There are two extreme ways by which to understand the relation of language to reality. One is to think of language as a representation of reality and in that case, as Bertram Russell put it, a well formed, which means grammatical, proposition is always either true or false because it cannot but be an assertion about reality. That allows for a lot of badly formed propositions, those to be regarded as not much more than nonsense, of no use to the speakers. A professor of mine, a pragmatist, took this view, when he held that what most literary critics were doing when they talked about symbols or what sociologists were doing when they spoke about norms, was just mumbo-jumbo, sounds without meaning, because they could not give clear definitions of their basic terms. Most exercises in language should simply be dismissed as nonsense, however sincere the speakers. It should be remembered that even Aristotle, who supposed that most argument was rhetorical in that it was aimed at winning over people to a leader by persuading them in ways that would appeal to them, still imagined that those forms of persuasion were made up mostly of deformed or short circuited logic, a leap of inference required to get from one place to another. Even tyrants sounded somewhat logical.
The other extreme position is to say that language speaks the language of myth and imagery, and so is an insight into the nature of the world, even if those insights (whatever that term might mean) are not easily reduced ito definitions or propositions. This was the view of Ernst Cassirer, who therefore recognized that anthropology was a key discipline for understanding the world. Such a view can also be credited to Immanuel Kant, the supposed apostle of pure reason, and the philosopher who most inspired Cassirer. Kant, after all, treated judgment in the arts as following its own “logic” because its objectives were different than the establishment of absolute truth. More generally, Kant thought that to understand the world as more than a kalidescope of impressions, it was necessary to organize perception through the use of concepts that themselves had only transcendental existence. The empirical world did not speak for itself, which would mean organize itself into patterns which the observer would find self-evident. This view that language was rich and allusive is also the view of Frederich Nietzsche, who spoke in metaphors and images because language was simply one way, or an “art”, for apprehending the human condition, drama and art providing their own structures for apprehending it.
There is a third position which I would like to explore. That is the view that language is incredibly flexible, filled with ways of holding conflicting propositions in balance through the use of such devices as “though” or “but” and qualifying its assertions, as in “somewhat”, or my favorite, “not necessarily” which means “may or may not be true” or through the invocation of adages that describe the reasoning process, such as “the exception proves the rule”. Language is very rich in ways to navigate between half and full truths and all levels of falsehood. People can be sincere even if they tell untruths and so are not liars. People can suspect or have reason to believe and so are thought of as visionaries or ideologues. Living with language is very complicated.
I want to exemplify this sense that the complexities of language itself makes language something less than an accurate reflection of reality by turning to a passage of recent journalism and looking at it closely. My purpose is not to make fun of the journalist, just to note how he makes use of the possibilities of language so as to cover up the discrepancies of his argument not because he is faking it but because he thinks that his utilization of the resources of language does indeed make his argument plausible. Here is a paragraph from a workmanlike essay by Jonathan Stevenson entitled “Hatred on the March” which reviewed the history of recent right wing white nationalist terrorism and appeared in the November 21, 2019 issue of “The New York Review of Books”:
More troubling still, the transnational cross-fertilization of right-wing terrorism suggests that a networked global threat, structurally akin to the jihadist one, may be emerging. Ukraine appears to be a hub. Two American GIs who deserted and have been indicted for murder apparently met while fighting for a far-right Ukranian group called the Right Sector. One of them had mentored Jarrett William Smith, a soldier based at Fort Riley who was arrested in September. Smith had told undercover FBI agents of his plans to attack CNN, suggested that Beto O’Rourke would be a good target for assassination, and planned to travel to Ukraine to join an elite white supremicist element of the Ukraine military that actively recruits Western fighters.
Now this is clearly an attempt to give a straightforward account of the facts of the matter and was selected because it carries with it no ideological baggage. But consider its language stratagems. By opening the paragraph with “More troubling still”, the author is saying that what will now be suggested is worse than what has come before, which includes nothing less than… That is very weighty, and one wonders by what measure the author can asssert that it is worse rather than different or of a piece with the other charges he has brought. Is it worse to be a world wide conspiracy than it is to be merely a home grown one? It is more general but not therefore more pernicious or dangerous. Moreover, the link between white supremacy as an international movement and Islamist movements is “structurally akin”, which might, in the author’s mind, mean secretive and well organized, suggesting something very fertive, when the plain meaning of “structurally akin” is very general, and so could refer to the fact that it has a leadershp and an ideology, which are characteristic of any number of movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, which is generally held to be worthy of praise. “Ukraine appears to be the hub” provides little information because any number of other places might also be hubs: Moscow, for example, or Alabama, and the assertion is further weakened by saying that it only appears to be the case rather than a settled fact. The author then goes on to a usual gambit in argument, which is to provide a single example as if that proves the case. Moreover, the informant simply claimed he was going to the Ukraine to join fellow white supremicists, an easy claim that might well have been spurred on by a desire to display bravado and a measure of self-importance in the face of his inquisitors.
All of these caveats may seem nothing more than that in the face of the fact that most argument boils down to the invocation of such flimsy reasoning, and so leaves uncontested the gravamen of the author’s charge, which is that there is a perhaps world wide white supremacy movement. Well, maybe so. I am not saying otherwise. But the whole point of Stevenson’s essay is to demonstrate that the conspiracy exists, not that it might exist, or that the author is just stating his opinion that it does exist. So expository writing, in this case, does not go beyond assertion, however tempting to see the images of two plotters at Fort Riley as the entrance point to something larger, the real burden of the article to cultivate that image rather than to prove a proposition, as if it were possible to prove this sort of proposition rather than simply point out some facts and tie them together through the resources of language. Not that we don’t do that all the time, and that is just my point: we depend on the resources of language to make something plausible and, for the most part, settle for that as all the proof that is necessary.
There is a contemporary relevance to these observations about language. The nation is involved in a Presidential impeachment inquiry is which so many of the tools of language are being deployed to make the case for one side or the other. The President’s allies say that there was no quid quo pro in the telephone call between Trump and Zelensky because that particular phrase was not used, as if the offer of that transaction did not exist unless that precise phrase was used, thereby confusing the exemplification of a concept with its title, which is what we regularly do when we say “I love you” to mean whatever that person means by “love” and trust it will be taken to mean what the recipient of the phrase wants it to mean, should that be able to be specified.
Actually, I have come up with a defense for the President that neither he nor his supporters have made use of, perhaps because they are not really all that clever. Trump could announce that he had, yes, tried to go around the State Department and trust instead to Rudy Guiliani and political appointments, which he is allowed to do because he is President, and that he had, yes, sought a quid pro quo but that it was not to further his own private goals but the national interest. It was very important to get at the deepset corruption of the person most likely to be his rival in the 2020 election because it was necessary to rid the electoral scene of such a viper. So he took the risk of having his phone call misinterpreted and did so for the national good and now he is being punished for his act of selfless patriotism. Now, language allows for substituting one motive for another because motives are always attributions attached to behavior and so language is not prejudiced about whether one loves or hates someone, the one turning into the other and setting off a different story. But it should be remembered that Spinoza thought there were limitations on how one emotion is transformed into another. There had to be similar or allied characteristics to bear up the transition from one emotion to its nearly related relative (which also includes an opposite, as when love, so some people think, is more easily turned to hate than merely amiability without deep passion. You can’t just assert anything you care to, such as that the President’s motives were different from what he clearly indicated they were. It isn’t only in his psychology that Spinoza challenges the notion that anything goes. Spinoza’s philosophy of language was a follower (or progenitor) of the first of the two theories of language mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Deep down, the only things worth saying are those that mean something, and it is very difficult to craft those. The rest is noise.