Dear Mario,

The only thing that persuades me that ther is (or should be a reality -natural or supernatural) is the existence of language.  This may be an extreme interprestation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In other words, speaking of the observable, we can only make sense out of ir (or others) only through language. Language might precede mankind.

Mi five cents thought

Jorge 

Thanks Jorge.

Dear Mario, 

Our social experiece of reality is a construction that is only possible through language, and, as far as I understand, there is no meaning beyond language that could be shared and experienced. Enst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a classic approach from a non linguistic view point.

Elements that are out of the language they are mediated, interpreted and only make sense and understanding from a narrative, a relationship with language. We conjecture that an explicit working memory will be central to explaining interactions between language and visual attention. Though much progress has been made it is clear that a synthesis of further experimental evidence from a variety of fields of inquiry, methods, and distinct participant populations will prove to be crucial for our understanding about how language, vision, attention, and memory interact.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear all, 

Readers of this thread of discussion may find the following paper of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230362760_Does_Language_Determine_Our_Scientific_Ideas

It aims pretty directly at an answer to the question under discussion.

H.G. Callaway

Article Does Language Determine Our Scientific Ideas?*

Thank you, Callaway! 

Hi Mario,

Good question. Language indeed enables us to articulate our views, experiences, etc. about a context. It is a crucial medium for communication. But I would not say that it is the only medium. A few years ago I saw a spiritual session where people hardly understood the trainer. His English was very poor. Yet, the group engaged perfectly in that session. I would say that it was communication at the energetic level. The participants could not describe their communication with each other during the session. But they all felt what it was about. Feeling that they could not label, but which made sense to their spiritual consciousness. Our inability to describe that 'feeling' does not  remove the existence of that 'reality'. I hope that this answer helps to develop a more differentiated view on language.

Best,

Kirtie

 Philadelphia, PA

Dear Algoe,

Thanks for your interesting answer and comment. Your description of your experience is interesting.

I think to compare it with the kind of comprehension which is some times achieved when a person is learning a second or third language. I have had the experience of being able to respond appropriately to someone in a foreign language, without being able to subsequently report or repeat what was said to me in the conversation. I suspect this kind of experience is not so uncommon, though it may happen only at a certain level of learning and comprehension.

I recall on one occasion speaking with someone in a local dialect (of a foreign language) with which I was familiar. I was simply buying some meat in a grocery shop, and I was there with a native speaker of the language (foreign to me) who was not familiar with the local dialect. I successfully negotiated my business, though I could not have told anyone what the woman behind the counter said to me or asked me. A remarkable fact of the encounter is that my friend, the native speaker of the language (unfamiliar with the local dialect) had not understood anything the woman said and wondered how I could have succeeded in the conversation. 

My sense of such episodes is that they involve a low level of comprehension. Perhaps it is something like a child's comprehension which allows appropriate responses, but no verbal reply?  

H.G. Callaway

You might have absorbed without knowing it enough of the way the language works and if one person says X then the other is supposed to say Y, or better yet, do Z.  It does sound like the way my children learned to speak (English).

Dear Mario 

This is an interesting question but I don't think there is a settled consensus among scholars. Indeed, there may well be a movement away from the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which suggested (very roughly) that our world view was dependent on the categories provided by our language. Recent work in cognitive linguistics, for instance,  on conceptual metaphor suggests that some base metaphors may be universal across languages and this is because there are certain perceptual universals - aspects of reality that we process, as it were,  'pre-linguistically' . 

Personally, I'm inclined to a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language helps to shape our world view but it does not determine it in all particulars. I summarised my position in the following chapter.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301608054_Language_and_representation

Data Language and representation

Since we are cultural beings and since culture is conditioned by language, my answer would be NO. Real thinking (in the case of intelligent human beings) is not possible in the absence of (linguistic) meanings. There is a kind of pre-linguistic thinking (like when we blink at the bright light of the sun or when we press the brakes of our car, etc.), but most of our thinking is linguistic. Even when specialists try to determine/identify the functions of non-verbal communication, it is easily noticed that those functions also underline the implicit importance of verbal communication (because non-verbal communication is actually judged in comparison with language/verbal communication). See, for example, John Dewey's third chapter (The Existential Matrix of Inquiry: Cultural) of his extraordinary "Logic. The Theory of Inquiry"). When we try to solve a problematic (real) situation, we actually have to think the whole situation (to represent it in our mind) linguistically in order to solve it (then, the situation "makes sense", as Dewey says).

Also, Charles Sanders Peirce' s semiotic look at mankind as semiotically defined species, "sentenced to mean"

I agree. As a matter of fact, Peirce influenced Dewey quite a lot. 

And I would add to what Jorge said about Ernst Cassirer a philosospher  (highly influenced by Cassirer), almost fogotten today in matters of philosophy of language, W.M. Urban and his impressive book, "Language and Reality".

Philadelphia, PA

Dear all, 

Readers of this thread of discussion may find the following paper of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230362760_Does_Language_Determine_Our_Scientific_Ideas

It aims pretty directly at an answer to the question under discussion.

H.G. Callaway

Article Does Language Determine Our Scientific Ideas?*

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Abla, 

I would suggest in reply that not all structuring of experience is linguistic --consider the facility for color vision as an example. Not everyone has it, of course; and it is hard to imagine that this make no different in how people relate to the world around them.

Regarding the Einstein quotation, the talk of "use of symbols" may just mean mathematical symbols in contrast to physical concepts--he did sometime emphasize the role of conceptual, physical thought in some contrast to mathematics.

That thought may go on unconsciously, I do not doubt--as when one wakes up in the morning with the solution to a problem--or when a solution to a problem arises, out of the blue, as we say or all of a sudden. Surely something went on which produced the insight or answer. On the other hand, I would also say that the developed ability to report one's own thoughts is somewhat different than the ability to think them. This seems to be one factor involved in the emphasis we sometime see placed on "intuition" or intuitive thought. Still, it is plausible that the underlying thought processes depend upon some particular conceptual developments--otherwise (and capable) of being expressed in words. Einstein could hardly have had his masterful physical insight if he lacked the requisite physical concepts. Thinking is one thing, our reports of our thoughts is something partly distinct.  

The concept of "abstracted from" may be a bit doubtful or misleading here. More generally, concepts are needed to comprehend elements of perceptual experience. It may be more like the relationship between an imaginative hypothesis and confirming observations.  

H.G. Callaway  

Dear Abla,

Aristotle (in his treatise De anima, III) said that concepts has to be associated with images (only God would think in pure forms). Perhaps that is why Einstein said what he said (in this famous quotation [excerpted from a letter], also referred to by Sebeok in his "Signs"). Otherwise, he needed language not only to convey to others his ideas, but to clarify his ideas to himself. Ideas or thoughts are sometimes pretty vague in our mind, so we need to express them to become clearer. The same goes with arts, where expression refines intuition. The artists need to express themselves, because till they express what goes through their minds, they do not see (in advance) very exactly the product of their imagination.

I have underlined here the importance of language in general. Certainly, in particular situations, an image or a kiss may value more than 1000 words, as was noticed, but going to essentials, we ought to admit that language is more important than the other forms of culture. As a matter of fact, we can talk about language using language, and we can talk about music and painting using the same language, but we cannot talk (rationally) about music through the medium of music or of painting. I do not say that there are not others things apart from language, but only (as the title of this topic points it out) that the human experience is imbued with language (meanings). If you look at a picture and want to understand it, than you have to grasp its sense, as if  it is a text. Now, regarding the unique emotion felt by someone when contemplating Mona Lisa, that is why John Dewey would prefere here the term sense (in its etymologogical meaning), than signification or meaning in general.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Munteanu, 

Interesting comments.

That we can and sometimes do think imagistically, I do not doubt. For example, I find myself imagining particular turns or corner while walking through familiar streets and navigating from one place to another. 

Its an interesting question, I'd say, whether the participants in the early modern, "new way of ideas," actually thought in images, or instead believed that they should think that way or that way exclusively. There was an epistemological norm involved, especially for the empiricists, of the need to relate our thoughts to sense experience. 

But in another sense, the question is obviated. The reason is that we clearly do sometimes think in words --as in thinking out loud in a lively conversation. You may come to express things new even to you! 

On the other hand, silent thought might be regarded as sometimes or prevalently a matter of thinking in auditory images of words.

H.G. Callaway 

Dear Prof. Callaway,

As F. de Saussure remarked (referring to linguistic signs), an "image de pensee" is associated with an "image acoustique". Before we could talk of an inner language/discourse, language is created externally, in a (more or less) conventionally manner, as a result of a joint activity of men. We all know what a linguistic sign involves or is. You are right, our silent thinking process is a matter of thinking in auditory images of words (as "images acoustiques"), too, not only (still mostly) in meanings (or significations). Of course, language is best defined (as Eugenio Coseriu stated) as "signification with expression" (not the other way round), since in culture the content (as a form of conscience) looks for a convenient substance/matter. But, after our language has been accepted (in its auditory expression as well) by the other members of our linguistic community, becoming a kind of habit, then we use it as an inner discourse; still, we cannot completely get rid of its "material" side, that is why our inner words preserve these "auditory images" (or "images acoustiques") like some phantasmal (im)prints.

On some common points (regarding the philosophy of language) of Dewey and Coseriu concerning the universals of language, you may find here an article of mine (although, I have to appologize for my poor English):

https://www.academia.edu/17540777/John_Dewey_and_Eugenio_Coseriu_on_Creativity_and_Alterity_in_Language._Some_Common_Points

Dear Abla,

(1) I was not referring to Aristotle's influence on Einstein, but to the fact that Aristotle noticed long ago before Einstein that, when thinking, we cannot completely get rid of images. [Of course, Einstein didn't need Aristotle's approval to initially think/conceive of his theory in terms of images...]

(2) When, for instance, we write down our ideas, we feel this urge of ex-pressing [see the Latin origin of the term expression] in order to clarify our thoughts. On the other hand, how else can you explain the famous Latin phrase "docendo discitur" (as a didactic principle)?

(3) Viceversa is valid, too: no picture (Mona Lisa, etc.) can create the exact aesthetic beauty of a novel as "Madame Bovary"... My aim was to underline the importance of language connected to the problem of intelligibility. Obviously, we cannot repeat someone else's sensible experience and even ours. When we try to talk about it, it is a past one already, already had. Talking about it means to recreate it, re-live it, name it, so it cannot be the same [as somebody said, when you realize that you are happy, happiness is already gone]. Language (as speech/verbal communication) is the supreme/ultimate semiotic system in which we can translate (at a certain extent) the other cultural forms and, first of all, language is a requisite for our rational thinking. I do not try to mislead "the magnificent of non-literal expression" (I hope you didn't misinterpret my previous message).

(4) I strongly recommend you to read the following books: John Dewey's "Art as Experience" and R.G. Collingwood's "Principles of Art". For a comparison between philosophy and literature, see Collingwood's "An Essay on Philosophic Method".

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Muntenanu, 

Thanks for your reply. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you repeated back to me my own comment--attributing the points elsewhere. Or was there something I wrote with which you disagreed?

H.G. Callaway

Dear Prof. Callaway,

I don't see points of disagreement with you... Which comment (repeated back to you) are you referring to? [I hope I didn't make any technical mistake in my reply to Abla; it's my first time with this ResearchGate forum; till now,  I posted items and replies only on Academia.edu]. Naturally, we have a common ground, since both of us dealed with Dewey (and not only with Dewey, of course).

Dear Abla,

Of course, we cannot share with the others all our perceptions. We are closed consciences, that is why we need to attach our intellectual content to something material and external at the same time. That is how culture is created (within which language is the most important of all cultural forms; and it's not me saying that, but great thinkers/philosophers like Aristotle, G. Vico, Hegel, W. von Humboldt, Dewey et alii eiusdem bonae farinae). Very concise, as a principle: "Intersubjectivity warrants objectivity". We know how things are, because the others communicate to us the same description of those things [For instance, I know this (let's say) wall is white, because I see it white and the others tell me it's white, too.].

We cannot say how a blind man (blind since his birth) thinks, because we are not (fortunately) in the same position. Perhaps he makes use of some images, who knows? Likewise, I don't know, really, how the animals communicate, how complex their "language" is, since I cannot communicate with them through their "language".

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Munteanu, 

Thanks for your clarification. I also saw no disagreement. 

Regarding language and the philosophy of language, I would emphasize Wittgenstein over Dewey and the pragmatists. 

Of course, I have studied Dewey and the pragmatists, and they have influenced my thinking in degree; but when Dewey and the pragmatists show up, this also partly a matter of my purely historical engagement with American intellectual history. To know where it might be best to go, we have to know where we have been. But knowing the history of American thought, and having one's favorites: Madison, Jefferson, Emerson, James, etc. are quite different matters.

If a philosophy is to prevail, it must rest on what is already prevalent. But this differs quite significantly from place to place. 

H.G. Callaway

Dear Professor Callaway,

For me, Dewey is more important than Wittgenstein (which one? the first W. or the second W.?). It depends, I guess, on what we are looking for, and what I am looking for right now (in my second Ph.D., in philosophy) has to do a lot with philosophy of language and hermeneutics (the problem of meaning). I try to see how these great philosophers dealed with the problems I am interested in. To me, philosophy is not a matter of fashion. There was a time, many centuries ago, when Aristotle and Plato were completely forgotten. I am glad that Dewey, after being forgotten for some decades, is nowadays rediscovered and his philosophy analysed and applied in many parts of the world. In my view, he is the No 1 Philosopher of U.S.A. (but it is my view). Likewise, Plato could be my favourite reading (due to the beauty of his style or the numerous problems he raises), but I learnt and continue to learn much more from Aristotle.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Munteanu, 

I would definitely recommend Later Wittgenstein for his philosophy of language; and I would think the "later" would pretty much go without even saying. There is some significant kinship to the pragmatists. I recall that Wittgenstein mentions Wm. James in particular. 

H.G. Callaway

Alimjan,

Music is also language.  Music is a form of expression , poetry and prose are other forms of expression, science are other forms of expression, all artforms are forms of expressions, and all of them are created and understood in human imagination, like Aristotle was saying.  Experience itself involves imagination.  The senses are interpreted through our imagination. So experience and all forms of expression are all related to the imagination.  The later came about through biological evolution, it mirrors the whole history of the interaction of the body, it is the repository of all possible body narrative  of interaction.  The human imagination is a mammalian type of imagination but one that can that can self-enact itself like in dreams but also through common dreams mediated by artefacts and all the form of expression.    All the form of expression are mediating self-enacting the body interface narrative of the mammalian imagination allowing us to share experience and thus to get in communion.  This is what being a human is, this capacity to share experience and to express everything through the mamalian narratives.  I like to see us as the theatrical animal.  Until our evolution, imagination had been closely reactive to the need ot the action of the animal.  It had always been from the first mammal, a narrative reality engine but the engine was only used automatically and reactionary.  Humanity evolution is a coming out of the biological realm of automatic and reactionary used of the narrative reality engine, it is the realm of theatrality, of the creation of experience out from the reality engine.  Art and expression and invention is this.  The mammalian imagination/reality engine which was a mirror of the world of interaction has now been opened and now humans are learning to use it through all the art forms we have invented for not only understanding our world but for what is most important: for coming together into a true union of humanity into a collective know thyself.  What evolved was only the beginning of a process of forming a collective being , of a coming together that can only take place through our learning to be together through this new way to use the mammalian imagination.  Since we do not know who we are and what we are doing, we are constantly in conflict.

Dear,

In an attempt to collaborate with this excellent debate put another question to be thought: what can be said of theorists with Hans Gumbrecht (Stanford University - Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian) and his theory about the 'materialism' and what he called as "presence."

The author's proposition would try to think of the possibilities stocks of other forms of expression and communication that are beyond language, are the possibility to understand elements that the senses can not capture. Trying to offer a chance to understand the world and the relationship with the things of the world (objects) in addition to the interpretation and hermeneutics. The idea of "epiphany", ie, an instant manifestation provided by extra-linguistic situations, such as chills when listening to music among other things.

What is your opinion about these formulations?

Note: I greatly appreciate for all contriubuições, I believe this is very valid to think increasingly very important issues about language.

Mario,

''The author's proposition would try to think of the possibilities stocks of other forms of expression and communication that are beyond language, ''

If one form of expression could express everything, then they would be redundant and thus useless.  No each form of expression is not totally translatable into other forms.  So the idea that there are aspect of the world that are beyond ''oral language'' and expressable by lets say: music, or painting, etc is not surprising, but an evidence or a trivial truth.

Hola, buen día:

entro al debate con mi escaso inglés. El lenguaje, tal cual lo conocemos, media toda experiencia; esto se debe en mi opinión no a la experiencia misma, esta puede o no estar mediada, sino más bien a la posición relevante que tiene el lenguaje en nuestras estructuras de pensamiento y acción. Sin embargo, esta posición relevante no es privativa de otras ni tampoco implica una necesaria relación entre experiencia y lenguaje. Hay experiencias que no se median por el lenguaje. Son ciertamente esas a las que Gumbrecht llama presencias, pero que yo prefería abordar desde una terminología más fenomenológica como sensible o directamente emocional. la experiencia emocional puede encasillarse en el lenguaje, pero evidentemente éste no podría agotarla, y no podría hacerlo porque las emociones se sienten en lo más profundo de nuestro cuerpo y la mente -a través de la cual la experiencia emocional pudiera ser convertida en expresión emocional vía el lenguaje- en tanto función de sobrevivencia del cuerpo, es otro "lenguaje". Entender la mente como un lenguaje implica pensarla como un sistema de representación tanto de los acontecimientos internos del cuerpo como de los externos que son "leídos" desde ella. Sólo en la medida en que coincida el "lenguaje" propio que construimos cartográficamente desde la mente con las estructuras de sentido del lenguaje social o compartido, estaríamos a las puertas de comprender una experiencia que siendo mediada, no lo sería. En lo personal, creo que esto es imposible. Por lo que la relación entre experiencia y lenguaje, al menos en términos del lenguaje social que aquí se habla, sólo puede ser entendida al interior de un proceso de traducción, donde sin lugar a dudas hay pérdidas de información tanto como posibles ganancias.

saludos, V.

In a logical perspective of language, there must be something outside language. I develop a method to try to draw a diagram of it and understand what kind of content lies outside language.

It was a main feature in my PhD thesis and many articles (they are in Portuguese). To a broader audience, in English, I have one article from the time ("Peirce's Arrow...") and one recently published ("On a phaneroscopy...").

I will publish a working paper of this subject in December 2016 / January 2017 in English. When it is online, I let you know.

Article Peirce's Arrow and Satzsystem: A Logical View for the Language- Game

Article On a phaneroscopy beyond human consciousness: Building a phe...