An Invitation to Dinner
Imagination dining out with Melancholia
She woke up wondering if she could melt language under her tongue. Could she turn into a covert operative and uncover the syntactical pragmatics of conceptual issues. She would approach Wittgenstein in a trenchcoat, lure Chomsky to her secret behaviourist rendezvous, de-strategise Frege back down to his fascinations and release know, true, good and free back into ordinary play. Her ploy would unravel rigors of logic into laughter and keep semantics in the kitchen making chicken noodle soup; afterall, communication meaning and truth is all soulfood, right? Why stay at one remove from.. ? We all aspire to penetration and flourish under the attentive philosophical role of interest. Who doesn’t want that quintessential bond of mind language and the world.. self expression right?
Philosophical interest is like serving representation, communication, meaning and truth, chilled… not like revenge, mind.
Is language really that impressive? She wondered It also suffers foundational, methodological and conceptual issues: Are systematic explanations of its syntax really that revealing?
What’s more useful, discussing it all or actually doing the work? She turned the shower knob and waited for the rush of water. So what of the ways expressions exhibit and give meaning; isn’t it more about usefulness?
She reached for the shampoo, blindly, her eyes closed to the streaming rivulets of water pouring across her face: Afterall, she mused, isn’t everything cognitivist these days? Commonalities abound…
na und?
Having bundled her long hair into the froth of soapy bubbles she wondered why would anyone want to cut the stems of natural language into fractured formalities of mathematical models of form and meaning…does this imply poets need become theoreticians too; and imagined the scene:
Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnao, Montague, even Kripke — she would send him a last-minute invite: Why not have the bloody bunch to dinner and hammer it out once and for all, — then maybe, one could move on from this historical premise and break new ground with uncluttered thinking. Send semantics packing, she thought. Now wouldn’t that e=radical.
She wondered how that might go down in the minds of such men. She imagined pushing their buttons.. ha! She enjoyed the notion too much.
Could meaning be distilled as water? Was speech really a transaction? At what cost and to whom? Did this make of a war of words merely a pile of wrong assumptions?
Truth and meaning. Why the fuel of such desire to extricate it in such concrete terms? She let the water run cold. . .
Her spine prickled at the sudden wash of wet chill. She turned the water off. The shower door slid back under the pressure of her palm and she stepped into the steamy haze. She decided to stay naked. Like language. She wanted to feel meaning. She wanted to taste the clues of usage, to feel the truth of intention. It was her act of speech, her philosophical performance piece. She would become the implicature of linguistic metaphor. She smiled at her ingenuity, she knew this could maybe make her as popular as Grice; wouldn’t that be a slice of fun.
She walked out on to her terrace, still wet from the shower and in full view of the neighbours. She lay out on the lawn, closed her eyes, thinking, as the warmth of the sun settled on her skin: What if she could be persuaded that pragmatic concerns, far from being mere addenda to semantics, are crucial to the questions of where meaning comes from; of all it might consist, and even, how the multitudinous incompleteness and array of flexibilities in and of linguistic meaning, might be either overcome or exploited, by what might be said and or meant
…nah!
It was essentially meaningless, if it left out Imagination; nothing encompassed the Imagination more than the language of skin.
Published in New North 2017