Yes I too have a gripe against utilizing value judgements as the truth as you do. I didn’t get that from your OP however, but we’re on the same side there.
iam - what I am saying is that Magee’s is a piss poor argument. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s typical of the politician. It’s exactly what you argue against. Magee paints language and its ability to describe the world as an all-or-nothing proposition, which it is not.
Utmost? Really? Utmost? The crudest of terms? What terms would be less crude?
Inaccessible?
It’s just little-girl hyperbole. It’s propaganda for…something. It’s horrible philosophy.
The fact is that it’s impossible to be thoroughly Kantian and coherent at the same time. You give Kantians too much credit. Joe may believe he is being logical, but he’s not - not if he’s using Kant as his basis. The simple fact is that you can attack Kant’s logic, and you will always win, if you’re good enough.
Are you using the Magee quote to support your arguments? Your worldview seems to be at base Kantian, from where I’m reading it. There’s something Beyond, some formthingsinthemselves that our language scrabbles inadequately to capture, leaving us flailing about trying to reach the most primitive of understandings with each other, and only managing when we’re at our most cliched and unthinking. The difference between this view and Kant’s being that he thought he’d sorted it all out, whereas the existentialist gives up before even trying to. But it’s all predicated on confusion about what language is, in the first place.
As for the abortion debate, that’s a matter of core values, not a problem with language. Logic is a tool for finding those value differences, not a helpless pawn in the power struggle.
I guess I don’t really understand what this thread is about. That language doesn’t do justice to my experience seems pretty uncontroversial. That some people are better at describing their experience than others also seems pretty uncontroversial. What does Kant have to do with anything?
The proposal of a ‘noumenal’ realm, or something of the sort. In other words, language is only able to capture so much, and, in turn, our descriptions will not be of things in their totality [but, rather, how we perceive them]. Kant said noumena are inherently unknowable for that reason – language can’t capture what we can never obtain or understand. So, descriptions can only get so good before they hit a wall.
On the other hand, we’ve got folks who say the descriptions do capture things as they truly are, but are limited by understanding. The more we understand, the more we might perceive and eventually ‘know’. There is no inherent wall, so to speak. The limits to our understanding come from our methods and not the object itself.
But is Iambiguous talking about a noumenal realm? I thought he was talking about experience.
Not by name, but something of the sort, as O_H pointed out.
It’s just another way of saying it is impossible for us to capture what is truly being experienced. We falsify experiences through language, in a sense. Thus, we never capture the experience in language [experience is “inaccessible” to language]. We just make arbitrary designations for the pieces/parts that we happen to notice.
I agree that experience can’t be captured in words. But it’s not all or nothing. Some people are great with words. But some people live in their heads - they think the sky is blue and shadows are black.
I still don’t understand what this is about.
My take on it is that it’s about whether it’s all or nothing. Which you’ve answered.
Language captures the aspects of experience that we’ve agreed we can share. It’s not a profound source of information tapping into the fabric of reality and nature itself, or machine code for the brain; that train of thought seems to be predominantly reserved for small children, magical thinkers and philosophy professors. Most of whom end up disillusioned at some point.
To go to the first paragraph of the OP: “the towel is on the bathroom floor” is a perfectly accessible way of describing things. A two-year-old can access that. If his point is merely that the strongest version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is lacking, that’s fairly uncontested these days - that’s the all-or-nothing argument the other way.
But “no words to describe the shape it has fallen into, no words to describe the degrees of shading in its coliurs, no words to describe the differentials of shadow in its folds…” is clearly, patently, completely false. I’m not wondrously gifted at languages, but I could describe degrees of colour shading in at least four languages; anyone with a basic vocabulary can. “Who can describe an orgasm?” Mr Magee needs to start Googling the seedier side of internet fan fiction. 
It’s a false dichotomy - either everything we experience is defined by language, or nothing can be. Language is (among other things) the way we share our experiences. It already rests on the assumption that the experiences themselves, and the contexts in which we experience and describe them, are common. It defines a few basic points of contact, adds a lot of refining detail, and we go from there.
Ok, I’m with you except for your second to last paragraph. The towel on the bathroom floor is a good example to use actually. Of course there are words to describe various aspects of how the towel looks - there are words we can use for all the particulars of how it folds over itself and heaps up and the variety of colors, of light and shadow, that together make up this object. And there are poetic descriptions that might do some justice to the overall experience of seeing a towel on the bathroom floor. The poetic description likely conveys too much even, if the point is to see the towel in its mundaneness - the way an ordinary person sees it, without investing it with any significance. But good luck describing the towel in such a way that I can actually picture exactly how a particular towel sits on the floor. That’s what pictures are for. Practically speaking, words are insufficient to certain tasks.
A towel on the floor, an orgasm… I don’t believe you can describe these things, in words, to someone who has never experienced them. Words are memory triggers. Or we can construct simulacra using memories as ingredients, as dreams are constructed. I think many people take the power of words so much for granted that they fail to really attend to direct experience. Isn’t that the power of some poets? That they cut through conceptual mind by presenting familiar things in fresh and strange ways? Many poets and artists have been guided by the belief that it is better to see things “as a child”. A philosophy like that isn’t about hidden worlds - it’s about seeing this very world, again, but as if for the first time.
Apologies to Iambiguous, but I don’t know anything about his philosophical views. And I’ve never heard of Magee before. Maybe people who know them better know something I don’t know. But I don’t see how Kant or noumenal realms or Beyond has anything to do with the difference between words and direct experience. Except that it is beyond the ability of words to replicate direct experience.
People can describe things with more or less success, depending on their skills. But there is a real difference between direct experience and description of experience. There’s an ILP member who presented an idea on time travel, here. He says if you can create the illusion of time travel, then you have traveled in time. I think that’s bonkers. People can create that illusion with more or less success, depending on their skills, but there is a real difference between the illusion of time travel and actual time travel.
Words are also conceptual references. Sometimes it is a matter of how well someone can relate to what you’re saying. The description may not evoke an exact representation, but what description does? The audience can take pieces/parts of their own experiences and formulate them into some new concept, which is a representation that will be refined as more information is gathered.
There are things people don’t utilize when even looking at certain objects that are differentiated, remembered, or even recognized about objects. Seeing an object isn’t seeing the object in all its glory so to speak, as well.
I’m using Magee only to point out the obvious: that in many respects—some mundane, some momentous—language is of limited use and value in expressing or encompassing our experiences to others.
Not only that but for those who embrace one or another objectivist/essentialist point of view about human interaction, words can become quite dangerous when others are expected to take literally what we describe with them.
How does one discuss “core values” that come into conflict without the extensive use of language? And, in particular, regarding those who insist the words they use are the words others must in turn use if they are to be deemed rational.
My point is that such descriptions are largely embedded in dasein and that dasein is largely embedded in ever evolving [and thus changing] historical, cultural and experiential contexts. That is what language conveys here, not the logic needed to determine what can be known about the relationship between abortion and…justice?
Right, language is not experience. I could find a mathematical manifold that described the towel shape perfectly, and yet the description is not the thing. But it is the description. Saying all descriptions are inadequate as descriptions because they’re not the thing they’re describing is misleading, they’re adequate (or not) as descriptions. A map can be adequate as a map, but it can´t tell you the view perfectly, and there are never any trees growing on it. All descriptions need references, so you can’t describe sight to a blind man. As I say, it’s not all or nothing, either way.
Regarding the second point - Just as language isn’t experience, memory isn’t experience either. Can you remember perfectly how a towel on the floor looks, or an orgasm feels? This is where experience gets shaped by the concepts you work with, of which language is an important part. Experience and language can both evoke memories.
Could you explain what you mean by this?
You explain to them why you disagree with their choice of words. You’re on to political and not philosophical problems. Philosophy can’t force anyone to listen to you; it’s also no help if they attack you, or if you have to change a flat tyre on a rainy night.
If you agree on values, you can use logic to argue for the working-out of those values to practice. If you disagree on values, you generally have to use other methods to find compromise, tolerance or domination. They’re overwhelmingly methods with language, though. I still don’t see any fundamental problem with language.
Could you explain how you think logic could tell us about the relationship between abortion and justice?
I’m convinced we’re all discussing different things here. 
At least we’re staying on topic by doing so 
True! 
What if we do understand everything perfectly, but the process of linguistification [for want of a better term] or making meanings into words and other informations, is itself flawed. …and it is flawed because things cannot be truly represented by language.
What is it you don’t understand about these simple words ~ that you may attribute different meaning, yet you may not, you could understand them perfectly. Same goes for the outside world, you wouldn’t say a computer with a camera cannot ‘see’ the world, you may at most say it has limited resolution, but one day computers wont have. The brain is a vary good computer, at most we may be limited by its instrumentation, but once you have the idea of a box you know it’s a box.
We are talking resolvable limits.
Language of course is an essential component in philosopical discussions. It does not, however, mean it can encomapass as true anything it wishes to. Any more than it can resolve every conflicting understanding of what is alleged to be moral.
Suppose, for example, a Marxist and an Objectivist are discussing the nature of human freedom and moral justice. They all use exactly the same words. Yet they understand the meaning of those words in very different ways.
Or I can say, “the monkey wasn’t hanging from the pig’s entrails until the President shot the purple moose on the holiest Wednesday of the Venusian lunar calendar”. Now, you can go to any dictionary and look those words up. They all exist, right? But, put in that particular sequence they are gibberish.
Or someone can say, “aborting a human fetus is immoral”. You can look all those words up too. It’s not gibberish. But: is it logical? is it an epistemologically sound argument?
iam - the problem you are having here is that you are making a series of mistakes that, taken by themselves, are minor, but that have the cumulative effect of leading you very far astray. While you have made several in your latest post, I will point out only one: “Aborting a human fetus is immoral” is not an argument of any kind. It is not a logical argument because it’s not an argument. It’s not an illogical argument, either. It’s not an argument.