From Bryan Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher:
[b]…all that language can do is to indicate with the utmost generality and in the broadest and crudest of terms what it is that I see. Even something as simple and everyday as the sight of a towel dropped on the bathroom floor is inaccessable to language----and inaccessable to it from many points of view at the same time: no words to describe the shape it has fallen into, no words to describe the degrees of shading in its coliurs, no words to describe the differentials of shadow in its folds…I see all these things at once with great precision…with clarity and certainty, and in all of their complexity. I possess them all wholey and surely in direct experience, and yet I would be totally unable…to put that experience in words. It is emphatically not the case, then, that ‘the world is the world as we describe it’, or that I ‘experience it through linguistic catagories that help to shape the experiences themselves’ or that my ‘main way of dividing things up is in language’ or that my ‘concept of reality is a matter of our linguistic categories’.
Imagine applying the phrases just quoted to the experience I have when eating my dinner! Eating, like seeing, is part of our most elemental, everyday contact with the world of matter, even more necessary to our survival than seeing. I distinguish instantly, effortlessly, and pleasurably between the taste of meat, the taste of potatoes, the taste of each vegtable, the taste of ice cream, the taste of wine. What is more, I distinguish instantly and effortelessly between different kinds of meat…potatoes etc. Can there be anyone who seriously maintains that the categories in which these experiences come to me are linguistic, or that my main way of distinguishing between them is linguistic? Is there anyone who can put these experineces into words after he has had them—who can describe the taste of boiled potato, of lamb, of parsnip, in such a way that anyone who had not tasted those things would know from the descriptions what each of them tasted like?
We can…run through all the other senses in the same way. I know the individual voices of my friends, and recognize most of them on the telephone after only a couple of words, but the categories in which I distinguish them are not linguistic, and it is beyond the possibilites of language to put the separate character of each and every one of them into words. This is illustrated by the fact that there is no way I could describe them to you that would enable you to identify them all immediately yourself. The plain fact is that none of our direct experiences can be adequately put into words. And this is true not only of our sensory experiences of the external world. Going on inside me all the time is a complex and dynamic flow of ever-changing awareness, mood, response, reaction, feeling, emotional tone, perception of connections and differences, back references, side references, with flickering thoughts and glimpses and half-memories darting in and out of the various interweaving strands, all flowing endlessly on in some richly reverberating echo chamber of resonance and connotation and implication. I might be able to imagine this being translated into some kind of orchestral music but certainly not into worsds. Just as in the case of our outer experiences, even the most incisive and vivid of our private experiences are unverbalizable. Who can describe an orgasm? Or our response to a great work of art? Or the special quality of terror in a nightmare?
Try telling someone a piece of music.[/b]
We use words all the time—as though on automatic pilot. We go into a bank, a grocery store, a day care center, a conference room and the words come out with little or no self-conscious effort. We have internalized the experiences such that the words we use are easily translated back and forth in our routine interactions.
But what happens when the experience is not routine? You walk into a used car lot and begin negociating with the salesperson over the price you will pay for a car. You’ve done your homework and think you know how to “handle it.” But here, of course, you are almost always at a distinct disadvantage because the salesperson has all the inside dope on the car and, even more critically, s/he does this every day while you only purchase a car every few years. There is no ideal or objective or essential manner in which the exchange of words ought to unfold. There is only how it does unfold. And if you were to try to tell someone how the experience unfolded you would, at best, only have the words to encompass your own understanding of it.
It is, in fact, in this rather mundane context that I have to grin and bear it when particular moral philosophers actually imagine [in a Kantian or Randian sense] that “a rational human mind” can, indeed, encompass, a priori, deductions such that they can use them “on principle” to construct a moral or aesthetic edifice that then permits them, in turn, to imagine they can go out into the the world and distingusih Universal Right from Universal Wrong behaviors.
Imagine, for example, abortion is made unconstitutional. It is now a capital crime to either perform or obtain one. Mary and Joe are having a conversation about it. Lots and lots of words go back and forth. Mary is pregnant and wants an abortion. Joe impregnated her and thinks abortion is unethical. Joe, of course, is biologically exempt from ever having to endure the horrific ordeal of being forced to give birth. But he goes on and on and on stringing words together in what he believes to be a logically impeccable manner. He cites Kant and the categorical imperative and deontology and ethical obligations that are “universally applicable”. But he just can’t seem to understand, given the rational manner in which he encompases the situation, why Mary doesn’t seem to “get it”.
Alas, the logic of language and the language of logic do not get many things.