I love Magritte. His work ignites my imagination, as does Escher's. "Not To Be Reproduced" is one of my favorites of Magritte. I find it pretty philosophical, as it seems to hint at a doppelgänger theme that can be found in Shelley, David Lynch, and this short story I wrote for our short story contest. What exactly that theme is I don't know, but it pulls at the strings of what it means to be a human being, which makes it philosophical, since philosophy is about being a human being.

Art is information about the artist's evolving process of self organization.

Philosophy can be defined in exactly the same way.

Philosophy is information about the philosopher's evolving process of self organization.

These are the constant elements in art and philosophy, everything else is optional - endlessly variable and open ended. — Pop

Artists and philosophers don't organize themselves the same way. Thus, art and philosophy, using your logic, are different.

Yes, the human species - the same species that has been the most destructive in the history of earth - will suddenly, inexplicably, do a one-eighty and not just undo everything we messed up, but make right everything that we deem to have been made wrong from the very beginning. — darthbarracuda

Someone actually thinks that?

I think it's science fiction. I think the goals are noble, but that it amounts essentially to a religion, wildly exaggerating what we can do with our knowledge and capacity of science. — Manuel

:up:

Transhumanism tends to lack any understanding of what I can't think to call properly other than "the human condition". We're flawed, and technology won't fix our flaws.

Unsupportive.

Not to be annoying, but how is this thread not relegated to the lounge while others are? At the least it should be in the Phil of Art section, and that would still be generous.

Yeah, I like that track I posted. I was just saying this to my co-worker, though...it's a good track, but I can see why it's a B-side.

To me, it's message is that there are experiences that are not reducible to language, not concepts. For me, concepts, ideas, are creatures of language. I think the distinction is important. — T Clark

I've never thought about it this way before, so I found this very interesting. I'm chewing it in my cud right now. *cow noises*

But can't concepts be derived from experiences?

:rofl: For once I agree.

I think we already did, but they won't understand it, so it doesn't matter.

Interesting indeed!

Yea, true, but only when it consists of following infallible folk. At any rate, doubt that Wittgenstein took himself to be such, though I can't say as much about some of his adorers. — javra

Witty can seem infallible; indeed, on the surface, he does. Hence his religious followers.

Religion will do that to you too.

Religion will do that to you.

The idea that language encourages us to think in certain ways and limits our ability to think in others is very attractive. — T Clark

I get the sentiment, but I would word it differently. The intuition that I get is that there is an extent to which words help us construct our reality. So it's not that language "encourages" (language isn't sentient, is it?) or that it "limits" us, but rather that language is one aspect of experience that shapes our reality. It's part of our reality and it plays a role in shaping it at the same time.

Not all poems have sentences, but some do. — T Clark

Fair enough, but hairy belly appeared to be assuming there always are, which to me smacked of a lack of knowledge of poetry, which made me laugh internally, considering the role poetry plays in language and it's evolution.

As I noted, I think this is probably an oversimplification. — T Clark

Can you elaborate on why you think so?

Lol, there aren't sentences in poetry...

:up:

Something I learned many moons ago in my psychology of language class. From Wikipedia:

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.

I, and I think psychologists in general, were skeptical of this even back when I took the class, but I think there is something there. My children were all involved in a French Immersion program from the time they were in kindergarten. Watching them, it has always seemed to me that having two languages gives you two different minds.

I love German. I think being able to speak it a little opens me up to concepts and ways of thinking. On the other hand, I think that's the weak version of the Whorf hypothesis, i.e. some ideas are easier to express and come more naturally in one language vs. another, but it's possible to translate. Or, you can just steal the word. — T Clark

Not to be dramatic or self-important, but this "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" is exactly the same idea that I've felt intuitively for years without any special knowledge of the subject; I had never heard of this specific hypothesis before now. I have no expertise or argument to use to back up this intuition.

I need to think about it more, as you would say.

I'm not a Radiohead fanboy by any means, but this track is super cool and has me excited to hear the B-side album Kid A Mnesia that's coming out soon:

@Banno

What about color spectrum gradient? Let's get off the religiousic Witty high horse for a minute and realize that color exists on a gradient more fine than language does. Who's going to argue for one exact color gradient that the phrase "French Grey" defines? Come on now boys.

P-sha, I get instantly offended by logging on to the forum. :party:

Well, you sound offended; I didn't mean to offend you.

Of that which is a portmanteau, one must be uncertain.

The reference is the Wittegenstein.

All that I'm saying is what happens if I take a modern text - a novel, a scientific treatise, a poem, etc. - and take it back 2,000 years into the past and ask the people then to translate it: plane = iron bird? :chin: — TheMadFool

If a scholar from 2,000 years ago hypothetically somehow had the tools to translate future language into their current language, then I suppose anything would be possible, given those parameters, so then the gravity of the hypothetical question would completely disintegrate, rendering it laughable. This is why I hate these stupid, uncreative thought experiments (P-zombies, et al; take no offense please).

Woah. We may have to have a chat about that. Cheers to Herge and Lindsay. :party:

Incorrect

Who?..

Nice Tintin avatar, btw. And I can't help but ask... "Arcturus" wouldn't be a reference to "A Voyage To Arcturus" by David Lindsay, right?

I don't know the etymology of "computer" by heart, but I'd assume it has to do with "one that computes". But technological words are potentially the exception to the rule, although I think they're not unlike naming planets after Greek or Roman gods; established concepts are consciously used to define a new technological or scientific concept - but that's the exception to the rule of how language functions, although maybe increasingly that will change with the evolution of technology. My point is that, barring everything I just mentioned, language functions organically in that definitions arise naturally over time and are substantiated through common use, not through any premeditated design.

It looks as though description is synonymous with definition. The objective of definitions being to condense information, the description, in one word. It's very much like the concept of radix in math in which you pack quantities in different powers of a given radix. See packing problems. — TheMadFool

But at no point in history did anyone say "let's condense information into a single world and then we'll have a definition". I think you're thinking about it backwards. Definitions of words come after their use in language. Definition is academic; use is public and first.

I disagree!

Right; poetry is generally translatable word for word from one language to another. :razz:

:up:

but I think those moments only work because theyre not sentence like, not proposition like, theyre gesture-like, theyre a moment-like, something happening like. If you talk of truth-value, and stuff, its not a container that will hold a truth-value past that moment — Arcturus

I do agree with you and I like your way of putting (saying?) it here. But all I'm pointing out is that we have to acknowledge indescribability in order to realize we share the experience of indescribability. If the most over-quoted phrase on TPF is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", then my mental response has always been "you're the one who brought it up, Witty..."

When you recognize some things are unsayable or undescribable, you have to give up saying and describing. — Arcturus

But acknowledging indescribability to another person communicates that you feel that way. Like we're doing here. Doesn't that communication have value?

Surely deep-seated love exists which is difficult, if not impossible to express with language. It doesn't have to be romantic. I love my older brother in ways that I can't seem to express. That includes things about him I really don't like at all. Language is not simple math; there are reasons beyond the utility or lake thereof of language that render a fundamental human experience like love hard to express.

Quarks, protons, digital, transgender, Hostess Twinkie, television, internet, Covid 19, HIV, Slim Jim, cell phone, penicillin, GPS, Watergate, infotainment.... — T Clark

You sound like Bono.

But seriously, , this is a question I've always thought about a lot, but never felt I had the linguistic grasp to start a thread on, so I'm grateful you started it; regardless of how "thorough" your OP was. Folks get a little fundamentalist about that sort of thing here, but I immediately was interested in the thread. Works for me.

More broadly, I've wondered in the past if there are actual aspects of fundamental reality that are only grasped by speakers of specific languages through words and expressions in their respective languages... "Untranslatability", a term suggesting that something real is indeed there that can't be properly translated. As time moves on, I've started to move away from this intuition, but I'm still open to it. I'm more of the disposition now that language often fails, so it's not quite on the pedestal it used to be on for me, but I still love language.

Maybe you know more than I do. I'm looking for the 5/7/5 pattern I know, but I'm not seeing it. I'm aware that the original Japanese structure isn't the same. It still doesn't quite add up to 17, so again, maybe I'm in the dark here.