I'd be interested if you could cite some references for earlier philosophers works which treat of "how the knowing subject affects knowledge". I'm not contesting your statement or claiming there are no such philosophical works or passages of work; I just can't think of any, and it seems like it should be interesting to see what such philosophers had to say about it.

Consider the ubiquitous maxim: quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur, "whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver." This is pretty much an axiom in scholasticism and amounts to "people only understand in the mode they are capable of understanding." This is used to apply to both the universal structure of human understanding as well as learned/social constraints on the reception of ideas.

Another way this is put is "cogitum est in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis", which means "a thing known exists in a knower according to the mode of the knower."

Both these phrases are popularized by St. Thomas but you can find very similar ideas in Boethius centuries earlier, e.g. the contrast between the human understanding of Providence and the Divine in the Consolation, and plenty of other places aside.

Just off the top of my head, this sort of investigation shows up in Thomas' commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate, with the differentiation between processual, discursive human ways of knowing and the divine simplicity (this plays off Boethius' conception of eternity, that everything is present to God as a unity). The idea that truth is inheritly bound up with minds and is not simply reducible to being in a straightforward manner is addressed in the Disputed Questions on Truth. A view at odds with naive realism would be Thomas' theory of "intentions in the media," and the related concept of virtual signs worked out in Poinsot and Cusa. There are parallels between intertextuality and Al Farabi and Avicenna too. And then Thomas addressed if we know things or simply our ideas of things (indirect realism) in Question 84 of the Summa, as well as some other places, anticipating Locke, Hume, and Berkeley to some degree. Such a view wasn't unimaginable, rather it is rejected on the grounds that ideas and signs are "that through which we know," rather than "that which we know;" a position contemporary philosophy largely has wandered its way back to.

Edit: one source of this misconception might be that some scholastics do maintain that the "senses do not error," which can be read out of context in a way different from what is intended. The point being made is generally that errors are in judgements. It's asynthea, Aristotle's category for propositional knowledge, where falsity crops up. So the point is that we cannot have a sort of "false awareness." If you see or hear something, you are definitely seeing or hearing. Judgements about what you see and hear are where error come in.

You can use Wittgenstein inspired ideas as elaborate ways to tell people to shut up about a problem ("dissolving" or "undermining" a dispute), while using highly contestable concepts implicitly. Upon highlighting those highly contestable concepts or challenging them, you can receive another violently reframing invitation to shut up.

In my book it's less about Wittgenstein and more about totalising. You see the same from devout Heideggerians, Derrideans etc. Pretty much anyone aligned with vaguely poststructuralist (yes, including Wittgenstein) philosophers can exhibit that specific form of totalising discourse. Which is obviously not totalising because how can it be totalising if you're undermining the concept of totalities and reifications and ancient metaphysical superstitions which exist everywhere except in your own thoughts blah blah blah...

There's another form with less pomo-ish peeps. You just get drawn into their system and every issue is treated as explicitly subordinate to that system's articulated terms. In the pomoish form of totalising, the chat in thread superficially resembles the OP's topic but is in fact a contest of merely implicit worldviews. In the architectonic form, the thread is entirely derailed into the poster's fairly rigid system.

If you're reading academic philosophy, there are forms of this. When reading postructuralist inspired literature I play a game I call "reciprocal co-constitution bingo". In which the author adopts phrases like "affect and be affected by", "in and through", "unable to imagine without", "always already". I get a point for every phrase like that. They're used in order to stifle thought that anything could exist before everything analysed became inextricably subsumed in everything else and impossible to analyse on its own terms. If the author explicitly endorses the co-constitution of discourse and being, I win.

In all cases, these worldviews monopolise the connections between ideas and the conditions under which ideas are generated. They're ways of thinking about thinking, and about how thoughts arise. The pomoish form monopolises those connections by picking a specific way of undermining one flavour of connection (binarised, dual, antipodal) while asserting another (pluralised or continuous, multiply connected, mutually presupposing), the architectonic form instead severs connections of all types which are irrelevant or contrary to the articulated system, or otherwise interprets them as terms of it.

Ultimately both tendencies are refusals to stay on topic. In both the academic and Philosophy Forum forms, they produce a lot of redundant and derivative content. Everything becomes an application of the infinitely rehashed.

Do you mean "evolved" in terms of man's ability to use language overall, or in terms of how individual languages evolve? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say both, as the one seems to just be a more specific example of the other, which is more general.

I agree with what you're saying to some degree, but it's also the case that various metaphysical traditions: Platonism, atomism, Aristotleanism, etc. are all significantly older than any of the languages people on this forum are likely to speak as their native language. So there has been plenty of time to "work out the kinks," if it was easy to do so. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see the point. The evolutionary force of change, brought about by the common usage of billions of people is much stronger than the force of a few metaphysicians. This makes it impossible for metaphysicians to "work out the kinks", because the kinks are being created at a rate much faster than anyone could have a hope of working them out.

Furthermore, the evidence of history shows, that controls over language use are not well received by the common people, and attempts at this will backfire. Look at the Catholic Church's attempt to control heresy, by controlling language use, The Inquisition.

Probably more relevant to the linguistic turn's hopes is that, for over a millennia, philosophers and theologians actually did use a dead language whose function was primarily to discuss these sorts of issues (outside of the liturgy obviously). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see where you derive this idea. There was never a language whose primary function was to discuss theology and metaphysics. Latin's primary use was never simply theology and metaphysics. Now its use in religion is simply ceremonial, symbolic. In its late stage of actual usage, it was the language of all science and higher education. It had that role because the institutions of educational material were constructed with that language. Such institutions maintain tradition and are late to be affected by evolutionary change.

. You have a thousand year stretch of philosophers using a language that had been denuded of its "everyday" implications, supported by vast and elaborate lexicon of technical terminology worked out within that time period. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not at all true. It implies that higher education has no "everyday" implications. That of course is false, as higher education is a major driving force of evolutionary change. Changes at the higher levels of education trickle down to the less well educated, and the word usage gets altered on the way, because of the difference in understanding.

Yet this clearly didn't resolve all the issues vis-á-vis metaphysical questions—questions that appear to be at least as old as the written word itself, and which will seemingly always fascinate us. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course all the metaphysical questions have not been resolved. If that were the case, knowledge would be absolutely complete. The problems of quantum physics, wave-particle duality, entanglement, etc., and the problems of cosmology, dark energy, dark matter, etc., demonstrate that knowledge is far from complete, and many metaphysical questions remain unsolved.

I don't understand what you are arguing. Language does not resolve metaphysical problems, it is simply a tool used by the human beings who work to do this. When human beings are uninspired toward addressing such problems, directing their attention in other ways instead, and using language toward those other endeavours, it is incorrect to blame the failure of solving those metaphysical problems on the language. Clearly, when human beings have no interest in solving metaphysical problems, the failure of solving these problems is not to be blamed on the available tools.

Human beings are quite innovative, and are very capable of formulating, adapting, and shaping tools to suit there purposes. So if the human population was inclined toward solving specific metaphysical problems, they would adapted the tools necessary for this task, as they have done in science. The reality is that very few are inclined in this way, so the tools do not get produced.

The Latin era sort of seems like a gigantic natural experiment to see if the problems of philosophy can be fixed by moving away from everyday language. There is an irony in the fact that the medieval period is often singled as an exemplar period "bad philosophy" vis-á-vis the linguistic turn given the language philosophy was done in at the time. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You've got this backward. You are not looking at the proper chronological order, looking backward from now instead of from the ancient times toward now. What is the case is that "everyday language" moved away from Latin, not vise versa. There was, historically, a very close relationship between everyday language and Latin, and even further back in time, Latin was everyday language for many. However, as the written language, replacing Greek, Latin always held a place of authority, being "the memory" of the people. When people started questioning the authority (and this was deemed heresy), and those acting in the position of having authority responded with enforcement rather than allowing freedom, then everyday language rapidly moved away from Latin.

Is there another way to study and critique metaphysical and epistemological issues, or is language indispensable for the task? — Janus

I don't think there is any other way. But the issue is as I mentioned above. Language changes and evolves according to usage, and the usage is determined by the aims (intentions) of the users. Primary usage is the billions of mundane communicative everyday expressions. Secondary usage is business, legal and political. Tertiary is higher education. Metaphysics and epistemology are far down on the list of importance. Therefore language in its natural form, is fundamentally not well suited for these purposes.

Since natural language is not well suited to these purposes, yet language is the tool which must be used, then we can conclude that a special form of language needs to be designed for this purpose. And, there is nothing absurd about designing a special form of language for a specific purpose, mathematics is an example of such a specialized form of language. It's formulated for the endeavours of empirical science. Also we commonly create languages for purposes, in computer science.

Heidegger tells a long story about how the concerns of philosophy were corrupted by some elements of its practice. He wrote (and lectured) at length upon how Nietzsche was the last practitioner of the mistake.

There are a lot of other points of contrast and conflict between their views but let me start with simply observing that Wittgenstein has negative interest in the romance and nostalgia expressed thereby — Paine

Rorty’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s peculiar use of the word philosophy may go some way toward appreciating the basis of his lack of interest in its history.

The more one reflects on the relation between Wittgenstein's technical use of “philosophy” and its everyday use, the more he appears to have redefined “philosophy” to mean “all those bad things I feel tempted to do” Such persuasive redefinitions of “philosophy” are characteristic of the attempt to step back from philosophy as a continuing conversation and to see that conversation against a stable, ahistorical background. Knowledge of that background, it is thought, will permit one to criticize the conversation itself, rather than joining in it.

The transcendental turn and the linguistic turn were both taken by people who thought that disputes among philosophers might fruitfully be viewed from an Archimedean point outside the controversies these phi-losophers conduct. The idea, in both cases, was that we should step back from the controversy and show that the clash of theories is possible only because both sets of theorists missed something that was already there, waiting to be noticed.

Once we give up on the project of “stepping back”, we will think of the strange ways in which philosophers talk not as needing to be elucidated out of existence, but as suggestions for talking differently, on all fours with suggestions made by scientists and poets. A few philosophers, we may admit, are “like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it”. (PI 194) But most of them are not. They are, rather, contributors to the progress of civilization. Knowledgeable about the dead ends down which we have gone in the past, they are anxious that future generations should fare better. If we see philosophy in this historicist way, we shall have to give up on the idea that there is a special relation between something called “language” and something else called “philosophy.”

What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum?

Is it that Wittgenstein tends to bring out these personality-types that like to gatekeep when discussing on a forum setting?

Is Wittgenstein liable to group-think whereby the only way one can read Wittgenstein is an adherent who must use ONLY a BETTER interpretation of Wittgenstein to refute Wittgenstein — schopenhauer1

I would like to use a specific example to clarify what gatekeeping means to you( forgive me, Antony).
I consider Antony Nickles’ discussions of Wittgenstein’s ideas on this forum to be some of the most rigorous and informative contributions to this site, not only because it jibes with my understanding of Witt, but because he is able to bring Witt’s way of looking at the whole ( as seen by Antony) alive by careful use of the author’s vocabulary. I have noticed the frustration and exasperation of many of Antony’s interlocutors as they try and fail to make their way into that world that Antony is painting, and I can’t help but suspect that a few of them blame Antony’s ‘elitism’ for their being shut out of that world. I’m curious as to whether you consider Antony’s approach as a type of gatekeeping.

I think he is good-intestioned, not malicious but if my critiques of a philosopher could never get beyond the philosopher in question, I don’t know what to call that. As if, the only reason Wittgenstein is (can be or is) wrong is because we don’t know enough Wittgenstein…just knowing his philosophy obviously shows Wittgenstein is right, right? Let me present to you more Wittgenstein so we can see how right Wittgenstein is.

↪Joshs
I think he is good-intestioned, not malicious but if my critiques of a philosopher could never get beyond the philosopher in question, I don’t know what to call that. As if, the only reason Wittgenstein is (can be or is) wrong is because we don’t know enough Wittgenstein…just knowing his philosophy obviously shows Wittgenstein is right, right? Let me present to you more Wittgenstein so we can see how right Wittgenstein is. — schopenhauer1

Le me tactful suggest you have a chip on your shoulder and it’s causing you to blame the messenger rather than your difficulty in deciphering the message. You have the advantage here. 90% of the contributors to this forum do not ally themselves with postmodern , poststructuralist or deconstructive philosophy, and I’m including within those groups the later Wittgenstein, at least as people like Antony and myself read him. Let me make it clear: when I talk about deciphering the message, I dont mean agreeing with it, swallowing the koolaid, joining the cult. I mean having the capability of summarizing its content effectively so that one understands what one is disagreeing with. I dont agree entirely with Antony’s take on Wittgenstein , and I am critical of many aspects of Wittgenstein’s ideas, but I have no problem in thinking from within the world that Antony spins out so as to have lively engagements with him. Some others who have engaged with him remain outsiders to that world and resent him for it. To them, he is indeed an ‘elite gatekeeper’.

Imo his whole philosophy is a linguistic sidetrack. — kindred

Wittgenstein was not responsible for the linguistic turn in philosophy.

Recent scholarship has begun to pay more attention to his discussion of seeing. In his later work the saying/showing distinction is not as clear as it may appear to have been in the Tractatus. We do, however, find in the Tractatus a comment about two ways of seeing a cube. (5.5423)

If you ask Antony questions, he's more than happy to engage and isn't at all dogmatic. Not much of a gatekeeper.

I had a long response, but after reading over @Antony Nickles post again, I can see that he isn't being overly forceful with the fandom (taking the author as right, and thus whatever the author says is beyond reproach), as I totally agree with his sentiments here:

I would put it that some people have particular interests in philosophy, and so take Wittgenstein as pointless or trivial, and some use Wittgenstein to attempt to dictate others’ interests, which is not the point either. — Antony Nickles

That is to say, instead of believing Wittgenstein thought his works dissolved the problems, his works actually dissolves the problems... And in this view, there is no fight because Wittgenstein already had the checkmate. So in this point of view, having an objection is simply not reading him correctly.

Edited more there @Josh

More than one person has come here suggesting this post is you projecting your difficulty with the material upon others. That's probably worth noting.

More than one person has come here suggesting this post is you projecting your difficulty with the material upon others. That's probably worth noting. — DifferentiatingEgg

I don’t mind being ignorant. I know nothing. But hate/gate keeping and elitism are often part of the Wittgenstein social landscape, and that’s unacceptable to me as a teacher/learner. It’s also bad faith to never accept criticism of one’s favorite philosopher and make the move that “You just don’t have a good or the correct understanding”. Do you believe that Wittgenstein can only be refuted by better readings of Wittgenstein or could Wittgenstein just be wrong and refuted thus?

Fair enough, but I suppose the biggest issue with all philosophy is that any philosophy is the prejudice of the philosopher who admits them. Therefore every philosophy is not "right" or "wrong" in this regard as they end up building a world view for themselves. The strength of any interpretation comes from how closely it follows the philosopher's own point of view on these prejudices. Even the interpretation that occurs from the text to the reader in the text's native tongue.

Philosophies are all just modes of thinking that other people tend to adopt. Especially when a certain mode resonates with their own experiences and prejudices.

- Good post.

In the architectonic form, the thread is entirely derailed into the poster's fairly rigid system. — fdrake

A simpler game of Bingo is to just observe how much language an author uses in a technical sense, and how willing they are to drop the technical connotation. Aristotle almost always begins a discussion by looking at the common opinions and the common ways that words are used. Aquinas is famous for using very simple Latin with a minimum of technical terms (except those inherited from his context). It's fairly common to hear people mock Aristotle for the way he considers common opinion and common language use, but I believe it to be a sign of a good philosopher, one who is not pulling the wool over his eyes with the verbiage of a specialized system. I suppose we are just talking about ideology and ideologues.

In encountering Wittgenstenians, I have noticed a paradox in that there is an attempt to focus on common usage (perhaps to a fault), but then the utterances of these people are not to be interpreted according to common usage, but rather in accord with the technical color of a Wittgenstenian interpretation. How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?

Wittgenstenians — Leontiskos

Wittgenstein, of course, should not be faulted for what Wittgensteinians say and do. This happens to every thinker who has a large following.

The reliance on technical language is a wide spread problem. Many think that this is what academic writers should do, and is copied by others who talk about these things.

A few philosophers, we may admit, are “like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it”. (PI 194) But most of them are not. They are, rather, contributors to the progress of civilization.

Rorty supplies additions to what was written that are sharply at odds with other ways to read those words. I don't understand Wittgenstein to be denigrating the role of the philosopher in PI 194. It is an expression of humility toward what has been created around the philosopher. If all the problems of philosophy are without value, then one should stop. And yet Wittgenstein is out there digging in ancient grounds.

Rorty’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s peculiar use of the word philosophy may go some way toward appreciating the basis of his lack of interest in its history. — Joshs

Wittgenstein does not place himself in the narrative of the philosophy of history by means of talking about it. Concluding that means he had no interest in it is prejudicial. That suggests the absence of word on the matter was not intended but a condition of his times, or something.

How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way? — Leontiskos

Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk.

Nothing seems less likely than that a scientist or mathematician reading me could be seriously influenced in his way of working. At best, I can hope to stimulate that a significant amount of crap will be written, and that this in turn might contribute to something good coming into being. — Wittgenstein, 1947

@jkop

What do you take that to indicate?

I don't understand Wittgenstein to be denigrating the role of the philosopher in PI 194. It is an expression of humility toward what has been created around the philosopher. If all the problems of philosophy are without value, then one should stop. And yet Wittgenstein is out there digging in ancient grounds. — Paine

I think Lee Braver has a point when he characterizes this quote by Wittgenstein as:

branding the problems of philosophy simply foreign to mundane life.Their very existence is due to this separation, to the disorienting extrapolation from our usual sense of a term to situations where no proper usage has been settled A philosopher theorizing is a bit like a dog trying to fetch a snowball thrown into a snow­bank, looking up quizzically when no amount of digging unearths it. The great philosophical debates represent, for Wittgenstein, divergent applica­tions of pictures that have been carried far beyond their legitimate role.

How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?
— Leontiskos

Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk — fdrake

The ordinariness or commonness of the words contained in Wittgenstein’s later work isn’t to be determined by seeing how often they have been used by the wider culture, but in how Wittgenstein employs them to connect with and carry forward what is immediately relevant to the reader. It is these concerns that are common, and where the meaning of language finds purchase.

This, too, fills in a space left empty by Wittgenstein. It mischaracterizes the role of "forms of life." The work does not mark out what a "legitimate role" is.

↪Joshs
This, too, fills in a space left empty by Wittgenstein. It mischaracterizes the role of "forms of life." The work does not mark out what a "legitimate role" is. — Paine

I have a feeling a quote from any of my favorite interpreters of Wittgenstien will likely deemed by you as a ‘mischaracterization’ of his views. Ironic term to use in a thread on ‘gatekeeping’. Don’t you think a more humble stance to take toward a thinker who has spawned communities of readers with sharply divergent views of what he meant might be to simply say that you prefer so and so’s reading of him to my sources?

Wittgenstein, of course, should not be faulted for what Wittgensteinians say and do. — Fooloso4

Shouldn't he? The OP seems to presuppose that he can be faulted for this. Or at the very least, that it can be traced back to his writings.

If you're reading academic philosophy, there are forms of this. When reading postructuralist inspired literature I play a game I call "reciprocal co-constitution bingo". In which the author adopts phrases like "affect and be affected by", "in and through", "unable to imagine without", "always already". I get a point for every phrase like that

:lol:

I think you hit the nail on the head in that post. But this is a tough one for me because I see a lot in favor of systematic philosophy, of having everything hang together such that ethics and aesthetics flow from metaphysics and epistemology, etc. This is what makes Platonism and Aristotle so appealing. But the more systematic (or "anti-systematic") your philosophy is, the more you're going to want to bring it everywhere.

The co-creation thing doesn't belong to any particular system. It shows up in a lot of the cool ones, though

If one takes your approach, no person is speaking for themselves in response to the text but are parroting "so and so's" who speak for others. That means I am not speaking for myself but advancing someone else's view.

So, the humility you are asking from me is a keeping of a gate. And you have shopped out the work to a contractor.

- Exactly right. :100:

I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein. — schopenhauer1

I would agree with you that it can be very difficult to debate the ideas of later Wittgenstein. But this is likely due to the approach to philosophy he takes where he wants to emphasize description and use of words rather than provide explanation and the theorize. What is there to debate when he is just describing how we commonly employ are language in everyday life. But the next step is where one has to decide if peace can be found in this analysis of words, or continue to be tormented by problems traditional philosophy has presented to us. I think most would agree that most modern philosophers either ignore Wittgenstein and continue on theorizing, or give him respectful nod and continue theorizing.

That said, can one criticize Wittgenstein? Of course, even Wittgenstein heavily criticized his early work, the Tractatus, that is pretty much how Philosophical Investigations is set up. And as for Philosophical Investigations itself, I believe even Wittgenstein viewed this work as an incomplete and that it still needed to be improved upon, see Preface to Investigations. As for other philosophers, there have been many interesting attempts, for example:

1. Word and Things, Ernest Gellner
2. The Metaphysics of Meaning, Jerrold Katz
3. The Concept of a Person, essays: "Philosophy and Language" and "Can there by a Private Language", A.J. Ayer

To name of few. But my favorite criticism and one that has stuck with me the most and is very simple and to the point, from Quine's Word and Object:

"There are, however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its traits: its disposition to keep on evolving."

What is there to debate when he is just describing how we commonly employ are language in everyday life. — Richard B

Oddly, it's like reading a bunch of reasons for a premise that isn't there. I can make that into whatever I want.. And that is indeed a problem. And I can always sidestep getting pinned down because I can shovel around the same key phrases to obfuscate it- "It's about use, damn it!".. "It's about showing! Explanation is off the table, you see, and this is the philosophy that shows! Thus de facto, no explanation needed!". Clever, and bad faith it seems to me, in philosophical discourse when used as the only punchline, because there is no real punchline other than these moves.

That said, can one criticize Wittgenstein? Of course, even Wittgenstein heavily criticized his early work, the Tractatus, that is pretty much how Philosophical Investigations is set up. And as for Philosophical Investigations itself, I believe even Wittgenstein viewed this work as an incomplete and that it still needed to be improved upon, see Preface to Investigations. As for other philosophers, there have been many interesting attempts, for example: — Richard B

As someone else said, perhaps Wittgenstein would admonish his own adherents... He admonished himself.. But then the double-bad faith move is taken that, the Prophet knew himself well enough to know what the real errors were... Thus, he caught himself in time, and one can then claim (pick your bad faith move here..).. That Wittgenstein simply had both ideas right, you see, if you read him right to left, and through the looking glass, you will notice that PI is simply commentary on Tractatus... Such as the New Testament really is the completion of the Old Testament. Didn't you know..

OR

You can make the move that he simply caught his own errors just in time to have the truth of the matter, thus completing the foundation of the linguistic turn, and apparently dissolving problems by pointing out the common notion that language communities use words in different contexts, and that people often confuse the meaning of words and sentences so it can be hard to communicate stable ideas.. Yet by me trivializing such a trivial idea, I am just not enlightened enough, and I must read this or that passage in the PI to really inform me that he is more than this and everything else and all that and the TAO and the universe, and 42 and the end of philosophy and the end of discussion, and the end of debate. And didn't you know... The PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT>> What about the fuckn god damn PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT!!! :scream: You see? You see? CHeckmate checkmate, mate!

OF COURSE, all of this relies on even thinking his Old or New Testament matters or is the right approach.. Something that seems completely off the table to the adherents. You see, you can't directly attack Wittgenstein, only provide either primary sources (from the GURU himself), or from one of his approved sooth-sayers.. Like the Oracle at Delphi was able to communicate the great Apollo's insightful messages...