what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? — Tom Storm

Perhaps the answer to this question doesn't exist already, as if waiting for us to find it. I'm tempted to speak of a frontier calling for creativity. We can always find new ways to talk about our talking and argue that this or that way is the deepest and truest way ---and then someone else comes along with an equally impressive tale.

What is it to say ? This may get us in Heidegger territory. What is being ? What is meaning ? It's like trying to make darkness visible, but maybe it's just a ghost story. Are humans hilariously ignorant in all of their hubris about fundamental things ? Or are they high on the fumes of not-exactly-questions ? I don't know, but I lean toward some fundamental ignorance and vulnerability which it mostly pays to ignore (or doesn't pay to not ignore) (unless you were a existentialist who sold some books.)

On the reality issue, I think you already said something valuable -- that it tends to function religiously in certain contexts. IMO, examining the meanings of 'real' is great part of the greater examination of meaning. How do these power words function ? We could also talk about the meaning of 'God' or 'truth' or 'reference' -- endlessly. I started a thread about 'semantic finitude' on this topic, as you may recall, because I don't think we can escape the fog, get a perfect grip, only a better one, or at least a new one, so that we don't get bored. — plaque flag

Yes, good points. I tend to keep coming back to similar notions of 'semantic finitude' too.

What is it to say ? This may get us in Heidegger territory. What is being ? What is meaning ? It's like trying to make darkness visible, but maybe it's just a ghost story. Are humans hilariously ignorant in all of their hubris about fundamental things ? Or are they high on the fumes of not-exactly-questions ? I don't know, but I lean toward some fundamental ignorance and vulnerability which it mostly pays to ignore (or doesn't pay to not ignore) (unless you were a existentialist who sold some books.) — plaque flag

This may well be the case, which either amuses me or makes me sad, depending on my mood.

And that never actually changes. Language, world, self --- we never achieve full understanding of any of these, so we go on our entire lives in with this partial understanding, just as when we were infants. And it works. — Srap Tasmaner

Probably right, similar to @plaque flags take.

How does language map onto the world? The obvious place to look is children, who have to learn how they work, how the world works, and how language works, and figure out how it all connects. — Srap Tasmaner

Agree, but I guess this is a pragmatic understanding of language, which doesn't address the question of realism. It seems to say, just get on with living and perhaps this takes us back to your statement above.

[Re: what kind of "world" you have in mind?] I have no world in mind. I am simply interested in what others think of this matter. — Tom Storm

I can't believe you wrote about something w/o having anything in mind! :smile:

I chose Lawson because he put what he thought was a key problem for ontology in plain English — Tom Storm

Yes, I know. This is why I talked about an impasse (no outlet, no solution),

I am wondering what people who study philosophy think of this claim as it strikes me as an interesting argument and might breathe some new life into debates about idealism. — Tom Storm

Oh, I din't know that. I'm not a student of or studying philosophy. So I cannot speak in that capacity.
I also see that you swtched the focus to idealism. I'm not so knowledgeable about that either.

So, I'm sorry to intervene.

Let me at least offer you a good reference on the subject: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-language-ontology/

So, I'm sorry to intervene. — Alkis Piskas

Not at all, I enjoyed your contribution. We're all in this together.

I can't believe you wrote about something w/o having anything in mind! — Alkis Piskas

I'm generally interested in philosophical ideas - these often have no bearing on what I believe. Nor should they. I'm simply interested in what ideas are out there.

I also see that you switched the focus to idealism. — Alkis Piskas

I didn't really. It's in the original quote from Lawson in the OP. The reason this question about language is interesting (if I understand it properly) is in determining whether it is even possible to talk meaningfully about ontology.

I'm generally interested in philosophical ideas - these often have no bearing on what I believe. Nor should they. I'm simply interested in what ideas are out there. — Tom Storm

Interesting. (As intellectual endeavor.)

I[Re: switching the focus to idealism]I didn't really. It's in the original quote from Lawson in the OP. — Tom Storm

I know that. I meant the topic itself, i.e. the mapping of language onto the world.

Anyway, I might get closer to the "language-world" subject since ita has alreaded starte to work somehow in my mind --not that I miss subjects to explore :smile:-- and read the SEP article that I brought up, to get myself some useful ideas on the subject ...

@Banno

Just to be clear, since I've been invoked, the distinction I'm articulating there is not the ultimate resting place for 'truth' (universe vs culture vs mind) but the declared nature of the barriers to its possession.

Whatever is between us and the truth is a power which can then be wielded politically.

What I meant by 'using those terms to bully' is that, in that particular instance, there is a certain class (let's call them liberal academics for want of a better term) who have a vested interest in promoting a location for 'truth' which is just within their grasp (from their hallowed halls) but just outside of the grasp of the great unwashed.

Literally the last thread on which I wrote was just such an example. The 'truth' regarding which political party it was best to vote for being conveniently just within the grasp of the moderately educated, but just outside of the reach of the working class, who must be educated out of their benighted ignorance.

Whatever the issue de jour, you'll find the same people who just so happen to hold an ever so convenient epistemology that places the truth just hard enough to access as to require their specific education, but not so hard as to render such an education worthless.

The hard-realists have it just right for sciencey types - truth is accessed by sufficiently complex empirical investigation.

The idealists have it just right for the humanities graduates. Truth is ever changing (the current version accessed, of course, via an up to date education - see 'are trans women women?')

The pragmatists are universally reviled for putting it out of everyone's reach like the exasperated parent finally putting the water pistol on the top shelf so that neither warring sibling can have it.

How does this relate to the OP? Not much maybe. My answer to the question of how language maps onto the world is that it doesn't. It's not what language is for and it never was. Language is a social tool to get stuff done, either cooperatively, or, increasingly these days, coercively, hence my somewhat rhetorical claim that truth is used mainly as a cudgel with which to beat one's opposition.

What's worse is that the direction of modern discourse is to make the truth even more pedestrian. In just a few years it's gone from the golden light at the end of the long tunnel of scientific enquiry to being easily accessed from the pages of the New York Times, or the lips of the government spokesman. Now we have 'disinformation experts' who's only truth-o-meter is to check what the government website says...

Anyway, I'm sure there's little stomach for political discussion in what's otherwise a nice bit of effete curiosity...

a pragmatic understanding of language, which doesn't address the question of realism — Tom Storm

That was the idea, yes, but I'm not sure it excludes what we want out of realism. This is precisely a question about the cognitive capacities and behavior of language-users. One reason to focus on learning when faced with such an issue is to "catch it in the act." Children are the ones who have to manage this mapping somehow; if it's a real thing (heh) then they're the ones who have to connect "ball" in their mouth to ball in their hand.

Put another way, if you're going to see it anywhere, you'll see it there, so look at the research on language learning and if that's not what it looks like, then this mapping is a myth.

I can give a small example of what I have in mind -- I think I'm remembering this from Rosch's prototype theory of concept acquisition. If you imagine a bunch of concepts arranged along a scale of abstractness, something like cocker spaniel-dog-mammal, then children tend to come into that scale in the middle, learning dog before the more specific or the more general.

Now we can ask how this partial language maps onto a partial world. Dog applies to every breed, and adults are fine with that. But what about in the other direction? Indeed children will over-generalize their use of a concept while they lack the more general term, so, if dog is the first mammal concept they acquire, or the first four-legged mammal, they'll apply it as if it were what we use mammal for: cows are "doggies", cats are "doggies", and so on. (In Monsters, Inc Boo calls Sully "kitty" -- those guys at Pixar are smart.)

Realism finds its clearest expression in the model-theoretic description of language, where you have a complete, closed set of symbols and a complete, closed set of objects, and they are matched up to each other according to some scheme. (It might be more precise to talk about systems of differences among symbols and among objects.) But to talk about natural languages, you have to allow the collection of symbols to grow, and allow the collections of objects that satisfy those symbols to shift, because the satisfaction scheme shifts, most dramatically when the collection of symbols is still small, but growing rapidly, as it is with children.

This is just one approach I remember a bit of, and only a tiny start on confronting the issue of realism using this research. What do we say about the child seeing a field full of cows and excitedly announcing "doggie!" or "doggies!"? One thing is clear, that the child would not have been "trained" to say this, because that's not what adults say, so an account that passes by issues of categorization is missing something. Is it plausible to focus only on categorizing the communicative situation, and describe the child as thinking, this is an appropriate occasion for uttering "doggie"? There's still over-generalization, but it's different. --- And what happens when the child does acquire cow but still doesn't have mammal? Does that mean cows are, to them, a kind a of dog?

One thing is clear from trying to write about this: hard as it is, it's easier to talk about a partial language than a partial world, but I think we have to find a way to get at the latter as well. If you don't know anything about chess and watch a game, you see everything the players do, under one scheme of description, but I really want to say that "black's king is in check" is not a possible fact for that observer -- neither true nor false if you must -- and you could describe this as not being able to categorize positions by whether black's king is in check. We might say the observer's world is not partial in the sense that it has less stuff in it, but that it makes slightly less sense. But it's also true that the observer cannot see check, and so there is something in the world of the players that is not part of the observer's world. (I think James somewhere gives an example of a dog, seeing perfectly the interactions among humans but attaching necessarily different meaning to it.)

So there's some stuff about realism.

Anyway, I'm sure there's little stomach for political discussion in what's otherwise a nice bit of effete curiosity... — Isaac

I think the beauty of Lawson’s promise (which I still don’t understand) is that if there’s no realist theory of language then discussions about effete topics like idealism and panpsychism bite the dust for good. That would be an interesting development.

Children are the ones who have to manage this mapping somehow; if it's a real thing (heh) then they're the ones who have to connect "ball" in their mouth to ball in their hand. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. There is a huge amount which can be learned about ourselves, from observing infants and young children learning. When we are very young all of our learning is a matter of automated deep learning in our brains, resulting from our interactions with the the world. The acquisition of capability for learning linguistically is secondary to learning from interactions with the world.

Whatever is between us and the truth is a power which can then be wielded politically. — Isaac

:up:
Truth, reality, God's will...

Anyway, I'm sure there's little stomach for political discussion in what's otherwise a nice bit of effete curiosity... — Isaac

Would you agree that the politics involved includes the interpersonal ? Not just forums like this, but friendships, marriages. Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things.

Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things. — plaque flag

:up:

I tend to keep coming back to similar notions of 'semantic finitude' too. — Tom Storm

FWIW, I connect this to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. We are nothingness trying to find a name for itself that will finally stick. To name truth or meaning or reality is also to name ourselves, define our project, who has authority, etc.

The acquisition of capability for learning linguistically is secondary to learning from interactions with the world. — wonderer1

But (1) language production and consumption is interaction with the world, social interaction, and (2) one of the things I wanted to get at -- and in a way, try to push back on the "map" metaphor -- is that it's not like children first acquire a complete conception of the world and then "paint" language onto it -- they have to do it all at once.

It seems obvious that a lot of basic learning mechanisms are common to us and our non-human relatives, but it's also apparent there are mechanisms specific to acquiring language, and it's a question whether some of the basic mechanisms are a bit different since they're part of a system that is also acquiring language. Is there an additional constraint on at least some of the concepts we form that they must be, so to speak, language-able?

This may well be the case, which either amuses me or makes me sad, depending on my mood. — Tom Storm

:up:

Hence the argument does not support your rejection of ↪Janus's point, a repetition of Davidson's observation that we overwhelmingly agree as to what is the case.

And this in turn fits with Wittgenstein's analysis of doubt, in On Certainty. To doubt, we must hold some things as indubitable. A view not too far from Quine. — Banno

Are you saying that overwhelming agreement on what is the case is a form of hinge proposition? I understand Witt’s notion of hinge propositions to concern pre-suppositions that function like Kuhnian paradigms. They make possible the determination of rational truth and falsity of propositions within their purview, but are not themselves rationally derived. As arational, they can neither be rationally doubted nor can belief in them be rationally generated. Thus, hinge commitments can not strictly be considered to be beliefs. I would add that, like paradigms, these commitments undergo continual, if gradual, transition.
How would overwhelming agreement function within a paradigmatic scientific community? Given that paradigms constantly change, wouldn’t agreement require a reciprocal back and forth, and begin as partial and among a minority before it became overwhelmingly majoritarian? And wouldn’t this near unanimity pass into a phase of overturning of the at-one-time overwhelming agreement?

Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things. — plaque flag

Another way I've looked at that is that we use language in place of the grunts and calls and mating dances and dominance rituals and grooming and all that other communication non-linguistic animals engage in just because, well, we've got language and it's usable for that. Which is to say we engage in what amounts to non-linguistic use of language, and that muddies the waters if you're trying to figure out whether language is different and how.

But maybe language is just animal communication only moreso. Animal communication with better tech (recursive syntax and all that). It's of course true that people write sonnets to get laid -- or claim the mantle of "truth" to control others -- but you won't see anything else if you don't look for anything else. I used to say it's an accident that in slightly upgrading our capacity for communication, evolution selected for something that was far more powerful than we could possibly have needed -- and here we are, a globe-spanning civilization. Evolution aimed for better chitchat and gave us language, and we're still trying to understand what happened.

Perhaps we should think of a big wet continuous blanket of interdependent concepts. Or we can think of the concept system as a restless goo. Popper foregrounds/invents one aspect of science. Kuhn foregrounds\invents another. Brandom's version of Hegel could maybe include both, and more, because Popper and Kuhn are now both themselves part of our inherited conceptual toolkit.

Popper saw that universals were everywhere in our talk. He respected metaphysics. Theoretical frameworks make observations possible in the first place. @Srap Tasmaner talked about watching a chess game above. Good analogy ! A theory brings the state of being in check into 'existence' --into the game of norm-governed responsible symbol trading. Our Lifeworld (largely lived 'inside' culture) gathers complexity as we bind time/experience symbolically.

Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.
...
All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings. — Brandom

I've also put on the goggles of seeing language as a complex system of grunts and squeaks and barks. I found it illuminating. I think you are right to do justice though to the power of our system, which got us to the moon somehow.

Brandom's inferentialism offered me my most recent insight into language. He makes interpersonal responsibility absolutely central to meaning. There's something down-to-earth about this that gets the animal origin right but also an awareness of an unlimited potential for self-referential consciousness. We can talk about our talk about our talk, which is maybe all the divinity we can hope for, or all divinity ever was.

One thing that's really tricky about the question of realism in language is that it's not just a question of theory; even if our best theory says that language does not map onto the world, the idea that it does is part of our practice. What looks like it could be a misconception, or an unreachable, unreached, or even un-aimed-for goal, is operative within our use of language, plays some kind of role.

For a quick illustration. Grice tells the story of a guy that some college at Oxford wanted to offer a fellowship, but he had a dog, and the rules forbade dogs, so the fellowship committee "deemed" his dog a cat.

Grice only comments that our use of language may involve quite a bit of deeming.

(And he himself proposed a theory based on infinitely deep chains of intensions and recognitions -- you recognize that I intend that you recognize that I intend that... And he admits that can't ever really be completed; hence you'll have to "deem" some level complete. In a very similar way, David Lewis concludes that probably no one ever really quite speaks a Tarski-style language, so he works a bit at how they might count an approximation or an equivalence class as success.)

But (1) language production and consumption is interaction with the world, social interaction, and (2) one of the things I wanted to get at -- and in a way, try to push back on the "map" metaphor -- is that it's not like children first acquire a complete conception of the world and then "paint" language onto it -- they have to do it all at once. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. While I often find 'the map' to be a handy metaphor, that is all it is. Certainly language plays a huge role in how our 'maps' evolve.

Is there an additional constraint on at least some of the concepts we form that they must be, so to speak, language-able? — Srap Tasmaner

I'd say that depends on who we include in "we". Certainly there are people with much less ability to participate in language than we tend to expect of people.

That said, as a species we have evolved to have a dependency on (and ability to benefit from) language to share our learnings with each other, in order to be adaptive. Our linguistic faculties are different from the intuitive faculties we share with other animals, with our linguistic faculties resting 'atop' our intuitive faculties but also playing an ongoing role in reshaping what our intuitions reveal.

I don't think there is any real possibility of cleanly disentangling our linguistic faculties from our 'more evolutionarily basic' non-linguistic faculties. (For those of us with relatively functional linguistic faculties, anyway.)

I used to say it's an accident that in slightly upgrading our capacity for communication, evolution selected for something that was far more powerful than we could possibly have needed -- and here we are, a globe-spanning civilization. Evolution aimed for better chitchat and gave us language, and we're still trying to understand what happened. — Srap Tasmaner

:100: :up:

Edit: The ARHGAP11b mutation looks like it might have been a key happy accident that resulted in our brains evolving so much 'overkill'.

even if our best theory says that language does not map onto the world, the idea that it does is part of our practice. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

That's related to what I try to gesture at with 'lifeworld.' The 'given' is our everyday cultureworld. Philosophers pretend they can peel back the symbolic layer, perhaps taking the scientific image as nude reality (paradoxical in my view.)

We live with promises and insinuations much as with puppies and asteroids and uncomputable numbers. We move through this world with a skill (linguistic) that surpasses in complexity any of our attempts to sketch its nature.

All of those attempts depend of course on the 'blind' or tacit skill they hope to explicate. I'm reminded more generally here of Socratic ignorance. Sincerely trying to make sense of our situation is valuable at least for the recognition of our ignorance and the difficult of the problem --a cure for humorless dogmatism. To me it's like ending up with a toolkit of theories that one knows are always imperfect but possibly helpful.

Hollywood influenced Matrix version of 'we are living in a simulated reality' without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible.
- Hilary Lawson — Tom Storm

You don't have to have a theory of language to create a simulated reality.
The Klingon language is a constructed language spoken by a fictional alien race. (The Klingons, in the Star Trek universe.)
One can create any kind of language as well as any kind of world.
Our world is basically independent of any specific language. But language certainly enriches immensely our world.

I can have a pretty good idea of what is happening when I see two Dutch persons quarreling, without knowing a single word of their language. I would undestand much more of course what is happening and what they are quarreling about if someone translated to me what they are saying. And I would have a better reality if I knew Dutch myself, and esp. if I were a Dutchman. Languages enriches our world.

Language is basically a set of symbols, structures and rules used to describe or communicate something with the purpose of creating information. This information is then mapped onto developping of structures --patterns, schemes, models, etc. The assimilation and understanding of this information creates knowledge.
This is how a great part of our view of the world is created.
And this is how I view the relationship of our language with our world.

I know that most people in here will find all this an oversimplification of how things are and work.
Well, I know that there are much more that can be said about the subject. But would that change the essence of what is language and "How Does Language Map onto the World?"

Grice only comments that our use of language may involve quite a bit of deeming. — Srap Tasmaner

That sounds right. I think another way to say this is: substance and subject are hopelessly entangled. Institution, historical semantic sediment. The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. For us, anyway, as timebinding and timebound animals, 'thrown' into an ethnocentrism that we wrestle with but never leave behind. We 'are' our history in the mode of no longer being it. The lust for naked reality, hiding under the panties of cultural inheritance and everything human, is maybe related to the fantasy of waking up from the nightmare of history and the achievement of divine selfcreation and the elimination of all passivity. Or, more cynically-reductively, a token that gives authority and access to mates.

Cool. I don't anything about that stuff.

Honestly, I'm probably over-fitting by suggesting it was even a communication-related selection.

I've often found the gestural origin of language somewhat appealing because speech production is still gestural once it moves from hands to lips and tongue and vocal cords. Anything that gave us fine motor control might have jump-started the ability to make more variegated and precise sounds, so that could be part of the story.

Not the whole story though. Speech production is complicated, and I've always heard that children understand far more speech than they can produce, so it doesn't make sense here either to give people an ability they just layer language on top of.

I don't think there is any real possibility of cleanly disentangling our linguistic faculties from our 'more evolutionarily basic' non-linguistic faculties. — wonderer1

:up:

This sounds right. I like Lakoff's work on metaphor and embodied cognition. Our minds seem very 'incarnate.'

I think the beauty of Lawson’s promise (which I still don’t understand) is that if there’s no realist theory of language then discussions about effete topics like idealism and panpsychism bite the dust for good. That would be an interesting development. — Tom Storm

I haven't read the thread, I've not been on the forum for a while, just noticed a few 'mentions' yesterday. Glancing through now I see your OP develops the titular question in quite a specific direction. Yes, I mean as far as I'm concerned (very specific angle on this from a psychological perspective), idealist talk is inevitability unmoored insofar as one cannot carry out any investigation into the nature of some non-material entity where the specification of such an entity consists of nothing more than the meaning of the word. 'Consciousness' (in the philosophical sense) is one such example popular hereabouts. It refers to nothing but that which is agreed by a wink and a nod among those who wish to use the term a certain way. Such an ephemeral ontological object cannot really be the subject of any serious investigation since it's properties must, by definition, already be known - those being the only grounds on which the entity is delineated at all.

Language here rather forms the tools by which these entities are constructed rather than the tools by which they are labelled. But I see @apokrisis has already made that point, so I shan't repeat.

.

While I often find 'the map' to be a handy metaphor, that is all it is. Certainly language plays a huge role in how our 'maps' evolve. — wonderer1

:up:

There's also the issue of metaphor itself. What exactly is a metaphor ? If human cognition is fundamentally metaphorical, it's an important question. Roughly I relate it to analogy. I sometimes try to open my front door (where I live) by pushing a button on my car keys. The mind exploits skill in one domain in a new domain. Something like that.