back to the beginning: the limitations of language

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James Malcolm, West Molesey, Surrey

Now you’re talking: That distinction.

I come across it all the time here. I’m challenged to define a particular word. That way – technically – we can all be on the same page. The part where subjective nuances come in however is the part where we actually use the words in our interactions with others from day to day.

But even here I am clear about another distinction: defining words used in the either/or world and words used in the is/ought world. Words used to describe objective facts and words used to encompass personal opinions.

The part the objectivist among us fuse into “my way or the highway”.

Of course there are the musical instruments that Neil Young used here: youtu.be/m5FCcDEA6mY

And the instruments used by Lynyrd Skynyrd here: youtu.be/ye5BuYf8q4o

The same instruments by and large. And the language spoken is the same: English.

But then the part where those on both sides insist the other side is out of tune in regard to any number of things. What about the limitations of language then?

Or, philosophically…

On the other hand, there’s still the distinction here that I keep coming back to. The part where language works because it can work and the part where it may not ever be able to work.

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Jim Farrer, Kirriemuir, Scotland

And we’ve been squabbling over where to draw the line ever since. In fact, one suspects, ever since the first philosopher centuries ago insisted that others are obligated to draw it in the same place that he does. And that’s before the subjunctive “I” starts in on collecting, assessing and then ranking all of the hopelessly conflicting religious, ideological and deontological assumptions.

Here too however the rest is history. In other words, what on earth does language of this sort convey to me that it does not convey to you or to others? I keep coming back to “we’ll need a context, of course”, but, okay, you tell be a better alternative. The tools are there for all of us: language, perceptions, concepts. So why throughout history have we only been able to embrace reason as it pertains to the either/or world. Why not the other one?

Instead…

Everything you need to know about lanaguage…except its profound limitations when it comes to what, in my view, is the most important philosophical question of them all: How ought one to live?

What about “these units then become meaning generators at a higher scale of organization, that is, on a cultural level” in the world of conflicting goods?

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Maurice John Fryatt, Scarborough, Ontario

Speech acts. How to pin down the definition and the meaning of that “technically”.

Right?

And then to take this out into the world of human interactions that revolve around the question, “how ought one to live?”

For me, I’ll accept whatever others think a “speech act” is epistemologically as long as they are willing to take that out into the is/ought world and discuss it given the main components of my own speech acts: identity, value judgments and political economy.

One thing seems certain: in the act of speaking the words that come out of our mouths go into the ears of others [who are not deaf] and then any number of actual behaviors producing any number of actual consequences are possible. The human condition as it were.

But sure the technical stuff:

Yes, and there is not likely to be much disagreement among us about it. There are rules that have been established over hundreds [sometimes thousands] of years within communities that share the same language. But if instead of foxes chasing dogs or dogs chasing foxes we have people shooting foxes or eating dogs – South Koreans eat over 2 million dogs a year – it’s not the syntax that is likely to mar our communication.

Actually, the finality revolves more around establishing satisfaction between those who utter words and those who hear them. But that’s where my own frame of mind here comes into play.

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Ray Pearce, Didsbury, Manchester

Again, these are elements of language communication that are basically technical components of any language…whether spoken, encompassed in signs or in facial expressions. And ultimately what counts is 1] how successful we are using these elements in order to communicate to others what we think we mean and 2] the extent to which what is being communicated is able to be demonstrated as in fact in accordance with as close as we can come to understanding an objective reality.

Then the shift to language that is conveyed in more problematic contexts. In the world of art for example.

On the other hand…

With music, back again to Emil Cioran:

“If everything is a lie, is illusory, then music itself is a lie, but the superb lie…As long as you listen to it, you have the feeling that it is the whole universe, that everything ceases to exist, there is only music. But then when you stop listening, you fall back into time and wonder, ‘well, what is it? What state was I in?’ You had felt it was everything, and then it all disappeared.”

In fact, given my own experience in listening to music, what is being communicated “as long as I am listening to it” is this sense of reality that seems “in the moment” to be beyond doubting. What I am listening to simply conveys what I know to be true. But only in the moment. Why? Because as soon as I do stop listening to it the ambiguities and uncertainties and confusions I confront when dealing with verbal communication comes surging back. I am, once again, fractured and fragmented.

Still, just because we can’t speak of some things in a fully coherent manner, if we choose to interact with others out in a particular world, what is the alternative but, to the best of our ability, try?

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How Does Language Work?
Philosophy Now Magazine
Adrian Fitzgerald, Adelaide

Again the brain doing its thing to sustain the part where biological imperatives more or less rule the roost. Which is why the language skills of most animals revolve almost entirely around instincts and drives and libidos. The primordial brain that nature had millions of years in which to introduce mutations through. And imagine the mutations it took to produce an animal species like us. For human beings, language communications is of an order that goes off the chart with respect to all the rest of nature.

But that’s all the more reason to explore it as far as we might be able to go. Well, once we take that leap of faith to autonomous communication.

I merely focus in here on what we may well be unable to communicate fully or objectively…however sophisticated our language skills might be.

I’m sorry but there is really no comparison between the use of language in human communication and the vocal sounds that lions and leopards and lobsters are able to manage. Other than in a wholly determined world. With us come at times ferocious conflicts over the sounds that come out of our mouths. We are even able to invent Gods said to be the final arbiters when it comes around to judging the most worthy sounds.

See how far tbis can be stretched? Now, pick up that rock and bash someone along aside the head with it. Until he’s dead. Why? Well, using language, you can try to explain it to a judge and a jury.

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

Here, my own conjectures revolve more around the extent to which we grapple with the limitations of language.

Think of it as the recently departed Donald Rumsfeld might have:

There are known knowns about language. These are things we know that we know about it. There are known unknowns about language. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know about it. But there are also unknown unknowns about language. There are things we don’t know we don’t know about it.

Now all we need is a context.

The rest, as they, being history: sophoslogos.wordpress.com/2014/ … tgenstein/

On the other hand, however complex the relationship might be between thought, language and reality, look around you at a world bursting with technologies, structures and human interactions in which the words used to describe them or to explain them are basically now just taken for granted. The either/or world is awash with phenomena in which language can be used by all of us to communicate accurate information. You can come from any nation, adhere to any religious or political belief, be of any race, gender or sexual persuasion and the words encompass the same thing. We go about our day to day lives exchanging words with each other that almost never cause confusion or misunderstanding.

The same with philosophers who embrace all of the different schools of thought. The either/or world and the language used to convey it, is as much intelligible to them as to all the rest of us. Not much in the way of intractable communication here. Unless, of course, it involves understanding really complex information that only experts in any particular field grasp.

Instead, we know where the “failures to communicate” are most likely to be found. Which takes us closer to the conclusions reached by the “later Wittgenstein”

Well, let them squabble over the “technical” components of his laconic style. What interests me are the didactic conclusions they reach that can then be anchored more to that which interest me about human interactions: rewards and punishments meted out for behaviors deemed to be right or wrong.

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

Okay, given the assumption that we all experience a reality that we think about and communicate to others through language, my own first reaction in regard to logic – “a unified, solid core supporting the whole structure” – is this: are there limitations imposed on it when describing interactions that precipitate behaviors that come into conflict?

After all, any newscast will introduce us to hundreds, thousands, millions who are seemingly capable of being logical and yet can’t seem to get along in any number of given contexts. For example, to get or not to get vaccinated for the covid-19 virus.

When noting things like…

“Logic is therefore essential to what we think and say, as well as to the reality we think and talk about. However, the logical structure is neither imposed nor regulated by what we think or say.”

…what on earth are we to make of that given these endless conflicts?

Back again to the limitations of logic. For engineers and mathematicians, logic and knowledge is in sync with what either is or is not in fact true given the laws of nature in the physical world around us. Which explains why there are not often heated confrontations on, say, physics forums. At least until the discussion shifts to what either is or is not true “in reality” out at the very end of the more speculative limbs in regard to “The Big Questions”. Lots and lots of things that those like Wittgenstein and Russell can agree on as is entirely rational.

Thus…

Logic and language and limits. Okay, what are they?

Now all we need is a context.

Note to Faust:

Pick one.

First of all, the first paragraph is simply wrong, on just about every level. 1) We do in fact have words to describe nearly any shape a towel or anything else could fall into, (in higher mathematics, we have 10,000 words to describe even higher-dimensional objects and the infinite topological manipulations of objects in higher dimensions) it’s just that it would be both laborious and unprofitable to describe such a thing in such detail. That’s why most people don’t have such words in their vocabulary- they have no use for them. There wasn’t any blue shit in ancient Greece so they didn’t bother linguistically specifying shades of blue. 2) Second of all: you don’t even possess all of that rich multiplicity in your immediate direct experience anyway, which Magee claims we do. You just think you possess it, when in reality, this ‘multiplicity’ is just a bunch of representational gaps. Your experience of a totality in this multiplicity is just a mental illusion. Close your eyes and imagine a flock of birds, then open them. How many birds were in that flock? You know it couldn’t be like 10,000, but it also can’t be fewer than 5 or 6. You know it wasn’t just one or two birds. But there is not actually any number of birds in the flock. (Borges’ Argumentum Ornithologia.) You just imagined a flock of birds without any specific number of birds. How’s that possible? Did you access the Platonic form of a flock of birds that exists without any phenomenal or specific number? No. It’s possible because your impression of there being a totality or ‘completeness’ to your immediate experience is just a mental illusion supported by empty placeholders that don’t actually correspond to anything real. That same thought experiment with the birds and the flock applies to your continuous daily, waking experience of the world: most of it is just an illusory sense of totality, of there not being any ‘gaps’ in your immediate experience. (When you walk in a room and glance at a pile of dishes, this is supported by the same mental illusion as the flock of birds.) But there are such gaps. Most of it is just gaps, and language exists to close and to fill those gaps in our immediate experience.

As to the later bit of text, are you suggesting that our immediate emotional and physical affective state trumps rationality in delimiting ethical boundaries? Because if you are, it seems a bit self-defeating. You’re using language and reason to argue that language and reason are not sufficient in such a delimitation of the ethical. And by criminalizing late term abortion, nobody is ‘forcing’ a woman to give birth anymore than we all forced her to have sex in the first place and become impregnated.

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

For the life of me, I can’t think of a more appropriate reaction to this then, “we’ll need a context of course”. Think something. Express it here at ILP. Then ask us, “does this make sense?”.

Now, sometimes, admittedly, making sense of something can only revolve around the extent to which you have a grasp of what is being expressed. For example, read the OP from this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 4&t=197244

Does what he thought up and expressed here make sense to you? Is his thinking clear? Is it expressed clearly?

You tell me.

Without a background or education in QM and Many Worlds thinking…or a sophisticated understanding of mathematics and the laws of nature involved in thinking his conclusions through…it may as well be gibberish to some.

So, given any other context, what exactly is Wittgenstein proposing in Tractatus in regard to putting things clearly in the words you use to describe and to encompass what you thought up? Who gets to say when something is nonsense when the discussion shifts from the either/or to the is/ought world?

My own touchstone then being the limitations of “logical analysis” in regard to many aspects of what is said to constitute the “human condition”.

Revolving one would then imagine around this: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

On the other hand, in regard to those many aspects of the human condition in which logical analysis comes up short, we can no more stop speaking something thereof than we can interact without rules of behaviors. But what role does logic then play in devising them?

Or: Is it logical that one might be “fractured and fragmented” in regard to his or her moral and political value judgments? Is there a way using the rules of language to construct the most rational or epistemologically sound assessment of such rules.

Okay, choose a context and let’s have a go at it.

Okay, laborious or not, take a towel from your bathroom and drop it on the floor. More in a heap than flat as a pancake. Describe the shape that results. Ask others to describe it as well. See how close you can come to the shape of the towel. At least make the attempt. Otherwise we’ll just have to take your word for it.

As for this numbingly ponderlous intellectual contraption…

…it can’t possibly be further removed from my own interest in the limitations of language. Back to Mary and Joe and the abortion. The actual abortion itself as a medical procedure can be encompassed in very precise language. Nothing at all like the towel heaped on the floor. The doctors go from step to step explaining specifically what must be done in order to accomplish the procedure successfully. And safely. At least for the pregnant woman.

Which is what you are attempting to do with respect to the morality of abortion. You insist that , “nobody is ‘forcing’ a woman to give birth anymore than we all forced her to have sex in the first place and become impregnated” as though the woman either chooses to give birth at any juncture from the point of conception or, what, be arrested for premeditated murder, tried and then, if convicted, sent to prison? Or, in some states here in America, to death row?

And what if she had not chosen to have sex but was, in fact, forced to. Or was raped. And what if giving birth could result in grave physical harm to herself?

There are countless individual contexts in which hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variables can be different.

But, what, you’d take it upon yourself to encompass each situation with the precise language needed to describe it? And with the optimal or the only rational ethical prescription the woman is obligated to share?

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

Okay, picture something. Picture whatever facts you can imagine about it. Describe it abstractly. Then if challenged connect the dots between your words and the world that whatever you are picturing contains it. How close do you get to a “structure of the world itself” such that almost no one will challenge you?

Isn’t that basically the bottom line when connecting/communicating the dots between words and worlds? And isn’t that more or less where I draw the line between descriptions in the either/or world and prescriptions/proscriptions in the is ought world.

Now all we need is a context. What can our words describe such that no rational human being is likely to challenge us? And what will our prescriptive and proscriptive words very likely precipitate but all manner of challenges?

The “evaluation” part:

Only it’s one thing for a doctor to picture an abortion as a medical procedure and another thing altogether for that same doctor to picture the exact moment from conception to birth when the unborn becomes an actual human being. Let alone the aggregation of words that pictures for us whether the abortion was either moral or immoral.

As for this, however…

“Wittgenstein doesn’t mean images in your mind, but rather a way of (metaphorically) seeing the world through language.”

…how on earth would our words [pictured or otherwise] go about seeing an abortion through language alone?

Instead, the language is always derived from the brain/mind of a particular individual out in a particular world reacting to this abortion in a particular manner. The part I root in dasein and others root in entirely different things.

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

Things. Objective things interacting with other objective things. So, sure, if you picture them in your mind and attempt to connect the dots between thoughts [propositions], language, and the structure of reality, it can certainly be as close to a mirror image as we are likely to get given “the gap”. In fact you can take a camera and literally snap a picture of what you are trying to convey in a world of words. They don’t remind us that “a picture is worth a thousand words” for nothing.

Instead, my own interest in language revolves more around interacting moral and political prejudices that do not lend themselves to snapshots at all. The pictures exchanged can at times barely resemble each other. Introducing us to the limitations of language in any number of contexts.

This has never seemed reasonable to me. On the other hand, what are the odds that I understand fully what he meant by it? Language may or may not mirror the structure of reality. And, in part, that is because, given any description of any particular context, it may or may not be able to. Even in the either/or world just because your language isn’t an exact reflection of the world around you doesn’t doesn’t make the reality of the world around you go away. It’s always the part where the limitations of your language mirrors one reality while the limitations of another’s language mirrors a very different reality where we might get closer to this: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Yes, but only regarding those aspects of human interaction where the rules of language can be shown to be applicable to all of us. Language, thought and reality in a more or less perfect alignment…but only because they can be.

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

Yes, if you are a natural scientist. And if, instead, you are a social scientist? Or a political scientist? Or a psychologist? Or an ethicist?

Here of course what makes things particularly [and sometimes profoundly] problematic is that in regard to social interactions, political interactions, human psychology, moral contexts etc., there are actual facts that can be established as applicable to all rational people. Instead, it’s in how we interpret the interaction of these facts given conflicting value judgments regarding how some insist they ought to be interpreted that brings on the especially murky or incongruous or contentious pictures of reality.

Then what, Mr. Epistemologist?

But you can guess the proposition that will be explored here:

Right, as long as the proposition revolves around a cat, a chair, and whether or not it can be determined at any particular point in time that this cat is on this chair.

But what if it’s a proposition from one of these countries: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat

A proposition that revolves around killing cats, cooking them and eating them? You take the cat from the chair and butcher it for dinner. How about all of the conflicting reactions to that “picture of reality?”

_
“Wittgenstein’s later works, notably the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, criticised many of his earlier ideas in the Tractatus.”

I think that fact ^^^ makes the publication worthy of a read… and also the fact that it’s only 75 pages long.

The home of true philosophy Biggums style. :evilfun:

:banana-angel: :banana-blonde: :banana-dreads: :banana-explosion: :banana-fingers: :banana-gotpics: :banana-gotpics: :banana-guitar: :banana-jumprope: :banana-linedance: :banana-ninja: :banana-parachute: :banana-rainbow: :banana-rock: :banana-skier: :banana-stoner: :banana-tux: :banana-wrench:

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

Starting with, perhaps, “Regularity Theory” or “Value Ontology” or “RM/AO”?

The rigors of “definitional logic” producing one or another “world of words”. Worlds that have almost no relevance whatsoever to the lives that we actually live from day to day.

Indeed, whatever any particular language includes and excludes can make all the difference in the world when it comes to actually communicating what we think we know about ourselves in the world around us. It’s just that this communication can get considerably more problematic when we switch over from the either/or world to the is/ought world.

Note a context yourself and we can explore it.

What then is there to do but, in regard to a particular context, make distinctions between communication derived from “a universe of logical rules that define true and false propositions” and communication derived more from language as it is used everyday. Noting where logic is able to make some propositions either true or false while other propositions become increasingly more entangled in the subjective/subjunctive nature of “ordinary language”.

The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.

What is the “mystical” but the at times ineffable gap between what we want to convey through language and the limitations of language in conveying any number of things we encounter from day to day…just in going about the task of living our lives.

In particular when confronting the subjunctive frame of mind. We feel or intuit any number of things that we never seem able to pin down with the sort of precision that language almost never fails us in regard to the interactions between actual things in the either/or world. Communicate to another the day you spent with your son or daughter. The things you did together. You went to the zoo and had a picnic in the park. Words and worlds pretty much in sync. Others understand completely what you are telling them. Then your child conveys to you that he or she is gay. Try here to pin down your reaction [good or bad] such that all others will understand it and completely agree with you.

Where is the precision needed to resolve conflicting moral narratives?

Where is the precision needed to close the gap in our reaction to things like this:

Indeed, what makes them very difficult issues is that we seem to lack the language that can make the complexities go away. It gets all tangled up instead in the existential elements that flow around the ofttimes convoluted relationship between genes and memes, nature and nurture, historical and cultural contexts.

I have my own existential preoccupations of course. Chief among them exploring the gap between the fractured and fragmented “I” in the is/ought world and the limitations of logic in examining the structure of reality.

This part:

Sound familiar, Mr. Objectivist?

The Tractatus
“The world is all that is the case”
José Zalabardo investigates which problem Wittgenstein is trying to solve.

Come on, we all know that’s not true. It’s just that we all know this in such a way that using the tools of philosophy there does not seem to be a way to pin down whether in fact it is all actually true. Of the is/ought world in particular, but even of the either/or world if we go far enough out on the metaphysical limb.

Nope, sans an omniscient God, we are all on our own in commanding the language to “get” others to understand what we say here. Let alone agree with us.

I just aim that at what I construe to be the most important philosophical question of them all: “How ought one to live?”

Now all we need is a context, right? There are clearly philosophical assessments relating to logic and epistemology which are not likely to be dissolved anytime soon. Right answers and solutions that no matter how hard you engage in the enterprise above won’t even put a dent in them insofar as, say, human communication is concern. John either is or is not a bachelor no matter which ladder is kicked out from under you.

Unless of course I am not “getting” the point here. Maybe it’s all entangled in how those who embrace the analytical school of philosophy go about thinking these things through differently from those who embrace the continental school.

Thus the need for a context.

The Tractatus
“The world is all that is the case”
José Zalabardo investigates which problem Wittgenstein is trying to solve.

And, as with Kant’s theoretical conjectures revolving around the categorical imperative, Plato’s theoretical conjectures regarding “the forms” are entirely dependent on the existence of one or another rendition of the transcending God.

For instance…

Theoretically in other words. An “ontology” that is basically Plato thinking it up in his head and then in regard to actual squabbles over which particular chair, table, cathedral, painting, person, etc., is more beautiful or the most beautiful who else but God is there to give us the “final answer”?

At best it can be argued that biologically, genetically we are hard wired to see certain forms or features as more pleasing to us than others.

But philosophical Forms with a capital F? Or Ethics with a capital E?

In any event, expect it to all unfold up in the clouds:

Unless, you count tables.

Or, unless you double think.

and for dome that is a categorical necessity of survival.