ceoln

I say that all the time. :)

I forget where-all I've written down more about it, and what it means (ha ha a trick, nothing “means”).

“Language cannot express truth” isn't true, or at least doesn't express truth (since it's language and all).

And also because when we learn (by ostention) what it means to express truth, the examples we learn from are pretty much linguistic.

But it's meant to suggest that there is something that we might expect language to do, or might think that it does, that it does not actually do.

I wrote some words about this in the 2022 NaNoWriMo novel “Various Flings”. Let's see...

“I might write down the words 'language allows one mind to communicate a thought to another'; but what is communication? What is thought?

This is why it is difficult to construct language about language, nicht wahr? I can use language, and these books can use language, to speak about, to be about, anything whatever, on the assumption that language works for speaking about things. But if I am going to speak about language? What can I use, if I have not yet satisfied myself (satisfied the potential reader) that language works?”

That is not entirely it. Another bit of it is that truth, either the detailed material truth of the universal wave equation or the subjectively infinite truth of experience, is far too complex and nuanced to capture in some very finite string of symbols from a tiny even more finite set, in any approximation sufficiently accurate to deserve the title of truth.

Exceptions in the case of for instance small formal systems may be addressed later on.

Fin