Augustine on Words in his Confessions

 Augustine, in his Confessions, stimulated a significant discussion on the nature of language. I would like to explore this matter briefly.

            In 1.6, Augustine imagines his infancy, saying that little by little he began to realize where he was and to want to make his wishes known to others, who might satisfy them. However, he could not do this, because his wishes were inside him, while other people were outside, and they had not faculty that could penetrate his mind. He would toss his arms and legs about and make noises, hoping that such few signs as he could make would show his meaning, though they were quite unlike what they were meant to mimic. If his wishes were not carried out, either because others did not understand or because what he wanted would have harmed him, he would get cross with his elders, who were not at his beck and call, and with people who were not his servants, simply because they did not attend to his wishes. He would take his revenge by crying. Of course, he remembers none of this, but he says that he has watched babies, and this is how they behave. He then observes, and this is the spiritual point he wants to make, “My infancy is long since dead, yet I am still alive.” Clearly, what he has observed in infants is not just observation, but rather, it has been shaped by the theology that will want to express later in this work and in his other books. 

            Then, in 1.8, Augustine makes what proves to be a significant account of speech. He imagines his transition from a baby unable to talk to a boy with the power of speech. He says he can remember that time, although he also says that “later on” he realized how he hand learned to speak. His elders did not show him the words by some set system of instruction, in the way that they taught him to read not long afterward. Instead, he taught himself by using the intelligence that God have him. When he tried to express his meaning by crying and making various sounds and movements so that his wishes should be obeyed, he found that he could not convey all that he meant to those around him, even though he wanted them to understand. So his memory prompted him. He noticed that people would name some object, and then turn towards whatever it was that they had named. He watched them and understood that the sound they made when they wanted to indicate that particular thing was the name that they gave to it, and their actions clearly showed what they meant. There was a kind of universal language, consisting of expressions of the face and eyes, gestures and tones of voice, that can show whether a persons means to ask for something and get it, or refuse it and have nothing to do with it. Thus, by hearing words arranged in various phrases and constantly repeated, he gradually mastered the pronunciation, he began to express his wishes by means of them. In this way, he made his wants known to his family and they made their wishes known to him. He took “a further step into the stormy life of human society,” even though he was still subject to his parents. 

            Famously, Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations (1945), with a quote from 1.8. He says that it gives us a particular picture of the essence of human language. He understands the picture it presents in this way. The individual words in language name objects. Sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture, every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. The meaning is the object for which the word stands. Augustine does not write of there being any difference between kinds of word. Thus, he is thinking primarily of language as nouns like table, chair, bread, names of people, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties. It assumes that the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself. 

            Wittgenstein then invites us to think of the following use of language. I send someone shopping. I give the person a slip marked “five red apples.” The person takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples.” He looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a color sample opposite it. He then says the series of cardinal numbers up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer. How does he know to do this? Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere. His point is that the “meaning” of the word “five” was not in question here, but only how the word “five” was used in the supposed interaction in the story. 

            His point is that Augustine has a primitive understanding of the way language functions. The picture Augustine presents is that language is meant to serve for communication between builder A and an assistant B, who must then identify blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. A calls them out, and B brings that for which A asks. This would be a complete primitive language.

            Wittgenstein grants that Augustine describes a system of communication. However, not everything that we call language is this system. Augustine has described a language system appropriate for a narrowly circumscribed region, but not the language system we actually use. For example, one might define a game in the following way, “A game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules,” but one would have to add that “games” describes much more than just “board games.” One could make the definition correct only by expressly restricting it to those types of games.

            In Par. 32, Wittgenstein suggests that Augustine describes the learning of a human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country. He seems to assume, I think Wittgenstein is quite insightful here, that the child already has a language, only not this one. The child can already think, only not yet speak. In this case, “think” would mean something like “talk to itself.” Wittgenstein himself seems to suggest this in the previous paragraph. He uses the example that one must already know something in order to ask an appropriate question. What does one have to know? He seems to suggest that Augustine may be quite right in making the assumption that some level of thought and language is going on with the child, even as it must learn to express itself in a social setting appropriate to the social setting.  

            Well, my point here is only that Wittgenstein considered what Augustine wrote important enough to take seriously and correct as he worked out his own theory of language. It is not my purpose here to describe that entire approach of Wittgenstein, but only to suggest that language is far more than Augustine describes here. 

Here are some notes from Cambridge Companion volume on Augustine.

            Augustine speculates about how he thinks he learned language. Language is not just picked up; much of it is taught, by parents and others. However, how does that succeed with infants, when the teachers cannot use language as their medium of instruction? The answer to the how question seems to be: teacher and infant communicate wordlessly, by the natural language of facial expression, tone of voice, and bodily movement. One of the many ways in which we can see pre-linguistic communication at work is in the business of teaching language itself, which can be illustrated form pointing and naming. From Augustine’s example, to point out that it would be a woeful mistake to infer from the illustration that learning the names for things is all that is necessary for mastery of a language. However, not all words are names. He makes no distinction between kinds of word. His example of expressing one’s own desires is so simple as not be far away from mere naming. Too many philosophers have adopted a picture of language as a system of names. Since Augustine knew grammar, he would not do this. He rejected the view that the essence of human language is the individual words in language name objects. As to the purpose of language, Augustine used language acquisition to test ideas about human teaching, or what passes for human teaching. He was taught to speak. Human teaching is possible; the question is finding out how it happens. How we convey the contents of one mind can be conveyed to another. It was obvious to Augustine that among humans the chief instrument of this conveyance is language. The role is so important that Augustine does not hesitate to describe it as the purpose of language. As to signs, language fulfills its purpose of conveying information by signifying. We should note that the stoics were the most potent source of intellectual endeavor over a long spread of centuries 300 BC to AD 200. Augustine received information about the Stoics through Plotinus and then through Christians around Ambrose and Simplicianus. Stocism remained an unavoidable influence. He must have known something of Stoic dialectic. In terms of isomorphism of speech and thought, he criticizes speech-thought isomorphism. Augustine seems to assume thoughts must be analyzable into constituent elements, each one signified by a distinct word. There must be a one to one correspondence between the elements of a sentence, which are words, and the elements of the thought signified by that sentence. That is speech-thought isomorphism. This view is wrong by being a mislocation, or misdescription, of one of those truths that are so obvious as to go without saying, and that therefore risk going without accurate identification: the truth that thoughts that can express beliefs, desires, questions, and the like are structured. I should prefer to explain the sense in which thoughts are structured in terms of their being a complex of the exercise of several distinct conceptual abilities. These reflections should loosen the grip on us of the doctrine that words are signs.