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).