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Ineffability and Philosophy
Presenting a fascinating analysis of the idea of what can't be said, this book ascertains whether the notion of there being a truth, or a state of affairs, or knowledge that can't be expressed linguistically is a coherent notion. The author distinguishes different senses in which it might be said that something can't be said.
The first part looks at the question of whether ineffability is a coherent idea. Part two evaluates two families of arguments regarding whether ineffable states of affairs actually the argument from mysticism and the argument from epistemic boundedness. Part three looks more closely at the relation between mystic and non-mystic stances. In the fourth and final part the author distinguishes five qualitatively different types of ineffability.
Ineffability and Philosophy is a significant contribution to this area of research and will be essential reading for philosophers and those researching and studying the philosophy of language.
The first part looks at the question of whether ineffability is a coherent idea. Part two evaluates two families of arguments regarding whether ineffable states of affairs actually the argument from mysticism and the argument from epistemic boundedness. Part three looks more closely at the relation between mystic and non-mystic stances. In the fourth and final part the author distinguishes five qualitatively different types of ineffability.
Ineffability and Philosophy is a significant contribution to this area of research and will be essential reading for philosophers and those researching and studying the philosophy of language.
- GenresPhilosophy
184 pages, Hardcover
First published August 2, 2004
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October 12, 2025
An ineffability is something that cannot be captured in words. It’s an attractive, even enjoyable concept, that some things, insights and experiences, are just beyond words. The kinds of examples that come to my own mind include mystical experiences, mystical concepts, perhaps metaphysical insights, and more.
At least in contemporary philosophy, the concept of ineffability gets relatively little play. It does appear, by inference, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and in further treatments of post-Kantian epistemology. William James’ Variety of Religious Experiences is one notable exception. And I think, following James’ lead, it’s more often associated with mysticism, particularly eastern thought but also some aspects of Christianity. Kukla, despite the boundaries he puts up around the topic, touches on all of those senses and instances of ineffability, and more besides.
A warning though. Kukla is an analytic philosopher to his bones. You’re not going to get discussions of the Buddha, the life of Christ, the leap of faith, . . . . none of that. He walks a very abstract and technical path.
His principal question is whether or not ineffability is a coherent concept, whether ineffabilities are truly possible. In his terms that is the question whether or not there can, in principle, be states of affairs that cannot be expressed. It’s a question of the relationship between reality (“states of affairs”) and language. Those terms require some glossing — they are carefully chosen, and they do impose limits on Kukla’s discussion.
Kukla’s conception of “language” is, as he says, Tarskian (after the logician and philosopher of language, Alfred Tarski). A language is “an abstract system of syntactic and semantic rules that delimits a class C of sentences that are either true or false,” and he goes on to say, “I assume that the semantic rules of the language associate a truth-condition X to each sentence S in C such that S is true in the language if and only if the condition X is satisfied.”
That’s a lot of jargon, and Kukla may well have repelled some potential readers right off the bat. Maybe I did, too.
Breaking it down a little, he is asking whether or not there are gaps in what we can express in language, facts that cannot be said (in jargon, “truth-conditions” that are not the truth-conditions for any sentences, maybe any possible sentences, of a language).
If you want a spoiler, he will conclude that ineffabilities are possible, the concept holds together, but of course his conclusion is nuanced.
His argument is twofold, an argument from “epistemic boundedness” (relying on Jerry Fodor’s work on that topic) and an argument from mysticism (relying on William James’ articulation of mysticism). Either argument is sufficient for his conclusion, although he finds independent grounds to accept each.
“Etpistemic boundedness” refers not to the limits of language per se, but to the limits of knowledge. The two are going to be philosophical cousins in Kukla’s discussion. He follows Fodor’s arguments for boundaries to human knowledge. I won’t try to reproduce the discussion — it is technical and intricate.
Neither Fodor nor Kukla is especially interested in contingent limits to human knowledge — e.g., facts about events that haven’t yet happened, events too far away in space, etc. They are most interested in inherent limits, limits by the very nature of human knowledge and understanding. Such limits follow from the finitude, for example, of the conceptual repertoire we have for attaining knowledge and stating facts, that that conceptual repertoire is not infinite and cannot be justifiably said to be “complete.” Kukla’s discussion, following Fodor, is almost completely abstract on this point — somewhat justifiably since we cannot give examples of things or facts that fall outside our ability to conceptualize.
Remember the Star Trek line, “It’s like nothing we’ve seen before.” That’s about all we can say when our conceptual repertoire isn’t prepared for the experience.
There are also potential facts or states of affairs that are arguably beyond any conceptual repertoire, ours or any other. For example, the philosophically resilient notion of the “thing in itself,” the world as it is independently of our particular perceptual capabilities. We cannot escape our perceptual or conceptual repertoires to experience such a world, and the same would be true presumably of any perceptual or conceptual repertoires. Those repertoires are the very conditions of experience, and experiencing anything independently of them is impossible. Any claim to have an insight, ineffable or not, about such a world of things in themselves would require some philosophical loophole or mystical experience.
I’ll leave epistemic boundaries there for now. Kukla also talks about the thoughts and experiences of non-linguistic subjects — animals and young children. It would be a steep uphill argument to claim that such subjects have no thoughts or experiences that in some way or other capture facts despite not having a language in which to express them. Those experiences may themselves be candidates for ineffability.
Mystical insights are a little bit different from epistemic boundedness. A mystical insight is not a matter of limited knowledge — the insight is itself a claim to knowledge, at least of some degree. What is lacking crucially though is the language in which to express the insight. Kukla draws on William James here, that the mystical is “an intuition that cannot be put into words.”
Here there are lots of familiar examples — spiritual or religious revelations (which James discusses extensively), drug-aided experiences (Michael Pollan speaks extensively of ineffability in his book, How to Change Your Mind), or maybe the more common and less high-flying instances of an insight that catches us and changes our thinking about something without itself ever becoming explicit.
Maybe all of these kinds of ineffabilities are profound, either because of the insights they carry or because of the mysteries they expose. But they may have different scopes — something Kukla describes in a hierarchy of “grades of ineffability.”
- weak ineffability (ineffability in one language but not all). Kukla cites Benjamin Whorf’s claims that some sentences in Hopi cannot be translated into English. It’s not at all uncommon for non-English terms and sentences containing them to be elusive for translators. This is not what you’d call “deep” ineffability — it’s the limitations of a particular language, maybe inevitable for natural languages.
- human ineffability (ineffability in all human languages). This is getting “deeper”. But limitations here could be circumstantial. Human beings’ experience is limited. We’ve never been to Mars, we’ve never traveled at speeds close to the speed of light — these are just factual limitations on our experience and what of them we’re prepared to articulate. Other limitations are structural or biological. We lack, for example, some senses that other animals, e.g., bats, have. Or it could just be that in the history of human understanding and language, no humans happen to have invented concepts that we might have.
- nomological ineffability (ineffability for human beings and all other nomologically possible beings, e.g., aliens). This category extends beyond human limitations to the limitations that follow from the laws and regularities of nature. So languages invented by other species (Earth-bound or otherwise) would share these limitations. These could be insights or knowledge available only to gods or other beings not bound by natural limitations. They could be mathematical manipulations involving infinities, or they could be direct observational claims about the origin of the universe.
- logical ineffability (ineffability in all logically possible languages). The “deepest” level. One way to understand ineffability at this level would be that any attempt to formulate propositions or capture facts inevitably results in logical contradiction. Zen koans and Taoist paradoxes come to mind, where the differences between logically exclusive categories collapse — there is no difference between full and empty, even between good and bad. I’ll talk a little bit later about Christian candidates as well, the virgin birth or transubstantiation. The line between logical and nomological ineffabilities may blur — at least it does in my own understanding.
Where does this leave us with respect to the thoughts and interests we may have had about ineffability before Kukla’s discussion?
I can’t help wondering whether Kukla has actually missed the point of at least many ineffabilities. What, for example, if the ineffability isn’t an actual claim that some state of affairs pertains, but a question, or a recognition that a question is unanswerable?
I do think there is an interesting category that we might call “mysteries” that escape Kukla’s conception of ineffabilities. Christians have no trouble referring to and talking about the “fact” of the virgin birth or transubstantiation. There are words for those, but what are lacking are explanations of how they are possible, how they could square with our rational beliefs about the world. Any attempt to spell those out fails (beyond simply calling them “miracles”). It’s not the “what” but the “how” that leaves us speechless.
The Tao also does not fit nicely into Kukla’s discussion. The Tao is certainly talked about in Taoist texts, but with the warning that all the talk of the Tao isn’t the Tao. It cannot be named or described, despite our doing so.
This might be one sense of the logical ineffability Kukla is talking about, but there is more to it. There’s a strictly non-Tarskian role for language at play. By talking about the Tao, “expressing” what the Tao is, despite our necessarily missing the mark, we draw closer to it. There is an experience to be had that is itself enlightening without fully revealing and making the concept accessible to description.
These examples make me wonder if the most interesting category for mysticism may well be that of mysteries rather than ineffabilities as defined by Kukla. Even at least one class of epistemic bounds — the thing as unperceived and unconceptualized, the world of “things in themselves” — might be understood as a mystery.
That’s the heart of Kukla’s discussion and my own thoughts about it. Kukla does go on, though, to some interesting remarks about the credibility of mystical insights, and I feel like I should add at least a few thoughts on what he has to say.
The problem for the credibility of mystical insights is twofold. One problem is that the mystical insight may be dependent on an experience, one that can only be had individually. If a person who has had that mystical experience believes it to be trustworthy, or believes the insight derived from it to be trustworthy, their grounds for doing so are their own and no one else’s. How can they share the basis for their belief if it depends on an experience that only they had?
The second, not unrelated problem, is that the insight itself, if ineffable, is can't be communicated. What is it that the person who didn’t have the experience is even to consider believing if it can’t be put into words?
Take the example of Abraham. Why does Abraham believe that what he has heard is in fact the voice of God? And why should he obey such a command, to sacrifice his own son? That experience of God’s voice is private and shared by no witnesses. And the force of the command God has given him is part of that experience.
Or take examples like the ones Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. An experience of unity with the world and with other beings. Cynics dismiss such experiences, but not everyone is a cynic. Why give credibility to such experiences?
Kukla has some interesting points to make here about the general grounds we have for believing reports of experiences and insights. We certainly grant credibility to many reports of experiences we personally have not shared in, and we also grant credibility to theoretical insights we don’t even begin to understand.
Although not the explicit crux of Kukla’s argument, I think an important point to be made is that credibility is a social phenomenon with many factors at play, not just a matter of publicly available evidence and reasoning.
Suppose we find that many people have the same insights that, for example, Pollan cites. A consensus forms around those insights. Kukla actually argues against such a consensus-based credibility, and there may be good reasons to do so. The articulations that are made of the insights may not be independent of one another — the subjects reporting them are after all subject to anticipations of what they might experience (“memes” if you like that term). But the agreement is still there — it’s still real. And for that matter, all experiences are subject to socially prevalent anticipations.
I’m not going farther on the credibility question. I don’t think it’s really the germ of Kukla’s book and requires a fuller discussion than he has given, or that I’m capable of.
At least in contemporary philosophy, the concept of ineffability gets relatively little play. It does appear, by inference, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and in further treatments of post-Kantian epistemology. William James’ Variety of Religious Experiences is one notable exception. And I think, following James’ lead, it’s more often associated with mysticism, particularly eastern thought but also some aspects of Christianity. Kukla, despite the boundaries he puts up around the topic, touches on all of those senses and instances of ineffability, and more besides.
A warning though. Kukla is an analytic philosopher to his bones. You’re not going to get discussions of the Buddha, the life of Christ, the leap of faith, . . . . none of that. He walks a very abstract and technical path.
His principal question is whether or not ineffability is a coherent concept, whether ineffabilities are truly possible. In his terms that is the question whether or not there can, in principle, be states of affairs that cannot be expressed. It’s a question of the relationship between reality (“states of affairs”) and language. Those terms require some glossing — they are carefully chosen, and they do impose limits on Kukla’s discussion.
Kukla’s conception of “language” is, as he says, Tarskian (after the logician and philosopher of language, Alfred Tarski). A language is “an abstract system of syntactic and semantic rules that delimits a class C of sentences that are either true or false,” and he goes on to say, “I assume that the semantic rules of the language associate a truth-condition X to each sentence S in C such that S is true in the language if and only if the condition X is satisfied.”
That’s a lot of jargon, and Kukla may well have repelled some potential readers right off the bat. Maybe I did, too.
Breaking it down a little, he is asking whether or not there are gaps in what we can express in language, facts that cannot be said (in jargon, “truth-conditions” that are not the truth-conditions for any sentences, maybe any possible sentences, of a language).
If you want a spoiler, he will conclude that ineffabilities are possible, the concept holds together, but of course his conclusion is nuanced.
His argument is twofold, an argument from “epistemic boundedness” (relying on Jerry Fodor’s work on that topic) and an argument from mysticism (relying on William James’ articulation of mysticism). Either argument is sufficient for his conclusion, although he finds independent grounds to accept each.
“Etpistemic boundedness” refers not to the limits of language per se, but to the limits of knowledge. The two are going to be philosophical cousins in Kukla’s discussion. He follows Fodor’s arguments for boundaries to human knowledge. I won’t try to reproduce the discussion — it is technical and intricate.
Neither Fodor nor Kukla is especially interested in contingent limits to human knowledge — e.g., facts about events that haven’t yet happened, events too far away in space, etc. They are most interested in inherent limits, limits by the very nature of human knowledge and understanding. Such limits follow from the finitude, for example, of the conceptual repertoire we have for attaining knowledge and stating facts, that that conceptual repertoire is not infinite and cannot be justifiably said to be “complete.” Kukla’s discussion, following Fodor, is almost completely abstract on this point — somewhat justifiably since we cannot give examples of things or facts that fall outside our ability to conceptualize.
Remember the Star Trek line, “It’s like nothing we’ve seen before.” That’s about all we can say when our conceptual repertoire isn’t prepared for the experience.
There are also potential facts or states of affairs that are arguably beyond any conceptual repertoire, ours or any other. For example, the philosophically resilient notion of the “thing in itself,” the world as it is independently of our particular perceptual capabilities. We cannot escape our perceptual or conceptual repertoires to experience such a world, and the same would be true presumably of any perceptual or conceptual repertoires. Those repertoires are the very conditions of experience, and experiencing anything independently of them is impossible. Any claim to have an insight, ineffable or not, about such a world of things in themselves would require some philosophical loophole or mystical experience.
I’ll leave epistemic boundaries there for now. Kukla also talks about the thoughts and experiences of non-linguistic subjects — animals and young children. It would be a steep uphill argument to claim that such subjects have no thoughts or experiences that in some way or other capture facts despite not having a language in which to express them. Those experiences may themselves be candidates for ineffability.
Mystical insights are a little bit different from epistemic boundedness. A mystical insight is not a matter of limited knowledge — the insight is itself a claim to knowledge, at least of some degree. What is lacking crucially though is the language in which to express the insight. Kukla draws on William James here, that the mystical is “an intuition that cannot be put into words.”
Here there are lots of familiar examples — spiritual or religious revelations (which James discusses extensively), drug-aided experiences (Michael Pollan speaks extensively of ineffability in his book, How to Change Your Mind), or maybe the more common and less high-flying instances of an insight that catches us and changes our thinking about something without itself ever becoming explicit.
Maybe all of these kinds of ineffabilities are profound, either because of the insights they carry or because of the mysteries they expose. But they may have different scopes — something Kukla describes in a hierarchy of “grades of ineffability.”
- weak ineffability (ineffability in one language but not all). Kukla cites Benjamin Whorf’s claims that some sentences in Hopi cannot be translated into English. It’s not at all uncommon for non-English terms and sentences containing them to be elusive for translators. This is not what you’d call “deep” ineffability — it’s the limitations of a particular language, maybe inevitable for natural languages.
- human ineffability (ineffability in all human languages). This is getting “deeper”. But limitations here could be circumstantial. Human beings’ experience is limited. We’ve never been to Mars, we’ve never traveled at speeds close to the speed of light — these are just factual limitations on our experience and what of them we’re prepared to articulate. Other limitations are structural or biological. We lack, for example, some senses that other animals, e.g., bats, have. Or it could just be that in the history of human understanding and language, no humans happen to have invented concepts that we might have.
- nomological ineffability (ineffability for human beings and all other nomologically possible beings, e.g., aliens). This category extends beyond human limitations to the limitations that follow from the laws and regularities of nature. So languages invented by other species (Earth-bound or otherwise) would share these limitations. These could be insights or knowledge available only to gods or other beings not bound by natural limitations. They could be mathematical manipulations involving infinities, or they could be direct observational claims about the origin of the universe.
- logical ineffability (ineffability in all logically possible languages). The “deepest” level. One way to understand ineffability at this level would be that any attempt to formulate propositions or capture facts inevitably results in logical contradiction. Zen koans and Taoist paradoxes come to mind, where the differences between logically exclusive categories collapse — there is no difference between full and empty, even between good and bad. I’ll talk a little bit later about Christian candidates as well, the virgin birth or transubstantiation. The line between logical and nomological ineffabilities may blur — at least it does in my own understanding.
Where does this leave us with respect to the thoughts and interests we may have had about ineffability before Kukla’s discussion?
I can’t help wondering whether Kukla has actually missed the point of at least many ineffabilities. What, for example, if the ineffability isn’t an actual claim that some state of affairs pertains, but a question, or a recognition that a question is unanswerable?
I do think there is an interesting category that we might call “mysteries” that escape Kukla’s conception of ineffabilities. Christians have no trouble referring to and talking about the “fact” of the virgin birth or transubstantiation. There are words for those, but what are lacking are explanations of how they are possible, how they could square with our rational beliefs about the world. Any attempt to spell those out fails (beyond simply calling them “miracles”). It’s not the “what” but the “how” that leaves us speechless.
The Tao also does not fit nicely into Kukla’s discussion. The Tao is certainly talked about in Taoist texts, but with the warning that all the talk of the Tao isn’t the Tao. It cannot be named or described, despite our doing so.
This might be one sense of the logical ineffability Kukla is talking about, but there is more to it. There’s a strictly non-Tarskian role for language at play. By talking about the Tao, “expressing” what the Tao is, despite our necessarily missing the mark, we draw closer to it. There is an experience to be had that is itself enlightening without fully revealing and making the concept accessible to description.
These examples make me wonder if the most interesting category for mysticism may well be that of mysteries rather than ineffabilities as defined by Kukla. Even at least one class of epistemic bounds — the thing as unperceived and unconceptualized, the world of “things in themselves” — might be understood as a mystery.
That’s the heart of Kukla’s discussion and my own thoughts about it. Kukla does go on, though, to some interesting remarks about the credibility of mystical insights, and I feel like I should add at least a few thoughts on what he has to say.
The problem for the credibility of mystical insights is twofold. One problem is that the mystical insight may be dependent on an experience, one that can only be had individually. If a person who has had that mystical experience believes it to be trustworthy, or believes the insight derived from it to be trustworthy, their grounds for doing so are their own and no one else’s. How can they share the basis for their belief if it depends on an experience that only they had?
The second, not unrelated problem, is that the insight itself, if ineffable, is can't be communicated. What is it that the person who didn’t have the experience is even to consider believing if it can’t be put into words?
Take the example of Abraham. Why does Abraham believe that what he has heard is in fact the voice of God? And why should he obey such a command, to sacrifice his own son? That experience of God’s voice is private and shared by no witnesses. And the force of the command God has given him is part of that experience.
Or take examples like the ones Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. An experience of unity with the world and with other beings. Cynics dismiss such experiences, but not everyone is a cynic. Why give credibility to such experiences?
Kukla has some interesting points to make here about the general grounds we have for believing reports of experiences and insights. We certainly grant credibility to many reports of experiences we personally have not shared in, and we also grant credibility to theoretical insights we don’t even begin to understand.
Although not the explicit crux of Kukla’s argument, I think an important point to be made is that credibility is a social phenomenon with many factors at play, not just a matter of publicly available evidence and reasoning.
Suppose we find that many people have the same insights that, for example, Pollan cites. A consensus forms around those insights. Kukla actually argues against such a consensus-based credibility, and there may be good reasons to do so. The articulations that are made of the insights may not be independent of one another — the subjects reporting them are after all subject to anticipations of what they might experience (“memes” if you like that term). But the agreement is still there — it’s still real. And for that matter, all experiences are subject to socially prevalent anticipations.
I’m not going farther on the credibility question. I don’t think it’s really the germ of Kukla’s book and requires a fuller discussion than he has given, or that I’m capable of.
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