Compressed Language versus Mentalese
I was playing around with AI and asked it to extrapolate the way English would look in the year 3500 based upon how it has evolved over the past 1,500 years or so. According to AI and the articles I could locate, languages compress over time, with the more "evolved" languages showing great reliance upon contextual clues and less extraneous words like articles and the like. Mandarin, for example, is a highly compresed language, which is why native speakers translate English in a compressed way. As in they might say, "I bring two chair" instead of "I will bring you two chairs," often eliminating pronouns, plural designations and the like.
As an interesting aside, you can also ask AI to speak English as a Russian, French, German, or whatever would. It gives a quick understanding of how other languages use word order, emphasis, and so on.
Anyway, this got me to thinking, which is that one would expect one's internal langauge to be highly compressed, meaning it need not adhere to conventional grammar in order to be language, but it would need to adhere to some sort of grammar to be a rule oriented language (per Wittgenstein).
For example, to say "brick" while pointing to a brick could mean "hand me that brick" or "that is a brick" or "watch out, there's a brick in the road," etc. That is a highly compressed sentence, dependant upon context and even gesture.
Consider, "the egg dropped," which means "there is yolk on the floor that needs to be cleaned up," and yet there is no mention of yolks, floors, or cleaning in the text itself. If I shrug when I see it, that might mean, "you need to pay better attention next time, and you're the one that needs to clean that up, not me."
This then raises the question of what linguistic process goes in in my head when I arrive at a propositional truth. It might be so highly compressed it would not appear as language at all, but as long as it is translatable into a longer expression, that it began compressed does not matter.
I think this might be where some confusion arises where people refer to their internal processes as mentalese. It's not. It's just highly compressed language. True mentalese would be pure experience, like pain, not reducible into language at all.
But the distinction becomes harder to maintain when our internal sentences are so elliptical (the ommission of superfluous words while still maintaining meaning) that they lack almost any structure, and we are forced to argue that our compressed internal speech (not to be confused with private language) is expressed in long-hand when spoken, as a type of translation of one grammar (i.e. language game) to another. And we are forced to deal with the fact that our internal speech without sound is a public language even though it might have no identifiable syntax.
"When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." — PI §329
What then does the hyper-compressed vehicle look like if not letters, words, and sentences? How does that shrug look prior to my shoulder shrugging?
Anyway, I leave this open to thoughts, efforts to clarify whatever my misunderstandings might be, and possibly to better understand what language actually is under this framework.
As an interesting aside, you can also ask AI to speak English as a Russian, French, German, or whatever would. It gives a quick understanding of how other languages use word order, emphasis, and so on.
Anyway, this got me to thinking, which is that one would expect one's internal langauge to be highly compressed, meaning it need not adhere to conventional grammar in order to be language, but it would need to adhere to some sort of grammar to be a rule oriented language (per Wittgenstein).
For example, to say "brick" while pointing to a brick could mean "hand me that brick" or "that is a brick" or "watch out, there's a brick in the road," etc. That is a highly compressed sentence, dependant upon context and even gesture.
Consider, "the egg dropped," which means "there is yolk on the floor that needs to be cleaned up," and yet there is no mention of yolks, floors, or cleaning in the text itself. If I shrug when I see it, that might mean, "you need to pay better attention next time, and you're the one that needs to clean that up, not me."
This then raises the question of what linguistic process goes in in my head when I arrive at a propositional truth. It might be so highly compressed it would not appear as language at all, but as long as it is translatable into a longer expression, that it began compressed does not matter.
I think this might be where some confusion arises where people refer to their internal processes as mentalese. It's not. It's just highly compressed language. True mentalese would be pure experience, like pain, not reducible into language at all.
But the distinction becomes harder to maintain when our internal sentences are so elliptical (the ommission of superfluous words while still maintaining meaning) that they lack almost any structure, and we are forced to argue that our compressed internal speech (not to be confused with private language) is expressed in long-hand when spoken, as a type of translation of one grammar (i.e. language game) to another. And we are forced to deal with the fact that our internal speech without sound is a public language even though it might have no identifiable syntax.
"When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." — PI §329
What then does the hyper-compressed vehicle look like if not letters, words, and sentences? How does that shrug look prior to my shoulder shrugging?
Anyway, I leave this open to thoughts, efforts to clarify whatever my misunderstandings might be, and possibly to better understand what language actually is under this framework.
Comments (62)
To consider mentalese as a highly compressed language is to accept mentalese.
The idea of a private mental language supposedly explains how pubic languages come about, emerging from some innate and private place. It's a supposed computational explanation for how language arrises.
Private language was shown to be incoherent.
And we increasingly understand how the brain is not computational. It uses neural nets, which do not code situations symbolically.
So mentalese, if it is anything at all, must be a form of talking to oneself that is a back-construct from public language.
So briefly and dogmatically, mentalese as an innate, computational system is incoherent. Internal thought may appear compressed or elliptical, but it is always derived from public, norm-governed language. Any “mental language” we experience is a back-constructed internalisation of public language, not a separate symbolic system. The brain’s architecture (neural nets, not symbolic computation) supports this derivative view.
But that idea of thinking as a very compressed language still has merit.
This of course is the problem. Assuming all thought is verbal is clearly not right.
As I noted elsewhere, the answers to your questions are not philosophy, they’re science. I doubt anyone likely to participate in this discussion knows enough to have a credible opinion about this subject.
Nuff said.
No one suggests that though. The quote only says that there are not meanings outside language but the meaning is the language. Quoting T Clark
This too is incorrect because if you look at what I said above, I made no reference to brains or neuroscience. We're defining terms: language and meaning.
Then since you participated, we need not pay your opinion any attention. :wink:
PI §329, in context, does not presume that all thought is linguistic. Rather it is giving consideration to linguist thought as a sample that is readily available for philosophical consideration. He's talking about linguistic thought for the same sort of methodological reason that a geneticist might study fruit fly rather than elephants - it's easier, and we can extrapolate later.
What is the minimal criterion for a thought to be considered “linguistic”? Does internal compression preserve the normativity and rule-following required for something to qualify as language? How can a single, highly elliptical internal expression maintain truth-conditions? What does it mean for a thought to be “true” if the content is context-dependent and underspecified? How do we rigorously distinguish between internalized forms of public language and a hypothetical private language? What guarantees that internal compression doesn’t slip into the incoherent private-language scenario that Wittgenstein critiques?
These are not issues that can be decided by experimentation.
Perhaps "incoherent" is the proper term, but there's no suggestion that thoughts emerge without all sorts of unknowable brain processes. What is incoherent is how those pre-linguistic whatevers can "mean" something. Meaning requires use of the language I say this for @T Clark's benefit as well, so as to avoid some suggestion we're delving into neuroscience. The question is whether the neural goings on can have meaning without public use, and the answer per Witt is no. Quoting Banno
Let's say it didn't, and we discovered the mind computed symbolically, why would that matter? That seems problematic, as that would suggest Wittgenstein is only valid insofar as science reveals him to be, but I'd assert his claims are entirely non-science based..
If the mind computes symbolically, we'd be heading in support of Fodor and Pinker, and we really would have to conclude that all thinking is symbolic, linguistic, and indeed, algorithmic.
But it seems to me that such a view would be far too restrictive.
The idea is that all language is compressed, which is to say it's contextual, to degrees greater or lesser.
Quoting Hanover
If, of course, we look not to meaning but to use, those neural weightings and whatever do stuff with hands and eyes and so on. Language develops as we do stuff together. Then we learn to talk to ourselves internally. A potted analysis, an outline, but it might be worthy of some consideration.
In terms of the neuroscience, the "compression" happens as you don't have to fully unpack an intention because you already know where it is largely about to go.
Standing waiting to return a tennis serve, you could go through the effort of constructing a complete mental image of lunging low to your backhand and smiting the ball straight as an arrow down the line. Or you could just stand there feeling the general intention of being about to do exactly that kind of thing should the need occur.
So it a general thing about the brain. You know what to do from well-drilled habit. And you also know that you need to be ready and focused in an oriented and intentful way. Each moment presents its challenge. You are aware enough of what it is to already be predicting your actual response with the degree of vividness and fixity that would be helpful.
And so it is with our linguistic responses to the world. And with our own internal organising narrative of that world.
We face the moment in a way that already the right kind of words are starting to assemble. If we wanted, we could develop that general oriented intent into some spoken utterance. Or even the motor image of that utterance as words we are saying to ourselves in our head. A shadow sensorimotor image of exactly the same sort which would be imagining the perfect backhand return if we happened to get a wide kicker served by our net-rushing opponent.
But much of the time, we don't have to promote an intent to respond to a full actual – or even vividly imagined – sensorimotor response. Just being aware the circumstances of the moment are what they are, and this is the general idea of how we might launch into some fully grammatical structure of words as a suitable thought, has already got the job done. We can skip on ahead having just got ready to say something, and not then hanging around to articulate what would be by now a rather predictable thing to have heard being said.
Often we do articulate our inner speech – promote it to sentences – as it is useful to be surprised by how our machinery of speech habits does express our intent. But mostly the world moves fast and so we let the articulation slide. Our thoughts feel as if they fly along in rather wordless fashion. Perhaps just fragments of phrases and abandoned points we might have made.
So there is an interesting question about how languages evolve to become better for some kinds of thinking. English is said to be good for form abstract nouns out of everything. The Chinese number system is better suited to maths.
But the mentalese issue is explained by the fact that cognition divides into rapid learnt habit vs slower patient attention.
The brain always needs to be reacting to whatever is happening. So everything passing through our lives is putting us in mind of the sort of responses we ought to start generating. The kinds of clever things we could put some attention on and develop into a fully imagined motor intent.
But more often than not, the challenges of the moment turn out rather mundane. We get ready, but can already start to relax again. Something else is bubbling up and now we are getting ready to lurch in this next direction instead.
One way to hear the PI §329 statement is that some kinds of internal dialogue demonstrate that the thinking through using language is where thinking would otherwise not happen. It may not be exclusively "private" in origin, but it is nonetheless personal.
That would make it different from both the dialogue with others or translating a purely individual experience into words.
(I do think something like this happens, but I'm not sure how to describe it.)
I think taking a look at Polanyi's work, particularly The Tacit Dimension might be very interesting. At least the first half of the book. The second half gets quite weird.
But the mantra coming from him is "we know more than we can say." Quite right. That's why people write novels, draw paintings, compose music, etc.
As for the mentalese part, as far as I understand (which is not much, I have not read Fodor too much) it is not quite language and it is not quite thought, it's a mixture of the two.
Putting Fodor aside, we end up articulating a part of our thought through externalization. Other parts we can't.
That's why you get the phenomenon of not being able to find "the right word". There's something there we can't say. Maybe a passage in a novel gets it, maybe a scene in a movie. Sometimes nothing.
The answer to your question is, we don't know very well. Some kind of structural shortcut that can be used when we acquire a language.
This comment suggests it matters how the brain computes things and lends support does it not to the idea that Pinker and Wittgenstein operate within the same sphere, which is to offer an explanation for how the brain uses language?
I see Wittgenstein"s objective is to show us how we use langauge in our everyday lives and clarify its limitations.
I sense a category error in throwing a cognitive scientist into the ring with a philosopher.
I agree generally that Pinker et al appear facially contradictory to Wittgenstein because they assert an a priori sort of linguistic underpinning while Wittgenstein is purely posteriori in outlook (he requires public usage for langauge to exist), but I don't think there is true contradiction.
Even if langauge emerges from symbol manipulation, that doesn't suggest private langauge can exist. Under my compressive language challenge, you can preserve Wittgenstein only if you deny that shorthand language is primordial, but you must insist it is full language, publicly confirmable to grammar rules.
If I think in Latin as the last Roman, I don't have a private language as long as it can be spoken in the common language among the people.
This very issue is discussed at length in Philosophical Investigations, starting at 335 and going to 339. The critical line comes at the end of 337 where my hand is, "To the extent that I do intend the construction of an English sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak English." That is, sure, you're word searching, but you must have an appreciation for the rules of the language game you play to even engage in the search. You might not know which chess move you'll make until you find it, but you necessarily searched within the confines of the rules.
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And predicting english over 1000 years into the future is quite a monstrous task: it seems that the technologies that people use in their daily life has a big effect on it, both in terms of vocabulary and manner of use. For example, it seems that the internet has encouraged the use of acronyms due to the freedom from phonetics.
Quoting Hanover
In my opinion, this is quite controversial, since the very method of predicting future events based on hindsight is quite dubious. As we know, history develops in fits and starts, and some languages ??that existed 1,000 years ago (and were even considered global) are no longer used at all. This point is important to emphasize.
Quoting Hanover
This observation is interesting, but it may be related not to a desire to simplify, but to the native speaker's language itself. Specifically, in Chinese, tenses are expressed differently than in English, and the use of prepositions or copulas in many languages ??is replaced by suffixes. Therefore, when English is learned rather than acquired from birth, the native speaker's knowledge of their native language undoubtedly makes a difference. For example, as a native Russian speaker, I have great difficulty correctly placing words in sentences when I try to speak English. If we consider the differences with Turkic languages, such as Kazakh, it's difficult to grasp the use of copulas and prepositions (there, everything is done with suffixes). I also have difficulty expressing thoughts within the three cases that English has, and it seems that in my native language, what I want to say sounds more phenomenological, that is, more sensual. Although, of course, all this is mitigated by a more advanced knowledge of English.
What would I like to say about the current state of language? The constant invention of new, specific terms or different interpretations of words in narrow areas of human activity already easily leads to misunderstandings between representatives of different professions, even within the same language. This is easily verified: try philosophizing using a philosophical dictionary on a factory floor or in a boardroom—most listeners will say, "Interesting man, but what the hell did he say?"
Quoting Hanover
In my experience, I've noticed that expressing your thoughts in nuanced language is always slower than the thought itself. I like the flow of complexity and duration, because as I speak, I have time to think about what I'll say next.
I suppose it might be seen as pretty unfair on Pinker. :wink:
Yes, there is a significant difference in the tasks each has at hand, and you summarise that well, with Wittgenstein doing conceptual clarification while Pinker is seeking explanatory hypotheses. Wittgenstein is not, like Pinker, offering an alternative scientific hypothesis about the nature of language, but working through how we might coherently talk about language.
But these two are not mutually exclusive. In so far as Wittgenstein has a cogent description of what language is, Pinker's explanation of how language functions shouldn't gainsay it.
But as I understand Fodor and Pinker, symbolic manipulation goes all the way down. Mentalese is the real deal, and public language a pale shadow, forced to conform to the vagaries of public usage. So it appears to rely on private language from the get go.
I'm fairly confident about Fodor here, bit less so about Pinker. I'd need to do some reading.
Pinker would utterly disagree with OP, since OP says that language is the vehicle for thought. Overall, I'm more on the side of Pinker with the linguistic discussion here, even though I do think his analysis that language does not effect the way speakers perceive the world around them is too one-sided, even though the opposing theories he criticizes, about how language and perception are totally inextricable, are much more ridiculous in my opinion.
The other problem with compressing language based on context is that sometimes it does remove significant meaning. For example, "you need to pay better attention next time, and you're the one that needs to clean that up, not me.", is radically different from "the egg dropped", and there aren't any english speakers i know of that would use the latter as a replacement for the first one. You can of course cut the first one down substantially and preserve the important parts ("you dropped the egg, clean it up!"), which is generally what professional translation tends to be all about.
It's just the motor cortex running. Some of it gets picked up by the comprehension center. Wittgenstein never wrote anything that requires us to think of the mind as a void. There's all kinds of stuff happening.
Could it be that times (perhaps even minds) were simpler as recent as 200 years ago before any sort of recognizable modern engine, let alone technology? Perhaps compounded by a harsher, constant "fight or die" environment before man gained mastery over said environment allowing for more time to think and "mentally evolve", per se? :chin:
Perhaps it depends on the climate of the environment as well. More time indoors versus moving around for survival (or perhaps a harsh winter climate that required long periods inside with one's community in a confined place with little to do) would probably lead to a sophistication in language. Or would it?
Ergo, language was simpler because times were simpler. There just wasn't much to talk about or perhaps even not much time to idly ponder the things the average person does today.
But first you'd have to show that languages were simpler in the past, and I don't think that's supported by historical linguistics. And @Hanover might be interpreted as pointing out the opposite: the simplification of languages over time, rather than their complexification.
But I don't think historical linguistics is in the region of what Hanover is really getting at, although with Hanover it can be difficult to tell, such is his wildly fecund mind.
Well done, you know how to compliment your moderator friend, but are surprisingly sensitive when someone criticizes one of your posts...even once. This ultimately the issue with just mysteriously erasing posts without any comment whatsoever, everyone just magically loses a reference. This is clearly not a very Socratic type of environment.
Why i thought it was possible for a moderator to engage in hypocrisy less frequently than what i've seen well...this one is beyond me...clearly there's some personal failing at work on my part.
I honestly don’t know what you’re referring to, and so your post seems to me unmotivated and out of the blue. In any case, you’re off-topic. To complain about a member of staff, please create a new topic in the Feedback category.
Consider the number of cases in the following languages:
Modern English - 2
German - 4
Old English -4 or 5
Middle English - 2
Cherokee - 6
Mandarin - 0
A common cause for this simplification is the introduction of adult non-native speakers into language. Adults are poor learners of language and as diverse populations enter, the language corrupts through simplification, but, interestingly does not affect the ability of the language to convey information. This points to the fact that much of language serves functions other than direct communication of thought.
Any marker that comminicates one's ethnicity, country of origin, educational level, etc. serves sociological functions. It obviously matters greatly from an evolutionary perspective that I immediately know you were raised in Germany, you were born in Boston, that you were not formally educated, etc. Consider Cherokee, unless you are very adept at language learning, you will never convince a native speaker that you grew up on the reservation if you didn't because you'll never master the complexity of the language. You'll also never match their accent.
But this is all (an interesting) aside. My point wasn't to wander down the path of language evolution as much as to say that it's entirely possible that our internal language (and please don't confuse"private language" with "internal language" in the Wittngensteinian sense) bears limited resemblance to the full expressive language we use in public where we're trying to get others to understand us.
And Wittgenstein went to great lengths not to catagorize what a language is (as in requiring particular syntax or form), but only to require that it comport to a grammar, which he defines very liberally to mean that it follows rules within a particular community of speakers and is publicly confirmable.
I will concede of course to the speculative nature of AI's attempt at extrapolation of English in the year 3500. So you know, it could not reverse engineer from 2025 backwards simply because it's not possible to predict what arbitrary elements might have existed in a language over time and then fell out.
Isn't that supported by basic evolution? Even common layperson knowledge (caveman grunts, etc.)? A child can barely speak, but typically, gains the ability to as most every person can today. Isn't this a parallel to evolution of human society?
Sure, that's not to say some societies or groups happened to evolve their language skills "quicker", at least in relative comparison to others who may have existed somewhere at the time. Perhaps those in the immediate past, who were forced to suffer and toil, thus bringing about the knowledge and experience we now take for granted as "common sense", may have been more advanced and then other societies kind of, you know, "simplified things" the way a computer used to take up the entire size of a room yet can now fit on a person's wrist and perform equal and even greater function, yes.
Quoting Jamal
What is your take on his intention, then? Don't worry, he likely won't be offended if you're way off course. :razz:
The "caveman grunts" idea is not supported by any evidence. It's just a nineteenth century stereotype. The fact is that we cannot know, looking back in time, what language was like beyond a certain point. But the earliest languages we can actually study, like Sumerian, Old Chinese, and early Indo-European languages, are more complex grammatically than many languages today. So the evidence actually runs the other way.
So as I said, historical linguistics doesn't support your speculative claim, which is an empirical claim best settled scientifically (i.e., by historical linguistics).
And no, child development does not recapitulate evolution: the speech of children does not mirror some earlier, ostensibly simple, stage of human language. Children speak simply because they're starting out in learning a massively complex system, and within a few years they've mastered it, whereas adults from other language communities take many years to become fluent. Crucially, this quick mastery is evidence of how deep and ancient our linguistic capacities already are—it does not in any way say that earlier languages were simpler.
I concede to speculation, but trending of languages can be observed and general observations noted.Quoting Astorre
As I've noted, much linguistic change occurs as the result of the introduction of non-native speakers (of course there's internal drift (caused by all sorts of things) as well, but this really isn't meant to be an all inclusive conversation in linguistics, much of which goes well beyond what I know). That is, people who speak other languages mix up the prior language, trending toward elimination of differences, resulting in a less complex system for the new members of the community. That is, if suddenly we see great change to a previously stable language, we can expect that a good number of adults just arrived and they are all insisting upon using that language. Quoting Astorre
This is more specifically on topic with the OP. The critical distinction here is whether you are saying (1) you had a thought and it was in a primordial language, not something identfiable, but a constructed idea that had not yet seen language or (2) you had a full language that identified your thought but it was compressed and then you expressed it fully into complicated words and syntax. If you go with #1, you are arguing a mentalese. If #2, you are giving room for a Wittgensteinian analysis.
I've tried to think about this, but it's incredibly difficult. I've established for myself, and found it sufficient, the following: when I speak or write, I kind of imagine what I want my interlocutor to feel. This doesn't come in the form of words or even images, but rather in the form of emotions. That is, each subsequent word must be such that it evokes the response I intend in the other person's mind. Let me clarify how this works. In Russian, the everyday language of a normal educated person, there are about 40,000 words. This isn't bragging; it's the breadth of how subtly I can express what I feel. This makes me want to read literature, to master the language so that I can express precisely this feeling I've intended, down to the subtlest details. Incidentally, I think this is why Dostoevsky is so popular. He expresses himself incredibly precisely.
Here on the forum, I see that there are also people who speak incredibly precisely and use English to do so. And they achieve this not by the quantity of words, but by the ability to use fewer.
To answer your question, it's more about the emotional image I want to evoke in the interlocutor, and the words themselves emerge.
I’d like to tell you one more interesting thing about the Russian language. A lot of people think that since Russian doesn’t have a strict, fixed word order like English, you can just throw the words in any sequence you want. That’s not true at all. Let me show you how it actually works with a simple example.
The neutral, emotionally flat version:
? ????? ????? ? “I’m going to bed” (or literally: “I went to sleep”). Now the same phrase with different word order — each one carries its own emotional coloring:
? ????? ????? ? “Alright, I’m making myself go to bed.” lt feels like an internal command, almost forcing yourself: “Enough, time to sleep, no more excuses.”
????? ? ????? ? “I’m off to bed” or “That’s it, I’m going to sleep.” Usually expresses tiredness, boredom, or mild irritation: “Everything’s got on my nerves, I’ve had enough, I’m out.”
????? ? ????? ? “I’m going to bed, period.”
Can sound like a claim or even a small protest: “Don’t bother me anymore, I’ve decided — bedtime.”
These are just a few ordinary permutations of the same three words. And when you add the right intonation, the number of shades multiplies even more.
So, in the end, how do you figure out what was going through my head when I chose a particular order? Very simple: the main thing for a native speaker is not “what is grammatically correct,” but what exact feeling or attitude I want the listener to pick up. The word order is one of the main tools for that — it puts the emotional emphasis exactly where I need it.
In Russian, we don’t just convey information with words — we paint the emotion directly into the sentence structure. That’s why the same objective statement can sound neutral, decisive, annoyed, or defiant depending on how you shuffle the words.
Of course. We can speak ungrammatically and even say nonsense: up the well, fire chills, or whatever. We tend to follow certain rules to be intelligible.
What's interesting here is when you find yourself in that instance in which you can't find the right word - because there is no one word which conveys what you feel.
Which makes you wonder why we have specific words such as "loathsome", but not other words which convey something like joy above what God could feel, or something like that.
Maybe some things aren't worth compressing or something is too specific to merit a word?
"To the extent that I do intend the construction of an English sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak English."
That is, while you search for the correct Russian term to convey your emotion (which is not denied to exist), you do so with an understanding of how you must do that, as in, what the parameters are. You are working within a publicaly agreed upon set of rules. By analogy, it's like if you're playing chess (another Russian past-time), you create all sorts of ideas in your head about how you will attack or defend, but the underlying requirement is that you do so within the rules of that game. You can't just say you're going to kick the king off the board. That is not within your creative boundaries.
That "language" (and I'm into metaphor here) of the chessboard, as in "I'm thinking of moving Rook to a4 and then the Bishop to c3" is not considered a private language just becasue it's internal. Your actual physical move of the piece was your language. It's how you communicated your decision.
The point here is that when you searched for the move on the chessboard, you were necessarily searching within the rules of the game. If you had a private language, your move would be incoherent because no one would know what you meant to do by moving your piece. However, as everyone plays and watches one another, it becomes clear what language your are using. That is referred to as the "grammar" of the game. There can be no question though that you had some thought prior to making that move, but that thought had to be within the rules of the game and so it was therefore not private.
And that goes back to the Wittgenstein quote above. That you searched for a word in English presumed you spoke English.
I understood your point. And an idea immediately arose. (In this topic, I'm voluntarily eager to be the object of research.)
You seem to be trying to formalize it. To bring it into line with a structure, with an idea that exists BEFORE my thought. I'm talking about a different realm. What if this birth of meaning in my head is not formalizable, but only experienced sensually? (well, either in the eidos or in God, and not necessarily in my head)
I'm writing to you now in plain text, without any processing, as it occurs. This is important.
For example, Baumgarten describes this very accurately in his aesthetics: "to give form to feeling," "to transform a dark feeling into a bright structure."
So here's what (a completely emotional statement): what if it's simply something else, and not structural at all? That it lies, as it were, outside of experience, outside of chess, outside of logic, and any attempt to force it into these frameworks is like combing your hair with a comb—that is, involuntarily shaping your hair into the shape of the comb's teeth?
I want to say again that I am writing exactly what I feel, perhaps all of this looks very unstructured.
How's this:
Add to this that neural nets do not function symbolically. Current physiology is somewhat contrary to Pinker's account. But neural networks must implement symbolic structures at some level. At some stage Pinker must drop the "mentalese" metaphor.
Perhaps this is not quite the direction in which you would have this thread head, Hanover?
I noted that you wished to differentiate mentalese from private language. I am not sure that you can.
As to #1, I can intuitively understand that meaning would be internal and be attached to the symbol, as in, I am annoyed (internal meaning), so I roll my eyes (the symbol). What I don't get is why the internal meaning must be attached to a symbol. I am annoyed, so some internal listing of information passes before my homunculous. I'm reminded of the Terminator when he saw the data reveal before his eyes.
Additionally, Pinker doesn't need to convince me that his view is logical. He needs to show me a brain and where all these symbols are. He's not a philosopher seeking consistency. He's a scientist seeking empirical truth.
As to #2, Witt shows the private language argument incoherent.
As to #3, yes, there is an incompatibility in Witt saying X is impossible and Pinker saying X exists regardless of logical impossibility.
I would suggest Pinker abandon his ideosyncratic mentalese position (some computational model he pulled from his ass, surely not from a lab). I just don't understand why one would posit a private sub-symbol that computes and then attaches to a public post-symbol I can see. By mentalese, I would think he would mean the stuff that precedes the sub-symbol, the computation itself, not some strange layer of first symbol to follow a second symbol.
Whether mentalese is salvagable under any imaginable scenerio is a fair question, but I might agree at this point that the Pinker model is not sustainable.
Quoting Hanover
Yep. That's a typical semiotic move. I might be tempted to counter it with "the internal meaning must be attached to a use", but that's not quite right - the use replaces the meaning.
Quoting Hanover
Yep.
Socrates was fond of places in which he didn't belong... :wink:
I think this is based on the assumption that meaning is rule based. Kripke demonstrates that the private language argument itself gives us reason to doubt that it is.
I wonder where linguistics, as a science, fits into Pinker's model. Before trying to map a "mental" substratum for the activity, it would be good to have the empirical study of grammar and expression established as a starting place. It is not a settled area of theory.
That is not the same starting place of Wittgenstein working out that our understanding of meaning is more than naming things we all can recognize alone. Unless, of course, one understood Wittgenstein to be reducing the problem to a set of criteria.
I was thinking about the idea of an innate universal language that Chalmers and Chomsky talked about. The idea was that all languages have been analyzed and a linguistic core extracted. This core would have to be innate, so fundamentally like whales and birds. A human would be born with the potential to communicate, and that potential would be triggered into development by social interaction. The brain is transformed by that development, but in the shadows, the core (developed by millions of years of species/environment interaction, or however) remains and can be detected.
This leaves the issue of how an internal dialog works open-ended. It's definitely not that a child decides to adopt certain rules. It's more that the child lives out the rules, keying in to points where the internal structure is matching the external circumstances. Maybe the core language truly is just the motor cortex flexing without the signals going all the way out to the muscles of speech.
Am I way off track?
Perhaps not.
I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient.
So that part of what you suggest must be correct.
On the one hand, we can observe that humans are socializing mammals and that there's a genetic component to that. For instance, all socializing mammals produce hierarchies, and these social structures pervasively shape interactions between individuals, dictating greeting protocols, assigning roles, and even determining the sex of the offspring. There just isn't any way that all of that results from each generation working things out in practice. It has to start with individual genetics.
It's probably just natural that a scientist would go from observing predispositions in wolves to explaining human language and thought. The philosopher says back up.
The answer to the question is genetics.
Both the question and the answer are supposedly genetically determined.
This isn't going to work. We're saying the answer to the question was determined by the answer to the question. All of science turns into phenomenology, and worse, this puts the cognitive scientist into a black, isolated box, like a beetle. The scientist beetle churns out answers that determine themselves. Wittgenstein would be horrified.
My intuition is that the light at the end of the tunnel is that magical thing: meaning, as it crawls, beetle-like, from the nest we call truth conditions.
I'm just a category police here, trying to keep the philosopher captive in his study and the scientist in his lab.
When Wittgenstein says language can't be private, he's not a sociologist, neurologist, or anthropologist. His view isn't dependent upon whether humans are lone predators or highly social. That is, language would theoretically exist on the day the last man stood before the world ended (and the sound would be a whimper).
This is because to attend to a feeling with a describable symbol marks it language, regardless of whether the confirmation of the symbol is by human or inanimate means.
If the validity of Wittgenstein is science dependant, he loses, even if scientificly correct, because he would then be speaking of the world of beetles and not words.
Empirical refutation or confirmation is therefore impossible.
You have to tell me what you disagree with.
To restate, where P is a private language: ¬?P.
Pinker cannot show us an example of P. One can't locate the morning star at night because it by definition is present only during the day. That's not to say nothing is there.
I find this confusing.
We do things. Among the things we do is speaking, writing, hearing, reading, thinking words. Language is a tool, which you use as you judge appropriate.
If I point at a brick and want that brick being handed to me and say "Brick," why would you imagine that this is a compressed version of "Hand me that brick?" That feels strange. I judge using a word is enough, so I don't use a sentence. Simple efficient tool usage, nothing more.
Here's how I see things: there's this stream of private meaning. That includes anything from my intentions to the words I might use to express them and so on. Some of it is active and some it is there as generalised knowledge, potentially activated. So I can say "Hand me that brick," which is part of my language competence as a speaker of English, or I can say "Brick," which is also part of my language competence as a speaker of English. They're alternatives, not all equally viable in any particular context, the judgement of which depends on your competence in the politeness rules relevant in the situation.
Philosophers like propositions. They make thinking logically easier. Maybe that's why they see them everywhere. But I'd say if I point at a brick and say "Brick," in order to convey that this is a brick, the proposition "This is a brick," has a scope. And it's scope is not "Brick," but the entire situation. So what about that situation has anything to do with language and in what ways? There's phonology: I say "Brick" and you hear "Brick" because we have mutually learned to make the same same sound distinctions (we know the phonemes of English). There's grammar (morphology and syntax), which is fairly simple here, since all we have is a word. There's semantics, which involves what the words mean. And there's pragmatics, which is what you use the words for. This is pretty complex.
So what is it that you think is being compressed? What's the scope here?
If something is translatable into a longer expression, then what you're translating into a longer expression is not just words. It's my intuition that you transform more non-linguistic stuff into linguistic stuff. It didn't start out compressed. There never was a need to use language for that particular part to begin with. I could have used a sentence, but I judged a word will do, so I used a word instead. I didn't first not-use-a-word, then compress a sentence I didn't form, so I end up with a word I did form.
The extreme form of puzzlement: To recognise a door as a door, we need knowledge of doors. Opening one and walking through suffices. This might imply the proposition "This is a door," on some level when we look at the whole situation analytically, but that doesn't mean that opening a door and walking through it is a compressed form of language.
I often feel like philosophy overextends the scope of language. Language is special, sure, but just how special is it?
But I don't think I do disagree...
It's just the way you said it.
Quoting Hanover
If night is the period before sunrise, then yes, you can. Look to the East. I'd allow Wittgenstein into the lab, in the hope of helping Pinker get his conceptual foundations in order.
Well, my analogy means to be forced, meaning if the morning star is defined as that in the morning, it can't exist not in the morning. No need to stare at the sky in the morning hoping to catch a lazy evening star that forgot to go inside. It's not subject to empirical disproof.
When I was a kid, I was hopelessly confused when night was, given that I was told a day was 24 hours. Then I learned night was part of day, but then I didn't have a word for the time the sun was up. How could that be day if it lasted less than 24 hours?
Then this: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day." Day starts in the evening?
I could go in to a analysis of the terms involved, but I don't think that will help. You are pleased to play with words, and I won't stand in your way. But what you say remains unclear.
Mentalese is supposed to be pre-linguistic and universal. When you think in your head, that is supposedly a translation from mentalese. And so mentalese, if it is going on, is not necessarily consciously accessible, unlike our verbal thoughts.
I rather agree with Wittgenstein, that language is a vehicle of thought, not a reflection of thoughts happening elsewhere. That said, when I think verbally, I don't think in the compressed manner that you suggest. I think in full sentences. Maybe this just reflects differing cognitive styles. Maybe my dumb brain has to spell everything out. Also remember that verbal thinking is not the only kind of thinking. There is also visual thinking, and other people have claimed more exotic modes (tactile? emotional? logical?).
And so I don't necessarily agree that what is going on in our heads is compression, analogous to how languages compress over time. I wouldn't even call it a language, language is only one component. There is no rigid grammatical requirement for our thoughts to be comprehensible to ourselves.
This suggests thought is language, words traveling throughout our brain, which is a metaphysical claim, arguing about what the internal thing going on in our head is. That would not be consistent with Wittgenstein, but a better phrasing would be that thinking is shown through use, namely language.
Quoting hypericin This points out the problem with ascribing a metaphysical claim to Wittgenstein because here we're now being baited into a conversation about how different people might think. Witt can't answer that question. He's not a scientist or linguist. He's only saying that whatever the mystery in your head is, it's not something we can speak of, but what we can know about it and talk about is the linguistic expression.
Yet, I only paraphrased what you quoted:
Quoting Hanover
Quoting Hanover
If anyone is "baiting", it is you. Your OP is about the nature of our internal language. Yet now you are demanding all discussion must adhere to some kind of Wittgensteinian ametaphysical purity.
I'm wasting my breath as usual. But if you want to understand the mind, start by understanding the brain.
If you examine the neurocognitive architecture of the human brain, what stands out is that it is organised so that anticipation and habit are set up to intercept the onrushing flow of events and react to them in the simplest learnt fashion possible. We are designed to pre-filter the world in a way that is as thoughtless and wordless as possible.
And then that filtering sifts some part of the onrushing world so that it becomes the candidate focus of our "spotlight of attention". The aspect of whatever is happening – either in terms of what is interesting about the world, or even our own mindful reactions to that – which would reward some more exploratory and thoughtful level of response. Some actual behaviour worth talking about in any overt Wittgensteinian sense.
So first the filter of habit. Then the swivel of the spotlight of attention. All this has its neural architecture. And the third thing I would draw attention to is the three major flows of motor response – the behaviour planning action – that follows from there.
The frontal lobes are organised into three physically separated, but fully integrated, streams of planning. The obvious one is the motor response planning. Lifting a hand to ward off a blow, perhaps. The second closely allied – in being the recent Homo sapien addition to the mammalian base plan – is the automatic response to put events into some narrative context. One might feel oneself also forming the intent to shout out something appropriate, like "what the fuck, bro?".
But a third form of instant response to anything catching our attention in any moment is a generalised intention to shift our attentional resources to their next expected point of focus. This is what closes the loop of thought so we can exist in the world in "real time". A very large part of the frontal cortex is taken up by the frontal eye fields, for example, which instruct our eyeballs how to swivel to where the action is likely next to be taking place.
Getting reoriented - something we must do every second we are alive – is a huge computational demand and a very large part of what we are always "thinking about". Feeling oriented is a big chunk of what it feels like to be phenomenally engaged in the world. And it is the basis of imagination and visualisation abilities. Scaffolded by our narrative abilities, we can get "oriented" to any kind of possible world we can call up in words, not just the immediate world as it is busy presenting itself to us in amy moment.
So no one likes to have to consult a neuroanatomy textbook when the discuss "philosophy of mind" let alone "philosophy of language". But really, philosophy would be much improved if folk did talk about the brain in terms of how it is organised and not as some abstracted neural mush inhabited by some ineffable essence or irreducible computational stuff.
Anatomy tells the story. Analytic philosophy has never even been in the game.
Absolutely agree. They are different categories. It would be absurd if Wittgenstein weighed in on the neurological underpinnings of thought.
I'd ask you sort that out or we just talk past each other. You cannot offer empirical evidence that defeats Wittgenstein"s claims not because he's some God who can't be wrong, subject to worship and cult leader status, but because he's not making an empirical claim.