Complementarity in Language; Toward a General Understanding

Abstract

Published in Carvallo M, ed. (1992): Nature, Cognition and System, II: On complementarity and beyond.-(Theory and decision library, series D; vol 10)-Dordrecht-London-Boston: Kluwer, 113-153. Abstract Ever since its first conception in 1907 by Bergson, "complementarity" has come to represent extremely wholistic situations, for which fragmentability into parts turn out unsuccessful. In 1927, Bohr used the term complementarity within quantum mechanics , with profound consequences, for a principally unsuccessful fragmentability into independent observability and definability concepts. The paper objectifies language, in a very general understanding, as a complemen-taristic phenomenon. Language is thereby conceived as a whole of description and interpretation processes, such that fragmentation in these parts is in principle impossible within the language itself, but possible in a metalanguage if one such exists. The linguistic complementarity is an ultimate form to which particular complemen-tarity conceptions can be reduced. In a basic understanding, the linguistic complementarity refers to the impossibility of describing the constituents of a language, its description and interpretation processes, in the language itself. As such, the complementarity obtains for every language , from genetic language over programming and formal languages, to external communication languages. The argument is based on a factual function of every language , namely to admit communication or control, whereby descriptions are bound to be finitely representable and static, whereas the corresponding interpretations may be infinite of any order as well as dynamic. Further understandings of the linguistic complementarity are developed by utilizing specific knowledge of languages. With reference to languages for formal set theories, we develop the complementarity as a tension between describability and interpretability. With reference to a processual function concept, with origins in re-cursive function theory and lambda calculus, we develop complementarity in terms of the unavoidable partiality of the self-references that a language may permit. The reducibility, to the linguistic complementarity, of the specific complementar-ity conceptions by Bergson and Bohr is investigated with positive results. For the reducibility of Bohr complementarity, as a tension between definability and observ-ability, to the linguistic complementarity, as a tension between describability and interpretability within a language, we develop observability as interpretability in an observation language. Furthermore, we suggest that the self-reference problem for quantum mechanical measurement be naturally resolved in terms of the linguistic complementarity, thereby pointing at a possibility of developing linguistic models for quantum mechanics, for which mechanistic models do not suffice.