INVENTING LANGUAGE FOR THE UNSAYABLE

Wittgenstein ended his first book with an order: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. It has been obeyed for a century, which is remarkable, because it was never an argument. It was a moratorium declared exactly where a competition should have been announced. This book breaks the moratorium in the only way that counts. Not by insisting that the deepest things are sayable after all, and not by writing lovely sentences about what lovely sentences cannot reach, but by going after the machinery. Thirty-three times it takes something our language handles badly or not at all - timelessness, entanglement, the instant a property comes into being, another person's pain, the suspicion that nobody is home behind anyone's eyes, action with no one performing it - finds the exact grammatical part that fails, designs a replacement, and states what the replacement forbids. That last word is the whole test. A proposed category has succeeded when it makes a question not unanswerable but ungrammatical: when nobody can ask where God is located, or what the electron's spin really was before anyone looked, not because the answers are hidden but because the sentences no longer assemble. Our languages already do this in small corners. Some Amazonian verbs cannot be spoken without reporting how the speaker knows. English cannot ask who is raining. The parts exist. They are installed on the weather instead of on eternity. One rule governs everything built here: no word survives that forbids nothing. The great foggy nouns - mind, being, spirit, the real - are dismissed early and never used again, on the grounds that a term nobody can be caught misusing is not a term. What replaces them is dull, specific and testable, which is exactly the trade this subject has refused to make for two thousand years. Along the way: why nearly every word we own for these things begins with a minus, and why a minus names nothing. Why the Jahai of the Malay Peninsula name smells as fast and as consistently as we name colors, which is the best evidence anywhere that such gaps close. And why Mendeleev, who left a hole in a table and filled it with properties fifteen years before anyone found the metal, is the patron saint of this enterprise - including his holes that were never filled at all. Keywords: philosophy of language, linguistics, semantics, quantum physics, Wittgenstein, cognitive science, philosophy of mind