Episode 95 Your name without language

Image by Reid Zura

What would your name be without language?

In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’.

What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated?

Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the world and language are on two different planes of existence? What if language is a one-dimensional phenomenon attempting to delineate multidimensional experience?

The most fascinating aspects of language (to me) is that it presumes and thereby constructs a self. But a one-dimensional language, it would seem, would produce very limited, superficial selves. Does inhabiting language keep us from experiencing the vastness of other dimensions? (If this question sounds familiar, you might be remembering playing with it in Episode 94, Language and the Afterlife.)

It turns out that the linearity of language offers possibilities not available in other dimensions. Language, being one-dimensional, can (and does) shape itself in constantly changing ways to create new selves. The selves form spaces from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I read in Episode 95 is ‘The brutal linearity of language’.

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Episode 70 The meanings of life

Photo by Daniel Páscoa

Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life?

Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when we ask what it means.

Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a narrative, so the ‘meaning of life’ becomes something like the ‘moral of the story’?

What if we thought about meaning of life from a biological perspective?

David Deamer, a biologist who explores the origin of life, gives this definition: ‘Life is an evolving system of polymers synthesized by chemical reactions (metabolism) that take place in membrane-bounded compartments called cells’ (2011, p. 3).

The image we have here is not one life, with one story and one meaning. Instead it’s a proliferation of discrete compartments – cells, surrounded by membranes, each containing its own unique strand of genetic information – in other words, strands of communicable meanings.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know I’m fascinated by the idea that the information contained in these membrane-bound compartments… indeed, that the membranes themselves, are a form of language.

This perspective would present human language as nothing more or less than a means for the Earth to produce new forms of membrane-bound compartments, with new forms of information within.

Human language creates the self, which serves as a membrane, that requires us to feel separate, divided, broken.

But it also offers us the experience uniqueness, individuality and the rare pleasure of co-creating something new, something meaningful, something that reconnects us to everything we once felt separate from.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution: rather than spending time trying to find out the meaning of life, let’s celebrate how we each individually contribute to life’s multitude of meanings.

The story I discuss in this episode is ‘The Mosaic Makers’.

Works cited

Deamer, D. (2011) First life: discovering the connections between stars, cells, and how life began. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lessing, D. (1979). Shikasta. New York: Knopf.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to the curious, intelligent, creative community who listen to this podcast. I have exciting new things in store for you. Stay tuned to future episodes to find out more.

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