Not so clear to me. Is this the "absurd game" you're looking for a solution to? Or do you endorse this viewpoint?
It seems to me that the absurdity is evident. An "outside of language" is not conceivable because "outside" is a word? Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience. Whether we must mediate these experiences through language is a separate question, the answer to which will vary depending on which experiences. Pain, I'm guessing, is pretty language-free. — J
" Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience." In this you implicitly affirm the metaphysics of everydayness. — Astrophel
It is impossible to imagine a world outside of language, because 'language' itself is a particle of language. — Astrophel
I will say that if there is no private language, then what Wittgenstein states related to the limits of language follows. And this should be obvious as you think about it. All things within the private mental state (i.e. qualia) are necessarily off limits because the antecedent of the conditional is that "there is no private language." And so that's where the challenge has to be made, which is to attack the enterprise of private versus public language (if that's your mission). — Hanover
So what is qualia to Wittgenstein? It is the predictable behavior that surrounds the use of that term, just like any other term. I say "ouch" to pain, so we now know what pain is. But to be clear, "pain" is a word. We don't speak of mental states.
If I say "I'm experiencing qualia," qualia is that thing I say when I perhaps express confusion at my state or I simply mean to say that I'm having a non-descript mental state, not to be confused with the actual mental state. That is "I'm feeling qualia" is known by how I use it. Mostly it's a term used in philosophy forums when other words like "consciousnessess," "Wittgenstein," "mental objects," "silence" and other sorts of words get used — Hanover
On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. — Hanover
The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover
this term [qualia] is something that turns up in philosophy forums, but really, nowhere else, and this is because other contexts do not possess the basis for the concept to come forth. Only philosophy. — Astrophel
Assume the feeling I have when I'm at the park I self refer to as "burj." I speak this word commonly to myself, often out loud, but no one ever hears it. What this means is that I cannot check for my consistency in use of the word and it cannot be verfied that today's feeling of burj is yesterday's. I engage in ten years of this self-talk of burj, and on year 10, it is discovered that the park had audio-taped my coversations unbeknownst to anyone.
On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. It is now a word retroactively. Before, not.
This makes the point again: The reason "burj" was not a word yesterday isn't because it was simply isolated in my head. What made it not a word was that no community had evaluated it. In this thought experiment, the community did not get into my head, but it was the usage of the word that fell into the previously silent world. Use arrived late, well after the word spoken, but its use made the non-word of yesterday the word of today once it was used.
The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover
but no, the mutterings are not what we properly call qualia. They may share the feature of being private by virtue of "no community", but qualia are sensations or individual subjective experiences, not words or behaviors. Allegedly. — J
The people who introduce doubt about qualia are usually aiming for eliminative materialism. They're basically saying we're like robots who claim to be more than robots, but we're wrong, we're just robots. — frank
Not sure what that is. But in any case, thinking in language doesn't make the subject of thought also linguistic. Does cutting boards with a saw make every board a tool? Nor does it mean that animals and human infants don't have experiences because they don't have language. — J
I sense that you basically agree with this latter point, but are holding out for some other way to frame the idea that "Language is what we ARE." Language may be, as you say, the foundation for comprehension, but so much of my experience has nothing to do with comprehension. — J
But why would that restrict what can be imagined? I am now imagining a rabbit. Why would it be the case that the rabbit must be within language, because "language" is within language? There could conceivably be some other reasons why imagining a rabbit requires some linguistic component, but the status of the word "language" itself doesn't seem relevant. — J
This does not follow. Wittgensteinian linguistics is metaphysically agnostic because it refuses to speak of it. It does not hint one way or the other what lurks within. It talks about language and what can be expressed through language.
How could his theory possibly hold sway if it were defeated by simply pointing out we all have internal feelings? What he's getting at is the futility in discussing that which cannot be discussed. — Hanover
The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover
Merleau Ponty writes: “For what exactly is meant by saying that the world existed prior to human consciousnesses? It might be meant that the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together. But each one of these words, just like each equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement. — Excerpt from the Blind Spot Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson
I don't think that quite fair. Have another look at the first few paragraphs of Quining Qualia. Dennett is trying to deal withe the notion as it is presented by those that use it, but running in to the difficulty that they themselves do not agree as to what qualia are. Dennett is pointing out the consequences of their own usage.Dennett, you will note in all of these "intuition pumps," makes the attempt to remove qualia from meaningful talk by reducing qualia to contextual affairs of meaning making, in which a quale is precisely not accessible, by definition. — Astrophel
I don't think about the way animals and infants experience the world because it is simply a bore. They eat, sleep, and defecate and stare at things, generally speaking. — Astrophel
The meaning underlying the mutterings are the references to qualia. — Hanover
I don't think that quite fair. Have another look at the first few paragraphs of Quining Qualia. Dennett is trying to deal withe the notion as it is presented by those that use it, but running in to the difficulty that they themselves do not agree as to what qualia are. Dennett is pointing out the consequences of their own usage. — Banno
I guess this would be a spade-turning difference between us. I am fascinated by the inner lives of animals; to me it's the least boring thing in the world. Infants, a close second. I guess you've never been close to an animal? Eating, sleeping, defecating, and staring are popular activities, all right, just as they are for us! (And you left out sex!). But they don't begin to exhaust the repertoire.
As for our need for language to describe non-linguistic things: granted. You still haven't shown me how this turns the thing described into more language. — J
" I think you owe us a story about how the mutterings are conveyers of meaning, which in turn can be analogous to qualia. I took you literally, to be referring to the sounds themselves. Isn't the question (of what [and how] they could mean) at the heart of the thought experiment? — J
We have three cats and they are adorable, and they are endowed with emotional abilities, are sensitive, yearning for affection. — Astrophel
But we [the corporation] were NOT just years before. How does existence simply come into being just by talking it into being? A person is like this, no? — Astrophel
The point is, language is primordial, and that makes being complicated... or does it? — Astrophel
the picture is coming a bit more in focus. Is my role at T-1 mute, though? Am I meant to be understood as simply listening, just as I do with the video at T-3? Can we assume that, among other uses of "burj," you define it for me? — J
I need to get a little clearer about these circumstances before I can hazard an opinion on what is missing, so to speak, during the crucial T-2 events, which take place with neither a present nor a future auditor. — J
So, I'm walking through the woods, and I get this feeling I fully identity with personally. It reminds me of my youthful walks in the woods. I say to you, I'm feeling burj. I use this word often.While neither can show one another's feeling, I use the word consistently. This is public use, full fledged language — Hanover
However, if you were a cat, my story would be better all things considered, but I digress. — Hanover
Well, no. I'm happy to grant existence, for philosophical purposes, to both corporations and persons (however galling that may be in U.S. politics). But if we agree that both exist, we should also agree that they exist in very different ways. A corporation is a sort of mereological construction, whereas a person is a living biological entity. (I'm assuming you don't mean to get into the intricacies of whether every human is properly a "person."). A living thing doesn't get talked into existence. A corporation does, and must, along with a few other social requirements. — J
Again, I recognize that this is what you're asserting, but I don't see the case for it yet. Let's imagine that all language-users go extinct; is the physical world not still there? If so, how is language primordial? It may be basic and constitutive for us, but that's a different matter, no? Likewise, we can hypothesize that our way of constituting the physical world is simply that -- our way -- but do you want to deny any independent existence to it at all? — J
When you say that a quale is like "burj" at T-2, do you mean the word "burj" or the reference of the word, i.e., a feeling about the park? I had been taking you to mean the word itself, but in replying I realized that a lot hinges on that interpretation, so I'd better check it out. — J
But that being a cat becomes a cat when I take it into my perceptual apparatus. Prior to this, it is not a cat. My perceptual, cognitive, affective "functions" manufacture catness. — Astrophel
thought is directed to something palpable in time and space, and what could be more "real" than this [biological entity], but when asked what a biological entity IS, you find more language, and this leads to more language still . . . — Astrophel
So if we subtract 2 from the 3, we isolate our quale. — Hanover
Reference here is to form of life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_life
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" — Hanover
But if we agree, more or less, about this, how can language be primordial? Unless we're just disagreeing about what "primordial" ought to mean. I took it to refer to something extremely basic, ontologically, something that, at the very least, precedes human cognition. If all you mean is "Language is basic for humans, without which we could not recognize items we call 'cats'," then that's fine. Yet I sense you mean something quite different and more radical, but it still isn't clear.
I want to understand why you believe the experience bottoms out in language. It seems to me that the necessity of thinking in language does not mean that what is thought about is also language. Can you help me see why this is false? With respect, you just keep asserting it. Can you perhaps describe how that experience happens for you -- the moment at which you lose contact with a reality external to language? — J
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