Are there things we can’t describe with the English language?
Even things that depend on context and situation? What are the barriers then, language structure or dictionary (wires)? I’m halling about describing in such a way that its meaning is unambiguous in the given context and situation.
Comments (196)
I think we can probably talk about anything we can be aware of. There are many things we aren't aware of and maybe many more we can't be.
If you're going to start a thread, you should provide more of your own thoughts in your opening post. It's just courtesy.
I think the barrier could be vocabulary. There are some words that cannot be translated at all because probably in English speaker country the word doesn't not exist at all.
For example, in my language there is a profession called pospós or trapero. This is a person who picks clothes from the street, make some new renewable ones and then sell it cheaper that was back then. Probably this also exists in English speakers countries but I can't find the exactly word of your vocabulary.
This is true, but when it's needed, languages evolve. New words. Modifications of old words. Words stolen from other languages. Whole new ways of looking at things.
Quarks, protons, digital, transgender, Hostess Twinkie, television, internet, Covid 19, HIV, Slim Jim, cell phone, penicillin, GPS, Watergate, infotainment....None of these existed 100 years ago. I checked, Hostess Twinkies were first made 91 years ago.
Yes! You are right. We create words to make them international. Inside plane or journeys vocabulary is more common. For example: Check in when you have to register or just notice that you are already on the airport. Here in Spain we just say check in, we do not translate it to Spanish.
There are definitely several concepts and theories that its understandings can only be reached in its native language, for example, Ibn Arabi's Islamic concept of "Wahdat al-Wujud", which in its best translations is usually translated to something like "Unity of Being", however, understand that the concept itself can only be truly intelligible, if captured in its original language - Arabic -.
Other better-known examples are found in 19th and 20th century German philosophy such as "Dasein" - best translation would be "existence" -, "Übermensch" - transl. "Superman" - and "Eigenheit" - transl. "Ownness" -.
English is only the "Universal" language, as its universality became necessary after the 1940s - from the 1800s to 1940, French was the universal language, at least in the West; in the East, Arabic has been the universal language for more than a 1000 years -. However, humanity is still far from a "homogeneous" language, in the sense of fully comprehending each and every epistemological field.
I'm a big fan of English. It's a very powerful language with great flexibility and vitality to import or create new words. It is perhaps weakest in the area of romantic love, but that may be my ignorance. I haven't read romance novels in English yet.
[joke]If all you feriners would just learn English like God intended, we'd have no more problems.[/joke]
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing the English language at all, I just pointed out on my previous comment, that "English", even though it's the synthesis of more than 2,000 years of Western culture, with all its phonetic and etymological flexibilities, still cannot be considered "the language of humanity", because as I had shown in my examples, there are many, many terms and concepts that in English, we are not able to fully comprehend them.
Yes. Including pretty much the entire old French lexicon, which got absorbed into English starting from Hasting.
Not only French, but Greek and Latin as well.
English is the mixture of a Germanic method of language, with a Greco-Roman epistemological field.
Some philosophers think this way. Or that basically some things ought to be uttered in the actual language they were first used in the specific meaning.
They have to use terms like da sein when talking about existential philosophy of Heidegger. They just irk if someone just translates it to Heidegger's "existence", or "being their".
Nope.
Use the German word. Closer to what Heidegger meant.
Well put.
Dunno. The OP seems to have been sufficient to create a viable thread.
The world is all that is the case. What is the case can be stated.
Quoting Banno
From Site Guidelines:
[i]Don't start a new discussion unless you are:
a) Genuinely interested in the topic you've begun and are willing to engage those who engage you.
b) Able to write a thoughtful OP of reasonable length that illustrates this interest, and to provide arguments for any position you intend to advocate.[/i]
I think these are reasonable rules. If you're not willing to put a minimal level of your own work into a discussion, you shouldn't start one. Also - it pisses me off.
Quoting Cheshire
...and yet it is "more green than grey..." A "a deep, grey, twilight blue with a lavender undertone."
The OP hasn't suggested an intention to advocate a position. So, the omission of arguments seems reasonable.
I believe 'yellow grey' is also attributed to french grey. It changes everytime I look it up. It's my favorite color.
The point is that despite it being indescribable, there are descriptions.
A bit like "I love you more than words can say"... which says how much I love you; despite saying that I can't say how much I love you.
Granted, but if I do an image search for french grey I'll get any number of different colors. In order for something to be described it is necessary the thing and descriptions correspond. I can describe french grey as the sound dreams make, but it doesn't serve as evidence the feat as been achieved.
Quoting Banno
Not grey enough for my taste. In my mind it's light grey with a non-obvious hue of blue that perhaps suggest yellow and green might have recently been present. Closer to a svenska blue without so much blue and more grey. It's a bit of a running joke in the fine art department from what I've been told; that french grey escapes any real definition. It is a bespoke grey.
I don't think you could use english to describe what's been lost in a translation in a book that's been translated from another language to english. Well if f you want to get pedantic, I guess you could. Any description of anything is technically a description of that thing, even if its a bad, even horrible description. Butthe point is that there's elements of prose that don't translate, and descriptions of what didn't translate aren't going to capture it.
Quoting Banno
I've heard that one a few times but its usually by people who don't mean it and are trying to front. Does it say what it says it says?
so for example there's a version of it in King Lear. Goneril says: 'Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter." Goneril's speech in king lear is meant to be an example of language used by someone pretending to say something they aren't actually saying.
Maybe 'i love you more than words could say' would be true as one gesture among many during a romantic night, where shes touched your shoulder, and youve bought her a drink, and you danced this way, and put your arm that way, and she touched your hair that way, and she said 'i love you more than words could say' this way, and you made a joke that way, and she smiled at you that way. But it wouldnt be true like a sentence exactly.
You sound like Bono.
But seriously, , this is a question I've always thought about a lot, but never felt I had the linguistic grasp to start a thread on, so I'm grateful you started it; regardless of how "thorough" your OP was. Folks get a little fundamentalist about that sort of thing here, but I immediately was interested in the thread. Works for me.
More broadly, I've wondered in the past if there are actual aspects of fundamental reality that are only grasped by speakers of specific languages through words and expressions in their respective languages... "Untranslatability", a term suggesting that something real is indeed there that can't be properly translated. As time moves on, I've started to move away from this intuition, but I'm still open to it. I'm more of the disposition now that language often fails, so it's not quite on the pedestal it used to be on for me, but I still love language.
Surely deep-seated love exists which is difficult, if not impossible to express with language. It doesn't have to be romantic. I love my older brother in ways that I can't seem to express. That includes things about him I really don't like at all. Language is not simple math; there are reasons beyond the utility or lake thereof of language that render a fundamental human experience like love hard to express.
But acknowledging indescribability to another person communicates that you feel that way. Like we're doing here. Doesn't that communication have value?
In the wilds, outside of philosophical conversation, it doesn't seem to go that way. The sayers and describers tend to want to to say and describe the unsayable and undescribable, even if only as negative theology. In the wilds, I think people show and express it. In my example to Banno, i admit that there are moments where acknowledging indescribability convey it - but I think those moments only work because theyre not sentence like, not proposition like, theyre gesture-like, theyre a moment-like, something happening like. If you talk of truth-value, and stuff, its not a container that will hold a truth-value past that moment
I do agree with you and I like your way of putting (saying?) it here. But all I'm pointing out is that we have to acknowledge indescribability in order to realize we share the experience of indescribability. If the most over-quoted phrase on TPF is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", then my mental response has always been "you're the one who brought it up, Witty..."
ha, yeah.
Ok, my position, simply put:
Q: Are there things we can't describe in the english language?
A: Yes
:up:
Right; poetry is generally translatable word for word from one language to another. :razz:
I disagree!
Sorrow (description): That feeling you get when you lose a million dollars.
It looks as though description is synonymous with definition. The objective of definitions being to condense information, the description, in one word. It's very much like the concept of radix in math in which you pack quantities in different powers of a given radix. See packing problems.
Don't forget to check out Om/Aum
[quote=Wikipedia]Om (or Aum) is the sound of a sacred spiritual symbol in Indian religions, mainly in Hinduism, wherein it signifies the essence of the Ultimate Reality (parabrahman) which is consciousness (paramatman).[/quote]
But at no point in history did anyone say "let's condense information into a single world and then we'll have a definition". I think you're thinking about it backwards. Definitions of words come after their use in language. Definition is academic; use is public and first.
It would depend (a lot) on how literature compares historically. Did people have a word like computer back in the old days or did they use compound words like calculating-machine. Sorry, I'm too lazy and inept to Google.
I'll admit I'm not sure what you're trying to convey, but how would you apply it to this description? ->
'Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept."
What are the days? Before the computers there were computers.
I don't know the etymology of "computer" by heart, but I'd assume it has to do with "one that computes". But technological words are potentially the exception to the rule, although I think they're not unlike naming planets after Greek or Roman gods; established concepts are consciously used to define a new technological or scientific concept - but that's the exception to the rule of how language functions, although maybe increasingly that will change with the evolution of technology. My point is that, barring everything I just mentioned, language functions organically in that definitions arise naturally over time and are substantiated through common use, not through any premeditated design.
Nice Tintin avatar, btw. And I can't help but ask... "Arcturus" wouldn't be a reference to "A Voyage To Arcturus" by David Lindsay, right?
You got them mixed up.
Who?..
TheMadFool and Arcturus.
Incorrect
Right! It was me who is mixed up. Just woke up. My humble apologies...
You got it, still trying to digest that book
Woah. We may have to have a chat about that. Cheers to Herge and Lindsay. :party:
...and then we ask Wittgenstein's question: How do you know that what you think of as french grey doesn't slowly change in your mind... so that what you thought french grey on one day is different the next? It's not that the colour defies description so much as that there is no common agreement as to what it is... even to an individual.
Oh yeah I can get behind that. Sometimes it does show what it purports to say. And then, if we're on the same page, in other contexts, when said cynically, it shows the opposite, as in goneril's use?
All that I'm saying is what happens if I take a modern text - a novel, a scientific treatise, a poem, etc. - and take it back 2,000 years into the past and ask the people then to translate it: plane = iron bird? :chin:
Quoting VincePee
Is this - contradicting yourself - deliberate/accidental? Never mind.
Quoting Arcturus
There are different kinds of descriptions is all I can say.
? The word computer has more than 1 meaning.
ay, there's the rub:
The meaning is the use.
Except when you mean to use it or the meaning is not to use it.
If a scholar from 2,000 years ago hypothetically somehow had the tools to translate future language into their current language, then I suppose anything would be possible, given those parameters, so then the gravity of the hypothetical question would completely disintegrate, rendering it laughable. This is why I hate these stupid, uncreative thought experiments (P-zombies, et al; take no offense please).
You mean to say that the word "computer" existed in Babylonian/Egyptian times? I don't think so.
cheers :party:
Indeed. "Think"
The reference is the Wittegenstein.
When you're right, you're smart. When others are right, they're stupid. A common affliction. Join the club.
Sorry, I didn't catch your drift. Can you expand and elaborate. Thanks.
...or was it Shakenstine?
Of that which is a portmanteau, one must be uncertain.
Drift? What does that mean? The word computer didnt exist but who says no one computed?
Well, you sound offended; I didn't mean to offend you.
We're on the same page. Nothing to discuss.
So? Everybody gets offended about something. BTW, thanks for not wanting to displease me.
P-sha, I get instantly offended by logging on to the forum. :party:
I think I'm a few pages ahead...
:ok:
That you think you are is not the same as you are.
I have to think about this one...
It's almost the reverse of the issue of whether we see the same duck-egg blue. And asks whether we expect to see the same color. I suppose a less ethereal subject might make for a better test. What do you call all the indescribable things? What type of box do they fit in?
Don't waste your time...
Good advice. I'll write it on my wall. For when I wake up.
What about color spectrum gradient? Let's get off the religiousic Witty high horse for a minute and realize that color exists on a gradient more fine than language does. Who's going to argue for one exact color gradient that the phrase "French Grey" defines? Come on now boys.
:lol:
Go to sleep!
Agreed, partially. The linguists if they're out there might say, 'yeah guys, you're talking about pragmatics' and be confused there's any confusion. But just as the baby boomers took for granted post-war prosperity, maybe we take for granted Austin, et al.
The meaning's the use, but then why are some things usable in this way, and not other ways?
Say: I want to mess with my friend: I know If i use this word, it'll have one effect, and if I use another it'll have another effect. I choose what words to use based on how I understand their meaning.
To use, you already have to know what stuff means. (and stuff 'means' on all sorts of levels) So meaning can't simply be use.
Yes.
Being certain is easy. Any fool can be certain. Demonstrating that your notion of French grey doesn't change - that'd be interesting.
Quoting Noble Dust
My point, exactly.
...but no, you are choosing one use over another use; that being the effect it has on your friend.
My example wasn't very good. I see what you're saying. What I'm trying to say is : Yes, I'm using one word for a specific use - for its effect on my friend - but why do i choose this word versus another? I may want to elicit a reaction, but I'm constrained - in seeking to elicit a reaction, I know one word rather than another will work. . Words have histories and some words will hum and vibrate whether you want them to or not. A good writer is attuned to this, just as a good carpenter understands the grains and whorls in the wood. He doesn't impose fully - he has a general idea going forward, and adjusts to what's there. I'm saying meaning is like that. It's partially use, partially not.
Stand-up comedians are hyper-attuned to the valences of words, for example. They don't invent their acts out of scratch - they're attuned to the emotions and vibrancy of the semantic field and navigate it. You know what I mean?
Take a great prose stylist like Cormac McCarthy or Don Delillo or Marilynne Robinson. They're masters - but they're masters using words that preceded them. The only way they can have the effect they have is to recognize the potencies words have in ways other can't, and then to rearrange them in new ways. If they invented out of scratch how would they communicate? It hits because its shared.
We're always meaning by using stuff that already means, no way around that without dipping into dogmatism.
If its sentences are meaningful, then it is. The OP talks about description. Description is related to meaning, not to aesthetic expression.
Madhyamaka or not quite. I think Banno will have a good laugh. Playing with yourself, are you?
Oh! Updating my files! Gracias!
Anything that can be thought, can be described. Doesn’t mean the description is communicable, but that wasn’t the question.
Something I learned many moons ago in my psychology of language class. From Wikipedia:
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
I, and I think psychologists in general, were skeptical of this even back when I took the class, but I think there is something there. My children were all involved in a French Immersion program from the time they were in kindergarten. Watching them, it has always seemed to me that having two languages gives you two different minds.
I love German. I think being able to speak it a little opens me up to concepts and ways of thinking. On the other hand, I think that's the weak version of the Whorf hypothesis, i.e. some ideas are easier to express and come more naturally in one language vs. another, but it's possible to translate. Or, you can just steal the word.
Agreed. In this context french grey is actually a static color that I happen to enjoy. Really, grey itself represents a unique balance, but a little blue washing over it meets my preference. So, in a PLA sense it is unchanging.
The OP requests the indescribable; I try to make posts to order. To demystify the matter colors are describable by hexadecimal and I imagine even more sophisticated means by now. We have chosen a language our machines understand.
There are certain feelings which aren't captured as neatly as one would in other languages. For example, in Spanish we sometimes say "Hasta siempre", which roughly means, until forever. It is usually said when a person dies or is about to, conveying the emotion that we will never see them again. I suppose "farewell" could be similar-ish given a certain context.
Likewise, in English the word "Schadenfreude" is borrowed from German, which is taking pleasure at someone else's misfortunes. Apparently, there is "epicaricacy" in English, which means something similar. But it sounds less nice.
Also, the term often used in English in philosophy "what it's like" to be so and so, is not sufficiently well translatable to other languages. You can get the main idea, but there is an important residue (or nuance) which can't really be conveyed.
I imagine that if China, Japan and so on, the cases sky rocket. Nevertheless, the main ideas can be expressed in any language.
And surely many emotions and perceptions can't be stated appropriately in words at all.
Not quite, though there are similarities. Sadism implies liking to actively harm people. Schadenfreude doesn't necessarily carry a connotation of enjoying other people's pain, more like enjoying whatever misfortunes happens to them. Pain could be involved, but not obligatorily.
I know that you query the understanding of English language, but I wonder if your question goes further and is about the limits of any language. How do we construct the many complex aspects of experience into words and theories which can be discussed amongst others? How much is language itself, or the ideas which lie behind the surfaces of language?
Some questions occur to me.
How do we judge whether something is sufficiently unambiguous? In general I think we rely on practical criteria. We are simply satisfied or not with the results of talking-acting together in a context.
You ask:
Are there things we can’t describe with the English language?
I'm tempted to joke with you and ask for an example. Does it make sense that there's a proper answer to this question? IMV, a simple yes/no answer would be useful, and the justifications for either yes or no might be illuminating or amusing. Can God make a stone he can't lift?
If we change "perceptions" to "experiences", and if we understand experiences to be strongly entwined with all manner of conceptualizations which over time become ingrained into the way we experience, then I think this hypothesis of linguistic relativity makes a good deal of sense.
While there are basic concepts that can safely be assumed common to all beings and hence languages - such as the roundabout concept of other(ness), or the dichotomy between thing(ness)/noun and activity/verb - think, for example, of the vast chasm between Western and Eastern concepts which in English go by the term of "emptiness". Such as in statements like "heightening your own realization of emptiness". There's a great divide in conceptual understanding here, and a plethora of entwined connotations that result in generalized meaning that get lost in translation. And, were one to be in no way exposed to Eastern thoughts, one as typical Westerner would almost certainly hold no experience whatsoever - regardless of how marginal - of what a philosophically educated Easterner's experience is in relation to reality at large.
Then there are languages and cultures we are fully unacquainted with, many an individual tribal culture for instance. A typical Westerner cannot experience reality in the animistic ways that many an individual from such tribal cultures do - in large part due to the differences in languages used to engage in internal thoughts regarding reality.
Quoting T Clark
Yes, but this already presupposes that some individual which so translates or steals words holds multilingual understanding, hence knowledge of two or more languages. Were the other culture's language to not be known by a given cohort, this cohort would not have recourse to the concepts uniquely captured by the given other language.
Millennia of philosophy of language settled in one short passage.
- - -
Quoting TheMadFool
Indeed. For use to have the potential to define the meaning of a word, the word must already have some previous definition (the result of a previous use?). (Except for true novums where an entirely new, non-onomatopoetic, non-abbreviating sequence of sounds is produced; such words are extremely rare.)
It seems that the meaning of a word consists of two components: a relatively static one and a relatively dynamic one, and that the two are in a temporal mutual relationship.
For example: mouse, as in computer mouse. The relatively static part is the meaning of mouse, as in mouse the animal. The dynamic part is in using this word to also name a part of computer equipment which in shape and movement somewhat resembles mouse the animal.
The other point is that for a particular use of a word to become its meaning, it must gain enough social traction. We have a computer mouse, but not a computer turtle.
(But it seems that the actual question that such inquiries are trying to answer is something like, What came first: use or definition?)
Going by the Humpty Dumpty quote ( :up: , btw), shouldn't this be: What came first: use of pre-established symbols or the intentional creation of symbols we use?
Hence, the "which is to be master" part: words that create the limits of concepts with which we think or the agency to express concepts we choose to think via words.
True novums are extremely rare. Normally, we use existing language material (or, more generally: symbol material) and make something other out of it.
Humpty Dumpty is refering to which particular meaning of the word is the relevant one, the one that prevails.
I think this is a misleading dichotomy. I think the relationship between the two is mutual, they are mutually interdependent, and that we cannot meaningfully talk about one without the other, nor assume that one came first and is the condition or requirement for the other.
A description is like the handle on a coffee cup.
Which is the french grey you love? It doesn't matter, of course, since the french grey you love is not a colour you have in mind, but a colour on the swatch, the wall, the art work.
The meaning of french grey is what you do with it; ordering and applying a colour that is pleasing.
Unless you subscribe to a kind of biblical "and then God gave man language", you're always looking at matters of language as someone who is birthed into and thereby embedded within, at the very least, one language.
I assume that just like there is unbroken evolutionary continuity that spans through time to our present state, from our ancestors who lived in the sea to ape like creatures to H. sapiens, so there is unbroken evolutionary continuity of language, where at each t + 1 we use what was already there at t and make other things out of it (but which cannot rightfully be called "new"). It's not recycling, but it's also not invention.
I don't see how the "which came first" question can be asked meaningfully.
Both of you say that the meaning of a word is in its use. Except that Humpty Dumpty goes further and specifies which use (the one of his choice; the one that prevails).
Contrast "The meaning of the word is whatever I say it is" with "The meaning of the word is the part it plays in the language game being played".
But it's good to see you thinking about this.
I get what you're saying, but unless one assumes that all life is endowed with language, then language appeared at some point in time after life appeared. (One could even extend this form of reasoning prior to life: if bacteria have language, do self-replicating protein molecules like prions have language, how about crystals, rocks, atoms, and so on.) In this line of reasoning, language appeared out of non-language at some point in time.
Besides, rare as they might be, novums - new features - perpetually occur, thereby the evolution of any living language, and how are novums not invented?
Can there be use devoid of intention?
I find that to mean X is to intend X. The meaning of "tree" I cognize at any given time is what I intend via the use of the symbol - hypothetically ranging from aspects of divinity like the tree of knowledge of or life to fully profane generalized ideas like the biological workings of a lifeform (no, I'm not Abrahamic). What another might mean - intend - by "tree" is relative to what they as other individual agency intends. There then is intersubjective, or shared, intention. The atheist and the spiritualist will both minimally intend by the symbol "tree" the generalized idea of something endowed with roots, a trunk, and branches. But this shared, hence social, intention is yet constituted of individuals' intentions ... a plurality of intentions that find accord.
Hm. let's see.
Can you put something to use accidentally?
Intent is built into an analysis of use. Indeed, there's a whole branch of work on the topic.
If someone else has a different "intended meaning of tree", does that prevent communication? Usually not. Meanign is not a thing in your head.
Usually, but not necessarily. Suppose someone intends the generalized idea of cat by the use of "tree". We'd likely call them other than perfectly sane, but that's beside the point of what constitutes meaning.
At any rate, is intention not something in your head?
But you implied meaning was a thing in your head.
Immediately, the thing in your head is not the same as the thing in my head, and we do not have a shared meaning.
And yet we can have conversations, implying that we can mean the same thing...
So, by a reductio, something has gone wrong in equating intent with meaning, or claiming that meaning is private.
In short, a language does not strictly exist in my head, no. Yet meaning - or, what is intended via symbols - does.
As one example, the pain or pleasure I might at one moment associate with a given color due to my own idiosyncratic experiences - with this color momentarily leading my thoughts to a certain outcome of affect and, in so governing my thoughts' intentionality, granting this color a momentary meaning to me - will be a fully private occurrence. That the color orange momentarily means putrid to me on grounds that it vividly reminds me of an orange I one ate that was spoiled will be a meaning of the color orange that is fully private to me.
Its just that when it comes to language, there is a conformity between a) what an individual intends via a symbol and b) the commonly agreed upon understanding of what is to be intended via a symbol which pertains to the cohort (a) is a part of. This general conformity - whose limits can on occasion be tested - is necessary for communication.
So for example, that the color red means passion or love when on a rose or a heart will be an intersubjective meaning relative to those who understand red to so symbolize in the given contexts - a meaning that resides in the head of each individual and which is commonly agreed upon.
Nuh.
Have a read of Philosophical Investigations. Especially the first forty or so paragraphs.
No, and I'm so far not inclined to. Have you read the two examples of color's meaning which I just posted?
One issue I have with Wittgenstein's claim that meaning is use is that even definitions viewed in terms of essences is, after all, use of a word to stand for a certain idea or object. I don't recall anyone attempting to clarify how Wittgenstein's theory differs in a significant way from essence-based definitions which are, bottom line, also use.
:roll:
It looks like I wasn't clear enough. My bad, the ability to articulate my thoughts wasn't ever my strong suit. I'll give it another shot.
First off, we have to acknowledge the fact that even when words are being thought of as possessing an essence they are being used, used to represent the idea/object that the word stands for. For example, if I define "water" as "that clear liquid we drink, and use for cooking, bathing, and washing", I am, for certain, using the word "water" to stand for "that clear liquid we drink, and use for cooking, bathing, and washing." Note kindly that in this case the word "water" is used but then it has an essence as stated in "that clear liquid we drink, and use for cooking, bathing, and washing."
My question is, how does the use of the word "water" in the above paragraph differ from Wittgenstein's use when he claims that meaning is use. There's got to be a difference, right? After all, a word is used in both cases but in one, there is an essence to the word but not, according to Wittgenstein, in the other. :chin:
Not to be dramatic or self-important, but this "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" is exactly the same idea that I've felt intuitively for years without any special knowledge of the subject; I had never heard of this specific hypothesis before now. I have no expertise or argument to use to back up this intuition.
I need to think about it more, as you would say.
:up:
Lol, there aren't sentences in poetry...
Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.
Not all poems have sentences, but some do.
As I noted, I think this is probably an oversimplification.
Fair enough, but hairy belly appeared to be assuming there always are, which to me smacked of a lack of knowledge of poetry, which made me laugh internally, considering the role poetry plays in language and it's evolution.
Quoting T Clark
Can you elaborate on why you think so?
Hi. If I may interrupt, I think we tend to use 'meaning' in a way that suggests that it's attached to a person. 'I said ketchup, but I meant mustard.' It reminds me of W's talk of toothaches. It's the 'grammar' of our language that 'toothaches' and 'intentions' are (as if) private entities. But I think that it ('meaning') nevertheless boils down the social. How could I learn what an 'intention' is without interacting with others? Even if you postulated some internal-private machinery that's just there, we'd still have the issue of how certain tokens get attached to these entities. And we'd also have the question (one of many like it) of how we could know that we all have the same internal machinery (is my green your green?). What tempts us to put meaning-language mostly (if not entirely) in the head...when it can only be made sense of as part of a social world?
The Whorf hypothesis, at least in my day, was a strong statement that language controls the kinds of things we can think about. Since then, I think the concept has become more nuanced, but I think it's easy to overstate the effect. The idea that language encourages us to think in certain ways and limits our ability to think in others is very attractive. I felt that way when I first heard about it.
I get the sentiment, but I would word it differently. The intuition that I get is that there is an extent to which words help us construct our reality. So it's not that language "encourages" (language isn't sentient, is it?) or that it "limits" us, but rather that language is one aspect of experience that shapes our reality. It's part of our reality and it plays a role in shaping it at the same time.
Yeah, I'm always avoiding explaining Wittgenstein - over more than a dozen years and thousands of posts. Never mention him, that's me. Won't enter into any conversations about his stuff.
Maybe if I can find a fuck to give, I'll reply to you.
Religion will do that to you.
Religion will do that to you too.
Yea, true, but only when it consists of following infallible folk. At any rate, doubt that Wittgenstein took himself to be such, though I can't say as much about some of his adorers.
Quoting Banno
Cute. Especially seeing how you put in the effort to reply. :lol:
Good to see you two have each other's company to enjoy.
When you can be interesting, let me know.
Witty can seem infallible; indeed, on the surface, he does. Hence his religious followers.
Interesting indeed!
I think we already did, but they won't understand it, so it doesn't matter.
What? It's the name of a color. They make a crayon. I didn't get to label it. I maintain that this phrase above is never resident in some one's mind during an internal process of understanding things. No one thinks to themselves in a convoluted way. The meaning is what you do with it with respect to the context and any ceremonial entailments. How do you describe what it is to mean something? Seems thread relevant.
Yep.
Lao Tzu - The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
Some guy - Hey, Lao Tzu, you're talking about something that can't be talked about. What's with that?
Lao Tzu - Tao as a thing is entirely illusive and evasive. Evasive and illusive. In it there is image. Illusive and evasive. In it there is thinghood. Dark and dim.
Some guy - This is such bullshit.
Lao Tzu - Go fuck yourself.
While all of this is plausible, I do suspect that the 'grammar' of the word 'private' drags us toward thinking of some mind-box with a private picture show. Then one can worry about solipsism or the thing-in-itself and so on. But we don't have to start with this Cartesian picture. Or rather we can become aware of it as an optional inheritance. The whole 'one peeping Tom homunculus per body' is just the way we've done things. One headstone per corpse. One proper name. One bearer of praise and blame (and whatever 'free will' is supposed to be beyond this.)
I suppose we can try to build language from the inside out (little souls learning to get in sync) or from the outside in ('soul' talk is a part of coordinated action talk, etc., as if of a relatively hidden variable, or a variable accessible by conversation rather than stethoscope.)
I think of W as just one slap in the face among others, to wake foolosophers up from a dream. Some of his early metaphors still hold, IMO. The ladder is disposable. The evidence of something like understanding Wittgenstein is talking less silly talk. Definitions can still be useful, but they are taken far less seriously than a certain kind of philosopher might want to take them (as if they were formal definitions that might be used in a mathematical proof.). I think the big point is that meaning is out there with them not in here with me. No one cares about my 'definition' of [choose a sound-mark]. Why should they? I don't decide what 'justice' or 'knowledge' or 'science' means, though I can bark and squeak like the rest on such matters. Yeah, a few of us bark and squeak so well that others' barks and squeaks come to resemble our own stolen noises. But the main thing is to just look and listen at what's going on ('meaning is use' blah blah blah.)
Thank you for addressing the example I gave. Since you claim it to be plausible, you didn’t give me much to argue against, for I too find it quite plausible.
BTW, do you by “homunculus” simply intend a euphemism for “consciousness”? The little person within the total person that itself has a littler person within, and so on ad infinitum, is not something I can fathom anyone believing in.
At the moment, don’t have much interest in arguing one way or another about the reality of consciousnesses. But I thought I’d ask, since I am curious.
I guess I've just been impressed by some holes that have been poked in the initially plausible Cartesian framework. Not just by Wittgenstein, either, though he's an obvious reference. Ryle makes some killer arguments.
Quoting javra
Yeah, something like consciousness, the man in the box, etc. To me it's not about arguing for or against the existence of consciousness (which of course exists in the usual way) but blowing open certain conversational habits about this 'consciousness' stuff. I think that some seeming-deniers of consciousness are really attacking certain vague/complacent uses of the word.
Wittgenstein, it seems, was especially affected by the word "game." He realized that, in truth, no one really knows how to define it but then everyone uses it and uses it correctly. It's actually a paradox very similar to St. Augustine's time paradox:
[quote=St. Augustine (on time)] What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.[/quote]
LoL
:lol:
I reckon the grear Lao Tzu is referring to what I suppose is some kind of God-like entity or a Cosmic Principle that's behind all there is, every object, every phenomenon, basically everything, with the Tao.
Lao Tzu then goes on to say that the Tao is nameless i.e. it can't be named which seemingly contradicts the fact that he calls/names it the Tao. Lao Tzu out of necessity must invent a word for that which he wishes to talk about even though no word is suited for the task. He picked "Tao" for some reason now lost to history.
What's important to note here is Lao Tzu is employing apophasis to get us to realize what the Tao is. It's unnameable: Is it a stone? No? Is it a thought? No! Is it this (pointing to something)? No! Is it that (pointing to another thing)? No! No! No! No!...The bottom line is that the Tao is not anything that we know, that which we know always nameable.
Apophasis, I'm told, is also a technique used in theism.
Even the great buddhist master Nagarjuna adopts a similar attitude with Nagarjuna's tetralemma. The buddha precedes him but the teralemma, I believe, came into its own at the hands of the talented Nagarjuna.
What's going on?
Can I convey my phenomenal state of the phone before me through representational symbols with 100% accuracy? I'd say no. No words could convey the boredom I'd experience while that transpired. The full experience isn't reducible or conveyable except in some hypothetical construct offering a very simplified example and an infinite amount of time.
You'll never know how I feel, regardless of the depth and breadth of our therapy sessions. Just ask any angst ridden teenager if you need further empirical proof.
I'm reluctant to get into a discussion about that here. You've been in threads with me and others where this was discussed. If I remember correctly, you have a pretty good idea of what Lao Tzu means by "Tao" even if you don't agree with how he sees things.
Quoting TheMadFool
"Tao" means "way." "Te" sort of means "virtue." "Ching" means book. Tao Te Ching means the book of the way and virtue, more or less.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think you're right, but I've always preferred to think about it as a joke Lao Tzu is telling.
Quoting TheMadFool
As I noted, I think you have a fairly good idea of what is going on. Methinks the laddie doth protest too much.
I don't see how we can discuss the subject of the OP without talking about how we use language.
Quoting Hanover
Describing something doesn't mean representing something "with 100% accuracy." Red Delicious apple. About 3 inches diameter. Red. I don't normally need to count how many seeds.
I think that such a starting point should only be seen provisionally, and as an artificial imposition on what is otherwise a dynamic flux.
Take, for example, vocal chords: language as we know it is impossible without vocal chords. But for vocal chords to come into existence, dozens of other things had to happen, evolve. On the other hand, as we began to speak, our vocal changed, developed further, so as to be able to produce more and more sophisticated sounds. Which in turn made it possible for language to be more complex. (Of course, the development of vocal chords is not the only factor in the development of language.)
Looking at the "which came first" question a bit more literally in the ontological sense assumes a discrete point from which on some feature can be observed as existing, and not existing prior it. I think such an ontological analysis should only be seen provisionally, so as to not gloss over of the causes and conditions that had to be in place for some feature to become observable.
My neighbor's son is about two years old. He's struggling with speech. I've been observing (listening) to how he's developing his language abilities. He still can't utter actual words, but he has distinctly gone from a phase where he sort of yelled and cried the way small babies do, to a kind of deliberate "uuurggghhh" but which is nevertheless specific enough, recognizable. It seems that he's trying hard to utter a word, that he has something to say, but it just won't come out right.
On the whole, phases of language development in a child can be observed, but it is not possible to pinpoint the exact time and date where the child went from one phase to another, as if to completely leave behind the previous phase. The lines aren't so sharp. This is also why I think that the dichotomy between words that create the limits of concepts with which we think and the agency to express concepts we choose to think via words is not clearcut, and meaningful only provisionally.
(For comparison: We distinguish between, say, the upper body and the lower body, but any dividing line we were to draw on our waists would be only provisional, it wouldn't be definitive. This is because the division between the upper body and the lower body exists conceptually, but not on the body itself.)
But most things that seem new are actually made of old, already existing things.
The OP is ambiguous to the extent one wonders if it's asking (1) whether English in particular offers limitations in what it can describe as opposed to what might be only explainable in French, for example or (2) whether certain concepts are ineffable and not reducible to langauge.
As to (1), I think the consensus is no, that all langauges in principle can equally explain things, even if it requires more words or longer explanations. For example, in English, we can say "quantum mechanics" and know what that means, whereas in a tribal langauge of the rain forest, no such words or concepts exist, but it could be eventually translated sufficiently.
As to (2), I've argued they are, and that's what I addressed.
What you've addressed iare the sociological biases inherent in language, which I'd agree with. If our houses are built for our particular needs, I can imagine langauge would be similar. I don't think that what I've said regarding #1 impacts #2, but i can see debate there.
As to my objection as to what is being droned on about is this insistence to deny any reality being seperate from langauge. It attempts to. solve the problem of metaphysics and qualia by denying them.
Of course you don't provide the irrelevant for the purposes of the conversation. My point us that my experience of the apple can never be conveyed to you.
You mean it can't be conveyed via language.
We can conceive of machinery that would record your experience and make it available to others, so it's metaphysically possible. Whether that's physically possible in this world, we don't know yet.
Your point stands, though.
Nicely done, TC. It does however make me feel quite justified in walking away from any kind of fathomless, inscrutable writings. What possible use can they have (for me)?
Have to say (and this is not a criticism) I find it interesting that you can reconcile this with your model of pragmatism.
Good quote. That's W in a nutshell, perhaps. 'Knowing what it is' is something banal like knowing how and when to invoke and respond to the familiar token. We can know what time it is without knowing what time is (if we insist on believing that time must be something in the first place...something more than a useful token.)
But I take the perception as all encompassing, not limited to just the apple I perceive, with its color, snell, etc.., but the itch on my foot, the anxiety of my overdue bill, the calm from the sound of the rain, etc. all within the state of the perception at that second We have no known symbolic feed of that from me to you like we do "apple" or even through photographic or audio representations.
If you mean by "metaphysically" possible, to mean "hypothetically" or "imaginable," perhaps, but i don't think it's physically possible and it does strain the imagination.
I thought it was clear from the OP that this discussion was about question (1). I didn't see any ambiguity. That's what my responses started out as answers to. Perhaps I was wrong. Now we've moved over into a discussion of facts vs. truth vs. knowledge vs. belief.
Quoting Hanover
I might have some quibbles with this, but generally I agree.
Quoting Hanover
Again, I generally agree.
Quoting Hanover
Quoting Hanover
If you're saying that certain concepts are not reducible to language, I'm in agreement with a major qualification. I've spent a lot of time discussing The Tao Te Ching on the forum. To me, it's message is that there are experiences that are not reducible to language, not concepts. For me, concepts, ideas, are creatures of language. I think the distinction is important. It's central to how I think about reality. And I'll say it again as I always do, that's a metaphysical judgement, not a fact.
I'll just say - for me as an engineer and usually a pragmatist, Lao Tzu's way of seeing things is the one vision I've found that provides a convincing foundation for everything I believe. Nothing else I've found provides a better metaphysical basis for science, engineering, and problem solving. That's another way of saying I don't find them fathomless or inscrutable at all.
Now you'll ask me to explain. I'll just say first, I don't think it's really relevant to this discussion. And then, It's something I've discussed many times on the forum, including in discussions you've participated in. I haven't really tried to convince people. I'm mostly just trying to express my thoughts and feelings - my experience - clearly enough that people can understand them, whether or not they agree. Looks like I haven't done a good job with you.
It's just a question of whether you're holding that it's impossible in principle to share your experience or if you're going for a softer version of that.
The idea of telepathy and 'uploading' consciousness has been a mainstay of science fiction for around 60 years, so it would be hard to make the case that it's inconceivable. If we want to say it's physically impossible, that might require a working theory of consciousness, which doesn't exist yet.
I'm left with: my intuition is that there's an aspect of my experience that I can't communicate through language. Why should I doubt this intuition? Kierkegaard agrees with me
I guess some would say Wittgenstein answers why I should doubt it?
Probably more the case that I don't see what you see, even with patient explanations.
Not to have you do my research for me, but do you have a quote from Kierkegaard for that?
:ok:
Quoting T Clark
:up:
Quoting T Clark
Great attitude!
Quoting T Clark
:ok:
He talked about how the 'quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form' has no beginning or end and there are no words that can describe it.
I'd have to look for it. I think it may have been in his journal.
:ok:
I've never thought about it this way before, so I found this very interesting. I'm chewing it in my cud right now. *cow noises*
But can't concepts be derived from experiences?
Of course. Saying "auw!" quite accurately describes the feeling of pain. Of course people hearing or reading "auw!" must know pain.
Quoting Noble Dust
Sure, but the point is that not all of experience can be conceptualised - ie. reduced to concepts. Concepts refer to patterns of experience with a high probability of shared value/potential/significance. We can still share and relate to some significance or meaning of an experience without the use of concepts, let alone sharing language.
For me (and perhaps this is where T Clark and I may differ) qualitative ideas in experience interact to form concepts but have no form themselves. Chinese ideographs give form to ideas only through interaction within a language system, the logical structure (grammar and syntax) of which determines the situational conceptualisation that a symbol conveys. In this way, one symbol in Chinese can convey a positive or negative conceptualisation of the same qualitative idea, depending on its relative position in the grammatical structure. Each symbol, phrase, line, stanza, chapter or entire text is an idea that is conceptualised by understanding the logic of its relative position.
In English, a concept is already largely determined by the arrangement of letters or sounds in the word itself, including tense, position and focus. Ideas in modern English (and even in modern Chinese) refer to a complex interplay of conceptualised structures whose boundaries may or may not overlap and dissolve across phrases, sentences and entire texts. The qualities of speech sounds in English are often just as significant and evaluative as the words we use, more so than in Chinese.
As for what we can describe without language, isn’t this what art is for? And failing that, the way we interact with the world? I guess it depends on how narrowly you define ‘describe’: to write down, to render, to follow an outline...
Sure. That's what happens. Experiences go in one end of our minds and come out concepts at the other end.
I couldn't word it better!
You and I don't generally see these things the same way. It seems like you are using "qualitative idea" as your version of what I am calling "experience." I think that's misleading. As I said, to me, a concept, an idea, is a linguistic entity.
Quoting Possibility
I think you and I are in general agreement, but the use of the word "describe" bothers me. Descriptions are generally done with language. Again, I think that will be misleading, perhaps not to you and me, but to others.
First off, I am sympathetic to your views. In entering into the realms of primacy, which is a metaphysical issue, I do hold a non-materialist slant on things. So this colors my world view. And the topic is not something worthy of this thread's theme. But to address the issue of language having had a beginning:
Language. Are we by this term intending “words and their grammatical use” or “communication of meaning”? Certainly all animals use “body language” to communicate meaning, often enough, this between species. A solitary cat will raise its hairs and spit; a solitary rattlesnake with rattle its tail; etc. All this done to communicate its private intentions of action that are not yet action - and thereby intimidate - and, often enough, this again to animals of other species which, more often than not, understand (or "get") what is being communicated. Arguably, to communicate is to make common that which is otherwise not. It can be intended and thereby voluntary or involuntary (such as how sweat can unintentionally communicate one’s fear).
Did Neanderthals speak with words. TMK, we don’t know. Nevertheless they exhibit being endowed with a great deal of complex meaning in their placing of flowers into the graves of their dead - from the meaning of flowers, to that of graves, to that of a potential spirituality. Though we don’t know whether they had words, we can only sanely infer that they communicated complex enough meaning to each other.
Once we get into interpreting language as “communication of meaning” and further into plain “communication” we can further abstract language to be the imparting of information from one form to another via any type of interaction. And then we can get into propositions such as, “the hammer communicates its force to the stone which it hits”. And so would crystals, prions, bacteria, and so forth.
Now, again, I’m sympathetic to the gradualism of evolution when looked at from afar. But when evolution is looked at up close, it holds mutations that result in punctuated evolution, if not punctuated equilibrium then punctuated gradualism. Unless the rate of successful mutations is constant, punctuated evolution necessarily unfolds. Just as there logically was a mitochondrial Eve from which Homo Sapiens as we know it resulted, so too I logically find the necessary occurrence of a mutation-driven punctuation in the evolution of communication that gave birth to the grammatically correct languages which we now know of.
So, due to this line of reasoning, I do maintain that there was a start to language in the sense of "words and their grammatical use" - a beginning that is ontic rather an artificial imposition on what otherwise is.
As to agency, I’m of the view that it is intrinsic to life, all life, differing only in magnitudes and the quality that ensues from such different degrees. In the history of biological evolution, mutations (and the novel genetic instincts that mutations can bring about, which can affect not just body but cognition) do not subvert agency in my view, but merely facilitate its degrees of presence. Hence, in simplistic manner and imo: a mutation brought about the cognitive degree of agency (this alongside the needed biological workings of the body that may have already been sufficiently present) required to create, aka invent, words. But as I first commented, this issue of agency working in tandem with biology is a very different topic than that of the thread. And I have little to no interest in debating it for the time being. Merely wanted to give my perspective.
Quoting baker
Here I find an equivocation between that addressed and its constituents. Genotypically, a mutation is "actually made of old, already existing things" but the phenotype the mutation brings about is utterly novel. So too do I find with the novums of language. For example, the letters of novel words will be old stuff, but the new words and what they gradually come to convey to a populous will be utterly novel. As one concrete example of this, there is "meme" (coined in 1976, and today a common aspect of the English language). A good example of a recently invented word.
Additionally, I notice you say "most". What do you make of the exceptions?
The main difference I see (apart from equating ‘concept’ and ‘idea’) is that by ‘experience’ you’re referring to an affected quality of consciousness, whereas by ‘qualitative (or aesthetic) idea’ I’m referring to quality prior to affect. It is in one’s experience (of aesthetic ideas formed in the TTC, for instance) that any quality is affected in relation to its context.
So, as linguistic entities, for me ‘concept’ is an affected or experienced ‘idea’.
Quoting T Clark
Which was why I mentioned the narrowness generally assumed in the term ‘describe’. Dictionary definitions of ‘describe’ include marking out or drawing a geometrical figure, as well as moving in a way that follows an imaginary outline.
I love this word! I have been using ‘accurate’, but found it far too scientific to describe this dynamic quality of balance and sufficiency in one’s perspective.
English language use demonstrates a reluctance to name the relative quality of an unaffected idea. Lagom cannot be qualified as a concept until its value/significance is determined in relation to the quality of affected experience. So we translate lagom as a relative value in idiomatic form: ‘just the right amount’ or ‘less is more’. But each of these idioms alone is insufficient to describe the relative quality that is lagom.
You just described "lagom" in English!
Plus :point: lagom (Wiktonary). Fit the bill? Just what the doctor ordered? Perfect?
Quoting Noble Dust
A week or so ago, you and I discussed the Whorf hypothesis. I commented that it was controversial, but that there seemed to some substance. I've been reading "The Language Instinct" by Stephen Pinker. In the front of the book he spends several pages explaining, with backup, why the whole idea is bologna.
Oh yeah?
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Unfortunately I forgot what 12 was.