His claims that the shared language game becomes the territory terribly misunderstands philosophy. Yes, some philosophy investigates the use of language.
The precise philosophical meaning of words solves the exact problem he has: when there is a precise concept described by a word in that field, faith in the word isn't lost. It's maintained because you always know what it means. The words losing touch with reality is a warrantless argument: the words are specific to philosophy and may still have contact with reality depending on the philosophy using it.
There's also the issue of using the term "semantic deconversion" without ever trying to define it: this isn't a term used anywhere else and there's no understandability of what he makes his terminal impact
i believe he is referring to genocide being lexical and semantic (not referring necessarily to real-life genocides). as in the regime strategically destroys parts of language for its own ends.
his argument (criticism?) of philosophy becoming a language-game detached from reality seems to work in the case of mathematics. it looks to me like mathematics is completely a language-game, where the words and the relationships between them and the information contained therein is itself the territory being explored. although you would say its attached to metaphysical mathematics?
he uses semantic deconversion as a phenomenon he uses to describe people who study in fields who use words very carefully and think they have very clear and important definitions, but upon communication with others find that words fail to communicate information or are not attached to reality.
the examples he uses are psychologists, who in theory use words to describe human behavior but he criticizes as a language-game, and "philosophers besides wittgenstein", who he claims use irony and scare quotes and such due to semantic deconversion
in the case of psychology, he says that teaching communities assign distinct meanings to the DSM words, with a implicit faith that these are the global "true meanings" or are attached to something. but due to the weakness of the field of psychology and the lack of actual global consensus definitions, psychologists find that the words fail. hence, semantic deconversion; loss in faith of words.
See, he explains it (kind of) elsewhere as the process in which people lose faith in language, e.g. Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc. The concept is pretty meaningless when he puts no consistent explanation of it in.
But this isn't true?
He is referring to real-life genocide. He says lexical and semantic genocide is what enables real-life genocide with no argument why or explanation.
Yes, mathematics is purely a language game. That is exactly what it is: the discovery of what sentences in a formal language are true, false, and undecidable. It's attached to math regardless of it being metaphysical or not. Applications of math through physics show that language games can still be used to touch upon reality
im pretty sure he is referring to lexical and semantic genocides: genocides of lexicon and semantics.
alright; you can disagree with the coherency of the notion of "semantic deconversion"; i dont know if its legit either. for me the article just gave me some insight into the mechanism behind the difference between how we use words. i think of things basically in relation to reality, so the words dont matter to me. but in fields less directly attached to reality, the words become holy because they are part of a language game, and using them wrong causes bad things to happen. and language games can be very useful; like mathematics.
No they don't. They never assume global "true meanings," only a meaning that is static within the domain of philosophy
he is remarking on psychology communities. i dont know how psychology students think, but it seems easy to me for someone to commit a small cognitive error and accidentally assume their words correspond to a global truth or to reality or at least to the global psychologist lexicon. his criticism is that for the psychologist DSM words, these things arent true, so people have their expectations defied.
This is horseshit. Disciplines need technical meanings for words within their disciplines. No physicist assumes "charge" means only the meaning in physics.
Aside from that, it's horseshit because the words do change meanings: hence the updates of the DSM
well, he is making a strong criticism of the psychological field, in that a lot of what they do is playing language-games not strongly moored to reality, not even among the global psychological community, but among their local ones.
and he characterizes the edits of the DSM and addition of new words as a symptom of the aforementioned problem. which may itself constitute progress towards better words.
i guess if you have more faith in the rigor of psychology (psychiatry?) as a discipline you can reject his analysis outright.
Yes, and he provides zero evidence for that claim and it's facially not true.
If it makes better words, then it's not a problem for the reasons he says it's a problem.
To be rigorous, it needs rigorous definitions. I don't disagree that it isn't fully rigorous. But it needs to have specific, rigorously defined terms to become rigorous
okay. i dont really understand what psychiatrists do; so lemme see if i can learn something from you:
suppose two people disagree on whether a patient has something that constitutes borderline personality disorder. from your perspective, what is the nature of the dispute? is it about semantics, or the property of the patient, or what things to prescribe? is there a thing like BPD in the same way as there is a thing called influenza?
The DSM describes BPD in terms of "characterized by X Y Z" and "displays five or more of the following symptoms". but is this a diagnostic criterion or a definitional one? is this a "rigorous definition"?
to contrast, while we can see influenza is associated with symptoms, the definition of influenza is pretty clearly rigorous and not equivalent to the presence of symptoms. are psychology words useful in the same way as influenza is?
Then this becomes a debate in psychology. Either there is evidence the DSM should change in its next version either through new definitions or through making a new term. This is the process through which the DSM changes over time.
Property of the patient and treatment methods (personality disorders are rarely treated with medication).
Both
It's attempting to establish one
Yes, it's defined by the structure of the viruses. But we don't know enough about the brain to make those definitions in psychology, so we need to make rigorous definitions which are the diagnostic criteria. Much like how the flu was defined by symptoms before virology.
dont the scientific studies, when interacting with the idea of BPD, already rely on the old definition of BPD? can you make up a hypothetical example of a scientific result that could motivate an adjustment of definition?
An inquiry into what symptoms are commonly exhibited across people that have BPD as currently defined. Is one symptom much rarer? Is there one we missed? Change the definition