Language and the World

Does language actually ‘hook’ onto the world? Or does language actually make the world? There are multiple answers to these questions, naturally, and no single answer is entirely satisfactory. That language plays its part in forming the world is not debatable. We do form our concepts through and with language. It is a bit like wondering whether fish experience water or cats understand about air: it is just something which is there for them; they do not need to conceptualise it because it is a constant presence; they are immersed in it.

Similarly, humans are immersed in language. Much of the time we hardly notice it; it is simply the medium in which we live and move and have our being. We communicate using language because we do not have a huge amount of choice. While there is some non-verbal communication in all exchanges, much of what we want to put across is verbal. Language matters if we are to communicate clearly, and mostly we do if we wish to.

In part, then, language constitutes the world we live in, but it is not entirely so created. Famously Samuel Johnstone refuted Bishop George Berkeley’s theory of naive idealism by kicking a rock and declaring ‘I refute it thus!’. The world we experience is not only a mental construct – reality keeps intruding. Mostly we accept this and the match between our mental models of the world and the world are close enough for us not to notice any dissonance, and we proceed quite happily in our cross-over between the mental and physical worlds.

Occasionally there is a mismatch between the world as our mental models and experience suggest it should be and the way the world presents itself to us. These happen, perhaps most famously, in science. For example, For example, the Geiger – Marsden experiment involved shooting alpha-particles at a thin metal film. Occasionally Marsden found that the particles were deflected at large angles, rather than going straight through the film of only incurring small deflections. Lord Rutherford is reported as it feeling like someone had fired a pistol at a piece of tissue paper only to have the bullet bounce back at them.

Such experiences require us to develop our thinking, our thoughts and concepts of what the physical world is like. The answer to the Marsden experiment is in the ‘planetary’ model of the atom, where (almost) all the mass is concentrated at the centre of the atom and the rest is more or less empty space. Thus, if the alpha-particle goes close to the centre of the atom (the nucleus) it can bounce back. From the experience, we have learnt something, developed a new concept, moved things forward, even changed the language and invented new words and descriptions of the world.

Such developments are not limited to the sciences, of course. Other concepts can change and develop. This is perhaps clearest in religion. If you read the Old Testament and the New Testament separately, you might well think that they were referring to different gods. The God of the Old Testament sometimes appears as a tribal deity, only interested in the Israelites. Yet, over time, the concept of God, YHWH, extends to cover overlordship of other nations, and superiority to their gods. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis, probably finally edited during the Babylonian exile, where it is observed that God created, for example, the Sun and Moon, which others worshipped as deities, as well as the sea and everything that dwelt in it, which included sea monsters worshipped as deities.

This could be interpreted as the forlorn aspirations of a defeated people, if the idea had not been taken up and become monotheism, the idea that there is but one God, and that is the God of Israel and that this God could be worshipped anywhere, by anyone. That idea was extended by Jesus and the early Christian movement within the Roman Empire, which could welcome all to worship God. But the concept of God put forward was different from that of the surrounding culture (or most of it) which still had its local gods as well as state religions (which early Christians frequently ran foul of, it seems).

A new concept requires new words. The Marsden experiment required a new language of atomic physics to accommodate the ideas put forward. A universal God, the incarnate Son of the God, requires a new language also, something which perplexed early Christians. For a century or so the language of Christianity was strictly Biblical. However, as thinking about how God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit interacted with each other and with us, a new language, borrowed from the philosophy of the surrounding culture, was rather controversially developed. For example if you search the Bible for the word ‘begotten’ (as in ‘begotten, not made’ from the Nicene Creed) you will search in vain. A new language, new concepts, new understandings had to be developed in order to describe the new insights about the nature of God.

It is often forgotten that this language is not absolute. We describe the atom or the Trinitarian God through models. No model precisely describes the object modelled – if it did it would be the object modelled, not a model of it. Our ideas of the nature of God are limited by our language and our finite minds. If we push any of the models of God that we have too far they can always be found wanting. Thus, a critic of the Christian faith can choose one model used for God, push it as far as it will go and then a little further, and then declare the model to be obviously false and therefore the whole concept of God to be false. The problem is not with God but with the extension of the finite model of God beyond what it can bear.

There is a similarity or analogy of theology here with, say, atomic physics. The models of atoms can be stretched beyond what they can cope with. Oddly, however, we do not then reject the whole idea of atoms, but refine and extend our models to accommodate the new information. That, of course, happened during the development of Christianity through history. It is, perhaps, only more recently that one over-extended model of God has been counted as decisive evidence against the whole concept.