this is reminding me that i had a dream last night about my mormon landlords having a cult and being somehow stuck in the middle of it, literally, and also riker from TNG was there (as riker) and he was disgustingly a love interest but-not-actually, he just expressed interest upon meeting, when i had previously had a crush on him as a child(dream me) but, when i met him, i was disgusted and felt as strangely cornered by it as by the whole cult thing that was populating the property i lived on (which ultimately resulted in the development of a small village) fucking.weird.
in other news, my dreams are back to normal (fucking outrageous, as usual)
That’s some wild shit lmao
Happy they’re back tho :)
This was supposed to be a reply o well
yea my point in reccing the work was to draw attention to the fact that the ways you and ewiz use words are often fundamentally incompatible and its going to keep triggering ewiz because you have your own colloquial and idiosyncratic conceptions of lots of words that have more rigor to them
and since your use of them is so idiosyncratic its just keep going to trigger actual pedants (in the most generous sense of the word) like ewiz who actually know the scopes of the words and how they contradict in their more formal and rigorous definitions etc
i didnt really have to recommend wittgenstein for it but he illustrates the bigger picture about why there are a lot of common fallacious disagreements caused by just mismatched uses of words and semantic disagreements
also even if "natural language is contained in the brain" does that mean knowledge or information about the physical configuration actually points towards our experience with natural language in a meaningful way? if we cant actually use physics and math and neurochemistry directly to get at issues of langauge use, why give them any sort of primacy in trying to understand i?
the whole thing ewiz took issue with is kind of a tangent from my overall point though
and even my point in itself cant really illustrate all the issues with your use of certain philosophical terms and stances; that would require a lot more reading.
still not convinced a decent amount of philosophical thought isnt a totally masturbatory waste of time, but it's somehow even worse to do it half blind and with heavy assumptions about the primacy of "science" and "physical"
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Listen iaafr you can’t just come at transcendentalism like that
my autism is triggered by you making a joke that doesnt seem to hit that good on first glance but makes me wonder if its actually clever for some angle i cant think of
Nah just saying transcendentalism is hella masturbatory and I’m attacked cuz I love it
sure. language being contained in the brain does not limit analysis of language to analysis of the brain itself. apparently there are higher level structures that can be studied directly. i classify the study of that linguistics. and the neurological perspective may be able to inform the study of linguistics. and conversely, language is very important to humans, so understanding language better might also inform our understandings of human cognition as a whole. all of this follows easily and the significance of language is not undermined by my physical reduction.
what i am criticizing is the kind of analysis that looks for the "real meaning" of a word, or asks where "the meaning of a word comes from", or otherwise invokes all that ontological or metaphysical hullaballo. we can talk linguistics. we can make abstractions. we can observe, empirically, how language works, and our intent and invoked effect when words are used. theres a lot of depth there, and the depth is plenty accessible without leaving the physical reduction. but if you make statements like "understanding the true definition of a king in chess presupposes understanding of a board game", i think you are barking up the wrong tree. there is no true definition of a king in chess. there are young children who have some idea of what a king is, possibly different from yours. the definition is not philosophically pure, it is a property of the human brain. when your theoretical abstractions conflict with reality, reality wins.
actually, it seems we misunderstood each other. i dont like the stupid wordgames any more than you do. and yes it is in large part my fault for using idiosyncratic definitions, because i dont know the canonical ones.
well imma just reject any philosophy that literally thinks there is a god outright.
i wanted to better understand what this thing ewiz calls metaphysical/ontological is. words and language are about as real to me as gods. they dont "technically exist", but as an abstraction they matter. a lot. language moreso than gods.
to make a stronger statement, i claim philosophy is setting back our understanding of psychology and linguistics because the very smart philosopher-linguists have their concepts confused, and arent separating their theoretical model of language with actual language. and when faced with contradictions some people keep chugging along in the theoretical model claiming it is metaphysically significant, or something. who knows, it might even be significant! just stop pretending its real.
Do you not know what linguistics is?
if linguistics is concerned with "the real meaning of words in a metaphysical sense" then i reject linguistics and i think people should be doing hbotzlinguistics where instead people investigate "the practical meaning of words in an empirical sense".
No. This always introduces a problem of interpretation. See: debate on languages that allegedly don't confront to universal grammar
Yes there is
Actually nonsense
Then you can't use empiricism to investigate them.
Yes they are.
You clearly don't know what metaphysics is
You realize that modern linguistics and philosophy doesn't conceive of language as static in meaning, right?
i think you are wrong and confused, and your confusion sets back actual progress with practical implications.
You literally don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You are once again making sweeping claims about a variety of fields that you admit you've never read anything about
language is obviously not static in meaning. people change.
Then why the fuck do you think philosophy and linguistics treats it like it is?
because its the current best abstraction. this doesnt preclude better abstractions that help to understand the real thing better.
and also, because the philosophers and linguists are confused. language feels like its static to an individual, so its very easy to suppose it is actually static. its an easy mistake to make.