Digitality, granularity and ineffability

Digitality and granularity are two distinctive features of human language and both of them, as argued in this paper, contribute to ineffability, and the ineffability problem, not surprisingly, constitutes a serious challenge to what Harris [Harris, R. (ed.), 2002. The Language Myth in Western Culture. Curzon, Richmond] has called “the communication myth” in the Western culture. Based on a conceptual analysis of the notion of ineffability, the present paper argues that there is indeed a descriptive gap between language and experience, but sensory experience is only phenomenally ineffable in an attenuated sense, namely that the phenomenal content of sensory experience (e.g. the aroma of coffee), largely effable, cannot be conveyed in words only in an exhaustive sense. Furthermore, the strength of phenomenal ineffability is in direct proportion to that of dynamic phenomenal effect sensory experience exerts on the experiencing subject. This weak thesis of phenomenal ineffability is ultimately motivated by the map theory of language, which provides a unified explanation for what is said, what is unsaid, and what cannot be (exhaustively) said. Phenomenal ineffability is not something that should be avoided; instead, it helps to save us from a language that is too cumbersome for acquisition and communication.

Research highlights
► The ineffability problem constitutes a serious challenge to what Roy Harris has called the “communication myth”, but all traditional ineffability theses (especially the thesis of lexicogrammatical ineffability) are somewhat misleading.
► There is indeed a descriptive gap between language and experience because, even for an ideal speaker, the phenomenal content of sensory experience remains weakly ineffable in the sense that it cannot be digitally encoded in an exhaustive way, hence phenomenal ineffability.
► Phenomenal ineffability is a matter of degree, and is propotional to the phenomenal effect of sensory experience.
► Phenomenal ineffability is largely due to the digitality and granularity of human language; it arises only when the question under discussion is to fully represent the finest-grained phenomenal content of sensory experience in digital words.
► Phenomenal ineffability can be successfully explained by the map theory of language, which goes against all versions of the picture theory (and accordingly the classical code view) of language.