Why does the study of being qua motion (physics) implicate the study of being qua being (metaphysics)? Because motion is a kind of being. — Leontiskos

Yeah that's the inference I want you to flesh out. You have:

1 ) X is a subset of Y
2 ) Study of X is a subset of study of Y.

Why does 1 entail 2?

But the study of being qua being will be implicated in every other study of being (qua X). — Leontiskos

Why though?

I say that the dialogue would go differently. After the first reply of “I read it in the book,” the next recursion is not “Why?” but rather, “Tell me how reading it in the book justifies your answer.” The interlocutor would then need to give an account of fictional realities, and how they may relate to truth and justification, etc. etc. More philosophy, and very interesting philosophy at that. So it’s not just reading comprehension. What it “says in the book” is far from a concluding moment in the dialectic. — J

Broadly speaking I wanted to use the Frodo example to highlight some challenging properties of the question sequence that would need to be in place for the "termination in philosophy" to behave as you seem to want it to. But I wasn't explicit about it, because I hadn't thought those constraints through. Here is my attempt to highlight what was merely implicit in the Frodo example.

I think this is presumptive in a way the set up of the problem hasn't specified. It could very well be that the "right" answer to Q in that instance is as you say, but that elides the nature of a criterion by which the right answer could be specified.

I have bolded "would" there since it seems modal. But in my view it's the wrong modality for the question - I think the dialogue must go differently than I suggested in order for it not to count as an counter example. So we'd be left requiring an account of why the flippant repetition cannot count as an answer. It strikes me that it could count as one, even if it is a bad one.

Roughly, you'd need to constrain which answers are accessible from a start point by iterating Q.

Another wrinkle is that Q would need to be a specific question with one variable in it. It would need to behave very much like "Why is X justified?", where X is the prior assertion. I think you've given yourself a freedom to change at least the exact wording of the question in that paragraph. Which would be fine, but then there's a similar question to above regarding which questions are accessible from which other questions in this context. How do you ensure the content is preserved? Does the content need to be preserved? Or is the thesis a bit different?

Is it now more: "For every initial statement X, there exists a series of questions Q1, Q2, ... , Qn such that when Q1 is asked of X, and Q2 is asked of the answer of Q1 to X... the context of the answer of Qn is Philosophy"?

I’m suggesting that this be downrated to an argumentative pinnacle because of a particular characteristic it reveals: The philosopher can automatically trump any card played against them. Suppose some surly neo-Freudian interrupts me at the point where I assert that “there’s nowhere else to go.” Nonsense, he says. “I’ll give you a psychological-slash-reductive explanation of why philosophers do what they do, and this explanation will have nothing to do with ‛ideas’ or ‛reasoning,’ and everything to do with culturally determined modes of expression mixed with individual depth psychology.” Ah, but I can reply, “Indeed? And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true?” We see where this has to go: We’re back to doing philosophy. My surly interlocutor has been trumped. My question doesn’t arise out of any real insight or depth, but he can’t very well deny that it’s reasonable and meaningful. And nor can he claim that it has an answer within his discipline. — J

I don't think it follows that one discipline is more primordial/foundational than another based on the "what is your justification for this?" question's recursive nature. I will spell out why.

Asking the question "What's your justification for this this?" is recursive. Call asking that question of an assertion X the function Q( X ), which I'll just assume maps to another assertion X'. Every assertion occurs in a context, and call the mapping from an assertion of X to its context C( X ). I'm going to leave 'context' undefined for now, and just assume that every assertion has a context of utterance that makes it understandable, and some rules that characterise that context.

Some contexts will have properties that make their rules philosophical. If a context is characterised by rules of philosophy - again stipulate that such rules are comprehensible and recognisable -, say that that context has the property Phil.

The quote says that for every statement X, there exists a number of recursions of Q^n ( X ), mapping an assertion to its justification, such that Q^n( X ) has a context C characterised by Phil. You can grant that, but you might wonder why such a thing would render philosophy the "top level". Roughly what this claim states is that asking for justification eventually terminates in philosophy, but there's no particular argument for the uniqueness of the termination. The statement in the quote construes Phil as the demarcation between a fixed set of Q and other sets. There's a question about the uniqueness of the fixed set - why does asking that question eventually lead to philosophy?

When Hegel compares this image to the way a philosophical idea develops, he points out that nature must exist in time, so this development is necessarily time-sequential. But he emphasizes that, again, being last in a sequence is not what he means by “highest” or “last” philosophy. We are speaking of a dialectical process in which each stage retains or “sublates” the former one. Ideas reveal themselves as a theoretical unity, they do not grow or develop in time, like a plant. That would be like saying that 3 “comes before” 4 according to a clock measurement. This coming-before is surely not temporal. Rather, we perceive the sequence in one glance, so to speak, and can recognize that what is last has to be last, but not in the way that events in time are last. — J

The iteration of Q also induces an order on contexts. If you consider the sequence X, Q( X ), Q^2 ( X ) ..., Q^n ( X ) and so on, you could treat that as defining an order on the contexts. Which would just be C( X ), C(Q( X ) ), C(Q^2 ( X ) ), each context has its place in the order given by the number of recursions of Q it is evaluated of.

If you showed that for every initial X there existed an n such that C(Q^n ( X ) ) = Phil, you would have some kind of "termination in philosophy".

At this point, if we want to, we can shrug our shoulders and declare nothing of interest here. Or we could keep the Hegelian glasses on and speculate that philosophy is “last” or “concluding” because it represents a true limit of something beyond mere argumentation. If we go full-on Hegelian, we would describe this something as Idea, or Spirit. But we could also say, more modestly, that the limits of inquiry may also show us the limits of being. As mentioned earlier, this requires a monistic turn, a suspicion that what is true of thought must be true of being as well. We have all read Irad Kimhi by now ( :joke: ) so we know how complicated this can get. But, again more modestly, all I’m pointing to is this: If there is an important connection between what can be thought and what exists, then it must include a thesis about self-reflection, and the limits of inquiry, and how these limits are related to what exists. — J

But the relationship between the termination of the sequence of contexts in Phil and any properties of the recursive function Q remains unspecified. Why Q has the (alleged?) properties it has is something hitherto unexamined.

I do notice a bit of a landmine in this discussion, however. There is a presumption that Q can be meaningfully applied to any assertion X which is reached by some application of Q. Roughly this means that any assertion is in the domain of Q. Why would this be the case, when we know that questions generically also occur in contexts that determine their conditions of meaningful answer?

A ) For example, if you have 2+2=4, and someone asks why, you better give a mathematical answer.
B ) If you ask why Frodo had to bear the ring, you better give an answer in terms of Lord of the Rings.

In both cases, if you ceased talking in the initial context of assertion, you would no longer be providing relevant information about the question. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, since contexts tend to relate to each other even if they are distinct (but have fuzzy boundaries). What I suspect is producing the termination in Phil, if it indeed happens, is that it is a property of Q itself rather than any of the assertions it is applied to.

Here's an example of a chain that doesn't terminate in philosophy. So if X is "Frodo bears the ring", Q( X ) would be the answer to "How do you justify that Frodo bears the ring?", which would be "I read it in the book"... And someone asks you why... And you assert you read it in the book. And someone asks you why. And you assert you read it in the book. Which, I hope we can agree, is not a termination in philosophy. It's about basic reading comprehension.

It thus seems to me to be a big extrapolation to imagine that every image of Q's context tends more and more to philosophy. What ensures that Q( X ) has this convergent property? And what ensures the convergence always goes to philosophy? How do you argue that the convergence goes to philosophy without already arguing that philosophy interrogates the context of all contexts.

I'm not interested in discussing it with them at all, I just remarked that the decision to ban him has nothing to do with the forum being left-leaning or censorship as is being implied. But rather that he showed a failure to behave respectfully. — Christoffer

:up:

Take the discussion about the excesses of reactive left wing culture elsewhere @Leontiskos @Swanty , @Christoffer . It is an interesting topic for a thread but it's not for this one. If you have further comments related to Lio's banning, say them.

It is difficult to have any charitable interpretation of his remarks, in particular, given that he'd used a white supremacist organisation as a source and lied about it. There was plenty of other mod relevant behaviour which we did not provide warnings for, but serves as additional context. "Sodomy" and "george floydism" should be interpreted as pejorative given his past behaviour, some of which probably went unnoticed except through mod work. Making an explicit troll thread at the same time as that remark also didn't help - I deleted it.

Suffice to say it isn't just his current remark which got him banned, it's a whole history.

I don't have the background to think through this unfortunately.

Isn't formal language a part of natural language? — Banno

Not transparently so, to me? Consistent systems capable of first order arithmetic can't contain their own truth predicate, so we don't put the predicate in. But natural language does contain its own truth predicate and behaves... well it doesn't disintegrate. That's at the very least a type distinction between consistent formal systems and natural language - one can contain its own truth predicate without being crap, one cannot.

Don't know what you're driving at. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I imagined Srap and I were talking about how the formalism in mathematics doesn't start at its "grounds", in the axioms. I imagine Srap and I are reacting to an imagined enemy of a formalist who thinks that mathematics is somehow "just" symbol manipulation. Or alternatively just awed at how the root of the formalism is in as something as messy as natural language, despite how set in stone - settable in stone - the concepts of mathematics seem to be.

because there is nothing anyone can say to explain it. — Srap Tasmaner

You can give a few token examples of... collections... using blocks, hands of cards, sweeties, square of chocolate, desks in their class, and just hope that the kid can educe the idea of a collection through analogy. Eventually.

Though it is incredibly hard if someone struggles with analogies and abstractions.

There's your foundations, all in box, instead of logic coming from outside mathematics ― that's what I was questioning, am questioning. (I suppose, as an alternative to reducing it to something acknowledged as being part of mathematics, which I admit doesn't seem doable.) — Srap Tasmaner

Eventually the metalanguages terminate in predicates applied to undefined primitives and natural language statements. At some point that always happens. Even though such statements have clear conceptual content - though one might need to flesh that content out by derivation.

What does mathematics get out of pretending it's importing logic from elsewhere? — Srap Tasmaner

Someplace to start writing without having to explain yourself. I honestly think that's it.

What about division by 0? This stuff got me so confused in calculus — Shawn

Yes! Following that thread leads you either to ill definition or infinity, neither of which maths teachers are expected to teach.

One of my students gave the ingenious answer: 16/0 = 0, because the number of steps you can apply the iterated subtraction for division algorithm (finding division with remainder) to 16 with 0 as the divisor is 0 since you can't do it at all. Which is, again, quite cromulent.

I agree somewhat with the "required pace", but you and I know that in post-K12 math and related subjects it takes effort and time to accumulate a background necessary to advance or apply knowledge even a bit. In my years of teaching college math I have encountered only one such individual - an older student who dropped out to support himself as a poker player. He had taken my course in complex variables, and I recall speaking with him informally in the math office in which he brought up a really interesting and unusual notion on the subject, spur of the moment. Like a light bulb burning bright. I was unable to convince him to continue the curriculum. — jgill

I think our bar for profundity is different. Kids trip up on stuff like:

a ) x+1 = 2, solve
b ) x+1 = 3, solve

because they think that x in the context ( a ) is the same as x in the context of ( b ). Which is a very good reason to be stuck.

They also get tripped up on stuff like addition in the integers being commutative, but subtraction in the naturals not being.

Sometimes they even do things like 1-2 = 0, which isn't "wrong", per se, it's a sense of subtraction that removes instances from collections of stuff - like scoring off bags of pasta from a shopping list. You then have to tell them that it's "wrong", in some sense, to say 1-2=0 even when such subtraction is perfectly cromulent.

Yes and, to develop the idea, there’s a kind of bait and switch whereby what’s ostensibly offered, “knowledge” (of this and that) is offered as an implicit route to power, but functions to obscure the actual route to power (the meta knowledge of the system of power in which such “knowledge” is misleadingly elevated) both in terms of its content and mode, i.e. this “knowledge” tends towards a static “body of knowledge” that divides the individual against itself rather than an integrated praxis that would unify and dynamize it. And this exclusion of praxis, the inculcation, not just of disembodied “knowledge” but of the idea that knowledge (implicitly generalized as power) just is disembodied “knowledge” enables the gradual castration into the social that the social needs to inflict to reproduce its organs (institutions and those willing to be dispensable cells therein). — Baden

Absolutely!

You paint a picture of knowledge as a monolithic yet untethered abstraction.

Monolithic, in the sense that the static body of knowledge pervades society totally. It saturates us as both assumed common sense, and that sense's unfulfilled expectation. It determines those who know what we know. And those who do not. The enculturation of this knowledge must also remain relatively static in order to reproduce the social forms that that knowledge pervades and engenders. For such expectations, in order to function as an assumed body of knowledge, need a means of propagating the assumption as well as its content.

Also untethered, a subject which satisfies the demand of that knowledge, one who knows what we know, satisfies it in a normative sense rather than a semantical one. One does not need to be able to calculations with fractions to count as someone who knows how to do calculations with fractions - most jobs need a qualification that says you can do this, most people never learned to do fraction maths. There is a divergence between what is known and what is counted as known by whom. Whatever tethering mechanisms distribute satisfaction of these knowledges into bodies thus only reproduce this knowledge approximately, but also therefore are not required to reproduce this knowledge in toto. Thus we're left in a situation in that who counts as knowing what we know is distributed by the broader social form of education, rather than the content which it is designed to reproduce. The medium of education is to a large part also its message.

Every person is not, however, a coordinator of the medium of education. But they are a vehicle for its expectations - and thus its norms. Everyone who knows what we know expects others to know what we know, for that is what it means to know what we know. Those expectations however are stratified, as the broader social form of education distributes who counts as knowing differently from who knows. Whenever someone thus passes on what we know, they pass on the stratified means by which those expectations of knowledge are formed. Alienating us from our own capacity to reproduce a social form of knowledge, as its guide.

I believe you can feel this alienation when teaching students. There are daily moral dilemmas, some are related to the curriculum and some are not. Regarding those which are not related to the curricula - you know your students are doing things that are socially non-normative but are nevertheless morally permissible. You know they are thinking and acting in ways that are socially unacceptable in broader society but work in their community. You're thus confronted with the responsibility of raising concerns regarding deviations from what is normative and socially acceptable, regardless of its moral status. Because you know your students will be punished for deviations, and thus act as an organon of that punishment - reproducing the expectation by enacting it. There are even forms to fill in when something non-normative is disclosed. Not that they always are.

Regarding knowledge of the curriculum - the kind of student that satisfies all benchmarks in a subject has already been discouraged from pursuing their insights and skills due to herding them through the curriculum at a required pace. It is not uncommon to see an allegedly failing student have a profound insight, which you nevertheless cannot spend time developing with them since it is more important to their life to count as knowing what we know than teaching them how to learn, to grow their own capacities and insights.

Another way of saying this is it's not the knowledge that is primarily identify-forming in an educational context, it's the context itself as a way of framing knowledge as power that forms the social identity and the ground on which individuals' navigation of this embedded framework rests. You might call individual strategies for negotiating the framework individual identities. But the framework is what's primarily internalised and grounds them. — Baden

I want to "yes, and" this. Primary and secondary education is also an unholy union of parenthood and peer socialising. It is the "village which raises a child", if that village were administered entirely by beleaguered and hopelessly overworked academics, forced to play the roles of parent and prison warden. The social machine that reproduces knowledge is also the principal site that society collectively reproduces itself within.

(A key here is to understand that stimulation and down-regulation are not at all identical. Stimulation will also involve, for example, up-regulation — Leontiskos

Yes. It involves both. Stimming works like a stabilising perturbation to arousal. The overall effect is down regulatory. A bit like eye jitter is required to produce consistent visual perception.

So you exclude the possibility of true play; — Leontiskos

True play? Of course what's going on is play.

Aye. And that's about autistic cognition more generally, rather than the role stimming plays in it, or Baggs' stimming routine. There might be something specifically autistic about what Baggs is doing, but the phenomenology doesn't reduce to the autistic cognitive style which promotes stimming.

So then play is merely down-regulating? — Leontiskos

Remove "merely".

. I don't interpret everything they do as mere down-regulation. — Leontiskos

Nor do I. What about stimming?

There is no reason at all to rule out such a possibility. — Leontiskos

Indeed. They are playing. Having formed a routine out of stims.

Yes and. Both. Have you ever been about autistic people?

Indeed. — Joshs

That strikes me as incredibly reductive. The specificity of Baggs' conduct has been dissolved into a broader glut of sensorially infused and creative sociality.

Which is to say that your explanation of "stimming" is self-admittedly not an explanation of what Baggs is doing, which is interesting given that you are the one who introduced this word "stimming." — Leontiskos

Everything Baggs is doing is a stim. The stims seem to form routines. That's pretty normal autism stuff.

Infants do this to understand their environment. Infants are hypersensitive. — I like sushi

Yet you can distinguish an infant's behaviour from a neurodivergent person's stimming, like they do in the diagnostic protocols for it.

Reductively analyzing stimming behavior in terms of arousal mechanisms misses the creative sense-making motivation behind it. Stimming is not a thermostatic mechanism, its pleasure comes from learning to organize a chaotic hodgepodge of sensations into regular patterns. — Joshs

Didn't you say the same holds for everything we do though?

I suppose where the above gets complicated is that being able to stim like that allows a form of stimming play, which is what Baggs is doing. But it's not too much different, as stimming play, from arranging things on your desk or handling your collection of rocks.

I do think that the regulatory component of those activities is still well described by eliciting regular stimuli, but there's a bit more going on. It's a routine, in a place, and the acts are volitional. Generically stimming is less volitional and more autonomic, but Baggs' play is a stimming routine.

I don't particularly agree with this, in application to stimming anyway. To the extent I understand what you're saying.

The intentionality associated with stimming is not toward the stim source, it's a means of the body coordinating to produce a regulated and focussed state. The stimulus and conceptualisation of the stim is a down regulatory component of the overall state of the person stimming which is nevertheless otherwise directed. Someone stimming strokes their hair to listen, not to stroke their hair.

I think it's better to think of it as a means of enabling perception to function "as usual", by providing it regularizing grist. You get a steady stream of elicited, predictable sensations which are rapidly cognized. Which regulates arousal by reducing variation in perception in the stim relevant senses over time.

being mesmerized by the changing visual patterns of fireworks, ocean waves, a roaring fire. — Joshs

Those ones probably don't count as stimming. Since they're not repetitious in the context of the stimmer's life.

any people see it as a form of comforting oneself (and some evidence backs this up), but it is more or less about a need to process and interact with the environment I believe. — I like sushi

It's both, a self regulatory perceptual activity. Often, or perhaps usually, done involuntarily.

Primarily stemming from early childhood adaptation and learning regarding items like cause and effect, — I like sushi

I think whether you see it as an adaptation depends upon how you read adaptation. Whether a given person stims or does not stim seems relatively innate, as do the senses which the person stims with, but the specific stims used are unlikely to be predetermined. As an example, assume someone who stims is likely to be born with a hypersensitivity to some range of senses, and also born with a tendency to find tactile stims comforting, and thus picks up tactile stims to regulate the hypersensitivities. Like maybe they stroke their hair.

Someone could have the same hypersensitivities and find a different sense regulative. Like maybe they fidget - vestibular and proprioceptive stimming with tactile elements.

Just for clarity, by hypersensitivity I mean a much lower than average ability to down regulate arousal associated with that sensation. That is, a hypersensitivity to a sense engenders states of enduring and heightened arousal associated with that sense.

More broadly, stims are triggered in response to high arousal states. Hypersensitivity might bring that about, but so might the excitement of a friend's company or an interesting task at work. Or a social conflict. Someone will rely on the sensory modalities that aid them in regulating arousal for their stims, regardless of the state of arousal's source. People's stims often change over their lifetime, as do the scenarios and events which produce the heightened sense of arousal those stims regulate.

Not exactly. I don’t think they refer so much as enact. — Joshs

What do the sensations enact?

It s a language of thought using sensation rather than verbals symbols. — Joshs

Were you meaning to construe the sensations as symbols?

Also, for what it's worth, Baggs used to speak, went through something like normal language acquisition, got all the way to college before they started to lose their speech, I think. So we're not dealing with a "feral child" situation. And they continued to write even after they stopped speaking. It's complicated. — Srap Tasmaner

How complex.

Another reason it doesn't make sense to see their behaviour as language. You watch the video, it's a series of perceptual and sensory exercises. There are sounds made for their own purpose, for how they're heard and relate to background sounds. Objects are tasted, just for how they relate to the tongue and mouth. Objects are nuzzled, just for how they relate to the face and neck. It's at best a language metaphorically, and I think construing it as a language makes you lose so much specificity of description it's a damn shame.

There aren't any symbols, there aren't any words, there isn't an attempt to communicate, how they've expressed themself doesn't convey a content that's durable in time, no one could have a conversation with the series of actions unless it was already codified as a language through extant norms. Some of this even comes from the video - the "language" is nonsignifying , it cannot be representational or symbolic - and has no linguistic community associated with it.

There are so many interesting things you could describe about stimming routines. eg Baggs is pitch matching background noises with humming, but is a nonspeaking autist, why? What's the phenomenology there? What's the expressivity?

Calling it a language with a spoken component (the humming) when it's produced by someone who as a premise of the video cannot communicate in spoken language is hopelessly reductive and easily refutable. And for the purpose of normalising autism no less.

fdrake seems stuck on non-necessary norms of interpretation, such as spacing and punctuation. I would suggest that he think about coded language, such as encryption or the hidden signs involved in a football game or military strategy, where the linguistic matter is supposed to be unrecognizable according to standard norms. — Leontiskos

I never intended to say groups of symbols were necessary for something to count as language, I think it's essentially a sufficient condition to be able to recognise units of meaning. In the context of the discussion, I was showing a sufficient condition for recognising the presence of units of meaning without there being an understanding of the underlying language. Which was a counterpoint to the idea that one cannot hope to recognise whether something is a language unless one already speaks it.

;) I dare you to find the different particles in the word. And before you think of it: the ' symbol in the text is a normal letter in the Hebrew alphabet (Jod). You can find this and more examples on page 160 of the grammar I linked before. — KrisGl

All I meant was that there were recognisable units of meaning. The example you gave is a unit of meaning. I would have no idea wtf it means, there are still marks on the page. You even split it up into units of meaning for me.

There are plenty of examples like that, like making the sound iu-a'o in Lojban prior to saying an activity acts as an incredibly specific audible emoji. There isn't a translation of the attitude into English, or of the attitudinal indicator into English - it's still a unit of meaning!

You really don't need fluency, or even much understanding. to detect the presence of units of meaning. The fact that such a thing is so difficult for Baggs' stimming indicates that if it is a language, it is unlikely to be like any hitherto known one. It also will have only one "speaker".

Ok! And can you make the argument you intended to with the reference too?

I told you already that I don't think I can, because I do not speak that language. Take me by my word. I could make some elaborate counterargument now by introducing you to the nature of pre- and suffixes in the hebrew language and how you can cram a sentence into a whole word and how someone not familiar with that language would not be able to distinguish the different parts of one word that make up a whole sentence. I will not bore you with it. — KrisGl

You wouldn't bore me with it.

I don't speak this language. — KrisGl

You don't need to to try.

"Салам, куыдтæ дæ?"

What are the distinct symbol groups in that? Clearly, "Салам", "куыдтæ" and "дæ". It has a question mark at the end, so presumably it is a question.



What are the distinct gestures in this ASL poem?

Even if we make mistakes, it's still clear what trying to split this stuff up would mean in terms of a language. I doubt you can say the same form Baggs' stimming. Can you do it?

Sometimes ticks include cursing. Would you know from the outside if my cursing is me cursing or me having a tick? — KrisGl

You can tell that over time. People who curse as the result of a tic do so in wildly variable circumstances and seemingly independently from them. For a single instance of cursing, you might not be able to.

What units exactly would be fine enough for you to consider something a language? — KrisGl

I don't know. Try going through her tap water scene and dividing it up into distinct events of qualitatively different character that might be used for expressing something! I'll respond further when you've tried something like this.

This seems like a matter of basic semiotics. There is sign use and then there is intentional sign use. Language is the latter, and it is uniquely human. A dog licking its paw is the former, and humans are of course immersed in this sort of unintentional sign use as well, but it is not language. It is Helen Keller's transition from water-as-stimulus to water-as-sign. — Leontiskos

I wanted to avoid semiotic language since, taking Baggs at her word, her language is nonsignyfing. It doesn't have symbolic representation. You might think of that as a contradiction in terms, which would be another way to undermine its claim to be a language.

Why is that exactly? — KrisGl

Because AFAIK it's known that stimming is tightly linked with autistic people's emotional regulation. If you must suppress stimming, the self regulation goes out of whack. Another reason I want to think of it as autonomic is related to what you said here:

Whether or not there is intent or meaning(s) behind them ... we still don't know. — KrisGl

that likens her behaviour to stroking one's hair, scratching yourself, finger twiddling etc. None of which need be carried out with intent.

And how about the question if you would consider a sigh or a yawn part of language? — KrisGl

Someone can sigh in response to something, or at the end of a long day. A sigh in itself I wouldn't want to call an item of language in all circumstances, even though it is a sound that allows predictable expressions in some contexts. Like when it's a response to a request. But in others it isn't - like when you do it when frustrated. Compare the above to a word or a gesture in sign language. In contrast, "egg" is always "egg", an "a" sound is recognisably always an "a" sound. Can you say the same for Baggs' finger rubbing in the tap? Can you even say what this finger rub means vs that one? Can you even tell when one ends and one begins? There just aren't units of fine enough graduations to represent the continuum of behaviour she has.

A yawn is also something unintentional, but you "feel a yawn coming on", and can't suppress it. It's even unpleasant to try suppress. There's a sense of relief and normality afterwards. In that regard I think it's a better analogy for a stim than thinking of it as a language.

If you know an autistic person's stims, I think you can treat them as indicative of their mood sometimes. Some people have stims that only come out when very distressed, some people have stims that only come out when happy. If you knew what was what for a person, you can read it like a facial expression. Even though facial expressions aren't language either.