The Logic of Expressivity
An attempt to describe a sui generis phenomenon
In a vastly underappreciated 1978 essay, “Language and Human Nature,” Charles Taylor draws a contrast between two traditions in the philosophy of language. One tradition thinks about linguistic meaning in terms of the semiotic phenomenon of “designating,” indicating, or referring. The other organizes itself around the semiotic phenomenon of “expressing.”
When Taylor was writing the article, Anglo-American philosophy was firmly part of the first tradition.1 (It might still be.) Even the philosophers who made a splash talking about pragmatics or rehabilitating Fregean Sinne were obliged to articulate their views by explaining where their views fit, or did not fit, within the predominant picture of a linguistic item pointing beyond itself to an independently identifiable non-linguistic item.
Indeed, this picture is so entrenched as the default that you, dear reader, might be wondering what semiotic phenomenon expression could possibly be.
Taylor explains the idea of expression thus:
Something is expressed when it is embodied in such a way as to be made manifest. And ‘manifest’ must be taken here in a strong sense. Something is manifest when it is directly available for all to see. It is not manifest when there are just signs of its presence, from which we can infer that it is there, such as when I ‘see’ that you’re in your office because of your car being parked outside. In this kind of case, there is an implied contrast with another kind of situation in which I see you directly. Now we consider things expressions when they make things manifest in the stronger sense, one which cannot be contrasted with a more direct manner of presentation, one where things would be there before us ‘in person,’ as it were. [. . .] [In cases of indication and not expression], I infer to something that I am not seeing directly. Expressions, by contrast, make [it] manifest; they put us in the presence of [it].
After meditating on this idea, Taylor goes on to trace its trajectory throughout the history of philosophizing about language and to draw some sweeping lessons about the nature of the human being and the Geisteswissenschaften which study that nature. But those lessons are not my concern today.
My interest lies in his account of the semiotic-hermeneutic relationship between expressibles and their expressions. Like Taylor, I think this logic of expressivity, along with the phenomena it governs, deserves more philosophical exploration than it has received. This post is an attempt to isolate and distill this logic and explain it in my own vocabulary.
Expressing, the general idea: manifesting by embodying
On Taylor’s account, an expressible is expressed when it is manifested by being embodied. The significance of this is twofold.
First, what makes an expression a manifestation, as opposed to a mere indication, is that there is no implied contrast between being presented with the expressible in an expression and being presented with the expressible independently of its presentation in an expression. To know something by knowing it in its expression is to know it in the most direct, most immediate, most intimate way one can. An expression “puts us in the presence of” its expressible, as Taylor says.
Now, an expressible might be expressed in a variety of expressions. But no one of those expressions, if it is an expression, is “closer” to the expressed than any other expression. Each expression is a way of presenting the expressible, of giving it an appearance, of making it immediately appreciable.
Here, “direct” and “immediate” are neither synonyms of “unmediated” nor antonyms of “mediated.” For nothing available to the human mind is available unmediatedly.2 The relevant contrast, rather, as Taylor explains, is with concluding or inferring. To envision the expressed as merely indicated by its expression is to envision the possibility of perceiving the expressed in some more immediate way than through its expression. But that is to misunderstand the relationship between an expression and what it is an expression of: the expression is what gives perceptible form to the expressible in the first place. The expressed is not hidden behind its expression. It appears in its expression, even if we can recognize it only by its expression.
Which brings us to the second thread of significance. When an expressible is manifest by being embodied, it has taken a tangible form that also makes it perceptible — “directly available for all to see,” in Taylor’s phrase. This not only implies that an expression presents its expressible in a form suited to human sensibility. It also implies that an expression’s being so suited is what makes its expressible available for all, makes it public.
Being oriented to human sensibility, which is humanity-wide, just is how something can count as being possibly publicly available for grasp, whether or not it is expressed or merely indicated. Intelligibilia are nothing for us if they do not make some difference to the shared realm of the experienceable. Even the meanings of our most abstract concepts, concepts of phenomena beyond the reach of our senses, must show up for us in some way — in instrument readings, local practices, or political formations, for example — in order for us to grasp the fullness of those meanings.3 (But not only in those places, of course.)
Expressions, though, are special in their relationship to human sensibility and thus to public availability. The meaning expressed in an expression is not hinted at or suggested by the expression; the expression is not a symptom, clue, or trace; we do not have to infer the meaning. Rather, we see the meaning appearing in its expression.
Now, it might take a whole curriculum of training to recognize the meaning that so appears. But when meaning appears in a humanly sensible expression, it becomes something in-principle graspable by anyone who can exercise human sensibility. And this is so despite gradations in clarity and comprehensibility, and even if reading the meaning in the expression requires training, education, or initiation into a second nature or a culture.
What you learn to recognize, when you learn to recognize the expressible appearing in its expressions, is something that resides in those expressions, not behind them, beside them, or otherwise outside of them.
Expressions of personality as illustrative of the logic of expressivity
A simple and familiar example of knowables that are manifest to us in being embodied, that appear to us and make themselves directly known in their corporeal expressions, are the personalities of our friends. The personality of a friend appears to you in her diction, the lilt of her speech, the way she squishes her face when she laughs, how she uses her hands when she talks, the way she crosses the street, and so on. The range of expressions in which your friend makes herself known to you is not a collection of clues as to who your friend is. They are your friend, embodied. She is present to you in them and, indeed, in virtue of them. They are what let her appear to you.
If you understand what the example illustrates, you will understand that the desire to see your friend’s personality “in itself,” as it is independently of all expression, radically misfires. There is no stripping away the expressions of your friend’s personality in order to know that personality more directly. Even though your perceiving your friend’s personality is mediated by your perceiving its range of expressions, facial or otherwise gestural, the expressions do not get in the way of your knowing your friend’s personality. They are how you know that personality. They are how anyone can know that personality. They are that personality, expressed in public space and thereby in-principle appreciable by anyone who exercises human sensibility.
Knowing expressibles by knowing their expressions
The semiotic-hermeneutic phenomenon of expression seems to be a sui generis phenomenon. In this, I follow Ernst Cassirer, who, in his 1929 Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, the third volume of his great Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, cautions against assimilating the relation of expressible-and-expression to other kinds of relation, such as the causal relations found in natural indication or the conventional relations found in purely conventional indication, for fear of missing its distinctive essence.
As Robert Brandom suggests in his 2000 monograph Articulating Reasons (aka “Making Making It Explicit Explicit”), one reason expression is hard to get a handle on is that the character of the expressible that gets expressed and the character of the expressions expressing that expressible cannot be individually understood independently of understanding the relation between them. Our understanding of what a particular expressible is comes by way of understanding that and how it is expressed in its range of expressions, and our understanding of what its expressions are comes by way of understanding that and how they express it.
If this is so, we cannot positively characterize that which is being expressed in a range of expressions except by reference to what it looks like when expressed in those expressions. Expressibles appear to us, but only in sensible terms. They are present for us in their expressions, but also partly out of reach. They are not hidden, but they do come in a guise.
Expression is always the expression of something — something more, something further, something else. It is a two-term relation, which our grammar dutifully registers, making it nigh impossible to avoid marking some difference, some non-identity, between what gets expressed and the expression of it. But what that something is, is knowable only in the form of its various expressions. The category of expressible — of that which is expressed — is definable only formally as the category of beings that are both inexhaustible by their expressions and yet given to us in them.
Parting thoughts
In the Philosophische Untersuchungen of 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, in discussion of what it is to encounter another soul, that “der menschliche Körper ist das beste Bild der menschlichen Seele” and that “Ich habe nicht die Meinung, daß er eine Seele hat.” The human body is the best image of the human soul; it is the original site where, and whereby, the soul becomes perceptible, becomes present to and for humanity. I am, therefore, not of the opinion that you have a soul. I know of your soul, but not because some hypothesis of mine has been confirmed. Your soul is pretheoretically manifest to me in your speech, gesture, and bearing.
Manifest to me though it may be, the soul that is expressed, that is given to us through your body, does seem to be more than the sum of its expressions. In 1979’s The Claim of Reason, meditating upon Wittgenstein’s insight and what it might mean, Stanley Cavell looks this tension squarely in the face. It is a tension, he explains, that is never resolved and so one we must inhabit. Indeed, the simultaneous presence and elusiveness of the other is constitutive of our encounter with her. What it is to know another soul in its expressions just is to know that soul directly but only ever partially. This, Cavell claims, is the perfectly ordinary tension in which the deep truth of skepticism is revealed.
It is also, I would add, the tension in which love, as a desire to always want more of the beloved, becomes possible and palpable.
The story I would tell about the twentieth-century recrudescence in Anglo-American philosophy of the idea of reference would be a story about its falling under the spell of what is now called model-theoretic semantics and its extensionalist presuppositions, rightfully acknowledged for its illuminatingness and mathematical tractability in certain endeavors but wrongfully confused for a picture of what it must or can only be for something thing to mean something.
By what are those things which are available to the human mind mediated? The shortest answer is: whatever comes with one’s way of belonging to the overlapping forms of life one belongs to.
It should be clear I am drawing on the sort of semiotically inspired pragmatism of meaning laid out by Charles Sanders Peirce in, for example, his 1878 article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” (A pragmatism of meaning is not to be confused with the sort of pragmatism of truth advocated by William James.) But I am also inspired here by my readings of the works of Plato, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Ryle.
This was very interesting. For context, I used to be a Chomskyan linguist but I became dissatisfied with the way the theory tries to relate sentence forms to interpretations, so I tried to find satisfaction in Peircean semiotics for a while but - though I think Peirce has applications - I was later convinced by Wittgenstein that Peirce was still dealing with abstractions that presuppose an existing system of signification, and I wanted to understand how meaning is constructed at all. So there are lots of avenues I could go down - too many!
The main thing I want to comment on is your remark that "expression is always the expression of something — something more, something further, something else." There are different ways of reading this but it risks a collapse back into referentialism and, though I haven't read Cassirer, I would worry that you'd thereby end up with an analysis where expression is not sui generis, but is rather the specific relation which consists of an object being indicated by its facets. It would be the story of the blind men and the elephant, where each man receives an im-pression of the elephant, but instead of the expressed being the sum of their potential impressions, it would be something additional which is not sensible as an expression: the answer to the riddle.
Perhaps the impetus to say that there's some expressed thing beyond its expressions comes from the feeling that, though the expressed is constituted by its expressions, we could never actually make it entirely concrete - however much we manifest it, we cannot exhaust it; the impressions it could make are boundless. But note that we could maintain this with slightly less than what you said, proposing instead that expression always holds a promise of something more, without committing to the actual existence of this further thing.
Expression then becomes sui generis and boundless because the answer to the question "how do we identify expressions as belonging with one another without the expressed to bind them?" is that we construct the idea of the expressed together. It's our creativity and social practices which are inexhaustible. We play with riddles as though they have answers, but no answer is final - they're always subject to interpretation, argument and further riddling - so can we even call them answers? It doesn't matter because the mere promise of answers is enough to play the game.