Tag Archive for philosophy-of-language at Illusive Mind

Tag Archive for 'philosophy-of-language'

Wepple

Published at March 19, 2007 in linguistic curiosities. 0 Comments

I’d like to propose the following neologism if I may:

Wepple.

It is a portmanteau of ‘Web’ and ‘Kipple’.

Kipple was the word introduced by Phillip K. Dick in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ to signify:

useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There’s the First Law of Kipple, “Kipple drives out nonkipple.” Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you’ve picked - it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can’t win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick, 1968

Wepple is the useless junk that accumulates and reproduces itself on the web or on your computer. Old emails that should have been instantly deleted, shortcuts to files that no longer exists, backups of backups, abandoned registry entries, empty folders. As digitization of information and access to the internet increases, so does wepple, exponentially.

Spam, pointless flash movies, youtube videos of incredulous banality, abandoned webpages, useless flamefests, and all the inbox fillers you can imagine.

Wepple Wepple Everywhere,
How I weep were you rare.

-Wepple, Illusive Mind, 2007

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For Want of a Metaphor

Published at February 4, 2006 in philosophy. 1 Comment

I’m trying to come about with a metaphor that will help me express the absurdity of logic. Logic as we all know is a system of rules, inductive and deductive that were created by us people that we use to apply to the world, reality in order to ascertain truth.

We don’t mind the fact the logic was created by us and not reality because we tend to forget that fact and think that it in fact exists independently of us out in the world. It just seems to be a happy coincidence that what qualifies as a rule of logic is that which seems to make sense to the human brain and what is disqualified is that which seems absurd.

I mean if you have a cause you must then have an effect, and X cannot be both P and not P right!!! That just doesn’t make sense!!!

In fact (I’m using the term figuratively) logic appears to be more a corollary of language than anything else. Language rules which are of course governed by the particular arrangements of our brains.

So what is a metaphor (or a simile, or even an analogy) that expresses the absurdity of inventing a system of rules and then finding absolute truth by testing everything against these rules and forgetting the fact that you invented them in the first place?

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Agreement rules. OK?

Published at April 22, 2005 in philosophy. 2 Comments

Western Philosophy is too often guilty of focusing exclusively on the object whilst ignoring the subject.

An example of this is J.L. Austin’s “How to do things with words”. In his arguably most famous work Austin makes great headway in the Philosophy of Language by distinguishing different kinds of performative utterances namely: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.

The essential idea is that in communication and with the vast majority of utterances or ‘speech acts’ we getting people to do things by using words. “Get out”, an imperative or command performs a locutionary act by telling the listener to get out, it performs an illocutionary act by perhaps warning them of the danger if they don’t get out and a perlocutionary act which is the actual effect upon the listener.

This is all very well and good you might say, what is the business about the object and subject, surely this is just more of your oriental west-bashing nonsense. Not so. What Austin fails to capture is where the power of speech acts more accurately lies.

One of the most common examples used to explain commands, declarations and the enormous power of speech is “I now pronounce you husband & wife”. By simple words out of the celebrant’s mouth he has altered the relationship between these two people. Is that really so?

What if there was no-one else present, nothing was written down and the couple never spoke of it again? Nothing would have changed. I can pronounce marriages to whomever I like and it will likely make no difference? Why? Because I don’t have the authority, but where does this authority come from? Answer: It comes from the listener, or the observer.

This is where the true power of speech acts lie. Not in the speaker but in the observer. The marriage is declared in front of a whole bunch of people who recognize and consent to the authority of the celebrant. He writes up a marriage certificate probably with a particular seal that is recognized and consented to by various legal departments who will record it and thus the couple’s legal status will be changed because of the authority of that institution which is once again, recognized and consented to by ‘the people’.

The air coming out of your mouth has no power of influence over me directly unless I recognize or understand what you are saying and then consent to it. This is how meaning is created, it lies at the heart of the very possibility of an interpersonal language. If you don’t agree that the word ‘red’ refers to the same sorts of things I think it does, then we won’t be able to talk about it. Dictionaries are consensus machines, their authors are hoping we can all come to an agreement of the definitions of words so as to grant them those meanings. But of course philosophers are infamous for not doing so.

The object is the word itself, and it is in of itself a meaningless, worthless nothing. It is a creation of the subject, ourselves. It what sense do philosophical arguments about the ‘true’ meaning of words make any sense? I contend that what is ‘really’ going on, is people are disagreeing about what meaning they want to consent to, for whatever reasons. However, can I say what is really going on? This is committing the same fallacy. It might be more accurate to suggest that this interpretation of the debate is more explanatory you can agree with this, or not.

Consensus is King. All our social institutions are built upon it. Not everything is consensus you may say, there are things which are the same for all people regardless of our agreement. A tree will always be a tree. Yes, I don’t think our consent changes the natural world as such, but what about the word tree? What about the concept of a tree? Anything that elicits meaning, any text or sign is subject to a consensus to generate that meaning. You can of course refuse to play the game, and come up with your own meanings that no-one else agrees with, however we as a society would probably put such a person in a mental hospital, for they obviously have lost touch with ‘reality’ haven’t they? With the world ‘out there’.

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Morality, Fiction and Possibility

Published at April 19, 2005 in philosophy. 0 Comments

Brian Weatherson, a well known Philosophy Blogger has an intriguing paper published in the online Philosophy journal Philosophy Imprints

The paper is Morality, Fiction and Possibility which Weatherson has referred to it as ‘my favourite puzzle’ .

The paper starts off with the following story:

Death on a Freeway
Jack and Jill were arguing again. This was not in itself unusual, but this time they were standing in the fast lane of I-95 having their argument. This was causing traffic to bank up a bit. It wasn’t significantly worse than normally happened around Providence, not that you could have told that from the reactions of passing motorists. They were convinced that Jack and Jill, and not the volume of traffic, were the primary causes of the slowdown. They all forgot how bad traffic normally is along there. When Craig saw that the cause of the bankup had been Jack and Jill, he took his gun out of the glovebox and shot them. People then started driving over their bodies, and while the new speed hump caused some people to slow down a bit, mostly traffic returned to its normal speed. So Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

Weatherson notes that the last statement is intuitively false and that even given the poetic licence and/or authorial authority he doesn’t seem to be in a position to make moral judgements true like he can make other descriptive statements true.

Weatherson goes onto to cite a whole host of other examples of incongruous and discordant claims in fiction such as the author’s authority over certain logical contradictions, one of the solutions posed is the “impossible solution” that an author can only convey as true those claims which are logically possible, or imaginatively possible. If we can’t conceive of a square circle, we can believe the author is correct in suggesting that one of his characters is holing one in his hands.

However I think the moral claim is far more ambiguous than that. Can we accept that regardless of context some moral judgements are impossible to believe are right?

Suppose we modified the last sentence of Death on a Freeway, “So Craig did the right thing in getting rid of Jack & Jill as he was a typically bloodthirsty denizen of his time” Perhaps the confusion comes from the conflation with the contextual world of Death on a Freeway with our own social context. I can imagine a future society, particularly bloodthirsty and individualistic, perhaps Utilitarians who would feel no moral revulsion at the claim made as it is congruous with their social norms.

This might be more clearly illustrated by thinking about historical examples:
“The noble raped the newlywed as was the custom and he was right to do so in order to ensure the continued bloodline of Britain.”

Now by modern sensibilities we would say that the author is wrong, that spreading British blood is not a justification for raping newlywed women. However such acts were considered justified and politically expedient at the time, and by reading the author like his characters, within the context of the time we can imagine the moral consensus being that such actions in war are morally justified.

If such a context can be created historically it can also be created in terms of alternate histories and parallel dimensions. Thus we can imagine a universe in which it is considered right that people who slow traffic on freeways should be shot. The author does not have the authority to simply ‘make true’ what is right within the reader’s context but he surely has the right within the world he has created, though in the Death on a Freeway example it is not easy to distinguish between our own world and the one that has been created.

Imagine that this freeway his the only road for convoys of critical medical supplies, perhaps rushed to third world countries or the front lines. There are any number of ways the context can be shifted so many readers can agree with the judgement, but this is not the point. This is still reading the story in comparison to our own society.

Another way to think about the problem, is to think about the author’s voice. In Death on a Freeway, and in all the other examples Weatherson uses, the omniscient third person narrator is used. This is the voice that is able to comment on any part of the fictional world, including the thoughts of characters, the past and the future.

The same problem would not arise if a first person voice was used. We could immediately recognise the author as a character within the story and his judgements thus being contextualised. When he says “It is right that x” we read that “the character believes that it is right that x” and can accept that is true regardless of our own agreement or disagreement with the moral judgement.

This is much harder to recognise in the third person omniscient narrator, who we on one level, expect not to have beliefs or opinions about the world but simply be a kind of God who is stating the facts. But this is plainly nonsense as any statement such as “the brave hero” involves such comments and beliefs about the characters.

It just so happens that the author structures this descriptions so that we generally agree with the narrator. We may read Death on a Freeway and conceive of the narrator as twisted and deviant, and we may disagree with his assessment, but this I think that does not constrain his authority to make such assessments.

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Language may shape human thought

Published at January 8, 2005 in philosophy. 2 Comments

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.

Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called “linguistic determinism” was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since.

“It is a very surprising and very important result,” says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies’ abilities to distinguish between different numerical quantities. “Whether language actually allows you to have new thoughts is a very controversial issue.”

Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City who carried out the experiment, does not claim that his finding holds for all kinds of thought. “There are certainly things that we can think about that we cannot talk about. But for numbers I have shown that a limitation in language affects cognition,” he says.
“One, two, many”

The language, Pirahã, is known as a “one, two, many” language because it only contains words for “one” and “two”—for all other numbers, a single word for “many” is used. “There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirahã need to count,” explains Gordon.

In order to test if this prevented members of the tribe from perceiving higher numbers, Gordon set seven Pirahã a variety of tasks. In the simplest, he sat opposite an individual and laid out a random number of familiar objects, including batteries, sticks and nuts, in a row. The Pirahã were supposed to respond by laying out the same number of objects from their own pile.

For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.

The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four of five taps.
Babies and animals

Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.

Previous experiments show that while babies and intelligent animals, such as rats, pigeons and monkeys, are capable of precisely counting small quantities, they can only approximately distinguish between clusters consisting of larger numbers. However, in these studies it was unclear whether an inability to articulate numbers was the reason for this.

The Pirahã results provide a much stronger case for linguistic determinism, says Gordon, because, aside from their language, they are otherwise similar to other adult humans, whereas there are many more factors that separate babies and animals from adult humans.

However, scientists are far from a consensus. Feigenson points out that there could be other reasons, aside from pure language, why the Pirahã could not distinguish accurately for higher numbers including not being used to dealing with large numbers or set such tasks.

“The question remains highly controversial,” says psychologist Randy Gallistel of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. “But this work will spark a great deal of discussion.”

Journal reference: Science Express (19 August 2004/ Page 1/ 10.1126/science.1094492)

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