The Sun rose from the East in the morning. Is the sentence true? What does mean that it is true? Does it mean that the event that the sentence described has occurred, or that the sentence is a perfect representation of what has happened? How can a string of symbols or sound represent the physical world? Is it possible for a sentence to perfectly represent what has happened? What does it mean by “the East”? The Earth is roughly spherical shaped, if we follow any direction long enough, we will get back to where we are. Do we define “East” as the direction that Sunrise is? Then doesn’t that just made the sentence a tautology? “The Sun rose from the direction Sun rises in the morning.”
When we talk about true or false, we are almost exclusively talking about how accurate a representation is in comparison to what it is trying to represent. It not only applies to sentences but also to photographs, paintings, videos, and recordings. An event that has happened, has happened, it can not be true or false. But what words we choose to describe the event can be labeled as true or false based on how accurate and objective our description of the event is. But what does an objective or accurate description mean? “The Sun rose from the East in the morning.” Is it accurate? Can a 9-word sentence accurately capture the complex movement of the trajectory of the Sun moving across the sky and how its first light piercing through everything that it touches and leaves the grass, the tree in its absolute radiance? Is the description objective? There are literally thousands of visible stars in the sky, and each is its Sun in its solar system, what made our Sun, “the Sun”? Isn’t that a subjective choice we made based on the bias of our personal close relationship with our closest star?
One of the most important works of modern philosophy and science is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Its insight into how human language works has shaped how linguists study languages, how historians view history, and even how scientists discover the laws of our natural world. In this episode, I will dive into what Wittgenstein calls the Language Game, and discuss the meaning of truth, and the language’s relationship to reality. You can learn about how words get their meanings and the nature of mathematical language in my previous episodes on the Philosophy of Language.
Throughout most human history, the common belief was that language has a special connection to reality. In Plato’s Republic, Plato proposed the theory of forms. He believed that every general word was created by the Gods along with a perfect object corresponding to that word in a higher reality. A specific table is an imperfect shadow of the perfect table in the higher reality created by the Gods. And the word “table” corresponding to the perfect tables in that higher reality. Plato believed this is true for all words and ideas. There is a perfect “Cat”, a perfect “Dog”, or a perfect “Society”, utopia in that higher reality, and we can figure out what they are through dialogues, hence the Republic. This theory only works, because Plato and many other philosophers and theologians in ancient times believed the true reality never changes. All things and ideas existed that have always existed. Any thought we have, or sentences we spoke, must correspond to something in that higher reality, and language has a special relationship with the reality itself. In the Old Testament, the name of God is a special word that should not be uttered without reverence. During medieval times, when people believe in the power of magic and witchcraft, certain sounds or incantations were believed to have the power to alter reality. The word “Bear”, originally means “the brown one”. It was believed that utter the real name of the “Bear” would summon one, and now we are only left with “Bear”‘s substitute name. Even nowadays, we call certain words “curse words” because it was believed that those words will bring bad fortune when spoken.
The idea that language has a special connection to reality, is originated from the Platonic assumption that the higher reality itself never changes and our reality shifts because it is only a flickering shadow of the higher reality that we can not perceive directly. But modern science has deeply challenged that assumption. We have discovered new stars from supernovas. Evolution has shown that cats and dogs have changed in their appearance and behaviors throughout history and will keep changing. Technological innovations had presented us with new gadgets and ideas that never existed before, and we invented new words to describe them. I doubt that Plato would know what “Netflix and Chill” means. So, maybe the theory of Forms is wrong, and language does not have a fixed and predetermined relationship with reality at all.
Modern linguists have more or less agreed that the sounds and symbols we use to represent things are mostly arbitrary. I say mostly because for some words representing certain sounds, the sound of a word usually shares some similarities to the sound that it is trying to represent, like “meow”. Similarly, for Pictographic languages, such as Chinese, words were originally drawings of the things that it is trying to represent. But, with time, those words become more abstract, and often completely lost their resemblance to the physical things. We don’t have any scientific evidence that certain words have magical powers, nor do they summon bears. Especially with the rapid extinction rate of species, it becomes less and less likely that words can summon wild animals. As far as to curse words, they only bring bad fortune because as a society we found those words unacceptable and therefore punishes those who speak them. There are many English words that sound like bad words in Chinese, but nothing bad happens to people speaking them in English. Though people probably won’t make many friends if they use those words when they are in China.
The Treachery of Images is an oil painting created by René Magritte in 1929. In the painting, a realistic depiction of the pipe was drawn. But underneath it, the caption says: “This is not a pipe”. The artist wants to remind us, that no matter how realistic an art piece looks, it is not real, only a representation of reality through someone’s perspective.
There is nothing special about language. Like paintings, videos, photos, or audio recordings, it is just an abstract representation we use to communicate about the physical world. But unlike other media, we commonly forgot that about language. Like Plato, we often think that by engaging in a pure linguistic debate we can somehow reveal some truth about the world, which is what 99% of the internet is made of. Linguistic arguments are great when we have all of the information we need to come to conclusions. It helps us eliminates contradictions in our beliefs and arguments. But it won’t help us if we do not have sufficient information. In those cases, we will need to collect more data. We can’t figure out what the food taste like from a photo of the food alone, we can’t figure out whether Newtonian mechanics or Einstein’s relativity are better at capturing laws of the physical world by mathematical arguments alone, and we can’t figure out which policy is best for the economy by engaging in endless political debates. But I do blame the ancient philosophers for our bad habit of seeking objective truth through pure verbal argument. Plato wrote a whole book the Republic in which Socrates debated over other philosophers so to find out the best way to organize human society. Ancient Chinese Confucianism writers believed the best way to learn about governing is to read books of governing written by old Confucianism writers. Medieval scholastic scholars believed that the only way to gain knowledge is to read about what ancient writers wrote on what they know. By the way, our modern education system is still very much resembles scholastic philosophy. We teach students to regurgitate sentences that the textbook writers wrote and test their abilities mostly on memorization instead of understanding. What does it mean to understand something is an extremely complex topic and the central question to epistemology. But I will leave it to another episode. But for now, language is just an arbitrary collection of symbols and sounds we use to represent the physical world. Like the game of monopoly, we made up the rules about what color or shape we use to represent properties, jails, and the character, what dies rolls means what events. Similarly, in our language game, we made up the rules about what letters and sounds we use to represent things surround us, and what sequence of words we use to represent relationships. Is it a “black cat”, or “gato negro”? Should the adjective be before or after the noun? We were taught to play this game when we were kids, and we accepted that whatever rules were taught to us are natural, because they feel natural to us. But those rules are made up by humans. And just like there are different versions of monopolies and poker at different places, we have different rules for what we consider the same language in different communities.
In the now-famous “The Habitual Be” study, conducted by Janice Jackson from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, groups of black and white children were shown images from Sesame Street. In one of the images, the Cookie Monster was sick and lying in bed without any cookies, while Elmo stood nearby eating a cookie. Then Janice asked the kids: “Who is eating the cookies?”, all kids pointed to Elmo. But when Janice asked the kids: “Who be eating the cookies?”, the white kids pointed to Elmo, while the black kids pointed to the Cookie Monster. The reason for the different choices is that in what we consider as the standard American English, “be eating” is not proper grammar, so the white kids considered that it means the same as “is eating”. But in African-American English, “be eating” and “is eating” are grammatically different. “Is eating” means the subject is currently eating, while “be eating” means the subject has the habit of eating. The Cookie Monster is usually the one eating the cookies on Seasame Street. So when asked “Who be eating the cookies”, for African American English speakers, it should be the Cookie Monster, not Elmo.
We have the tendency to consider the language we speak as the “correct” one. My automatic grammar checker is currently screaming at me for using “be eating”. For those who speak a similar language as ours but with some differences, it is easy for us to consider them as less intelligent or less educated for those grammatic nuances that we are not familiar with. But the fact is, language is a living phenomenon, there is no one correct language. Each linguistic community can have its own twists and house rules that are different from other communities. There is no one correct way to speak English. If you travel across France to Germany, you don’t find a line where everyone suddenly switches from French to German. But rather a gradual dialect shift from place to place. The more North you travel, the more Germanic the language becomes. This flexibility of language is something that we should celebrate, rather than trying to force everyone to speak the same way as ours. Our language is far from complete, there are still many more ideas and thoughts that we can’t yet express. And we can’t even know what those ideas and thoughts are because we can’t express them in our language. The flexibility and inventiveness of language allow language to evolve with our thoughts, culture, and accumulated knowledge. 500 years ago, human right was not a concept that exists in our language, but nowadays we have developed a cornucopia of vocabularies and ideas surrounding human rights and equality, and almost everyone grows up in the U.S. knows about them and can discuss them. In mathematics, we invented the language of calculus that allowed us to discuss and examine concepts such as differentials and laid foundations for modern physics. We should be careful not to dismiss ideas simply because they are unfamiliar and different. Instead, we should try to understand them as charitable as possible. Give them a chance and they might surprise us. After all, we do not know everything yet.
Even though the rules of language are somewhat arbitrary and there are many different languages all with different rules that can express similar ideas equally well, not all linguistic rules are capable of giving the language its meaning. When language is used for deception and manipulation, it is usually kept ambiguous and inconsistent, so that it can confuse the listener and create the illusion of successful communication without actually achieving it. But for a language to be used to carry out meaningful communications, it requires to be logically consistent at least to some extent.
If you walk into a bar and want to order a drink, but everything on the menu is called “The Special”, how can you order what you want? To carry out meaningful communication, a language should be as clear and unambiguous as possible. To be able to order the drink you wanted, not only that each drink must have unique names, but the name you think a drink has must also be the name that the bar has given to it. If you have listened to my previous episode, you will know that this is the linguistic agreement test. “The Habitual Be” is a valid grammar because, within the linguistic community that uses the grammar, the member consistently uses “be doing something” to refer to “someone has a habit of doing” something. If members of the community sometimes use it as “someone has a habit of doing” while in some other times in the same situation would use it as “someone is currently doing”, then the listener would not be able to differentiate the meaning, then the grammar would have lost its power to communicate, and would no longer be valid. Here “in the same situation” is crucial. As much as we want languages to be as clear and unambiguous as possible, it is simply not practical to have every single word one meaning, one meaning only. It would require us to invent new words or compounded words for every different experience we have, which is infinite and unique to each person, then we won’t be able to communicate at all. Instead, we use words that describe our existing experiences and use them in new places with some similarities to give them new meanings. “Mouse” used to only refer to the small furry animals, but now, it also refers to the electronic devices we attach to our computers. But when I say “My mouse has stopped working.”, you can almost certain that I am talking about the electronic device, not the animal. But how?
Context. Because we give language meaning by simply using it to refer to something in a context, sentences are often extremely ambiguous by themselves without the context in which they were spoken. The same words can have different meanings when used in different situations. A sentence can be either request or command based on how it is spoken. “Could you pick up the mails?” vs “Could you pick up the mails!”. We use rhetorical devices such as hyperbole or sarcasm to invert the literal meaning of a sentence. “I am sure you have literally never heard of any sarcasm before.” But yet, we seem to be able to understand each other most of the time, well, at least we think we understand each other most of the time. The question of what does it mean to understand something has haunted philosophers and teachers ever since we start to teach. It is a very important question as we use language to pass on knowledge, but what if what we think we are teaching is not what the student has learned due to the ambiguity of the language? When we read the Constitution as the guiding principle for government, how can we know that what we think it means is actually what the writers meant? I encourage you to think about this question as it is one of the most profound and important questions in epistemology. All knowledge we learned is kind of dependent on the answer to this question. I will leave it for you to contemplate for now and get back to it in a later episode. But regarding clarifying the meaning of a sentence and creating a verbal agreement, we play the language game of “question and rephrase”. We learned the game while we are fairly young, we try to rephrase a sentence someone else has said, and if we do not have enough information, we ask more questions for more context. We repeat until the other person agrees with what we rephrased it as is what they meant. Note that this process is completely subjective and simply because we agree that we understood each other, doesn’t mean we actually do, as anyone who ever had a misunderstanding before can testify.
Wittgenstein pointed out that all languages are private, that is, we can not communicate to others what a sentence truly means to me. He gave the following example: consider a group of people all holds a box with something in it. The only person who can see what is inside is the person holding the box. So no one knows what’s in everyone else’s box. Everyone refers to what is inside their box as “a beetle”. Just because everyone agrees on the word that is used to refer to what is in the boxes, does not mean everyone has the same thing in their boxes. Similarly, just because we agree on the same sentences for describing the same event, does not mean our understanding of the event is the same. What does it mean to understand something is far more complicated than just to agree on the word we use to describe it. But I will leave this point for later.
Now coming back to the question “The Sun rose from the East in the morning.” Is the statement true? There is a sentence I like a lot: “you can no more change history than change the fact that there are 9 planets in the solar system.” 20 years ago, if you said that there are 8 planets in the solar system, people would probably laugh at you and question the education you got. But now if you say there are 9 planets in the solar system, some may say that your education is out of date. But how can it be that two sentences: “There are 9 planets in the Solar system” and “There are 8 planets in the Solar System” both be true but at different times period? 8 is certainly not equal to 9? The planets are still following the same orbital cycles, and have roughly the same shape and size. What has changed isn’t the physical reality, but our definition of the word “planet”. With the old definition, there were 9 planets in the Solar System. Now, with the new definition, there are only 8.
Let’s consider the word “Democracy” and what it refers to. Ancient Athens was famous for its proud democratic system. But in their cities, women, and slaves have no right to vote or speak in public symposiums. How can they call themselves democracy while the majority of the population can’t vote? Just about 100 years ago, women in the U.S.A. finally won their rights to vote, and many countries didn’t extend voting rights to women until after WWII, while the West has been boasting its democratic system for centuries. But we are different now, right? Today, everyone who deserves the right to vote has the right to vote, correct? Yet, citizens under the age of 18 still can not vote, immigrant workers can not vote, and prisoners who have been convicted of felonies can not vote. You may argue that they don’t deserve the right to vote. But who “deserves” the right to vote is heavily dependent on our definition of “democracy”. All societies that consider themselves democratic, believe that they only exclude those who do not “deserve” the democratic right. Politicians in Ancient Athens have lengthy arguments on why women and enslaved should not participate in politics. So did the founding fathers of the United States. They considered their political system to be democratic, exactly because they believed that all people who deserve the right to vote got to vote. But who decides who is deserving and who is not? Taking teenagers as an example, a common way to justify excluding them from the democratic process was to say that they are not mature or knowledgeable enough to participate in the political process. But there is a fundamental problem with this argument, that is, we can’t really objectively measure that. If we have an objective way to decide which bill or which candidate is better, then we won’t need voting at all, won’t we? Some may argue that they simply do not have enough education to make good and sensible choices. Besides the fact that we have no objective way to determine what is good and sensible. The argument itself is also problematic. If this argument is enough to ban teenagers from voting, shouldn’t it also enough to ban anyone who does not have enough education from voting? That is certainly not very democratic, isn’t it? The truth is, there are no real good logical reasons behind preventing teenagers from voting, besides that is the definition of democracy we have accepted in our language, and we were just trying to justify that definition. In the future, maybe in a society that allows teens to vote, when they look back to us, they will find our definition of democracy hypocritical, just as how we saw the societies before us. The fact is, it is not that our political system is democratic, but rather we are defining the word “democracy” based on our current political system because we consider it as the paradigm case of the word “democracy”.
This is a harrowing fact. The same sentence, one day was true, the next day, it became false. Not because our physical reality has somehow changed, but the meaning of the words has been redefined. A sentence that we consider as objectively true today, may turn out to not be so true tomorrow, just because we have given the words a new meaning? If so, is the sentence really objectively true? Can any sentence be objectively true?
Most modern philosophers say, no sentence can represent objective reality, even this sentence itself. Some people interpret post-modernism as the denial of the existence of objective reality itself. But that is not accurate, many postmodern philosophers believe in the existence of objective reality, but they don’t think language or any media can represent that reality perfectly or objectively. The idea of our language is only a representation of reality, not reality itself is actually not new. Medieval Christian Philosopher Thomas Aquinas postulated that everything we assert about God is mere “analogical predications”, i.e. an analogy, or representation of God’s attributes, and we can not say anything objectively true about God’s nature. What words we choose, what meaning we give to those words, or if you are using photographs to capture reality, how the photograph is framed, who do we choose as subjects are all subjective choices based on our value. So instead of insisting on our version of reality as the objective one and force everyone to agree with us, we should present it as simply one of many interpretations of the facts we have at hand.
That been said, simply because all sentences are subjective, does not mean all statements are equally valid. For instance, whether there are 8 or 9 planets in the Solar System, is up to debate based on the definition of the word “planet”. But, if I say Mars is not a Planet because it is not really orbiting the Sun, that is false. Because there are no agreed definitions of the words “Planet” and “Orbiting”, that allows this sentence to logically consistent with our perceived reality. Maybe one day the sentence will become true. But at least for now, ” Mars is not a Planet because it is not really orbiting the Sun” is a false statement, because it is logically inconsistent with the existing definitions of the words and our perceived reality.
Logic is what gives the word “truth” meaning. In our minds, we all hold a collection of beliefs that we consider true. Some are based on our experience, for example, when we know touching fire would hurt because we have all been that kid before. Some are based on what we have been told like that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Some we don’t even remember why we believed in them. Why can we exchange money for food, while money is essentially just cheap papers or digital data on some remote server? When we receive new information or experiences we are constantly consciously or unconsciously trying to fit them into our own existing belief system using some version of reasoning to assign them truth values. If what we hear or experience contradicts what we believe, we can either consider what we hear as wrong or reflect upon if what we believe needs to be adjusted. Though, in most cases, we just dismiss what contradicts our existing beliefs as false. But note that the word false is a result of the contradiction we found. Logic and reasons are important because they give the words “True” and “False” their meaning. We use logic and reasons to determine the truth value of statements within a universe of discourse or a belief system. Logic is the method of reasonings that will not lead to contradictory results, while Fallacies are reasonings that can lead to contradictory results. The topic of what is logic and what are fallacies is a long but important one that I will have to leave for a later episode. But this is important about fallacies: In a belief system that a statement can both be true and false at the same time, you can use reasoning to show any statement to be true and false at the same time. The word “true” does not matter anymore. For people who do not care about logical consistency, the word “true” often just refers to what they want to believe. Everything is both true and false at the same time, then we can just choose an arbitrary set of things to believe that benefit ourselves the most. And everyone can do the same and believe whatever they want and all beliefs are equal. In a society that is not founded on logic and reason, there is no such thing as truth, only power. The strong can force the weak to serve them as they please.
Thanks for listening, I hope this episode has helped you a bit in understanding how language works and how to be better at communication. I have repeatably used the word “logic” throughout the podcast. I know that most people don’t agree with the definition of “logic” because it is quite often that two humans look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. In the next episode, I will give my definition of “logic”, and see if you agree or disagree.
RhaPsoDySea 