Descending Babel: Chapter 24

Of all the things I have discovered over the years, this is perhaps the most important : an understanding of 'language' (what is is, how it works, how it doesn't work) is the key to revealing the answer to all life's puzzles, in obtaining knowledge and wisdom, and, ultimately, personal enlightenment. Everything that we think we know or think we don't know is directly tied up in the knot of words and language: our society, culture, philosophy, politics, religion, science, law, literature, and so on.

It has been said that language is the very essence of what makes us human. If we are to fully understand what it means to be human, then, we must understand what language is, how it works, how we use it, or misuse it.

Linguistics, often defined as 'the scientific study of language', is a broad term covering a wide range of different disciplines. The traditional 'core' areas of the subject deal with the structure of human languages in terms of how speech sounds combine to form syllables and words (phonetics and phonology), how words combine into meaningful utterances such as sentences and phrases (morphology and syntax), and how we extract meaning from utterances we read or hear used by other people (semantics and pragmatics). But beyond this, linguists are also interested in matters such as how languages evolve and change over time, how they are learned by children and by adults, how languages are used in social settings, the historical and contemporary relationships between languages, the roles of language in nation-building and identity marking, the development of writing systems, how the brain processes speech and language, how communication is possible when speech and language are impaired, etc. Linguistics therefore has close links to many other fields of enquiry in the social, physical and medical sciences, philosophy, and the arts and humanities. Our understanding of language origins, structure and use changes constantly with new discoveries in neuroscience, animal behaviour, archaeology and palaeontology, sociology, and psychology, etc.

Apart from what Lycan himself has in mind concerning the meaning of meaning, one may take this example as some support for Ayer's claim that unless a sentence can be verified (in principle), it's meaningless (see Language, Truth, Logic, and God below).

But even sentences that can be verified can be tricky. What's tricky about them isn't our concern about what the individual words or sentences mean—a dictionary or encyclopedia can solve that problem—but what it means for us to infer meaning from an expression. Why do expressions have the meanings they have? Which expressions have the same meanings as other expressions, or how can identical expressions have different meanings? How can meanings—whether agreeable or disagreeable—be known? Where does 'meaning' come from? What, really, does the word 'meaning' mean? And can 'meaning' be found outside the realm of words or is the notion of meaning an artificial construct only found within the workings of language?

A closer examination of words, language, and meaning reveals that all words are abstractions, only the degree of their abstraction defers.

Throughout this site, you will hear me mention language and the artifice of words. Now the term 'artifice of words' may sound strange to some people, especially those who have no familiarity with the philosophy of language, linguistics, or aesthetics. While we are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of words a day, whether oral, written, or broadcast, very few of us have actually taken the time to consider the symbolic abstraction that underlies the meanings of the words we use and the rapid mental associations we make to interpret such generic terms like dog, tree, hot, bad, love, blue, and god.

Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth are important subjects of consideration not simply because they are used in everyday life, but because language shapes human development, from earliest childhood and continuing to death. Knowledge itself is intertwined with language, its transmission and distribution. Notions of self, experience, and existence mostly depend on how language is used, what is learned through it, how it is interpreted and on-going assumptions derived from interpretation. The topic of learning language leads to all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to have any thoughts without having a language? What kinds of thoughts need a language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how one acts in it? Can anyone reason at all without using language? Does language influence the "primal experience of being" (i.e., the animalistic pre-language state) in such a way so as to distort one's experience and worldview in order to confirm language's abstractions? The philosophy of language deliberately considers these types of questions. It is an important point of study because language is inseparable from how one thinks and interprets the world. People in general have a set of vital concepts which are connected with signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," everyone has shaped (or has had shaped for them) a view of the universe and how they have "meaning" within it. In a great many cases—especially when considering religion and politics—people infer meaning from words alone, from the abstractions inherent in language, because the objects of the describing words (entities or agencies like "god" or "afterlife" or "angels") are nowhere in evidence in the 'real world'.

By definition, then, and necessity, language is abstract and assumptive. The linguistic meaning of words is presupposed and inferred. There are essentially two different types of inferences when it comes to words we use: conceptual meaning and associative meaning.

The conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind of meaning is treated by using a technique called "semantic feature analysis." The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension") and extension (also called "denotation").

The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. Such mental understanding can be broken into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic (see Alice Mwihaki's MEANING AS USE: A FUNCTIONAL VIEW OF SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS in PDF).

One issue that has bothered philosophers and ordinary people for as long as there have been words is the problem of their vagueness. Often, meanings expressed by the speaker are not as explicit as the listener would like them to be. The consequences of vagueness can be disastrous to classical logic because they give rise to the Sorites Paradox (in which the definition of a word like "heap" can be constructed or deconstruction one grain of dirt at a time until the object in question can no longer be considered a "heap" by definition but becomes something else).

Most people don't think about the abstractive and assumptive properties inherent in language although both are constantly used in day-to-day interaction. This is best demonstrated by an example similar to Lycan's sentence above, except the objects of this sentence are neither invented or improbable. Consider the sentence:

If you're like most people, the sentence above makes perfect sense to you. You know precisely what it means. You can imagine it, almost picture it in your mind's eye. But how? Every element of this sentence is completely abstract.

What makes this kind of abstraction possible is your awareness of having actually had physical interaction with specific dogs and balls and streets and cars. You can conceptualize based on this interaction and thus infer the meaning from a broad abstract sentence like "The dog chased the ball into the street and got hit by a car."

Now, here's the kicker:

When it comes to supernatural religion it may be surprising to most believers to consider the simple fact that religion is all talk, only talk, and nothing but talk. Supernatural religion consists only of words, an ancient collection of words mostly recounted in anonymous third-person narratives (a fictional technique or unwarranted hearsay), and that's it. Because supernatural religion is comprised only of words, there's nothing empirical, physical, nothing of substance that you can point to besides art (derived from the word artifice or artificial) in any of its aspects: literature, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, theater, motion pictures, television, etc.

So, when believers talk about the "Will of God" or say things like "God is Love" or "God is Omnipotent and Omniscient" or ask "What Would Jesus Do?" not only are they utilizing a generic abstraction (like using the words 'dog', 'street', and 'ball') they are using an abstraction twice-removed because they are inferring God's godliness only from the artifice of words and not from any actual associations in the 'real' world. Ask a believer to describe "God" and to drill down to the particulars (as with the description of "dog") and you will be handed a list of generic abstract terms that are by themselves quite meaningless until they are weighed against 'real' properties that exist in the physical world.

I realize this is heady stuff, so let's try to make it a clearer with another example.

When believers explain that "God is Love" where are they getting this information? Are they observing God in action, then deducing from His behavior that he is a loving god? No. They are quoting and interpreting words in the Bible to make their case for a loving god while ignoring or conveniently forgetting other words in the Bible that make a case for a petty, judgmental, infantile, and merciless god. In either case, the very idea of a loving god was not derived from any behavioral evidence apparent in the 'real' world (with it's illness, disease, war, pain, suffering, cruelty, etc) but only from the artifice of words. Now, who wrote the words from whence believers derive the interpretation that 'God is Love'? In nine out of ten times, they don't know who wrote the words because the various authors are anonymous or the words subject to centuries of editing and redaction. In other words, believers are basing their interpretations of the attributes of God only on words written thousands of years ago by who knows whom? And apologists like to carp that rationalists and skeptics rely too much on naturalistic presuppositions!

But the artifice of words goes further than just the attributes of God. The artifice of words runs throughout the entire Bible, but is nowhere clearer than in third-person narrative accounts that describe events no one actually witnessed or historical settings that are centuries passed. In this case, the artifice of words applies to so-called "revealed" scripture once again composed by who knows whom.

The book of Genesis is a good example of this. Conservative Christians like to believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch or Torah), which includes Genesis. On the other hand, Bible scholars have ascertained that the first five books of the Bible were compiled, edited, and redacted over hundreds of years by several unknown authors and editors. In either case, neither Moses nor the unknown writers and editors were physically present to report the following example from Genesis (Genesis 1:1-5):

As far as content goes, it makes no difference who or whom the authors or authors were in relation to the above passage because it is not based on any actual historical reporting (i.e., the author or authors were not parked somewhere outside the uncreated universe and observing God during the act of creation). As such, it is either (1) an invented myth or legend used etiologically to explain the existence of the world, (2) an appropriated older myth and legend altered to "fit" a particular tribal tradition, or (3) supernaturally "revealed" to the fortunate author or authors in which case we are suppose to trust (have "faith") that the lucky author or authors did in fact receive special revelations that eventually found their way into the Bible (a compiled book which references itself to prove its own authority) and were not otherwise politically or socially motivated, artististic, superstitious, fraudulant, or hallucinatory.

Once again, such passages rely fully on the artifice of words since there is no natural way the author or authors called have ever witnessed such fantastic events. As an exercise, read through the entire book of Gensis. If it was written in the third-person hundreds of years after all it's events transpired, it is not an eyewitness account, but an artificial account. It is art, not history. To believe otherwise only because anonymous passages of the Bible direct you to believe otherwise is to become ensnared in the artifice of words and the self-referential loop of circular reasoning. The presupposition here is that the Bible is authoritative only because the Bible's own words tell you it is authoritative, words that reference non-historical events based on "supernatural" revelations given to anonymous authors who wrote and edited using standard story-telling techniques (third-person narratives, copy-and-paste, appropriation and plagiarism) two thousand years ago in an age of crass superstition, political upheaval, and social agendas.

Instead of saying God, Heaven, and Hell, you could just as easily say Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo. Like God, Heaven, and Hell, the only way you can know anything about Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo is through word association. But this isn't exactly true either. In all actuality, you don't know anything about Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo other than the words associated with these terms. You can't point to Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo, or see them, or measure them, or know what they're suppose to be or whether they even exist, or where, or how. In fact, any words used to define Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo are applied not because of anything experienced in reality, but solely out of artificial and abstract word associations. The only we we think we know anything about Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo at all is through word associations and for no other reason! Since the existence of Glavin, Homatron, and Jyklumoo cannot be proven and nowhere in evidence, anything said about them is completely contrived, invented, speculative, made-up. If I say "Glavin is All-Knowing and All-Powerful" how do I know this? Since the existence of Glavin cannot be proven and is nowhere in evidence, I could just as easily have said "Glavin is ignorant and weak." Why? Because 'Glavin' is by itself a meaningless term that appropriates meaning solely from the words associated to it and from nothing else! This being the case, any words could be associated with it no matter how far-fetched, ridiculous, or contrary. You can't prove that one set of word associations is correct and a different set of word associations is incorrect, because 'Glavin' is composed of nothing but word associations. And that is the nature of religion.

Religion is nothing more than a carefully crafted series of word associations whereby X = A + B + C + D . Remove A + B + C + D and you have nothing else to show for X. While you can make these same types of word associations with a tree or a dog or a car, trees and cars and dogs don't need word associations to argue their existence or make themselves known, but terms like God and Heaven and Hell are wholly constructed by word asociations alone.

Don't believe me? You can't show me 'God' but you can show me words associations that add up to define God. Where did these word associations come from? The term 'God' is meaningless without the word associations, but what about the word associations themselves?

Let's look at the Christian doctrine assertion that God is omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent (everywhere), and omnibenevolent (all-good, all-loving). How do we know God is any of these things? Did we determine this by pointing to God or did we determine this by pointing to words?

Without pointing to words, without relying on word associations, what can you tell me about God? If you can't tell me anything without refering back to word associations, then the word associations themselves—omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent—are meaningless since they also or composed of associations that cannot be proven and are nowhere in evidence. For example, what does it mean to say that God is omnipotent (all-powerful?) Is there really such a thing as omnipotence or does its very definition entail contradictions and paradoxes? This quote by Epicurus (341-270 BCE) clearly exemplifies the issue: "Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"

It's almost like an elaborate con game is going on. The term 'God' is meaningless without the word associations, but the words used to make the associations are also meaningless since taken together they are inherently contrary, paradoxical, and still manage to beg the question. And isn't all doctrinal language just this way? You can't point to God, so you make word associations instead. You can't point to life-after-death, so you make word associations instead. You can't point to Satan, so you make word associations instead.

Without words, without making word associations, there would be no knowledge of the Soul or Heaven or Hell or Judgement Day or Eternal Life, etc. Even the notion of 'Sin' depends on word associations, for what is a 'sin' without the declaration of sin? It may be said that "it's a sin to tell a lie" but the 'sin' and the 'lie' are both products of the 'telling' word associations.

Without language, without words, you cannot tell a lie and you do not sin. Both come into existence with a declaration and not before. And, if you think about it, the same can be said for 'truth'. Outside of telling, there is no truth. Like God, like Heaven, like Hell, you can't show Truth. Truth is a product of language and requires words to exist. Prior to language, notions of God, Heaven, Hell, Soul, Salvation, Truth, etc, are not an issue. With language they are defined using any consensual word assocations that anyone can make. This being the case, such words—because they can be defined as anything—are ultimately meaningless, hollow, and empty. Reality is not based on definitions or word associations or quotes from a book. Reality is what you have after all the books have been put away and you keep your mouth shut. Reality has been around for billions of years and language for only a few thousand. You don't need language to know reality. Anything that requires language to make itself known is not reality but the artifice of words, simply word associations, predicates on paper that can nowhere else be seen.

Language, Truth, Logic, and God

The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition.

The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant. And with regard to questions the procedure is the same. We inquire in every case what observations would lead us to answer the question, one way or the other; and, if none can be discovered, we must conclude that the sentence under consideration does not, as far as we are concerned, express a genuine question, however strongly its grammatical appearance may suggest that it does. As the adoption of this procedure is an essential factor in the argument of this book, it needs to be examined in detail. In the first place, it is necessary to draw a distinction between practical verifiability, and verifiability in principle. Plainly we all understand, in many cases believe, propositions which we have not in fact taken steps to verify. Many of these are propositions which we could verify if we took enough trouble. But there remain a number of significant propositions, concerning matters of fact, which we could not verify even if we chose; simply because we lack the practical means of placing ourselves in the situation where the relevant observations could be made.

A simple and familiar example of such a proposition is the proposition that there are mountains on the farther side of the moon. No rocket has yet been invented which would enable me to go and look at the farther side of the moon, so that I am unable to decide the matter by actual observation. But I do know what observations would decide it for me, if, as is theoretically conceivable, I were once in a position to make them. And therefore I say that the proposition is verifiable in principle, if not in practice, and is accordingly significant. On the other hand, such a metaphysical pseudo-proposition as "the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress," [F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality] is not even in principle verifiable. For one cannot conceive of an observation which would enable one to determine whether the Absolute did, or did not, enter into evolution and progress. Of course it is possible that the author of such a remark is using English words in a way in which they are not commonly used by English-speaking people, and that he does, in fact, intend to assert something which could be empirically verified. But until he makes us understand how the proposition that he wishes to express would be verified, he fails to communicate anything to us. And if he admits, as I think the author of the remark in question would have admitted, that his words were not intended to express either a tautology or a proposition which was capable, at least in principle, of being verified, then it follows that he has made an utterance which has no literal significance even for himself. […]

It should now be clear that the only information which we can legitimately derive from the study of our aesthetic and moral experiences is information about our own mental and physical make-up. We take note of these experiences as providing data for our psychological and sociological generalisations. And this is the only way in which they serve to increase our knowledge. It follows that any attempt to make our use of ethical and aesthetic concepts the basis of a metaphysical theory concerning the existence of a world of values, as distinct from the world of facts, involves a false analysis of these concepts. Our own analysis has shown that the phenomena of moral experience cannot fairly be used to support any rationalist or metaphysical doctrine whatsoever. In particular, they cannot, as Kant hoped, be used to establish the existence of a transcendent god.

This mention of God brings us to the question of the possibility of religious knowledge. We shall see that this possibility has already been ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics. But, as this is a point of considerable interest, we may be permitted to discuss it at some length. It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved. To see that this is so, we have only to ask ourselves what are the premises from which the existence of such a god could be deduced. If the conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstratively certain, then these premises must be certain; for, as the conclusion of a deductive argument is already contained in the premises, any uncertainty there may be about the truth of the premises is necessarily shared by it. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.

What is not so generally recognised is that there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Chrisianity, is even probable. Yet this also is easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible. It is sometimes claimed, indeed, that the existence of a certain sort of regularity in nature constitutes sufficient evidence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence "God exists" entails to more than that certain types of phenomena occur in certain sequences, then to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all he intended to assert in asserting the existence of a god. He would say that in talking about God, he was talking about a transcendent being who might be known through certain empirical manifestations, but certainly could not be defined in terms of those manifestations. But in that case the term "god" is a metaphysical term. And if "god" is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that "God exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

It is important not to confuse this view of religious assertions with the view that is adopted by atheists, or agnostics. For it is characteristic of an agnostic to hold that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of an atheist to hold that it is at least probable that no god exists. And our view that all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical, so far from being identical with, or even lending any support to, either of these familiar contentions, is actually incompatible with them. For if the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion is that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. As for the agnostic, although he refrains from saying either that there is or that there is not a god, he does not deny that the question whether a transcendent god exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the two sentences "There is a transcendent god" and "There is no transcendent god" express propositions one of which is actually true and the other false. All he says is that we have no means of telling which of them is true, and therefore ought not to commit ourselves to either. But we have seen that the sentences in question do not express propositions at all. And this means that agnosticism also is ruled out.

Thus we offer the theist the same comfort as we gave to the moralist. His assertions cannot possibly be valid, but they cannot be invalid either. As he says nothing at all about the world, he cannot justly be accused of saying anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient grounds. It is only when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a genuine proposition that we are entitled to disagree with him.

It is to be remarked that in cases where deities are identified with natural objects, assertions concerning them may be allowed to be significant. If, for example, a man tells me that the occurrence of thunder is alone both necessary and sufficient to establish the truth of the proposition that Jehovah is angry, I may conclude that, in his usage of words, the sentence "Jehovah is angry" is equivalent to "It is thundering." But in sophisticated religions, though they may be to some extent based on men's awe of natural process which they cannot sufficiently understand, the "person" who is supposed to control the empirical world is not himself located in it; he is held to be superior to the empirical world, and so outside it; and he is endowed with super-empirical attributes. But the notion of a person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used, as if it named this "person," but, unless the sentences in which it occurs express propositions which are empirically verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything. And this is the case with regard to the word "god," in the usage in which it is intended to refer to a transcendent object. The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it. It is only when we enquire what God's attributes are that we discover that "God," in this usage, is not a genuine name.

It is common to find belief in a transcendent god conjoined with belief in an after-life. But, in the form which it usually takes, the content of this belief is not a genuine hypothesis. To say that men do not ever die, or that the state of death is merely a state of prolonged insensibility, is indeed to express a significant proposition, though all the available evidence goes to show that it is false. But to say that there is something imperceptible inside a man, which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead, is to make a metaphysical assertion which has no more factual content than the assertion that there is a transcends god.

It is worth mentioning that, according to the account which we have given of religious assertions, there is no logical ground for antagonism between religion and natural science. As far as the question of truth or falsehood is concerned, there is no opposition, between the natural scientist and the theist who believes in a transcendent god. For since the religious utterances of the theist are not genuine propositions at all, they cannot stand in any logical relation to the propositions of science. Such antagonism as there is between religion and science appears to consist in the fact that science takes away one of the motives which make men religious. For it is acknowledged that one of the ultimate sources of religious feeling lies in the inability of men to determine their own destiny; and science tends to destroy the feeling of awe with which men regard an alien world, by making them believe that they can understand and anticipate the course of natural phenomena, and even to some extent control it. The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be sympathetic towards religion is a point in favour of this hypothesis. For this sympathy towards religion marks the physicists' own lack of confidence in the validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their part from the anti-religious dogmatism of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural outcome of the crisis through which physics has just passed.

It is not within the scope of this enquiry to enter more deeply into the causes of religious feeling, or to discuss the probability of the continuance of religious belief. We are concerned only to answer those questions which arise out of our discussion of the possibility of religious knowledge. The point which we wish to establish is that there cannot be any transcendent truths of religion. For the sentences which the theist uses to express such "truths" are not literally significant.