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

THIS is what you are up against: your thinking makes assumptions about what is not language, IN language. And any way you might have of understanding what something IS has its "isness" in copula 'is'. Imagine qualia without the word 'qualia'. Language is the foundation for comprehension. In matters of pain and ethical examples, this is all played out contextual settings, but without any setting of this kind at all?? Things would have no ethical dimension, because ethics comes into being by talking about ethics. The only way one can even imagine a cat's world vis a vis the pain it has, is through this matrix of goods and bads and the "issues" that arise; but there are no issues outside of what language can say. Issues are inherently propositional, and without propositions, one simply stares vacuously into space. It is impossible to imagine a world outside of language, because 'language' itself is a particle of language. Language is what we ARE.

And this by no means is wrong. It just doesn't follow through.

For me, I think philosophy's job is to first describe, not just create inhibitions on belief (which leads to the ever popular nihilism, epistemic, ethical, ontological nihilism). Comprehension exceeds propositional affirmation, which comes down to: all propositions are open, and tracing their openness leads to openness itself, and here there is a threshold at which one can stand before all things, yet possessed by none interpretatively; a 'place' where thought yield to all that is laid out before them, including, of course, the massive totality of other thoughts----Jarring, uncertain, uncanny, yet this is where philosophy takes thought. 'Pain' the concept is, at this juncture, pain the wonder and mystery. I think this is where your assumption goes where you say," Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience." In this you implicitly affirm the metaphysics of everydayness.

" Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience." In this you implicitly affirm the metaphysics of everydayness. — Astrophel

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.

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.

It is impossible to imagine a world outside of language, because 'language' itself is a particle of language. — Astrophel

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.

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

All things within the private mental state are private because we have a term for private mental states, which is 'private mental states'. Language is reflexive, turns back on itself, and like the serpent that bites its own tail, the ouroboros, finds its self in the very ground of the conclusions of its reasonings. A symbol of hermeneutics. I am not trying to irritate you. I do want to make a point about how intrusive philosophy can be in the simplest things. I am reminded of this from a book on Foucault, "Foucault associates himself with the modernist voice of Beckett’s Molloy: ‘I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me . . .’ (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215). Language penetrates, if you will, to the very core of what we are and all that can be summoned to "speak" us into existence.

If I had to say what my mission is, it would be along the lines of making more clear that extraordinary boundary between language and "real' metaphysics, where everything is under erasure. This erasure is, as Wittgenstein said of "that which cannot be said" in his Tractatus to a prospective publisher, the most important part. This takes philosophical work that deals with just this. It does exist in post post modern theology. Husserl through Heidegger through ....language and TO the world.

For me, the world is pure wonder and horror; pure because it has nothing to do with that or that or any particular thing at all. It is in our "thrownness," our being here as such. Qualia is about this primordial thrownness of who and what we are. I see a cat, and the "ouroboros of seeing" takes analysis right back the very seeing itself. This doesn't led to solipsism at all. It simply says that the things around me are acknowledged in me. What else? It simply leads to the much sought after simplicity of grounding our existence. It is already grounded, but one must understand this in a pure openness to the world.

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

I think you are right to say this term 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. You can say " I am feeling qualia" only if you are in that particular philosophical context where the issue of qualia makes sense, and you are consciously trying to acknowledge tht world without language, and you do a reduction by eliminating all that can be said about the world, as world, and not just qualia as qualia, because what keeps qualia "at a distance," so to speak, is not just some constraint on belief about qualia, but the whole totality of language that constitutes your everydayness, that is, language instantly assimilates what it sees, and it takes philosophicl work to "unsee' this instant interpretatively qualified existence. I look up at the clock in the morning, and clocks, and what they do, and their role in my affairs comes instantly in to play. ALL things implicitly are brought to heel like this. Qualia is outside of this totality, and it is important to see that to "comprehend" qualia, one stands no out side the taste of wine or the smell of a rose; rather one stands outside the general grip language has on all things. It is a standing back and away from sense making across the board. My thinking? That taste of wine (Dennett's example) is not just a taste, but is bound to a very extensive set of meanings that are the impossibly complex implicit understanding of being in the world, the being in a wine shop, walking through the door, on a floor, walls all around, and so forth. This is what possesses the non-quale dimensions of the event, making what is there conform and stand a A being. Qualia can only be understood in a radical withdrawal from language-in-the-world.

My take is that qualia is an analytic term, as are ALL such things. Nothing more or less. It is not some platonic form that finally speaks the world as it is, really. A philosophical term that says, look, language is what comprehension is made of, yet it does not exhaust comprehension of what the world is, and there is this residuum that is actuality that both is conceived in and by language, yet stands apart from language[/u]; thus, language itself must be understood differently in order to allow this. Language in its essence, in other words, is incompletely understood; it is rather open, not just to novel construals of what is already in language, but to an impossible "other' than what language, at least in its current evolvement, can conceive.

@Banno


Thoughts on Private Language:

And I could be wrong, so feel free to say so because I don't just speak this for myself, but I do so to understand it through my community of speakers. See what I did there?

I discuss private langauge in this thread because it is the content of private language we discuss here, which we call "qualia." If there is no private language, there is no qualia, but if there is, there is.

The problem with the privacy of qualia doesn't lie in its inaccessibility, but it lies in its insulation from community rules. It is not its location within your head that insulates it from rules. It is its removal from the community of rulers that insulates it. That is, if the community were in your head, you inner states would not be private states. Odd example, but that matters.

The reason others must rule you and you not rule yourself, is that if you are the authority as to what the rule is, you can change the rules from second to second. You cannot meaningfully obey or disobey the law if you are given unbrideled power to change it and to rule upon it.

A thought experiment: 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?

EDIT: The bold I used made my post look AI-ish, but, trust me, AI is smarter than this.

On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. — Hanover

I hate to rain on a fun thought experiment but . . . what does this actually mean? Could you give just a few examples of how you spoke to yourself using "burj," and how the community was able to declare your use consistent and rule-bound?

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

Nice. The mutterings were "out in the open" but still private because there was no community to evaluate it. I think the analogy works, and makes your point, 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.

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

I've seen this said before, and have never understood it. Anyone with an introspective turn of mind has thought of qualia, often under the name "inner feels." One of the standard childhood puzzles is, "How do I know my 'green' is your 'green'?" I've had innumerable conversations with adults in which the distinction is easily made between the (seemingly public) sensory basis for experiences of sight or sound, and the (seemingly private) experiences themselves.

Why hasn't "qualia" caught on as a term? No idea. But it can't be because the concept is obscure.

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

I think the 10 years of talking to yourself made it a word, though as you say, of somewhat dubious meaning. The group who hears the recordings will debate amongst themselves what it means. If they come to a consensus, it's probably because of that one lady who talked really loudly while other people were trying to say something, so she got her way because they were like, fine, whatever.

I just assume your functional consciousness is accompanied by qualia. In other words, as your body navigates around the park, there is something it's like to see, hear, smell, and feel the world around you. I assume you're that way because I am. There may be a little bit of dubiousness to naming various aspects of the experience, but that's par for the course for language, most of the time.

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.

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 meaning underlying the mutterings are the references to qualia. That's the point of the thought experiment. They were non-linguistic and therefore meaningless due to lack of public rules until retroactively

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

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.

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

Yes, cutting boards with a saw makes the boards on which boards are cut, tools. And infants and animals do have have experiences, but these are not the kind of experiences that produce thought and philosophical discovery. 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. If they do possess more, then this more is interesting only because it is in the direction of being what our existence is.

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

Language is what we are, and so when I say "what we are" the verb 'to be' is what singles us out, determines our existence. I ask, what are you? and you will say you are a clerk in a store, a lawyer, a nurse, a husband, a wife, a geologist looking for fossils, I mean, the question who are you? IS a question, and the moment it is asked it belongs to language, and basic questions about what it is to be human is to respond to the question. One cannot answer such a question outside of lanuage, for the answer is inherently a construction of predication and this is propositional. The point would be that IF there is some way to disclose what IS and language has absolutely nothing to say about it, then to "speak it" really is nonsense. Everything you can say about animals, infants, paramecia, and so on, are what they are IN the medium of discovering these. Go to a dictionary to find out what something is and what do you find? More language. Ask me if an infant has experiences, and I SAY such and such.

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

It doesn't seem relevant because it is so pervasive, so integral to understanding that one hardly pays attention. One has to ask the question, what is being a "self" all about? Infants don't have a self (ipseity) .not yet. And all you can imagine has its being in language FOR US, for WE are language beings, not for elephants or giraffes: did you SAY "rabbit'? Again, whatever it IS outside of language is just impossible to conceive. If it were possible, then it could be taken up in language.

To me, one has to see that qualia is a philosophical construct only meaningful ina philosophical discussion, the same way talk about pottery or weaving techniques only has meaning IN such discussions. But this doesn't mean it is meaningless any more than talk about pottery is meaningless. One has to go there, into the issue to understand it.

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

Imagine a realm of pure sensation. Think of it as a dark ocean and the mind is a flashlight, bringing this in view, focusing on that sound, or just relaxing without focus as colors bleed into each other, patterns appear, tones mix with undescribed feelings like the earth touching your feet.

Wittgenstein asks how language could be used to nail down some section of this ever turning ocean. If we picked a word, like red, how could we confidently say it properly attaches to this rather than that? What we can do is look to the way people behave. The word has no meaning that can endure over time until we see that it's attached to that rose, that berry, those lips, by the actions people take.

So Wittgenstein was not saying we don't have sensations. He's saying that words like pain don't gain their meaning by referring to a particular section of the ocean of sensations. There's no way to throw a dart of reference and hit something in that realm. The meaning comes from our primal connections with one another.

Do you agree with that?

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

I think the basic assumption of your question is that, prior to conceiving of burj in your head, you were already in a system of agreement about words and their meanings. The word 'burj' itself has its status of being outside of a consensus PRIOR to it being conceived, and so it was already in language regardless: it was already IN the consensus by being outside of it, because being outside of is contingent upon the consensus being in place for an "outside" to make sense.

The nature of qualia reveals itself nicely in your example, though. One cannot present the matter of qualia unless one brings into language the reflexive act of thought thinking about the nature of thought, thereby questioning its limits, because nothing IS that is not thought, and yet, as you know, the rabbit you imagine or otherwise is not a particle of language running around. But you see the dilemma: to know this is to speak it. Ontology and language CANNOT be separated.

Right now there is a crab under a rock in the depths of the Mariana Trench, never once observed. So how is it that science has so much to say about this crab? The "saying" is always preceded by established assumptions. One never REALLY sees that which sits before the camera, the telescope or before their very eyes. If this were so, then simply having eyes would be sufficient. What one "sees" lies in memory and a symbolic system called langauge that speaks what it there.

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'm reluctant to say much more. @Hanover and I have had this chat before, but it repeats, like not-quite-right fish. I don't think Hanover has quite got the point of the private language argument down, mis-presenting it somewhat. But it seems we talk past each other, since here it is again.

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 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.

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

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.

The meaning underlying the mutterings are the references to qualia. — Hanover

Ah. But that's different. You asked, "Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia?" 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?

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 don't know what is supposed to be fair. I don't think it enters into it. Dennett had a naive understanding about qualia because there is naivete built into his thinking and those he was addressing. Naive because he really didn't know how to talk about what it is that makes qualia an idea at all. It would be pretty easy to go through each "pump" and show this. He holds that cauliflower's taste cannot be pinned to any particular "central" taste and therefore is hopelessly lost to discovery of qualia: one cannot "isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on." But isolating qualities that disappear as other qualities arise, says nothing about the presence qua presence of what is there before one. It doesn't matter how it appears, or the consistency of its appearing, or its intensity, or its morphing into something else, because qualia is not a property, not part of a description of consciousness, as he thinks it is. Qualia is only what it "is" when all "properties" are suspended, so it being a taste of cauliflower or wine, is already a misconception. The "taste" is not a taste nor is it of anything. In order for one to take qualia as a meaningful concept, one has to release the "taste" from its language imposition, while still in the general language setting that is foundational for being a self. How can this be done?

One has to reconceive what language is and allow metaphysics back into philosophical conversation, something anglo american thinking has an absurd and debilitating phobia about, but it's the only way to understand the world that is other than language---though, not beyond what language can say, for language can say anything. There are no limits to language in so far as what language is vis a vis the world. It is just that in basic ontology, what is NOT language emerges in the analysis. Language can say this just as I am saying it now (and this is to pull away from earlier comments a bit. Technical matters are not postable). At any rate, I claim that nothing could be more clear than this, yet philosophers thinking in the tradition of positivism are appalled because they think it smacks of metaphysics...and they are right; it does.

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

Well, don't get me wrong. We have three cats and they are adorable, and they are endowed with emotional abilities, are sensitive, yearning for affection. But philosophically they are uninteresting, meaning whatever they possess that IS interesting is only seen through the interpretative gaze of a cognizing and affective egoic center that is me, a person, and this is where the issue of qualia finds its ground. Your pet is only a pet, an animal, affectionate, in short, what it IS, IN the system of its apprehension. I like to think of a company you and I can begin right now, call it "Pets for Prosperity Inc." (PFP) and you are CEO while I am cofounding affiliate, and now we need pamphlets to raise awareness, and more employees, and do community service, and take in donations, and soon we are a huge, entangled corporation that has sway politically, controls vast wealth, and so on. Now at this point, does PFP exist? Of course it does. Just ask any of our 1.5 million employees. And the world says we ARE that and that and our enemies say we ARE less savory thises and thats: we ARE.

But we were NOT just years before. How does existence simply come into being just by talking it into being? A person is like this, no? I am born, "given" a name, given a language and a culture, and PFP was constructed OUT OF that, but even as I write these words, it is the language that is doing the talking. Of course, things get done, but the question of what it IS that gets done belongs to language, as does the question of what I AM? Ask what you are, with the provision that you cannot say this. Cat got your tongue?

The point is, language is primordial, and that makes being complicated...or does it? Qualia: the not-language discovered in language, or in spite of language, or in the midst of language; it is presupposed in everything that IS, just like language! This is the world where cats and dogs appear, are brought into being in the first place, on the stage, if you will, of language and its possiblities, and this setting has a historical genesis, and there really is no "outside" of this. It's not that cats don't have an inner world, but this world, like my own, is understood through language, when I encounter my cat, it is an event, not just some passive reception.

" 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

Scenario #1: T-1

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

Scenario #2: T-2

Same thing, except this time, you're not there. I'm alone. I use that word often, out loud, saying it, using it in sentences, even describing it. No one ever hears me ever. .Burj is not a word. It is not publicly used.

Scenario #3: T-3

Same as #2 except you find the video of me talking to myself all those years that no one had ever seen before. You confirm I followed rules.

What we have here is retroactive public language. It's removing you from Scenario #2 at T-3 and inserting you into scenario #1 at T-3.

If we hold that in Scenario #3 burj is language, but the exact usage at Scenario #2 it was not, then we need a word for burg at T-2. That word is qualia.

Hang with me in this maze. Tell me where it's wrong.

OK, 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?

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.

We have three cats and they are adorable, and they are endowed with emotional abilities, are sensitive, yearning for affection. — Astrophel

Very good! And do you never wonder what they're thinking? I find this especially interesting precisely because I doubt they have language, yet I'm quite sure they engage in ratiocinative mental processes and are able to represent facts about the world to themselves, somehow.

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

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.

The point is, language is primordial, and that makes being complicated... or does it? — Astrophel

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?

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

You're muteness isn't necessary. You may speak. I just made you quiet because I prefer people not talking. It's my story, so I made it more pleasant.

The critical aspect is the community of speakers who are able to obtain consistency in usage and enforce rules, else it'd be a private language.

If you can't speak, like if you were a cat, then that'd be a problem for the language game to occur. However, if you were a cat, my story would be better all things considered, but I digress.

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

Your caution is appreciated, although curious, considering I tend toward a more stream of consciousness methodology.

But to get back on the rails here, if you begin with a system that demands public validation, the test to be imposed seems like it must be to how that occurs. My test, to the extent valid, plays with the timing of it, validating ex post communicato as they would say in Latin if it were spoken today as yesterday, which I think speaks in the present from the past like in my example. Again.

But for real, I do think I'm onto something here, so you're thoughts are appreciated.

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

But we can show each other feelings, as long as we assume there's some commonality between us. To pin down what "burj" is, I could take a rock and pretend to smash my foot and hold it and hop up and down on the non-injured foot yelling "burj! burj!" Assuming we each understand "yes" and "no" correctly, you would stop me and say "no burj". Maybe a dog wanders by and flops in your lap and you pet it and look happy and say "burj". Now I'm starting to understand what you mean by "burj".

No doubt burj is a word when it is publicly used.

No doubt it's not when it's not.

My test case was what about after it's not but while it's not?

Making sense of that last question: it was not publicly used at T-2, but at T-3, we found a tape of it, so it was publicly used at T-2 just not known to be publicly until T-3.

I had ChatGPT help me iron out some of my rambling thoughts. Maybe there is no private language ever? Maybe the process of coming up with a word "splits" the mind into speaker and listener, so the invention of any word is a public event. Anyway,

"On the possibility of private language—even within one mind—here’s where it gets interesting. When I coin a new word for a feeling I’m having, I’m not just labeling the raw sensation. I'm placing that word into a mental framework of contrasts, expectations, and usage patterns. In effect, my mind is playing two roles: one part invents, the other interprets and validates. Even privately, there’s a kind of intra-mental dialogue, similar to what happens when we talk to ourselves or reflect on a dream. This structure mirrors the public use of language, just without another person.

And we know from split-brain studies that minds can bifurcate. A single brain can contain functionally distinct agents—each with partial access to language, memory, and agency. So the idea that “private” language might involve one part of the mind proposing and another part accepting or rejecting isn't just poetic—it’s neurologically grounded. Even in solitude, meaning isn’t assigned in a vacuum; it’s tested against internal consistency, memory, and imagined scenarios.

So to your point: yes, language may begin “privately,” but it becomes language—even internally—only if it can be situated within a system of use and contrast. Without that internal structure, “burj” is just noise, like a feeling with no handle. With structure, it becomes meaningful—even before others hear it."

However, if you were a cat, my story would be better all things considered, but I digress. — Hanover

And if you were a cat, there'd be no story, so there! :joke:

OK, I just wrote a post in reply to your "burj" story that was coming along very nicely until I realized I had another question I needed to ask. So, if you'll be patient with me:

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.

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

I think you have put one foot into qualia proper: By mereological construction, you mean nothing but a construction of relations, butthe rub is, how do you escape to what is there that is not this "nothing but"? One wants to say a "living biological entity" is the bottom line, for thought is directed to something palpable in time and space, and what could be more "real" than this, but when asked what a biological entity IS, you find more language, and this leads to more language still, untill you realize that all of you understanding of anything at all is bound to this, as you call it, mereological dimension, and there is no way out of this. A corporation, it can be said, is reducible to the thoughts of the biological entities that conceive it, andso this, too, can be held apart from the true physiology of the desirable affirmation, Consider.

Now you teeter on some fascinating philosophy, the true bottom line, if you will. Does a corporation reduce to qualia in inquiry that same way that a biological aentity does? Back up a bit: a biological entity like my cat is there, in the midst of my apprehension of things in the world, but no matter how I try to pin what the cat IS to something other than what language IS, my mouth is closed and my thoughts are suspended, for to speak what the cat IS is to deploy language! Even the term 'existence' leads to this same analytical finality. What is existence? And then, What am I?? You find language there, ready to hand, literally creating the affirmations in the propositions, but then, if you want to play the physicalist, there are no propositions in my cat!

Or are there? What is before me, that grey furry thing is speakable only in the speaking, so to speak. No words, no identity, no "isness," but then I KNOW with incorrigible certainty that there is "something" there that is not possessed by the speaking, and if you stare at this peoblem long enough, it becomes clear that a language construction (you refer to above as mereological) almost entirely constitutes the understanding of what that IS.....and yet there is this residuum that cannot be so reduced, a "thereness" or a "being" but this itself is simply language poking its head into the attempt to speak what it is. So how to move forward in understanding this, when understanding confronts its own terminus?

Well, what is the problem essentially? The problem is that there is "distance" between me and the "cat," epistemic distance. "It" is over there, and I am here, and laguage does not reach over and affirm what it IS by some impossible "knowledge at a distance". Long, long story short: The "cat" and the language that speaks it into being a cat are one. But this doesn't mean at all that cats are language; it does mean that I am allowed to speak of the "cat' as a cat in speakable terms, and the term in this conversation is 'qualia'.

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

Of course not. 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.

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

Well yes, that's the crux of this. I'm challenging the Wittgensteinian model that dispenses with the referent and relies upon use by suggesting that with my time shifting we can isolate the quale.

Usage theories depend upon public rule creation and enforcement which was lacking in scenario 2, so we had no language then. But in 3, viola, we imposed public games playing retroactively by discovering the hidden videotape.

So if we subtract 2 from the 3, we isolate our quale.

Or so the argument goes.

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

This is what I meant by saying that "our way of constituting the physical world may be simply that -- our way." And I recognize that all kinds of meaningful debates occur around just how much the human apparatus contributes to what we consider the physical world to be -- in other words, what the cat "is" before it is a cat for us.

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.

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

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?

This is what I meant by saying that "our way of constituting the physical world may be simply that -- our way." — J

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"

So if we subtract 2 from the 3, we isolate our quale. — Hanover

OK, sorry if I'm like a dog with a bone here, but . . . if we dispense with the referent, as Witt suggests we can, are you arguing that the word itself at T-2 is now like a quale -- something personal and not yet "used," but still meaningful? Is that the case you're illustrating against usage as meaning?

Again, your patience is appreciated. I don't like posts that clearly haven't tried hard enough to understand what they're responding to, so I don't want to be guilty of that.

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

Yes, though as is often the case, I think Witt was exaggerating a bit to make his point.

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

More radical, yes. You likely won't be very pleased.

Language is primordial not because it sits in the seat of absolute authority answering questions about absolute reality. Lnauge is inherently interpretative, contingent, a system of meanings that are intra-penetrating, so nothing has this seat of authority. But the philosophical insight that acknowledges that language recognizes its own delimitations is a pivotal recognition in that it forces, really, one to face a world without the confidence and security of any authority at all. THIS is the post modern world, and you can blame Kierkegaard through Hegel, through Heidegger through Derrida and beyond (go extreme and read Blanchot or Levinas. Madness to read, at first; but then you start to get it and it is extraordinary). I say Look a cat!, you ask, whaty is a cat? I look in the dictionary, find other explanations, and each of these bears the same indeterminacy. Primordiality, as you observe, itself belongs to this indeterminacy, for it is a particle of language, has a context of discussionable possibilities, so primordiality, as Heidegger puts it, is really "equiprimordiality": a bottom line analytic that is itself manifold, complex, open to the world for more penetrating discovery. He didn't posit, but explicitly denied, any metaphysical primordiality to our existence, anything like qualia.

That is, ontology, an analytic of what it means to be. Qualia is a term that violates this, it is argued correctly. It belongs to the margins of thought, that disconcerting threshold of acceptance. See how Eugene Fink talks about it: "Having overcome world naivete' we stand now in a new naivete, a transcendental naivete'. It consists in our unfolding and explicating transcendental life
only in the presentness." (from The Sixth Meditation" early on). See, Fink takes this idea very seriously, because he thinks that philosophy must end up here, facing a world that does not conform in its essence to standard thinking, which he calls naive. Naive because the cat seen and accepted as a cat is all there is to being a cat, in this everyday world. There is another world that IS this familair world and is also a more penetrating analytic into the presuppositions of all this familiarity.

Philosophy has to go here, to this threshold, otherwise it is reduced to squabbles about things that have no meaning, like ethics without a metaethics or existence without a metaexistence. Qualia is essentially metaphysics, not some medieval theology, but "real" metaphysics: what one must allow it, yet to do so requires not a discursive move into more of the "same" but into the "other" of this very world.