A world by any other name | Arif Ahmed, Ruth Kempson, Hilary Lawson

foreign for much of the 20th century language was seen as Central to our understanding of the world the limits of my language mean the limits of my world argued Wittgenstein there's nothing outside of the text claimed derida but now it seems that language is being jettisoned by philosophers as either containing puzzles that are insoluble or irrelevant to the real issues facing us the American philosopher Hillary

Putnam went as far to say that the project described the relationship between the language between language and the world is a shambles so should we conclude that the puzzle of language and its relation to the world is not solvable or is it essential we crack the problem and not give up or should we focus not on the medium but the message and return to an era

before the so-called linguistic term when language was largely seen as a transparent vehicle of our beliefs so the critical question that I'm going to present first to Ruth kempson for three minutes is is the puzzle of language and its relation to the world fundamentally unsolvable Ruth thank you well I'm a linguist so I have to answer the question is the language puzzle not solvable with the

answer no it is solvable however I wholeheartedly agree that conventional views of language of making a dichotomy between language ability and language use have to be abandoned and the concept of language as a set of it's constantly seen as a sort of jigsaw puzzle from God on high looking it down at these bits which have fixed meanings which have to get put together that also has

to be abandoned the shift is to see language as a process it's a tool for interaction its rules being conditional actions as to how to build up representations of content incrementally think of what you're doing right now relative to an immediate and evolving context this is the way we Define language all the way down we have General procedures anticipating structure and words too are defined as

routine eyes conditional update actions relative to context we're always building as we go fast now these are shared by speaker and hero alike on this view so in effect we're incrementally building stuff together in tandem there's no syntax on this this is what the grammar amounts to that's us now the consequence is that what others have seen as disfluences of conversation we're all told by linguists

conversations are full of Errors people don't know what they're doing you can just ignore the mistakes but once you shift to languages process then in fact all these mechanisms that we have to confirm to correct to interrupt they're all part of the tools for interaction which we can use in order to come to successful exchanges so communication succeeds as long as the overlap we have in

our underlying assumptions are sufficient for the purpose to hand and if they're not we can always query and clarify but it's not always in harmony but in virtue of me going blah blah are you listening to the blah blah we are in effect interacting well we hope so with the questions and answers and these interactive capacities they're all an intrinsic part of what it means to

have language as a processing tool and so it follows that the correspondence in answer the question the correspondence between language in the world has to be secondary and moreover it has to be approximate now there's much more to be said because it's critical that words are not associated with fixed correspondences there may are labels pointing in the direction of putative construals given the immediate context of

other words occurring in the context and that's what we need and what we think we can model now I'm actually going to shift now and ask instead how on Earth could the linguist have got to this point and the answer is that I was trying to do things for my friends who are pragmatists and they wanted I thought they needed a model of how we actually

build up structure into promote understanding in context and I knew I couldn't do it on my own so I turned to logicians and computationists but the result of it was that we had this view of building up things incrementally and one after another all the puzzles which syntacticians or semanticists had fell into our laps where for other Frameworks they all have to be stipulated with huge

amounts of ad hoc and block structures and so we decided it was a grammar adopted by both speakers and hear it now if that is correct if as an assumption it has the immediate consequence that we can interact that the phenomena of conversational interaction comes as an immediate consequence because I can start off and you can finish the sentence you might want to disagree with me

but that's fine I can start and you can take over now that is completely impossible to express in standard Orthodox views of grammar they just have to ignore it and in fact they do but there's much more to say about the intrinsic non-determinism and then I'm going to I'm going to not do that but I'm going to stop and say just this in order to Define

language as a system of tools with flexibility to operate in an evolving context which we're all doing all the time then it's concepts of process under determinism change growth those are the central underpinnings to explanation of not just what language is about but what language is and that's what we call Dynamic syntax thanks very much well yeah spot on thank you very much thank you yes

flaws for that too thank you and I'll now turn to Hillary Lawson with the same question Hillary so the question again is is the puzzle of language and its relation to the world fundamentally unsolvable thank you well I think if by a solution we mean that we might provide a map of how language relates to the world I think the answer is no I don't think

it's possible to provide a map of how language relates to the world and for a very straightforward reason a reason that Wittgenstein identified right at the outset of the linguistic term which is that and it's relatively easily expressed really it's that uh you can't escape the language in order to describe how it relates to something which is outside of language after all another way of putting

it would be to say the words language and the world are words in language aren't they the word the world hasn't escaped from language it it it it it doesn't somehow get at the world it's a word in language so you can't from within language say what the relationship is between language and something outside of it because any account you give is going to be in

the context of language so he concluded we just can't say anything about that relationship now I think one way of thinking about what's going on here is that to ask what is the relationship between language in the world is a bit like asking what's the relationship between cabbages and bicycles well the best answer is there isn't a relationship rather than to try and provide one which

is uh exceptionally tricky because there isn't one in the first place and it seems to me that there isn't a relationship between language and the world in the sense that language is not describing the world I agreed with much of things that Ruth was saying but I would actually go a bit further I don't think that language is approximating to reality I think it's got nothing

to do with it and um the challenge for contemporary philosophy is not to describe the relationship between language and the world but to count for how it is that even though language doesn't have anything to do with reality or or let's stick to the word world actually it doesn't have anything to do to do with the world that nevertheless it is so powerful and it's able

to seemingly describe things so precisely and that we can share it to talk to or to talk about what seems to be a shared reality and that seems to me to be the central puzzle it's one I've spent a lot of time thinking about and in in an instantaneous sort of indication of the sort of answer that I'm going to offer to you that I would

say instead of thinking of language as describing the world think of language as holding the world as something and by holding the world as something we intervene on the basis of holding it like that and we can refine that way of holding the world based on how it seems from when in that model within that theoretical framework and we can refine it ever more accurately but

it never gets to be like stuff out there because it can never reach out there it's a different sort of stuff and um but nevertheless it can be immensely uh powerful and so think of language as a metaphor by which we can achieve all sorts of extraordinary things but not as describing how things are in some ultimate sense thanks very much Hillary thank you [Applause] and

so now I'll pose the same question to rfomed is the puzzle of language and its relation to the world fundamentally unsolvable thank you thank you thank you so much um I think my comments will largely be agreeing with with some of the things that Ruth kempson has has said um I think I'll actually say three things so first of all I'll say I'll make a comment

on what Hillary just said uh and then I'll say something about a couple of misconceptions that I think can exist about this about this problem but first of all my answer is no it's not insoluble it is it is soluble um one thing I would say is that I think there might be they might be mistaken thinking that somehow the fact that like the fact that

we're talking about language means that we can't actually describe it fully in language as though you can't use language to talk about itself it's true that Wittgenstein sometimes seems to have had ideas like that in his early work but it's not obvious why any of that should be true I mean after all you can write about handwriting in handwriting you could say something about the English

language in English and it's not clear there's anything you can't say about it in English that you could say in another language so it's not obvious why this sort of reflexivity um uh eye-catching as it is raises any insoluble problems for the project of understanding language either scientifically or in a more sort of philosophical way if there's a difference the other two things I want to

say first of all I guess is that we should be skeptical that there is a single problem which is about the relationship between one thing called language and another thing called the world Vikings fan himself wrote not in his earlier work but in his later work um he emphasized the fact that languages like games come in a very large variety of things there may be no

one thing in common but in all the different linguistic all the different behavioral phenomena that we call language so if you just think in the in the case of words if you think about words were used to describe people's mental States words like conditionals or pronouns or words describing causation all the words for relations all the variety of words that we have in our language there's

no particular reason to think that they should all function in the same way or that we can say anything very useful in general about how all of them work similarly you might there's no one relationship between language in the world but rather there are many different relationships between this bit of language and this bit of the world and that bit of language and that bit of

the world and we can say how these words are used this picks up on one of the things that Ruth kempson emphasized um in a piecemeal way which is nonetheless scientific the third thing I want to say I guess is just to emphasize that of course languages is like anything because it's not magic it's not some sort of metaphysical achievement it's a natural phenomenon and it

grew out of natural phenomena their animals have some things like languages so animals have various cries that have evolved into language we can see why language would exist simply the from the fact that we need to be able to signal to each other in various situations and some philosophers like David Lewis and others have seen languages arise from the sort of Game Theory type situations where

you're trying to signal to someone else about something in a state of ignorance of the other person's in a state of Icarus they can explain a great deal about how language works and what it illustrates more importantly is that language just like everything else in the world is a part of Nature and should be studied as a part of Nature and not as some additional metaphysical

achievement uh that somehow achieves some kind of magic that we're incapable of understanding thank you thanks very much Harris thank you thank you to watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas