David Breeden is speaking all week about the problem with language.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden…. This is Coffee and Wisdom, and thanks for joining us today. We have gone to a live-on-Tuesday-and-Thursday format for summer Wisdom. And this week we’ve been talking about The Problem With Language. What is the problem? Well, as I mentioned the other day, one thing is that it’s really, really old thing. It’s probably about two million years old, and it probably occurred before either of the Neanderthals or the Homo Sapiens, probably Homo Erectus was the first speaking human type animal. And therefore, this is a very, very old and imbedded form of communication, the way we talk to each other. And so it’s almost instinctive in that way, which… that’s pretty cool, except that we don’t always know exactly then how this works. And it’s a little hard to figure out how it works, actually, I mentioned on Tuesday that Daniel Everett has written a book back in 2016 called How Language Began, The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention. It’s a little bit controversial, but I think he’s on the right track to talk about Homo Erectus and how we developed language. And he says a human language has three properties. One is arbitrariness, one is intentionality, and one is the word he kind of makes up, which is conventionalization, which I have a hard time saying. But here’s how it really goes. Number one, the sounds that we make are completely arbitrary. That’s why different languages have different words in them. So the word tree is absolutely arbitrary in the way that that sound comes out. Other languages have other words for it. English has other words for different kinds of trees. So it’s arbitrary. We just have to remember that. But it feeds into intentionality. At least two people have to agree that a particular sound means some particular thing or we couldn’t have any kind of communication. And then from that we get the conventionalization idea that we, a larger and larger group, begins to agree on some sort of meaning for this language. That’s all very great and cool, except it doesn’t always work that way, as we will talk (about) today. Number one is Epimenides, who is really an unknown philosopher at this point, except for one very famous paradox in which, he was from Crete, and he said all Cretans are liars. Okay, well, was he telling the truth or was he lying then? And this is the paradox. And we suddenly realized that language sometimes breaks down. Sometimes what we say and what has to be real, whatever that means, is in some way disagreement or we can’t figure it out. And that’s what I want to look at today. I mentioned on Tuesday a simple phrase like “God exists” suddenly has some problematic things to it, if those arbitrary sounds begin to mean different things to different people. We’ve talked a lot about the concept of God in Coffee and Wisdom. There are lots of ways to define God. One is a very Theistic, that God is outside the universe and some sort of throne or in the sky. Also, though, we have Pantheism, in which God is exactly, matches the universe, no more, no less. And then there is Panentheism, in which there is a God and the universe. The universe is in God, but God is larger than the universe. And then a Process-Relational idea, it’s kind of a little bit panentheistic, a little bit pantheistic. But this is the idea that all the processes of the universe, including the expansion and an accelerating expansion, are all parts of the creativity of something that we can call God. So we can mean a whole lot of different things by this arbitrary sound. And again, we can say God exists,