music, language, and origins 49this is Kant’s question about what makes scientific knowledge itself
possible, which he seeks to answer in terms of the a priori rules of
thinking that must be involved in any intelligible judgement of expe-
rience. J. G. Hamann already claims in 1781 that Kant does not see
how the categories must depend on natural languages. A vital ques-
tion raised by Hamann’s objection to Kant concerns the relationship
of the explanation of language to scientific explanation. Any scientific
account of what language is necessarily involves the circularity of using
language to explain language. It is not, of course, that meta-linguistic
statements are problematic per se: we make use of them lots of the
time. The problem lies in the status of meta-linguistic statements when
they claim to give a scientific description of language, that is, a descrip-
tion in which the object of the analysis must be of a different order
from the analysing language. The aim in logical empiricism of con-
structing a logically purified language makes the difficulty apparent.
Can there be a ‘purer’ language which explains ‘impure’ natural lan-
guages in a manner which natural languages themselves cannot achieve,
and, if so, how would we understand this language, if not on the basis
of our prior understanding of a natural language? We saw a version
of this problem in Wittgenstein in thelast chapter, and he regarded
music as a possible response to it. The basic point was already made by
Schleiermacher in the remarks I quoted from hisDialecticon the depen-
dence of science on natural languages. None of this, of course, explains
what it is to understand and how it is that we understand in the first
place.
These questions can only arise once traditional metaphysical assump-
tions about language, of the kind present in the idea of the divine
origin of language, cease to be defensible. The theory of the divine
origin relied on the assumption of a grounding divine language from
which natural languages derive. The problem from early modernity
onwards is that, even though this theory comes widely to be seen as
merely dogmatic and as not really explaining anything, nobody seems
able to give a plausible alternative account of the origin of language.
What is too rarely appreciated, however, is that the difficulty of doing so
derives at least as much from the question of what languageisas it does
from any other consideration. Establishing which source of evidence
could be used to answer questions about language’s origin has to be
secondary to the problem of characterisingwhatit is whose origin is to
be explained. Is language a means of representing things in the world
or of communicating information, a means of expressing emotions, a