The unthinkable and the ineffable

Suppose that Alice right now thinks about some fact F and no other fact. Then we can stipulate that “Xyzzies” is a sentence whose content is that very fact which Alice is thinking. Thus:

1. If a linguistically identifiable person can think about some fact F to the exclusion of other facts at a linguistically identifiable time, then F can be expressed in a language.

It does not, however, follow that every fact can be expressed in a language. For it’s epistemically possible that there is a fact F such that a person can only think about F if the person is simultaneously thinking about G and H as well, and there may be no way for us to distinguish F from G and H in such a way as to stipulate a term for it.

This may seem like a pretty remote possibility, but I think it’s pretty plausible. There could be some fact F that only God can think. But presumably any fact has infinitely many logical consequences. But since God is inerrant and necessarily thinks all facts, necessarily if God thinks F, he thinks all the infinitely many logical consequences of F as well. And it could well be that we have no way of distinguishing F from some of its logical consequences in such a way that we could delineate F.

So it is possible to accept (1) while holding that some thinkable facts are ineffable.

However, plausibly any fact thinkable by a human can be thought by the human in a specifiably delineated way (the primary fact thought about at t₁, etc.). Thus our thought cannot exceed the possibilities of our language, since for anything we can think we could stipulate that “Xyzzies” means that. (Though, of course, our thought can (and sometimes does) exceed the actualities of our language.) Thus:

2. The humanly ineffable is humanly unthinkable.

Nonetheless, we might make a distinction between two ways of extending human language. A weak extension is one that can be introduced solely in terms of current human language. Stipulations in mathematics are like that: we explain what “continuous” is using prior vocabulary like “limit”. A strong extension is one that requires something extralinguistic, such as ostension to a non-linguistic reality.

3. There are things that are humanly thinkable that are only expressible using a strong extension of human language.

An analogy for divine infinity

Here’s an analogy I’ve been thinking about. God’s value is related to other infinities like (except with a reversal of order) zero is related other infinitesimals. Just as zero is infinitely many times smaller than any other infinitesimal (technically, zero is an infinitesimal—an infinitesimal being a quantity x such that |x| < 1/n for every natural number n), and in an important sense is radically different from them, so too the infinity of God’s value is infinitely many times greater than any other infinity, and in an important sense is radically different from them.

Suppose we think with the medievals that value and being are correlative. Then zero value corresponds to complete non-being. There isn’t anything that has that. Between ordinary non-divine things like people and oak trees and non-being we have a radical ontological difference: there are people and oak trees, but there is no non-being. Suppose we push the analogy on the side of God. Then between ordinary non-divine things like people and oak trees and God we will have a radical ontological difference, too. Some theologians have infamously tried to mark this difference by saying that people and oak trees are but God is not. That way of marking the difference is misleading by making God seem like non-being instead of like its opposite. A better way to mark the difference is to say that in an important sense God is and people and oak trees are not (compare what Jesus is said to have have said to St Catherine of Siena: “I am who I am and you are she who is not”). In any case, the gap between God’s “is” and our “is” is at least as radical as the gap between our “is” and the “is not” of non-being.

In fact, I think the gap is more radical: we and all other creatures are closer to non-being than to God. So the analogy I’ve been thinking about, that God’s value is related to other infinities like zero to other infinitesimals (but in reverse order) is misleading: God’s value is in a sense further from other infinities than zero is from other infinitesimals. (And not just because all infinitesimals are infinitesimally close to zero. The relevant scale should not be arithmetic but logarithmic, so that the gap between zero and anything—even an infinitesimal—bigger than zero is in an important sense infinite.)

Don’t take this too seriously. Remember this.

Dualist eliminativism

Eliminativism holds that our standard folk-psychological concepts of mental functioning—say, thoughts, desires, intentions and awareness—have no application or are nonsense. Usually, eliminativism goes hand in hand with physicalism and scientism: the justification for eliminativism is the idea that the truly applicable concepts of mental functioning are going to be the ones of a developed neuroscience, and it is unlikely that these will match up our current folk psychology.

But we can make a case for eliminativism on deeply humanistic grounds independent of neuroscience. We start with the intuition that the human being is very mysterious and complex. Our best ways of capturing the depths of human mental functioning are found neither in philosophy nor in science, but literature. This is very much what we would expect if our standard concepts did not correctly apply to the mind’s functioning, but were only rough approximations. Art flourishes in limitations of medium, and the novelist and poet uses the poor tool of these concepts to express the human heart. Similarly, the face expresses the soul (to tweak Wittgenstein’s famous dictum), and yet what we see in the face is more complex, more mysterious than what we express with our folk psychological vocabulary.

There is thus a shallowness to our folk-psychological vocabulary which simply does not match the wondrous mystery of the human being.

Finally, and here we have some intersection with the more usual arguments for eliminativism, our predictive ability with respect to human behavior is very poor. Just think how rarely we can predict what will be said next in conversation. And even our prediction of our own behavior, even our mental behavior, is quite poor.

The above considerations may be compatible with physicalism, but I think it is reasonable to think that they actually support dualism better. For on physicalism, ultimately human mental function would be explicable in the mechanistic terminology of physics, and my considerations suggest an ineffability to the human being that may be reasonably thought to outpace mechanistic expressions.

But whether or not these considerations in fact support dualism over physicalism, they are clearly compatible with dualism. And so we have a corner of logical space not much explored by (at least Western) philosophers: dualist eliminativism. I do not endorse this view, but in some moods I find it attractive. Though I would like it to come along with some kind of a story about the approximate truth of our ordinary claims about the mind.

Yet another theory of ineffability

There is a long-standing tradition of trying to explain (!) the attribute of divine ineffability. Theories that are metaphysical in flavor rule the roost:

1. The only true assertions we can make about God are negative. (Eastern tradition)

2. The only true assertions we can make about God are analogical. (Aquinas)

3. The only true assertions we can make about God are non-fundamental. (Jacobs)

I want to add one more theory to the mix, one that can either be stand-alone or a complement to (1)–(3). This one is more epistemological:

4. The only assertions we can make about God are misleading.

One can illustrate the misleadingness of true, and even literally true, statements by examples.

• “Alice did not treat minorities as badly as Hitler” (when Alice was in fact an exemplary promoter of social justice).

• “Bob is somewhere in this building” (when he is standing right behind you).

• “I saw Carl in a car on I-35 this morning” (but the car was being towed by a truck).

• “Davita passed some of her exams” (when she passed all of them).

• “On a good day, Roger Bannister could run an 8 minute mile.”

Note that while (1)–(3) are limited to true statements, (4) does not have this restriction. After all, all false statements are misleading.

For concrete theological examples, think of how the doctrine of the Trinity shows that the doctrine of the unity of God is misleading, or the doctrine of the Incarnation shows that the doctrine of the transcendence of God is misleading. In a similar same way, when the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are taught apart from the doctrines of unity and transcendence, they are misleading. But by (4) something more pessimistic is true: even when we teach Trinity and unity (or Incarnation and transcendence) together, we still mislead. I suspect that in heaven we will learn something that changes our understanding of unity and Trinity at least as much as the doctrine of the Trinity changed our understanding of unity.

Alvin Plantinga gives this counterexample to the thesis that we cannot say anything literally true of God: “God is not a bicycle.” If (4) is true, even this statement is misleading. In what way? Well, maybe it leads us to forget the intimate link between all reality and God: that all the reality in a bicycle is a participation in God.

Note that if (4) is true, then it is misleading. But that’s not a refutation.

One could also restrict (4) if one wanted to. For instance, one could restrict (4) to non-negative statements, or to non-analogical ones, or to non-fundamental ones.

I don’t know if (4) is true.

Ineffability

Consider this argument against divine ineffability: Let p be the conjunction of all fundamental truths intrinsically about God (I'm thinking here of something like the Jon Jacobs account of ineffability, but the point should work on other similar accounts). Stipulate that the sentence "It divines" (a feature-placing sentence or zero-place predicate, like in "It rains") expresses p. It divines. It seems I have just said the conjunction of all fundamental truths intrinsically about God. Hence God is not ineffable.

But this argument cannot be sound, since God is in fact ineffable--divine ineffability is, for instance, part of the creed of the Fourth Lateran Council. So what goes wrong with the argument?

First, one might have technical worries about infinite conjunctions or arbitrary linguistic stipulations. I'll put those to one side, though they are worth thinking about.

More deeply, one might worry whether there are any fundamental truths intrinsically about God. Truths are true propositions. Perhaps the fundamental reality of God not only cannot be expressed in language, but cannot even be given propositional form. I am not sure about this, though it is a promising response to the argument. But, plausibly, propositions are divine thoughts. And God surely does express his fundamental reality in his thought (indeed, this is central to Augustine's Trinitarianism).

I want to try out a different response to the argument: question the last step in the argument, the inference "Hence God is not ineffable." This response allows that we can stipulate and assert a sentence that means the conjunction of all fundamental truths intrinsically about God, but denies that this is a problem for ineffability. Ineffability isn't a denial of the possibility of asserting a sentence whose semantic content is such-and-such truths about the divine nature. Rather, it is the denial of the possibility of linguistically communicating these truths. For me to linguistically communicate a truth to you it is required that my sentence give rise to your thinking that truth. But the truth expressed by "It divines" isn't a truth you can think. On this understanding, divine ineffability is an immediate consequence of divine incomprehensibility, and rather than being a doctrine about semantics, it's a doctrine about communication.

If this is right, then stipulation allows the semantics of our language to outrun communication and thought. You can think some deep philosophical truth that I don't know, and I can stipulate that "It xyzzes" means that truth, and I can sincerely assert "It xyzzes." But I don't thereby think that truth. I can, of course, think the second order thought that "It xyzzes" is true, but to do that is not the same as to think that it xyzzes. Similarly, I can think that "It divines" is true, but that's a thought about a piece of stipulated language rather than a thought about God. Indeed, it divines, but I don't understand the sentence "It divines" as I can't grasp the proposition it expresses.

Sometimes people are accused of a certain kind of insincerity like this: "You're just saying the words but don't really understand." This is a different kind of insincerity than when people are lying. A person who is "just saying the words" may believe that the sentence composed of the words is really true, and if so, then she isn't lying. (Corollary: One can say something one doesn't believe and yet not be a liar, as long as one believes that what one is saying is true.) The reason that there may be insincerity in "just saying the words" is that normally one implicates that one believes (and hence has a minimal understanding of) the content of what one says. But that's an implicature that can be canceled to avoid even this kind of insincerity: "I don't exactly know what 'God loves you' means, but I believe that it is true. God loves you." And when people are talking of a topic neither is close to being an expert on, the implicature of understanding one's words may be contextually canceled.