The Being of Meaning
"We never know [exactly] what we are talking about." As I make out the situation, this is to be inferred from any structuralist semantics. The traditional and still dominant (?) view is well presented here:
[quote = Aristotle]
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. This matter has, however, been discussed in my treatise about the soul, for it belongs to an investigation distinct from that which lies before us.
[/quote]
To me there's some irony in the ambiguity of 'mental experiences' which are presumably private and yet certainly (?) 'the same for all.' Note that the speech sounds directly symbolize the mental experiences. What can this phrase mean ? At the very least, I think we can infer a one-to-one mapping.
It seems to me that this prejudice or assumption is a contender at least for the greatest cause of philosophical confusion of all time.
Here's a taste of the opposite approach:
[quote=Wittgenstein]
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)
The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a thing corresponding to a substantive.)
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.
As a part of the system of language, one may say the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm
If one ends up convinced that signs get their meaning from their relationships with other signs, then one ends up suspicious about terms like 'consciousness' and 'being' and 'qualia.' It's not a simple matter of denial. It's rather a sense that people don't know what they are talking about, and (often enough) they don't know that they don't know what they are talking about. A certain kind of philosophy is that within us that resists bothood.
[quote=Heidegger]
Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer.
[/quote]
[quote=Hegel]
What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that it is familiar. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
[/quote]
Socrates and a certain kind of philosophy can be understood as making darkness visible, destabilizing our complacent parroting of educated common sense. (Perhaps Jesus helps us question the Resentment Industrial Complex.)
Personally I'd like to know if anyone else has been struck with a strong sense of just how foggy sense tends to be. What does this kind of thinking mean for the question of the meaning of being ? It seems that every 'master word' is threatened by the structuralist insight.
[quote = Aristotle]
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. This matter has, however, been discussed in my treatise about the soul, for it belongs to an investigation distinct from that which lies before us.
[/quote]
To me there's some irony in the ambiguity of 'mental experiences' which are presumably private and yet certainly (?) 'the same for all.' Note that the speech sounds directly symbolize the mental experiences. What can this phrase mean ? At the very least, I think we can infer a one-to-one mapping.
It seems to me that this prejudice or assumption is a contender at least for the greatest cause of philosophical confusion of all time.
Here's a taste of the opposite approach:
[quote=Wittgenstein]
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)
The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a thing corresponding to a substantive.)
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.
As a part of the system of language, one may say the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_Book
[quote= Saussure]
...in the language (that is, a language state) there are only differences. Difference implies to our mind two positive terms between which the difference is established. But the paradox is that: In the language, there are only differences, without positive terms. That is the paradoxical truth. At least, there are only differences if you are speaking either of meanings, or of signified or signifying elements.
When you come to the terms themselves, resulting from relations between signifying and signified elements you can speak of oppositions.
Strictly speaking there are no signs but differences between signs.
...
You can never find the meaning of a word by considering only the exchangeable item, but you have to compare the similar series of comparable words. You cannot take words in isolation.
The value of a word can never be determined except by the contribution of coexisting terms which delimit it: or, to insist on the paradox already mentioned: what is in the word is only ever determined by the contribution of what exists around it. ... Around it syntagmatically or around it associatively.
You must approach the word from outside by starting from the system and coexisting terms.
...
There are no positive ideas given, and there are no determinate acoustic signs that are independent of ideas. Thanks to the fact that the differences are mutually dependent, we shall get something looking like positive terms through the matching of a certain difference of ideas with a certain difference in signs. We shall then be able to speak of the opposition of terms and so not claim that there are only differences (because of this positive element in the combination).
In the end, the principle it comes down to is the fundamental principle of the arbitrariness of the sign.
It is only through the differences between signs that it will be possible to give them a function, a value.
If the sign were not arbitrary, one would not be able to say that in the language there are only differences.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm
If one ends up convinced that signs get their meaning from their relationships with other signs, then one ends up suspicious about terms like 'consciousness' and 'being' and 'qualia.' It's not a simple matter of denial. It's rather a sense that people don't know what they are talking about, and (often enough) they don't know that they don't know what they are talking about. A certain kind of philosophy is that within us that resists bothood.
[quote=Heidegger]
Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer.
[/quote]
[quote=Hegel]
What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that it is familiar. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
[/quote]
Socrates and a certain kind of philosophy can be understood as making darkness visible, destabilizing our complacent parroting of educated common sense. (Perhaps Jesus helps us question the Resentment Industrial Complex.)
Personally I'd like to know if anyone else has been struck with a strong sense of just how foggy sense tends to be. What does this kind of thinking mean for the question of the meaning of being ? It seems that every 'master word' is threatened by the structuralist insight.
Comments (100)
One different kind of parallel does come to mind. Equivalence classes of expressions that have approximately the same function might serve to explain translation. "Find Y in language B that serves (basically, close enough) the same purpose as X in language A." Even in the same language, one can be asked to "translate" a philosophical thought, for instance. So "what do you mean?" is like "can you say that (the 'same' thing) in a different way?"
[quote ]
The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself.
[/quote]
I take these to be 'godgiven' concepts, glowing identically from a single eternity for a inner eye that makes the human truly human. Softer versions of this might acknowledge that it takes time for the soul to remember its inheritance, with the help of a semantic midwife perhaps.
Is the voice truly so central here ? Or is it the interactive physical presence of the teacher ? How about an adept and a novice who only use sign language ? Compared to an autodidact who only uses sound recordings ? The temptation is to create a triangle of speech, writing, idea. Both speech and writing are thought of as clothing or husk. To be fair, there is still something seemingly immaterial even in equivalence classes. Or is there?
To me this gets us back to the difficulty of talking about being and ideality and consciousness by means of a structural organ. Maybe we dodge this embarrassing situation by taking on faith or as an axiom what's being dragged into the light here. "Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all..." The sign is understood to be like a coin, with a conventional public face, conventionally established, and a profoundly private and yet necessarily shared internal face. "As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God."
Present.
:)
All I know is that they mean with guesses at what they mean -- I certainly don't know how they mean, and at times doubt that they mean but immediately recant as the expression makes sense in the moment of the saying.
Could you say more ? I've always had trouble (ain't it ironic?) feeling understood on this issue. It'd be great to wring out some solidarity.
It has a self-referential quality -- what we say is an example of the phenomenon being explored, and so in the act we can make new examples that break old rules, even the rules that we may supply ourselves.
Presuming rules even matter in the matter of meaning, which seems doubtful but it's a place to begin.
And this is true even if we don't find counter-examples in a given discussion -- given that language has an infinite number of possible iterations, one might even predict that every theory of meaning has a counter-example, and the successful theories of meaning are theories for which we haven't found the counter-examples yet ;).
And in the midst of deliberation, we could claim that a given sentence is "meaningless", so it doesn't count against a theory of meaning. (it's easy to find ways to "save" a pet theory of meaning)
Then there's the possibility of undermining ourselves in the same manner that we might be suspicious of:
Quoting green flag
If it's possible for others to not know that they do not know, how can I know that I do know? Especially when meaning seemed so simple and easy this whole time, almost as if it were given, and now it seems impossible to determine?
Which says a lot about my doubts and difficulties. Maybe that'll be enough to the task of feeling like we understand one another :) -- though it certainly didn't help in answering the question of meaning.
:up:
Good point. Philosophy seems to me like exactly that kind of self-referential insanity, the cat trying to catch its tail.
It seems to me that we could clarify the word 'meaning' forever. And we can only send strings of words to do so. And that's how the glorious bots see the world, only as a chains of words. I know that there is a something more than language in human existence, but how the chains of words refer is not so clear...
I don't think we ever know exactly what we mean, which means I don't know exactly what I mean when I say that. But if I keep trading strings of words with you, we might both walk away with a sense that we are in on a blurry but significant realization together. I'd call this a phenomenon. It's beyond the external/internal talk. It's there in the lifeworld to be noticed, foregrounded with the right string of words.
Yes. It's all too easy to cheat and make excuses. Old fashioned virtues like honesty and courage have no small place here. We've got to be willing to suffer wounds .... which is probably made possible because identity is not too invested in this or that theory but rather in the image of the self as courageous and honest and willing to let its pet theories die. So a higher and better narcissism, which is open to all members willing to follow the rules, tames a lesser, lonelier kind.
It's as if philosophers share the same ego ideal of honest courage that tarries with the negative in the name of the positive.
Lakoff and Hofstadter both write that cognition is metaphorical, but the idea is older. In the narrower context of metaphysics, Anatole France had a character make the case.
[quote = Garden of Epicurus by Anatole France]
I was thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language for themselves, are like knife-grinders, who instead of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins to the grindstone to efface the value When they have worked away till nothing is visible in these crown pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: These pieces have nothing either English, German, or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more ; they are of inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely.
[/quote]
The idea is to examine metaphysical terms etymologically and find the original metaphors. Ideas turn out to be images. The soul turns out to be breath. And so on. The referee blows her whistle at this point, because we are on the verge of the etymological fallacy. Or are we ? Once 'image' is used enough in a new way, a new 'concept' is indeed created (perhaps as this new way of using an old word.) So the 'hieroglyphic' for image is now understood to refer to something like a FORM. In the same way, the word 'breath' can lose its association with lungs and air and become consciousness or the subject.
Metaphysical words aren't meaningless, but their status is strange. They float over an abyss, one might say. How is their meaning to be grounded ? If it all ?
The critique of phonocentrism also detaches (elusively pure) "meaning" from the voice. If what is poured in the ear is mostly signs evoking images, we like to drink our hieroglyphs with the mouths on the side of our face.
Is "grounded" the right relationship to seek? And if so, what even is grounding?
I usually just take meaning as basic. Being a competent speaker of a language means knowing meanings, and we seem able to use English. It's us that knows what words mean. In fact, sometimes we're even something like the gods of meaning, creating words ex nihilo -- a strike against the structuralists.
Quoting green flag
Derrida is in the back of my mind. In particular there's a difference between the meaning of the sign, or writing in the small sense, and meaning, or writing in the large sense. Writing can be taken as primary to speech, where speech is phono-centric writing.
At which point -- how do we know what the sign is? Isn't it that which is always-already meaningful?
And if everything is text, writing in the large sense, that too is meaningful. Meaning overflows our signs. Writing is a chasing after, a drawing a trace within a meaningful world using the pen we all have, our body -- in whatever capacity.
Which goes further to highlight how difficult it is to come up with a general notion of the sign. Even those without writing in the small sense manage to communicate meaning in the large sense. What could a sign possibly be, given how widespread meaning is in this set up?
Beautiful question. Because 'ground' is a metaphor. We want our feet on the ground.
But perhaps we could talk of them hanging from the ceiling ?
Quoting Moliere
But we are back to grounds and foundations this way :
'Basic' => 'base '= > "bottom of anything considered as its support, foundation, pedestal"
https://www.etymonline.com/word/BASIC
Is taking meaning as basic a kind of platonism ? Are meanings 'basically' forms ?
I don't dispute our practical skill with the language and the way we glide glide glide.
That sounds right, but how do we define 'meaningful' ? That which signifies ? Is the sign "that ill-named [s]thing[/s], the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy...what is it?" ?
To me something like being-in-the-world-together-with-language is an unbreakable unity. If you try to break it, you end up talking nonsense.
Yes! I agree. Philosophy is that chase. The chase for clarity ? Power ? Beauty ? Novelty ?
We leap from stone to stone, from sign to sign, trying to say it.
Trying to say what saying is ?
Right. And if metaphors are central and mostly visual, then our talk aimed at the ear is nevertheless hieroglyphic and aimed at the inner or spiritual eye. Now I'm an atheist, so this spiritual eye is an organ for geist or culture or symbol interpretation. Given that the etymological fallacy is indeed a fallacy, what is the strange process of metaphors being 'lifted up' or transfigured so that they bear metaphysical import thereafter ? How does breath become spirit ? How does dirt become primordiality or the apriori ? How does image become trans-ocular form ?
Heh. That's the question! I don't believe in forms, and yet I believe words mean. It sounds like platonism of some kind, but I don't think that's really believable either.
I believe language means also, I just don't know exactly what it means to say so. So I'm a semantic finitist rather than a semantic nihilist, right ?
Here's Lakoff:
It is a system of metaphor that structures our everyday conceptual system, including most abstract concepts, and that lies behind much of everyday language. The discovery of this enormous metaphor system has destroyed the traditional literal-figurative distinction, since the term literal, as used in defining the traditional distinction, carries with it all those false assumptions.
***
As Derrida noted, metaphor is itself a metaphor. What the hell does it mean to call something a metaphor ? If metaphysics is metaphorical, then metaphor is playing a metaphysical role in the structure as center or basis. I call this the blurry go round. It's a merry hurrying through the fog.
Sounds good to me :).
For myself, I don't feel coherent enough to have a classification yet. It's just one of those questions which lingers in the back of my mind, one which I don't even know how to formulate clearly, even though here we are talking about meaning.
Quoting green flag
Not sure what "It" means here.
Quoting green flag
I prefer to attempt to put the question of meaning aside from metaphysics, first. I think it makes much more sense to say we don't know metaphysics as we know science (points in favor of the structuralists -- comparison helps clarify meaning). But regardless of all that, surely we must be able to use language?
I think I'm persuaded by the pragmatics of language. Meaning and use are not the same. But I think the method of looking at use clarifies meaning. Something I think about is that even though language on the whole has a possibly infinite number of meanings, any one token of meaning can't have any more than some finite number of meanings. "token" as in token/type.
I don't think he's referring to an aesthetic experience ('what a beautiful sunset!') or a passing thought ('I might go and get icecream'.) I think he's referring to the activities of formal reason. And indeed, there must be commonality there, mustn't there? If I say 'greater than', and you hear 'less than', then communication would be impossible, wouldn't it? There is an entire domain of conventional meanings, one would hope.
A lot of modern philosophy is deflationary with respect to the claims of traditional philosophy. Wittgenstein, I understand, was anti-metaphysical in his approach, and it is just this matter - the reality, or otherwise, of abstract objects - which is fundamental to metaphysics. A great deal of what has gone on in 20th c philosophy has been concerned with overthrowing such tropes.
There's a recent Platonist philosopher I've noticed, Jerrold Katz, one of whose books is called The Metaphysics of Meaning. 'According to Katz, meaning is not simply a matter of convention or social agreement, but is rather grounded in the structure of reality itself. He contends that the meaning of a linguistic expression is not determined solely by its social context or by the intentions of the speaker (contra the 'natural language' philosophers) but rather by real facts about the world to which it refers.
Katz distinguishes between referential and expressive meaning. Referential meaning is the aspect of meaning that is determined by the relationship between language and the world, while expressive meaning is the aspect of meaning that is determined by the speaker's intentions and emotions.
He proposes a theory of semantic composition, which explains how the meaning of complex expressions can be derived from the meanings of their constituent parts. According to Katz, the meaning of a complex expression is not simply the sum of the meanings of its parts, but rather depends on the syntactic structure of the expression and the rules of semantic combination.' (Review here.)
My own view is that words refer to things, or mean something just because we take them to. We simply associate the sounds or the visual symbols with what we have learned to associate them, and there doesn't seem to be any great puzzle in that. The real puzzle is the consciousness that allows us to make those associations, and that there can be a shared world for us.
The Katz books look interesting.
Yes, that seems to be the hub of it to me - what correspondence is there between the world and language? It's a pretty tentative connection and interpretive and context dependent, but there's certainly an illusion of signifier and signified mating to produce meaning, even if the post-structuralists have demonstrated the limitations of this relationship.
Yes, there is something going on. But maybe Aristotle got it backwards. It's the 'external' synchronization that leads to the 'logical illusion' of 'internal' forms.' The language and its 'equivalence classes' (forms, concepts) are more feasibly cogenerated by our constant practical interaction which includes, among other more energy-intensive modifications of our shared world, the imposing of marks and noises called signs or words. We are so profoundly social and linguistic that the 'ghost' in the each of our machines is mostly the same ghost, which is how we mostly cooperate and understand one another.
Yes, and 'tropes' is a good word. They were just taking seriously the directive to know thyself. The 'rational animal' is the symbolical linguistic animal, the metaphysical metaphorical animal. What is the nature of meaning ? How are meaning and being entangled ? Can we still believe in a static notion of meaning, in the midst of our towers and rockets and chatbots ?
I'd go so far to say that it is the structure of reality in some sense. And I'd say that of course it's determined by real facts of the world -- and that social context and intentions are themselves such facts.
The idea that there is some meaningless stuff beneath appearances is, as I see, a confusion suggested by 'mental experiences,' as if humans are looking at the screen and not the world. It's the fear of error here which is the cause of that error. The metaphor of the control room in the skull is the most successful conspiracy theory in history. It's The Cave writ small. Atoms and intentions and toothaches exist on the same plane, or they could not signify (objects are obviously not just clumps of sensation but exist in a space of reasons -- but we need not take reasons as immaterial in any simple sense.)
This implicitly casts intentions and emotions as otherworldly or outerwordly, evading our embodiment. Language is marks and noises in the world, not a layer smeared on top of it. (Please add an 'in my view' in front of all my claims. It'll save us both time.)
What exactly do you mean by 'causal' or 'mechanical' though ?
The problem of meaning haunts everything, which is not to say that it itself is not haunted in return. But that gets us back to the structuralism half of my point.
Sure. We are practically successful. There are billions of us. I imagine philosophy as wanting a tighter and tighter grip and yet a larger and more articulated view of the world. To solidify and sharpen what we mean manifests something like a will to power and beauty. Why does a cat groom itself ?
You can think of an infinite number of tokens in a certain sense by adding context to each traditionally conceived token. You might never use 'token' twice in the same context. We can also imagine sentences as tokens for a countable infinity. And so on. But you make a good point about the reuse of words. There's a paper out there about the use and efficiency of ambiguity. Our short words tend to be ambiguous. We've learned to lean on the practical context to cheapen the cost of babble.
For me what you say invokes another layer, another wrinkle in the fabric.When we ask for correspondence between language and world, are we asking for stable, but hidden, lines of connection, like unseen electrical cables, between words and the world "as it really is"?
I see no problem with correspondence between language and the phenomenal world, since I see the latter as a paradigmatically familiar, collectively linguistically generated illusion that we all find it impossible not to be inducted into. I hear someone say "it is raining" and I know exactly what to look for, simply because of the association of these words with an everyday experience almost everyone would be familiar with.
It is correspondence between language and the noumenal world which is inscrutable, even impossible. And I think it is that impossible correspondence which is really being asked for. It is impossible because language can correspond only to what we commonly experience, simply by association, on account of the fact that we take it to correspond, but nothing beyond that.
So, the idea that language could correspond to the noumenal world is neither correct nor incorrect, but is a "not even wrong" category error; we don't even know what it could mean for them to correspond to the noumenal world.
No real disagreement but how does this reflect on our capacity to talk meaningfully about ontology and metaphysics? Nevertheless it often does seem a metaphysical puzzle that we are able to understand each other at all. No wonder some religious folk consider God foundationally necessary for intelligibility.
Quoting Janus
Are you coming at this as a Kantian?
We all knows what 'causal' means in the ordinary sense. Same with 'mechanical'. The meaning of both just consists in one thing acting on another to bring about effect, change, event or process.
If we think that if we don't know what words mean or refer to, then we cannot understand ourselves to be asking the questions about meaning or reference in the first place.
It seems we can talk meaningfully about the ideas that come to us when we try to imagine what the world might be like in itself. I would just say that we cannot meaningfully assign truth or falsity to those words, because truth and falsity are established either logically or empirically, I don't see truth and meaning as being joined at the hip.
Quoting Tom Storm
I do generally agree with Kant regarding the limitations of thought.
Discursive practice.
Of course we know well enough for practical purposes how to sling these tokens. That's never been in question. What I'm trying to point out is this structural hopscotch from 'cause' to 'thing' to 'effect' to 'event' and so on. The being of meaning seems to be distributed over the whole system rather than concentrated in a particular bark or squeak. I don't deny that saying 'dog' can trigger a certain image. But 'cause' and 'event' are terribly blurry.
Quoting Janus
I've already said myself (in other words) that semantic finitude can only finitely or imperfectly specify itself. As convenient as it might be for those uncomfortable with the issue, this is not a simple case of "communication is impossible," which is of course self-cancelling. It's obviously, given the quotes, well within the philosophical tradition.
***
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.... As a part of the system of language, one may say the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.
***
What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that it is familiar. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
***
This is not about some kind of authority of those quotes but to show that the tradition has tended to give a damn about whether and how it knew what it was talking about. What are we who think ? What is thinking ? What is meaning ? It'd be folly to expect some simple answer here. In fact, I expect this project to go on forever, but not without progress, with the sign 'progress' also being used in unpredictable ways (taking on new 'meanings') in the process.
I don't see that they are any more blurry than anything else. Speaking for myself, I, at least,
have a clear idea of cause and effect.
[quote ="green flag;793190"]The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.... As a part of the system of language, one may say the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.[/quote]
All you're saying is that one must have some minimal command of language in order to understand what words refer to and what sentences mean.
That said, even my dogs understand what "do you want to go to the beach" means.
I don't imagine "something in some occult sphere" that gives meaning or "life" to sentences; it's just a matter of habitually instilled association as I understand it.
someone unpack that a bit. Why that word? Why 'occult' in this context.
Do you mean the possibility of transcendence built into the process?
Are there an infinite number of sentences?
I think there's a very large number of sentences, and language is infinitely iterable -- but it's used within a finite amount of time, so there will only be so many finite sentences produced, for instance, if our theory of tokens is that sentences are tokens.
But one thing I'd push against here is that language must use sentences. The stop light is a good example of tokens of meaning without English sentences (though surely, if we normally use English, we interpret with English and explain what the lights mean in English -- green means go, red means stop, yellow means slow down)
So part of the difficulty in asking after the sign is even choosing what a token is. Is braille sententially structured? What is its relation to sign-language, and what is sign-languages relationship to ant pheromones which mean "follow this trail" when interpreted into English?
Quoting green flag
I think a certain kind of philosophy likes to pursue a grasping of the world. For me, I pretty much find pleasure in the activity itself. And I see so many potential avenues for philosophical development that it's really fascinating. Sometimes there is comfort in having an articulated viewpoint, and sometimes there is comfort in recognizing that articulated viewpoint as something more like a model to share with others and less like a grasping of reality.
So, in short, I do it for fun and sociality.
:up:
That sounds right to me (as you imply, it's embodied.)
:up:
What's funny is that even the rhetorical failures or troubles of semantic finitism serve as examples thereof.
To me this thread is about making darkness visible. I carry my torch into the cave to look at the size of it. The tunnel widens as I push forward.
I have a 'clear idea' of the will of God myself. Why do you think phenomenology became hermeneutic ? What is the essence of human historicity ?
Let's look at the etymology of these terms.
IDEA
idea => from idein "to see," from PIE *wid-es-ya-, suffixed form of root *weid- "to see."
https://www.etymonline.com/word/idea
Roughly an idea is an image, though (as mentioned early), metaphors lift terms into new usages, so that 'idea' is no longer interchangeable with 'image.' Do you see what I mean ?
CLEAR
c. 1300, "giving light, shining, luminous;" also "not turbid; transparent, allowing light to pass through; free from impurities; morally pure, guiltless, innocent;" of colors, "bright, pure;" of weather or the sky or sea, "not stormy; mild, fair, not overcast, fully light, free from darkness or clouds;" of the eyes or vision, "clear, keen;" of the voice or sound, "plainly audible, distinct, resonant;" of the mind, "keen-witted, perspicacious;" of words or speech, "readily understood, manifest to the mind, lucid" (an Old English word for this was sweotol "distinct, clear, evident"); of land, "cleared, leveled;" from Old French cler "clear" (of sight and hearing), "light, bright, shining; sparse" (12c., Modern French clair), from Latin clarus "clear, loud," of sounds; figuratively "manifest, plain, evident," in transferred use, of sights, "bright, distinct;" also "illustrious, famous, glorious" (source of Italian chiaro, Spanish claro), from PIE *kle-ro-, from root *kele- (2) "to shout."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=clear
This one is messier, but it's amazing to find an auditory metaphor at the bottom. What is clear is like what shouts at you in the environment. It's obvious, grabs your attention.
I think the clarity metaphor is also related to a background idea of an object being seen through clear water. In this case the clear speech or writing is the conveniently clean and transparent water, while the meaning of that speech is the pebble on the bottom of the creek. To say something is clear is like pasting a hieroglyph of clean water on it, perhaps a few wavy lines.
:up:
A profound pleasure ! But it also makes me feel powerful, and I think that's part of the pleasure.
As Hegel noted, we can always try to summarize a philosophical point with a banal platitude. This is why the point is clarifying what the hell we are even talking about. What is a 'command of language' ? Another metaphor, this 'command.'
(1) No one denies that you can go on with your life and chug along in the usual idletalk and its average intelligibility. You might end with more money in your bank account and more friends.
(2) I claim that most of the real work in philosophy is semantic. You can prove God is dead or blue or made of numbers. Fine. But I want to know what you've proved exactly, as exactly as a finite human can manage in a finite time. Of course even here we have to choose what is worth clarifying in the first place.
(3) If the clarification of meaning is the essence of philosophy, then it makes sense to clarify clarification (seeing its own metaphorically, for instance) -- and to get a better sense of what sense is. This is fairly obviously Heideggarian, but that just means he found a good path to explore and not authoritative answers.
If humans go extinct, then I guess you are right. There are finitely many expressions, even including context as part of the expression. Chalk up another win for semantic finitism. (Just kidding. But good point.)
Something like the mind of God seems to be necessary for the 'prestructuralist' theory of meaning. The assumption (not usually made explicit) is that there is a universal set of signifieds just waiting for this or that tribe to agree on handles or labels for them. This eternal set of signifieds is 'the divine logos.' Somehow (no one can tell) we are all plugged directly into this logos, for these 'mental experiences...are the same for all.' And yet 'we' pretend to be (?) scientific and think we evolved from amoebas....? How do animals which evolved from germs co-generate language ? Many animals have bodies that cooperate. That's a natural starting point. How do metaphors get 'lifted up' into new, literal meanings ? Platonistic theories of meaning are married to some version of creationism, it seems to me, without realizing it. They want structure without genesis and, accordingly, without death.
I think Wittgenstein is saying that we tend to imagine signifieds or pure meanings as existing in some 'purely mental' realm. This seems to be what Aristotle claims when he says there are 'mental experiences' which are the same for all humans.
But Plato's forms are images etymologically, mere pictures. So even Plato is on the edge of seeing us as savages trading hieroglyphs, except his are not historically generated, mutable, blurry, entangled with 'matter' (embodied), and subject to decay and erasure.
To what does a Donnie Darko cleargoo snakebridge refer ? Has that idea always existed in the divine logos ?
It just means hidden. This is just Ryle's classic target, the ghost in the machine. 'Your' experience of redness or love or the meaning of meaning is radically private. According to the theory of this ghost in the machine, no amount of technological progress could make a mindscope possible. There is something infinitely interior, infinitely self-present and self-transparent. This ghost, which is radically immaterial (hence the hard problem), either 'is' or is in immediate contact with 'the divine logos' or the 'pure information' or the 'meanings' of words, stripped of their mere clothing, marks and noises.
This 'soul superstition' is not entirely wrong. Philosophers like Brandom have build understandings of what it is to be a self from what Kant and Hegel got right. Social language is at the center of the lifeworld. What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim.
Interesting. What's the nature of the gulf between these two?
Quoting green flag
I've not heard this style of Platonic argument made before about this.
Quoting green flag
Maybe I'm reading you wrong but is it your contention that evolution can't explain language and metacognition?
Quoting green flag
Can you make that connection for me - simply, for a non-philosopher?
So, yes, a very large number. But still finite.
(EDIT: Also, I thought it a mistake but then I kind of liked the distinction between writer-listener -- it's perfect for disrupting the notion that a sign must be either visual or aural, and the pheromone example demonstrates how it could even be chemical (and need not include homosapeins -- most social species, I imagine, have language, whatever it is))
Quoting green flag
A command of language is simply the ability to communicate adequately. If we didn't have command of a language we would not be having this conversation.
Quoting green flag
If we cannot do more than "ideltalk" then philosophical discussion would appear to be a waste of time, and the meaning of anything anyone says will be indeterminable beyond the banality of "average intelligibility".
If most of the "real" work (whatever that means) in philosophy is semantic, which means "to do with meaning", then we would appear to spiralling down an infinite helix of regress. I suffer from vertigo, so I won't be joining you in that endeavour.
As to choosing what is worth clarifying, is that not inevitably an individual choice? Or is there some authority...?
The clarification of the clarification of meaning? How about the clarification of the clarification of the clarification of meaning? There you go slippery sliding down that infinite helix again!
The later Heidegger did not seem to clarify much, but then poetry doesn't aim for clarification but rather for evocation of the unclarifiable nature of our situation, which is much more fun.
Or maybe they do manage to say it, but you don't get it. I say 'occult' is deliberately pejorative, in this context. Ryle's ghost metaphor is grounded in the fundamental flaw of Cartesianism, which is the 'objectification of the self' - treating the self as a kind of ghostly thinking thing. The right stance is that 'the eye can't see itself, the hand can't grasp itself' - the self is elusive, not because it's ghostly or occult, but it is not in the objective frame, it's the subject of experience, not the object of knowledge. Since Descartes, western philosophy has never been able to deal with that, hence the Cartesian anxiety - referring to the notion that, 'since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other"'. Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. You can see how the dismissive use of the term 'occult' is used in a futile attempt to combat that anxiety - by depicting it in terms usually reserved for side-show charlatans and fortune tellers. Speaks volumes.
[quote = Hegel]
The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.
[/quote]
The finite, as I understand, is something that is independent and enclosed and detached from everything else. The finite entity is an abstraction (a useful fiction, no true being), the result of reason's 'violence' against the unified fabric of being-in-the-world. In other words, idealism means holism. Idealism means system. The truth is the whole.
The scientific image is a desiccated X-ray of the world where history and language are methodically omitted. This is why it's useful as map. Reduction is a good thing, I'm saying, because I'm not antiscience.
But it's shitty metaphysics to worship a map within the lifeworld which depends for its sense on that lifeworld as somehow the realest truth about that lifeworld -- as if marriages and mockingbirds don't 'really exist' but other 'fictions' like quarks do.
But of course many 'idealist' are caught in preHegelian veil-of-ideals implicit solipsism. They 'trust' that the 'external' world exists, but they don't see the absurdity of doubting it theoretically.
I've tried to make it vivid and explicit. There is a 'mindscape' thread out there at the moment that invokes this idea in pretty much this way.
The fantasy that we ghosts in the machine seems to require it. People speak of the hard problem of consciousness [singular] -- which implies that there is one way to be conscious -- while also assuming the absolute privacy of the stuff. It makes no sense. Or it can only be saved with the assumption that we are all plugged directly into the divine mind, call it what they will.
No. I'm saying that any explanation must make sense in the context of evolution. I'm suggesting that language is fundamentally a tribal kind of software, which evolves as tribes struggle together in their environment. Our late, leisured civilization, economically rewarding the right kind of creativity, has pushed individuality to (often literally) insane heights of course. 'Moloch demands a tower.' But we are monkeys trading hieroglyphics. We know what we mean just well enough to lay the next brick.
Quoting Tom Storm
Platonic theories need ideas to have always been here (I neglected to account for this.) Or to have been suddenly created all at once. Postchristian Plato ?
To me the issue is whether we cogenerate a larger and larger set of meanings together as animals trading marks and noises as we cooperate to make babies who make babies...or whether we 'remember' the divine logos which we swim in between rebirths. I think words are the supertool, the metatool.
It can't be this simple, but maybe Platonism is the mystification of equivalence classes in the perennial quest to deny death.
Do we create, as historical animals, the meanings we live and die in ? Are the meanings there in the world, incarnate and never utterly bodiless ? Or are we born with spiritual receivers that tune in to some otherwise hidden dimension, getting the juice ineffably directly ?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/793279
This is not such a difficult idea. It's one of several flavors. In this version, the self comes of as the being or presence of sensations, that they are and not what they are. The self doesn't look at a screen. The self is a screen. But now the screen metaphor is pointless, for there is no one to look at it.
What do thinkers make of thoughts ? They are in a bind here. Some want to unify the thoughtstream and decide (without justification) that it's a monologue. In this version, we have a selfoverhearing voice that needs neither mouth nor ears to do so and understands itself perfectly. In this version, we have a screen that watches itself, it seems.
If the thoughts are part of The Given, you might as well go the whole hog :
[quote=James]
Thoughts and things are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. ... But one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego... ... the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the content of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity these passing over to the content and becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein überhaupt of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said.
I believe that consciousness, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing soul upon the air of philosophy. ...
To deny plumply that consciousness exists seems so absurd on the face of it for undeniably thoughts do exist that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. Consciousness is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that functions being carried on.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm
From my perspective, you are interpreting the situation in terms of antireligious scientism, addicted to certainty, and the courageous quest for genuine spirituality, willing to risk being wrong. But it's absurd to frame Wittgenstein as antispiritual (need I explain ?),and it's also absurd to seemingly implicitly frame my own semantic finitism, self-consciously striving to make darkness visible, as another form of certaintyworship. "Philosophy cuts the crust of convention and the cheese of complacency."
I've been discussing ideas that emphasize the basic difficultly of even knowing what we are talking about. We know something. Communication is possible. But what is its nature ? What is the being of meaning ?
But not as anti-metaphysical.
So you've forgotten about or have not yet read Witty's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (especially propositions 1-2) or, more sadly, you just read it as badly as the Viennese logical positivists had? :chin:
:100: Notice how this re-affirms my criticism of Descartes' reification - because that is what it is - of the self as 'res cogitans', which is what subsequently gave rise to Ryle's 'ghost in the machine' argument.
I wholeheartedly embrace a certain style of metaphysics.
I even like the way Emerson uses 'God.'
I call myself an 'atheist' as a shorthand for not 'that' kind of theist. My God is a devouring fire. He eats [s]atheists[/s] himself for breakfast.
In case you missed it, I wasn't endorsing James but saying that a certain way of thinking (reducing all the subject, etc.) points toward the dissolution of a subject that no longer has an other to talk about or others to talk to.
The minimal rational situation is us in a language in a world together, with ourselves subject to norms for the making and acceptance of claims. This is almost tautological, but it's surprisingly nonobvious in various circles.
So I will boldly admit that I believe that I live in a world with other people. I don't think it makes sense to present this as 'very likely all things considered.' I think it's confusion to violate this unity.
Quoting Janus
Sure. But I also think people are different. I can't pretend to think all interpretations are equally good or that communication is impossible or offer some other easy target. Semantic finitude is not semantic nihilism. I can't get it all but I'll always want more. Will to power, will to clarity, will to beauty.
Quoting Janus
You leap from stone to stone, as we all must when we clarify. Pile signs on signs. But not all piling is equal. What is it to communicate adequately ? We both already know 'well enough' in the fog of average intelligibility. In this context the point is to notice the leaping from stone to stone. Meaning is being is seeing is meaning is being. Forms and information and sensations. We dance around in a ring and suppose.
That doesn't make sense, unless you want to reduce rational norms to 'habitually instilled associations.'
What is being associated with what ? It can't be hidden mind stuff, so ?
I think we are basically on the same page. Meaning is between and within us. The view I criticize seems to assume that the self is infinitely transparent to itself, gazing on 'pure information' or on Exact Meaning which wears marks and noises as its clothing. Exact Secret Meaning is to marks and noises as The Soul is the mere flesh. I use the capitals to emphasize the Theological payload here. God created nature from nothingness. His radical separateness from nature symbolizes (Feuerbach or Becker might say) our denial of our animality and death.
I like the continuity you are emphasizing. Biosemiosis (such as very low level cellular signaling) also interests me, but I haven't got around to studying it closely.
The apparent medium-independence is also fascinating. It's easy for us now anyway to switch between reading and listening. Then of course we speak and hear so many metaphors meant for eyes (visual memory, I guess.)
One more little point: if the goal is to clarify thought and ennoble existence and see reality whole and true, then hiddenness is not exactly the fetish of the philosopher who lives to unveil and shine light.
Me neither.
The ant example is something I take more seriously as an example of a sign than cellular signaling. At that point I'm not sure if we're speaking in metaphor or not anymore, where at least with the ant example I'm certain I'm willing to claim that has enough similarity to count as a sign -- looking at meaning as something that isn't unique to humans, at least, when thinking of writing in the large sense.
I originally thought that because they are an obvious example of a highly social species, even moreso than ourselves, and it seems to me that this is a good guess to begin in looking for some kind of bridge between the two kinds of writing. And now I'm thinking any sexual species must have language at some level in order to coordinate copulation, but it may also be very metaphorical at that point -- it's a little hard to see what we have in common with sharks, for instance. There clearly is more than just this point, but it's an important point to consider in looking at cellular signalling, because they are asexual. Making it even stranger for us to relate to -- which means it may be their "language" is is so foreign that it'd be foolish to understand it on the architecture of understanding our own language.
Some thoughts on translation:
Even though ants are writing meaningfully to one another in a way which we can translate into our language that doesn't mean that we are suddenly speaking ant, or that they can speak English. If there be a poetry of ants we'd have to be an ant to read it. But we know we have poetry, at least. So there's something to claiming these four tokens as a sign (English sentences, braille, sign-language, ant pheromones) -- but that sort of meaning is larger than and doesn't include translation, per se, where "translation" is an act whereby a writer who knows two languages is able to re-express meaning in a similar manner in both of them. (the first three obviously count as translatable, where the fourth is questionable). But just because this writing is "larger" that doesn't mean "better" -- just more encompassing. We, as humans, will clearly prefer the first three examples of signs over ant-signs, and if there be a way to understand language on a scientific basis then it'd make sense to prod why it is our species is able to write in the small sense.
Relating our abilities to the creatures around us seems to me to be the route I'm most interested in. It just gets very confusing very easily.
Right! That's what makes it hard to specify some set of conditions for a sign. Along with everything else we've said so far.
Quoting green flag
Yup! Seems pretty close. Though it's worth noting that what we are close in is confusion :D
I think (?) we are forced to speak in varying intensities of metaphor, within or upon a continuum of metaphor.
At the moment I'd say we don't need consciousness for a sign system. But I see the value in looking at ants, because the interplay between individual and tribe is still visible.
What would reading their poetry be ? Deep question. Do ants have consciousness ? But I don't even know what 'consciousness' means exactly. Humans use it in criminal trials and on operating tables. We implicitly (most of us) judge that the dead are not conscious, for we put them in holes or ovens, just as surgeons cut out the wisdom teeth of anesthetized patients.
Yes. And we can note why Saussure said a system of differences without positive elements. In other words, the game of chess would still be (essentially) chess even if everything, even the game itself, was renamed. So a sign system is designed only up to isomorphism. But the 'positive elements' (the arbitrary, contingent paintjob) strangely hint at the presence of such a system. Writing 'poison' on a bottle is no better than writing 'hisdfhsdfsd' on a bottle unless a particular arbitrary convention is established. I imagine that various neurotransmitters are just as arbitrary. But a historical 'conversation' is established even in Darwinian evolution. There's a nerve that runs from the brain to the throat but goes under the heart, for stupid historical reasons (marginal costs of stretching it just a little more were always low, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0
I'm not certain anymore. I had thought that, but now I'm not sure. But even if so, it's still worth noting the divergence here between cellular signaling and ant-signs, yes?
It's hard to pin-point when we're no longer really talking about language, but rather using the metaphor of language to talk about something else. With cellular signaling I suspect that this is what's happened, but I admitted to not being well read on the subject of biosemiotics too which seems to go down that rabbit-hole -- so it's just a worry of mine. I tend to worry about overly complicated ontologies, especially when they start going into things we don't normally have day-to-day experience with like cellular machines, proton pumps, antibodies and so on. And then the a/sexual division which makes me doubt that we are similarly motivated enough to really be able to even begin to make metaphors of understanding, where at least with the ant I can see an organism performing a role within a community. It's close enough to count while still possibly being wrong, but in figuring out it being wrong that might point to possible differentiations between large and small writing.
At least, so the guess goes.
Quoting green flag
Agreed. Consciousness is a related issue, but a side issue.
Cool :) That's what I want. And ant-psychology is so very different from ours too, so we can't go down the psychologistic rabbit-hole in defining the sign -- which I think is another reason it's a good thing (no reason to explain one uncertain thing with another uncertain thing like the mind)
Quoting green flag
Exactly! It's an example of something that is not-translatable, but in total. Unlike, say, English to Spanish poetry, which is very difficult but we are able to make translations because we are able to learn both languages. And we are able to interpret the ant in our languages, but we are not able to translate because the notion of ant-poetry (or ant-language) is so foreign and alien we can't even imagine what it might be like. It's entirely out of our knowledge of meaning. (EDIT: Though, quick note upon re-reading -- I hate to rely upon the imagination as an argumentive tool. It's very easy to point out that one could just not be imaginative enough)
It's a great question to me :) -- but hopefully the above can put the question of consciousness aside as another confusing question rather than an avenue for understanding the confusing question of the sign.
For me the questions are entangled. A relatively innocent early version of philosophy (like lots of us start with?) tries to do 'math with words' about God, truth, knowledge, etc. , without noticing much that it takes these signs for granted, as if these words are reliable labels for definite independent entities. Our own role in the creation or maintenance of reality is unnoticed. We are so eager to prove P that we don't notice that we only barely know what we mean by P. We've gone deaf (a metaphor). Call it the forgetfulness of meaning, but maybe it's basically the same as the forgetfulness of being (of the 'hard problem' of the meaning of being ). These token thing begin to sings.
***********
The voice is heard ( understood ) ... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many ---since it is the condition of the very idea of truth... Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity --- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility --- as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word," the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in all language and...only this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense of being in general...Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word "being" nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language..., at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity...
*******
Of Gram
:clap: :halo:
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_Book&action=render
We haven't checked lots of machines for toothaches and failed to find them. We don't know how to look for them. We don't know what it mean for a machine to have a toothache.
Now one may go on and ask: How do you know that he has got |(Ts-309,39) toothache when he holds his cheek? The answer to this might be, I say, he has toothache when he holds his cheek because I hold my cheek when I have toothache. But what if we went on asking: And why do you suppose that toothache corresponds to his holding his cheek just because your toothache corresponds to your holding your cheek? You will be at a loss to answer this question and find that here we strike rock bottom, that is we have come down to conventions. (If you suggest as an answer to the last question that, whenever we've seen people holding their cheeks and asked them what's the matter, they have answered, I have toothache, remember that this experience only co-ordinates holding your cheek with saying certain words.)
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_Book&action=render
The vaguely postulated pure immaterial pain is like the hole in a donut. Its plenitude, the circular dough, seems to be a nexus of public deeds including blurry equivalence classes of speech acts.
When we say that by our method we try to counteract the misleading effect of certain analogies, it is important that you should understand that the idea of an analogy being misleading is nothing sharply defined. No sharp boundary can be drawn round the cases in which we should say that a man was misled by an analogy. The use of expressions constructed on analogical patterns stresses analogies between cases often far apart. And by doing this these expressions may be extremely useful. It is, in most cases, impossible to show an exact point where an analogy begins to mislead us. Every particular notation stresses some particular point of view. If, e.g., we call our investigations philosophy, this title, on the one hand, seems appropriate, on the other hand it certainly has misled people. (One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which we used to call philosophy.)
...
If we sing a tune we know by heart, or say the alphabet, the notes and letters seem to hang together; and each seems to draw out the next as though they were pearls strung on a thread, and by pulling out one I pulled out the one following it.
[i]Now there is no doubt that seeing the picture of a string of beads being pulled out of a box through a hole in the lid, I should say: These beads must all have been together in the box before. But it is easy to see that this is making a |(Ts-309,65) hypothesis. I should have seen the same picture if the beads had gradually come into existence in the hole of the lid. We easily overlook the distinction between stating a conscious mental event, and making a hypothesis about what one might call the mechanism of the mind. All the more as such hypotheses or pictures of the working of our mind are embodied in many of the forms of expression of our everyday language. The past tense meant in the sentence I meant the man who won the battle of Austerlitz is only part of such a picture, the mind being conceived as a place in which what we remember is kept, stored, before we express it. If I whistle a tune I know well and am interrupted in the middle, if then someone asked me did you know how to go on? I should answer yes I did. What sort of process is this knowing how to go on? It might appear as though the whole continuation of the tune had to be present while I knew how to go on.
Ask yourself such a question as: How long does it take to know how to go on? Or is it an instantaneous process? Aren't we making a mistake like mixing up the existence of a gramophone record of a tune with the existence of the tune? And aren't we assuming that whenever a tune passes through existence there must be some sort of a gramophone record of it from which it is played?
Consider the following example: A gun is fired in my presence and I say: This crash wasn't as loud as I had |(Ts-309,66) expected. Someone asks me: How is this possible? Was there a crash, louder than that of a gun, in your imagination? I must confess that there was nothing of the sort. Now he says: Then you didn't really expect a louder crash, but perhaps the shadow of one. And how did you know that it was the shadow of a louder crash? Let's see what, in such a case, might really have happened. Perhaps in waiting for the report I opened my mouth, held on to something to steady myself, and perhaps I said: This is going to be terrible. Then, when the explosion was over: It wasn't so loud after all. Certain tensions in my body relax. But what is the connection between these tensions, opening my mouth, etc., and a real louder crash? Perhaps this connection was made by having heard such a crash and having had the experiences mentioned.[/i]
These last passages are great for foregrounding the takenforgranted metaphoricity in our talk about the mental.
I don't think what I think you are looking for will be found via any discursive investigation. It is obvious there is no perfect communication and that language is an inherently fuzzy medium, so it is not a suitable tool for drilling down to utter clarity. You might be able to formalize language to get unequivocal statements, but they will be unbearably dry and empty. It will be like eating perfectly washed sand.
Quoting plaque flag
We communicate adequately when we feel we understand each other. Do we really understand each other? Did your wife really have an orgasm? Does she really love you? We can torment ourselves because we can never be logically certain of anything, because it's always logically possible that we are mistaken. Can we live with uncertainty then? Is it okay to allow ourselves to dream a little, or must we aim, per impossibile, to be absolutely explicit and correct about absolutely everything?
The idea of semantic finitude seems mistaken to me; meaning is not finite it is in-finite; there is no way to corral it satisfactorily, and it would be unsatisfactory if we could corral it. The deluded endeavour to corral meaning is the reason AP is such a terrible 'medicine'; it produces legions of one-dimensional semantically correct wankers who are in mortal danger of disappearing up their own arses. They are flies in a dreadful normative bottle of their own devising who deludedly think they have escaped another bottle of their own imagining.
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Rational norms are the delusions of semantic policemen. The habitually instilled associations of shared meaning are merely organic outgrowths of the lifeworld. Association is a living ever-changing process; don't ask what is being associated with what; the attempt to isolate the elements will always fail and after the futile process of eliminating error, you'll end up with sand instead of water.
We live our lives in an ocean of seeming; that is the "being of meaning". If you try to get out of the ocean of seeming onto dry land, onto terra firma, you'll end up trying to eke out a bare existence on an uninhabitable speck. There's my bit of wisdom for the day for what it's worth; take it or leave it, I don't mind.
This is accidentally hilarious. Are you trying to replace my boy @Bartricks ? I'm not offended but just a mixture of amused and dismayed. You don't exactly make me reconsider my case when this is what you end up throwing (throwing up) against it.
Quoting Janus
No offense intended (I'm really not angry but just mystified by your new tone), but thus spoke The Great @Janus, who either thinks he can make a case for this bold claim in terms of the very norms he denies or thinks he doesn't need to. I don't mind if you disagree with me, but it's only polite to agree with yourself.
Quoting Janus
Let's translate this less flatteringly (I admit this is a parody, an exaggeration .) : ...dude like philosophy is stupid because like you never like get things totally like figured out like dude seriously its pretty much a waste of time just be cool and have fun... Have you forgotten that philosophy is a profound pleasure ? No one is asking for your therapeutic sermon to release them from the infinite [s]task[/s] opportunity of getting more clear on the being of the here or what the fuck that even means. It hurts so good to play the game. It squirts glow wood to pay the flame. But do feel welcome to spew it if it puts you in a better mood.
****************************************************************************************
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to
sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove
your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of
some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluffmadonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring.
https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf
I'm not disagreeing with myself. The only rational norm worth holding to is consistency and then only when the concern is with logic.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Can you briefly explain this curious poetic sentence? Generally I find poetry as impenetrable as any foreign language (except, perhaps Dylan Thomas).
Joyce has an avatar of his young self say : History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.
Heidegger and Sartre say (or so I claim) that we are the history from which we are trying to awake. This works both individually and culturally. A metaphor that might help here is software that modifies itself. It's only within the constraints or by the instructions of my current code that I can modify that code and be something new, and so on --- in our case with more and more complexity, until the Jenga tower falls and we worship thunder again.
Or it's a convoluted and playful way to say I'm a postFeuerbach humanist of some flavor. We humans are god. The divine predicates are human virtues. We 'eat' our old selves by criticizing what we've been as part of inventing what we will be.
Neurath's boat is another good metaphor. Imagine a boat that is always at sea, so that it must always float. We can change out every part over time, but only piece by piece. Man is underdetermined, has no 'essence.' Existence is the kind of thing that is whatever it takes itself to be. image
Sure there are 'physical' limits and we aren't truly blank slates, but we are 'the' nightmarishly triumphantly softwhere-not-hardware selfdefining animal toolgod. If we don't kill ourselves, we may merge with our technology, modify our genetic code, colonize the galaxy. Hard to say. But of course the innocent optimism of Hegel and Feuerbach is mostly lost now. Technology threatens dystopia and extinction. This gets us into the ghost that haunts Hegel, one strangely named Schlegel ( two brothers who are theorists of Romanticism's infinite irony.) Are we the ironic flowers of the heat death ? Are we coal's trick for getting itself burned ? Dissipative structures who didn't start but surely must optimize the fire ? Are we the gallows humor of the Universe in its hospital bed?
:up:
[i]You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the beds edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.[/i]
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/preludes-56d22338dc954
This I understand.
Quoting plaque flag
I think we are whatever we fancy ourselves to be. Or nothing in particular (which is my position).
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Sorry, officer, that I assumed we were concerned with logic. Carry on my playword fun.
No doubt you know this one. I'm amused by this becasue I have a dull, literalist mind. :wink:
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one anothers throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And dont have any kids yourself.
:up:
But I'd add that we have the languages we were thrown into, the technology, the political structures. We take a world and a default background self (decency norms) for granted most of the time. The menu from which we choose we did not choose, but we do get to change the menu for the next customer.
I love that one, yes. I used to quote that one for my wife when her family was trouble.
:up:
I'm down with the positronic negativity.
I see also how appropriate this was in terms of selfmodifying softwhere, our individual beingthrown into a particular duo of tooyoung clowns. I think of my young parents now (as they were when they had me) as children.
:up: No worries cuntstable; it's all just language games, after all...until it isn't...
[ erased an angry post ]
:rofl: Now that's funny...or at least a little funnier than "Run along. You are boring"...! It seems you are starting to develop a sense of humour...
I had just grown tired of the regurgitated faux-poetic and normative machine-man cliches and wanted to get off the merry-go-round as I was becoming bored, so I thought I'd inject a little rhetorical counterpoint that was not meant to be taken seriously as a way of easing out of the 'engagement' with a bit of a laugh.
I likewise don't take you to be an intimidating intellectual adversary, but then I don't think of myself as being above you either; I just think our basic presuppositions and approaches are so far apart that we will never manage to do anything but talk past one another, and that quickly becomes tiresome.
It does puzzle me that you are worried about my age...I just can't see how that is relevant. Probably best we ignore one another from now on.
But this discussion is about meaning. I claim the hermeneutic is a spiral. We are all bots running a circular spiel, but we run in wider and wider circles. Repetition with variation, a ring of metaphors lets in a new child to join the mad dance.
Is clarification worth it ? Is it not easier to pretend that everybody already knows [some issueevasive platitude ] ? Aren't edifying supplements from the local drugstore better than the icy climb into the lonely heights of no longer being intelligible, if only in this tiny regard, by Tom, Dick, and Harry ? Should an ecstatic critical metaphysics offering sober joy be thrown over for a bumper stick which offers a wonderful ratio of comfort over cost ?
[quote=Hegel]
The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying.
Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness of meaning; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude. But just as there is a breadth which is emptiness, there is a depth which is empty too: as we may have an extension of substance which overflows into finite multiplicity without the power of keeping the manifold together, in the same way we may have an insubstantial intensity which, keeping itself in as mere force without actual expression, is no better than superficiality. The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself when spending and giving out its substance. Moreover, when this unreflective emotional knowledge makes a pretence of having immersed its own very self in the depths of the absolute Being, and of philosophizing in all holiness and truth, it hides from itself the fact that instead of devotion to God, it rather, by this contempt for all measurable precision and definiteness, simply attests in its own case the fortuitous character of its content, and in the other endows God with its own caprice. When such minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion, they think that, by putting a veil over self-consciousness, and surrendering all understanding, they are thus Gods beloved ones to whom He gives His wisdom in sleep. This is the reason, too, that in point of fact, what they do conceive and bring forth in sleep is dreams.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
:up:
Yes. We bury complexity under words that we pretend to understand.