What Makes Natural Language “Natural”? A Phenomenological Proposal

ABSTRACT

The paper answers the title question via its methodological commitment to a Husserlian description of the acts of consciousness which we cannot but perform when we engage in linguistic communication. Familiarizing the reader with the central terms of the German Vorstellung and Vorstellbarkeit (imaginability) and their prominence in phenomenological inquiry in the Introduction, the paper addresses major uses of Vorstellung from Kant to Husserl, before identifying imaginability as the hidden core of natural language, captured in a re-definition of language and linguistic meaning. The observation that imaginability affects all linguistic aspects from phonology to pragmatics is followed by the claim that it is primarily a communally shared form of. The last Section offers a speculative, radically gradualist thesis of language evolution in opposition to dominant catastrophe theories, with the conclusion summarising the answer to the title question in terms imaginable, schematized resemblance relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Imaginability
• Vorstellung
• schematization
• communal intentionality
• radical gradualism
• catastrophe theories

1. Introduction

When the Polish philosopher Alfred Tarski cautioned his fellow logicians not to employ his “Convention-T” as a tool for the description of natural language, he must have held a richer view of language than those of his followers who disregarded his warning. For Tarski, “it is only the semantics of formalized languages which can be constructed by exact methods”. Applied to natural language, he writes, “the results are entirely negative”. Here, “not only does the definition of truth seem impossible, but even the consistent use of this concept in conformity with the laws of logic”. So, if we do not heed his advice, we are likely to violate what renders natural language “natural”. (Tarski 403; 153; 267) The most influential violation in this regard is Donald Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning”, arguably the pinnacle in a long list of writings on truth-conditional semantics. (2004; cf. Ruthrof Language and Imaginability 80–84)¹ But if truth can be discarded as producing a false diagnosis, what is it that makes natural language natural? The answer I propose in this paper is communicable imaginability (mittelbare Vorstellung), which I claim functions as the deep anchor and actual driver of language.¹

The tools for making this claim are borrowed from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method of the eidetic distillation of the description of the intentional acts which we cannot but perform when we engage in language and a commitment to his broad, natural linguistic paradigm, which conceives of language primarily as our dominant form of communication.²

In part, the paper is also a response to Husserl’s statement that the topic of the relation between words and intuition invites “difficult and important analyses”, in so far as I will address some of the principles on which we can project an imaginability description of natural language. (Husserl Logische Untersuchungen 22). The paper does so within a frame of inquiry which we could sum up under the ubiquity thesis of imaginability. Accordingly, it is taken for granted that the human mind could do hardly anything without drawing on its faculty of imagining things. But since the notion of the imagination is a much-contested concept, the paper chooses the narrower semantic scope of imaginability (Vorstellbarkeit) in its two main senses, as (1) the quality of something to be imaginable and (2) the human faculty of performing acts of imaginability. The paper will later specify this broad distinction further with reference to natural language, such that (3) language is investigated as to its capacity to carry and convey imaginability and (4) that linguistic meaning events cannot occur without the human ability to transform language expressions into schematized, communicable, imaginable scenarios.³

In addition to the ubiquity thesis of imaginability, the paper further asserts its primacy over perception in linguistic meaning constitution. It appears to be uncontroversial to say that imaginability in the sense of (1) and (2) is everywhere. In sharp contrast, (3) and (4) are not commensurate with the majority of positions in linguistics and the philosophy of language. As to the philosophical uptake of imaginability as Vorstellbarkeit in the anglosphere, it was introduced into language philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein. (PI §§395ff.) However, it failed to catch the eye of Wittgenstein’s commentators, not even that of as meticulous a commentary as Baker and Hacker’s two-volume analysis. (1980; 1985) In Continental thought, by contrast, imaginability has played a central role, especially since Kant, in the work of Brentano’s student Kazimierz Twardowski in the work of Husserl, and that of his successors.

A second, central notion in this paper is communicability, Kant’s Mitteilbarkeit, discussed in the Critique of Judgment, in as far as it refers to representations (Vorstellungen) “pertaining to cognition”, the latter understood as the “determination of the object”. As such, no matter who performs its imagining, the object is communally and, we could say since Husserl, intersubjectively and eidetically sharable. As Kant puts it

this state of free play of the cognitive faculties attending a representation by which an object is given must admit of universal communication: because cognition, as a definition of an object with which given representation (in any subject whatever) are to accord, is the one and only representation which is valid for everyone.

Leaving aside here the relevance of communicability to Kant’s discussion of taste, what is relevant for the purposes of this paper is his emphasis on communicability as “the natural propensity of humanity to social life (Geselligkeit), i.e. empirically and psychologically”. (CJ §9) The topic of universal communicability is resumed once more “under the constraint of determinate concepts”, as part of his second maxim of thinking, that is to think “from the standpoint of everyone else”, (CJ §40) and towards the end of the third Critique as a prerequisite for a future civil community. (CJ §83) In Husserl, communicability finds its most elaborate manifestation in the “communicative human manifold” where “I-You-acts” bind us together “as a unity of a communicatively experiencing subjectivity”. (Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (1973b) 469; Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (1973c) 199; 369)⁴

Lastly, a remark on the difficulty of rendering Vorstellung in English. Vorstellung has no straightforward, lexical equivalent in English for reasons that are to be sought in their very different philosophical traditions. The difficulty manifests itself in such diverse translation options as representation, idea, presentation, imagination, conception, perceptual modification, intentional act or, perhaps most Kantian, as imaginable schema.⁵

2. Imaginability Since Kant

What Kant calls Vorstellung, Locke called idea.⁶ However, whenever Kant employs the term Idee, he narrows its concept down to non-existent imaginability, as a mere “concept of reason” transcending the very “possibility of experience”. (A320/B377). And unlike the empiricists, Kant pays careful and consistent attention to Vorstellung. So much so, that the term and its derivatives occur some 525 times in the Critique of Pure Reason, with reference to Kant’s “inner sense”. (CPR A177) Vorstellung is likewise a prominent critical concept in the Critique of Judgment. In its English translations, Vorstellung is predominantly rendered as representation, in contrast to Anschauung, that is, perceptual intuition. For Kant, Vorstellung is the “genus”, (CPR A320) of which Anschauung is an “immediate and single” formation and as such a “species of representations”. (CPR A320; 370) Which also distinguishes the singular Anschauung from the concept, which he says refers to an object “mediately by means of a feature which several things may have in common”. Furthermore, concepts are either empirical or pure, the latter abstracting from all empirical content and so reducing to a notion. Vorstellung, then, functions as a kind of super concept covering many of these distinctions. Different kinds and modes of Vorstellung (Vorstellungsarten) permit us to grasp whatever is imaginable.⁷

In this sense, Kant speaks of Vorstellungsfähigkeit (CPR A19), Vorstellungskraft (A34), Vorstellungsart (A35; 251; B376), Teilvorstellungen (A32), the manifold in a Vorstellung (A354), Nebenvorstellungen (A271), “deceptive Vorstellungen (A376), perception as the “Vorstellung of a reality”, (A374) and space and time as “Vorstellungen a priori”. (A373) In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant’s Vorstellung plays a lesser, though still important, role in such formulations as the “Vorstellung of the moral law”, “Vorstellung of virtue”, “Vorstellung of duty”, and the “Vorstellung of an action as noble and magnanimous”. Given the centrality of interpretation of complex and opaque contexts in art, nature, and culture in the Critique of Judgment, it should not be surprising that Vorstellung once more takes centre stage. Here, Kant singles out the importance of “Vorstellung with respect to cognition” (CJ §8), the distinction of the form and “matter of Vorstellungen”, such as “mere sensations”, the “animation of Vorstellung”, and the Vorstellung of “utility”. Vorstellungen can be “confused” (verworren) or lack a “concept”. (§§ 14f.) Different Vorstellungen are required to distinguish between purpose and purposiveness (Zweck und Zweckmaessigkeit) (§21), amongst “quality”, beauty, and the “sublime”, as well as between orthodoxy and “novelty”. (§§17; 23; 27; 29) Likewise, Vorstellung is what permits us to vividly grasp the differences between disunity and “unity”, parts and the “whole”, between impossibility and “possibility”, between temporal sequence and “causality”, (§§73; 77f.; 80), between “purpose” and “final purpose” (§ 84), and lastly amongst “things of opinion”, “facts”, and “belief”. (§ 91) It is, as if Kant’s Vorstellung were meant to cover everything we might want to refer to as consciousness. Although Kant’s Critiques never employ the term imaginability, we can build on the key importance which Kant granted the critical concept of Vorstellung in addressing the core definitions required for the arguments to follow.

An important qualification of Kant’s Vorstellung is that it predominantly occurs in schematic form.⁸ Although we are capable of entertaining detailed images, facilitated by our deep-seated monogram “of pure a priori imagination” hidden in the “depths of the human soul”, through which “images themselves first become possible”, (CPR A 141f./B180f.) the vast bulk of imaginability is made up of Vorstellungen that are schematized to various degrees of abstraction. What distinguishes Kant’s schematism sharply from previous uses of the many concepts of schema since Western antiquity is its role in his cognitive dualism as a duality which is reconciled in his synthetic conception of consciousness. Quite apart from Kant’s claim that the schematism is an irreducible characteristic of consciousness, an important innovation here is Kant’s epistemological dual highway, offering two radically different ways towards abstraction, one by verbal hierarchization, the other by nonverbal, paradigmatic schematization, (CPR A137ff./B176ff.) both playing major roles in cognition and communication. As such, they are clearly distinct from formalization as the elimination of all resemblance relations. A much- underestimated accomplishment of the nonverbal generality of Kant’s schematization is that it overcomes Locke’s empiricist problem of semantic privacy by building the missing bridge between subjective ideas and public discourse. (Ruthrof 2013)⁹ The Kantian schematism also functions as an incisive characteristic of his cognitive dualism.

It was Salomon Maimon who mounted a famous early critique of Kant’s cognitive dualism in 1790, a critique which places him very much in the rationalist philosophical tradition. Contrary to Locke who, as Kant writes, sensualizes appearances and, like Leibniz, who intellectualizes them, (CPR A271/B327) Maimon favours the role of verbal abstract reasoning. According to Maimon, “when we read a book or hear speech, the representations or concepts of the objects are often quite obscure, although their relations are clear”, his position is compatible with Kant’s emphasis in the schematism chapter: “schemata, not images of objects underlie our pure sensible concepts”. (CPR A140/B180) But then Maimon resolves the relation between language and imaginability by gradually eliminating the latter. The “images” which we associate with words “become weaker and weaker until they become completely obscured”. While their non-intuitive relations are transformed into “a priori concepts that emerge at the instigation of intuitions, i.e. indivisible unities; so they are not subject to any fading away, and because they were at one time connected with words they always remain connected in their full strength thanks to this association”. So, “intuitive images can gradually fade away until they have been totally obliterated, i.e. they can be forgotten; by contrast, a priori concepts are continually present to the understanding, needing only intuitions to provoke them to emerge”. (Maimon 141; my emphasis) Crucially, what is neglected in Maimon’s critique is aboutness, as well as its tonal qualification, which cannot be retrieved without at least a trace of resemblance which is thoughtfully retained in Kant’s nonverbal schematization.

While empiricists have howled down Kant’s schematization, the notable exception here is Charles Sanders Peirce who retooled it into the notion of diagrammatic reasoning which, as diagrammatic skeletonization, plays a prominent role in his Collected Papers. Like Maimon, Peirce singles out non-intuitive relations, but unlike Maimon, who argues a trajectory of diminishing image content in verbal understanding towards its total obliteration, Peirce restricts this trajectory in his tripartite notion of hypoiconicity and so separates out the symbolic sign as purely conventional, that is, without any resemblance relation to what it signifies. Instead, hypoiconicity covers three stages of resemblance relations between a sign and what it stands for, the image as direct resemblance, its skeletonization into a merely diagrammatical semblance and, third, its metaphoric displacement in an analogical, parallel representation. (CP 2.276f.) Peirce’s “principal purpose” of diagrammatic skeletonization is “to strip the significant relations of all disguise”, a process by which “all features that have no bearing upon the relations of the premisses to the conclusion are effaced and obliterated”. (CP 3.559; 2.276f.) Hypoiconicity is Peirce’s super term covering iconicity conceived as direct resemblance as in images; diagrammatical schematization or skeletonization as reduced resemblance, as in maps; and metaphorically displaced likeness, the most elaborate transformation of iconicity. In their display of direct resemblance, images “partake of simple qualities”; “skeletonization” (CP 3.559) reduces likeness to systemic relations, as in diagrams; while metaphors are “representing a parallelism in something else”. (CP 2.276f.) With reference to the iconicity of linguistic expressions, we can specify Kant’s schematism and Peirce’s diagrammatic skeletonization further by the notion of degrees of schematization.

In 1894 Kasimir Twardowski dedicated an entire research monograph to the proto-phenomenological Doctrine of the Content and Object of Representations (Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen) in which he meticulously distinguishes intentional objects of Vorstellung from actually existing objectivities, such that it is in virtue of their content that representations represent, both perceptually and conceptually. Unlike his teacher Brentano, Twardowski sharply distinguished between “object” and “content”, the former referring to externally existing objects, the latter to intentional objects that are “immanent” to the mind. (Brentano) According to Twardowski, “one has to distinguish the object at which our representation is ‘directed' from the immanent object or the content of the representation”. (Twardowski 2) Contrary to the material existence of any external object, Twardowski’s immanent object is always produced by a Vorstellungsakt that does the intentional representing. He calls the Vorstellungsakt the “activity of Vorstellen”, in the sense of generating a “quasi-Bild”. (3) At the same time, Twardowski acutely distinguishes the act of Vorstellung from any act of judgment. (5; 8) Vorstellungsakte precede acts of judgments. While the latter are about affirmation or rejection, Vorstellung merely establishes awareness. Twardowski’s account is also helpful in clarifying a number of other issues vital for the role of Vorstellung in human consciousness. There is his distinction between the predicative “Wortvorstellung”, that is verbal representation, from thing representation, and his accent on the process character of Vorstellung (Vorstellungsverlauf). (5f.) Likewise crucial for Twardowski is his notion of “objectless Vorstellungen” to which no actual object can correspond. (20) Thus, we can imagine “Vorstellungen the object of which do not exist, but not Vorstellungen which are without an object”. (29ff.) The former will be taken up in phenomenology later by Husserl and Ingarden under the concept of purely intentional objects in contrast to such Vorstellungsinhalte as quasi-judgments, quasi-wishes, and other quasi-objectivities. (Husserl; Ingarden Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt; Ingarden The Literary Work of Art) Husserl also managed to circumvent the debate about the existential status of Vorstellungen by sharply separating existence from essence via Wesensabstraktion. (Husserl 2012, 223; 237; 243) As he categorically states, “essence can be given without existence”, (Husserl 2012, 33) which underlines the central role which Vorstellung as imaginability play in Husserl’s phenomenology. Indeed, without the umbrella notion of Vorstellung, many of Husserl’s critical concepts would not make sense. To name only a few, there are his retentions and protentions, (1966) the “fullness of presentation”, (2000, 729) “analogical representation”, (2000, 729) “graded series of fulfilment”, (2000, 735), “abstractive percept”, (2000, 795) “semblance acts”, (2005a, 710) “appresentation”, (1960, 109f.) or the typifications of the Lebenswelt, (2008) all of which also have a direct bearing on Husserl’s conception of the natural quality of language.

3. Defining Natural Language via Imaginability

Having indicated the ubiquity of Vorstellung in a broad range of human activities and argued its centrality to consciousness with reference to Kant, Twardowski, and Husserl, we are now well placed to elaborate on the paper’s title and core thesis. Without imaginability, that is our ability to imagine things, natural language could not have emerged, nor could it function the way it now does. Postponing the speculative claim to later, we can make the uncontroversial claim that we cannot but imagine language at the levels of phonology, syntax, lexis, semantics, and pragmatics, that is, if we wish to draw a distinction between the latter two. To be sure, collective introspection suggests a broad spectrum of language users stretching from strong visualizers to persons who claim that they imagine nothing when they speak. Some say that language is all there is, and it is immediately and imminently meaningful by itself. However, on closer scrutiny, the Vorstellung deniers appear to be confusing the camera-shutter speed of the act of Vorstellung with its non-existence. (Ruthrof “Shutter-Speed Meaning, Normativity") On the other hand, introspective descriptions of gustatory and especially olfactory Vorstellungen experienced in response to taste and smell terms by individual persons strongly buttress the imaginability claim.¹⁰ Once more it is Husserl who offers a plausible explanation of the two opposing responses. The deniers of Vorstellung in acts of linguistic comprehension merely attend to Bedeutung, that is the fleeting, merely verbal or logical sense,¹¹ Husserl’s Durchseinsbewusstsein,¹² while those who affirm Vorstellung in the response to the sounds of expressions comprehend more richly in the “modus of saturation” of “meaning fulfilment” by employing “empathetic apperception”. (Husserl Logische Untersuchungen 68; Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1973b, 234)¹³ It is the latter form of linguistic comprehension where imaginability as “reproductive consciousness” fulfills its natural, meaning endowing task in language. (Husserl 2005, 369; see also 700f.; 707)

On the assumption that Kant, Peirce, Twardowski, and Husserl have pointed us in the right direction, we can claim that schematized Vorstellung is a necessary condition of the very possibility of meaningful linguistic expressions. Without an intentional scenario that we wish to express in words, we would not know what it is we want to talk about. We would lack at least the rudiments of aboutness. And Vorstellung cannot but be schematic rather than specific to meet the criteria of high-speed, nonverbal abstraction. Which provides an explanation for the mechanism by which the biological organism proceeds from percepts to concepts. The tiger cub learns to survive by turning its innate ability of schematization into typified hunting recipes under the training regimen of its mother. The result is the formation of nonverbal, dynamic, conceptual structures meeting the criteria of Husserl’s typifications. (Husserl Logische Untersuchungen 137; 143f.; 151; 291f.) Accordingly, in humans, such typifications provide the schematized intentional material contents of linguistic concepts. “As such, the ‘type' would be a pre-predicative component of cognition whereby our typifying apperception renders an object imaginable, that is, anschaulich, but does so in abbreviated, schematized form”. (Ruthrof 2021, 120)

If Vorstellung, in its schematized, typified form, is a condition of nonverbal re-cognition of perceptual objectivities in advanced biological organisms, it must have been available also for the emergence of natural language. On this assumption, how can we conceive of imaginability (Vorstellbarkeit) as providing intentional material content for linguistic expressions? To begin with, we need to offer a definition of imaginability as it functions in language. The definitional description in the OED of imaginability as “the quality of being imaginable” proves insufficient since it only addresses the object side of what is imagined. What is missing is the ability of the organism that is doing the imagining. Applied to natural language, this revision suggests the following redefinition of natural language in terms of both the human capacity of imagining objectivities in response to the sounds of linguistic expressions and the capacity of natural language to function as a vehicle of imaginable intentional material contents. We can call this the imaginability thesis of natural language. It can be summarily formulated thus. Natural language is a set of schematized social instructions for imagining, and acting in, a world. At the same time, the imaginability thesis entails a redefinition of linguistic meaning as a social event, such that if you can imagine what I am talking about, and the manner in which I do so, there is meaning. If not, not. And vice versa. (Ruthrof 2021, 1f.)

4. The Functions of Imaginability in Language

In a comprehensive and widely used linguistics textbook by William McGregor we read that reference “covers the relationship between an NP [noun phrase] and imaginary and intangible “things’ existing in possible worlds of human imagination”. (2009, 129; my emphasis) Which addresses one of the core features of natural language, that is, linguistic aboutness. As such, this is a decisive observation to make about the workings of language. Unfortunately, the remainder of the 384-page book leaves the topic of the imagination and imaginability aside as irrelevant to linguistics. Much the same can be said about the bulk of writings in the arena of language studies. The obvious exception one would expect to be cognitive linguistics, but even here imaginability does not play the prominent role it should. (Ruthrof 2024) But before we are in a position to pursue the neglect of imaginability in the literature more specifically, a brief summary of the ways imaginability functions in verbal communication, beyond the contribution made by perception, we will be helpful.

At the level of phonetics we not only hear word sounds in their syntactic arrangements, we also notice devious pronunciations and outright mispronunciations. But by what standard do we do so? Here the mere perception of verbal utterances has to give way to knowing a language, a knowledge that the members of a speech community share as a stock of typifications stored in memory, which we as schematized, imaginable recollections. Much the same goes for misspellings, which jar against our Vorstellung of standard orthography. Here too, phonology plays a role, since all reading is accompanied by a largely nonconscious process of providing written discourse with a silent intonation, a response which turns into intentional acts when we notice that we have misread the tone of a passage.

Our comprehension of diction and lexis reveals a similar relationship between perceived linguistic expression against the background of the kind of thesaurus knowledge we hold in memory for non-perceptual retrieval. Which is one way by which we construct linguistic meanings, that is, by inter-grammatically comprehending expressions in terms of imaginable synonymic and antinomic verbal relations, the deep anchor of which however is ultimately to be sought in extralinguistic aboutness. Intergrammaticality being conceived as a view language as a system operating separately from nonverbal human interaction. At the level of syntax, we cannot but notice a similar relation between what we hear and see in terms of the sequencing of words, their contribution to compositionality and our acts of comprehension. We recognize standard and deviant phrasing by agreement or disagreement with our stored syntactic expectations available for imaginable retrieval. Lastly, the key aspect of linguistic communication, the production and construction of linguistic meaning, or semantics, relies even more heavily on imaginability than do all other features of language. It is a prerequisite for two fundamental acts, the imaginative construction of aboutness, of which reference is a special case, and the manner of presentation, or tone. The former secures the kind of world that verbal expressions guide us to imagine, that is, in the bulk of utterances where language functions as the world in absentia, while the latter guides us in specifying the communicative accord that links addressers and addressees. In natural language, neither can be conceived as fixed by language itself, relying instead on schematizing, reconstructive imaginability. All of which strongly suggests that imaginability is not, as it usually is, to be conceived in any subjectivist sense. Rather, its merely individual portion in acts of awareness should be recognized as being no more than a fringe phenomenon.

An intriguing case in point is the claim that it is personalization which is at the heart of the process of building and increasing the network of neural connections in the brain, (Greenfield 2016, 67) illustrated by the qualification exam for taxi drivers required to memorize the vast London street directory. (Macguire et al.) Although the neural claim is not to be disputed, it testifies more persuasively to the contrary, namely that it corroborates the socialization of imaginability rather its personalization. A similar observation can be made with reference to works of art. When the Basque town Guernica was bombed by the Luftwaffe of the German Condor Legion on 26 April 1937 on the invitation of Generalissimo Franco, the response split into two camps, one, celebrating the fascist precision strike, the other recoiling in horror and sympathy with the victims, both reflecting acts of communal imaginability. In sharp contrast, Picasso’s massive masterpiece painting Guernica remains as the only testimony of uniquely personalized imaginative acts.

5. Natural Language Renders Imaginability Communicable

While tactile, gestural, and other nonverbal forms of communication have the capacity to transfer imaginable contents to others to a certain extent, as they do for instance in art, it is natural language which has the characteristic of expressing most effectively what would otherwise remain hidden in individual consciousness as acts of ineffable intentionality. So, it makes sense to claim that if it is tied to language the way argued it is in this paper, imaginability is bound to be a fundamentally communal phenomenon, grounded in intersubjectivity in the Husserlian sense. (Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1973b; Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1973c; Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1973d) More specifically, imaginability appears to be a crucial component of the manner in which humans conduct mutual “introjection”, (Husserl 2000, 277), more recently referred to as “intention-reading”, (Tomasello 3f.; 8), as “mindreading” (2018) and by Husserl as the overall construction of the Other via the processes of “appresentation”, (1960) specified later as producing a reciprocal “being-within-one-another” (Ineinandersein), (1973d, 366-377) a form of “intentional intertwining” (intentionale Verflechtung). (1973d, 12f.)

Further evidence in support of the assertion of the communal character of imaginability is the linguistic linkage compulsion, according to which the shutter-speed, nonverbal realization of aboutness in response to the sounds of linguistic expressions is in each case strictly circumscribed by the speech community. (Ruthrof “The Linguistic Linkage Compulsion”)¹⁴ Much the same can be claimed for their manner of presentation, or tone, which in natural language qualifies aboutness to the point where its propositional content can be altered to its contrary, as for example in verbal irony or such expressions as “May I help you”. Husserl added a serious amendment to his discussion of aboutness in the Logical Investigations (1900/1901) when a decade later he addressed the importance of tone in linguistic expressions first as part of the positing of representational projecting, that is, Vorstellungssetzung. As such, “tone is a component of the word … of the sentence, the declarative sentence, the interrogative sentence, the sentence of wishing … ”. (Husserl 2005b,102ff.; 456; cf. Ruthrof “Implicit Deixis”; Ruthrof Husserl’s Phenomenology of Natural Language 81–88) As a natural component of language, tone, both as an indication of generic uses of linguistic expressions and their colouring (Frege’s Färbung), adds to the indispensability of imaginability as socially shared intentionality in acts of linguistic production and comprehension. In contrast with Husserl’s earlier restriction of tone to “essentially occasional expressions”, (313ff) we learn from his Nachlass he later radically revised his view of linguistic deixis by declaring tone a fundamental feature of natural language where, beyond standard “pronunciation”, every expression “always has its “tone””. (Husserl 2005b, 102)¹⁵ Linguistic aboutness, then, is never alone. In natural language, aboutness is always qualified at least by implicit deixis. Whereas the study of deixis in the literature has focused on marked or explicit deixis, its implicit form does not appear phenomenally in texts but only in their interpretive reconstruction. (Ruthrof “Implicit Deixis”)

Taking a broader perspective, we can say that natural language is “the world in absentia”, (Ruthrof Husserl’s Phenomenology of Natural Language, 118) functioning as it does as universal medium. (Cf., however, Kusch) After all, the bulk of verbal expressions is not apophantic but about absent things. If so, then what must be prominent in both linguistic aboutness and its qualification by tone are non-perceptual, intentional acts, both active and passive, declaring communicable imaginability rather than perception the main driver of natural language. (Ruthrof 2024) It is in this sense that imaginability makes a double contribution to rendering natural language natural.

6. The Neglect of Imaginability in Some Mainstream Language Paradigms

Husserl’s early insights of introjection and appresentation have recently found support in empirical research, as for instance in the work of Michael Tomasello who addresses the role of imaginability in language as “one another’s intentional and mental states for various cooperative and competitive purposes” which lend “linguistic symbols their unparalleled communicative power”. (Tomasello 2003, 3f.; 8) And yet, our dominant paradigms in language research still dismiss imaginability as relevant to natural language. Of course, it is only to be expected that in formal semantics up to current hyperintensional semantics all intentional, material content would be transformed into procedural symbolicity. (e.g. Duzi et al.) Which has its source in the Fregean reduction of language to the relation between sense as pure, definitional thought and scientifically secured reference, tied to truth values in propositionally viewed sentences. Vorstellung (idea) is eliminated on the grounds that it differs from person to person, as is the all-important component of tone as implicit deixis, (Ruthrof “Implicit Deixis”) while Frege’s definition of linguistic meaning in terms of truth is shrinking the totality of language use to a relatively small selection of apophantic expressions. This is where Husserl’s paradigm of natural language offers a more attractive analysis by distinguishing objects as characterized to have “essentia and existence” from merely imaginable, intentional objectivities which only have “essence”. (2012, 33) From the Husserlian perspective, we can likewise question Frege’s law of compositionality, which fails to cater for many of the richest forms of natural language, especially elliptic, metaphoric and other idiomatic formulations. The Fregean reductions of linguistic complexity can be traced back to his untheorized analogy between language and geometry in Sinn und Bedeutung, a methodological option which has changed his object of inquiry into something it is not. Frege’s conception of natural language, though elegant, has rendered language unnatural. (Frege “On Sense and Reference”; Frege “Der Gedanke: Eine logische Untersuchung”)

Arguably the most radical rejection of imaginability as a component of consciousness and language is Gilbert Ryle’s extended critique in his The Concept of Mind (1949), where the very phrase “in the mind” should always be “dispensed with” on the grounds that “its use habituates its employers to the view that minds are queer “places’, the occupants of which are special-status phantasms”. (1990, 40) We can agree with Ryle that the theory of intentional “picturing” cannot be a “looking at reproductions of sense data”, (242) or indeed any other form of imagistic plenitude. Yet his wholesale claim that “there is no special Faculty of Imagination” leaves in abeyance the clarification of the difference between our awareness of absent things and acts of cognition of what is in front of us. (244) Ryle deliberately leaves unaddressed the Kantian path of schematization as an alternative to image projection, as he does Husserl’s life-long contemplation of intentionality. Instead, not unlike Leibniz, Ryle intellectualizes awareness by declaring it “a narrative skill” rather than a nonverbal capacity. (263). Reduced to a mere “fancying”, imaginative acts of awareness of absent objectivities remain unclarified. Above all, Ryle’s narrowly rationalist conception of mind underestimates acts of multimodality in and by human consciousness and its role in the way we produce and comprehend linguistic expressions.

In spite of his attempt in the Philosophical Investigations to free himself from Frege’s logic as a “preconceived idea of crystalline purity”, (2009, §108) Wittgenstein grants imaginability only an incidental role in language, where its contribution is reduced to “image-mongery” and the “striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination”. (2009, §§390; 6) Instead, he offers a strongly behaviorist explanation as an alternative, eliminating Vorstellbarkeit.

The words ‘six apples’ are written on a piece of paper, the paper is handed to the grocer, the grocer compares the word ‘apple’ with labels on different shelves. He finds it to agree with one of the labels, counts from 1 to the number written on the slip of paper, and for every number counted takes a fruit off the shelf and puts it in the bag. (1978, 16f.; cf. 2009, §1)

Wittgenstein appears to have second thoughts on the matter in §395 of the Philosophical Investigations, where he concedes that “there is a lack of clarity about the role of imaginability in our investigation. Namely about the extent to which it ensures that a sentence makes sense”. Yet any hope for some kind of rehabilitation of imaginability in linguistic comprehension is once more dashed in the succeeding paragraphs.¹⁶ After he has substituted “representability by a particular method of representation” for “imaginability”, (2009, §397) Wittgenstein falls back on the Fregean argument that ideas (Vorstellungen) vary from subject to subject, such that “when I imagine something, or even actually see objects, I have got something which my neighbour has not”. (2009, §398) What is not addressed here by either Frege or Wittgenstein is the schematic nature of representations that permit nonverbal, intersubjective agreement. Thus, Wittgenstein lets go of imaginability as a path to linguistic aboutness by replacing the picture theory of language with the behaviorist practice of language-games. Inadvertently, however, Wittgenstein’s sidelining of imaginability has produced a fundamental tension in the Philosophical Investigations with its high frequency of reader instructions to imagine specific scenarios guiding our comprehension of his text.

The motif of the merely incidental character of imaginability in linguistic comprehension is resumed in a radical way by Jerry Fodor in his hypothesis of LOT, the language of thought. (1975, 184ff.; 2008) Here, natural language is viewed as a one-way process from a neurological, computational, deep-structure mentalese to the social construction and regulation of language by the speech community. Eliminated are the perceptual and imaginative patterns of recognition in their Gestalt structure which provides schematized, intentional content for linguistic expressions. Instead, Fodor condenses all analogical brain responses to the external world and their passive and active intentional variations into cognitive modules of propositions and propositional attitude symbolization. As ingenious as Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis may strike us, by eliminating meaning providing nonverbal schematization it cuts the vital umbilical cord with what makes language natural.

7. Husserl’s Expanded Linguistic Horizon

Diametrically opposed to any reduction of imaginability in natural language is Husserl’s phenomenological paradigm, at the heart of which we can place his focus on language as communication, (2000, 276) a commitment to which he adhered to the end of his career. A consequence of this perspective is what we can call Husserl’s “expanded linguistic horizon” according to which, contrary to Fregean and much post-Fregean minimalist semantics, the verbal meaning chain stretches from nonverbal meaning intention (Bedeutungsintention) to its reversal in acts of nonverbal (and verbal) meaning fulfilment (Bedeutungserfüllung). (Husserl 2000, 292; Husserl 2005b 3; Ruthrof 2021, 3f. and passim) Which allows Husserl to address two crucial acts of transformation within the meaning chain, one from nonverbal intentional acts into linguistic expressions, the other, from merely verbal and logical sense (Bedeutung) to nonverbal, as well as further, verbal saturated meaning (Sinn). (Husserl 2000, 694ff.; 281; 745) Whereas Bedeutung as “exclusive directionality” steers “our attention” towards meaning fulfilment, (2000, 283; 290), Sinn is characterized by “gradations of vividness” (2002, 240), the “more or less” of similarity relations, and approximation. (Husserl 2012, 42f; 63f. 71f.; 109ff.; 230ff.; 234)¹⁷

In these transformations, our acts of projecting intentional, material content generate both minimal Bedeutung and saturated Sinn, the latter schematized to various degrees according to social need. Language, then, is conceived as our predominant form of “communicability of what is communicated” (die Mittelbarkeiten der Mitteilung), (Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1973d, 218n2) which firmly establishes the communal character of linguistic meaning events as part and parcel of Husserl’s “communalized life” (vergemeinschaftliches Leben). (Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1973d) In Husserl, such socially schematized meaning events are based on typifications to be understood as communally schematized percepts and their imaginative variations. And, as Dieter Lohmar has argued, convincingly in my view, Kant’s schemata and Husserl’s typifications, though differing according to their genesis, can be regarded as co-extensional salve veritate. (Lohmar) In Husserl’s conception of language, typifications reappear as “fluid type concepts (fliessende Typenbegriffe)”, (2012, 230) which significantly contribute to what makes natural language natural.

Schematized intentional acts, then, provide the material content of language whenever our linguistic expressions address perceptual reality and, more typically, things that are not before us. In the latter case, we can speak with Husserl of quasi-perceiving, quasi-wishing, quasi-judgments, quasi-questions, quasi-predication, quasi-assertions, in short, of quasi-acts. (Husserl Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory 413) In either case, all linguistic expressions demand “saturation”, that is, the filling of the eidetic schemata of our lexicon to appropriate degrees of specificity with nonverbal forms of imaginability, Husserl’s Anschaulichkeit. (2002, 3; 38; 2005b, 143f.)¹⁸

As introspection tells us, our stream of consciousness is crammed chock-a-block with imaginative mirror schemata of perceptual reality. In other words, the imaginability that makes language meaningful is to a high degree fictive. So much so that Husserl, as early as in 1913, sums up §70 of Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology as follows.

Hence, if anyone loves a paradox, he can really say, and say it with strict truth if he will allow for the ambiguity, that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology as of all eidetic science is ‘fiction', that fiction is the source whence the knowledge of ‘eternal truths’ draws its sustenance. (1969a, 201)

If the tone of this early commitment to the primacy of ‘fictive” intentionality strikes us as over-enthusiastic, its fundamental validity is borne out in much of Husserl’s later writings on language, and especially in his Nachlass. (2005a; 2005b; 2008; 2012)

8. Speculations on the Origins of Language

To be sure, any attempts at exploring the origins of natural language cannot but be highly speculative. No wonder then that they were banned by the International Linguistic Society in Paris in 1866 and likewise by the London Philological Society in 1972. Still, after one and a half century of linguistic and language philosophical inquiries since then, we are now in a somewhat better position to revisit this controversial topic.¹⁹ On the premises of the present paper that (1) imaginability plays a vital role in natural language at the level of the motivated signified, and (2) must have preceded the emergence of language, it seems plausible that imaginability had a special function in the way language probably emerged in the mists of human pre-history. Given the semi-symbolic character of today’s languages, their evolution must have involved a gradual loss of iconic traces in the increasing conventionalization of signifiers and, at the same time, the necessary retention of iconicity as aboutness in the motivated signified. If so, the retention of iconicity as essential communicable resemblance relations would have been reinforced by shared modes of perception, communal activities, and intersubjective recollection.

Arguably, a crucial link between such nonverbal modes and language would have been such pre-predicative conditions as Husserl’s concepts of substantivity and adjectivity preceding verbal configurations as intentional ordering principles, such that the former would give rise to naming and general nouns, the latter to basic qualifications. (1973a, 210f.; 2005b, 400) We could extend Husserl’s analysis to verbality and other intentional attitudes functioning as precursor structures of later linguistic formations.²⁰ All of which require imaginability as a substantial, natural ingredient in the transition from nonverbal to verbal communication, a point recently supported by the observation that from the beginning “language entails high-level mindreading abilities”, (Cuccio 60) a claim that buttresses the empirical findings of Tomasello’s “intention-reading”, (Tomasello 3f.; 8) as it does Husserl’s insight into human “introjection”. (Husserl 2000, 277) At the same time, all three assertions support the thesis of the long-term, interactive evolution of the human brain in correlation with culture. Support for a gradualist view of language evolution can likewise be found in the rejection of any dichotomy between nature and culture, as argued by Jordan Zlatev, who advocates a transitional multimodal protolanguage as a link between nonverbal, hominid communication and fully fledged verbal behaviour as an expression of the human propensity for mimetic interaction. (2014; cf. also Enfield “Language in Cognition and Culture”)

None of which, however, undermines the equally plausible thesis that imaginability would have been progressively enriched by verbal feedback during the evolution of language up to the present. What those premises also suggest is that the natural-social emergence of language is likely to have occurred gradually over eons, with multiple, tentative beginnings and a multitude of miscarriages. We could formulate this speculative scenario as the thesis of radical gradualism in opposition to the now dominant catastrophe theories, the latter being committed to the claim of the singularity of the recent origin of language between about 100,000–70,000 years ago. In sharp contrast, the gradualist thesis suggests that language is more likely to have emerged much earlier, again and again in small clans, as well as having died many deaths by unsustainability or their absorption into larger fledgling speech communities. In either case, according to our premises, the driving force in linguistic emergence can be viewed as the result of pressure exerted by habitat change and increasing social complexities on the communal imagination, “demanding” a more economical form of communication than was afforded by limited nonverbal, communicative practices. It could be argued that such an evolutionary scenario may have occurred in alignment with Kant’s notion of communicability as the transcendental condition of both nonverbal and verbal communication, such that the latter naturally emerges out of the former according to need. (CJ §§ 9; 40; 83; cf. Husserl 1973d, 218n2)

From the gradualist perspective, the dominant discourse of language, summed up here under the term catastrophe theories, looks as implausible as it is popular. As the structuralist anthropologist Lévi-Strauss confidently declared, “Language could only have been born at a single stroke. Objects couldn’t just start to signify progressively … a passage was effected from the stage where nothing made sense to another where everything did”. (Kristeva 46) The gradualist perspective encourages us to argue precisely the opposite, that perception of objects and their Vorstellung gradually signified more and more intricately as they were progressively supplemented by, and embedded in, verbal contexts. Which resonates with Wittgenstein’s idea that language “is a refinement, im Anfang war die Tat”. (1976) Another structuralist theorist, Eric Gans, proposed that language is likely to have emerged out of the communal experience of death, on the “transcendental hypothesis” that mimetic gestures generated conflict and murder, followed by the repetition of death rituals giving rise to the signifier-signified relation. (1981)

The structuralist singularity thesis of the origin of language is also shored up by the stipulation of a significant event of mutation. Thus, the linguist Derek Bickerton views language as having been born as the result of a “mutational break” (1990; cf. 1981; 1987; 2007). Likewise, Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch are committed to “the emergence of language” at a certain moment in human development as tied to the acquisition of the “faculty of language” and, more precisely, to the “language faculty”. (2002, 1569–1579). While we share FLB (broad language faculty) with other species, such as involving the sensory-motor system, FLN (narrow language faculty) is said to be “uniquely human” in that it centres on recursion, conceived as a “computational mechanism”, a reductive version of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s thesis of language as a “limited means for infinite ends”. (1999, §§3-9) Much in the same vein, R.M.W. Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Languages (1997) assumes the rapid emergence of language, conceived as a form of punctuation within a period of relative equilibria. Yet it is counterintuitive to stipulate as fundamental a change as that from nonverbal communication to verbal symbolization to be so punctuated. After all, nothing complex in the broad picture of evolution exhibits precipitousness. Ironically, almost all of Dixon’s arguments testify to the very opposite, such as “new dimensions to human life”, an increase in “co-operation”, “planning”, improved “food gathering”, “population increase”, and migration, all suggesting gradual change rather than the structuralist idea of a recent and abrupt singularity.

That many linguists and theorists in other fields still write under the powerful influence of Chomsky’s core assumptions is surprising, since they have all been seriously challenged. His “syntactocentrism” (Chomsky 1957) has been shown to be flawed by Ray Jackendoff, as has been the idea that syntax is a product of language, when one can argue, perhaps more persuasively, that language has inherited basic nonverbal sequencing from communally shared perceptions of the world. (Ruthrof 2016) Chomsky’s confident assertion of the existence of a “language acquisition device” (Chomsky 1965) has been debunked by neurological research, with findings that the entire perceptual and motor-sensory regions of the brain are activated when humans engage in language. (Johnson and Lakoff 1999) Nor is Chomsky’s assumption still tenable that there exists a clear-cut disconnect between animal communication and human communication. (Chomsky 1966; 2009) Above all else, the “strong minimalist” claim of the emergence of language within a short time span of about 30,000 years is looking increasingly dubious, though it is still championed by Chomsky and a number of likeminded linguistics, without any significant modification since then. (Bolhuis et al.) Likewise deficient in explanatory force appear to be studies which place all their eggs in the biological basket. (E.g. Johnson and Lakoff 1999; Fitch 2010)²¹ What is underestimated here is the all-important social component, which is likely to have had a substantial impact on both language evolution and the concomitant evolution of the human brain.

9. Conclusion

What then makes natural language natural, in contrast with artificial languages, is that it has retained imaginable iconicity as schematized resemblance relations at the level of the motivated signified, rendering arbitrary signifiers meaningful in their instantiation by speakers of a language, as to both aboutness and tone, in agreement with a speech community. As such, we can view language as a “linguistic living body” (Sprachleib), (Husserl 2000, 694) animated with “all the non-formal ‘material of cognition'”. (Husserl 1969b, 71)

Disclosure Statement

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Notes

1 As I have argued in The Roots of Hermeneutics in Kant’s Reflective-Teleological Judgment (Springer, 2023a), in complex interpretive contexts, “truth” was replaced by the more modest notion of intelligibility in the third Critique in 1790, a message which appears to have been forgotten.

2 As formulated by Kant in the Critique of Judgment, according to which the “free play of our cognitive capacity” renders our Vorstellung of any object “generally communicable”. (CJ §9)

3 See Husserl 2000, 276. For Husserl, “the home world” is “fundamentally determined by language.” (1973d, 225) Since Vorstellung always entails Vorstellbarkeit as its necessary and inseparable condition, I sometimes use the two terms univocally where their semantic difference is not an issue.

4 According to Husserl not only does imaginability as “reproductive consciousness” belong to every act of perceiving, as a possibility, “every memorial as-if ” is a sort of “transforming fiction” and “every experience has as its counterpart a phantasy (a re-presentation) corresponding to it.” (2005, 369; 700f.; 707) Cf. also Husserl’s “soziale Geistigkeit” and “gemeingeistliche Welt“. (2005b, 75; 23)

5 A naturalist explanation of the emergence of imaginability is offered from the perspective of biology by Tecumseh Fitch.

6 However, Vorstellung in Kant is a much more important notion than the concept of idea is in empiricist philosophy. It encompasses all of consciousness apart from perception in the narrow sense.

7 The main justification for returning to Kant and Husserl is that we should avoid reinventing the philosophical wheel as much as possible in our writings. This applies specifically to Kant’s notion of schematization, as deeply anchored in human biology, and to imaginability as theorized in Husserl’s conception of intentionality.

8 Contrary to its largely negative uptake in empiricist philosophy, I argue that Kant’s schematism is a major contribution to our understanding of consciousness and has rightly left its mark on phenomenology, Gestalt theory, and the cognitive sciences, especially cognitive linguistics. See CPR A140ff./B179ff.

9 For a sketch of Kant’s overall view of natural language, see “Kant’s Conception of Natural Language” in Horst Ruthrof. The Roots of Hermeneutics in Kant’s Reflective-Teleological Judgment. (New York: Springer), pp. 93-130.

10 Cf. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses. (New York: Vintage Books).

11 According to Husserl, Bedeutung is unanschaulich, always “demanding fulfilment (erfüllungsbedürftig).” (2005b,2; 4)

12 Transitional consciousness. (2005b, 105f.; 134f.; 151; 205; 207; 2002, 38)

13 In Husserl: “einfühlende Vergegenwärtigung“. (1973b, 234; 188; 288)

14 For Husserl, the speech community is made up of persons who “stand in the unity of a tradition” and “are conscious of the norm of the habitual means of reciprocal communication and mutual influence.” (1973c, 229)

15 According to Ullrich Melle, probably written in 1914. Cf. Husserl’s remarks on “Tone as indication of sentence type” and “The unity of tone and word substrate”. (2005b, 102f.) However, he also anticipated tone in its current usage when he speaks of an “icy tone” and a “contemptuous tone” in the Nachlass.

16 I have altered the translation of “Satz” to read “sentence” instead of “proposition”. After all, Wittgenstein is talking here about natural language rather than its analytical transformations.

17 Husserl here distinguishes sharply between “empty essences as the domain of pure logic (die leeren Wesen der Domäne der reinen Logik)” and the “typical essence (typisches Wesen)” of the merely approximate (Ungefähres). While the former can be exact, the latter consists of “Typen,” that is, “apperceptive generalities.” In the first case, there is the possibility of full congruence, in the second, we will find the mere “congruence of similarities (Deckung von Ähnlichem)” within a “circle of similarity (Ähnlichkeitskreis)” or a “milieu of similarity (Ähnlichkeitsmilieu).” (2012, 42f.; 63f.; 71ff.; 106f.; 109ff.)

18 It is in “Veranschaulichung“ where our acts “become imaginable (Anschaulichwerden)” as “redeeming fulfilment (einlösende Erfüllung).” (Husserl 2005b, 143f.)

19 For a comprehensive survey of theories on the evolution of natural language, cf. Chapter 1 in George Yule, The Study of Language. 7th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

20 As Husserl elaborates, the “core-form of substantivity“ must not be “confused with the subject-form. It designates “being-for-itself”, the independence of an object”. In contrast, “adjectivity” is the “form of “in something”, of the dependence of the object-determination”. (2073a, 210f.)

21 Cf. Enfield, “Language Evolution Without Social Context?” 1600–1601.