The American poet Emily Dickinson, commenting on the power of words, once said: ‘I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine’. And, in one of popular fiction's most memorable explorations into the nature of words, Humpty Dumpty examines their ultimate, shape-shifting malleability. In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty asks Alice how old she is. This leads to a discussion of the nature of word meaning:

But is Humpty Dumpty right: can words mean anything we want? The traditional view of language and the mind is a clear no. We have a mental dictionary, so received wisdom maintains. This mental dictionary, or ‘lexicon', contains all the words we know. And each word has a prescribed sense – what it conveys – and a prescribed set of referents – things in the world it can refer to.

For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the scientific study of language assumed that syntax – our ability to construct grammatically well-formed sentences of great complexity – was the underlying hallmark of human language. The unfortunate consequence was that the study of meaning was relegated to the margins, barely getting a look-in. Yet, in our everyday world of experience, as we act and interact in the host of encounters that make up our daily lives, it is the communicative value of language – the meanings we use it to convey – that is of pre-eminence; in everyday life, how we use language and for what purpose is of the utmost importance; linguistic meaning can be a matter of life and death. And yet ironically, until recently, the scientific study of language relegated its central function – the way we use language to convey ideas, make requests, ask a favour, express anger, love, dismay – to all but the margins of scientific analysis.

In recent times, the study of meaning has returned to the fore, regaining its rightful place as the centrepiece of the scientific study of the human mind. This book tells the story of how our language, in conjunction with the vast body of knowledge about the world which we carry around with us in our heads, enables us to communicate with one another – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. From the barbed, childish taunt on the school playground to the eloquent sophistry of a lawyer prising open a legal loophole in a court of law, meaning arises each time we use language to communicate with one another. The Crucible of Language explains what we know, and what we do, when we communicate using language; it shows how linguistic meaning arises, where it comes from and the way in which language enables us to convey the meanings that can move us to tears, bore us to death or make us dizzy with delight. And in so doing, it proffers profound insight into exactly what it is to be human. This book presents the emerging story of what we now know about how we mean, and how we use language to mean, following a cascade of recent scientific breakthroughs.

Until relatively recently, it was not considered good form to speculate on the origin of language. And in part, this was a sound position to adopt. By the time that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and his subsequent publication The Descent of Man in 1871, all manner of exotic theories had been put forward to explain the origin of language, replete with some equally ludicrous names. My personal favourite is the ‘ta-ta’ theory of Sir Richard Paget. Paget, who was influenced by Darwin, proposed that language may have arisen as an unconscious, vocal imitation of specific body movements – for instance, the way my tongue sticks out when I attempt a task that leaves my thumbs-for-fingers confused, such as trying to thread a needle or play the guitar. Indeed, Darwin himself was not immune, speculating that spoken language may have arisen from our ability to produce song – but it seems unlikely that singing gave rise to language. Recent research, for instance, demonstrates that ‘amusia’ – an impairment of the brain that results in the inability to process musical cadences and recognise music, and ‘aphasia’ – the loss of language – are unrelated. A person can lose the ability to use or comprehend language, but still retain, perhaps counterintuitively, the ability to recognise music. Indeed, the nature and organisation of music and spoken language appear to diverge in a host of ways– although some scientists do see value in Darwin's musical origins of language hypothesis.

When the Linguistic Society of Paris was founded in 1865, it famously included a prohibition against speculating on the origin of language in its constitution: ‘Article 11: The Society will accept no communication … dealing with the origin of language’. This stance made good sense at the time, being later adopted by the Philological Society of London. In 1873, the President of the Philological Society, Alexander Ellis, declared that ‘We shall do more by tracing the development of one work-a-day tongue, than by filling waste-paper baskets by reams of paper covered with speculations on the origins of all tongues’.

Speculation on the evolutionary basis of language remained off-limits for over a century. But by the 1970s, scientists began to again speculate on the origin of language.

The sorts of experiences that we use to structure abstract ideas, according to Lakoff and Johnson, arise from our interaction in the world. They come from our experience of moving about in space, from picking up and putting down objects, and by bumping into things. They derive from giving objects to others, and from receiving things in return. It is these sorts of spatial experiences, they claim, that provide us with the inferential structure that makes up our understanding of abstract states like love, death, time and countless others. The truly radical idea at the heart of Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that abstract thought arises from our sensory–motor systems – our eyes, ears, pressure exerted on the skin, our felt sense of movement, our sense of balance, and so on. In short, so the claim goes, our experience of the spatial world provides the basis for the range of abstract concepts that comprise our conceptual systems, and which, accordingly, enable fundamental aspects of our meaning-making capacity – for instance, our ability to think about and externalise, in language, the range of abstract concepts that we express on a daily basis. In this chapter, I investigate this issue – whether more abstract concepts and domains are created by importing structure from our experience of space – by considering the domain of TIME. And in so doing, this will enable us to get a handle on the nature and origin of abstract concepts, with implications for our ultimate objective: to understand our human capacity for meaning. After all, my contention is that the human conceptual system – our repository of concepts, structured in part by conceptual metaphors – provides the basis for what language can be employed to encode and express in our everyday acts of meaning-making.

The reason for selecting time is that it amounts to the paradigmatic example of an abstract domain – time is presumably as abstract as you can get. We seem to experience time; yet there is nothing physical or concrete in the world, like stones and trees, that you or I can point to and identify as time. We sense its presence: we anticipate the future, which is distinct from the present we inhabit, and our recollection of the past. We even feel its effects on our own bodies as we age.

In the previous chapter, I presented the case for thinking that concepts arise from embodied experience. But this raises the question: how, exactly, do concepts arise in the first place? How do we turn our everyday embodied encounters into concepts? And how does this enable a young infant to begin the slow process towards first comprehending the world, and later developing the sophisticated capacity to mean that you and I take for granted? Language, again, illuminates the challenge. The philosopher Mark Johnson, in discussing the concept of containment, describes the start of an ordinary day:

The recurrent use of the expressions in and out in this passage – which I've highlighted in italics – reveals something quite striking. A great number of everyday objects and experiences are categorised as specific instances of the schematic concept Container: not only obvious containers such as bathroom cabinets and toothpaste tubes, but also less obvious containers such as bed-covers, clothing and rooms, and even states such as sleep, stupor and daze.

This reveals that spatial information appears to form the bedrock of many of our everyday concepts. While it is perhaps obvious that we should conceptualise a bathroom cabinet as a container, it is less clear that more abstract concepts like being in a state of sleep can also be thought of, at least in part, as a container. But this is exactly what our everyday language suggests. In Chapter 3, I showed how conceptual metaphor enables abstract concepts to be structured in terms of more concrete sensory–motor experiences. And in this way the human conceptual system is enriched, facilitating, in part, the full panoply of concepts upon which language depends, and which we take for granted in our daily lives and encounters.

In the novel, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner narrates the thoughts of his protagonists using a stream-of-consciousness technique. One character, Vardaman, a young child, is in a stall with a horse. Faulkner presents Vardaman's thoughts – using language – to recreate the child's perceptions of his surroundings, and in particular of the horse that Vardaman dimly perceives through the darkness:

The horse emerges to Vardaman through the darkness, not as a single, coherent whole, but in fragments, a ‘scattering of components’. Faulkner brilliantly conveys how the horse seems to the child: Vardaman perceives the disembodied snuffings, the stampings and cooling flesh and the gaudy splotching. But while Faulkner attempts to convey Vardaman's thought processes in the dark stable using language, language is not the same as thought. After all, as I observed in Chapter 6, and in detail in The Language Myth, thought can proceed in the absence of language.

So here's the point: when Faulkner attempts to recreate Vardaman's pure thoughts, using language as the medium for doing so, he is in fact doing more than this. In this chapter, I will show that our human meaning-making capacity is a consequence of the symbiotic interaction between our conceptual system – the repository of our concepts, our units of thought – and language – our linguistic system. Both are essential to produce the complex mental simulations that Faulkner creates in the minds of his readers, as he attempts to recreate Vardaman's thought processes. And in using language to help coordinate and construct Vardaman's thoughts, Faulkner is not in fact presenting pure, distilled thought. Language is not the same as thought.

In this book, I've focused on the relationship between language and mind in creating meaning. I've argued that meaning arises in the mix, from the complex interplay of analogue knowledge in the mind's conceptual system and the parametric knowledge embedded in the grammatical system of a language. But there's a third factor that contributes just as significantly to meaning: namely, culture. Daniel Everett, an anthropological linguist and one of the world's leading authorities on the relationship between language and culture, has observed that, in certain respects, language itself appears to be a cultural invention. For Everett, language is a tool, moulded and honed by culture, in order to facilitate the shared values and ideas that form the backdrop to the collective lives of the individual members of any given community. And just as language is, in part, shaped by culture, so too are the concepts that it helps express: ‘Living in a culture and acquiring cultural knowledge enables us to gain meaning from the world around us and from each other’. Hence, no account of the unprecedented capacity exhibited by our species to create meaning would, or could, be complete without considering the role of culture in giving rise to meaning.

A moment's reflection reveals that language is a repository of cultural knowledge, one that captures and provides effective cues to a complex body of shared values, experiences and even a common past. For instance, Everett discusses the use of the word Dickensian in the following utterance: The living conditions were Dickensian. The word itself amounts to a label – a shorthand cue – pointing to a complex body of knowledge shared by all literate native speakers of English. It evokes the inequality and moral decrepitude of aspects of Victorian England: the poor sanitation, overcrowding, and the misery of the have-nots compared to their lords and masters, as brilliantly captured in the didactic works of Charles Dickens. The word itself neatly ‘packages’ this body of shared knowledge and the value-laden judgements, both implicit and explicit, in Dickens’ oeuvre. Moreover, even those who haven't read Dickens’ novels will nevertheless understand the term, through shared cultural knowledge of the Victorian world of Dickens. The word, then, neatly labels a large and diffuse web of culturally shared and culture-specific information, and the values that apply.

Like many other species, we are minded creatures: we store representations of the world around us, and of our own internal bodily states. But unlike other species, we also have language: an unheralded means of packaging these representations – our thoughts – and rendering them public. Sometimes we use language for the better – when we share our pearls of wisdom with a friend in their hour of need – and sometimes for the worse, and to our regret – something spoken in the heat of the moment cannot, alas, be taken back, and may not always be forgiven, or forgotten. Making thought public is the hallmark of communication. And while language may, on occasion, be an imperfect means of achieving this, it nevertheless gets the job done. But communication is dependent on something more mysterious, the seemingly ineffable elixir of communication: meaning.

Meaning presents itself in a variety of ways. The dark, menacing clouds slowly creeping by in the sky outside, as I look through my window, mean rain. A red traffic signal means stop. The ‘recycle bin’ icon on my computer desktop means that's where I place an unwanted file. And the yellow and black colouration of a droning wasp means danger: don't touch.

But having language raises the stakes. Think about it for a second: after all, you're currently reading marks on paper, or on a computer screen. While you could be watching dark, menacing clouds through a window, or sitting at a stop signal, or contemplating deleting a computer file, the chances are you're not. You've used the orthographic representations that I've typed – and that you've just read – to conjure up complex ideas – lowering clouds, computers, traffic signals and wasps. For creatures with language – us – meaning appears to arise, in particular and most saliently, in the liminal space between the private world of thought and the very public shop window of language. I can use it to suggest ideas that you might then call up from your past, such as your first pet, or your first day at school, or your first date, or the first time you kissed; or I can use it to prompt you to think about ideas you're not actually experiencing in the here-and-now, such as a droning wasp meaning danger.

Dr John Dee (1527–1608 or 1609), was renowned as one of the most learned men of Elizabethan England. While still in his twenties, he was invited to lecture on algebra at the University of Paris. He was a widely respected mathematician and astronomer. He was also one of the age's leading experts on navigation: he trained those who led many of the English voyages of discovery to the Americas. During his lifetime, he amassed one of the greatest personal libraries in all of England. Moreover, his intellectual prowess brought him into the orbit of the court of Elizabeth I, whom he served as scientific advisor.

But John Dee was also a scholar of the occult: his compass included the realms of both science and magic, in a time, before the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800), when the two were still not clearly separated or distinguishable. Dee was an expert in the mysteries of alchemy – the pseudoscientific study of the essences of materials. His investigations drew on the mystical, such as Hermetic philosophy, which attempts to tap into cosmic consciousness, and primordial wisdom. And in his final years, his research increasingly focused on an attempt to commune with divine beings, including angels, seeking to uncover a universal ‘language of creation’.

For Dee, all his research endeavours nevertheless formed part of a coherent intellectual quest to uncover the divine forms that undergird and infuse the visible world of corporeal experience. Dee was, in an important sense, representative of a tradition of mediaeval scholars whose scholarly pursuits both presaged and led to the later development of scientific thought, theory and practice, based on observation rather than divination and the occult.

The ostensible goal of alchemy was the transmutation of material form into perfection. One example of this was the quest for the ‘philosopher's stone’, a substrate that would work on base materials, transmuting them, via a chemical process, into more noble metals, such as silver or gold. In terms of the human form, the search for an ‘elixir of life’ was meant to transmute the human body, providing youth and longevity. While alchemy dates back to antiquity, it was still widely practised during the mediaeval period, and even into the Enlightenment.

Any account of the human mind has to grapple with the nature of concepts, the subject of this chapter. After all, concepts are the foundation of our mental life, and play a central role in our meaning-making capacity. For without concepts that could be no thought; moreover, language would have nothing to express. Love, Freedom, Peace, and even Superman are all concepts. A considerable amount of ink has been spilled by philosophers of mind over the nature of concepts, often with perhaps startling conclusions. As I observed in Chapter 2, the philosopher Jerry Fodor is famous – or rather infamous – in certain circles for having claimed that concepts are innate; we come into the world pre-equipped with a mental store of concepts, ranging from Pineapple to Porcupine, from Molecule to Atom, and everything in between, even the concept for Doorknobs! While we can be fairly confident that babies aren't born with the concept of Doorknobs – and even Fodor has recanted in his later work – it is far from clear what concepts are like.

To my knowledge, no one's ever seen a concept. So we have to infer what they might be like from the language we use, from the way we think and act, and from how we categorise our environment as we experience it. For concepts are central to everything, or nearly everything, that's significant about the mental life of human beings. They populate our conceptual system: our repository of knowledge.

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, made the following observation: ‘Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood’. Concepts come and go, and are born and die.

Take the concept Phlogiston, which you may be excused from not having come across until now. Phlogiston was thought to be an odourless, colourless substance without weight. It was said to be given off in burning by all flammable materials. As likely as not, you won't have heard of this mysterious substance before. And this is precisely because the theory of combustion assumed by alchemy, which it was part of, had, by the end of the eighteenth century, been overturned, with the arrival of the modern science of chemistry.