Sometimes the contrasts we see actually do exist. Sadness is part of the human condition and enmities abound. Sometimes the contrast exists only in our imagination because the actual contrast is for us literally inconceivable.
For instance, we cannot conceive of the actual opposite of meaning. We would say that the opposite is ‘meaninglessness’, but that itself is a meaning. Usually when we call something meaningless we mean, ‘I don’t know at the moment what meaning to give this’ or ‘I don’t approve of this’, as in the phrase popular with politicians and media commentators, ‘meaningless violence’.
When we are reaching into our imaginations to create a contrast we often come up with images from our past experience which seem sensible but are actually quite misleading. When physicists talk about the edge of the universe or before the Big Bang we can picture a cliff-like edge to the universe or a time before the universe existed. Our image presupposes an observer. However, the physicists are talking about a timeless nothingness which is the actual contrast to our timeful somethingness, but a timeless nothingness which, like the opposite of meaningful, lies for ever beyond our comprehension.
When I talk about meaning I can only use words, and this can give the impression that meanings exist only in words. Many of them do, but many, perhaps most, exist in wordless forms. Many exist as visual or auditory or tactile or kinaesthetic images, or mixtures of all four – the kinds of images we create before we acquire language. Many exist in that wordless but vital knowledge we call skills. Ask a champion golfer, a master potter or an experienced cook how to produce a winning drive, a superb pot or the perfect soufflé and their description will fall far short of what they actually do. Each is likely to say, ‘I’ll show you.’
Even when we construct our meanings in words we do not, and cannot, report the world as it is. Just as our past experience limits what meanings we can create so does the language we speak limit what we can say.
As they left the forest for the savannah our far distant ancestors weren’t chattering away as we do now. They would have communicated with one another, but language as we know it evolved over many thousands of years. As Richard Gregory has pointed out,8 they would have evolved perceptual classifications of objects and actions, knowing, say, which leaves to eat and which to avoid, and it was from these classifications that language developed. There had to be changes in the brain, changes in the larynx and pharynx to make possible a wide range of vocalizations, and these changes had to be underwritten by changes in the genetic structure. Linguists and anthropologists argue about the rate of these changes. Could the Neanderthal people talk? Did our species, Homo sapiens, have, right from its first appearance, language as we know it, or was there some major explosion of language ability coinciding with an explosion, between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago, of artistic creation, implying the ability to think in symbolic forms? The only thing these scientists seem to agree on is that we evolved language in order to talk to one another, to inform, warn, trade, or, as Robin Dunbar said, to gossip.9
Different languages developed as different groups of people spread across the continents. The best time to learn more than one language is in early childhood when neuronal connections are being set up. In adulthood learning another language is for most of us quite difficult, and different languages can seem to be extremely diverse, yet what linguists following Noam Chomsky have shown is that every language has within it the same Universal Grammar, and that small children learning to speak exhibit an innate ability to use this grammar.
Language might be universal to our species but different languages developed in different groups of people in different places, dealing with different kinds of environment and having different interests and needs. Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instinct10 scornfully demolishes the belief disseminated by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf that the Eskimos had some 400 words for snow. The Eskimos, said Pinker, had about as many words for snow as English speakers have.
This rather schoolboy-like harangue overlooks the fact that Eskimos had a particular interest in snow quite different from the interest in snow taken by the inhabitants of London, where snow sometimes falls, and from the inhabitants of Cairo, who are little troubled by snow. It is not a matter of individual words. People who live in an environment dominated by snow have to develop a language with the power to make fine discriminations in situations involving snow. Over recent years the inhabitants of the Australian Antarctic research base have developed a large collection of words and phrases which refer to the peculiar conditions under which they live and which must be learnt by any newcomer in order to communicate. There is fast ice and brash ice, ding nights, pissa-phones, dongas, slushies, tradies, Larcies, jafas and jafos.11
No language, not even English with its huge vocabulary, can describe the world in all its vastness and complexity. Languages differ in what they can hide and reveal. For instance, in languages which add suffixes to indicate gender one cannot say, as one can in English, ‘A friend is staying with me,’ and keep ambiguous the gender of the friend.
A language can force its speakers to lie even when they think they are telling the truth. The history of psychology and psychiatry is littered with such lies. This is because the English language loves nouns, words that refer to things, far more than it loves verbs, words that refer to people and things in action. Psychologists and psychiatrists study people in action, but when they talk about ‘people-doing’ they find it hard to resist turning ‘people-doing’ into abstract nouns, which they then talk about as if the abstract nouns were referring to real entities. Thus ‘people-intelligently-doing’ became ‘intelligence’, and ‘people-depressedly-doing’ became ‘depression’. Holding the mistaken idea that if a name exists there must be an object that has that name, psychologists and psychiatrists set about measuring the lumps of intelligence that people were supposed to carry around inside them and searching for different kinds of lumps of depression which might or might not be dissolved by drugs.
Every language uses metaphors to convey meaning. Sometimes these metaphors give an accurate picture of what actually happens and sometimes they do not. ‘The rain poured down’ uses the metaphor of river water pouring over a cliff or water pouring from a jug, and accurately describes a particular type of rain. The metaphor contained in ‘I gave her the news’ is not an accurate metaphor. If I give you a cake, the cake which leaves my hands is the same cake which you take, but when I give you my news the story which I tell is not the story which you hear. You do not hear my story. You hear your interpretation of my story, something which is always different from what I say.
When we talk about communication, when we say things like ‘That book is full of good ideas’, or ‘He gave me his opinion’, or ‘She poured out her feelings’, the metaphor we use implies that communication is a thing which can be inside something, or passed from one person to another, or a liquid which passes from source to receptacle. But this is not what actually happens. In communicating, one person creates a meaning and displays this meaning to another person who then interprets the displayed meaning to create his own meaning. Many errors can be made along the way in both the display and the interpretation of the display. All these errors are compounded when we talk about communication without understanding that the metaphors we are using are leading us astray.
Because we do not always remember that what a person says is different from what we hear that person say we often fail to distinguish when a person is using a metaphor as an empty cliché and when a person has chosen a particular metaphor in order to describe a particular truth. Consider the following conversation between John and Mary.
MARY: Hello, John. What’s it like out?
JOHN: It’s pouring with rain.
MARY: