and it is hard to see what might perform it better. One central goal of thought is the making of fine distinctions (in addition to producing new thoughts) and language is inherently suited to facilitating this process. Lest I be accused of further truism, let me state the thesis more forthrightly: the distinctions that exist between words as such are used as a tool to construct distinctions of meaning, i.e. conceptual distinctions. The mind invokes words qua formal objects to aid it in the process of conceptual distinction making. This is the analogue of the thesis that the mind uses the combinatorial power of language to aid it in combining concepts into thoughts—it recruits syntax as a device of thought assembly. Similarly, the mind uses lexical distinctness as a tool for generating conceptual distinctness. Note that this is not the thesis that conceptual distinctness is lexical distinctness but rather the thesis that lexical distinctness is used as a tool for constructing conceptual distinctness. A hammer is a tool for knocking nails in not a nail that has been knocked in; a language is (inter alia) a tool for making conceptual distinctions not a conceptual distinction itself. It is not just that human language permits an infinite number of thoughts; it also permits an infinite number of finely individuated thoughts. A language is a thought-slicer, a concept-differentiator. It is designed to generate ever finer conceptual distinctions, and it does so by containing fine distinctions itself.  [1]

There are many kinds of conceptual distinction; I shall mention three. First, we have distinct but co-extensive concepts, expressed by co-denoting names and co-extensive predicates. We have separate words for these concepts (“Hesperus” and “Phosphorus”, “creature with a heart”, “creature with a kidney”). There might possibly be a language that failed to provide for such conceptual distinctions—that was completely extensional in meaning: but no human language is like that. It would surely be impoverished relative to ours, if more to the liking of certain logicians. Second, we have near-synonymy—words that are close in meaning but not really synonyms: “house” and “home”, “friend” and “ally”, “stone” and “rock”. These are important because they illustrate the pervasiveness of distinction making: the concepts may be very similar but they are not exactly the same; there is a conceptual distinction to be made. Third, we have straight synonymy—identity of concept expressed: “bachelor” and “unmarried male”—that type of thing. Even here different words are suitable in different contexts, so there are distinctions to be made. Human language is rich in synonyms, as well as near-synonyms and co-extensive non-synonyms: that is, it is rich in conceptual (semantic) distinctions. It seems to make a point of registering such distinctions, as if it matters. It insists on marking subtle differences of meaning. This is not throwaway redundancy, but attentiveness to fine distinctions of human thought. I venture to suggest that it is a universal feature of all human languages (though not all possible languages): they all contain the machinery for recording fine-spun distinctions, and also the machinery for making new fine-spun distinctions. In thought we are constantly recognizing and creating conceptual distinctions: the thesis is that human languages aid in that process, crucially so. Words are the knives of thought: they chop things up finely.

Chomsky talks about the Merge operation that combines words into collections of words, construed as a function from sets to sets.  [2] Clearly language requires such an operation, because it is combinatorial; and the mind must be able to compute Merge if it is to exploit the combinatorial power of language. Let me likewise introduce an operation I call Dissect that operates on concepts to generate more fine-grained concepts. Suppose we start with an undifferentiated concept people and then apply Dissect to this concept to derive the concepts men and women: we have gone from a concept treated as unitary to two concepts that distinguish among the members of the class consisting of people. If we applied Dissect to the set of people (not the concept people), it would partition that set into two subsets, viz. the set of men and the set of women—so it would be the opposite of Merge. If we apply it to concepts (or word-like elements in the language of thought), it generates two new concepts (or inner words)—thereby introducing a conceptual (semantic) distinction. I do not claim that I know how Dissect works (it seems rather mysterious), but evidently it does, since we make new distinctions all the time. We suddenly (or slowly) “see the difference between X and Y” and feel a sense of accomplishment or enlightenment. We implicitly grasped the distinction (whatever quite that means) and now we grasp it fully and consciously. Language enables us to make the leap: our language faculty feeds into our cognitive faculty and awakens us to distinctions that had been blurred or elusive before. Thus we employ Dissect in conjunction with Merge in our mental operations: we merge different elements into one, but we also dissect a single element into two (and those in turn may be dissected). Both operations enlarge our cognitive scope: by permitting the formation of new thoughts by means of combination, and by making finer distinctions that produce increasingly refined thoughts. Both are “generative” or “creative”, but along different dimensions of semantic space (inter-concept and intra-concept, respectively).

It might be wondered why thought dissects: what is the point of making concepts ever more acutely distinct? The answer is that finely individuated thoughts are useful thoughts: the distinctions are real and they affect the ability of thought to function effectively in the world. There is a selective advantage to having thoughts with this degree of differentiation: semantic differentiation is biologically adaptive. Thought is relatively crude without it. We may surmise that many animals have thoughts of some kind, but it is also likely that they don’t do well on the score of conceptual differentiation. Some animals may even have the ability to entertain a potential infinity of thoughts, but their thoughts are not chopped as finely as ours. Productivity and differentiation are distinct properties of a cognitive system, so they can in principle be dissociated. And the reason our thoughts differ from animal thoughts in this way is that we have a language rich in lexical distinctions and they don’t. It is estimated that human speakers have mastery of 30,000 to 50,000 lexical items, as well as the ability to combine these to produce indefinitely many distinct expressions for what is intuitively the same thing. Our language consists of clusters of distinct but semantically related words, the result of Dissect. Dissect evolved at some point and it opened up the possibility of creating new conceptual distinctions from old concepts: it took us from an initial relatively crude lexicon to a more sophisticated lexicon rich in semantic distinctions. Thus we became advanced thinkers compared to other animals, and we made adaptive use of this cognitive advance. Dissect is what made science possible, as well as religion, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, politics, and so on. A creature stuck at the level of purely extensional concepts (or worse) would not have our advanced cognitive powers. Part of this is that more fine-grained concepts are needed for the purposes of explanation—an area in which other animals are conspicuously lacking. In explanation we need to distinguish between different properties of things, not just different things: for example, we need to distinguish weight and mass in physics, species and genus in biology, and belief and knowledge in psychology. One wonders whether there are any such fine distinctions to be found in bee or whale language (and thought).

The standard emphasis on the combinatorial power of language stresses the quantitative results of this power—the sheer number of sentences that can be generated. Thus its utility as a tool of thought rests on its ability to increase the quantity of thoughts a creature can entertain. But the emphasis on the differentiating power of language stresses the qualitative results of that power—the acuity and finesse of the thoughts it can facilitate. It can generate superior thoughts (a normative notion): as Descartes would say, clear and distinct ideas in contrast to unclear and blurred ideas. We obviously value our distinction making capacities, for reasons both practical and non-practical (e.g. philosophy). Not to be able to make sharp conceptual distinctions is a definite intellectual handicap. Somehow the thinking mind taps into the structure of language and uses that structure in acts of Dissectto produce ever more refined conceptual distinctions. It uses distinct words as concept markers, thereby eliciting concept division. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis—though we have virtually no understanding of how the process works, computationally or cerebrally. We know that language serves as a tool in the making of distinctions (or we have good reason to suspect that it does), but we don’t know how it does this—except that it appears to have something to do with the distinctness of words themselves (whatever they are exactly). The lexicon itself is quite mysterious, intrinsically and evolutionarily, and its mental operations inherit that mystery—thus Dissect is shrouded in obscurity. Concepts give rise to other concepts by a process of differentiation, but how precisely this comes about is unknown. Language acts like a tool in the process, but the underlying mechanics are not apparent.  [3]           

 

  [1] Mental images were once viewed as the elements of thought, or at least vital tools of thought. That idea has come in for a lot of criticism and is no longer widely accepted. Although images have some combinatorial powers, it is unclear that they can match those of concepts, which are essentially unlimited. But it is also true that images don’t have the kind of fine-grained individuation that meanings have: several meanings can correspond to the same image (say, an image of a man fishing), and meanings can be abstract in a way that images cannot (as with the abstract concept of a triangle). Images don’t have the right properties to generate fine-grained thoughts, but words do. Language as a formal object consisting of a lexicon and a set of syntactic rules is exactly the right kind of structure to serve as a tool for facilitating thought, because it maps so neatly onto the structure of thought.

  [2] See Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT Press, 2016). I won’t go into the details of Merge.

  [3] I am not saying Dissect is a permanent mystery, only that our current understanding of it is quite limited. Mergeis also not free of mystery at the psychological and neurological levels, despite its clarity as an abstract set-theoretic operation.

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Ideal Communication

 

 

Life on earth has reached the point that germs are in the ascendant. You can’t touch someone without catching a disease. Naturally this puts a crimp in people’s romantic lives: no more dating, no more kissing, and certainly no more sex. The future of the human race is in jeopardy. Fortunately, however, technology is advanced, particularly robot technology: it is possible to buy a disease-proof avatar that can go proxy for you in romantic encounters. Thus love life is conducted by employing such avatars as intermediaries—with the advantage that they are beautiful, ageless, and skilled in the arts of love. You send your avatar on a date to meet the object of your romantic interest, while she sends hers to you; by remote control you take it from there. Marriages are made this way, sex becomes feasible, and the human race is saved. The main difference from current arrangements is that languagebecomes far more important in this brave new romantic world, because you have to instruct your avatar about what to do, as well as speak through it to your human partner. Instead of touching your partner, you instruct your avatar to touch him or her, and this can get quite complicated and detailed. The act of love becomes an elaborate series of verbal maneuvers, more or less well executed. Accordingly, verbal skill is paramount, as opposed to actually doing any touching. What was once non-verbal has become verbal: physical interaction has been replaced by linguistic interaction—talking not touching.  [1] There is a language of love, literally.

            After a few centuries of this it becomes taken for granted. Everyone has a romantic avatar and all amorous relationships are conducted via avatar; it works quite well now that the kinks have been ironed out. People have become adept in the linguistic feats needed to operate the system, and a whole industry has sprung up to serve their new romantic needs. There are no more wordless amorous interactions, since participants need to direct the proceedings verbally—instead of actually kissing someone the human operator says, “Kiss now” to the avatar. Everything is mediated by language, with no direct communion between people. Human bodies never actually touch; instead words are exchanged, information is transmitted, and a goal is achieved. People do get into romantic contact, but indirectly, using a symbolic medium. They are in direct physical contact with avatars, but not with each other. The avatars act as expressive vehicles for flesh-and-blood humans—a communicative medium, in effect. People romantically communicate, but only via language; there is no direct body-to-body communication, such as we observe today (though the avatar body provides a satisfactory surrogate). People can be married with children and yet never meet and touch—they have a “long-distance” relationship. It is fortunate they can speak, for otherwise they would be condemned to a solitary life; and indeed for the few with language problems romance is ruled out.

            It seems to me that this parable mirrors our actual situation with regard to interpersonal communication. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and suppose that they have no communicative language, communing with each other non-verbally, yet happily. They are perfectly attuned to each other’s emotions and can pick up on the subtlest of cues—they have a perfect mutual understanding. They can even communicate telepathically. But then Eve bites into the apple and they are cast out of Eden—finding that they can no longer communicate as they did before. Now they must invent a public language with which to express themselves, making audible noises that are intended to convey messages. Oh, the labor and tedium! It used to be so easy, so immediate and so intimate; but now they have to pronounce these things called “words”, stringing them together into monstrosities called “sentences”. Jagged noises issue from their mouths, clashing with other noises, often not making it to the recipient. Thoughts and feelings get mangled in translation. Misunderstandings abound. Adam and Eve dejectedly wish they could read each other’s mind, as in days of yore, but now they have to resort to the intermediary of speech—so clunky, so inept! The sinners have been forced to become speakers (the word itself repels them). They are condemned to indirectness, remoteness, mental distance—their minds never touch any more. They squeak out their messages, wielding the avatar of language, but they yearn to communicate more directly—mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart. True, God has not condemned them to communicative solitude by subtracting all means of communication (for he is a merciful God), but he has condemned them to an inferior proxy in the form of spoken language. Since that distant time in Eden the human race has grown accustomed to the new communicative reality, but underneath it still irks and rankles—it still seems distinctly second best. They fantasize of direct mind-to-mind contact (as my imaginary lovers fantasize of direct body-to-body contact), but words are all they have.

            The point I want to urge is that we yearn for a more intimate form of communication (while also perhaps dreading it). For language is not the sole and necessary method of communication. It is contingent and dispensable, not the very essence of communication. The OED defines “communicate” as “share or exchange information or ideas”, and “convey (an emotion or feeling) in a non-verbal way”. Here there is no explicit mention of language (except negatively): language is just one way to communicate. Animals communicate in all sorts of ways that don’t require language–and so do humans; language is just one component of our communicative repertoire. If telepathy were biologically possible, it is doubtful that spoken language would ever have evolved—a gene for telepathic communication would surely have arisen. Language (the external kind) only exists because of the problem of other minds; it is designed to make up for an epistemic deficit. And it is not difficult to imagine modifications in human faculties that would render spoken language otiose. For instance, suppose that we had brain receivers that could pick up whatever someone else is thinking: why wait for people to express their thoughts in language when thoughts can be detected before anyone opens his or her mouth? Why bother to speak if you can communicate what you are thinking already? I want to share an item of information with you: I just direct my brain to your brain scanner. This would make giving lectures a lot easier. Or the human brain could evolve tentacles that physically reach out to the brains of others and insert themselves into their informational pathways, thus actually sharing the thoughts of another—a “brain-meld”.  [2] No more squeaky noises emanating from the oral cavity, subject to masking and misunderstanding, just direct contact with the cerebral centers of information themselves—a return to Eden. If we are to believe the futurists, the human species will soon be half-robot anyway, possessing downloadable brains, with files swapped at will: what need for speech? We are already talking less, what with the rise of texting—how long till writing gives way to direct brain transmission? Speaking and writing are just dispensable tools, destined to go the way of the dodo. Communication is transferring information from A to B—by whatever means possible. In all likelihood language first evolved as an instrument of thought and was only later co-opted for communication; it might then eventually fall away, if and when new means of communication become available. The issue is technological not conceptual.

            This means that the study of communication is not the study of spoken language, save per accidens. Language is one means of communication not communication itself. We have grown used to language as an intermediary in our contact with other minds (like my distant chattering lovers), so that it looms large in our vision of what communication is; but really it is not at the heart of the phenomenon. The technology of communication has changed and advanced over the years, and it may well be that it is destined to change even more dramatically as neuroscience progresses. But even if nature stands in the way of such progress, conceptually it is wrong to place emphasis on spoken language. First, we must reckon with language as a tool of thought not communication; second, language is just one mode of communication not the essence of it. If communication is the intentional conveying of information, then the means of conveyance can vary. And let’s not define language so as to make it trivially true that all communication is linguistic (“anything that serves to convey information is a language”); we are speaking here of actual human languages with their distinctive properties—lexicon, grammar, phonology, and so on. This is what is a dispensable tool. Bats may think that the only way to fly is by means of a wing made of a hand-like organ with skin stretched between the fingers, but birds know better—as do airplanes and rockets. No doubt there are those who believe that only sounds can act as a means of linguistic communication, because they are so familiar with that medium; the existence of sign language may therefore come as a surprise (though the possibility of it is not conceptually remote). Similarly, spoken language is just one species of a genus—and a recent arrival at that (maybe only 80,000 years ago  [3]). As philosophers, it behooves us to take in the full range of communicative possibilities. And in so far as meaning is bound up with communication, our study of meaning should not be confined to human public language as it now exists: that is like studying cooking by inspecting pots and pans. There are many ways to skin a cat.

            I return to the point that spoken language may not even be optimal as a means of communication, let alone unique. It is true that human language has the important characteristics of discrete recursive infinity and fine-grained lexical differentiation, but it has also been found wanting in its expressive powers: not everyone can talk like Shakespeare, and even he probably couldn’t talk like that. It takes work to express perfectly what is on your mind, if indeed that is ever achieved. A lot can go wrong—which is why people regularly complain that language is more an obstacle to communication than a means to it. Our relationship to language is fraught—we wrestle with it as much as we blend in with it. On some occasions it seems wholly inadequate to express what we want it to (“There are no words to express…”). Let’s not idolize human language—any more than human anatomy. It is not a transcendental gift from God, perfect in every detail.  [4] Like other evolutionary products, it is a practical solution to a problem, based on what existed antecedently, capable of improvement, and maybe destined for extinction. It’s the giraffe’s neck of human evolution—one way to achieve a certain goal, but with its downside. Language is elongated, to be sure, but it takes some learning and operating, and is prone to breakdown, as well as being somewhat lacking in the expressive department (compare music). It may well be a better tool of thought than it is of communication. The fundamental problem with it is existential: it is an external sign of an inner reality—in its nature it is removed from that which it is supposed to convey, viz. thought and emotion. Mindreading would be so much better, so much truer to the facts. Speech is as much diversion as revelation. What have sounds got to do with thoughts? How can feelings be conveyed by phonemes? So we naturally ask, and we are not wrong to do so. The phenomenology of human “being-with-others” is conditioned by the proxy status of the spoken word—we never get the genuine article. This is very evident in the case of a foreign language—nothing of the other’s mind comes across without a means of translation. But even in the domestic case the hearer must interpret what he hears—the other’s state of mind is not present in his words. We are always trying to get behind the spoken word, so we have the idea of accessing this ulterior thing directly (hence the attraction of telepathy). Communication in its ideal form is not mediated by language. We resort to language in our communicative efforts.

 

  [1] The avatars touch the humans, but no human touches another human. No one loves an avatar, only the human it represents. Avatars don’t speak except as mouthpieces for their human operator. What has changed is that humans no longer have physical contact with each other—though they have verbal contact.

  [2] Followers of Star Trek will recall the Vulcan “mind-meld”—a deep mind-to-mind connection caused by Mr. Spock placing his hand just so on another person’s forehead.

  [3] Evolution took a “linguistic turn” only very recently, but surely there was plenty of animal communication on planet Earth before language arose.

  [4] Flaubert: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”