Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt?
Beyond the irreducible facts of logical incompleteness, indefinite extensibility and ineradicably circular semantic tautology when these information systems are considered in gestalt, there is something else hiding in plain sight here. The subtly discontinuous and quite plausibly hard-coded incompetency of verbal or written communication is a critical rupture by and through which language endlessly and quite blindly regenerates itself.
All ambiguity, disagreement, dissonance and uncertainty serve as substantive fail-safe against the redundancy of linguistic (and other ordered, symbolic communications) systems themselves. In this sense we can observe that language is really not at all different from any other autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system. By generating a threshold level of structural or logical and useful information entropy, these systems ensure the proliferation of more words, discourse, texts, analyses and ideological or philosophical positions.
Most of the words and languages we use are engaged to negotiate the hyper-inflating referential complexity that those words and languages themselves generate. The underlying uncertainty and ambiguity of these systems also provides open systems of indefinitely-extensible complexity and structural metamorphosis or evolution. The strength of language is simultaneously its key weakness and as a general philosophical observation, the same is true of all other grammatical, cognitive, cultural, ideological, political and technological practices, artefacts, entities and systems.
Daedelus Kite 