Language and the ineffable

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when all you have is language, everything looks effable. Well, eff that! And eff the police too. But see, we need the police. They provide an invaluable service though they they do a lot of damage at the same time. If only we COULD call a hippie next time we were in trouble. Berger has a bit of the hippie in him.

Like the previous book I reviewed, (you're following all my reviews, right?) the one that told us how science was ripping us off while distacting us by curing our diseases and air conditioning our living rooms, this book does that same job for language. But it also gives us an out; a hippie we could call. It suggests that if we only understood what language did--how it worked--we could free ourselves. Well that's what I was hoping, anyway. I was hoping this since the summer of 2014 when I started the book but I never got past Chapter 3 for a long time.

Yes, I'm forced to use language when writing my review but I'm going to personalize it. One of the sins Berger tells us about is the myth of seperability--the belief that you can remove the human element from language and treat it as a form of mathematics. He goes after in the last chapter, but we'll get to that later. The problem wiht separability is that it turns out that wherever you go, there you are. This means that actual objectivity is impossible, so what we do instead is follow a bunch of rules that culturally entitle us to claim objectivity. Lately (since this book), this has had political ramifications with racism and sexism struggling to be seen from where it was hiding in plain sight. (I'd like to add age-ism but that REMAINS mostly invisible, but this is my review so I get to add it in these parentheses.)

Berger tries to have his book both ways--it's clearly a very personal view but is written in a mostly objective style with footnotes and a fancy vocabulary that lets the reader know they're hearing from an expert or at least a very smart person. This kept me from getting past Chapter 3 for several years as I didn't feel smart enough to proceed. I don't mean to pick on him for this because that is the style of most non-fiction writing--following the rules which simulate objectivity to create an aura of authority. That he just fell into it just adds weight to his thesis that people tend to stick with the received view of everything, language in particular, and forcing him to spell out just what that received view of language is in Chapter 2. It's a chapter which starts with quotes like: "The influence of a fading paradigm goes well beyond its explicit domain. All paradigms include subterranean realms of tacit assumptions, the influence of which outlasts the adherence to the paradigm itself." (by Shimon Malin, in Nature Loves to Hide)

So here's the book's plan: The first 3 chapters expose the problem--make the unconscious conscious. In particular, the third chapter brings in others who have weighed in on the topic in the past, the two famous ones being Wittgenstein and Quine. With their help he rips away the hidden unexamined assumptions in our usual way of understanding language.

In the fourth chapter he builds his developmental approach, but like they always told the hippies, it's much easier to find fault than to build something yourself. Here, he looks at first language acquisition as a way to understand what is this thing that is actually being acquired. But first a bit more fault finding. Language in its received view is projected backwards on to the learning child and previous studies have just documented the mechanics of discovering what they were already expecting to find. Burger asks, how do we know what a newborn's experience is really like? However, he never asks, how do we know what an adult's experience is like, other than our own. The same way--we project. He has no problem with the adult case. But we were once newborns. Remember? We knew from the inside what it felt like, but who remembers? If I told you I did, would you believe me? If not, is it because you don't remember and project that failure on to me? At best you'll think I'm imagining it. and it's not like I can prove otherwise. At least that's what I imagine & project onto you.

Berger doesn't even bother denying he's imagining it. His version, he says makes as much if not more sense than the one he'd just discredited. In the end, though, he doesn't do much building at all. Turns out, he's anti-building and pro-ineffability. To build would just not be facing the necessary ineffability. He just wants to avoid the missteps he'd listed when critiquing the received view. He's fine with any new ones that may creep in. And since were starting from ineffability, we're not going to end up with science. We just want to ask (along with Bertrand Russell in Chapter 5) "What is its purpose and ideal? In what way does it contribute to the beauty of human existence?"
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and yet people tend to talk about it as if it's a shared value. The scientific view from nowhere was invented to clean up that kind of muddle. It may be impossible logically to achieve, but we can still talk about being more objective or less so. And, yes, more objective isn't necessarily better. In particular, I share Berger's view of psychiatry (chapter 6). Therapeutically working with people's subjectivity isn't improved by trying to eliminate the human element.
But in my opinion, logic and mathematics (chapter 7) don't need more human input, which isn't to say I didn't find his discussion of subitizing interesting. In his treatment of logical paradoxes, he skips over one of my favorites. If God can do anything, can he make a boulder so large that he couldn't lift it? My guess is he left it out because it would derail the course of his argument with theology. However, it's significant that Berger seems more interested in the eastern, godless religions which are less of a challenge to separability than a supreme being in "our image."