Kantian

Now i have returned from Dupont City, i can get on with unfinished business!
I was shooting for a hierarchical mode of thinking- with language as the over-arching be-all and end-all holistic entity, and the term ‘identity’ functioning as the specific activity in which we repeat over time. Yet this activity includes the assumption that we make an identity through time, which introduces a problem of reidentification. Once we gain the ability to form an identity “in our mind” (using pre-wittgenstein references is awkward and laborious) how are the assumptions we make on a case-by-case basis justified? Derrida makes a similar charge against Husserl’s unexamined assumptions in his phenomenology in the book Speech and Phenomena. Would you agree that all or any discourse about identity is actually a covert attempt at discussing being or existence in the ontological fashion? Is Quine correct in his slogan, “no entity without identity” ?

Also, would you be amiss if I said that there is identity in difference, i.e. that identity is not what it is and is what it is not? This apparent contradiction stems from the limits of the understanding, and not from the position of reason. Sweet jesus I think I just had me a bone rattling philoso-gasm!

Aaargh! You have cursed me with a representational theory of perception! Get thee hence, thou eliminative materialist! That’s largely an untenable theory, thanks to its painfully incompetent attempt of extruding sensory experience from the individual sensorium into the material world.

True- because there is no “internal” language you are inventing here as a straw position. Internal or private language is not even coherent. However, on the other hand, language does distort and hide the reality we perceive. Is the experience of love possible without participating in the activity of a language that contains the word love?

Before we recognize the word “dog,” we need a society that establishes the intersubjective parameters of the language in order to do so. So it is not necessarily an individualistic enterprise you are making it out to be.

The ontology of identity is very interesting, and I have written an essay on this subject matter.

Humor me then, what is the difference between what and how one talks?

And are these “physical mechanics” related to Chomsky’s linguistic suppositions? If so, how? And if not, why not?

Goes to show that even the scientist-minded philosopher is as much a weasel a clever rhetorician is reputedly to be.


No, you misunderstood. There are different kinds of proofs. I am asking you how to specify one, in order to understand the question.

Why?

Then the claim that our minds are “emergent” from the material processes isn’t too far from what you’re claiming. The experimental evidence is limited to a causal chain assumption, and neatly rules out the phenomenological experience from the get-go. A mistake to wring through that concept through the wrong apparatus, methinks.

Actually it’s vice versa. Space and time are ‘forms of intuition,’ or conditions of a possible experience the mind automatically assigns to experience, or brings to the table. Ergo, each bits of sensory data contains rudiments of spatial or/and temporal essentials. Otherwise experience would be unintelligible, and a naked empirical theory, at least a honest one will fall into skepticism. If you persist in claiming that the mind IS the brain, which is nothing more than a complex electro-chemical machine, then you are commiting a reductio ad absurdum of your beliefs about functionalism or materialism. True or false?

It isn’t my theory of persistence, FYI. Is it true that ephiphenomenalism sacrifices the concept of free will, that at most the ephiphenomenalist is reduced to pleading that the concept of FW is obscure?

In a world of objects that absorbed all visible light, we would be able to hear and smell and touch other elements of experience, correct?

Your external world hypothesis founded upon the empirical style is notoriously weak, and prone to the bundle theory, a stream of consciousness conclusions. The inference that the collection of sense data as an ‘external world’ is the inductive in nature, i.e. animal beliefs.

Yes, a child learns to form assumptions about the sense data he receives from his environment, but he will not be able to identify them as incongruent elements privately, without the advent of society, which is another person practicing the same language.

Works either way, since the word ‘empirical’ is an adjective. Remember your repeated assertion that reality is the source of meaning is actually elucidated within our language, which helps us see the world. By talking about ‘reality’ we occupy in the house of language, and therefore we are enslaved to the dungeons of language. The presumption that language is a medium is the biggest fool’s gold in philosophy.

I would be much happier to see what you meant as ‘reality’ without referring to a circular definition.

Then your answer to what reality is a sum of its parts.

besides the ones above, just this- do you really believe your impersonation of Dennett is going anywhere?

~Transcendentalist~
__________________
Reason has often led us into transcendent metaphysics that "overstep the limits of all experience, [and] no object adequate to the transcendental ideal can ever be found within experience."

Kantian

Interpretation is fundamentally linguistic because our subjective experiences are not amenable to a private language. We transcend the realm of privacy to share with others in the game of language to express how we feel, what we experience. That is interpretation.

I am not arguing against the phenomenological contents of experience or of memories, but that the language is the limit of our experience- that these memories are defined with our language. I remember something in the past, and in order to identify it I need the apparatus of language.

True, a person could not conceive of the empirical properties of the word 'blue' in itself, if he lacked any prior experience. However, suppose a person experienced all the shades of colors but blue. That means he is capable of conceiving of green, yellow, bluish-green or purple, and is potentially capable of deducing blue from what he has already experienced. But this is an empirical squabble, not a linguistic question, and I think a person would not be able to understand the experience of ‘blue’ as vivid as a person who is capable of participating in the language of his society. A person, say, the wolf boy, who lacks language, but functions like a human, is not a fully developed human being.

Incorrect. Our thoughts are extensions of our external practices of language. Thoughts are nonexistent without language. Try and prove your assertion to yourself, and think without using words. A jumble of nothingness, isn’t it?

~Transcendentalist~
_____________________________
The limit of logic is the limit of my world.
The limit of the world is definied by the limit of my language.
My world, the microcosm, is my self.
“I” am not contained in the world.
“I” am a limit of the world, not an object located within the world.

John Page

So, the end justifies the means?
Not really, you just need repeatability or persistence.
No. It does not need to be covert. If you agree that there is a physical/material part of reality and a mental or abstract component of reality then I ask "How are they related to each other." We suppose "things" have "identity" and any discourse about linguistics separate from identity is tyo talk about "how" rather than "what".
No, unless you reworded it to "no consciously perceived entity without identity".
No contradiction here, you just conferred separate identity on classes of thing that "are" and those that "are not". This reveals the possibility of identities that have no underlying "thing" and these are accomodated within my ontology.

You may, of course, object that identities are "things" in themselves. However, one has not created an "identity" which is an "abstraction of an identity" - and these two classes of thing have separate identities and one can proceed ad nauseum until all your brainpower is used up.
Enough name calling! I'm not sure what you're accusing me of. Please clarify.
I didn;t say there had to be an internal language. Yes, I think you are using language in a way that distorts reality. Your last proposition above seems absurd to me, entities experience reality without language. It seems to me that I first drank root beer without actually knowing the word for it.

Language is used to describe the experience, not the other way round.
Please read my post again. I was refering to a real dog, not the word dog. For the word dog to be meaningful we need to triangulate its use against an instance of the entity dog, (although sometimes a picture or other representation will do). All I'm doing, though, is describing how intersubjectivity occurs so I don;t think we have much disagreement here.
I'd be interested to read it. BTW so have I.
Please see third response in this post on discourse about identity.
No, because they work at a much more basic level than language.
Takes one to know one.
The proof that you consider reasonable (that the mind lacks location and volume).
Because I don't need to (agree with either Parmenides or Socrates in the Third Man Debate)
I don't think it rules out phenomenological experience and, IMO, leans partly upon it. The question is, how does the mind "emerge".
Stop trying to put words in my mouth.
1. I haven't claimed that the mind IS the brain.
2. How to you know the brain is nothing more than a complex elctro-mechanical machine? Or is this simply your definition of it? What about molocular and sub-molecular activity? What about certain mind function being physically located outside the brain?
3. If you refuse to accept the empirical evidence that an abstract, informational-type representation of reality resides in us and is derived from our sensory organs then you are doomed to an eternity of mental masturbation believing that the language fairy magically imparts meaning to reality. Forget putting labels on things and concentrate on the facts. (TeeHee).
I don't think the epiphenomenalist pleads anything. I suggest you consider that the proposition of epiphenomenalism results in physical action through mental action because mental action requires physical action. Thus, in the domain of mental activity the two are interchangeable.
I have not conducted this experiment.
...and the opposite approach invites confusion between what is real and what is imagined. I suggest you look at some of the links to neurological experience in the link to the "Mind/Body Border debate" I posted earlier.
So, all I said was its a learning process!!
There appears to be one reality and many languages. Furthermore, I can directly experience reality without the use of (your) language.
Here, in the language of diagrams as well as words
I am not and do not wish to impersonate Dennett. I bought his book entitled "Consciousness Explained" and was very dissappointed, IMO it was an interesting book but it didn't (explain consciousness).

Anyway, lots of fun in your reply. I think you'll agree that while language is very important and undoubtedly the mind/brain there are only around 816,000 words in the English language as against 10 billion neurons. Derrida may being having fun exploring the relations between words, and this might even provide clues how the mind/brain processes words, but a meaningful (pun intended) contribution to ontology is one I have yet to see.

Cheers, John

Osiris

I enjoyed reading the web page posted a while back...

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/t/truth.htm

However, just when it was getting into the science realm, it ended.

Looking at the origin of the word truth, all I can come up with is a word to describe a dependable reaction to an action. Of course this little word has grown to encompass "The Truth" and all of its religious connotations. However, I think absolute truth is something developed through satisfactory sampling. This can be conscious or unconscious deduction. "The Truth" is only a belief, and does not require proper sampling, only a trust in another person's version of truth.

John Page

Hi Kantian:

Previously in this thread I observed that Tarski did not offer a definition of truth that was free from transcendental ideals.

The truth is that Tarski relied upon a rigidly defined metalanguage to resolve paradoxes in the underlying language. However, since languages in themselves ultimately obtain their meaning from the appearance of reality, using langauge alone results in meaningless transcendent ideals - the truth of which we would never be able to discover.

Consider truth itself as the object here. If we were never able to compare a physical instance of a written word with another, how would we know whether they were (truly) equivalent in symbolic/language terms? Same goes for the spoken word. Indeed, has it even been spoken more truly .

Enough of this jesting, although my example is serious. Do you subscribe to a definition of the truth that is not transcendent and, if so, what is it?

Cheers, John

Keith Russell

Transcendentalist said:
"Incorrect. Our thoughts are extensions of our external practices of language. Thoughts are nonexistent without language. Try and prove your assertion to yourself, and think without using words. A jumble of nothingness, isn’t it?"

Nope, I call such thoughts visual art...or music.

Neither has anything to do with 'words'.

Do you really think that human beings created language without first thinking? Have you ever met someone who coined a new word, or perhaps coined a word or phrase yourself? How did they do that, if they weren't first thinking of a concept; and also thinking that the concept they had in mind could use a word or phrase to refer to it?

Keith.

Thomas Ash

I just wanted to let everyone on the thread know that I'm going off to Ghana for three months tomorrow, so if I don't get back to people's replies, it's not that I'm being rude! I will try and log in from an internet café however, so I can debate atheism from Africa... Happy New Year everyone, see you in three months (or less)!

Pee Pee Poodle

Keith Russell

transcendentalist:

One more thing. Do you realize that if you believe that people cannot think until they have language, that this means that you believe that children learn to speak, without thinking--since you believe that thought follows language, rather than the other way around?

How do you account for this?

Keith.

John Page

Keith, I agree and anxiously await the trascendental reply that may cause the meaning of my life to evaporate in a puff of blue smoke.

Cheers, John