ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI: PICTURES, QUOTATIONS AND DISTINCTIONS CHAPTER 8: EXORCISING CONCEPTS

Robert Sokolowski, in this extract, spends much time and effort describing and then denying the existence of concepts. Concepts simply do not exist, according to him, nor do mental words, interior words, intelligible species, ideas, notions, cognitive contents and abstract entities1, or any other word or combination of words trying to signify the extremely widespread concept (!) of concept. In the whole history of philosophy, Sokolowski reckons that only William of Ockham and Gilbert Ryle claimed likewise the strict non-existence of concepts.2 Everybody else, it seems, accepted, under various names, their existence. The style of Robert Sokolowskis argument is simple, pedagogical and repetitive, for he tries in a short piece to uproot a widespread, deep and rarely questioned understanding of language and words. Robert Sokolowki first presents at length the position he argues against, in order to correct it with his own phenomenological position. The critique of the concept of concept is overly sweeping to my view, and its definition too broad: we do not know whether he is rejecting, as concept, a substantialised, independent idea or a meaning distinct but inseparable from a sound. The lack of precision in the definition of concept matches the lack of precision in the presentation of his thesis. By the end of our reading session, I had a general idea of what Robert Sokolowski was rejecting: the concept in all its conceivable (!) forms; but I could not really define to my satisfaction what he was advocating. This remains unclear. Although he insists, with adequate examples3, (I thought he had invented for this purpose the word persimmons) that language, in its unity, is meaning, that words are what they mean, he still cannot deny that language also has meaning. Thus in his description of words, we find (1) the speaker; (2) the sound, the phonemic dimension of the word; (3) the thing being named or referred to through the use of the word; (4) someone who hears and understands the word.4 It seems that number 3 matches what everyone else would call concept, particularly in case of immaterial
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thing, like fear or mercy, or even God. In any case, number 3 provides a meaning for number 2. What Sokolowski sets out to prove is the fundamental unity of sound and meaning in a one given word, whereby meaning does not precede sound, either temporally or hierarchically. He also argues for the intentionality behind our use of language, which affects our choices of word. This is highlighted by his insistence that words, to exist, need a speaker and a listener, who can also understand them. This last point is properly phenomenological, as was pointed out during our common reading. The fundamental unity of sound and meaning in the word, whereby the word itself carries the meaning to the other person, and does not make it glow5 or awakens it in the others consciousness is a valid point. In that case, Sokolowski proclaims: there is no need to appeal to a concept or idea as a mental entity6. Thus meaning does not precede sound in the mind of the speaker or succeed it in the mind of the listener. For Sokolowski, language is not thought made communicable, but language is thought, or rather thought is language. Thus his interpretation brings words and things more closely together without a concept mediating between then7. This very immediacy of language, wherein the thing being thought and the thing being said are one gives us the ability to deal with the absent8. What is absent to our senses is not always there in our minds, under the form of mental picture, but is actually made present by the use of language, carrying at once sound and meaning. This is an interesting point to be brought in the great debate around the word idea and their pre-existence in the mind. The use of language is also unthinkable, for Sokolowski, outside dialogue between at least two persons. In a true phenomenological manner, Sokolowski sets out to show that any truer understanding of language needs to take account of the speaker, and his intention, and of the listener, who understands what is said to him in the manner used. Language, in its fundamental unity, originates from human beings (not animals) and is born in utterance and in reception: We are constituted as human beings and as speakers not by the emergence of mental entities, but by our persistent

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ability to take what we experience as presented by, or as presentable to, someone in speech.9. When our little group encountered this theory, the reception was somewhat dubious. Even though we read the text so as to give language the widest and deepest possible definition, I could not see clearly how human thought, inseparably and necessarily expressed in human words between two persons, was not reduced and indeed limited to the form of words, to intentional language. This may be what Robert Sokolowski means. In that case, I do not think that this does justice to the human mind, whether mental entities exist or not. And I hope people generally know (indeed, not explicitly) what they intend to say, or to mean, before they open their mouths, just as I know what I generally intend to write before the painful process of putting it into words begin. I certainly do not see how Sokolowskis view can be reconciled with Newmans Illative Sense. However, Robert Sokolowskis views are refreshing against the classical background of the dualism of ideas and words. It carries anthropological resonances, when uniting so completely sound and meaning, matter and form, accident and substance. It should be fitting that the human person, indivisibly body and soul, should thus embody the form of his/her thought in the matter of words, doing so only within the context of the society, or interpersonality, towards and from another. This text enriches greatly or previous study of epistemology, but instead of providing answers, rather points out to questions that could be raised, in the study of language and thought. Sokolowskis text adds the phenomenologist point of view to a panel of epistemological understandings covered thus far, and enriches the question while fuelling the debate.

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