Ideal Languages

Ideal Languages

Logic-minded philosophers have lamented the logical ineptitude of natural languages like English. They have recommended improvements based on formal systems. They have tried to approximate to an ideal language—one free of all logical defect. Others have decried these revisions and declared natural languages fine as they are; they have preferred descriptive philosophy of language to revisionary philosophy of language. It is less often noted that the would-be improvements are all stateable from within ordinary language, so that kind of language is quite capable of logical perfection, by the standards of the revisionists. But I am not going to be concerned with questions of logical perfection here but with other kinds of lapses from the ideal—less esoteric ones. For I wish to say that language as we have it is imperfect in certain other important respects: it is actually quite bad at certain things it purports to be at least competent in. Indeed, language distorts and misrepresents certain facts; moreover, this cannot be rectified from within language—the imperfection is endemic to language as such. In point of fact, ordinary language is very good at logic, which is why it can fix its own (alleged) logical problems; but it is not good at everything—quite the opposite. Good with logical reality, but bad with this other kind of reality (to be named shortly; I am keeping you guessing).

Let’s warm up with a relatively mundane aspect of language (and I mainly mean vocal speech): its volume. It’s not loud enough. Speech has to cope with background noise and sheer distance, and it often loses the battle. It is by no means sonically ideal. The human voice in its native state is not a great volume generator; shouting is frustratingly limited. There are low-talkers and loud restaurants. The human voice is poor at compensating for hearing loss in the elderly. Suppose you want to inform someone that a car is heading straight for them, so you shout a warning, but alas you just don’t have the necessary vocal volume. We know what happens next. It would be nice if you had an inbuilt loudspeaker to which you could resort when necessary, because your voice is just not loud enough sometimes; it is sonically deficient. It is also bad with accents: unless you are a native speaker of a given language, your foreign accent will always bedevil you. The English language is notoriously terrible at the pairing of spelling and sound; far from ideal. It does the non-native speaker no favors. Human speech is imperfect in its ability to conjure the right accent in a foreign tongue; the articulatory system thus leaves a lot to be desired. Then too, some words are just hard to pronounce (e.g., “anemone”) and many are far too long.

But the point I am leading up to hits us in a deeper place: our emotions (I’m sure you guessed it, because it’s all too familiar). Isn’t it a truism that our language falls grievously short in the emotion department? What is that quote from 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”. Love, fear, anger—they receive short shrift from our cramped turns of speech. We can express our thoughts well enough, but our emotions are difficult to put into words, and we know it. We resort to gestures and grimaces, kisses and hugs. We shout and scream, murmur and coo. Saying the words “I love you” doesn’t seem to cut it—to show our love, put it on display for the beloved to savor. Just three little nondescript words, no different from other words, for such a Big Thing (cf. “I like figs”). Hence the talk of “shouting it from the rooftops”. Emotion and language just don’t match up that well; the latter is not designed for the former. What does match up? Music, song, dance, weeping, screaming, hitting, stroking. You can’t tell your pet dog or cat that you love them, so you stroke them or cuddle them or make funny noises. I think that song is the main symbolic medium of emotion in human beings, its ideal expression (insofar as it has one). But the words of the song don’t matter that much; it’s the way they are sung, particularly pitch and rhythm.[1] What is a human language? A finite system of syntactic rules and discrete lexical items, capable of infinite combination—an abstract computational object; it isn’t intrinsically expressive in the way other actions are. Emotions belong to a much older part of the human mind and brain, originating in animals; the language faculty was grafted on rather late in the day. There is no guarantee that it will express or convey the nature of feeling. It can name emotions, but it can’t embody them. We therefore sink into hyperbole and theatricals. We look the other person in the eye and adopt a particular bodily posture in a non-verbal effort to communicate our feelings. Darwin wrote a whole book on the expression of emotion in man and animals and language hardly came into it. Language is poor even at describing emotions let alone expressing them. We easily become tongue-tied. But I am stating the obvious, am I not? Language is good at logic because language and logic are structurally analogous, but language and emotion are not structurally analogous; emotion doesn’t have a digital discrete structure but a dynamic continuous structure (if “structure” is even the right word). Language does not picture emotion as it pictures thought (hence the “language of thought”); at best it alludes to it. We don’t speak an emotionally perfect language, or even an emotionally adequate one.

Thus, the emotional imperfection of language is not remediable from within language; it is inherent in language. Language is necessarily inept when it comes to emotion; not just not ideal, but the wrong kind of beast. It is bad at the representation of emotion. It is faulty in the way logicians have thought ordinary language is logically faulty. But there is no perfect or ideal language of emotion; the two are just not cut out for each other. We are stuck with this situation, unable to escape from it. We might therefore expect that our emotions have become stilted and distorted by their alliance (such as it is) with language; they have become linguisticized, if I may coin a phrase. And not just some humans but all humans, insofar as they are language users. Not animals, though—their emotions are pure and unadulterated. Dare I suggest that this infiltration of the emotional by the linguistic has resulted in a degree of emotional inauthenticity? And dare I further suggest that this inauthenticity is the root cause of many of our problems as a species? (Just wondering.) To put it simply, there is a distinct danger that our emotions will get reduced to mere words. Emotional desiccation results from a top-heavy language faculty.[2]

Let’s leave that grim subject and hymn our language, though in a way that might seem paradoxical. One often hears it said that ordinary language is less than ideal on account of its vagueness, imprecision, and sloppiness, leading to outright falsity. Actually, I think this allegation is baseless, though understandable: language is good because it permits these “faults”; they are integral to its working as well as it does. Again, I am saying nothing startlingly new; this is a Wittgensteinian point (see his discussion of vagueness in PI). Often, we don’t need exactitude, precision, pedantic correctness; we just need to get our point across for some practical purpose. Language allows us to do that because of its flexibility and concision. It’s like a tool: you don’t need an ideal broom or knife in order to clean the kitchen floor or slice bread—you just need instruments that get the job done up to a reasonable point. The downside of the perfect tool is that it may be too expensive or dangerous or cumbersome, and you don’t need to sweep up every last crumb or cut through bread in an instant. Similarly, you can talk loosely or impressionistically and communicate successfully. Our language is designed to be sloppy (if we are going to use this term). Imagine an ideally precise language that takes ten times as long to pronounce and defies human comprehension—it would be no use at all. So, I would not slam our language for its inaccuracies, but instead praise it. In the case of emotion language, however, I would lambast language for its lack of verisimilitude, its want of transparency, and its poverty of expression. In short: it doesn’t tell it like it emotionally is.[3]

[1] A good example is “Mother” by John Winston Lennon, which packs tremendous emotion into the simple words, “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home”. Lennon sings these words in a virtual scream of bitter anguish. He seems to be pointing out how inadequate human language is to express human emotion, elongating the word “go” and dramatically varying its pitch.

[2] See George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the character Edward Casaubon, the emotionally barren (but wordy) scholar.

[3] Isn’t it interesting that Oxford analytical philosophy was obsessed with whether ordinary language is logically defective, but it never crossed anyone’s mind that it might be emotionally defective. I wonder why. Maybe some people like language to be emotionally lifeless, or distancing and indirect. It stiffens the upper lip, dash it. In general, the philosophy of emotion is somewhat of a side subject in analytical philosophy. It bypasses the topic.