Dead Philosophers of the Day: Bertrand on Language (pt. 1?)

Lately my studies have been focused more or less exclusively on language, or, more specifically, words themselves - the way words are used, or not used, to convey meaning, how it interacts with the concepts of perception and relativity (in terms of the hearer and speaker), and how the physical proccesses of 'hearing' and 'speaking' can be separated from understanding and meaning. Along those lines, I wonder (and I state these ponderings in more detail in past bloggage) how thoughts and language interact - whether it is language that creates thought, whether words can exist absent thought, whether they are in fact coexistent and codependent, or wholly independent species.

I was complaining to a friend yesterday that I have yet to come across any essays by my favorite dead philosophers that speak specifically to the questions plaguing me. Most essays speak to grammatical structure and form of language and its interaction with meaning, translation, and treating language as given, its usage as a priori. But I want to be able to, with support from those more learned than I, understand what a word is, in its essence, self-referentially, not merely what it claims to represent, like a placeholder for true meaning, and how true meaning is obtained beyond language. Although Heidegger talks about these topics AT EPIC LENGTH, I find the translations of his works to be lacking in clarity and much less digestable than I like after a long day at work reading/writing stomach-churning legalese (which I find to be quietly amusing - philosophical essays on translation that have been translated from/to other languages, and all of the many things lost in that translation that gain no clarity within the essay on translation. ya dig?)

So anyway, last night, while perusing my bookshelf in a state of near-resignation (I considered returning to Existential studies, something I haven't touched since my days of undergrad angst), I came across an unassuming, tiny in stature, color of cold coffee with a dab of cream, slightly aged and tattered copy of Bertrand Russel's 'An Outline of Philosophy." Flipping to the chapter on language, intending to be dissapointed and misled yet again, I found, against doubt and expectation, exactly the philosophical framework for the quest(ions) that I have been asking. An excerpt or two behooves us all:

The subject of language is one which has not been studied with sufficient care in traditional philosophy. It was taken for granted that words exist to express "thoughts," and generally also that "thoughts" have "objects" which are what the words "mean." It was thought that, by means of language, we could deal directly with what it "means" and that we need not analyse with any care either of the two supposed properties of words, namely that of "expressing" thoughts and that of "meaning" things. Often when philosophers intended to be considering the objects meant by words they were in fact considering only the words, and when they were considering words, they made the mistake of supposing, more or less unconsciously, that a word is a single entity, not, as it really is, a set of more or less similar events. The failure to consider language explicitly has been a cause of much that was bad in traditional philosophy. I think myself that "meaning" can only be understood if we treat language as a bodily habit, which is learnt just as we learn football or bicycling.

and

We usually take for granted the relation between a word spoken and a word heard. "Can you hear what I say?" we ask, and the person addressed says "yes." This is of course a delusion, a part of the naive realism of our unreflective outlook on the world. We never hear what is said; we hear something having a complicated causal connection with what is said. There is first the purely physical process of sound-waves from the mouth of the speaker to the ear of the hearer, then a complicated process in the ear and nerves, and then an event in the brain, which is related to our hearing of the sound in a manner to be investigated later, but is at any rate simultaneous with our hearing of the sound. This gives the physical causal connection between the word spoken and the word heard. There is, however, also another connection of a more psychological sort. When a man utters a word, he also hears it himself so that the word spoken and the word heard become intimately associated for anyone who knows how to speak. And a man who knows how to speak can also utter any word h hears in his own language, so that the association works equally well both ways. It is because of the intimacy of this association that the plain man identifies the word spoken with the word heard, although in fact the two are separated by a wide gulf.

Just perfect. In one succinct paragraph, the summarization of the clarity which my mind seeks. I'm pretty excited about having encountered this. Now I feel more confident in creating plans to write my own [small section of an] essay on this topic with much needed co-signage from ole' Bert Russ.