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 — J

To be specific, I'd say Witt doesn't suggest no internal, mental referent, but argues it is incorrect to seek that referent because meaning isn't derived from it. It is derived from use. The understanding of meaning comes from interaction within a community of users. Accepting that as true, we conclude in 2 there is no language.

We then go through my time rigamarole and we say "Hang on! The private mutterings within 2 have now satisfied the public use demands, particularly the adherence to clear rule following.

We then reassess and say within 2 we in fact had language. It was determined to be language at T-3, but it was known at T-2, which means we were wrong at T-2 to say it wasn't language. Turns out it was.

So, what existed at T-2 was (a) some sort of internal state and (b) a then unknown logical rule based coherence.

My conclusion is to suggest that since ontological state 2 was whatever it was at T-2, and T-3 cannot change what really existed in the world at T-2, then it was as much language from T-2 to T-3. This means that it was (a) that is the critical element for language, which I call a "quale " The issue isn't (b) as we have shown that whether the language actually follows a rule matters, not whether it is known. That means we need not subject a word to public use to make it lingual. A private word is just as much a word as a public word. There might be epistemic challenges at T-2 to know if it's language, but that doesn't impact ontology.

OK, here's where I am with this, and please tell me if you think I'm off track:

First of all, you're showing that this is not about private language as Witt understood it. There's nothing intrinsically private about "burj," or at least I don't think there is -- that's why I've been so concerned to understand the circumstances in which it's introduced. It got a little confusing because, by telling us that it refers to a somewhat ineffable feeling on the part of the speaker, you incline us toward believing that it is private in Witt's sense, but the subsequent details don't bear that out. "Burj" is merely a potential new word in a public language. It would make no difference to the case whether "burj" referred to a somewhat ineffable feeling or a type of perfectly effable tree.

I think this fits with your saying:

That means we need not subject a word to public use to make it lingual. A private word is just as much a word as a public word — Hanover

though you take it a bit further. For you, "burj" is already a word at T-2, by virtue of its meaning something to you, the speaker. I'm calling it a "potential" word but the difference is unimportant because we're both saying that, either way, it's not private in the invidious sense that would lead someone to conclude that meaning lies exclusively in usage. (It is an open question, however, whether meaning can be determined in any other way.)

If all that rings true, then I see the analogy with qualia. Your (a) is the internal state which analogizes to a quale, in that both exist and are "meaningful," if I can put it that way, yet have no appearance in public. You're saying it isn't possible to demote either (a) or a quale, claiming they're irrelevant to the experiences of language use and sense perception, respectively. Subjectivity matters, in short.

The analogy might break down when we ask how a quale could become part of public experience, but that's outside the scope of your story here.

Well, this is interesting and complex enough that I might have it all wrong! But see what you think.

You likely won't be very pleased. — Astrophel

Oh hell, nothing in philosophy pleases me! :grin:

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. — Astrophel

OK. But how does that turn the world into language?

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. — Astrophel

Let's switch the example to something I might really find puzzling -- an echidna, let's say. You point to the thing, calling it by name, and I say, "What's an echidna?" For starters, you'll say, "That is," and I'll have a good look and form some sense impressions. We might then discuss its features. If I then go on to ask, "What sort of beast is it?" you might have recourse to a biology text to give me some info. But that can't be the point at which what you're calling the "indeterminacy" enters. Nothing in a written text is any more indeterminate than the language you and I are already using. So for me, the question is, How indeterminate is that? At the level of philosophy, we all know the arguments that can be made. But none of them prevents you and me from agreeing with perfect certainty on what counts as an echidna, and what are the correct and incorrect ways of describing it. Isn't that good enough?

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 — Astrophel

You do realize this is opaque? Perhaps not in context, but it doesn't do the job of explaining why the world must be made of language, which is what I was asking about.

He didn't posit, but explicitly denied, any metaphysical primordiality to our existence, anything like qualia. — Astrophel

Who said qualia, or some qualia-like sense of existence, were metaphysically primordial? (Not me.) I'm asking why you think language is. Do you perhaps mean that the only alternative to the primacy of language is some story about what is self-evident about my own existence? Why would that be?

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. — Astrophel

Fair enough. Can you describe the cat in terms of the more penetrating analytic, showing how a relevant difference in description occurs?

I'm really not some AnalPhil opponent of Continental philosophy. Nor am I trying to broaden the discussion to make you defend an entire approach to philosophy. I just want to get a sympathetic grasp on how it might appear to an intelligent thinker that the external world is at bottom linguistic, which I take to be your position. Far from wanting to refute it, I'd like to inhabit it, at least provisionally, and see what I can learn.

OK. But how does that turn the world into language? — J

So I'm not going to put out there the long version. As succinctly as it can be put: It's is crazy to think what you see before you is what it is with no contribution from the perceptual act that produces it. Its "isness" IS the act, and when I turn my attention to a fence post, say, I already know fence posts prior to attention being episodically engaged, and this recognition is part and parcel of the act that brings the fence post to mind, allowing it to be understood AS a fence post. For us, not for cats, this is a language event, for ven though you may not say "fencepost", it reveals its language dimension themoment you do, think about where it is, how shabby it is, how lost you are, who it belongs to, and so on. It is these language contexts that tacitly attend the passive understanding, evidenced by the way language is "ready to hand" and the way language confirms what it IS in language: a fencepost.

It is not that we don't share a basic structure of relating to the world with animals; I am sure we do, but a self that knows, constructs conditionals, negations, disjunctions, conjunctions, and so on, is a language construct. Consider: I say, "I am." This is supposed to be an existential declaration, but who is talking here? I want to say I am using language, but the way of affirming that it is me is in the language that "speaks". I say, "why, it is me." You see, cats do not have the ability to use the copula, "is". They cannot predicate anything of something else, and they cannot think propositionally. Language confers upon the world its "being". No, you say, perhaps, being is all that out there, the trees, the birds, and so forth, but: what ARE these without language? What am I, if the "I" is not speakable?

But you will protest again that obviously there are things there that are not language. Obviously. This is why we have the term qualia: unspoken Being (and since this is sooo succinctly put, I have settle for this here. Once you read into the matter, things get technical).

Let's switch the example to something I might really find puzzling -- an echidna, let's say. You point to the thing, calling it by name, and I say, "What's an echidna?" For starters, you'll say, "That is," and I'll have a good look and form some sense impressions. We might then discuss its features. If I then go on to ask, "What sort of beast is it?" you might have recourse to a biology text to give me some info. But that can't be the point at which what you're calling the "indeterminacy" enters. Nothing in a written text is any more indeterminate than the language you and I are already using. So for me, the question is, How indeterminate is that? At the level of philosophy, we all know the arguments that can be made. But none of them prevents you and me from agreeing with perfect certainty on what counts as an echidna, and what are the correct and incorrect ways of describing it. Isn't that good enough? — J

In a context of talking about enchidna, it makes sense to talk about enchidna. If you and I made up an animal, gave it a name, it would depend on what we say about it, but whatever that would be would depend on what is already there, in the resources of language at our disposal. Japanese or Zimbabwean connotative values would be unavailable to me, for example. Indeterminacy is not about contextual agreements, like the ones found in text books or dictionaries. These are determinacies, for all is there for one to read and agree about. Rather, it is about these contexts, and any context you can think of, having no center, no final context to which they conform and derive their essential meaning. God use to be this, and the church, for example, but in the post modern setting, God is absent and thus the ground for all things is absent, and so meanings just hang there, so to speak, by their own intercontextual agreements and possibilities, but no foundation outside of this. There is no outside. Such a thing belongs to metaphysics.

Who said qualia, or some qualia-like sense of existence, were metaphysically primordial? (Not me.) I'm asking why you think language is. Do you perhaps mean that the only alternative to the primacy of language is some story about what is self-evident about my own existence? Why would that be? — J

One has to steer clear of all of the above, stories, scientific accounts (regardless of how well evidenced), for even the "saying" the word 'qualia' stands as a violation of what it "is". For to speak is never "about" what sits before your eyes. Speech is historical, logic sees individual things subsumed under universal concepts, some think truth is made, not discovered (for we construct meanings in propositions, and propositions are bound to a contextuality of related meanings). But a quale-like sense, this makes the move, for a sense is something that intimates a vagueness not yet congealed in words. What makes all of this so difficult is that the method of discovery (real discovery) has to thought about.

In his Ideas I, Husserl spoke of a phenomenological reduction, and this is a modified Cartesian attempt to suspend language's instant grasp of things in the world, such that if one practiced just looking at "things themselves" (not to be confused with Kant's noumena, the "thing itself") rather than allowing mundane language use to do what it always does, which is to identify spontaneously, thoughtlessly, preanalytically, preontologically, one could eventually see the world as it IS, the world of phenomena, not cats, and dogs and computer chips, but the phenomenological ground that is always there, but ignored. So this word "sense" has some value in this, because as familiarity slips away in this method, and the uncanny "sense" of things moves in (Kierkegaard's "anxiety"; see his Concept of Anxiety. Heidegger had read Kierkegaard closely), there is an existential crisis, and how one understands this depends on who you read.

This innocent idea of qualia is at the heart of some of the most abstruse philosophy there is.

Private language is really not the way to frame the discussion about qualia. One's being in the world is historical and collective, but this language one inherits is inherently reductive, that is, it reduces the world of itches and tickles, and yearnings, and contmpt and interest, and on and on, into a language that gives these actualities enunciation, or even "being". Language both opens and closes a world's meanings, but the point I wold make is this: I have experiences you do not have, simply because mine are here and yours there, and I can't witness yours nor you mine. My world is a private actuality, and no one can "peek in". But language is public, and so what I am, qualia aside, is a publicly constructed self that is settled in this private world. And so these actualities of feel and taste, etc., are understood subsumed under these public headings, but they remain independent of these as well. An itch, after all, is not language as such, and by as such I mean...as qualia.

Fair enough. Can you describe the cat in terms of the more penetrating analytic, showing how a relevant difference in description occurs?

I'm really not some AnalPhil opponent of Continental philosophy. Nor am I trying to broaden the discussion to make you defend an entire approach to philosophy. I just want to get a sympathetic grasp on how it might appear to an intelligent thinker that the external world is at bottom linguistic, which I take to be your position. Far from wanting to refute it, I'd like to inhabit it, at least provisionally, and see what I can learn. — J

Then read Heidegger's Being and Time. Here is an idea: Einstein talks about time, but he doesn't talk about the nature of the perceptual event that is presupposed by his mathematics. In division II of Being and Time Heidegger talks about time, taking up the way it has been handled historically, from Augustine (Confessions, chap 11), Brentano (which I have read a bit of), Kierkegaard, Husserl , and so on. The essential idea is that time has three modalities, past, present and future, and it is simply impossible to make sense of these at all apart from the others, for (the down and dirty version) when I think of the past, I do so in the present, and the past cannot be conceived apart from the present act of recollection as if one could simply step away from the present and affirm the past "as it is," which is just impossible to conceive. No, the past comes into existence IN the present recollection, but then, as I recall something in the present, that act of recalling itself anticipates the recalled events that are about to be recalled, just as, as I write these words, the next words that will be written do not spring up spontaneously from nowhere, but are anticipated PRIOR to the actual writing, and that priorness leaps ahead of the present into the anticipated future. I write what I already know, the words, sentential constructions, the meanings are all there, but these are already ahead of the present moment as they are thought.

Heidegger calls this the ecstatic modalities of time, ecstatic because each have their essence bound to that of the others: he past IS the future, and the future IS the past, and they each are outside of themselves, ecstatically, as they are IN each other. One could say, there really is no such thing as sequential time. Time is a unity. And the present? This is freedom. This is where one will find qualia.

For us, not for cats, this is a language event — Astrophel

Then, as noted before, we have no real difference. I too think that language permeates human experience, though calling sense perception a "language event" is perhaps too strong. I'd taken you to be saying that the thing we perceive is also a piece of language, but that, of course, is different, and I'm pleased you're not recommending such a view.

obviously there are things there that are not language. Obviously. This is why we have the term qualia — Astrophel

Well, and the term noumena as well. But again, no problem, as long as something, whether noumena or qualia (depending on the degree of idealism you adopt, I guess!) pre-exists our efforts to talk about it.

Really, can't this all be said quite simply? We don't (as adults with language) encounter the world innocently, seeing objects like fenceposts and cats "because they're there." Both biologically and socially, we've learned over the history of our species to make choices about how to concatenate and discriminate our perceptions into the categories that are important to us. More often than not, we're aided (or on occasion constricted) by our language, which provides ready labels. Whether some sort of "true being" is to be discovered beyond this, we don't know, or at least I don't.

Really, can't this all be said quite simply? We don't (as adults with language) encounter the world innocently, seeing objects like fenceposts and cats "because they're there." Both biologically and socially, we've learned over the history of our species to make choices about how to concatenate and discriminate our perceptions into the categories that are important to us. More often than not, we're aided (or on occasion constricted) by our language, which provides ready labels. Whether some sort of "true being" is to be discovered beyond this, we don't know, or at least I don't. — J

Simply? That was simply. Open, say, a book called Totality and Infinity by Emanuel Levinas, and your head will spin. These philosophers are not trying to be accessible to anyone but those who read continental philosophy.

Keep in mind that when you think of "the history of our species" and the way we are biologically and socially embedded in the world, you have not yet reached the primordiality of our existence. Phenomenology takes such thinking and asks what is presupposed in science's observations and claims. I said earlier that Einstein didn't really ask questions like this and did not enter into the presuppositional world of themes and analysis. You saybiology, and I don't at all disagree with biology, but I do ask about the perceptual acts that are in place in gathering biological data. A biologist tells me there is a physical brain that is the "seat" of consciousness, for example, and I do not deny this in a setting where biology is being discussed. But then ask, how this brain is confirmed to be what it is, and this of course goes to observation, and then the question, well, what is observation? Biologists will then give you an extensive account of the central nervous system, various organs that receive information, but then all of this begs the same question asked about the brain: we know nervous systems and the rest by observation, so what IS observation apart from these physical accounts that is non question begging? and then you have to move away from observation as a physical manifestation, because all of this kind of thing begs the same questions about observation, and then, you are forced to move into apriori reasoning, which is philosophy, really. (If someone gives empirical proof as an evidential ground for something, it is not going to be a philosophical thesis; it will be a science or some speculative extension of a science; though, technically, "science" needs to be qualified here. Husserl thought he had discovered a science of phenomenology). Philosophical naturalism leads absolutely nowhere philosophically.

A long time ago, I read Rorty who stated that there is no way to explain how anything "out there" gets "in here" referring to, respectively, some tree or cup on the table, and his brain. Rorty was a Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian, Deweyan; a pragmatist. I found this more than curious, and thought about it a lot until I discovered he was right: that epistemic relation between me and my cat "over there" is impossible, flat out impossible, on a naturalist ground for understanding, because, as Quine put it, for a naturalist science, causality is the essential authority the underlies all things (notwithstanding quantum issues, which do not deny causality, which is impossible, for causality is apodictically coercive, but await causal connectivity down the road), and there is nothing epistemic about causality!

The weirdest thing I had ever encountered, but there was no way out of this. In fact, it gets weirder, for not only on this basis do you not get knowledge of the world, you don't get knowledge of anything, for what is knowledge but brain events, and so to affirm brain events, what is the ground for this? Brain events. But calling them brain events is reducible to briain events, and to confirm this you would need to stand apart from brain events to do this, so that what you witness is not reducible to brain events. But this is absurd, to step outside of a brain event. Where, into another brain? But then this wold beg the same question! Wittgenstein said as much: logic cannot know the ground for logic (Kant said this, too), because to affirm this, one would have to move to a thrid perspective from which logic could be observed, but this itself would be questioned as to its nature, and one would have to again find another pov to affirm the ground for this; and so on.

The only way to preserve knowledge, and the world, and everything, is to step away from naturalism altogether. This thesis leads to pure epistemic and ontological nonsense. One then must move toward affirmation where it had been all along: in the phenomenon of the givenness of the object itself, which is apodictic, just as apodictic as logic! Hence, phenomenology wins the philosophical dispute over foundational ground for existence.

:wink:

First of all, you're showing that this is not about private language as Witt understood it. There's nothing intrinsically private about "burj," or at least I don't think there is -- that's why I've been so concerned to understand the circumstances in which it's introduced. It got a little confusing because, by telling us that it refers to a somewhat ineffable feeling on the part of the speaker, you incline us toward believing that it is private in Witt's sense, but the subsequent details don't bear that out. "Burj" is merely a potential new word in a public language. It would make no difference to the case whether "burj" referred to a somewhat ineffable feeling or a type of perfectly effable tree. — J

Alright, I went back and re-read myself. I think I see where the confusion arises, which is likely in my presentation of the thought experiment. You read what I literally said, not what I was thinking, which is ironic in a way.

In #1, burj was a word.
In #2, bujr was not a word.
In #3, burj was a tape recording of the word at #2 when it was not a word.

I said #1 was at T-1 and #2 was at T-2, leading you to understandably believe that the word that was at T-1 couldn't have unbecome a word at T-2. I want you therefore to erase from your memory banks #1 at T-1. It never happened. I had presented it as just an exemplar case of common word creation, but it wasn't to suggest that burj had been a word and now was un-worded once I started using it only in my brain without public use.

Is that where some confusion lies? Kill #1. It's dead. Now consider everything I said as if some of the things hadn't been said.

Is that where some confusion lies? — Hanover

Possibly, thank you.

Kill #1. It's dead. — Hanover

Consider it dead.

OK, the analogy with qualia is clear. In #2, "burj" is like a quale. In #3, "burj" is like a quale that has been made public. You're saying that there must be qualia, otherwise the transition from 2 to 3 would make no sense. "Burj" is still lingual, still a word, even at 2.

Something like that?

Moving it a little further, is there any process for making qualia public? We more or less understand what happens to "burj" in #3, but what is the analogy for qualia here?

Is "burj" supposed as an example of a qual?

I'd understood that a qual was this sensation, here, now, present to me... that sort of thing. That the qual I have on looking at the red folder is not the same as the one I had looking at the folder yesterday - the light, the position of my head, being slightly different...

And so since "burj" occurs on multiple occasions, it is not a qual... perhaps it is a sensation, or a memory, or a pretence, but not a qual.

But that's the problem, isn't it? It remains so unclear what a qual is.