What remains constant, however, is their old-fashioned faith in the capacity of language, used with humility and intelligence, to act as a window upon reality.
Absent a detailed explanation, what the opera seems to be about is the capacity of language — and by extension, perhaps, reason — to lose coherence and ultimately to fail.
This is a writer's Haggadah, and its authors seem to believe more than anything in the capacity of language to spur readers to empathic acts: " 'All who are bent with hunger come and eat.' This is one of those strange locutions linguists call a performative," reads one commentary by Goldstein, The uttering of it itself constitutes an act.
Pocock emphasizes both the enabling and the limiting, the evocative as much as the expressive capacity of language.
That the claims expressed by or implicit in Vedic texts cannot be falsified has to do with the distinctive capacity of language to bear on imperceptible states of affairs such as are not ready to hand, but always "going to be realized" (bhāvya or bhaviṣyat).
(See Clooney 1990, 239, ff.; Halbfass 1991, 300 307) Once again, then, Kumārila can here be seen to take his bearings from the thought that what matters most is what is disclosed by the unique capacity of language somehow to bring into view indeed, to bring into being a world beyond what is actually present.
His work attests to a belief in the capacity of language to affect the present by reanimating the past.
It is difficult to know whether experimental subjects who exchange comments before laboratory games have not already cultivated cooperative habits from systems whose complexity far exceeds the instructional capacity of language.
Our results show that aspects of the ability to communicate remain present even when core capacities of the language system are dysfunctional.
