Table Of Content1
Gabriel Furmuzachi
LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURALISM
Gefördert durch die Universität Wien
2
3
To BW (sine qua non)
For all the stories yet to be told…
4
Table of Contents
LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURALISM .................................. 1
INTRODUCTION ............................................................. 7
LANGUAGE (GLOSSOLALIA) .................................................. 13
ON THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE .................................................. 13
MEANING THINGS AND COMMUNICATING – LANGUAGE, WORLD AND THOUGHTS ................... 15
FROM THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE COMMUNITY ......................................... 18
Kripke on Wittgenstein's Private Language ............................ 19
FROM THE COMMUNITY BACK TO THE INDIVIDUAL ..................................... 26
Chomsky on I-language ................................................ 27
I-language and Communication ......................................... 30
DAVIDSON'S BALANCE ........................................................ 36
The Framework ........................................................ 36
Meaning, Words and Sentences ......................................... 38
Radical Intepretation ................................................ 40
LOOKING FOR THE WORLD ................................................... 46
REFERENTIAL SEMANTICS? .................................................... 46
LINGUISTIC RELATIVISM? .................................................... 49
ON ORGANIZING AND FITTING THE WORLD .......................................... 53
ON SHATTERING AND INCREASING THE WORLD: THE CASE OF METAPHOR ..................... 55
Language as Discourse ................................................ 55
On What Metaphor Is Not .................................................... 57
On What Metaphor Is ........................................................ 61
Reference: Metaphors and Reality ........................................... 66
Imagination .............................................................. 69
A METAPHOR OF IDENTITY .................................................... 73
5
IDENTITY (SOLILOQUIES) .................................................. 75
AN IDENTITY STORY ........................................................ 76
PROBLEMS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY ............................................... 83
The Principle of Physical Continuity ................................. 84
The Principle of Psychological Continuity ............................ 87
Parfit's "Unimportance of Being Person" .............................. 89
A Word on Thought Experiments ........................................ 91
WHAT IS A PERSON? ....................................................... 94
LANGUAGE AS ANOTHER CRITERION? .............................................. 97
THE NARRATIVE ALTERNATIVE .................................................. 99
MacIntyre's Quest .................................................... 99
Taylor's Stance ..................................................... 107
RICOEUR AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY ............................................. 115
Narratives .......................................................... 117
Identity ............................................................ 122
Actions and Agents .................................................. 129
A Semantic Approach ....................................................... 129
A Pragmatic Approach ...................................................... 131
Texts and Actions ................................................... 132
THE POLYSEMY OF ALTERITY ............................................... 136
THE LAND OF STORIES ...................................................... 140
Stalking with Stories and Speaking With Names ....................... 142
ANOTHER OTHER: THE FOREIGNER .............................................. 149
Toccata et Fugue pour l'Étranger .................................... 150
The Silence of Polyglots .................................................. 153
Leaving - Eva Hoffman ............................................... 155
MULTICULTURALISM: A PERSPECTIVE ............................................ 161
CONCLUDING REMARKS ..................................................... 169
6
APPENDIX ............................................................... 171
1. BEING USED BY METAPHOR: THE FALLACY OF TAKING A METAPHOR LITERALLY ............ 171
2. SPLIT IDENTITIES IN SEARCH OF A SELF ..................................... 174
3. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I DIVIDE? ............................................ 178
4. JULIA KRISTEVA: LE SILENCE DES POLYGLOTTES ................................ 182
REFERENCE LIST ......................................................... 184
7
Introduction
When it comes to language, the classical tradition considers that
language is more or less a medium and that the words we use stand in,
conventionally, for thoughts. With Augustine, however, we step into
another direction: he introduces the idea that when we use language we
"negotiate a meaning", we pay attention to the context, we are careful
on how we use words. This idea is picked up and developed by
Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein insists
that there is no private language, that one cannot develop alone a
language because it is in a language's essence to have rules and these
rules, better off, the idea of following a rule is something that can
only be acquired within a community. Thus, inasmuch as language is
concerned, the community has priority.
Now, does "being part of a community" mean "being part of a human
community"? At least this is what Kripke seems to say when discussing
Wittgenstein's ideas. Is this ability of learning a language something
that only belongs to human beings? This possibility is exploited by
Noam Chomsky. Actually, according to him, language is something that
happens to us, rather than something we learn. He speaks of a "language
organ" which "grows" at an incredible speed in childhood. This is why,
Chomsky thinks, our use of the plural when we speak of language is not
exactly justified: languages differ only slightly and these differences
are only socially and politically entertained. What this means then, is
that the community is not as important as Wittgenstein thought. It is
important inasmuch as it provides an input, inasmuch as it creates a
"medium" but the fact that we can speak a language is something which
pertains solely to biology. The individual and the individual's
biological makeup are the only things that count and not the community.
Thus, we have two very different views here. On the one hand, we have
Wittgenstein who emphasises the importance of community in the process
of language learning and use and, on the other hand, we have Chomsky
who bets on the individual, an individual biologically ready to absorb
what we usually call a language (and what really only is a social
object, an E-language).
8
Now, the individual and the community stand here for the I and the
Other. The individual is the I. With the Other, we already have a
community. Inasmuch as language is concerned, Wittgenstein says that
the I cannot be an I without the Other, while Chomsky says that the
Other cannot exist without the I. Is there a way to bring the
individual and the community, the I and the Other, in a balance?
The one who attempts this is Donald Davidson. With his rejection of
understanding meaning as something that is assigned to sentences, as a
sort of entity, he does away with a conception of language which
considers that the meaning of sentences stems out of the concatenation
of the meaning of the words which make up the sentence. Instead, he
suggests a theory of meaning which parallels, in the field of natural
languages, Tarski's achievements in the field of formalized languages.
This is the only way, Davidson considers, in which we could understand
how we, finite beings with a finite vocabulary, can manage in a finite
amount of time to become competent speakers of a language and thus
being able to speak and understand an infinite number of non-synonymous
sentences.
His theory of meaning is warranted practically by his approach to
interpretation, which he calls "radical interpretation". With Davidson
we find a way to keep meaning (what someone thinks) and belief (what
someone holds true about the world) together and thus we manage to
bring and keep the individual and the community in a balance. One is
able to learn a language only by "means of another person triangulating
among his own responses, and the world being responded to".
The next step is constituted by a return to the relationship between
language and phenomenal. In order to do this, we point out that in
Chomsky's theory lies dormant an idea which would bring him rather
close to a referential semantics. If we are to introduce the concept of
I-substances which would stand for the things of which we talk whenever
we use language, then we could see that they do not always meet the P-
substances, those of which physics and chemistry talk about. We would
tend to think that this is a problem because we are used to take for
granted what physics and chemistry tell us. But natural sciences do not
tell us how the world is; they only give us, more or less an idealized
version of the world. They are not, in the end, the arbiters of what is
9
real. If we understand this, we could "bite the metaphysical bullet"
and give these I-substances a metaphysical connotation. In a certain
way, this is what Whorf has done in his analysis of the Hopi language
and of the way the Hopis understand the world. One would see very
little reasons to think that Chomsky and Whorf have something in
common. In fact, they seem to have tackled the same issue but coming
from different directions. Chomsky says that E-languages differ only
superficially. Whorf says that the language we speak influences the way
we think about the world. Now, since we live in a common world, since
we have to talk about the same reality, it should follow that our
languages should be very similar. Of course, Chomsky did not go as far
as showing any interests in a language/world isomorphism (although
there are reasons to believe that his theory allows such an
interpretation), while Whorf did not take into consideration the
similarities between languages (although he managed to convey in
English what the Hopi language expresses).
What exactly is then the relationship between language and the world?
Davidson considers that there are two possibilities here: we can either
speak of language organizing the world or of language fitting the
world. And if different languages imply different ways of understanding
the world, this would mean that one could entertain the possibility of
total translability failure. But this perspective is flawed. Languages
share the same ontology (and a similar principle of individuating) and
they share the same notion of truth (which cannot not be translatable).
However, besides these two ways in which language relates to the world,
we would suggest, following Ricoeur, another one: language shatters and
increases the world. How does this work? First we have to notice that
language as such is nothing more than a system. We should point out
another dimension of language, namely, discourse. Language as discourse
is language in use, is language being instantiated by people who speak,
who mean things, who do things, who talk about themselves, the others
and about the world.
This relationship between language and the world is best expressed by a
figure of speech, namely by metaphor. In order to analyze the
relationship between metaphor and reality, I will discuss, at first,
two relevant theories (Collin Turbayne's "myth of the metaphor" and
Philip Weelwright's "tensive character of the metaphorical language")
10
and then, I will try to show that Ricoeur's insight on this issue comes
as a conclusion to both of them and, at the same time, elevates the
analysis to a whole new level. Both Turbayne and Wheelwright's analyses
achieve their pinnacle when they talk about the connection that is
established between metaphor and reality. Turbayne does not intend to
show that metaphorical language should be distrusted but that "critical
consciousness of the distinction between use and abuse [of metaphor]
leads not to disuse but to re-use metaphors, in the endless search for
other metaphors, namely a metaphor that would be the best one
possible". Wheelwright stresses the tensive character of language and
he affirms that the reality which metaphor brings to language is
"tensive", "coalescent" and "perspectival" and this, in turn, means
that metaphor has the power to tell us something about "What Is", about
the reality.
These accounts are however considered by Paul Ricoeur as a "de-
mythified myth of metaphor" (with regard to the first one) and as an
"ontological naïveté" (the second). Metaphors are philosophically
relevant, Ricoeur thinks, because they are innovative. A metaphor, as
Ricoeur sees it, is not an atomic unit; it is "the operation of
predication, permitting inference, transformation, orientation and
other cognitive operations". Moreover, Ricoeur upgrades Frege's
distinction between sense and meaning into one between sense and
reference. Sense results from a largely horizontal, semantic
proceeding. Reference is "[metaphor's] claim to reach reality" (even if
often a redefined reality), and it adds to sense an emotional and
imaginative, pragmatic verticality. If metaphor is thus a particular
cognitive instrument, what is it that to which it refers? We believe
metaphor is directed toward and necessary for an insight into
continuously variable processes1 when these are being handled by
language, which is composed of fixed signs.
Until now, we have been talking about language and the relationship
between individual and community. With the issue of metaphor we brought
in another account: that of the relationship between language and the
world. Now, what we are interested in is moving from the issue of
language to the issue of narrative. What we discover is that language
1 What Umberto Eco called a "dynamism of the real".
