Essay Thirteen Part Three -- 'Mind', Language And 'Cognition'
Readers should make note of the fact that this Essay does not represent my final views on any of the issues raised. It is merely 'work in progress'.
This Essay seeks to challenge a well established and dominant set of ideas about 'mind', language and 'cognition' widely held by philosophers, cognitive theorists, revolutionaries and other assorted Marxists. Many of the conclusions drawn here depend on much that has gone before at this site (particularly in Essay Twelve Part One and several other as yet unpublished Essays).
Moreover, this Essay is far from complete; as I noted on the opening page of this site:
I am only publishing this material on the Internet because several comrades whose opinions I respect urged me to do so, even though the work you see before you is less than half complete. Many of my ideas are still in the formative stage and need considerable attention and time devoted to them to mature.
I estimate this project will take another ten years to complete before it is fit to publish either here in its final form or in a hard copy.
At a later date, I will be returning to this Essay to add material on Vygotsky and Chomsky, as well as a handful others on the left who have written on this topic.
Even in its incomplete state, the reader will find that this Essay challenges many widely held views that have in one form or another dominated 'western' thought since Ancient Greek times, including the ideas of the vast majority of Dialectical Marxists.
Nevertheless, this is not meant to be an academic study, merely an intervention in revolutionary theory. In that case, unnecessary technicalities have been omitted. For those who want more details, I have listed books and articles in the End Notes that further elaborate on or defend the line adopted here. The reader must not, however, assume that I agree with everything contained in these referenced works.
Throughout most of this Essay I have blurred the distinction we should normally want to draw between the meaning of a word and the sense of a proposition. A more pedantic deployment of this distinction would not alter the conclusions reached in the main body of this Essay, it would merely stretch further the patience of the reader. [I list, however, several different meanings of "meaning" here, and outline the rationale behind the distinction between meaning and sense, here.]
Finally, I begin this Essay briefly reviewing the results of Essay Twelve. In that case, any who find what I say at the start controversial should consult that Essay. [Part One has already been published; the unpublished material is summarised here.]
This Essay is over 143,000 words long; a précis of its main ideas will be posted at this site at a later date.
Quick Links
Anyone using these links must remember that they will be skipping past supporting argument and evidence set out in earlier sections. [If your Firewall has a pop-up blocker, you will need to press the "Ctrl" key at the same time or these and the other links here won't work!]
(a) Representation Versus Communication
(2) Wittgenstein And Revolutionaries
(d) Philosophy Goes To The Dogs
(3) Voloshinov And His Popularisers
(a) Occasionalism And Contextualism
(b) Word Meaning Versus Speakers' Meaning
(c) Coughs And Sneezes Spread Confusion
(e) The Meaning Of Words Versus The Sense Of Propositions
(i) Understanding And Translation
(3) Private Property In The Means Of Language Production
(a) Orienteering
(b) No Translation Without Representation
(e) Murder On The Orienteering Express
(f) The Material Roots Of Thought
(4) "Inner Speech" And Psychosis
(a) Evidence -- Or Supposition?
(b) An Interface Between Thought And Language?
(d) Mind The Gap
(f) Freud And Fraud
(g) Public Meaning -- Private Muttering
(h) One Conversation Does Not A Theory Make
(k) Are Written Words Different?
(5) Science Fiction
(b) The 'Lamarckian' Origin Of Speech
(c) Harming Marxism
(6) Language: Social Or Genetic?
(a) The Retreat Of The Radials
(b) The 'Pentecostal' Origin Of Speech
(c) Harman's Theory
(d) Proto-Language -- Invention Or Inheritance?
(e) Meme Dreams
(g) DM And Dialectical Miracles
(7) "Critical Realism" In Crisis
(a) Basket Case?
(b) An Unbalanced Account Of Causation
(f) 'Mental Causation' -- Or Care In The Community?
(g) The Humiliation Of Metaphysical Realism
(a) 'Going Native'
(9) Notes
(10) References
Abbreviations Used At This Site
In this Essay, I will be discussing in more detail theories of language, 'consciousness', and 'cognition' held by dialecticians. To that end, I will be concentrating particularly on the work of Voloshinov and Vygotsky, but I will also be considering others on the left who have written on these topics. In addition, I shall briefly examine the generally unfavourable reception Wittgenstein's work has enjoyed among revolutionaries. [This augments what I have already written here.]
It is worth pointing out at the beginning what I will not be considering: important as they are, I won't be addressing such issues as the relation between language and power or that between gender and language; nor will I be covering regional dialects, the standardisation of language, or racist and other examples of ideologically-compromised discourse. This is not because I do not think these are important but because several of them will be tackled in Essay Twelve (when it is finally published), and even then, those that I won't be discussing have already been adequately addressed in books and articles written by comrades (and others). Since I do not disagree with many of the substantive points they make, comment would be superfluous in an Essay that is already overly long.
Representation Versus Communication
It was established in Essay Twelve Part Seven (not yet published) that a particular view of language has dominated 'Western' (and, indeed, 'Eastern') thought for over two thousand years. This approach sees the primary role of discourse (in fact, in many cases, its only role) as representational, and thus solely as a vehicle for thought. In fact, if discourse was ever seen as a means of communication, it was often regarded as a means by which speakers could communicate to others thoughts already arrived at independently of and prior to social interaction and/or their linguistic expression.
In fact, language was originally considered (by priests, theologians and philosophers) to be a gift of the 'gods', and thus a means whereby the latter could re-present their 'thoughts' to the 'chosen few' --, or, alternatively, 'the chosen' few could think 'divine thoughts' for ourselves.
As Umberto Eco points out (in relation to the 'western' Christian tradition):
"God spoke before all things, and said, 'Let there be light.' In this way, he created both heaven and earth; for with the utterance of the divine word, 'there was light'.... Thus Creation itself arose through an act of speech; it is only by giving things their names that he created them and gave them their ontological status....
"In Genesis..., the Lord speaks to man for the first time.... We are not told in what language God spoke to Adam. Tradition has pictured it as a sort of language of interior illumination, in which God...expresses himself....
"...Clearly we are here in the presence of a motif, common to other religions and mythologies -- that of the nomothete, the name-giver, the creator of language." [Eco (1997), pp.7-8. Bold emphasis added.]
Language and thought were thus vehicles for the 'inner illumination' of the 'soul'; a hot-line to 'God'. Unsurprisingly then, the thoughts produced by countless generations of ruling-class ideologues invariably turned out to be those that rationalised or 'justified' the status quo.
These ancient myths also suggested to such indolent thinkers that not only were the heavens called into being by means of language, but language ran the entire show. But, this was not just any old language, and it certainly wasn't the vernacular; it was a specialised language full of newly crafted terminology (jargon) -- concocted by theorists to re-present the 'divine' order to humanity.
Later, in the work of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, for example, language became an important vehicle for the 'soul' to converse with itself (via "inner speech"), which prompted these and subsequent philosophers to imagine they could access divine/eternal verities directly from thought alone.1 As noted above, 'languageless thought' was regarded as a means whereby the souls of the select few could draw close to 'Being'/'God' -- which idea in fact lay behind the 'problematic' of the relation between the 'Knower' and the 'Known', later to re-surface in German Idealism (and then later still in 'Materialist Dialectics') as a key component in the alleged relationship between 'Thought' and 'Being'.1a
In the work of more modern and increasingly secular theorists, the mind became an inner arena, wherein the bourgeois 'Mind'/'Soul', acting now as a social atom, could not only represent to itself 'divine verities', but also the 'information' the senses sent its way -- in many cases with the former shaping the latter. In general, this family of theories held that such 'information' was processed by means of one or more of the following: (1) A set of 'innate' principles, (2) Privately applied rules or habits of mind, (3) A collection of (arbitrarily chosen) 'categories' and/or 'concepts', supposedly either granted to us by 'god' or necessitated by our psychological, 'logical', or more recently, genetic make-up. [These were discussed in more detail in Essay Three Part Two.]
On this view, language was primarily regarded as mean by which the inner microcosm could be put in the right intellectual order so that it was capable of mirroring the outer macrocosm. Only then was language seen as a means of communication. And even then language merely served to give expression to private 'acts of intellection/meaning'. 'Social meaning' was constructed out of atomised units such as these, cobbled-together inside each individual, bourgeois skull. The social was thus an expression of the individual, not the other way round.
For both Rationalist and Empiricist philosophers, in the end, truth was to be attained by examining the contents of our minds -- the difference between these two traditions now revolved around stories their respective ideologues told in order to turn this subjective world into an 'objective' account of reality -- which, naturally, they now found hard to prove existed!1b
Give or take a few complications, this is largely how things remain to this day. The dualism of Mind/World, coupled with Representationalist theories of knowledge and cognition have kept 'western' thought permanently teetering on the edge of Idealism and Scepticism for more than two millennia. And this predicament is not likely to alter this side of massive social change.
[The rationale for saying this is detailed in Essay Three Part Two.]
So, outside the Marxist tradition, and almost as an after-thought, language was seen secondarily as a means of communication --, but this was only so that the private thoughts of each Social Atom could be shared with other such Atoms.1c
This dominant paradigm pictures each 'mind' as representing the world to itself first -- perhaps constructing a private language in order to do so -- using "the light of reason", an inner "language of thought", or activating a "transformational grammar" (now "unbounded Merge") and a "Language Acquisition Device", before it is able to convey its thoughts to other 'minds' in like predicament. Indeed, only because of such inner goings on could human beings be said to have any thoughts at all to convey. 'Thought', on this view, is not therefore a social phenomenon, but a private, hidden, and essentially individual process.1d
And that is why we find in most forms of modern Cognitive Theory the 'mind' is pictured as a set of departments, or processors, juggling with various 'representations' -- the work hived-off to various 'modules', now seen as specialised mental subcontractors, the bourgeois social division of labour revealingly mirrored in the operation of our mental economy --, with each whole person thus reduced to the deskilled sum of these fragmented parts.2
The view of the 'world' this approach attributes to each one of us is perhaps no longer that which was intended by the 'gods', it is that which is supposedly contrived by our genes. As if to cap it all of late, 'Evolutionary Psychology' (henceforth, EP -- now the dominant intellectual force in this area) projects the bourgeois individual we are all supposed to carry around in our heads back tens of thousands of years, informing us that selfishness, individualism, male dominance, the instinct to "truck and barter", and more besides, are all hard-wired in our brains -- to such an extent that we would be foolish even to try to fight any or all of them.
Once more, we see the status quo under-written by a new set of ruling ideas, this time dressed up in the language of evolutionary theory, and Cognitive Science.
Each and everyone of us is thus pictured as a perfectly selfish, social atom before we even begin to speak.
The bourgeois individual is indeed alive and well, and living in a skull near you!
Worse still, this particular set of ruling ideas seeks to rule all our other ideas --, it even overshadows and dominates the doctrines invented by erstwhile revolutionaries, as we will see.
Of course, (as we saw in Essay Three Part Two) the problem here is that if correct, each version of these remarkably general theories would be trapped in the private world of its inventor, with no legitimate avenue of escape. Since no two theorists (or indeed human beings) can possibly share the same ideas, communication on this view would be impossible2a -- unless, of course, an overt or covert appeal were now made to factors that depend on the only other view of language and thought there is (i.e., the Marxist view of social nature of both), in order to save the bourgeois bacon.
Naturally, such a retreat would only serve to undermine further the already insecure rationale that exists for adopting representationalism in the first place.
The end result of all this is that Marx and Engels's insight that language is the product of collective labour and communal life -- so that its primary role lies in communication -- has never seriously been considered, let alone adopted, even by those who claim to be Marxists!
[Unfortunately, we saw this was true of Marxists in general here; we will see further confirmation as this Essay unfolds.]
To that end, the ordinary language of the working class has been distorted, denigrated and depreciated (by ruling-class thinkers from ancient times onward) as part of a class-motivated assault on the vernacular. Marx pointed this fact out, too:
"The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life." [Marx and Engels (1970), p.118. Bold emphases added.]
As Essay Twelve Part Two will show (in the meantime, see here), the reason for this is quite simple: it is in fact impossible for anyone (let alone Priests and Philosophers) to concoct metaphysical theories using the vernacular.2b Hence, the vernacular had to be declared defective and a whole new abstract vocabulary invented in its place, so that a 'hidden world' beyond 'appearances', accessible to 'thought' alone, could be conjured into existence. And, as we now know, this was prosecuted in order to provide an a priori 'justification' for class division, inequality and state power.3
Representational theories still dominate Philosophy, Psychology and Linguistics to this day, so it is not surprising to see Marx's words amply confirmed in this regard, too:
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch...." [Marx and Engels (1970), pp.64-65.]
However, this Essay is concerned mainly with the ideas of those who at least give lip-service to the idea that language is a social phenomenon which serves primarily as a means of communication. To that end, I will begin with a brief look at how certain Marxists have received the work of the single most important modern champion of the social/communal approach to language: Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein And Revolutionaries
It was acknowledged in an Additional Essay that there are serious problems facing anyone who tries to combine Marx's and Wittgenstein's ideas. Naturally, this does not mean that such a synthesis cannot be achieved, but it does mean that if this is to happen it will require a much more profound understanding of both thinkers than has hitherto been apparent.4
[TAR = The Algebra of Revolution, or Rees (1998a); DM = Dialectical Materialism.]
Having said that, there is still a high level of distrust of -- if not resistance and/or open hostility shown toward -- Wittgenstein's ideas among revolutionaries. This surfaces in TAR, for example, in the following passage:
"The social root of these [postmodernist] ideas has been identified as the new middle class in retreat from the values of the 1960s. But the narrower intellectual source of [such] views is the intellectual climate in which postmodernist notions such as the idea that '"reality" is a purely discursive phenomena, a product of various codes, conventions, language games or signifying systems…'." [Rees (1998a), p.297.]
While it is true that Rees is quoting Christopher Norris here, his reference to "language games" is (intentionally or not) clearly directed at Wittgenstein.5
Nevertheless, the puzzled reader might wonder why there is no explicit mention in TAR of arguably the 20th century's greatest philosopher, when numerous second- and third-rate thinkers receive inordinate attention. This in a book seeking to make the dialectic relevant! That would be rather like, say, writing a history of modern Physics but forgetting to mention Einstein, Dirac or Bohr.
As noted above, revolutionaries in general have displayed a consistent level of hostility toward Wittgenstein's ideas, a stance that has not always been matched by a serious attempt to come to grips with his method -- or even summarise it accurately!
For example, Cornforth [in Cornforth (1965)] openly misrepresents Wittgenstein's work solely in order to rubbish it. This is surprising since Cornforth had once been a personal friend of Wittgenstein's.
However, as is plain to anyone who bothers to check, Cornforth has confused parts of Wittgenstein's early work with that of Russell and/or Carnap, asserting that he adopted a "verificationist" stance to "elementary propositions" in the Tractatus, for example. This interpretation muddles Russell's empiricist approach to such propositions with the anti-metaphysical aim of the Tractatus. Verificationism is, however, completely foreign to the Tractatus. The simple objects of the Tractatus are not objects of possible experience, but logical objects, as Wittgenstein himself clearly indicates. [Cf., 2.01-2.0211, 2.023, 2.024-2.031, 4.1272. (These refer to numbered sections of the Tractatus.)]5a
Cornforth must have known this, which perhaps explains why he offered no evidence to substantiate his wild allegations. Little wonder, since there is none; neither the word "verification" nor any of its synonyms occurs in the Tractatus, and the entire idea is completely at odds with Wittgenstein's own stated aims.6
Cornforth's depiction of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is thus a catalogue of errors and misrepresentations from beginning to end, to such an extent that it is doubtful whether Cornforth actually read that book! Indeed, it is abundantly clear that he relied on second- or third-hand comments written by positivists (such as Moritz Schlick), among others. In fact, Cornforth only quotes the Tractatus once in his five page 'summary', and even then this reference is brief and relates only to the Preface.
Cornforth's discussion of Wittgenstein's later work is, thankfully, less unreliable. Although Cornforth manages to get a few things right, he ends up confusing the method adopted in the Philosophical Investigations with that found in Oxford 'Ordinary Language Philosophy' (henceforth, OLP), that is, with the work of Ryle, Austin, Warnock, Strawson, Urmson and Hampshire). Beyond a few superficial similarities, Wittgenstein's work bears no resemblance at all to "Oxford Philosophy". [On this, see Cavell (1971a) and Dummett (1960).]
An equally inept attempt to come to grips with Wittgenstein's work (and with OLP in general) can be found in Chapter Seven of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. [Marcuse (1968).] Marcuse failed to tell his readers that he derived many of his criticisms from Ernest Gellner's notorious Words and Things [i.e., Gellner (1959)] -- except that in note 2 page 141, he acknowledges that similar ideas appeared in Gellner's work --, but it is quite plain that he has. [Gellner's diatribe will not be examined in this Essay. On that egregious book, see Uschanov (2002); there is a lengthier version of that article, here. See also Dummett (1960).]6a0
Marcuse begins with this hackneyed criticism of OLP and Wittgenstein:
"Austin's contemptuous treatment of the alternatives to the common usage of words, and his defamation of what we 'think up in our armchairs of an afternoon'; Wittgenstein's assurance that philosophy 'leaves everything as it is' -- such statements exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism, self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labour does not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements. These affirmations of modesty and dependence seem to recapture Hume's mood of righteous contentment with the limitations of reason which, once recognized and accepted, protect man from useless mental adventures but leave him perfectly capable of orienting himself in the given environment. However, when Hume debunked substances, he fought a powerful ideology, while his successors today provide an intellectual justification for that which society has long since accomplished-namely, the defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established universe of discourse."
Added in a footnote:
"The proposition that philosophy leaves everything as it is may be true in the context of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach (where it is at the same time denied), or as self-characterization of neo-positivism, but as a general proposition on philosophic thought it is incorrect." [Marcuse (1968), pp.141-42. Quotation marks altered to conform to the conventions adopted here. Spelling corrected to conform to UK English. I have used the on-line text here, and have corrected any typographical errors I managed to spot. The same is true of the other quotations from this book used below.]
I will not try to defend John Austin in this Essay, but Marcuse clearly failed to note that Wittgenstein is here speaking of philosophy as he practiced it, not as it has traditionally been carried out. Moreover, in view of the fact that traditional Philosophy is little more than self-important hot air (on this, see Essay Twelve Part One), except negatively, it cannot change anything, anyway.
Furthermore, Wittgenstein is not advocating "conformism", as Marcuse alleges. It is no more philosophy's goal to challenge the status quo than it is the role of basket weaving to do this. Alongside Marx, Wittgenstein would have argued that the point is in fact to change the world, not build empty/non-sensical theories about it. Change is the concern of political action, science and technology, not Philosophy. Moreover, one only has to read the many conversations that took place between Wittgenstein and those he gathered around him to see that he was not a political quietist. [On that, see here.]
In fact, Marcuse, along with the vast majority of Wittgenstein's critics, misquotes him in this regard. This is what Wittgenstein actually said:
"Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. It also leaves mathematics as it is, and no mathematical discovery can advance it." [Wittgenstein (1958), §124, page 49e.]
From this it is clear that the word "everything" refers to language. This is plain from the fact that he then goes on to mention mathematics ("It also leaves mathematics as it is"), which he would not have added if "everything" were unqualified.
Now, in conformity with the traditional contempt shown by theorists toward the vernacular and the thought of ordinary workers, Marcuse argues:
"Throughout the work of the linguistic analysts, there is this familiarity with the chap on the street whose talk plays such a leading role in linguistic philosophy. The chumminess of speech is essential inasmuch as it excludes from the beginning the high-brow vocabulary of 'metaphysics;' it militates against intelligent non-conformity; it ridicules the egghead. The language of John Doe and Richard Roe is the language which the man on the street actually speaks; it is the language which expresses his behaviour; it is therefore the token of concreteness. However, it is also the token of a false concreteness. The language which provides most of the material for the analysis is a purged language, purged not only of its 'unorthodox' vocabulary, but also of the means for expressing any other contents than those furnished to the individuals by their society. The linguistic analyst finds this purged language an accomplished fact, and he takes the impoverished language as he finds it, insulating it from that which is not expressed in it although it enters the established universe of discourse as element and factor of meaning.
"Paying respect to the prevailing variety of meanings and usages, to the power and common sense of ordinary speech, while blocking (as extraneous material) analysis of what this speech says about the society that speaks it, linguistic philosophy suppresses once more what is continually suppressed in this universe of discourse and behaviour. The authority of philosophy gives its blessing to the forces which make this universe. Linguistic analysis abstracts from what ordinary language reveals in speaking as it does-the mutilation of man and nature." [Ibid., pp.142-43.]
From this, it is quite plain that Marcuse prefers the obscure and impenetrable jargon of ruling-class hacks to that of ordinary workers, and it is not hard to see why. Indeed, as was alleged above, Marcuse all but concedes here that it is impossible to derive the empty theses of traditional Philosophy if theorists confine themselves to the vernacular. [On this, see Essay Twelve Part One.] And that is why he complains that the language used by Wittgenstein and others has been "purged" of the jargon upon which traditionalists like Marcuse dote, a move that would prevent them from even attempting to practice their verbal tricks.
It is also worth pointing out that, also in line with many others, Marcuse has confused ordinary language with "common sense". As we saw here, these two are not at all the same. [On this, see also Hallett (2008), pp.91-99.] Moreover, he is wrong in what he says about "boffins" -- in fact, in all my years of studying OLP, I have yet to encounter anything that remotely suggests this reading. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Marcuse does not quote a single passage in support of this allegation.
What of this, though?
"Moreover, all too often it is not even the ordinary language which guides the analysis, but rather blown-up atoms of language, silly scraps of speech that sound like baby talk such as 'This looks to me now like a man eating poppies,' 'He saw a robin', 'I had a hat.' Wittgenstein devotes much acumen and spare to the analysis of 'My broom is in the corner.'" [Ibid., p.143.]
But, does Marcuse take Hegel or Engels to task for their use of "The rose is red", or Lenin for his employment of "John is a man"? Not a bit of it. In fact, Marcuse misses the point of using such simple language -- if we can't get this right, we stand no chance with more complex propositions. And, as we have seen (for example, here, here and here), dialecticians cannot even get "John is a man" right! Which rather makes the point, one feels.
Except, Marcuse has an answer to this:
"To take another illustration: sentences such as 'my broom is in the corner' might also occur in Hegel's Logic, but there they would be revealed as inappropriate or even false examples. They would only be rejects, to be surpassed by a discourse which, in its concepts, style, and syntax, is of a different order -- a discourse for which it is by no means 'clear that every sentence in our language "is in order as it is,"' Rather the exact opposite is the case-namely, that every sentence is as little in order as the world is which this language communicates." [Ibid., p.144.]
But, if that were indeed so, then the ordinary words Marcuse himself uses are not "in order", either, and we cannot take what he says at face value. [But is there any other, deeper significance to his words?] We have already seen that attempts to argue that ordinary language is in some way (or in any way) defective back-fire on those making such rash allegations. And now we witness the same here, for if Marcuse's words are not "in order", what can they possibly mean? As Marcuse notes on the same page:
"Thus the analysis does not terminate in the universe of ordinary discourse, it goes beyond it and opens a qualitatively different universe, the terms of which may even contradict the ordinary one." [Ibid., p.144.]
Except that here the tables are turned on Marcuse, for if we analyse his words we can see that if he is correct, then his words in fact say the opposite of what he intended: if they are in the "right order", we can understand him after all. And yet, as soon as we understand what he is telling us, we immediately see that his words too are not in the "right order" (for he tells us that none are!), and thus they make no sense. [Yet another ironic dialectical inversion here, one feels.]
And then we encounter this hackney, traditionalists' lament; Marcuse (quoting Wittgenstein):
"The almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common is made into a program: 'if the words "language", "experience", "world", have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words "table", "lamp", door."' We must 'stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties...' -- as if this were the only alternative, and as if the 'extreme subtleties' were not the suitable term for Wittgenstein's language games rather than for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Thinking (or at least its expression) is not only pressed into the straitjacket of common usage, but also enjoined not to ask and seek solutions beyond those that are already there. 'The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.'
"The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the given state of affairs, distrusts the possibility of a new experience. Subjection to the rule of the established fact is total -- only linguistic facts, to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey. The prohibitions are severe and authoritarian: 'Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language.' 'And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.'
"One might ask what remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking, intelligence, without anything hypothetical, without any explanation? However, what is at stake is not the definition or the dignity of philosophy. It is rather the chance of preserving and protecting the fight, the need to think and speak in terms other than those of common usage -- terms which are meaningful, rational, and valid precisely because they are other terms. What is involved is the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is happening (and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is happening (and meant)." [Ibid., pp.144-45.]
Marcuse has worked himself up into a right old lather here, all the while missing the point. Wittgenstein was speaking here of his new approach to philosophy, which, if correct, would mean that traditional forms-of-thought, beloved of characters like Marcuse, are little other than "houses of cards". Wittgenstein is certainly not arguing against "anything hypothetical", or against "explanation" in other areas of theory (for example, in science -- indeed, in this area, he developed a novel account of what it is to reason hypothetically). Once more, in his haste to malign Wittgenstein, Marcuse has simply punched empty space.
And, far from this being true:
"It is rather the chance of preserving and protecting the fight, the need to think and speak in terms other than those of common usage -- terms which are meaningful, rational, and valid precisely because they are other terms. What is involved is the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is happening (and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is happening (and meant)" [Ibid.]
the opposite is in fact the case. The obscure terminology found in traditional thought, and particularly the impenetrable jargon Hegel inflicted on humanity, actually prevents us understanding the world. As I pointed out in Essay Twelve Part One, the influence of traditional Philosophy must be destroyed in order to facilitate the advance of scientific knowledge in general, and Marxism in particular. [Here, I am very loosely paraphrasing Kant.]
Marcuse's failure to get the point is further underlined by this blindingly irrelevant comment:
"To begin with, an irreducible difference exists between the universe of everyday thinking and language on the one side, and that of philosophic thinking and language on the other. In normal circumstances, ordinary language is indeed behavioural -- a practical instrument. When somebody actually says 'My broom is in the corner,' he probably intends that somebody else who had actually asked about the broom is going to take it or leave it there, is going to be satisfied, or angry. In any case, the sentence has fulfilled its function by causing a behavioural reaction: 'the effect devours the cause; the end absorbs the means.'" [Ibid., pp.145-46.]
Marcuse clearly did not know, perhaps because of his characteristically sloppy research, that when Wittgenstein used the sentence "My broom is in the corner" [Wittgenstein (1958), §60, p.29e.] he was in fact criticising a view he had adopted in the Tractatus -- about (1) the nature of logically simple names, (2) the idea that a fact is a complex, and (3) that analysis can reveal hidden logical form, etc. [Wittgenstein (1972), 2-3.263, pp.7-25, and 5.5423, p.111; on the background to this, see White (1974, 2006). On the Investigations §37-61 (the relevant sections), see Baker and Hacker (2005b), pp.112-42, Hallett (1977), pp.112-39, Hallett (2008), pp.33-41]. Wittgenstein is here advancing a profound criticism of his earlier way of seeing things, and whether or not one agrees with Wittgenstein (before or after his change of mind -- or even at all!), the issues he raises are not of the everyday "behavioural" sort that Marcuse seems to think; they concern the logical nature of propositions and how they can represent the world (that is, if they can). [These issues are considered in more detail in Essay Twelve Part One, and in subsequent Parts of that Essay.]
And there is more:
"In contrast, if, in a philosophic text or discourse, the ward 'substance,' 'idea,' 'man,' 'alienation' becomes the subject of a proposition, no such transformation of meaning into a behavioural reaction takes place or is intended to take place. The word remains, as it were, unfulfilled -- except in thought, where it may give rise to other thoughts. And through a long series of mediations within a historical continuum, the proposition may help to form and guide a practice. But the proposition remains unfulfilled even then -- only the hubris of absolute idealism asserts the thesis of a final identity between thought and its object. The words with which philosophy is concerned can therefore never have a use 'as humble ... as that of the words "table", "lamp", "door"'.
"Thus, exactness and clarity in philosophy cannot be attained within the universe of ordinary discourse. The philosophic concepts aim at a dimension of fact and meaning which elucidates the atomized phrases or words of ordinary discourse 'from without' by showing this 'without' as essential to the understanding of ordinary discourse. Or, if the universe of ordinary discourse itself becomes the object of philosophic analysis, the language of philosophy becomes a 'meta-language.' Even where it moves in the humble terms of ordinary discourse, it remains antagonistic. It dissolves the established experiential context of meaning into that of its reality; it abstracts from the immediate concreteness in order to attain true concreteness." [Ibid., p.146.]
Once more, as we have seen, it is in fact the use of the obscure jargon found in traditional Philosophy that undermines clarity of thought. In which case, it is no surprise to discover that, far from constituting a "guide" to practice, dialectics has been refuted by it. [On this, see Essay Ten Part One.]
Moreover, as far as 'abstraction' is concerned, Marcuse just helps himself to this word without any attempt to explain the obscure process that is alleged to lie behind it, or show how it is even possible to 'abstract' anything at all. [On this, see Essay Three Parts One and Two.]
"Ordinary language in its 'humble use' may indeed be of vital concern to critical philosophic thought, but in the medium of this thought words lose their plain humility and reveal that 'hidden' something which is of no interest to Wittgenstein. Consider the analysis of the 'here' and 'now' in Hegel's Phenomenology, or...Lenin's suggestion on how to analyze adequately 'this glass of water' on the table. Such an analysis uncovers the history in every-day speech as a hidden dimension of meaning -- the rule of society over its language. And this discovery shatters the natural and reified form in which the given universe of discourse first appeals. The words reveal themselves as genuine terms not only in a grammatical and formal-logical but also material sense; namely, as the limits which define the meaning and its development -- the terms which society imposes on discourse, and on behaviour. This historical dimension of meaning can no longer be elucidated by examples such as 'my broom is in the corner' or 'there is cheese on the table.' To be sure, such statements can reveal many ambiguities, puzzles, oddities, but they are an in the same re language games and academic boredom." [Ibid., pp.147-48.]
As we will see in Essay Twelve, Hegel's crass analysis of the spatial and temporal indexicals (i.e., "here" and "now") isn't a reassuring advertisement for the 'superiority' of DL, after all. And we have already seen what a mess Lenin got himself into with his 'analysis' of glass tumblers. In which case, the alleged banalities of ordinary language are much to be preferred over the irredeemable confusion that has for two centuries flowed out of Hegel's Hermetic House of Horrors, clogging the minds of far too many comrades. Indeed, science has about as much to learn from this backwater of Neo-Platonic mysticism as it has from dowsing or crystal gazing.
It is also revealing that Marcuse shows an unhealthy interest in what is "hidden", since we have already seen that this is a cornerstone of ruling-class ideology: that there is a "hidden" world behind "appearances", which is accessible to thought alone. Here, Marcuse reveals that even though he pretends to be a radical, he is nonetheless a philosophical conservative, happy to ape the thought forms of the last two-and-a-half thousand years of boss-class theory. [On that, see these comments in Essay Two.]
It would be tedious indeed to detail the many other confusions and errors that this chapter of One Dimensional Man alone contains, so I will end with just two more examples (one taken from the next chapter, and one from earlier in the book):
"The 'whole' that here comes to view must be cleared from all misunderstanding in terms of an independent entity, of a 'Gestalt,' and the like. The concept somehow expresses the difference and tension between potentiality and actuality -- identity in this difference. It appears in the relation between the qualities (white, hard; but also beautiful, free, just) and the corresponding concepts (whiteness, hardness, beauty, freedom, justice). The abstract character of the latter seems to designate the more concrete qualities as part-realizations, aspects, manifestations of a more universal and more 'excellent' quality, which is experienced in the concrete.
"And by virtue of this relation, the concrete quality seems to represent a negation as well as realization of the universal. Snow is white but not 'whiteness;' a girl may be beautiful, even a beauty, but not 'beauty;' a country may be free (in comparison with others) because its people have certain liberties, but it is not the very embodiment of freedom. Moreover, the concepts are meaningful only in experienced contrast with their opposites: white with not white, beautiful with not beautiful. Negative statements can sometimes be translated into positive ones: 'black' or 'grey' for 'not white,' 'ugly' for 'not beautiful.'
"These formulations do not alter the relation between the abstract concept and its concrete realizations: the universal concept denotes that which the particular entity is, and is not. The translation can eliminate the hidden negation by reformulating the meaning in a non-contradictory proposition, but the untranslated statement suggests a real want. There is more in the abstract noun (beauty, freedom) than in the qualities ('beautiful,' 'free') attributed to the particular person, thing or condition. The substantive universal intends qualities which surpass all particular experience, but persist in the mind, not as a figment of imagination nor as more logical possibilities but as the 'stuff' of which our world consists. No snow is pure white, nor is any cruel beast or man an the cruelty man knows -- knows as an almost inexhaustible force in history and imagination." [Ibid., pp.168-69.]
This is in fact a faint echo of Hegel's reference to Spinoza's Greedy Principle [SGP] (so-called in Essay Eleven Part Two) -- i.e., "All determination is also negation". But this is an unreliable principle (even if sense can be made of it), not least because it confuses what we do with words with the means by which we do it. Of course, that is about as brainless as confusing, say, a holiday with the aeroplane we travel on in order get there, or a map with a trek in the hills! [The other serious weaknesses of the SGP are outlined in Essay Eight Part Three.]
Ignoring, too, the fact that Marcuse confuses concepts with words, it is not even true that:
"the concepts are meaningful only in experienced contrast with their opposites: white with not white, beautiful with not beautiful. Negative statements can sometimes be translated into positive ones: 'black' or 'grey' for 'not white,' 'ugly' for 'not beautiful.'" [Ibid.]
Colour concepts are meaningful, among other things, because of the colour octahedron [this is a link to a PDF] not because we have met in experience "not-white" (or whatever). If someone has no understanding of colour words, they can swim in "not-white" all day long for all the good it will do them.6a
But, the above errors are connected with much deeper logical issues. This brings us to the final passage from One Dimensional Man that I propose to discuss here:
"In the classical logic, the judgment which constituted the original core of dialectical thought was formalised in the propositional form, 'S is p.' But this form conceals rather than reveals the basic dialectical proposition, which states the negative character of the empirical reality. Judged in the light of their essence and idea, men and things exist as other than they are; consequently thought contradicts that which is (given), opposes its truth to that of the given reality. The truth envisaged by thought is the Idea. As such it is, in terms of the given reality, 'mere' Idea, 'mere' essence -- potentiality.
"But the essential potentiality is not like the many possibilities which are contained in the given universe of discourse and action; the essential potentiality is of a very different order. Its realisation involves subversion of the established order, for thinking in accordance with truth is the commitment to exist in accordance with truth. (In Plato, the extreme concepts which illustrate this subversion are: death as the beginning of the philosopher's life, and the violent liberation from the Cave.) Thus, the subversive character of truth inflicts upon thought an imperative quality. Logic centres on judgments which are, as demonstrative propositions, imperatives, -- the predicative 'is' implies an 'ought'.
"This contradictory, two-dimensional style of thought is the inner form not only of dialectical logic but of all philosophy which comes to grips with reality. The propositions which define reality affirm as true something that is not (immediately) the case; thus they contradict that which is the case, and they deny its truth. The affirmative judgment contains a negation which disappears in the propositional form (S is p). For example, 'virtue is knowledge'; 'justice is that state in which everyone performs the function for which his nature is best suited'; 'the perfectly real is the perfectly knowable'...; 'man is free'; 'the State is the reality of Reason.'
"If these propositions are to be true, then the copula 'is' states an 'ought,' a desideratum. It judges conditions in which virtue is not knowledge, in which men do not perform the function for which their nature best suits them, in which they are not free, etc. Or, the categorical S-p form states that (S) is not (S); (S) is defined as other-than-itself. Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be, because be is free in the eyes of God, by nature, etc." [Ibid., pp.110-11.]
We have already seen that dialecticians have bought into a defective theory of predication, so it is no surprise to see Marcuse follow suite. His claim that the traditional logic of subject (S) and predicate (P) "conceals rather than reveals the basic dialectical proposition, which states the negative character of the empirical reality" may or may not be true --, but if it isn't, then that is all to the good since "reality" has neither a "negative" nor a positive "character". In fact, it is only because Marcuse has considered a very narrow range of examples that his assertions here might seem (to some) to be reliable. As was noted in Essay Three Part One:
For example, how would the following be classified?
H1: Every sailor loves a girl who reminds him of anyone other than his mother.
H2: Anyone who knows Marx's work will also know that he is second to none in his analysis of all the economic forces operating in Capitalism, and most of those constitutive of other Modes of Production.
H3: Any prime factor of an even number between two and one hundred is less than a composite number not equal to but greater than fifty.
H4: Some who admire most of those who do not despise themselves often avoid sitting opposite any who criticise those who claim membership of the minority break-away faction of the Socrates Appreciation Society.
H5: Today, Blair met some of those who think his policy in Iraq is a betrayal of his few remaining socialist principles.
Are these universal, particular, negative, or positive? Are they judgements or propositions? But these are the sort of propositions (and worse!) that appear in mathematics and the sciences all the time (to say nothing of everyday speech). Indeed, the serious limitations of the restrictive old logic, with its incapacity to handle complex sentences in mathematics, inspired Frege to recast the entire discipline in its modern form. [On this, see Essay Four.]
Some might argue that these are not the sort of "judgements" traditional' logic concerned itself with, but that is the point. It is only because Marcuse, along with other dialecticians, has relied on a bowdlerised form of Aristotelian logic that his argument seems to gain a slender toe-hold.
However, let us assume that Marcuse's analysis was impeccable. Even then what Marcuse alleges is still incorrect:
"In the classical logic, the judgment which constituted the original core of dialectical thought was formalised in the propositional form, 'S is p.' But this form conceals rather than reveals the basic dialectical proposition, which states the negative character of the empirical reality. Judged in the light of their essence and idea, men and things exist as other than they are; consequently thought contradicts that which is (given), opposes its truth to that of the given reality. The truth envisaged by thought is the Idea. As such it is, in terms of the given reality, 'mere' Idea, 'mere' essence -- potentiality.
"...Or, the categorical S-p form states that (S) is not (S); (S) is defined as other-than-itself. Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be, because be is free in the eyes of God, by nature, etc." [Ibid.]
But, this depends on "men and things" having an essence, which Marcuse simply takes for granted. Of course, to mystics like Hegel and Aristotle, it seemed clear that "men and things" did indeed have an "essence", but that was just another example of ruling-class ideology dominating their thought. But, even if this allegation were itself incorrect, what is Marcuse going to say about propositions like these?
M1: Man is mortal.
M2: Tables and chairs are material.
Do these "oppose" the "truth of reality"? Are we to assume that "men" are "really" immortal, and that they "oughtn't" be like this? Or that ordinary objects are in "reality" non-material, and that there is an "imperative" here which means that we should struggle to make them material? If not, then Marcuse analysis cannot be relied on to reveal the truth consistently, which fact should not surprise us in view of the preceding paragraphs -- that is, in view of the defective logic by means of which Marcuse arrived at most of his conclusions.
It is time to leave this sad victim of ruling-class confusion, and turn to others who have similarly drifted off into deep water.
A more recent swipe at Wittgenstein comes from my old friend Ben Watson (in a book that is openly contemptuous of academic standards -- an approach, of course, that Marx himself would have deprecated):
"Take Ludwig Wittgenstein. Deprived of the benefit of Trotsky's optical materialism, his commitment to Aristotelian formal logic drives him into madness…. Wittgenstein's 'play of the imagination' is incipient schizophrenia, the confusion of reality with symbolic systems used to represent it…. The 'logical' analytic philosophers, whose attempt to live in the flatland of symbolic representation, drove themselves crazy." [Watson (1998), p.121.]
To be fair, the first set of dots in the above passage conceals the omission of a long quotation from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations -- which Watson then, unfortunately, proceeded to misrepresent, as we will see.
[FL = Formal Logic; AFL = Aristotelian Formal Logic; LOI = Law Of Identity; LOC = Law Of Contradiction; LEM = Law Of Excluded Middle.]
The reference to Trotsky's "optical materialism" is no less unfortunate. As was demonstrated in Essay Six, and if we are more accurate, Trotsky's "optical materialism" rather more closely resembles 'Dialectical Myopia'.
Even so, the presence of these relatively minor errors should not be allowed to detract from the following, more serious flaws:
First, as far as logic is concerned, Wittgenstein was a Fregean (even if he adopted a critical but deferential stance toward the latter's work).7 In fact, Watson is invited to try to find a single reference in Wittgenstein's entire corpus (of over five million words) that commits him to AFL.8
Second, far from confusing symbols with reality, Wittgenstein was in fact one of the few leading Philosophers in the entire history of the subject consistently to strive to do the opposite, arguing that most of traditional Philosophy was guilty of this very failing (a point that has been reiterated throughout this site). Hence, it is a little rich of Watson to raise this particular point when he himself is an avid fan of dialectics, whose theorists constantly do precisely what he accuses Wittgenstein of doing (substantiated here and throughout this site, but especially in Essay Three Part One, and Essay Twelve Part One).
Finally, and with respect to the passage quoted above from the Philosophical Investigations (aimed at discussing the LOI), Watson has clearly missed the point. On the very same page, Wittgenstein himself admits the following about his earlier approach:
"My symbolic expression [in the Tractatus] was really a mythological description of the use of a rule." [Wittgenstein (1958), p.85e, §221.]
Now, even the most superficial reading of the Philosophical Investigations will reveal that Wittgenstein is arguing against the mythology surrounding our use of symbols -- including his own earlier misdemeanours in that regard --, that is, against what I have here called the "fetishisation of language".9
This is one reason why Wittgenstein himself took the LOI to task in both his earlier and later periods. On this issue, he argued that those who regard this 'law' as a particularly deep sort of truth misconstrue a rule for the use of certain symbols as if it were a scientific or metaphysical truth about reality. Indeed, and as we have seen, this is precisely how Trotsky, for example, misinterpreted the LOI, even if, following Hegel, he declared this 'law' always false -- or, perhaps, both false and true, or, at least, not always unconditionally true. It is this tradition that Wittgenstein sought to undermine: a pattern of thought that Hegel, Trotsky and other DM-theorists share with card-carrying defenders of a ruling-class view of the world.
One of the main aims of Wittgenstein's method was to show that philosophical theses (like those based on a traditional reading of the LOI, the LOC, and the LEM) were based on a systematic misconstrual of rules of language as if they were substantive truths about the world. Although Wittgenstein would not have concurred with the following observation, such rules become fetishised when alienated forms-of-thought encourage theorists to mistake contingent features of the linguistic tools we use to communicate with one another for necessary objects, relations or processes in reality (i.e., with those underlying, 'invisible' "essences").
Hence, what had once been the product of the social relations between human beings (i.e., language) becomes inverted and then systematically mistaken for the real relations between things -- and, in the case of the LOI, the real relation between "a thing and itself" -- or, between two or more events/states of affairs, respectively.
Of course, because this misidentification had always been taken seriously by traditional thinkers, it was easy for them to project this error back onto nature to give spurious 'objectivity' to their theories. In the 'ideal' world they had constructed, the socially-sanctioned relationships between words were misconstrued as the real relationships between things. The material world was now interpreted through an idealised view of language, in such a way that contingent features of discourse were regarded as objective features of the universe. By such means, distorted linguistic forms came to determine the nature of reality, which was now simply a reflection of fetishised discourse. [We saw this was also the case with Marcuse, above, and we will see it several more times throughout the rest of this Essay.]
Even though dialecticians have tried to distance themselves from Idealist moves like this by the invention of scientific-sounding 'reasoning' -- by means of which they have attempted to argue that the LOI, the LEM and the LOC are empirically false while being ideally true -- this manoeuvre merely reduplicates the problems with which they began, as we saw (in Essays Four, Five, Six and Eight Part Three).
If, for example, the usual interpretation of the LOI as a 'necessary truth' is in fact the result of a confusion over the use of certain symbols, then the standard DM-critique of that 'Law' will only ever be self-defeating. This is because the latter critique is directed against a mythological representation of a rule of language, and not against an empirical falsehood (or even an 'ideal truth'). Indeed, as we saw in Essay Six, such an 'attack' on the LOI cannot succeed because it is aimed at a mirage; hence that 'attack' can only ever backfire on those held in the grip of this mythological picture. In this way, this approach undermines the meaning of the vocabulary we normally use in this area, words such as: "same", "equal", "exact", "identical", and "different". Hence, anyone straying down this route will only ever succeed in vitiating their own use of these words. [This illustrates once more why Marx said what he did about "Philosophers".]
And this is precisely what we witnessed earlier in connection with Trotsky's (and derivatively, Hegel's) 'analysis' of the LOI; any attempt to undermine that 'law' cannot fail to undercut the application of the words used in that very 'attack'!
Hence, a misplaced assault on the LOI is forced to employ linguistic symbols whose own identities are simultaneously both called into question and not called into question. In that case, the argument is entirely misconceived, since, if it were valid, all the words used by an erstwhile critic in such an argument would (as phenomenal objects) cease to be identical from moment to moment, otherwise the following hackneyed 'dialectical' criticisms of the alleged equality of two letter "A"s would fall flat:
"[T]he first of [the universal Laws of Thought], the maxim of Identity, reads: Everything is identical with itself, A = A…." [Hegel (1975), p.167.]
"In this remark, I will consider in more detail identity as the law of identity which is usually adduced as the first law of thought.
"This proposition in its positive expression A = A is, in the first instance, nothing more than the expression of an empty tautology." [Hegel (1999), p.413.]
"Abstract Identity (a = a…) is likewise inapplicable in organic nature. The plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct from itself….The law of identity in the old metaphysical sense is the fundamental law of the old outlook: a = a." [Engels (1954), pp.214-15.]
"The 'fundamental laws of thinking' are considered to be three in number: 1) The Law of Identity… [which] states that 'A is A' or A = A…." [Plekhanov (1908), p.89.]
"…Hegel elucidates the one-sidedness, the incorrectness of the 'law of identity' (A = A)…." [Lenin (1961), p.134.]
"The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that 'A' is equal to 'A'. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality 'A' is not equal to 'A'." [Trotsky (1971, p.63.]
"Formal Logic starts from the proposition that A is always equal to A. We know that this law of identity contains some measure of truth…. Now…when we go to reality and look for evidence of the truth of the proposition: A equals A…we find that the opposite of this axiom is far closer to the truth." [Novack (1971), pp.32-33.]
"Formal Logic asserts: 'A is A'. Dialectical Logic is not saying 'A is not-A'…. It says: A is indeed A, but A is also not-A precisely so far as the proposition 'A is A' is not a tautology but has real content." [Lefebvre (1968), p.41.]
"The Law of identity is usually expressed in the form, A is A. That is, each thing is identical with itself." [Somerville (1946), p.183.]
"The Aristotelian conception of the laws basic to correct thinking may be stated as follows: 1. Law of Identity: Each existence is identical with itself. A is A…." [Somerville (1967), pp.44-45.]
"Classical, Aristotelian logic takes as its fundamental premise the Law of Identity, the statement that a thing is identical with itself. Expressed in a formula: A is A…. In Aristotle's formal logic A is A, and never non-A. In Hegel's dialectics A is A as well as non-A." [Baghavan (1987), pp.75-76.]
"The biggest contradiction of all lies in the fundamental premises of formal logic itself…. The basic laws…are:
1) The law of Identity ('A' = 'A')…." [Woods and Grant (1995), pp.90-91.]
"Dialectics, or the logic of motion, is distinct from formal or static logic. Formal logic is based on three fundamental laws:
"(a) The law of identity: A is equal to A; a thing is always equal to itself." [Mandel (1979), p.160.]
"The laws of logic are based on two main propositions. The first is that of identity or of self-conformity. The proposition very simply states: 'A is A,' that is every concept is equal to itself. A man is a man, a hen is a hen, a potato is a potato. This proposition forms one basis of logic." [Thalheimer (1936), pp.88.]
"[In FL] things are defined statically, according to certain fixed properties -– colour, weight, size, and so on. This is denoted by the expression 'A is equal to A'." [Rees (1998a), p.272.]
If two such letters are "never equal" to one another, then complex sentences stand no chance.
In practice this means that no one, not even Trotsky or Hegel, would have access to identically the same message that they (Trotsky and Hegel) had committed to paper the previous week, let alone seventy or one hundred and eighty years later, since there would, on this account, be no such thing.
But, critics who have arrived at the same conclusion as Trotsky (or Hegel) about the LOI must clearly have done just that; they must have access to the exact message one or both of these two had committed to paper -- which message now tells them there can be no such thing!
Clearly, this undermines the conclusions drawn by such critics -- but not the LOI. Indeed, that 'law' will have just been used in this charade to derive that self-defeating result. Hence, their own implicit (or explicit) use of identity -- in this instance, involving the identity of symbols, meanings and use of language over many generations -- to criticise this 'law' counts as a practical refutation of that very critique! With that, this 'criticism' of the LOI self-destructs, which is, of course, part of the reason why such 'dialectical' arguments so readily collapse into incoherence -- as we saw in Essay Six. [The "relative stability of language" defence is defused in here.]
As Wittgenstein noted, we can't get outside language in order to state 'philosophical verities' (which masquerade as particularly deep empirical truths) about discourse, or about 'reality'.
[This does not threaten 'objectivity', as will be demonstrated in Essay Thirteen Part Two.]
By implication, this cannot be done either with the more radical aim of undermining the application of fundamental rules of language (such as those encapsulated in the LOI); anyone attempting to do this will find that they first have to employ these self same rules in order to undermine them, which will, naturally, fatally damage that attack. And that is why theorists cannot even try to challenge such logical features of language.
[This is a summary of three long arguments found here, here and here.]
Nevertheless, in a later part of the same book Watson offered his readers the following thoughts:
"The radical democracy of Voloshinov's linguistics is a model for any theory of the superstructure. It stems from the fact that he does not abstract speech from its actual use in society. This is the very opposite of philosophers who build a system by wondering what it means to stare at their desk. It is a slap in the face for cretins who think it is clever to read Wittgenstein." [Watson (1998), p.334. Bold emphasis added.]
However, if these so-called "cretins" have read their Wittgenstein with the same careful attention to detail that certain comrades have devoted to the task then this epithet is no doubt well-deserved. To hammer the point home, Watson very helpfully provided his readers with an example of Voloshinov's careful use of ordinary speech in this further quotation from his book:
"The separation of word meaning from evaluation inevitably deprives meaning of its place in the living social process (where meaning is always permeated with value judgement), to its being ontologized and transformed into ideal Being divorced from the historical process of Becoming….
"Meaning -- an abstract self-identical element -- is subsumed under theme and torn apart by theme's living contradictions so as to return in the shape of a new meaning with a fixity and self-identity only for the while, just as it had before." [Voloshinov (1973), pp.105-06, quoted in ibid., pp.334-35.]
Now, I'm sure Watson can clearly recall the last time he heard ordinary folk talking like this at work, down the pub or even on the picket line, discussing how the bosses are always "ontologizing" their jobs, or downsizing them so that the number of operatives is no longer "self-identical" with whatever it once had been. In fact, observers of everyday conversation regularly note how it is nigh on impossible to stop working people constantly talking about "ideal Being", "theme" and "Becoming".
Indeed, and on a personal note, I can vividly recall selling revolutionary papers alongside Ben in XXXX in the 1980s -- how we shouted catchy slogans about "Being", "Becoming" and "theme". Needless to say, we sold a record number of copies as a result.
Cheap debating points? Perhaps so. But, Watson will need to research his work a little more carefully if he hopes to substantiate the allegations he levelled against Wittgenstein -- or, indeed, if he wants to establish his claim that Wittgenstein is at all representative of twentieth century Analytic Philosophy.
In fact, Wittgenstein's method was and still is largely ignored by the vast majority of Analytic Philosophers (and by practically all professional Philosophers).10 Even when his approach was more 'in vogue', as it were, only a tiny minority of Analytic Philosophers ever fully embraced it. One reason for this is that in his later work Wittgenstein insisted on using the vernacular wherever possible -- unlike, one might add, Voloshinov or Hegel -- and, dare I say it, Watson. Another reason is that his method reveals how confused and useless traditional Philosophy is -- which approach would bring the entire subject to a long overdue end.
In that case, naturally, the fact that professional Philosophers almost en masse ignore Wittgenstein's method is no more surprising than the fact that members of the UK Royal Family are not arch Republicans.
An apposite quotation from Larry Laudan (in fact aimed at French Philosophers) springs to mind, here:
"Foucault has benefited from that curious Anglo-American view that if a Frenchman talks nonsense it must rest on a profundity which is too deep for a speaker of English to comprehend." [Laudan (1977), p.241. I owe this reference to Kitcher (1998), p.55.]
If Foucault's name and the phrase "a Frenchman" are replaced by "Voloshinov" and "a sort-of-Bolshevik" respectively, then this might help explain what prompted Watson to write a 400-page book eulogising similar "profundities", and worse.
Finally, this almost unseemly dismissal of a fellow comrade's work finds ample justification in the subtitle of Watson's book (Art, Class and Cleavage): viz.: Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix. A dog's dinner of a title, for sure -- but a genuine slap in the face for those who think it clever to confuse revolutionary socialism with the intellectual equivalent of rabies.
Voloshinov -- And His Popularisers
This brings us to Voloshinov. Recently, his work has been discussed by a number of comrades: John Parrington, Marnie Holborow, Sean Doherty and Dave McNally.11 Because what Voloshinov 'appears' to have said about language flatly contradicts much that is contained in these Essays -- and in view of several of the unfavourable things said about his work above -- detailed comments are clearly in order.12
Occasionalism And Contextualism12a
Marnie Holborow summarised one of Voloshinov's main insights in the following way:
"A fundamental element of Volosinov's critique of abstract objectivism is his view of language being able to generate new meanings…. This generative quality arises from the fact that language is inseparable from its context and its users…. The meanings and different connotations for a word or a piece of language are constructed by the speakers, who give each utterance their particular evaluative accent.
"Let us take an example…. [:] I'm hungry conjures up a general concept. When, however, we look at different contexts in which the phrase might be used, we see how the evaluative accent changes everything. A child saying this to her mother might be indirectly a request for the mother to get her something, an enquiry about what there is to eat, or a statement that she just feels like something to eat. One adult saying it to another might mean that it's time for lunch and be a suggestion that they go somewhere to eat…. In each case the context is not merely the gloss on the meaning but constitutes different meanings -- different in every aspect…." [Holborow (1999), p.28. Bold emphasis added. On Holborow's spelling of Voloshinov's name, see here.]
But, when Holborow says that the sentence "I'm hungry conjures up a general concept", it is not at all clear what she means. Unless we suppose, perhaps, that several people utter this sentence all at once as part of a synchronised plea for food, say -- or one person suffering from a multiple personality disorder comes out with it -- no generality seems to be implied here at all.
Perhaps Holborow meant that this sentence when considered in isolation from an occasion of its use possesses certain non-specific general features -- or, that maybe the sentence itself might suggest them to us. What these are Holborow unfortunately failed to say; nor does she indicate why they are general, or, indeed, why they are concepts, as opposed to propositions, requests or orders, for example.13
Moreover, Holborow's claim that utterances have an "evaluative accent" is puzzling, too, since it's unclear what evaluation has to do with the type of request she herself considered. Had she interpreted such a plea (i.e., "I'm hungry") as the equivalent of something like: "I like food", or "Food is sacred" -- or even "Food is theft" -- her point might have been a little clearer. But, what sort of "evaluative accent" does a plain and simple request for food possess or suggest? Again, Holborow failed to say. [To be sure, Voloshinov does attempt to say; his comments will be examined presently.] Even less obvious is how an "evaluative accent" could affect the meaning of any of the words used -- as opposed to altering what a speaker might consequentially intend to convey by means of them. As we shall see, these two are not at all the same.
Of course, Holborow is simply summarising Voloshinov's view here:
"Any word used in actual speech possesses not only theme and meaning in the referential, or content, sense of these words, but also value judgement: i.e., all referential contents produced in living speech are said or written in conjunction with a specific evaluative accent. There is no such thing as a word without evaluative accent." [Voloshinov (1973), p.103. Italic emphasis in the original.]13a
Voloshinov then proceeded to connect "evaluative accent" with "expressive intonation", but he failed to say why these are in any way "evaluative". The same can be said of Holborow. To be sure, Voloshinov quoted a long passage from Dostoyevsky to clarify his point, adding:
"All six 'speech performances' by the artisans [in the quoted passage from Dostoyevsky, RL] are different, despite the fact that they all consisted of one and the same word. The conversation was conducted in intonations expressing the value judgements of the speakers. These value judgements and their corresponding intonations were wholly determined by the immediate social situation of the talk...." [Ibid., p.104.]
But is this true of every utterance? If it is, then Voloshinov neglected to include the data that established this fact in the first edition of his book. It is not too clear if subsequent commentators have provided any since.
Despite this, what Voloshinov says is highly implausible. What, for instance, is the "evaluative accent" of this response (and many more like it):
Questioner: "What can you tell me about the River Nile?"
Respondent: "It's longer than the Thames."
Or:
NN: "I went on the demonstration this afternoon."
MM: "I heard it was quite big."
Maybe these do contain "evaluative accents", but until we are told what an "evaluative accent" is, little more can be done with this claim.
Nevertheless, Holborow did go on to argue that different contexts of utterance (or, is it the different "evaluative accents" of each utterance?) constitute entirely new meanings every time, which are "different in every aspect". Once more, Holborow failed to explain how the same words could take on these new senses in this way. To be sure, different connotations can be suggested by prosody (i.e., different intonation, rhythm and stress, etc., as Voloshinov himself noted). For example: "I'm hungry" suggests something different from "I'm hungry"; but even then, the words do not change their meaning. Once more, what changes here is what a speaker might hope to convey by the use of familiar words accentuated differently.
It could be that an injudicious choice of examples has distorted Holborow's conclusions, since the sentence "I'm hungry" uses an indexical expression (viz., "I'm") -- that is, this particular sentence depends for its incidental import on one of its words being relativised to a time, a speaker, and possibly a place or occasion.
On the other hand, from what little else the above passage says, it's reasonably clear that Holborow probably doesn't have this aspect of sentence/word use in mind -- i.e., pointing out the obvious fact that as each individual utters the words "I'm hungry" the "I" could relate to someone new, changing the import of what was said by adverting to a different speaker. This is because the mere fact that one person might utter it one minute, and another the next, does not warrant the conclusion Holborow draws that they convey a different meaning "in every aspect", each time.
However, perhaps this is too hasty? If so, it is worth considering this claim in more detail.
Holborow might be claiming that different tokens of the same type utterance "I'm hungry" could be used to say different things, and that the meaning of each of these speech acts is entirely dissimilar, since the occasions of utterance cannot fail to vary:
"A child saying this to her mother might be indirectly a request for the mother to get her something, an enquiry about what there is to eat, or a statement that she just feels like something to eat. One adult saying it to another might mean that it’s time for lunch and be a suggestion that they go somewhere to eat…." [Ibid., p.28.]
Anyway, what Holborow then goes on to say does not seem to be at all correct:
"In each case the context is not merely the gloss on the meaning but constitutes different meanings -- different in every aspect…." [Ibid., p.28. Bold emphasis added.]
Holborow cannot seriously be suggesting that words have new meanings ("different in every aspect") each time they are uttered. If she were, then these particular words (i.e., "I'm hungry") would be of no use to anyone, since no one would be able understand what they meant from occasion to occasion.
Perhaps these new meanings could be inferred from the intentions of each speaker, or from each context of utterance? But, in that case, Holborow's own suggested translation (i.e., that "I'm hungry" means "It's time for lunch", or whatever) would surely be subject to the very same equivocation, in that it too would be occasion-sensitive and in need of its own translation -- just as each of these translations would, too, and so on. Naturally, this would mean that the supposed translation (i.e., "It's time for lunch") could itself mean "I'm bored with this conversation", which in turn could mean, "Bush has just admitted he is an Imperialist war-monger", which itself could mean…
Now, when Holborow wrote:
"A child saying this to her mother might be indirectly a request for the mother to get her something, an enquiry about what there is to eat, or a statement that she just feels like something to eat. One adult saying it to another might mean that it's time for lunch and be a suggestion that they go somewhere to eat…." [Ibid., p.28.]
maybe she really meant something different, too? Given her own intentions, she could have meant by the above: "I think Voloshinov is correct and I want you to agree with me". In that case, "I think Voloshinov is correct and I want you to agree with me" and:
"A child saying this to her mother might be indirectly a request for the mother to get her something, an enquiry about what there is to eat, or a statement that she just feels like something to eat. One adult saying it to another might mean that it's time for lunch and be a suggestion that they go somewhere to eat…." [Ibid., p.28.]
must mean the same!
If intending something can change the public meaning of words to the extent that totally different passages and sentences become synonymous, then each and every one of our words would mean anything whatsoever. Hence, in this case, not only would "I'm hungry" mean the same as "It's time for lunch", it would mean the same as "I think Voloshinov is correct and I want you to agree with me" -- as well as "I'm not the least bit hungry". Who can say?
Furthermore, the (current) employment here of these very same words (by me, RL) implies that all three passages must now mean: "I (RL) disagree, and think Voloshinov is seriously confused", since that is what I intended to convey by this use of words. This implies that all three sentences must mean at least two or more totally different things!
But, that means that I have now used four sentences to mean "I (RL) am right and Holborow is wrong". Hence, if Holborow were right, these must all mean the same thing (viz.: "I (RL) am right and Holborow is wrong"), even while all these (now) five sets of words could mean something else entirely if someone else used them to advertise, say, the sale of a garden gnome on E-Bay.
In that case, by extrapolation, these words could now be led by the nose to mean anything whatsoever -- and hence, nothing at all. [That is, these words would have no intrinsic meaning.13b] Of course, since I (RL) intended that all these passages should end up this way (i.e., to mean nothing), that must mean my use of these sentences indicates that they do indeed mean nothing. So, when I use Holborow's words, they mean what I want them to mean, not what she intended -- i.e., nothing at all!
Is anyone convinced by any of this? They should be if they agree with Holborow -- or perhaps even with Humpty Dumpty from Alice Through the Looking Glass.14
It could be argued that the context of utterance will in fact rule out many of these fanciful 'translations'; unfortunately, as we will see, this is not even remotely correct.
Once more, therefore, if the words "I'm hungry" do in fact mean the same as "It's time for lunch", why do we need the translation? As competent speakers of English, we would all know this. For example, who (saving small children and those ignorant of the English language) needs to have the word "puppy" translated as "infant dog"? Indeed, only someone with a rather poor grasp of their native tongue would need to have a perfectly ordinary sentence translated into another perfectly ordinary sentence (unless, of course, the former contained a coded message of some sort).
Again, if all such sentences require translation, then why not also the one that is offered as its 'real' meaning? If we need to be told what "I'm hungry" really means, how can we be sure we understand "It's time for lunch"? Perhaps, as already noted, the replacement sentence means something else, too? On the other hand, if the replacement sentence "It's time for lunch" is already understood, why use "I'm hungry?" Why not just say "It's time for lunch"? And, if they both mean the same, why do we have two sentences not one?
It is worth stressing here that I am not denying that speakers can often intend to convey a message that its time for lunch by saying "I'm hungry"; what is being questioned is whether such an intention can change what the words "I'm hungry" actually mean.
Of course, Holborow is not trying to translate one sentence into another; she is offering an analysis of the various uses toward which we put language -- amplified by the observation that discourse is context-dependent. This topic is examined in more detail below.
The fact that several speakers can intend to produce different effects by the use of typographically identical words depends on those words having relatively fixed meanings already -- if this were not so, then, with respect to a particular utterance (i.e., each physical speech act), any words will suffice. The child in Holborow's example could say: "My socks are wet" and 'mean' that she wants her mother to get her some food -- or that her mother should join the Foreign Legion, or that this week's TV Guide has been delivered, or that her goldfish has just died, or, indeed, anything whatsoever. If context determined the meaning of our words, all of these would be possible.
Nevertheless, Holborow failed to consider the most obvious and plausible option here: What if "I'm hungry" is in fact being used to communicate the same thing each time, or most of the time? What if it is being used to indicate that the speaker is indeed hungry (period)? In that case, wouldn't we be tempted to say that a perfectly ordinary act of communication had occurred? Isn't this how we ordinarily address and comprehend each other? Why is this so mysterious? Why do we need to be bamboozled into thinking otherwise? Why do we need to eulogise the work of someone who has made something that is patently obvious seem hopelessly obscure?
Even on Holborow's account, we certainly can't rule out the possibility that "I'm hungry" might be being used to say the same thing many times over. On the other hand, if this could be ruled out, and anything could mean anything (dependent on context), no one else would be able to indicate, for instance, that it was time for lunch by the use of the words "I'm hungry" -- including Holborow and her own translated suggestion to that effect! This is because, if meaning were that sensitive to each occasion of use -- so much so that the meaning of what had been said changed in "every aspect", each time --, then no one else could ever utter "I'm hungry" and mean "It's time for lunch". In fact, no one else could ever make the point that was just made by me in the last sentence, using the same words in just that way in any other sentence! Once used, the meaning of any given set of words, or sentence, would have been used up, so to speak. Any words uttered would have to be sealed away in the archives forever, never to see the light of day again.
Presumably, therefore, we are not being asked to suppose that once these words have been used in this uncontroversial manner to indicate that the speaker was indeed hungry, no other speaker would ever be able to use them this way again. Holborow cannot possibly mean that. But if not, what is the force of her claim that each utterance changes meaning in "every aspect"? If in this clear everyday example this does not happen, and at least two utterances of the same token words can (and do) have the same meaning (i.e., "It's time for lunch"), what can Holborow possibly have meant by what she herself wrote?
However, let us suppose for a moment that Holborow is right, and "I'm hungry" does mean something different each time, and that the context, aims and intentions of speakers can actually change the meaning of any of the words used. In such circumstances, as was argued earlier, who would then be able to say what such words meant? Certainly not the person uttering them. Any explication by the latter of his/her own meaning (even if this were 'internally voiced') would surely be subject to the very same equivocation; their words would change in meaning upon being uttered -- or, rather, any of their explanatory words would themselves be sensitive to this new occasion of use. Still less would hearers of these words be able to say; they could now only guess what these elusive meanings might be, or might have been -- and, incidentally, whose own guesses would in turn be subject to the same sort of equivocation.
In that case, if the meaning of every word is occasion-sensitive, then so is that of any word that appears in a putative translation or explanation of it -- including Holborow's.
To be sure, what someone intends to achieve by what they say does affect how we interpret the aims and intentions underlying what they have said, but this cannot affect what the words they use mean. Why this is so will now be examined in more detail.
Word Meaning Versus Speaker's Meaning
It is reasonably clear that Holborow failed to distinguish speaker's meaning from word or sentence meaning. What a person intends to achieve with his/her words is surely distinct from what those words mean. If this were not so then we would have to admit that the sentences listed below, for example, all meant the same if they were aimed at making the same point. So, if someone uttered these sentences with, say, the intention of alarming their listeners, then this account would imply that they all meant the same -- that is, that they would all be synonymous!
V1: "Move, and you're dead!"
V2: "Your house has just burnt down!"
V3: "Those pickets will stop you strike-breaking!"
V4: "The Nazis know where you live!"
V5: "Margaret Thatcher is your biological mother!"
V6: "Tony Blair really admires you!"
T1: "I want to alarm you!"
So, taking for example, V1 and V2: if these were uttered with the aim of alarming whoever they were directed at, then they would both have to mean "I want to alarm you!" In that case, presumably, "move" and "your" from V1 and V2 must now mean "I" from T1; "and" and "house has" from V1 and V2 must mean "want to" from T1, and so on. If not, then what precisely is implied by this idea?
In fact, all the above were written with the intention of showing that Holborow's ideas on this issue are mistaken. Does that, therefore, imply that "Those pickets will stop you strike-breaking!", for example, means, "Holborow is wrong about word meaning being sensitive to intended effect and/or occasion of use", if the use of both of these sentences have the same aim? Is this true of all the rest? Does the sentence "Those pickets will stop you strike-breaking!" mean the same as "The Nazis know where you live!" --, which meaning actually is: "Holborow is wrong about meaning being sensitive to intended effect and/or occasion of use"? On Holborow's account, it seems they must.
This alone shows that context cannot narrow down the options, ruling certain 'translations' out as fanciful, for all of the above (and more) could be (and were, here) used with the same intention, even if all of them are totally dissimilar, and seemingly unrelated.
And worse: if these sentences are now synonymous, they must be capable of being used interchangeably. So, the next time someone wants to tell you that Tony Blair admires you, all he/she has to do is say "Your house has just burnt down!", and if they want to inform you that the Nazis know where you live, all they need do is utter "Margaret Thatcher is your biological mother!". But, if the occasion of use means that these are synonymous, then all this, and more, is surely possible. And if that is so, it is not easy to see how any conceivable context of utterance (short of the highly fanciful) would be able to tell you that when someone says "Those pickets will stop you strike-breaking!" they really mean "Your house has just burnt down!".
Of course, all of the above were written, not spoken, examples of word use, but this can't form the basis of a successful objection. [Anyway, Holborow's reported utterance (i.e., "I'm hungry") was written, too.] The same points could have been made verbally, so they do not depend specifically on the written word. There is surely no significant philosophical or linguistic difference (at least with respect to the meaning of words) if, say, V1-V6 were printed as part of a hard copy of this Essay, or if they were recorded and then played back as a speaking book, or even yelled in public in the main square by the Town Crier at noon.
It could be maintained that there is a difference here. Voloshinov was at pains to distinguish the living, interactive use of language between speakers, and the written word. That objection is neutralised here.
Someone might now object that the above examples are highly fanciful, and hence they cannot be used against Voloshinov or Holborow. But this is not so. Sentences like these are uttered every day. Anyway, the real point is that according to Voloshinov and Holborow any sentences uttered with the aim of alarming hearers (and who can deny that this happens many times a day around the world?) will all have the same meaning. The actual choice of examples is therefore irrelevant.
Despite this, it could be argued that the circumstances surrounding the utterance of each of the above sentences (i.e., V1-V6) would all be different, and although they would all mean the same in the abstract, their "theme" would be different, and thus their concrete meaning would be different, too.
However, even if this were the case, any theory that had the consequence that in the abstract V1-V6 all meant the same (even if we knew what an 'abstract meaning' was!) would still be subject to the objections advanced above. Moreover, as we will see, Voloshinov is hopelessly unclear what he means by "theme", and his commentators are no help, either. In that case, an appeal to "theme" here to rescue this theory would be about as helpful as a solution to a puzzle that was itself written in the language of the Voynich Manuscript.
Coughs and Sneezes Spread Confusion
In fact, this theory implies that a cough, for example, would actually mean the same as a sneeze if it was intended to make someone jump -- and that a child's cry was synonymous with an alarm bell if both were aimed at waking up the child-minder.15
Perhaps more significantly, given this view, it would be possible for plain gibberish to have the same effect on an audience that a perfectly ordinary sentence had on those who heard both, and hence for these two to mean the same. In which case, we should have to admit that a nonsensical string of letters, such as:
V7: "BBB XXX ZZZ QQQ TTT"
had the same import as:
V8: "Your cat has just voted Tory",
if both were aimed at puzzling the hearer.
[Or, indeed, if both were intended to annoy and/or perplex supporters of Voloshinov's 'theory' of meaning, and succeeded in doing one or both of these.]
Moreover, if, as Voloshinov argues, sentence and/or word meaning (not speaker's meaning) were dependent on context and occasion of use then words divorced from all contexts should have no meaning at all.16 So, for instance, the sentence "Voloshinov is correct about meaning and theme" would mean nothing until someone actually uttered it in a particular context. But, if it had no meaning, why would anyone choose to utter it? Why would anyone select such a meaningless string of words? They might just as well say something genuinely meaningless like: "BuBuBu", which, on this theory, should gain a sense from being uttered with a specific aim in mind. But, wouldn't they rather utter "I'm hungry" in order to mean "Voloshinov is correct about meaning and theme"?17
Again, someone could object that this ignores Voloshinov's distinction between "theme" and meaning. This will be dealt with presently.
Alternatively, Voloshinov's theory seems to imply that interlocutors must ascertain each other's aims and intentions before they could be expected to grasp what was said. This would then involve the latter in having to link aspects of any utterance (which, we must recall, are as yet meaningless) that are relevant to that end, in that context, to an indeterminate number of possible meanings. But, if the said utterance has no meaning until it is interpreted (or even until it is uttered!) what is there that hearers could latch on to in the local environment that might help them do this?18 It is little use replying that speakers and hearers accomplish this every day, since on this view it would be impossible for them to do it. To be sure, we often make an educated guess when we encounter the odd things we sometimes hear, but this typically takes place against a background consisting of little other than meaningful words we already comprehend. But, if all the words we encountered were meaningless before we interpreted them, or even before they were uttered, we would surely be like those trapped in a foreign land, confronted by a language we had never met before.
In fact, we would normally say that conversationalists communicate because they possess a common language, which has a shared vocabulary with reasonably settled meanings that both parties already understand. What interlocutors do not normally do is revise language during every conversation. And yet, it seems that they must do this if Voloshinov were correct.18a
And we certainly can't appeal to past experience to help out here; that is, interlocutors can't rely on previous uses of the same words in the same contexts to ascertain what was intended in or by their current employment, for Holborow and Voloshinov tell us that any and all words have completely different meanings each time they see the light of day. Not only that, but the circumstances surrounding each utterance are completely novel, too.
Nevertheless, each new context brings with it new meanings, according to Voloshinov and Holborow. These novel connotations would not only have to be supplied by both parties to a conversation, they would have to coincide for each of the parties to that conversation if communication is to succeed. But, how might the latter be achieved if neither interlocutor understands what is said in advance of it being said, or if neither party has experienced exactly these circumstances before? Indeed, given the fact that no two human beings are completely alike, nor have they even remotely shared the same experiences, this theory implies that no act of communication would ever succeed. [Much more on this later, and below.]
In fact, anyone overhearing such a conversation, and not knowing the aims or intentions of interlocutors, would not understand what they had overheard. In general, this is patently incorrect. We readily understand things not addressed to us. We might sometimes miss the point of why it was said (just as we might not always grasp every single detail (if, say, some of the individuals mentioned in such a conversation were unknown to us)), but that is an entirely different matter.
More difficult to explain, however, is the fact that hearers would have to express to themselves in their own language (i.e., in their own idiolect, or "inner speech") the aims and intentions of their interlocutors. This would have to involve them in representing these in a language that was not itself subject to the same constraints.
Let us call such a language (i.e., one that is comprehensible without recourse to any further occasion-sensitive protocols) an "immediate language".
Hence, a language understood without the need for any further processing would be an immediate language. But, if such an 'internal language' is immediate, then language itself at some point must be occasion-independent -- namely, just here, internally. And yet, if language is immediate, internally, why not externally? [The only possible reason for denying this seems to be that the hypothesised language here is 'internal' to an individual. That option will be considered presently.]
Conversely, if a hearer's own 'internal language' is also occasion-sensitive -- that is, if it is not an immediate language --, then an infinite regress must ensue as interpretation upon interpretation is layered on top of each incoming message, and each subsequent translation (and translation of a translation of a translation…) is rendered into that individual's inner, inner, inner..., idiolect.
As already noted, this theory would mean that words in fact possessed no meaning (i.e., no intrinsic meaning) until someone deigned to give them one by using them. But, if that were the case, no one would be able to ascertain whether or not they had settled on the same meaning as that latched onto by any of their interlocutors. Not only that, but any attempt to resolve even this quandary would itself stall until a decision had been made (in no language at all, presumably!) whether or not each party to a conversation meant the same by the phrase "same meaning", let alone any of the other terms on offer.
And how might that minor miracle be arranged?19
On the contrary, if a hearer has not already grasped what is said to him/her, the assumed (internal) process of interpretation cannot even begin. This is because hearers would not be able to distinguish what was meaningfully communicated to them from irrelevant or pointless remarks -- or, for that matter, from gibberish and incidental noises. If they had to decipher words directed at them based only contexts of utterance and/or the aims and intentions of speakers, then they would also have to be able to ascertain which aspects of those contexts were relevant to that end (as noted earlier). But, that would involve them in understanding the said utterance first. Otherwise, anything could be counted as 'relevant'. If we are to interpret the aims and intentions of fellow speakers successfully, they must address us in terms we already understand so that we can add to what we hear whatever gloss we deem is intended by its originator as each occasion demands (or otherwise). It cannot work the other way round. We do not divine what others intend by a sort of magical, languageless intuition, which subsequently enables us to put meaning to their words. That is why we do not have to wait to ascertain the point of someone uttering, say, "The BNP is a Nazi Party" before we understand it. Once more, we must first grasp what is said if we are to figure out the point of someone saying it. Hence, the point behind the present author's inclusion of this sentence about the BNP (which was in fact to argue that Voloshinov is wrong in what he says) has nothing at all to do with what its words mean.
In fact, it is easy for us to see that the above suppositions are not viable since we already understand the exemplary sentences from earlier (i.e., V1-V6):
V1: "Move, and you're dead!"
V2: "Your house has just burnt down!"
V3: "Those pickets will stop you strike-breaking!"
V4: "The Nazis know where you live!"
V5: "Margaret Thatcher is your biological mother!"
V6: "Tony Blair really admires you!"
And we manage to do this before knowing the contexts in which they actually feature. Moreover, because of our facility with language we also know the sorts of contexts in which such sentences could plausibly feature, and it is this that enables us to interpret the aims and intentions of others when they arise.20 Of course, we do this with such ease that we do not notice it, just as we can, for example, walk without noticing how we do it. And that is why we feel we can exclude (as highly unlikely) most of the fanciful interpretations (advanced above) of what the hypothetical child, for example, might have meant by "I'm hungry". That is also why readers who have made it this far can easily comprehend sentences like V1-V6 whether or not they are aware that these sentences are totally fictional and have no context other than the spurious ones provided here. And it's a safe bet that that will not have affected their understanding of these perfectly ordinary sentences. That would be totally inexplicable if meaning were context-dependent.
The seeming plausibility of Voloshinov and Holborow's examples (or any imaginative interpretation put upon them) trades on a facility possessed by all competent language users -- that is, of being able to understand sentences independently of their context of utterance, saving, of course, those that have indexical and/or token reflexive features. And this still remains the case even when a reference to the context of utterance could help hearers ascertain the aims and intentions of their interlocutors. That is why it is not necessary for Voloshinov's readers to know the contexts surrounding his particular use of language in order to understand him; indeed, it is because they already grasp the words he chose to use that they can recognise in general the types of contexts in which the examples he cites might plausibly occur, as well as the sorts of aims and intentions they might reveal. That is also why the implication that sentences like V1-V6 have the same meaning strikes all of us as completely bizarre, and why we can see that, despite the fact that uttering any or all of them could have the same effect, or arise from the same intention, they don't have the same meaning.
Finally, it is also why we can all see that strings of signs like those in V7 (i.e., "BBB XXX ZZZ QQQ TTT") are totally meaningless, despite the fact that V7 could have had the same effect on someone as a meaningful sentence, and be employed to the same ends. Even though V7 has a use -- for example, to make the very point that it is meaningless21 -- it is nonetheless mere babble. Using it to make that very point does not show that its meaning is that it is meaningless. Plainly not, otherwise it would have no meaning by meaning that -- indeed, in that case, its meaning would be that it had no meaning!22
As we will see later in this Essay, despite what they might appear to say, the reason why theorists like Voloshinov (and, it seems, the other comrades mentioned above) find occasionalism so attractive is that they have accepted the traditional view that 'acts of meaning' are 'inner mental events', private to each individual. Quite apart from the fact that this theory sits awkwardly with the belief that language is a social phenomenon, if it were true it would actually prevent -- not facilitate -- communication. Indeed, since this view of meaning is plainly based on the representational model, it is hardly surprising that it undermines communication.
Now, there are places in Voloshinov's work where he sort of half recognises this, but his grasp of this idea is not secure enough for him to appreciate that it is undermined by many of the other things he says about meaning.23
Naturally, this is not to deny that languages change, nor is it to argue that the spoken word isn't part of a living system of inter-communication -- and neither is it to reject the idea that context affects speaker's meaning --, nor even that social parameters have a decisive effect on the development of language. The above comments are merely aimed at reminding us that whatever else lends to sentences the sense they have (and to words their meaning), it cannot be context of utterance. Speaker's meaning is parasitic on much more fundamental aspects of the social nature of language -- those that Voloshinov and the other comrades mentioned above appear not to have noticed. What these features are have been hinted at throughout this site (especially here). Other important logical features of language will be outlined below.
The Meaning Of Words Versus The Sense Of Propositions
As is pointed out in Note 29 and Note 86, Voloshinov and the other comrades mentioned above seem to have ignored the important distinction between the meaning of words and the sense of sentences. This is in fact a failing they share with the majority of Philosophers who have written on this subject, that is, up until just over a hundred years ago. Beginning with ideas that were first seriously mooted in Frege's work, Philosophers working in the Analytic tradition have generally (but not unanimously) maintained the opinion that an account of language that ignores the above distinction is radically flawed.24
This observation, of course, is not based on supposition; neither is it mere dogma. We all recognise it to be the case when we are reminded of it. Even competent speakers of a language would fail to comprehend what was said to them if it contained words they had never encountered before; and they would remain in that state until the meaning of these words had been explained to them. In stark contrast, all of us readily understand sentences we have never heard before (saving, of course, those which contain such novel words). This indicates that word-meaning and sentence-sense cannot be the same, otherwise this would not happen.
For example, the words in the previous paragraph could be reassembled in different combinations, and, providing this new arrangement satisfied certain syntactic and pragmatic constraints, they would be readily understood by most competent speakers of English. However, if the names "Tony Blair" and "Leon Trotsky" were mixed up to give "Leon Blair" and "Tony Trotsky" no one would know who was being referred to -- even if they knew who the original characters were.
Moreover, if the following sentence were uttered:
V9: "Tony Blair's wrist watch has just been eaten by a Koala Bear",
the vast majority of English language speakers would understand it even though that sentence (in all probability) has never been written, spoken or heard before by anyone; and they would comprehend it without knowing whether or not it is true, since they would know under what circumstances it could be either one of these. In short, they would understand its sense. [This theme is expanded upon greatly in Essay Twelve Part One.]
Contrast V9 with the following:
V10: Bogomil.
Now, it's highly likely that most English speakers have never encountered this word before. Even though it contains familiar letters, no one would understand it until its meaning had been explained to them, or they looked it up in a dictionary.25 If this word appeared in a sentence, that sentence would similarly remain incomprehensible until this word's meaning had been clarified -- unless, of course, that had been worked out by means of an educated guess, perhaps.
This difference between words and sentences shows that the sense of the latter and the meaning of the former are distinct logical features of our use of language.
All traditional (and most modern) theories of meaning founder on this fact alone.26
Nevertheless, this is not an obscure feature of language, something that only those who study Linguistics or Analytic Philosophy are aware of. All of us appreciate its validity (and recognise its force) when it is pointed out to us since we depend on it to communicate everyday of our lives. We all understand sentences we have never encountered before, and we all fail to comprehend words we have never met before. The fact that this distinction had been ignored for thousands of years (and is still ignored today) by traditional theorists shows how divorced from ordinary life -- and how wedded to atomistic theories of language -- such thinkers had (and have) become (and this is so for reasons examined in Essay Twelve (summary here)).
Naturally, this means that serious errors were introduced into thought by previous generations of Philosophers who ignored the vernacular and operated with a fetishised view of language.27
[Again, why this is so, and why it is significant, is explained in detail in Essay Twelve Part One.]
Moreover, any portrayal of language that tries to explain the meaning of words and the sense of sentences by an indiscriminate appeal to speaker's usage (i.e., to what a speaker idiosyncratically intends to convey by employing certain sentences or words) would similarly fail to account for the phenomenon noted above. If the senses of sentences were (generally) based on the use to which a speaker might (idiosyncratically) put them, then competent speakers of a language would not be able to understand new sentences they had never heard before -- just as they now fail to comprehend novel words they have never previously encountered (without their meaning being explained to them). If the idiosyncratic use of words determined meaning, and if intentions/contexts determined the sense of sentences, word meaning and sentence sense would be of a piece.28 In that case, language users would not be able to understand both words and sentences they had never met before (rather than just the former). Since most of the sentences we encounter are novel (while the words they contain are not), we would in such circumstances fail to understand anything said to us until everything had been explained (but which explanation would also need explaining, and so on, and for the same reason).
A plausible account of language must be able to relate the clear distinction we draw between the sense of sentences and the meaning of words to our capacity to form and comprehend novel sentences -- the senses of which are related (sometimes systematically, sometimes not) to the manner in which their constituent words have been conjoined (etc.). It must therefore connect the senses of sentences to rules of syntax, which in turn must be related to something other than idiosyncratic usage.29
It is here, perhaps, where the weakness of Voloshinov's 'theory' is most obvious: the confusion of the meaning of words with the sense of sentences.30 Again, as already noted, he is not alone in taking this serious wrong turn; it is a major failing of all traditional theories of language (and many modern ones, too). Oddly enough, this atomistic approach also plagues accounts of language written by many prominent Wittgensteinians -- including, it seems, practically every 'Wittgensteinian' who is also a social scientist.31
At this point, it could be objected that Voloshinov's theory of language is not susceptible to the above criticisms This is because of (1) the distinction he drew between meaning and "theme", (2) his insistence that written words and spoken words are subject to different criteria, and (3) because of his opposition to what he calls "abstract objectivism".
(2) has already been discussed here, so I will consider (1) first.
Unfortunately, Voloshinov's comments on "theme" are far too sketchy and confused for anyone to be able to say what he actually meant by this word! To compound matters, Holborow, Parrington and Doherty provide us with little help in this regard, either; indeed, Parrington does not even use this term!
Nevertheless, Voloshinov had this to say about "theme":
"Let us agree to call the entity which becomes the object of a sign the theme of the sign. Each fully fledged sign has its theme. And so every verbal performance has its theme.
"An ideological theme is always socially accentuated. Of course, all the social accents of ideological themes make their way into the individual consciousness (which, as we know, is ideological through and through) and there take on the semblance of individual accents, since the individual consciousness assimilated them as its own. However, the source of these accents is not the individual consciousness. Accent, as such, is interindividual....
"The theme of an ideological sign and the form of an ideological sign are inextricably bound together and are separable only in the abstract…." [Voloshinov (1973), p.22.]
"A definite and unitary meaning, a unitary significance, is a property belonging to any utterance as a whole. Let us call the significance of a whole utterance its theme…."
[Added in a footnote: "The term is, of course, a provisional one. Theme in our sense embraces its implementation as well; therefore our concept must not be confused with that of a theme in a literary work. The concept of 'thematic unity' would be closer to what we mean."]
"…The theme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation ('historical' here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part.
"It follows, then, that the theme of an utterance is determined not only by the linguistic forms that comprise it -- words, morphological and syntactic structures, sounds, and intonation -- but also by extraverbal factors of the situation. Should we miss these situational factors, we would be as little able to understand an utterance as if we were to miss its most important words. The theme of an utterance is concrete -- as concrete as the historical instant to which the utterance belongs. Only an utterance taken in its full, concrete scope as an historical phenomenon possesses a theme. That is what is meant by the theme of an utterance.
"...Together with theme or, rather, within the theme, there is also the meaning that belongs to an utterance. By meaning, as distinguished from theme, we understand all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self-identical in all instances of repetition. Of course, these aspects are abstract: they have no concrete, autonomous existence in an artificially isolated form, but, at the same time, they do constitute an essential and inseparable part of the utterance. The theme of an utterance is, in essence, indivisible. The meaning of an utterance, on the contrary, does break down into a set of meanings belonging to each of the various linguistic elements of which the utterance consists. The unreproducible theme of the utterance 'What time is it?' taken in its indissoluble connection with the concrete historical situation, cannot be divided into elements. The meaning of the utterance 'What time is it?' -- a meaning that, of course, remains the same in all historical instances of its enunciation -- is made up of the meanings of the words…that form the construction of the utterance.
"Theme is a complex, dynamic system of signs that attempts to be adequate to a given instant of generative process. Theme is reaction by the consciousness in its generative process to the generative process of existence. Meaning is the technical apparatus for the implementation of theme. Of course, no absolute, mechanistic boundary can be drawn between theme and meaning. There is no theme without meaning and no meaning without theme. Moreover, it is even impossible to convey the meaning of a particular word…without having made it an element of theme, i.e., without having constructed an 'example' utterance. On the other hand, a theme must base itself on some kind of fixity of meaning; otherwise it loses its connection with what came before and what comes after -- i.e., it altogether loses its significance….
[Quoting Marr] "'But was such an all-meaning word in fact a word?' we might be asked. Yes, precisely a word. If, on the contrary, a certain sound complex had only one single, inert, and invariable meaning, then such a complex would not be a word, not a sign, but only a signal. Multiplicity of meanings is the constitutive feature of a word. As regard the all-meaning word of which Marr speaks, we can say the following: such a word in essence has virtually no meaning; it is all theme. Its meaning is inseparable from the concrete situation of its implementation. This meaning is different each time, just as the situation is different each time. Thus the theme, in this case, subsumed meaning under itself and dissolved it before meaning had any chance to consolidate and congeal. But as language developed further, as its stock of sound complexes expanded, meaning began to congeal along lines that were basic and most frequent in the life of the community for the thematic application of this or that word.
"Theme, as we have said, is an attribute of a whole utterance only; it can belong to a separate word only inasmuch as that word operates in the capacity of a whole utterance…. Meaning, on the other hand, belongs to an element or aggregate of elements in their relation to the whole. Of course, if we entirely disregard this relation to the whole (i.e., to the utterance), we shall entirely forfeit meaning. That is the reason why a sharp boundary between theme and meaning cannot be drawn.
"The most accurate way of formulating the interrelationship between theme and meaning is in the following terms. Theme is the upper, actual limit of linguistic significance; in essence, only theme means something definite. Meaning is the lower limit of linguistic significance. Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality -- the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme. Investigation of the meaning of one or another linguistic element can proceed, in terms of our definition, in one of two directions: either in the direction of the upper limit, toward theme, in which case it would be investigation of the contextual meaning of a given word within the conditions of a concrete utterance; or investigation can aim toward the lower limit, the limit of meaning, in which case it would be investigation of the meaning of a word in the system of language or, in other words, investigation of a dictionary word.
"A distinction between theme and meaning and a proper understanding of their interrelationship are vital steps in constructing a genuine science of meanings. Total failure to comprehend their importance has persisted to the present day. Such discriminations as those between a word's usual and occasional meanings, between its central and lateral meanings, between its denotation and connotation, etc., are fundamentally unsatisfactory. The basic tendency underlying all such discriminations -- the tendency to ascribe greater value to the central, usual aspect of meaning, presupposing that that aspect really does exist and is stable -- is completely fallacious. Moreover, it would leave theme unaccounted for, since, theme, of course, can by no means be reduced to the status of the occasional or lateral meaning of words." [Ibid., pp.99-102. Italic emphases in the original.]31a
It would, of course, be unfair to criticise Voloshinov too much for the sketchy nature of these comments since he admitted his ideas were provisional. In addition, he was prevented from developing his theory into full coherence by the fact that he disappeared during the Stalinist purges, which took place soon after he wrote his book.
However, it is worth pointing out at the start that Voloshinov supplied his readers with little or no evidence to substantiate this distinction between "theme" and meaning (or, indeed, much else that is dogmatically asserted in his book). In fact, readers will find no experimental results, tables, graphs or figures to support a single substantive conclusion in the entire work. That alone ought to worry comrades who regard Voloshinov's work as a major contribution to the science of linguistics. In like manner, Parrington, Holborow and Doherty offer little (or any) empirical evidence to back-up their claims that Voloshinov's ideas are worthy of scientific merit -- or, indeed, for allaying the concerns of those who are tempted to conclude that his ideas had actually been imposed on reality, contrary to what we are told dialecticians never do.32
Anyway, given the nature of what Voloshinov actually said, no evidence could ever have been, or could ever be found to support his claims. This is because by definition "theme" is inaccessible since it is essentially occasion-sensitive. This means that not only is "theme" inaccessible to scientific enquiry, it is inaccessible to each and every party to a conversation. In that case, it can serve no part in effecting communication, since, as Voloshinov himself admits, "theme" is affected by the microscopic differences between cases:
"[T]heme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation ('historical' here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part." [Ibid., p.99. Bold emphases added.]
If this is indeed the case, it might well be wondered how anyone could possibly tell whether an utterance does or does not have a "theme"; if something is intrinsically unique, has a transient nature and is ephemeral in the extreme, how might its existence even be detected, let alone confirmed?32a
In fact, in the place of supporting evidence Voloshinov presented his readers with what looks suspiciously like a Transcendental Argument to demonstrate the existence of "theme".33
Ex hypothesi, that is all that he could have offered anyway, since whatever evidence there might have been for the existence of a particular "theme" must of necessity have arrived far too late on the scene for it to be of much use to anyone. A split-second delay would be too long to wait, if as Voloshinov says, even microscopic changes alter "theme". Hence, by the time any of this elusive 'evidence' became apparent, the alleged "theme" would have changed, or perhaps disappeared. Naturally, this means that it would be impossible for anyone to confirm this aspect of Voloshinov's theory. Even film, video or recorded evidence would be of no use; these could not possibly preserve the microscopic details surrounding the original utterance.34
Indeed, it is unclear whether it is possible for anyone to begin to form the faintest idea of what such confirmation might even look like. This because the "object" of a sign, which is the "theme" (according to the long passage quoted above), is intimately connected with the unique, occasional use of certain signs. In that case, such an "object" plainly could not be identified, let alone studied independently of singular events like these. Since these are in principle unrepeatable they are uncheckable, and if that is so, a scientific investigation would be unable to confirm this part of Voloshinov's theory. but, what could be measured, observed, or tested in such circumstances, anyway? Even of there were any, how might test results be confirmed if the "object" studied is ultimately unique, and ephemeral in the extreme?
This situation is not at all like that which obtains in nuclear Physics, for instance, where things happen extremely quickly, too. There, such events are reproducible since they are not unique. Here, this is not so. Hence, not only did Voloshinov not provide any evidence to support his claims, none could have been offered by him -- or by anyone on his behalf for that matter -- now or ever.
What then are we to make of claims like these?
"Finally, for me there could be no question of superimposing the laws of dialectics on nature but of discovering them in it and developing them from it." [Engels (1976), p.13. Bold emphasis added.]
"The dialectic does not liberate the investigator from painstaking study of the facts, quite the contrary: it requires it." [Trotsky (1986), p.92. Bold emphasis added]
"Dialectics and materialism are the basic elements in the Marxist cognition of the world. But this does not mean at all that they can be applied to any sphere of knowledge, like an ever ready master key. Dialectics cannot be imposed on facts; it has to be deduced from facts, from their nature and development…." [Trotsky (1973), p.233. Bold emphasis added.]
"'[The dialectic is not a] magic master key for all questions.' The dialectic is not a calculator into which it is possible to punch the problem and allow it to compute the solution. This would be an idealist method. A materialist dialectic must grow from a patient, empirical examination of the facts and not be imposed on them…." [Rees (1998a), p.271. Bold emphases added.]
"A consistent materialism cannot proceed from principles which are validated by appeal to abstract reason, intuition, self-evidence or some other subjective or purely theoretical source. Idealisms may do this. But the materialist philosophy has to be based upon evidence taken from objective material sources and verified by demonstration in practice...." [Novack (1965), p.17. Bold emphasis added.]
"Marxism, therefore, seeks to base our ideas of things on nothing but the actual investigation of them, arising from and tested by experience and practice. It does not invent a 'system' as previous philosophers have done, and then try to make everything fit into it…." [Cornforth (1976), pp.14-15. Bold emphases added.]
As we have seen (in Essay Two), comrades who say such things, or who assent to them, quite happily do the opposite in the very next breath, and readily impose their ideas on nature, just like Voloshinov.
Furthermore, even if there were some corroborating evidence, it would surely have to be expressed in linguistic form. In that case, it would itself be subject to the very same strictures applied its own "theme" and meaning, and so on ad infinitem.35
In addition, if the "microscopic" details surrounding an "utterance" are essentially unique then within nanoseconds of an "utterance" ending those involved in the conversation would be at a loss themselves as to what its "theme" had been --, that is, if it indeed had one. In fact, even as the sound waves carrying each utterance were travelling between speaker and hearer the "microscopic" details surrounding the original speech act would be altering, changing the "theme", or perhaps losing it forever. Worse still, during vocalisation the "microscopic" details proximate to each and every nascent speech act would be changing diachronically. This means that, while a speaker was speaking, the theme of what he or she was in the act of saying would be altering -- unless, of course, we are to suppose that each "theme" is timed to coincide with the end of what is said.36 Indeed, unless "themes" were timed to end miraculously like this, it would mean that each utterance must possess an indefinite number of "unitary themes" depending on how fast its originator spoke, how many micro-phonetic parts it contained, or how often a speaker coughed, sneezed, or was interrupted during in a conversation. Of course, anyone with a stammer would be doubly handicapped.36a
It could be objected that this is all rather unfair since Voloshinov speaks of a "unitary theme" belonging to each utterance, and he tells us that the "theme" of an utterance is "indivisible".
However, exactly what these phrases mean will, of course, depend on how we count utterances. Voloshinov appears to believe that "themes" and utterances can be paired-off, one-one. In fact, something like this would have to be the case, otherwise the ascription of a "unitary" and "indivisible" "theme" to an utterance would be entirely empty. If so, it might look as if "themes" could be individuated by the utterances they accompanied. But, that can't be correct since "themes" are circumstance-sensitive, which implies that any particular type utterance could in fact be the expression of countless different themes at different times for each of its tokens, as the "microscopic" details (etc.) surrounding them varied. We saw as much above with respect to the sentences Holborow discussed:
"Let us take an example…. [:] I'm hungry conjures up a general concept. When, however, we look at different contexts in which the phrase might be used, we see how the evaluative accent changes everything. A child saying this to her mother might be indirectly a request for the mother to get her something, an enquiry about what there is to eat, or a statement that she just feels like something to eat. One adult saying it to another might mean that it's time for lunch and be a suggestion that they go somewhere to eat…. In each case the context is not merely the gloss on the meaning but constitutes different meanings -- different in every aspect…." [Holborow (1999), p.28.]
Here, each token utterance of the type "I'm hungry" means something entirely new. If so, they must presumably have different "themes". Indeed, as Voloshinov says:
"The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation ('historical' here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part." {Voloshinov (1973), p.99. Bold emphasis added.]
Since we are not allowed to consider the meaning of type utterances (the idea is foreign to Voloshinov, it seems -- but, they might be part of what he refers to as the "self-identical" aspects of an utterance; p.100), Voloshinov's theory appears to indicate that token utterances of a certain type are in fact pairable with an indefinite number of "themes" according to circumstances. Conversely, the 'same' "theme" could be expressed by different type utterances (something Voloshinov does not explicitly rule out, even though this seems to be inconsistent with some of the things he says). So, the "theme" above (if it is one!) expressed by the child's desire for her mother to get her some food could in fact be expressed in a number of different ways. The child could say any of the following:
P1: "Please get me some food."
P2: "I'm starving/famished/ravenous."
P3: "Is it nearly time for dinner?"
P4: "I want a biscuit/apple/burger/banana/pizza…."
P5: "I want to eat."
P6: "My tummy's rumbling."
P7: "My stomach thinks my throat is cut."
And so on. In fact there are countless ways the child might express the very same "theme".
These possibilities now raise serious questions as to how the pairing of "themes" and utterances is supposed to work. More pointedly: Which "theme(s)" is/are to be paired with which utterance(s) if, in theory, an utterance might represent a 'different' theme at different times, and the 'same' "theme(s)" might be expressed by different utterances at same or different times? Indeed, how are we to rule out the possibility that one utterance could in fact express two or more "themes" at once (which seems to be a viable option since two or more "themes" -- as allowed for by the theory -- could be expressed by one and the same utterance on different occasions of use)?36b
For example:
P8: "I'm hungry."
could indicate that the one saying it wanted feeding as well as expressing a veiled criticism of the one not doing the feeding. In that case, it would have two "themes" -- if, of course, this is what a "theme" is! P8 could thus mean (i.e., speaker's meaning), "Get me some food" and "I think you are a rather poor carer". Indeed, there might be other "themes" 'themed' by this one sentence on the same occasion (such as "I'm more important than him/her, so feed me first", "You always treat me worse than him/her", or "You are my employee, do as I say!", and so on).
To be sure, one or more of the above could in principle be ruled out by a suitable definition or stipulation; it could then simply be asserted baldly that each token utterance was paired one-one with exactly one "theme". Unfortunately, that would mean that whenever the 'same utterance' was produced, the 'same' "theme" would have to be present, as a matter of definition. That would, of course, make a mockery of the occasion-sensitivity of "theme"! Either that, or it would mean that (despite appearances to the contrary) no utterance was actually repeatable since each would be identified and/or individuated by its own unique and unrepeatable "theme", which fact would superglue each utterance to a unique set of circumstances. Indeed, this latest observation seems to be consistent with what Voloshinov himself says:
"[T]heme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance." [Voloshinov (1973), p.99. Bold emphases added.]
Unfortunately, Voloshinov then went on to say:
"The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation ('historical' here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part." [Ibid., p.99. Bold emphases added.]
In that case, it seems reasonably clear that Voloshinov would not have pointed out that "The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used…" if the same utterance had not in fact been used -- otherwise the second "it" would dangle with no referent. This indicates that, confused as he was, Voloshinov wanted to appeal to the possible use of the same type utterance, tokened in new circumstances, all the while clinging on to the idea that each utterance was totally unique. With the best will in the world, it is not easy to see how this is at all feasible --, nor is it easy to figure a simple way out of this self-inflicted dialectical thicket. It is even less easy to see why anyone (least of all the comrades mentioned above) would voluntarily want to propel themselves right into centre of this impenetrable briar patch.
On the other hand, it could be argued that "theme" might be identified by 'thought' conveyed by an utterance. However, this option would itself risk becoming bogged down in a metaphysical dispute over the precise nature of 'thoughts' and how they too might be individuated! Anyway, we have already seen (in Note 23) that Voloshinov ruled this escape route out:
"In point of fact, the speech act, or more accurately, its product -- the utterance, cannot under any circumstances be considered an individual phenomenon in the precise meaning of the word and cannot be explained in terms of the individual psychological or psychophysiological conditions of the speaker. The utterance is a social phenomenon." [Ibid., p.82. Italic emphasis in the original.]
Nevertheless, if we ignore this intractable problem for the moment, the question would still remain: How do we individuate 'thoughts' except by reference to the utterances they supposedly accompany?37 But, that just loops the discussion back in on itself. The whole point of the volunteered response outlined in the previous paragraph seemed to be aimed at trying to identify or individuate a "theme" by means of an accompanying 'thought'. It now looks as if this can't be done without defining a 'thought' in terms of utterances that are supposedly identified by a "unitary theme". But, that in turn seems to mean that "themes" may be individuated only if they have already been individuated!
Maybe we could pair-off 'thoughts' with type utterances? Unfortunately, this would undermine "theme's" context-dependency, since the same utterance would implicate the same 'thought', and hence the same "theme", and that would just put the discussion back to where it was at the end of the last paragraph.
Perhaps an appeal to meaning might help? But, again, if meaning is parasitic on "theme", we are no further forward. Maybe the physical properties of an utterance -- that is, the sound patterns associated with specific sets of vibrating atoms or molecules -- could supply the principle of individuation for "unitary themes"? However, criteria of individuation for sets of already identical atoms and molecules (distinguishable only by an appeal to even more problematic spatial and temporal coordinates, scalar energy, and vector force fields) are not all that easy to construct. And even if they were, that would still be of little assistance. This is because those criteria would have to be expressed in linguistic form, which would in turn attract the very same difficulties that bedevilled the alleged "theme" it supposedly accompanied! This is not an impressive escape route out of this deep, dark dialectical ditch.38
Furthermore -- and returning to an earlier theme (no pun intended) --, if utterances are to be individuated by means of circumstances, and the latter are still microstate-sensitive, a finite set of words could conceivably represent a potentially infinite (or indefinitely large finite) set of such token utterances (since there seems to be no upper limit on the different circumstances surrounding each utterance if any one of the latter is paired-off with one of the former), all with their own "unitary themes". Hence, and once more, the question: "What time is it?" might in fact mean countless different things because of the indefinite set of surrounding circumstances that might accompany/occasion each utterance of it, all of which would presumably instantiate their own "themes". Naturally, this implies that since the meaning of "What time is it?" is not fixed by context-independent considerations (according to Voloshinov), it could exemplify any number of such "unitary themes", as the micro-details of each nascent utterance dictated -- including those indicated during vocalisation, or those attendant upon that utterance while it was in the process of being registered in a hearer's 'consciousness', and so on.
Consequently, unless far more clearly defined criteria are provided (by those sympathetic to Voloshinov's ideas) for counting, distinguishing, or identifying utterances and "themes" (etc.), it seems impossible to decide whether there are in fact countless "unitary themes" pairable, one-one, one-many, many-one, or many-many, with utterances (interpreted as identifiable spoken tokens, etc.) --, or whether there exist more complex sets of functional relations between utterance tokens and "theme" tokens, or between utterance types and "theme" tokens, and so on ad nauseam.
Having said that, it is worth pointing out that the difficulties we face in comprehending what Voloshinov meant are largely the result of the confused way in which he expressed himself. For example, on the topic in hand (i.e., the individuation of "theme"), he had this to say:
"The theme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation…." [Ibid., p.99.]
From this, it looks like Voloshinov thought that an utterance could be individuated by its "theme":
"The theme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance…." [Ibid.]
On the other hand, he clearly thought that "theme" was dependent on concrete circumstances:
"The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation…." [Ibid.]
But, he also appears to have believed that concrete circumstances were expressed by "theme":
"The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance." [Ibid.]
In addition, it looks like Voloshinov thought that not only was "theme" unreproducible, so were utterances:
"The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible." [Ibid.]
And yet, as noted above, he then spoke about utterances being repeated:
"The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used…." [Ibid.]
So, an utterance is and isn't repeatable, hence its "theme" is and isn't unreproducible! [More on this in Note 36b.]
Moreover, when Voloshinov said:
"The meaning of the utterance 'What time is it?' -- a meaning that, of course, remains the same in all historical instances of its enunciation" [Ibid., p.100.]
it also looks like he believed that meaning is fixed after all, but only when the same utterance is produced, something he had just said couldn't happen!
Unfortunately, the bemused reader will search in vain in the articles written by the aforementioned comrades for any help in comprehending what on earth Voloshinov was banging on about!39
Again, it could be objected that the above badly misrepresents Voloshinov in that it ignores the clear distinction he made between meaning and "theme":
"A definite and unitary meaning, a unitary significance, is a property belonging to any utterance as a whole. Let us call the significance of a whole utterance its theme. The theme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation….
"It follows, then, that the theme of an utterance is determined not only by the linguistic forms that comprise it -- words, morphological and syntactic structures, sounds, and intonation -- but also by extraverbal factors of the situation. Should we miss these situational factors, we would be as little able to understand an utterance as if we were to miss its most important words. The theme of an utterance is concrete -- as concrete as the historical instant to which the utterance belongs….
"Together with theme or, rather, within the theme, there is also the meaning that belongs to an utterance. By meaning, as distinguished from theme, we understand all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self-identical in all instances of repetition. Of course, these aspects are abstract: they have no concrete, autonomous existence in an artificially isolated form, but, at the same time, they do constitute an essential and inseparable part of the utterance. The theme of an utterance is, in essence, indivisible. The meaning of an utterance, on the contrary, does break down into a set of meanings belonging to each of the various linguistic elements of which the utterance consists. The unreproducible theme of the utterance 'What time is it?' taken in its indissoluble connection with the concrete historical situation, cannot be divided into elements. The meaning of the utterance 'What time is it?' -- a meaning that, of course, remains the same in all historical instances of its enunciation -- is made up of the meanings of the words…that form the construction of the utterance.
"…On the other hand, a theme must base itself on some kind of fixity of meaning; otherwise it loses its connection with what came before and what comes after -- i.e., it altogether loses its significance…." [Ibid., pp.99-100. Bold emphasis added.]
From this it could be argued that Voloshinov actually acknowledged many of the points made above, and consequently they cannot be used against him. Unfortunately, however, there are other things he said that undermine this 'sympathetic' interpretation of his intentions:
"A definite and unitary meaning, a unitary significance, is a property belonging to any utterance as a whole. Let us call the significance of a whole utterance its theme….
"…The theme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation ('historical' here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part….
"Together with theme or, rather, within the theme, there is also the meaning that belongs to an utterance. By meaning, as distinguished from theme, we understand all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self-identical in all instances of repetition. Of course, these aspects are abstract: they have no concrete, autonomous existence in an artificially isolated form, but, at the same time, they do constitute an essential and inseparable part of the utterance. The theme of an utterance is, in essence, indivisible. The meaning of an utterance, on the contrary, does break down into a set of meanings belonging to each of the various linguistic elements of which the utterance consists….
"Theme is a complex, dynamic system of signs that attempts to be adequate to a given instant of generative process. Theme is reaction by the consciousness in its generative process to the generative process of existence. Meaning is the technical apparatus for the implementation of theme. Of course, no absolute, mechanistic boundary can be drawn between theme and meaning. There is no theme without meaning and no meaning without theme. Moreover, it is even impossible to convey the meaning of a particular word…without having made it an element of theme, i.e., without having constructed an 'example' utterance….
"Theme, as we have said, is an attribute of a whole utterance only; it can belong to a separate word only inasmuch as that word operates in the capacity of a whole utterance…. Meaning, on the other hand, belongs to an element or aggregate of elements in their relation to the whole. Of course, if we entirely disregard this relation to the whole (i.e., to the utterance), we shall entirely forfeit meaning. That is the reason why a sharp boundary between theme and meaning cannot be drawn.
"The most accurate way of formulating the interrelationship between theme and meaning is in the following terms. Theme is the upper, actual limit of linguistic significance; in essence, only theme means something definite. Meaning is the lower limit of linguistic significance. Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality -- the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme…." [Ibid., pp.99-101. Bold emphases added; italic emphases in the original.]
In this extract, while Voloshinov distinguished "theme" from meaning, he also identified them, saying that:
"A definite and unitary meaning, a unitary significance, is a property belonging to any utterance as a whole. Let us call the significance of a whole utterance its theme…." [Ibid., p.99. Bold emphases added.]
"Unitary meaning", "unitary significance" and "theme" are one and the same here.40 To be sure, Voloshinov later acknowledged that words (etc.) possessed fixed meanings, but he had already torpedoed that idea by his prior equation of meaning with "theme". Moreover, he added that:
"…The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme….
"…Moreover, it is even impossible to convey the meaning of a particular word…without having made it an element of theme, i.e., without having constructed an 'example' utterance….
"…Meaning, on the other hand, belongs to an element or aggregate of elements in their relation to the whole….
“…Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality -- the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme….
"...Therefore, there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding…." [Ibid., pp.99-102. Bold emphases added.]
All of these appear to make fixity of meaning a rather empty notion for Voloshinov -- that is, if meaning is indeed occasion-specific and context-dependent, or if it can change with each utterance (but cannot be ascertained apart from it), or, indeed, if it is speaker-relative.
It could be objected that this still misrepresents Voloshinov in that he is quite clear that while there is no clear boundary separating them, at the extreme end of this continuum, they are entirely different:
"The most accurate way of formulating the interrelationship between theme and meaning is in the following terms. Theme is the upper, actual limit of linguistic significance; in essence, only theme means something definite. Meaning is the lower limit of linguistic significance. Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality -- the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme…." [Ibid., p.101.]
But, this concedes that without an identification with "theme", meaning "means nothing". Moreover, we are given no clues as to how meaning can slowly appear along this alleged continuum. Is, therefore, meaning like the temperature of a body as it is heated up from cold to warm to hot? But, what would be an example of a 'tepid' sort of meaning? An utterance that was mumbled? Or one that was cut-off in mid-stream? Or one that was uttered between two distinct surrounding circumstances, on the run, as it were?
Hence, although Voloshinov does try to distinguish "theme" and meaning, the other things he says identify them, as pointed out above. For example:
"A definite and unitary meaning, a unitary significance, is a property belonging to any utterance as a whole. Let us call the significance of a whole utterance its theme. The theme must be unitary, otherwise we would have no basis for talking about any one utterance. The theme of an utterance is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance 'What time is it?' has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation…." [Ibid, p.99. Bold emphases added; italic emphases in the original.]
Of course, this quandary is not helped by the fact that we still haven't got the faintest idea what "theme" is!
The above might still be regarded as a little unfair to Voloshinov, for he went on to connect "theme" with "understanding":
"The distinction between theme and meaning acquires particular clarity in connection with the problem of understanding….
"Any genuine kind of understanding will be active and will constitute the germ of a response. Only active understanding can grasp theme -- a generative process can be grasped only with the aid of another generative process.
"To understand another person's utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that we are in process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words. The greater their number and weight, the deeper and more substantial our understanding will be.
"Thus each of the distinguishable significative elements of an utterance and the entire utterance as a whole entity are translated in our minds into another, active and responsive, context. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature…. Understanding strives to match the speaker's word with a counter word….
"Therefore, there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding. Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together. Those who ignore theme (which is accessible only to active, responsive understanding) and who, in attempting to define the meaning of a word, approach its lower, stable, self-identical limit, want, in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current…." [Ibid., pp.102-03. Bold emphasis added; italic emphasis in the original.]41
Here, meaning is no longer linguistic (i.e., it no longer belongs to the use of word), but is essentially psychological. It is now a feature of the interaction of at least two minds. In that case, meaning is not:
"the lower limit of linguistic significance. Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality -- the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme…." [Ibid., p.101.]
Nor is it what we were earlier led to believe:
"The meaning of an utterance, on the contrary, does break down into a set of meanings belonging to each of the various linguistic elements of which the utterance consists. The unreproducible theme of the utterance 'What time is it?' taken in its indissoluble connection with the concrete historical situation, cannot be divided into elements. The meaning of the utterance 'What time is it?' -- a meaning that, of course, remains the same in all historical instances of its enunciation -- is made up of the meanings of the words…that form the construction of the utterance." [Ibid., p.100. Bold emphases added.]
Meaning has now become
"the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together. Those who ignore theme (which is accessible only to active, responsive understanding) and who, in attempting to define the meaning of a word, approach its lower, stable, self-identical limit, want, in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current…." [Ibid., p.102.]
As we will see later, Voloshinov has clearly run-together several different meanings of "meaning" here.
In fact, as Note 23 shows, if Voloshinov were correct, understanding would be impossible.
Nevertheless, even if we ignore these difficulties for now, the above passages cannot help us in our understanding of Voloshinov's theory, since we are now entirely unclear about both "theme" and meaning!
Moreover, if understanding were in fact dependent on translation then that would simply compound the problems facing Voloshinov's theory. This is because a listener would have no way of knowing whether his/her translated words accurately represented the "theme" that his/her interlocutor had (in fact?) intended, or had associated with their own words when they were uttered. Instead of having merely to understand a speaker, a hearer would have to unravel an intrinsically inaccessible and un-reproducible "theme" before understanding could even begin!
Worse still, the "theme" associated with any utterance (according to the 'definition' we were given) is totally unique; it cannot have been experienced by that individual, or by anyone else for that matter -- ever. How then could anyone use this totally unique "theme" (never before encountered in human history) to assist in the understanding of someone else's words? Naturally, this means that far from assisting linguists and/or psychologists in finding a solution to the 'problem' of understanding, the introduction of this radically obscure notion ("theme") is not just a hindrance, it presents them with an completely insurmountable obstacle.
Furthermore, if all understanding involves translation, then speakers themselves would fail to understand even their own words. If translation is to be successful, it must represent what is to be transposed in a medium that is already understood. But, if this prior understanding itself requires still further translation (which it must do if, on this theory, all understanding requires translation), then that just introduces yet another infinite regress, with translation upon translation stacking-up in order to facilitate each episode of "understanding".
Translation has to take place in some language or other, which according to Voloshinov must itself be "theme"-dominated, and hence occasion-sensitive. That being the case, these translations would now depend on resources which are themselves intrinsically inaccessible, and would relate to speech-acts and surrounding circumstances that are sensitive to microsecond changes (according to Voloshinov). Since no speaker has access to any of their own past "themes" (or any at all!) to assist him or her in this endless 'theme-hunt', they would be searching for the terminally ephemeral by means of the psychologically unattainable.
Consequently, on this account, speakers would fail to understand even themselves!
In that case, the following would be impossible:
"Thus each of the distinguishable significative elements of an utterance and the entire utterance as a whole entity are translated in our minds into another, active and responsive, context. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature…. Understanding strives to match the speaker's word with a counter word…." [Ibid., p.102.]
If such "counter words" have a meaning, they must also have a "theme", and if that is so, they will fail to be understood, for the above reasons. Furthermore, even if the "theme" of an utterance were in fact accessible to speaker and hearer alike, only a minor miracle would make the "theme" of a listener's "counter word" coincide with the "theme" of the original utterance. Either way, understanding and communication must fail.
Conversely, if understanding a particular translation required no further acts of understanding or of translation (that is, if the regress outlined above were short-circuited somehow), it would then be pertinent to ask why translation was introduced to account for understanding in the first place. If we succeed in comprehending our own 'translated' words sui generis (un-mediated, as it were by any further acts of translation, as this short-circuited variant would have it), why can't we do this directly with the words of others? Why can't we just understand them? Not only would this prevent the above regress (and the subsequent attempt to block it on an ad hoc basis), it would be in conformity with what we already mean by "understanding" (as will be demonstrated below).
Private Property In The Means Of Language Production
The only conceivable reason for accepting the sort of psychologistic detour mentioned above (i.e., that which appealed to what appear to be occult acts of 'inner translation' to account for understanding) would seem to be that comprehension is a private mental process that we accomplish directly by means of "inner speech".
Now, we do not have to appeal to the definitive case constructed by Wittgenstein against "private languages" to forestall this traditional move -- Voloshinov's own precepts rule it out, for he declares that:
"Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex." [Ibid., pp.102-03. Bold emphasis added.]
In that case, it is not easy to see why Voloshinov (or, indeed, any of his epigones) needed to appeal to translation to account for our ability to understand one another, when, given his own theory, it drops out of the picture. If anything, it is publicly sanctioned understanding that accounts for translation, not the other way round.
Having said that, my earlier allegation that there is a tension in Voloshinov's work, whereby, on the one hand, he wants to see language as a social phenomenon, while on the other the way he frames his ideas about "understanding" suggests that he has fallen for the traditional picture (i.e., that language and our capacity to understand it depends on 'inner acts of intellection').41a This is what he says about "understanding":
"Idealism and psychologism alike overlook the fact that understanding itself can come about only with in some kind of semiotic material (e.g., inner speech), that sign bears upon sign, that consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs...understanding is a response to a sign with signs." [Ibid., p.11. Italic emphasis in the original.]
"In the first instance, to understand means to refer a particular inner sign to a unity consisting of other inner signs, to perceive it in the context of a particular psyche....
"Self-observation (introspection) is the understanding of one's own inner sign....We do not see or feel an experience we understand it. This means that in the process of introspection we engage our experience into a context made up of other signs we understand. A sign can only be illuminated with the help of another sign." [Ibid., pp.35-36. Italic emphases in the original.]
Now this is unfortunate since, if it were the case, human beings could never begin to "understand" anything. This is because we are not born with 'signs' in our heads (or our 'consciousness') -- unless we assume that a baby has 'innate' signs in her/his 'psyche'). Hence, if understanding is indeed a function of the relation between signs, as Voloshinov says, it would never have been kick-started. After all "a sign can only be illuminated with the help of another sign"; if we have none to begin with, the process of "illumination" cannot even start. [On this see Note 23.]
Despite this, it is rather odd to say that our heads are full of "signs" -- but since Voloshinov is not too clear what he means by "sign" not much more can be said about this peculiar idea. [However, we will return to this later.]
Anyway, the above at least pins Voloshinov's flag to the traditionalist mast: understanding for him is (in the "first instance") an inner, private affair. Despite other gestures to the contrary, he has clearly not broken decisively with Platonic, Christian, and Cartesian mythology. This is one "ruling idea" that has alighted and set up home in yet another radical "psyche".
The signs are that far too many other comrades have caught the same bug.
One response to the above might be that hearers have to (in Voloshinov's own words) "orient" themselves toward a speaker's utterance, and this must involve the translation of the latter's words into the listener's own idiolect (or perhaps into their own "inner speech", as Voloshinov indicated above). Quite apart from the fact that Voloshinov offered no empirical evidence to substantiate this bizarre idea (that we accompany the speech of others with strings of our own words -- i.e., "inner speech", or "counter words" -- in order to comprehend our interlocutors), any parallel dialogue like this would actually get in the way of our attending to what is being said. It would be rather like having to put up with an irritating 'inner i-Pod' -- one that we could never ignore, turn down or switch off while we struggled to listen to what was being said to us.41b
Even if such an 'inner running-commentary' actually took place, it still wouldn't explain how we succeed in understanding anything said to us, for it would clearly fail to account for our immediate comprehension of the words (the "signs" of "inner speech") that these 'inner i-Pod' themselves constantly pump into our 'inner ears'. If all understanding requires such "inner speech", the constant din of this inner nuisance would surely have to be accompanied by an even 'inner inner i-Pod', ('inner, inner speech') if it is to be comprehended, and so on ad infinitem.
On the other hand, if we directly understand our own individual 'inner i-Pod' without recourse to any further such devices (that is, if this infinite regress is terminated at the first stage, once more), then what reason could there be for not stopping it one stage earlier? Why may we not understand each other's words directly and dispense with these spooky 'inner voices'/'inner signs'? If we understand "inner speech" directly, then why not 'outer' speech?
Furthermore, the mere correlation of two parallel streams of language (wherein an 'inner' dialogue supposedly accompanied its 'outer' correlate, as one or both are processed in the Central Nervous System [CNS], perhaps) does not establish that the one is the translation of the other, any more than talking aloud in English while a Russian film is on TV counts as translating it. And this remains the case even if the one doing the talking actually understands Russian. Hence, even if we could comprehend "inner speech" (which we all seem have no choice but to endure), it would not establish that a successful translation had been accomplished by means of it. The latter would count as a translation of the former only if the words they contained had the same meaning (and presumably the same "theme"), but since (according to this theory) no two utterances can have the same "theme" (and thus not even the same meaning), then these annoying 'inner voices' would be of no use at all (even if they existed). Just like the antics of an incompetent translator, this ghostly charade would get no translation right, since there is, on this view, no such thing!
The sensible theorist, therefore, will switch this annoying device off -- or, perhaps better, question its existence from the get-go.42
No Translation Without Representation
As noted earlier, the only apparent reason for rejecting the above objections would appear to be one that was itself based on the belief that "inner speech" is immediate to 'consciousness', and is therefore instantly comprehensible simply because is "inner". This view in turn trades on the idea that when something is inside our heads (or is part of the CNS, perhaps), a sort of ghostly, internal ethereal viewer/listener takes over and does the translating and/or understanding (directly without further translation), for us. [There is, alas, no other way to comprehend these untoward metaphors.]
If so, proximity seems to be the factor that renders such speech automatically comprehensible. In contrast, speech that is 'outer' somehow prevents, or at least does not facilitate, understanding (in the "first instance -- p.35.).43 In that case, it looks like the mere fact that such speech is inner means that it is capable of being grasped directly without the need for another even more inner, inner 'meta-translating' device to act as the next intercessor in the chain. But, as noted above, if "inner speech" is indeed speech, presumably it too must be occasion-sensitive. And yet, if that is so, the elusive "theme" associated with each inner representation of the utterances encountered in 'outer speech' would be even more inaccessible than the "theme" allegedly belonging to those outer correlates themselves. And, as noted above, short of a minor miracle, there is no way these two speech episodes could have identical "themes", given the strictures that Voloshinov placed on "theme".
If, on the other hand, "inner speech" is not occasion-sensitive (and thus has no "theme") then we are owed an explanation as to why it should be called "speech" in the first place, and why this use of "signs" is exempt from -- while their outer correlates are still subject to -- occasion-sensitivity. Indeed, if "inner speech" is not itself occasion-sensitive, then how could it help translate "theme" accurately if the "theme" of 'outer speech' is occasion-sensitive?43a
The traditional account (i.e., one that holds that 'thinking' (etc.) takes place 'inside the head') is in fact derived from the metaphorical/mystical notion that 'consciousness'/the 'soul' can be likened to a sort of internal viewer of, or listener to, the contents of the 'mind'/brain -- somewhat similar to the way a cinemagoer watches a film in an auditorium, only far more intimate. This metaphor implies that 'consciousness' operates like a sort of linguistically-challenged sub- or quasi-human 'entity', a social atom in the verbal universe. In Voloshinov's work, this re-surfaces as the "psyche", a sort of semi-passive, mute 'inner couch potato', which just seems to compare "signs". ["Semi-passive" since this ghostly head-lodger is apparently not permitted to translate "inner speech" into speech that is even more inner, in order to forestall the infinite regress alluded to above.] It certainly does not enter into any practical activity; no one imagines it jogs about inside the skull, finds employment in a mitochondrial power plant, or agitates neurons into working-to-rule. It manifestly enjoys no social connections of any sort (unless we suppose it suffers from some sort of multiple personality disorder).
Alternatively, this trope might imply that whether or not inner 'consciousness' possessed its own 'inner, inner language', it need never use it because plain and simple "inner speech" can be understood directly, with no need of further acts of intercession. In that case, this 'inner spectator' would be a sort of taciturn but highly intuitive (if not magically gifted) 'inner couch potato', since it would not need to translate "inner speech" into something even more 'inner' in order to comprehend it.
One or other of these alternatives would at least have to be the case if translation is to stop somewhere, and this rather dumb 'hostage in the head' is to 'understand' things directly (and then 'explain' them to us) without the need for still more 'inner, inner, inner...' intercessors.43b
On either account, the connection between the use of language and understanding would be severed -- which seems to be contrary to Voloshinov's own stated aims. That is because, given this approach, language drops out of the picture, since, at some point, "translation" must be effected in a non-linguistic form or medium, 'intuitively', as it were. Understanding has in the end to be divorced from the use of language to avoid the infinite regress of ever inner and inner 'couch potatoes', needed to facilitate this. Comprehension thus becomes a non-linguistic, sui generis feature of our private 'mental' lives. But, if comprehension works like this (i.e., if it is in the end 'inner', direct and immediate), then the motivation to provide an explanation for it by postulating such inner processes vanishes. If we all understand one another in such a direct way at some point, why postulate the need for "inner speech" to assist us? What possible role can it play?
Even on this account it does no work; at some point we all just understand each other.43c
[Any who think this misrepresents Voloshinov should consult Note 23, and then think again.]
Once more, if 'inner understanding' is itself sui generis (and spontaneous), why can't everyday 'outer' understanding work in the same way? What possible reason could there be for an internal device of this sort to provide an inner sanctum where language is finally processed -- if, in the end, we end up with an explanation of understanding that just reduplicates whatever it was meant to replace, and which mystifies this phenomena into the bargain? What is gained by an appeal to an 'inner' process that works just like the outer one for which it was supposed to provide some sort of account? If the immediate understanding of one human being by another is indeed a 'problem' (which requires a philosophical and/or scientific 'solution'), why is the reduplication of that very same 'difficulty' in an occult 'inner' realm deemed a significant advance? If in the end understanding is something we just do (if it is basic fact about all of us), then why do we need to burrow away inside our heads to find a more basic process that merely reproduces the very thing that needed 'explaining' in the first place: the intelligent use of language (by humans who in the end understand it immediately)?43d
At this point, and as noted in several other Essays (for example, here and here), the atomistic nature of this traditional line-of-thought should now be obvious, for the 'explanatory' core of this approach to language presents us with what looks suspiciously like an isolated individual -- beloved of bourgeois thought -- lodged inside each head. This oracular, cranial lodger -- who differs from the Cartesian soul in name only -- is, on this account (and not surprisingly), far removed from the affairs of communal life. Such a speechless atom would have no need of a public language -- nor would it require socialisation. Its 'discourse' (if such it may be called) cannot in fact be social, it is just 'inner' and private.
Indeed: private property in the means of speech production sits rather awkwardly with an avowedly Marxist account of language.
Here is another nagging problem: even if the 'representational' view of language were correct, how could language actually represent things to this 'inner spectator'? Voloshinov talks as if "signs" (or at least their comparison) can do this, but who it is that views these inner "signs" is left a mystery -- unless, of course, we postulate an 'inner eye', or an 'inner observer' to fit the bill.
Anyway, how can sounds or words communicate anything to a mere viewer of pictures (or, indeed, hearer of sounds)? Surely, they could only do this if this 'internal watchman' was already a language user, and possessed 'inner, inner eyes' or 'inner, inner ears' -- along with an 'inner' social life, whereby these skills were first acquired.44 If our 'outer' social life and our 'outer' eyes and ears are not enough, then how can these 'inner' sense organs make up the deficit?
In fact, and to the contrary, as many have pointed out, an 'inner spectator' like this is nothing more than a little man/woman "in the head", with no family, friends or acquaintances, entirely self-taught and self-educated.45
Naturally, the metaphor used earlier (i.e., that of the cinemagoer/head-lodger) itself suggested this 'inner spectator' interpretation, but even if this analogy is inapt, how else could we make sense of these "inner representations" to 'consciousness'? What is the point of using the word "represent" (that is, if we interpret Voloshinov's own words in this way) if there is no one to whom things are represented? If this word means what we ordinarily take it to mean (that is, if we do not misrepresent its meaning, or fail to regard it as the transitive verb it is), then this account clearly depends on yet another homunculus theory of the mind. Indeed, this is Voloshinov's own metaphor:
"Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure. but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs." [Voloshinov (1973), pp.12-13.]
So, instead of having to endure an interminable i-Pod inside our skulls, we would all have an invisible internal friend who sifts through the myriad of sensory inputs the CNS sends its way, all of which are then 'represented' to him/her/it so these can be communicated to each of us. This inner invisible friend must of course explain everything to us --, presumably by 'whispering' in our 'inner ears', using inner "inner speech" -- since we seem incapable of understanding anything without him/her/it intercessing on our behalf.46 Naturally, that means that there would have to be at least two of these 'cerebral squatters' inside each head: one to do the explaining, and one the listening. Worse still, each of these homunculi would themselves have to have similar, but smaller 'friends' in their minds/brains/heads, to 'whom' things are likewise 'represented', and so on. We might then wonder how we ever manage to hear anything above the ensuing din, as this potentially infinite body of jabbering Russian Dolls went about their cacophonous daily afairs.47
Figure One: The Human Psyche?
On the other hand, if understanding is made manifest by our competent use of language (and associated skills) in a public arena, then an appeal to the intercession of "inner speech" to facilitate it is unnecessary to begin with. Indeed, we do not need to anthropomorphise the brain/mind/CNS in this way in order to account for our ability to comprehend one another, since, of course, there is nothing here that needs accounting for.48
The contrary supposition (i.e., that "inner speech" is indeed essential to understanding) is clearly motivated by a powerful set of ideological illusions, chief among which is the belief that unless something is internalised it cannot be understood. This by now familiar representational view of language and thought is based on the idea that it is mere proximity and immediacy that renders "inner speech" directly comprehensible to 'consciousness', That is, it is the inner manipulation of signs and/or symbols (or their physical/psychical correlates) that constitutes understanding, as opposed to 'outer' communication, behavioural competence and social awareness that does. [On this, see below.]
It is also plain that the traditional picture is itself motivated by yet another set of inappropriate nominalisations of everyday words -- those which ordinarily express our intellectual or linguistic skills, dispositions and states --, compounded by their immediate fetishisation.48a
The traditional story here seems to run along the following (highly abbreviated) lines: if 'consciousness', 'language' and 'the understanding' are in fact objects and/or inner processes (and who can doubt this if they have names?), or they are based on them, a successful theory (especially if it is to be 'scientific' and 'philosophical') must account for the inter-relationship between them.
Unfortunately, these 'inner entities' have been conjured into existence by the simple expedient of 'naming' them -- which thus separates them from one another by objectifying them. Naturally, in that case these 'inner objects and process require' a 'theory' to re-connect them!49
But this is a programmatic 'solution' to a bogus problem. "Bogus", because the original distinction between these 'internal objects and processes' was motivated solely by these inappropriate linguistic moves, and nothing more. "Programmatic" because it is impossible to complete since these entities (i.e., 'consciousness', 'language' and 'the understanding', etc.) are figments of the imagination created by the fetishisation of a handful of words.50
As any competent user of the language may readily confirm, this is not how we already use words like "understand", "think" and "to be aware"; we do not employ them to name inner objects and processes. This is shown by the fact that we ordinarily decide, for instance, whether someone has understood what is said by an appeal to outer criteria; we do not examine the contents of their heads, or try to access their mental imagery. If this is what we mean by "understanding" (that is, if we apply this word successfully on the basis of outer criteria, related to publicly checkable performances, skills and achievements), then the employment of this word to depict what goes on inside our heads will be seen for what it is -- the Platonic/Cartesian Paradigm in disguise.
Naturally, this last set of assertions needs defending -- but, fortunately, not much.
Undeniably, language has grown as result of the material interaction between human beings and the world. Manifestly, this development did not take place as a result of the occult deliberations of an obscure, inner ethereal entity (i.e., "consciousness", or "thought") beloved of tradition. And that observation is not just consonant with a Marxist view of the social nature of both language and human beings, it agrees with everyday linguistic and social practice. When studying the social and intellectual development of humanity, for example, archaeologists and historians would make no progress at all if they attempted to consider the machinations of these mythical inner objects and processes.51 What they do (what we all do), of course, is to examine the conditions under which our ancestors lived -- the social/political forms these took --, their struggles, writings, inter-relationships, means of production and relations of exploitation, etc., etc. In addition to this, the study of artefacts, inscriptions, buildings, coffins, possessions, property relations, class structures, and so on, add detail where necessary. This is what constitutes a materialist study of the past (and of the present, for that matter). If language is connected with our social development, then a materialist account of comprehension and discourse need take no heed of immaterial 'inner objects and processes', even if any sense could be made of them.
It is not the case that occult processes like these are forever hidden from us because they are well-concealed, impossible to locate or depict; there is in fact nothing there of this sort to hide or study -- or, rather, it makes no sense to suppose there is -- and for the reasons given above, and further elaborated upon below.
The contrary supposition that there are such occult goings-on is fostered by an inappropriate use of language -- and only that. Apart from a crass misuse of words, there is nothing to suggest that such 'inner processes' exist, let alone take place. Indeed, that is why it was asserted above that such mysterious 'inner objects and processes' are immaterial (in both senses of that word); they could not feature in a material account of anything since they do not exist (or rather, once again, no sense can be made of the supposition that they do), and thus they do not matter. In practice we take no heed of them; our material use of language and our shared behaviour show that such 'objects and processes' are chimerical.51a
The social nature of language implies that individuals are not free to attach their own private meaning to words and that these become the meaning of those words -- least of all a meaning that runs counter to the open and public application of terms like "understanding", "thought", and "to be aware". This is partly because whatever personal gloss might be put on words -- as with other social products, such as commodities --, their meaning/value is fixed by outer, not 'inner', material conditions. [This topic is examined in more detail below.]
Hence, despite his disclaimers, Voloshinov's theory not only depends on just such a reification of language, it relies on an anthropomorphisation of the mind/brain. That is, it depends on a inner projection of outer social categories onto the aforementioned atomised inner couch potato.
Murder On The Orienteering Express
To summarise: In connection with Voloshinov's claims about translation and "orienting" ourselves to another's speech, it is worth noting that unless listeners could confirm that they had translated their interlocutor's words into their 'own language' correctly, they would be in no position to say whether or not they had successfully "oriented" themselves toward that speaker. But, how could they do that without already having understood what was said to them? Otherwise, any translation is going to seem right -- in which case we cannot talk about "right" (to paraphrase Wittgenstein).51b
The 'theory' of understanding under consideration here clearly implies that there must be a correct pre-translation of a speaker's words into "inner speech" of his/her hearers if they are to "orient" themselves to their interlocutors aright. Hence, the claim that speakers have to "orientate" themselves to one another, if they are to understand what is said, is the reverse of the truth. They would in fact have to understand the words spoken to them before orientation could even begin (otherwise, on this 'theory' the supposed translation itself would be incomprehensible). In that case, the appeal to translation and orientation to account for understanding is an empty gesture, since it too would require the pre-existence of the very thing they had been introduced to explain -- i.e., inter-subjective understanding of language.
As noted earlier, underlying this traditional approach to language is the idea that understanding is a mysterious 'inner process' in need of scientific 'explanation', and that the nature of both is a philosophical 'problem'. But, there could be no philosophical problem concerning 'the understanding', one that required for its resolution the application of a special kind of linguistic or psychological Superscience.51c This is because we should already have to be expert users of the word "understanding" to be able to comprehend the formulation of the 'problem', let alone grasp its supposed 'solution'.
Naturally, this is not to suggest that most scientists and philosophers do not find 'understanding' problematic, but that 'difficulty' is a direct consequence of conceptual confusion.
This can be seen from the fact that if scientists, for example, did not already comprehend the word "understanding", they would be in no position to put together a single coherent sentence that expressed even the suspicion that there was a problem connected with 'understanding' -- nor would they be able to comprehend any of the 'solutions' on offer.
And that goes for philosophers, too.
That is why the difficulties theorists claim to find with the use of words like "understanding" (and a host of other related terms) can be attributed to conceptual confusion; if they were not already masters of this word and its associated vocabulary, they could not function as educated or competent adults. The fact that they find these concepts 'problematic' when they theorise about them -- as opposed to when they use associated words correctly every day -- shows that they are conceptually confused. 'Problems' only arise when an attempt is made to interpret these terms theoretically (i.e., 'philosophically') as the supposed names of ethereal 'inner processes' (etc.).
Either that, or they are being deliberately disingenuous.
It could be objected here that the mere fact that we are competent users of certain words does not mean that understanding and communication are not problematic. Surely, the difficulty for scientists is to give an account of how human understanding works; this task is thus one of providing a scientific/materialist theory of the way we internalise, or make sense what is said to us (etc.). To give an analogy: able-bodied people can walk, but that does not mean that everyday ambulators know how they themselves do this (i.e., what muscles they use, etc.). And yet that does that prevent scientists from studying the physiology of walking in order to discover its underlying mechanisms.
Or so an objection might go.
Once more this analogy is lame. We do not use walking in order to comprehend our ambulatory skills, but we have to understand something before it can become part of the explication of anything (and that includes words associated with understanding itself). This is a requirement that cannot be bypassed or circumvented. In short, we have to be experts at using and receiving language intelligently in order to grasp the supposed 'problem', let alone its alleged 'solution'. But, in this respect, we already know all there is to know about the use of the word "understanding", and its related vocabulary. If we didn't, we would certainly fail to comprehend the original 'problem' or the proposed 'solution'. This is not the case with walking. [Naturally, that fact does not prevent anyone studying the physical concomitants of walking.]
Furthermore, an insistence that we need a theory of how 'the understanding' works (as part of a scientific or philosophical account of 'the mind') was, as a matter of fact, first motivated by a series of linguistic false moves, and nothing more. Traditionally, the phrase "the understanding" and its related concepts/expressions were interpreted as the names of inner processes (as part of the Platonic/Christian/Cartesian tradition), and that was in turn motivated by the nominalisation of verbs like "to understand", "to think", "to imagine" (etc.).52 This means that the only evidence that there are such 'inner objects and processes' is a series of spurious nominalisations!
It is worth emphasising this point, since most theorists either ignore it or fail to recognise its significance: the only 'evidence' that there are any wild geese here that need chasing is this spurious set of nominalisations. And the subsequent 'chase' itself depends on the further idea that if there are such names, then there must be objects and processes which answer to them. [We have met this sort of word-magic several times before, in other Essays at this site -- particularly here, and here.]
In fact, to call an investigation of this sort a "wild goose chase" would be to slander wild geese; at least they had the decency to exist before they were chased!
Again, it could be objected that something physical must be responsible for our understanding if we are to base it securely on real material processes. Hence, as materialists, we have little choice but to attribute the capacity to form thoughts (etc.) to processes at work in the CNS -- albeit, mediated by practice, subjectivity, and ideology, etc. Such thoughts (etc.) would themselves be emergent features of complex structures that have evolved as result of our intelligent use of language -- which is itself materially-grounded in our social and economic development. In that case, the nominalisations referred to above need not imply that a single 'entity' answering to a given name is responsible for all or most of our psychological make-up. It could be the case that a series of (suitably complex, dialectical) processes in the brain (mediated by the other features just listed) underlie the emergence of consciousness, and thus understanding (etc.), from its material base.
Or so it could be claimed.
Despite this, it is worth re-iterating the fact that the only 'evidence' to suggest that there are 'processes' in the brain/CNS (etc.), which underlie consciousness and the understanding (etc.), are the nominalisations mentioned above. In fact, apart from tradition (the dominant Platonic/Cartesian paradigm), the idea (among revolutionaries) that there must be such 'processes' is itself motivated by the erroneous belief that materialism somehow requires it.53
To be sure, some might want to argue that if mental events had no material/dialectical base, that would leave it open for others to postulate a non-material platform for human consciousness, which would clearly have untoward Idealist implications.
Of course, Idealists are going to argue for an immaterial mind whatever we say. But, in order to avoid the implication that our own theory leaves room for immaterialism, materialists have obviously just assumed they have no choice but to postulate just such a material foundation for thought in certain, hypothetical processes in the CNS (but not reducible to them). However, what this material base could possibly be is seldom spelled-out in any great detail. And no wonder! Given Lenin's 'definition' of matter, it is not at all clear whether such an account could ever be given.54
Be this as it may, HM does not in fact require such a (metaphysical) theory of 'consciousness'.55 That, of course, has not stopped dialecticians from wanting to impose their version of this ancient paradigm on hypothetical processes and structures in the brain, 'the mind', or the CNS -- despite the claim that they never do this. Nevertheless, this imposition often involves them reading into the phenomena the view that 'consciousness' is an "emergent property" of the CNS -- dialectically linked to increased neural complexity, social development and practice -- in order to support the idea that there is (or could be) a 'scientific' or dialectical theory of 'mental phenomena' not reducible to the "crude" operation of mere "matter and motion".55a
There is no little irony here: in order to avoid Idealism, DM-theorists have spirited ("divined") into existence several highly obscure 'concepts' (which, by shear coincidence, turn out to be the very ones they borrowed from traditional metaphysics and neo-Platonic mysticism, thus imbuing their ideas even here with an impeccable ruling-class pedigree). But, these 'concepts' readily collapse back into LIE since they too are dependent on the derivation of a set of psychological truths from the supposed meaning of certain words. In trying to avoid Idealism, DM-theorists have thus slipped right back into it! [This is explained in detail in in Essay Twelve Part One and here.]
[LIE = Linguistic Idealism.]
Unfortunately, few branches of science are as suffused with conceptual confusion as is Psychology (and that comment does not just apply to DM-versions of it). It is highly doubtful whether Voloshinov's attempts to clarify matters will greatly alter this state of affairs (despite the plaudits of his epigones).56
It could be objected here that while Voloshinov himself provides no evidence in support of his claims, there is evidence that substantiates what he says, and John Parrington's article summarised it for us.
However, when we examine the assembled 'evidence' we find that it is indirect and allusive, at best. In fact, Parrington's 'evidence' is perhaps more accurately described as mere supposition. As he himself admits (but note the Cartesian language!):
"The problem with studying inner speech is that it is impossible to observe directly using objective scientific methods, hidden as it is within the mind of the individual. However, much valuable information about [inner speech's] character has emerged by using some ingenious indirect methods….
"…An excellent attempt at describing what inner speech would sound like if we could actually hear it is James Joyce's Ulysses….
"…A study of literature may seem a strange way to investigate the workings of the mind, but Bakhtin believed that novels 'permit readers to see things that are obscured by the restraints on expression in other applications of language.'…
"…[M]atters become necessarily more speculative once we start to consider some of the possible concrete mechanisms whereby social change is translated into change in consciousness itself. Part of the problem will always be our inability to access inner speech directly. However, it should be clear from Voloshinov's work, as well as that of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, that a wide range of sources can be used successfully as an indirect source of information about our thought processes…." [Parrington (1997), pp.134-35, 141, 143. Bold emphases added. Quotation marks altered to conform to the conventions adopted at this site.]
But, if we cannot access "inner speech" directly, how do we know it even exists? Worse still: Do we even have a clear idea, or any at all, what the phrase "inner speech" could possibly mean? Are we to imagine that cells or neurons in our heads hold conversations with each other? Must we suppose that certain "modules" in the brain chat amongst themselves over the synaptic fence? Does the brain give lectures to the spinal chord?
Is Parrington perhaps referring to sub-vocal movements of the larynx? That is, to 'outer speech' with the volume turned way down?56a0
In fact, Parrington himself has to refer us to James Joyce's Ulysses to provide us with a vague sort of idea what "inner speech" is. But, if we all know (from introspection?) what "inner speech" is, we would hardly have to be told. Anyway, Parrington's own phrasing indicates that few of us (if any) know what this mysterious 'inner process' is; this can be seen from his use of the prefixing clause: "if we could actually hear" "inner speech". He would not have needed to add that rider if we all knew what to listen out for.
In addition, it is worth asking how Parrington knows that certain novels reveal "inner speech" to us. All he says is this:
"An excellent attempt at describing what inner speech would sound like if we could actually hear it is James Joyce's Ulysses…." [Ibid., p.135. Bold emphasis added.]
But, if he has never heard "inner speech", and no one else has, how could he possibly know that certain novels are able to reveal it to us? Apparently, Parrington's only evidence that this particular novel can serve as an accurate (scientific!) source is based on a belief expressed by Bakhtin (a non-scientist!) about novels in general. Moreover, exactly how Bakhtin himself knew that certain novels record "inner speech" is no less mysterious. No doubt, as Lenin said of Hegel, Bakhtin must have "divined" it.
[Several detailed comments about Vygotsky's work will be added here at a later date.]
Perhaps then, Parrington is alluding to soliloquy, or to other vocal/sub-vocal ramblings? If he is, then we already understand what these are, and we have direct access to them (unlike "inner speech"). Moreover, and better, we do not need to be referred to examples taken from obscure "stream of consciousness" novels to tell us more in this regard, nor need we appeal to indirect evidence to identify them (again, unlike "inner speech").
It would seem therefore that Parrington cannot be referring to soliloquy (etc.). Maybe he is alluding to the thinking we all supposedly engage in while awake, or while reading (say)? If so, why call this "inner speech"?
[In fact, not everyone mumbles sub-vocally to themselves when reading either. In fact, speed readers do not mumble at all.]
Nevertheless, this 'inner dialogue', of which we are all supposedly aware -- or half aware -- that allegedly accompanies our waking moments, is perhaps Parrington's best candidate so far. But, we can all hear (in the sense of "attend to") this commentary, so it can't be "inner speech" either, or Parrington would not have had to labour this point quite so much. We'd all know what he was on about if this were the right candidate.
Even so, Parrington then proceeds to tell us that one of the major features of "inner speech" is:
"...its predicative (subject-less) character. A child talking to itself 'already knows' what he or she is talking about and therefore there is no need for naming the subject…. Inner speech must be even more telegraphic and abbreviated, and probably uses words that are highly personally coded -- that is they have a private meaning for the person who is using them, which may be different from their accepted social meaning." [Ibid., p.135.]
Here, he is drawing on a limited contrast between "inner speech", soliloquy and the ramblings of children; while all of these are "predicative", "inner speech" is perhaps even more so. But, the subjectless nature of all of these is not unique to any of them. Conversations between two or more people often take much for granted, including the subject of discussion. Many are "predicative", and many are coded (think of Cockney Rhyming Slang, 'rap', etc.). So, it seems that "inner speech" is much like "outer speech" in this regard.56a
This, of course, only deepens the mystery; if "inner" and "outer" speech are no different in this respect, why all the fuss? And how is it possible for the allegedly "private meanings" of certain words to engage with or be captured by "inner speech", and thus be of any use? If certain meanings and words are private, even though no one can hear the speech which is supposed to relate to them (otherwise Parrington would have appealed to that as a fact, and thus would not have bothered with "indirect" evidence), what linguistic function could they possibly serve? How could 'private meanings' even be recorded (imprinted) if no one has access to them, and no one can hear them?56b
Anyway, it is reasonably clear from other things that Parrington says that he is in fact alluding to something much deeper than mere soliloquy (and perhaps even deeper than 'thinking'), and he was rather coy about what this 'something' actually is. Parrington does, however, refer us to studies that Vygotsky completed several generations ago (pp.133ff.), but failed to direct us to more recent research carried out into "inner speech" -- for example, that supposedly relating to children.57
Even if he had done this, we would still be no further forward, for we still have absolutely no idea what "inner speech" is; until this serious problem is resolved we are in no position to decide what would even count as evidence for or against 'its' existence. If we have no idea what we are looking for, any evidence gathered could, for all anyone knew, relate to something else, or, indeed, to nothing at all. As noted in Essay Six: you can look for your keys if you do not know where they are, but not if you do not know what they are.
Moreover, it is unclear how Vygotsky himself was able to study something that Parrington elsewhere declares no one can directly experience. If Vygotsky had in fact succeeded in listening to the "inner speech" of children as they spoke to him, as they conversed with others or as they babbled to themselves, then this would make "inner speech" look pretty direct, and hence unproblematic, since it would be a clear example of these children learning to soliloquise, or to ramble aloud. Such phenomena then, if that is what Vygotsky observed (or was referring to), could not be "inner speech" -- at least, not as Parrington seems to understand the term.58
All this, of course, is in addition to the serious philosophical difficulties (outlined earlier) associated with "inner speech".
An Interface Between 'Thought' And Language?
Putting these annoying quibbles to one side for now, Parrington clearly wants to read more into "inner speech" (so characterised) than even the dearth of 'evidence' permits, for a few pages later we are informed that:
"…[I]nner speech is the link between thought and language…. [T]here is a gap between thought and words…inner speech is the fluid interphase where meaning can start to be formed and shaped…." [Ibid., p.135.]
How Parrington knows that "inner speech" is such a link he failed to say; it is to be hoped he is not trying to impose yet another thesis on the brain/'mind'!
The question now is: Is "inner speech" even a linguistic phenomenon? If it is, then how could it be an interface between language and 'thought'? If 'thought' and language absolutely require such an intermediary, and "inner speech" is indeed a linguistic phenomenon, then there would have to be an analogous link between 'thought' and "inner speech", too. On the other hand, if "inner speech" does not itself need such an interface with 'thought', why then is one needed between ordinary 'outer' language and 'thought'? Alternatively, if "inner speech" is not a linguistic phenomenon, why call it "speech" to begin with?
More problematic, however, is the fact that the occurrence of episodic bouts of "inner speech" -- if this isn't soliloquy, etc. -- would normally be regarded as clear evidence of a psychotic disorder in one so afflicted. Given what little we are told, such inner voices would be a sure sign, not of a fluid interface between 'thought' and language, but perhaps a clear indication of a deranged or split personality. Small wonder then that Ulysses seemed to some to be so apposite. What next? The novels of Charles Manson and Fred West?
Nevertheless, if we were to reconsider the following words they might help us understand what Parrington really means:
"…[I]nner speech is the fluid interphase where meaning can start to be formed and shaped, based on the emotional, practical and social experience of the individual…." [Ibid., pp.135-36.]
But, what sense of "meaning" is this? Is Parrington speaking about linguistic meaning? If so, it would be of little use in helping us understand Voloshinov, for according to him:
"Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex." [Voloshinov (1973), pp.102-03. Bold emphases added.]
Plainly, such an "interaction" cannot reside in the head of either interactor. Hence, if Parrington is trying to make Voloshinov's ideas clear, contradicting him is not a good place to begin!
[However, as we have seen (here and here), the source of this difficulty lies in the fact that Voloshinov cannot seem to make his mind up whether meaning is a social phenomenon or whether it's a private, 'internal' affair. Parrington has obviously inherited this confusion from him.]
Of course, part of the problem here is also the fact that the word "meaning" itself has many different meanings:
(1) Personal Significance: as in "His Teddy Bear means a lot to him."
(2) Evaluative import: as in "May Day means different things to different classes."
(3) Point or purpose: as in "Life has no meaning."
(4) Linguistic meaning: as in "'Vixen' means 'female fox'", "'Chien' means 'dog'", or "Recidivist" means someone who has resumed their criminal career.
(5) Aim or intention: as in "They mean to win this strike."
(6) Implication: as in "Winning this dispute means that management won't try another wage cut again in a hurry."
(7) Indicate, point to, or presage: as in "Those clouds mean rain", or "Those spots mean you have measles."
(8) Reference: as in "I meant him over there", or "'The current president of the USA' means somebody different at least once every eight years."
(9) Artistic or literary import: as in "The meaning of this novel is to examine political integrity."
(10) An indication of conversational focus: as in "I mean, why do we have to accept a measly 1% rise in the first place?"
(11) An expression of sincerity or determination: as in "I mean it, I really do want to go on the march!", or "The demonstrators really mean to stop this war."
(12) The content of a message, or the import of a sign: as in "It means the strike starts on Monday", or "It means you have to queue here."
(13) Interpretation: as in "You will need to read the author's novels if you want to give a new meaning to her latest play", or "That gesture means those pickets think you are a scab."
(14) Import or significance: as in "Part of the meaning of this play is to change our view of drama", or "The real meaning of the agreement is that the bosses have at last learnt their lesson."
(15) Speakers' meaning: as in "When you trod on her foot and she said 'Well done!' she in fact meant the exact opposite."
(16) Communicative meaning: as in "You get my meaning", or "My last letter should tell you what I meant", or "We have just broken their secret code; the last message meant this..."
(17) Explanation: as in "When the comrade said the strike isn't over what she meant was that we can still win!"59
From what little Parrington says, it looks as if he might have meant (i.e., "intended") senses (1), (2), and, of course, (15).
Nevertheless, it seems reasonably clear that many of the problems confronting Parrington, Holborow and Voloshinov's accounts of language have arisen from their failure to notice that this apparently simple word (i.e., "meaning", and its cognates) is in fact highly complex. Because these comrades have conflated several different senses of this word, their ideas naturally create confusion instead of dispelling it -- as we have seen.
However, and once more: In this they are in good company: most traditional Philosophers have done (and still do) the very same thing.60
Earlier we had occasion to quote the following passage from Parrington's article:
"…[I]nner speech is the link between thought and language…. [T]here is a gap between thought and words…inner speech is the fluid interphase where meaning can start to be formed and shaped…." [Parrington (1997), p.135.]
Although Parrington asserts that there is a "gap" here, he neglected to show that there is indeed one between 'thought' and language. Worse still, he failed to explain what a supposition like this could possibly mean. For example, might such a "gap" be measured in centimetres, seconds, or missing teeth? If not, what sort of "gap" is this? Is it a literal "gap" (like the space that exists between platform and train in certain underground and/or railway stations), or is it metaphorical (like a hole in someone's memory)?
Well, perhaps he is alluding to an explanatory "gap", here? But, in that case, there is no such thing. If there were, it would 'close' even before it 'opened'. This is because the supposition that there is such a "gap" would have to be expressed in the same medium either side of the supposed divide -- in thought and in language --, thereby 'closing' the alleged "gap". Plainly, the thought that there might be such a "gap" and its linguistic expression are one and the same.61
To some, the above claims might seem somewhat dogmatic. Hence, it could be pointed out that if there is indeed an objective gap between thought and language, the above constraints on its explanation, even if correct, are surely irrelevant. The gap either exists or it doesn't -- or so the argument might go.
However, any who doubt the claims made in the last but one paragraph are invited to say to themselves "There is a gap between thought and language" and then repeat the same thought without using these or any other words! Upon doing that (or in fact failing to do it!), they will soon see there is no such "gap".61a
Indeed, it is worth reminding ourselves that the deflationary argument presented above was originally aimed at countering the idea that there is an explanatory gap in our knowledge, and it sought to establish (indirectly) that our mastery of language shows that no such "gap" exists -- in the sense that that supposition itself made no sense -- not that it was empirically false. This is largely because the formulation of the thought that there is such a "gap" and its linguistic expression are one and the same.62
All of this is quite apart from the fact that the supposition that there is a "gap" is itself based on the idea that the words used to describe it are actually the names of 'internal objects and processes'. And these in turn are said to exist because of just such a nominalisation! Because of that, whatever these newly concocted words allegedly refer to (i.e., 'language' and 'thought'), they have now been separated by the introduction of these artificial 'names'!
Hence, it seemed to the traditional theorists who invented this way of depicting the 'mind' that these spurious entities ('thought' and 'language') needed to be re-connected.
[But, this is just as brainless as thinking that the word "God" and the word "Satan" imply there is a gap between these two as well! What two?!]
And from this morass of confusion out popped the 'philosophical problem' of the 'gap' between 'language' and 'thought'.
In that case, all we have here is yet another spurious 'problem' that has arisen out of a crass use/distortion of ordinary language, and nothing more.
And yet, if the words "language" and "thought", for example, do not actually name any objects or processes (or, rather, if they do not operate as names), then the assumption that there is a "gap" between the things they supposedly denote is baseless.
[On this, see Note 61. The idea that all words are names was debunked in Essay Three Part One.]
Given the validity of this deflationary conclusion, not only is there be no "gap", there are no (named) objects or processes there to form one. As should now seem clear, here as elsewhere, this "gap" has only opened up because of the literal interpretation of yet another inapt metaphor -- compounded by a sloppy use of language.
Nevertheless, it could be objected that this does not even begin to deal with the scientific problem of the relation between language and thought. Hence, it could be pointed out that Parrington might have meant that there is a gap in the current scientific explanation of the connection between thought and language, one that Voloshinov's ideas help close. This appears to be why Parrington said the following:
"However, this still leaves us with the question of the concrete mechanisms whereby this process takes place." [Ibid., p.136.]
From this it seems that the supposed "gap" might be a euphemism for our profound lack of knowledge of the physical, mental or psychological mechanisms/causal links, or indeed "mediations", that connect 'thought' and 'language'. But, a few lines earlier Parrington had already declared that:
"Language, therefore, is not just an expression of otherwise independent and fully formed thought, but rather is a necessary form of the thought's realisation." [Ibid., p.135.]
This appears to mean that our only handle on thought is purely linguistic. This further seems to suggest that Parrington himself half accepts the view that thought is not in fact an isolatable aspect of the 'mind' independent of its linguistic expression. In other words: thought is precisely what our ordinary words about it indicate it to be. [On this, see Note 61, again.]
Nevertheless, there are other things that Parrington says which suggest he failed to appreciate the significance of the above admission. As we found with "meaning", the word "thought" (and its cognates) is more complex than most theorists acknowledge. Again, it is only when philosophers try to theorise about this 'concept' (and thus restrict the meaning of the word "thought" so that it only refers to what goes on in our heads) -- as opposed when they use language normally to express their thoughts and to understand those of others -- that confusion arises.62a
If this is so, there is no object or 'mental process' called "thought";63 any supposition to the contrary could only itself have been prompted by yet another inept linguistic reification. Moreover, whatever is true of "thought", is also true of "language" (and for the same reason). In which case, there aren't two objects or processes here (inside or outside the head) for there to be a "gap" between.64
The fact that Parrington has been misled -- as have so many others -- by a series of reifications like this is confirmed by the way he poses the problem: it is only if thought and language are understood to be literally two sorts of objects/processes that there could be a "gap" between them (even if this is just an explanatory "gap"). [Otherwise, his use of this word would surely be metaphorical.]
Traditionally, several competing media have been proposed as carriers of thought, or which are capable of bridging the alleged 'gap' between these two nominalised 'entities' ('thought' and 'language'). For example, some see one side of the divide consisting of material processes and events while the other side comprises the mental or psychological concomitants of language. Another view sees mental processes linked to words (or proto-words, or semantic structures) physically represented (somehow) in the brain (as 'concepts', or "signs" (Voloshinov's view)), or in some other inchoate form. There are of course many other possibilities. Indeed, while there are sections of Parrington's article that suggest he might have favoured the second of these options, others indicate that it might in fact have favoured the first.
Whichever set of functional inter-connections Parrington actually intended, both of the above are motivated by the inappropriate metaphors already highlighted --, i.e., those that represent the contents of our heads as if they were 'objects or processes' which stand in specific (if changing) relationships with one another. So, on one side of the "gap" we might have material events and/or processes; on the other, 'mental' or 'psychological events'. Alternatively, one half might consist of 'mental events' ('thoughts'), while the other is comprised of 'inner representations' of linguistic expressions (in the 'mind', or in 'consciousness') etc., etc.65 Now, wherever the boundary between these disparate entities is imagined to fall, and whatever supposedly occupies either side of it, Parrington seems to believe that "inner speech" can be slotted neatly into the resulting "gap". But, the "gap" itself appeared out of nowhere as a result of the reification of a metaphor (which pictures thoughts as objects or processes), and nothing more.
Is there anything to recommend this view over and above the (inapt) metaphors and nominalisations from which it emerged? It seems not -- or if there is, Parrington was remarkably quiet about it. In that case, if there is nothing to recommend this picture other than the linguistic distortions outlined above, perhaps we should re-direct our attention to the motives of those materialists who think there is, or should be, something to fill this "gap"?
Perhaps these motives arise from a genuine desire to find a materialist-sounding explanation of 'consciousness'? This might involve, inter alia, an attempt to go behind the social conventions (that already exist for expressing our thoughts and talking about them) in order to trace their material roots in the CNS (etc.). But, why would anyone want to go behind social convention in order to account for human thought? Well, only the politically naive or those with overtly anti-socialist aims and intentions would want to do that, it would seem. In that case, have Marxists who have toyed with these ideas been duped once again into accepting an alien-class agenda, and the adoption of a ruling-class view, not just of nature, but now of the 'Mind'? It is not easy to resist this conclusion in view of the Idealist implications this approach possesses -- outlined earlier, and again below.66
However, the problem with attempts to go behind convention lies not so much with the ideological compromise this introduces (on this, see Essay Twelve Part One and here), but with the fact that those who venture down this route are forced to employ words they already comprehend as competent language-users as if they didn't! Or, they have to use words which they must now interpret in odd ways in order to convince themselves that there is a 'problem' here to begin with, and hence that there is indeed such a "gap".
But, this worry has only arisen because of the misuse of these very same ordinary words. Indeed, those so minded have to persuade themselves that there is a 'scientific problem' about the reference of these transmogrified 'concepts', when the ordinary words used to set the 'problem' up were not referential to begin with. This is because such words do not represent anything, they merely facilitate description and communication. In effect, as has been pointed out in many of the Essays at this site, such theorists fall prey to the idea that scientific-sounding philosophical 'problems' can be manufactured to order by the simple expedient of misusing ordinary language.
The upshot is that this linguistic slide involves a distortion of the very medium it had been intended to explain (i.e., language), turning the word "thought", for instance, into a name, when it functions typically as a verb (or predicatively as a descriptive, not a naming, term). We have encountered this suspect dodge several times before at this site; this is just the latest unfortunate (but almost universally copied) example.67
Hence, in order to motivate this 'scientific' enquiry, a 'problem' has first to be created where none before existed. It has to be shown (in fact it is only hinted at, it is never shown) that our ordinary words and phrases relating to 'psychological states' (e.g., verbs like "to think", "to be aware", "to understand", etc.) are defective, contradictory or misleading -- or at least that they are superficial, non-'philosophical', pre-scientific, or reflect 'folk psychology'. To that end, these perfectly ordinary expressions have then to be torn from their usual contexts and turned into the names of metaphysical objects, containers or processes so that these conjured-up 'private objects and processes' can be re-located inside our 'minds', just so that the "gap" (which traditionalists and others worry about) can be created.
Alternatively, ordinary words are transformed so that they now name the 'inner' psychological attributes of that the all-wise, all-knowing, constantly jabbering, surrogate in-house theatre critic mentioned earlier (who serially explains the plot of life to each of us, apparently) -- a voice which we implicitly trust, that has our inner ear at all times of the day (and perhaps night), and to whose "inner speech" we must attend if we are to understand what others say to us -- but whose own 'speech' is readily comprehensible and has no need of an intercessor of its own.
In all of this it is just assumed that because we are all familiar with these ordinary psychological words in their normal everyday contexts, such a radical change of use will not affect their meaning. Either that, or it is simply taken for granted that part of the meaning of ordinary words -- i.e., whatever it is that helps us use them in normal contexts -- can be transposed without alteration into these novel contexts. All this so that perfectly normal phenomena (like our ability to think) can be 'investigated' when no literal sense can be made of this use of language (without, of course, conjuring into existence that super-loquacious, 'inner' invisible friend again).
In effect, language is taken on a trip -- it goes "on holiday", to paraphrase Wittgenstein.68 Words are uprooted and flown off on a mystery tour, dressed in outlandish -- nay garish -- clothing so that they look entirely alien and 'problematic'. While away on holiday, words are forced to do rather odd things -- they seem to get 'metaphysically drunk', encouraging all manner of strange activities and ideas -- and are then employed in totally foreign surroundings. This transposition 'allows' theorists to derive immaterialist, if not ghostly conclusions -- theories which are (not surprisingly) conducive to a ruling-class/mystical view of the human 'soul'.
[No mystery then that from this heady brew, there also emerged 'rational economic man', a fictional character who behaves just like the atom of thought that originally went into 'his' creation.
Marxists should be aware of the rest of this sorry tale; it is outlined here for any who might have forgotten.]
Even so, the legitimacy that this 'linguistic mystery tour' seems to confer on its results is simply taken for granted -- but it is never questioned and seldom justified. Indeed, this is just one more way that ruling-class ideas become the ruling ideas -- and, alas, also among Marxists. Few question this picture! In fact, this is one area where right-wing ideologues and Marxists share common ground (even if these disparate groups paint this picture using different metaphors).
Worse: this bourgeois view of our allegedly 'rational economic mind' creates the metaphysical space for ruling-class ideas about humanity and nature to dominate and distort our ideas about ourselves and our relation to the 'status quo'.
[As we will see, this even affects Marxist theory, More on this below, and in Essay Twelve Part Seven -- until it is published, see here.]
Unfortunately, this 'virus of the mind', this metaphysical approach to language, seduces far too many erstwhile materialists into thinking ruling-class immaterialist, individualistic thoughts of their own. Not so much divide and rule, then, as: duped and ruled.69
Whatever merits are possessed by the philosophical-sounding arguments in favour of such an alien approach to language and 'mind', the results seem clear enough: This distortion of language (the transmogrification of all words into names designating abstract entities, concepts, ideas, substances, processes or events) amounts to its fetishisation -- i.e., the distortion of social forms of communication, so that what had once been a result of the relation between human beings (language) is transformed into the real relations between things, or into those very things themselves, or, indeed, into linguistic forms that represent them to us in our heads.69a
And, this is all the more unimpressive when Marxists join in.70
Apart from this, there is little to recommend the traditional approach.71
On the other hand, perhaps Parrington meant by "thought" something pre-linguistic. Alternatively, maybe he holds that the "mind" is a sort of 'container' in which "mental entities" mill around, occasionally bobbing to the surface from time to time in 'conscious' linguistic forms --, or even that they do so disguised as "images", "feelings" or "emotions"?72
Parrington's reference to Freud's "unconscious" (pp.139-40) suggests that he does indeed incline in this direction. However, this is bad news.73 The nature of the "unconscious" is obscure, at best -- despite the totally undeserved fame Freud enjoys for having 'discovered' 'it'. In fact, it is now clear that other ruling-class theorists had already concocted this notion decades, if not centuries earlier.74
It is highly doubtful whether scientific knowledge will be advanced much by the use of such fictional notions (themselves the products of further linguistic distortion/fetishisation). However, since Parrington did not outline his ideas in this area in any great detail, little more can be said about them.
Public Meaning -- Private Muttering
Despite the above dead end, what sense can be made of the following claim?
"Inner speech is the fluid interphase where meaning can start to be formed and shaped, based on the emotional, practical and social experience of the individual." [Ibid., pp.135-36.]
This idea is connected with his earlier comments on something else Parrington found in Voloshinov:
"A related feature of inner speech that Voloshinov pointed to was that it is more concerned with 'sense' rather than 'meaning'. In this definition, meaning is the dictionary definition of a word, for instance cat: 'a furry domestic quadruped'. Sense, on the other hand, refers to the whole set of psychological events aroused by a word, such as the personal memories of your own pet and its mannerisms, the feel of its fur and so on. It contains activities, impressions and personal meanings, not just accepted social definitions. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense." [Ibid., p.135.]
From this it looks like Parrington is interpreting/translating Voloshinov's word "theme" as "sense".75
[Incidentally, in what follows, since Parrington is using "sense" in a different way to my use of typographically the same word, to prevent confusion I will use "senseRL" to distinguish the latter from the former, but only in this section. My use of "sense" is explained in Essay Twelve Part One. Briefly: the senseRL of indicative sentences is the feature which allows us to understand them before we know whether they are true or false. More on that here, too.]
Having said that, it is quite clear that many or the things Parrington says of "sense" do not apply to Voloshinov's "theme".
Despite this, the above passage is rather unclear. If the "sense" of a linguistic expression relates to aspects of an individual's personal recollections, intimate feelings and idiosyncratic associations, which each user brings to the language they employ, then how are we to understand the following?
"A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense." [Ibid., p.135. Bold emphasis added.]
This passage says that a word "acquires its sense from the context in which it appears" (emphasis added), not from the contingent associations a speaker attaches to it.
On the other hand, perhaps Parrington meant by "context" the immediate framework of a speaker's life, her memories, associations and 'values', as well as the social situation in which she might find herself (or even a 'dialectical' combination of these and other related facts).76
But, how does all this relate to the public use of language, which is its primary function? Private associations may add flavour to some words (or "tone", as certain Analytic Philosophers have called it), but they cannot affect linguistic meaning. Or, rather, they can no more do this than, say, a person's idiosyncratic view of money is capable of affecting its public, economic value.
However, it is reasonably clear from what Parrington says that for him the linguistic meaning of words is (at least implicitly) the dominant factor here. For instance, unless the word "cat" meant (linguistically) what it actually does mean, the correct images, feelings, associations (etc.) would not be triggered-off in the 'mind' of the individual using or hearing that word (that is, if any are). If everyone associated what they liked with any of their words, and this was the determining factor influencing linguistic meaning, then the word "cat" could conjure up a dislike for fish fingers, fond memories of the last time they joined a strike, their hatred of Norman Tebbit, or indeed anything whatsoever.
Of course, Parrington does not deny this; in fact, he says:
"A related feature of inner speech that Voloshinov pointed to was that it is more concerned with 'sense' rather than 'meaning'. In this definition, meaning is the dictionary definition of a word, for instance cat: 'a furry domestic quadruped'. Sense, on the other hand, refers to the whole set of psychological events aroused by a word, such as the personal memories of your own pet and its mannerisms, the feel of its fur and so on. It contains activities, impressions and personal meanings, not just accepted social definitions. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense." [Ibid., p.135. Bold emphasis added.]77
But, he could not have argued this way -- i.e., that the word "cat" conjured up the sorts of associations he lists -- if users failed to employ the word as the rest of us do -- that is, to talk about cats (perhaps). If so, the public meaning (use) of any word must be primary, even for Parrington (and Voloshinov). With that observation, unfortunately, Parrington's entire case is completely undermined; if public meaning (use) in fact governs 'outer' and "inner speech" (if the latter in fact exists!), then contingent idiosyncratic associations must drop out of the picture as far as linguistic and communicative meaning are concerned. The contingent associations Parrington lists are parasitic -- or derivative --, at best. Naturally, that is why when someone talks about cats, for instance, what they say will readily be comprehended by anyone who knows how to use the word "cat" in sentences about them (etc.), without having the associations Parrington mentions, or any at all.
Of course, the sheer ordinariness of the word "cat" obscures this point. Anyone not convinced of it should try arguing as Parrington does with less common words/phrases -- such as "eggplant", or "oxbow lake" -- or, indeed, attempt to spell out the "sense" of any verb, preposition or conjunction in this way (and good luck there!). In fact, and on the contrary, provided that such prospective users understand the (linguistic) meaning of these words (i.e., know how to use them properly), no personal associations would be needed in order for them to employ each successfully, or, indeed, to grasp what is communicated by means of them.
Despite this, it is not difficult to show that "sense"/"tone" [henceforth, S/T] cannot attach to all words, or even to words in general -- as they appear in the public domain --, and function as a primary determinant of meaning in the way that Parrington seems to think. Here, for instance, are several words that do not possess a S/T: "and", "if", "but", "was", "inadvertently", "sense", "tone", "word", "idiosyncratic", "theme", "meaning". [The list is, of course, endless.]
Perhaps someone might object that such words do possess an S/T for them; their very mention conjures up all manner of associations and feelings. Naturally, there is no way of refuting this contention -- or, indeed, of confirming it. And there is no way that it could be determined whether or not the 'same' S/T occurred each time such words were employed by the same user, even when they appear in unusual sentences, clauses or phrases -- like the one in the last paragraph, namely: "Here, for instance, are several words that do not possess a S/T: "and", "if", "but", "was", "inadvertently", "sense", "tone", "word", "idiosyncratic", "theme", "meaning"".
But, even if each of these words possessed an S/T for such an objector, the images, feelings and associations they conjured would be a result of that objector already having understood these words, and with their normal import, otherwise they would fail to prompt the correct images, feelings and associations. Indeed, if this were not so, they could in fact induce the wrong images, feelings and associations (if, that is, any sense can be made of the use of "wrong" in this context).78 The contingent feelings or associations anyone attaches to words depends on those words being used to identify the alleged object of those feelings correctly, and they can only do that if they are employed in the same way the rest of us do.78a
Again, his is not to deny that idiosyncratic S/Ts might be associated with many (perhaps all of) these words, only that this feature of our allegedly 'private' lives cannot affect the public meaning of words.
Nevertheless, with respect to the idea that there might be a 'dialectical' interplay between public meaning and private S/Ts, which determines the import of the words we use, consider the following sentence:
C1: I inadvertently killed your cat.
C2: London is the Capital of the United Kingdom.
Whatever images, feelings and associations C1 conjures up, they would clearly be specific to the present circumstances of this Essay -- that is, those that are connected with the reason why C1 was chosen -- which, in turn, was to serve as an illustrative example criticising this aspect of dialectics! But, that fact does not alter C1's senseRL. That is why we would all be able to understand C1 before we knew whether or not it was true -- that is, provided the reference of the indexicals it contains (i.e., "I" and "your") were already understood.
Of course, in C2 we do not have any of these problems to contend with.
Indeed, C1 contains several terms whose reference is indeterminate [Whose cat? Who is the one claiming to have killed the said cat? Which cat? When? And so on.] Clearly, although C1 itself may well be understood, its precise import would have to await the clarification of indeterminacies like these. But, one thing it won't have to wait upon: the pooled S/Ts of anyone hearing it or reading it. The components of C1's actual senseRL are clearly unrelated to the pooled S/Ts of its constituent words. The S/T of individual words drops out of the picture if C1 is to be understood by both originator and recipient. The senseRL of C1 depends on the reference and/or use of the indeterminate terms it contains -- and the latter are surely independent of anyone's 'feelings', 'associations' and 'values'. That being so, there does not appear to be a hook here for any sort of 'dialectical' interplay to latch onto.
Nevertheless, even if it were still maintained that all the words in C1 possessed their own individualised and/or idiosyncratic S/Ts (which contributed 'dialectically' -- perhaps, orchestra-like --, combining to give the S/T of the whole) for whoever it is that might be still be objecting, that fact (supposing it were one) would still not be relevant to the thought C1 expressed. If each speaker associated a thought of their own with each utterance (and the latter were linked to the S/Ts idiosyncratically connected with the words used), then it plainly wouldn't be the same thought as the thought entertained by their interlocutors. Each would have their own set of S/Ts which is different from anyone else's. Including their own on each occasion!
In which case, no shared thought could ever be conveyed or received, and that would completely undermine the idea that language is a social phenomenon, acting primarily as a means of communication. The fact that we do succeed in communicating countless times each day shows that the that S/Ts are of little linguistic consequence.78b
Now, readers of the above words may or may not disagree with their import, and some may continue to maintain that S/Ts (as understood by Parrington) are central to their comprehension and use of language. However, such individuals may do this only after acknowledging that they will have succeeded in understanding the above contentious thoughts of mine without having a clue what S/Ts I -- RL -- attributed (or did not attribute) to, or associated with, any or all of them. Upon doing that, of course, such erstwhile contrarians would then be disagreeing with themselves, for then it would be plain that they had grasped those words -- even while dissenting from their import -- when that act itself only succeeded because the meaning of my words did not depend on a single S/T being attributable to one or all of them.
In addition, die hard S/T fans (if such there be) would also need to explain, for example, what Parrington himself meant by S/T without access to his emotional state, biography or predilections.
Of course, no one else would be able to comprehend even that long overdue explanation without performing the same miraculously psychic trick on the words of those die-hards contrarians themselves.
One Conversation Does Not A Theory Make
Parrington and Holborow both quote a passage from Voloshinov's work which they seem to think provides an important insight into the entire nature of language and communication:
"How does verbal discourse in life relate to the extraverbal situation that has engendered it? Let us analyse this matter, using an intentionally simplified example for the purpose.