Structured Visions

Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we … Continue reading Episode 98 Linguistic singularities

What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ … Continue reading Episode 97 The intimacy of denial

We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions: There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true. Does that make spoken language more genuine? … Continue reading Episode 96 The Earth’s language

What would your name be without language? In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’. What would it be like if … Continue reading Episode 95 Your name without language

What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise … Continue reading Episode 94 Language and the afterlife

Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than … Continue reading Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a … Continue reading Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions

Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared … Continue reading Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood

What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the … Continue reading Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism

‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ (from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127) Can something be … Continue reading Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery