Ted Chiang is not only a good writer but a sharp and interesting thinker, a combination that is sadly rare. This LARB interview with Julien Crockett (archived) is well worth reading in full, but I’ll pull out the passage about language:
Your work often explores the way tools mediate our relationship with reality. One such tool is language. You write about language perhaps most popularly in “Story of Your Life” (1998), the basis for the film Arrival (2016), but also in “Understand” (1991), exploring what would happen if we had a medical treatment for increasing intelligence. Receiving the treatment after an accident, the main character grows frustrated by the limits of conventional language:
I’m designing a new language. I’ve reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought. […]
I’ll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect coexpressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent.
Do you think there could be a “better” language? Or is it just mathematics?
Umberto Eco wrote a book called The Search for the Perfect Language (1994), which is a history of the idea that there exists a perfect language. At one point in history, scholars believed the perfect language was the language that Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden or the language angels speak. Later on, scholars shifted to the idea that it was possible to construct an artificial language that was perfect, in the sense that it would be completely unambiguous and bear a direct relationship to reality.
Modern linguistics holds that this idea is nonsensical. It’s foundational to our modern conception of language that the relationship between any given word and the concept it is assigned to is arbitrary. But I think that many of us can relate to the desire for a language that expresses exactly what we mean unambiguously. We’ve all tried to convey something and wished there were a word for it, but that’s not a problem of English or French or German—that’s a problem of language itself. And even though I know a perfect language is impossible, the idea continues to fascinate me.
As for the question of whether mathematics could be a better language, the reason that mathematics is useful is precisely what makes it unsuitable as a general language. Mathematics is extremely precise, but it’s limited to a specific domain. Scientists who speak different languages can use the same mathematics, but they still have to rely on their native languages when they publish a paper; they can’t say everything they need to say with equations alone. Language has to support every type of communication that humans engage in, from debates between politicians to pillow talk between lovers. That’s not what mathematics is for. We could be holding this conversation in any human language that we both understand, but we couldn’t hold it in mathematical equations. As soon as you try and modify mathematics so that it can do those things, it ceases to be mathematics.
I grew up in a French household, and I often feel that there are French words and expressions that better capture what I want to express than any English word or expression could.
Eco writes that when European scholars were arguing about what language Adam and Eve spoke, each one typically argued in favor of the language he himself spoke. So Flemish scholars said that Adam and Eve obviously must have spoken Flemish, because Flemish is the most perfect expression of human thought.
For the Adam-and-Eve theory, cf. the first LH post; we discussed Arrival in 2016. And he has a lot of sensible things to say about LLMs and so-called AI; I can’t resist quoting this snippet:
LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything.
My favourite word is “ineffable”.
I was kinda predisposed to sniff at this, because I reckon the McGuffin of “Story of your life” is basically higher technobabble (admittedly, definitely “higher”), but everything Chiang says in this interview is extremely sensible. Especially about “AI.”
The corpo-rat pushers of “AI” are not stupid, and although some among them probably do believe their own hype (I suspect that the less intelligent, like Eglon*, may really do so) I am sure that most do not. The hype is to distract people from what they are really up to with this.
* He thinks he’s the protagonist of a Heinlein novel based on an original idea by Ayn Rand.
My favourite word is “ineffable”
You don’t say!
That kind of language already exists: Ithkuil.
I don’t believe that it’s impossible for language to express exact thoughts; it’s just not efficient. It would require too much constant effort for very little perceivable gain. It’s easier to communicate faster and “good enough” and then repeat in other words if you notice that people misunderstood your point.
And people seem to forget that we’re not machines. We weren’t evolved to communicate abstract ideas in a precise manner, so much as social cues. Most of our communication throughout history has been non-verbal and about communicating stuff like “I’m trustworthy”, “I’m interested in what you’re saying”, etc.
A lot of communication is also about either simple stuff “please, pass me the mug” or an excuse to spend time with other people and tell them that you like them and dislike everyone outside your tribe.
The corpo-rat pushers of “AI” are not stupid, and although some among them probably do believe their own hype …
Indeed. Then this is a worry: AI should replace some work of civil servants, Starmer to announce. I’d be pretty certain that a technobabble Sir Humphrey would be less entertaining than Nigel Hawthorne.
I wrote the above before seeing this. Sometimes you can’t even make it up:
Replacing government workers with AI appears to be the endgame of DOGE as well. For whatever nefarious reason, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to be publicizing that aspect of the project. It is course quite possible that Trump is completely unaware of the details.
@AntC:
Too right about Starmer and AI.
But then, he replaced the head of the Competition and Markets Authority with a man who used to be head of Amazon UK.
There are some pretty suspect advisers in there …
(I am espousing the traditional Russian trope here: the Tsar loves us like his children, but he is poorly advised by bad counsellors.)
Cory Doctorow pointed out that one of the criteria for successful deployment of “AI” is that it shouldn’t matter when it fails, because the victims of the failure have no real options for redress. So it actually makes sense for a regime without any actual interest in governing in the interests of the people. But in the UK, this has to be attributed merely to culpable gullibility.
I don’t believe that it’s impossible for language to express exact thoughts; it’s just not efficient.
There is no such thing as “exact thoughts.” There are, of course, exact statements in mathematics, but we do not think in mathematics (except, of course, for mathematicians, who do not count as “we” because they are not here, they are doing mathematical thinking somewhere else).
I’d say it’s impossible in principle, no matter how sophisticated our thought processes might be.
The world itself does not obligingly divide up into elements which could all be labelled precisely. One of the many implausibilities of the Tractatus, even if one were to accept the picture theory of how language relates to the world, is that nobody can say what an “atomic fact” would actually look like.
Even the purportedly transcendent world of mathematics rests on philosophical foundations of sand, a fact that most mathematicians cope with by never thinking about it. (Much like the rest of us.)
a fact that most mathematicians cope with by never thinking about it.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
(except, of course, for mathematicians, who do not count as “we” because they are not here, they are doing mathematical thinking somewhere else).
I’m here! If a long-time-reader-first-time-commenter counts.
There was enough non-technobabble to hold onto in the description of Heptapod B in Story of Your Life that it was one of Sai’s inspirations for our joint conlang UNLWS. Admittedly, some of the more fanciful properties that Sai was keen on, like single strokes that wind up forming part of many different words, aren’t realised in UNLWS as more than poetic devices.
Excellent! I was hoping to lure stray mathematicians out of the woodwork. And I’m glad to hear Chiang’s story was useful.
Kleist comes to mind here:
“Nur weil der Gedanke, um zu erscheinen, wie jene flüchtigen, undarstellbaren, chemischen Stoffe, mit etwas Gröberem, Körperlichen, verbunden sein muß: nur darum bediene ich mich, wenn ich mich dir mitteilen will, und nur darum bedarfst du, um mich zu verstehen, der Rede, Sprache, des Rhythmus, Wohlklangs usw.”
der Gedanke, …wie jene flüchtigen, undarstellbaren, chemischen Stoffe
Stick-figure esthetics that try to ignore the passage of time. They serve as excuses for disappointment over any given performance. Practice more, try something else next time.
The Heartstopper plot shows how teenagers figure out things nowadays, using their smartphones. They write a text on an impulse, reread it, push the delete button and write something else. It’s a motif throughout the series – using words to help you think. One step backwards, two forward.
Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Texten. Kleist wised up at some point.
I haven’t dipped into it in some years, but somewhere on some bookshelf in some room in my house is a copy of the late James McCawley’s _Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic . . . But Were Ashamed to Ask_, which touches on how the alleged imprecision of any given natural language does or doesn’t correspond to the alleged precision of various artificial/formal systems of notation/expression.
As Borges says of John Wilkins, (see also Sapir), a language classifies the World, but we unfortunately don’t know what the World is.
Mathematics is a language for special purposes, \eg like legal jargon which demands extra attention to quantifiers and referents. It is not a spoken language. It is distinguished by its useful uncountable supply of pronouns (x,y,z, \alpha,\beta) \etc and a cultural emphasis on brevity and precision. It is perhaps best regarded as a register, with various high and low-church variations. Unlike many human institutions, \it{pace} DE’s qualms, it seems very reliable.
[One of its great features is its comfort with metaphors – the radius of a circle is to its are J a as a number is to its square – and is in some sense designed for their manipulation. Don’t get me started about language vs cognition, I will try to tell you about semi-simplicial sets…]
Here’s J J Sylvester’s oration for Founder’s Day at JHU:
Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer’s gaze: it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence…
sorry for typo: the radius of a circle is to its area as a number is to its square.
More generally, if A is to B as C is to D , ie
A : B :: C : D
then
A x D = C x B
[discuss ? ]
A x D = C x B
It states the determinant of a singular 2×2 matrix
[A C
B D]
That is, A x D – C x B = 0.
That’s just a remark. Doesn’t count as discussion.
Off and on for decades I’ve wondered what the significance of the determinant is. I see now that the whole business of linear transformations is (so to speak) an extended meditation on proportionality: A : B :: C : D
Proportionality is a fly in the soup. It messes with invertibility. It’s a kind of symmetry that messes up other kinds.
using words to help you think
“how do i know what i think until i hear what i say”
Yeah. Then you know what you think, for a while anyway.
Or alternately “… until I see what I say”. Quote Investigator found no particular source; E.M. Forster attributed it to “that old lady in the anecdote”.
This Quote Investigator page gives a particular source:
#
The earliest match known to QI appeared in the 1926 book “The Art of Thought” by Graham Wallas who was Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of London. Wallas suggested that the processes of thinking and expressing were entangled for the poet because the precise selection of words was crucial to success. Wallas attributed the saying under examination to an anonymous young girl. Boldface added to excerpts by QI.
The next match known to QI appeared in the 1927 book “Aspects Of The Novel” by the prominent literary figure E. M. Forster who discussed the recent novel “Les Faux Monnayeurs” (“The Counterfeiters”) by André Gide …
#
Fidelity to QI compelled me to reproduce their version of Gide’s title, without the hyphen. I’m so sorry about that.
@jack morava: It was, of course, a huge advance when Eudoxus of Cnidus realized that was true and meaningful even when the four numbers were not in integral ratios.
Ithkuil, impressive as it is, is pretty much just more (poly)synthetic than natural languages; it expresses the same things in fewer words – at the cost of a very large phoneme inventory.
The endgame, and current practice, of the Muskovites seems to be to fire government workers without replacement. Just have less government! Less of a country! In particular, first of all, nobody to check if you’ve paid your taxes.
Any necessary evil of a remainder (I don’t know if Phony Stark is a minarchist) can still be handwaved in the general direction of AI, but that seems more like an afterthought.
Less of a country!
Rendering America (and the world) less habitable is a ploy to encourage emigration to the realm of the Emperor of Mars.
In particular, first of all, nobody to check if you’ve paid your taxes.
Since we’re replacing income taxes with tariffs there will be no need for the IRS at any rate.
@ Brett:
Indeed it raises the question of whether A,B,C,D need to be numbers at all. If the proton is to the electron as the sun is to the earth, in what combinatory structure is
proton x earth = sun x electron ?
This may be related to `scissors congruence’ but that’s another story.
Po moyemu I don’t know what I think until I descend the staircase or open the box.
@ Stu Clayton :
Only on seeing your remark did I realize that what I learned in 3^\rd grade as
A / B = C / D
can be restated as
(B,D)^\T \cdot (A,C) = 0
\ie that the vector (A,C) is perpendicular to the reflection [ T(x,y) = (y,x) ] of the vector (B,D), in some context in which \eg ravens and writingdesks take values.
This gives me a chance to say that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snell%27s_law
(a key example in Chiang’s story) is a metaphor that says that the ratios of (the sines of but never mind) angles of incidence equal the ratio of the refractive indices of the media. [The r.h.s. quantities are themselves ratios…]] Similarly for Archimedes and the ratio of densities of gold and water…
The Archimedes story was much later fan fiction. It was probably prompted by the fact it was known he had authored a lost work on the equilibrium of floating bodies, which is much more advanced than just using liquid displacement to calculate specific gravity.
emigration to the realm of the Emperor of Mars.
I wish they’d get a move on and blast him to there. Let not the effort be held back by trifling details like organising a return trip.
@ Brett,
Whoever it was, I believe that was the first measurement of a physical quantity in numerical terms (\ie of the relative density or specific gravity of gold or electrum vs water) in the history of the universe…
Apologies also for missing sign in the reflection operation T(x,y) = (-y,x) used above.
Here’s another relevant quote from Chiang on language and AI:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art