The curse of the perceptual: a case from kinaesthesia

Abstract

Abstract Debate in philosophy of language and linguistics has focused on conceptual representations/propositional thought; as a result there has been little discussion on the effability of perceptual or, more generally, phenomenal representations and the communicative difficulties associated with them. In this paper, I start from an example based on the relative ineffability of kinaesthetic representations, i. e. representations involving bodily posture and movement, and then generalise the discussion by looking at the reasons why – even when there are no limits on either the richness of available contexts or the ways in which contextual material could be used to enrich linguistically encoded meanings – perceptual/phenomenal representations test our expressive capacities to the limit. Some recent work on linguistics suggests that the ineffability problem arises mainly with words whose linguistic meanings are tightly associated with perception. Arguing that a much wider variety of linguistic expressions can evoke phenomenal states – including proper names, whose main function is referential – I will try to show that the challenges phenomenal experience poses for our communicative abilities reach well beyond the limited range of those expressions tightly associated with emotion and perception.