Realism Within the Limits of Language Alone

Streetlight

I'm starting this thread as a spin-off to some thoughts I'm been trying to work through in the Davidson reading, although what follows will only seem tangentially related. Anyway, my question has to do with what we might call the 'overlap' between meaning and language, and to what degree language can be said to be 'self-contained'. By language I mean the stuff we are taught in English class in primary school, having to do with words, sentences, grammar and the like (as distinct from say, 'body language' - although we will complicate this later). Anyway, the conventional idea is that meaning is expressed through language (understood in the above sense); to mean something is to use language to convey that meaning. Here, the 'scope' of meaning exactly coincides with the 'scope' of language. From this starting point, we can generate all sorts of philosophical questions about how language does it's job of conveying meaning, how it 'refers' to things 'outside' of language and so on.

But what if the assumption that language nicely overlaps with meaning is simply mistaken? What if meaning exceeds the bounds of language, as it so regularly does with respect to gestures, body language, and even - if the phenomenologists are right - perception? To get a handle on this, consider one of the puzzles of language: what is the minimal 'unit' of meaning in language? Is it a word? A sentence? The entire structure of a specific language (e.g., English, Japanese)? One common answer is that there is no 'minimal unit', and what qualifies as 'having meaning' is context-dependent: a word means what it does only in the context of the sentence in which it is expressed, for example. A condensed way of putting this is that meaning is differential. One does not begin with pre-chunked blocks of meaningful units in order to build them up into ever more elaborate swathes of meaning, but instead, one rather circumscribes meaning through a differential structure which confers meaning upon things only by putting them into a meaningful context.

This, in turn, can be condensed by speaking of what some have called a 'semantic holism' or 'meaning holism' (as distinguished from 'semantic atomism'). Davidson, for instance, has proclaimed unambiguously that, "a sentence (and therefore a word) has meaning only in the context of a (whole) language." According to this point of view, the 'differential structure' mentioned above would precisely be 'a (whole) language'. But now the question becomes - what in principle limits the differential involved in the production of meaning to language and language alone? In other words, if meaning is context dependent, and all 'units' of language (whatever one might take them to be) refer to a context, is it really the case that language functions as the 'ultimate context' beyond which there is nothing? Once you reject the atomistic picture of language, at what point can you 'stop' the proliferation of context? Once you start that ball rolling, can it be in principle stopped at some arbitrary point that we can call language? Is it not true that language itself works in context as well?

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Now, the consequences of this idea are fairly far-reaching - quite literally. Vicki Kirby, in a discussion of the difficulties that Ferdinand Saussure had in circumscribing just such a bound, speaks in this respect of the "monstrous elasticity of the word" that "surrounds and invades everything." Similarly, when Wittgenstein, in the Investigations, attempted to specify his oblique understating of meaning as use, he himself appealed to nothing less than a "form of life" which would itself provide the contextual backdrop of language itself: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" - elsewhere equating a form of life with an activity of which language is a practice. What all of this ultimately means - or at least, how I read it - is that language is continuous with the world. This is not to say that language 'refers' to the world, or has some sort of 'direct contact with' or hooks up to' the world by way of representing it in some manner. Rather, it is to say that language is of the world, it functions only by dint of being of a piece with the world.

The inability to place any boundaries that would in principle limit the differential specification of meaning requires that language not be thought of in terms of a self-enclosed domain whose contours are isomorphic to meaning. Instead, the production of meaning bleeds beyond the bounds of language and spills over into world from the very beginning. This allows us in turn to speak of meaning, of sense, as a domain of it's own, of which language - in the sense specified above - might be seen as simply a certain consecration of. One of the motivations here is to explode the traditional anti/realist approaches to language (which tend to turn upon the badly posed question of whether or not language can 'refer to an external world' or not), and inflect it toward a realism of a different bent, one not concerned with language's ability to tell us 'about' the world ,while nonetheless being rooted in it. So another way to put this is that one ought to be committed to a realism not in spite of the bounds of language, but because of them.

*Thinking in retrospect, it might perhaps be better to characterize this as a naturalism of language, rather than a realism. But I suppose this is more provocative and fun, knowing our little crop of posters.

Baden

Yes, without a common sense approach to language as grounded in a world of meaning from the beginning (and a recognition of its evolutionary flourishing in this ground ) you get drawn into all sorts of absurdities like Quine's destruction of meaning, which bleeds into reference and (though he tries to deny it) ontology. Davidson follows him down this route and we are left with a dizzy relativism where the forms of life behind language seem to float magically in some philosophical ether. I guess it's all a very interesting intellectual endeavor but essentially an aimless one.

Thinking in retrospect, it might perhaps be better to characterize this as as naturalism of language, rather than a realism. But I suppose this is more provocative and fun, knowing our little crop of posters. — StreetlightX

I think naturalism is a better term here too (although hardly any term is untainted by unwanted associations). Language is a natural evolutionary phenomenon and that needs to be the basis on which we come to both a scientific and philosophical understanding of it. Certainly we shouldn't be using language to extirpate the very tools necessary to comprehend it.

The Great Whatever

By language I mean the stuff we are taught in English class in primary school, having to do with words, sentences, grammar and the like (as distinct from say, 'body language' - although we will complicate this later) — StreetlightX

A little aside here, but (first) language not only isn't taught in school, but can't be.

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I'd say that the way language is supposed to work, it pretends to have a kind of transcendental function that circumscribes the limits of the world. Of course it doesn't really, but that's what it's 'supposed' to do, and the extent to which you realize it doesn't is the extent to which you stop 'believing' in language non-ironically, and correlatively, the world.

I don't think rooting language back in the world again will help. You'll just get more dumb correlationist paradoxes. I think it would be better to work through language's logic from the inside, ironically, until it can be systematically untangled, and allow the world to collapse with it. No more realism or naturalism then.

Streetlight

@Baden - Yeah, I think that is perhaps what I find stale, or at least artificial about some analytic approaches to language; it's treated as a sort of world of it's own which can be captured as being composed of certain moves in a game of logic or something. Language is entirely deprived of it's affective resonance, it's ability to act on bodies, rather than simply mean things. Speech act theory made some headway here, but it consistently gets domesticated into frameworks which it is meant precisely to explode (cf. Searle's mind-numbingly lame reworkings of Austin).

Stanley Cavell - one of the great analytics - has a great little quip about how some philosophers "seem like the drunk in the story who, having dropped his keys trying to open the front door, has gone around the corner to look for them under the street lamp because the light makes it easier to find things. Or perhaps like a second drunk who, looking at the difficulties of the first, tries to convince him that he hasn't dropped his keys because they are obviously not under the light." Cavell is speaking of ordinary language philosophers in his passage, but I feel sometimes the same way about those who would prefer to treat language wholly on logical terms, because frankly, that's simply what their training has thought them to be good at. That's not to say it's all like this, but exceptions seem to be deviations from the rule, rather than constitutive of it.

Streetlight

I don't think rooting language back in the world again will help. You'll just get more dumb correlationist paradoxes. I think it would be better to work through language's logic from the inside, ironically, until it can be systematically untangled, and allow the world to collapse with it. No more realism or naturalism then. — The Great Whatever

Surely you can give me more to chew on than this?

The Great Whatever

↪StreetlightX

I don't know, I was just offering an opinion. I have the vague feeling that this approach results, like I said, in more correlationist paradoxes, but I can't substantiate that. The feeling is enough to want to look for a different approach though.

Maybe what you really want is just empirical, natural language semantics. It derives from philosophy of language and uses logical techniques, but always in service of treating language as an empirical thing, not a transcendental one. I'm starting to think that ultimately this is what you have to do, because the history of philosophy has gotten it backwards: whereas philosophers have been inclined to think that natural language mimics ideal logic forms, often imperfectly, I now believe that logical systems are basically crude, toy semantics, abstracted from the living complexity of natural semantics, which we're only now beginning to study seriously. That is to say, old logical 'laws' like the principle of non-contradiction are grammatical rules, like many philosophers have said, but not because they're subject to transcendental logic principles, or stipulated linguistic ones ala positivism, but rather because they're crude reflections of the way contradiction works in natural language (albeit very simplified). And so metaphysical principles once thought to be transcendental are neither stipulated nor eternal, but empirical facts about the way a certain system works. Logic is, in that sense, a stepping stone to semantics, where the real deal is. A mature semantics would know how to do precisely what you say, though of course at this stage reflections on the interface between linguistic semantics and non-linguistic semantics are still in their infancy.

TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't think rooting language back in the world again will help. You'll just get more dumb correlationist paradoxes. I think it would be better to work through language's logic from the inside, ironically, until it can be systematically untangled, and allow the world to collapse with it. No more realism or naturalism then. — The Great Whatever

The problem is that's exactly what language can never do. Since language is always distinct from what it talks about (e.g. my talk about the apple is never the apple), it is incapable to work through language "from the inside" because, in every instance, language is always outside what it talks about, including its own instances.

In any situation where I use language to analyse an instance of language, I am outside the instance of language I am analysing. I'm locked out. There is no way I can get in. I can't turn my language of analysis into the language I am talking about. Telling people (including myself) about one of my experiences is never the same as living it. The "inside" language is impossible.

I'd say that the way language is supposed to work, it pretends to have a kind of transcendental function that circumscribes the limits of the world — The Great Whatever

Seems to me this is an error formed out of failing to consider how language is of the world. The "limit of the world" is only suggested to be the role of language, if we ignore the fact that each instance of language is one particular use which talks about one tiny part.

If the worldly nature of language is understood, this mistake is avoided. Let's say I have language which talks about the tree. Is this language the limit of the world? No. Is it the limit of the tree? No. It is merely a specific instance of language (a state of the world) which talks about something. Any instance of language does not put a limit on the world (including anything it talks about). It merely talks about something.

Michael

Thinking in retrospect, it might perhaps be better to characterize this as a naturalism of language, rather than a realism. — StreetlightX

Probably best. After all, consider the question "what's this?". Clearly to fully understand the question (or, rather, the (thing referred to by) "this"), we need more than just the language; we need the empirical context in which it's used (i.e. the world). But this world can be understood according to realism or anti-realism, and so simply saying that language is rooted in the world doesn't really saying anything about either.

Streetlight

whereas philosophers have been inclined to think that natural language mimics ideal logic forms, often imperfectly, I now believe that logical systems are basically crude, toy semantics, abstracted from the living complexity of natural semantics, which we're only now beginning to study seriously... At this stage reflections on the interface between linguistic semantics and non-linguistic semantics are still in their infancy. — The Great Whatever

It's precisely this nexus or interface, as you call it, that fascinates me so much. Once meaning becomes unmoored from language, you open yourself up to a whole new universe of study; the world itself becomes a vector for meaning (which is not to say things are inherently 'meaningful'), which is something I think the phenomenologists have understood for a long time, although without ever framing their investigations in terms of semantics. And now of course there's a shit ton of work being done in biological circles with respect to environmental or ecological semiotics, as well as studies of meaning (or rather, significance) that operate at the level of child development or even autistic thought - areas of the human experience once considered devoid of 'proper' cognition (where cognition is indexed by language). Instead, language as we classically know it is pretty much simply a laterally situated 'regional zone' among a far flung milieu of semantically generative ecosystems which run orthogonally to human proclivities and ideas of exclusivity.

Couple all this with the realization that semiogensis can be understood according to the same mechanisms as morphogenesis, and you have this incredibly fertile field where language, evolution, ecology and the human experience can all be seen to shed light upon each other in a way that is just mind blowingly interesting. Anyway, that's more or less the path of thought I've been traversing for a while now. And then you get to read someone like Davidson and you think - for all his genius... how petty.

Streetlight

↪Michael

There's not much sense in talking about 'realism' or 'anti-realism' as abstract categories. One needs to speak about these things with respect to some domain or another: a realism of lingusitic reference, of numbers, of Platonic ideas and so on. My target here is specific to semantic anti-realism and the implications that can be drawn from it. Frankly I think that any anti/realism divide - regardless of the domain you choose - ends up being meaningless and amenable to the same deconstructive practice demonstrated in the OP. Most anti/realism debates are the results of badly posed problems, and subject to dissolution after rather cursory investigations.

Michael

↪StreetlightX

Well, if your target is semantic anti-realism then perhaps my comment was misdirected. I assumed the target was the type of anti-realism that would include phenomenalism and idealism and the like.

I'm not sure what you think I want to say. The only thing I wanted to say is what I said; that saying that non-linguistic parts of the world are often relevant to meaning doesn't say much regarding realist or anti-realist metaphysics. Everything you've said seems to work whether you're a materialist or a physicalist or an idealist or a phenomenalist and so on.

Aaron R

↪StreetlightX

Hi Streetlight. Thanks for the great post! I've been wrestling with similar questions for a while now, and while I find the idea that meaning production extends beyond language-use to be compelling, I think it raises some hairy questions about the limits of theorizing. What you seem to be proposing is that meaning be thought of as something that can be produced outside of linguistic contexts, that language is simply one form of meaning production, and you also alluded to the claim that perception might be an example of a non-linguistic form of meaning production. The problem I see here is that this approach to meaning seems to entail that a theory of, say, perception is impossible. In other words, how can the proposed theory explain what it is to talk about non-linguistic processes of meaning production if the meaning that is produced in, say, perceptual contexts transcends the meaning produced in linguistic contexts?

Michael

↪Aaron R

From my reading (of both of you), I think you misunderstood @StreetlightX. He's not saying that there's more to meaning than language use and that meaning extends beyond linguistic contexts; he's saying that there's more to meaning than vocal and written (and other) expressions. Linguistic contexts include non-linguistic parts (e.g. the things happening around us) and these non-linguistic parts are often part of the meaning (e.g. when I point to something and say "what's this?").

Aaron R

↪Michael

Hi Michael, you might be right. I think there is some decent textual evidence to support the conclusion that Streetlight intends to claim that meaning-production itself extends beyond the limits of language-use:

What if meaning exceeds the bounds of language, as it so regularly does with respect to gestures, body language, and even - if the phenomenologists are right - perception? — StreetlightX

Instead, the production of meaning bleeds beyond the bounds of language and spills over into world from the very beginning. — StreetlightX

In his third paragraph he also questions the idea that language-use can be thought of as the "ultimate context" of meaning production.

Hopefully he'll clarify.

Michael

↪Aaron R

Well, I think our disagreement stems from a different interpretation of the ambiguous phrase "language-use". On the one hand it might refer to the act of speaking or writing or signing but on the other hand it might refer also to the contexts in which the speaking or writing or signing occurs. I interpret it according to the latter. As an analogy, tool-use is not just a case of swinging a hammer but also of mending one's house.

So to extend beyond language is not to extend beyond language use.

The Great Whatever

which is something I think the phenomenologists have understood for a long time, although without ever framing their investigations in terms of semantics — StreetlightX

No, that was one of Husserl's initial concerns. It was mostly phased out by later phenomenologists who didn't have the same technical training that he did in 'analytic' issues. One thing to the credit of analytic philosophers against continental ones is that they historically have been in dialogue with linguists.

Streetlight

Actually @Michael, @Aaron R is on point here, which is that once you include 'non-linguistic components' within the ambit of the linguistic, any hard and fast metaphysical distinction between the two becomes impossible to sustain. The differentials that constitute meaning cannot be atomised at any point, once you admit that semantic atomism cannot hold. This is what I'm driving at when I said language is of the world; with respect to meaning, language has no 'special' place - hence my perhaps oblique comment that language is a "laterally situated 'regional zone' among a far flung milieu of semantically generative ecosystems."

As for your question @Aaron, I guess the point would be to recognise what we might call the "amodality" of meaning. A way of understanding this is to replace the word meaning with "significance". As far as I'm concerned, what we call meaning is just a linguistic sub-species of a more generalised notion of significance, a notion which I think we implicitly recognize as not necessarily being linguistic in nature (although there is a resonance as when we ask "what is the meaning of life?" - which, again, isn't a question about semantics!). And to perceive of course is just to recognize what is significant in a field of perception; the affordances of the doorknob for gripping and twisting, the glowing red of the hotplate as something to avoid touching to avoid being burnt. What we call meaning - as far as language goes - is just a nominally more specific instance of this: to respond to you in conversation is to know the significance of your words, and to respond appropriately - or inappropriately, if the mood strikes; not unlike how I respond to the world I perceive about me. Meaning is a kind of doing. We move amongst the foliage of language like we do the forest.

So I don't think it's quite right to phrase it such that "the meaning that is produced in perceptual contexts transcends the meaning produced in linguistic contexts"; I don't think it's a matter of two 'types' of meaning, each produced by a 'different' mechanism. Perhaps another, more awkward way of putting it would be that meaning is 'substrate independent' - an ugly phrase, but one I hope gets the point across. It was Merleau-Ponty, who, towards the end of his life, began to recognize the resonances between what he called expression in language with a more generalized notion of expression operative in perception, and in tun, ontology more widely. When I get the time, I'm going to try and write up a post on the language of autistics, who give silent voice - to use a favorite term of Merleau-Ponty - to this mode of significance.

Michael

Actually @Michael, @Aaron R is on point here, which is that once you include 'non-linguistic components' within the ambit of the linguistic, any hard and fast metaphysical distinction between the two becomes impossible to sustain. — StreetlightX

Well, I'm not sure about a metaphysical distinction between language and non-language, but I'd still make a distinction between them, even if the latter gives meaning to the former -- just as there is a distinction between a hammer and a nail, even if the latter gives meaning (although your term "significance" is perhaps the better fit here) to the former.

To include non-linguistic components within the ambit of the linguistic is not much different to including non-hammer components within the ambit of hammering. Indeed, such things are probably necessary.

Streetlight

Yes, but meaning is the parameter of distinction here; with respect to meaning, can we draw any metaphysically significant division? The argument says no. The distinction between any two terms needs to be related to a third in order to itself be of significance - and 'meaning' here is our third.

The Great Whatever

Linguistic meaning specifically has some interesting properties that aren't reducible to 'modality' (being written, spoken, signed, etc.) That is, even linguistic meaning specifically is 'substrate-independent' and the reason we don't smell language just seems to be physiological rather than cognitive or systematic. One of those interesting properties is syntactic grammaticality. There are no 'ungrammatical' perceptions: perception doesn't form a system with a kind of prescriptive force that lets native speakers know that a certain way of perceiving is ruled out by the rules of the game. You can have weird perceptions, or unhelpful perceptions, or maybe even 'defective' ones in some sense (though here I mean normatively 'defective' rather than metaphysically or epistemologically as a realist might imply), but you can't have 'ungrammatical' perceptions.

Pneumenon

↪The Great Whatever

I am not accustomed to hearing "irony" in the context in which you're using it. Can you say a thing or two about what it means here?

EDIT: normally I think of irony as either 'poetic irony' or something like sarcasm. What is this you're doing with the word?

Janus

↪StreetlightX

What you are saying seems to point to the idea that it is not merely that linguistic "units" of meaning derive that meaning from a context which is the whole language, but that concrete things make sense only in relation to to a context which is the whole world, or at least a circumscribed environment.

I have tried to express an idea like this in the Davidson thread. For me, it is the whole of language which presents the whole world; but this is by no means to say that the world is merely linguistic; it is not to assert any kind of linguistic idealism. It is against the limited notion of language as an attenuated system of abstract or ideal (non-concrete) symbols. Language evolves out of the very "flesh" of the world, and meaning, or "significance" is derived from, and inscribed in the complexity of its surfaces. Meaning is generated, sustained and evolved by the conformations of our physical in-habitation of environments.

In other words, how can the proposed theory explain what it is to talk about non-linguistic processes of meaning production if the meaning that is produced in, say, perceptual contexts transcends the meaning produced in linguistic contexts? — Aaron R

For me the point is that the meaning produced in perceptual contexts is the primordial substance of the meaning produced in linguistic contexts. The separation of the two contexts is artificial; in other words, we can just talk about perceptual contexts, about the world as a whole context, without self-consciously recursing back on ourselves and thereby conceiving that any talk must, insofar as it is talk, therefore be merely linguistic.

There is much that can be got at, not through determination, but allusion. We are not finished, determinate beings

Janus

but you can't have 'ungrammatical' perceptions. — The Great Whatever

If I just gaze emptily at the environment, with nothing in particular becoming present for me; that level of perception is ungrammatical. It is when I begin to pay attention; bring things into focus and they become present, that perception becomes grammatical or at least potentially so.

Non-linguistic animals obviously perceive, can pay attention and focus on things, and maybe it could be said that their perceptions are to varying degrees potentially grammatical or proto-grammatical. This would be to say that they embody some of the raw characteristics necessary to become linguistic beings.

The Great Whatever

↪Pneumenon

I mean 'irony' in the broad sense of exploiting customs for something other than their conventional purpose. So specifically in philosophy there's the tradition of 'Socratic irony' with dialectic: in the course of a dialogue, Socrates might ask a question, and he exploits this to get an answer from his interlocutor, but for a non-conventional reason (he doesn't actually want to know the answer, but is rather drawing out an answer from the interlocutor in order to test its internal consistency with other admissions, often to get the interlocutor to see that he is mistaken or has contradictory beliefs). So in using language or metaphysics ironically, one propounds linguistic statements, maybe even metaphysical ones, but it is sort of with one's fingers crossed -- with the knowledge that the purpose of doing so is to explode the very system one is making use of from the inside.

Pneumenon

↪The Great Whatever

"Socratic irony" should have a more modern name. Perhaps "malicious bracketing?" :P

On a more serious note, I am a bit at a loss to ask the right question here. Perhaps this will work: I understand that you don't take language the same way that a lot of other people do, so, for example, I'm not gonna be dense enough to ask you "What's left once language collapses?" Rather, I'd like to ask: "How do you communicate the stuff that's left after the collapse of language?"

I guess if by "collapsed" you mean "no longer taken seriously," then language isn't destroyed so much as deflated. But then, what can you communicate that is meaningful, if anything? I seem to remember you saying that people can't relate to one another meaningfully. Is this an example of that?

(no Socratic bombs here, just poking around)

The Great Whatever

↪The Great Whatever "Socratic irony" should have a more modern name. Perhaps "malicious bracketing?" :P — Pneumenon

'Bracketing' is good. It's what's at stake in the Skeptic, and later phenomenological, notion of epoché, which is quite Socratic in origin.

Rather, I'd like to ask: "How do you communicate the stuff that's left after the collapse of language?" — Pneumenon

With gentle lovemaking...no, with language too, but it would just be a changed language, language disenchanted.

I seem to remember you saying that people can't relate to one another meaningfully. Is this an example of that? — Pneumenon

I don't know, I think that's one of those truths that, so to speak, you only say at night. It shouldn't be made the theme of a philosophical project because it can't be thematized. But those who think it at night know it, and all the philosophical posturing in the world won't change it.

Aaron R

↪StreetlightX

Thanks for the clarification, Streetlight. Some thoughts for consideration:

1. You seem very keen to avoid leveraging the concept of representation, and I wonder if the abandonment of this concept is strictly necessary. I wonder if we can resurrect a servicable account of representation on the back of something like your concept of significance (i.e. representation as a species of differential meaning). Why would we want to do this? My worry is that if we abandon the concept of representation then we have to abandon anything like a correspondence theory of truth. Now, you're probably thinking that this is exactly what we should do because the correspondence theory of truth is a lost cause, but I'm not convinced that this is the right move for anyone who wishes to defend a genuine metaphysical realism (but perhaps you don't(?)).

More on the correspondence theory of truth: I'm not suggesting that we ought to try to explain truth entirely in terms of correspondence. We can make true statements about fictional entities like Harry Potter, and we wouldn't want to try to cash out the truth of those statements in ontological terms. I tend to think that the theory of truth needs to be split across ontological and semantic dimensions. So the semantic dimension deals with what it is for a claim to be correct - to satisfy certain norms of discourse - and then we can identify a subset of claims where the norms governing their correctness dictate that we cash that correctness out in ontological terms (e.g. in successful representation). This is, perhaps, where we could appeal to something like Terry Deacon's dynamical theory of representation, which roots it in a specific, 'substrate-independent' dynamical form (i.e. teleodynamics) to explain what it is for one process/state to represent another. I'm still digesting Deacon so at this point I can't say that I completely endorse his account, but I think it seems promising (as do some others that I have encountered).

But why bother? I guess I'm not convinced that metaphysical realism can survive without something like a correspondence theory of truth. If we can't cash out truth in ontological terms at least some of the time, then it seems to me that our ontological claims will be left spinning in a self-contained semantic void, and it won't help to appeal to "the world" since all such appeals will ultimately bottom out into that same void.

2. A word about normativity: the notion that language-use (and even perception) has a normative dimension doesn't seem to be too popular on this forum, but I can't see how it can be avoided. To make a claim is to implicitly have a stake in the specification of how things "ought" to be done. Not only can we make claims, but we can make claims (argue) about claiming (arguing) itself - that is, about how we "ought" to argue or make claims. So why does this matter? It matters because, in accordance with Hume's law, I don't think that the normative dimension of language-use can be naturalized, ever. If this is correct, then language (syntax, semantics, prgamatics) cannot be fully naturalized, ever. And that's where I tend to think that we simply cannot avoid developing something like a transcendental account of thought/language, as much as we might wish to avoid it.

mcdoodle

A word about normativity: the notion that language-use (and even perception) has a normative dimension doesn't seem to be too popular on this forum, but I can't see how it can be avoided. To make a claim is to implicitly have a stake in the specification of how things "ought" to be done. Not only can we make claims, but we can make claims (argue) about claiming (arguing) itself - that is, about how we "ought" to argue or make claims. So why does this matter? It matters because, in accordance with Hume's law, I don't think that the normative dimension of language-use can be naturalized, ever. If this is correct, then language (syntax, semantics, prgamatics) cannot be fully naturalized, ever. And that's where I tend to think that we simply cannot avoid developing something like a transcendental account of thought/language, as much as we might wish to avoid it. — Aaron R

If I've understood this right, I agree with it: there is a constant dialectic between language that seems to flow through us, and a felt need to make rules and say we derived them naturally then try to force them on our young. Language is partly a Bakhtinian flow, dialogue that we delight in and can be traced back to the dawn of language (it's interesting how there is a growing archeology of language itself), and partly made and remade every time we speak, claim to correct each other, invent something new or bat theories back and forth.

To me though there's certainly fun to be had - and maybe stuff to be learnt - in contextualising, as SX did earlier in the thread, language alongside gesture, movement, dance, song, music. A linguistic turn to thinking can be a prison. I loved the basic idea of 'The primacy of movement' by Sheets-Johnstone, a dancer-turned-philosopher. Why don't we sing all the time? is one of my questions, as an old arty-fart. There's a great range of unexploited potential ways of expression and communication in music and movement, and indeed some lost ways - as our use of written language gets more and more sophisticated in some sort of correlation or correspondence (sic) with the growing sophistication of our ideas.

Streetlight

1. You seem very keen to avoid leveraging the concept of representation, and I wonder if the abandonment of this concept is strictly necessary. I wonder if we can resurrect a servicable account of representation on the back of something like your concept of significance (i.e. representation as a species of differential meaning). Why would we want to do this? My worry is that if we abandon the concept of representation then we have to abandon anything like a correspondence theory of truth. Now, you're probably thinking that this is exactly what we should do because the correspondence theory of truth is a lost cause, but I'm not convinced that this is the right move for anyone who wishes to defend a genuine metaphysical realism (but perhaps you don't(?)).

More on the correspondence theory of truth: I'm not suggesting that we ought to try to explain truth entirely in terms of correspondence. We can make true statements about fictional entities like Harry Potter, and we wouldn't want to try to cash out the truth of those statements in ontological terms. I tend to think that the theory of truth needs to be split across ontological and semantic dimensions. So the semantic dimension deals with what it is for a claim to be correct - to satisfy certain norms of discourse - and then we can identify a subset of claims where the norms governing their correctness dictate that we cash that correctness out in ontological terms (e.g. in successful representation). This is, perhaps, where we could appeal to something like Terry Deacon's dynamical theory of representation, which roots it in a specific, 'substrate-independent' dynamical form (i.e. teleodynamics) to explain what it is for one process/state to represent another. I'm still digesting Deacon so at this point I can't say that I completely endorse his account, but I think it seems promising (as do some others that I have encountered). — Aaron R

Trust you to ask the hard questions @Aaron R! Anyway, I'm not entirely averse to rethinking representation, and if I come off as being so, it's more because I'm using representation as a foil to clarify the specificity of my own position. I think there is room to rethink representation along the lines you mentioned above, but for reasons that are perhaps more nominal rather than metaphysical. After all, it's just too darn convenient to speak of language as referring to things. When I say rather than metaphysical though, I mean that I don't really share your concern that a correspondence theory of truth is needed to secure metaphysical realism. I think that once you've relativized the status of language as a mere regional aspect of the world, there no reason to try and secure realism within language. There's no reason, in other words, why realism should be dependent on the vicissitudes of an empirical phenomenon developed amongst some highly evolved apes on a small corner of the universe. One your tether your realism to language, you've lost it before you've begun.

2. A word about normativity: the notion that language-use (and even perception) has a normative dimension doesn't seem to be too popular on this forum, but I can't see how it can be avoided. To make a claim is to implicitly have a stake in the specification of how things "ought" to be done. Not only can we make claims, but we can make claims (argue) about claiming (arguing) itself - that is, about how we "ought" to argue or make claims. So why does this matter? It matters because, in accordance with Hume's law, I don't think that the normative dimension of language-use can be naturalized, ever. If this is correct, then language (syntax, semantics, prgamatics) cannot be fully naturalized, ever. And that's where I tend to think that we simply cannot avoid developing something like a transcendental account of thought/language, as much as we might wish to avoid it. — Aaron R

I absolutely agree that language-use has a normative dimension, but on the other hand - and this is perhaps controversial - I reject the Humeian position that normativity cannot be naturalized. The trick, however, is to rethink at the same time what it means to speak of nature. It might be a bit much to write out a whole naturphilosophie in a post, but the gist of it is that if you hew to a process-orientated ontology, one can upend the traditional understanding of nature in terms of objects-displaced-in-space-and-time and think instead in terms of tendencies, forces, affects and imperatives which comprise the primacy 'units' of ontological analysis as it were. To cash this out in phenomenological terms, consider this passage from Alphonso Lingis, in which he links both language and perception in terms of their respective implication within the world in which they operate:

"Our remarks, exclamations, and ruminations respond and correspond— in their tone, pacing, and precision of wording—to the way light and shadow, colors, shapes, and horizons take form, are drawn out, break up, intensify, move andante or with staccato outbursts with the pacing of our walk and the sweep of our gaze. Our words do not simply depict the forest that is visible; they actively explore and reveal; they slow down and intensify the contact our bodies are making with things and events or accelerate them, turn them in new directions, focus the eyes and the hearing or let them drift. And the forest for its part thrusts events and shifts vistas before us that arouse questions and exclamations and reanimate our commentary.... Our voice is a wave rising and being moved across the rumbling and rustling, pounding and chattering earth and city. It relays and responds to the voices of things." (Lingis, The First Person Singular, p. 25)

If one could speak unironically about an essence of language, this would be it: the mobilization of language is primarily a way to induce affects which in turn move and co-compose both self and world in mutual becoming. To speak of truth, to argue over claims, to relay 'information' though language is just one 'regional' method of doing precisely this (a method we tend to mistake as comprising the main purpose of language). The difference then, between our respective conceptions of normativity turns upon whether to think of it primarily in terms of rationalist or sensualist lines. I think of rationalism as something like a highly constrained, rule-orientated method of sensual operations. And sense - significance - is, I think, something entirely amenable to naturalization - especially once you admit top-down or recursive causality.

Michael

When I say rather than metaphysical though, I mean that I don't really share your concern that a correspondence theory of truth is needed to secure metaphysical realism. I think that once you've relativized the status of language as a mere regional aspect of the world, there no reason to try and secure realism within language. There's no reason, in other words, why realism should be dependent on the vicissitudes of an empirical phenomenon developed amongst some highly evolved apes on a small corner of the universe. — StreetlightX

I don't understand this. As I said before, you can't go from "language is an aspect of the world" to "metaphysical realism obtains". At least now you've clarified that you are indeed talking about metaphysical realism.

Streetlight

Eh, I'll try and speak in the idiom of those I'm conversing with for convenience sake. If I were to be honest, realism - of any kind - is not something that interests me, intellectually. My own (roughly processional) metaphysical leaning is one that privileges relations over terms - processes of individuation over individuals, fields of differentials over identities - and to the extent that the anti/realism debate by definition requires an already constituted entity (number/mind/perceiver/language/world/etc) to be anti/realist about, I think the whole problem is essentially a badly posed one. Gun to my head I'll call myself a realist - and on this community it gets a rise out of people - but only because it shades closer to the truth of things even while it doesn't attain it.

Realism Within the Limits of Language Alone

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