Wordlessness

We can only ask questions in a language we understand. We can, however, feel wordlessly miserable, confused, fearful, and incongruent.

And yet being able to speak is itself, viscerally and computationally, a knowing how. We are neither aware of any 'internal linguistic machinery' nor can the metaphor of internal machinery be unpacked without generating paradoxes that render the unpacking itself incoherent. We cannot give a demonstrably intelligible account of why our accounts are, in general, intelligible ...

But our attempts to speak are not vain. If they were, we could not intelligibly say so ('Our attempts to give an account are vain' is an account ...)

And so we experiment and discover. We cannot map the whole landscape, but our feelings of incongruence guide us to those areas that it would be most productive to explore. We find new ways to use our words, and, where necessary, we find new words.

This is science, as well as therapy.