Discover the Language of the World
An Introduction to Parmenides' Philosophy of Language
We all know about Plato and his famous teacher Socrates. These two are often credited with being the first true philosophers. However, Plato and Socrates both built on a long tradition of intellectual work by those who came before them.
One of the most influential pre-Socratic philosophers was Parmenides. He was born into a rich and influential family in what is now southern Italy and earned a reputation for being a wise politician and scholar. Parmenides was so famous that Plato named one of his dialogues after him where an elder Parmenides conversed with a young Socrates.
While scholars today believe that no such visit ever took place, the fact that Plato used Parmenides’ name shows just how important a figure he was even during his own time. Today, Parmenides is considered the founder of ontology (i.e., the study of existence) and is included along with discussions of Plato and Aristotle to provide background for their metaphysics.
Here I would like to focus on a less well-known part of his thought than his ontology. I would like to present Parmenides’ view of language and how it can be helpful even today in understanding some of the most pressing issues in what is now called “philosophy of language.”
Discovering Language
Parmenides’ approach to understanding reality is very different from Heraclitus’. He says:
The one, that [it] is and that it is impossible for [it] not to be, is the path of Persuasion (for she attends upon Truth); the other, that [it] is not and that it is needful that [it] not be, that I declare to you is an altogether indiscernible track: for you could not know what is not — that cannot be done — nor indicate it. (Fr. 2 Proclus in Tim. I, 345, 18, 18; Simplicius in Phys. 116, 28 (lines 3–8))
For Parmenides, the two paths to understanding are that of experience and logical reasoning, referred to above as the indiscernible track and the path of persuasion, respectively. He rejects the way of mortals saying that it only leads to incoherence and claims that only the way of the Goddess leads to a proper understanding of the world, to truth.
Parmenides’ rejection is based on one fact; that we experience change. While we experience change, Parmenides argues that change is logically impossible. The contradiction arises from the fact that for there to be change something would have to come from nothing, that is non-being would have to be able to become being.
However, this is a logical impossibility since, by definition, non-being is not being (e.g. it is its own negation). Thus, it is impossible for there to be change since something cannot come from nothing. All things that have being must already had being, have being, and will have being.
Despite this apparent rejection of the everyday, Parmenides believes that language is connected to reality. Like others of his time, Parmenides says that language is capable of being used properly and improperly. Parmenides says a perfect example of this is how we talk about change. He explains:
Mortals have laid down believing them to be true — coming to be and perishing, being and not being, changing place and altering in bright color. (Fr. 8, 32–49, Simplicius in Phys. 146, 5)
These ways of speaking are a result of us speaking based on experience rather than from truth and thus we mislead ourselves as to what the real world is like. However, Parmenides provides us with a way out and gives us insight into what he regards as the proper use of language. Parmenides states:
“There still remains just one account of a way, that it is. On this way there are very many signs, that being uncreated and imperishable it is, whole and of a single kind and unshaken and perfect.” (Fr. 8, 1–4, Simplicius in Phys. 78, 5; 145, I)
From this passage, we can see that proper language is defined as language that does not posit anything as existing that does not exist. The signs, or words, of uncreated, imperishable, whole, of a single kind, unshaken, and perfect, are all part of a proper language. They are the direct negation, and thus rejection, of the words that Parmenides cited earlier as being mistaken.
From the notion that what is already exists (i.e. has being), Parmenides claimed that thought and language can only take things that exist as their subject. He says:
“For you will not find thinking without what is, in all that has been said. For there neither is nor will be anything else besides what is, since fate fettered it to be whole and changeless.” (Fr. 8, 32–49, Simplicius in Phys. 146, 5)
To put it another way, thought and language are only able to have as a reference something that actually exists. Since if they were to try to refer to something that did not exist it would lead to a contradiction.
Take for example the sentence of its accompanying thought ‘the apple is red’. In thinking or saying the sentence ‘the apple is red’ one posits something by which ‘red’ is a predicate of, namely the apple. But if there were no apples, one would attribute a predicate to nothing, which is incoherent. Additionally, the thought ‘the apple is red’ posits the existence of the subject, the apple. However, if apples did not exist, one would be positing that a non-existent thing exists which is a contradiction.
Language also illuminates temporal implications of Parmenides’ ontology. Bertrand Russell writes that for Parmenides,
“if a word can be used significantly, it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist.” (Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 50)
Russell goes on to give the example of the name ‘George Washington’ and says that for the name ‘George Washington’ to have meaning beyond the time that the man was alive, before or after, what it refers to must in some way exist beyond the time that the man called George Washington was alive. Thus, what ‘George Washington’ refers to is more than the physical person that was born on a certain date, lived and did things for a period of time, and then died on a certain date.
Such facts are simply a result of mortal human experience and not truth. The name ‘George Washington,’ or any word for that matter, means something for Parmenides that is not a subject of the temporal realm. Rather it means what might be called the ‘essence’ of the thing, that which always is. This allows any language that is meaningful to always be meaningful.
Language, in addition to thought, is then the thing that allows for one to escape the “indiscernible track” and follow the path of persuasion. It is language that allows for the abstraction of being, and thus truth, away from fallible experience, allowing one to speak of only that which is true.
Further, it is this abstraction in language that allows one to fully comprehend how it is that experience is fallible in that in following the natural logical conclusions that follow from proper language one sees how it is that truth is truth. To put it another way, it is the syntactic relationship between words that allows for one to see the ontological relationships between things.
It is from these linguistic implications that one can see how language is necessarily tied to the world for Parmenides. Leonard Woodbury indicates:
“Parmenides says repeatedly that we are compelled to speak, as well as to think, in a certain way. There are correct forms of words, with which thought cannot dispense, which it must use if it is to follow the right course.” (Woodbury, “Parmenides On Names,” 63)
In other words, there is a language of truth that one must use in order to be meaningful. When one uses language, one does not simply express a certain statement about what one believes to be true, but any linguistic act makes a statement about the actual world.
Woodbury argues that it is possible that Parmenides sees words as sharing the same being of the objects that they refer to. Thus, words that refer to nothing literally lack being and are necessarily meaningless and to be meaningful is to have being.
Parmenides on Language
Parmenides’ view of language stands against others of his time. He does away with the usual discussion of opposites, instead claiming that there is only one, the road to truth, and anything else necessarily leads nowhere. The end result is that proper language is in tune with this “one road” and is therefore connected to reality.
Parmenides sees language as being static just like the world that it is used to describe. Rather than the thing that unifies all, it is the thing to which all must be reconciled if anything is to have meaning. Humans match up to it rather than being part of its expressive activity.
As Woodbury puts it, Parmenides,
Conceives of a necessary expression of the real world as the manifestation of the world, not to the mind alone, but in language as well. (Woodbury, “Parmenides On Names,” 153)
Parmenides, then, desires a particular kind of language, one that does not share the same fluid modality as, say, Heraclitus, another pre-Socratic philosopher.
In fact, change is precisely the thing that must be avoided. He says that one should not be led astray by habit as a result of experience, but rather to rely on reason to stop from having a “tongue full of meaningless sound.”
For Parmenides, language is not something that is molded to the world, rather it is something that is found in the world. Of all the possible ways of talking there is a right way and one must use logical reasoning to discover what that right way of talking is.
Proper language is then like finding a needle in a haystack; one must keep searching for the needed and not to be distracted by the pragmatic, but false ‘hay’ that one is digging through.
Conclusion
In the above essay, I have tried to make it clear that Parmenides has a robust philosophy of language, one that is necessarily tied to the ontology of the world. He sees a connection between how one uses language and the worldview that one holds. The question is now, why does such a connection between language and reality matter? How does understanding Parmenides’ view help us today?
As mentioned above, the idea that language has such a strong connection to reality is not something that is taken for granted. Parmenides presents evidence and arguments that are relevant in the debate over the connection between reality and language (i.e. world and word).
More importantly however, what I have hoped to show in exploring Parmenides’ discussion of language is that he was doing philosophy of language.
Often, Pre-Socratic philosophers are not seen as having anything to contribute to current philosophical discussions. Under this view, while they give important insight into the early days of Western philosophy, their arguments contain only rudimentary thoughts, thoughts from which philosophy has since moved on. However, at least in regard to philosophy of language, this is far from true.
In order to claim a necessary connection of some kind between language and reality, Parmenides considers aspects of language that are part of the modern analytic debate on language. He discusses the nature of true statements defining truth as that which properly relates to the way things actually are. The discussion of truth naturally flows into the conversation of how it is that words have meaning. Parmenides even ventures into an early notion of modality in relation to reference, something that can be seen in the work of Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity.
Parmenides claims that words, in some way, do refer to the world. However, this view has been challenged in current debates in the philosophy of language. Philosophers such as W.V.O Quine and Donald Davidson have argued that words do in fact not refer to the world.
For example, Quine argues that providing an account of reference is impossible since all sense data are undetermined, making it impossible to precisely indicate what a word refers to. Parmenides addresses this claim directly. He says that people, whether by experience or by thought, are capable of fully determining facts about the world to the extent that one can refer to them with words.
This then shows that, contrary to what many have argued, the current philosophy of language is not something confined to modern analytic philosophy; started in the 18th or 19th century. It is something that has been considered along with other questions of metaphysics and epistemology since the earliest days of philosophy.
Language was not something that was ignored or marginalized in some of the earliest philosophical discussions of the nature of the universe. Rather, it was often at the center, playing a vital role in their understanding of the cosmos and humanity’s relationship to it.
References
Primary Text Fragments
Kirk, G S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. 2nd ed. Cambridge Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Secondary Sources
Mourelatos, Alexander P.D. The Route of Parmenides. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 2007, 1972.
Woodbury, Leonard. “Parmenides on Names.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958): 145–160.