The following is a commentary on the essay titled New Evidence for the Epicurean Theory of the Origin of Language: Philodemus, On Poems V, by Jacob Mackey and Epicurus, On nature, Book 28 by David N Sedley.
As we have seen before, the founders of Epicurean philosophy were deeply concerned with the role that language plays in our apprehension of the nature of things. The canonical faculty of prolepsis (anticipations) is tied to the use of language, and its place in the canon implies that language can be a shortcut to recalling things that were at one point empirically available to our other faculties. But language conventions can betray prolepsis, sometimes purposefully, as we see in the case of metaphors.
We are not necessarily against poetry. Philodemus says that poetry gives pleasure through excellence of diction and content. We may say that “mountains vomit clay into rivers”, and by context most people will know that we are speaking metaphorically. But we must never forget the utility of words in their context. This expression is fine when we speak poetically, but in his Epistle to Herodotus, Epicurus starts by saying that words are only useful if their clear meaning is kept in mind.
Epicurus clashed with Dialectitians from Megara. Among them, Diodorus Cronus (who was an extreme conventionalist), said that language isn’t natural. From these facts, we can imagine that Epicurus was arguing against them that language (and other phenomena) do exist and are natural.
Epicurus’ views concerning language evolved. He had begun adopting Metrodorus’ process of using conventional words (rather than the pedantic practice of some philosophers, who are very particular about their choice of obscure language) by the time he wrote On Nature 28:
“I now see, as I did not then, the particular difficulties concerning this class, of having correct names for individual things … as you (Metro) also used in those days to assign names without adapting certain conventional usages, so that you should not make plain the principle that by assigning any name one expresses an opinion, and see and reflect upon the indiscriminate treatment of words and objects.”
We see a distrust of words, and we see their preoccupation with avoiding the addition of opinion when we express ourselves, and a recognition of the great difficulty of this in our choice of words. We know that Lucretius mentions “opinion” as a category that does not belong in the canon. The argument here is that to name something is to express an opinion, which may be true or false. So the addition of opinion is a sign that a definition of a word is non-canonical, has no empirical basis, and is not based on true prolepsis.
In addition to these concerns, Epicurean anthropology recognizes three stages of the evolution of language.
First Stage: Nature teaches words
The founders believed that initially, language started by ananke (necessity) as a reaction to external stimuli. This view is held today by people like linguist Noam Chomsky, who has argued that there exists in the human brain an “inborn universal grammar”. But the ancients didn’t have a scientific field of linguistics. They only had empirical attestations from nature. They likely observed the role that certain calls have in certain communities of monkeys (if they came across them in their travels) or birds, who use calls to warn each other about the presence of predators, for mating, for warning enemies who enter their territory, and for other rudimentary uses. Award-winning studies of human reaction to the noise made by nails on a chalk board seem to indicate that this may an ancestral vestige of primate warning calls:
The authors hypothesized that it was due to predation early in human evolution; the sound bore some resemblances to the alarm call of macaque monkeys, or it may have been similar to the call of some predator. This research won one of the authors, Randolph Blake, an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006.
Second Stage: Reason develops language
So, the initial sounds and grunts made by our ancestors were wild, that is, invented by nature. Later, as humans became civilized, the founders argue that language was developed further by logismos (reason), which refined the first words. Since this stage is distinct from the third stage, I imagine that this stage did not involve an intellectual class, but emerged naturally from the intelligence of average language-users and from the pragmatic necessities of their interactions with each other and their environment.
Third Stage: Reason adds new discoveries
It’s in this final stage that the philosophers of the first Garden believed to be operating when they engaged in the practice of reassigning names. This is a practice that Confucian philosophers have also, interestingly, engaged in for the sake of clarity. It’s possible that this is a widespread practice among the intellectual classes of many cultures, and responds to real, universal problems of sophisticated human communication.
It’s also here that poets get to work on inventing novel ways of utilizing words, and sometimes these innovations end up having great utility, while at other times this creates confusion and obscures speech for the entire community.
Epicurus generally doubts the utility of definitions and insists that people use words as they are used commonly–and yet sometimes (as in Principal Doctrine 1, which uses the definition of the word “gods” rather than the word itself) it’s clear that he trusts the definition more than the word, because the word has been so corrupted by the culture that it’s best to clearly define it in conversation.
To the first Epicureans, the legitimate practice of word-coining was born from utility, rather than for aesthetics. When I wrote Tending the Epicurean Garden
Further Reading:
Against the use of empty words
