Introduction
We usually present our knowledge in fragments. We can identify the capital of France, or state the number of quarks in a proton. Sometimes the fragments will be more complex than single sentences. We can for example set out the IS-LM model of an economy, or the replication mechanism of DNA, or the progress through Parliament of a particular piece of legislation. But even a large fragment will have context that is omitted when the fragment is presented in isolation.
Full understanding, sufficient to make intelligent use of a fragment, may require awareness of a substantial context. In our examples this may be awareness that France is a country and that countries have capital cities which are important political or economic centres, awareness of what particle physics is all about, awareness of supply, demand, investment, output and interest rates, awareness of how molecules interact, or awareness of the relevant political system. It is reasonable to present our knowledge in fragments because we can take it that our audience will know enough context, or at least (if we are teaching them) will steadily build it up as the pieces of knowledge we supply accumulate in their heads and are woven together.
There is another kind of context. This is the context of a field of possibilities. It is the context of an indefinite and ill-defined range of things that are not asserted. And it is the context that will interest us here.
This context can be important in different ways, which we shall explore through the thought of four different thinkers. We shall start with Gareth Evans, whose work shows that the ability to have alternative thoughts is required for us to have the thoughts we in fact have. Then we shall move on to Robert Musil, who takes the view that we need to appreciate the existence of a field of possibilities in order to see the actuality of what is the case. Our third thinker will be Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, with a comment on the importance of knowledge of other languages. Lastly, Ludwig Wittgenstein will provide an additional perspective on knowledge of languages.
Gareth Evans
Gareth Evans, in The Varieties of Reference, section 4.3, focused on how a grasp of some propositions required an ability to grasp other propositions of the same nature, rather than focusing on awareness of a context of propositions of any different nature. He pointed out that someone who can have the thought that some object a is F, for example that John is happy, can also have the thought that some other object b is F, for example that Harry is happy, and the thought that the original object a is G, for example that John is sad. (We shall abbreviate the contents of these thoughts in the conventional way as Fa, Fb, and Ga.)
We can detach this idea from Evans's larger project, and make use of it for our purposes. Taking the contrapositive, we can say that if someone could not think that Fb or that Ga, he or she could not think that Fa. He or she could not do so given that the thought that Fa has to be a structured thought in order for it to be the thought that it is. Thinking that Fa involves recognising that an object a and a property F are to be linked. It is not a mere trigger for some automatic response to the presence of F-ness, or even to the presence of F-ness in some form that makes the instance of particular concern to the thinker. The object itself has to be identified and a particular property has to be attributed, casting the object in the role of a carrier of F-ness without reducing it to being nothing more than a carrier of F-ness. To put it another way, "a" in "Fa" is a name, and the use of a name in a thought of the type at issue here involves picking out an object and then attributing some property to that object. The structured nature of the thought is inevitable, and then the contrapositive goes through.
The required context for fragments that is implied by Evans's claim and its contrapositive is at first sight a narrow one. It extends only to alternative combinations of objects and properties. And it seems to be about conditions for the proper use of language in pretty basic ways, rather than being about any rich fabric of knowledge in which a human being might revel.
Evans's implied context does however have the potential to be of broader significance. An ability to pick out different objects implies an understanding of the nature of objects in the relevant field. Having such an understanding is for example easy with individual animals but a bit harder with genera and species of animal. And in some fields, for example particle physics, it requires an ability to think in ways that most of us find counter-intuitive. Moreover, an ability to attribute various properties implies an acquaintance with at least some of the conceptual map for the relevant field.
Robert Musil
At the start of chapter 4 of Robert Musil's novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), we find this:
Wenn es aber Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, und niemand wird bezweifeln, daß er seine Daseinsberechtigung hat, dann muß es auch etwas geben, das man Möglichkeitssinn nennen kann.
But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.
Here we have something, the broad significance of which is more obvious than that of what we may extract from the portion of Gareth Evans's work we have highlighted.
We are also moved up a level, from pieces of knowledge to the framework within which one may locate alternatives like those which Evans required (Fb and Ga, to go alongside Fa). At least, we are moved up a level if we take ein Möglichkeitssinn, a sense of possibility, to be not merely an ability to imagine what we do not observe but also an awareness that we are exploring possibilities as possibilities. And we should take the sense of possibility of which Musil wrote in that way. We must do so if the Wirklichkeitssinn, the sense of reality, with which it is paired is to be an awareness that things are in a certain way, and not merely an awareness of some facts that happen to obtain.
In what follows we shall generally substitute "a sense of actuality" for "a sense of reality". This is so as to emphasise the sense that things are in a certain way as awareness of a single second-order fact about the world which we must face if we are not to delude ourselves.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe commented on our grasp of languages:
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. (Maximen und Reflexionen, 91)
He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
This comment takes our discussion in a new direction. Knowledge of a language is primarily a skill rather than a body of factual information. And if other languages were to be context, a fragment of knowledge in the terms of our discussion would be competence in the whole of a single language. Such a competence can be free-standing. Many people are competent monoglots.
While all this is so, there is an aspect of knowing one's own language that brings such knowledge within the scope of the topic that is indicated by our discussion of Evans and Musil. This is knowledge of the language's expressive powers, of its limits, of why it has those powers and limits, and of its existence as a living entity with its own history and potential for future development. Such knowledge may be acquired most easily by seeing how other languages do things differently.
Knowledge of this sort is far less important for everyday purposes than competence. Indeed, outside the scope of poetry or richly evocative prose, its possession may be of little practical use. It is not the knowledge that has been analysed by Michael Dummett in his paper "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?", and by other authors in response to that paper. It is however knowledge that can be valued for its own sake, as well as being useful in relation to some special forms of writing and oratory.
Could one have such knowledge of one's own language other than through knowing other languages? We can imagine a book about a single language that would set out the relevant information without reference to other languages. But while it might cover the ground systematically, it would be a long and laborious read. It would be far more efficient to make use of another language inside one's head and in that way get a feel for points of similarity and difference so as to become a finer user of one's own language. Moreover, picking up points in that way would keep one closer to the activity of using a language that would for most people be the main reason to learn about its powers, limits, workings, history, and potential. Knowledge that is picked up in action has a different flavour to knowledge that is picked up abstractly, even if it would be risky to go so far as to say that it had different content.
We may compare Goethe's remark with what Gareth Evans said. To go on from thinking and saying that Fa to thinking and saying that Fb and that Ga is to discover that one can think and say different things. Doing so brings a fuller realisation of the content of the thought that Fa. One comes to realise that it is a structured thought. Likewise, when ability in a second language allows one to have and utter thoughts in ways that would not come naturally in one's first language, that will confer a fuller grasp of the things one thinks and expresses in that first language. It will do so by disclosing things that expressions in the first language do not in any direct way say or suggest. One becomes aware of what one is steered to think and say in one's first language by seeing what the second language could have done.
(We have here run together thinking and saying. There are arguments that thought is to some extent independent of all language, or alternatively that it is conducted in its own language, a language of thought, which is separate from the language in which the thinker speaks. We do not wish to get into that debate, and our discussion could be conducted even if we were to regard some underlying practice of thought as detached from the thinker's language of speech. Our concern is with the need to be able to have a range of thoughts in order fully to grasp some of them. That case could be made whether or not thoughts were somehow detached from languages of speech. The only proviso is that if a single individual's language of thought or some other mechanism of thought could facilitate all possible thoughts, with no support from particular languages of speech, we could not make Goethe relevant in the way that we do. But that would be a very strong and contentious hypothesis about a language of thought or about some other mechanism of thought.)
We can also apply Musil's thought to languages. Another language is a possibility for oneself, giving a sense of the actuality of one's own language. One can come to see the fact that one's own language does certain things and does them in a certain way as a second-order fact about the language's actuality, rather than merely a collection of first-order facts about the methods used within the language. One can do so when one comes to see that the other language does some additional things, does some of the things that one's own language does differently, and does not do some things that one's own language does.
Mere awareness of other languages, filled out with a few examples of their alternative vocabularies and sentence structures but falling far short of competence, could be enough here. So we would at this point only require a very minimal type of knowledge of other languages, even though Goethe for his purposes envisaged competence. And if the languages of which one were aware did not differ very much from one's own language, all being within some small group such as the West Germanic languages, one could rely on the known existence of similar languages to extrapolate to the possibility of more radically different languages. Thus from a minimal basis one could acquire a sense of the actuality of one's own language. But the minimal basis would have to include the idea of the possibility of other languages, and it might not be reducible to that mere idea without at least some fragmentary examples drawn from other languages.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
An additional perspective on knowledge of languages is provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He made this remark:
Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 5.6)
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
What Wittgenstein meant is much debated, but we can still make use of the thought in ways of which he might or might not have approved.
We should join the thought with something Wittgenstein said in the foreword to the Tractatus:
Das Buch will also dem Denken eine Grenze ziehen, oder vielmehr - nicht dem Denken, sondern dem Ausdruck der Gedanken: Denn um dem Denken eine Grenze zu ziehen, müßten wir beide Seiten dieser Grenze denken können (wir müßten also denken können, was sich nicht denken läßt).
The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather - not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
Knowing extra languages would not remove all limits of language that might limit thought or its expression. (This is another point at which we deliberately disregard the question of whether there is thought independent of all language, or thought independent of public languages but conducted in a language of thought, or only thought conducted in public languages, even though Wittgenstein's distinction between thought and its expression presses the question.) But additional languages might remove some limits of one's first language, while perhaps imposing other limits not imposed by one's first language.
More significantly for our purposes, knowledge of extra languages might give a greater sense of what some of the limits imposed by one's first language were. Then one might be able to think both sides of any limits imposed by one's first language which were not imposed by some other language one knew. This could be so even if there were no collection of languages, knowledge of all of which would allow one to think both sides of all limits.
Drawing the threads together
On reviewing the authors we have discussed, we see that there are disparate ways in which a context of thinking within a field of possibilities can be important.
Gareth Evans highlighted a consequence of the structured nature of our thought and language. There are objects and properties which we identify separately, and we can then combine them. In order to have the thoughts we do, we must be able to pull the components of those thoughts apart and put them back together in different combinations. Someone who only used a language in which each expression was a single whole sentence that could not, within the language, be analysed into components would not have the same thoughts.
This looks like a narrow point about human thought and language. But it is an instance of something wider. Our languages have considerable reach. We cannot set a precise limit to the number of possible thoughts, or the number of possible sentences, although we might be able to set some upper bound based on the capacities of human brains which would be far above any hypothetical least upper bound. The particular form of reach that is given by a scope to recombine objects and properties can be seen even without recourse to the sophisticated analyses that are given under the rubric of transformational grammar. And it was straightforward for Evans to show that this simple form of reach followed naturally and that its availability was necessary for us to have the thoughts we have.
It would be less straightforward to show that the availability of wider forms of reach, for example the reach that was conferred by the scope to use elaborate recursive structures, was necessary in order for us to have the thoughts we had rather than some deceptively similar thoughts. But the potential is there. When someone thinks something, part of the significance of the thought is that he or she could have thought something which differed from the actual thought in some way that would place the actual thought and the potential thought in some meaningful relation. Perhaps the two thoughts would pick out different objects, or attribute different properties, or refer to different times, or imply different directions of causation, or different degrees of confidence in what was being thought.
Thus the idea we take from Evans is that it is part and parcel of our thought to be able to open up possibilities by exploiting the resources of our language. This ability facilitates our noticing facts about the world (for example, instances of Fx or of Gy). The idea we take from Robert Musil involves extending our grasp of the world in another way. The extension is not an increased grasp of first-order facts, a greater understanding of how things are. It is a second-order grasp, a grasp of the actuality of how things are which is conferred by an understanding that there are unactualized possibilities.
This understanding that there are unactualized possibilities could be obtained without thinking of any specific possibilities, simply by putting free variables in place of names of objects and properties in sentences true of the actual world and observing that unspecified other names of objects and properties could be substituted for those variables. But it would be psychologically easier to imagine particular unactualized possibilities, and then to note that they were unactualized and that at least some of them were obvious variations on the facts. For example, if as a matter of fact Fa, then Fb and Ga would be obvious variations, although Fb might be slightly more obvious because the identification of objects does not require thought that is as abstract as is required for the identification of properties.
Entertaining the thoughts that Evans says we need to be able to have, Fb and Ga, is therefore a basis for having the sense of possibility that Musil requires us to have in order to have a sense of actuality, although one would then need to think beyond that basis in order to achieve the required second-order grasp.
Goethe's maxim has a different primary focus. Knowledge of other languages gives us a sense of alternatives to our own language, and therefore a sense of the actuality of our own language. Attention is directed inward to our minds, and outward only to our linguistic interactions rather than to the world in general.
Nonetheless, knowledge of other languages can contribute to our sense of possibilities in the world. (We here require the competence in other languages that Goethe had in mind, rather than the mere awareness that there could be other languages to which we alluded above.) Such knowledge can show us how to look at the world differently, and identify different features. With that additional awareness will come new options to vary in imagination how the world is, allowing us to entertain new possibilities. This would not be needed in order to have a sense of possibility in general, and therefore of the actuality of the world in general. That sense could already be possessed by monoglots. But what it may give is a sense of possibilities in particular areas, and therefore of the actuality of the world in those respects.
The most obvious examples come from knowledge of the language of mathematics. For example, once one starts to talk in terms of derivatives, that is, in terms of rates of change, rates of change of rates of change, and so on, one sees concretely that any such rate could have been different. That confers a sense of the actuality of the rates there are. And the sense of actuality that is achieved is much stronger than it would be if rates could only be seen as what they happened to be, so that they were mere immobile facts about the world.
Other examples can be found in the languages of various natural sciences. In physics, knowledge of the languages of fields and of unified spacetime allows one to identify specific ways in which things could have been different, creating a sense of the actuality of how things are. And in biology, knowledge of the language of metabolic cycles, including concepts such as those of metabolic pathways, anabolism, catabolism, and catalysis, gives a concrete grasp of how the mechanisms of life could have been different (and how in certain respects they could not plausibly have been different while still being close enough to the actual mechanisms to count as variations on them).
Moving on to the social sciences, similar things could be said about economics. In particular, the language that is used when modelling whole economies is very much designed to handle variations in economies and how changes in the values of some variables may lead to changes in the values of others. The sense of possibility conferred is much more concrete than a general sense that things could have been different in some way or other.
Technical languages of some of the other social sciences may also be able to perform the same task of giving a concrete sense of possibilities, although it may be less obvious that they can perform that task because values of quantitative variables are typically less central. Examples are given by the concepts used to characterise and explain instances of social stratification, concepts such as those of class, status, cultural capital, and openness of a given stratification to mobility.
All of these examples might be thought of as vocabulary and (particularly in mathematical disciplines) grammatical rules in mere sub-languages, constructed within natural languages. The extent to which we should see sub-languages and the extent to which we should see new languages that have broken free from the natural languages of their originators could be debated, although the more abstract, and in particular the more mathematical, the greater would be the reason to see new languages.
Examples based on people with one natural language that is unenhanced by scientific knowledge learning another unenhanced language, the sort of thing Goethe actually had in mind, may be harder to find. Some natural languages may be restricted in their grasp of number, or may not have words for some things, or may have unusual grammatical constructions that allow special forms of comparison or ways to capture our relationship to the future or to the otherwise unknown. But the fact that natural languages serve the purposes of human life, which are largely although not entirely the same in all societies, means that acquaintance with new natural languages is less likely than acquaintance with their artificial (and mostly scientific) daughters to open up a grasp of new possibilities and hence a grasp of the actuality of specific things along the lines that Musil's words suggest.
This is no criticism of Goethe. As we have noted, his concern was with knowing one's own language rather than with grasping the actuality of the world in general. But thoughts derived from Goethe can make a connection between languages and Musil's claim, in that knowledge of new languages can open up new possibilities for our consideration. On the other side of Musil, Evans's work gives particular and carefully specified examples of thoughts that would allow someone to gain the sense of possibility that Musil's claim requires us to have in order to have a sense of actuality. Thus Musil emerges as the central figure in our enquiry. But why should having a sense of actuality and a sense of possibility matter?
The importance of senses of actuality and possibility
It is vital to know how things actually are. And it is part of the process of discovery to consider how things might be, both in order to work out how to discover which possibilities are realised and in order to devise new theories and new technologies. But all of that is at the first-order level of facts and putative facts. It is not obvious that there would be much benefit in ascending from awareness of specific facts and possibilities to a general sense of actuality and one of possibility. We can see the enormous benefits of making the comparable ascent from first-order logic to second-order logic. But what about the senses of actuality and possibility we discuss here?
The benefits are primarily psychological. They may arise both in the area of theory, and in the area of practice.
In the area of theory, a sense of actuality gives us a sense that some statements are true and others are false. And it gives us that sense prior to any determination of which statements are true. So we understand in advance of any research that there will be correct answers and incorrect answers to our questions. It would be a bold leap to say that a sense of actuality would in itself suffice to turn us away from the kind of relativism that does not allow for a boundary between the correct and the incorrect which is independent of our thought. But the leap might be made, and it would be a great benefit of a sense of actuality if it did suffice to see off such deplorable relativism.
Staying in the area of theory, a sense of possibility reminds us that things might have been different. It also reminds us that things might in fact be different from how we think them to be, so we should continue our research and never assume that matters are finally settled. And it reminds us that in at least some areas in which we lack knowledge, we do not merely draw a blank. Instead we have a range of plausible possibilities, a grasp of which can help us to design our research.
In the area of practice, a sense of actuality confronts us with the need to face the world as it is. We see that we must work if we would like the world to be different. A sense of possibility encourages us to explore options for change, knowing that there may be scope to make changes which would bring actuality into line with the more attractive possibilities.
In both areas, theory and practice, a general sense of actuality that is not tied to particular current facts or factual beliefs has the advantage that the same sense can continue to perform its functions while facts or our beliefs as to the facts change. Likewise a general sense of possibility can remain the same sense, able to do its work, regardless of what possibilities are or are believed to be available.
References
Dummett, Michael A. E. "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?". Chapter 3 of Dummett, The Seas of Language. Clarendon Press, 1993. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198236212.003.0003
Evans, Gareth. The Varieties of Reference. Clarendon Press, 1982.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Maximen und Reflexionen. In Goethes Werke XII: Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen. Christian Wegner, 1955.
Musil, Robert. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, herausgegeben von Adolf Frisé. Rowohlt, 1999.
Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins. Picador, 1997.
Wittgenstein. Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Suhrkamp, 1963
Wittgenstein. Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, translated by C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922.
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