The language of thought.
I'm not sure if i've chosen the right category since i'm not well-read on philosophy in general.
I emailed Mr Noam Chomsky on this matter once, and he disagreed with my observation, which was :
If we all speak different languages, then that logically implies that there is a global language that comes before words, ie: we don't think in words.
Mr Chomsky's answer was "Introspection reveals to me that i think in words."
Babies obviously have thoughts, not in any language until they are trained.
I emailed Mr Noam Chomsky on this matter once, and he disagreed with my observation, which was :
If we all speak different languages, then that logically implies that there is a global language that comes before words, ie: we don't think in words.
Mr Chomsky's answer was "Introspection reveals to me that i think in words."
Babies obviously have thoughts, not in any language until they are trained.
Comments (157)
I suppose you're suggesting some underlying structure to thought: a structure we all share?
"If we all speak different languages, then that logically implies that there is a global language that comes before words, ie: we don't think in words."
I'm sorry, I don't see how you got from speaking different languages to a global language before words. Can you describe the logical steps for your thought process, please?
Can you give an example of a thought that can not be expressed with words in the context of someone that can speak?
Touching your partner in some way expresses some thoughts to them. A lot what's expressed has word labels but there isn't a translation between speech/writing and all of these non-verbal aspects of communication.
There's some witticisms expressed in particularly good chess puzzles too. The ideas expressed are a kind of motion and initiative you can then attribute to the involved pieces, and liken current positions on the board to previous games and these motion/initiative corpuscles if you're particularly skilled (which I'm not).
The first part I'm not so sure about. People can express intense desire, arousal, excitement, anticipation, comfort, belonging and any other emotion typically communicated through non-verbal communication. Such things, I thought, have evolved to supplement what is now our primary form of communication, verbal. But it is certainly a sound idea.
The second part is very interesting. I'm going to look that up, thanks.
I would reply the big mistake is asking what we think in. The real issue is what constrains our thoughts to be about some thing in some particular way. And words, with their grammatical structure, are an immensely powerful means of constraining thoughts in a particular fashion.
So animals and babies "have thoughts". The brain itself is set up to work in anticipatory fashion. It must have some kind of image of what is just about to happen next in the world - what it would want to happen even - so as then to make sense of what does actually happen that is a surprise, or fail to meet some intention we had.
The mind is thus generally constrained by its long-term experience of the world and its short-term expectations concerning the world. Those focus its thoughts to be about certain things in terms of anticipations and plans.
Words - and the structure of ideas they encode - then add to what is already going on at that biological level. We don't think in words. But we certainly talk to ourselves to constrain our own expectations and behaviour just as we talk to others to do the same to them and their states of mind.
So language gives humans a unique ability to self-constrain their states of mind. Words limit our thought in a very particular and socially constructed fashion. They shouldn't be understood merely as symbol strings carrying some already present cargo of meaning.
You don't need an already present mentalese which forms the thought and then gets translated into overt speech. Instead, speaking is the skilled action of forming up a thought with grammatical clarity by applying a structure of limits on all the things that could possibly be going on in another mind ... or our own.
If I say "cat", you should not be thinking of horses, cake, Russia or a Sherman tank. You should be now limited in your conceptions to cat-like experiences and expectations. If I say "that black cat that's always crapping in your vegetable patch", then your state of mind should be that much more constrained in what it is thinking.
All that "thought" was always there in your head - potentially. But words and sentences build little fences that enclose states of active interpretation. It narrows what you are likely to be actually thinking to the point that it becomes highly predictable to me. We can be of like mind and communicate.
So yeah. Words don't carry the actual meanings themselves. They are a tool to regulate meanings - a way to restrict the natural roaming freedom of another's wandering mind. And once humans started regulating each others thoughts through language, it was a short step to turning the trick on themselves and regulating their own thinking in just as strict a fashion.
This can confuse your readers. There is a global language that comes before words? Language is communication using words. Don't you mean "global communication" instead?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/although-they-cant-tell-us-about-it-infants-can-reason/
"The researchers claim that this increased pupil dilation [in infants] “suggests increased cognitive ability, possibly due to inference-making.” Why do the researchers think this? They used millennials as a control. Millennials can, usually, tell us what they are thinking—that’s how we know they have reasoning skills. But when they are presented with the same movies of plastic dinosaurs and flowers in cups and boxes, their pupils likewise dilated only when they had to infer which toy was where. (They also stared longer at inconsistent outcomes.) Téglás and co. conclude that precursors of logical reasoning are thus independent of, and even preliminary to, language."
@creativesoul You might like this too.
it really does work like that, the pupil stuff.
You should have asked Mr Chomsky, "What are words, if not sounds and visual scribbles? You think in sounds and visual scribbles."
We all think in the form that our sensory impressions take.
When this topic comes up I like to mention this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words
Does Chomsky think that this man had no thoughts for the first part of his life because he was never taught a language? How does Chomsky explain how we learn a language if we don't think prior to learning it?
I'll just add some things to these comments.
The question, it seems to me, is, what does it mean to have a thought? How do we learn to apply the word thought? This is similar to the thread on beliefs, there are thoughts and beliefs that are expressed in actions, and it's the actions of a person that give rise to what we mean by thought, and what we mean by belief. Just as the word pain gets its meaning from observing the actions (moaning and screams for e.g.), so the inner experience is expressed as we act in the world. These actions then provide the backdrop for language and meaning.
I believe Chomsky goes wrong by thinking that thoughts are these inner private experiences, i.e., that accessing thoughts is a matter of introspection. For a belief, thought, or pain to have meaning there must be the outward manifestation, otherwise we could claim that rocks have thoughts.
What also seems clear is that for my thoughts to mean anything to you, there must be something in common, i.e., there must be something in common with my inner experiences and yours that is expressed in such a way that we all see that common thing. Language then grabs this outward commonality and calls it pain, thought, belief, intent, etc.
I have parsed your words for brevity and do not want to take you out of context. However, I did parse as I did because the two "strike" me as inconsistent.
If experiences are inner, how could thoughts about them not be inner? And do I not experience my thoughts regarding my experiences? Would anyone think it odd to say "I remember I was thinking about my experience. . ."
I am puzzled as to why my experiences would be inner while my thoughts about them would not.
Perhaps the inner outer thing is just getting in the way. (as it often does).
Good comment.
I like that this treats language as external; constituted by public criteria, dealing with things (in a general sense) in our shared world; even when describing something internal, allegedly like our mental states. Broadly speaking, linguistic expression draws from and is part of a communal knowledge.
But I don't think this goes far enough. The inner/outer or public/private schema is driven, or perhaps haunted, by a personal criterion of epistemic access. What I mean here is that because it isn't possible to feel another's pain, the language cannot be about, or be have the meaning of, particular instances of pain, only pain insofar as it plays a part in language games.
Which is fine, mostly. We don't feel particular dispositions, emotions or sensations from others, even if two people, A and B, are subjected to the same pin prick, A does not feel the pain that B feels and vice versa. But why should this entail that A's pain and B's pain cannot be part of the language game? Contrast this to A's pain event and B's pain event, which will never be the sense of the words about them. My point is that A's pain event and B's pain event can still be part of a language game, because a comparisons can be made.
Seemingly because A's pain event and B's pain event are not the same event. Is it possible for them to be the same event (not just occur at the same time)? Probably not, at least out of the realm of sci-fi. Why should this entail that A's pain (not A's pain event) and B's pain (not B's pain event) cannot be the subject of a discussion, or the difference between them a driving force in a language game? Again, I read these two things being equivocated as a symptom of epistemic access.
So, what problem do I have with epistemic access being used as a criterion to demarcate that which may be a sense of a word (its use) and that which may not be the sense of a word (the invisible or maybe impossible referent of pain)? Just that epistemic access itself is part of a language game of knowing, philosophically transposed into the realm of language use simpliciter.
If we pay attention to the words people use when describing private sensations, emotions, states of mind, we can establish a kind of equivalence between them. Like two alcoholics on TV describing addiction unfelt by the audience. Establishing equivalence between things is something we do with words.
During the language game of pain comparison, people can offer a lot of adjectives to describe qualities of the pain. Some common ones are; sharp, stabbing, throbbing, blinding, maddening, dull, intense. There are words which connote different intensities of the sensation; like agony and discomfort. Those intensities can clearly be part of the language game, so why not something which is equivalent to the pains themselves within the language game?
If philosophy really is, ultimately, a form of therapy, it would be strange that it cannot discuss the preferences and proclivities which underly every linguistic act. Especially when real therapy is founded upon this idea.
Long story short: epistemic access and establishing equivalence are both part of word use, rather than a transcendental precondition of them.
That's a fair question, and one that can be confusing. I'm going to be repeating myself for emphasis, and to word it slightly different for clarity (hopefully).
Our inner experiences must be separated from how we talk about inner experiences, viz., what we mean by saying we have thoughts. So what we mean by a thought or thoughts is not connected with my having a thought/s. Again, experiences, or what we mean by experiences, is not dependent (in terms of meaning) on something inner. This is not to say that the inner experience isn't real, but only that what we mean by experience isn't dependent on inner awareness. So both words, and many others, thought and experience get their meaning from what we observe in each other; and these observations occur in the open. It's not like Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box where we can't observe what's in the box, i.e., we can see what it is for someone to mean something by their words, because we all can observe the thing in the box.
Your question is: "If experiences are inner, how could thoughts about them not be inner?" Again, good question, but I'm not saying that there isn't something inner happening, or that we're not expressing something inner. And yes, you do experience thoughts about your experiences. Again, what we mean by these words is not dependent on what's inner in terms of meaning, so if what I mean by these words is strictly based on something completely subjective, then the words have no foothold, thus no sense.
It really comes down to how we are using these terms, so if someone thinks that they're going to understand what a thought is, or what an experience is by observing what's inner, then they're confusing how it is that we come to mean something by these words.
I agree.
Thank you for the clarification.
I'm not sure of your point here. Are you saying that we have knowledge of private experiences, i.e., "I know I'm in pain?" Let's clear this up first. Much of what your saying I agree with, but this isn't clear to me. I'm specifically referring to your use of the phrase "epistemic access."
For example, I might say that I understand what thoughts are based on our shared meaning of the word, i.e., the language-games that give meaning to the word. However, I might then think that because I understand this - that I can go on to say that I understand thinking or thoughts by thinking about my own thought, i.e., by introspection. It's here that we can easily go astray.
ME: Don't do that stuff around here.
Him: I don't do stuff around here...
Me: Dude, your pupils are sooo big...
Him: He he. Ok.
Millennials - there's your problem, right there.
By epistemic access I imagine a relation between a person and thing such that the person can come to know the nature of the thing. Which is a bit of a fuzzy idea. What I'm trying to say with reference to epistemic access is that what is 'private' is beyond our reach - epistemically inaccessible - and what is public is not.
Then I'm trying to say that this is a bit weird, as that each sensation, disposition or emotion can be made equivalent to a series of expressive linguistic acts. The privation associated with any sensation is only the privation of the event of feeling only ever happening to one person, but absolutely nothing to do with the sense of speech acts about it. This works in the real use of language as if the privation can be circumvented by the use of language (which pace the Wittgensteinian background we're working in is language simpliciter) to treat my pain event as equivalent to another's pain event within a language game.
Another way to put this is the private/public distinction isn't something outside of language, we can go from one to the other by treating a sensation with language; expressing it. This renders the sensation equivalent to the expression despite that the sensation itself is not identical with the sense of the linguistic acts. Equivalence, there, is a rule to be followed and negotiated in talk of feelings and sensations.
Yet don't you believe these people will have something like the experience we call pain?
As an experiment, say we assembled 6500 people in a large hall, with each individual person speaking one of the 6500 languages of the earth. What I will do is place a black cat on a table on the stage for all to see. Everyone in the audience will see the same thing. However, each person will make different sounds, to describe what they see. This visual language is universal, but spoke language is not. There is no universal sound or noise for black cat, even though it looks the same for all, with each able to pick it out of a picture lineup.
The visual language is universal since eyes, optic nerves and the brain processing and assembling of data, works the same in all humans. These universal sensory languages use interchangeable parts, which are assembled into collective human patterns.
Although we all see the same thing; common sensory language, this internal data is not easy to transfer directly to others, since human brains do not have wireless connections. Audio language was developed as a way to transfer information, from the internal universal sensory languages, to people outside yourself.
For example, the scientist sets up and runs his experiment. He will watch, listen and smell, which is the same for any scientist running the same repeatable experiment. Translation for others comes last, using any of a number of subjective audio languages. Since these spoken and written languages are subjective and arbitrary; not universal, there is some loss during transfer. It is a good approximation, but not as good as being there, running the experiment, using universal sensory languages.
Say you were in the rain forest and discovered a new species of animal that is unique. There is no word for this, yet. However, the universal visual language nevertheless assembles the input data in your brain, so this new animal fits into patterns and/or categories. From this you give it a name. The invention of each word, started inside a person using one or more of the universal sensory languages.
I don't understand your post very well. Can you add some more detail please?
I don't understand this either Banno. If it's a joke I don't get the subtext.
I still have no idea what that means, sorry.
Oh go on, indulge me. How do Lewis and qualia relate to what I said?
I think we've sufficiently explored how profoundly we are unable to communicate with one another.
Bah, quitter.
I'm trying to make the point that the public/private distinction is something that we regularly circumvent in conversation or usual language use. It has a strange position in being a precondition on the types of account that are admissible for the sense of linguistic acts, while doing nothing to limit the expression of sensations, emotions or dispositions. IE that language isn't just shared contingently, it's necessarily shareable. Since events of emotion, disposition or sensation aren't shareable in some sense - you don't feel mine exactly -, they make a poor candidate for the sense of linguistic acts. One reason for this is because your sensations aren't accessible to me; I can't feel how they feel for you. This easily leads to I can't know how they feel for you.
But we can, really. This is because language can be used to express the private, and we can establish an equivalence between a linguistic act and the 'private' event of feeling just by talking about it. This is not to say that the words are the things, or that emotions are things 'attached' to words, but to say that there are much richer senses of equivalence at work in the construction of sense than intimated by the public/private distinction; strict identity. The feelings, insofar as they permit expression, are already 'public'.
Then what I'm trying to say is because the private stuff is already public insofar as the private drives a language game, the distinction dissolves in use.
EG: people had no problem saying 'I felt the same' in your recent thread on dread. This isn't to say that they felt your dread, but that the feeling of dread is already expressible up to posited/established equivalence in the use of language. EG, we can establish equivalence between dreads by matching descriptions with our feelings. Or, as works in general, match the of the word with this or that particular emotion, sensation or disposition that I have had.
Equivalence is a lot richer than identity.
When it comes to what we know there are a variety of language-games in which we can make claims to knowledge. So in science we would appeal to inductive and deductive arguments (mostly inductive), but there are other ways of knowing such as: Linguistic training, I know that that is a cup, because that is what we mean by cup in English; knowledge through sensory experience, I know the orange juice is sweet because I tasted it; testimonial knowledge, I believe that X is true, because the testimony is reliable (most of our knowledge comes in this way); and pure reason or pure logic (tautologies). So there are a variety of language-games that use the word knowledge, and each of these is a correct use of the word, and each use is public. I say all this just to give some background of where I'm coming from.
Since each of these uses of the word know is public, i.e., that's where knowledge gets its sense, it's senseless to make a claim to knowledge outside this public use. So it's not, to my understanding, that knowledge of the private is inaccessible, it's that knowing makes no sense in this arena. Maybe that's what you're saying, I guess I didn't like the word inaccessible, but maybe it works.
Also I view these first-person events, like, "I am in pain," "I feel..." as very basic kinds of beliefs, or bedrock beliefs quite apart from epistemic considerations.
I would also say that what is private is accessible, but only in a public way (a slight variation on what you're saying), viz., what's going on privately has meaning as it's exposed publicly through our use of language.
Quoting fdrake
I'm not sure you can say, "...that each sensation, disposition or emotion can be made equivalent to a series of expressive linguistic acts." My understanding is that our pain is not equivalent to the speech act, but gets its meaning through the outward public expression. What you're saying reminds me of the idea that the word's meaning is associated with the thing, but it depends on what you mean by equivalent.
I agree that the private event, say, of pain, is only happening to one person, but I'm not sure I agree that it has nothing to do with the sense of the word pain. It has everything to do with the sense of the word, but only as it can be made public. So I can't point to my private sensation and think it will acquire sense without the public expression of the pain (beetle-in-the-box PI 293). The private experience isn't circumvented, it's only that meaning of the private sensation must be shown in the public arena of language use.
You seem to be using equivalent in a strange way, i.e., you say, "...to treat my pain event as equivalent to someone else's pain event within a language-game," but is this what we mean when we compare pains? If I say, "I have the same pain," do we mean that it's equivalent to a similar pain event that I might have, or is it akin, for e.g., to saying, "Stand here," where we don't need to have an exact point in mind, but rather a rough idea.
Quoting fdrake
If someone says, "I've experienced the same pain," referring to a lumbar puncture, we understand what they mean, it's not as though we think that our pain experiences are different; so we can say it, and A's pain and B's pain is part of the same language-game. And what is A's pain event, and B's pain event, other than A and B's pain? It's true that the private experience itself doesn't give sense to the word, but that doesn't mean we can't speak about private sensations. The only point I would want to make is that the only way we can speak about these private sensations, is that we have something that's not private. Once we have the sense, then it follows that the language-games about private experiences do make sense. I'm not sure we are disagreeing.
Quoting fdrake
I think I answered this already.
Quoting fdrake
No, argument here.
Quoting fdrake
I think I've answered what you getting at above, but maybe not.
Quoting fdrake
Is this what you think I'm saying, i.e., that there is some transcendental precondition to word use? Because I definitely don't believe this.
Well, I tried to answer, and/or add to what you were saying.
I think it's just qualia that we're talking about. Where a word isn't enough to convey a feeling, we resort to music, paintings on chapel ceilings, and giant novels.
Does something remain that's completely unsharable? People will answer that according to what they believe about consciousness. People who are allergic to superstition would reject the existence of communal feelings. That's basically what the divinity Eros is.
What I would say here is that just because we use a word in a language-game, as in the Christian use of the word soul, that that in itself doesn't mean it has sense. Consider Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box example, let's suppose that we develop language-games to refer to what's in each of our boxes - does it follow that the word beetle has a sense? No. The tendency is for people to take Wittgenstein's example of language-games and use, to be, the be all and end all of meaning, but it's not, and Wittgenstein never meant it to be.
The problem with saying that the soul is where the person's essence resides is that there is nothing public about such a thing. I could say for example, that what's in my box (beetle thing again) is where the soul resides, but it would be senseless because there is nothing public here. The same is true of Christians who point to the inner thing in reference to soul. There isn't anything public - as Wittgenstein points out - what we think we are referring to may be something quite different, it may be nothing, or it may be something changing all the time. The sense of the word soul has nothing to latch onto, which is the same with the beetle example.
Meaning isn't always use, we often use words incorrectly. Meaning isn't always driven by context either, and meaning isn't always driven by a language-game. Use has to be looked at in a much broader sense, and that takes place in everyday language. By everyday I don't mean that the man on the street is the one who decides meaning, but that meaning is derived across a wide linguistic swath. One also has to look at the original home of words in conjunction with language-games. It's not an easy thing to do.
Finally, it's not a matter of looking into the phenomenal states of Christians, quite the opposite.
I don't think you need to feel pain in order to understand the sense of the word. Surely I could understand the sense by observation, and thereby use the word correctly, giving it sense.
Where John is talking about that experience, Mary does not understand.
Whether or not Mary can satisfy anyone with her usage of "red" is irrelevant.
It's true in this example that Mary doesn't understand the sense of the word, there is nothing public here, so Mary has no sense of the word. I don't see in this example how Mary would be able to use the word. However, in my example of the use of the word pain, it's quite different. Bob doesn't feel pain, but he is able to observe along with everyone else the outward signs of pain, for e.g., moaning, crying, pleading, etc., so Bob is able to see how the word is used, and apply it correctly. Mary is not able to partake of anything public.
If someone has never experienced childbirth does that mean they can't use the word correctly? We don't always have to experience the same thing others do in order to understand the correct use of a word or concept.
Ok. He still doesn't know the experience of pain.
I don't think I'm trying to paint a picture of word use where words like pain attach to a pain. To be sure, in cases like the pain in my right leg, I could describe it and it would resonate in some way with you - but this is more of a function of our shared history of language use than any pointing to my pain. The sensation would drive my expressions (motivating how I use language, constraining which words are adequate), but the words never have the meaning of the pain I feel, they don't attach to each other in a bizarre marriage like 'red' and 'red-ness' in the 'sense of the word is identical to the feeling'. Rather, the words do something like correlate with our shared heritage of language and we interpret this fuzzy composite of correlates in a way that links it to feelings I have or have had. It's use all the way down.
By equivalence of pain event with linguistic acts I meant that 'rough accord' you mentioned, in my terms a fuzzy cluster of correlates, which nevertheless enables more precise exposition.
To see if we're disagreeing or not, do you think that the public criterion is a necessary feature of language use? If it is necessary, why is it a necessity?
Are you familiar with Terrence Deacon's theory of language evolution?
I do believe that public criterion is a necessary feature of language use, so I don't think it's possible to have a private language. However, this is different from having a language and putting it to private use.
It's necessary because of the nature of language and following rules, i.e., since language necessitates rule-following, and rule-following is not a private endeavor, then it follows that having a language is not private but public. Sounds a bit circular, so let me give a deductive argument.
(1) If it's not possible to follow a rule privately, then a private language is not possible.
(2) It's not possible to follow a rule privately.
(3) Therefore, it's not possible to have a private language.
Of course then the challenge is show that premise 1 is true. What does it mean to follow a rule privately in this context. This doesn't mean that I can't do mathematics in a private setting, but to know that I've done it correctly needs to be shown objectively, i.e., publicly. In this case many mathematicians have their work checked by other mathematicians to validate correct use of the rules.
If it was completely private, then whatever I think is correct, is correct. Following a rule is by its very nature is public, and not private. Much more can obviously be said.
Nope.
Not sure if this link would help. He's using a lot of information theory and thermodynamics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_Nature
Where the experience of pain is being discussed.
The way I view this is that all uses of language, even when used in private, even when an inner monologue, even a 'half formed' thought are parasitically social. That is to say they must be expressible in some way, even if that expression is one of the ambiguity or conflict within the 'private' episode. I don't imagine this possibility as something external to language, a contingent fact which happens not to obtain now in a separate possible world.
Instead I imagine it as the ability for a person to put words to their thoughts and feelings with varying degrees of difficulty depending on the thoughts, feelings and how the person inhabits those emotive or thinking states; even when the states themselves are conflicted like cognitive dissonance, deliberation and dysphoria.
So I'm with you insofar as yes, language is necessarily public. And yes, this comes with the idea that senses are historically constrained as a positive feature of their expression (I cannot use this word, but there are many I could use). Also, this comes with agreeing to the idea that rule following is not something that can be 'done' without at least a parasitic dependence on the norms of expression that are in play.
What I'm trying to say is that if I express a feeling and its concomitant behavioural tendencies, that expression can be taken as the expressed feeling with no additional linguistic constraints. You either can or cannot see the aspects put forth in linguistic acts. You might make a new box of correlates, like I have done with dysphoria; something my beetle has never felt. But which it can interpret by correlation, analogy, and notional equivalence.
The privacy of feelings; that all feelings which are felt in my lifeworld are mine; can make it difficult to express the private thing, to guide the possible interpretations with the right words so that the other can cotton on to how that feeling is for me. The same goes for ideas that we have or opinions that we hold; it is always difficult to take the amorphous and half-formed and codify it into our shared canon of experience and language use.
There is a struggle against the trappings of what is shared to express what is novel and singular; what is not already a habit or established permutation of language use. The private/public distinction paints the borders of sense as something demarcated beforehand; as a necessary condition for language use the beetle is not allowed out of the box.
Really, all I have is a suspicion that as uses of language are dynamic, languages evolve, uses are introduced for novel phenomena, and the box the beetle is in shrinks. Just as much as use is a contingent and yet constitutive activity of language, just as much as language is enmeshed in cultural norms, use frames language as the collection of the codified already sensible. Forgetting that use is as much the codification of the new as the reference of the established.
The beetle screams and we are its voice.
If you express a feeling and its accompanying behavioral acts, then it is necessarily rule-governed, so it may or may not need other linguistic modifiers in order for meaning to be conveyed. Whether I "...can see or cannot see the aspects put forth [as] linguistic acts," is dependent on many things.
Quoting fdrake
I agree, although I wonder about the use of mine, i.e., these feelings I have are mine. I think this may generate confusion, viz., the tendency to associate meaning with my feeling, as opposed to the shared social construct of language. There is a tension here that seems to force us to acknowledge that there is a private world, but this private world doesn't give meaning to our linguistic expressions, but it's necessary. We also don't want to restrict language to the point that we don't allow for novel thinking and expression. So sense is not a fixed or contrived border, but moves and expands, but ever so slowly around the fixed point (fixed point may not be the best choice of words) of what we already know or believe.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, as I mentioned above, we have to be careful that we don't let the border between sense and nonsense become so fixed that we stifle creativity. Sometimes the beetle gets out of the box, as our expressions become clearer and more precise, and other times our words remain senseless because there is no sense to be had. However, it may be necessary for this to take place in order for language to grow and expand. It's like being in a maze, some paths lead to nowhere, other paths take us to new places, expanding our knowledge. Wittgenstein did this with his idea of language-games, and his method of inquiry.
Quoting fdrake
I agree, but I'm not sure the box shrinks, the beetle sometimes escapes though, into the world of sense.
Perhaps I missed it, but one point that doesn't seem to come out clearly in your exchange is that language use includes non-linguistic elements, which include private, personal, phenomenal experiences -- however you'd like to put that. People's actual pain is part of the "talking about pain" language-game -- even if only by its absence, as in shamming, lying, exaggerating, etc., and its absence would be important. (The blocks too are part of the builders game.)
And then we note again how all of this is underwritten by the broadly similar biology of speaker and audience, blah blah blah. Ultraviolet is part of the spectrum just like green, but we talk about it differently.
Quoting fdrake
Temporarily anyway. Experience isn't finite. (With all this talk of novelty, creativity and sense-making, why isn't @StreetlightX here?)
Two short thoughts on this:
(1) Imagining an instance of this sort of thing, of trying to get an idea (or an experience or sensation, novel or not) into words for someone else to understand, one interesting indicator of success is when the listener, trying to figure out what you're getting at, says something right that you haven't said yet -- on the right track! -- and even better when they say something right that you hadn't even thought of yet. In the best cases, you seem to pick up on this immediately, can recognize whether they've gotten it, even when their thought is now, in turn, new to you, though in tune, or in line, with the thought you were trying to express to them. (Again, all of SX's stuff about sense making is swirling around this for me.)
(2) Back during the discussion of Russell's paradox, it occurred to me that while it may be true that natural language has no meta-language we can kick paradoxes up to, we seem to be able to temporarily switch levels as needed, and do so all the time. Even the simplest cases, like saying, "That's not what 'literally' means," betray an ability to temporarily, on-the-fly, conjure a meta-language we'll dispose of when we're done, which might be at the end of a single sentence. This is not so far from where Davidson lands, that people only ever speak local, temporary, negotiated shared languages, not some capital-L Language. And oddly, this starts to look like the scenario in (1) there.
It is interesting that our ways of talking about pain, for instance. can evolve, despite the experiences being broadly constant through human history.
Importantly, it's not a given that the 'athletic response' is entirely nonsensical. Maybe someone thought me that 'pain' means something other ('happy'?), or I misread the word 'pain' in a book and mistook it for something else. Or else one might intentionally be trying to subvert the meaning of pain, perhaps for some kind of in-joke or some other reason ("look I'm in pain haha" - maybe someone's bullying someone in pain?). In any case, the expression 'pain' is just one 'unit' in an entire ensemble of words and action, which, taken together, 'realize' the meaning of the word pain (the elements of this ensemble is, in principle, inexhaustible).
I'm not necessarily criticizing your post, but only pointing out that use is not always a good indicator of the correct use of a word. Some people who read Wittgenstein necessarily equate meaning with use when it's not always the case. This same problem arises when we say that meaning has to be seen in context; and while it's true that both of these play an important role, we don't want to be absolutist about it.
The word correct has it's own problems, but generally we know if someone is using the word pain correctly or incorrectly. If for e.g., I'm learning English words and I confuse the use of the word pain with being happy, then it's clearly incorrect. This of course doesn't always mean that it's clear that a word is used correctly, sometimes people are just confused about the use of a word. Moreover, if I make a claim that a word is not used correctly, it's incumbent on me to demonstrate how it's incorrect. I've been making the claim that Christians generally use the word soul incorrectly, because much of the time it's exactly like Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box.
I agree with this absolutely. One of the motivations I had with picking a bone with @Sam26 was to draw attention to the undercurrents of language. There's a lot of expressive, delicious and vital parts of language use that are pulled along by them.
When you have the (( (language game) background ) form of life) schema, it's easy to remove all the passions and ambiguities from use by bracketing them in background and form of life, with the means of bracketing being epistemic access and the public/private distinction. The public/private distinction and that all language is public(izeable) is all well and good, but it's often used in a manner which displaces attention from the background and forms of life and onto followed rules. At least by us armchair philosophers on here.
My posts tried to achieve this by situating the public/private distinction within the use of language and that, often, we spend our time wantonly disregarding it by bringing how the beetle rattles about into the realm of sense. This changes the beetle; passions, moods, sensations, dispositions; from a passive exterior of sense to its guide.
As Banno puts it, we spend our time effing the ineffable.
I actually agree with much of what you're saying. However, maybe what you're observing about my concentration on particular Wittgensteinian ideas, is not that I, or anyone else, is neglecting other important aspects of language, but that this emphasis is important to our understanding of philosophy. There are always other things that can be pointed out as important, and one should point them out.
I'm sure if we continue, we will find areas of disagreement as you probably have already. That's what makes the sharing of these ideas fun, and sometimes ego crushing. I know it pushes me up against the limits of what I think I know.
That's a relief!
Quoting fdrake
Yes, I think it's an interesting move, and wanted to say that something similar happens with semantic distinctions that formally would require a meta-language. You might also look at Lewis's scorekeeping this way: the domain of discourse should be fixed before we start predicating, assigning truth-values, and so on, but instead the domain of discourse is (implicitly) negotiated as we go.
I think that's a fair appraisal of it. What do you think the differences in our viewpoints are?
It might be incumbent on you to demonstrate this. But seriously, how do Christians use this word incorrectly, or how is it like Wittgenstein's beetle? It has an established usage among Christians, AFAIK.
Ah, I understand 'use' differently from you I think; all the cases of 'pain' I briefly profiled count as 'uses', and none of them are either 'correct' or 'incorrect': they are simply uses simpliciter. One can speak of the 'correct use' of a word of course, but this is not how I understand Wittgenstein's own deployment of the term (in the context of 'meaning is use in a langauge-game'). The contrast-space of 'use' here would simply be something like 'not-a-use in a langauge-game, rather than 'incorrect use'. Like Luke, I don't really understand why the Christian use of the term 'soul' would not count as a use. One can argue that there are particular incorrect uses of the term from the point of view of a particular, historically-established langauge-game, but this would be largely trivial.
I'm going to turn the question around, since it's you who had the bone to pick. :razz:
Yes, it's an established use among Christians, but just because something is part of a language-game, that doesn't mean it's correct usage, or more importantly that it has sense. My contention is that it has no sense, however, I'm open to another way of looking at it.
My point is that the way Christians use the word is exactly like the beetle analogy. They refer to this thing that's a soul, but what is it that they're referring too? Let's assume the beetle analogy for a minute. I can say many things about it in the abstraction, it's that part of me that continues after my death, or that it's this or that, but there's no way to confirm it. When I use the word pain there are outward signs that confirm that inner experience or thing, but there is nothing that can be associated with the word soul as used by Christians. Meaning is established as a rule-based agreement amongst people, and along with that, is the idea of being correct or incorrect. How do we know if we're even referring to the same thing?
If you trace the use of the word soul, and the way it's been used historically (outside of religion), it refers to the animation of the living body; and the animation of a body doesn't necessarily mean that there's something that survives the death of the body.
Am I saying there is nothing that survives death, no, I'm just saying that the use of the word soul in the Christian context has no sense.
You may decide that the soul is not immortal. If Plato, for instance, asserts that it is immortal, his usage of the word is correct though you think his assertion is not.
In @StreetlightX's sense thread, it occurred to me that we might look at the rules of language as permissives, or as enabling communication, rather than as constraints.
One way is this: "The word for that is 'thimble'", suggesting a natural predicative/model-theoretic approach -- you sort things into what "thimble" is true of and what not, which sentences including "thimble" are true and which not, etc. All the machinery of Frege-Tarski style semantics.
Another is this: "You can/may call that 'thimble'", that is, using "thimble" to refer to that is a recognized usage in our speech community, using it that way you're likely to be understood, etc. There is "correctness" here as conformity to convention, but conventions are not carved in stone, and you participate in their revision.
The permissive view deliberately leaves open a pair of possibilities: (1) finding new uses for "thimble" (as in Peter Pan, for instance); (2) finding other ways to refer to thimbles. (When Homer can't remember the word "spoon" he asks for a "thing you dig food with".)
One of the purposes of Wittgenstein's language-games is to show how it is that we mean something by our words, and how this comes about, this has been true since the Tractatus. This is important as we traverse this topic.
In his notes on On Certainty Wittgenstein is pointing out, as I understand it, that Moore's use of the word know is senseless, and it follows from this, I believe, that it's incorrect. Now I'm not saying that all senseless uses of words are incorrect, or that all language-games involving senseless words are incorrect uses, but that one of the features of incorrect usage is that the word is senseless. There are certain language-games where it makes perfect sense to talk in a senseless way, maybe to emphasize the senseless nature of a word, or to be funny. However, in some language-games using senseless words simply misleads us, especially in philosophical language-games. It's important to make a distinction between what's nonsensical and what's senseless. Without getting into a discussion of the differences between these words, suffice it to say that nonsensical tends to be a more radical misuse of a word than something senseless. A piece of nonsense tends to be completely devoid of meaning, whereas something senseless can appear to have sense, like the beetle example. The differences between these two words can be a bit vague, but I think you get my drift.
One more thing about correct and incorrect usage, since language is by it's very nature rule-based, it would seem to follow necessarily that one can speak of correct and incorrect uses of words; and of course in terms of Wittgenstein we see this especially true, I believe, in On Certainty. That said, not all language-games lend themselves to this view.
If someone was to compare the language-games of a primitive culture, where their knowledge was based on the movement of the stars, would it be correct to say that their use of the word know was incorrect? Note that in this example, the whole language is based around this notion, so it's not as though we could compare the use of the word know against other language-games within that language. All of the uses of know is this primitive language-game would revolve around understanding the stars and their movements.
Finally, there's more to Wittgenstein's language-games than meaning is just "not a use in a language-game," because the notion of meaning, which is at the core of Wittgenstein's philosophy, has to do with words having a sense. This gets back to my talk above about the word soul having no sense in much of the discourse of Christians. A language-game in itself may or may not have a sense, and that's one of the reasons I make the claim that one is being incorrect in terms of the use of a word or words.
My point is whether the use of the word soul has sense, not whether there is something immortal that goes on after death. Besides even Plato can be wrong, and has been wrong about some ideas, even though I believe he is right up there with the greatest of philosophers.
It has many senses.
I'm trying to see things from the beetle's point of view. People can be quite skilled at feelings talk, to the extent where from the sense of their behaviour; involuntary or habitual expression; you can read their inner states quite well. I take it that we can assess others' states of mind, feelings and emotions from what people say and how they say it, the latter is still part of sense. This is somewhat inferential, as @StreetlightX pointed out, but it can also be an accurate certitude depending on people, feelings, previous experiences etc.
The tendency to associate peering into people's mental lives; how they embody and express dispositions; as some kind of philosophical confusion - rather than something that we do all the time when engaging with each other, is part of what I'm criticising in (what I read as) your approach. So when you say things like:
Quoting Sam26
it's actually very clear when I refer to 'my feelings' outside of Wittgensteinian ordinary language analysis, you mean how you feel about things. Or, with a philosophical veneer, you mean something which you take as equivalent to your feelings (not identical). So when I say my piles are a 'sharp, throbbing' pain, you have a very good idea of how I feel if you have the prerequisite experiences and are familiar with the words. 'sharp, throbbing' is my formative transposition of the feeling into language, just like these posts are a formative transposition of how I see us philosophically at odds.
If I were to describe a less common affective state, say 'bodily dissociation' which comes with a chronic illness I have. You could find out what dissociation is and get an idea of what it's like to be in that state. You get 'an idea' of it, but you probably don't get 'the feeling' mapped to a similar one that you have had. What is said of an affective/embodied/sensorimotor state is a good substitute (sense being a good substitute for sensation) for having had that state.
I believe what I've said is in tension with your account. I'm not really sure where, it may just be a difference in emphasis. There's certainly some grit in our oyster, but I need help from you finding out where it is.
Yes, I think this is certainly the right approach, and the proviso is only that a word that does not belong, that has no use in a language-game, is a word that has not yet been given a role, a use in the language-game.
What I think Wittgenstein is interested in blocking, as a sort of catastrophic misunderstanding, is taking a word as it used in one language-game, and bringing it into a another language-game where it is expected to play that same role, to have the same usage. The bare sign can readily be re-used. But if a word's functionality in a language-game is its interface, the way it connects to other words and how they're used, etc., there's no reason to expect that such a piece of machinery will even slot into another machine properly, that everything will connect so that it can function at all much less function here as it functioned there.
I have some qualms about this view. Machines are of course quite rigid and specific in their requirements. Sometimes you can take something quite generic from one machine and use it in another, but most of the time hardly any part from any machine will fit into another machine. What's more, machines are largely designed not to change.
Language use doesn't appear to be nearly this rigid. I'm not trying to start a war about LW here, but I think this way of reading him, even if a bit of a caricature, is natural, widespread, and a genuine tendency within his thinking, even if it's not the whole story.
I don't see how what I've said differs from this quote. Of course you mean how you feel about things. I'm not saying it's senseless to refer to inner experiences. I think you're misinterpreting my analysis. I'm saying it's senseless if there is no social way of latching on to your inner experiences. I thought we were in agreement on this issue.
Maybe this is where the disagreement arises. We both seem to agree that language is social and that meaning is established socially. So let's suppose that after learning what it means to have a pain, i.e., I've learned how to correctly use the word pain in a variety of contexts, I then go on to tell you that I have a pain in my foot; and as I tell you this, I show no outward signs of pain. So your talking about pain in a very subjective way, i.e., I'm relying on what you mean by pain as you express some inner experience. There is nothing in what I'm saying that poses a problem here.
So according to your interpretation of what I claiming, it wouldn't make sense, or have a sense/meaning to make such a statement. However, this is not what I'm claiming. My claim is that we learn the correct use of the word pain socially as we understand the objective physical cries, moans, complaints, etc. All of us learn the use of the word in this way. After we learn the correct use of the word we can reliably associate it with our inner experiences, and since this is true, generally it's also true that when we talk about inner experiences, even though there is no outward signs, I can be reasonably sure that you're using the word correctly. However, the sense of the word is learned by the outward signs.
I tried pointing this out when I talked about having a private language, and doing mathematics privately. It's very similar, i.e., it's true that having a private language is not linguistically possible. However, this doesn't mean that I can't do mathematics privately, once I've learned mathematics. The same is true of words having a sense when talking about private experiences. Once I've learned how to use the words correctly, I can refer to my private experiences even though you may not see any outward signs of my inner goings on.
Note two things about this: First, you've already learned the correct use of the word within a social context; and second, correction is done in a social context. So if you were referring to the pain in your foot, but later I find out that you weren't using the word to refer to pain, but to a feeling of joy, then of course there was no sense to what you were saying. But generally people use such words correctly to refer to their inner experiences, but only after learning how to do it in the social context.
Once everyone knows how to use the words, I can say I've got foot pain, and the meaning is the pain? The use is to refer to the pain, meaning is use, so the referent is the meaning... This is rather strange to me. Because on one hand we've used the private language argument -which is a-priori, demonstrating a necessary feature of sense that it doesn't come into contact with any beetles in boxes -, and nevertheless we're using words in a way that makes the pain part of the sense!
What part of saying 'I have pain in my foot' to my partner is private? I'm referring to the pain, she's a competent speaker of English, we both have the prerequisite social background which roots the word pain to pain behaviour...I can express my pain as part of the sense of that phrase.
We use established meanings, interpersonal understandings to push the envelope all the time. There's enough of a communal understanding of pain for me to go 'I have a pain in my foot' and people will understand that I'm expressing my pain. I take it as a given that 'I have a pain in my foot' expresses my pain, and thus my pain is bundled up interpersonal project of meaning, interpretation, innovation and habit that makes sense make sense.
Every time you post something, I don't see where we disagree. I'm just guessing as to where that disagreement is. I see where there is possible disagreement, but that's about it.
Yeah, this all seems right to me. One way in which I would extend this though, is to attend to Witty's focus on grammar as a constraint with respect to the transposition of words/phrases/etc between langauge-games. I think Witty would agree that you that one can indeed plonk words from one language game into another and expect them to have the 'same role' on the condition that the grammar stays invariant. In some sense that's really, I think, the only stipulation on flexibility: don't let the (seeming similarities in) grammar misled you. Attend to that, and everything else is fair game (this is easier than it sounds, insofar as grammar is a function of our 'forms of life', our lived linguistic and extra-linguistic activities).
It's not just catastrophic misunderstandings, but also subtle misunderstandings, so subtle that much of the time they're missed.
I take it that the private language argument shows that, well, language is necessarily social. This means that senses are established with reference to shared phenomena. Initially when people learn how words work, they'll have to mimic how they're used.
What I'm trying to say is that feelings like pain, dread, despair, joy etc are already part of the social ensemble/community of language users. This means that they are public phenomena not just because their senses are fixed with reference to what is shareable, but we inhabit a world where their expressions and embodiment are commonplace. People sufficiently competent with the language that contains those words can understand not just the words as shared, but the feelings underlying them as shared too.
This then means when I say something like 'I have pain in my foot', a feature of the meaning of the phrase is my pain. When I feel that way, it's ground so well trodden that everyone else can discuss my pain. If someone asks 'is it throbbing?' I would reply 'No, it's sharp'. And everyone would know what it meant.
The language game of describing my pain, say, doesn't just consist of expressions whose meanings are established in the community. It also consists in me using those meanings to paint a picture of my pain. In that regard, what I'm aiming at with the descriptions is an adequate account of my pain - the features of the pain guide my expression. This is not to say that the meaning of my expressions is what I intend by them, nor to say that the word pain means my feeling or a set of feelings.
What I'm getting at is, to borrow some Sellars from the recent threads, is that pain here is functioning as a token (the particularities of my expression in the pain discussion language game and how they relate to my current pain) as well as a type (the general patterns which give pain its shared sense). I'm using pain language to express my pain, and thus my pain can't easily severed from the understanding of the words (so long as the interpreter is playing the usual part).
In a similar regard, I'm trying to express my opinion on our disagreement, you're behaving in the way that's expected. We're both working towards a common understanding, which means transforming and expressing both our notions of what's going on. You can treat these posts as examples or attempts (tokens) of expressing my opinion, where my opinion also is functioning as a guiding type. Much the same for pain talk in the way I meant above.
Or this whole approach is wrong, this is the sort of thing language takes in stride, and the only question is how well or poorly it's done. (All models are wrong. All analogies suck.)
I'm deeply suspicious of this Wittgensteinian "You think you're making sense but you're not, and it's so subtle you don't even know it, but I do." People ripping bits off one machine and shoving them into another, and making it work , making a machine do something it couldn't do before, or making a new machine -- this sort of bricolage might be perfectly commonplace. It's not a terrible description of uttering a sentence no one's ever uttered before and being understood.
I had hoped I was suggesting an alternative approach and providing some motivation for it, why one might invest some time in pursuing such an alternative.
Just tinkering, as usual.
Many words have no referent (e.g. 'the', 'of', 'if', 'then' or names of fictional entities) but this doesn't make the use of these terms incorrect.
Hi Luke, I haven't talked to you in a while.
Those of you who have followed my posts over the years, or have followed my recent posts, I hope know and understand that I agree with Luke's point. However, if we're talking about the beetle analogy for e.g., there is no agreement, not only in terms of having a referent, but there is no way to know what rule to follow in terms of correct usage. So while it's true that many words have no referent, there are objective ways to know how to use words like 'the,' 'of,' 'is,' etc, there are rules of grammar for us to examine, or some other objective feature for us to examine, as in the case of pain. So sense isn't necessarily dependent on a referent.
Hi Sam
I'm glad we agree that sense does not require a referent. However, it seems to be the lack of a referent which leads you to assert that the Christian use of the word 'soul' is incorrect. Given a community who share a use of this word in similar ways (you even offered a definition of the word on the previous page yourself), I don't see how it's at all like W's beetle.
I think there's a definite distinction between saying one person is using a word incorrectly and saying an entire community is using a word incorrectly. It seems inappropriate to label the usage 'incorrect' in the latter case.
Well maybe I wasn't clear in that post. It's not just a lack of a referent, it's lack of any way to be subject to a rule that gives meaning to the word, or any way that we could possibly agree, or not agree, that the thing we are referring to is the same thing. Christians do offer a definition of the thing they are referring too, are you suggesting that because there is a definition that that in itself is enough to give meaning to the word? I don't think so. Suppose the soul was the thing in the box, would saying it was the soul give it sense? We could even imagine saying the beetle is that thing that goes on after I die, the essence of who I am.
We could easily extend Wittgenstein's beetle example into a language-game similar to how Christians use the term soul. We could develop language-games around the use of the word beetle, would that give it sense? We could imagine pulling out our boxes whenever we refer to the word beetle. I think it's exactly like Witt's beetle example. How is it not? I'm open to being wrong, but at the moment I don't see it.
Finally, why would you say that it's inappropriate to say that an entire community is using a word incorrectly? Communities of philosophers and theologians do it all the time. Wittgenstein railed against philosophers for doing this.
So these threads seem to get hung up on the idea that language stripped bare would reveal its secret propositional structure. And yet when language is stripped bare - disaster! - that logicist structure appears to evaporate. The logicist is so disappointed that he/she proclaims language to lack any proper objective or intrinsic structure at all. It is all just games of pretend.
But a constraints-based understanding of language gets at the structure it has due to self-organising dynamical principles.
Instead of the atomism of logicism - where meaning must be constructed from the ground up, fixed part connected to fixed part - meaning is holistic.
Anything might have been meant at the beginning. While you wait for a speaker to speak, your own state of understanding is a vague receptacle. No communicative possibility (and a host might be buzzing), has yet been definitely dismissed. There is neither understanding nor misunderstanding. The symmetry is yet to be broken in terms of that logicist disjunct.
Then speaking starts to constrain that open state of mind which is entertaining a plenum of the possible. To some degree, a host of interpretive possibilities get eliminated.
Information theory models this in detail. The 20 questions game illustrates how you can arrive at any word in the dictionary if you just ask a question that divides the field of possibilities in half with each question. You get an exponential elimination of alternatives. Is it real, is it fictional? Is it a form or life or is it not? Language allows the systematic construction of states of constraint. Meaning becomes whatever set of possible interpretations is yet to be positively eliminated.
So words don't carry cargoes of meaning in truth-apt style. They construct socio-cultural boundaries to acts of interpretation. Agreement is "meaning is use". But agreement is also agreement on a deep structure - the structure that is needed to restrict free possibility in that pragmatic fashion.
Quoting Sam26
So the goal of communication is to limit misunderstandings by constructing a shared mental frame of constraints.
Misunderstandings then separate into those that matter and those that don't. Catastrophic misunderstandings would be meaningful. The logicist constraint of either/or - the constraint that is intolerant of ambiguity - would have some pragmatic point to it. Something matters about the misunderstanding that is worth correcting.
But then, from a constraints view, no state of understanding ever bottoms out in concrete atomistic definiteness. The old logicist hope of that kind of foundationalism has long gone. So, in the pragmatist account, the only thing that terminates the possibility of "subtle misunderstanding" is a generalised agreement not to sweat the detail. Pragmatism is self-grounding. Top-down constraint is eventually matched by a principle of indifference. Part of the deal is knowing when either/or choices - binary bits of information - cease to make a material difference to the formal structure of constraints in place.
It is an easy trick to bring up subtle misunderstandings that lurk in any speech act - as if that were a telling blow to language structuralism. But that just reflects reductionist thinking at work. It could only matter if you thought meaning has to be constructed bit by bit, atom by atom, from the ground up.
When speech is understood as a semiotic story of constraints, then the open-ended bottom is part of the point. It means speech has irreducible creativity and spontaneity. The fine-grain possibility of misunderstanding is an important organic part of the deal.
And then a ground is always found as the other part of the deal. In ordinary speech - not so much in philosophical discourse - folk tend to share a common level of indifference. A fine-grain of misunderstanding is not a big issue as it doesn't make a real difference to the communicative intent - the structure of thought or structure of constraint.
First, no one said that the goal of communication is to limit misunderstandings, at least I didn't. Much of what you're saying is a complete misunderstanding of what's being said.
Quoting apokrisis
Where does anyone even hint at this? Maybe if we were discussing Wittgenstein's Tractatus you could make such a criticism, but no one is suggesting that, especially me.
The issue is the flip from one extreme to the other extreme.
Recognising that there is no definite atomistic foundation leads to the jump to the other extreme of anti-foundationalism.
I just seek to make it clear that there is a middle path that sees foundations as what in the end get constructed via a collective system of constraints.
So don't take it personally that I quoted you on a particular bone of contention.
Anti-foundationalism, where do you see that? I'm sorry, but what you saying seems a bit bizarre. Especially since I've constructed a kind of foundationalist view from much of my understanding of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. If anything we might have some agreement here, maybe.
There are public expressions of ecstasy or beatitude, which can be associated with the word 'soul' just as public expressions of suffering due to disease, injury or emotional trauma can be associated with the word 'pain'. Of course an individual will not understand the sense of the words unless they have had private experiences of ecstasy or suffering that they can associate with the public expressions of these private states and the conventional words that refer to them. In other words the lack of sense of 'soul' is merely a lack of sense for you, and you are unjustifiably attributing this lack of sense to others.
I don't have much time to respond, but would you say your criticism regarding the word 'soul' equally applies to words like 'unicorn' or 'if'? Are we all using these words incorrectly? What makes the word 'soul' any different?
This is where I think you are mistaken; the sense of words which refer to subjective states depend both on public expressions and private experiences of those states.A person who could not feel physical pain could still somewhat understand the word as applied to the physical by "analogy", if they felt emotional pain; they could not understand the word at all if they never felt physical or emotional pain.
Is that true? It really might be -- I'm not disagreeing -- but there's also a little waystation we get to stop at sometimes of knowing at least what kind of word we don't understand. Oddly, stopping here seems to mean that even though you don't know how to use the word properly yourself, and could not judge whether someone else is, you get to have a partial sense of what someone using the word is saying. ("He's referring to a color I don't know by name." ”She's referring to a feeling I may never have felt.")
ETA: Learning a new word usually means getting to this waystation first, I think.
Any bodily expression is an expression of the soul, which really is related to what we've meant by soul historically. If you really want to know the meaning of soul, watch a living body, it's the very expression of a soul. Note though, that this is the same as how we arrive at the meaning of pain, expressions of pain are the thing that demonstrate the inner experience, the same is true of soul, at it's root meaning.
However, what is the expression of soul, or the meaning of soul as Christians use it? I'm not saying that all Christians are always using the word soul in a senseless way, but much of the time they do, especially when referring to some inner thing that has no outward expression. It's that thing that lives on after we die, well, what are the manifestations of this thing? I can tell you what the manifestations of pain are, or I can tell you what the traditional manifestations of soul are? But what in the world are Christians talking about? Saying it's that thing that lives on is senseless, and it's not just senseless to me, it is senseless, unless you can tell me how it's not. I'm listening, or reading.
Yes, I think it's always a matter of degree of understanding, when it comes to affective states. Let's say you've never experienced murderous intent motivated by hatred, you can still understand it up to a point if you've ever merely disliked anyone, and intended to punish anyone in any minor way, or morely generally intended or desired to do anything at all. But still you could not fully understand what 'murderous intent' means unless you had experienced it yourself.
Right, so you do agree that 'soul' has sense, but not that 'immortal soul' does. But again, I must disagree with you, because we understand the sense of 'immortal' by its negation of the sense of 'mortal', and to make sense of 'immortal soul' is just to apply that notion of living forever or never dying to what we already understand to be the living soul. Of course, in accordance with my answer to Srap, I acknowledge that we cannot fully understand the sense of 'immortal soul', in its specific application as 'life after death', unless we have experienced life after death, but that just reinforces my argument that personal experience is required as much as public expression of such experiences is..
I just don't see this as being true. Do I have to have the exact experience as you in order to understand certain kinds of pain? I've never had my arm hacked off, so does that mean I don't understand something about the meaning of pain? You might respond, yes, unless you've had that experience you really don't understand that kind of pain. But you might say this about any experience, i.e., how would anyone one know what any pain feels like, because none of us have access to another's inner experiences? How could you possibly know what someone else experiences when they get a dental needle in their front gum, even if you have had the experience? This again links meaning or understanding back to the inner experience, which, I believe is incorrect.
There is no relationship between the use of the word soul as it has been historically used apart from religion, at least some religions, and how Christians use the word soul, they mean two different things. To say that we have a soul that is recognized as bodily movement among other things, doesn't mean that there is an invisible thing that lives forever. There's nothing invisible about the correct use of the word, it's completely visible, and makes sense because it's visible. But this other idea of soul is devoid of sense. As I said before it's like Witt's beetle example.
The last part of your paragraph I dealt with above.
I think you're thinking too much in terms of 'either/or'; that we either understand affective states, and by extension the sense of the terms that refer to them, or we don't, and that the sense of words referring to affective states is linked to either the private experiences or the public expressions, but not both. I'm saying there are degree of understanding of the sense of terms that refer to affective states, that depend on the degree of experience of both public expressions and private experiences, as well as 'analogies' with other affective states and the degree of experience, both private and public, of those.
A person, for example, who never felt anything at all, physical or emotional, could have no sense of the word 'feeling' at all, no matter how many public expressions of it they had witnessed. Of course most likely no such person has ever existed.
This is not true; Christian thinkers appropriated and extended Aristotle's conception of the soul.
Quoting Sam26
I don't see where you've dealt with that.
If your concern is that we, as a community, have no way of determining that “the thing we are referring to is the same thing”, then it sounds a lot like it is just a lack of referent. You appear to be saying that a lack of referent is the reason for why we can’t be sure, or can’t find a way to agree, that we are referring to the same thing. But I thought we had already agreed that sense does not require a referent?
Quoting Sam26
Probably, in most cases. A definition at least offers some direction as to how a word might be used.
Quoting Sam26
Assuming the language games are public, then of course. Meaning is use, right?
Quoting Sam26
Because the word ‘soul’ has a very public use. The beetle example, as part of the private language argument, is designed to show that the meaning of ‘pain’ is not derived from one person’s subjective (private) sensations, but from its public use in the language game. Per Wittgenstein, “if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation,’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
Quoting Sam26
Which word(s) did Wittgenstein rail against philosophers for using incorrectly?
Even for obsolete scientific terms like ‘ether’ or ‘phlogiston’, I don’t think you would call the users of those words incorrect in their use of those terms, despite the fact that later science found that those words did not actually refer to what it was presumed they did. The obsolete terms had those meanings to those scientists and were used accordingly (and correctly at the time). Even now people (e.g. students) can use those words correctly or incorrectly.
Quoting Sam26
I can only see a contradiction in you saying that the word has no sense, and that it refers to the animation of the living body. You appear to be saying that the word both has and does not have a meaning.
The animation of a body might not “necessarily mean that there's something that survives the death of the body,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Christians are using the word ‘soul’ incorrectly. You may not believe that the soul survives the body, but this personal view is irrelevant to the meaning of the word or its use by Christians.
It depends I guess on what you mean by referent. So I can point to a specific referent when referring to the Earth, or I can talk about many referents when speaking about cars, cups, or trees, depending on context. These things of course have nothing to do with my internal private experiences, at least in the sense that we are talking about. When we observe how these words are used we can clearly see, in most cases, if you're using the word correctly. If you point to a car, and say tree, we would naturally think something was amiss, and rightly so. We learn these kinds of words through ostensive definition.
Similarly when referring to pains, although, I'm not sure if one wants to call a particular pain a referent, but there is something (call it a referent if you prefer) associated with the pain that let's language and the public connect up with the inner experience. The way we learn to use the word pain, is not by pointing to some unknown inner experience, but by observing the public thing that becomes manifest. So the inner experience must have a public side to it in order for us to agree in terms of meaning. We say this because if the inner experience has nothing that can manifest itself publicly, then how are we able to make sense of the thing. That public thing, by the way, must be more than simply writing down what we think is the meaning of the word.
Definitions are more like guides, they're not what give words meaning, use (although this isn't absolute) has more to do with meaning than anything else. They sure didn't have dictionaries thousands of years ago, but they could observe how someone was using a word within the public domain of rule-following.
Now it doesn't follow from this that we can't talk about our inner experiences unless their is a publicly driven something that's available for us to observe. This may sound contradictory when comparing it to what I just said above. However, we must take into account that once we learn a language within a social setting, then it can be reasonably assumed that you know what you're talking about when you refer to an inner experience. The point being that if you have already demonstrated that you know how to use the word pain, anxiety, happy, etc, correctly, then generally you don't need a public referent to express the inner experience. However, learning what the inner experience is, must take place publicly, and within a linguistic environment. So the inner experience is linked to certain behavior expressions.
As you pointed out there are no behaviors or objects associated with other kinds of words, i.e., no referents if you prefer. It therefore follows from this that not all words need a referent, and this is true, so I follow your point. So how do we learn words without referents? There are arbitrary rules of use associated with the marks or writings we do on paper, or when we type, and the rules associated with these various markings can be checked for proper use. We do this with mathematics too. Note that even though these kinds of words need no referent as you say, they still need some way of checking them publicly, and this is important. It's important because any word that has a meaning, must be checked in a way that makes sense of rule-following, which is why a private language is impossible. Rules and rule-following is not a private thing. However, don't confuse this with not being able to use what we've learned privately. Thus, it doesn't follow from what I just said, that I can't do mathematics privately, or that I can't refer to some inner experience privately. It only means that meaning, viz., making sense, first has to be established openly or publicly, before I can do the private thing.
If all of this is true, then it follows that Wittgenstein's beetle example demonstrates that if we talk about something that is totally private, i.e., it not only has no referent, but there is no way for us to establish a rule of use that can be publicly said to be correct or incorrect. This is why it doesn't make sense for me to make a knowledge claim without some way of verifying that one does indeed have knowledge. It would be weird if your high school teacher asked you if you know algebra, and you replied, "Yes," and that was all there was to it. No, we want to observe that you indeed do know algebra, do some algebra problems (publicly).
Now let's move on to the word soul, and here I'm referring to that thing that is said to be in us that lives on after we die. This is the use I'm referring too, not the use that refers to the behavior acts of a body, viz., he has soul, or your expressions are soulful. These two uses have a public domain, and more importantly they have clear cut (in most cases) uses that can be seen publicly to be correct or incorrect.
The use of the word soul that I'm critiquing, is the use that has no outward behavior act associated with it, i.e., it's referring to the thing in the box, the thing we call beetle (the soul). You can't see it, smell it, and there is no outward expression of it, like there is with the learning of the word pain. But you say it's like learning the use of the word the, of, or about, we learn them by applying these words correctly in certain contexts. However, we learn these words in a much different way, and in completely different contexts; learning them requires learning grammatical rules, like learning mathematics has to do with learning particular rules associated with the marks we make on paper. There are clear guidelines to follow, where errors can be ascertained publicly.
I say the word soul as used by many religious people, has no clear cut meaning that can be said to be correct or incorrect. Moreover, they're saying that there is a something attached to the meaning of the word, viz., the thing that lives on after the body dies, so they're saying it has a referent. Furthermore, they're claiming that that is what gives it meaning or sense (even though it doesn't matter if you associate a referent to it or not, the word is still senseless). Isn't this exactly what people are doing when they refer to the beetle in the box, it's the thing in their box that gives meaning (they think) to the word. How do we know what that thing is? Note that even if I apply the same meaning to the beetle in the box (it's the thing that lives on after we die) that they do when referring to soul, this still does nothing to give the word sense, the problem still persists. Let's suppose that people claim to have religious experiences around their beetle, does that give it sense? Even if they create language-games around the beetle, does that give it sense? How do we know that the thing associated with the word, is a thing at all? That would be like me saying I have a pain, and it causes certain feeling inside of me, but if there were not outward observational things for the word to latch onto, how is saying I'm in pain have any sense.
How is the word soul the same as other inner things that have outward expressions? There are no outward expressions of this thing. All there is, is a definition, but that's not enough to give it sense. No more than giving a definition to the beetle would give it sense.
By the way, meaning isn't always use, that's not what Wittgenstein proposed, there is much more to it than that. If that was the case, then any group could arbitrarily change all meaning simply by using a word how they wish. How we use a word is very important, and use tells us much about meaning, but use is not an absolute method of determining meaning, no more than context is. If I use the word car to describe a headache in a particular context, will that drive the meaning of the word car?
Sorry, but I couldn't get to everything you wrote. I was trying to clear up any misunderstandings. I'm not sure this will even do it, probably not. :razz:
This is different to your earlier claim, where you said that "Christians generally use the word soul incorrectly". Now you are saying that their use of the word is neither correct nor incorrect. Please clarify your position.
Quoting Sam26
Wittgenstein's example has nothing to do with what "we" talk about as a community; it refers to the (mistaken) philosophical assumption that an individual can create sensation terms (or other language) solely via their own sensations. Clearly, the word 'soul' has an established communal usage by more than one person, so it is completely unlike Wittgenstein's beetle.
According to your argument, neither could we establish rules of use for the word 'private'. And you have offered no clear explanation for how we are able to agree on rules of use for the word 'unicorn'.
Quoting Sam26
Who cares? It doesn't matter. It's only the use of the word that matters. Whether or not there is such a thing, let's agree to use the word 'soul' to mean "the thing that lives on after the body dies", okay? Oh wait, you already were. And now we can use this word correctly or incorrectly.
Quoting Sam26
What is enough to give it sense is a public usage, which is precisely what Wittgenstein's beetle does/can not have, in principle.
ETA: Having re-read §293, I may have confused my last response above relating to Wittgenstein's beetle with some other section of the private language argument. The main point as I mentioned earlier and throughout the current post, is that the "thing" or actual referent to which words such as "soul" or "pain" refer, is irrelevant to the language game.
"The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is." [PI §293]
And I think it is readily understandable to most if I say that my computer does not seem to get angry, but sometimes sulks. Or, old-fashionedly that water seeks its own level.
Which is to point out that it is a sophistication to de-animate the world, rather than a struggle to animate others. Knowing when, or how to stop in this depopulation of the world is the problem of sophisticates already living in language. That my computer sulks conveys perfectly meaningful sensible information in animated language - that the wretched thing is unresponsive and uncooperative. Have I said anything about its inner awareness or experience? I don't think so.
Furthermore, I mean the same thing when I say that Mrs Un is sulking - that she is being unresponsive and uncooperative.
And sometimes I sulk.
This is straight-up brilliant.
((Hey @frank -- remember that thread about whether we do in some sense "talk" to the world, ask it questions and listen for an answer, etc.))
Ya, you miss understood my point. I did say earlier that there is a correct use of the word soul, also that there is an incorrect use of the word soul, the latter being that thing that lives on after we die. However, that's different from the point I was making in that quote. One of the reasons it's incorrect is that there is no way to demonstrate that it's incorrect or not. That's also part of the reason the beetle example is also senseless, because there is no way for us to establish a correct or incorrect use of the word beetle. Think of it in terms of how we learn to use the word pain, we learn based on the rules of use that happen socially, but these rules are rules that have a correction built into them (like mathematics), and it's observable. I can observe if you call someone's joyful acts, painful, that that is incorrect. Let's say that there were no outward signs of pain, would you think it had sense? Would you think it had sense if we attached a definition to it?
Quoting Luke
Yes, you're right, he's talking about this in reference to a private language. My point is that there would have to be a rule based social component to give it meaning. Also, I'm connecting what Wittgenstein said in these passages, with his ideas in other passages. The problem is that we have to look at Wittgenstein's total picture. I do more of this in my commentary on Wittgenstein. This is why I often argue with the idea that Wittgenstein is giving some absolute picture of meaning as use. His writings are much more nuanced and complicated. Use alone doesn't drive meaning, even if it's done with others. If that's what Wittgenstein is saying, then I just vehemently disagree, but I don't think it's that simple, and I think it involves some of the things I mentioned above.
Note also that Wittgenstein's beetle example involves a group of people, each having their own beetle in a box; so it's not that an individual can't create meaning via their own private sensations, even though that's true, it's that no person or persons can do it. According to your idea, if a group of people started calling pain something quite different than what we normally mean, then it would have sense, even if there were no outward signs of pain. Language always involves rules, but, and here's the important part, those rules necessarily have a social corrective mechanism. Ask yourself, what would it mean to be incorrect in this particular use of the word soul, it's a kind of self-sealing use of the word.
By the way I'm very familiar with those passages. All I do is read Wittgenstein. Of course that doesn't mean I'm always right, but I am very familiar with those passages. In fact, I've just recently gone all the way through the PI.
I believe what you're doing is imposing our linguistic understanding onto the cat or dog. The only way we know, for example, that an animal has a belief is because of it's actions. Note, however, this is only done from a linguistic perspective.
Knowledge along with the necessary ingredient of justification is only done with propositions, i.e., in a linguistic setting. Beliefs can take place apart from a linguistic setting, and this is seen by the actions of the one having the belief. So a belief can be pre-linguistic, but knowledge or justification is something that happens after one learns a language. It's necessarily linguistic. I would say the cat believes there is a mouse in the hole because he smelled it, not that the cat is justified. And of course it doesn't require a syllogism, that would be linguistic. These beliefs are simple and basic, there is no need for justification.
I know my wife and my dog knows my wife. I know which cupboard the dog-food is in, and so does the dog, and with the exact same justification, that that's where we always keep it. I can tell you about it, but my dog can only gesture. I believe you exaggerate the importance of language, and thereby underestimate the perspicacity of non-speakers (along with about every philosopher ever).
Where did you say this?
Quoting Sam26
I don't get it. You're saying that it is incorrect because it is neither correct or incorrect?
Quoting Sam26
We already have a word "pain" with particular uses/meanings in our language. If there were no outward signs of pain (as we normally use that word), then we could still use the word in some other way(s) by attaching a different meaning to it.
Furthermore, we learn to use the word 'soul' based on the rules of use that happen socially, and these rules are rules that have a correction built into them (like mathematics), and it [the use of the word] is observable.
Quoting Sam26
"It's not that an individual can't do it, it's that no individual can do it"? What?
Quoting Sam26
"I soul my car." That is an incorrect use of the word.
Please understand that I originally only took issue with your claim that the use of the word 'soul' by Christians is incorrect on every occasion, tout court. But that's just plain wrong. And now you appear to be vacillating on whether their use is incorrect, or neither correct nor incorrect.
You appear to consider the use of the word 'soul' as equivalent to Wittgenstein's 'beetle' because one person doesn't know what the next person has in their box (in either case). Is that a fair description of your position?
However, this completely misses the point of Wittgenstein's example. The point is not that it is problematic for us to lack knowledge of what other people have in their box, or in their personal experiences. Rather, Wittgenstein's point is that this lack of knowledge (of what is in another's box) is irrelevant to the use of the word. The thing in the box "cancels out, whatever it is."
This is why I find your specific criticism of the word 'soul' and its lack of sense and/or observable behaviours to be misguided. Christians use the word and make sense of it, so what more needs to be said?
I'm going to try to word this a bit differently to see if it helps to make my position clear.
I am saying that we don't know what's in each other's boxes, but it's more than that, the only access we have to the inner experience, is the outward behavior (pain for e.g.). Other than that there is no access to be had. So again it's not only that we don't have access.
So the boxes equate to our inner experiences, which none of us has access to except that there is an outward cry, as in the case of pain. Note that Wittgenstein says, "But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these peoples language?--If so it would not be a name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something." This compares nicely to what I'm trying to say, because the meaning of the word soul that I'm critiquing, is that use that is pointing to the inner thing. Remember this particular incorrect use has a referent, the thing that lives on after we die. I'm saying there is no referent, because it's similar to the beetle example. However, in this incorrect use, they're saying the meaning of the word soul has a referent, but what is it? It's like asking what your beetle is, it may be something, but it may be nothing.
We never should point to the inner thing in terms of meaning or sense. Why? Because there is no outward expression of it. Obviously there are words that have referents, not all, but many words are learned in just this way. But we never should be pointing to something internal to give meaning or sense to a word. This is not to deny the inner thing, but only to say that a word doesn't get its sense in this way (at least in terms of inner experiences). But again, this is exactly what they believe gives meaning or sense to soul. And if it's not the inner referent that they're pointing to, then what is it? Again, even the definition points to the inner thing.
I like this. I think it highlights that all of the things which we build or do with language have piggybacked on other things bodies do. I think this is somewhat related to the Heideggerian distinction @Arne referenced earlier between sense and intelligibility.
Intelligibility, when referenced on PF, is often expressed as our capacity to 'read off of the world', this is a pretty good characterisation when dealing with humans. So much of what we do with intelligibility has found a voice in our use of language, permitting us externalised memories like customs and traditions, and allowing our habits to shape those externalised memories. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that codification - a transposition of intelligibility into norms of meaning like word use- provides a full account of intelligibility as such. Something must be an understandable part of the world; a patterned being, process or event; in order for us to transpose it into sense and treat it as a goal or guiding direction of use. With more philosophical reference, this is the phenomenological point that intelligibility is a condition for the possibility of sense.
It could be doubted here whether performatives like wedding vows fit into this framework, but intelligibility doesn't care so much for its substrate. A social tradition serves just as well as a throbbing temple in terms of a pattern which can be transposed into language; expression is not the only use of language and performatives attain their sense upon the customs (a form of social pattern) which they inhabit. Again, like in my response to @Sam26, this is intimately related to how types and tokens relate to sense. EG, particular wedding vows attain their sense as wedding vows, wedding vows as a social process attain their sense as commitments of relationship durability and fidelity. The take home message here is that regardless of how language is characterised, sense makes sense upon the background of intelligibility.
I'm feeling particularly self indulgent today, so I want to take that point further. Intelligibility's status as a condition for the possibility of sense doesn't do much to describe its character. It provides the logical structure of the relation between sense and intelligibility but not a functional one. Since intelligibility must be something that humans do, it is always at work, the logical structure of this does not suffice for a positive account of intelligibility. What does a positive account of intelligibility look like, what does it do?
And this is where @unenlightened's nice comic fits in. Intelligibility is a structured relationship between one set of patterns and another. It is a pattern made of correlated patterns in which each correlate has a conformable function. This idea can be projected onto the above account of sense.
We have norms of linguistic acts. EG, there are patterns of word use which becomes associated with the particulars of their use; a fuzzy cluster of relevance for the meaning of each word, a fuzzy syntax with which they are expressed interpretably. Speaking simply, these are patterns of language which we use and whose use is equivalent to language. But what are they for? What tethers the generality and constraints of customs and norms to the proclivities and dispositions which are the driving motivations of language (use)? Something which is intelligible but unexpressed or unperformed, for now. In other words, another pattern. Be it of feeling or sensation for the subject, of a theme blossoming in a painting, or the regularities of natural processes expressed in equations; we live in the liminal space between the customs at work the particularities at play. With every utterance we give voice to the difference between conformability and mismatch; which then serves as another pattern for its own mechanism, yielding the fungibility of meaning as use and the dynamical character of linguistic norms.
As an aside, I think that you might be defining 'soul' a little too strictly to accommodate your beetle analogy, by eliminating any observable behaviour. Google offers several synonyms for 'soul' including 'inner self' and 'inner being', but another is also 'personality', which we know has an outward expression. You said that 'soulful' has a different meaning to the one you intend, but I think your meaning can also be found in describing certain people as 'kind souls' or 'beautiful souls'; descriptions which depend on outward behaviours. Your use of 'soul' also appears restricted only to a post mortem state of the body, whereas the word can equally be used to refer to living bodies, which also fits with your earlier historical definition as that which animates the body.
I quite like imagining the beetle being there though. A shadow cast by language equivalent to its agreed upon shape. A spilling of ink with each stroke of the pen. A useful metaphor of meaning/intention/mental state as a composite which we often use something like in real life ('what did you mean by this', 'when you said that, what did you intend?'). It's very close to working like this when two people are earnestly disagreeing like in the thread. People try to triangulate on intended meaning. Similarly in a relationship conflict, understanding intentions is often a good way of addressing it.
While you can read PI 199-201 as the culmination of an argument about mental states not having expressible patterns, a general skepticism about meaning and a whole host of other things, I take it to be mostly suggesting to pay serious attention to what you're doing so that you don't end up framing things in a stupid way. With reference to the 'queer process', the only thing which made it objectionable is that looking at the conditions of possibility with respect to an inappropriate framing device; looking for underlying features of language games with much different structures. Every standpoint holds all else equal on its contours.
Stupid framing is probably more often achieved on here than in the literature; endless threads of silly questions with horrible framing because the framing is treated as transparent. Of course the use is present in 'some sense' and isn't equivalent to a deliberate interpretation. Ironically enough different dogmatically held Wittgensteinian positions are probably symptomatic here.
There being a way of following a rule 'which is not an interpretation' connotes the resistance people feel with language - gesturing towards hereditary and transforming uses followed again by us (while 'spilling ink' as above) - while simultaneously using it adaptively for our situated desires. This exposes that language is always (already) public as much as it enables the interpretation of language as a series indifferent to particular senses or followed rules; both of which are grists to its mill.
In contrast to (my version of) Sam I like to stress the opacity of language, how it resists our uses through heredity, and how the undercurrents (box rattling = beetle) make us navigate it. Probably because this is how I see it as relating to philosophical methodology.
Mental content and opinion expression is a reasonable approximation to philosophical discourse. When what someone wants to do or express with their language (their opinion) and how they use what's available to do that (how they make the point). But it frames things badly when trying to use this rough and ready approximation to do philosophy of language, linguistics or philosophical methodology/metaphilosophy.
I'm never sure how best to talk about it. We can see the trick, performed by the blind watchmaker, and it seems to me that where there is a trick, there is a (mis)communication. So do I have to talk about a 'visual language' whereby these lookie-likeies speak unknowing, unthinking and involuntary? Then I could translate the insect as saying 'I'm a leaf', and the scaredy-cat of the cartoon as saying 'I'm big and fierce'. We do speak of 'body-language', and these things do have uses.
Or shall I say that the insect is deceptively intelligible as leaf, (just as I am deceptively intelligible as a philosopher)? Make a rule for me, someone.
Anyway, the matter of the beetle arises out of trickery, I'm sure of that. One only needs an 'internal' world if it is something different from the 'external'. The cat looks fierce because it is scared, and so there are the two worlds. If we all wore our hearts on our sleeves, the idea of an inner world of beetles would never arise.
Sorry @Srap Tasmaner!
Pfft. I was only using Gary Larson to support (!) to @unenlightened's point.
((Need clones! Would love to be here in this thread more, but I'm still trying to deal with Sleeping Beauty,
and I've promised to participate in the Tractatus thread, which is now starting. Oh, and I have a job.))
Very true, and the fact that there is disagreement is very important to working through these ideas, and it's very important to not being bored. :nerd:
I agree. And that is true of most of us. Language is the articulation of an interpretation of an understanding rooted in the intelligibility of the world. You and your cat share the same understanding of what is in that cupboard.
:smile:
Ah. Nice. It's always good to see that modern science is conducting experiments which support the position I hold.
I'm lucky here too, I guess. I mean just stumbled upon this thread. For whatever reason my notifications do not always work as they should. Thanks for calling my attention to it, even if your attempt was thwarted...
You keep expressing yourself absolutely, as though your assertions have been proven correct by someone. This one hasn't, although it could well be accurate. We don't know. It might help (you) if you confine yourself to absolute statements when they're about known and proven facts. :wink:
Yes, communication would have been a better choice but even that doesn't suffice because it's an internal process, the translating of thoughts into language.
My introspection reveals that the idea comes before the linguistic expression of the idea, i suppose a 'sudden realisation' may be a good example
We've all heard people say or said ourselves "Oh i can't find the words", but obviously the idea is there.
Ironically, i'm finding this hard to put into words ;+}
People that practice a language that's non-native for them for a long time say things like 'I found myself starting to think in French, rather than doing the translation in my head first'.
I may email Mr Chomsky again and point him to this discussion.
Noam reads your emails? :wink: :gasp: :chin:
He replied, screenshot attached, he just said "thanks, interesting" (im a bit of a fanboy, he is a clear thinker, he cuts through a lot of political shit).
I'm not even sure what the 'medium of thought' is for *me*! ;)
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Except by talking to the deaf-blind...
Ableism at work.
Thanks for video. Very informative.
@Banno; @Pattern-chaser
I meant, more specifically, a person born completely blind and completely deaf. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that the mind processes images. It conveys all information into its particular brand of imaging. The images may be forms, configurations, structures, descriptions, etc. Words also fall in that category. People who've learnt words in school (they have seen those words in written form) hold different images from those who've learnt the same words only from spoken language.
I think, also, it's why sight is the most depended-on mode of sensation - because it captures images.
Not quite. I don't know the 'medium of thought' that *I* employ, although I can speculate. Trying to analyse some object, using that object as the tool with which the analysis is carried out, seems fraught with problems to me. Deaf-blind or not.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/6
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/26
An obvious rejoinder to the beetle-in-the-box is that we talk about our dreams, whose content is inherently private, since nobody else can experience what we're dreaming. The content of our dreams is epistemically closed off from others unless we talk about them.
If that doesn't count as private, then I don't know what does.
[quote=Oliver Sacks from The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat]Patient is a user of cocaine, and PCP to get high. Vivid dream one night, dreamt he was a dog, in a world unimaginably rich and significant in smell. Waking, he found himself in just such a world. "As if I had been totally colour-blind before, and suddenly found myself in a world full of colour." He did, in fact, have an enhancement of colour vision (" I could distinguish dozens of brown where I'd just seen brown before. my leatherbound books, which looked similar before, now all had quite distinct and distinguishable hues") and a dramatic enhancement of eidetic visual perception and memory (" I could never draw before, I couldn't "see" things in my mind, but now it was like having a camera lucida in my mind - I "saw" everything as if projected on paper, and just drew the uotlines I "saw". Suddenly I could do the most accurate anatomical drawings.") But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world: "I had dreamt I was a dog - it was an olfactory dream - and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world - aworld in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell." And with all this there went a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half-forgotten, half recalled.
"I went into a scent shop", he continued "I had never had much of a nose for smells before, but now I distinguished each one instantly - and I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world." He found he could distinguish all his friends - and patients - by smell: "I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, of any sight face". He could smell their emotions - fear, contentment, sexuality - like a dog. He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell - he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell. [/Quote]
Now I don't know what it's like to experience the world in such a sensory state, but I can understand the story. So again, there's something wrong with saying that we can't talk about the beetle in our own box.