By |

How We Can Mean Much More Than We Say

Illustration of the legendary telegram exchange between Victor Hugo and his publisher

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

According to lore, when Victor Hugo wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, he sent his publisher a telegram consisting of a single character: ‘?’ 

The publisher replied: ‘!’

Two punctuation marks had been able to carry an entire conversation—because they could lean on shared knowledge and expectations.

Much of our communication works like that.

Suppose I am hosting a dinner party at 7pm. At 4pm, one of my guests texts me, ‘I’m free from 6pm.’ From that, I will understand, ‘I’m free from 6pm, and I’d like to arrive early if that’s OK?’

As the evening progresses, another of the guests says something horribly rude. I respond with, ‘So, what did you all think about the fish?’ From this, my guest ought to understand that he has overstepped the mark.

As a writer, I am acutely aware that I am conveying much more than the words on the page. As a psychiatrist, I am acutely aware that my patients are disclosing much more than the face value of their words.

So, how exactly do our words and sentences achieve so much?

The Theory of Implicature

The Oxford classicist and philosopher Paul Grice (d. 1988) attempted to answer this question with his theory of implicature.

Grice distinguished conventional implicatures, inherent in certain words such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, and ‘indeed’, from conversational implicatures, which arise from a sort of game-playing, and rule-observing, between speakers.

Let me give you an example of each.

If I say, ‘She was poor but honest’, I am, by the simple use of the word ‘but’, also conveying or betraying a certain prejudice that poor people are generally dishonest.

A few hours before my dinner party, I bump into a friend while stepping out of a bakery with three loaves under my arm. My friend asks, ‘How are you?’ To which I respond, ‘Dinner party tonight!’ By which she understands, ‘I’m excited and rather busy preparing for the dinner party I’m hosting tonight—and so may not have time to chat.’ That’s at least three separate things.

With conversational implicatures, our utterances can take on added meanings, or different meanings, according to the situation or context in which they are uttered.

When we speak to our partner in a crowded place, they are able to derive much more meaning from what we are saying than the strangers who are also in earshot, in part because they are leaning upon background information known only to the both of us. Our partner is capturing not only our words, but also how they work with or wrap around the world that we have in common. Like a compression algorithm, conversation can dispense with whatever information the receiver is already able to reconstruct. The more we know about each other, the less we need to say.

More interesting, I think, is that non-literal meaning can also be created by pushing against certain general and deeply ingrained principles of communication and co-operation, shared even with strangers.

In particular, meaningful conversation can only take place on the assumption that the speakers are, at least on an epistemic level, cooperating with one another.

Grice divided this so-called cooperative principle into four maxims of conversation:

  1. Maxim of quality: That utterances ought to be sincere, justified, and truthful.
  2. Maxim of quantity: That the right amount of information ought to be provided.
  3. Maxim of relevance: That the information provided is in some way pertinent.
  4. Maxim of manner: That the information provided is as clear and unambiguous as possible.

Whenever one or more of these maxims appears to have been flouted, we reflexively assume that the speaker must somehow have observed the maxims and start searching for a likely non-literal meaning.

After my dinner party, I ask one of my guests, ‘How did you like the dinner?’ and she replies, ‘The conversation was stimulating.’ My friend has apparently failed to answer my question. But because I assume that she is cooperating with me, this failure becomes informative: she has politely and indirectly answered my cooking, while also telling me what she thought of the company.

In other words, implicature arises when the Gricean maxims are flouted, or would have been flouted had it not been for the implicature.

We are, in effect, pushing against expectations to save on words. The speaker need not transmit the entire meaning because the listener already possesses most of the apparatus required to reconstruct it. As a writer, I try not to underestimate your reconstructive machinery—because if I do, I risk becoming literal and boring.

Playing with Meaning

Common examples of floutings that, by implicature, are not true floutings include irony (maxim of quality), metaphor (maxim of relevance), and euphemism (maxim of manner). And some jokes as well. When my neighbour arrives late—from next door—to my dinner party, she exclaims: ‘Sorry, the traffic was really bad!’ Once we notice the gap between what is said and what is meant, we begin to see it everywhere.

Flirting is especially dependent upon this ambiguity. ‘Are you staying for another drink?’ can be nothing more than a question about another drink—or not. The advantage is precisely that neither party need decide, at least not yet, which meaning is intended. If the invitation is declined, both can retreat into the literal meaning without embarrassment.

This possibility of retreat gives rise to one of the great uses—and abuses—of implicature: plausible deniability. The diplomat, politician, seducer, passive-aggressive friend or relative, or social media troll can all communicate something without assuming full responsibility for having communicated it. ‘I never said that’ may be literally true, but entirely disingenuous.

At its darkest, implicature can become the political dog-whistle: an expression innocuous enough to one audience but freighted with additional meaning for another. The speaker communicates on two levels at once, while the ambiguity itself provides cover.

The maxims can also be flouted in a genuinely non-cooperative way. Thus, politicians often answer a different question to the one asked, or provide a much longer answer when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, or been preferable. In such cases, most of the interviewer’s interjections are, in effect, attempts to return the politician to the maxims. In ordinary life, we might do much the same when we don’t know the answer to a question, but are too embarrassed to admit it.

Conversational implicatures serve a number of important functions such as: increasing the efficiency of communication; making communication more lively, varied, and humorous; and introducing ambiguity or restraint to avoid being ostracised or otherwise penalised for speaking hard truths.

But this slipperiness, this malleability, also gives rise to a number of ethical and legal problems—which is why legal contracts, witness statements, and the like are expected or even required to be as concrete and literal as possible.

More fundamentally, while we can be held responsible for what we say, to what extent can we be held responsible for what we implicate?

The same leaning on context that enables a bad actor to insinuate without admitting also enables friends to joke, lovers to flirt, diplomats to negotiate, and all of us to communicate far more economically and effectively than if we had to spell everything out. Meaning is not contained in words alone, but arises between words, expectations, and circumstances. Language is not merely the transmission of meaning from one mind to another. It is the art of sparking another mind to reconstruct meaning for itself.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

What the Logicians Have Missed

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato was a master of metaphor. He compared the soul to a chariot and the state to a ship at sea. He compared his teacher Socrates both to a gadfly and to a midwife.

But the most famous of all his analogies is the Allegory of the Cave, in which he compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their entire lives in a cave, are unable to imagine a world beyond.

How exactly do allegories work? An allegory (Greek, ‘a speaking about something else’) is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a myth, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one.

Allegories are often described as ‘extended metaphors’, so one way of understanding the allegory is by understanding the smaller metaphor. Whereas an allegory is a complete narrative that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another, a metaphor is a sentence or short segment that equates two seemingly unrelated things. For example, Solomon 2:1-2:

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

The first sentence consists of two metaphors (‘I am the rose of Sharon’ and ‘I am the lily of the valleys’), and the second sentence consists of a simile.

Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy

What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much. Whereas a metaphor says that something is something else, a simile says that it is like or as something else.

Simile might be considered a type of metaphor, as might also analogy, which involves drawing a comparison for the purpose of explaining or clarifying an idea, for example, if I say, ‘Scientists are as blind to their own paradigms as fish to water.’

In fact, the second sentence from the Solomon (‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’) is more properly an analogy than a simple simile. But my broader point is this: they are close relatives and their boundaries are porous.

Metaphor and simile are figures of speech, which are a type of rhetorical device (also called, depending on context, literary or poetic device). They are both forms of analogy, which can be purely cognitive as well as rhetorical—in the mind and in the mouth, or in the mind only.

Metaphor and the Structure of Thought

Unlike other rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and resonance, metaphor is not merely ornamental, but a cognitively respectable way of knowing.

Metaphor and analogy enable an abstract or unfamiliar idea to be grasped in terms of a more concrete or familiar one. What’s more, the superimposition or juxtaposition of two superficially dissimilar ideas brings out any hidden or secondary correspondences between the two. This is not unlike formal deductive logic, which marries two ideas to give birth to a third—and is, in fact, a lot more common.

Logicians and their students prefer to focus on deduction and induction, but it may be that analogy is the principal form of human reasoning.

Faced with something new, the mind reaches for something familiar: What is this like? It then carries the structure of the familiar over to the unfamiliar, enabling us to make inferences that it may not otherwise have made.

We reason by analogy whenever we apply the lessons of one situation to another. A historian reaches for the past to illuminate the present, a doctor compares a new presentation to previous ones, a lawyer argues from precedent. Darwin reasoned from artificial selection to natural selection. In each case, analogy helps us connect the familiar to the novel.

In the words of Aristotle, whom Dante described as ‘the master of those who know’:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

What Makes for a Good Metaphor

The force of a metaphor depends above all upon its freshness and originality, in some sense, upon its disruptive qualities.

If a metaphor is overused, it becomes a cliché, and some metaphors are so tired that they are no longer visualised or even thought of as metaphors. For instance, in English (as opposed to, say, Spanish), we tend to talk of time in terms of space and distance, even if we are no longer aware of doing so: ‘I won’t be long’, ‘Let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’, ‘His drinking finally caught up with him.’ Metaphors such as these that are no longer visualised are called dead metaphors, and language is full of them.

Indeed, an argument could be made that all language is either onomatopoeic (or imitative, like ‘cough’, ‘splash’, and ‘thud’) or metaphorical. After all, what else could it be? The word ‘metaphor’ derives from the Greek for ‘a carrying over’, so it is itself a metaphor.

In its broadest, Aristotelian sense, metaphor is the carrying over of meaning from one thing to another on the basis of some perceived relation between them. Metaphor is a large family, including simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. Here’s a metaphor, or arguably a simile, by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer…it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Unlike tired or dead metaphors, fresh, vivid metaphors like this one are experienced as beautiful and pleasurable. Beautiful because they are so concise and condensed. Pleasurable because, like humour, which they often contain, they exercise our cognitive range and flexibility. And like humour, they can be a little playful, a little naughty, and a little dangerous.

In the words, again, of Aristotle:

To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.

The Most Brilliant Metaphors

Now back to the allegory. Like the metaphor, the allegory serves to convey abstract and at times subversive ideas in more concrete and condensed forms that then become symbolic of the ideas, making them easier to reveal or conceal or otherwise play with.

When an abstract notion is given the form of a person or animate being, this is known as personification. Narcissus, for example, is a personification of vanity and self-absorption, and Icarus of hubris. The Mahabharata, the Iliad of India (although a lot longer), presents three approaches to moral problems, personified by Bhima (brute force, ego, desire), Yudhishthira (rigid moral law, deontology), and Arjuna (virtue ethics, moral indeterminacy), who, wavering between the paths of his two elder brothers, is forced to make difficult, existential choices.

An important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy it as it suits them, and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or indeed, whatever they wish to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero and Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

Explore all Aristotle essays

By |

If You Love Words, Read On

The sophist Gorgias speaking before an audience and casting his spell.
Gorgias mesmerising his audience.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.

Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.

If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.

Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.

In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates: “I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.”

Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helen and the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.

Words as Magic

In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.

In defending Helen, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: ‘Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.’

A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.

Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’

As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.

The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

Nothing Exists

In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.

Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the Ten Attic Orators.

In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:

…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…

Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.

Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.

Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

To Have Another Language Is to Have Another Self

Ambrose McEvoy, The Ear-Ring (1911).
Ambrose McEvoy, The Ear-Ring (1911).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 23 August 2026.

It can come as a surprise to many people in the UK and US that speaking more than one language is the norm rather than the exception. In prehistoric times, most people belonged to small linguistic communities, and had to speak several languages to trade with, and marry into, neighbouring communities.

Still today, remaining populations of hunter-gatherers are almost all multilingual. Papua New Guinea, a country smaller than Spain, counts some 850 languages, or about one language per 10,000 inhabitants. In countries such as India, Malaysia, and South Africa, most people are bilingual or better. Even in the world at large, polyglots outnumber monoglots. And with the advent of the internet, contact with foreign languages has become increasingly frequent, even for the most linguistically isolated of monoglots.

In sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth I could speak at least nine languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. A few days after her death in 1603, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli wrote back to his Doge and Senate:

She possessed nine languages so thoroughly that each appeared to be her native tongue; five of these were the languages of peoples governed by her, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, for that part of her possessions where they are still savage [lo scozzese per quella parte de’ suoi possessi dove sono ancora selvaggi], and Irish. All of them are so different, that it is impossible for those who speak the one to understand any of the others. Besides this, she spoke perfectly Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian extremely well.

No wonder the ‘Virgin Queen’ didn’t want to get married.

Cognitive and Economic Benefits

To speak a language competently implies knowledge of the culture associated with the language. Multilingualism is closely linked to multiculturalism, and, historically, both came under attack with the rise of the nation state. In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the British Prime Minister Theresa May stated: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’—as though that were somehow deviant or problematic. Human beings, and their tongues, are far older than any nation state.

Still today, some people believe that teaching a child more than one language can impair the child’s linguistic and cognitive development. But what’s the evidence? According to several studies, people who learn another language do significantly better on standardised tests. Language management calls upon executive functions such as attention control, cognitive inhibition, and working memory, and it appears that bi- and multilingual people are better at observing, multitasking, and problem solving. They also have a larger working memory, including for tasks that do not involve language.

Being multilingual can also improve judgement. According to one study, people who think through a moral dilemma in a foreign language come to much more rational, or utilitarian, conclusions—perhaps because certain words lose some of their emotional weight, or because the problem is seen from a different cultural perspective or processed through different neural channels. So, if you have a second language, you can use it, like a good friend, to check yourself.

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism, disputed though they are, also extend to health. A study of hospital records in Toronto, Canada, found that bilingual people were diagnosed with dementia on average three to four years later than their monolingual counterparts from a similar educational and occupational background. Another study in Northern Italy looking at people at the same stage of Alzheimer’s disease found that the bilingual people were on average five years older, and had stronger connections between the brain areas involved in executive function. Over in India, a study of 600 stroke survivors found that the bilingual ones had a much better outcome. Specifically, 40.5% of the bilingual patients had normal cognition compared to just 19.6% of the monolingual ones. Of course, multilingualism is entangled with education, occupation, and other confounding factors, but the direction of the effect is difficult to doubt.

And then there are the undisputed economic benefits. High-level bilingualism has been linked to higher income, even after controlling for confounding factors such as educational attainment and parental socio-economic status. Over the course of a forty-year career, this additional income might add up to a pension fund. Of course, the overall economic impact of multilingualism is much greater than the sum of the higher earnings of multilingual speakers. Switzerland’s multilingual heritage has been estimated to contribute as much as 10% of GDP, whereas lack of language skills in the UK could be costing the British economy around 3.5% of GDP in lost output.  

Personal, Social, and Cultural Benefits

Being bilingual may have important cognitive and economic benefits, but it is usually the personal, social, and cultural benefits that multilingual people are keenest to emphasise.

Many bilingual people feel that the way they are, and the way they see the world—and even the way they laugh and love—changes according to the language that they are speaking. In the 1960s, Susan Ervin-Tripp asked Japanese-English bilingual women to finish sentences in each language, and found that the women came up with very different endings depending on whether they were speaking English or Japanese. For example, they completed ‘Real friends should…’ with ‘…help each other’ in Japanese, but ‘…be frank’ in English. ‘Who’s your favourite writer?’ ‘What do you want to eat for dinner?’ ‘Shall we break all the rules?’ Ask a question in one language, and you get one answer; ask the same question in another language, and you might get a different one. ‘To have another language,’ said Charlemagne, ‘is to have another soul.’

Translation dictionaries seem to assume that languages are made up of corresponding words, but even when that is more or less the case, the equivalencies have different connotations. Compared to ‘I like you’ in English, je t’aime in French is a far more serious proposition. George Carlin once joked that ‘meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat—but, of course, it doesn’t. Owing to a certain je ne sais quoi, some things are more readily expressed in one language than in another. By code-switching, multilingual speakers can increase their range of expression and perhaps even their range of thought. In the words of Wittgenstein: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’

Certain languages are better suited to certain purposes, for example, English is great for science and technology, French is better for cooking and complaining, and Latin is best for praying and formal rites of passage. Multilingual people are free to pick and choose, maybe along the lines of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: ‘I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.’ Charles V did not get on with the German lords and preferred to live in Spain, sitting on the newly created Spanish throne by right of his incarcerated mother, Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca)—things I know because I speak Spanish. And after a few glasses of fino, I’m almost fluent.

The more languages we learn, the easier it becomes to learn languages. But learning a language also strengthens our first language. For instance, one study found that Spanish immersion significantly improved children’s native English vocabulary. More broadly, learning a language casts light upon our first language and language in general, increasing our appreciation of language and ability to communicate. ‘You speak English beautifully,’ wrote Robert Aickman in The Wine-Dark Sea (1966), ‘which means you can’t be English.’

Just before writing this article, I asked my social media followers the following question: ‘If you are bi- or multilingual, what do you most value about that fact?’

And here are some of their responses:

  • The freedom to access different cultures plus the possibility to read many authors in original version!
  • Being fluent in a couple of other languages has given me insight into other ways of seeing the world. That helps empathy, and openness.
  • I appreciate the cognitive advantages being multilingual has offered. Also the connections with culture, history, and the knowledge acquired.
  • Language is knowledge. Always useful to be a little less ignorant.
  • It feels as if I can switch into two different modes and think from different perspectives.
  • I’m more outgoing in one language than another. It’s not just that I speak differently—I feel like a slightly different person.
  • My voice, gestures, and even sense of humour change when I switch languages.
  • Difficult or intimate things can be easier to say in my second language. There’s a little more distance between the words and me.
  • Being more tolerant—new language = new culture, new and different perspectives/access to more information.
  • That I can talk wine with twice as many ppl.
  • It gives me patience and understanding for those who want to articulate, but have difficulty conveying what they really mean.
  • The fact that I can fully understand and communicate in another language (Afrikaans) makes me feel good.
  • It gave me an understanding that ‘thoughts’ don’t come into my head in a language at all. Thoughts come as ‘ideas’. Only when I have to verbalise my ideas, I have to use a language.
  • I’m bilingual in India. There’s nothing special about it here. Know a ton of people who are trilingual. In India, multilingualism starts becoming impressive if the language count’s above like five or something.
  • Obviously, being able to speak about people in elevators without them knowing what’s said. 😉
  • Having a variety of options when cussing.

Every language on this earth has its own rules and conventions, its own sounds and rhythms, its own beauty and poetry, its own history and philosophy. Every language on this earth is another way of being human, another way of being alive.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Cognition essays

Explore all Rhetoric essays

By |

John Heaton is, amongst others, a practising psychiatrist and psychotherapist, a regular lecturer on the Advanced Diploma in Existential Psychotherapy programme at Regent’s College, London, and a long- and some-time editor of the Journal for Existential Analysis.

This is Heaton’s third book with Wittgenstein in its title. In it, he applies the great philosopher’s insights to the psychotherapeutic process in all its forms. Heaton’s principle thesis is that many of our deepest and most intractable problems find their roots in linguistic confusions and limitations, and are resolved not by the search for causes inherent in the various pseudo-scientific doctrines and theories of the mind (such as those of Freud and Klein), but by careful attention to the use of language. This is particularly true in neurosis and psychosis in which language is used not so much to clarify and to communicate as to deceive and to obfuscate.

Like all the best things, the talking cure has its roots in ancient Greece with such luminaries as Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic (see my post on Diogenes here). Upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes replied ‘parrhesia’ (free speech, full expression), and his intransigently courageous and sometimes delightfully shocking behaviour consistently accorded with this, his, truth. The self-understanding that underlies parrhesia is revealed not in reductionist propositions based on questionable pictures of the mind, but in the singular use of language – both by the expression and by its truthfulness. In short, it is revealed not in causes, but in reasons, with all their multiplicities and particularities.

For Wittgenstein as for Heaton, the talking cure is, like philosophy itself, a battle against the bewitchment of intelligence by means of language, for it is not knowledge but understanding that is needed to live an integrated, productive, and, dare I say it, happy, life. To date, this important, indeed, devastating, critique has had little or no impact on psychotherapeutic practices, and Heaton’s revolutionary book requires and deserves to be read not only by psychotherapists and psychiatrists but by every mental health professional. Although the book is not difficult to leaf through, she with little more than a scientific background may find it difficult to understand, accept, or come to terms with certain concepts. As Lichtenberg tells us, ‘A book is like a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out … he who understands the wise is wise already.’

Neel Burton

NB: This review has also been published in the September issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.