Thinkling

It seems to be a reasonable conjecture that when asked to "say a word, any word", an average human being in control of randomly chosen language will most likely come up with… a noun. Nouns are mentally easy and readily available to the extent that many of them serve as names for what appears to be reliable and well established objects of our world. Consequently, a word like "house" or "dog" may seem somehow more real and fuller example of a word than, say, "behind", or "frankly", or "emphasize". As long as we think of nouns as representative language phenomena, we can get by with some theory of language as a set of code-signals referring to objectively existing outside reality. The word "dog" means what it means, because it designates a class of real entities an example of which we can touch and point at and say "this is a dog" when teaching the language to foreigners and children. Unfortunately for any such neat theory, things begin to complicate immediately when we take other examples than nouns into consideration. What do we point at to explain the meaning of "behind", or "frankly", or "emphasize"?
It was grappling with questions like that what led Ludwig Wittgenstein to his later days reflections on verbs, words, languages, and meanings, as recorded mainly in his Philosophical Investigations. This is not a book anyone will confidently claim to entirely understand. Wittgenstein never made that much effort to be particularly lucid either, but even more than that, this text is a good example of form closely reflecting the subject matter: pursuing his thinking about language to places which no one had ever trod before him forced Wittgenstein, as it were, to abandon any idea of classical organization of argument, its systematic gradual build-up in the course of flowing paragraphs connecting up to chapters. We do not find any structure of that sort in Philosophical Investigations. As if thinking too far and too deep about language and about how come something means something for us, disrupted a delicate uncertain balance on which the possibility of language and understanding had heretofore so innocently rested. What awaits a reader of Investigations instead are loosely related short statements – even aphorisms – standing on their own in their lonely independence and stubbornly resisting editors' attempts to impose on them a unity of a single purpose, heading or chapter. This has the fascinating effect that almost no two readers of Investigations will agree on what it is that Wittgenstein is saying here, but all will agree that he is saying something really important.
It is perhaps not necessary for a reader to attempt an all out frontal attack at Philosophical Investigations as a whole. Most of the aphoristic propositions in it provide plenty of food for thought on their own and many of the problems sketched out here in a few lines have become notorious starting points of extensive treatments and controversies. The theory of language games or the argument of impossibility of private rule-following – both taking their origin from Philosophical Investigations – certainly deeply influenced all subsequent thinking on the subject of reference and meaning. After Investigations, language will never be sufficiently accounted for as a representation of some objectively existing outside world.
In the first volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer was not working on a mirror-theory of language confined to the "reflection-of-objective-reality" either. But his neo-Kantian project is obviously very much distinct from anything Wittgenstein aims at. Far from being a mere reflection of an outside world, the "symbolic forms" of language and symbols/signs in general, are the foremost medium which to an important extent actively creates and awards meaning. So far so good. But although careful of his phrasing, Cassirer appears to be presenting a basically evolutionary scheme of development of languages worldwide. He seeks to uphold a Kantian notion of universally valid categories of judgement by showing how those correspond to forms empirically manifest in grammar; and how language expression evolves from the stage of particular depiction of concrete spatial and temporary distinctions toward the stage of designating pure syntactic and logical relations. Man's body in space and in its relation to things close and distant provides the fundamental reference point from which the dichotomies of "here-there", "this-that" refine into the categories of personal pronouns "I-you" and ultimately into the grammatical and logical concepts of "subject-object", while awareness of the flow of time provides an impetus for developing the tense structure of verbs and the "subject-predicate" formula.
Although he relies on secondary treatments regarding non-Indo-European languages, drawing particularly heavily on Wilhelm von Humboldt, Cassirer's point here is clearly meant to be a philosophical analysis of generic linguistic forms as types of forms of "knowing" and "having meaning", and not a comparative analysis of respective language groups. In spite of that a reader seems to be left with impression that although all language forms inherently contain the tendency to express pure epistemological relations in their various grammatical forms, still, for Cassirer, the grammatical constructions of developed modern Indo-European languages (Cassirer's synonymous term actually is "Indo-Germanic") are the ones most advanced on the journey toward expressing pure relations not facts (and therefore epistemologically most promising): the moment the verb "to be" in a language ceases to denote only the particular occurrence in time and space (like "be at home") or existence (like "to be or not to be"), and makes possible a pure expression of predicative relation in its function as copula in nominal phrases (like "A is B"), philosophy of judgement first becomes logically and grammatically possible with the expression of "pure being" this linguistic development brings. Such development is more or less explicitly contrasted with the absence of such pure grammatical forms in languages of primitive tribes and nations or those of other language groups (Japanese gets little mention, although Uralo-Altaic languages or Chinese are dealt with a bit more extensively). Although it was not Cassirer's aim, his argument seems to imply the conclusion that particular grammatical forms of modern European languages are at the same time the forms best suited to universally valid categorial cognition.
Let us bring in Wittgenstein for just one more brief turn to venture a response: "Over again we hear repeated that philosophy is not making any progress, that we are still dealing with the same problems ancient Greeks were already engaged with. Those who say that, however, do not know the reason why this must be so. It is so because our language has remained the same and tempts us ever to ask the same questions. As long as there is the verb "to be", which appears to us to function in the same way as the verbs "to eat" and "to drink" …, as long as there is talk of the flow of time and expanse of space etc., people will always run into and fixedly stare at the same mysterious obstacles which no account can probably explain away."