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What the Speaker Knows: Language, Compositionality, and the Limits of Explanation

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1. A Capacity We Exercise Without Explaining It Imagine hearing someone say, “The astronaut left a sandwich beside the telescope.” You have never heard this particular sentence before, yet you can understand what happened and how its elements relate to one another. You do not need to have memorised the sentence in advance to grasp its meaning. This ability is part of our ordinary experience of language. We understand unfamiliar expressions, recognise relationships between words, and notice when a change in formulation alters what a sentence means. We can also distinguish between sentences that contain similar words but organise them differently. Our command of a language therefore extends beyond the expressions we have encountered and learned individually. What makes this possible? We clearly draw on what we already know about words and their use, but that knowledge must somehow enable us to interpret combinations we have never encountered. Describing the meanings of individual w...
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Between Sign and Image: Adorno on Communication, Expression, and Non-Identity

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1. The Problem of Language Language enables us to identify objects, describe situations, and communicate our experiences to others. Through words and concepts, we establish distinctions and make aspects of the world intelligible. These operations are indispensable to knowledge, yet they raise a question about the relation between our descriptions and what they describe. When a concept allows us to recognize something and communicate our understanding of it, what happens to the features that do not fit within its established meaning? The categories we employ direct attention towards certain aspects of an object while leaving others unarticulated, so that a description can be informative without being exhaustive. Theodor W. Adorno investigates this difficulty within a broader critique of modern thought. In Dialectic of Enlightenment , written with Max Horkheimer, he examines how the pursuit of rational knowledge becomes intertwined with the desire to make nature predictable and contr...
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When Opposites Meet: Adorno and Nietzsche on Leisure and Moral Values

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1. The Problem with Opposites “Free time is shackled to its opposite,” writes Theodor W. Adorno in his essay “Free Time.” The remark challenges a distinction that seems straightforward enough: work occupies one part of our lives, while leisure begins when working hours are over. We generally treat these as separate domains, each with its own activities and purposes. Yet Adorno’s formulation suggests that the relationship between them may be more complicated than this division allows. We are familiar with the expression “extremes meet,” which suggests that things that appear far apart may turn out to have something in common. But Adorno’s question goes further than a resemblance between opposites. What if the relationship between two things helps determine what each of them is? Could something we regard as independent acquire some of its defining characteristics through its connection with what appears to stand against it? These questions concern how we understand the things we e...
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Adorno’s Constellations and Derrida’s Chain of Substitutions

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Gelehrtes Gespräch in der Bibliothek. AI image 1. When Concepts Become Problems We understand the world through concepts. They enable us to identify things, distinguish one phenomenon from another, and explain how different aspects of reality are connected. Yet the concepts that make understanding possible can also limit it. An object may possess features that its established definition leaves out, while a word that seems to have a stable meaning may acquire its significance only through its relations to other words. In both cases, understanding requires us to look beyond concepts considered in isolation and examine the relations through which they become intelligible. Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida approach this problem through two distinctive ideas. Adorno’s constellation brings concepts into a configuration that allows an object to become more intelligible than it would through an isolated definition. Derrida’s chain of substitutions explains how a term acquires mea...
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