ABSTRACT
The possibility of linguistic redress depends on the ability of tragic literature to express suffering in words. But it is often held that language cannot express pain and suffering. In this chapter I argue that this popular view is incoherent. Why is the ‘inexpressibility’ thesis so popular? My diagnosis is that it involves a confusion of word and thing. When people complain that language is inadequate to express pain, they are, in effect, complaining that the words we use to talk about pains are not themselves pains. There are several reasons why people are attracted to the inexpressibility thesis, despite its incoherence. It is often felt that we can only do justice to the sheer awfulness of something by calling it ‘indescribable’. Or it is held that to name something terrible would be to break a taboo; some things ought not to be named. Or we are influenced by the fact that certain experiences can only be understood by those who have undergone something similar: this is true, but it applies quite generally to understanding language, and does not undermine language’s adequacy to express the world. It is also the case that suffering can be so acute that it inhibits speech on the part of the sufferer. A final reason for the popularity of the ‘inexpressibility’ thesis is that pain is sometimes assimilated to a kind of Kantian Ding an sich, beyond the reach of public language. Words, as Frege taught us, are subject to a sense–reference distinction, and a limited ineffability thesis applies to language in the following respect: the way in which an item of language refers (that is, its sense) may not be precisely duplicated by any other item of language. The same applies to non-verbal expressions that have semantic significance: the sense of Dido’s silence towards Aeneas in Virgil’s underworld could not be precisely duplicated by any form of words. But this spin-off of the sense–reference distinction does not, I argue, derogate from language’s competence: it is simply a reflection of the trivial logical point that one piece of language (or non-language) cannot do what another piece of language (or non-language) does in precisely the same way, without being the same piece of language (or non-language). A piece of language cannot duplicate the how of another piece of language (or non-language), but this is so without detriment to its ability to express the what.
