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Language and the Limits of Knowing

#1
Yazata Offline
"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."

Is this quote of Wittgenstein's really plausible?

What implications does this statement have for awareness in animals that lack language? If they lack words, how can they know anything? (My dog, now sadly deceased, certainly seemed to know where to find her food bowl.)

Does it imply that the many kinds of supposedly ineffable experience and knowing are impossible? These range from mystical experiences, through aesthetic experiences, to knowing what the color red looks like and what love or fear feel like.

(Given the richness and texture of my experience, I wonder how much of it I could ever put into words.)
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#2
C C Offline
Like behaviorism, I guess this emphasis of cognition resting upon symbol systems was what was in vogue during that era. Both Wittgenstein and Wilfred Sellars have been accused --perhaps unjustly-- of linguistic idealism. In some respects that's part of what eliminative materialism is descended from / inspired by (Rorty's version, anyway, and whatever disputed sympathies Dennett irregularly has with EM). Andrew Chrucky expresses the LI argument as:

All awareness is propositional.
All propositions are composed of concepts.
All concepts are linguistically mediated.
Therefore, all awareness is linguistically mediated.


Wilfrid Sellars did make statements that seemed to support such a view: "...all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities -- indeed, all awareness even of particulars-- is a linguistic affair."

But he also acknowledged that not all conscious-like body activities are dependent upon / driven by advanced "conceptual thinking":

"Not all 'organized behavior' is built on linguistic structures. The most that can be claimed is that what might be called 'conceptual thinking' is essentially tied to language, and that, for obvious reasons, the central or core concept of what thinking is pertains to conceptual thinking. Thus, our commonsense understanding of what sub-conceptual thinking -- e.g., that of babies and animals -- consists in, involves viewing them as engaged in 'rudimentary' forms of conceptual thinking. We interpret their behavior using conceptual thinking as a model but qualify this model in ad hoc and unsystematic ways which really amounts to the introduction of a new notion which is nevertheless labeled 'thinking'. Such analogical extensions of concepts, when supported by experience, are by no means illegitimate. Indeed, it is essential to science. It is only when the negative analogies are overlooked that the danger of serious confusion and misunderstanding arises."

Sellars also wrote: "...representational systems (RS) or cognitive map-makers, can be brought about by natural selection and transmitted genetically, as in the case of bees. Undoubtedly a primitive RS is also an innate endowment of human beings. The concept of innate abilities to be aware of something as something, and hence of pre-linguistic awareness is perfectly intelligible."

Likewise, I'm sure there are quotes that muddy the water about Wittgenstein literally championing linguistic idealism, especially in later years after he drifted away from the logical atomism of the Tractatus.

- - - - - - -

Nelson Goodman: "[The language philosopher, linguist, etc] may be forgiven for a vocational myopia that blinds him to all symbol systems other than languages. Anyone else recognizes that gestures, nods of approval and disapproval, pointings, facial expressions, bodily demonstrations, sketches, diagrams, models, play an important role in the acquisition and inculcation of skills of all sorts; and that mastery of symbols of many of these kinds occurs before, and aids enormously, in the acquisition of language."
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
I don't know what dogs know. But speaking strictly for myself, whenever I try to think of something I know without words, I find it already framed in a complex semantic of language-based abstractions. Even if I just think about myself knowing the color red, have I not already defined red in such a way that it is predefined as an abstract property separate from my viewing or imagining it, investing it with a certain knowledgable status that makes it a meaningful concept to me. Yes, even our allegedly wordless sensations and images arise in us preadorned in the abstractions and generalizations of language itself. Otherwise they would have no meaning to us. They'd be there, but only as fleeting "unremarkable" ephemera much as perhaps a dog itself experiences. The fundamental epistemic possiblility--of being able to know a thing--is to be able to separate it from ourselves and objectify it as a proposition that CAN be known. We only know truths, and truths are ALWAYS constructs of language.

"To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own."--Richard Rorty
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#4
C C Offline
On the surface, awareness without words or signals of any kind would at least seem to be a very alien form of consciousness in contrast with having a symbol or token representational system. Yet AFAIK, the scientists who studied the feral child Genie didn't ascertain much of anything about her pre-linguistic cognitive medium (apart from the external behaviors that "nonverbally expressed her emotions and desires").

People who recovered from or managed to communicate somehow after suffering aphasia claim that they could still think and make conscious identifications -- but again the researchers associated with them don't seem interested in how they specifically did it.

Higher-order animals probably can't be exonerated from the possibility of using no private audible signs at all, since even wild turkeys have a "vocabulary" of over thirty such, with inflections of those at least doubling the number of meanings (or more).
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