moncrief

Preface

This paper is a hasily-edited adaptation of an overzealous reply I wrote in a slightly-heated online discussion. I'm choosing to adapt and publish it here because it covers 70% of an article I've been trying and failing to write for weeks. The argument within it functions as a “bootstrapped explanation” of why I've been failing to write that last article, or any article, really. No sources are provided because I originally wrote this one message at a time over discord. If that makes you mad, read Saussure yourself and tell me if and why I'm wrong.

Funnily enough—I probably had to write this much, in a casual fashion, to grasp that it's impossible to write a perfect formal paper about why the words I'm using to write it are an imperfect, informal system.

Take any commentary to the cafe bot comments, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Why I'm Skeptical of Language

I did my first degree in english lit, mostly because I was depressed and flunking out of compsci at the time. I wasn't that interested in literature, I just did well in it in high school and figured I could stay in school that way. But I did end up taking every course my school offered in literary theory—the study of methods of reading and interpreting texts. A lot of this gets pretty fuzzy, mingling with the rest of the humanities, and it took me directly into philosophy, gender studies, psychoanalysis, and semiotics: the last of which I'm gonna talk about at length for a minute. Studying semiotics, even to the limited degree I did, left me with strong opinions on how language operates. What I'm gonna talk about is related to semiotics, if not totally orthodox or comprehensive or 'objectively true'. It's what I believe, what I took away. Make of it what you will.

Casually, let's start with a definition of a definition, from merriam-webster: “a statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol”. Alright, let's do the definition (“a statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol”) of meaning: “the thing one intends to convey especially by language”. Ok, let's look at the definition (“a statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol” (meaning being: “the thing one intends to convey especially by language”.)) of language: “the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community”. Now, onto words, pronunciations, combining, community...

Sheesh, we're gonna be here all night.

The notion of a “objective definition” is effectively impossible. Diogenses kinda got to the heart of this when he responded to Plato's definition of man as “featherless bipeds” by holding up a plucked chicken and saying “behold! I've brought you a man”. You can define the term as precisely as you want, but corner cases will slip through for basically any term. You can add more rules to patch up the corner cases, but then you start to exclude things which also match the definition, in a similar fashion.

Even if you could patch up every single corner case, the definition you create is written in more words which require their own definitions, which all suffer the same fate. If any of these definition-words have corner-cases where similar diogenses-style misunderstandings can occur, the original definition is compromised by extension. At some point, use of language is a process of subjective, probabilistic interpretation, not objective linguistic forms.

A word is only a linguistic sign. A linguistic sign is only an arbitrary mapping between a “thought-concept”, (casually: a pre-verbal, probabilistic mental process of understanding or classifying some category) and a “sound-image” (casually: a class of possible/recognizable spoken sounds or visual writing). The relationship/mapping is arbitrary, because both components are arbitrary. Linguistic signs only gain their meaning relative to other linguistic signs, in a social context. I can say that “trehrke” is a word that means “pizza that's gone stale in the fridge”, but unless I'm saying that to somebody else who's familiar with the mapping between sound-image “trehrke” and the thought-concept of “pizza that's gone stale in the fridge”, it's a useless linguistic sign. And even if they do share that linguistic sign with me, if their mapping of sound-image “stale” doesn't include the thought-concept “moldy”, and mine does, then we're actually using two slightly different signs, because we're mapping sound-image “trehrke” onto slightly different thought-concepts. And beyond that, “pizza that's gone stale in the fridge” is also arbitrary. It's not some divinely established category, on which we bestow an arbitrary label. I could create infinite arbitrary signs just like “trehrke” (see: the German language) Our words, even extremely important ones, don't correspond to objective, pre-linguistic ontological categories. Different languages have different words for different things, words that can't be translated directly and that map onto different subsets and supersets of each other. The english word “love” could encapsulate countless different emotions in other languages, emotions which native speakers of those languages would never think of as “the same thing” in the same, very loosely-connected fashion that english speakers think of all possible variations on “love” as being “the same thing”.

More formally, what I'm calling a thought-concept would be called the “signified” and sound-image would be called the “signifier”. I prefer these descriptive terms because I'm slightly dyslexic and stumble over the similarity of the formal signifier/signified.

Controversy also totally shatters these mappings. A militant maoist maps an entirely different thought-concept onto the sound-image “socialism” than a lifelong Republican does. Casually, to the former, it's utopian affect; to the latter, dystopian. When they have a discussion with or around that linguistic sign, they aren't talking about the same thing, because they conceive of it so differently. Same sound-image, different thought-concept: asymmetric mapping. They can attempt to clarify this misunderstanding by hedging it against their shared understanding of other signs—like “government” and “freedom” or “money”, other words you'd use when talking about this stuff—but it's likely there's some asymmetric mappings going on with respect to those words too! Clear communication and consensus becomes extremely challenging.

For a more fun example, “is a hotdog a sandwich” is a clear example of an asymmetric mapping.

In this sense, language is lossy compression; the pre-verbal, rich, analog, probabilistic thought-concept understanding of the world we have has to be compressed into discrete sound-image symbols to be communicated, and then decompressed by the other individual in the context of all the other signs involved and their idiosyncratic mappings. Usually, for day-to-day stuff, this is done pretty successfully. Shared social context goes a long way. But it breaks down at times, particularly on controversial and advanced topics (like the socialism example above).

We don't live in a world of language, we live in a world of ineffable, idiosyncratic, fluid, probabilistic thought-concepts. I'm interested in phenomenology because I hope one day we might be able to communicate without the restrictions innate to language: the tragic loss involved in compression and decompression. I don't want to tell somebody I appreciate them, I want them to feel what I feel when I appreciate them. And I appreciate you for reading this.

Footnote on scientific communication

While I have a lot of skepticism around communication, I will freely admit the scientific method, and standards are reproducibility, are one of humankind's greatest communicative accomplishments. Scientific literature is clear and formal enough to avoid many of the pitfalls of casual language-use.

But it doesn't fully solve the problem. Ultimately, it's still taking a phenomenal analog world and trying to chop it up into little digital linguistic signs, running experiments on those categories. When an abstract says “this paper is on dogs” it assumes a clear delineation of what a “dog” is vs a “wolf”. Sure, that's an easy enough distinction to make with 99.9% accuracy – but when you have to do that for every single word, every single category, every single communication, the notion of true, clear-minded objectively becomes a lot less tenable. Any “measurable category” is a measurable category of some “X”—and “X” is, sadly, just a linguistic sign.

I don't have ample words (well, other than this expression of “I don't have ample words”) for how I feel about the beauty and understanding we might get out of a post-linguistic science.