The Language Game
I want to make a note of a couple of good ideas that I sometimes lose track of. Not mine, of course. Just things I have read but forget to apply sometimes.
One is from H. G. Wells "Modern Utopia". He mentions that names for groups of people do not denote anything in the real world. The larger the group, the more useless the name. This applies to "socialist", "black people", "climate change deniers" ... The advice is to seriously limit the use of such words in serious discussion.
A similar insight comes from Buddhism, which goes further and applies skepticism to words that denote anything at all. A "real" object does not exist in and of itself. It exists in relationship to other "things". Its existence is time-limited and is constantly in flux. I would add that our ideas about "things" are "scale dependent" in time as well as space. If you look closely at anything, the "object" is lost and a new world appears. If you learn to think in terms of "deep time", what you mean by "the world" shifts. Astonishing things can be observed in freeze-frame, slow motion or time-lapse photography. What we take for granted as "real" is strongly "relative" to conventional perception of time.
Finally, I recall what Wittgenstein called the "language game". For example, you can confidently use the word "I" properly in a sentence but that doesn't mean you have a clue about what "I" really is. In fact, what we refer to as "meaning" seldom goes beyond how to use a word in context. This insight is specifically noted in modern Buddhist thought, which is skeptical about all "concepts" that are merely conventions of language.
In passing, I remember the ideas of McIntyre (sp?) who refers to "intelligibility" rather than "truth" in any statement. It's about the job of philosophy to be recognizing "legal moves" in the "language game". "Understanding" and "truth" are another matter entirely.
Finally, I remember E H Carr's "What is History", which makes the case that "history" is simply the story we come up with when we focus on certain aspects of the past. Those are the ones that the historian regards as "relevant" in his own time. This reminds me of the blind men experience the Elephant. - also mentioned in my readings on Buddhism.
All this is simply to mention the deep currents behind what I have been saying recently about everything. It is consistent with one of the themes in this blog: that we can't really "think for ourselves". We can only "speak" of the world and come to a common understanding of the language game rules, making "intelligible" statements that allow us to "think" in groups. While useful, there are some very fundamental reasons why this process rarely results in a true understanding of the "world" we live in. In fact, the agreed-to rules of language can create a dangerous distance between what we expect of the world and what we actually experience.
The Buddhist answer to this dilemma (and the one proposed by "Science") is to trust actual experience. It doesn't get us all the way out of the woods but is where the light is coming from.
One is from H. G. Wells "Modern Utopia". He mentions that names for groups of people do not denote anything in the real world. The larger the group, the more useless the name. This applies to "socialist", "black people", "climate change deniers" ... The advice is to seriously limit the use of such words in serious discussion.
A similar insight comes from Buddhism, which goes further and applies skepticism to words that denote anything at all. A "real" object does not exist in and of itself. It exists in relationship to other "things". Its existence is time-limited and is constantly in flux. I would add that our ideas about "things" are "scale dependent" in time as well as space. If you look closely at anything, the "object" is lost and a new world appears. If you learn to think in terms of "deep time", what you mean by "the world" shifts. Astonishing things can be observed in freeze-frame, slow motion or time-lapse photography. What we take for granted as "real" is strongly "relative" to conventional perception of time.
Finally, I recall what Wittgenstein called the "language game". For example, you can confidently use the word "I" properly in a sentence but that doesn't mean you have a clue about what "I" really is. In fact, what we refer to as "meaning" seldom goes beyond how to use a word in context. This insight is specifically noted in modern Buddhist thought, which is skeptical about all "concepts" that are merely conventions of language.
In passing, I remember the ideas of McIntyre (sp?) who refers to "intelligibility" rather than "truth" in any statement. It's about the job of philosophy to be recognizing "legal moves" in the "language game". "Understanding" and "truth" are another matter entirely.
Finally, I remember E H Carr's "What is History", which makes the case that "history" is simply the story we come up with when we focus on certain aspects of the past. Those are the ones that the historian regards as "relevant" in his own time. This reminds me of the blind men experience the Elephant. - also mentioned in my readings on Buddhism.
All this is simply to mention the deep currents behind what I have been saying recently about everything. It is consistent with one of the themes in this blog: that we can't really "think for ourselves". We can only "speak" of the world and come to a common understanding of the language game rules, making "intelligible" statements that allow us to "think" in groups. While useful, there are some very fundamental reasons why this process rarely results in a true understanding of the "world" we live in. In fact, the agreed-to rules of language can create a dangerous distance between what we expect of the world and what we actually experience.
The Buddhist answer to this dilemma (and the one proposed by "Science") is to trust actual experience. It doesn't get us all the way out of the woods but is where the light is coming from.
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