Cratylism and the Linguistic turn

In an article on the Cratylus in the current issue of Modern Theology , Catherine Pickstock asks whether Socrates/Plato is/are Cratylists, whether they believe that words are linked, perhaps onomatopoetically, to the things they signify, or if they argue for a purely conventional understanding of the relation of sign and thing.

Along the way, Pickstock discusses two arguments that would seem to make the linguistic turn (which she characterizes as the “semi-materialist” view that we cannot think without language) and Cratylism incompatible. She doesn’t think either works.

First, she raises Gadamer’s objection that, if we only think in language, we can never check language against reality to see if it is appropriate to reality. If I only access the feline on my sofa through the word “cat,” then there is no way for me to see if the real feline is genuine “catty.” Pickstock’s response is to turn this argument back against the conventionalist non-Cratylists: If we cannot check language against reality, we can’t determine that the words we use are arbitrary either. The linguistic turn thus doesn’t answer the question about the naturalness or conventionality/arbitrariness of language. the two issues are distinct.

Second, there is the objection that Cratylism assumes a noun-based theory of language – a set of objects to which we attach words that have a certain appropriateness to the thing they name. Though this view is sometimes attributed to Plato, Pickstock disputes this, arging that Plato’s illustration of naming is not affixing a label to an object but a movement of pointing or gesturing. Speaking and naming is not a matter of mirroring reality, but sumpheron , bearing with, carrying along. When the soul names, the soul moves toward the good and true and beautiful, and this movement of the individual soul is caught up in the movement of the world-soul toward the good. Naming furthers “the teleological movement of reality.”

She points to the fact that in the Cratylus Plato uses images of generation to describe naming, and concludes that language and reality are both about “generation and non-identical repetition,” insisting that for Plato this generation and repetition does not “necessarily” imply “debasement.” It well might; to name is to risk debasement and falsification. But it is not determined that it will be so. Naming a child – naming anything – demands a judgment about the appropriateness of the name to the thing, a judgment that might well be wrong.

Pickstock thus concludes that a semi-Cratylism is not incompatible with the linguistic turn. Following Gadamer, she argues that Plato attempts to transcend the distinction of Cratylism and conventionalism, and argues that ultimately Plato has a religiously grounded understanding of language in which the fabricated character of language is viewed not as arbitrariness but as the givenness of divine inspiration. Speech is always “fundamentally ‘in the middle voice,’” active and willed, but fundamentally and inevitably also receptive.