In his discussion of the ideas presented by Democritus in The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell casts the problem of void in a different light, suggesting that the problematic notion be reconsidered in terms of pure capacity rather than spatial terms. Democritus was a philosopher from ancient Greece, a contemporary of Socrates (though still considered to be among the pre-Socratic thinkers), who advocated a theory of physical reality that is a remarkably advanced precursor to today's atomic theory. In brief, he theorized that all matter is made up of imperceptible tiny particles called atoms. The most significant way this theory differs from our present day conception of atoms is that to the Atomists these were necessarily impenetrable, indestructible, and indivisible. There was no further divisions that could be made; atoms were thought to be the absolute smallest building blocks of which every physical thing we encounter is comprised. The Atomists held that the atoms existed in a pure and limitless void, through which they could move freely. At first, this seems natural, basically suggesting that there is a space in which the atoms exist. But if these atoms are the absolute smallest particle which makes up everything that exists, then this space cannot be made of anything that exists and is thus void. Needless to say, this is problematic, or at least it is if we consider void to be the absence of matter.
But if we look at it in terms of pure capacity, then the paradoxical statememnt of positively referring to a negative concept (e.g. "there is nothing here") is, if not eliminated, at least made more comprehensible. In other words, it makes sense to say that we cannot truly conceive of or positively refer to a negative concept such as void. But we can, and I think we do this in our everyday language, positively indicate a level of capacity or degree of something in particular, while we cannot make an utterance that references to, or even conceive of, "nothing."
But what about our concept of nothingness? How is it that we can meaningfully convey anything by this word at all? Certainly we intend to express this all of the time, and wouldn't it follow that we must have somewhere in our heads a concept of it that we understand ourselves if we have an intention to express something? How could someone wish to express something they have no concept of? Certainly if we meant to say "no capacity for x in regards to y" we would say just that, rather than convoluding our ideas with such misleading words as "nothing."
In support of Russell, the Atomists, and common speech, I cannot think of any instance outside of discussions in theology or metaphysics where "nothing" would hold such broad meaning as it does here. In general, if I say "there is nothing in the box," I am really saying that the box does not contain anything mentionable, that is anything besides air or possibly packing material. The person to whom I am communicating the absence of contents in the box would undoubtedly think me peculiar if I informed him that this box contains air. Utterances such as this are also highly dependent on context. A word like nothing, though a noun, is unique in so far as it cannot be conceived to exist independently of its context, as can most other nouns.
There is no question that we do, if in a limited capacity, understand negative concepts on their own. How this can be the case has been the concern of many philosophers throughout history, including Plato's famous argument of recollection in Meno and Immanuel Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism, which he presents in his Critique of Pure Reason. As I said above, I think that it is the case that we always ascertain a negative idea like nothing by thinking of it in terms of its context, as an absence of the thing or idea to which it refers. But how do we arrive at understanding isolated negative concepts such as nothingness or void? The fact that we refer to them in a positive sense indicates that there is a transference. Rightly or not, it seems to me that we can arrive at a notion of pure nothingness in and of itself by means of induction: there is no ketchup in this bottle, I am short fifteen cents, etc., until we have an idea culminating in a general law-like understanding of absence-in-general, which we, for the most part correctly, apply to describe situations, both observed and hypothetical, that seem to fit its criteria. But to this law-like understanding of absence-in-general, we can only talk about positively, in so far as to do otherwise would be something like removing words from a sentence instead of adding them, or not thinking of an idea to think about it. So, language provides a meaningful and convenient shorthand for such complex inductive thoughts that we barely understand but can successfully convey nonetheless. I suggest that it is by pure analogy that we can successfully entertain and convey these sorts of thoughts, just as it is by pure analogy that the word "negative" refers to its meaning.
It also seems to be so with language in general: that words can somehow be related to the thoughts of their author in such a way that they more or less can reconstruct the author's mental state(s) in a second person is a profound notion. While the Atomists' views regarding the natural world, though insightful and correct to a certain extent, has been exceeded by modern physics, the theory could be applied with more success to our language, and then to the minds of speakers and hearers. Such a theory might culminate a unique take on some problems in philosophy mind, exploring the power of metaphor and symbols of language as mechanisms of pure capacity. Further, such a model might aspire to bridge the waring so-called clashing disciplines of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy.
