[lit-ideas] Re: Language, Justice and Social Practices (long)

  • From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:43:35 -0700

Walter Okshevsky wrote:

Robert seems to find more agreement between us than I am able to. 

Sorry!

My thesis here is that language has a constitutive function with respect to
emotions and feelings, not simply a representative function. In other
words, it's not that we first are able to feel indignation or Angst and
then attach label/name to it.

Exactly what is the thesis here? I think that Walter may have confused
two things: (1) We might on occasion not know how to articulate what we
feel (by way of moods and emotions) and then seek to find the right
words with which to do so (we can be, as it were, Flauberts
of the emotions), an enterprise that is often difficult and frustrating.
(Usually, such a 'discovery' brings with it a sense of relief.) (2) We
may have certain feelings (emotions, moods) and then give them tags by
which they are later identified, and become words which circulate in a linguistic community.

(1) differs from (2) in just this way: it assumes that 'emotion talk' is
well-established in a community of speakers, although the person caught
up in the 'feeling' or 'emotion' in question cannot find a 'name' for
what's felt, whereas (2) need assume no prior existence of emotions and
moods in general. There is no a priori reason why emotion talk might not
have developed piecemeal. To deny that we first are able to feel
indignation or Angst, e.g., and then 'name' them is slightly question
begging: these words already exist in English (although Angst is adopted
from the German by way of psychology), and it would be odd to suggest that someone might believe that we first feel indignation and then come to call it indignation. This absurdity is not my thesis. However, the thesis that one might feel what we now call indignation without having a name for it is not absurd. (Else, whence the name?)

I certainly agree with Walter (although this is my interpretation of
part of what he says) that much has to be in place before one can 'feel'
indignation. One is indignant (or not) because one believes some wrong
has been done; one's views dismissed in a committee; one's bank has charged a fee for writing a check on Tuesday, etc. But the contingent limits of how much has to be in place are virtually impossible to set, and there are no a priori ones.

I also believe, and I'll bet Walter does too, that in the absence of such 'reasons' for indignation, this 'emotion' cannot be identified by a rise in one's blood pressure, an increase in one's heart rate, or whatever; that is, we don't distinguish between indignation and the onset of a tropical disease on somatic grounds. (This is borne out in what Walter says below.)

> To feel indignation or Angst or morally 
bound is to  understand an entire conceptual network of relations and
inferences to other concepts. Clearly what we call these concepts,
their names are  unimportant. We can call "Anst" the feeling one has
watching a car bear down on oneself, but that doesn't make the feeling
"Angst." It's still fear. Similarly, Whatever a community calls "romantic
love," its members  wil not be able to feel that emotion independent of a
conceptual network  differentiating it from such related things as courtly
love, divine love,  agape, sexual infatuation, etc.. So, I think we
disagree on the relation  between conceptual terms housed in language and
our capacities to feel that which is connoted by the terms.

I sympathize with the general thrust of this, but disagree with its sweeping nature. Only a philosopher would believe that children cannot feel morally bound (or become indignant) without 'understanding an entire conceptual network of relations and inferences to other concepts.' Children (and adults) learn such things in the context of a way of life and as members of a linguistic community, to be sure; but the extent, from the child's view, of conceptual complexity involved in sorting out, let alone identifying, emotions and moods, is surely much narrower than, say, Martha Nussbaum's. Moreover, the case of Helen Keller suggests that she learned words, as ordinary children after a certain point do not, one step at a time, as it were (and no doubt in learning them learned concepts). At least this much is clear: she learned the word 'water' first. (And about a dozen words quickly thereafter.) Yet that she learned the word 'water' within a linguistic framework of 'solid,' 'liquid,' 'gas,' 'H20,' etc., is, I think, unlikely.

Robert also believes that people can "possess a concept without having a
name for it ..." My claim is that it is unimportant what name we ascribe
to a concept. Robert's claim is a stronger one: we can understand a
concept without having any name for it. I would think that without some
name, we would not be able to mark the conceptual differentiations
necessary for the identification and understanding of any single concept.
Our concepts encounter ourselves and the world as a whole, not singly.

I certainly do believe 'that people can posses a concept without having a name for it.' My examples of Treppenwitz and l'esprit d'escalier would seem to prove this. In English, we have no name with which to translate these two concepts; we must resort to somewhat roundabout descriptions of the psychic phenomenon in question. Does that mean we lack the concept? No. But what concept, on the 'no name, no concept' view do we lack?

There is much more to be said, of course. I'll try to reply to the rest of Walter's interesting comments later.

Robert Paul
Reed College

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