Language and Reality: Before or After, In or Instead?

The article deals with the notion of reality and the problem of realism in the theory of language. In the traditional paradigm, language is seen as a medium between human and reality helping the former to draw a conceptual map of the latter. It is not made clear though why some ‘maps’ are called unreal (Cf. subjunctives) or why a language user cannot decide to deal with reality without any go-betweens. In the present article, it is hypothesized that reality is emergent in language only, or rather, through languaging, i.e. the circular process of reflective organization of sensorimotor and emotional experience. The research is based on the nondualist, enactivist approach to reality where there is no distinction between life and living, living and acting, acting and actuality, actuality and perception, perception and knowing. It is posited that reality is self-referential and constructed out of abstractions from a subject’s perceptual experiences, which is possible only in and through the respective semantic substitutes, or representations. Thus, it makes no sense to speak of ‘objective’ or ‘extra-language’ reality because what is real is experiential, what is experiential is abstracted from perception, what is abstracted is language-based, and what is not abstracted does not ever exist or/and cannot be perceived at all. To prove these theoretical tenets, a psycholinguistic experiment was carried out in April, 2019, to discover the perceptual and cognitive character of the ‘objective’ reality which is traditionally understood to exist beyond languaging. The computer program Ganbreeder made it possible to simulate unprecedented perceptual experiences in a photographic mode. According to the philosophy of objective realism and mirroring of the world, such simulations are supposed to be linguistically rendered in a respective unprecedented manner. The results of the experiment show that it did not happen, and all the participants reported seeing what they knew in a way familiar to all the English language community. Thus, it proves the hypothesis that we can see only what we have abstracted fully or partially in/through language structures. The implications of research suggest that the enactivist perspective on realism opens up new horizons for studies into language allowing for a holistic understanding of its semantic structures. In particular, a semantic structure might be seen as an experiential item constructed in the dynamics of one’s reflections upon the perceptual objects abstracted from the immediate perceptual field.

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