Language and Experience

An interaction with a counselling client brought something into focus for me - something obvious, on reflection, but obscured (perhaps) exactly by its own nature ...

We often have experiences - we feel things, or think things - that cannot be put into words, that may even challenge our confidence in our capacity to put things into words. Ironically, and often cruelly, these experiences can be among our most intense - and meaningful (in the sense resisted by semanticists and most insisted upon by nearly everyone else).

In the company of an engaged interlocutor, attempting to put these experiences into words can be profoundly therapeutic. What I suddenly realised, while listening to my client, was that two pictures we might have of the internal 'pre-articulation' processes were mutually incongruous but, at the same time, 'behaviourally' indistinguishable.

One is the picture we have from the Analytic tradition - Hume to Fodor, perhaps - of an internal space that is very like the space we describe to one another when we speak. A space of logic and experience, which, to be articulated, only needs 'translating' into words.

The other is a picture that has more of the character of religious inspiration - of words forming from the incoherent swirl within, almost without preliminary, in a way that seems necessary, that seems to participate in the deep nature of human communication, but whose processes themselves cannot be intelligibly articulated.

We might imagine that we can distinguish between these two cases on the basis of content or accompanying behaviour. This hypothesis is revealed to be ridiculous even as it is formulated - what is it about it, itself, that might give us a clue to its generation?

The desire to appear intelligible, of course, may - in our present cultural context - push us towards narratives of generation that have the first character. However, our capacity to be intelligible is just our capacity to engage in conversation - nature is indifferent to method, distinguishing only contextual success ...

So, while my inspirations may appear to be the product of profound calculation and superior interpretation, you must just take them for what they are, asking not from whence they come ...

 (!)

On Instruction

We don't learn to talk by having it explained to us. If we can't talk, we can't take instruction either.

Being able to talk to one another, being able to give and take instructions, appears to depend on what we might vaguely call 'shared understanding' or 'shared appreciation of meanings'. This doesn't really add anything to 'shared ability to talk to one another,' but its specific components (things like 'shared experience', 'shared grammatical/logical capacities', our understanding of foundational concepts like 'same' and 'similar', the apparent persistence of common memory etc.) all have the character of Wittgensteinian 'hinges' - not just of specific enquiries but of any possible intelligible enquiry, including any enquiry into their own nature.

When a philosopher tells you that there is a 'right' way to do something - to translate a linguistic expression, to understand an experience, to perform an experiment or a calculation - they are already depending on your having a shared concept of  'rightness' and a shared appreciation of at least one (very disjunctive and distributed) example of it, which is 'the right way to talk'.

If we don't know the right way to talk, we have, of course, no way of discussing this with one another - never mind being able to attribute it to any failure to 'follow instructions' ...