Question All spoken and written languages - current or extinct - have things they express poorly or can't express at all. Art can be used to fill in the gaps of the inexpressible. How many languages would a person need to know to express everything, and by being able to express everything, would they be more capable or less capable of art?

Accepted:
November 14, 2005

Comments

But are there thoughts that language cannot express? I know many peoplewrite as if there were many thoughts, many valuable ones too, thatsimply can't be put into words. But are there any? Can anyone give mean example? Of course, many things can't be put into words — the cup ofcoffee I had this morning can't be (though the thought that I drank itcan). But is such an inability on language's part a failure to express something?

These new coffee beans I just got make very nice coffee. I could try to describe the difference in the taste, but I'm not much of a coffee expert. I'm sure there are people who could do a better job than I could, but, frankly, I don't find the descriptions I read on the bins all that helpful. I mean, I can see why someone would say that this particular roast had a hint of cinnamon, but that hardly captures it.

Is there a thought here that cannot be put into words? That's quite unclear, but there does seem to be something here that it is difficult, maybe even impossible, to put into words, except, as John McDowell suggested, by saying simply: that taste. But that's not exactly what one had in mind.

Suppose I've tried a lot of coffees, and I find that many of them seem similar to me in a certain hard to describe way. Coffees A, B, and C seem similar to one another in this respect; coffees D and E are similar in that respect, but not to A, B, and C; and coffee F is unique in that respect. Suppose I can reliably detect such similarities. Then it seems as if there's something there about which I can think but which it might be very difficult to express verbally. I can name the respect in which the coffees are being compared, to be sure: Coffees A, B, and C have the same sort of flubidity, whereas D and E have a different flubidity, though one different from A, B, and C, and coffee F has a flubidity all its own. But there nonetheless seems to be something missing from the verbal description, namely, something about the terms of the comparison and, moreover, the intrinsic properties of the coffees that I'm comparing.