Philosophical competence, language, and the perplexing Gavagai problem

Many grad students at the department where I work (Saint Louis University, philosophy) are fluent Latinists. In the hallways they make constructions such as these for fun in Latin (I am unfortunately not so endowed, so I’ll give you my approximation in English):  

Q: Whether it is true that there are alligators in Florida?

A: It might seem there are no alligators in Florida, for such reports are no more than hearsay…

In this respect, my department is somewhat of an outlier. Even passive competence in a second language at anglophone departments is at an all-time low, and language requirements at universities are being cut back or altogether axed. This lack of linguistic competence presents a problem: it cuts us off from our own rich philosophical traditions and it prevents serious and deep engagement with other traditions where the primary texts are in languages other than our own.

Christoph Harbsmeier, at a conference in Singapore I attended just now, lamented this loss of language. He is a senior German scholar of Chinese, and spent time in multiple countries. He worked at the University of Oslo, where he spoke with the legendary Arne Naess in Norwegian. In addition, he not only speaks Mandarin fluently (and reads classical Chinese as one might expect from a scholar in Chinese history and linguistics), he also knows Latin, Greek, some Sanskrit, French, German (of course), Polish (which he said he took with the sole aim to better understand Tarski—given the notorious complexity of this language I hope for his sake Tarski was worth it for him), and, of course English.

Each of us ESL speakers has at least two languages, a fact that is curiously regarded as an impediment rather than an advantage because of the worry of non-idiomatic English (see some more thoughts on English as a lingua franca by Eric Schwitzgebel, here).

In Harbsmeier’s view, any philosopher who is only competent in English (or any other language for that matter), suffers a severe cognitive and epistemic disadvantage. The starting point for his talk was W.V.O Quine’s problem of radical translation (discussed in Word and Object, 1960) where a native speaker exclaims “Gavagai!” and you, a linguist, wonder whether this word might mean “rabbit.” In a similar vein, should we translate the crucial Confucian concept of cheng as sincerity, authenticity, or wholeheartedness? The holism inherent in Quine’s conception of language and thought threatens any adequate translation of cheng because to really understand this idea it you must know that Confucianism is among others about self-authentication, getting rid of doxastic and motivational conflicts, and become whole within yourself as you avail yourself of the finely-honed cognitive technology of the rituals of the sage kings of the Western Zhou.

Closely connected to linguistic competence is cultural competence. Harbsmeier agreed with someone during the Q and A that some translations are relatively speaking straightforward, for instance, as his interlocutor said, “a rose is a rose is a rose”—this is, allegedly, a straight botanical fact. However, as Gertrude Stein already implied when she penned that famous line, the point is that a rose is not just a rose. A rose is a flower with rich cultural connotations that vary across cultures.

In a recent public address, Harvey Lederman argues for the disciplinary autonomy of Chinese philosophy. He argues that such work involves, necessarily, a close, patient, unglamorous engagement with the primary sources in their original language, reading them with “rigor, care and precision.” Herein lies an enormous difficulty for those who, like me, merely dabble in Chinese philosophy and only have a bit of Mandarin and even less classical Chinese.

The severe difficulty of relying on translation was recently brought vividly to me in a graduate seminar where my students and I looked at Wang Yangming’s responses to questions posed by students on the Great Learning (da xue), a chapter in a pre-Qin Confucian text. Wang Yangming, a Ming dynasty neo-Confucian author, objects to Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the relevant lines in Great Learning. He says:

And so, enlightening one’s enlightened Virtue must find expression in loving the people, and loving the people simply is the way one enlightens one’s enlightened virtue. (Trans PJ Ivanhoe) 

Wang, unlike his predecessor Zhu Xi, does not think enlightening one’s enlightened virtue (ming ming de) lies in renewing the people but in loving the people. He objects to Zhu Xi’s innovation in this text which had snuck in since the Song dynasty. Wang preserves the older meaning. But how could renewing and loving the people be two such different readings of the same text?

One of my grad students who is Chinese and visiting from mainland China explained that it is a confusion or perhaps deliberate emendation on Zhu Xi’s part where loving the people (qinmin 親民, where the sense of love is specifically proximate or familial) became to renovate or renew (xinmin,新民), that is the same character as for New Years (xin nian). This and other subtleties you will not get if you do not study classical Chinese.

So much of our competence in other languages is down to linguistic luck. You have moved as a child or as an adult, or as in my case, grew up in Belgium where it is obligatory to learn the three national languages (French, Dutch/Flemish, and German) and the education is of good quality. Beyond that, there is a genuine problem of investing in another language even in graduate school. Learning a language is slow, unrewarding, and unproductive for a significant period. You must submit obediently (as Iris Murdoch, I believe, pointed out) to the peculiarities of the language. In that respect, learning a language in its slowness and lack of immediate reward mimics the model of Chinese philosophy as Lederman puts forward: patient, unglamorous, slow.

Our students are already expected to do so much. It is unsurprising that language and logic and other such requirements that emphasize a certain well-roundedness are disappearing as the pressures mount to publish. Whereas it was fine to just focus on coursework in the first years (I’m taking the American context here, I know it differs between countries) they must now also already do “their own” research so as to get ahead in the publication game (as this question by Lila Graham makes clear).

With all those pressures, especially the regrettable pressure to already publish in grad school, languages land on the back burner. At the same time, there is pressure for philosophers to expand outward, to engage in the study of less commonly taught philosophical traditions. These two aims are in tension. Productivity and linguistic competence pose competing demands that a student nowadays, especially one who grew up in a monolingual anglophone environment, cannot easily both satisfy.

Are we then forced to remain at the edges and dabble? I do think Harvey Lederman is right that a deep and serious engagement with Chinese philosophy requires competence in classical Chinese. I am going to give it another shot to learn more classical Chinese, but I don’t think at this point that I’ll ever be good enough to bridge that gap that Justin Tiwald told me presents the greatest obstacle. Many people, like me, can decipher some common phrases with the aid of a dictionary or put translation and original side by side and compare (as CTEXT gives us resources for pre-Qin philosophy especially, it’s fun to try you can do this for instance after you worked through Bryan Van Norden’s Classical Chinese for Everyone). But few can make a fresh translation from scratch. Tiwald’s advice is to form a translation group and put in the collective elbow grease. A student seriously considering to specialize in Chinese philosophy should probably do this.

I don’t have a clear answer to these questions of how we can surmount linguistic luck and break out of the cognitive prison of monolingualism. Here’s a closing thought. When I was in Chile this summer and spoke to quite some Portuguese-speaking Brazilian philosophers one of them drew my attention to the fact that Quine was fluent in Portuguese and that Quine was proud of this. He would lecture in Portuguese while he was in Brazil in the 1940s, and even wrote a book in philosophical logic in Portuguese. It was only very recently translated in English. As someone with Portuguese heritage it intrigues me that so few philosophical works have originally been written in that language, compared to other Romance languages. Quine was competent in several languages. This sheds, I think, an interesting new light on the Gavagai thought experiment. When we think about such concepts as cheng, xiao (roughly, filial piety), or even less laden ones such as loving and renewing, are we shut out from a full understanding and left to grasp to the elusive rabbit or, for that matter, the undetached rabbit parts?

Comments

[moss roberts]

The Daode Jing begins with the impermanence of labels 名可名非常名。

[Filippo Contesi]

Making philosophy departments more international by providing more educational, hiring and other opportunities to non-native speakers would be a free and easy way to start addressing the problem:

https://contesi.wordpress.com/bp/

[Marina]

Due to the specialized nature of the subject matter, I recently reached out academics in the US, Canada, and the UK in order to review articles written in Spanish. They only needed to be able to read Spanish, as the actual review could be done in English. Surprisingly, not a single person agreed to undertake the review. While some of them may not have responded or declined due to their lack of interest in a South American journal or to lack of time, others likely declined because they were unable to read languages other than English (and using an AI to do the translation was probably too time-consuming for them, although I need to use it every time I write in English to create a text that they will not criticize for its poor English).

[Jacob Joseph Andrews]

I'm a philosopher with an AOS that requires knowledge of multiple languages, and I definitely feel this pressure.

I'm also a foreign language teacher, and I will say this: learning a language is time consuming, but it doesn't have to be tedious, or intellectually taxing *in the same way* as philosophy. Even if you're learning a language for research purposes, taking an input-based approach, at least partially, is the way to go. E.g., YouTube chanknels like Aleph with Beth for Hebrew or Latin YouTubers like Luke Ranieri and Carla Hurt. Nothing will make languages easy, but they can become a break from academic work rather than an added burden.

[F]

In the past, at least in old European institutions, it was commonly expected for a scholar, not necessarily only in the humanities, to know the main "languages of culture", as they were known back then, even if this was by and large unnecessary for their scholarship. This was presumably tied to elitism in university access and education, and social homogeneity in the selection of permanent staff (upper-middle class). The kind of education and experiences that lead to mastery of several languages (and the "right" languages) by the time one is in grad school still point toward these "privilege" considerations, while it is my impression that academia has been democratizing (and upper-middle-class folks pick other careers).