David Peat

Language 73swered questions and degrees of uncertainty. But within the boundarythe ground will be clean and free from weeds.It was a contemporary of Leibniz, the satirist Jonathan Swift, whoindicated an obvious flaw in this grand plan. His observation would beechoed three centuries later by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Swift pointed outthat the dream of an ideal language is impressive, but can it exist inreality? In Gulliver’s Travels, the protagonist visits the great academy ofLagadu where the professors of language have already eliminated everythingexcept nouns “because in reality all things imaginable are butnouns,” and, what’s more, “every word we speak is in some degree adiminution of our lungs by corrosion.” When in Swift’s satire two philosopherswish to debate, they must avoid all ambiguity and logicalinconsistency. They arrive at the debate carrying enormous sacks. Insteadof using words, the first philosopher begins the debate by takingan object out of the bag and holding it up, then the other philosophercounters by holding up another object, and so on. No ambiguity orconfusion is possible—a book is a book, a brick is a brick—and all theambiguities inherent in words and language are avoided. The onlyproblem is that the philosophers don’t have much to talk about!Swift’s satire exposes the inherent weakness in Leibniz’s dream. Ifwe wish to be free from all potential confusion, we must employ apurified language, one in which all subtleties and shades of meaninghave been eliminated, so that each word serves only one purpose. Inthis way language becomes restricted within highly narrow confines.On the other hand, if we wish to discuss the deepest issues of life, weneed human language with all its richness and ability to embrace metaphorand tolerate ambiguity and paradox. This is the dilemma we shalladdress in the present chapter. It is a dilemma that challenges us to askif we want to hang on to certainty or, as a basic condition of beinghuman, accept a world that has a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty.In Chapter 2 we learned of Bertrand Russell’s search for certaintyand completeness in mathematics. He was also an active player in thediscussion of the nature of language. To begin with, he reacted stronglyto an earlier movement in British philosophy called Idealism and, as toHegel’s grand philosophical system, Russell believed that “the whole