Language & Reality

Abstract

Of the many problems that come under the title of this symposium, two stand out as the most important. These are : ‘ How is language related to reality?’ and ‘ Is language a suitable medium for knowing reality? ’. This paper shall have something to say about each of these problems. However, each of these questions reveals an ambiguity that is due to the ambiguity of the word ‘ reality ’. By ‘ reality ’ is sometimes meant real things, events, facts and persons which go to constitute what we in common parlance call the real world. But ‘reality’ is also sometimes, especially in metaphysical discourse, taken to mean ultimate or metaphysical reality in which case it denotes something that stands behind and beyond the world of things and persons which is but its appearance. One who asks the first question, namely ‘ What is the relation between language and reality?’ may be asking ‘ How is language related to the real things and persons which constitute the real world? ’, or he may be asking ‘ How is language related to the ultimate metaphysical reality, to the Absolute or Brahman?’ Similarly, the second question may mean either the same as ‘ Is language a suitable medium for knowing the nature of the empirical world of things and persons?’ or the same as ‘ Is language a suitable medium for apprehending the nature of the ultimate metaphysical reality?’.

Read at the Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University in November, 1965.