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Of all the things distinguishing humans from other species, language and symbolic forms of communication play a central role. From religion to physics, and from art to industry, linguistic and graphic communications are key.
Speech is reflexively used in so many social situations that without it our cultures could not be as we know them. Those cultures are also awash with text, audio and video covering everything from technical manuals to the most bizarre fiction and fantasy. Organized entertainment, legislation, administration, education, scientific theory and more, all rely so heavily on human forms of encoding reality that it is easy to see why all such pursuits appear wholly absent in other species.
So central has language and related activities been to the development of human cultures that any self-examination of our species should surely place them center stage. Perhaps for the same reason, philosophy seems magnetically drawn to this whole issue. But despite millennia of debate and linguistic expression – endless words about words – no clear understanding of language has emerged that might match, for example, the human understanding of our solar system. In terms of such an analogy, theories and ideas about language have not even agreed on the trajectories of the planets, what orbits what, or what holds the apparent order in place. However, any philosophical inquiry that fails to acknowledge and interrogate language’s pre-eminent role in human affairs would be rather like daylight astronomy concluding there can only be two or three celestial bodies. Without questioning our mode of investigation, we effectively assume it to be sound and unwittingly allow its flaws to skew our thinking.
Notably, it can be asked if astronomers would ever have bothered working in the dark were it not that conditions impact perceptions. But obvious as this issue might be in certain disciplines, the matter has little recognition when examining the ubiquitous role of language in relation to human ideas. Far from peering out into the darkness to see what new entities and phenomena might be found, linguistically-couched human ideas are handed from one generation to the next in rather routine manners that escape question. This represents an almost mythological blind faith in our core ideas and their linguistic formulations. And although such cultural inertia is heavily masked by the industrious thrust of making various forms of progress, the underlying paradigm of abstract thought only remains even more beyond question as a result.
Regardless of its huge role in human development, language remains a profound mystery – even if linguists, philosophers, psychologists and others choose to debate it in disarmingly erudite-sounding manners. It is almost as if our model of knowledge is circular in a manner prohibiting any proper interrogation or understanding of the very language that frames it. But if language and related forms of conceptualization are the bedrock underlying human abstract knowledge and inquiry, our understanding of everything thereby accessed remains dependent on the true nature of these things – regardless of how obscure that nature may be.
The inability to get at the real nitty-gritty of language arguably extends right back to its very emergence. Theories of how and why language and graphic representations first emerged must remain speculative given there obviously were no prior-existing means of recording such matters. As the evolution of language was presumably not instantaneous and initially limited to its verbalized form, it could only emerge devoid of any record of its true origins. Hence no one knows how we came to speak, or what the subjective human experience felt like before language appeared. And yet we are now so habituated to it that we struggle to turn off our conscious stream of linguistic thoughts long enough to get a feel for the wordless consciousness our distant ancestors must have known as their daily reality.
It is not only within the external world of human societies, cultures and industries that language has had a monstrous impact: it has presumably also reworked subjective human consciousness. And we may well be laboring under a very imbalanced view of this, given that the very conspicuous physical effects of human development contrast sharply with the invisibility of our consciousness. Archaeologists have seemingly reliable accounts of how evolving civilizations transformed their physical environments, but there are no equivalent accounts detailing how those civilizations transformed human consciousness. There is however, significant evidence that our brains have physiologically evolved to better manage all the linguistic and related cognitive processes that, despite all our shared DNA, leave us appearing quite distinct from other species.
The foundation of technology
From a certain perspective, it is arguable that language, symbolism, abstraction and the related brain functions should be seen as a fundamental technology underlying all other human technologies. Much as we might typically think of technology as a modern phenomenon, the etymology of the word simply concerns skills and know-how and does not therefore exclude our ancestors inventing how to grunt intelligently at one another: a technology now highly developed and called language. Given all our modern technologies could surely only emerge after language’s initial emergence, this slightly unusual step of seeing language as a root technology appears sound.
Notably, the emergence of new fields of technology has always been paralleled by new jargon and language use – something that underscores the crucial role language and related forms of encoding ideas continue to play today. In a complementary manner, great strides in human knowledge and its sharing are associated with various technologies and inventions that helped spread the word, such as writing and paper, the printing press, sound recording, the telephone, the radio, the television, satellite communication and the internet.
A significant benefit of language is that it can record, store and exchange information such that whatever any individual happens to know or discover remains available in their absence – including long after their death. This simple fact that abstract knowledge can be encoded linguistically has moved knowledge and learning from the live-and-learn paradigm of other species to one in which language alone allows humans to, for example, become familiar with the speculations of each other’s minds regarding events at the furthermost extremities of the universe.
Crucially, this linguistic encoding of knowledge and ideas in manners that allow their exchange, storing, and reuse constitutes a cumulative model of amassing knowledge, such that whatever was known by our forebears can be handed over to us without the need to repeat the acts and experiences that initially derived such knowledge. Thanks to language, knowledge – at least a certain form of knowledge – no longer necessitates direct experience of that which is known. Hence, instead of learning through direct interaction with the physical world, we increasingly learn via abstracted processes; by referencing existing texts, concepts, ideas, theories and historical records: the learning materials that form the substance of formalized education and knowledge acquisition in general.
The ever-growing wealth of factual knowledge facilitated by this process down through the ages is well beyond estimation. Combined with the many technologies spawned along the way, the individual can now acquire all sorts of information that until recently would not even have appeared knowable, regardless of any effort. There is now so much knowledge to potentially learn, that in terms of the overall body of human knowledge, even the most scholarly mind knows relatively little.
Managing this explosive mass of knowledge requires continual categorization and sub-division into more and more fields of knowledge, such that the growing totality is spread across a large and still-expanding universe of specialisms.
This huge exercise of examining and encoding our world and its phenomena in ever-greater detail is evidenced in etymology where concepts once closely related are now considered quite distant. For example, art, craft and science are words with roots closely related in a manner that seems odd to modern minds. Similarly, physics was once seen as a branch of philosophy, as were various other disciplines now considered fields in their own right. Consequently, an argument can be made that specialists and experts who focus extensively on specific areas do not have well-rounded and balanced views – their attention having been mostly spent examining details within some narrow band of human activity, rather than looking at matters in more general manners.
Via science in particular, knowledge acquisition has to date promoted such specialization and the examination of relatively discrete microcosms in ever-finer detail – as opposed to considering that individuals should maybe develop more rounded views by looking at multiple areas on a broader basis. Simultaneously, new words and concepts have been birthed at an accelerating rate, as language and its abstract modeling of our world have moved relentlessly to deeper levels of sophistication and granularity – a word that not by coincidence enjoys popularity within information technology.
Comparing recent and ancient history illustrates that not only has language enabled a cumulative learning paradigm, but also that this paradigm exhibits a chain reaction effect in which the more we learn the faster we learn, and the greater is the ongoing explosion of new linguistic terms. It is even debatable if language, together with other symbolic forms of encoding reality, can be properly separated from the learning and knowledge it seeks to frame. What could it mean to know anything without at least some internal verbal description of whatever is known? Modern fact-ridden minds typically struggle with such questions, whereas certain individuals from more primitive civilizations can for example, navigate long distances at sea without even being able to describe the nature of the knowledge or techniques they use.
The accelerated development of more and more technologies has rendered the outward appearance of our environment increasingly alien when compared to that of our primal origins or the natural habitats of other species. It therefore seems misleading to directly attribute our considerable technological prowess to the minor differences in DNA between ourselves and related species. Instead, perhaps homo sapiens long ago reached some critical tipping point – primarily related to the birth of language and abstract thought – from which our unique means of encoding, recording and reusing knowledge progressively took hold as a self-propelling process otherwise unseen in nature. This idea is reflected in the popular idea that today’s scientists are merely standing on the shoulders of their predecessors – and also in the observation that formal education is such a major part of the modern world, whereas it believably had no counterpart in the caveman era.
From this same perspective, it is quite arguable that language enabled a form of learning that is actually out-of-control – at the same time as it becomes questionable if the result is as beneficial as commonly thought. That we humans are somehow driven to pursue more and more factual knowledge only appears unequivocally advantageous from within a belief that our knowledge has no downsides and serves exclusively for our communal benefit. But these are both questionable ideas. As regards downsides, we need only glance at the unintended damage done to the planet’s biosphere to realize our knowledge and its use appear defective in terms of delivering exclusively desirable results. And as for knowledge being used entirely for communal benefit, our very long history of developing increasingly sophisticated weaponry to annihilate one another silences that particular argument.
Nonetheless, the modest admission that human knowledge remains somewhat limited and that such limitations leave it occasionally prone to producing imperfect results appears culturally preferred to any idea that knowledge itself might actually provoke problems. Hence, problems tend to be framed in terms of whatever was not previously known or understood about specific situations, rather than as direct results of for example, excessive confidence in what little actually was known. Similarly, any idea that mere language might actually play an important role in man’s inhumanity to man will sound bizarre to most minds but proves not so ridiculous on examination. Can the fact that much blood has been spilled over so-called holy texts never teach us a lesson?
In general, whilst dominant cultural ideas tend to see knowledge as inherently good, language is at least presumed to be wholly disconnected from the worst excesses of human conduct. Hence, whenever knowledge is used to perfect any means of persecuting or killing our own kind, the apparent evil is generally regarded as ultimately rooted in something vague such as human nature, rather than as related to abstract knowledge itself. Similarly, language of itself tends to be seen as a simple medium of communication unrelated to any specific motivations. But do these everyday ideas really stack up?
All such questions inevitably turn on the difficult issue of what language itself is – not only because such questions are by necessity linguistically framed, but also because, poorly understood as language is, it remains anchored at the very heart of our uniquely-human form of knowledge. This relationship between language itself and linguistically-framed knowledge is obviously tight – if indeed any real distinction between the two can be reliably discerned. The whole matter is ironically too central to human thought and communication to escape serious philosophical circumspection and doubt. Can abstract knowledge properly comprehend itself, its origins, and its own machinations, given that a true mirror reflects anything other than itself?
For better or worse, modern culture has generally promoted a state of consciousness in which minds struggle to understand how any form of knowledge could possibly elude linguistic framing. That anything could possibly be known but nonetheless defy verbal expression is an uncomfortable notion to the mind that has been schooled in objectivity and factual knowledge. And yet the position that anything known must be amenable to linguistic expression comes close to a silly inference that every species lacking our form of language knows nothing
By further logical inference of that same idea, it seems things can indeed be known outside of language – no matter how odd this strikes the more fact-based orientations of conventional human ideas. Do we not have numerous traditions in which concepts of enlightenment and spiritual transcendence present themselves as forms of knowledge that are purposefully devoid of abstract thoughts, ideas, linguistic descriptors, and related cognitive processing?
The obvious step from here is to reason that not all knowledge – at least within a broad understanding of the concept knowledge – is of the same order. More worryingly, if we humans tend to think that all knowledge must be capable of verbal expression, how and why have we come to adopt such a monolithic language-only view of knowledge that on examination actually looks misguided?
If asking what we might be missing or forgetting within such a perspective, it is curiously pointless to expect any direct answer, given that such a question asks for linguistic descriptions of some unknowns that by their very definition defy such descriptions.
So not only is language poorly understood, but common conceptions of knowledge appear constrained by misguided presumptions that whatever is known must be capable of verbalization. And if there appears to be more to the concept of knowledge than we typically imagine, the word knowledge itself becomes suspect as something properly understood.
Is the knowledge that one is tired and ready for sleep really of the same order as the knowledge that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system? One seems personal, subjective, temporary, and known through physical sensation, whereas the other is considered impersonal, objective, enduring and learned through intellectual exchange. Like the concept or idea of knowledge itself, it seems the real flexibility of language and words is too often ignored. Perhaps there is no knowable entity that is pure knowledge, and the word knowledge is simply used in various contexts to fulfill somewhat different linguistic functions that we do not bother distinguishing from one another.
This flexibility of language can also be seen by considering a word such as religion and what it might signify. Does the word refer to religious doctrine, religious belief, the religious lifestyle, religious ceremonies, organized churches, religious cults, a generally religious outlook, some combination of these things, or any one of them in isolation? Such open-ended questions readily arise whenever we mistakenly assume a noun such as religion must stand in a one-to-one relationship with some absolute thing, phenomenon or essence of the known world.
But as soon as we abandon the strict idea that words mean things, and think instead of language as serving hard-to-define goals within different social contexts, the problem of defining exactly what any word supposedly means is replaced by the idea that word meaning is merely a convenient idea itself, and that any supposed meaning of a word is in fact somewhat variable from mind to mind and from context to context. In fact, it may be more accurate to state that the very idea words mean things is just an internalized idea rooted in rather unthinking social convention.
The common idea regarding the meaning of words as being within the words themselves is in fact easy to debunk in various ways. Firstly, it is noticeable how even those who argue words to have set meanings inadvertently ridicule their own argument by their interminable disagreements over what those supposedly set meanings really are. Secondly, if words have meanings within them, why do we need dictionaries? Similarly, if the meaning of a word is in the word itself, why do we need to learn languages? Would the supposed meaning within any word not reveal itself? Thirdly, the idea that dictionaries detail word meanings by using other words does not establish that any words at all have inherent meanings, as a dictionary is still useless to someone who is not familiar with the language in the first place. What dictionaries actually reveal is that a mind seeking to understand socially-adopted uses of an unfamiliar word can reference other linguistically structured words to hazard a rough understanding. Fourthly, we never think of text itself as knowing what its author meant. Is it not obvious that what we call the meaning supposedly within any text only occurs once a mind accesses that text?
But if it feels odd to suggest that words have no meaning, this is because words nonetheless have very definite effects – as demonstrated by everything from our holy books to urban graffiti. Such a position is not necessary in any case if words are seen as dynamic elements within wider contexts. Rather than looking for meaning within language, the value of language is perhaps a more realistic concept that accommodates the real-world impact of specific instances of language use. Conventional ideas of linguistic meaning focus too rigidly on the actual words, at the expense of considering other contextual elements and the social function of language in general. For example, whereas the statement I hate you might generally be seen as having just one meaning, it can have very different values depending on whether it is uttered in anger or in playfulness. So, whether words are considered to have internal meanings or not is actually pretty irrelevant once language is understood as a social activity in which the actual words are often somewhat incidental.
Being essentially a form of intercourse that can communicate anything from technical information to a declaration of war or a desire for sexual intercourse, language’s true social role is surely more significant than anything understandable via the conventional idea of word meanings. Given actual words can appear somewhat incidental to language’s social role, surely a better understanding of the whole subject should focus on underlying human motivations, intended results, and actual psychological outcomes, rather than on narrow linguistic analyses of actual words.
With this in mind, should someone automatically be taken to task simply on the basis that two things they have said are logically contradictory? Viewing the relevant individual narrowly as someone to be attacked as soon as their statements are linguistically inconsistent is a typical stratagem seen within the squabbling of political theater, but in the wider world this surely represents a failure to understand that, because people pursue different goals in different situations, stating one thing today but something contradictory tomorrow is not necessarily hypocritical or foolish.
The social aspect of the spoken word is that we use it to convene with the minds of others, and therefore we no doubt prioritize the effects of the language we choose over any strict factual accuracy. Even the politician – quick to attack his opponent’s apparent factual error or lack of consistency – easily fits the idea of someone who is nonetheless targeting a certain impact on his audience.
More generally, given the effective use of language is tailored to specific circumstances, is it not more appropriate to view language-use as endlessly creative, rather than as utterances of would-be eternal truths unrelated to the context in which language is used? Even the recounting of supposed hard facts is typically tailored to the goals of given situations.
Why did we embrace language?
All purposeful language use, from habitual politeness to grand oratory, appears formulated, agenda-driven, and deployed for social goals. Even impersonal technical manuals and scientific textbooks are the works of minds seeking social rewards for their efforts. Casual chat helps us bond socially, whilst even the most famous works of literary geniuses can be seen as merely the means by which their authors pursued artistic expression – possibly alongside their desires for fame, fortune and social status. Amidst gazillions of words poured out in countless formats for all sorts of overt reasons, the idea that any of this happened without inner motivations seems positively idiotic. In terms of our consciously planned actions, do we do anything at all without goals in mind? The very idea is at odds with both basic psychology and common sense – even if it is hard to get a fix on exactly what motivations are at play in any given situation.
Understanding that obscure motivations underlie language use and the pursuit of knowledge shifts thinking away from popular ideas; it debunks purely semantic views of language and purely factual views of knowledge. Such conventional perspectives may be common, but they do little in terms of understanding the bigger picture in which linguistically-framed knowledge spearheaded a new evolutionary direction that has increasingly set humans apart from other lifeforms.
But our history should not just be retold in terms of language, knowledge and our motivations for using these things; it also ought to accommodate everything else we are. Much as we might see ourselves as the animal that talks and knows, we are by that very definition still an animal, including all that is thereby implied.
Rather than analyzing the human condition via all our culturally familiar concepts and the language that frames them, it can prove useful to view things from a more primitive and animal-like understanding of what we are. Can we suspend our learned ideas in key fields such as anthropology, sociology and psychology, and rediscover ourselves as something different from the civilized beings we habitually believe ourselves to be? Civilization, as often remarked, is only skin-deep in any case.
Is it not logical that, language having proven such a powerful force in human development, the animal within us would have used it for purposes other than simply categorizing and describing the world in sterile encyclopedic terms? When we all know at some level that people can say things just to produce particular results, shouldn’t we ask to what extent language is used to manipulate others, as opposed to being a mere tool of communication?
Instead of passively observing for example, how political messages are dressed up in drama, why not ask what really motivates the political mind to deploy such drama, as well as why such obviously contrived theatrics can sway the masses? Inasmuch as such issues are uniquely human and superficially manifest themselves through the medium of human language, they surely offer a deeper insight into the wellsprings of language’s wider use. Political drama is notably also a key means by which social power is somehow agreed – or at least established. The underlying suggestion is that language use is in fact not so disconnected from our more primal herd instincts – including the search for domination and the desire for protection.
For all our technological developments, we remain social beings, and just like any other species, we seek to breed and secure our existence within an uncertain world where biological needs are never fully assured. So just as other species exhibit various behaviors designed to achieve such essential ends, the appearance of language in humans would presumably be harnessed to meet those same ends – if in fact it did not evolve primarily to further them.
From such a perspective, language should not be considered the sort of intellectual or academic tool it is often thought to be; it appears more as an evolutionary development that marks us off dramatically from other species, and something that significantly impacts how we address this world’s challenges. It can easily be hypothesized that, deprived of our linguistic skills, we would be pretty much like any other uncivilized mammal trying to eke out its living within Earth’s threatening environment. And if we now struggle to envisage how our anc