James Shaw, "Truth, Paradox, and Ineffable Propositions"

Just out in PPR. The first two sentences have me hooked (though it appears to be a long, tough read):

There is a natural and quite reasonable assumption to make about what it is possible to express in language—roughly: everything. In this paper I want to present some reasons for thinking this assumption might be false.

Go!

The Difficulty of Experience

I've just posted a draft of a paper I've been working on for awhile. Here it is. And here's a description:

Some things are hard to put into words, including profound experiences that inform our way of judging the world. This paper explores the intersection of the problem of putting such experiences into words and the problem that some disagreements hinge on unshared experiences. I suggest that two ways of dealing with these difficulties--which I call mysticism and extreme anti-mysticism--are both false. I consider in detail examples involving Wittgenstein's "wondering at the existence of the whole world", J.M. Coetzee's character Elizabeth Costello and her horror at the treatment of animals, and a correspondence between Freud and Romain Rolland about the "oceanic feeling." Often, what we need is not simply to put our experience into words but rather to find a way to give the other a similar experience.

Comments will be greatly appreciated.

Words Can't Express

A Google search of "words can't express" gives 864,000 hits containing that phrase. That's a lot of things, written in words, that words can't express!

I don't mean to be flip. (See my previous post.) But someone has some explaining to do here. Here's a shot:

"Words can't express x" --> whatever one says about x will fall short of expressing all there is to x. (So, words can perhaps partially, but not completely, express x.)

As I said before, this is why we do other things, like paint pictures, write songs, make films, and (I might add) buy people flowers, as those activities are expressive in ways that get beyond language (i.e. word-use).

At the same time, it seems like one might find these non-linguistic modes of communication equally dissatisfying, such that we are tempted to think that nothing can fully express something, as it were, "inside us." Is that thought an illusion?

(I'm thinking here, for those who know it, of Wittgenstein's remarks aimed at debunking the notion that there are "private objects" or could be a "private language"...)

Ineffability and Silence

During my period of silence here, I've been thinking about things that are hard to express--that is, the "hard to eff" as opposed to the "ineffable." I've been writing some things about this, in part, looking at remarks Wittgenstein makes about "the mystical" (in the Tractatus) and claims in the "Lecture on Ethics" that speaking about ethics involves "running against the boundaries of language."

Wittgenstein notoriously claimed in the penultimate section of the Tractatus that all of the things he said in the book are nonsense, and then in the final section that, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." There's a huge literature about what this is all about. However, the more I've thought about it, the more I tend to agree with Michael Kremer's claim that the final passage of the Tractatus, "strictly speaking, forbids nothing" (in "The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense," Noûs, 35:1 (2001), p. 57.

Of course we must pass over in silence whatever we can't speak about--precisely because it is not possible for us to speak about whatever that is. That is, Wittgenstein is not saying, "There are certain things we shouldn't try to talk about." We can talk about whatever we can talk about. But he was, I think, saying something specifically to philosophers--namely, that there are certain things, or areas of discourse, which can't be "grounded" in a philosophical theory. (This includes ethics.) We can, as individuals, talk about ethics, make ethical claims, and adopt ethical positions and live our lives accordingly. But when philosophers do such things, they aren't doing anything in addition to what the ordinary person does (though they might do it with a different vocabulary, or with more precision).

At any rate, I'm rather tempted by the view that things we are often inclined to describe as ineffable are really only "hard to eff" and that the "limits of language" don't hit up against a wholly alien realm of "inexpressible" truths. Rather, the limits of language is just where other modes of expression--such as art, music, and physical gestures--take over. This would mean that even if there are things we must utterly pass over in (linguistic) silence, there are still other modes of expression by which we can reach out to others, and, as it were, break the silence. And often, our efforts to insistence about just how much "words can't express X" actually end up expressing quite a bit about X!