Language does not "convey thoughts"

Our deepest thoughts remain essentially private, however much we attempt to put them into words or express them in other ways.

I mentioned in a previous post that, after having spent some time in countries where proficiency in English is not widespread, it was a relief to be in a country which presented no linguistic challenges for me. My focus in England has been on acclimatizing myself to English ways. To say “reacclimatizing” (as I nearly did) would probably be misleading, given how long it is since I’ve been here and how much things have changed in the intervening decades.

I may write about shifts in the social and political mood and changes in the wider culture at a later date but, for now at least, I want to steer clear of politics and related matters entirely. Lately I’ve been reviewing my views on language, thought and communication, and what follows is a brief statement of my general perspective on the relation between language and thought and the implications of such a view for human communication.

Even when there is no “language barrier” in the usual sense of that phrase, effective communication is far from guaranteed. In fact a shared language will often contribute to creating an illusion of agreement, obscuring profound differences in point of view.

In a footnote to one of his essays, Aldous Huxley (obviously recalling a personal experience) talked about an unbridgeable gulf suddenly opening up between two men engaged in a friendly fireside chat on account of a stray remark. A felt or imagined affinity proved to be entirely illusory.

My point is that language, by its very nature as a cultural phenomenon, tends to create illusions of affinity. Its nature is not so much to reveal as to conceal or paper over the very real differences in how speakers see the world.

Language, of course, is a powerful tool for doing what it does best. It facilitates thought and interaction and so makes other aspects of human culture possible. But it doesn’t operate in the way we naively think it does or deliver exactly what it seems to deliver.

What linguistic communication doesn’t do is convey thoughts in a literal or even (I suggest) in a metaphorical sense—though we often fool ourselves into thinking that it does.

Let me explain. I have a thought or feeling. I try to put it into words. If it is a thought which draws not only on my commonsense or technical or scientific knowledge of the world but also on my memories, values and judgements then it is private to me: it cannot be encapsulated in a string of words and so cannot be conveyed into someone else’s brain.

The words, the sentences are in some sense conveyed, sure, but the crucial point is that the same words and phrases trigger different thoughts and feelings in different brains.

The basic building blocks of a language are phonemes (minimal, meaning-distinguishing sounds). Every language has its own set of phonemes from which words and phrases and sentences are built. In any given language the abstract forms of words (lexemes or word stems) constitute a dynamic lexicon which is involved in complex combinatorial processes involving the formation of actual words and sentences (morphology and syntax). Specific parts of the brain are dedicated to dealing with these processes.

I want to make a contrast between the core features of linguistic processing—phonological and morphosyntactic—which operate (largely unconsciously) in areas of the brain devoted specifically to language, and semantic processing which is not restricted to these areas and draws heavily on other aspects of thinking (e.g. memories of lived experience and various other kinds of general reasoning and inference).

The complex phonological and morphosyntactic processes which give human language its remarkable power are, in an essential sense, shared. These processes only arise and sustain themselves over time within a shared social and cultural milieu. The semantic aspect of language also involves shared understandings, but this sharing is necessarily of a much more limited nature.

Take a simple noun like “dog”. It has a publicly-agreed primary meaning but the thoughts and feelings and memories triggered in my mind by this word will (because of our different personal histories) be very different from the thoughts and feelings and memories which the word triggers in your mind. And if this is so with such a mundane word as “dog”, how much more divergent will thoughts triggered by more value-laden or abstract expressions be?

Though the brain processes underlying linguistic processing remain obscure, the basic elements and patterns of a language can be discovered and written down. Linguists have been doing this sort of thing for hundreds of years. In principle at least, anyone with access to a dictionary and a grammar can attain technical proficiency in a new language. Which again suggests that the core mechanisms of language are neither deep nor private in any meaningful sense.

Our deepest thoughts, by contrast, remain essentially private, however much we attempt to put them into words or express them in other ways. To some, this may be a disturbing idea. But it is also salutary to the extent that it forces us to adjust our expectations concerning what language can—and cannot—be expected to do.