"An incredible trick"
The starting point for this piece is an observation that Simon Kirby made a long time ago in the introduction to a BBC Horizon programme Why do we talk?, a documentary that I have used for nearly 20 years in my language acquisition classes at Konan. It is a scene-setting observation, one which seems self-evident and innocuous, and to which I paid next to no attention until a few months ago.
I can walk up to someone I don’t know, and I can make a sequence of noises…that I’ve never made before…by pushing air through my mouth. I will take a thought in my head…and make it go into their head. That’s an incredible trick.
It would be incredible, if that was what happens. Yet a moment's reflection - or perhaps twenty-plus years of rumination, I'm not sure which - tells me that this is completely wrong. We do not take our thoughts and cause them to go into other's heads. That would be amazing. Instead, whatever is involved in verbal communication is a much more friable and tortuous process of encoding and decoding, of struggling with the ineffable. A raid on the inarticulate, as T. S. Eliot noted. And whatever thoughts are produced by the generative semantic capacities of a particular listener at a particular moment in time are new thoughts -- typically mundane, often hackneyed, usually half-baked, "good enough" -- new thoughts that bear at best a passing similarity to the those in the mind of the speaker. Verbal communication is not "assisted telepathy": it is an inherently flawed process of encoding and decoding, and semantic computation.
It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that my silent communication with my dog before and during our walks together is more successful and purer than anything I attempt with other humans, even close family members. Language screws up at least as much as it spells out.
Kirby's observation also ignores the distortions introduced by language itself, even on the most rigid anti-relativist assumptions. Even abstracting away from the problems of deixis and reference "I miss you" conveys something subtly different from "Du fehlst mir" or "Ich vermisse Dich" or "逢いたいよ"; "Is there water in the pot?" asks a more general question than its Japanese equivalent, where a distinction must be drawn between water (水) and hot water (お湯). "やかんに水/お湯は入っていますか". As trivial as these expressions are, they illustrate the corruption of translated thought.
"A common treasury of thoughts"
Which brings us to the following quotation from Frege's Über Sinn und Bedeutung, which comes at roughly the same point in the essay, as Kirby's observation in the documentary, and which like Kirby's remark is almost a throw-away comment, so obvious does Frege consider it to be:
...denn man wird wohl nicht leugnen können, daß die Menschheit einen gemeinsamen Schatz von Gedanken hat, den sie von einem Geschlecte auf das andere überträgt....for it cannot be denied that mankind has a common treasure of thoughts which it transmits from one generation to another.
Of course something hangs on the term Gedanke, which I'll develop further. But prima facie, this must be just as false as Kirby's assertion. Unless this treasury is like langue for Saussure -- an abstract Cartesian object, floating free of individual minds -- unless transmitted through inheritance means something other than innate knowledge, this is at best implausible, and completely questionable (es lässt sich doch leugnen!).
Here's the thing, though: both Kirby and Frege could be correct; their views are mutually consistent. But if they were, we would live in a utopia of perfect communication. Language could be reduced to an addressing system: I could say "Thought 435218" and you could look it up in the register. Since that's not remotely how things work, since many people lack the capacity to generate certain thoughts, or at least fail to exercise the capacity, since we misunderstand each other constantly, with grievous consequences, it must be concluded that one or both of these men is/are seriously mistaken.
tbc...
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