leyline

Hi spacer

Yeh I had a cool weekend thanks, still am. but my girlfriend is getting jumpy about me writing not playin so I will write again later.

Yes I am familiar with wittgensteins private language argument, and this is fundamental to what I mean by a language being loaded. If language isn’t private then you are not entirely free as an individual. Like a car, there is terrain that it is suited to and terrain that it is not, and then there is the truth and experience of speed, and manouverability and so on. They haven’t invented a family saloon that can beat all comers at all aspects of driving, and they never will. There will always be advantages to not putting kids in the back. Similarly for culture and language. Moreover no car means no car driving,……. And no culture and language means no truth.

“To recognize any patterns in reality, which is necessary to signify such a pattern by a symbol or word, requires a mind to interpret that reality and/or find those patterns.”

Not just a mind…… but a culture for that mind to exist and grow in. imo

Re ghosts..

“What do they claim to see then? The way I see it, the contents of the mind can only be effected by the external world, or by the mind itself.”

Well there we go. That’s your cultural way of relating to yourself and the external world. Buddhism on the other hand makes no distinction between outer and inner, and if you can personally experience it by overcoming the common cultural view then they claim it is a very very profound event. Similarly people claim that they can relate to the spirit world by not being blocked by scientific rationalism.

spacer1

Leyline,
I don't see how language could prevent you from doing anything you could otherwise normally do (limiting your freedom). Language is used to communicate some aspect of experience. It should not encapsulate the entire experience (somewhat akin to a map not being the territory it describes), for, if it did, there would be no need for communication - it would be the same as having the experience itself (or providing the person you are communicating with, with the same experience you are describing).

It seems you are arguing that language cannot fully capture our experiences, and so, it interferes with our ability to capture the truth. What I am interpreting you as saying here is that language is too general to be able to relate all the specifics of a given experience and so does not really get at the whole Truth.

I wish to turn this view on its head (as I believe Wittgenstein did) and say that the very fact that we share a language and can communicate our experiences, must suggest that our (every human being's) experiences of the world are extremely similar. If they were not, then we could not even have language. Far from your view that language is too general to encapsulate all our different subjective experiences, I would make the claim that our subjective experiences are not very different at all, but that our attempts to communicate such experiences are where the problems arise. Our subjective experiences are objective facts (or mine are, at least ). It is the descriptions of those experiences/facts where, I believe, discrepancies over the truth arise.
Only one mind is necessary to recognize patterns in reality. A culture is required to communicate such recognitions.
It may be cultural, but I also think that the mental division between inner and outer is necessary in order to communicate experiences to others.

Tristan Scott

First of all, I already mentioned that the temperature argument is the one that is normally used in explaining Protagoras' philosophy. If you think it's silly, well I guess philosophy does seem silly to some people, but then my question would be, what are you doing starting a thread in a philosophy board if you aren't willing to discuss different philosophies?

Ridiculing other's philosophy, and calling people with whom you disagree names only underlines out your own bigotry.

sophie

spacer1, Leyline,

so would we say that private language underlines one's own understanding of what we are trying to communicate? Then logically the not so private language discusses the shared understanding which is communicated?

sophie

TAZZ, to further your mind in philosophy, what I should point out, is at the instant one realises one has the truth, as I said earlier the turning point within the self then this :

"Sophie, it looks to me like truth is its own delivery system. It's like light, when you hold it out in front you can see wherever you look. When you understand a fact, do you know it, or see it? Do you convert truth, or does truth convert you, or are you converted by truth, or are you converted in your understanding by finding the truth in something. The fact that life exsists it truth. So truth emanates out of life itself. People find truth shining. The light of truth. I saw a woman today. She was one of the most beautiful women in the whole world i have ever seen if not the most beautiful. What is beautiful to me, may not be what's beautiful to you. That it's possible that someone might be beautiful to me, but not to you, is true, and that is the truth. But it may also be true that she wasn't truly beautiful at all. But then it may also be true the she was God... but then maybe not."

may follow as a consequence of having posession of the truth. NOT before.

If you have not noticed the rest of us were discussing how to arrive at the point of clearly labelling the information in one's posession as truth. Mabye a second stronger reading of all the discussions here may serve your truth better.

John Page

Sophie:

My interpretation is not whether the private language is shared, but whether we're consciously aware of it.

There seems no obligation upon the "public language" to discuss shared understanding - it could be like ships passing in the night - although it could be said that is its purpose/function.

On the other hand, private language is just something we haven't learned anough about or we're not sufficiently aware of it. Arguably its still language and thus would have the same shared understanding purpose/function as any other language, private, public or otherwise.

Cheers, John

P.S. Maybe "private language underlies one's own understanding...."

leyline

Spacer

“I don't see how language could prevent you from doing anything you could otherwise normally do (limiting your freedom).”

Well that’s a commonly held view. But what is normality if it is not what your culture teaches you as normal? So I agree, but from a different perspective, that language does not prevent us from doing what’s normal because the culture defines the language and what ‘normal’ is. Eg the structure and rules of a sonnet are both a restriction and a means of freely using a cultural form.

“What I am interpreting you as saying here is that language is too general to be able to relate all the specifics of a given experience and so does not really get at the whole Truth.”

No not really. I am saying that languages are nowhere near as general as we naturally think they are. Any more than normality is general across cultures. Not only that but we have specific languages like mathematics that are not designed to communicate emotion for example.

“the very fact that we share a language and can communicate our experiences, must suggest that our (every human being's) experiences of the world are extremely similar.”

I strongly disagee here. Both individuals within our culture and the general populace of a very different culture can have very different experiences to most of us ‘in here’. There are of course a very wide set of experiences that we share like hunger and sight and so on, but even so how we interpret them and relate them can be very different. Eg serendipity is seen as meaningless coincidence within the scientific paradigm but a profound communication with the universe or god for others.

Different interpretations that are a part of experience and not separate from them, lead to very different languages. There are words in some languages that simply do not have corresponding ones in others.

“Our subjective experiences are objective facts (or mine are, at least ).”

well we differ there but I can see that it can make sense within certain cultural paradigms.

leyline

Sophie

“so would we say that private language underlines one's own understanding of what we are trying to communicate? Then logically the not so private language discusses the shared understanding which is communicated?”

well public language is neither pure freedom or a watertight straight jacket. Generally language and culture evolves and changes, and individuals play a very important role in that. An individual can invent a private word for a new concept, and then the culture can adopt it and make it more culturally general. But agreement is intrinsic to this process just as it is with truth.

sophie

Here is another example for modal truth.

leyline : An individual can invent a private word for a new concept, and then the culture can adopt it and make it more culturally general. But agreement is intrinsic to this process just as it is with truth.

In the latter case of spreading the truth behind the new word, agreement is necessary. In the case of the private individual's understanding which leads a private individual to create a new word to abbreviate the understanding of the new truth, there is no necessity to have agreement except the agreement private individuals reach through understanding the truth with themselves.

Thus there seems to me so far three modes of truth,
(1) The truth individuals find within themselves.
(2) The truth individuals obtain through interaction with the objective world.
(3) The truth amoung a group of individuals.

According truth in these cases are not achieved through the same truth delivery systems and as such I argue for modal truth.

leyline

sophie

i wouldn't argue against modal truths ......... anymore than i would argue against validity in any cultural paradigm. But...........

"In the case of the private individual's understanding which leads a private individual to create a new word to abbreviate the understanding of the new truth, there is no necessity to have agreement except the agreement private individuals reach through understanding the truth with themselves."

i personally disagree with this, because i relate to the world through a different cultural bias. The private truth introduced to a culture through a new concept and understanding etc. for me cannot occur in a cultural vacuum. The private language can only exist for me within the context of an inherited one. What we think and feel is a private insight i believe is actually enabled through a cultural existence with all its bias and freedom.

i also disagree with the concept of the objective world. It implies that reality is there to be related to and would be as such even without that relationship. I believe that reality is profoundly affected by the relationships we have. Truths for example are not independent of cultural context for me, but are nevertheless a part of reality within that context. We create them through relationships with reality. What reality is like without relationship to it is for me unknowable to humans, because we need relationship in order to know anything. But having said that i realise that the opposite point of view "makes sense" within its own terms. Many people would agree with you.