/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11787358]

When Witty rejects the representational character of language, what does he do to the brain? Seriously. Is he just some behaviorist? What the fuck is left for the brain to do it it's all language games and stuff?

[Anonymous No.11787418]

>>11787358
Follow your desire - try to not put it in words

[Anonymous No.11787518]

A lot of people confuse late Wittgenstein's thought for a metaphysical commitment to "language," as if he's saying language "exists" in some ontologically real sense, or that "thought is language." But the whole trick of Wittgenstein, and other philosophers who take a radically immanent approach to language, is that we CAN'T get at the metaphysical substance of language at all, can't get at the constitutive essence or ground of intelligibility, even though we are WITHIN intelligibility. Wittgenstein is not saying anything about what the brain is or is not, or what consciousness is or is not. He's only saying that "language works," and that we understand one another.

Where you go from there is up to you. So if you want to say, "well, the metaphysical ground of language 'working', of intelligibility and understanding in the first place, certainly must be the material constitution of the brain, somehow," Wittgenstein would only say that, because language is radically immanent, while you can make such a proposition and be understood by others, the question of the proposition's truth is a matter for agreement or disagreement with other speakers -- that is, within language, within mutual understanding. Likewise, when someone says, "that's materialist nonsense; the ground of all understanding is only understandable as a divine mind, in which all individual minds participate," Wittgenstein would say the same thing to him in response. And he would point out that neither party is, or ever could be, "self-evidently" or "certainly" right. What matters is that they are both presenting utterances that make sense to them (and presumably to at least some others). Neither party can somehow pull rank by manifestly and finally proving that the brain or the rational god is self-evidently and necessarily correct, because even the norms of self-evidence and necessity need to be interpreted.. through mutual understanding, i.e., through language.

In either case, and in ALL cases, for us to even be talking about such things at all, intelligibility of meaning must always come first. It's assumed in the very act of talking that we are capable of talking. Even when attempting to present or posit the metaphysically real grounds of such talking, of meaning and intelligibility.

It's basically Kantian. Kant's successors (and Kant himself arguably) had similar difficulties understanding whether he was giving a transcendental or a constitutive account of the possibility of knowledge, that is, whether his critique of the faculty of knowledge was positing a metaphysically real "faculty" that had the "properties" of behaving in such a way, or whether he was somehow only describing phenomenologically the appearance of all objects of knowledge without pointing to the metaphysically real ground of that appearance. But the basic answer is that a good phenomenologist or immanent philosopher of language "brackets" the metaphysical.

[Anonymous No.11787531]

>>11787518
Also, all of this still rests on the Kantian problem of how it is possible to do a metaphysics of the thing in itself, in this case of "thought." What is the brain, what is thought, what is language? What is matter? What is "reality?" What are the laws of physics? What is a "law?" Is thought distinct from what we call nature? What is the relationship between thought and nature, then? Is the rational orderliness of reality related to the rational intelligibility of thought?

All Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and others can tell us so far is that when we talk about "things," like matter, brains, thoughts, ideas, concepts, or whatever, we reify words in order to communicate. Language works pragmatically: I can get you to pick up a brain, I can navigate the world, by having a word for "brain." But that doesn't tell me what a brain "is," or how my word relates to the object (what is an "object?"), or how my word relates to my thought, or how my thoughts relate to "me," and so forth. I can also navigate those confusing issues for pragmatic purposes by coming up with specialised jargon and sharing that jargon with others, but the question of human knowledge vs. metaphysical truth is still an open one.

[Anonymous No.11787678]

language is a memetic immanentization of form, a legacy of pythagorean fractal generation. stop using language it's making capital sentient

[Anonymous No.11789264]

>>11787518
>>11787531
OP here. Great response. But I still take issue with your claim that

>Wittgenstein is not saying anything about what the brain is or is not

Take 307-308 of the IF for instance:

307. "Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren't you
at bottom really saying that everything except human behaviour is.

308. How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise?——The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them—we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)—And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them."

It does seem that he has a lot more going on in his philosophy of mind that what we can aprehend by only reading his philosophy of language (both are intertwined anyway).

Just a bit of a disclaimer here: when I created this thread I didn't do it in typical /lit/ fashion of just bashing and memeing some well-established philosopher. I'm interested in the subject and want to understand more.

[Anonymous No.11789288]

>>11787358
Wittgenstein is mostly mute about the brain. You can catch him referring to physiology at certain points in order to supply more fuel to the line of thought he's making, but the brain is implicitly treated as a blackbox throughout.

Wittgenstien did play a decisive role influencing the development of logical behaviorism alongside G.E Moore. However Wittgenstien was less declarative than Moore on the subject, and didn't explicitly propose that meaning and intention is extruded by the body

[Anonymous No.11789296]

>>11789288
Oops not Moore. I was thinking of Gilbert Ryle.

[Anonymous No.11789325]

>>11789264
Oops:

307
"307. "Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?"—If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction."

[Anonymous No.11789374]

So many philosophers thought that language and thought are the same.
What a bunch of stupid fucks.

[Anonymous No.11789398]

>>11789374
I don't follow. I'd say most philosophers argued that thought came before language, and that's the crux of representation: you form the ideia of 'x' before you can say 'x' meaningfully.

[Anonymous No.11789400]

>>11787518
>dude, whatever you say must be said in language
Is this the power of Wittgenstein? Who woulda thunk.

[Anonymous No.11789409]

When words seem to be insuficient, the only logical solution is to remain silent

[Anonymous No.11789418]

>>11789398
That's not my experience, I'd say most continental philosophers, especially in the 20th century focused so much in language and they gave it a privileged position.
My understanding is that language IS everything.
I once got kicked out of a chat, because the owner of the chat insisted that you can't have thought without language and he cited tons of philosophers and considered the opposite plainly stupid, and he had a bachelors in philosophy.

I really don't think that it's just my perception, it is an actual thing, maybe you, as a reasonable person you just rightfully assume that thought precedes language but not sure if that's the case across the board, not even close I'd say.

[Anonymous No.11789423]

>>11789418
Clarification:
My understanding is that THEY thought that language IS everything

[Anonymous No.11789441]

Saying language is the basis of thought is like saying mathematics is the basis of reality.

[Anonymous No.11789451]

retard

[Anonymous No.11789457]

If you care for a word, you speak for all its parts

[Anonymous No.11789465]

>>11787531
>But that doesn't tell me what a brain "is,"
W is not Kantian. There isn't anything a brain "is" beyond grey and white matter to a biologist, or a calculator to the materialist, or the part of us that thinks, etc. It isn't that W brackets metaphysics, it's that there's none to be done.

[Anonymous No.11789475]

>>11787531
Representationalism is a cognitive myth.

[Anonymous No.11789479]

>>11789441
exactly, too many philosophers put language on an axiomatic pedestal.

Language is artificial and ultra recent, it's amazing how much value they put on it.

[Anonymous No.11789481]

Philosophy- the science of difference and enumeration- is a disease and we can look at the “progress” of philosophy as a viral contagion. As we all know, Philosophy begins in earnest with Plato. The central concern of the dialogues (themselves a capture mechanism whereby the “oral” tradition is contained within what would begin the
expansion/contagion of the first fully standardized, internal, highly abstract, economical, phonemic/atomistic representational exogrammic model) is “what is x in and of itself?”.

This archetypal question is advanced with much rigor and is indeed the archetypal question. This question gives rise to what I call “the problem of meaning”. Meaning is a new category arising in ancient thought and meaning itself arises with its necessary (ananke) organ- the soul. This archetypal questioning can be seen as “symptomatic” of exposure to something, thus it is a problem to be solved not by advancing the cause of philosophy but by seeking a cure. The Pharmakos, Logos and the Savior are all attempts at various times answers stages to contain and or cure philosophy. As a side note, Hegel is the AIDS of philosophy. The arising of what is x for itself is the “birth of the problem of meaning”.

Debord was a voyeurs voyeur and thus a radically incomplete thinker. Trapped within the completion phase of Cartesian/Newtonian/materialist voyeurism, Debord was unable to see the sorcerous aspect of his own compulsions. In other words he didn’t go far enough, deep enough, surreal enough in his contemplations.

There is a reason why the logos and light and vision and linear time and Utopianism and industrialism and Cartesianism and voyeurism reign supreme in the west.

The pre-Socratics, the Pythagoreans, were the true 'seers' - an extraterrestrial or extrastitional group who project objects in thought via geometric manipulation. The human brain recieves this via on board decimal plexing and created the immanentization of form.

[Anonymous No.11789495]

>>11789418
Can you even define thought? I don't think we can.

[Anonymous No.11789501]

>>11789481
Wittgenstein said that the mystical is the manifest--that which known by direct perception without analysis or interpretation. A color is mystical in this sense. The color red cannot be described. It can only be shown. "Red" designates something "unsayable" in this sense. Many of the most fundamental words in our language--words for sounds, colors, aromas, etc., designate the "unsayable."

Mystical noumena is the existence of reality yet to be claimed and formalized by the memetic symbol.

[Anonymous No.11789502]

>>11789479
But it is valuable, just like mathematics is. The issue is not about value.

[Anonymous No.11789506]

>>11789495
Ok but what are you implying, that language is thought after all?
Have you tried looking into neuroscience ?

[Anonymous No.11789507]

>>11789502
Sorry I meant value as in how postructualists put it, that there is nothing beyond the text.

[Anonymous No.11789508]

Objects or definitions are not permanent, even if making them into situational tools is helpful.

[Anonymous No.11789510]

>>11789495
Philosophers in the analytic tradition usually lean towards thought as a synthesis of some mental process. When I say 'x is the case' I'm basically using 'x' as whatever thought I have in mind, my intention.

[Anonymous No.11789514]

>>11789506
I can define thought, but i cannot define what thought fails to define, by definition

[Anonymous No.11789521]

>>11789514
Define thought please.

[Anonymous No.11789530]

>>11789514
How would you define thought? And is it objective?

[Anonymous No.11789533]

>>11789521
Thought is the human concept of an individual divission of the process of thinking, a static snapshot of the movement

[Anonymous No.11789535]

>>11789530
immanentization of form

[Anonymous No.11789542]

>>11789510
So vague and wishy-washy though. For me, what is happening in our minds is often unintelligible.

[Anonymous No.11789545]

>>11789533
What is the basis of that claim?
Do you base it in science? In a particular philosophical discipline?
Where?

[Anonymous No.11789550]

obligatory copy pasta:
>"My wife gave him [Wittgenstein] some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly liked. Thereafter he more or less insisted on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that my wife prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it always remained the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed "Hot Ziggety!" --- a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim "Hot Ziggety!" when my wife put the bread and cheese before him." -Norman Malcolm, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1966), p. 85

[Anonymous No.11789558]

>>11787358
He failed to consider that everyone is RIGHT.

[Anonymous No.11789562]

>>11789545
I base it in the idea that reality is an undivided process or verb, and that objects or nouns are mere stable patterns in it.

[Anonymous No.11789568]

>>11789535
>>11789533
Looks like this thread has been invaded.

[Anonymous No.11789571]

Everything exists as a whole of God/nature until its immanentization in form, at which point it becomes process binary.

[Anonymous No.11789587]

>>11789507
>There is one statement by Derrida—in an essay onRousseauinOf Grammatology—which has been of great interest to his opponents.[13]:158It is the assertion that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte),[13]:158–59, 163which is often mistranslated as "there is nothing outside of the text". The mistranslation is often used to suggest Derrida believes that nothing exists but words.Michel Foucault, for instance, famously misattributed to Derrida the very different phrase "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" for this purpose.[24]According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the unavoidability of context that is at the heart of différance.

[Anonymous No.11789616]

I just want to have a serious discussion

[Anonymous No.11789628]

Wittgenstein believed existing states of affairs (objects plus properties in relation) to be most ontologically basic . He failed to explained how a sequence of events, such as a wave, seem to be of the same entity. In reducing this to a mere context of difference and misunderstanding, the contingent transcendentality fails to account for the potentially horrific quasi-metaphysical implications of this on the part of both speakers. Then you are not really imagining a lion speaking, you are imagining a person. The lion still speaks but we choose ignore him for the purpose of correlationist reduction.

[Anonymous No.11789638]

>>11789628
>Wittgenstein believed existing states of affairs (objects plus properties in relation) to be most ontologically basic .

This is TLP, which is not under discussion directly

[Anonymous No.11789742]

>>11789616
Nobody on this board has read W.

This >>11789264 more or less clarifies this >>11789465 . He is not a behaviorist (though Ryle and many others would have him that way).
>It does seem that he has a lot more going on in his philosophy of mind that what we can aprehend by only reading his philosophy of language
This is key: he has no philosophy of mind divorced of his philosophy of language. To mistake him for a behaviorist is really to ignore the whole his philosophical (investigative) project as a whole, to take little bits out of context. (W is all about context.)
Those within the discipline of philosophy of mind like to talk in terms of qualia and such in Cartesian ways - as if it is a private thing to each person and words are some something which can(not) access them. But one of the first things W tries to dispel in PI is this way of thinking. It is not that words point to things (such as inner feelings). Words do things - they are tools. To say "I'm in pain" is almost equivalent to "ow" - to atomize and sentence and analyze one part of it, "pain" is to mistake the utterance for something else. It is a call to action, a warning, etc. - it does things. So W is not a behaviorist because thinking in terms of "inner" is already the wrong setup - if you want to (badly) approximate it in Cartesian terms then "ow" would communicate just as much about the "inner" and "outer".
Admittedly it's easier to talk about what W is not than what he is. This is a good one to meditate on:
>"Another person can't have my pain." -- My pains -- what pains are they?... In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. (PI 253).
See the ways in which "private" (in the W's quote's "my") no longer makes sense in W's terms (or, as his entire project sets out to elucidate, in everyday language) - "my" now just operates as a tool, not as some sort of pointer fixed by some philosopher in concrete.

[Anonymous No.11789756]

>>11789628
speculatorum in synthesis

[Anonymous No.11789812]

>>11789742
I feel like its not just language that is a tool. All representations are illusions. Tools of the mental state.

[Anonymous No.11789835]

>>11789742
>t is a call to action, a warning, etc. - it does things.
the thing is the way in which it does something is precisely by pointing towards a specific kind of idea or set of ideas. Ive always found that such a meme that sperged about that.

[Anonymous No.11790146]

>>11789418
>>11789423
>>11789441
>>11789479
The thing is more that any thought you can imagine pretty much has the structure of a language. Even thinking in, say, connected images and sensations is language-like. Thought is comparative. We compare and equate things in thought, and this is also (at the most primordial level) the structure of language. We look at a leaf and think (perhaps even on a pre-verbal level) “The leaf is green.” This involves a system of abstraction where we’ve made the general category of a leaf, the general category of green, and equated them. It has the most basic form of A = B. It’s also, in a way, communicative. We’re communicating something to ourselves. Even if you can think of this (that the leadnonverbally, it’s still language-like, just like hieroglyphics are also a form of language, a pictorial one. Sign language is also a language, one made with symbols of the hand. So language doesn’t require words as we think of it.

You could argue that I’m just re-defining language to include all thought in language. This is a fair rebuttal. If you said that, I’d concede it, but still say, at the very least, that thought is fundamentally language-like and language is fundamentally thought-like. If you really get this, you can start to even understand Greek and Chrisrian mystical ideas of the Logos (word) being at the heart of reality.

[Anonymous No.11790153]

>>11789418 #
>>11789423 #
>>11789441 #
>>11789479 #
The thing is more that any thought you can imagine pretty much has the structure of a language. Even thinking in, say, connected images and sensations is language-like. Thought is comparative. We compare and equate things in thought, and this is also (at the most primordial level) the structure of language. We look at a leaf and think (perhaps even on a pre-verbal level) “The leaf is green.” This involves a system of abstraction where we’ve made the general category of a leaf, the general category of green, and equated them. It has the most basic form of A = B. It’s also, in a way, communicative. We’re communicating something to ourselves. Even if you can think of this (that the leaf is green) nonverbally, in a flash, it’s still language-like, just like hieroglyphics are also a form of language, a pictorial one. Sign language is also a language, one made with symbols of the hand. So language doesn’t require words as we think of it.

You could argue that I’m just re-defining language to include all thought in language. This is a fair rebuttal. If you said that, I’d concede it, but still say, at the very least, that thought is fundamentally language-like and language is fundamentally thought-like. If you really get this, you can start to even understand Greek and Chrisrian mystical ideas of the Logos (word) being at the heart of reality.

[Anonymous No.11790195]

>>11790153

[Anonymous No.11790225]

>>11790195
I’m not sure I get the point. Is it that “word” is too simple a way to translate Logos? I’m well-aware, but it’s one of its many interpretations which has to be taken into account.

[Anonymous No.11790260]

>>11790225
i'm going along what you said last about greeks and christians

[Anonymous No.11790264]

>>11789400
Stop trying to be funny. The sentiment is actually pretty novel, or was, when Ludwig presented it. It's easy to look at the idea and think "duh" but essentially no one considers the consequences.

[Anonymous No.11790283]

>>11790260
Ah, interesting.