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MIGHTN'T LANGUAGE BE INADEQUATE?

J. W. Powell
Humboldt State University

Words are not the garb of thought but are their very incarnations.
William Wordsworth, "Essays Upon Epitaphs, II,11 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B.
Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 84.

With Music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard would see them there
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan"

Talking about hay doesn't load the wagon.
Charlie Wonnell


When we think of language in a perfectly general, abstract way, we might think of a drawing in Ferdinand de
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics,
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in which two outlines of heads face each other and engage in language. Like
de Saussure, it seems a commonplace to think of language as people using speech as a vehicle of communication,
producing sounds as signs of (that is, sounds which stand for) what is enclosed within. Language originates as a way to
convey to others by a kind of proxy something which cannot be seen or heard, something which lies within us.
One result of thinking about this simple cartoon is that we might be struck by--or might miss--how rich and
complex and marvelous language processes are--struck that this cartoon is a schema representing not only people
exchanging greetings but that one outlined head might be Homer speaking the Iliad, or Shakespeare trying out lines for
Lear, and the other might be you or me. There is a gulf between the life of the mind and the dead sounds which make
their way along those dotted lines from mouth to ear. Language seems on one hand fragile and on the other marvelous.
There is a dizzying gulf between this caricature of human beings as transmitting and receiving stations and the flow of
sympathy and affect between any two close persons. We may think of the great poets. We wonder whether this process
which is language might be completely adequate, since sometimes poets bemoan the recalcitrance of words and since the
relations of the inner and the outer in this cartoon seem so problematic.

Mightn't language be inadequate? We might think
of this as a generalized version of a question built on more
specific notions of what the task of language is--mightn't
language be inadequate to express our ideas? to convey our
thoughts? to bring about in others dispositions to behave?
to embody a particular illocutionary act potential or
propositional content or conditions of satisfaction?
I am interested in, in part, whether it might be
possible to turn this view on its head, to investigate
whether one result of the view could be right. That is, one
way to proceed could be to trace out from the most basic
theoretical concerns about language, materials which
present day linguists and philosophers of language have in
common with each other and with just about every
philosopher who has written about language--trace out
from those thoughts how the limits of language must work,
how language might or even must be inadequate. But the
terms of the description of the inner and the outer will
clearly be philosophically burdened--what is outer is
public, physical, dead, sounds or marks. What is inner?
That is a durable fray with large, well-defended, and
familiar landmarks. If we start from there and follow that
path then the philosophical problems arise, as they arose,
for example, in John Searles first page of Speech Acts, like
genies from a rubbed lamp.
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How can a sound carry
meaning, or refer to a thing, or carry out an intention, or
be a representation? If we start anywhere near here we are
already down the garden path and it stretches out before
us. Sooner or later we may have to come to this point, but
another starting place might be worth seeking. The view
that language is signs of, say, hidden and invisible
thoughts, which make it possible for us to communicate
those thoughts, gives rise to the questions of whether
language mightn't be inadequate, but perhaps the
questions can arise in non-philosophical ways as well and
perhaps it can be dealt with without begging philosophical
questions. In what follows I deal with different ways to
raise questions of the possibility of linguistic inadequacy,
and try to run them to earth.
Poets do tell us of having thoughts too deep for
words, though not so many poets and not so often as one
might think. We can think of examples to confirm the
question in Tennyson, in Wordsworth, in Blakes visions.
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At any rate, it seems we might be asking a question a poet
would endorse.



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Too, we can think of plenty of non-poetic examples
of language failing us. I could describe my mother to a
friend who is to pick her up at the airport and they spend
half an hour wandering past each other looking. Or on a
raft trip down the Owyhee I try in my diary to capture the
moment of vertigo when the current first takes hold of the
boat and yet because of the scale of huge hills and cliffs
and width of river nothing seems to move at all, and finally
I give up in disgust and toss the diary in the breakfast fire.
Some people can answer the question, "Did you have a
happy childhood?" but for some it is a struggle and for
some perhaps an adequate answer is impossible.
These abbreviations of examples won't stand still
yet. Consider the following: Susan, who is a painter, tells
me of a place where once she stayed a month in Eastern
Oregon, in a cabin on a reach of the John Day River. In
particular, she is trying to tell me of an attempt to paint
the curve of the river and the cottonwoods, poplar, and
alder crowding it.
I was on a dock (she said) and the river was wide
enough and curved enough and the surface was alive
enough for me to see what to do with it. There were
parched hills and the kind of sky where you ought to be
able to see stars all day long. But it was only after four
days of pretty good work that things seemed to me to go
sour. I couldn't tell why and at first I fought with it, spent
four more days thinking it was me, that I was copping out
or that this simple project was beyond my abilities. I was
insecure then about my vocation as a painter and it was
with a kind of desperation that I would stand back and
wonder what was going wrong. The desperation wasn't
helped by my knowing that technically I was doing pretty
good work, that with competent judges I could put it in the
juried show back home, that it could have a chance to sell
at a decent price. Jeffery kept saying it was fine, and when
I said something was wrong, he would deny it and ask, if
something is wrong, what is it? I couldn't answer, though--
words failed me--I couldn't say. It was clear to me that I
had missed something, but I couldn't put it into words. I
finally gave up in disgust, scraped the canvas and did a
still life of goatsbeard and rocks, and then went to doing
prairie scenes on hikes, sometimes till standing on the
dock and wondering what went wrong.
Susan might say such a thing, and it looks like
material for my question--mightn't language be
inadequate? Here is a place where one might say, she does
say, there was something she could not put into words.
Words failed her.
But while her case looks like the kind of case I'm
after, it is not, for a couple of reasons: l) There is nothing
here to be done, by language or painting or whistling, until
Susan at least begins to see or know what has gone wrong,
and 2) the only ways we can imagine the problem resolved
are ways we can talk about and describe. (We can, of
course, imagine the problem as one which never is
resolved, or which leaves us with the nagging sense of
something which is left unsaid.) For instance, her story
might continue: "It was in a card shop back in Eugene that
I realized what had been wrong--I saw a card of Monet's
picture of the three people in a canoe under overhanging
trees and there leaped before my mind another picture of
his of the Argenteuil river with the same sorts of trees as
those I had been painting on the John Day, but curving
through unseen fertile fields and friendly hills under the
kind of sky that sometimes gives rain. I realized that I
could have gone ahead and made the painting--I just
needed to place it, to realize it was in a certain place in a
tradition (or out of one); my painting would have been, at
least partly, about Eastern Oregon not being France, even
if we do plant Lombardy poplars. I did not remember that I
knew Monets painting. I hadn't seen what I was doing."
We can say then that what went wrong was a
failure of sight or of insight, but it had nothing to do with
language. Her earlier claim that she couldn't put it into
words was not false so much as secondary to the problem
that she had nothing to put into words; she just did not
know the answer, somewhat as students will claim not to
be able to say what they know when the fact is that they do
not know. (Sometimes of course those students really have
frozen up, faced with a test or stage fright, but in those
cases their argument that they really do know depends on
their later being able to tell us, or at the very least
themselves, the thing they could not tell us when they
froze.) There have been other ways language has been
supposed to be inadequate; some subtle distinctions
escape our power to describe them; some emotions (such
as a euphoric, lofty sense of being in on something of
utmost importance), or the felt depth of emotions, seem to
escape characterization; the color of an experience likewise;
there may be mystical truths which are ineffable;
mathematics and mathematical logic improve on a realm of
language by being more precise with some distinctions;
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and ordinary speech is supposed to be too vague and
imprecise.
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That we in ordinary conversations struggle
with our language, and that some writers strikingly
succeed in other struggles, and that we usually have
remedies like paraphrasing, explaining, and making new
words (quark, craton, bipolar personality disorder)--these
remedies do not quite take care of the question whether
such struggles are always in principle soluble. Some things
may in fact be ineffable.
When we take up the view of language as a system
of signs, we find as almost a tangential consequence the
question of ineffability. But there is a counter- current as
well: we do seem led into the view (that language consists
of signs) partly because we think there are some things
within us which cannot find their way into the public eye.
There is a gap between the inner life and the outer
expression of that life in the sounds and marks we use to
communicate. Jerry Fodor
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thought of this as clearly
visible with infants and animals; there is a mental life there
which cannot be put into a natural language just because
no natural language exists there. If we were not so careful
as Fodor, we might say that a cat thinks we are opening a
can of cat food, but because she cannot say so, the thought
for her and for all cats is an ineffable thought. Locke too is
committed to a view of language as that which makes
communication possible, without which our thoughts
would all be ineffable.
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So our question, which more specifically here is,
mightn't language be inadequate to express our ideas? is
the obverse to the question, Are there possibly things
which are ineffable?
There are things, of course, for which the proper
response is an outraged scream, or stunned silence, and
there is nonsense of many varieties, and there are things
we cannot conceive and have no way to understand, some
of which leave us agape
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. Need we a taxonomy? Perhaps.
But my interest here, in those places and times when
language cannot adequately serve as signs of our inner
lives is because of my interest in whether language EVER
serves as signs of our inner lives. That is, I am looking for
cases in which the foundations of the semiology of
language show, and I think that they may show in those
cases in which it makes sense to ask whether language
mightn't be inadequate to express our ideas. I am not
committed to any answer to the question; I am only
checking to be sure that the question makes sense. And I
am doing that because the intelligibility of the question
seems to follow from the view that language serves as signs
of an inner life.
All I have done so far though is to give ways not to
ask the question. But the example of the painter will not
slow me down much in worrying about the question. All
she showed me is that sometimes people might be tempted
to blame their own lack of eloquence or lack of insight on
an inadequacy of language, and this is old news. Further,
the fact that some people can explicate poetry (or movies or
dreams or significant looks) does not mean that the
language was inadequate to the task until those people
came along, though it may mean that none of the rest of us
were as careful or paid as much attention or were as
insightful.
I can distinguish those cases in which I cannot
find the words to signify my inner life from those cases in
which no one could find the words to stand for the inner
life. This is not a question about what I can do, but rather
about what can be done, about limits of language rather
than limits of some particular speakers.
Some other examples will not do either, including
some we might have been tempted by. Writing teachers
sometimes set a sadistic assignment to describe a
particular sensation or smell ("For next time, describe the
smell of gasoline for someone who has never smelled it,
and without using or identifying gasoline, in 75 words."
"Take at least 300 words to describe how it feels to be on
the receiving end of a lover's angry slap"). But here the
lesson just has to do with opening the students' eyes as to
what can be done, with getting them to pay attention, with
the fact that such assignments are not hopeless but can be
done more or less well, as going over the papers in class
will demonstrate. Yet letting these kinds of examples die
without a struggle may do the investigation a disservice,
since there is some temptation to think that in every case
of telling something difficult or problematic part of the
difficulty or problem has to do with the process of putting
the inner into words. And if the flaming, dramatic cases of
full-blown mysticism or ineffability show a dramatic barrier
between the inner life and what can be said, still there is a
temptation to suppose that the barrier can be found with a
little careful attention in even everyday cases in which we
struggle with the richness of the inner life and the poverty
of the dead sounds we use to share it. If we think language
is what makes it possible to communicate, we can be
struck, as Locke was, by how amazingly apt those
articulate sounds are, both for plenty and quickness, and
at the same time feel the gap between the teeming ideas
within and the line of words rippling through the air or
arranged upon the page. I take this to be a reminder that
we may not just think that there are some things which are
beyond our ability to communicate, but rather we may
think that the fact that we are able to communicate at all
seems to fly in the face of our understanding what
language is. So the question whether language mightn't be
inadequate could be answered with anything from "Of
course, always," to "Perhaps here are some places."
At any rate we need some cases in which the
question can be put and explored, and the painter who
couldn't find words for her discontent did not work. I take
the next case to be a prosaic attempt to capture something
like Wordsworth's mystical "spots of time" in the Prelude.

Some thirty-odd years ago (I might tell my
daughter, who is running middle distances for her track
team), I watched Jim Ryun run the first high-school four-
minute mile. I was a miler myself, and had gone to this
meet in Kansas out of a kind of self-abusive dread, since I
was still trying to break five minutes as a senior, and it was
clear that this kid from Wichita, a junior, might break four.
There is a great deal I do not remember, but part of the day
is as clear as a piece of crystal you could hold in your hand
and turn and look at from different sides. It was a big meet,
competitors from all over, bleachers filled on both sides of
the oval, noisy and with little kids who had to be shooed off
the track. It was a cinder track--the sound of spikes on
cinders puts me back there now at some small town tracks.
It is a grating sound, and the sound does not fit with the
feeling the runner has on a good fast track. The mile came
late in the afternoon and clouds had been gathering in all
day, quite slowly, so that it felt cool and a little threatening,
ideal for running. The sound is one of the things I
remember best; the place got a little quieter for the starter's
gun for the mile, and several of us had our own watches we
punched at the puff of smoke. The P.A. system announced
in the middle of the third lap, with Ryun and his rabbit
setting the pace, 1:59.3 for the half. That was just what I
had gotten. And, he might do it.
I suppose the word spread through the stands,
because by the time the last lap was half run it was quiet
as my mother's farm. You could hear the runners' feet, you
could close your eyes and place Ryun by the sound, fifteen
yards ahead of anybody else. And when you opened your
eyes the flat-bottomed, mottled clouds seemed to press
down and tiny kids wanted to bawl but were scared to in
the silence. Everything seemed to slow to a crawl except
the runners, who moved like ducks, their arms and legs
going at the speed of ducks's wings flying. I stared at my
watch, convinced that it had stopped, looked back up for
the last twenty yards of the world caught in some eddy of



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time and these ducks flying through it, beating their wings
but going very slowly. I punched the stopwatch at the tape
and the clouds released their pressure and moved back as
if a spring had relaxed, and everything returned to normal
speed. Ryun curved onto the infield grass and fell on both
knees before a bunch of people caught him up and made
him walk around. I stared at my watch and a couple of my
neighbors looked at it too until the announcer read the
numbers on it to us: 3:59.0.

I tell this little story rather than, say, quote
St.Teresa of Avila, because I want to ask some questions
about it and to imagine how the possible answers might go
if any of us were to offer them. As such, it is important that
I put it at home in a place, so let us suppose that I tell it to
Rachel, who is fifteen and out for track. And one of the
things I want to do with you if not with Rachel is to make
clear that this story is related to that literature of the
mystics that includes St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa,
and which also includes Wordsworth and Blake. For our
investigation here, that means I feel a lack in words, even if
I am proud of the effect of them, and so would think or
would say to Rachel, "Words just can't convey what that
was like. It was incredible."
In the grip of the view of language as a system of
signs for communication we will see the above example as
a tiresomely extended case in which language indeed is not
adequate to express our thoughts or ideas. I want now to
investigate that, to see whether that is so and if so, how.
So I watched Jim Ryun's first four-minute mile, tell
the story now, view it as a story about something
remarkable, and I end the story by saying that "Words
cannot convey what that was like." What am I saying when
I say that?
Compare two ways of answering this question. The
first might be to explicate in terms of the view of language
as a system of signs--to say that words cannot convey what
that was like is to say that I have within me thoughts or
ideas for which I am trying to find the proper words, the
words which can stand for that experience for Rachel, the
listener. (Or some such explication.) The second is to
imagine the question arising in the example--Rachel asks,
"what are you saying, words can't convey what that was
like?"
I suppose that I can answer in several ways, any of
which might make sense within the example, that is,
without importing philosophical accounts to fill in. Here
are a couple, with the second alluding to a possible third in
other examples:
"I wish you could have been there. When I tell
about it I get all excited and I remember it again so clearly
and so vividly that I wish you could have seen it for
yourself."
Or
"Actually, I suppose that was a good description,
wasn't it? This is the first I've spent any time at all telling
about the event, and every other time, when I've told people
that I saw Ryun run that mile, I've felt the lack of power of
my description--I mean, my memory is so vivid, but I never
did a good job before this time of getting any of the feel of
it. I always just said stupid things, like, 'Gee, it was
amazing and weird, and so unforgettable.' And I've always
said that words couldn't convey what it was like, but
maybe this time my words did just that."
If these are possible ways of responding, then it is
a mistake to think of the line, "words cannot convey what
that was like," as an expression of how language might be
inadequate. Instead, it is an expression like, "you had to be
there," or "I wish you could have seen it yourself." Or it
may have something to do with admitting the speaker's
inadequacy in describing the race. But when we try to
follow it as an expression of the inadequacy of language,
there are no results. For one thing, the supposed
alternative of an adequate language cannot be imagined,
but even more, if one imagines the case as a
nonphilosophical conversation neither linguistic adequacy
nor inadequacy seems to be at issue. You had to be
there, or It was a wonderful thing to see, and I feel my
lack of vocabulary are none of them comments about
language. --Unless, of course, we insist on seeing the
example through our philosophers insistence that the
issue is linguistic inadequacy. That is, I might say that
words cannot convey what that was like if what I wish I
could do is to have Rachel live through what I lived
through. If I think about that philosophically, I might even
be confused enough to suppose that telling her about
watching Ryun run that mile is some kind of substitute for
having her live through what I lived through, and to
suppose that if the words were strong enough then I could
convey more than a description does convey--I could wipe
away the here and now and she could look through my
eyes thirty years ago, hear the dreadful silence I heard
broken by the now nearlyextinct crunch of spikes on
cinders. I can suppose, that is, that words cannot do that.
I am tempted to say that I had an experience I wish to
share, and I am thinking that words are an appropriate
way to do that, so I talk. I recount the experience, and do a
better or worse (or slightly overblown) job of it according to
my gift for description, but I wish I could do more. The
problem, I would think then, is that each human being is
bounded by that persons individual skin and experiences
are penned up inside each of us in a logical way. This
philosophical conception of a human being as an
individual, with logical consequences for the contents of
each of our minds, shows up as a regrettable fact which
places limits on language.
It is no great task to untangle this. As my great-
grandfather used to say, "Talking about hay doesn't load
the wagon," and there are a great many other things that
talking will not do. Giving someone else what I am tempted
to call an experience I have had by describing that
experience is in this way like loading the wagon by talking
about hay. It is a bit of wishful thinking, not a place where
the inadequacy of language may be seen.
When I share with Rachel what it was like to watch
Jim Ryun run that mile, I can describe it vividly or in the
most tiresome prose, and I can perhaps get her to wish she
could have seen it too. I can convey my excitement, make
the event memorable, present her with a striking image,
give her a feel for the event. And others who are more gifted



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writers or describers may do these things better than I. If I
do a poor job, I may be aware that I have done a poor job or
I may blame the poverty of my description on some other
factor than my own inability. I may blame words, for
instance, or language. Yet this cannot be legitimate, for
when we ask how the language will not do what we want it
to do, how shall we clarify what we want the language to
do, if not in words? And if we want more, perhaps we are
not thinking through what we want.
Think again about words not conveying what it
was, or what it was like, to watch Jim Ryun run that mile.
Suppose that I write that description in a letter to Rachel,
except that it is much better and more complete, a good
short story's worth on The Day I Watched Jim Ryun Beat
Four Minutes. It is moving, detailed, vivid and dramatic; it
makes a nice package. It pulls the reader in, makes her
laugh, makes her gasp, leaves her contemplative and
savoring the story when she finishes. Part of the story is
description of my watching the race, and it conveys the
intensity and excitement I felt thirty years ago.
What then would it mean to say that it does not
convey what it was like? Can I imagine what it would be to
convey the thing which it does not? That is, can we imagine
what it would be to remove the limits of language in this
case?
When I try, it falls apart. It goes like this: Rachel,
reading my words, is transported to that Kansas stadium
in the spring, thirty-odd years ago. She notices the things I
noticed, hears the things I heard. To anyone who has tried
writing fiction or description this may sound terrific. But
there may be problems if we try to take the attempt as an
attempt to "give Rachel the experience" I had thirty years
ago. To begin with the small ones, there is a problem of
whether it is still Rachel who is transported; will she
recognize the people I do, and will she fail to recognize her
mother, since I had never met her mother then? Will she
know what the rabbit is doing on those first two laps?
Rachel always notices colors and I never did--will she
notice the colors the day Ryun beat four minutes? Will she
finally be able to multiply laps in her head (though she
botches it now) just because of the story? Will she have
the slow pulse, the 20-15 vision, and the stopwatch I had?
This is not something that can be imagined. It is like
loading the wagon by talking. Besides the result that minds
divorced from persons and their histories and interests and
situations turn into Cartesian minds without individuality,
I do not make Rachel into someone else or transport her in
time by telling her a story, except in the way that stories
often do transport us, absorb our attention, show a new
way to think, or leave us feeling dreamy when we close the
book.
A further problem, reminding us of Nagel, is with
the phrase, "what it was like." Is the thing we wished were
conveyed but was not conveyed a thought or idea?
Descriptions can come up short even if the thing that is
being described is not an idea or a thought. If it is an
experience or a vase or a landscape, the description may
still be judged by some of the same standards: by its
liveliness, completeness, how easy it is to follow and to
imagine the thing described, its faithfulness and integrity,
its coherence, its appropriate length, and so on. In these an
experience, as an object or subject of description, may be
more like a vase than like a thought. --Though even
thoughts and ideas, when they are described may come
across as like vases; a gifted teacher may present a
description of an idea whose virtues are those same virtues
above, or the virtues of a description of a building or a day
in Kansas. When we ask whether language mightn't be
inadequate to express our ideas, and then think in terms of
my description of an experience, the question of what
language does not do or convey seems based on a
confusion. There are things a description does not do. But
the proper response is, "Of course." Describing, or hearing
a description, is not the same as bucking bales or running
a race or watching a race.
I have been asking about how language might
seem inadequate in my giving a description of the occasion
when I watched Jim Ryun run a four-minute mile. But
when I press the question, the question seems in every
case to be based on confusion. I confuse my inability or
lack of eloquence with inadequacy of language. I forget that
the remedies for the lacks I see in a description or a task
are remedies which make sense, if they do make sense, in
language. I mistake the goal of a piece of moving prose,
saying "words can't convey it," when what I wish to convey
is my audience to another place and time. I confuse the
impossibility of loading the wagon by talking about hay
with a lack in talking.
* * * * * *
And yet, surely there is something to the notion
that there do exist thoughts, ideas, which cannot be
spoken. I want now to try to think about an example of
unconscious thoughts and whether they mightn't show the
possibility of an inadequacy of language. Depth psychology
has made us acquainted with unconscious conflicts and
desires and thoughts, and sometimes those never do make
their way into consciousness, and so of course never are
expressed. And Carl Jung suggests that some patterns of
psychic energy which he calls archetypes can never be
made completely conscious.
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If they cannot be made
conscious, then perhaps they are to some degree ineffable,
and show something that language cannot express. What
can be said to this?
The first thing to be said is that the case for the
existence of unconscious thoughts is radically different
from any possible case for the existence of ineffable
thoughts, since we are persuaded to confess to
unconscious thoughts by arguments which involve making
them conscious. That some remain unconscious and
unexpressed is a weak argument that they are
inexpressible, not stronger than that a man dies a bachelor
is an argument that he was not marriageable.
Dealing with Jung's archetypes, without going into
his theory, is harder. Jung supposes that there are parts of
the collective unconscious which resonate with individuals
and work themselves out in the lives of those who embody
them. Some of the archetypes can be thought of as the
gods and goddesses of myth or the motifs (such as death-
and-rebirth or redemption-through-killing-monsters) which
seem to be fundamental patterns in storytelling, art, and



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myth. Sometimes Jungian patients seem to find peace and
relief in seeing their lives as expressions of a large pattern
or a story which seems timeless and meaningful. And yet
Jung may have been serious in his claim that these
patterns cannot be made conscious, cannot be articulated,
must remain dimly perceived if at all.
The thing to be said on this can be said to any
claim about the existence of ineffable truths or thoughts,
namely that the denial that they exist is at least as cogent
as their affirmation, since the denial can in principle be
supported and the affirmation in principle cannot, since to
support it is to destroy the ineffability of the thing
supported.
For instance: Jung's basic argument for the
existence of archetypes is always made by appeal to
striking coincidences across great distances, disparate
cultures, gulfs of time. The same motif, say, might show up
spontaneously in the Ozarks of Missouri, the east
borderlands of the Kalahari, among Inuit on the Arctic
Circle, among the sacred scriptures of the Koran, and in
the dream of an illiterate actress undergoing analysis in
Los Angeles--inexplicable occurrences unless on the
postulate of an archetype, a pattern within the collective
unconscious which crops up and leads to these strikingly
similar images or stories or motifs.
Consider what the argument shows and then let us
grant the argument. Some of the motifs and images are
remarkable, so let us suppose a case: that the thing that
shows up, and it shows up in all the places just named, is
a story, a story of a fish, caught by a woman and cooked
and eaten, whose head then speaks and asks to be
returned with the rest of the bones to the water from which
it was caught, which done, the fish tells the person to wait,
which she does all night, ridiculed by her family, and in the
morning the fish returns whole and gives her two large
fangs of a bear or lion.
Such occurrences of such a story would be strong
stuff for the case that there is an archetype of The
Returned Fish. But remember that the argument depends
on no other explanation being adequate, and so its
strength is no more than the severity of the inadequacy of
other explanations. (So that, for instance, the claim that
there is an archetype of the Puer, the boy who stays forever
young, may be less strong if it could be shown that boys
and men around the world may actually fairly often wish
that they could stay forever young.) And one other
explanation, namely plain old coincidence, is notoriously
hard to pin down as adequate or inadequate. That the
cultures in which this story occurs all contain fishermen,
and women, and persons who cook and eat, and folk tales
of animals who can talk, and bears or lions, and people
who have waited up all night, and the possibility of families
ridiculing particular family members; all these things make
the occurrence of the story in any one culture at least
something we can talk about. That is, if the dream had
come to someone who had not ever seen or heard of a body
of water with fish in it, we should then simply be
dumfounded (or suspicious).
Would the occurrences of the story above
demonstrate the existence of the Archetype of The
Returned Fish? It would be reasonable to be struck with
wonder, certainly, and if by the archetype we mean only
that there are these amazing occurrences of the story and
we have no other explanation, then perhaps yes. But if we
mean more, if we mean that there is within a collective
unconscious of the human race (and within each of us)
that story, with those details, then we are faced with
questions about the adequacy of our account and we have
taken a stand, that going without an explanation is
intolerable and that coincidence is less adequate as
explanation than is postulating the archetype. That is, the
transcendental argument is not the only one in the running
(unlike its role in most philosophical issues) but is judged
stronger than any others. But given the alternatives, there
may be no compelling reason to choose archetypes over
coincidence, or over reserving judgment.
But for now, let us grant that there are archetypes,
and explore what boundaries result in what can be said.
There is of course a great deal that cannot be said for
certain. We cannot say whether archetypes are valuable
therapeutic tools unless we do some research. Nor can we
say much about when and where they will crop up in the
future (in this way they are rather like earthquakes or
volcanic eruptions). We cannot say whether they are in
places where the particular patterns have not yet
manifested themselves. We cannot say whether they are
related to the signs of the Zodiac or to Rorschach test
responses, or both. With research on their effectiveness as
therapeutic tools we should still have questions about
whether that effectiveness is due to some kind of placebo
effect or to something else.
But we can speculate. We can suppose that
archetypes have the same source as the zodiac and Tarot
cards and astrological readings and extrasensory
perception, and that source has been sadly neglected by
science and by unnecessarily skeptical people. We can
suppose that everyone has within and is playing with a full
deck, a selection, of archetypes, and that healthy personal
development depends upon actions in harmony with the
archetypes each of us has within.
To dismiss this as speculation (or mere
speculation) is not the same thing as to say that any of it is
ineffable. To claim that it is fluff or nonsense, even, is not
to say it is ineffable. Where then are the boundaries that
the existence of archetypes can show us, the frontiers of
the sayable? That Jung shows himself a masterful and
intuitive reader of dreams and images (as Freud did also)
shows us only that there is a great deal more to say than
we would have thought, and show us nothing about what
cannot be said.
Jung's oft-repeated remark, that "The wonderful
thing about the unconscious is that it is, after all,
unconscious," tells us more about what remains to be said
than about what cannot be said. Ineffability and mystical
accounts are often put in terms of knowledge. "I know that
my redeemer liveth." "I am absolutely certain but cannot
say why." Say then that the actress, with the help of her
analyst, decides that her dream of the Returned Fish is an
important dream, the most important dream of her life, and
that it means that she is out of place in her life as an



7

actress. Suppose her to say, "I have to go back home to
Montana. I know it, but apart from the dream I cannot say
why."
Have we thereby found some limit on what can be
said? Imagining the case, we will think of a great deal
which can and will be said by her friends. Her friends will
tell her that the dream is nonsense, or that she may be
right, but how can we tell? or that the stakes for her
career are very high. Her analyst may tell her that her
interpretation is congruent with other dreams, get her to
articulate a conflict in values between her life now and the
life the fish wants for her, help her clarify choices she faces
up to when working on the dream, talk to her about her
responsibility for making choices and whether voices from
her unconscious life should have some influence on those
choices, and how much influence, and so on. We can
imagine the two of them, the actress and the analyst,
working on this dream for many hours, and then one of
them saying, "We are no longer making any headway with
this dream. You and I are both saying the same things over
now. The time has come for talk to end."
And what would that be, the end of talking? Would
it be an acknowledgement of unsayable truths, or of
ineffable ideas or feelings? There may be a strong
temptation for us when we think of language to suppose
that we have reached the end, not of the inner life, but of
the language which can express that inner life. Of course
we often acknowledge unsayable truths with mutual
silence. My wife's work with dying AIDS patients brings her
in contact with family members for whom the truth that
their brother or son is homosexual or is dying is an
unsayable truth, and often eye contact and awkward
silence is the only way they have to say they understand.
But that would be a slip again. This is another
wrong kind of unsayability. We require an example which
has to do with limits of language, not with the inability of
people to face up to bitter facts. The example we require is
one in which there is the inner life which cannot find its
way into the outer language, and that means among other
things that the barrier between the inner and the outer
must not be a personal or social taboo, or silence in the
face of political power relations,
10
but an inadequacy (or at
least a possible inadequacy) of language. In the example of
the actress's analysis, it is not going to work if the actress
has some taboo against speaking of certain subjects or
saying certain things.
We can imagine replies to the insight voiced in that
analysis, to the effect that they, the actress and the
analyst, have come to the end of talking. One might be the
prosaic comment that what she faces now is not a problem
to be analyzed but a decision to be made, a decision she
now understands as well as it is possible to understand for
now. Another might be that she needs to take a rest from
talk, perhaps have more archetypal dreams, or just sleep
on it and see if she is ready for some other step.
None of these help in making sense of the possible
inadequacy of language, though. We cannot see on the
other side of these boundaries of what-can-be-said to
something which can be thought or felt but not expressed.
It might be too much to ask, of course. The reason
we cannot see past the frontier of what can be said in the
right way is that we are looking to put what we see into
words, and that is the frontier. How shall we make sense of
what cannot be put into words, in words? It's preposterous
to try.
Yet we do come to the end of talk easily in some
ways. With some decisions, talk them through till we are
blue in the face yet we must stop talking and decide. We
stand around the hay mow and talk about it but that does
not load the wagon. We claim to feel some feeling deeply,
but that may not make the person to whom we speak feel
deeply. Sometimes our health requires silence, the kind of
silence that involves a cessation of words, and so we pick
up our sheet music or fly rod or go to sleep. Here are
boundaries to words, if not possible inadequacies of
language; we can talk about those boundaries as well as
we can talk about them, and sometimes we will leave
things unsaid, but that is up to us.

There is another way in which language may be
inadequate, a way which has been argued for by John
Searle, in his work in Speech Acts on what he calls the
"assertion fallacy,"
11
and by Paul Grice in his claims
regarding conversational implicature, that the ways that
things seem to us are the ways that they are.
12
Briefly, the
claim is that philosophically-aided language can express
truths that ordinary language is not competent to capture,
truths which would not be expressed in non-philosophical
language. Here is another supposed place which shows
the gap between the signs and the things that might be
communicated by means of the signs, or if you like the
signs and the truth for which the signs are called to stand.
I am going to go through this pretty fast, since all
the possible reasons for these positions have already been
driven into the ground by Frank Ebersole.
13

The main argument used by Grice is that when we
mean the stronger we do not say the weaker even when the
weaker is implied. An example would be that when there
are lots of people there we don't say there were people
there, even though what we do say, namely, "There were
lots of people there," clearly implies that there were people
there. Similarly, when we are standing in front of a red
barn in the middle of an ordinary day, telling someone
what we see, namely "The barn is red," we do not say that
the barn looks red to us even though what we do say
clearly implies that the barn does look red to us.
One problem with this argument is that what we
are saying when we DO say that the barn looks red to us is
not easily assimilated into this example, supposing that the
example can be made intelligible. And doing the latter
takes some work Grice neglects. Why would I be telling
someone that a big red barn right in front of me in the
middle of the day is red? When one actually tries to
imagine the example it becomes clear that the example was
not really an example but rather the schema for an
example, and filling out the schema gets to be tricky fast.
My listener is blind? colorblind? we are both colorblind?
you are giving me directions on the phone, directions which
seem not to be working? We are working on a movie and



8

there is a major problem with continuity? My listener is
my diary and I collect views of barns? If Grice thought of
this as the kind of example which could be captured by
sketching in a barn in the middle distance of de Saussure's
cartoon, he was just mistaken. You and I are standing in
the countryside looking at a big red barn and I tell you the
thing which you also see, "That barn is red." This is to
portray philosophers as oafs; no wonder we fall into wells.
More specifically, we could take each of these
more-seriously-imagined examples and show that "That
barn is red" does NOT imply that the barn looks red to me
by also thinking through what I could be imagined to be
saying if I were to say that the barn looks red to me. But
you can do this. I'll abbreviate just one. Remember the
details for the example need to accumulate enough that
what is said can be understood without importing
philosophy.
Suppose, then, I am looking for a furniture
auction, driving on a mixture of gravel and macadam roads
which have sharp 90-degree turns every mile or so, and
have followed the directions you gave me to a tee, but no
auction. I turn around once, get back to a landmark, turn
around again, no luck. I punch you up on the car phone.
I say, "Pat, I've gone past the 4.4 miles twice, but
no lane to the left. I've just crossed a one-lane bridge you
did not say a thing about. Help."
You say, "Oh, well, I think the bridge comes before
the turn. Any other landmarks?"
"There is a big hip-roofed barn coming up on the
right."
"What color?"
"The barn is red. They are all red."
"Ah well, you have not gone far enough. You will
turn after you come to an old unpainted hip-roofed barn, a
little swaybacked too."

Now consider what I might be saying if instead of
the line "The barn is red. They are all red." --if, instead of
that line, I were to say "The barn looks red to me." We can,
I think, list some of the possible replies Pat might give:
(long pause) "You being sarcastic? You should see
an unpainted barn before the turn."
"What are you saying, it looks red? You have those
orange sunglasses on? Your tinted windows up? Are you
colorblind and never told me?"
Any of the above hints at what might be being said.
It could complete the example if I were to say, "Just a sec,
getting the tinted window down--yep, it's red." Saying it
looks red, then, is saying in part that the tinted windows
are still up or something like that. Not exactly Grice's
story.

Searle's argument is for the claim that
philosophers beguiled by the methods of working with
ordinary language conflate the conditions which make
something assertable with the conditions which make it
true, with the resulting mistake that they will not accept
the truth of a claim because they have not been provided
with the conditions which would lead anyone to assert it.
One example could be, to follow G.E. Moore in the kinds of
examples he gives in "A Defense of Common Sense," and
"Certainty," an example such as the following: you and I
stand looking at a tree. I tell you that that is a tree.
Further, I tell you that I know that that is a tree. Searle
admits that in most cases neither of these pronouncements
on my part is likely to be something that I would say.
Nevertheless, the negation of either is transparently false,
and so both are true, even if neither is something I would
say in the example.
Ebersole treats this argument at length and with
delicacy, out of respect for Searle and out of a conviction, I
think, that this is perhaps the only serious argument
against using ordinary language examples as an important
guide in working on philosophical problems. I refer the
reader to that essay. The short of it is that Searle=s
argument is appallingly question-begging, barely an
argument at all unless you buy the idea that telling that
the negation is false can be done without putting that
negation at home in non-philosophical examples. There
are situations in which one wants to fall back to asserting
the obvious and incontestable truths your companion
cannot find fault with. Perhaps "That is a tree" might in
the right circumstances be such an incontestable, obvious
truth. Put the words "know that" in the middle of such an
example, though, and other possibilities for what one is
saying arise, enough that the thing being said raises
puzzles rather than resolving them. Is one, in claiming to
know that that is a tree, denying that it is a shrub, or
denying that it is a hologram? What is one saying? Why
"know"? And without our understanding what is being
said we cannot be justified in claiming that it is
transparently false. Searle's argument, and the supposed
existence of assertion fallacies, implode.
* * * * * *
Part of my thinking of language as signs or like
signs came from thinking of people as creatures with rich
mental lives and a need to share their mental lives with
each other. I thought though of signs as basically physical
things--sounds, flashes, gestures, tokens of one kind or
another--and one of my problems then became, how is it
possible for dead sounds to communicate the life of the
mind? When I refer to some poets, they reinforce me in this
question, which I can think of as a question about the
possible inadequacy of language. I think if the life of the
mind and of the inflexibility, the opacity and physicality of
acoustical blasts (John Searle's term), and come up with a
worry. I think of language as signs and can ask from within
that kind of thinking whether the system of signs I use is
complete or adequate to this task. Using poets and
psychologists as my guides, I have tried to think of
candidates for items of mental life which cannot find their
way into words.
So far though I have been unsuccessful. I find that
I confuse speakers' inabilities with inadequacy of language.
I express regrets about not having shared experiences with
someone in terms that look like a regret about language. I
express wishful thinking in ways that look like thinking
about words, when they are about deeds. I forget what
eloquent writers can do. I confuse unconscious ideas with
ineffable ideas. I cannot find the latter. I find that the



9

arguments philosophers make for the ability of philosophy
to remedy linguistic inadequacy are seriously question-
begging. And if the view of language as signs entails the
intelligibility of the question, the unintelligibility of the
question counts against the view.


Notes




1.



(Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics,
trans. Wade Baskin (New York City: McGraw-Hill, 1976),
p. 11.)

2. John R. Searle, Speech Acts, An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1969) p. 1

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., LIV.
"The Tables Turned," The Poetical Works of Wordsworth,
ed. Paul D. Sheats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 83.
See also his "spots of time" in the Prelude, to which I shall
allude later.

4. Alice Ambrose, "The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy"
in Essays in Analysis, (London: Geo. Allen and Unwin,
1966) pp. 157-181.

5. This view is cruelly murdered in Oets Bouwsma, "The
Terms of Ordinary Language are . . .," Philosophical
Essays (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965) pp. 203-
209.

6. Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975) p. 56. This argument,
with Fodors wording, has been bought by Michael Devitt
and Kim Sterelny in their text, Language and Reality
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990) p. 118. Later, in
beginning a section on the origin of language, they
comment, We had thoughts before we were able to say
anything, and before we learned any linguistic
conventions. p. 127. Locke writhes again. In the contrast
with Chomskys view that language is an internalized and
biologically-prompted array of parameters to principles
built out of the interaction with a childs stimuli to give the
child the competence to produce novel utterances, despite
the contrast with that, note that the conceptual division
between what is said and what can be said is preserved.
Chomskys least obscure description of this view is in
Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988) in A.P.
Martinich, ed. The Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed. (NYC:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1990) pp. 509-527.

7. John Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, Book
III, Chapts 1-3.

8. Here goes the case of the goldfinch which explodes or
starts quoting Mrs. Woolf. J. L. Austin, Other Minds,
Philosophical Papers 3
rd
. Ed. J.O. Urmson and G. J.
Warnock (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979) p. 88.

9. C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (Princeton: Bollingen:
1974).

10. Cases like this, then, are relevantly like those in which
Foucault or Derrida or critics like Barbara Johnson
attempt to give voice to what has been silent because of
socially constructed practices using, for example,
dichotomies, to keep some facts or ideas or power relations
or differences from being noticed. See Barbara Johnson,
Teaching Ignorance: Ecole des Femmes, Yale French
Studies, no. 63 (1982), 165-182, or her famous reading of
Melvilles Billy Budd in The Critical Difference: Essays in
the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980 and 1985).

11. Searle, ibid, p. 172ff.

12. H. P. Grice, The Causal Theory of Perception,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Vol.
35 (1961), pp. 121-168. See also his Meaning,
Philosophical Review vol. 66 no. 3 (July 1957), pp. 377-
388, or Logic and Conversation, in Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 3, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (NYC:
Academic Press, 1975), pp. 41-58.

13. in two essays: "Does it Look the Color it Is?" in
Language and Perception: Essays in Philosophy of
Language (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America,
1979), pp. 165-194; and "Knowing and Saying So" in
Meaning and Saying: Essays in the Philosophy of Language
(Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1979) pp. 137-
237.