D

I’d like to tell you one more interesting thing about the Russian language. A lot of people think that since Russian doesn’t have a strict, fixed word order like English, you can just throw the words in any sequence you want. That’s not true at all. Let me show you how it actually works with a simple example.

The neutral, emotionally flat version:

Я пошёл спать → “I’m going to bed” (or literally: “I went to sleep”). Now the same phrase with different word order — each one carries its own emotional coloring:

Я спать пошёл → “Alright, I’m making myself go to bed.” lt feels like an internal command, almost forcing yourself: “Enough, time to sleep, no more excuses.”

Пошёл я спать → “I’m off to bed” or “That’s it, I’m going to sleep.” Usually expresses tiredness, boredom, or mild irritation: “Everything’s got on my nerves, I’ve had enough, I’m out.”

Спать я пошёл → “I’m going to bed, period.”
Can sound like a claim or even a small protest: “Don’t bother me anymore, I’ve decided — bedtime.”
These are just a few ordinary permutations of the same three words. And when you add the right intonation, the number of shades multiplies even more.

So, in the end, how do you figure out what was going through my head when I chose a particular order? Very simple: the main thing for a native speaker is not “what is grammatically correct,” but what exact feeling or attitude I want the listener to pick up. The word order is one of the main tools for that — it puts the emotional emphasis exactly where I need it.
In Russian, we don’t just convey information with words — we paint the emotion directly into the sentence structure. That’s why the same objective statement can sound neutral, decisive, annoyed, or defiant depending on how you shuffle the words.

Of course. We can speak ungrammatically and even say nonsense: up the well, fire chills, or whatever. We tend to follow certain rules to be intelligible.

What's interesting here is when you find yourself in that instance in which you can't find the right word - because there is no one word which conveys what you feel.

Which makes you wonder why we have specific words such as "loathsome", but not other words which convey something like joy above what God could feel, or something like that.

Maybe some things aren't worth compressing or something is too specific to merit a word?

I do see what you're saying, but look at Wittgenstein's comment:

"To the extent that I do intend the construction of an English sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak English."

That is, while you search for the correct Russian term to convey your emotion (which is not denied to exist), you do so with an understanding of how you must do that, as in, what the parameters are. You are working within a publicaly agreed upon set of rules. By analogy, it's like if you're playing chess (another Russian past-time), you create all sorts of ideas in your head about how you will attack or defend, but the underlying requirement is that you do so within the rules of that game. You can't just say you're going to kick the king off the board. That is not within your creative boundaries.

That "language" (and I'm into metaphor here) of the chessboard, as in "I'm thinking of moving Rook to a4 and then the Bishop to c3" is not considered a private language just becasue it's internal. Your actual physical move of the piece was your language. It's how you communicated your decision.

The point here is that when you searched for the move on the chessboard, you were necessarily searching within the rules of the game. If you had a private language, your move would be incoherent because no one would know what you meant to do by moving your piece. However, as everyone plays and watches one another, it becomes clear what language your are using. That is referred to as the "grammar" of the game. There can be no question though that you had some thought prior to making that move, but that thought had to be within the rules of the game and so it was therefore not private.

And that goes back to the Wittgenstein quote above. That you searched for a word in English presumed you spoke English.

I understood your point. And an idea immediately arose. (In this topic, I'm voluntarily eager to be the object of research.)

You seem to be trying to formalize it. To bring it into line with a structure, with an idea that exists BEFORE my thought. I'm talking about a different realm. What if this birth of meaning in my head is not formalizable, but only experienced sensually? (well, either in the eidos or in God, and not necessarily in my head)

I'm writing to you now in plain text, without any processing, as it occurs. This is important.

For example, Baumgarten describes this very accurately in his aesthetics: "to give form to feeling," "to transform a dark feeling into a bright structure."

So here's what (a completely emotional statement): what if it's simply something else, and not structural at all? That it lies, as it were, outside of experience, outside of chess, outside of logic, and any attempt to force it into these frameworks is like combing your hair with a comb—that is, involuntarily shaping your hair into the shape of the comb's teeth?

I want to say again that I am writing exactly what I feel, perhaps all of this looks very unstructured.

, @Hanover

How's this:

• Pinker’s Mentalese requires meaningful symbols whose content is fixed internally and whose correctness is internally determined.
• Wittgenstein’s private-language argument shows that such a system cannot constitute meaning.
• Therefore: Pinker’s framework and the private-language argument are fundamentally incompatible.

Add to this that neural nets do not function symbolically. Current physiology is somewhat contrary to Pinker's account. But neural networks must implement symbolic structures at some level. At some stage Pinker must drop the "mentalese" metaphor.

Perhaps this is not quite the direction in which you would have this thread head, Hanover?

I noted that you wished to differentiate mentalese from private language. I am not sure that you can.

Ah yes, the bullet-point, the evidence of ChatGPT at work. :smirk:

As to #1, I can intuitively understand that meaning would be internal and be attached to the symbol, as in, I am annoyed (internal meaning), so I roll my eyes (the symbol). What I don't get is why the internal meaning must be attached to a symbol. I am annoyed, so some internal listing of information passes before my homunculous. I'm reminded of the Terminator when he saw the data reveal before his eyes.

Additionally, Pinker doesn't need to convince me that his view is logical. He needs to show me a brain and where all these symbols are. He's not a philosopher seeking consistency. He's a scientist seeking empirical truth.

As to #2, Witt shows the private language argument incoherent.

As to #3, yes, there is an incompatibility in Witt saying X is impossible and Pinker saying X exists regardless of logical impossibility.

I would suggest Pinker abandon his ideosyncratic mentalese position (some computational model he pulled from his ass, surely not from a lab). I just don't understand why one would posit a private sub-symbol that computes and then attaches to a public post-symbol I can see. By mentalese, I would think he would mean the stuff that precedes the sub-symbol, the computation itself, not some strange layer of first symbol to follow a second symbol.

Whether mentalese is salvagable under any imaginable scenerio is a fair question, but I might agree at this point that the Pinker model is not sustainable.

In my way of thinking, I just think philosophers don't belong in the lab and scientists don't belong where ever it is philosophers lurk. But to the extent someone suggests an impossibility can occur (as in, "hey guys, I just found an X that's ~X"), I suppose I'd need to see that walking contradiction. If it's there, I guess the scientist can stand smugly with his discovery while the philospher's head explodes.

Yes, I asked it for a summary of Pinker. It remains pertinent. Don't tell Baden.

What I don't get is why the internal meaning must be attached to a symbol. — Hanover

Yep. That's a typical semiotic move. I might be tempted to counter it with "the internal meaning must be attached to a use", but that's not quite right - the use replaces the meaning.

I would suggest Pinker abandon his ideosyncratic mentalese position — Hanover

Yep.


Socrates was fond of places in which he didn't belong... :wink:

Wittgenstein’s private-language argument shows that such a system cannot constitute meaning. — Banno

I think this is based on the assumption that meaning is rule based. Kripke demonstrates that the private language argument itself gives us reason to doubt that it is.

Sorry - not sure I follow your direction here. Yes, there are various cogent arguments that meaning is not rule-based, and I accept that. Language is not algorithmic. If mentalese is computational, it is thereby algorithmic. Do you agree?

I just don't understand why one would posit a private sub-symbol that computes and then attaches to a public post-symbol I can see. By mentalese, I would think he would mean the stuff that precedes the sub-symbol, the computation itself, not some strange layer of first symbol to follow a second symbol. — Hanover

I wonder where linguistics, as a science, fits into Pinker's model. Before trying to map a "mental" substratum for the activity, it would be good to have the empirical study of grammar and expression established as a starting place. It is not a settled area of theory.

That is not the same starting place of Wittgenstein working out that our understanding of meaning is more than naming things we all can recognize alone. Unless, of course, one understood Wittgenstein to be reducing the problem to a set of criteria.

If mentalese is computational, it is thereby algorithmic. Do you agree? — Banno

I was thinking about the idea of an innate universal language that Chalmers and Chomsky talked about. The idea was that all languages have been analyzed and a linguistic core extracted. This core would have to be innate, so fundamentally like whales and birds. A human would be born with the potential to communicate, and that potential would be triggered into development by social interaction. The brain is transformed by that development, but in the shadows, the core (developed by millions of years of species/environment interaction, or however) remains and can be detected.

This leaves the issue of how an internal dialog works open-ended. It's definitely not that a child decides to adopt certain rules. It's more that the child lives out the rules, keying in to points where the internal structure is matching the external circumstances. Maybe the core language truly is just the motor cortex flexing without the signals going all the way out to the muscles of speech.

Am I way off track?

Am I way off track? — frank

Perhaps not.

I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient.

So that part of what you suggest must be correct.

I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient. — Banno

On the one hand, we can observe that humans are socializing mammals and that there's a genetic component to that. For instance, all socializing mammals produce hierarchies, and these social structures pervasively shape interactions between individuals, dictating greeting protocols, assigning roles, and even determining the sex of the offspring. There just isn't any way that all of that results from each generation working things out in practice. It has to start with individual genetics.

It's probably just natural that a scientist would go from observing predispositions in wolves to explaining human language and thought. The philosopher says back up.

The answer to the question is genetics.
Both the question and the answer are supposedly genetically determined.

This isn't going to work. We're saying the answer to the question was determined by the answer to the question. All of science turns into phenomenology, and worse, this puts the cognitive scientist into a black, isolated box, like a beetle. The scientist beetle churns out answers that determine themselves. Wittgenstein would be horrified.

My intuition is that the light at the end of the tunnel is that magical thing: meaning, as it crawls, beetle-like, from the nest we call truth conditions.

Nice.

:smile:

Perhaps not.

I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient.

So that part of what you suggest must be correct. — Banno

I'm just a category police here, trying to keep the philosopher captive in his study and the scientist in his lab.

When Wittgenstein says language can't be private, he's not a sociologist, neurologist, or anthropologist. His view isn't dependent upon whether humans are lone predators or highly social. That is, language would theoretically exist on the day the last man stood before the world ended (and the sound would be a whimper).

This is because to attend to a feeling with a describable symbol marks it language, regardless of whether the confirmation of the symbol is by human or inanimate means.

If the validity of Wittgenstein is science dependant, he loses, even if scientificly correct, because he would then be speaking of the world of beetles and not words.

Empirical refutation or confirmation is therefore impossible.

The insight is that private language is an all black penguin where a penguin is defined as requiring some white. You search forever for the all black penguin and you quibble over whether it has some white here or there, not realizing you don't engage in a synthetic inquiry when the inquiry was analytic all along.

, , I suspect I don't disagree, which is most disagreeable. But I'm not confident that I understood what you said, so I may be wrong.

I suspect I don't disagree, which is most disagreeable. But I'm not confident that I understood what you said, so I may be wrong. — Banno

You have to tell me what you disagree with.

To restate, where P is a private language: ¬◊P.

Pinker cannot show us an example of P. One can't locate the morning star at night because it by definition is present only during the day. That's not to say nothing is there.

.

It might be so highly compressed it would not appear as language at all, but as long as it is translatable into a longer expression, that it began compressed does not matter. — Hanover

I find this confusing.

We do things. Among the things we do is speaking, writing, hearing, reading, thinking words. Language is a tool, which you use as you judge appropriate.

If I point at a brick and want that brick being handed to me and say "Brick," why would you imagine that this is a compressed version of "Hand me that brick?" That feels strange. I judge using a word is enough, so I don't use a sentence. Simple efficient tool usage, nothing more.

Here's how I see things: there's this stream of private meaning. That includes anything from my intentions to the words I might use to express them and so on. Some of it is active and some it is there as generalised knowledge, potentially activated. So I can say "Hand me that brick," which is part of my language competence as a speaker of English, or I can say "Brick," which is also part of my language competence as a speaker of English. They're alternatives, not all equally viable in any particular context, the judgement of which depends on your competence in the politeness rules relevant in the situation.

Philosophers like propositions. They make thinking logically easier. Maybe that's why they see them everywhere. But I'd say if I point at a brick and say "Brick," in order to convey that this is a brick, the proposition "This is a brick," has a scope. And it's scope is not "Brick," but the entire situation. So what about that situation has anything to do with language and in what ways? There's phonology: I say "Brick" and you hear "Brick" because we have mutually learned to make the same same sound distinctions (we know the phonemes of English). There's grammar (morphology and syntax), which is fairly simple here, since all we have is a word. There's semantics, which involves what the words mean. And there's pragmatics, which is what you use the words for. This is pretty complex.

So what is it that you think is being compressed? What's the scope here?

If something is translatable into a longer expression, then what you're translating into a longer expression is not just words. It's my intuition that you transform more non-linguistic stuff into linguistic stuff. It didn't start out compressed. There never was a need to use language for that particular part to begin with. I could have used a sentence, but I judged a word will do, so I used a word instead. I didn't first not-use-a-word, then compress a sentence I didn't form, so I end up with a word I did form.

The extreme form of puzzlement: To recognise a door as a door, we need knowledge of doors. Opening one and walking through suffices. This might imply the proposition "This is a door," on some level when we look at the whole situation analytically, but that doesn't mean that opening a door and walking through it is a compressed form of language.

I often feel like philosophy overextends the scope of language. Language is special, sure, but just how special is it?

What then does the hyper-compressed vehicle look like if not letters, words, and sentences? How does that shrug look prior to my shoulder shrugging? — Hanover

I imagine "I don't know" or "I don't care". It something on the table catches my eye, reaching for it can't be a reflexive action. Maybe sometimes. Particularly when there is danger. but usually, I suspect thinking in words is so fast, and commonplace but I don't much notice thinking something like "I want to pick up that pen."

You have to tell me what you disagree with. — Hanover

But I don't think I do disagree...

It's just the way you said it.

One can't locate the morning star at night because it by definition is present only during the day. — Hanover

If night is the period before sunrise, then yes, you can. Look to the East. I'd allow Wittgenstein into the lab, in the hope of helping Pinker get his conceptual foundations in order.

If night is the period before sunrise, then yes, you can. Look to the East. I'd allow Wittgenstein into the lab, in the hope of helping Pinker get his conceptual foundations in order. — Banno

Well, my analogy means to be forced, meaning if the morning star is defined as that in the morning, it can't exist not in the morning. No need to stare at the sky in the morning hoping to catch a lazy evening star that forgot to go inside. It's not subject to empirical disproof.

When I was a kid, I was hopelessly confused when night was, given that I was told a day was 24 hours. Then I learned night was part of day, but then I didn't have a word for the time the sun was up. How could that be day if it lasted less than 24 hours?

Then this: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day." Day starts in the evening?

Hu?

I could go in to a analysis of the terms involved, but I don't think that will help. You are pleased to play with words, and I won't stand in your way. But what you say remains unclear.