Ok, I think I better see your point, one thing I’m not sure you are on board with is that unique language can come from:
Direct experience of the world—or linguistic thinking about a memory (sky here has green~ish tint before a storm)
Linguistic thinking -- with several nested layers of recursion (what is <abstract concept>)
Ultimately there’s no hard line between the two but in practice, this seems quite relevant. Statements that come from 1) seem usually ok , and statements that come from 2) usually seem maladaptive.
Isn’t that unique composition of language? If you consider descriptions of the world to be something like a linear combination of words (or the impression they map to in your mind), then language can be said to span/cover some intrepretation of experiences.
I agree with you, and linguistic thinking is certainly the more reductive one.
But aren’t they both mistaken? As soon as anything is put into words, or encoded in logic for that matter, it has already been severely reduced and lost its connection to reality.
Difficult questions are basically syntax errors, loaded questions, self-contradicting statements, or statements with mistaken assumptions baked into them. But more importantly, I don’t think that even correct language has much in common with reality. We have no reasons to assume that the words we’ve come up with have the expressive power needed to align with reality, and it might be the case that no such words can’t exist.
You might be arguing that the meaning or concept behind a word is valid, and that manipulating these underlying things can allow us to understand the world. I suppose that this understanding of the world is correct enough to be useful, but I doubt that there’s any formal equivalence between even our intuitions and “reality”. As I see it, “getting out of the car” allows one to live a genuine human life, but it still doesn’t allow one to move outside the scope of human.
Ok, I think I better see your point, one thing I’m not sure you are on board with is that unique language can come from:
Direct experience of the world—or linguistic thinking about a memory (sky here has green~ish tint before a storm)
Linguistic thinking -- with several nested layers of recursion (what is <abstract concept>)
Ultimately there’s no hard line between the two but in practice, this seems quite relevant. Statements that come from 1) seem usually ok , and statements that come from 2) usually seem maladaptive.
Isn’t that unique composition of language? If you consider descriptions of the world to be something like a linear combination of words (or the impression they map to in your mind), then language can be said to span/cover some intrepretation of experiences.
I agree with you, and linguistic thinking is certainly the more reductive one.
But aren’t they both mistaken? As soon as anything is put into words, or encoded in logic for that matter, it has already been severely reduced and lost its connection to reality.
Difficult questions are basically syntax errors, loaded questions, self-contradicting statements, or statements with mistaken assumptions baked into them. But more importantly, I don’t think that even correct language has much in common with reality. We have no reasons to assume that the words we’ve come up with have the expressive power needed to align with reality, and it might be the case that no such words can’t exist.
You might be arguing that the meaning or concept behind a word is valid, and that manipulating these underlying things can allow us to understand the world. I suppose that this understanding of the world is correct enough to be useful, but I doubt that there’s any formal equivalence between even our intuitions and “reality”. As I see it, “getting out of the car” allows one to live a genuine human life, but it still doesn’t allow one to move outside the scope of human.