Keith Russell

Kantian:

So, when your 'protohuman' selects an object (in order to be able to guide his finger to 'point to it') you still insist that no thinking is invovled?

Keith.

Gurdur

A fascinating thread; and I stand in respectful awe of your stamina.

Just a few questions and idle notes:

1) Would you mind expanding on your statement quoted above ?
i.e. why do you think that of Dennett ?

2) Universal Grammar is no longer solely Chomsky, for which we can be very, very thankful.
Chomsky's view was always too mechanistic and too explanatory --- it explained everything possible, including a Turing machine, and therefore explained nothing (such as why human languages are but a sub-set of all possible grammatical languages.
There are better models of Universal Grammar; so far they're only trudging along, but IMHO they're the only answer.
BTW, ksagnostic, a psycholinguist who posts every now and then here, would completely disagree with me on this score.
His opinion is very worth while checking out.
copernicus, another professional linguist, would also be well worth asking on this.

3) Out of massive interest, why do you never (as far as I know) refer to evolution ?
For example, in this discussion it's of topical interest with regards to the algorithms that birds and animals use for problem-solving, these then forming the foundations for our own hollowly-trumpeted and often-strumpeted human cognition.

After all, evolutionary science has been around long enough to finally be intergrated even in the sacred halls of philosophy, or no ?


Sorry if this seems a bit rude to jump in here with the above while you're conducting at least 3 massive discussions at once.

John Page

What have you been smoking? You state "If identification requires persistence than persistence dictates identification." Things have been proven to persist outside of our direct and immediate perception of them. What makes you think persistence entails identification (the latter being a process of mind).
So you're taking the idealist position?
Is one not part of the other?
Yes. I also have some things not to say that he did say.
Yes, I wholeheartedly disagree.
Using perjorative terms can at times be persuasive but I suggest you attend to the arguments instead of indulging in baseless accusations.
Red herring. Anyway, animals have language. Giraffes whisper.

Yes I would. Of course, its unlikely anyone would be able to understand what I was refering to.
The body. BTW have you checked out this topic Headless thinking
Freedom of choice does not deny that something within us determines that choice.

Cheers, John

John Page

"and the word means nothing that man has not made it mean". This is over-grand, the meaning of words comes from the reality that man uses them to describe.
Word-play.
Oh no it isn't!
Nice definition, Ludwig.
How about "The experience of fish is salty water"?
... and the lies from mans tongue condemn the art of communication to one of subterfuge through the sacrifice of accuracy.
Way to go Martin!
This answer is not comprehensible, I asked "How would I know what are the necessary books?"
In other words, you made another pointless remark and introduced confusion by introducing the ideas of others and running away when it suits.
So, the correspondence theory of truth most closely corresponds to the truth. You appear guilty of clinging on to a "given" constant "word in language". Nice ontology, Kantian! (sarcastically)
Putting words in my mouth again! Where did I say that a concept is independent of its natural surroundings? Sharp boundaries? Perhaps you're confusing me with one of those analytical philosophers you revile so much.
Anyway, let's say formal language is public and has definable rules of syntax. Please clarify when you say "I doubt a speaker of a different language may understand a concept in isolation..." - in isolation from what?
"reality is senseless"? Are you accusing me of anthropomorphism wrt reality? Where is the proof that language is "self contained"? Am I to find it in reality?
Now you're fishing. I'm a staunch relativist and the synthetic a priori is exactly what it says it is, synthetic.
I think Keith has you pretty well cornered on this one so I'll leave it to him.
Like I said before, pragmatism leads to Platonic masturbation (evidence your response).
Tell me more of this "mythical substratum" o wizard of the west.

Cheers, John

Kantian

Correct. The word “thought” refers to some sort of introspective act, and introspection requires self-consciousness. Animals and protohumans are conscious of their environment, undeniably so, but self-consciousness is a latecomer to the stage of history. I’m looking at Jaynes’ wild claims to see how watertight they are, and for the moment, I can’t find many faults. I define thinking as the activity we engage in after we gain the apparatus of self-consciousness, which is ascertained only after we develop as a member of a community that practices the certain activity called “language.”

You may be confusing the activity in the brain in the proto-human as ‘thinking,’ but that’s not what I mean.

~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."

Buddrow_Wilson

perhaps symbolism should be used instead of language. Thoughts could easily be expressed through symbols. If a person were raised purposely without language would they not at some point still develop thoughts?


Praise Be To The EAC

Kantian

Welcome, Gurdur, to the philosophy forum where naturalists are the lions and us transcendentalists are the Christians!

Nothing like yours, I’m sure.

I very much doubt the ‘idleness’ of these notes

If you have read Dennett’s book, you will detect a streak of scientism in his writings. In his attempt to ‘explain’ consciousness as heterophenomenology, he has been accused of vulgar reductionism or revisionism- saying that conscious experience is merely the reports or judgments or beliefs we inveigh about experience. It’s questionable whether his remark of consciousness as a joycean machine is justified – one may merely mention animals and infants are conscious sans the joycean apparatus. I’m also interested in doing away with mythological monsters of philosophy, such as Cartesianism, but from a different vantage point than Dennett’s. If Dennett paid more attention to Wittgenstein than lip service, he wouldn’t be as naïve in his treatment of the nature of psychology of language.

May I ask what they are, where to look for them and why you think they are the only answer? What books would you recommend looking into, so I can update my ammunition for future John “Dennett” Pages?

Thanks for the heads-up.

Only with the respect of the direction within this thread, I am not truly concerned with scientific theories at this level of philosophy. If I am going to discuss about algorithms birds and animals employ in their activities I would be far more concerned with whether we are importing Cartesian dualism when we should’ve gotten rid of that chimera completely. Let scientists do science, and let philosophers squabble about what is science.

The distinction between evolutionary science and philosophy is an “evolutionary” one – so to speak. Evolutionary science is a specialized field that is as distant from the vanishing wafts of the philosophical landscape as the solar system is from a quasi-stellar object. Evolutionary science is based on a number of suppositions philosophy preoccupies itself with – in other words, if you’ll allow a vulgar metaphor, it is a compartment at the 100th floor of a skyscraper where the irascible thinkers scurry about in the basement arguing over obscure concepts and definitions.

Will Durant said it best: “Science always seems to advance while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science- problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science beings as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics) or of the inexactly known (ethics and politics); it is the front trench of the siege of truth. Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored.”

It's no bother, i'm on vacation. I’m tired of :banghead: with numbskulls. Am I to take it you fancy yourself the 3rd massive interlocutor?

~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."

Keith Russell

Kantian said:
The word “thought” refers to some sort of introspective act, and introspection requires self-consciousness. Animals and protohumans are conscious of their environment, undeniably so, but self-consciousness is a latecomer to the stage of history.

[snip]

I define thinking as the activity we engage in after we gain the apparatus of self-consciousness, which is ascertained only after we develop as a member of a community that practices the certain activity called “language.”

Keith: The above is yet another unsupported claim. You haven't offered any evidence to support your definition of 'thought', you've only stated that the above is your definition. You've offered no explanation as to why the above is your definition. I suspect the reason is that only the above definition allows you to stand by your earlier statements.

You say 'animals and protohumans'. That is redundant, you realize, since human beings (including, of course, 'protohumans') are animals.

Lastly, you say this:
I define thinking as the activity we engage in after we gain the apparatus of self-consciousness, which is ascertained only after we develop as a member of a community that practices the certain activity called “language.”

You claim that 'we develop as a member of a community', which is incorrect. 'I' can develop as a member of a community', but 'we' cannot. 'We' develop as a community; 'I' develop only as an individual 'member'.

(This isn't merely a grammatical correction; I am becoming increasingly more convinced that you do not view human beings as individuals, and the above is a symptom of this.)

And this statement, too--even with its improper conjugation--is another yet unsupported claim. If a community practices language, then its members gain self-consciousness, and only then do those members begin to think, then I ask you yet again:

How do we develop language without thinking? (I know this is what you believe happens; you need not restate your premise. I know also that you define language in such a way that it appears plausible; you need not restate your definitions.)

But how does this happen? What is the nuerobiological mechanism which allows a community of 'protohumans' to develop both community and language, without having developed the ability to think? What is the process such individual 'protohumans' undergo in order to form community and language without 'thought'?

And, where is the evidence which supports your earlier claim that we develop the ability to design and employ language prior to developing or possessing the ability to think?

And, where is the evidence which supports your new claim--that we develop community prior to both 'thought' and 'language'?

Keith.

John Page

Kanticle:

Here's the question:

If language is the universe's fount, (as seems to be your debating position), and thus the source of absolute transcendent truth (which, incidentally, seem to be your opinion of the beliefs of "scientists" wrt empirical knowledge) then please provide a meaning for the word "indescribable" viz "too unusual or extreme to be described."

As you will be forced to acknowledge, for the word indescribable to be part of a meaningful language, there must be something indescribable and therefore this something is outside of language. Conversely, for the word indescribable to be meaningless is to admit the lack of language's ubiquity.

So much for the cunninglinguists.

Cheers, John

Kantian

..demanding Jerry Seinfeld to logically prove his sense of humor.

Another? Have I made an unsupported claim in the past you missed a chance to take me to task on? Now that is highly unlikely! You can demand for support of any claim as long as it makes an assertion that requires evidence. However, in philosophy you are required to look beyond such scientific thinking, beyond the apparent evidence, beyond the limits of positivist thinking and examine the bottommost assumptions, concepts, ideas, notions, etc., and work out the implications.

As for your demands of evidence to support my definition, that’s easy. I will begin practicing the psychology of language, and analyze how words mean. The meaning of each word in language is its use. We learn words in language solely from external means – for example, when we were expressing discomfort as toddlers, parents called our behavior ‘hunger.’ ‘He is crying because he is hungry.’ We learn the definition of the word ‘hungry’ from ostensible means that are exhibited to the world.

I agree- then I should have written “animals, specifically proto-humans’..” You may now start your happy dance.

If you paid as much attention in your analysis of fragments that they are merely fragments, i.e. broken snippets of a complete sentence, you’d saved yourself the trouble of going to such lengths trying to make my claims look ridiculous.

For those who aren’t inclined to scroll up, the gist of my sentence is as follows: “Thinking is the activity we gain after we become self-conscious, which comes only after the development of a community that practices language.” Since I am not saying that ‘we develop as a member of a community’ as a stand-alone sentence Keith, I recommend you may shove that strawman back where it belongs.

However you have raised a point I want to stress. The concept of individuality does not exist prior to the manifestation of language. There is no ‘self,’ no ‘I,’ no ‘me,’ or any notion of individuality without a participation in a culture because the only possible criterion of a feasible language is intersubjective, meaning it depends on the participation of several members. The notion of a Cartesian self is derived from the constituents of grammar, and has as much force as the convictions of the person who invents metaphysics based on bad grammar.

And I’m becoming increasingly more convinced that you do not see anything but in black and white- if it is not an individualistic enterprise or pays lip service to the human ego, it must be an evil collective enterprise that you are morally obligated to swiftly condemn at the outset. Instead of making insipid inferences, why don’t you ask whether I see human beings as individuals? After all, I am a huge fan of Sartre’s existential implications. When you stop thinking in black and white, that one concept is automatically good and its antonym, evil, you can engage in philosophy unscrupulously.

Good question- only if I was offering a scientific hypothesis. Given the implications of this anti-philosophical stance, there were going to be inevitable investigations of this nature in the related fields of anthropology and psychology. I have been doing light reading, and the studies of Rene Girard and Julian Jaynes for further research in the origins of consciousness and language are quite interesting. Girard argues that human desire is not innate, but an acquired behavior gained through imitation, or what he calls mimesis. Man is fundamentally an imitative creature who copies perceived desires of others, and that results in potential conflict. The mimicry of desire of an object leads to predictive behavior, and communities began to emerge in early man- strictly with groups of 30 or so. They practiced the enforcement of socially sanctioned rules by ritual scapegoating – a random victim is sacrificed for the mob. That quelled the thirst of violence and the constant repetition of this ritual developed culture, societies, and language. Jaynes investigated the link between current schizophrenics and the connection between a dormant region (wernicke?) in the right brain hemisphere. From this fact and a wealth of evidence (hermeneutical reading of historical text) Jaynes concluded that consciousness emerged with the breakdown of the bicameral mind around 1000 BCE.

My anti-philosophical rehabilitation does not depend on a theory of mind. I have no interest in explaining things by cognitive processes, instincts, or mental mechanisms. All these notions will subvert the problem to the theory, and then the theorist begins to see the problem through the eyeglasses of his theory. I am strongly in favor of getting rid of explanation and leave only description behind.

Murder. Cultural institutions and consequently, language, were born in collective murder. Although that is a far-fetched hypothesis of Girard, all we have to do is observe how language is acquired at childhood where it is taught in ostensive means. Since there are no proto-humans to study today we are limited to speculation about their behavior from the current evidence we have at hand- and the best candidate is to observe how our language works.

Tut tut. I hate to disappoint you because there is no evidence – because I am not giving you a scientific hypothesis. The bald description of how language works is where I depart from archaic philosophical vocabulary of Kant, of Descartes, and of Hume. The mistakes of philosophers came from their failure to recognize that their activity was working with language, inside language, especially when they were inspecting the workings of language. This is not a denial of the existence of reality or the ability to utter true claims of such, but we are using expressions in our language like ‘reality,’ ‘real world,’ or ‘truth.’ All these words have a function in language activity and work the same way ordinary terms do.

The philosopher who plays in platonic metaphysics and attempts to divine the sublime nature of reality or truth is no longer to be trusted. Far better to describe how these words are used- and the criterion of the meaning of all or any word(s), symbol(s), sign(s) is ultimately social. The meaning of a word is merely its use, and that meaning depends on socially sanctioned rules. The rules are developed by an intersubjective agreement between persons. That places an onus on the history of culture or civilization, and we can look at the foremost investigators of a scientific keen in anthropology, archaeology, sociology and psychology.

Traditional epistemology is based on the naïve assumption that we can, should, or are capable of building knowledge of the world from inside out, which begins at the inner private sensations and build a public language/knowledge on the grounds of inner experience. Language does not work that way – we do not invent concealed inner definitions of private sensation and then build a vocabulary. Since language is tied to the public social phenomena at all times, the only way we could have a vocabulary for talking about hunger is that hunger arises in certain situations and produces external indicators – behavior. Because we learn the vocabulary with a public criteria that is tied to behavior and circumstances ordinary sensation language is not private at all. We could not even provide one because we couldn’t decide on a private ostensive definition where we just point inwardly to a private experience and name it, then keep on using the same name in other situations. We could not be able to distinguish between using the private word right and just thinking we are using it correctly. If this isn’t possible then the notion of a private language collapses in a reduction ad absurdum manner. The solution to the problem is that rules of grammar are socially authorized. Since we are members of a linguistic community we have rules in language. Only through a public social criteria can we use language to refer to private experiences. Anything inner depends on an outer criterion.

Therefore no form of human discourse can step outside of discourse to render an antiseptic judgment about it. Our only access to reality is a semiological one, yet if language is intrinsically unstable, and language constructs the self, then the self is intrinsically unstable, a nihilating black hole of nothing.

~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."