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Ineffability, Signification and

the Meaning of Life
Roy W. Perrett

University of Hawaii at Mnoa

Published online: 12 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Roy W. Perrett (2010) Ineffability, Signification

and the Meaning of Life, Philosophical Papers, 39:2, 239-255, DOI:
10.1080/05568641.2010.503462
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Philosophical Papers
Vol. 39, No. 2 (July 2010): 239-255

Ineffability, Signification and the Meaning of Life

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Roy W. Perrett

Abstract: There is an apparent tension between two familiar platitudes about the
meaning of life: (i) that meaning in this context means value, and (ii) that such
meaning might be ineffable. I suggest a way of trying to bring these two claims together
by focusing on an ideal of a meaningful life that fuses both the axiological and semantic
senses of significant. This in turn allows for the possibility that the full significance of a
life might be ineffable not because its axiological significance is ineffable, but because its
semantic significance is ineffable in virtue of the signification relation itself being
unsignifiable. I then explore to what degree this claim about signification can be
adequately defended.

I
It is obvious enough that questions about the meaning of life are closely
intertwined with issues in ethics and philosophy of religion. It may be
rather less obvious to some, however, that such questions can also be
closely intertwined with what might seem more distant issues in logic and
philosophy of language. To demonstrate this latter claim let us begin
with what many would consider to be two familiar platitudes about the
meaning of life.
The first of these platitudes is that the meaning of a life is the value
of that life. Of course, on this understanding of the issue there still
remains plenty of room for lively philosophical debates about whether
the value of a life is to be most plausibly identified with its subjective
value, or its objective value, or some combination of both.1 But these
debates are clearly family quarrels: all parties to them implicitly agree
that when we speak of a lifes meaning we are speaking of its value,
though disagreeing about the nature or presence of that value.
1 For a useful review of some of these debates see Thaddeus Metz, Recent Work on the
Meaning of Life Ethics 112 (2002): 781-814
ISSN 0556-8641 print/ISSN 1996-8523 online
2010 The Editorial Board, Philosophical Papers
DOI: 10.1080/05568641.2010.503462
http://www.informaworld.com

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The second platitude about the meaning of life is that it may be

ineffable. This thesis is admittedly not quite as platitudinous as the first
thesis, but many would surely consider it to be a commonplace about the
meaning of life that such meaning may be ineffable. Thus Wittgensteins
famous remarks at Tractatus 6.521 are usually taken to express not just a
deeply idiosyncratic view of his own, but rather to reflect a widespread
feeling in the more general culture:
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this
problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting
the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense
consisted?).2

It is not obvious, however, that these two platitudes about the meaning of
life sit easily together. If the meaning of life is to be understood as the
value of a life (however that value is conceived), then why would anyone
suppose that such value might be ineffable? After all, there is no general
presumption that value is ineffable. Moreover, even if we can plausibly
explain why someone might come to believe the meaning of life is
ineffable, is this purported ineffability really the case? In other words:
how might the ineffability claim about the meaning of life be defended,
and is it true?
II
Although I should confess right away that I am personally sceptical about
the truth of the ineffability claim, I also think that any such scepticism
ought not to be acquired too cheaply. Thus I do not find it self-evident
that the widespread support for the ineffability thesis in the general
culture should just be summarily dismissed as a confusion of the folk, who
naively allow their feeling that the question of the meaning of life is
somehow conceptually unmanageable to lead them to attach esoteric
significance to the question. After all, the ineffability thesis is also

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K Ogden (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922).

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espoused by various distinguished philosophers, some of whom even

attempt to offer rational justifications for it.
Nor am I convinced that philosophical concerns with ineffability like
Wittgensteins are of an altogether different type than those of the more
general culture. To be sure, the particular philosophical account of
ineffability that Wittgenstein offered in the Tractatus was integrally tied to
the peculiar mix of truth-conditional semantics and atomistic metaphysics
in that work and hence largely unintelligible to most laypersons. But I take
it that Wittgenstein saw his philosophical theory there as providing a
justification, rather than an explanation, of the folk belief in ineffability.
Moreover, it is clear too that Wittgenstein himself believed the plausibility
of the ineffability thesis to be independent of Tractarian semantics. Thus
in 1931, long after he had abandoned the central doctrines of the
Tractatus, he wrote: Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious
and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I
could express has its meaning.3 And this theme arguably continues to be
present throughout his later work.
Finally, the idea that there is an ineffable background presupposed
by what we can express is also present in philosophical traditions quite
different from those Wittgenstein is associated with. Heidegger, for
instance, writes of the significance (Bedeutsamkeit) that makes up the
structure of the familiar world and claims that significance is the
condition for the particular significations (Bedeutungen) which find
expressions in words. And Sartre writes of the impossibility of fully
deciphering the world to which I belong in and through action and
which provides the necessary setting against which I speak.4
Admittedly, these philosophical utterances are far from pellucid.
Nevertheless I am inclined to take them as providing at least some

3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p.16e.

4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp.120-1; Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), pp.244-5. For more on
these themes see David E. Cooper, Ineffability Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
Supplementary Volumes 65 (1991): 1-15.

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motivation for exploring further the ineffability thesis. What, though,

can we reasonably say about the purportedly unsayable?
The first point to make is that when we consider a claim of
ineffability it is important to recognize that ineffability can come in
degrees.5 A weak ineffability claim is a claim that some sentence is
inexpressible in a particular language or class of languages. Thus
Benjamin Lee Whorfs notorious claims about the inexpressibility in
English of certain Hopi concepts would be an example of a weak
ineffability thesis and I take it that it is entirely possible that a truth
might be weakly ineffable in this sense, whether or not Whorf is right
about his Hopi examples. The more challenging philosophical thesis
about the meaning of life, however, is that such meaning is strongly
ineffable, i.e., inexpressible in any language. And surely this is the kind
of ineffability thesis that Wittgenstein is gesturing towards (his claim is
presumably not just that the sense of life cannot be expressed in
German or English). So what reason might we have for supposing that
the meaning of life is strongly ineffable?
One route to a suggestive answer to this question proceeds somewhat
circuitously via a response to an unconvincingly brisk sceptical rebuttal
of the very intelligibility of the question of the meaning of life. Imagine a
ludicrously flat-footed positivist arguing that there is no intelligible
problem about the meaning of life since the very term the meaning of
life involves a category mistake: meaning is a linguistic notion, a
property of sentences only, not of lives.6 Obviously such scepticism is
unconvincing and it is natural to respond that meaning in the phrase
meaning of life refers to the significance (i.e., value) of a life. And this
response, of course, is just a restatement of our first platitude about the
meaning of life.

5 A point well made in Andr Kukla, Ineffability and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2005),
Ch.1.
6 For both this category error charge and the platitudinous rebuttal see Terry Eagleton,
The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.
1-2, 37-38.

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But this very natural response is arguably a bit too quick. As Robert
Nozick has pointed out, lives can both have significance (i.e., value) and
signify that significance, thus combining both the value and semantic
dimensions of the term meaning. In much the same way as something
can exemplify a property by both having that property and referring to
that property, a life might both have significance (i.e., value) and signify
(i.e., refer to) that significance (value):
[W]e can say that a persons life refers to a property if its having that property
is a (weighty) part of the life plan he is putting into effect. His life exemplifies
a property if it both has it and refers to it.7

This possibility in turn yields at least one ideal of a meaningful life: a life
that has full significance (i.e., both has value and signifies that value). Such
an ideal concedes that our first platitude captures something important
about the meaning of life, but introduces a further constraint on a
meaningful life.
Moreover, this more demanding ideal also creates a space for
defending one version of a strong ineffability thesis about the meaning
of a life: the full significance of a life might be ineffable not because its
value is ineffable, but because signifying that value would require also
signifying the signification relation. What if, however, the signification
relation is itself unsignifiable? Might this be a way of defending the
thoughtapparently common to, inter alia, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and
Sartrethat there is an ineffable background presupposed by what we
can express? If so, then perhaps the reason for the ineffability of the
meaning of life is that one important component of full significance is
thus inexpressible.
This seems to me an interesting way of attempting to reconcile and
defend our original two platitudes about the meaning of life. But is there
any reason to suppose that the signification relation really is
unsignifiable?
7 Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981), p. 577.

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III
The claim that the signification relation is itself unsignifiable is not new:
the fifth-century Indian philosopher Bharthari, for instance, mentions
such a claim in his Vkyapadya:

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This is the signifier of that; that is the signified of this. Thus the thatness of
the relation is signified. Of the [signification] relation there is no signifying
expression on the basis of a property belonging to it (SS 3-4).

But Bharthari also notes the apparent inconsistency of such a claim:

That which is signified as unsignifiable, if determined to have been signified
through that unsignifiability, would then be signifiable. If (the word)
unsignifiable is being understood as not signifying anything, then its
intended state has not been achieved (SS 20-1).8

And this is, of course, a familiar difficulty for all strong ineffability
claims: having first claimed that something is (strongly) ineffable, the
speaker then typically goes on to contradict this claim by succeeding in
saying something about the supposedly unsayable (if only that it is
ineffable). Thus Frank Ramseys famous jibe at Wittgensteins ineffability
claim in the Tractatus: What we cant say we cant say, and we cant
whistle it either.
To address the issue here more clearly we need to distinguish two
different theses. The first is the Unsignifiability Thesis, which claims that
the signification relation is itself unsignifiable. The second is the
Signification Paradox, which claims that the signification relation is itself
both unsignifiable and signifiable.
Exegetically, while it seems clear that Bharthari affirms the
Unsignifiability Thesis, it is unclear whether he himself affirms the
Signification Paradox, nor is it clear what the argument for the paradox
8 The translation of these particular verses of Bharthari is taken from Hans G. Herzberger
and Radhika Herzberger, Bhartharis Paradox Journal of Indian Philosophy 9 (1981): 1-13.
For an alternative English translation of the relevant chapter of Bhartharis text, together
with the Sanskrit original and a detailed scholarly commentary, see: Jan E.M. Houben, The
Sabandha-Samuddea (Chapter on Relation) and Bhartharis Philosophy of Language
(Groningen: Egbert Forstein, 1995).

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is supposed to be. However, presumably at least these three options

deserve attention:
(1) The Unsignifiability Thesis is self-refuting and hence just false.

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(2) The Unsignifiability Thesis is true but the self-refutation claim is

false.
(3) The Unsignifiability Thesis is both true and self-refuting, so the
Signification Paradox is a genuine true contradiction.
Clearly, the first option sharply undercuts the argument for the ineffability
of the meaning of life that we are considering. The second option,
however, supports that argument for ineffability. The third option is
obviously the most radical, but it would also support our argument for
ineffability. It assumes, of course, that dialetheism (the doctrine that there
are true contradictions) is a coherent option and that a contradiction need
not universally imply.9 For the sake of the argument here I am willing to
concede that assumption. But even if dialetheism is true, it is not the case
that every apparent paradox is a real dialethea or true contradiction. So
what are the arguments for both sides of the Signification Paradox?
IV
Hans and Radhika Herzberger take Bharthari to have affirmed the
Signification Paradox, which they apparently take to be a genuine
paradox.10 On the one hand, they seem to concede that the
Unsignifiability Thesis really is self-refuting and hence false. But they
also offer a creative argument of their own for the truth of the
Unsignifiability Thesis. Essentially, it goes like this.
The signification relation cannot be signified without it being one of
its own relata, but no relation can be one of its own relata for the
following reasons. First, relations are to be identified with their
9 For extensive exploration and defence of the dialetheic response to various paradoxes see
Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
10 Herzberger and Herzberger, pp.10-15.

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extensions, which are set-theoretically reducible to sets of ordered pairs.

Thus the relation R is to be identified with the set of all ordered pairs of
objects that fall under it: in other words, the set of ordered pairs <x, y>
such that Rxy. Second, the Axiom of Regularity in Zermelo-Fraenkel set
theory (No non-empty set contains an element which is disjoint from
that set itself) is needed to prevent the formation of self-referential
paradoxes like Russells Paradox. But this axiom entails that no set of
ordered pairs can be a member of a pair that is a member of that set
itself. Hence if every relation has a set of ordered pairs as its extension
and we embrace ZF set theory, no relation can be one of its own relata.
This interesting argument, however, is open to several objections.
Firstly, why are we required to accept ZF set theory? After all, there are
other versions of set theory that seek to avoid Russells Paradox while
eschewing the Axiom of Regularity. In the absence of further argument,
there is no case for the uniqueness of ZF as a solution to Russells
Paradox. But without a case for such uniqueness there is no conclusive
argument here for the Unsignifiability Thesis.
Secondly, ZF arguably does not really get rid of Russells Paradox.
After all, if the axioms of ZF without the Axiom of Regularity were
actually inconsistent, how could adding the Axiom of Regularity to them
restore consistency to the system? Instead what the Axiom of Regularity
does is help to weaken the proof-theory so that Russells Paradox cannot
be constructed. But this cannot show that the paradox is not genuine.
Moreover, in doing this ZF apparently violates both mathematical
practice and Cantors highly plausible Domain Principle (For every
potential infinity there is a corresponding actual infinity) which do
require the existence of sets that cannot be shown to exist in ZF.11
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are relations really just
extensions of ordered pairs? The problem here is not just the relatively
minor technical difficulty that appeal to the notion of an ordered pair
still makes use of the ordering relation and hence has not really effected
11 On this issue see further Priest, pp. 123-6, 158-9, 280-2.

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a genuine reductive account of all relations. Many logicians will be

inclined to respond to this worry by invoking the Wiener-Kuratowski
device, which substitutes for the ordered pair an unordered pair of
unordered classes. But this clever technical device arguably does not
really touch the more fundamental difficulty: even if these unordered
classes can be used to represent relations, they do not seem to be those
relations. Thus consider two distinct possible states of affairs, a preceding
b and a succeeding b. Both of these distinct states will be represented by
either of the formulas <a, b> and <b, a>, or else by either of the
formulas {{a}, {a, b}} and {{b}, {a, b}}. But this very arbitrariness can
be construed as suggesting that the classes represent the relations rather
than constitute them.12
Perhaps there are adequate answers to such questions, but at the very
least the onus is on friends of the Unsignifiabilty Thesis to provide them.
Accordingly, I conclude that there is no overwhelmingly conclusive
argument here for the truth of that thesis, and hence too no
overwhelmingly conclusive argument here for the existence of the
Signification Paradox.
V
Terence Parsons has offered a different argument for the Unsignifiability
Thesis, one that rests on a supposed parallel with the (strengthened) Liar
Paradox.13 Very briefly, Parsons argument for this conclusion is as follows.
Suppose, per argumentum, that the relational predicate signifies signifies
signification. Then the following Signification Principle will be true for any
term T that successfully refers: T signifies T. But then by taking the
question of what entity a singular term signifies to be equivalent to the
question of whether a given sentence is true or false, this Signification
Principle can be shown to entail some principles that lead to the Liar
12 Cf. D.M. Armstrong, Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (Boulder: Westview Press,
1989), pp.31-2.
13 Terence Parsons, Bharthari on What Cannot Be Said Philosophy East and West
51(2001): 525-534.

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Paradox.14 Since the liar sentence is a contradiction, this result is a reductio

ad absurdum of our original assumption that the relational predicate
signifies signifies signification.
I have passed lightly over some of the technical details of Parsons
ingenious argument because I think the real difficulty with it as a
conclusive argument for the Unsignifiability Thesis is to do with its
reliance on the Liar Paradox, given that it is so controversial what the
status of the liar sentence is. Hence even if the negation of the
Unsignifiability Thesis does entail an analogue of the liar sentence, it
still remains very much disputed whether this is really equivalent to it
entailing a contradiction. After all, some philosophers (including Prior,
Barwise and Etchemendy) argue that the liar sentence involves no
contradiction.15 Nor is it uncontroversial that entailing a contradiction
would be a genuine reductio of the Signifiability Thesis: dialetheism
permits the embracing of contradictions while utilizing paraconsistent
logic to limit the damage that is usually taken to be a consequence of
accepting a contradiction. Once again, there seems to be no conclusive
argument here for the Unsignifiability Thesis.
In this connection it is interesting to note that Bharthari himself
explicitly rejects the claim that (at least the simple) Liar Paradox is
genuinely paradoxical:
With everything I say is false, that statement itself is not meant. For if its
own expressing is false, one does not arrive at the point in question (SS 25).16

The exegetical question of exactly why Bharthari thinks this rejection of

the simple Liar Paradox is justified is more difficult to answer. In a
cryptic verse he offers another example that is apparently intended to be
explanatory:
14 For the technical details of how this is to be done see the Appendix to Parsons paper
(pp.532-3).
15 See: Arthur Prior, Papers in Logic and Ethics (London: Duckworth, 1976); Jon Barwise
and John Etchemendy, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
16 Houben, p.227.

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Just as A thesis has no proving force does not refer to that thesis itself, in the
same way also no property whatsoever of that [statement itself] is understood
[from the statement everything I am saying is false] (SS 27).17

One interpretive possibility here is to take this as the suggestion that the
liar sentence is to be understood as self-excepting: Everything I say is
false (except this sentence). However, this is a weak reply because it
seems unsatisfactorily ad hoc, even if it does indeed give us a formal
solution to the Liar Paradox.18 (Bharthari himself seems to suppose that
a bluff appeal to pragmatics will sweep away any problems here: in actual
conversational usage, the speaker of the sentence would intend it to be
understood as self-exceptive on pains of failing to communicate. This
sanguine line of thought is, at the very least, unobviously true.)
Similarly, saving the ineffability claim from paradoxicality by
claiming the Unsignifiability Thesis to be self-excepting also seems
unacceptably ad hoc. As with the Liar Paradox, we need a deeper
explanation of what went wrong in the arguments that led to the
appearance of an Unsignifiability Paradox and exactly why the
Unsignifiability Thesis is supposed to be self-excepting.
VI
So far, then, I have argued that there is something of an apparent
tension between two familiar platitudes about the meaning of life: (i) that
meaning in this context means value, and (ii) that such meaning might
be ineffable. I then suggested a way of bringing these two claims
together by focusing on one rather demanding ideal of a meaningful
life, a life that is fully significant in virtue of exemplifying value (thus
fusing both the axiological and semantic senses of significant). This
ideal in turn allowed for a possible defence of the ineffability claim: the
full significance of a life might be ineffable not because its axiological
significance is ineffable, but because its semantic significance is ineffable
in virtue of the signification relation itself being unsignifiable.
17 Ibid., p.228.
18 Cf. Nicholas Rescher, Topics in Philosophical Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1968), p.16.

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The problem with this defence of the ineffability of the meaning of

life, however, was providing any reason to suppose that the signification
relation really is unsignifiableespecially when the Unsignifiability
Thesis itself seemed self-refuting and hence false. One response was that
what this showed was the existence of a genuine Signification Paradox:
the Unsignifiability Thesis is both true and false. But when we came to
consider some arguments for both sides of the purported paradox I was
unable to find a convincing one for the truth of the Unsignifiability
Thesis, though it was quite easy to make a case for its falsity. The obvious
thing to conclude, then, is that there is no Signification Paradox and the
ineffability claim is most likely false.
But now there still remains a worry about why the ineffability thesis
has seemed platitudinous to so many in the absence of any convincing
argument for its truth. What might be the explanation for this odd state
of affairs, especially when it is to be found even among philosophers?
Here I offer an explanatory conjecture for consideration: the
undefended attraction for many of such claims about the ineffability of
the meaning of life and the unsignifiability of the signification relation is
to be located in certain unexamined tacit intuitions about language as a
universal medium. To be at all plausible, however, this conjecture
obviously requires a little elaboration.
In a number of challenging essays Jaakko Hintikka has argued for
the presence in much twentieth-century philosophy of a
Collingwoodian
ultimate
presupposition,
i.e.,
an
implicit
presupposition that is not so much a premise assumed by different
thinkers in their arguments, but an assumption to the effect that a
certain general question can be raised and answered.19 This question is
whether language is universal in the sense of being inescapable and
hence whether semantic relations between language and the world are
inexpressible. The presupposed answer is that we cannot, as it were,
19 Most of these essays have been conveniently collected together in a single volume:
Jaakko Hintikka, Lingua Universalis vs. Calculus Ratiocinator: An Ultimate Presupposition of
Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997).

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look at our language from outside and talk about it. To do so we would
have to rely on a network of meaning relations between language and
the world. Hence we cannot meaningfully say in language what these
meaning relations are because any attempt to do so would already
presuppose them.
Hintikka likes to locate the historical origins of this presupposition at
least as far back as in a tension to be found in two rival conceptions of
logic in the work of Leibniz. On the one hand, Leibniz sought to develop
a characteristica universalis or lingua characteristica that was to be a
universal language of thought, the symbolic structure of which would
reflect directly the structure of the world of our concepts. On the other
hand, he also sought to develop a calculus ratiocinator, a method of
calculation that would mirror the processes of human reasoning.
In the nineteenth century these two components of Leibnizs project
were taken up by different research traditions in logic. The algebraic
school (which included Boole and Peirce) favoured the spirit of the
calculus ratiocinator ideal. Frege, however, explicitly aligned his own work
with the spirit of Leibnizs characteristica universalis. For the likes of
Peirce, a wide variety of different logics can be developed, depending on
our purposes, and logic can even be self-applied. For Frege, in contrast,
there is a single logic that is a purified version of ordinary language and
designed to replace it, at least for mathematical purposes. The meanings
of the expressions of this language are indefinable in the language
without circularity. In other words, the semantics of our one and only
language are inexpressible in it.
The Fregean tradition in turn generates a syndrome of ideas that
Hintikka calls language as medium, elements of which are famously
involved in Wittgensteins belief in the ineffability of semantics as
expressed (in different ways) in both his early and later philosophy.20
According to this tradition, we are the prisoners of our own language
and we cannot hope to escape. In contrast, the rival language as
20 Ibid., Ch.6.

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calculus (or model-theoretic) tradition in logic and philosophy of

language holds that language can, in principle, be reinterpreted like a
calculus. We are not prisoners of our own language: we can speak in a
suitable language of our own semantics, vary its interpretation,
construct a model theory for it, and theorize about its semantics.
Although the idea of language as the universal medium might seem
strange, Hintikka points out that it dominates the work of an extremely
influential group of twentieth-century thinkers. These include not only
analytic figures like Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, the early Carnap,
Quine and Church, but also the early Heidegger. The model-theoretic
tradition only very slowly (and somewhat ambivalently) gains support
through the work of Peirce, Gdel and Tarski (and also Husserl).21
If we accept that Hintikka is right historically and that the idea of
language as a universal medium, together with its implication of the
inexpressibility of semantic relations, has operated powerfully as an
absolute presupposition of much philosophy, then I submit that this fact
may indeed offer a possible explanation of why the ineffability thesis has
seemed platitudinous to so many (including philosophers) in the absence
of any convincing argument for its truth.
Moreover, it is surely significant here that, though far from the
historical period and cultural milieu Hintikka concentrates on,
Bharthari too held a (rather extreme) version of the language as
universal medium view. Thus he believed not only that there is no
cognition in the world in which the word does not figure (Vkyapadya,
I.123) but even that because in our cognitions we identify objects with
their words and our cognitions are intertwined with words, they are
essentially of the nature of the word (Vkyapadya, I, comm.).22
21 Hintikkas claims about the views of Husserl and Heidegger are self-avowedly indebted to
the extended treatment of this issue in Martin Kusch, Language as the Universal Medium vs
Language as Calculus: A Study of Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).
22 K. A. Subramaniya Iyer, trans., The Vkyapadya of Bharthari with the Vtti, Chapter I.
Poona: Deccan College, 1965), pp.110, 1. On Bhartharis linguistic monism see further
Ashok Aklujkar, The Word Is the World: Nondualism in Indian Philosophy of Language
Philosophy East and West 51(2001): 452-73.

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VII
If all this is so, however, then the question of adjudicating between the
two rival conceptions of language has not yet been explicitly addressed.
Now that the implicit presupposition has been made explicit, inquiring
minds will surely want to know whether the popular universal medium
idea is in fact correct. This is a big question and not one I shall even
pretend to be able to settle definitively here. Instead I shall content
myself with discussing briefly just two arguments, one for each of our
rival conceptions of language.
The first of these arguments might be supposed to favour the case
for the conception of language as a universal medium. It appeals to
Tarskis famous proof of the indefinability of truth, that most
scrutinized of all semantic relations. Tarski showed that the definition
of truth for a first-order language can be expressed only in a richer
metalanguage. Since there is no such metalanguage beyond our actual
working language, it may seem that truth is thus inexpressible in our
colloquial language.
But as Hintikka points out, it would a mistake to infer such a strong
version of semantic ineffability from Tarskis result alone. All we would
be entitled to infer is that the general concept of truth cannot be
defined in a language for that language wholesale, not that truth is
indefinable piecemeal. The corresponding generalization of this point
about truth is that the only sort of semantic ineffability thesis that
Tarskis result would give us warrant for is the thesis that the semantics
of a language cannot be defined in that language itself, not that it
cannot be defined piecemeal. Semantics might thus be inexhaustible, but
not ineffable.23
The second argument I want to consider is a tentative argument
against the plausibility of the conception of language as universal
medium. Briefly, the objection here is that the universalist conception is
23 See Hintikka, Ch.3 for an argument that there are even deeper reasons for doubting
the relevance of Tarskis impossibility result for semantic ineffability because our most basic
logical languages do not satisfy the premises of Tarskis theorem.

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Roy W. Perrett

in tension with realism, which plausibly should be our rational default

position in philosophy, albeit a defeasible default position.
The language as universal medium view is in tension with realism
because it implies that we can have linguistic access to the world only
through the medium of the human artifact of our one and only
language. Our only way to describe the world is through this language.
We cannot say how things are considered in themselves, i.e.,
independently of our language. The obvious next step (as we saw with
Bharthari) is to eliminate things considered in themselves altogether
and embrace some form of linguistic antirealism.
Realism, however, is supposed to be our rational default position
because belief in realism is the well-entrenched commonsense position
and in the absence of any good reason to doubt a well-entrenched
commonsense belief we should assume that it is true (while, of course,
remaining open to possible defeaters of this assumption).24
Interestingly enough, this view that realism is the rational default
position is particularly evident in metaethical debates. Thus John
Mackies irrealist moral scepticism, for instance, freely accepts that
objectivism about values is so much the well-entrenched commonsense
view that it has become part of the meaning of moral terms.
Correspondingly, the onus of proof is on those who seek to deny the
objectivity of value.25 Contemporary noncognitivists also typically accept
this burden of proof. Value realism, then, should be our rational
(defeasible) default position and, although I cannot demonstrate this
here, I am inclined to believe that antirealism about value has not yet
successfully discharged its burden of proof.
Conceding this would in turn give us a route back to our original two
platitudes about the meaning of life. The first platitude was that the

24 Many philosophers happily accept something like the underlying principle here without
demur, but for an unusual effort at an explicit defence of it against a sceptical challenge
see Quentin Smith, Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp.170-1.
25 J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), Ch.1.

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meaning of life involved the value of that life; the second platitude was
that such meaning might be ineffable. But if the argument for
ineffability is to be one from a more general semantic ineffability that
threatens to undermine realism, this conflicts with a rational
presumption in favour of value realism. Thus even though the concept
of full significance that I introduced earlier seemed to offer a way of
reconciling a tension between our two platitudes, it now seems that any
defence of the second platitude that rests on an assumption of a more
general semantic ineffability just threatens to reintroduce the original
tension at a deeper level. I conclude, then, that we have good reason to
be sceptical that the meaning of life really is ineffable.26
University of Hawaii at Mnoa
perrett@hawaii.edu

26 I acknowledge gratefully the helpful constructive criticism provided by the referees for
this journal on an earlier draft of this essay.