Should language mean stuff?

Reality is both discrete and continuous, my friend.

I was not ridiculing you at any point. I think you're quite smart.

Good night.

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Perhaps, but I was speaking of the subject/object distinction. These kind of vague, wiser-than-thou statements are simply obfuscatory and attempt to redirect the discussion elsewhere. It is possible that discrete entities exist, but the discussion here is whether or not the subject is one of them. It would serve you well in the future to address my points instead of glossing them over with an unrelated statement with no explanatory power. Save the aphorisms for Nietzsche and Adorno. They also had some theory to go along with their poetry.

I would go as far as to say that they are not hierarchical at all but composed of an entirely different relation. This relation is not capable of logical mediation.

Language too is a mental attribute. And indeed, the general/specific distinction is firmly rooted in the very structure of language. The thing I want to do is to get out of this structuring.

If logic could reveal the true nature of reality, a fully standardized ideal language should surely be constructed. However, if the opposite is true as I claim -- if it is in fact the very failings of language that reveal the true nature of reality -- then we must certainly never try to aim for an ideal language but instead allow language to exist fluidly as an endless becoming.

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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."

You are still failing to grasp the implications of what I have written.

Seriously, I'm done now. No offense intended at all.

If I am truly failing to understand, then I require help, because I am reading everything you are saying.

The only person who can provide that assistance is you. I am very curious to see what you truly mean, but alone I can progress no further. You need to give me more than two sentences per post for me to understand. This is just the nature of my understanding. It requires examples or instantiations of what you are professing. If you could just give me one example of what you mean by general and specific, I would be very grateful.

I think it probably would be futile of me to continue... you seem annoyed and we aren't communicating very well at all.... but let me ask you a question instead:

Is reality absolute or relative?

Reality or The Real is absolute and it is material.

Our access to that absolute is what is at stake here; specifically, our access to that absolute through language.

I claim it cannot be done within language. You claim it can through the disclosure of logical atoms, which I do not believe exist, and you certainly have not shown to exist or given an example of or resembling one.

Now it is I who have to go to sleep. I did enjoy this to the extent that your answers were not boring, but they were so "interesting" that they failed to actually connect with anything I was trying to say, and ultimately what you were trying to say as well.

Oyasuminasai.

You are half-right.

"Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge.

Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge

Us thinketh hem, nd yet thei spake hem so,

And spedde as wel in love as men now do."

Translation: "You know that the form of speech will change within a thousand years, and words that were once apt, we now regard as quaint and strange; and yet they spoke them thus, and succeeded as well in love as men do now." -Chaucer

Hey, whatever happened to this (I noticed lines reading it this morning)? I never got to hear what planet thought about the "you can't break boundaries that aren't there" stuff. I think we may have moved the conversation to our respective profiles, but I'm not sure if that was before or after this.

I still think words mean stuff! You memetic language people paradoxically need us to disagree with you!

After recently making an insurance claim, I came to the conclusion that in the case of our salesman, words meant absolutely nothing.

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Under-the-radar Movie Awesomeness.
http://earlsmoviepicks.blogspot.com/

Paraphrasing Bill Clinton, it depends on what "mean" and "stuff" means.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

i've changed my views (maybe)

i'm afraid to read what i wrote

I am interested in this.

Courage.

Words, by themselves, are meaningless. The mere utterances that come out of one's mouth are but soundwaves, and different languages with different utterances could mean the same thing. It's strange because there are other animals that use the frequency to communicate, eg. Dolphins. We humans don't ascribe meaning to just how the word "sounds" like.

I still subscribe to the theory of 'constant conjunction'. Words derive their meaning by the way we use them. Use comes first, followed by meaning. Behaviourists believe that human beings acquire language through the combination of classical and operant conditioning. The former refers to how successful the particular utterance is used to achieve a particular response. When you step on my foot, I say "ouch!", and the word "ouch" is reinforced with someone in pain. Over time the conjunction is programmed into our brains. The latter explains the learning of more complex words such as 'if', 'but' or 'however'. It refers to the reward/punishment for using the word rightly or wrongly. Now this is almost impossible for our early primate ancestors, but progressively across millions of years we acquire rudimentary skills for communication (I suspect about 6 million years ago since we last shared a common ancester with chimpanzees). Steven Pinker has written a brilliant book on the Darwinian theory of language, which I think is the best explanation that we currently have, called The Blank State. Once we understand how language comes about in our species, that they are repeatly reinforced successfully as part of our increasingly complex goal-directed behaviour, then can we say that words should indeed mean 'stuff' with respect to our self-directed goals that we strive to achieve. Natural selection has been kind to our early language endeavors, ensuring the survival of those groups who cooperate with a common language, and hence the passing down of 'successful' words.

The philosophical approach I'm not too aware of. But if I'm not wrong, Wittgenstein once said words get their meaning by being conjoined with the other words in a phrase; the meaning arises from their relationship with the other words. So the word 'cat' is not a fact. But 'cat on the mat' shows the relationship (namely cat + mat = cat on the mat) of 'facts'.

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

Just to follow-up on this, I read something that illustrated one of the costs to having an especially fluid language: it creates a barrier between us and the rest of history. It makes it harder to understand older writings. This has political implications as well as cultural ones.

There are some instances in which this can be nice, to be sure; older poetry may benefit from this layer of separation. But even that comes as the expense of making it harder to read, more intimidating, etc. Whether it's a net good or not, there are definitely downsides.

Was Shakespeare understandable even in his own time?

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It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

Shake the Spear of Knowledge at the dragon of ignorance.

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sedai, you're an idiot.

will, you're an utter fool.

yoda, you're really dumb.

dexter, you're a real dunce.

someone close this thread now please.

Nah.