Are you confusing sublimation with Hegel’s sublation?

That said, I see from Googling around that there’s been some talk of sublimation as expressing some of the sense of Hegel’s Aufheben. And I quite like that sense in the context of the OP as well.

Are you confusing sublimation with Hegel’s sublation? — Jamal

Oh, yes, sorry about that, I never ran into "sublimation" in philosophy, and I guess I just read the word in the title as "sublation".

So, I guess I don't at all understand what you mean by "sublimation" in the title. That's a word I've only heard in a meteorological context to talk about how snow, the solid form of H2O, evapourates directly to gas, without passing through the intermediary, liquid form, in the process of evapourating. With the use of Google, I see the term is used in psychology, and I assume that is the meaning you are using. If so, I'll read up on that.

snow, the solid form of H2O, evapourates directly to gas, without passing through the intermediary, liquid form, in the process of evapourating — Metaphysician Undercover

:ok: :razz:

That said, I see from Googling around that there’s been some talk of sublimation as expressing some of the sense of Hegel’s Aufheben. And I quite like that sense in the context of the OP as well. — Jamal

Interesting. On further reading I see that Freud's "sublimation" has some resemblance to Hegel's "aufheben" which I translate as "sublation" (if I remember to get it right). By Wikipedia it is stated that Freud wanted to indicate with the word, a scientific, sort of chemical process. But Jung was critical, claiming Freud obscured the origins of the word, to make it appear scientific.

Whatever the case, I think we might agree that I made a Freudian slip.

Whatever the case, I think we might agree that I made a Freudian slip — Metaphysician Undercover

I deeply regret my failure to make this point myself.

:lol:

However, if it is the case, that the described condition which Freud called "sublimation", is really quite similar to Hegelian "sublation", and Freud used the word "sublimation" to intentionally obscure the origin of his conception, then this might be the original form of "Freudian slip". It might be that there is more intention within a true Freudian slip, than was hitherto imagined.

There is an issue I have found with German philosophers in general, and that is that they tend to have very idiosyncratic word usage. It appears to me like they actually choose unusual words, to intentionally hide the origins of their conceptions. So they'll read and learn prior philosophers and prior concepts, then present them in a new way with different words, hiding their sources, and creating the illusion of originality.

I cannot understand the need, or reason for this attitude of hiding sources to demonstrate originality. In philosophy it is generally beneficial to show the sources, and the other authors who support your own thesis, and how your thesis is related to those of others, sort of like an appeal to authority. So the German philosophers appear to be kicking themselves in the shins by hiding the sources of their conceptions in this way. I've read about how Wittgenstein may have been influenced by Charles Pierce, and some similarities are quite evident. But Wittgenstein doesn't very much reveal his sources. I suppose that if a philosopher reads a lot, and picks up some ideas here and others there, then synthesizes, the original conceptions would get twisted or reformulated, to mesh with others, so that the work would be original and there would be no need to reveal sources.

The mention of Hegel prompts me to ask about the role of time. Kant was very particular about how that as an element of experience. Wittgenstein is ahistorical in laying out the conditions of what can be said about the world as a whole or experience as Kant treated the matter. But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time.

But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time. — Paine

Yes, and the shifting of the river bed of certainties, which points to historical change, as opposed to Kant’s often ahistorical time—time as the form of inner sense, but not as social change. I think these are different topics: Hegel and Wittgenstein on history, Kant on time as such.

There is an issue I have found with German philosophers in general, and that is that they tend to have very idiosyncratic word usage. It appears to me like they actually choose unusual words, to intentionally hide the origins of their conceptions. So they'll read and learn prior philosophers and prior concepts, then present them in a new way with different words, hiding their sources, and creating the illusion of originality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Scurrilous accusations.

It isn’t true of the German philosophers I’ve read. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, and Adorno didn’t do it. Their novel terminologies were genuine. Heidegger too: as far as I can see he sincerely coined new terms to get away from certain modes of thinking in philosophy (the conscious subject, etc). Hegel? I don’t know. Obscurantist, let’s say maybe, for the sake of argument—but so as to seem more original than he really was? I don’t buy it. Leibniz? What was he trying to hide?

But yes, people do argue that Freud in particular tried to conceal his sources. Turns out he’d probably read more Nietzsche than he admitted. And if he did take sublimation from someone else it was likely Nietzsche, who used the word in Human, All Too Human.

Scurrilous accusations. — Jamal

Do you mean spurious accusations? Or do you think of me as a rat or something like that? I've known that proponents of German philosophy tend to defend vigorously the true originality, and authenticity of the German philosophers. So I suppose I was just stirring the pot, looking for an emotional response.

Novel terminology may be "genuine", but what does that really mean? Let's assume that there truly is novel modes of thinking expressed by people like Heidegger, which actually require new words, and it's not just a pretense, the authors are not just trying to separate themselves from the old, they've actually "discovered" or are endowed with, something new. Due to the role of intent in thinking, wouldn't these two (the pretense of something new, and the actual presence of something new) just be reducible to the very same thing in the end, anyway? Attempting to separate oneself from the old is to do something novel. But making oneself readable requires establishing a relationship with the old, and this turns the separation into a pretense.

Isn't that sort of what Wittgenstein showed with the idea of private language. A person can make up one's own private language, but it's really not at all useful, even for one's own purposes, unless that person provides relations to the language that one is already immersed in, the language which relates to the person's life full of meaning. Then, if the private language is presented as something completely novel, something outside the public language, the very fact of it being presented to the public language, gives it the appearance of pretense from the perspective of the public language. I mean, the author of the new words, must in some way relate those words to concepts understood in the public domain with words that already have meaning in that domain, in order for the new words to be intelligible. In this process the use of the new words takes on the characteristics of a pretense. It looks like what we would call a pretend language. So the intent to separate oneself, form the common language, with the use of new words, or using old words in a new way, will always have the characteristics of a pretend language.

The deeper issue of course is the reality of conceptual evolution, language evolution, difference in what what you call "modes of thinking", and genuine novelty. Genuine novelty is real and cannot be dismissed. The issue I see is that "reality" is defined by what is conventional, so the idiosyncratic philosophical perspectives will be judged as unreal, untrue, and pretense, as the pretend language. However, from the doubt of Socrates onward, it has been shown that the idiosyncratic has a real place in knowledge. The problem is to find this place, how it fits in.

But yes, people do argue that Freud in particular tried to conceal his sources. Turns out he’d probably read more Nietzsche than he admitted. And if he did take sublimation from someone else it was likely Nietzsche, who used the word in Human, All Too Human. — Jamal

Thanks for the information.

do you think of me as a rat or something like that? — Metaphysician Undercover

Gerbil.

But is it idealism?

I think we can avoid this question if we take Wittgenstein's advice about not looking for all encompassing theories in PI to heart. Unfortunately , Wittgenstein himself doesn't always take this advice, and some of his disciples in particular fail to heed it when they attempt to develop a theory of all language, or even all communication, solely in terms of "games." That language is sometimes usefully thought of as a game does not entail that we must always think of it as such, or attempt some sort of "reduction."

If you go through an introductory text on philosophy of language, you're likely to find a steady stream of mutually exclusive claims about how language is "just" (reducible to):

- Signs representing propositions (abstract objects);
- Just verification or truth conditions.
- Just games
- Just the communication of internal mental states, etc.

There are good arguments for each, and also significant flaws in each, and in general they also tend to totally ignore the broader field of semiotics, leaving the field a bit "free floating," from other philosophical areas of inquiry that certainly seem relevant (e.g. metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, etc.).

I personally really like the work of Robert Sokolowski, who capably weaves together Husserl, much of philosophy of language, Aristotle, and Aquinas to develop a solid theory of philosophical anthropology in a way that jives well with Wittgenstein's sentiment. However, it doesn't go overboard in trying to reduce the human experience or it's horizons to language. There is a practical element. He follows Aristotle's advice in the Ethics that "sometimes with complex things you need to start at the end or the middle, with what is most familiar, not with a clear foundation/beginning," and that "we shouldn't expect hyper detailed answers for the most complex phenomena."

This allows him the space to develop a theory where conversation and intersubjectivity are essential to the human experience, and how we come to "say things about things," without getting "stuck in the box of language," or "the cabinet of the mind." That is, he says we should start with language because it is dominant in our lives and philosophical discourse, uniquely human, and on the surface of our experience to analyze. Then, from the intersection of language and phenomenology, we can get into how predication works, how intelligibilities are perceived/communicated, etc. without having to reduce everything to language or necessarily ground the discourse in language in a strict sense. There is room for metaphysics, etc., but we start with what is most obvious, "what people say," and phenomenological experience, then make our way from there, without using these as a "foundation" in the strict sense of "all phenomena must be traced back to and explained in terms of our foundation."

It seems to me like perhaps the biggest misstep in modern philosophy is the obsession with foundationalism, although the 20th century tendency to claim all other positions were "meaningless" or the jump to make all difficult philosophical questions into "pseudo problems," or else eliminate (or massively deflate) the difficult term, are up there too. By my count, there have been serious attempts to eliminate causation, truth, logic, meaning, qualia, our own consciousness, etc. Surely these can't all be dispensed, or we'll have no philosophy left.

So it's clear enough that Wittgenstein's early philosophy can fairly be described as transcendental. — Jamal

I think we can set this out more clearly.

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too. — SEP: Transcendental Arguments

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. — Wittgenstein

5.6 concerns Solipsism.

Finally, we may turn to the work of Donald Davidson, who like Putnam bases his transcendental claim on a form of externalism, which links the content of our mental states to how we relate to our environment; but in his case, this idea is directed against scepticism concerning other minds. Thus, while the sceptic holds that the existence of such minds is doubtful, Davidson argues that it would not be possible for a creature like me to have thoughts unless I lived in a world with other creatures who also had thoughts, so the truth of the latter can be deduced from the fact that I am indeed capable of thinking: ‘What are the conditions necessary for the existence of thought, and so in particular for the existence of people with thoughts? I believe there could not be thoughts in one mind if there were no other thoughtful creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world’ (Davidson 1989: 193; note that he uses ‘existence,’ not ‘possibility’). On one interpretation, Davidson’s transcendental argument is based on his account of what it takes for a thought to have content, for which he argues that a process of ‘triangulation’ must occur, whereby the content of the thought someone is having is ‘fixed’ by the way in which someone else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world. Thus, Davidson argues, if there were no other people, the content of our thoughts would be totally indeterminate, and we would in effect have no thoughts at all; from the self-evident falsity of the latter, he therefore deduces the falsity of the former (cf. Davidson 1991: 159–60). Davidson therefore argues that the mistake the sceptic makes, in common with the Cartesian heritage of which he is part, is in the assumption that it is possible to be a lone thinker: Davidson’s transcendental argument is designed to show that this is not in fact the case, given the constraints on what it takes to have thoughts with content, so that the existence of a single thinking subject entails the existence of others.

As Davidson suggests (cf. Davidson 1991: 157), his position here might be said to have certain similarities to that put forward in Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, at least under the interpretation given by Kripke (see Kripke 1982). Kripke takes Wittgenstein as arguing that it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded: what makes our continuation of some addition rule a case of rule-following at all (for example), is that the community goes on in the same way; and, unless addition were rule-governed as a practice, statements like ‘2+2=4’ could have no meaning. Thus, from the fact that we are able to make such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others that ‘fix’ this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for the former (cf. Kripke 1982: 89). On this view, then, unless the sceptic is prepared to admit the existence of this community of fellow-speakers, and thus attribute a capacity for intentional rule-following to those around him, he cannot make sense of the idea of meaningful thought in his own case.

We have therefore seen that taking their inspiration from Kant to a greater or lesser degree, philosophers have come to develop a range of transcendental arguments that are intended to refute scepticism in a robust and ambitious manner, by establishing anti-sceptical conclusions on the basis of transcendental claims. . — SEP: Transcendental Arguments

Meh. I'm taking a leaf from Joshs and posting long quotes.

So what is the transcendental argument Wittgenstein uses, @Jamal? "Thus, from the fact that we are able to make such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others that ‘fix’ this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for the former..."?

"Form of life" is only used a couple of times in Wittgenstein's opus. How does it cash out?

His argument does not seem to be about biology.

This allows him the space to develop a theory where conversation and intersubjectivity are essential to the human experience, and how we come to "say things about things," without getting "stuck in the box of language," or "the cabinet of the mind." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Some of us are stuck on the treadmill of metaphor, otherwise known as idling.

On one interpretation, Davidson’s transcendental argument is based on his account of what it takes for a thought to have content, for which he argues that a process of ‘triangulation’ must occur, whereby the content of the thought someone is having is ‘fixed’ by the way in which someone else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world. Thus, Davidson argues, if there were no other people, the content of our thoughts would be totally indeterminate, and we would in effect have no thoughts at all...

The counterfactual seems tough here. If there is a lone astronaut on a mission out past the Moon, and a freak particle accelerator accident someone generates a black hole that tears the Earth apart, so that now our astronaut is the lone surviving human, would her thoughts lose their content?

It doesn't even seem that it is obvious that we must be around other minds for our thoughts to have content. We can imagine a human child raised by highly sophisticated robots. The robots have no subjective experience, but they are able to function well enough to keep the child alive and run her through the basics of a K-12 education, responding to her prompts the way a much more advanced Chat GPT might. Do her thoughts lack content? It's not obvious that they should.

I guess this sort of gets at my point about foundationalism, the need to ground the obvious substance of everyday experience, instead of begining with them as Aristotle suggests.

Saint Augustine says, "understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand." (Tractate 29) To which Anselm adds "For I believe even this: that unless I believe, I shall not understand." (Proslogion, drawing on Isaiah 7:9) This could be taken as a religious platitude, but in fact Augustine applies it against the same sort of solipsistic and relativist concerns common to modern philosophy.

His point, laid out most fully in Contra Academicos, is that learning itself requires taking experience as it comes. We can doubt anything. Yet, if we doubt every letter in our physics textbook, we shall never learn physics. Only after we have digested the topic can we have an informed opinion about its validity, and this will be the case even if no firm "foundation" exists (which is the case in modern physics; we know the middle better than the smallest or largest scales). This is true for social concerns and solipsism too. We can doubt that our parents are our parents, for we could have been switched at birth, but it would be insane to refuse filial devotion to our parents for this reason. Augustine's point is less clear in the context of modern culture, were it isn't seen as so shameful to lack filial devotion. The modern example here might be posting nude pictures to the internet because you assume other minds might not exist (whereas the ancients didn't much care about nudity).

So, regardless of whether conversation is required to give thoughts content, it is clear that in our case, it is an important component of how our thoughts come to have content.

The counterfactual seems tough here. If there is a lone astronaut on a mission out past the Moon, and a freak particle accelerator accident someone generates a black hole that tears the Earth apart, so that now our astronaut is the lone surviving human, would her thoughts lose their content? — Count Timothy von Icarus

There were other people. They are how she got there. I don't see this as any sort of counterexample. "...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"


An axiom need not be seen as god's writ. They can be seen as something we choose to do, a way to maintain coherence. One undertakes that this is the foundation, rather than discovering a foundation.

And yes, we can doubt anything; but not everything. Something must be understood as foundational, if only for our present purposes.

If Aristotle had only had the opportunity to read On Certainty.

Gotcha. I am only vaguely familiar with Davidson. I assumed "a process of ‘triangulation’ must occur, whereby the content of the thought someone is having is ‘fixed’ by the way in which someone else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world," suggested an ongoing process.

The latter example still seems like a problem, unless we're going to say that "someone else," doesn't need to mean "some other experiencing entity."

"...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"

Is this true though? Tolkien nerds can certainly correct each other on the proper use of the Elven language, but was the language not a language system until Tolkien shared it? Surely it had rules before then. Once one knows what a rule is, it seems completely possible to make up you own, in isolation, e.g., Allan Calhamer inventing the game Diplomacy, Naismith inventing basketball, etc. That we can create rules in the absence of a community and then other can learn them is how we get stuff like the mystery of the Zodiac Killer (Ted Cruz of course) or the related issue of languages that are "dead" for thousands of years before being decoded.

On the other end of the spectrum, it's possible to get a dog to follow rules and perform acts based on verbal commands, but the rule following there hardly seems like it can "fix" the content of thought.

Dogs cannot set out the rule they are following. We can.

Probably a good way to derail this thread:

...on Wittgenstein’s view, while chess is essentially a game for two players, this does not exclude the possibility of playing it against oneself provided such solitary games are not regarded as paradigm instances of chess. Similarly, he can claim that language is essentially social, but still allow the possibility of exceptions provided these are peripheral cases. The issue is complex... — SEP: Private Language

Elven is not a paradigmatic case of a natural language.

Maybe we should leave it there? There's history here.

on Wittgenstein’s view, while chess is essentially a game for two players, this does not exclude the possibility of playing it against oneself provided such solitary games are not regarded as paradigm instances of chess — SEP: Private Language

This is interesting. Playing against an opponent inherently means that both players want to win; one wins, the other loses. There is no such thing as both winning the game. If you play against yourself, and you win, you also lose. This is different from a draw.

Winning is the point of the game of chess. You can win two ways: 1. you are smarter than your opponent, or more educated in historically established strategies. 2. You make fewer mistakes than the opponent. Both of these are absurd in a one-person game. You can't be smarter than yourself. And if you make a mistake, you can't simultaneously capitalize on that mistake -- although further analysis in due course of time by a singular player of both sides of the game can reveal that he or she had made a mistake, and can capitalize on it.

Therefore I say that a single person can't play a game of chess all by himself. The paradigms are so far removed of the original of the game, that it becomes a different game, not a chess game, although it is still played with chess pieces with the same rules of their movements as in a two-person game.

I think in this sense Wittgenstein becomes a guru, who utters infallible truths in the view of his followers, and nobody notices that in effect he is speaking nonsense.

This is what I noticed on the entire board in the conversations between or among members here who have had some or else extensive formal training in philosophy. They like to discuss things in agreement with each other, they admire the classic greats, and they lose sight of the essence of philosophy in this mutual admiration society, which is the love of truth and wisdom, and which necessarily invokes the uncovering of mistaken lines of reasoning.

And then when one comes along who tells them, "hey, this is wrong, and this is wrong and this is wrong", then the trained gang ostracizes the logical dissenter, they make fun of him, and they bitterly reject him with either silently ignoring his points, or else calling him names.

Davidson argues that thought has content if and only if the thought is related to a social system. That is my perception Davidson's opinion, after reading paragraphs in this thread.

I think Davidson is only right if the thought is experienced in language. However, language is not essential to thought formation. The necessary need of language for though formation is one of the bigger misconceptions in philosophies concerning language and thought.

, , then again maybe there is stuff that autodidacts just miss out on.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. — Wittgenstein

This is another humongous error in logic. We think of people as beings who have a mind. Each person has his or her own mind. Yet we don't know what a mind is. We don't know how it attaches to the body. We don't know how it is related to the brain. Yet we speak of it as an obvious and inalienable quality of humans.

It is part of our world, but we lack the language that describes it. We each have an unerringly similar concept of what a mind is, yet the concept is not formed as a consensus achieved by language... it is a concept indescribable by language, therefore it is not possible to harmonize our understanding of the concept using language.

A similar concept may be god. We each "know" what we consider a god, yet nobody can assuredly describe a god knowingly with language. God and mind are concepts that are part of our world, that is, they are found inside the limits of our world, yet both are outside the limits of the language we use.

maybe there is stuff that autodidacts just miss out on. — Banno

Yes, totally right. I can't argue with that.

Dogs cannot set out the rule they are following. We can

That's partly my point. Once we know what a rule is, we can make them for dogs, cats, ourselves, etc. Kirpke's point about rule following is ostentatiously false, at least the the way it is presented there. I might buy that we learn "what rules are" through our interactions with others, but it's also clear we can develop and implement private rules.

Anyhow, unfortunately, we can only set out the rules the dog is following. If we could set out the rules that we follow, then philosophy of language wouldn't be in the state it is in.

I will leave my comments on Davidson's theory there.

I will leave my comments on Davidson's theory there. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Probably for the best.

I think in this sense Wittgenstein becomes a guru, who utters infallible truths in the view of his followers, and nobody notices that in effect he is speaking nonsense. — god must be atheist

Above, I call such nonsense "metaphor", language on holiday, idling.

Davidson argues that thought has content if and only if the thought is related to a social system. That is my perception Davidson's opinion, after reading paragraphs in this thread. — god must be atheist

I think that this totally misses what "thought" is, as @Count Timothy von Icarus demonstrates. Furthermore, it is completely inconsistent with the traditional form/content distinction. It is the "form" of the thought which is related to a social system, not the content of the thought. The content is the material element, the substance, the idea itself, as proper to the individual, and intrinsically related to the wants, needs, and intentions of the individual. I believe this is an important point toward understanding Marxist materialism, and the material reality of the individual, (replete with ideas), within the social context.

This is the perspective which makes language transcendental. Instead of trying to portray language and communion as something which inheres within thought, as Davidson seems to be doing, we need to accept the reality that communion is something completely different, with completely different organic origins, from thought. In this way, thought is not inherently directed toward communion, it is allowed freedom to roam by the nature of free will. And, despite the fact that language may appear to us as having the sole purpose of enabling communion, through communication, we must also recognize the fact that it is also purposeful for the act of thinking which is not necessarily oriented toward communion. Thinking, and communion have completely different origins, and because each of these has its own use for language, language can be used in ways which are completely non-conducive to communion (deception etc.).

Dogs cannot set out the rule they are following. — Banno

Our dog sets out rules for every moving creature in the house. When a cat breaks her rule, it hears about it. When I break her rule I hear about it. We call her "the police dog" because of this enforcement policy which allows us to relax on the couch, even when a cat attempts to jump on the table, because we know the enforcer is on patrol. In the same way that it does not require language to learn, and follow a rule, it does not require language to "set out" a rule.

Perhaps more to the point, do we actually think that people with aphasia have no content to their thoughts, that there is simply "no one home," in there doing "any thinking" once they lose the ability to either produce or comprehend language? If they can produce but not comprehend speech, or vice versa, how does the loss of one half of the speech world affect their status? What about the person with agnosia who has no trouble with language but cannot use sense perception to identify objects or people (and thus cannot name them)?

Sometimes people recover from these conditions if they are brought on by stroke or another form of brain injury. In general, their narratives reveal a radical absence of "essential" elements of conciousness, and yet a continued stream consciousness they can recall. What appears to be "thought" shows up in the absence of linguistic capabilities (e.g., "I must call the ambulance," existing in the absence of an ability to recognize numbers on a phone or to produce intelligible speech once 911 has been dialed, or to understand the other person on the line in neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's case).

The brain is a system of systems; language is a faculty built on top of prior systems, taking advantage of them. It can seem all encompassing vis-á-vis experience precisely because it utilizes so many systems. When we imagine a scene described by an author, we're employing the same systems we use to process incoming sense organ data. Lions clearly do not have a word for "gazelle," and yet it would be strange if they couldn't recognize one from any other object. People with aphasia don't necessarily have agnosia, just because names seem wed to "object recognition," in healthy people doesn't seem to suggest that you can't lose one without the other. Language as the defining aspect of thought or mental life appears to be a sort of synecdoche, or maybe a fallacy of composition.



It might be worth bringing up Davidson's famous "swampman" argument where he denies most physicalist interpretations of philosophy of mind. In his view, an atom for atom copy of himself couldn't understand language because it would "lack a causal history," associated with language. That is, Swampman would live out the rest of Davidson's life just like he would, speaking and listening, but would have no thoughts. This just seems implausible in light of what we know about learning and language. I don't believe he was ever married, which makes a certain sort of sense here. I'd maintain that it would be difficult to have raised a toddler, having to continually remind them to "use their words," to communicate themselves, and then argue that thought cannot continually outrun the limits of language/exist prior to it.

Language as the defining aspect of thought or mental life appears to be a sort of synecdoche, or maybe a fallacy of composition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fallacy of composition or division? I could see it as a fallacy of division, i.e. 'thought is language all the way down' or "In the beginning was the word." I'm not seeing how a fallacy of composition might be in play, however.

In any case, this is a very interesting topic to me personally. I'd love to see an OP where you delve into the topic further.

On the other end of the spectrum, it's possible to get a dog to follow rules and perform acts based on verbal commands, but the rule following there hardly seems like it can "fix" the content of thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Dogs cannot set out the rule they are following. We can. — Banno

Kripkenstein says normative meaning is a folktale. It sounds great and it fits a socially-centered narrative, but it's really not more than conjecture.

Back to Kant and what the individual sees and knows (and can't know).