Lions and Grammar
I was struck recently while reading a paper by Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka [PDF - READ THIS IT'S AWESOME] about the origins of language, and the similarities that paper had with the thought of Wittgenstein. The line from Wittgenstein in particular that I have in mind is this one: "Essence is expressed in grammar" (PI, §371). This is, in many ways, a very strange line, given that grammar is usually taken to be just a matter of organisational scaffolding, a mere formality foisted upon the 'good stuff' of semantics and meaning. Strange also for its invocation of 'essence', a loaded philosophical term usually avoided by Wittgenstein, who tended to view such words with great suspicion. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein's own interest in linking grammar to essence was due to his overwhelming interest in kinds - as he put it a few lines down: "Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is" (§372).
In a very concrete sense, the whole of the Philosophical Investigations can be read as a meditation on the importance of kinds of words, and the need to take kinds seriously. As early on as §6 of the PI does Witty already state the importance of kinds in his critique of Augustine: "Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word."
So what does this have to do with the origin of language? Well, for Dor and Jablonka, grammar in language also reflects the types of concepts into which we classify words. For example, we speak about things differently from the way in which we speak about events, or else we speak about events being factual or their being imagined, or whether things are countable (like bottles and people) or not countable (like beer and fog). In all these cases, the kinds of things we speak about delimit the kinds of things we can say about them: I cannot ask 'how many fog are there?' (or better: 'how are many fog'?) without committing a grammatical error (or what what otherwise be understood to be a category mistake....).
Now, the crucial thing for Dor and Jablonka is this: while it is possible in principle to parse out grammatical categories in any way we like, for the most part, language only ever reflects a small subset of all the possible grammatical categories that we could use. For example, while differences between events and things are generally marked by grammar in most - if not all - languages, the difference between friend and foe is not. Nor are there grammatical differences between say 'interesting events' and 'boring events': we can speak about these latter things in the same way, without committing a grammatical or categorical error.
Implications
What is important about this, in turn, is that it means that language is not a general purpose communication tool. Language is better at communicating some kinds of things better than others. This makes intuitive sense, even though it is often not acknowledged - it is much easier for me to show you in a diagram how to tie a knot, than to describe it step-by-step in language. Not all languages are of course structued in the same way grammatically: while "there is a core set of categories that are identifiable in all languages... the way that they are indicated grammatically varies from language to language. In addition, different languages may structurally distinguish some categories that are not distinguished in others".
One further implication of this is that it allows language to be understood as a product of evolution: the fact that language is better at communicating some things than others would generally indicate that those things would have been selected for because of the advantage they provide in whatever social-environmental setting that any one particular language took hold. In particular, language is really, really good at describing specific things that have taken place: "It is a communication system structurally designed to communicate messages which are grounded in a specific and constrained categorical scheme. This categorical scheme is centered around a specific set of events and situations (not all types of events and situations), their participants, their time and place, their properties, and some of the properties of their participants" - and this because language has gone though what the authors call "epistemic selection" - selection in which "a specific subset of all possible categorical distinctions was isolated, highlighted and marked by grammars for the purposes of linguistic communication."
Back to Wittgenstein
This, in turn, helps us shed light on another one of Witty's otherwise enigmatic declarations: that "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him" (§223). In light of the above, the idea would be that a lion's epistemic concerns would be different from that of a humans. The kind of grammatical categories 'natural' to a lion would be - or would probably be (this is Wittgenstein's not-unfair-wager) - quite different from a humans. In fact, it's possible to argue that one wouldn't even have to be a lion for this 'non-understanding' to take place: speakers of languages from different roots (say, Chinese and Greek - my background!), would recognise too the different grammatical/categorical parsings that each respective language has, and the effort it takes to sometimes communicate certain things, because of that difference in grammar and classification.
One last consideration: to the degree that human languages mostly share the same 'core' set of grammatical categorisations (with a few significant variations here and there) can be to a large extent put down to our shared physiognomy: the fact that we are (mostly) upright, forward-facing, symmetrical and motile beings. Moreover, we occupy a certain and shared scale of space and time (not shared by a mountain, say, who, if could speak, we would definitely not understand), with similar sets of 'epistemic concerns'. This is a nice way to link our embodiment with language in a way that is I think often overlooked, and which was intuited by Wittgenstein in his remark on the lion.
In a very concrete sense, the whole of the Philosophical Investigations can be read as a meditation on the importance of kinds of words, and the need to take kinds seriously. As early on as §6 of the PI does Witty already state the importance of kinds in his critique of Augustine: "Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word."
So what does this have to do with the origin of language? Well, for Dor and Jablonka, grammar in language also reflects the types of concepts into which we classify words. For example, we speak about things differently from the way in which we speak about events, or else we speak about events being factual or their being imagined, or whether things are countable (like bottles and people) or not countable (like beer and fog). In all these cases, the kinds of things we speak about delimit the kinds of things we can say about them: I cannot ask 'how many fog are there?' (or better: 'how are many fog'?) without committing a grammatical error (or what what otherwise be understood to be a category mistake....).
Now, the crucial thing for Dor and Jablonka is this: while it is possible in principle to parse out grammatical categories in any way we like, for the most part, language only ever reflects a small subset of all the possible grammatical categories that we could use. For example, while differences between events and things are generally marked by grammar in most - if not all - languages, the difference between friend and foe is not. Nor are there grammatical differences between say 'interesting events' and 'boring events': we can speak about these latter things in the same way, without committing a grammatical or categorical error.
Implications
What is important about this, in turn, is that it means that language is not a general purpose communication tool. Language is better at communicating some kinds of things better than others. This makes intuitive sense, even though it is often not acknowledged - it is much easier for me to show you in a diagram how to tie a knot, than to describe it step-by-step in language. Not all languages are of course structued in the same way grammatically: while "there is a core set of categories that are identifiable in all languages... the way that they are indicated grammatically varies from language to language. In addition, different languages may structurally distinguish some categories that are not distinguished in others".
One further implication of this is that it allows language to be understood as a product of evolution: the fact that language is better at communicating some things than others would generally indicate that those things would have been selected for because of the advantage they provide in whatever social-environmental setting that any one particular language took hold. In particular, language is really, really good at describing specific things that have taken place: "It is a communication system structurally designed to communicate messages which are grounded in a specific and constrained categorical scheme. This categorical scheme is centered around a specific set of events and situations (not all types of events and situations), their participants, their time and place, their properties, and some of the properties of their participants" - and this because language has gone though what the authors call "epistemic selection" - selection in which "a specific subset of all possible categorical distinctions was isolated, highlighted and marked by grammars for the purposes of linguistic communication."
Back to Wittgenstein
This, in turn, helps us shed light on another one of Witty's otherwise enigmatic declarations: that "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him" (§223). In light of the above, the idea would be that a lion's epistemic concerns would be different from that of a humans. The kind of grammatical categories 'natural' to a lion would be - or would probably be (this is Wittgenstein's not-unfair-wager) - quite different from a humans. In fact, it's possible to argue that one wouldn't even have to be a lion for this 'non-understanding' to take place: speakers of languages from different roots (say, Chinese and Greek - my background!), would recognise too the different grammatical/categorical parsings that each respective language has, and the effort it takes to sometimes communicate certain things, because of that difference in grammar and classification.
One last consideration: to the degree that human languages mostly share the same 'core' set of grammatical categorisations (with a few significant variations here and there) can be to a large extent put down to our shared physiognomy: the fact that we are (mostly) upright, forward-facing, symmetrical and motile beings. Moreover, we occupy a certain and shared scale of space and time (not shared by a mountain, say, who, if could speak, we would definitely not understand), with similar sets of 'epistemic concerns'. This is a nice way to link our embodiment with language in a way that is I think often overlooked, and which was intuited by Wittgenstein in his remark on the lion.
Comments (204)
@Saphsin- This is why I can't stand Chomsky (read the paper!)
"Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is"
I think Wittgenstein's central point here was deflationary in the sense of [I]identifying[/I] essence [I]with[/I] grammatical expression. which is to [I]not[/I] take kinds seriously in any transcendental sense that is independent of our way of speaking.
In contrast, suppose somebody said:
Essence is [I]represented by[/I] grammar
This leads to Hume's problem of induction but in the context of the classification of objects.
For to state that grammar is a representation of essences raises the sceptical question "what is it about the previously witness examples of each essence that necessitates how this object is to be classified?"
This question, along with other Humean problems of induction can be thrown out by replying that essences and the notion of necessity are normative notions pertaining to what we [I]say and do[/I] rather than referring to independently intuited features that the individual sees.
Which I suppose is complementary to the empirical idea of epistemic selection.
Exactly. The idea is that such kinds are naturally emergent, at is were, and not a function of any kind of pre-established harmony, if I can use that Humeian term. The question of necessity and contingency is an interesting one as well, insofar as I think there definately is a kind of principle of sufficient reason at work here: that some grammatical categories are selected over others is not simply arbitrary, but in some sense necessary: it is not an accident that so many of our grammatical categories just so happen to converge across so many different languages. In fact it might be entirely appropriate to invoke convergence in its properly evolutionary-theoretic meaning, as when different species independently evolve similar morphological features (like eyes or fins) despite great distances in space and time.
On the other hand, one can speak of these necessities themselves as contingent: the grmmatical categories we largely use could have been otherwise, had evolution taken different turns than it did, had the contingencies of social selection played out differently as a function of history and events, etc. The whole question of modality is given a very interesting twist insofar as neither contingency nor necessity alone account for the dynamics of grammatical evolution, but a curious blend of the two.
The knot example is very interesting, because it can be very difficult for some people to learn a knot by watching another demonstrate it. You need to have the capacity in your mind to recognize that your perspective is an inversion of what the person demonstrating the knot is doing, and switch your perspective intuitively, to follow the demonstration. This is a matter of putting yourself in the position of the person demonstrating. That's what grammar is, an attempt to put us all in the same position, so that we can easily understand each other. It is the backbone of communication.
"We started out by characterizing language as a transparent mapping-system, dedicated to the expression of a constrained subset of meanings by means of sound concatenation."
This agrees with my own conception of human language as a code which provides correspondence between a set of mental conditions and/or functions and a set of words (i.e., vocabulary) having paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations (i.e., grammar), hence; semantic content.
And I think it's accurate to say that the communication of signs between environment, social group, and individual entails the development of meaning and culture.
But I think it is incorrect to describe language as a communication system, because communication is the process of transmitting, conveying, receiving, decoding, authoring, and encoding information (language being encoded information).
Interesting that Hume comes up, as I see him as somewhat of a champion of sentiment, which the article identifies as one of the dimensions that does not find its way into the universal grammar. So our talk tends to neglect it the more our talk becomes formal. No emoticons in logic, please! I wonder if there could be a philosophy conducted through dance or painting or music, and what neglected topics might come to the fore? There seems to be some hint of it in conceptual art, but generally, I get the feeling that as it becomes more reflexive, so it becomes more dependent on the verbal analysis of the critics. But it's not my field; anyone care to educate me?
Some ramblings, just to get my thinking going.
First, it is important to note that PI is set out as a conversation between Wittgenstein and himself, and that hence some paragraphs have the characteristic of challenging Wittgenstein to re-think what is being said. See how, for example, §367 leads into a discussion of how an image can be quite right, despite being exactly wrong - the furniture in §368 being the wrong colour.
But I don't think that this is the case with §371. I think instead that this fits with my ongoing criticism of @Metaphysician Undercover; that what was once thought of in terms of essence is better thought of in terms of use - grammar being the rules of use.
I've never disagreed with you, on this point. Saying what the essence of a thing is, is just a matter of following a specific type of rule. Where I disagree with you, and Wittgenstein as well, is in what constitutes "following a rule". I believe that when a person follows a rule, one hold a principle within the mind, and adheres to that principle. Wittgenstein describes "following a rule" as being judged to act correctly, in relation to a rule. When an individual is judged as consistently doing the right thing (or saying the right thing), then that person is following a rule.
The difference being in the relationship between "rule" and "correct". In my understanding, a person may have a private rule, and follow that rule, and the rule might be correct or incorrect in relation to the judgement of others. In Wittgenstein's description, correct and incorrect follow from whether or not the person is following a rule, so it is impossible that a person could follow a rule, and be incorrect. My understanding makes following a rule neither correct nor incorrect, allowing that the rule itself may be judged as correct or incorrect.
I'm at odds with Wittgenstein here.
Consider, also on p.223,
If I see a lion writhing in pain with evident cause, do I think: all the same, the lion's feelings are hidden from me?
No.
Yeah but what about p-zombies and Searls Chinese room argument?
Yeah, but what about qualia?
I'm just saying that the notion of a private language or private pain is still being brought up to this day with the mentioning of qualia or the Chinese room.
I've never understood how Wittgenstein regarded the animal as such a radical Other.
I'd even go further and say, even before we are able to recognise that the lion is indeed speaking, we'll understand that some of what he is doing is saying stuff. Even if we can't know what it is.
How could you recognise that the lion is saying something without recognising what it is saying?
You want to judge rules as correct or incorrect without reference to rules?
Pretty much the same way I'll recognize that someone who is speaking a foreign language I've never heard and which might sound (to me) like a bunch of honomatopea, is still likely speaking.
Then how do you go about that if lions could speak we would not understand them?
I don't entirely understand that statement or sentence when confronted with the private language argument? Is it to say that language can be private if the non-cognitive or pre-linguistic and other characteristics of its participants are that radically different?
Quoting Akanthinos?
To be sure, I can agree with this.
I would add that as well as being embodied, we are embedded in a shared world. SO we share long grass and antelopes and water holes with the lion.
I do not think that Wittgenstein should be understood as saying that our world and the lion's world do not meet.
Quoting Banno
Performative analysis? Unless producing honomatopea has significantly more value in the Other's world than mine, then I can assume that his production is actually aimed at a similar goal than mine. Contextual cues lead you to assume meaning behind potentially meaningless actions, because they are correlated to our domain of action, which is always meaningful to us.
I was struck a long time ago by the image : An animal behaviorist was speaking of a relationship established by a black panther and a labrador, brought in to help the panther with her depression. The behaviourist kept insisting how the language games played by both were not, at all, the same as either those that would occur between panthers or labs, and not even really a mixture of both. The strength discrepency between the two was so large that they both had to develop a new set of communicative behaviours in order to interact.
??
And recognisably, they interacted.
What did these "language games" look like? I wonder if the behaviourist is using the term in the way Wittgenstein did.
Sorry.
onomatopoeia*
That is, the lion would do very different things with words?
Well, of course. But even with the lion (according to Wtty's thought experiment) I could interact. Sinking his teeth in my carotid still passes as interaction, so is me screaming in pain and crapping my pants.
Quoting Banno
Running to one another, striking a pose, rolling the head one side to the other in a really menacing way, then running away quickly to invite chase. Couldn't tell you why the behaviourist thought they were so unique, but he stated the panther would have easily killed the dog if she had acted with him the same way she had with other panthers, and the dog would have invited the panther to attack him had he acted like a normal dog, because that would have shown him to be meek.
Don't know. Ask Witty. All games are language games, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't think so. Grammar is more general than a language game. To be sure, both are governed by 'rules' (leaving aside the specificity of how a rule functions), but one can have a completely grammatically correct sentence that does not belong to a language game. This is why Witty says we can be 'bewitched by grammar': we can lay out what look like perfectly sensical (grammatically correct) sentences without them in fact making sense (the language game, the specific context regarding what we are trying to do with those words, is missing). 'Grammar' and 'language-game' are not interchangeable terms in Wittgenstein, and, I think, for good reason.
I suspect it's the lack of attention paid to the specificity of grammar that is at the root of our (maybe?) disagreement.
Yup.
(See, that's a language game too!)
If you can make a rule about it, then it's a game.
So to this, perhaps the answer ought to be: no, but how he would go about his 'doing things with words' might - most likely - be different.
I think to make things clear I need to talk about declensions, but I'm about to hop on a short flight. Maybe later.
What about my cat's (adowable lil') paws would make her unable to understand something like "take my hand", had she the linguistic abilities I have? No matter how different our performance of whatever task might be put before us to evaluate our ability to "take a hand", obviously, she should still be able to relate the terms to the event of a possibility.
You can think that a cat would have very little incentive to hold the hand of anything or anyone, and that might be true. But even then, the fact that they have very little incentive could be thematized, such as a : "look at me, I'm so crazy, I'm holding my master by the hand" type of thing.
A limbless man would only be too conscious of his inability to perform the associated performance of "take my hand" to be unable to understand it. I feel that a failure to relate to a term might actually be the best way to establish such a relation in the first place. A little bit like shame tends to be about the fact that we should've felt shame if we had any at all, given what we did.
Interesting. I had thought that to some extent Wittgenstein is using "grammar" in a broader sense than mere rules of syntax. Hence the notion of depth grammar.
Imagine that the lion's grammar consisted of nothing but commands.
To set out a language game is not always to impose a limit. Language games can change.
That's right, we look for substance, things like reality, truth, and soundness, when judging rules as correct and incorrect. The point being that rules must be grounded in something, or else they're meaningless. So if following rules is what is correct, rather than the proper grounding of rules being what is correct, then we might just follow the rules right into the abyss of meaninglessness. That's why StreetlightX says above, that we can follow rules without "making sense".
But I agree. The choice is not between grammar as mere syntactical rules or grammar-as-language-game. The whole point of Dor and Jablonka's paper is to demonstrate that grammatical categories are reflective of semantic categories. But the crucial point is that such categories always "belong to a very constrained subset of all the categories which we can use to think, feel and conceptualize about the world". The question then obviously becomes why this set and not another? And this is how D&J link language to evolution: the answer is that the subsets we use are the ones that pass through the net of selective pressures exerted by culture, biology and so on.
But of course such pressures are simply not universal: they act differently across different times, spaces, cultures etc. Not so differently that we can't translate, say Chinese into English, but enough that such translations will never be seamless, unproblematic (certiantly not algorithmic in any plainly ridiclious sense implied by a Lorentz transformation). Those who insist that we could understand a lion talking are like Augutine: they don't pay attention to kinds, to grammar, and think everything is just a matter of semantics without grammar. To be clear, I don't think Wittgenstein's stipulation is categorical: at some point, after alot of work and effort, we would be able to understand the lion.
But the point is that the grammatical types which are marked and unmarked in lionese would be so vastly different that it would be not just another lanaguge, but another kind of language altogether. There might be grammatical markings that exist that simply have no correlate in English - or in any human language - nor could they exist, even though we might come very close to reflecting the same meaning with some clever grammatical combinatorics.
You mean grammar types à laNordquist? Comparative, generative, mental, pedagogical, peformative, referential, theoritical, traditional, transformational, universal types? Because I really cannot at all conceive of conditions which would preclude the possibilities of these types without also precluding the possibility of language.
No matter how inventive lionese might be, as long as it provides it's fluent speaker with the basis for individuation, reference and abstraction, we should have all we need to relate directly to it. Everything else is, in other words, cultural.
Types refered to in the paper are 'what types of knowledge do speakers possess that determines their grammaticality judgements?'
Without much thought, these types could be the cognitive format types the memories of past validations take, or the more propositionally-conceived set of acceptable formulations in a given language.
The paper mentions some of the same types as Nordquist as well. Again, what conditions could impose themselves on lion so that lionese would not have the interrogative type as the statement of the implications of the query as well as the query? As in "Who did the girl kiss?" likely informs that the girl kissed someone?
There is also the problem that intuitively, I feel that I share a hell of a lot more with the world of a lion than I do with a countless number of entity populating this universe. I would have had much less problem with Witty's remark if he had spoken about a bacteria's language, or hell, a neutron star.
And agree of course that the further away you get from human morphology the stranger a language (to us) will be - I wrote about trying to consider kind of language a mountain would have in the OP, for instance.
Obviously not enough to disable relatively easy translation between languages. Are there human natural languages where, by principle, you couldn't formulate the idea of category? I guess that alone would blow my position.
Quoting StreetlightX
Same basic nervous system. Literally the same evolutive landscape. And we've already performed (in parts) backwards the bridging to their world (by developing a relatively healthy field of feline psychological study).
J+L points toward this. Lions probably already have categories broadly pointing to 'friend' and 'foe', practical utility (prob much more limited), not price, but probably risk (which is pretty similar). And I knowmy cat can see stuff as boring or interesting, according to her wise designs.
I don't think assuming these categories to be the same for most beings, especially similar ones, is *necessarily* chauvinistic or naive. These point to phenomenal markers which are common to species which play "the same games" in this world. And despite being vastly different, me and my cat, on many points, "play the same games", according to the same rules. I put more flourish around it, and she puts more grace.
I'm not sure I'd call translation easy, or even familiarity with single languages for that matter. It may seem so to one practised in language(s), but I think it's easy to overlook just how much work must go into achieving that mastery. Consider that it takes most humans more than a decade and a half - at least - to master (somewhat) one's 'mother tongue', and that it can takes years or months to translate 'high level' literature from one language to another. Sure, 'street talk' can be translated fairly fluidly, but even then, any translator or bilingual speaker knows just how much goes missing when moving from one language to another. And even then it's not quite fair to focus on inter-language communication, insofar as even 'intra-language' communication can present the exact same challenges.
Quoting Akanthinos
But we're not just talking about if lions or cat 'have' or 'do not have' categories: the question is whether or not such categories would be grammatically marked. Remember that there are plenty of semantic categories that are not grammatically marked (in fact the vast, vast majority of them). The point is that the exact same phenomenal markers might give rise to different grammatical markings - what would make the difference is nothing much else than evolutionary-historical contingency.
And we don't even have to turn to inter-species communication for examples. I mentioned declension earlier, and it's worth elaborating here: declensions are interesting because they are grammatical inflexions that convey certain information about a word. Modern English doesn't have many declensions meaning that it has to rely quite heavily on word-order to convey the same information. So in English object and subject are marked by position: 'John looked at Bob' is not the same as 'Bob looked at John'. However, languages with richer declension structures will specify subject and object by a suffix or prefix. So one might say: 'John-em looked at Bob-by', which would translate to 'Bob looked at John', despite the apparent word order: the idea is that 'em' and 'by' indicate subject and object, and not word order. Thus you can have weird Latin phrases (for example) where words might be in entirely different positions but because the declensions are all there the phrase would mean the exact same thing. German is notorious for this and is partly to blame for why reading Heidegger is nails on a chalkboard.
Now, declension isn't quite the same as having or not having grammatically marked semantic categories (as we've seen, the same semantic categories may be marked by word-order instead of declension and vice versa), but it provides a concrete, non-speculative example of how one could imagine a wildly different scheme of semantic and hence grammatical categorization. In fact, English is notorious for not having the metric crap ton of gendered markings that alot of other European languages have, and this despite the fact that the English did not have so very different 'phenomenal markers' than the German or the French.
Finally, if we are to look at intra-species communication, it might be worth looking to what the enthologist Gregory Bateson had to say about communication among certain mammals, and in our felicitous case, cats: "When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying “Milk!” Rather, she is saying something like “Ma-ma!” Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting “Dependency! Dependency!” The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants. ... What was extraordinary—the great new thing—in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship." (Bateson, "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication").
If one takes the not-too-wild leap in considering that lionese would not be too far off from cat-talk, one might imagine that the lion would speak entirely in this kind of idiolect, bearing on relationships. I made a thread quite some time ago about autistic communication which might be interesting to consider too, and how the language at stake was precisely this kind of relational language which looks very, very different from the kind we are used to. It is not clear that most anyone, for example, would 'understand' Amanda Baggs:
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc[/video]
I won't comment on the video here - I've written too much already - but I hope you can see what I'm trying to draw from it. Read the linked thread if you're interested in more detail. I'll only say here that one can imagine a modifed line form Wittgenstein here: 'If Amanda Baggs could talk, we would not understand her".
You would think that the lion would recognize the difference between night and day for example, and this might enter into the lion's categorization as something recognizable to us. However, if this difference is completely unimportant to the lion, then the lion probably would not talk about it nor even recognize it. So I would think that such categorization is based in what is important to us, and the ability to communicate is dependent on a commonality of values. Therefore language gets structured so as to encourage such commonality, enabling itself.
I think Wittgenstein's would have made more sense if he referred to apes instead of lions.
It's all about fish, and water temperature, and nutrient levels, and bioluminescence, and who's fucking whose blowhole. Or not. How does their grammar facilitate the stuff they want to talk about? We don't seem to have any idea.
Closer to home, see here a human language that is 2 dimensional, rather than the linear strings in which we philosophise. I wonder if this conforms to the limitations described in the op's article?
Semioticians Lotman and Sebeok think that language developed as a mental modelling system (an adaptation) in Homo habilis, and that speech is an exaptation derived from language (which emerged in Homo sapiens).
If true, nonverbal thought and communication preceeded verbal thought and communication in evolutionary terms. And if animals were to develop language, verbal communication would co-exist with advanced problem-solving powers.
Actually the passage I quoted above by Bateson on communication in cats was actually from a paper precisely on the topic of communication in dolphins! Bateson's thesis is that while cats communicate in terms of patterns of relationship (the 'meow' that means 'dependency!') rather than reference ('give me milk!' - see the passage quoted in my last post), dolphins, while also communicating in terms of such patterns, do so with a digital rather than analog system. That is, the cats meow for example is relatively undifferentiated: the same meow can aim to communicate different things. The dolphin's 'click' however, is far more differenticated - although it still 'speaks' in terms of patterns, it does so digitally. Here is Bateson:
"The vocalization of dolphins may be a digital expression of (relationship) functions. It is this possibility that I especially have in mind in saying that this communication may be of an almost totally unfamiliar kind. Man, it is true, has a few words for relationship functions, words like "love," "respect," "dependency," and so on. But these words function poorly in the actual discussion of relationship between participants in the relationship" ("Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication").
So you have three different types of communication. (1) Cat: analog communication of patterns of relationships. (2) Dolphin: digital communication of patterns of relationships. (3) Human: digital communication of both patterns and references. Interestingly, Bateson insists on just how alien a mode of communication is both (1) and (2): "We therefore have no idea what it is like to be a species with even a very simple and rudimentary digital system whose primary subject matter would be relationship-functions. This system is something we terrestrial mammals cannot imagine and for which we have no empathy." - The Wittgensteinian ring here is unmissable.
So the last thing to do is to relate the above considerations to grammar. Now, the whole point of grammar, evolutionarily speaking, is to simplify communication. Grammar, as a marker of semantic categories, communicates a crap-ton of semantic content even in the absence of a specific word. If I say 'when was the...?', the grammatical structure of this sentence already points to the fact that the last word is most likely some kind of event. Grammar eliminates a whole swath of possibilities as to what the the word could be: it imposes a constraint. Languages without grammar have to communicate this information in some other way.
For analog languages, this communication must reside in the environment: it is the environmental cues, the kinds of actions I accompany my 'meows' with, that tells you the kind of thing that is trying to be communicated. Digital languages, on the other hand, have such cues built-in to the language in the form of grammar. Grammar is a way of internalizing context into language: it brings the environment 'in'. It's actually a marvel of 'technology', if you think about it. Anyway, the idea is that a cat or a lion might not even have any idea of what to do with grammar! A dolphin, having digital communication, might be at least far more understandable than a cat - and by extension a lion - which only communicates in analog terms.
Interestingly, adding or talking away dimensionality is another possible way to do what grammar does. Chemical structural formulas, for instance, have added dimensions that are impossible to reflect in linear writing, and function as a kind of grammar i.e.:
The added dimensionally provides more information by virtue of the relative positioning of the atomic elements, just as grammar tells you contextual information about a particular sentence. In principle, there is actually no difference between what a strucutral formula is doing and what a grammar does. If human language is grammatical rather than dimensional, it's probably only a matter of convenice. One imagines Ulysses written without grammar, and only with 'grammatical formulas': it would be even more of a nightmare than it already is.
I think you're right to see in art efforts of communication that go beyond what we can do with conventional grammar - I think J+L get at this with their discussion of diagrams which would instruct us how to tie knots. The anthropologist Andre Lehroi-Gourhan specifically speaks of how linear writing differs from early modern art precisely in terms a loss of dimensionality:
"The invention of writing, through the device of linearity, completely subordinated graphic to phonetic expression .... An image possesses a dimensional freedom which writing must always lack. It can trigger the verbal process that culminates in the recital of a myth, but it is not attached to that process; its context disappears with the narrator. This explains the profuse spread of symbols in systems without linear writing .... The contents of the figures of Paleolithic art, the art of the African Dogons, and the bark paintings of Australian aborigines are, as it were, at the same remove from linear notation as myth is from historical narration. Indeed in primitive societies mythology and multidimensional graphism usually coincide. If I had the courage to use words in their strict sense, I would be tempted to counterbalance "mytho-logy"-a multidimensional construct based upon the verbal-with "mytho-graphy," its strict counterpart based upon the manual." (Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech).
Quoting StreetlightX
Well your honour, sir, with all due respect to your moderatingness, and bearing in mind that some us maybe have more fluency in the social side than others, and that the language of relationship is subject to contest and change, by the 'powers that be' and 'me too', it seems clear that even considerations such as the length of sentences, not to mention such formalities and informalities as the 'tu/vous' convention both establish and confirm social relations in subtle ways that relate to grammar. I'm sure I don't need to mansplain this to you, as an example of 'internalizing context into language'.
Perhaps it is philosophical bias that leads us into an overemphasis on the formal, abstract meanings of communication. These can only be built on top of (oxymoronic) 'social communication'. Which is to say that dominance/ dependency talk is perfectly familiar and understandable to us, and that we understand the dance of cats quite well. The meow or the hiss is a mere augmentation of the dance like a flamenco 'Ole!' It would be a mistake to ask what is the definition or grammar of 'ole!', wouldn't it? But no one raises their hackles and purrs, that is surely madness or nonsense?
Quoting StreetlightX
I may be heretical here, but it looks to me as though we could better regard talk as having its origin as an ornamentation or supplement, (perhaps having particular function at distance, or in the mist or jungle) to body language, intonation and gesture adding another dimension already to the word-worms that we deal in here.
I'm thinking the difference between a play-reading and performance, and wondering if a silent performance of Hamlet wouldn't be more nearly complete than a copy of the text?
Sure. Nothing I'm saying is incompatible with any of this so I'm not sure why the laboured histrionics. I even specified that human language works with reference and patterns of relationship. Perhaps it is a non-philosophical bias that leads to an underemphasis on comprehension. In any case, here is Bateson writing on just what you seem to say is missing:
"To use a syntax and category system appropriate for the discussion of things that can be handled, while really discussing the patterns and contingencies of relationship, is fantastic. But that, I submit, is what is happening in this room. I stand here and talk while you listen and watch. I try to convince you, try to get you to see things my way, try to earn your respect, try to indicate my respect for you, challenge you, and so on. What is really taking place is a discussion of the patterns of our relationship, all according to the rules of a scientific conference about whales. So it is to be human".
Just playing with subtext by way of poetic demonstration - trying to add a virtual dimensionality to the string - handwaving. Should have added a mystification smilie, but couldn't find one.
I don't object to this.
The notion of incommensurability was used by some philosophers of science to claim that some theories of science were so utterly different to others that something said in one had a different meaning to what was said in another. Thinking this through in terms of language games, what has happened is a change in the game.
So while I point out that we ought reject the notion of incommensurability, you are taking a step further and saying that the notion is incoherent. These two positions are not mutually exclusive.
Where is the interesting disagreement you promised?
Odd, then, that it seems we do understand her.
https://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/about-2/
But Banno, there is so much more to the rug...
It's cotton, a rough hand-weave. The warp is a slightly lighter grey. There's a thread pulled where the rug goes over the left arm of the chair. It is badly pilled.
But Banno, there is so much more to the rug...
It was given to my wife by a friend. She put it on the chair to catch crumbs and drops of cheap red. It gets washed once every few weeks.
But Banno, you cannot tell us everything about the rug...
Perhaps; but I can tell you anything. And what I can't tell you, I might be able to show you.
When I work with autistic children, I sometimes observe carefully, then choose some characteristic and imitate it. With one, it was roaring and raging like a great ape. For another, it was his rocking and hum. Sometimes that makes me part of their world; other times, it allows me to see something of their world.
Try Amanda's repetitive behaviour and singing yourself.
But Banno, you have not translated her statements into English...
Of course not. DId you want a translation, or an understanding?
If a lion could speak...
Let's not be slippery with terms.
Is sign language speech?
What about dance?
Come on, Street: If you have a point, make it.
Sign language has a grammar.
I'm not sure about dance. Perhaps particular dances, or even dance companies, develop or construct fleeting grammars in the process of dancing or choreographing. But I'm not sure dance ought to be measured by the standard of sense - what, exactly, is to be understood in dance?
But then, you've not said a word about grammar, or kinds, or lions, for that matter. You've more or less ignored the thread - and you ask after the point?
Wittgenstein seems to have been a logical behaviorist to some degree (contestable), so I don't think (as mentioned) that we could never understand a lion.
However, the fact that chimpanzees or other apes have a hard time learning our language speaks about a conceptual gap based on traits and characteristics which humans have, such as a higher intelligence or some such stuff.
This may appear so only as a result of arbitrarily limiting the definition of language to formal symbolization. If we broaden it to include perceptual interpretation of the world , affective gesture and vocalization, then language comes to be seen not as a tool of communication but as a precondition for any experience.
Sure, you're welcome to understand language in as broad a manner as you like. However, the introduction of grammar marks a qualitative change in what one can do with language: as I wrote earlier, grammar functions to internalize context into language. Where gesture and 'perceptual interpretation' rely on an environment to provide context for action, grammar imports that context into language itself. Because grammar indexes the kind of word any particular use of word is, grammar marks the shift from index and icon to symbol: it allows us to speak about what it not present-to-hand, with the most basic grammatical function being that of negation. Grammar frees language from it's tether to the 'world',
Daniel Dor, whose work with Jablonka I cited in the OP, rightly notes that this allows for the explosive role of the imagination in breaking with lived experience: "Language is the only system that allows communicators to communicate directly with their interlocutors’ imaginations, and thus break away from the here-and-now of co-experiencing: instead of presenting the experience to their interlocutors for perception, communicators translate their experiential intents into a structured code, which is then transmitted to their interlocutors and instructs them in the process of imagining the experience – instead of experiencing it.... This unique communicative strategy is the key to the enormous success of language and its influence on the human condition." source
It will simply not do to ignore the specificity of language as symbolization even if along a certain dimension it retains a continuity with gesture and perception. One must attend to the discontinuities as well, and the importance of that discontinuity thereof.
According to the linked article:
Challenging Chomsky and his Challengers: Brian Boyd Interviews Daniel Dor
So, the (doubly circular) argument goes: verbal modelling (a brain-dependent process of collective innovation, or imagination) creates language, which creates "language-ready" brains.
Please don't explain to me how this makes more sense than Chomsky's position (i.e., language is an innate faculty).
But, if language affects brain physiology, which language process will enable us to eradicate brain cancer?
Yeah, I wouldn't want to disabuse you of your now publicly embarrasing ignorance of genetic assimilation and how it works.
It is highly speculative, as is all cases of epigenetics, which is poorly understood in the general public.
It would be a difficult ask to prove that using words could effect a positive change in the genome.
What is being argued is that there is a limited innate facility in mammals to structure utterances in some way. All mammals have ability in this respect. But the examples where linguistic ability is at its apogee are examples where the brain is most highly developed is closest to a tabula rasa and able to employ micro-darwinian selectivity to neural pathways in build in vivo linguistic abilities. So rather than coming with a complete set of grammatical rules, humans learn as they go.
I disagree. J+D provide a very plausible account of exactly how such a positive change would come about: "Let us assume, then, that some of the adaptive linguistic innovations of stage N managed to spread and establish themselves in the community. This establishment was very enduring, because it was both dependent upon, and constitutive of, the social structure, and because social traditions are by their very nature self-perpetuating. This cultural change enhanced the communicative capacity of individuals within the community, thus increasing the fitness of the best individual communicators, as well as the fitness of the entire group. Crucially, however, the establishment of the innovation also raised the demands for social learning imposed on individuals in the community: ... In short: the linguistic innovations which established themselves in the community changed the social niche, and the inhabitants of this new niche had to adapt to it.
...Very gradually, however, the increasing cognitive demands set by the evolving linguistic niche started to expose hidden genetic variation. In our terms, residual plasticity was gradually stretched, and individuals found the accumulating linguistic demands more and more demanding. This process must have taken a long time. Eventually, however, after a very long period of consistent, directional cultural selection, genetic assimilation occurred: some individuals dropped out of the race; other survived. The frequencies of those gene combinations which contributed to easier language acquisition and use increased in the population... Obviously, this allowed for the whole process to start all over again: as a result of assimilation, individuals were freed once again to make use of their cognitive plasticity, to invent and learn more linguistic innovations"
It is true that this account, like all accounts of language acquisition, is speculative and hard to verify. However the mechanism is real, the account is evolutionarily plausible, and it certainly belies the incredibly naive charge of circularity. I do agree that epigenetics is poorly understood by the public, but this is a fault of the public and it's education, and not the field.
You care confusing genetic evolution with cultural/ social evolution. You have no account is these "linguistic innovations" could be encoded in the genome, and there is not need for that to be the case . Social evolution is extrasomatic.
So whilst it would always be the case that a species that relied on language would tend to favour those with an adequate linguistic ability to be able to procreate, there would be no direct pressure onspecific innovations.
And the authors acknowledge this: "The genetic assimilation of these capacities was most likely partial, rather than complete. It could not have led to a completely innate response, because the on-going process of cultural evolution made sure that the cultural environment to which individuals were adapting was constantly changing. As we have already indicated, this state-of-affairs must have had far-reaching consequences in terms of the genetic evolution of categorization, in our case, linguistic categorization: very specific innovations, such as the meanings of specific words or specific morphological markers, were not assimilated, because they were too variable and context-dependent, and because they changed too rapidly throughout cultural evolution.... Effectively, this process resulted in a cognition biased towards a specific set of semantic categories. These categories did not end up completely assimilated, because cultural change still put a high premium on epistemic flexibility."
The key is to strike the right balance between plasticity and robustness, which, of course, evolution excels at. I encourage you to read the original paper linked in the OP - it would save us both alot of unnecessary effort.
I never said that perception is an unmediated contact with the world. Neither did I say that "language doesnt allow the communication of visual or auditory information". Nor are either of these claims entailed by anything I said. It is not necessary that a language - broadly defined - has a grammar, and neither is grammatical structuring necessary for interpretation.
There is a real, hard and incorrigible distinction between somatic/ genetic evolution and what is now called memetic evolution but we were happy enough to call social evolution.
And that distinction is that the later involves the artificial selection of traits, and NOT natural selection of traits.
In making my way through the visual experiencing of a painting, I will organize this process into meaningful chunks. Individual bits of texture will give way to an outline of an individual form, such a a tree or hand or rock, (or something more abstract)depending on how much, in what way, semantic content is informing and directing my assimilationof the painting. This form will then appear in relation to another form. As my gaze moves from form to form, each form can become the visual subject for a predicate. So the visual equivalent of a series of paragraphs composed of sentences, structured as subject-predicate changes, unfolds as I process the artwork, all without any word concepts being involved.
One could do a similar analysis of music, dance or massage.
Kant actually gets at something similar in the famous passage on the changing cinnabar, in a neglected line that follows that well known text: "Nor could there be an empirical synthesis of reproduction, if a certain name were sometimes given to this, sometimes to that object, or were one and the same thing named sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, independently of any rule to which appearances are in themselves subject." These 'rules' and how they function are of course, just the subject of Wittgenstein's discussions of rule-following in the PI.
Anyway, the point is that art is bound to no such rules. A pirouette does not have to be followed by a releve, which does not in turn have to be followed by a saute. One can string a series of pirouettes together without anyone saying 'that doesn't make sense' - and this for the obvious reason that no one judges art by the metrics of communication, which is another reason why your description of viewing the painting comes across as so forced. Of course, one can construct art by way of such constraints - as with serialist composition or algorithmic/generative art, but such art is precisely a tiny subset of the far wider world of artistic creation, where any effort to read art in terms of grammar would be at best a kind of post-hoc rationalization.
I have definitely tried to utilize ways of communicating with people who seemed totally other to me. I have mirrored them and even did get "a sense" of their world through such action.
When you describe such activities it makes me wonder how you are such a staunch defender of commensurability to be honest. (bad spelling aside)
I long ago acknowledged how Davidson shewn that incommensurability is not logically defensible in the sense that the very idea of it can lead to contradictory results.
But here it seems -- to use a method by example -- that you would agree with what I thought of incommensurability at least.
I just highlight that because we were so unable to find where our disagreement lay before. Maybe this shines a light?
This is an abuse of language.
On the other hand, if a lion were to leap at me with the words 'Food! Get ready to be eaten!' I would not be at all puzzled as to his meaning. And he would definitely still be a lion and not a person.
But this doesn't contradict the point youre trying to make, that within a given language game, grammar constrains linguistic kinds. Lets look again at the sentence 'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?'. To the extent that it will evoke a response judging it as non-sensical or incoherent, why is this the case? What rules is it violating? A series of unfolding expectations are being sequentially set up as one begins to make ones way through the sentence. it begins with a question, 'what', priming one to look for a further development along these lines.
Once the sentence gets past the word 'kiss' (even the word kiss begins to ring alarm bells , given that most girls prefer kissing a who, rather than a what) it challenges one to piece it together as an inquiry into an action, which is what one is attempting to do based on its first few words.One could say it behaves the way certain optical illusions do, such as the three pronged object that extends from a two pronged base. The object as a whole doesnt cohere, its nonsensical.There are of course many visual situations one could cite where such violations of expected regularities occur, such as violations of perspective. The artist M.C. Escher was a master at this. Would the constraints provided by perspective not be considered a visual grammar? You say that art is bound to no such rules? Are there not artistic language games? Within realistic painting of a certain era, for instance, perspectve, proportion and accurate rendering of light source matter, and a landscape in which there are gross violations of any of the constraints will lead to experiences of incoherence.For instance a Renaisance painting from 1520 telling a biblical story in which part of the scene consists of something that looks like a cubist image will violate the grammatical rules of that particular narrative, within that particular game, in as jarring a fashion as the d-j sentence.
In a piece of music of a particular genre one can pick out an off key note or errant chord, because such kinds of meaning dont make sense within the rules of that communicative discourse. An example that offers perhaps a closer parallel to d-j's nonsensical sentence would be a pice of music that begins as a jazz score and suddenly becomes a classical piece without segueway. The effect is of two fragments that cohere within themselves but are inconsistent with each other, just as d-j's sentence contains fragments that make sense as far as they go('What did the girl kiss', 'the boy who delivered?', or 'kiss the boy who delivered?'). As you know, musical communication within its various genres depends on highly structured grammars.
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Of course the pronouncement of 'grammaticality' here is not categorical. What ultimately matters most of all is consistency. One grammar or another may be entirely arbitrary with respect to each other, but must, to qualify as a grammar at all, be at least internally consistent. A grammar must be such that one can learn 'how to go on', as Witty put it, such that the rules don't arbitrarily change by turn of phrase (again, Kant's comment on arbitrary names comes to mind). The point is that art, and even perception may revel in precisely this kind of grammatical promiscuity, switching codes willy nilly, even if allowing for fleeting instances of consistency, as indeed single works or oeuvres might have. One of Wittgenstein's more striking images is that of rules as constituting 'rails invisibly laid to infinity', where the power of art is precisely in it's ability to warp just such rails even while respecting - although this is not at all necessary - local moments of consistency.
I don't think so, though I would like to see this idea properly developed and supported. "Evolution" refers to a particular theory. That theory is associated with the existence of living beings, and their activities. So there is a particular type of activity of living beings which is referred to as evolution. SX's claim is that this activity innovates, which means to make changes, and create new things, and this appears to be exactly what evolution does. The only remaining issue is the relationship to "consciousness". The evidence is that there isn't even a hint of "consciousness" as the word is normally used, in simple life forms, which have evolved in an innovative way.
So instead of denying that this is the case, we ought to look at how this is possible. How is it possible that an activity, which is not driven by a conscious mind, can innovate, and create new things? We can understand such activities of the human being, as being driven by consciousness, bit if we remove consciousness in order to account for these activities in non-conscious beings, then what drives these innovative activities in life in general? What is the agent of innovative activities, if it is not the conscious will?
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".presents us with a sentence with a semantically meaningful subject(ideas) and a meaningful grammar only in the sense that we know we are being told that the subject has certain attributes(it is colorless and green) and behaves in a certain way(it sleeps furiously). What we have difficulty in making coherent is the HOW its attributes refer to it(In what way can we understand an idea being green, in addition to being colorless), and HOW ideas are able to sleep, much less furiously sleep. So the grammar is at one level consistent but at a more detailed level inconsistent.
In the sentence 'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?' We have a coherent subject (the girl) but unlike the Chomsky example we cant say that there was an activity or behavior at all, even a ta higerh level. Just fragments of subjects and an activity that we dont know how to connect to either subject.
So the difference between the two sentences is that the first has a more extented coherence, we can go on within it longer.The higher order grammatical consistency allows us to forgive to at least a small degree the lower order grammatical inconsistency.
As you say, the Chomsky example may be usefully compared to an Escher drawing. But my examples of a narrative within realistic painting interrupted by an inconsistent grammar from an entirely different stye(cubism) , or a 19th century classical ballet sequence suddenly becoming tap dance, is consistent with the d-j sentence.
It also seems to me that the subject in both sentences isnt itself strictly a semantic content, but also functions as a grammatic element in relation to a prior context.
After all, we dont perceive objects of emaning out of thin air. They emerge for us always out of a context. Thus, they transform that context at the same time that they have to be consistent with that previous background to at least a minimal extent in order for us to recognize it as object in the first place.
In this sense a subject is also a behavior, an activity, a coming into being or foregrounding of something out of a background. Ti would seem then the distinction between grammatical form and semantic content is not clear-cut.
" Art, and even perception may revel in precisely this kind of grammatical promiscuity, switching codes willy nilly, even if allowing for fleeting instances of consistency, as indeed single works or oeuvres might have. " This would seem to be a recent self-understanding of art. Mimesis, the veridical mirroring of an external world, was taken to be the task of Western art until modernism emerged. From that point on, grammars in many art forms were radically reinvented and warped(including, of course, in poetry and literature, with use of sentence fragments, stream of consciousness, etc).
It should be noted that switching of grammatical codes, rather than willy nilly, would be undertaken in relation to larger philosophical commitments(avant garde abstraction and Kantianism, ironic critical art and Marxism-postmodernism). Audiences would be encouraged to recognize these commitments within the art itself, that is, to learn a new code. A collection of art considered to belong loosely to a particular thematic or philosophical commitment could be read via a shared meta-code.
Its interesting to me that in music, the abandonment of long-standing conventions with the rise of Schoenberg, Boulez and Cage alienated many listeners and perhaps never recovered from this move into grammatical incoherence. For what its worth, respected art critics Arthur Danto and Clement Greenberg believed art had reached the end of its ability to say anything philosophically interesting with the advent of the 'anything goes' era after pop art. It was at this point that discernable movements in art disappeared. Im tempted to draw from these observations the lesson that there is nothing particularly unique about verbal language in comparison with non-linguistic meaning when it comes to the importance of grammatical consistency.
"the power of art is precisely in it's ability to warp just such rails even while respecting - although this is not at all necessary - local moments of consistency."
One could also argue the opposite point. Whether meaning inconsistency or incoherence is deliberately chosen as a strategy in art or psycho-linguistic research, the fact that it is chosen to make a point reinforces the necessity of consistency at a superordinate level . Making a point or statement out of a creative act of nonconformity is subsuming a lower order inconsistency within a larger sense-making theoretical framework,Without this superordinate coherence, we dont recognize meaning but instead perceive noise and chaos.
How a peafowl says:"fancy a fuck baby?"
Language might be human plumage.
You seem to take it for granted that we know what a subject is (I'm grammatically illiterate). I would think that "the girl" refers to a particular object, and in this context, this object is referred to as "the girl". Why do you think that "the girl" refers to a subject and not an object?
Hm.
One needs to take care not to define language in a way that is too broad.
Is this language?
We might speak of it as steeped in meaning, or as "speaking" to my soul, but such uses might be metaphorical.
anyone lived in a pretty how town?
Is this language? Is it interesting precisely because it breaks the rules?
We could fix a firm line between showing and saying, and claim that this is the line were language starts. You hinted at this:
Quoting StreetlightX
So let's start by understanding language to be anything that at least in part can be interpreted using a syntax of predication. Language a the least contains identifiable negation and conjunction, nouns and predicates.
Or do these grammatical categories derive from more fundamental grammatical features common to music, art and perception in general?
Only if you cannot interpret them in a predicate syntax...
If we are going to throw around words like syntax and grammar we ought at least check out how they relate to each other.
The whos become ams. When does art become language?
Will have to do a bit of Alice in Wonderlanding...
My favourite part of PI remains ?201. Here I find the point on which the whole balances. It shows how use lies at the heart of meaning. It says that there is a way of understanding a rule that is not set out in words, but demonstrated in our actions.
To interpret is to replace one sentence with another. Interpreting French is replacing "il pleut" with "it rains".
But understanding is not interpreting. Understanding is going out to splash in the puddles.
Translating would be "He rains".
Nouns and predicates? isn't that a mixed metaphor? Don't you mean subjects and predicates? I think that the predicate often contains a noun.
I'm suggesting that being interpretable in First Order Predicate Logic is the least structure needed for something to be called a language.
I'm suggesting this as a starting point to which we can tie the discussion.
What are you saying? I thought we were talking about language use in general, not this specific type of language use, predicate logic. You don't really believe that something has to be interpretable by the rules of first order predicate logic to qualify as language do you?
SO that's not quite the same as "If a lion could speak, we could not translate him"
Why not?
That's the question.
Because not all language use follows the rules of first order predicate logic.
For example?
And now it gets interesting. You are saying that there are some sentences of English for which there is no interpretation in FOPL. That's an all - and - some, and hence neither provable nor falsifiable: given some sentence in English, that we do not have an adequate interpretation does not imply that there isn't one; Yet being able to interpret any given English sentence in FOPL does not imply that we can interpret every sentence.
What we can do - and this was Davidson's program - is to see how far the proposal can go. What sentences can we satisfactorily interpret?
For our purposes here, Street left the notions of syntax and grammar flapping around in the OP. TO get our teeth into them, we need to hold them down...
Further, not all language use need be translated into FOPL, so long as part of it is.
Try "Let's go".
Quoting Banno
Clearly, if there are some sentences which cannot be satisfactorily interpreted, then one cannot claim the capacity to interpret any sentence.
Quoting Banno
I don't think that's true. Your claim is that in order to be called "a language" it must be interpretable by FOPL. But I think that language is defined by a capacity for communication. So if some parts of a language may carry our communication with utterances that cannot be satisfactorily interpreted by FOPL, then we can conceive of "a language" which cannot be interpreted by FOPL. That language might be less extensive and more restrictive in the sense of what it can say.
Do you believe that the more restrictions there are within a language, the less restricted the users are with respect to what they can say?
It would've been more fun if you had used "it's raining".
I am not claiming that I am now able to interpret every sentence in FOPL.
This is just fumbling between communication and language. You might as well define language as a capacity to use language.
The sort of buggering around that FOPL might help us avoid.
Put another way, you might try to translate "language" as "a capacity for communication", but if you do not understand what communication is, you have not made any progress.
Again, Meta, I don't see your style of analysis as making any progress.
...because grammar sets out how we can use the words for that object; and the use of those words sets up how we think about the object.
You agree with this?
He treated all words as nouns; to be defined by pointing.
Do you agree with this?
@StreetlightX
Cutting to the chase, won't any language worthy of the title include the basic structure of FOPL?
Quoting StreetlightX
...and FOPL.
Actually, that's exactly how understanding progresses, We proceed from particular instances of the individual, through the specific to the more general. So we encounter people, like you and I, we specify them as human, then we proceed to define human as animal, and animal as living, etc... By developing an understanding of the defining terms, we proceed toward a better understanding of the original particulars.
So we might define language as a form of communication. "Communication", as the defining term is the more general, such that not necessarily all forms of communication are language. We could analyze "communication" further to see if it is defined by a more general term, or we could look at the specifics of communication to see what separates language from other forms of communication.
You seem to think that it's being interpretable by FOPL which separates language from other forms ofcommunication. I disagree, I would think more along the lines of what SX proposes, that it is just having a grammatical structure in general which might be what distinguishes language from other forms of communication.
Quoting Banno
Yes to this though.
So you don't like first order logic because of who wrote it?
Anyway, sorry I'm being short, I mean to reply substantially a bit later, just busy atm.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So do you think, when you define language as a capacity to communicate, that you are proceeding from a particular to the more general? Language is a type of communication?
If the genus is the capacity for communication, what is the differentia?
What is grammar?
What is grammar?
Scares the willies out of me.
Hear, Hear to that!
Grammar deals with declensions, telicity, deixis, genitives, tenses - a whole word of interest removed from the calcified bullshit that is FOPL. There no need to be scared of shadows.
That's what I was asking. If we may communicate by means other than language, then what distinguishes language from other forms of communication? I don't agree that it's the ability to be interpreted by FOLP, but perhaps it's grammar in general. Or maybe grammar itself is a specific type of a more general category, a more basic form of consent to rules of behaviour which is better apt for defining language.
What if I were to say that the simplest grammar should include negation, conjunction, names for things and names for groups of things?
Unless of course those core categories are the reflection of universal perceptual processing constraints and organizational functions. But in order to show that, it would be necessary to closely study perceptual processing in a phenomenological manner(in the Husserlian sense).
One would have to uncover the way in which perception necessarily groups and divides based on relative novelty and redundancy, for instance. If you take your eyes off this page you're reading right now and glance at some pattern in your visual environment, see if you can notice the following;
Attempt to stare at a repeating pattern of lines or dots somewhere in the room. Even if you try to continue to look at this pattern in terms of an indefinite repeating of itself, after noticing the first 5 or 10 elements or so within it, your perceptual faculties will turn your attention to thematizing the multiplicity as a 'this'. Rather than noticing the individual elements of the pattern , the pattern is now seen as a whole, as a form in relation to new content.
The perceptual system abhors redundancy. What identically repeats itself eventually vanishes from awareness as the system looks for new meaning. independent visual features become thematized as attributes(adjectives) of single object(or subject) which we then relate to a new contextual predicate that forms in some relation(verb) to it. Perception craves novelty, but novelty that can be assimilated into the regularity of pattern. We encounter anomalies all the time in perception, but these are unconsciously normalized by our processing system.
The argument I'm making is that the features I've hastily sketched form the universal basis of both a perceptual and linguistic grammar. Far from a looking at a visual scene in a willy nilly manner, we automatically break up and group the changing features of our experienced world into a sequential structure of coherent chunks in relation. Visual and auditory subjects and predicates, , nouns and verbs, if you will.
Note that it is irrelevant whether we are talking about ordinary perceptual experience or any kind of art form with its associated conventions and rules( or lack therof). The same underlying constraints and organizing mechanisms apply. Regardless of how far removed from a rule-bound representationalism a work of art may be, the perceptual system will still parse the underlying visual features via a primordial subject predicate grammar before determining what kind of meaning or coherence it has at a higher level of abstraction.
Ah, well. Your thread. I tried.
Mmmm. Art begins as language? Showing begins as saying? I think that is the wrong way around.
Perception is overrated and confusing.
But yeah, language constrains what we talk about.
So when you talk about "talking about...", you were not talking about language?
It would be more interesting to tell us why you think language precedes art.
Wittgenstein was brilliant in teaching that discursive context determines linguistic meaning, but each of us is already our own discursive community well before and outside of our interchange with each other. Linguistic meaning is determined and redetermined in social context of use, but it is more fundamentally determined and transformed over and over in so-called 'private experience. I say so-called because the primary site of exposure to an other takes place before there is another person to commminicate with.
What is called thinking to one self already functions in the way Wittgenstein imagines in a social language game, but within an internalized social environment that makes each participant in discourse not simply a pole of a shared set of meanings within a language game, but resistant to an extent to what is supposedly constituted via the game.
(This comes from Heidegger and Derrida, among others).
Not sure what to make of this. Is there some jargon going on with "an other" as opposed to "another"?
But I don't know what a person is. I think such a notion is an abstraction. Before we know who experience belongs to there is already exposure to an outside. If I say 'my' experience is always already contaminated by this outside even before I encounter 'you' , I also have to rethink this 'i' as not already constituted as itself before it is altered by an outside.
SO much for the school boy understanding of evolution.
Evolution is an EFFECT, not a cause.
An otherwise completely useless adaptation wholly given over to sex and reproduction.
It's not rocket-grammar is it? Just word order, mainly.
Or: What did the boy whom the girl kissed deliver?
'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?' is not nonsense, it is ungrammatical, but decipherable in context. It doesn't seem to involve those deep categorical structures that might or might not e partially assimilated genetically, but more an ad hoc means of disambiguation like the BODMAS rule in maths.
Evolution is a process of development. It is an activity, Therefore theories of evolution refer to both causes and effects, as is necessary for understanding activity. Within such a theory one ought to adequately differentiate between causes and effects, or else the theory may present us with a misunderstanding.
From the perspective of empirical science, evolution is demonstrated and known through various physical evidence, which is the effects of evolution. So evolution is known through the effects. Logic is applied to various different forms of evidence (effects), relating them, to produce theory concerning the activity which is called evolution. Further logic, and speculation is applied toward determining the causes of evolution.
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin5.html
I would also be interested to hear your take on this article I wrote critiquing social constructionist writers for their neglect of private experience. In your view, is Wittgenstein exempt from this critique?
https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social_Theory_and_Psychology_October_2001_11_655-670_doi_10.1177_0959354301115004
You almost making my argument, but are stuck in an important fallacy.
A cause has to be driven you are saying that there is an ineffable force in the universe which is evolution. That's utterly absurd.
Shit happens, things change, and the result is evolution. For some species this is the end, for others it means little, for others still it means more fitness to a changing environment, but the result of all this change is evolution.
You can ask what was the change that led to evolution, but its just dumb to suggest we change BECAUSE of evolution.
Darwin gave us one of the three major Copernican turns in intellectual history, don't be a dinosaur medievalist!
Evolution is a description of what has happened, so to say that it is ineffable is what is absurd. It is no more ineffable than any other activity which we describe.
Quoting charleton
I don't see what you're trying to say. You are describing changes, and saying that evolution is not this activity described as changes, but the result of the changes. The result of these changes is that you and I are existing today. Are you and I evolution? See it's your statements which are really absurd. Or do you agree with me that "evolution" more properly refers to the activity of these changes, which has brought us into existence, not the result of the changes?
Quoting charleton
I don't know charleton, your points are really incomprehensible to me; "what was the change that led to evolution?". Since evolution has been going on since life began on earth, then I guess the appearance of life on earth is the change that led to evolution. Agree?
So instead of blaming time for the fact you are late, you agree with me that would be silly
All activities cause change. Evolution is an activity. Therefore evolution causes change.
Artificial selection is a cause of evolution
Domestic selection is a cause of evolution.
Changing environments are part of this causality.
Use your brain, I can tell you have one.
As I told, evolution is an activity, therefore it consists of both causes and effects. Variation in species is the effect of evolution.
This travels way to fast to be clear.
The poems of ee cummings I made use of earlier are a more erudite variation of Jabberwocky. A joke about first-order predication that wasn't recognised. As Alice says about Jabberwocky,
Grammar, unfixed.
The nonsense of the self comes forth from Heidegger and Husserl.
Quoting unenlightened
I think perhaps knot-tying made its way into language through Thales and Socrates.
Special variation is evolution.
It's very clear that "evolution" referrers to a process of change. Check your dictionary if necessary. You can reread my posts if you have something meaningful to add, but I don't see any point in repeating everything I've already stated.
A process is a series, or better, a nexus of causes and effects, though; it does not cause anything. Put it another way: change is the result of causal forces; change does not itself cause change.
If that is what you think, go with it.
Otherwise you could follow the discussion in more detail.
Variation is not evolution and neither is survival.
Evolution occurs when species characteristics change; extinctions occur; in the face of changing environments, after selection.
You simply do not have a clue about causality. It's a pity science teaching is so poor.
I see, science rather than philosophy is the authority on what "causality" is. It seems that the teaching of science where you are is very poor.
As a theory 'Evolution' is a theory of change. It includes both the micro level individual changes that produce advantages that are selected for, the processes of selection and the macro level changes in species that result.
As an actuality evolution is change which incorporates the actualities of micro and macro level changes and the environmental changes that modulate the interplays between them.
Process is change and all natural (which includes cultural) processes are evolutionary.
Show you? How about you take a look at all the wonderfully varied species of life which exist all around you everywhere. Then read Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". If you still wonder how evolution could be the cause of anything, get back to me.
Here's a line from the Wikipedia entry concerning "On the Origin of Species" :
"This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference). "
Notice how the theory of evolution states that the process of evolution "results in" (meaning 'causes') the formation of new species.
Everything he suggests point to evolution being the NATURAL consequence of necessity. In fact the whole point of his work is to remove it from the out-of-date notion that there is an underlying cause.
Get your arse out of your religious preconceptions.
Wiki is abusing language. It's common enough.
You might like to consider Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who explains this error in simple language.
It's a common enough error, and you can't be blamed for absorbing the shite that is all around you.
But when you get this, it will transform your world view and for the first time you shall REALLY understand how evolution comes about.
Consider this quote from "What Darwin Got Wrong"
[i]argument that goes like this: there is at the heart of adaptationist
theories of evolution, a confusion between (1) the claim that evolution
is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and (2)
the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected
for their adaptive traits. We will argue that: Darwinism is committed
to inferring (2) from (1); that this inference is invalid (in fact it's what
philosophers call an 'intensional fallacy'); and that there is no way to
repair the damage consonant with commitment to naturalism, which
we take to be common ground.[/i]
There is no active process for the selection of traits that the false assertion that evolution is causal would suggest. In terms of evolution, selection is passive. Death is the real mover in evolution, as it removes negative traits. But selection is blind. IT has no direction or goal. THAT is why evolution is an effect; the result of change and not a cause.
Do you understand what the word "cause" means? When something is the "consequence of necessity", then that thing has a cause. Something can only be necessitated by a cause. So your statement here is completely contradictory. You say that the description of evolution, as the "natural consequence of necessity", removes the notion of underlying cause. But all that the notion of "consequence of necessity" does, is reinforce the notion of causation.
Quoting charleton
Selection and death are both aspects of evolution. To deny that selection is causal, and introduce death as a cause, does not prove that evolution is not causal.
Creatures with adaptive traits are more likely to survive, flourish and reproduce. There is no suggestion that there is anything that intentionally selects creatures, or that all creatures with adaptive traits will survive and flourish while all with maladaptive traits will fail to flourish and/ or perish.
No. That's part of the point. Selection is not partial. Any member of a species can survive and maladaptive traits can flourish just so long as it does not too adversely impede reproductive success.
The error as shown by F&P above is ubiquitous throughout evolutionary studies.
The simple act of nominating any trait as adaptive or maladaptive insists that selection works towards adaptive traits. This assumption can be found in almost every work on evolution, even in Darwin.
Partly its a hang over from Victorian Naturalism which assumed design; language has not properly caught up.
When a scientist says trait X "is adapted to.." this intensionalist fallacy is made, and it happens all throughout the literature.
In the quote from Wiki above; Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Populations do not adapt TO their environment, but FROM it. Variations have to precede selection. You cannot select, by reproductive success if those adaptations are not already present in the variation within the species.
An environmental change leads to the selection of more fitness FROM those existing variations.
To suggest populations adapt TO their environment is to suggest that novel variations emerge because of that change; that is absurd. This is so obviously false since the genome has no way to assess the changing environment and design adaptations to fit them. Such adaptations have to be present in the population BEFORE the environmental change.
The continual changes that precede from that selection process is what we like to call evolution.
There is no force of nature called evolution which is causing this process. Evolution is the effect of environmental change upon living things which show natural variation and mutations.
Don't be a [****]. If you have something to say, about me, then have the decency to read what I have written.
[**** = Mod edit]
Andreas Wagner's book which is all about - in his words - how nature innovates - might be of especial interest to you. Alternatively, there is also Mary Jane West-Eberhard's pioneering work on adaptive innovation, which is equally interesting and important.
I think you are making the category mistake of associating what is said of "a population", with what is said of "an individual". Variations occur in relation to individuals, and precede selection. Changes to "a population" are posterior to selection. It may be that you have difficulty understanding what is meant by "a population", but this is collective terminology which is common in evolutionary theory.
Here's an example to help you understand. An individual will vote yes or no in a particular referendum, and this vote is prior to the decision of the population. After the vote is counted, we say that the population has voted in such and such a way, according to the count. Notice that the individual's vote is prior to the count, and the population's vote is posterior to the count.
Quoting charleton
Variations in "the population" may emerge because of that change in the environment, but this does not mean that variation to the individuals are due to that change in the environment.
You have quoted that out of context and made it look as though I was affirming that all creatures "with maladaptive states will fail to flourish, and/or perish". In fact I was rejecting that idea, which you would have noticed if you read what I wrote more carefully.
It is obviously, though, tautologously true that in general adaptive traits will be more likely to lead to flourishing, and maladaptive traits will be more likely to lead to declining.
I think you are just being pedantic over the inevitable use of the language of intentionality in evolutionary theory. It does not follow that the theorists who use those terms must reify them and imagine a telos where there is no telos, or imagine a certain kind of telos that does not exist. Whether or not there is a telos in nature is itself not a simplistic black and white matter.
]
It's not a cause though is it?
But I agree with this! In fact this was part of the point of the OP: that grammatical categories just are semantic categories. Grammar is not just a formal scaffolding of lingustic organization but reflective of - to use the Wittgenstinian lingo - a form-of-life. The whole point is that this informs Witty's statement that 'if a lion could speak, we would not understand him'. His form-of-life, reflected in his grammar, would be radically different from ours (not to be confused with 'in/commensurte' with ours). The focus on grammar here is to specify a mechnaism which would explain how this difference would come about/operate.
That all said, and thinking a little bit more carefully about your comments, perhaps I was too quick to assimilate art and perception together as two categories to set 'against' language-qua-symbolism. I think on reflection that the category to set apart is perception rather than art insofar as part of my motivation with the focus on grammar was to recognize the way in which it (grammar) allows for the creation of context 'out of thin air', as it were (also, reading back, our conversation began with a discussion of perception rather than art, and I think I allowed myself to get confused in the flow of it).
Anyway, the idea is that with grammar, I am no longer tied to a particular here and now, words can be used not simply as indexes or icons but as full blown symbols (to employ the tripartite semiotic distinction). This is something Dor gets at when he explains the specificity fo language:
"The claim is that the uniqueness of language lies in this very specific functional strategy. All the other systems of intentional communication, used by humans and the other species that we think we understand, work with different variations of the functional strategy that I call experiential: all these systems allow for (different variations of) the communicative act of presenting: “this is my experience”. This very general characterization captures the foundational fact that experiential communication is inherently confined to the here-and-now of the communication event, where experiences can be presented.
Language is the only system that allows communicators to communicate directly with their interlocutors’ imaginations, and thus break away from the here-and-now of co-experiencing: instead of presenting the experience to their interlocutors for perception, communicators translate their experiential intents into a structured code, which is then transmitted to their interlocutors and instructs them in the process of imagining the experience – instead of experiencing it. What the interlocutors do is use the code to bring back from their own memory experiences connected to the components of the code, rearrange them according to the structural configuration of the code, and construct a new, imagined experience." link
So yeah, okay, language is indeed closer to art than I was willing to give credence to, but further away from perception insofar as perception is indeed tied to the affordances of the environment which acts as the 'external' grammar of our perception (it constrains what we perceive, even while our perceptions are co-informed by our 'sensory-motor schemas').
Not really. To nick a saying of Feynman's, FOPL is as useful for talking about grammar as ornithology is to birds. You're not engaging with anything by invoking it, because it's completely tangential to any discussion of grammar. Want to talk about cases, genitives, declensions, participles and deixis? Be my guest. FOPL? Nothing doing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I wasn't going to say it but...
"How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow - or rather, to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death."
I really like the move from this kind of account to one that holds equally for intersubjectivity, and the diffusion of solipsism it allows. Cool stuff.