No real disagreement but how does this reflect on our capacity to talk meaningfully about ontology and metaphysics? Nevertheless it often does seem a metaphysical puzzle that we are able to understand each other at all. No wonder some religious folk consider God foundationally necessary for intelligibility. — Tom Storm

It seems we can talk meaningfully about the ideas that come to us when we try to imagine what the world might be like in itself. I would just say that we cannot meaningfully assign truth or falsity to those words, because truth and falsity are established either logically or empirically, I don't see truth and meaning as being joined at the hip.

Are you coming at this as a Kantian? — Tom Storm

I do generally agree with Kant regarding the limitations of thought.

"The being of meaning?"

Discursive practice.

We all knows what 'causal' means in the ordinary sense. Same with 'mechanical'. The meaning of both just consists in one thing acting on another to bring about effect, change, event or process. — Janus

Of course we know well enough for practical purposes how to sling these tokens. That's never been in question. What I'm trying to point out is this structural hopscotch from 'cause' to 'thing' to 'effect' to 'event' and so on. The being of meaning seems to be distributed over the whole system rather than concentrated in a particular bark or squeak. I don't deny that saying 'dog' can trigger a certain image. But 'cause' and 'event' are terribly blurry.

If we think that if we don't know what words mean or refer to, then we cannot understand ourselves to be asking the questions about meaning or reference in the first place. — Janus

I've already said myself (in other words) that semantic finitude can only finitely or imperfectly specify itself. As convenient as it might be for those uncomfortable with the issue, this is not a simple case of "communication is impossible," which is of course self-cancelling. It's obviously, given the quotes, well within the philosophical tradition.

***
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.... As a part of the system of language, one may say “the sentence has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.
***
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
***

This is not about some kind of authority of those quotes but to show that the tradition has tended to give a damn about whether and how it knew what it was talking about. What are we who think ? What is thinking ? What is meaning ? It'd be folly to expect some simple answer here. In fact, I expect this project to go on forever, but not without progress, with the sign 'progress' also being used in unpredictable ways (taking on new 'meanings') in the process.

But 'cause' and 'event' are terribly blurry. — green flag

I don't see that they are any more blurry than anything else. Speaking for myself, I, at least,
have a clear idea of cause and effect.

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.... As a part of the system of language, one may say “the sentence has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign. — green flag

All you're saying is that one must have some minimal command of language in order to understand what words refer to and what sentences mean.

That said, even my dogs understand what "do you want to go to the beach" means.

I don't imagine "something in some occult sphere" that gives meaning or "life" to sentences; it's just a matter of habitually instilled association as I understand it.

something in an occult sphere — green flag

someone unpack that a bit. Why that word? Why 'occult' in this context.

But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. — green flag

Do you mean the possibility of transcendence built into the process?

You can think of an infinite number of tokens in a certain sense by adding context to each traditionally conceived token. You might never use 'token' twice in the same context. We can also imagine sentences as tokens for a countable infinity. And so on. But you make a good point about the reuse of words. There's a paper out there about the use and efficiency of ambiguity. Our short words tend to be ambiguous. We've learned to lean on the practical context to cheapen the cost of babble. — green flag

Are there an infinite number of sentences?

I think there's a very large number of sentences, and language is infinitely iterable -- but it's used within a finite amount of time, so there will only be so many finite sentences produced, for instance, if our theory of tokens is that sentences are tokens.

But one thing I'd push against here is that language must use sentences. The stop light is a good example of tokens of meaning without English sentences (though surely, if we normally use English, we interpret with English and explain what the lights mean in English -- green means go, red means stop, yellow means slow down)

So part of the difficulty in asking after the sign is even choosing what a token is. Is braille sententially structured? What is its relation to sign-language, and what is sign-languages relationship to ant pheromones which mean "follow this trail" when interpreted into English?

Sure. We are practically successful. There are billions of us. I imagine philosophy as wanting a tighter and tighter grip and yet a larger and more articulated view of the world. To solidify and sharpen what we mean manifests something like a will to power and beauty. Why does a cat groom itself ? — green flag

I think a certain kind of philosophy likes to pursue a grasping of the world. For me, I pretty much find pleasure in the activity itself. And I see so many potential avenues for philosophical development that it's really fascinating. Sometimes there is comfort in having an articulated viewpoint, and sometimes there is comfort in recognizing that articulated viewpoint as something more like a model to share with others and less like a grasping of reality.

So, in short, I do it for fun and sociality.

"The being of meaning?"

Discursive practice. — 180 Proof

:up:

That sounds right to me (as you imply, it's embodied.)

So part of the difficulty in asking after the sign is even choosing what a token is. — Moliere

:up:

What's funny is that even the rhetorical failures or troubles of semantic finitism serve as examples thereof.

To me this thread is about making darkness visible. I carry my torch into the cave to look at the size of it. The tunnel widens as I push forward.

Speaking for myself, I, at least,
have a clear idea of cause and effect. — Janus

I have a 'clear idea' of the will of God myself. Why do you think phenomenology became hermeneutic ? What is the essence of human historicity ?

Let's look at the etymology of these terms.

IDEA
idea => from idein "to see," from PIE *wid-es-ya-, suffixed form of root *weid- "to see."
https://www.etymonline.com/word/idea
Roughly an idea is an image, though (as mentioned early), metaphors lift terms into new usages, so that 'idea' is no longer interchangeable with 'image.' Do you see what I mean ?

CLEAR
c. 1300, "giving light, shining, luminous;" also "not turbid; transparent, allowing light to pass through; free from impurities; morally pure, guiltless, innocent;" of colors, "bright, pure;" of weather or the sky or sea, "not stormy; mild, fair, not overcast, fully light, free from darkness or clouds;" of the eyes or vision, "clear, keen;" of the voice or sound, "plainly audible, distinct, resonant;" of the mind, "keen-witted, perspicacious;" of words or speech, "readily understood, manifest to the mind, lucid" (an Old English word for this was sweotol "distinct, clear, evident"); of land, "cleared, leveled;" from Old French cler "clear" (of sight and hearing), "light, bright, shining; sparse" (12c., Modern French clair), from Latin clarus "clear, loud," of sounds; figuratively "manifest, plain, evident," in transferred use, of sights, "bright, distinct;" also "illustrious, famous, glorious" (source of Italian chiaro, Spanish claro), from PIE *kle-ro-, from root *kele- (2) "to shout."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=clear

This one is messier, but it's amazing to find an auditory metaphor at the bottom. What is clear is like what shouts at you in the environment. It's obvious, grabs your attention.

I think the clarity metaphor is also related to a background idea of an object being seen through clear water. In this case the clear speech or writing is the conveniently clean and transparent water, while the meaning of that speech is the pebble on the bottom of the creek. To say something is clear is like pasting a hieroglyph of clean water on it, perhaps a few wavy lines.

For me, I pretty much find pleasure in the activity itself. — Moliere

:up:

A profound pleasure ! But it also makes me feel powerful, and I think that's part of the pleasure.

All you're saying is that one must have some minimal command of language in order to understand what words refer to and what sentences mean. — Janus

As Hegel noted, we can always try to summarize a philosophical point with a banal platitude. This is why the point is clarifying what the hell we are even talking about. What is a 'command of language' ? Another metaphor, this 'command.'

(1) No one denies that you can go on with your life and chug along in the usual idletalk and its average intelligibility. You might end with more money in your bank account and more friends.

(2) I claim that most of the real work in philosophy is semantic. You can prove God is dead or blue or made of numbers. Fine. But I want to know what you've proved exactly, as exactly as a finite human can manage in a finite time. Of course even here we have to choose what is worth clarifying in the first place.

(3) If the clarification of meaning is the essence of philosophy, then it makes sense to clarify clarification (seeing its own metaphorically, for instance) -- and to get a better sense of what sense is. This is fairly obviously Heideggarian, but that just means he found a good path to explore and not authoritative answers.

language is infinitely iterable -- but it's used within a finite amount of time, so there will only be so many finite sentences produced, for instance, — Moliere

If humans go extinct, then I guess you are right. There are finitely many expressions, even including context as part of the expression. Chalk up another win for semantic finitism. (Just kidding. But good point.)

No wonder some religious folk consider God foundationally necessary for intelligibility. — Tom Storm

Something like the mind of God seems to be necessary for the 'prestructuralist' theory of meaning. The assumption (not usually made explicit) is that there is a universal set of signifieds just waiting for this or that tribe to agree on handles or labels for them. This eternal set of signifieds is 'the divine logos.' Somehow (no one can tell) we are all plugged directly into this logos, for these 'mental experiences...are the same for all.' And yet 'we' pretend to be (?) scientific and think we evolved from amoebas....? How do animals which evolved from germs co-generate language ? Many animals have bodies that cooperate. That's a natural starting point. How do metaphors get 'lifted up' into new, literal meanings ? Platonistic theories of meaning are married to some version of creationism, it seems to me, without realizing it. They want structure without genesis and, accordingly, without death.

Do you mean the possibility of transcendence built into the process? — Tom Storm

I think Wittgenstein is saying that we tend to imagine signifieds or pure meanings as existing in some 'purely mental' realm. This seems to be what Aristotle claims when he says there are 'mental experiences' which are the same for all humans.

But Plato's forms are images etymologically, mere pictures. So even Plato is on the edge of seeing us as savages trading hieroglyphs, except his are not historically generated, mutable, blurry, entangled with 'matter' (embodied), and subject to decay and erasure.

To what is the (purely mental) 'idea' of reference supposed to refer ? To a Donnie Darko cleargoo snakebridge from the (shared) Platonisphere to desolate beach in Alaska where the thinker baits a hook ?

To what does a Donnie Darko cleargoo snakebridge refer ? Has that idea always existed in the divine logos ?

someone unpack that a bit. Why that word? Why 'occult' in this context. — Wayfarer

It just means hidden. This is just Ryle's classic target, the ghost in the machine. 'Your' experience of redness or love or the meaning of meaning is radically private. According to the theory of this ghost in the machine, no amount of technological progress could make a mindscope possible. There is something infinitely interior, infinitely self-present and self-transparent. This ghost, which is radically immaterial (hence the hard problem), either 'is' or is in immediate contact with 'the divine logos' or the 'pure information' or the 'meanings' of words, stripped of their mere clothing, marks and noises.

This 'soul superstition' is not entirely wrong. Philosophers like Brandom have build understandings of what it is to be a self from what Kant and Hegel got right. Social language is at the center of the lifeworld. What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim.

What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim. — green flag

Interesting. What's the nature of the gulf between these two?

Something like the mind of God seems to be necessary for the 'prestructuralist' theory of meaning. The assumption (not usually made explicit) is that there is a universal set of signifieds just waiting for this or that tribe to agree on handles or labels for them. — green flag

I've not heard this style of Platonic argument made before about this.

How do animals which evolved from germs co-generate language ? — green flag

Maybe I'm reading you wrong but is it your contention that evolution can't explain language and metacognition?

Platonistic theories of meaning are married to some version of creationism, it seems to me, without realizing it — green flag

Can you make that connection for me - simply, for a non-philosopher?

Cool. This might be the one thing that allows me to draw a distinction between myself and those who believe in Propositions, for instance (which fits the loose notion of Platonism) -- the words mean, but we are still their creators. And they are up for interpretation, so emphasis on the we: what I intend is not per se what I say. Intent could be important for my listener, but need not be. And it's this interplay between writer and interpreter where meaning originates, I think. (and the sharing of interpretations is itself a new writing which must be interpreted, and so on as long as we desire, which is a lot higher than one might suppose for the philosophically inclined ;) )

So, yes, a very large number. But still finite.

(EDIT: Also, I thought it a mistake but then I kind of liked the distinction between writer-listener -- it's perfect for disrupting the notion that a sign must be either visual or aural, and the pheromone example demonstrates how it could even be chemical (and need not include homosapeins -- most social species, I imagine, have language, whatever it is))

I'm not seeing any point here to respond to, which you should understand, even if only on the basis that you seem to think language so indeterminate.

What is a 'command of language' ? Another metaphor, this 'command.' — green flag

A command of language is simply the ability to communicate adequately. If we didn't have command of a language we would not be having this conversation.

(1) No one denies that you can go on with your life and chug along in the usual idletalk and its average intelligibility. You might end with more money in your bank account and more friends.

(2) I claim that most of the real work in philosophy is semantic. You can prove God is dead or blue or made of numbers. Fine. But I want to know what you've proved exactly, as exactly as a finite human can manage in a finite time. Of course even here we have to choose what is worth clarifying in the first place.

(3) If the clarification of meaning is the essence of philosophy, then it makes sense to clarify clarification (seeing its own metaphorically, for instance) -- and to get a better sense of what sense is. This is fairly obviously Heideggarian, but that just means he found a good path to explore and not authoritative answers. — green flag

If we cannot do more than "ideltalk" then philosophical discussion would appear to be a waste of time, and the meaning of anything anyone says will be indeterminable beyond the banality of "average intelligibility".

If most of the "real" work (whatever that means) in philosophy is semantic, which means "to do with meaning", then we would appear to spiralling down an infinite helix of regress. I suffer from vertigo, so I won't be joining you in that endeavour.

As to choosing what is worth clarifying, is that not inevitably an individual choice? Or is there some authority...?

The clarification of the clarification of meaning? How about the clarification of the clarification of the clarification of meaning? There you go slippery sliding down that infinite helix again!

The later Heidegger did not seem to clarify much, but then poetry doesn't aim for clarification but rather for evocation of the unclarifiable nature of our situation, which is much more fun.

What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim. — green flag

Or maybe they do manage to say it, but you don't get it. I say 'occult' is deliberately pejorative, in this context. Ryle's ghost metaphor is grounded in the fundamental flaw of Cartesianism, which is the 'objectification of the self' - treating the self as a kind of ghostly thinking thing. The right stance is that 'the eye can't see itself, the hand can't grasp itself' - the self is elusive, not because it's ghostly or occult, but it is not in the objective frame, it's the subject of experience, not the object of knowledge. Since Descartes, western philosophy has never been able to deal with that, hence the Cartesian anxiety - referring to the notion that, 'since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other"'. Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. You can see how the dismissive use of the term 'occult' is used in a futile attempt to combat that anxiety - by depicting it in terms usually reserved for side-show charlatans and fortune tellers. Speaks volumes.

Interesting. What's the nature of the gulf between these two? — Tom Storm

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. — Hegel

The finite, as I understand, is something that is independent and enclosed and detached from everything else. The finite entity is an abstraction (a useful fiction, no true being), the result of reason's 'violence' against the unified fabric of being-in-the-world. In other words, idealism means holism. Idealism means system. The truth is the whole.

The scientific image is a desiccated X-ray of the world where history and language are methodically omitted. This is why it's useful as map. Reduction is a good thing, I'm saying, because I'm not antiscience.

But it's shitty metaphysics to worship a map within the lifeworld which depends for its sense on that lifeworld as somehow the realest truth about that lifeworld -- as if marriages and mockingbirds don't 'really exist' but other 'fictions' like quarks do.

But of course many 'idealist' are caught in preHegelian veil-of-ideals implicit solipsism. They 'trust' that the 'external' world exists, but they don't see the absurdity of doubting it theoretically.

I've not heard this style of Platonic argument made before about this. — Tom Storm

I've tried to make it vivid and explicit. There is a 'mindscape' thread out there at the moment that invokes this idea in pretty much this way.

The fantasy that we ghosts in the machine seems to require it. People speak of the hard problem of consciousness [singular] -- which implies that there is one way to be conscious -- while also assuming the absolute privacy of the stuff. It makes no sense. Or it can only be saved with the assumption that we are all plugged directly into the divine mind, call it what they will.

Maybe I'm reading you wrong but is it your contention that evolution can't explain language and metacognition? — Tom Storm

No. I'm saying that any explanation must make sense in the context of evolution. I'm suggesting that language is fundamentally a tribal kind of software, which evolves as tribes struggle together in their environment. Our late, leisured civilization, economically rewarding the right kind of creativity, has pushed individuality to (often literally) insane heights of course. 'Moloch demands a tower.' But we are monkeys trading hieroglyphics. We know what we mean just well enough to lay the next brick.

Can you make that connection for me - simply, for a non-philosopher? — Tom Storm

Platonic theories need ideas to have always been here (I neglected to account for this.) Or to have been suddenly created all at once. Postchristian Plato ?

To me the issue is whether we cogenerate a larger and larger set of meanings together as animals trading marks and noises as we cooperate to make babies who make babies...or whether we 'remember' the divine logos which we swim in between rebirths. I think words are the supertool, the metatool.

It can't be this simple, but maybe Platonism is the mystification of equivalence classes in the perennial quest to deny death.

Do we create, as historical animals, the meanings we live and die in ? Are the meanings there in the world, incarnate and never utterly bodiless ? Or are we born with spiritual receivers that tune in to some otherwise hidden dimension, getting the juice ineffably directly ?

Exactly. :up:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/793279

it's the subject of experience, not the object of knowledge. — Wayfarer

This is not such a difficult idea. It's one of several flavors. In this version, the self comes of as the being or presence of sensations, that they are and not what they are. The self doesn't look at a screen. The self is a screen. But now the screen metaphor is pointless, for there is no one to look at it.

What do thinkers make of thoughts ? They are in a bind here. Some want to unify the thoughtstream and decide (without justification) that it's a monologue. In this version, we have a selfoverhearing voice that needs neither mouth nor ears to do so and understands itself perfectly. In this version, we have a screen that watches itself, it seems.

If the thoughts are part of The Given, you might as well go the whole hog :

‘Thoughts’ and ‘things’ are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. ... But one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego... ... the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity – these passing over to the content – and becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein überhaupt of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said.

I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy. ...

To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function’s being carried on. — James

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm

You can see how the dismissive use of the term 'occult' is used in a futile attempt to combat that anxiety - by depicting it in terms usually reserved for side-show charlatans and fortune tellers. Speaks volumes. — Wayfarer

From my perspective, you are interpreting the situation in terms of antireligious scientism, addicted to certainty, and the courageous quest for genuine spirituality, willing to risk being wrong. But it's absurd to frame Wittgenstein as antispiritual (need I explain ?),and it's also absurd to seemingly implicitly frame my own semantic finitism, self-consciously striving to make darkness visible, as another form of certaintyworship. "Philosophy cuts the crust of convention and the cheese of complacency."

I've been discussing ideas that emphasize the basic difficultly of even knowing what we are talking about. We know something. Communication is possible. But what is its nature ? What is the being of meaning ?

it's absurd to frame Wittgenstein as antispiritual — green flag

But not as anti-metaphysical.

... anti-metaphysical ... — Wayfarer

So you've forgotten about or have not yet read Witty's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (especially propositions 1-2) or, more sadly, you just read it as badly as the Viennese logical positivists had? :chin: