• Streetlight
    9.1k
    Riffing again on some thoughts inspired by Daniel Dor’s book on language (The Instruction of Imagination), but this time with respect to the question of trust. Commenting on language’s role in the bio-cultural evolution of humans, Dor notes that there’s an extensive literature on the role of the lie in advancing human society; without lying, we may be alot stupider as a species. The lie though, is a specifically linguistic phenomenon. One can deceive without language (by means of dress, say, by appearing other than what one ‘is’), but lies proper can only take place in language.

    This has massive implications: while deceptive experiences can be at least interrogated and uncovered in real-time, lies, for the most part, cannot. This has to do with the particularity of language: language allows us to speak about what is not experienced. If I make up a story and convince you of it, the entire story, every single thing about it, might be a fiction. This is how Dor puts it: "In lying ... the speaker is for the first time truly released from the bounds of experience: everything that can be said can be lied about.” This, in turn, means that language, at its core, is an institution that relies on trust. Because language, in principle, does not require any shared experiential ‘anchors’, the only guarantee of linguistic efficacy is trust.

    The distinction between the deception and the lie therefore is crucial to understand: the deception is only ever specific: one is deceived about this or that, and deception takes place against a ‘background’ of certainty against which deception takes place. The lie however, is general: the lie puts the entire institution of language at stake, it betrays the trust which, at the end of the day, is the only guarantee of linguistic efficacy. To the degree that this is the case, then language is what, for the first time, enables the primacy of doubt to take root - no pre-linguistic philosopher (if we imagine such a mythical philosopher, mired entirely in the experience of the here and now) could have ever come up with Descartes’ ‘method of doubt’ because no pre-linguistic philosopher would have been motivated to put into question the entire structure of reality.

    As Dor puts it, the very enterprise of philosophy is thus coextensive with the institution of language: the philosophical obsession with ‘truth’ and ‘certainty' is nothing other than the outcome of the possibility of the lie, which itself is only a linguistic phenomenon. One of the other reasons why I’m fascinated by this way of putting things is that it accords very nicely to an insight by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, for whom the oath is the central institution of language, insofar as the function of the oath is the guarantee of nothing other than the efficacy of language as such: "The proper context of the oath is therefore among those institutions ... whose function is to performatively affirm the truth and trustworthiness of speech” (Agamben, The Sacrament of Language). Agamben draws a whole range of consequences from this (bearing on questions of religion, faith, law, and even animality, but those issues are a but much to discuss in this space).
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    One other issue of possible interest here: the reflexivity of language, the fact that the lie can put into question the whole institution of language as such through its undermining of trust, means that language opens the way to another kind of very specific, very interesting kind of deception: a deception that appears to deceive (when in fact, it does not). This sounds strange, but consider a realistic painting of a pair of curtains, which makes one want to look behind them (a 'trompe l’oeil’: a painting that attempts to pass off as reality): the deception involved in this kind of painting is that it pretends to be other than it seems (and not, as customarily, other than it is). The realistic painting of the curtains conceals that fact that it conceals nothing: it really is just a pair of painted curtains. This is deception to the second-order: a deception that feigns to deceive.

    This is something Zizek makes a big hash of and says - following Lacan - that this is the defining mark of the human: animals can deceive, but only humans can pretend to deceive. One of the reasons for this, I want to say, is that only humans are wielders of language: because language itself can be put into question, truth itself can be utilised to deceive: “there’s no way that’s it, there’s got to be more to it than that”. Hence a quip Zizek once made about Silvio Berlusconi (ex-Italian PM), which now seems applicable to a certain President of the Free World: “He looks like an idiot, he acts like an idiot, but don’t be fooled: he really is an idiot”.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    While this is interesting, isn't it the case that language itself is experienced?Πετροκότσυφας


    Sure, but this experience-of-language is not what relies on (intersubjective) trust: we trust (or not) what is being said, not that something is being said (to ask a Wittgensteinian question: what would it mean to doubt that we are having this conversation?).
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Working backwards:

    In that sense, it seems that the primacy of doubt is impossible even in language, precisely because it is taken for granted that at least our language is meaningful. I don't see how there can be any case of doubting without a background of certainty.Πετροκότσυφας

    Ah, let me be careful about distinctions here: the 'primacy of doubt' I referred to in the OP is not a primacy that I attributed to the the functioning of language. On the contrary, I agree that trust is primary: it's precisely because trust is at the basis of all language that doubt can be parasitic upon it. The point though, is that unlike 'individual deceptions' which do not put reality in doubt, lies can in fact put trust - and thus the foundation of language - in question at a global level. Deception is not to reality as lies are to language, if I can put it that way: lies can have global effects on the efficacy of langauge, while deception only ever puts into question this or that part of reality. The effects are asymmetric.

    In game-theoretic terms, Dor speaks of liars as 'free-loading' on the system of trust that underpins language: "Language is based on trust, but once the trust is there, lying seems to be the most advantageous individual strategy. If everybody lied, however, the trust would collapse, dragging language down with it." What I said about the 'primacy of doubt' was that the experience of language - which, although founded on trust, is open, at least in principle, to global failure - is what enabled the very idea that reality itself could 'fail' - as with Cartesian philosophy. Part of my point is that this transposition (from language to reality) is an illegitimate one, even as we might be able to nonetheless trace where it might have come form.

    In any case it's the asymmetry between the effect of the deception and the effect of the lie that I'm trying to say that is specific to, and emergent from, language as an institution. So to bring it back to your first point, it's true that we don't always judge the sincerity of what is being said solely on what is being said, but the phenomenon I'm interested in, lying, only ever takes place at the level of the 'what is said'. Sweating and avoiding eye contact are not themselves lying. The utterance must take place. and it is only once it has taken place that trust - and with it language - can be put into question at a global level.
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