The truth is a rule that doesn't obey time or space?

[cjbrier08]

Hi Dan, its corey. remember! don't trust words! but if i'm not mistaken you are adding the element of logic to this issue. But you were aware of this because your suggestion is conditional i.e. (A=A, -A does not equal A). <Even this truth is a conditional one, which you have suggested.
Unless we suppose a pure and neutral observation language we must consider this condition a construction of discourse, no? Yes I am provoking insanity.

[cjbrier08]

oh i almost forgot to mention that the idea that there exists no neutral observation lauguage is also not a neutral observation. and so on, onto an infinate regress of paradoxical consistancy you might say. btw to the first post, it sounded like you were describing god to me. that which is everywhere but confined to nowhere, the unmoved mover etc etc etc

[Lomax]

Hello Mister Brier,

but if i'm not mistaken you are adding the element of logic to this issue. But you were aware of this because your suggestion is conditional i.e. (A=A, -A does not equal A). <Even this truth is a conditional one, which you have suggested.
Unless we suppose a pure and neutral observation language we must consider this condition a construction of discourse, no? Yes I am provoking insanity.

Okay, but notice that both expressions of the fact - the one in the "metalanguage" aswell as the one in the parent language - are nonetheless both expressions of the same fact. For that matter, the metalanguage must contain the same terms and meanings, in order to be a metalanguage. So let us assume a consistent definition of "snow", and of "is", and of "white"; then we can postulate:

"snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.

The overall statement belongs to the metalanguage, and the quotation belongs to the parent language. Now, note that we are able to state the parent language's claim within the metalanguage; and thus, the former is only a subset of the latter. This definition of truth can be applied salva veritae to any statement, and that is what makes it a good definition.

Lomax

[cjbrier08]

Okay, but notice that both expressions of the fact - the one in the "metalanguage" aswell as the one in the parent language - are nonetheless both expressions of the same fact. For that matter, the metalanguage must contain the same terms and meanings, in order to be a metalanguage. So let us assume a consistent definition of "snow", and of "is", and of "white"; then we can postulate:

"snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.

The overall statement belongs to the metalanguage, and the quotation belongs to the parent language. Now, note that we are able to state the parent language's claim within the metalanguage; and thus, the former is only a subset of the latter. This definition of truth can be applied salva veritae to any statement, and that is what makes it a good definition.

so are you saying that they both abide by the same rules so contradicting the logic that they both use is a contradiction of the contructed metalanguage they both belong to?

[cjbrier08]

so have not we just arrived at the Derridian paradox of deconstruction?

[Lomax]

Hello cjbrier08,

so are you saying that they both abide by the same rules so contradicting the logic that they both use is a contradiction of the contructed metalanguage they both belong to?

Sort of, yes. I am saying that as long as we define our terms consistently across the language and metalanguage, then we will not be fooled by words.

so have not we just arrived at the Derridian paradox of deconstruction?

Not as far as I can see. Would you care to explain?

Lomax

[cjbrier08]

Hello cjbrier08,

so are you saying that they both abide by the same rules so contradicting the logic that they both use is a contradiction of the contructed metalanguage they both belong to?

Sort of, yes. I am saying that as long as we define our terms consistently across the language and metalanguage, then we will not be fooled by words.

so have not we just arrived at the Derridian paradox of deconstruction?

Not as far as I can see. Would you care to explain?

Lomax

Ok I need to start from the beginning if you don't mind. I want to do this right.

The post that started this all from reconsiderate basically said, if i'm not mistaken. That truth is nothing other than a construction of discourse and making it appear as (capital T) Truth is a way to legitimize the claim of truth within that system. Similarly Derrida said, there is no thing outside the text. No objectivity or purity which is complete, intact or escapes the world of infinite signification.

You then pointed out that if this was the case, reconsiderate's claim could not be True by the standards of logic. This is were it begins to get complicated because it would appear as if this claim is operating both as a Truth statement and a constructed truth statement simultaneously. It is both evidence for its validity and evidence for its invalidity. This spells paradox.

Now I had pointed out that if you tell a skeptic that he is contradicting himself with such a statement that is assuming that skeptic is not skeptical of logic itself. And that assuming logic dictates Truth you are assuming that logic is some how a non-paradigmatic neutral stance.

However you then pointed out something to me further complicating the issue, if that is possible. You pointed out that logic dictating Truth or being a neutral stance is irrelevant because you are essentially trapped within the metalanguage that Truth is defined in. This intern provides evidence for reconsiderates claim even though such claims cannot be spoken of. Perhaps a problem of the language itself and not the thought, if they can be separated?

This is essentially the paradox I spoke of. And now I must ask myself what is left of my previous stance on this matter? You must show the metalanguage to fail by its own standards. You must show that by its own standards it contains inconsistency, chaos and is sufficiently arbitrary. That way you follow the rules of the metalanguage by showing it to fall apart on its own accord. This is what deconstruction is, it is neither active nor passive but somewhere in-between.

I don't want this to be too long so ill rap up by saying that if you look the word truth in the dictionary you must then look up every word that defines it and so on and for forth. Despite the definition of Truth you find, it will not be able to support itself for very long.

[Lomax]

Hello cjbrier08,

The post that started this all from reconsiderate basically said, if i'm not mistaken. That truth is nothing other than a construction of discourse and making it appear as (capital T) Truth is a way to legitimize the claim of truth within that system. Similarly Derrida said, there is no thing outside the text. No objectivity or purity which is complete, intact or escapes the world of infinite signification.

You then pointed out that if this was the case, reconsiderate's claim could not be True by the standards of logic. This is were it begins to get complicated because it would appear as if this claim is operating both as a Truth statement and a constructed truth statement simultaneously. It is both evidence for its validity and evidence for its invalidity. This spells paradox.

I am not highly familiar with Derrida's work, so forgive me if I have misunderstood your terms. Do you mean that "truth" is truth-within-a-language, whereas "Truth" is something which does not rely on, or reside within, language (at least within the theory of those who are leading themselves in paradoxes of deconstruction)?

Lomax

[cjbrier08]

Hello cjbrier08,

The post that started this all from reconsiderate basically said, if i'm not mistaken. That truth is nothing other than a construction of discourse and making it appear as (capital T) Truth is a way to legitimize the claim of truth within that system. Similarly Derrida said, there is no thing outside the text. No objectivity or purity which is complete, intact or escapes the world of infinite signification.

You then pointed out that if this was the case, reconsiderate's claim could not be True by the standards of logic. This is were it begins to get complicated because it would appear as if this claim is operating both as a Truth statement and a constructed truth statement simultaneously. It is both evidence for its validity and evidence for its invalidity. This spells paradox.

I am not highly familiar with Derrida's work, so forgive me if I have misunderstood your terms. Do you mean that "truth" is truth-within-a-language, whereas "Truth" is something which does not rely on, or reside within, language (at least within the theory of those who are leading themselves in paradoxes of deconstruction)?

Lomax

I am being unclear, ive never had to explain this before.
truth = within the system, in this case the rules of logic.
Truth= some pure state outside a paradigm, in this case out side of the metalanguage.

Deconstruction denies the latter. And denies the integrity of the former. In this case we are talking about logic or more specifically a fixed signified. Because the metalanguage itself is not logically consistent, logic in this case has no authority to dictate terms, if we are to be consistent.

[Lomax]

Hello cjbrier08,

Thankyou for the explanation. I shall have to pick at some further details, if you do not mind.

truth = within the system, in this case the rules of logic.
Truth= some pure state outside a paradigm, in this case out side of the metalanguage.

Deconstruction denies the latter. And denies the integrity of the former. In this case we are talking about logic or more specifically a fixed signified. Because the metalanguage itself is not logically consistent, logic in this case has no authority to dictate terms, if we are to be consistent.

This is reminiscent of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. There are some respects in which I agree; I deny the former (truth as a feature of a language) for reasons which we probably don't need to discuss, given that we are agreed on that point).

When you suggest that you deny Truth as some pure state outside of a paradigm, are you suggesting that Truth can exist within a paradigm? And by "pure", do you mean not theory-laden?

Also, why do you suggest that the metalanguage is not logically consistent? Is it because it can generate statements such as "this statement is false" and "'yields falsity when preceded by its quotation' yields falsity when preceded by its quotation"?

Lomax

[cjbrier08]

Hello cjbrier08,

Thankyou for the explanation. I shall have to pick at some further details, if you do not mind.

truth = within the system, in this case the rules of logic.
Truth= some pure state outside a paradigm, in this case out side of the metalanguage.

Deconstruction denies the latter. And denies the integrity of the former. In this case we are talking about logic or more specifically a fixed signified. Because the metalanguage itself is not logically consistent, logic in this case has no authority to dictate terms, if we are to be consistent.

This is reminiscent of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. There are some respects in which I agree; I deny the former (truth as a feature of a language) for reasons which we probably don't need to discuss, given that we are agreed on that point).

When you suggest that you deny Truth as some pure state outside of a paradigm, are you suggesting that Truth can exist within a paradigm? And by "pure", do you mean not theory-laden?

Also, why do you suggest that the metalanguage is not logically consistent? Is it because it can generate statements such as "this statement is false" and "'yields falsity when preceded by its quotation' yields falsity when preceded by its quotation"?

Lomax

I don't mind if you pick at it, I would expect nothing less from you.
Truth as “not theory laden” can be defined within the metalanguage as such, but it will never meet its own standards within that metalanguage. And sure we can call “not theory laden” pure, that is one way of putting it.
I said the metalanguage is not logically consistent because meaning is not logical, like my example of the dictionary. The word dog never rests on an ultimate meaning, it is in perpetual signification, rooted and entangled in every other word. The future is needed for the meaning of the original. Meaning like time is not simply located, it is not ultimately linear. We have the meaning of a term end at some arbitrary point for the sake of communication, however the meaning of these words are not logically fixed, we just at some point or another agree with these terms without exploring them any further. If we followed them to their logical conclusion (looking up every term that supports our term) we could have nothing solid to build a conversation out of.

[Lomax]

Hello cjbrier08,

I don't mind if you pick at it, I would expect nothing less from you.

Haha :P

I said the metalanguage is not logically consistent because meaning is not logical

Okay, well we can probably agree that "meaning is not logical", but I do not think that's what it means to be logically consistent. I mean: if we can generate two propositions within a language, both of which have a claim (within, but not without the language) to being true, then we can say the language is logically inconsistent, but not (as far as I can see) otherwise.

like my example of the dictionary. The word dog never rests on an ultimate meaning, it is in perpetual signification, rooted and entangled in every other word.

Okay, this seems like semantic holism. I grant you that the "meanings"* of words are interdependent (although I do not grant you that a dictionary is our ultimate source of acquiring meaning, because a lexicographer only intends to report meaning, rather than invent it).

The future is needed for the meaning of the original. Meaning like time is not simply located, it is not ultimately linear. We have the meaning of a term end at some arbitrary point for the sake of communication, however the meaning of these words are not logically fixed, we just at some point or another agree with these terms without exploring them any further. If we followed them to their logical conclusion (looking up every term that supports our term) we could have nothing solid to build a conversation out of.

I think we probably have a disagreement here, then: in that I do not think all meaning lies within the text. I mean: you deny the existence of Truth, as something which lies outside of a particular language, but I think that the Truth (and even the truth) must be antecedent to the language. There is no observable realm of things called "meanings", so it is useless to investigate the "meaning" of a word, or to treat the meaning as something severable from the unstanding generated between conversants. What I am trying to say is: we can discard the notion of "meaning" as something intrinsic to words and symbols, and replace it with the notion of "stimulus-meaning", being determined by the behaviour that an illocutionary act will illicit from a conversant. By this standard it does not matter so much that semantics are holistic: we can still observe the way a conversant responds to the stimulus, in a given language, and from this we can induce her language (or vice versa, depending which we know more about). We are not so much presented with a paradox as a web of propositions, each of which is revisable in light of new evidence.

Lomax

* I use quotation marks because I do not think that words have meanings, anyway: it is understanding which gives life to meaning, so I take a sentence - a sense-making string of symbols - to be the base unit of stimulus-meaning.

[cjbrier08]

cjbrier08 wrote:I said the metalanguage is not logically consistent because meaning is not logical
Okay, well we can probably agree that "meaning is not logical", but I do not think that's what it means to be logically consistent. I mean: if we can generate two propositions within a language, both of which have a claim (within, but not without the language) to being true, then we can say the language is logically inconsistent, but not (as far as I can see) otherwise.

Yes I sort of anticipated this objection. So according to your last post meaning is inconsistent just for a different reason. But consider, if the term truth is defined in such a way as a (fundamental reality) yet this very statement does not function as a fundamental reality, is this not an inconsistency of the metalanguage?

cjbrier08 wrote:like my example of the dictionary. The word dog never rests on an ultimate meaning, it is in perpetual signification, rooted and entangled in every other word.
Okay, this seems like semantic holism. I grant you that the "meanings"* of words are interdependent (although I do not grant you that a dictionary is our ultimate source of acquiring meaning, because a lexicographer only intends to report meaning, rather than invent it).

Its something like that. The dictionary is only an example to show that all meaning functions like it.

cjbrier08 wrote:The future is needed for the meaning of the original. Meaning like time is not simply located, it is not ultimately linear. We have the meaning of a term end at some arbitrary point for the sake of communication, however the meaning of these words are not logically fixed, we just at some point or another agree with these terms without exploring them any further. If we followed them to their logical conclusion (looking up every term that supports our term) we could have nothing solid to build a conversation out of.
I think we probably have a disagreement here, then: in that I do not think all meaning lies within the text. I mean: you deny the existence of Truth, as something which lies outside of a particular language, but I think that the Truth (and even the truth) must be antecedent to the language. There is no observable realm of things called "meanings", so it is useless to investigate the "meaning" of a word, or to treat the meaning as something severable from the unstanding generated between conversants. What I am trying to say is: we can discard the notion of "meaning" as something intrinsic to words and symbols, and replace it with the notion of "stimulus-meaning", being determined by the behaviour that an illocutionary act will illicit from a conversant. By this standard it does not matter so much that semantics are holistic: we can still observe the way a conversant responds to the stimulus, in a given language, and from this we can induce her language (or vice versa, depending which we know more about). We are not so much presented with a paradox as a web of propositions, each of which is revisable in light of new evidence.

I don't think I fully understand this particular objection. Could you try and explain it differently? I want to know exactly what your saying before I say anything back.

* I use quotation marks because I do not think that words have meanings, anyway: it is understanding which gives life to meaning, so I take a sentence - a sense-making string of symbols - to be the base unit of stimulus-meaning.

Deconstruction suggests that there is no understanding out side of meaning. Our understanding is just as holistic as you said and therefore just as incomplete. Understanding is viable but it is never complete and never settled.

[--vaikus--]

cjbrier08 wrote:I said the metalanguage is not logically consistent because meaning is not logical
Okay, well we can probably agree that "meaning is not logical", but I do not think that's what it means to be logically consistent. I mean: if we can generate two propositions within a language, both of which have a claim (within, but not without the language) to being true, then we can say the language is logically inconsistent, but not (as far as I can see) otherwise.

Yes I sort of anticipated this objection. So according to your last post meaning is inconsistent just for a different reason. But consider, if the term truth is defined in such a way as a (fundamental reality) yet this very statement does not function as a fundamental reality, is this not an inconsistency of the metalanguage?

cjbrier08 wrote:like my example of the dictionary. The word dog never rests on an ultimate meaning, it is in perpetual signification, rooted and entangled in every other word.
Okay, this seems like semantic holism. I grant you that the "meanings"* of words are interdependent (although I do not grant you that a dictionary is our ultimate source of acquiring meaning, because a lexicographer only intends to report meaning, rather than invent it).

Its something like that. The dictionary is only an example to show that all meaning functions like it.

cjbrier08 wrote:The future is needed for the meaning of the original. Meaning like time is not simply located, it is not ultimately linear. We have the meaning of a term end at some arbitrary point for the sake of communication, however the meaning of these words are not logically fixed, we just at some point or another agree with these terms without exploring them any further. If we followed them to their logical conclusion (looking up every term that supports our term) we could have nothing solid to build a conversation out of.
I think we probably have a disagreement here, then: in that I do not think all meaning lies within the text. I mean: you deny the existence of Truth, as something which lies outside of a particular language, but I think that the Truth (and even the truth) must be antecedent to the language. There is no observable realm of things called "meanings", so it is useless to investigate the "meaning" of a word, or to treat the meaning as something severable from the unstanding generated between conversants. What I am trying to say is: we can discard the notion of "meaning" as something intrinsic to words and symbols, and replace it with the notion of "stimulus-meaning", being determined by the behaviour that an illocutionary act will illicit from a conversant. By this standard it does not matter so much that semantics are holistic: we can still observe the way a conversant responds to the stimulus, in a given language, and from this we can induce her language (or vice versa, depending which we know more about). We are not so much presented with a paradox as a web of propositions, each of which is revisable in light of new evidence.

I don't think I fully understand this particular objection. Could you try and explain it differently? I want to know exactly what your saying before I say anything back.

* I use quotation marks because I do not think that words have meanings, anyway: it is understanding which gives life to meaning, so I take a sentence - a sense-making string of symbols - to be the base unit of stimulus-meaning.

Deconstruction suggests that there is no understanding out side of meaning. Our understanding is just as holistic as you said and therefore just as incomplete. Understanding is viable but it is never complete and never settled.

Understanding is when you grasp the idea of it. Not the semantics that everyone could generate around the idea.

That's my way of seeing it.

[--vaikus--]

And I'm sorry that i haven't had time to respond to you yet James.

[Lomax]

Hello cjbrier,

Yes I sort of anticipated this objection. So according to your last post meaning is inconsistent just for a different reason. But consider, if the term truth is defined in such a way as a (fundamental reality) yet this very statement does not function as a fundamental reality, is this not an inconsistency of the metalanguage?

No. Consider the more general form of this argument: "x is defined as y. 'x is defined as y' is not y". There is no inconsistency, because 'x is defined as y' need not be a subset of x.

I don't think I fully understand this particular objection. Could you try and explain it differently? I want to know exactly what your saying before I say anything back.

Certainly, I will try my best. My claim is that...

We have the meaning of a term end at some arbitrary point for the sake of communication, however the meaning of these words are not logically fixed, we just at some point or another agree with these terms without exploring them any further. If we followed them to their logical conclusion (looking up every term that supports our term) we could have nothing solid to build a conversation out of.

...is not a valid argument. It does not matter that semantics are holistic, or that we very regularly (arguably, upon each utterance) revise the semantic content of a word: we still have something to build a conversation out of. That something is our understanding of each other, which, so far as I can see, is the only justifiably criterion of meaning anyway.

Deconstruction suggests that there is no understanding out side of meaning. Our understanding is just as holistic as you said and therefore just as incomplete. Understanding is viable but it is never complete and never settled.

Well, what I am claiming is rather the converse: that there is no meaning outside of understanding. The fact that something is holistic, firstly, by no means makes it incomplete. We could have a unified theory of the universe and it would still be holistic, because we could (theoretically) revise every theorem individually without, as a consequence, changing what the overall theory predicts. Secondly, I do not know what kind of evidence we can ever have that understanding is largely incomplete. In fact we must take certain principles as a criterion for communiation. If another speaker is so far removed from our understanding that we cannot grasp any truth from what they are saying, then we do not recognise them as a speaker at all; there is nothing to distinguish the litany of sounds they are making from any other random collection of sounds*.

Lomax


* for a good defense of this, see Davidson (1974), and for a reasonable - and very famous - critique of the underlying principles, see Chomsky (1957)

[Lomax]

Hello vaikus,

Understanding is when you grasp the idea of it. Not the semantics that everyone could generate around the idea.

That's my way of seeing it.

Thankyou, I think that is a reasonable characterisation of my argument (so long as we accept that understanding is to be determined behaviouristically, rather than phenomenologically).

Lomax

[--vaikus--]

Hello vaikus,

Understanding is when you grasp the idea of it. Not the semantics that everyone could generate around the idea.

That's my way of seeing it.

Thankyou, I think that is a reasonable characterisation of my argument (so long as we accept that understanding is to be determined behaviouristically, rather than phenomenologically).

Lomax

Hello Lomax,

but isn't time more of an phenomenon than a way of behaviour ?

--vaikus--

[owleye]

Hello vaikus,

Understanding is when you grasp the idea of it. Not the semantics that everyone could generate around the idea.

That's my way of seeing it.

Thankyou, I think that is a reasonable characterisation of my argument (so long as we accept that understanding is to be determined behaviouristically, rather than phenomenologically).

Lomax

'Behavioral understanding' strikes me as provocative (or perhaps I should say it provokes a response in me).

It sounds like this means that we don't understand anything until we can put it to use. Another interpretation is that we don't understand anything until we can verbally express it (presumably in our own words, given that that should as well be subject to the same scrutiny -- possibly leading to an undesirable regress).

However, before I wrote the first sentence (and the thought that prompted it), what I was originally provoked to write was that it seems to imply that a behavioral determination of understanding doesn't take into consideration the elements of behavior dealing with belief (to include any degree of uncertainty) and desire. We could have grasped something (and even possibly satisfy the behavioral requirements as indicated above) but not act on it until the desire to act and the beliefs that support it are present, if ever. Does this affect the position you are representing? Though I might be able to dismiss it, do we really have to believe what we understand? (The dismissal would run along the lines of: Perhaps by not exhibiting the behavior it means that we understand it but don't hold it as a belief -- and by not exhibiting the behavior that corresponds to the understanding we are satisfying its behavioral determination, though negatively.)

James

[Louis_B]

Without an entity to recognise it, truth is irrelevant.

[cjbrier08]

No. Consider the more general form of this argument: "x is defined as y. 'x is defined as y' is not y". There is no inconsistency, because 'x is defined as y' need not be a subset of x.

This crossed my mind but I than thought that it was still an inconsistency. if x is defined as y then not y there seems to be no inconsistency of x. but it seems strange to me still. Perhaps x and y are not as separable as we might want to think? This depends on where we want to draw the line between the two.
Also we must keep in mind on how relevant to the claim that is at issue i.e. does a fundamental reality exist that can be known by human devise?

...is not a valid argument. It does not matter that semantics are holistic, or that we very regularly (arguably, upon each utterance) revise the semantic content of a word: we still have something to build a conversation out of. That something is our understanding of each other, which, so far as I can see, is the only justifiably criterion of meaning anyway.

I don't think understanding can function on its own without something to understand. And what is that which we understand, you say the other. But in what way do we understand the other? Meaning stimuli or however you put it?
I might even agree. Nothing really has meaning we give it meaning, what gods we are! But i'm suggesting that we apply this semantic holism to even understanding, to behavioral observation. I don't take deconstruction that seriously, I think its a wonderful tool for making my whims into principles by denying the authority in the whims of others, making us an even 0. just another perception with no more justification than the next, yet I still have faith in a universal morality which is often my motivation, go figure! So back to the issue at hand can your argument conquer mine :)
Deconstruction as I remember applies to understanding aswell. For example if I had more time explain myself we might assume this will bring us closer to understanding each other. Deconstruction denies that this can be for the same reason it denies that speech is greater than writing. I think its called phonocentrism or something? The idea that words when spoken are some how better than words when written because they have a closer position to the speakers presents of mind and body. But because the signified is always also a signifier you can never make progress with meaning, or understanding meaning.
I wish I had the pdf file for an essay explaining all this. I have a hard copy somewhere but o well. I thought it might help us understand each other :)

Well, what I am claiming is rather the converse: that there is no meaning outside of understanding. The fact that something is holistic, firstly, by no means makes it incomplete. We could have a unified theory of the universe and it would still be holistic, because we could (theoretically) revise every theorem individually without, as a consequence, changing what the overall theory predicts. Secondly, I do not know what kind of evidence we can ever have that understanding is largely incomplete. In fact we must take certain principles as a criterion for communiation. If another speaker is so far removed from our understanding that we cannot grasp any truth from what they are saying, then we do not recognise them as a speaker at all; there is nothing to distinguish the litany of sounds they are making from any other random collection of sounds*.

Meaning being holistic does make it incomplete because the meaning of A is being differed towards the futural other. Nature is the afterthought of culture. Teacher is the afterthought of substitute.

[Lomax]

Hello cjbrier08,

This crossed my mind but I than thought that it was still an inconsistency. if x is defined as y then not y there seems to be no inconsistency of x.

Rather what I am claiming is:

1."x is defined as y", and
2. "(x is defined as y) is not defined as y".

It does not follow from (2) that...

3. "x is not defined as y"

...so there is no paradox.

Also we must keep in mind on how relevant to the claim that is at issue i.e. does a fundamental reality exist that can be known by human devise?

By all means. I have used this quotation too many times already on this forum, but its pertinence seems almost ubiquitous:

"The very terms ‘thing’ and ‘exist’ and ‘real,’ after all, make no sense apart from human conceptualization. Asking after the thing in itself apart from human conceptualization, is like asking how long the Nile really is, apart from our parochial miles or kilometers”

Meaning being holistic does make it incomplete because the meaning of A is being differed towards the futural other. Nature is the afterthought of culture. Teacher is the afterthought of substitute.

I can't make sense of any of this, I'm afraid.

Lomax

[Lomax]

Hello vaikus,

but isn't time more of an phenomenon than a way of behaviour ?

Well, I don't strictly think it is either; but anyway, what I meant was: we determine whether the conversants have understood each other, by observing the way they behave.

If I may use Daniel Dennett's example (from Consciousness Explained): when we tell somebody "my uncle fired his lawyer yesterday", they may understand us, even though their "mental image" is very different to ours. As the speaker we may recount specific events that marked yesterday out; we may picture specifically our uncle and specifically his lawyer, and so on. The other conversant may have to fabricate an uncle in his mind; he may picture some middle-aged man with greying hair, perhaps dismissing some smartly dressed but otherwise nondescript woman; phenomenologically, he may skip over the word "yesterday" altogether. Yet it does not follow that he has not understood us. Further, it is not established whether people who were born blind can have any kind of visual imagination at all, yet we do not contend that they have no grasp of language.

So what I am saying is, that we do not need to have the same mental imagery to be talking about the same thing; or I might say, you do not need the same radio, to be on the same wavelength.

Lomax

[Lomax]

Hello owleye,

These are fair criticisms, I shall try to deal with them. I floundered a bit before I found the right words :P

However, before I wrote the first sentence (and the thought that prompted it), what I was originally provoked to write was that it seems to imply that a behavioral determination of understanding doesn't take into consideration the elements of behavior dealing with belief (to include any degree of uncertainty) and desire. We could have grasped something (and even possibly satisfy the behavioral requirements as indicated above) but not act on it until the desire to act and the beliefs that support it are present, if ever. Does this affect the position you are representing?

Possibly, depending on whether you accept my Occamist stance. I will try to explain:

The first thing of note is that I don't think we can observe a particular realm of entities called "meanings" which are affixed to particular words or instances of utterance. Nor can we can we know what is going on phenomenologically in the minds of those who teach us our language; we learn when to use the word by pairing the utterances of it with accompanying stimuli. For instance, my first word was "dog"; for me to learn this, my mother would always point at a dog or bring it near, while saying "dog"; or something along those lines anyway. It does not really matter whether my phenomena are the same as hers; the point is that I have learnt to say the word "dog" in the same circumstances as she does, and so we share an understanding of the word.

Secondly, now that I have established this externalistic explanation of language, let us consider an internal language (or a "private language"). Imagine that my friend Bigwig Kitchenstein says he has a language which only he understands. It isn't like he has just made up all the words and refuses to tell anyone what they mean; the problem goes deeper. Kitchenstein's phenomelogical library is so different to ours that we cannot possibly know what the words mean, because we cannot picture their meaning. He has a word for the colour "breen", which is different from any of my colours, and which I do not have the mental apparatus to ever see. When I see red things he sees breen things, and nothing can be done about this. What happens now?

Well, of course, I can never know that this is the case. When faced with a red thing I will say it is red and Kitchenstein will say it is breen. Eventually, if we wish to use the same words, I will accept that breen is a synonym for red, and he will accept that red is a synonym for breen

The point is this: although Kitchenstein pictures breen when he says that tomatoes are red, we nonetheless understand each other. I can ask him to go and get me the reddest tomato, and he will bring back exactly that. Despite differences of phenomenology, we have a shared language and understand each other perfectly.

So, for this reason, I hold that observation of behaviour is our only means of judging whether we are understood, and our only means of teaching or learning a language. Now my friend Donald Duckson takes this further. He points that, therefore, nothing can count as evidence that a non-understandable, non-translatable-into-English language exists. If the weather could speak, we could not understand it; its language would be (for whatever reason) impossible to understand, and so we would dismiss its noises as just that - noises. So (and this is where my argument must employ Occam's Razor), anything principally untranslatable is just noise, and all language is public language.

So, what I am getting at, is that understanding is not a sort of phenomenological identity, or anything like that. And I do think that, as you suggested, we can understand something without believing it (for instance, I understand the proposition "no tomatoes are red"; I would know how to test for its truth).

Lomax

[cjbrier08]

Meaning being holistic does make it incomplete because the meaning of A is being differed towards the futural other. Nature is the afterthought of culture. Teacher is the afterthought of substitute.

I can't make sense of any of this, I'm afraid.

you can't make sense of it because its absurd! But its how understanding works. Nature is defined after we have a culture. Nature has no meaning without culture (but nature by definition precedes culture) so the original meaning of nature is incomplete. If nature has meaning outside of culture it can be there for us just as much as “asking how long the Nile really is, apart from our parochial miles or kilometers” can give us an answer.

[cjbrier08]

further, if meaning is incomplete there can be no whole presents, no truth. if there is, but we dont have access to it, it might as well be meaningless. the paradox is meaning is incomplete. means, meaning is incomplete...

[owleye]

The first thing of note is that I don't think we can observe a particular realm of entities called "meanings" which are affixed to particular words or instances of utterance. Nor can we can we know what is going on phenomenologically in the minds of those who teach us our language; we learn when to use the word by pairing the utterances of it with accompanying stimuli. For instance, my first word was "dog"; for me to learn this, my mother would always point at a dog or bring it near, while saying "dog"; or something along those lines anyway. It does not really matter whether my phenomena are the same as hers; the point is that I have learnt to say the word "dog" in the same circumstances as she does, and so we share an understanding of the word.

This, I presume, is Quine's stimulus-meaning. If I have it right we are conditioned to associate the language element with what it refers to. Presumably the teacher is conditioning the youngster here. I seem to recall when reading Quine a number of years ago that there is potential confusion over what it is that is being referred to -- i.e., whether it was a part of a rabbit or the whole rabbit. I confess I don't remember much of it. I'm also a bit fuzzy on Davidson in this area -- I seem to recall he needed a third party (or possibly what would be considered an authority). In any case, through trial and error, I suppose, what your suggesting is that once we behaviorally align the word with what the teacher expects, and an understanding is reached. Alternatively, we can be said to have communicated.

Secondly, now that I have established this externalistic explanation of language, let us consider an internal language (or a "private language"). Imagine that my friend Bigwig Kitchenstein says he has a language which only he understands. It isn't like he has just made up all the words and refuses to tell anyone what they mean; the problem goes deeper. Kitchenstein's phenomelogical library is so different to ours that we cannot possibly know what the words mean, because we cannot picture their meaning. He has a word for the colour "breen", which is different from any of my colours, and which I do not have the mental apparatus to ever see. When I see red things he sees breen things, and nothing can be done about this. What happens now?

Well, of course, I can never know that this is the case. When faced with a red thing I will say it is red and Kitchenstein will say it is breen. Eventually, if we wish to use the same words, I will accept that breen is a synonym for red, and he will accept that red is a synonym for breen

The point is this: although Kitchenstein pictures breen when he says that tomatoes are red, we nonetheless understand each other. I can ask him to go and get me the reddest tomato, and he will bring back exactly that. Despite differences of phenomenology, we have a shared language and understand each other perfectly.

Ok. No private language. Was this Wittgenstein?

So, for this reason, I hold that observation of behaviour is our only means of judging whether we are understood, and our only means of teaching or learning a language. Now my friend Donald Duckson takes this further. He points that, therefore, nothing can count as evidence that a non-understandable, non-translatable-into-English language exists. If the weather could speak, we could not understand it; its language would be (for whatever reason) impossible to understand, and so we would dismiss its noises as just that - noises. So (and this is where my argument must employ Occam's Razor), anything principally untranslatable is just noise, and all language is public language.

So, what I am getting at, is that understanding is not a sort of phenomenological identity, or anything like that. And I do think that, as you suggested, we can understand something without believing it (for instance, I understand the proposition "no tomatoes are red"; I would know how to test for its truth).

Lomax

As long as you couch it in these terms, yes. Understanding has to be communicated, otherwise no one else would know whether there is one. All this is rather odd, though. It reminds me a bit of the pragmatists arguments for truth where what they seem to be saying is that truth is represented by an agreement reached among certain parties, like a jury decision. To the outside world, we take the agreement as one that satisfies what we need from them. However, among the jurists themselves, while their task is to reach agreement, they have their own individual pursuit of what constitutes the truth, which will differ from person to person, but essentially be external to them. They are not oriented toward the judgment that the agreement constitutes the truth, but that the truth lies elsewhere and the agreement only represents the alignment of the judgments regarding the same truth. Another example comes to mind in the form of the number of theories about what 'law' is (from a course I once took in jurisprudence). Among the theories is one adopted by lawyers -- namely, the law is whatever the judge decides. However, this is superficial because the judge doesn't (necessarily) regard this as the law, but as something else on which s/he has to pass judgment.

I will admit that the idea of 'reaching an understanding' has a strong kinship with 'communicating', and suffers from all the same failures of failing to communicate. However, this just seems like a different sense of the term 'understanding'. It also brings up the possibility that there can be a semblance of understanding, or a semblance of communication but that it is only a semblance.

Moreover, hypothetically, there might be different understandings that emit the same behavior. As a possible example, suppose I say I understand how to make use of quantum mechanics to solve problems in identifying energy levels of certain molecules. Well, it could be that I memorized a procedure to accomplish this and solved problems with it. However, to a person who has a (deeper) understanding, such memorization wouldn't qualify as such, despite that both would be able to solve it. (Well, perhaps we need to have better tests -- but this sort of begs the question here, it seems. When there is no distinguishing behavior, why would we think we need better tests? Indeed, who gets to judge this (i.e., are authorities needed here)?).

James

[Lomax]

Hello owleye,

This, I presume, is Quine's stimulus-meaning. If I have it right we are conditioned to associate the language element with what it refers to. Presumably the teacher is conditioning the youngster here. I seem to recall when reading Quine a number of years ago that there is potential confusion over what it is that is being referred to -- i.e., whether it was a part of a rabbit or the whole rabbit. I confess I don't remember much of it. I'm also a bit fuzzy on Davidson in this area -- I seem to recall he needed a third party (or possibly what would be considered an authority). In any case, through trial and error, I suppose, what your suggesting is that once we behaviorally align the word with what the teacher expects, and an understanding is reached. Alternatively, we can be said to have communicated.

Certainly. The problem about the rabbit is that we can never be totally sure, if we are learning language empirically, what a word means. "Gavagai" could have meant "rabbit" or "undetached rabbit-part" and so on. It's not too much of a problem, because the more we use language in different contexts, the higher the probability that we are using it correctly, at least for our basic vocabulary. It is also likely that we have evolved to have an intuitive understanding of each other, and are able to accurately infer a bit more than what is observationally justified (I think Chomsky called the gap between what we observe and what e manage to figure out "the poverty of the stimulus").

Ok. No private language. Was this Wittgenstein?

More or less. It was what people read into Wittgenstein's work, really. Wittgenstein tended to let the reader fill in all the gaps.

As long as you couch it in these terms, yes. Understanding has to be communicated, otherwise no one else would know whether there is one. All this is rather odd, though. It reminds me a bit of the pragmatists arguments for truth where what they seem to be saying is that truth is represented by an agreement reached among certain parties, like a jury decision.

Well, I am not suggesting that agreement is the criterion for truth, only for understanding. We can understand each other without agreeing with other, let alone both being right.

Among the theories is one adopted by lawyers -- namely, the law is whatever the judge decides. However, this is superficial because the judge doesn't (necessarily) regard this as the law, but as something else on which s/he has to pass judgment.

Certainly, it seems like they would be putting the cart before the horse.

I will admit that the idea of 'reaching an understanding' has a strong kinship with 'communicating', and suffers from all the same failures of failing to communicate. However, this just seems like a different sense of the term 'understanding'. It also brings up the possibility that there can be a semblance of understanding, or a semblance of communication but that it is only a semblance.

Agreed. I suppose we can't know for sure whether someone has understood us (but then, from my strictly empiricist perspective, I doubt we can know anything for sure anyway).

Moreover, hypothetically, there might be different understandings that emit the same behavior. As a possible example, suppose I say I understand how to make use of quantum mechanics to solve problems in identifying energy levels of certain molecules. Well, it could be that I memorized a procedure to accomplish this and solved problems with it. However, to a person who has a (deeper) understanding, such memorization wouldn't qualify as such, despite that both would be able to solve it.

This is what I was explaining to vaikus, actually: that the matter is not whether we are imagining the same thing, but whether our images are leading us each to interact with our world in the same way.

Lomax