The ontic status of situations

[Magical Realist]

How is it that we can become aware of a "situation"? Does the situation exist objectively as a physical state? Or is it a mode of interpreting and mapping information? I confront for example the situation of my existence on this planet. It is a fact that I live on planet earth. There is a propositional structure to my location in my environment such that I am factually related to the conceptual gestalt I call my planet. It is what I experience as a "situation"-- related like a web to a host of other implications, issues, and facts. It is factual, and yet it is also an abstract state of awareness that arises from language itself. I think the facts of a situation are objective. But the relatedness of these facts, as composing one whole state, are constructed by language and thought. Language situates us in a domain that would otherwise disintegrate into a thousand fleeting sensations and perceptions. Language "enworlds" us in a structure or form that persists transcendentally as a center or fulcrum from which we define ourselves and others. Situatedness is the flipside of selfness, grounding the ephemeral flux of our experiences in an identity and a geometrically unified and temporally enduring zone of contextualizing relationships.

[C C]

It's intriguing as to what it would be like to experience a mind whose thoughts and actions are completely bereft of being mediated by a human level of language and its particular regulating effects and offshoots. I've got nothing but infant / toddler amnesia to confront regarding my early stint in that stage. And contemporary feral children usually had some exposure to language before they wound up living under wild conditions; their later retrospective accounts are kind of contaminated. There are people who recover from extreme aphasia, but neither they nor those who research them seem to clarify exactly what their reflective thoughts and perceptual interpretations consisted of as a replacement for words during that period. Also, the latter system's syntactic and semantic conditioning would still be a lingering part of the acquired operational organization of the brain even if it had become suddenly opaque to the individual's immediate awareness.

[elte]

It's intriguing as to what it would be like to experience a mind whose thoughts and actions are completely bereft of being mediated by a human level of language and its particular regulating effects and offshoots. I've got nothing but infant / toddler amnesia to confront regarding my early stint in that stage. And contemporary feral children usually had some exposure to language before they wound up living under wild conditions; their later retrospective accounts are kind of contaminated. There are people who recover from extreme aphasia, but neither they nor those who research them seem to clarify exactly what their reflective thoughts and perceptual interpretations consisted of as a replacement for words during that period. Also, the latter system's syntactic and semantic conditioning would still be a lingering part of the acquired operational organization of the brain even if it had become suddenly opaque to the individual's immediate awareness.

Without language, maybe the role of mental images would increase.  They are symbolic in that they only represent reality, being incomplete and flawed, or possibly even modified for personal aid.  For example, people could picture themselves in a familiar setting and then modify it during planning for future activity.  

Language also suffers from those drawbacks, maybe even more than mental images, as when it is hard to find the right words.