The Very Idea of Language

John W. Powell

I’m working to figure out what can be said, and what cannot, about a problem. I’m tempted to say that when I read this paper to you, or you ask me puzzled questions afterwards, or we comment on the refreshments or ask about the piano or I show you pictures of my children and you say something, anything at all, then there is language present. I find myself thinking this presence is pervasive. When we converse about anything, when we tell a story or hear one, when we call upstairs to ask whether she’s or he’s ready for coffee, then we are using language or there’s language or language is a part of the conversation. It’s only recently that I’ve realized there could be a problem for me to work on here, and whether there is a problem is part of what I need to clarify. The problem, if there is one, arises because I have found that I am too easily guided by a picture (in Wittgenstein’s sense of an oversimplified sketch which helps raise philosophical issues) of language when I am lax about examples. That’s not strong enough--almost all the abstract claims I make about language, it turns out, are not claims that make sense in examples. Instead those claims, when I investigate them, are expressions of pictures of language, pictures which mislead me about my examples and which lead me to beg questions about the nature of language. (The book mss. of which this paper may become a part consists of attempts to bring one picture of language up against examples and show that the picture misleads us. A preface to that book mss. which contains a summary is at www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/preface.htm) Here I find myself tempted by another abstract claim, that whenever I talk there’s language.

            Another temptation I’m putting off investigating because it seems I must dissect this one first is to say that there’s language around us all the time even when we are silent, there’s no talking going on--that as I pad around in my robe turning on the coffee pot and walk out for the paper and put food in the cat’s bowl, even before the cat meets me on the sidewalk as I walk back with the paper and we start talking to each other--even before that, I’m up to my oxters in language, language surrounds me and makes up part of my being in all I do. I mention this second temptation because it gallops in off the bench as an answer to questions about the first temptation, and takes over for the first with no retreat--if language is always present, even when we are silent, then of course it’s present when we talk. That is, if this second temptation is true, that language is everywhere all the time like God, it’s in the forest when the tree falls, then of course it’s also present in any examples when we talk or listen to someone talking, and it’s still present when we remark on the tree falling. For now I’m trying to get clear about the idea that there’s language when we talk. I’ll admit to hoping that if I can show there’s something wrong with thinking there’s language when there’s talk, then that might help sabotage the idea of the perfect ubiquity of language, the second temptation.

            Is there language in every example of people talking? That’s still not quite right as a way to get at the problem. Is there language when we hear the chainsaw throttle down suddenly and I tell you to, we’ll put it in quotes for some reason, “Look over there,” to see the crown of the tree start its arc to earth? Is it in every conversation, does it show its ghostly visage to the trained observer even when the people conversing see no such visage? Part of the problem then is whether we are once again dealing with things only philosophers can see and hear.

            Perhaps this could be put as a question about a continuum of cases. I’ll note three segments along that continuum. There are the cases in which there is language and part of the evidence is that the people in the cases are talking about language in ways which are not at all problematic, not at all guided by philosophy or by pictures in that explanations of those are needed for the cases to make sense to those in the cases. Second, there are cases in which if someone would talk about language it would not be problematic to those in the cases even though in those cases they do not talk about language. Finally, there are cases in which talk about language would be surprising to those in the cases, or the people in the cases would have to change the subject somehow or would have to accede to some kind of philosophical point to continue.

            The boundary between the first two sections of this continuum winds up being innocent, I think. The reason is that what drives the investigation is paranoia about the philosophical talk I find tempting, and if that talk does make sense in the examples or would make sense in the examples, to those who are talking without any philosophical assumptions or pictures to lend out their crutches, then my paranoia is likely to be misplaced.

            The crucial difference to watch, then, is the difference between the first two sections of the continuum and the third. Since the features of cases in the third (that people in the cases would not say the things at issue about language, that they would not know how to take talk about language unless philosophical guidance were offered, that the case (because of the talk about language) would involve a changing of subject) look like evidence that questions could be being begged, I need to get clear about those cases and the boundary between them and the first two. The boundary is that between the cases in which we do or would remark on language and those cases in which we would not though my temptation tells me language is present.

            Consider some cases. My three-year-old, Hannah, is starting to develop a potty mouth. Her little brother and whichever kid in the group has been elected scapegoat that day (and when she has allies or is feeling brave then even grownups in the room) are poopyheads, that sort of thing. Poop, butts, diapers, are becoming themes in her conversations at day care or when her friends come over to play. I may blame one of her friends for this, but then her friend’s parents blame Hannah, so who knows. At any rate, we confer with her daycare teacher, strategize, glower a lot, give up on responses which do not work. One of the things that does not work well but we try it anyway is to tell her to watch her language. Saying “watch your language” is a latish development in a process stretching over three or four weeks, a process which mostly shows how slow her parents are to catch on. This admonition evolved out of “Don’t talk that way,” “Don’t say poop,” “Hannah, stop calling your little brother a poopyhead,” to talk about politeness that intimidates her to some extent (so it works briefly, though it clearly goes over her head). We hear her say to her doll and her bedtime bear, “Don’t talk that way,” and then she says it to us when we start to rebuke her, so she understands or she’s working on understanding that one. And “Hannah! Watch your language,” seems to be understood by her to some extent, based on the evidence that she recently has said “watch your language” to one of her friends (the one we blame for the potty talk), and to her bedtime bear as I walk up the stairs to read to her. And of course we learn too late that we have shown that potty talk will get attention in a world where otherwise her little brother soaks up all the attention. She and her friends have even learned that they can employ code, leave out the particular word, poop, and joke about diapers and potties: “you are a diaper” while holding one’s nose will work just as well at getting parents to talk to them, or at least to exchange those looks of utter despair the parents thought would not be needed for another twelve years.

            So we’ve talk about language in an example. What does that talk about language mean here, or to what does “language” refer? There’s too much to say here in metaphilosophical keys about the suspect nature of these questions, but here’s a little. The domestic example of pottymouthed kids may help us spot any tendency to drastically change the subject by answering in a way dictated by philosophical models or pictures. This is partly because it is easy to think how related questions might come up in the examples, and to think how the responses offered when those questions come up in the examples are wildly different from our philosophical temptations. That is, if we think this is an example of language, then there will be something to watch, like the road in the case in which Naomi tells me to “watch the road, I’ll take care of it,” to keep me from turning around to see why the baby is making gagging sounds. And what else could there be to watch but Hannah’s uses of the words and sentences by which we communicate otherwise hidden or invisible whatnots (“whatnots” here stands in for a rich variety of things, perhaps not all of them carrying portmanteaus of Cartesian dualism on their backs--ideas, messages, intentions, illocutionary act potentials, propositions or propositional contents, semantic features, and so on )? But if we should say to Hannah’s buddies in the playroom, forgetting that some of them have not been through much of the last three or four weeks of evolving admonitions, “You guys, please watch your language,” it may be clear that Ian or Jayme is baffled (though not Hannah or Owen), and so we need to fill in, even if they don’t ask, “Huh?” or “What’s that mean?” or “Language?”

            So there are two ways to take the question, the question being what is meant or what is language. One way is as a full-fledged philosophical question to be answered by pulling abstractions about language and human beings out of the ether into the conversation. But at that point it is clear that we are no longer talking to Hannah’s buddies or their parents--even Benicio’s, who have only been in the States for a couple of years. That we are not talking to anyone in the example, though, is evidence we are no longer responding to questions which make sense in the example. We have changed the subject. In taking the question this way, we may, cut loose from the example, have a great many begged questions hopping onto our backs before the train leaves the station.

            Another way to take the question is as one to be answered by how we would answer it in the example. We can tell what we would say. One way: “Watch your language means stop all the poop talk--stop calling each other poopyheads, and start being nicer to each other, or we will all quit and have to go home.” If we cannot help trailing clouds of the first way of taking the question, or cannot help trying to make a connection between the two ways of taking the question, we might be tempted to say that language is or refers to poop talk. Watch is stop it. These remarks, though, only help bring to bear the therapeutic insight that language in the case of Hannah’s potty mouth with her buddies does not refer to the means by which they communicate, and that language is not even around or present or remarkable or an issue during that first forty-five minutes before somebody started being a pottymouth. Stronger: there’s no language in their conversations before the poop talk starts. Still stronger: claiming there is or is not language in the example requires the philosophical picture be at issue, since neither will make sense in the example.

            That is, the stronger claim is itself a philosophical claim about the example, and it’s not something that would make sense in the example. Steering through this part requires we keep a delicate hand on the tiller and an eye on the examples. In our philosophical work, the claim that the kids’ conversations contained no language would at least seem supported by a parent’s worries about, “My God, how long has that potty talk been going on?” and some of the possible replies that could or would be made. Naomi might say, “I’m being firm the last few days about nailing them for any of this language as soon as it starts, so I’ve been listening the whole time. It just started, though Hannah and Owen sound so much alike I don’t know who started it.” (The kids are listening in, of course, and soon there will be whispering punctuated by gales of laughter, and Naomi has only made things worse.)

            Still, it would not be said in the example (and we have to proceed with care in handling the line), “there was no language before Hannah or Owen started it--they were all five talking just fine for a long time.” That no one would say such a thing in the example suggests its status is only that of a dopeslap for us in our dogmatic slumbers or our fever dream of language as a system of signs, a help to see that we are still possessed by our idea that when people talk then there’s language. It helps to show that the tendency to reify language and to forcibly inject it into examples guided by a picture or model--that tendency remains strong even when we are trying to investigate it.

            Keeping our eye on language, rather than keeping our eye on our picture of language or on the tempting assumptions about language, is made more difficult by something we could call the contagious nature of context. Told to write about the language of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in the scene in which Cleo first appears on stage, we may begin to notice contrasts and similarities with Shakespeare’s language in other scenes or other plays, and then, with our interest in language fed by those examples, we find the contagion of our interests, to plays of other playwrights, and then to eloquent teachers or speakers in classrooms or pulpits and then perhaps by contrast to the impoverished language that surrounds us all the rest of the time, the dreary teachers, stumbling speakers, dumb sitcoms. Soon, we are doomed to become English teachers. Indeed, saying that someone is an English teacher looks like an apology or an explanation for that person’s finding language in stray headlines or on the backs of brochures. Spend some time with linguists and you start being surrounded by language. “By God, Chomsky is right--no kid could learn language based on the defective samples of language we provide them.” Become a copy-editor (or marry one) and something analogous happens: “Listen to this,” you say, “and it’s in the very first paragraph of the novel.” If you are tempted to think that, as T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney says, “I gotta use words when I talk to you” and that language is present in every conversation, you will easily turn this contagion into a pandemic of language, present everywhere people talk or write. Traveling this route, with the slightest push, perhaps by way of considering the role of language before the words are pronounced or used, you may even gain further altitude and find yourself saddled with the second temptation I mentioned above, the one about the perfect ubiquity of language. Language is everywhere, there is nothing which is not language (or text), the limits of language are the limits of my world. Everything can be copyedited, everything is reiterable, everything can be an example for a linguist, everything is like or unlike Shakespeare, including not only what is said but the possibilities of what could be said.

            But examples in which we would remark on language are not all examples, and are not even all the examples in which people talk or listen, say or ask or deny or pray or sing. We are not always besotted with Shakespeare, we are not all linguists or editors or English teachers, and even when we are we would not remark on language in all the examples in which we talk and write. If we think about the contagion of contexts, and suppose that all examples carry the germs of English teachers and linguists and copyeditors on their filthy feet, we may regard language in those examples in which language is not mentioned as still contingently present. It has the conditional status of “If a linguist (or Shakespeare fan, or English teacher, or copyeditor, or a wannabe) should walk in, then we would say this about language in the case, . . . .” But we need to stay clear on when in the cases the existence of language has no status at all. This last is my awkward attempt to avoid saying either that it does exist or that it does not--we don’t have in the example ways to make sense of either of those claims. Language and talk of language make sense in some examples, and do not make sense in others, even though in a substitute for honest sense we use our picture of language to bully our way in and claim sense is made.

            Another part of my temptation I can blame on my Wittgensteinian teachers. I am tempted sometimes to think that language or maybe ordinary language is the real thing, the better alternative, the body of examples to which we keep coming back. Or I think it is the therapeutic couch to which we go when our head cramps up in a certain way. These temptations easily turn into mistakes, at least for me and for the students with whom I work. We are better off not to realize or to reify language or ordinary language. My students sometimes start thinking of language as the true battlefield on which philosophy is done, or of ordinary language as providing some kind of standard or criterion of sense. Both of these are dust in our eyes. Ordinary language does not refer to anything, and it only makes sense by way of its contrast with philosophical temptations, pictures, quests for substances to which substantives refer, metaphors which invite overgeneralization, abstractions produced by formal reasoning, temptations which may turn out to make no sense at all. Or we could say that ordinary language refers only to the cessation of those bogus temptations or to realms in which those bogus temptations are or may be conspicuously absent. An analogy might be found in rights talk, where it is a recurrent mistake to try to substantialize rights because it is not recognized that ways of talking about rights are only ways of talking about atrocities, totalitarianism, and oppression and their absence.

            But, we might say, surely the things that linguists study, the things that English teachers harp on, the specimens copyeditors put on their refrigerators, surely those things do not vanish when copyeditors etc. open the door to look at the milk. There is language even when linguists turn their backs, and there’s language when Hannah and her buddies are doing other things besides the things that are currently getting them in trouble with their parents. Denying that language persists when it’s not at issue smacks of Berkeley, invites a Samuel Johnson to kick a stone.

            Let’s stick with linguists. Linguists can teach us things about language which we may notice around us even after they have opened the refrigerator door. Some of these things are simple ways of making sense of differences in words (there are transitive and intransitive verbs), some help us label pragmatic changes in usage (e.g., educators seem to have bought the perverse practice from the world of business of turning the word partner into a verb), some help us see what little kids are doing when, for example, they over-regularize verbs. Look at that. If Hannah and her buddies are invited to come up onto the porch where they can see the tractor working the field across the road, and Hannah decides to stick with her volcano in the sandbox and says, “I seed it earlier,” we understand that this is not inexplicable, and not simply or only a mistake. It is evidence that’s she’s getting the rules for how to turn present tense verbs into past tense, and we don’t need to worry because learning those rules often comes before learning the exceptions to those rules, the irregular forms.

            We can tell why this example is relevant to our question of when and where there is language, and we can do this by appeal to what we would say in the example. That is, surely it’s language when Hannah says, “I seed it earlier.” Our reasons for saying it’s language may be obvious, and so we might jump past those reasons. But paranoia is our friend, and checking for reasons may help us escape mistakes. First, it is a linguist who helps us understand her saying, and what linguists study is language. Though we haven’t said anything about language yet in the example, we would, and with no violence to the case. Here’s how that might go: Jayme’s mother might say, “Jayme does that too, and I keep trying to teach her to say ‘Saw.’ instead of ‘seed’--she does it with ‘run’ too, and it makes me worry there’s something wrong with her.” To that we might respond, “Oh, no, don’t worry about her--she’s doing what kids do. She’s treating see and run as if they were regular verbs, like close in ‘close the door’ or play. People who study language development like to use kids doing that sort of thing as evidence that they are learning how verbs work. They learn the regular endings before they learn the exceptions, like see and run and build.” Jayme’s mother might sigh with relief, and say, “I wish I had time to learn more about language. Everything about language is interesting.” (Echoing Sapir’s famous quote: “Everything about language is interesting.”)

            Perhaps we would say such things, and then we would draw morals. As we draw the morals, though, it’s easy to mislay our compass of examples and start letting the picture of language guide our thinking and construct the morals for us. Here’s one of the results of philosophical thinking creeping in (and so perhaps we should, as some linguists do, place a question mark before each line of the following to mark it as suspect): even though it is linguists and students of child language development who tell us these things about children’s acquisition of language, we don’t need the specialists to stand around for the things to be true. The children are learning language or developing language, and when her language is more developed Hannah (and Jayme) will say “I saw it earlier,” instead of “I seed it earlier.” Their language does not go poof in between those occasions in which it is developing--it remains as a kind of competence, a set of abilities to get things like verb endings right or to use the correct irregular forms--and those abilities require the internalization of rules and systems of mapping signs on sense--it is competence to use a system of signs to communicate.

            (Please note that I’m not claiming that language does go poof in between examples, the esse percipi est view of language, since that would be just as much driven by philosophy as its contrary.)

            Out of the talk about language development, then, I find myself tempted to talk about the language which is developing. I think of it not as a bunch of examples but as an abstract object which develops inside children, an object which is the same object all the adults have inside them--and so a remarkable object. I may remind myself regularly that my basis for talk about language is examples in which it is not just me (and not just philosophers) who can see and hear language, but then I forget and begin to think in terms of the abstract object as persisting in between the examples and as the thing that gives those examples their identity. I will be alarmed if it occurs to me that language is beginning to look like a Platonic Form, but then I will forget. Language is, perhaps, some coherent structure in the brain or some system organizing the things Jayme and Hannah say. It is, I find myself tempted to say, a system which links sounds and meanings or a system by which children learn to communicate, a system they must master by acquiring the practices of their community.

            And if I do not notice that I have shifted in how I am thinking, then I will nod solemnly when some of the philosophers I admire say metaphilosophical things about language. I will think along with them that I can blame language for my philosophical mistakes. Philosophy is the bumps on the head one gets from running up against the limits of language (what W. actually says is more careful, in P.I. 119). There is no such thing as private language, so language is clearly and irredeemably public. In P.I. 115: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Or, after the line about a sensation not being a something and not a nothing either, “The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, . . . “ (P.I. 304) --but we take the moral as, so language functions in a multiplicity of ways, and that’s why we must consider all those uses of language.

            As I step back from the examples and make claims about what I’ve found in them I easily generalize about language in ways which are not supported by the examples. Language becomes more, in my thinking, than the results of linguistic inquiry, more than talk about poop, more than the sibilants and metaphors when Cleopatra enters the play. Language becomes remarkable, interesting, pervasive, dangerous, and abstract. Philosophy must include a consideration of language. The philosophical problems are problems, at least in part, about language which misleads us.

            And there are important therapeutic moves, insights which can help me shake myself free of my philosophical mistakes, which nevertheless are guided by those old mistakes. It is as if I am speaking in tongues and handling snakes. One of these therapeutic insights would be to claim, as I desperately wish to do, that there’s no such thing as language in most of our conversations; there’s no such thing as language when the kids are being innocent and are playing Wishywishy Run Around. There’s no such thing as language in my asking for a scone and coffee from the barrista (barring contagion–she’s not a philosophy major and I’ve never seen her before) at Ramone’s coffee shop.

            And by that I mean, and I have to remember that I mean, only that there’s no talk of language in those conversations and that talk of language would make it into a different example and would require ways of making sense of that talk of language--and that those ways of making sense threaten to come loose from the example and threaten to be guided by a picture of language instead, and so threaten to beg questions. Still, I want to say that I’ve got something different from Wittgenstein’s insight regarding the sensation which is not a nothing but not a something either--regarding language and its absence from so many of our conversations, it’s not a something, but it’s not even up there where it can be not a nothing either. Language makes sense or can make sense in those examples in which talk of language does or can make sense, and because of the contagion of contexts we do have resources for making sense of it in many contexts or examples. But our picture of language threatens to take the place of those ways of making sense, and threatens to lead us by the hand into a new world where things are cleaner and more abstract than this messy world, a world in which language is as ubiquitous as God.