With just the id, we achieve the pleasure similar to the utopia. But then the ego, intervenes and exposes us to the outside world. — L'éléphant

I think the opposite is the case. The more id -like, the more suffering ensues ( fear, rage, etc). The more effectively the primitive id is guided by anticipative sense-making, the better we are able to avoid profound emotional pain.

To live in a society where we were incapable of experiencing such things as unhappiness, sadness, pain would be the same as being colour blind to the complete palette of human emotion of what truly makes us human — kindred

Let me break this down in terms of priorities. Physical pain may be significantly reduced with medical advances, and perhaps even immortality is a conceivable possibility. But of all forms of suffering, I suggest the most profound is emotional pain, and this is a result of social conflict. Can we eliminate this source of suffering? Perhaps not completely, but we can make enough progress in understanding each other that we can make a huge dent in the frequency and intensity of experiences like anger and guilt. What makes us human is our creative capacities, and this does not requires that our mood colorations include intense feelings of suffering. Those are not a function of what it means to be human, but only reflect a stage in our development

I read your discussion. I think I agree with it. It doesn't mention (or use) the word "intuition", so I'm no further forward in understanding how that concept comes to be a part of Wittgenstein's deconstruction. I must have missed something. — Ludwig V

I wrote that for Wittgenstein “the meaning of a word doesn’t function like a picture. Words aren’t first created and then used. They only exist in their use. Furthermore, to use a word is always to change the sense of its meaning, and this is a social process. Meaning something is a social enactment, the production of something new rather than the referring back to a picture.”

In PI, Wittgenstein treats intuition as an inner picture one consults:

186. "What you are saying, then, comes to this: a new insight — intuition — is needed at every step to carry out the order '-f-n' cor-rectly." — To carry it out correctly! How is it decided what is the right step to take at any particular stage? — "The right step is the one that accords with the order — as it was meant" — So when you gave the order -\-z you meant that he was to write 1002 after 1000 — and did you also mean that he should write 1868 after 1866, and 100036 after 100034, and so on — an infinite number of such propositions? — "No: what I meant was, that he should write the next but one number after every number that he wrote; and from this all those propositions follow in turn." — But that is just what is in question: what, at any stage, does follow from that sentence. Or, again, what, at any stage we are to call "being in accord" with that sentence (and with the mean-ing you then put into the sentence — whatever that may have consisted in). It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.

213. "But this initial segment of a series obviously admitted of various interpretations (e.g. by means of algebraic expressions) and so you must first have chosen one such interpretation."—Not at all. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt. (There is something to be said, which is connected with this, about the psychological 'atmosphere' of a process.) So it must have been intuition that removed this doubt?—If intuition is an inner voice—how do 1 know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong. ((Intuition an unnecessary shuffle.))

↪Joshs
I believe Deacon would agree:
...language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought—symbolic representation. Without symbolization the entire virtual world that I have described is out of reach: inconceivable. My extravagant claim to know what other species cannot know rests on evidence that symbolic thought does not come innately built in, but develops by internalizing the symbolic process that underlies language. So species that have not acquired the ability to communicate symbolically cannot have acquired the ability to think this way either.
— Terrence Deacon — Patterner

I wonder how Deacon would distinguish between human use of word concepts and , for instance, the way a dog responds to a sentence. If a symbol represents a meaning by integrating information from disparate sense modalities, what is a dog doing when it recognizes a word, or an object , on this same basis? And I wonder how he would respond to this recent article in the New York Times?

“Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so.

Can a mouse learn a new song? Such a question might seem whimsical. Though humans have lived alongside mice for at least 15,000 years, few of us have ever heard mice sing, because they do so in frequencies beyond the range detectable by human hearing. As pups, their high-pitched songs alert their mothers to their whereabouts; as adults, they sing in ultrasound to woo one another. For decades, researchers considered mouse songs instinctual, the fixed tunes of a windup music box, rather than the mutable expressions of individual minds.

But no one had tested whether that was really true. In 2012, a team of neurobiologists at Duke University, led by Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist who studies vocal learning, designed an experiment to find out. The team surgically deafened five mice and recorded their songs in a mouse-size sound studio, tricked out with infrared cameras and microphones. They then compared sonograms of the songs of deafened mice with those of hearing mice. If the mouse songs were innate, as long presumed, the surgical alteration would make no difference at all.

Jarvis and his researchers slowed down the tempo and shifted the pitch of the recordings, so that they could hear the songs with their own ears. Those of the intact mice sounded “remarkably similar to some bird songs,” Jarvis wrote in a 2013 paper that described the experiment, with whistlelike syllables similar to those in the songs of canaries and the trills of dolphins. Not so the songs of the deafened mice: Deprived of auditory feedback, their songs became degraded, rendering them nearly unrecognizable. They sounded, the scientists noted, like “squawks and screams.” Not only did the tunes of a mouse depend on its ability to hear itself and others, but also, as the team found in another experiment, a male mouse could alter the pitch of its song to compete with other male mice for female attention.

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called “the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for vocal learning in species other than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and bats. But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated human language from animal communications, most scientists understood the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own — as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the 10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals; an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he said. “Come on, come on!”).

But the rudimentary skills of mice suggested that the language-critical capacity might exist on a continuum, much like a submerged land bridge might indicate that two now-isolated continents were once connected. In recent years, an array of findings have also revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of healthy reefs; and plants that can detect the sound of running water and the munching of insect predators. Researchers have found intention and meaning in this cacophony, such as the purposeful use of different sounds to convey information. They’ve theorized that one of the most confounding aspects of language, its rules-based internal structure, emerged from social drives common across a range of species.

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

For hundreds of years, language marked “the true difference between man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human revolution” fractured evolutionary history, creating an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.

Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown of a book by the celebrated behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it “perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972 and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon, presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological, neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up short.

One high-profile example came in 2001, when a team led by the geneticists Cecilia Lai and Simon Fisher discovered a gene — called FoxP2 — in a London family riddled with childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder that impairs the ability of otherwise cognitively capable individuals to coordinate their muscles to produce sounds, syllables and words in an intelligible sequence. Commentators hailed FoxP2 as the long sought-after gene that enabled humans to talk — until the gene turned up in the genomes of rodents, birds, reptiles, fish and ancient hominins such as Neanderthals, whose version of FoxP2 is much like ours. (Fisher so often encountered the public expectation that FoxP2 was the “language gene” that he resolved to acquire a T-shirt that read, “It’s more complicated than that.”)

The search for an exclusively human vocal anatomy has failed, too. For a 2001 study, the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch cajoled goats, dogs, deer and other species to vocalize while inside a cineradiograph machine that filmed the way their larynxes moved under X-ray. Fitch discovered that species with larynxes different from ours — ours is “descended” and located in our throats rather than our mouths — could nevertheless move them in similar ways. One of them, the red deer, even had the same descended larynx we do.

Fitch and his then-colleague at Harvard, the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, began to wonder if they’d been thinking about language all wrong. Linguists described language as a singular skill, like being able to swim or bake a soufflé: You either had it or you didn’t. But perhaps language was more like a multicomponent system that included psychological traits, such as the ability to share intentions; physiological ones, such as motor control over vocalizations and gestures; and cognitive capacities, such as the ability to combine signals according to rules, many of which might appear in other animals as well.

Fitch, whom I spoke to by Zoom in his office at the University of Vienna, drafted a paper with Hauser as a “kind of an argument against Chomsky,” he told me. As a courtesy, he sent the M.I.T. linguist a draft. One evening, he and Hauser were sitting in their respective offices along the same hall at Harvard when an email from Chomsky dinged their inboxes. “We both read it and we walked out of our rooms going, ‘What?’” Chomsky indicated that not only did he agree, but that he’d be willing to sign on to their next paper on the subject as a co-author. That paper, which has since racked up more than 7,000 citations, appeared in the journal Science in 2002.

Squabbles continued over which components of language were shared with other species and which, if any, were exclusive to humans. Those included, among others, language’s intentionality, its system of combining signals, its ability to refer to external concepts and things separated by time and space and its power to generate an infinite number of expressions from a finite number of signals. But reflexive belief in language as an evolutionary anomaly started to dissolve. “For the biologists,” recalled Fitch, “it was like, ‘Oh, good, finally the linguists are being reasonable.’”

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”

As our understanding of the nature and origin of language shifted, a host of fruitful cross-disciplinary collaborations arose. Colleagues of Chomsky’s, such as the M.I.T. linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, whose early career was shaped by the precept that “we’re smart, they’re not,” applied for grants with primatologists and neuroscientists to study how human language might be related to birdsong and primate calls. Interdisciplinary centers sprang up devoted specifically to the evolution of language, including at the University of Zurich and the University of Edinburgh. Lectures at a biannual conference on language evolution once dominated by “armchair theorizing,” as the cognitive scientist and founder of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution, Simon Kirby, put it, morphed into presentations “completely packed with empirical data.”

One of the thorniest problems researchers sought to address was the link between thought and language. Philosophers and linguists long held that language must have evolved not for the purpose of communication but to facilitate abstract thought. The grammatical rules that structure language, a feature of languages from Algonquin to American Sign Language, are more complex than necessary for communication. Language, the argument went, must have evolved to help us think, in much the same way that mathematical notations allow us to make complex calculations.

Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., thought this was “a cool idea,” so, about a decade ago, she set out to test it. If language is the medium of thought, she reasoned, then thinking a thought and absorbing the meaning of spoken or written words should activate the same neural circuits in the brain, like two streams fed by the same underground spring. Earlier brain-imaging studies showed that patients with severe aphasia could still solve mathematical problems, despite their difficulty in deciphering or producing language, but failed to pinpoint distinctions between brain regions dedicated to thought and those dedicated to language. Fedorenko suspected that might be because the precise location of these regions varied from individual to individual. In a 2011 study, she asked healthy subjects to make computations and decipher snatches of spoken and written language while she watched how blood flowed to aroused parts of their brains using an M.R.I. machine, taking their unique neural circuitry into account in her subsequent analysis. Her fM.R.I. studies showed that thinking thoughts and decoding words mobilized distinct brain pathways. Language and thought, Fedorenko says, “really are separate in an adult human brain.”

At the University of Edinburgh, Kirby hit upon a process that might explain how language’s internal structure evolved. That structure, in which simple elements such as sounds and words are arranged into phrases and nested hierarchically within one another, gives language the power to generate an infinite number of meanings; it is a key feature of language as well as of mathematics and music. But its origins were hazy. Because children intuit the rules that govern linguistic structure with little if any explicit instruction, philosophers and linguists argued that it must be a product of some uniquely human cognitive process. But researchers who scrutinized the fossil record to determine when and how that process evolved were stumped: The first sentences uttered left no trace behind.

Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language inside his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons living in a seminaturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.

What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots, the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract, efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this experiment, the language structures we were waiting for,” Kirby says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power — its ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible formulations — may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called “expressiveness,” for unambiguous communication.

For Descartes, the equation of language with thought meant animals had no mental life at all: “The brutes,” he opined, “don’t have any thought.” Breaking the link between language and human biology didn’t just demystify language; it restored the possibility of mind to the animal world and repositioned linguistic capacities as theoretically accessible to any social species.

This summer, I met with Marcelo Magnasco, a biophysicist, and Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who studies dolphin cognition, in Magnasco’s lab at Rockefeller University. Overlooking the East River, it was a warmly lit room, with rows of burbling tanks inhabited by octopuses, whose mysterious signals they hoped to decode. Magnasco became curious about the cognitive and communicative abilities of cephalopods while diving recreationally, he told me. Numerous times, he said, he encountered cephalopods and had “the overpowering impression that they were trying to communicate with me.” During the Covid-19 shutdown, when his work studying dolphin communication with Reiss was derailed, Magnasco found himself driving to a Petco in Staten Island to buy tanks for octopuses to live in his lab.

During my visit, the grayish pink tentacles of the octopus clinging to the side of the glass wall of her tank started to flash bright white. Was she angry? Was she trying to tell us something? Was she even aware of our presence? There was no way to know, Magnasco said. Earlier efforts to find linguistic capacities in other species failed, in part, he explained, because we assumed they would look like our own. But the communication systems of other species might, in fact, be “truly exotic to us,” Magnasco said. A species that can recognize objects by echolocation, as cetaceans and bats can, might communicate using acoustic pictographs, for example, which might sound to us like meaningless chirps or clicks. To disambiguate the meaning of animal signals, such as a string of dolphin clicks or whalesong, scientists needed some inkling of where meaning-encoding units began and ended, Reiss explained. “We, in fact, have no idea what the smallest unit is,” she said. If scientists analyze animal calls using the wrong segmentation, meaningful expressions turn into meaningless drivel: “ad ogra naway” instead of “a dog ran away.”

An international initiative called Project CETI, founded by David Gruber, a biologist at the City University of New York, hopes to get around this problem by feeding recordings of sperm-whale clicks, known as codas, into computer models, which might be able to discern patterns in them, in the same way that ChatGPT was able to grasp vocabulary and grammar in human language by analyzing publicly available text. Another method, Reiss says, is to provide animal subjects with artificial codes and observe how they use them.

Reiss’s research on dolphin cognition is one of a handful of projects on animal communication that dates back to the 1980s, when there were widespread funding cuts in the field, after a top researcher retracted his much-hyped claim that a chimpanzee could be trained to use sign language to converse with humans. In a study published in 1993, Reiss offered bottlenose dolphins at a facility in Northern California an underwater keypad that allowed them to choose specific toys, which it delivered while emitting computer-generated whistles, like a kind of vending machine. The dolphins spontaneously began mimicking the computer-generated whistles when they played independently with the corresponding toy, like kids tossing a ball and naming it “ball, ball, ball,” Reiss told me. “The behavior,” Reiss said, “was strikingly similar to the early stages of language acquisition in children.”

The researchers hoped to replicate the method by outfitting an octopus tank with an interactive platform of some kind and observing how the octopus engaged with it. But it was unclear whether such a device might interest the lone cephalopod. An earlier episode of displeasure led her to discharge enough ink to turn her tank water so black that she couldn’t be seen. Unlocking her communicative abilities might require that she consider the scientists as fascinating as they did her.

While experimenting with animals trapped in cages and tanks can reveal their latent faculties, figuring out the range of what animals are communicating to one another requires spying on them in the wild. Past studies often conflated general communication, in which individuals extract meaning from signals sent by other individuals, with language’s more specific, flexible and open-ended system. In a seminal 1980 study, for example, the primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney used the “playback” technique to decode the meaning of alarm calls issued by vervet monkeys at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. When a recording of the barklike calls emitted by a vervet encountering a leopard was played back to other vervets, it sent them scampering into the trees. Recordings of the low grunts of a vervet who spotted an eagle led other vervets to look up into the sky; recordings of the high-pitched chutters emitted by a vervet upon noticing a python caused them to scan the ground.

At the time, The New York Times ran a front-page story heralding the discovery of a “rudimentary ‘language’” in vervet monkeys. But critics objected that the calls might not have any properties of language at all. Instead of being intentional messages to communicate meaning to others, the calls might be involuntary, emotion-driven sounds, like the cry of a hungry baby. Such involuntary expressions can transmit rich information to listeners, but unlike words and sentences, they don’t allow for discussion of things separated by time and space. The barks of a vervet in the throes of leopard-induced terror could alert other vervets to the presence of a leopard — but couldn’t provide any way to talk about, say, “the really smelly leopard who showed up at the ravine yesterday morning.”

Toshitaka Suzuki, an ethologist at the University of Tokyo who describes himself as an animal linguist, struck upon a method to disambiguate intentional calls from involuntary ones while soaking in a bath one day. When we spoke over Zoom, he showed me an image of a fluffy cloud. “If you hear the word ‘dog,’ you might see a dog,” he pointed out, as I gazed at the white mass. “If you hear the word ‘cat,’ you might see a cat.” That, he said, marks the difference between a word and a sound. “Words influence how we see objects,” he said. “Sounds do not.” Using playback studies, Suzuki determined that Japanese tits, songbirds that live in East Asian forests and that he has studied for more than 15 years, emit a special vocalization when they encounter snakes. When other Japanese tits heard a recording of the vocalization, which Suzuki dubbed the “jar jar” call, they searched the ground, as if looking for a snake. To determine whether “jar jar” meant “snake” in Japanese tit, he added another element to his experiments: an eight-inch stick, which he dragged along the surface of a tree using hidden strings. Usually, Suzuki found, the birds ignored the stick. It was, by his analogy, a passing cloud. But then he played a recording of the “jar jar” call. In that case, the stick seemed to take on new significance: The birds approached the stick, as if examining whether it was, in fact, a snake. Like a word, the “jar jar” call had changed their perception.

Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who works with great apes, developed a similarly nuanced method. Because great apes appear to have a relatively limited repertoire of vocalizations, Hobaiter studies their gestures. For years, she and her collaborators have followed chimps in the Budongo forest and gorillas in Bwindi in Uganda, recording their gestures and how others respond to them. “Basically, my job is to get up in the morning to get the chimps when they’re coming down out of the tree, or the gorillas when they’re coming out of the nest, and just to spend the day with them,” she told me. So far, she says, she has recorded about 15,600 instances of gestured exchanges between apes.

To determine whether the gestures are involuntary or intentional, she uses a method adapted from research on human babies. Hobaiter looks for signals that evoke what she calls an “Apparently Satisfactory Outcome.” The method draws on the theory that involuntary signals continue even after listeners have understood their meaning, while intentional ones stop once the signaler realizes her listener has comprehended the signal. It’s the difference between the continued wailing of a hungry baby after her parents have gone to fetch a bottle, Hobaiter explains, and my entreaties to you to pour me some coffee, which cease once you start reaching for the coffeepot. To search for a pattern, she says she and her researchers have looked “across hundreds of cases and dozens of gestures and different individuals using the same gesture across different days.” So far, her team’s analysis of 15 years’ worth of video-recorded exchanges has pinpointed dozens of ape gestures that trigger “apparently satisfactory outcomes.”

These gestures may also be legible to us, albeit beneath our conscious awareness. Hobaiter applied her technique on pre-verbal 1- and 2-year-old children, following them around recording their gestures and how they affected attentive others, “like they’re tiny apes, which they basically are,” she says. She also posted short video clips of ape gestures online and asked adult visitors who’d never spent any time with great apes to guess what they thought they meant. She found that pre-verbal human children use at least 40 or 50 gestures from the ape repertoire, and adults correctly guessed the meaning of video-recorded ape gestures at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance,” as Hobaiter and Kirsty E. Graham, a postdoctoral research fellow in Hobaiter’s lab, reported in a 2023 paper for PLOS Biology.

The emerging research might seem to suggest that there’s nothing very special about human language. Other species use intentional wordlike signals just as we do. Some, such as Japanese tits and pied babblers, have been known to combine different signals to make new meanings. Many species are social and practice cultural transmission, satisfying what might be prerequisite for a structured communication system like language. And yet a stubborn fact remains. The species that use features of language in their communications have few obvious geographical or phylogenetic similarities. And despite years of searching, no one has discovered a communication system with all the properties of language in any species other than our own.

For some scientists, the mounting evidence of cognitive and linguistic continuities between humans and animals outweighs evidence of any gaps. “There really isn’t such a sharp distinction,” Jarvis, now at Rockefeller University, said in a podcast. Fedorenko agrees. The idea of a chasm separating man from beast is a product of “language elitism,” she says, as well as a myopic focus on “how different language is from everything else.”

But for others, the absence of clear evidence of all the components of language in other species is, in fact, evidence of their absence. In a 2016 book on language evolution titled “Why Only Us,” written with the computer scientist and computational linguist Robert C. Berwick, Chomsky describes animal communications as “radically different” from human language. Seyfarth and Cheney, in a 2018 book, note the “striking discontinuities” between human and nonhuman loquacity. Animal calls may be modifiable; they may be voluntary and intentional. But they’re rarely combined according to rules in the way that human words are and “appear to convey only limited information,” they write. If animals had anything like the full suite of linguistic components we do, Kirby says, we would know by now. Animals with similar cognitive and social capacities to ours rarely express themselves systematically the way we do, with systemwide cues to distinguish different categories of meaning. “We just don’t see that kind of level of systematicity in the communication systems of other species,” Kirby said in a 2021 talk.

This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular “self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology & Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent members of a species from recognizing others of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia, as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.

(Sonia Shah is a science journalist and the author, most recently, of “The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.”)

This gave me the opportunity to outline some of the ways that language is special — Deacon

Michael Tomasello argues that rather than there being something called language as a special phenomenon in itself differentiating humans from other animals, what separates humans from animals is a cognitive complexity that leads to the sophisticated social interaction making language possible.

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.
— Joshs
I'm afraid I couldn't detect how what you said was a deconstruction. There must be something earlier that I missed or have forgotten. Can you explain or refer to your explanation? — Ludwig V

I discussed it here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/923347

Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice?
— Joshs
Because its just acting blindly, and "social discursive practise" is just an extension of that involving many individuals.
— Apustimelogist
You both seem to me to have got this the wrong way round. You are positing the individual's interpretation of the rule as primary. But we can only interpret rules because we have learnt to do so - from other people. No doubt it is a complex process, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that it is develops by trial (responses of whatever kind) and error, coupled with positive and negative reinforcement — Ludwig V

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.

Perhaps there is a neurological element to it. For someone who went through a great crisis, everyday life will often be a high. For those however who have dwelt forever in mundane mediocrity, life is like a constant barely-worse-than-average experience. — Lionino

'Every activity as such gives pleasure' -say the physiologists. In what way? Because dammed-up force brought with it a kind of stress and pressure, a state compared with which action is experienced as a liberation? Or in that every activity is an overcoming of difficulties and resistances? And many small resistances, overcome repeatedly, easily, as in a rhythmic dance, bring with them a kind of stimulation of the feeling of power?

The normal unsatisfaction of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sexual drive, the drive to move, does not in itself imply something dispiriting; instead, it has a piquing effect on the feeling of life, just as every rhythm of small painful stimuli strengthens that feeling, whatever the pessimists would have us believe. This unsatisfaction, far from blighting life, is life's great stimulus. - Perhaps one could even describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of small unpleasurable stimuli . .(Nietzsche)

If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows.
— Janus

Yes, we can say the same for all word meaning, I mean! — Apustimelogist

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules? Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice? How is consulting an intuition different from consulting a reliably stable internal picture of meaning, the use of Kantian reason to make sense of sensuous intuition?

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.
— Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules. — Apustimelogist

As you probably know, Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein’s solution to the skeptical paradox is controversial, and even Kripke admitted that Wittgenstien may very well not have approved of his interpretation. There’s no reason to reject his approach merely on this basis. After all, there’s far from a general consensus among Wittgenstein scholars as to how to read him. All I would like to do here is illustrate how far apart Krpike’s take on the later Wittgenstein is from writers whose perspectives I find more consonant with P.I. and other later works (Cavell, Braver, Antony Nickles).

As I understand it, Kripke’s argument begins with the skepticism that ensues from rejecting a classical realist approach to the factual justification of meaning interpretation. There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year. The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm .

The evidence justifying us to assert or judge that Jones means green by “green” is our observation of Jones’s linguistic behavior, that is, his use of the word under certain publicly observable circumstances. We can justifiably assert that Jones means green by “green” if we can observe, in enough cases, that he uses this word as we do or would do, or more generally, as others in his speech-community are inclined to do. This is the only justification there is, and the only justification we need, to assert that he means green by “green”.( I.E.P)

Let me summarize the key points that I want to contrast with my reading of Wittgenstein. Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. For however long a period of time a particular meaning survives, it causally determines its use. The skeptical problem arises because the meaning can shift over time, and along with it the rules of its application. We can’t discern from the user’s disposition facts that will tell us how they meant to use a word. Put differently, Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. Kripke’s solution involves comparing the picture of one member of a community with the consensus picture of the community as a whole to see if there is a match between interpretations of meaning.

How does my reading of Wittgenstein differ from Kripke’s? For starters, the meaning of a word doesn’t function like a picture. Words aren’t first created and then used. They only exist in their use. Furthermore, to use a word is always to change the sense of its meaning, and this is a social process. Meaning something is a social enactment, the production of something new rather than the referring back to a picture. What allows for the relatively stable normativity of social use of word meanings is the stability of language games. A language game doesn’t lock down a determinate definition of meaning, it provides a framework of relative consistency of sense, within which the specific meanings of words constantly slide and shift in subtle ways without causing a crisis of intelligibility. Because we are always ensconced within one language game or another, the issue of skepticism never comes up for Wittgenstein. For Kripke , language games, and the normative ‘agreements’ that he claims they produce, accommodate themselves to already formed picture-like word meanings within individuals. Since this agreement occurs after the fact of creation of word meanings within individuals, it must undo a skepticism born of the indeterminacy of individually formed meanings, which in turn results from the assumption of a gap between how these meanings were formed and how they are interpreted within a community. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, word meanings are not created by the individual first and then submitted to social interpretation , they only emerge out of discursively formed language games , and thus never suffer from the interminably that Kripke’s model presupposes.

Whereas for Kripke we understand how someone means a rule by looking for a picture within their words that corresponds to our own, for Wittgenstein we do not rely on previously formed normative interpretations of the meaning of rules , either individual or collective, to understand each other (Kripke says the members of a speech-community agree to use “plus” in specific ways). Rather, within actual contextual discursive situations we transform the sense of our past history of word application This is what it means to use a word, and what it means for a word to have a meaning. According to Braver, Kripke’s grounding of word meaning in individually formed pictures which change their meaning over time is a “virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation.”

As commentators continue to instruct Kripke's interpretation, Wittgenstein's discussion is a reductio of traditional conceptions of thinking. He is not bringing to light a profound discovery that exposes a heretofore unknown vulnerability of understanding, but charting a particularly virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation. The philosopher's bafflement before suddenly mute or excessively permissive signs is an artificial product of the characteristic philosophical behaviors discussed in chapter 1: stopping ongoing usage and staring.

Wittgenstein writes:

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp. That this is so appears on asking when this problem strikes one. It is never when we lay down the rule or apply the rule. We are only troubled when we look at a rule in a particularly queer way. The characteristic thing about all philosophical problems is that they arise in a peculiar way. As a way out, I can only give you examples, which if you think about them you will find the cramp relaxes. In ordinary life one is never troubled by a gap between the sign and its application. To relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also see why you had it. (AWL 90)

Joseph Rouse argues:

..we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.

If there is a car crash, again one needs to identify the fault; sometimes it might be the brakes, and sometimes it might be the driver. There was one recently in which a child was killed - the fault was in the driver, but it was not alcohol, but epilepsy. The driver was unaware of their epilepsy because they had not been diagnosed. They were found not guilty of causing death by dangerous driving.
— unenlightened
1h — Leontiskos

It seems to me that if you’re going to apply the concept of forgiveness to this particular example you’re stretching its meaning well beyond the way it is commonly used.

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts — Apustimelogist

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. What Merleau-Ponty wrote about the organism applies equally well to Wittgenstein’s view of social relations. One might even say that the normative organization of perception is akin to a the normative nature of a language game.

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly. — Apustimelogist

Braver’s point is that Kripke’s solution is no solution. Whereas Wittgenstein’s starting point is radically social , deriving individual subjectivity from sociality, Kripke tries to explain intersubjective objectivity on the basis of the combined activity of individual subjects. This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). Kripke then tries to repair this gap with a theory of the activity of the subject which can then be applied to social relations. Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?
— Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently — Apustimelogist

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment.

As I say, I am not a big fan of the term forgiveness. In relation to the OP I would suggest that the issue is more likely to be one of needing a new way viewing oneself rather than needing to forgive. If we recognize that we are imperfect beings who sometimes make mistakes and inadequate choices, we can roll with challenges and mistakes more readily and improve our approach.
@Tom Storm

Your posts make me think you do not understand forgiveness, as they are replete with false dichotomies. For example, you here diminish forgiveness and promote the recognition of imperfection. And yet, without the recognition of imperfection forgiveness is utterly impossible. Recognition of imperfection is not an alternative to forgiveness, it is its prerequisite. This is but one example of the odd dichotomies I see — Leontiskos

There are many forms of imperfection, including decisions that seemed to be optimal at the time they were made but in hindsight, with the benefit of knowledge not available during the original decision process, now appear imperfect. I don’t forgive someone for mistakes they make due to understandable limitations of knowledge. Only a particular sort of imperfection is a prerequisite for forgiveness, and that is blame. We learn and grow by doing what Tom Storm described as modifying our ways of interpreting events. Each of us differs in how much emphasis , if any, we place on imperfections that deserve a judgement of blame, and thus provide an opportunity for forgiveness. When it comes to making sense of the imperfections of others, It sounds to me like blame and forgiveness are more useful concepts for you than they are for Tom.

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy — Apustimelogist

If a rule must always be applied in a specific context of use in order for it to have meaning , does that indicate that the meaning of a rule is therefore ‘indeterminate’, or that it is precisely determinate , but in a way that is unique to each use? It seems to me that to characterize this particularly of use meaning as indeterminacy presupposes what Wittgenstein is trying to get us to get beyond, the picture theory of meaning whereby exposing an ambiguity within ostensible definition indicates a failure to lock down epistemological meaning rather than a self-imposed grammatical confusion originating in the concept of ostensive definition. Lee Braver cites Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein as a symptom of this misunderstanding.

Kripke understands Wittgenstein's “skeptical paradox” to be that since rules and, by extension, the meanings of words can be interpreted in indefinitely different ways, “there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §201.” 48 This is the problem that reveals the need for social interaction for both Kripke and Davidson. But, as has been pointed out many times, PI §201 continues past where Kripke stops reading:

“it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another…. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule' and ‘going against it' in actual cases.” 49

The skeptical paradox that Kripke fixes on is actually being presented as “a misunderstanding,” a pseudo-problem produced by the artificial perspective that gets foisted on us when we cease interacting naturally:

“the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” 50

When we stop performing the daily activities in which understanding comes easily, strange possibilities pop up that cannot be ruled out by reasoning alone. This is when it strikes us that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” 51 Rules suddenly look terrifyingly unsupported and we are tempted to cry out in despair, as Kripke does, that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”

Luckily the point of PI §201 is not the endless interpretations but the non-interpretive immediate grasping that occurs “in actual cases.” The infinite interpretability functions as a reductio of the idea that we are interpreting rules rather than just following them in a more direct and practical sense. 54 If we can recover this mundane understanding, overlooked because of its ubiquitous inconspicuousness, 55 then we will dismiss the skeptical paradox the way Hume's philosopher laughs at his own bizarre thoughts once he gets a good beer and a pool cue in his hands.

“‘How can one follow a rule?' That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? Here we obviously misunderstand the facts that lie before our eyes.” 56

Wittgenstein considers his job to be assembling reminders of our normal immersion in the meaningfulness of everyday life.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains. — Apustimelogist

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is meant to prevent us from being tempted to subsume the particular within the general, to define the instances of ‘life’ on the basis of the category ‘life’ in such a way that we presuppose a centrally defining meaning of the category which can be understood independently of its instances.
Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.

If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essence common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses. But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule' also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule', that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule'?I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essence common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.

Also, the argument in the quote from Grayling in the OP is pretty much the argument Davidson presented in "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme". Davidson's triangulation of speaker, interpreter and truth comes in to play here, at least as a first approximation.

Forms of life cannot be incommensurable because they must all occur embedded in our activities in the world. So despite not being able to speak Chinese (an increasingly inappropriate example for all sorts of reasons) we will recognise a Chinese builder or grocer by their activities… Forms of life are fastened together by all of them occurring in the world. — Banno

If I can’t persuade another to take on the form of life necessary to make my actions intelligible to them, then don’t those actions continue to appear incommensurable with their form of life? Do forms of life simply occur in a pre-given world , an objective world for all, or do different forms of life develop the world in different directions? Is there not a sense in which worlds are intersubjectively constructed through forms of life?

It seems to me one can dispense with theism, recognize that More is Different and that humans have more cortical neurons than any other species, and thereby have a basis for recognizing a uniqueness to humans. — wonderer1

Ah, but the devil is in the details. To what extent, if any, does this difference in degree between the neurons of humans
and other animals translate into a difference in kind? Think of all of the historical assumptions concerning brain-based qualitative differences between human and animal behavioral capabilities that have turned out to be wrong-headed:
Only humans have language
Only humans have heritable culture
Only humans have cognition
Only humans have emotion
Only humans use tools

Perhaps more isnt so different after all.

↪Antony Nickles

But Witt shows is that the world has endless ways of being “rational” (having ways to account, though different), and so we can disagree intelligibly in relation from those practices. Ultimately we may not come to resolution, but that does not lead to the categorical failure of rationality, because a dispute also only happens at a time, in a context (which also gives our differences traction).

I don't think Wittgenstein shows this at all, as evidenced by the extremely diverse directions this thread is taken in by different Wittgensteinians. He leaves this incredibly vague; vague enough that a common take is that rationality just bottoms out in cultural presuppositions that cannot be analyzed. This view in turn makes any conflict between "heterogenous cultures" or "heterogenous language games," either purely affective/emotional or else simply a power struggle— i.e. "fight it out." This is especially true if the individual subject is just a nexus of signifiers and power discourses — Count Timothy von Icarus

The differences between language games are neither purely affective, as though pure affect could be separated from conceptual meaning, nor are they merely a matter of blind power. Convincing someone to change their perspective is not a function of coercion but of persuasion, and this is simultaneously affective and rational.

92. However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says something like: "That's how it must be”. (On Certainty)

To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world.
— Joshs

What are we communicating to ourselves? — Lionino

When we speak to another we have certain expectations concerning the response, which will never be precisely fulfilled. Likewise when we think to ourselves we are communicating with an other, since the self returns to itself slightly differently moment to moment. We always end up meaning something slightly other than what we intended to mean.

Its about the idea that language is not identical to thought. We don't need language to think about things. When — Apustimelogist

It depends on how narrow your view of language is. Wittgenstein’s analyses of language were focused on contexts of interaction between persons. His was a ‘phenomenology’ of the intersubjective. If we want an analysis of perception, and thus of thinking,
we have to turn to the phenomenology of perception. In the work of Merleau-Ponty we find an account of perception that I think dovetails nicely with Witt’s intersubjective focus. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is ‘languaged’, but this cannot be understood in terms of a split between thinking and communicating. To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world. Language isn’t simply a tool that we use to access concepts , in its very instantiation it uses us to transform the sense of our concepts and percepts by enacting them in the world. We dont think language, language thinks us.

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. — Constance

The simplicity Henry is after seems to depend on belief in a pure self-affecting ipseity. Zahavi is sympathetic to this stance, as he also argues that there can be no meaning without subjectivity and there can be no ground for subjectivity without an ‘I’ which comes back to itself as identically the same in its self-affection. As he says:

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”

This is where Henry departs from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, who all insist on the ecstatic nature of self-awareness.

I personally think Wittgenstein never fully got away from Russell and Hume's influence re causation. That is, the influence that made him write:

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Part of what helps cement rules though is causal consequence. Bad applied math results in bad consequences regardless of what the majority thinks for instance — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think Wittgenstein is closer to the phenomenologists and poststructuralists in his critique of efficient causation that he is to Hume or Russell. The contextually sensitive, unreflective kind of skilled behavior he is pointing to in actual rule following behavior involves reciprocal causality, a back and forth adjustment of meaning sense between the unfolding matter and one’s conceptually informed response to it. Efficient cause ignores the shifts in sense that contextually unfolding situations produce. The shift from one language game to another is merely a more exaggerated kind of reciprocally developing change in sense than what occurs in any interchange.

Metaphysics attempts to escape one’s worldview or form of life in order to latch onto something that transcends all perspectives, something that can rule on and rule over all individual views; but the entities posited as
transcending all systems, such as Truth or Reality in-itself or God are, like Hegel’s thing-in-itself-for-us, posited by and only function within systems. These systems or games can be incommensurable, with no possibility of common measurement or neutral judge, a Great Umpire in the Sky. “Some­body may reply like a rational person and yet not be playing our game.”
We should say no more than that their behavior is just not what makes sense to us: “there’s only one thing that can be wrong with the meaning of a word, and that is that it is unnatural . . . unnatural for us. . . . We just don’t go on in that way.”182 While we cannot take up a wholly external point of view, we can inhabit ours critically, without the illusions of metaphysical grounding.

This incommensurability also means that we cannot get the players of strange language-games to start acting normally (that is, as we do) simply by reasoning with them, since the very thing we’re trying to teach them is
our way of reasoning. Just as a child isn’t rationalized through arguments— were she susceptible to arguments, she would already be rational—but through training, so bringing others to think as we do happens through
nonrational means. Supposing we met people who did not regard [the propositions of physics] as a tell­ing reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this “wrong” aren’t we using our language­ game as a base from which to combat theirs? (Lee Braver)

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not that we forget what we have learned concerning how to follow a rule, it’s that the initial information is always inadequate to continually follow it. Wedon’t apply a rule like a picture, we USE it in contextually changing circulate that require us to go beyond the original instructions. Lee Braver explains:

Take the example of telling someone to follow a rule, say, repeatedly adding two. It isn’t that when we teach this procedure to her we don’t know what we want her to do, but that this knowledge shouldn’t be mod­eled on the picture of a mind encompassing the range of the function “Add two” in its gaze, even though our reflexive correction of a wrong answer makes it appear as if we were comparing the series coming out of her mouth
with a written list.
“When I teach someone the formation of the series . . . I surely mean him to write . . . at the hundredth place.”—Quite right; you mean it. And evidently without neces­sarily even thinking of it. This shews you how different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think.” And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling
meaning a mental activity! The interlocutor here argues that since we know that 1,002 should follow 1,000 when we issue the order “Add two,” a sequence not explicitly consid­ered at the time the order was issued, something queer must be plugging us into the entire series. Wittgenstein reverses the polarity of the argument.
We know what should follow 1,000 and the humble cogitative actions we find do not consciously anticipate every step—so understanding the rule must enable us to correct immediately without explicit thoughts. The mirage of the meaning-object’s containment of all future applica­tions shimmers into existence here to supplement the woefully underpow­ered act of comprehension.

In most situations, we simply follow a rule without reflection. It is only when an unexpected consequence ensues that we shift from unreflectively following a rule (or unreflectively observing someone else following it) to analytically dissecting it.

Lee Braver discusses the unreflective following of rules:

The standard view has the PLA resting on verificationism: the objection is that the private linguist cannot reliably verify the recurrence of the same sensation, since all he has to go on is his feeling that the present instance is of the same type as the previous one. Without an external check on my reidentification of the Gorignak, I cannot satisfactorily determine whether I have applied the term correctly or not, that is, whether this entity here now is a token of the same type as the one previously so baptized. My attempts to evaluate the consistency of my own applications cannot suffice because, being at the same level as the acts of identification themselves, they provide
no justification of these acts; on my own, I’m just buying multiple copies of a given newspaper to check the headlines of the first. Without such an external check, then, the difference between merely believing I am following a rule correctly and actually doing so collapses, taking the very notion of a rule, and that of language in general, with it.

Some commentators have denied that this argument appears in Witt­genstein’s discussion of PLA at all, but I find it expressed too clearly in too many texts to dismiss it entirely. However, as has been pointed out, this kind of verificationism clashes with many of his other ideas, in particular his frequent claims that we neither have nor need justification to carry out many rule-governed activities perfectly well, a claim that, in fact, often appears within his discussions of private language. For example: “‘but when I in my own case distinguish between, say, pretending that I have pain and really having pain, surely I must make this distinction on some grounds!’
Oddly enough—no!—I do distinguish but not on any grounds.” Wittgenstein believes that every interpretation must bottom out in some unjustifiable immediate reaction in order to escape the infinite regress of interpretive rule-following, so demanding an overt justification for the correct recognition of sensations even to be conceiv­able seems odd. I believe that Wittgenstein uses verification to indicate the purposelessness rather than the intrinsic incoherence of private language­ games, as clearly stated here: “you have to remind yourself of the use to get
out of the rut in which all these expressions tend to keep you. The whole point of investigating the ‘verification,’ e.g., is to stress the importance of the use as opposed to that of the picture.”

I guess I can get this gist of the joke from the general context. I don't remember much about the movie. Was that an actual scene, or something that you imagined? — Ludwig V

Given this, it would make sense to pick popular religions and try them out, learning as much as you can, and giving each a chance to display their truth to you. When you find a religion you think contains truth, you practice it but remain skeptical, still searching other religions for more/more relevant truths.
— Igitur
I'm puzzled about what you mean by trying religions out — Ludwig V

I’m picturing Woody Allen trying out Christianity by eating Wonder bread with mayo in Hannah and her Sisters.

However, I do agree that the "bedrock" metaphor doesn't challenge foundationalism itself, and that's always puzzled me. The radical issue is whether foundations are always necessary. After all, it turned out that there are no foundations of the planet. — Ludwig V

I think it does challenge foundationalism, which is why Lee Braver named his book on Wittgenstein and Heidegger ‘Groundless Grounds’. Take this quote from On Certainty:

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.

I interpret this to mean that bedrock assumptions are like the river bank. They change along with the river itself, but more slowly.

there is also the idea that Crusoe cannot make new rules so long as he is alone, and any continued rule following can only be judged by an absent community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There seem to be a number of issues involved here. First, what takes place when we use words to communicate with each other? Second, how does this compare with what happens when we use words by ourselves? We could go down the rabbit hole of the private language argument of private pains and beetles in boxes, but I would rather argue that both private language and public language involve
the use of words to enact new senses of meaning. In social
communication this takes place as a result of the mutual
affecting among the participants. In the case of my talking to my self, my present and past selves affect each other to produce new senses of meaning of the words and the criteria of rules I invoke.

." For example, the claim that a man who washes ashore on desert Island loses his ability to make and follow rules, but then regains this capacity when a second person washes ashore later. Obviously, a great many Wittgensteinians (as well as people generally) find this to be somewhat absurd. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why would the man who washes ashore lose his ability to make and follow rules? He would bring with him from
whatever culture he was raised in a background intelligibility of linguistic practices. When he is alone , thinking to himself, he would draw from that background. He would bring those practices to bear on his engagements with a second person on the island. Rouse’s point isn’t that we dont draw from that background, it is that the rules it brings it with don’t bind us in the new situation.

Language and mathematics are rule governed. Games are also rule governed.

These rules are developed socially and change over time — Count Timothy von Icarus

As to this the following:

We cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances. (Joseph Rouse)

Do you think this idea is commonsensical?

↪Joshs I don't think either H or W are regurgitating, but that they've had an influence upon philosophical thinking to a point that anyone whose read philosophy knows these points, even if they are hard to articulate -- especially because they're enigmatic, rather than logically valid.

Not a bad thing, at all. I think the Witti Heidegger comparison holds pretty well, tho I prefer to say Derrida-Wittgenstein is the true duck-rabbit of western-philosophy — Moliere

The way I see the heritage , Heidegger comes after Witt, and Derrida after Heidegger. That is, Witt is the least radical of the three. I wish you were right about their ideas having by now been thorough assimilated within philosophy. If that were true it would make my work a lot easier. My experience has been that there is a small community of thinkers who grasp the most radical implications of Heidegger and Derrida, and a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas.

Wittgenstein, much like Heidegger, ends up not being particularly radical or different from commonplace positions when you force yourself not to think using their specialised terms as a privileged vantage point upon philosophy, language and the world… His arguments are sufficiently enigmatic that none of them are logically valid as stated, they rely on unarticulated but perpetually unfolding and changing concepts. Honestly he's just like Heidegger. — fdrake

I’d love to hear what ‘commonplace positions’ you think these writers are regurgitating. What do you suppose their commonplace critiques of the ‘logical validity’ you obviously prize might look like? Do you think Ratcliffe would agree with you that they are not offering anything significantly new, given that his ideas are strongly indebted to both of them?

Signifiers and significance is also nothing more than use as knowledge is - we observe symbols and physical interactions from the outside world causally affect our internal neural systems. They then can spit out future behaviour that reflects the causal interaction with the symbol in the context of the outside world... a symbol is nothing more than the associations we observe it connected to. — Apustimelogist

In the spirit of Wittgenstein, we should keep in mind that we are not talking about an ‘internal’ cognitive system receiving inputs from, computationally representing and spitting out outputs to an ‘external’ world. The system includes brain, body and the intersubjective, linguistic environment in an inseparable reciprocal interaction. As Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

Forms of life are the intersubjective practices that we enact in actual contexts of social relation . The use of words are our doings , normatively constrained by the possibilities and limits of intelligibility produced by the enacting of particular language games. Regardless of whatever rules and criteria of meaning have previously been laid down, these are open to contestation in each actual
use of words, as each party to communication re-assesses what is at stake and at issue in the interchange.

Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibly complex and dynamic, and will never repeat in exactly the same way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of the many differences between what Derrida is getting at with ‘iterability’ and a reductive physicalist account is that the latter presupposes subject and object, cause and effect. This grammar assumes that quantitative changes in a process are subservient to qualitatively determined identities constraining the sense of those quantitative changes. The qualitative nature of a cause is not allowed to be changed by the effect, it is transcendent to what is immanent to it.

I am offering a prize of $10,000
— Dan

Yeah, that is bait to get people to do free work on your theory. — Lionino

You think he’s counting on reaping the rewards in terms of career advancement? Or maybe he’s a trust fund baby with nothing better to do with his cash.

Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. — Constance

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound — Constance

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time.”

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity.

It can be said, in a certain sense, that nominalism becomes absurd if it is carried to its ultimate consequences. For it would deny the very possibility of identity as repetition and permanence. We need time and permanence in order to distinguish and identify. Identity and difference imply each other — JuanZu

Derrida's chain of deconstructive tropes (difference, gramme, trace) directs us to the futural difference within presence, the way that a would-be identity comes back to itself differently as the same . Derrida's notion of iterability is informed by a radical view of temporality he shares with Heidegger. The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself..it is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition... Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

Derrida's thinking here bears a remarkable resemblance to Heidegger's insistence that identity is never simply present to itself, but differs from itself as the same.

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.”

Nietzsche arrived at a similar conclusion:

“Just as mathematics and mechanics were long considered sciences with absolute validity, and only now does the suspicion dare show its face that they are nothing more and nothing less than applied logic on the strength of the particular, indemonstrable assumption that 'identical cases' exist ­and logic itself is a consistent notation based on that assumption (that identical cases exist) being carried out…

Deleuze explains the meaning of Nietzsche Eternal Return in the following way:

“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which
is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of
that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the
different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the
unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return.”(Difference and Repetition)

the assumption that "seeing" is somehow magically contained in the development of the eye is actually conditioned by elements external to the eye (e.g. the light that the eye needs for vision, and this is evidently external to the eye, it cannot be said that light belongs to the teleological identity of the eye); but mainly it is never demonstrated a priori, only a posteriori — JuanZu

Reminds me of Nietzsche’s analysis of ‘purpose’:

“… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp…the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.”

I'd trace the problem here back to Kierkegaard booting theoretical reason from a determinant role in freedom (Nietzsche too). No longer is determinism seen as in a way conducive (or even essential) to freedom, in that it allows theoretical reason to give us a sort of "causal mastery" of the world through techne (e.g. Leibniz's invocation of PSR in defense of free will). Instead we have to keep retreating posterior to the findings of theoretical reason (the sciences) to defend freedom (a freedom which is increasingly contentless). — Count Timothy von Icarus

You probably have in mind thoughts like these from Nietzsche:

The 'external world' affects us: the effect is telegraphed into our brain, there arranged, given shape and traced back to its cause: then the cause is projected, and only then does the fact enter our consciousness. That is, the world of appearances appears to us as a cause only once 'it' has exerted its effect and the effect has been processed. That is, we are constantly reversing the order of what happens. - While 'I' see, it is already seeing something different.

What one also learns from Nietzsche is that the external world is not a deterministic mechanism, but continually changes its nature. If we supplement Nietzsche with the phenomenological insight that the intentional act perceives the givenness of what appears to it along dimensions of similarity in relation to what has been seen before, we can give human freedom a teleological, anticipative aspect. But this teleological vector is free in the same way as the ‘external world’ that appears to it. That is, not as theoretical reason but as contextually engaged sense-making.

n a similar way we can see ourselves: "I am I and my circumstances" (Ortega y Gasset), "Existence precedes essence" (Sartre). The end of our existence is never prefigured and is always about to happen, and it is to the extent that we develop in our circumstances that we become what we are. Nietzsche entitled one of his books as follows: "Ecce Homo: How one becomes what one is". We can say of ourselves that to a large extent we become what we are. We become. Which means that the end is not at the beginning (as teleological thinking presupposes) — JuanZu

Excellent point.