A story about language is a linguistic artifact. Any story about how language connects with 'reality' is also a linguistic artifact ...
Any possible answer to the question 'Why do our stories make sense?' must be a story that makes sense.
Our visceral feeling that the words we use to describe the world are directly connected with that world through our own experience is inclined to make us feel that there must be some story we can talk about this that validates our language use. Unfortunately, our individual phenomenological spaces are somewhat insulated from one another. I cannot directly look into your internal world of experience, and you cannot directly look into mine.
Insofar as we can share this phenomenological content, we do it through language - in the widest sense. We do it with descriptions, stories, theories, facial expressions, gestures, furtive looks ...
This means that however confident I might be that the way I speak is related to the world that I experience, I cannot point this link out to you. You can only hear what I say. You cannot directly share the experience that, for me, makes it seem valid, congruent, and real.
This general predicament is what Ludwig Wittgenstein was drawing attention to in his 'beetle' parable. Imagine, he suggests, that each of us has a box that only we can look into. No one else can see its contents. Imagine, also, that there is a public word for what each of us has in our box - we call it a 'beetle'. When we use this word in our conversations with each other, we know exactly what we mean, and we each have a private experience of examining the contents of our own boxes when we think about this meaning. The word 'beetle', however, would work in exactly the same way in the public language whether or not we each had the same things, or indeed anything at all, in our boxes.
Reflecting on this parable can be both disturbing and reassuring. It challenges some comforting assumptions we make about our shared language and shared world. On the other hand, it gives some insight into how things can go wrong, when one's phenomenological space suddenly seems to disconnect from the shared reality in a mystifying and unintelligible way: When what we see in our boxes makes the way we use the public word 'beetle' feel uncomfortable to ourselves and to others - uncomfortable in a way that sometimes cannot, itself, be shared.
Why might this insight be reassuring? Because it reminds us that real conversations are not just reassemblages of well-understood tokens - Lego-brick words that we all know how to use. Real conversations also incorporate experiments with meaning - sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit - which can help us to bring the language world and the phenomenological space back into congruence.
This exact process is what we see in 'focussing' episodes in the counselling room - where time is made to let some troubling experiences come fully into awareness, and to find or create the words that are needed to explore this with another human being, with an engaged and competent interlocutor.
I think it is also what happens when children learn to speak - when they first discover the relevance of their internal worlds to the way others interact with them. Learning to speak is a necessarily kinaesthetic process, however much it is demonstrated by 'knowing-that' capacities to articulate and describe. After all, we cannot learn to speak by having the rules and meanings explained to us!
The roots of incongruence can be even deeper and harder to articulate than the beetle parable suggests. Wittgenstein himself failed to reflect on the consequences of his investigations for the actual language that he used to carry them out - this was always treated as, somehow, transparent.
The counselling room is not a seminar - we cannot appeal to any kind of 'transparency'. In this place, all rules, relationships, meanings, are tentative.
It is a place where we may find ourselves having to explore the possibility of having the kind of conversation within which these other things - rules, meanings, explanations, narratives - can also be explored. The kind of conversation within which we can talk about how we talk.
(And so I leave these marks and squiggles here, imagining an interlocutor?)
