Language: Two Himalayan Mistakes

Seated Woman by Richard Diebenkorn

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

We take a lot on trust. Too much of it, mistakenly. We even have a name for it: ex verecundiam.  With this in mind, there are two things at the heart of our language, which we have mistakenly taken on trust. The first is how to circumscribe the meaning of a word, the second is how to qualify that meaning. These are not merely issues of semantics. They have profound implications for our understanding of the world. 

There was a time, not too long ago, when we had no dictionaries. In fact, it was not too long ago that we had no printing presses on which to print them. Then, when dictionaries arrived, we decided that words had definitions, and that, where applicable, each of these definitions held the fewest possible semantic features. A woman, for instance, was an ‘adult human female’, no less, and certainly no more – three features in all. While this may be too simple a description of the matter, the meaning will be clear.

We may never know who first gave us permission to do this, or on whose authority it was decided. It may go back to Aristotle. But at some time in our history, two options lay before us. One was to reduce the meaning of a word to the fewest possible semantic features. The other was to include in it every possible semantic feature. We know now what the decision was. We chose artificially and arbitrarily to radically reduce what words are.

We canvassed the literature. We canvassed the people. All had their own vast ideas and experiences about a word. Then we sought the word's pure essence, its abstract core – like the definition of the woman, an ‘adult human female’. This, however, introduced one of the biggest problems of semantics. We needed now to separate semantic features which mattered from those which did not. The artificiality and uncertainty of this dividing line – that is, between denotation and connotation – has filled many books.

Worse than this. It is easy to prove that we took the wrong option at the start.  We are in a position to demonstrate that, when we refer to a word, we refer to its maximal semantic content, not minimal. Some simple experiments prove the point. Take the sentences, ‘I entered the house. The karma was bad,’ or, ‘The car hit a ditch. The axle broke.’ What now does ‘the karma’ or ‘the axle’ refer to? It refers to the maximal content of a word. This is how, intuitively, innately, we deal with words.

Our second big mistake, which follows on from the first, was the notion of subject and predicate. We call these the ‘principal syntactic elements’ of language. They were at the forefront of Kant's philosophy. Today, the universally accepted view is that the predicate completes an idea about the subject. Take as an example the sentence, ‘’The woman (subject) dances (predicate),’ or, ‘The penny (subject) drops (predicate).’

Again, ‘the woman’ is taken as the bare-bones concept, ‘adult human female’. Add to this the predicate – the fact that the woman dances – and we expand on the concept of a woman. We already know that a woman dances, of course. We know, too, that she laughs, sleeps, eats, and a great deal more. Similarly, we define ‘the penny’ as a ‘British bronze coin’. Add to this that it can drop, and we have expanded on the concept of a penny. Of course, we know well that it clinks, shines, even melts, and much more besides.

Yet, what if the predicate serves not to expand upon the subject, but to narrow it down? In fact, if words contain every possible semantic feature, so too must subjects. A predicate takes a ‘maximal’ subject, then – the near infinite possibilities contained in ‘the woman’, or ‘the penny’ – and channels them, so to speak. ‘The woman (who can be anything) dances.’ ‘The penny (which offers a multitude of possibilities) drops.’  Predicates, then, are ‘clarifiers’, as it were. They take a thing, and narrow it down and sharpen its contours.

The application to philosophy is simple.  We discard a word’s many possibilities – those of a woman, a penny, a house, a car – in the interests of the arbitrary notion that they represent minimal meanings – so reducing them to the smallest number of semantic features people use, and throwing the rest away.

Day after day, we do this, through force of centuries of habit. With this, we instantly discard (almost) all the possibilities of a word. We meet situations without being open to their possibilities, but cobble a few predicates to bare-bones subjects, and so lose our good sense. Nuclear power is the generation of electricity, a ship is something that floats, a Führer is someone who governs. The words, being stripped of their maximal meanings, do not contain – perhaps most importantly – the possibility of evil. This greatly assists prejudice, bigotry, partiality, and discrimination.

When words are reduced to their minimal features – when we base their meaning on their denotative core – we ‘crop’ them, truncate them, reduce them, and above all, cut away from them a great many meanings which they hold, and so reduce our awareness of the world, and cosmos.  Due in no small part to the way we imagine our language to be – minimal words and minimal subjects – we have entered habits of thinking which are simplistic, reductionistic, technical – and dangerous.

But to understand words in terms of maximal meanings is to reject the reductionism of our present time, and to think expansively, creatively, intuitively, holistically.