I am at this moment reading Richard Rorty… of course his
‘‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’’
and I have come across an interesting phenomenon,
what I have called the “Tyranny of the Word”"
and all this means is that Rorty uses word in his descriptions
of both nature and philosophy… words that aren’t used or around
our common language… one of the words he uses is ‘‘incorrigibility.’’
and another word is ‘‘incommunicable’’ another word, well two words
are… ‘‘Pyrrhonian skeptics’’… I had to look them all up…
and here is where my point lies… that one cannot understand
Rorty or any other philosopher unless they learn the language…
the very technical language of Philosophy…
Try reading Kant… he has a very specific language that he uses to
describe thoughts or beliefs…
and why does one go to school, to learn philosophy or to learn
the specific language philosophers use and then be able
to ‘‘read’’ philosophy…
Philosophers have their own language, which is used to keep out
the ‘‘riffraff’’ and in doing so, prevents us or frankly anyone to understand
what the philosophers are attempting to say… it is exclusive language
to teach an exclusive topic…and by its use, the philosophers have
denied those who don’t speak its technical language, any access to
philosophy…now if this is accidental or on purpose, I can’t say,
but I will say this… until philosophy begins to speak in the language
of people, it will remain esoteric…for some, they will have to look
this word up to make any sense of my sentence… that is the ‘‘tyranny of
the word’’ … the words we use allow or limit who can read us…
and for philosophy, it must use words that create greater involvement
into philosophy, by using words that don’t need to be looked up
to be understood…
Ordinary language philosophy( OLP) sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in the misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting how words are ordinarily used. OLP was a big deal in 20th century analytic philosophy. They attempted to explain away Heidegger’s ontology, for instance. But sometimes a new word or using an old word in a new way is justified. Language is not closed system.
Is this specific to philosophy? To learn math or biology or literature or politics includes learning a vocabulary specific to those domains. Each vocabulary includes both new words used only in their respective domain, and familiar words with a specialized meaning in the context of that domain.
These specialized vocabularies develop because experts in a field need ways to talk precisely. They mean to refer to more dimensions and distinctions within the ideas they’re discussing. Importantly, the terms point to concepts that the lay reader doesn’t possess.
As such, the issue isn’t about the special words, it’s that the special words don’t have referents in the minds of non-specialists. Replacing those words would mean inserting a chain of reasoning that demonstrates the distinction, and then pointing to the distinction and saying, “Let’s call this [specialized term we spend all this time trying to avoid to avoid]”.
I agree there are cases of neologizing run amok, but I think in general it’s wrong to think that the primary justification is to exclude the riffraff.
Existence is only a perfection if you’re talking about the good idea that must exist (in action) in order to be true. The idea that existence is a great making quality over nonexistence never made any sense to me. But it does make sense to me that in order for something to be considered true (not to mention great) there must be an example or demonstration of it.
…and you can really only understand that within the context of the Harmonic Triads (be/ontology, do/existence, end/teleology).
only way i’ll ever vibe w an ontological argument.