In general, linguistic expressions—words, sentences, idioms, proverbs, and so on—are tied to norms of application. They are tied to practices, to normative configurations, and to what is sometimes called ‘conceptual-’ or ‘logical-schemes.’ These are logical structures which are structures of thought—structures of meaning. And when we apply linguistic expressions, engage them to those logical structures and let those structures breathe normative, meaningful, practical life into those expressions, reality thereby makes itself thinkable.
Now, In addition to this—and this is what I would like to focus on—linguistic expressions also have all sorts of psychological associations tied to them. The use of a word, for example, may be tied to particular experiences. It may provoke emotions, it may produce color, it may inspire. In short, words have a taste.
Saying of a politician, for instance, that she is “sensitive” about her public image may be a kind of understatement. It is a literal and not a figurative employment of an expression, but it illustrates a well-known fact: that choice of words matters—not only because of the logical function of the words, but also because of how they feel. The right choice of words may sometimes even make the difference between a convincing and an unconvincing argument. We choose words not only for their logical characteristics.
Now, Frege has issued a commandment: “always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective.” And since that happened, the experiential side of using language has not been taken very seriously by most of those who regard themselves as his students. (The separate, and more confusing, distinction between semantics and pragmatics, has also contributed to that.) Nevertheless, I wish to argue, these experiences, may too have a role in making reality thinkable.
To see that, I would like to highlight a particular kind of taste words can have—a particular kind of experiences associated with language: We sometimes, this is what I wish to highlight, can experience the mind making contact with the world, or attempting to make contact. The meaning of something in the world—a situation, a person, an object—and hence the meaningfulness of a certain word or linguistic expression (its ability to actually make sense of that situation or person or object), may come to us experientially. We may encounter the meaningfulness of things in the world as well as that of words, as if it were a thing, a body, something to hold, to feel. (Such experiences may be forced on us, but we can sometimes bring them about.) Wittgenstein talked in this context of ‘meaning experiences.’ And along similar lines, Virginia Wolf, in ‘On Being Ill,’ writes:
…words give out their scent and distil their flavor, and then if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.
We may call this the experience of thinking par excellence, the experience of capturing the world in thought. It is the experience of thinkability—the sense that the world could or should become intellectually ours.
To be sure, we don’t all have the same associations and experiences when we think; we don’t always—perhaps not even often—have any experience when we use language meaningfully (how else?). Nevertheless, the experiences of capturing reality in mind exist. There is a host of them. Such is the experience of knowing how to go on, the experience of things falling into place. Coming a bit short of that, we sometimes only have the experience that it should be possible for things to fall into place, even though they haven’t yet. Such experiences can be, and some of them are, “A-ha!” experiences. But more generally, they are experiences of being at home in the world. To have them is to experience the world allowing us to contemplate it.
And we sometimes also have the opposite sort of experience: experiences of the world rejecting us, refusing to make itself available to us—to make itself thinkable. Reality can be difficult in this way. These are experiences of failure to make sense, failure to come into smooth intellectual contact with the world. We may feel as if the world is shouldering us out. It is typically an experience of being deeply foreign.
What I called ‘the experience of thinking’ is at the same time the experience of the object about which we are thinking and of the mode of thought about the object. It is a reflexive mode of thinking, in which we are aware of the contact our mind makes with the world as it is making that contact—as it is making, or is attempting to make, sense of things. It is, we might say, a mode of thinking that is aware of itself—aware of its own concern to have things make sense; aware too of the possibility of its own failure.
And our susceptibility to such experiences is indispensible to us. It allows us to problematize, reflect on, and examine our modes of thought. And by doing that, it also allows us to examine ourselves: to examine whether we are alive to the world, and whether we allow the world to be properly alive to us.