What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language.

We’ll be returning to more normal material soon — Edgar and I are mid-move, and I’m falling behind on some grading, so I’m limiting myself to writing this while eating my breakfast. I think I can probably still squeeze out one or two thousand words. In the meantime, I might recommend considering a donation to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund — they’re a good organization and some very bad things are going on right now.

By the time you read this, it might be a completely different set of bad things. I worry about it a great deal.

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An image of unbalanced scales, from Roger Culos via wikimedia commons, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Right now, I’m struggling to teach a group of nineteen year-olds to question things that they find written down. This is an important development: to think critically about something, you need to suspend yourself in the space between believing “this is true” and “this is untrue” — you must sort the good information from the bad by testing it and thinking about it and verifying it. Many of my students seem to come into the classroom thinking, “Well, it wouldn’t be written down if it isn’t true/good/worthwhile, would it?”

This is a completely separate problem from getting them to read in the first place. Very few of them seem interested in that. The issue is just that, when they do read, they don’t think critically.

Now, I’m not perfect at this, I will readily admit, but I also clearly remember thinking, as early as my freshman year of high school, “this is bullshit,” about materials presented to me in class. It might have been the history teacher who confidently declared that English is a Romance Language and then tried to tell me I was wrong, because there were English words that came from Latin. Of course, what do you expect, the same institution produced Josh Hawley.

But being exposed at 14 to the idea, “the people who exercise power over you can be loudly and confidently incorrect,” actually had a strong effect on who I am today. It’s encouraged me to admit when I make mistakes in class, and it’s encouraged me to think critically about the information I’m presented with.

But I think this is also the genesis of a fairly important idea for me, but not for the above reasons. You see, it’s also where I discovered that being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter.

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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus that, “No one has ever died from contradictions,” and that’s stuck with me — I think it’s an important lesson in our current political moment. So much of our discourse in this (and increasingly, it feels, every election cycle) is about pointing out gaffs from the other side — about how the former President denied climate change but built sea walls to protect his golf courses, that sort of thing. As if the mere fact of this contradiction is somehow material.

This is partially what allowed them to succeed in the 2016 election. The emphasis was on the fact that the other side was a grotesque mockery, rather than a credible threat. As liberals often do, they reduced things to aesthetics.

Now, a lot of people are talking about how think tanks attached to the party of “small government” and “states’ rights” is putting forward a plan for national controls on abortion and other reproductive healthcare. The contradiction here doesn’t matter to them, and pointing out their hypocrisy is just going to allow them to retain their advantage, because no one actually cares about that.

Recently, the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate said, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do."

In short: “I’m going to use bullshit to get what I want.”

Harry Frankfurt’s definition of Bullshit is communication made "to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they [the bullshitter] speak.” I re-encountered this concept in an episode of Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast that I used as part of my strategy for dealing with AI in the classroom, and it’s proven surprisingly durable as a useful concept.

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Here’s the basic idea. There are (at least) two orientations towards language. Let’s call them the factual and instrumental approaches to language. I do not believe they are entirely mutually exclusive from one another, or from other possible orientations, stances, or modes, but I do believe that communication style can be thought of as one tending to dominate the other.

In the factual approach, you convey information with the desired end result of the other party having that information. This is, ultimately, I think, how we’re all explicitly taught to use language, and many of the faux pas and strictures we operate under in regard to language stem from a particular expectation: you shouldn’t lie, you should try to be clear, you should get to the point. All of these exist because we need to communicate information and we need the other party to understand the information.

In this mode, contradiction matters, because it indicates a failure of understanding. Someone who tolerates a contradiction is mentally defective in some capacity and needs help or correction. If it’s more remote from the immediate situation, contradiction indicates that there is knowledge to be had that will smooth out the contradiction and make it go away.

Images of paleolithic tools, uploaded to wikimedia commons by user PrehistoriaPV and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license.

In the other mode, however, contradiction not only doesn’t really matter, but it is created by the normal operation of the mode. The Instrumental Mode is not concerned with the horizontal(ish) transfer of information, but with the hierarchic imposition of will. You say things not to inform, but to achieve a particular end goal. In this stance, language is a tool that you use to achieve a material end result.

As such, contradiction serves the same purpose as exhaust, noise, and waste heat do for a combustion engine: it makes it clear that the apparatus is working as desired, it makes it obvious that it’s doing its job. As such, pointing out the contradiction is sort of like telling someone revving a muscle car, “That’s very loud and you’re putting out a lot of smoke.”

It’s not going to have the desired effect. You think you mentioned a problem; they think you’re describing the cool thing that they’re doing: only one of you is any closer to your goal.

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"Columbus Taking Possession of the New Country" from L. Prang & Co., Boston. Christopher Columbus -- who longtime readers will know I'm no fan of -- is a great example of the beneficiary of an oversimplified story.

The temptation, and I know it quite well, would be to label the “instrumental” use of language as a fascist or authoritarian style of language usage. I want to take a moment to disabuse you of that notion, though it is often used in that way. We’ve all basically accepted, already, that it’s okay to tell children things that are not strictly true for the purpose of eliciting a particular behavior.

Oftentimes, too, children are taught a simplified version of the truth so that they can begin to function in the world. There are, of course, issues with this: we can’t continue to live with the oversimplifications that are given to children and act as if that’s fine. To do so would be to live an oversimplified and deprived life.

However, it is apparently socially acceptable to invoke bogeymen to make children not wander off into the woods. That is also an example of the instrumental use of language. You are saying something not strictly true with the aim of eliciting a desired behavior. This is ethically dicey when it is for ends that benefit the person that you’re lying to, and outright evil if you deceive someone with the intent to cause them harm.

Ultimately, this is where the issue with the Instrumental Use of Language comes from: it creates a hierarchic relationship where the speaker claims they know better than the listener. What becomes upsetting about the whole thing is when the listener repeats what is heard, creating a sort of linguistic pyramid scheme where the one receiving the repeated message is two steps removed from the one who supposedly knows best.

This is what I tend to think about when someone invokes something that we all were taught in grade school — I think “this person lives an impoverished life and wishes for me to do the same.”

Ultimately, I think this is a big part of what I was getting at with the Reactionary Cute piece I wrote back in 2019. Invocations of childhood ultimately serve to reinforce the logic of childhood.

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I can’t help but think of this as an authoritarian use of language, but I also don’t want to just shut down my brain and slot it into that category. I believe that Instrumental Language is always present: even in the most informative utterance, there is the implicit message you should care about this. In answering a stranger’s request for help, there is the message that we should help each other.

Every utterance is, at least implicitly, a statement of belief about how the world works.

Alongside the Factual and Instrumental uses of language, I think it would be fair to say that there is a social use of language, a way of shoring up extant bonds between people and creating new ones. Perhaps this is an outgrowth of the instrumental use, but I think it is separate enough to warrant noting. We write and speak because we wish to create a connection. Without this connection, without inspiring trust or interest, the message will be discarded.

My belief is that every composition or utterance has all three of these uses in different proportions. There’s always going to be an effort to make the other person do something, there’s always going to be an effort to make a connection, and there’s always going to be an attempt to give the other party some information that they don’t currently have.

Of these, I think that the last is one of the most important, but I also think that — most likely, and despite what we say — it may be the junior partner between the three, the last to really develop as far as language goes. It is the one that we tend to lionize as the best, but if we ignore the use of language as an instrument of control and a means of making connection, if we only think of it as a way of moving information from person A to person B, then we’re going to be blindsided and act as if someone’s a spoilsport when they’re playing the senior game.

There is more to be said about this, I believe, but I should probably finish grading and packing for my move.

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