private language (repost)
Elaine Jackson
grasp the point of Wittgenstein's "private language argument". Not to verify
it, mind you, or to refute it, just to understand the point of it. So here's
what I've gleaned so far...
My uncle Wiggy is telling me there's something I can't do, something that's
impossible in principle, and that thing is to HAVE a PRIVATE LANGUAGE.
Alright, let's examine this. Presumably a private language is so-called
because it's a LANGUAGE that's PRIVATE. So what is a language? Well, since
uncle Wiggy was such a keen logician, probably we're talking about a LOGICAL
language. Good stuff. And what is meant by "private"? Well, a private
language is one whose "primitive terms refer only to the speaker's
subjective or private sensations and perceptions." Moreover, it is a
language that is "logically inaccessible to anyone but the speaker."
That would be scanned (Hamlet). How does the second property follow from the
first? (Both are quoted from the same respondent.) What is the discourse
domain of this language? Are there nonlogical constants (definition
available on request) in this language that refer to volition as well as
perception? What exactly is it that uncle Wiggy is telling me I can't do?
Somebody said something about writing in a diary. Could anybody expand on
that? Why would I want to do this impossible thing?
PS: One of the really fascinating things that has already come out of this
discussion is the suggestion that, up until early historical times, "hearing
voices" and even "seeing visions" was a normal experience for
psychologically healthy people.
Edgar Svendsen
"Elaine Jackson" <elaineja...@home.com> wrote in message news:NMXA9.824374$Ag2.27...@news2.calgary.shaw.ca...
You can't have a 'private language' because the essence of language is the consensus on the meaning of the utterances, the words.
Language is a group game. A private symbology is not a language, a language is a set of shared behaviours. A child learns to play
games with her mother, after a while playing little games with sounds and mother's smiles and coos the child learns which sounds
evoke particular responses. She tests these sounds on Daddy and others and, if they play the game right she 'learns a word". And
so forth. After while we say 'she learned the language'. Contrast that process with making up symbols and writing them in diary.
If someone from the CIA could crack the code, then it's not a private language, it just english, encoded. If it were really a
private language, no one but you could understand it because the process for forming that private language is entirely different
from the process for learning our language. L.W. didn't believe that one person, working alone, could create a coherent, consistent
language, with a grammer, rules of usage, etc, all the things it takes for something to be a language and not just a bunch of
doodles.
Without the feedback from the many speakers of the language, you can't know that you are using the words consistently. You can't
know that the words you wrote in your diary 20 years ago mean the same thing as the words you're writing now because there's no one
to tell you "You're talking nonsense!"
Ed
Sir Frederick
Wittgenstein was as good as any primate at confabulating
explanatory stories. His "private language" is explained
today as "internal" information structures, representation
and processing. Remember Wittgenstein came before the
age of computer technology and information theory.
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcn...@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
*************************
Phrases of the week :
"It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great
progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of
ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of
thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how
doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to
demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
"Lord, please break the laws of the universe for my
convenience."-- Emo Phillips
:-))))Snort!)
*************************
Chad L
"Elaine Jackson" <elaineja...@home.com> wrote in message
news:NMXA9.824374$Ag2.27...@news2.calgary.shaw.ca...
I don't know. (uncomfortable with talking for Wittgenstien too).
But, can you conceive of a way to create a private language without using symbols from a public one
(e.g., english)? If yes, then can you think in that language without first having to translate it
into the public language that you already know? (imagine trying to remember all of your terms
without the aid of a public community or a public language - even if you wrote down your private
language with your newly formed written symbols, would you be able to remember its meanings and
rules without being able to reference a public language?)
Then again, I suppose that if say, both a pack of wolves raised you in isolation AND you were a
re-incarnated being that remembered a language (now dead) that you once used that nobody today even
knew existed, THEN you could have a private language. BUT if John Edward came a long and contacted
your dead relatives, it could totally blow your whole privacy claim. :)
Finally, if none of that is helpful to you, then I'll have to ask you to first say what you made of
"Uncle Wiggy's" essay 'From Philosophical Investigations' - particularly the section in which he
speaks of the beetle in the box.
Mike Dubbeld
"Elaine Jackson" <elaineja...@home.com> wrote in message
news:NMXA9.824374$Ag2.27...@news2.calgary.shaw.ca...
Hi Elaine,
If I never tasted an apple what words would you use to convey apple
taste to
me? Something like eating a bite of cantelope and an orange at the same
time?
It can't happen is the point. There are no amount of words you can use
to
convey what an apple tastes like - just like a picture says a thousand
words.
Now suppose you were a health nut and you
particularly liked how good it felt to do situps. So you give this
feeling a
name - boshta. The inner experience you have from doing situps you
describe
using the word boshta. But since only you know it - it is only of value
to
you. If you have a headache, since only you can experience this
yourself,
I can only understand your headache by your natural and linguistic use
of
language per W. But W. was wrong. I can understand your headache by
virtue of the fact that I also have had headaches and 1.) know such
pains
exist and 2. remember this introspective feeling/state. If I do 50
situps I
can relate to you your new word boshta. Other people having done them
themselves have some notion of what this state must be like. Only you
can know exactly what your headache feels like however.
The PROBLEM is that W. set out earlier in his life to attempt to reduce
all of language to be constructed of meaningful sentences. Every single
sentence in a paragraph was self-explanitory. The reason he did this is
because a gang of ivory tower idiots known as the 'Vienna Circle' gang
were attempting to develop a 'Philosophy of Science.' And so they
wanted language to be very logical/something we would say today
could be understood as a step by step procedure for a computer to
perform. Something that could be quantified/counted/measured. This
means that things like 'beautiful/nice/good/your adjective here - were
out the window. No one ever measured beauty before. Computers can
not use subjective ideas like beauty and good. So in this sense W.
would call these adjectives part of a 'private language' because what
you consider to be beautiful - someone else may consider average.
There is no use of this word that can be agreed upon by all.
Later however W. took back a great deal of what he said and simply
said that the only way we can know things is by our cultural
indoctrination and the context in which a belief is expressed in a
culture. If I tell Saddam Insane he may be 'kicking the bucket' pretty
soon, he is not likely going to understand me. But in the US this
idiom is for going to die - and within the culture of the US my
sentence would be understood.
This whole conversation is extremely elementary and a classic
example of how easily Western Philosophers are impressed/what
passes for knowledge. What impresses me far more about W. is
what he DOES NOT know about language and metaphysics and
I can easily take this conversation a LOT further. Including the
demise of the Vienna Circle gang and their Philosophy of Science.
Mike Dubbeld
>
>
>
John Jones
yourself?!
JJ
The limits of language are the same for private use as
they are for communal use!
Mike Dubbeld <mi...@erols.com> wrote in message
news:ar31pv$mhh$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
John Jones
JJ
John Jones <scooby...@btopenworld.com> wrote in
message news:ar45mj$nc5$1...@sparta.btinternet.com...
Chad L
>
> John Jones <scooby...@btopenworld.com> wrote
> >
> > The limits of language are the same for private use
> as
> > they are for communal use!
or is it that: the limits of language are the same for communal use as they are for private use?
Mike Dubbeld
"John Jones" <scooby...@btopenworld.com> wrote in message
news:ar45mj$nc5$1...@sparta.btinternet.com...
> yourself?!
> JJ
I don't need to describe anything to myself. Thats not where
the problem is. Anything I know can never be completely
conveyed to anyone. Assuming it was somehow miraclously
able to happen, your understanding of it could never be
the same as mine. This is a Sophist identification of this type
of problem 2400 years ago by Gorgias - Socrates/Plato's
embodiment of evil. Gorgias said if there was anything
that was real, we could not know it. And if we were somehow
able to know it, we could not tell it to another.
A noumena is an object that exists in its 'real' sense as not
perceived by a perceiver. All perception involves phenomena
which is noumena as perceived by the senses. Any and all
perception by the senses is necessarily distorted in multiple
ways.
>
> The limits of language are the same for private use as
> they are for communal use!
Thats Wittgenstein's arguement. He says we know things
by their names. The important point being that our experiences
are a function of language. This is incorrect. Experiences are
not a function of our language at all. Particulars of experiences
are captured by the mind. In this sense - the words selected to
properly categorize the experience in the mind are important
and this is what W. was trying to say. But that is all. W. was
so concerned with objectivity he mistakenly identifies the
capture of experiences for the experiences themselves. Big
mistake. Words are a crude trade-off we are forced to use to
objectify experiences. Words are simply buckets we stick
experiences into to categorize and make sense of by generalization.
However all generalizations/abstract ideas are MODELS of the
actual experience. When I tell you I saw a big house the other
day, what have I really said? What has transpired here when I
say this? First of all there is no such thing as 'a house.' This is
simply an abstract idea. It has no existence in spacetime at all.
This category of phenomena is an abstract idea. You know lots
of SPECIFIC examples of this category of abstract concept/
generalization/word model - this category of 'houses' exists
only in your mind as a bucket for your mind to stick objects
that meet your house criterion into. When I say the word house
therefore, your mind goes in memory to the category of abstract
ideas that under which you have a bucket 'houses' labeled - and
pulls out a SPECIFIC house of one sort or another as an
example. The important point being there never is or will be
a time when you visualize 'houses' - unless it is when you reach
into your word bucket calle 'neighborhoods' and have a specific
image of a group of houses as an example of a neighborhood.
But likewise you never will visualize 'neighborhoods'. Only
an example of a Specific neighborhood. You could go on and
one with another bucket as maybe a community - which consists
of neighborhoods....
Why bother with all of this at all? Because unless and until you
know what processes take place in your mind during a
conversation and isolate that process - there is litterally no hope
of understanding linguistic abuse. For example, it took Plato
10 years to decipher what was wrong with the Sophists misuse
of the word IS. All of this is still at kindergarten level It goes
far far beyond all of this. The reason it is so difficult to even
identify as a problem is because cultural programming has
drilled the WRONG concepts into westerners so their very
thinking about some subjects is flawed from square one.
In other words if you form the inital wrong concept of a problem
you will sucked up into a logical black hole. The west operates
under false assumptions/notions of what is and is not 'real'.
> The limits of language are the same for private use as
> they are for communal use!
Is a re-wording of this very same problem. If you do not think
about something correctly to start with - the word model
concepts that your mind relates to falsely - how are you ever
going to identify the problem, let alone where the problem is?
If you can not correctly state the problem to yourself with your
own thinking - of what use is it to babble to someone else?
The babbling takes place but neither babbler or babblie knows
it to be such.
Zalta and gang at the Metaphysics Research Lab are on the right
track, but they skirt around the issue of consciousness like everyone
else.
And the people that talk about consciousness generally don't mess
with metaphysics. David Chalmers is the best I have seen -
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/biblio.html
But it is clear he lacks confidence on some very fundamental things
yoga teaches. The west has a long way to go. Language goes a lot
further than this. I suspect there are lots of things never even
imagined before by the junk I see. People that deal with
superior/meta languages generally identify the 'pet' ideas of the
object language. But such 'superior' languages are only superior
in the areas men have chosen to exploit them. Sanskrit is an
example but the same could be said about computer programs
in other areas. Vyass Houston has a NASA Artifical Intelligence
story on that very account/using Sanskrit.
Mike Dubbeld
Chad L
"Mike Dubbeld" <mi...@erols.com> wrote in message news:ar66n8$3s1$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
. Experiences are
> not a function of our language at all.
sorry to snip all the rest, but this looks like a fairly central point to what you are saying that I
agree completely with. Instead, it is language that is a function of experience (and not
vice-versa) - just as much as experience is a function of past experience.
John Jones
language. Thats like saying experience is behaviour, or
some such other. Experience is reported, and then
becomes language, but as for experience itself, Witgy
might have fancied passing over it in silence.
JJ
Mike Dubbeld <mi...@erols.com> wrote in message
news:ar66n8$3s1$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...