In the 19th and 20th centuries, a fever for scientific explanation of all phenomena gripped many an intellectual. Language, however, has proved resistant to the methods of modern science. Too many aspects of our experience prove irreducible to the empiriometric approach successful in disciplines such as chemistry or biology. This resistance vexes the reductionist’s mind. Most especially have non-existent objectivities—that is, the various ways in which we can talk about objects that do not exist as things—proved a great source of this vexation.
For natural languages, those we use in our everyday efforts at communication, cannot be conformed to precisely denotative maps of conceptual correspondence. As such, many attempted invention of artificial languages. But these artificial languages—although they have proved useful in development of technical apparatus—cannot convey the richness of experience found in our natural languages. They cannot, therefore, “explain scientifically” what those languages accomplish in our experience.
By contrast, let us hear what John Deely has to say about the relationship between language, non-existent objects, and semiotics:
Language Reconceived Semiotically
I hope to show how the semiotic point of view naturally expands… to include the whole phenomenon of human communication—not only language—and, both after and as a consequence of that, cultural phenomena as incorporative of, as well as in their difference from, the phenomena of nature. The comprehensive integrity of this expansion is utterly dependent upon the inclusion of linguistic phenomena within the scheme of experience in a way that does not conceal or find paradoxical or embarrassing the single most decisive and striking feature of human language, which is, namely, its power to convey the nonexistent with a facility every bit equal to its power to convey thought about what is existent.
Let me make an obiter dictum on this point. When I was working at the Institute for Philosophical Research with Mortimer Adler on a book about language (i.1969–1974, a collaboration which did not work out), I was reading exclusively contemporary authors—all the logical positivist literature, the analytic philosophy literature, all of Chomsky that had been written to that date—in a word, the then-contemporary literature on language. And what I found in the central authors of the modern logico-linguistic developments—I may mention notably Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Ayer, and even Brentano with regard to the use of intentionality as a tool of debate—was that they were mainly intent on finding a way to assert a one-to-one correspondence between language and mind-independent reality and to say that the only time that language is really working is when it conveys that correspondence. In fact, however, much of what we talk about and think about in everyday experience is irreducible to some kind of a prejacent physical reality in that sense. There is no atomic structure to the world such that words can be made to correspond to it point-by-point. Nor is there any structure at all to which words correspond point-by-point except the structure of discourse itself, which is hardly fixed, and which needs no such prejacent structure in order to be what it is and to signify as it does.
It is wonderful to look at the history of science and culture generally from this point of view, which is, moreover, essential for a true anthropology. The celestial spheres believed to be real for some two thousand years occupied huge treatises written to explain their functioning within the physical environment. Other examples include more simple and short-lived creatures that populate the development of the strictest science, such as phlogiston, the ether, the planet Vulcan; and examples can be multiplied from every sphere. The complete history of human discourse, including the hard sciences, is woven around unrealities that functioned once as real in the thinking and theorizing and experience of some peoples. The planet Vulcan (my own favorite example alongside the canals of Mars) thus briefly but embarrassingly turned up as interior to the orbit of Mercury in some astronomy work at the turn of the last century. But Vulcan then proved not to exist outside those reports at all. The objective notion of ether played a long and distinguished role in post-Newtonian physical science—as central in its own way as the celestial spheres were in the Ptolemaic phase of astronomy’s development—before proving similarly to be a chimera.
So the problem of how we talk about nonexistent things, where nonexistent means nonexistent in the physical sense, is a fundamental positive problem with which the whole movement of so-called linguistic philosophy fails to come to terms. This is not just a matter of confusion, nor just a matter of language gone on holiday, but of the essence, as we will see, of human language.
To understand this fundamental insouciance of language, whereby it imports literary elements of nonbeing and fictional characters even into the sternest science and most realistic concerns of philosophy, we will find it necessary to reinterpret language from the semiotic point of view.
John Deely 2015: Basics of Semiotics, 8th edition, 19-20 (all emphasis added).
Commentary
While there are many points worthy of expansion in this brief text, I wish to highlight only three: namely, the three points in bold.
Signifying Non-Existent Objects
First allow me to pick up the last, namely, that “how we talk about nonexistent things, where nonexistent means nonexistent in the physical sense, is a fundamental positive problem with which the whole movement of so-called linguistic philosophy fails to come to terms.” It is a failure, indeed, in a presupposed principle—what we might term the positive formulation of nominalism—namely, that only individuals exist independently of the mind. This nominalist presupposition condemns any believer in it to incoherence. As Deely here hints, language and indeed all communication require a reality of the relation in order to function. If only individuals exist, relations must either be fictions of the mind or themselves individuals. But if relations are individuals, they would be individuals unlike all others—to the point that we would be predicating the term, “individual” equivocally.
Nominalism will prove a ripe topic for another day, however. Instead, let us simply say that its presupposition leaves one unable to draw meaningful connections between existent and nonexistent objects. If one’s theory of language struggles to account for the latter—except to posit them as meaningless—one will be forced, ultimately, to evict all meaning from language, for that theory has failed to recognize the essence of language itself.
The Structure of Discourse
Second, let us consider Deely’s statement that “Nor is there any structure at all to which words correspond point-by-point except the structure of discourse itself, which is hardly fixed, and which needs no such prejacent structure in order to be what it is and to signify as it does.” Within this, I wish to focus on the except clause—that is, the structure of discourse. What is this structure? We might alternatively name it the structure of thought’s expression. Consider a common problem: finding the right words to express yourself. We all experience this from time to time. We fumble in vagueness for not only the right semantic signifiers, but even the right structure in which to array them. Perhaps, we might even feel pressured to creative linguistic expression: coming up with new words or structures in the effort to convey our meaning.
This occasional creative necessity exhibits the lack of fixity characteristic of the structure of discourse. To complete the conception of any given idea, we must bring it forward into expression. If we cannot express it, it remains incomplete. While every concept may be derivative of prior experience and thinking, this dependence does not preclude the new idea. Were that the case, we would have no inventions, no fictional stories. And this brings us to…
The Power of Language
Third, what Deely calls language’s “power to convey the nonexistent with a facility every bit equal to its power to convey thought about what is existent.” This equal power of conveyance bears enormous importance for understanding the psychology of the human person. That we constitute in linguistic objectivity both ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ alone explains the constitution of all culture. Moreover, it explains how that cultural being can grow up at odds with human nature. It can also explain why some hold the profane as sacred, and why the distinction between fact and opinion (as well as value) are not so absolute as often presupposed.
Fully explaining this power of language takes much more background and exposition than can be provided here. Suffice it only to say that, if we are to understand the functioning of language, we must do so from a perspective which grasps the true breadth comprised within the structure of discourse.
As a final way of articulating the importance, the semiotic point of view, illuminates the development of linguistically-signified meaning from out of the indeterminacy of pre-linguistic experience.
