Language and Philosophy

Question

It is clear that many words are defined by how they are used. That context defines the word. The setting of the environment together constitutes the context, and a word is a meaningless string which serves the purpose of denoting or expressing the context.

1. That 'apple' means (equivalent to denotes) a red colored fruit with such and such properties - and the properties are exhaustive to the extent that they can uniquely differentiate apple from similar fruits say peach. Here means is defined by the usage (in this case denotation).

2. That 'happiness' means an emotion of joy, not-sad, etc. Here means is equivalent to the expression of an emotion.

What these cases illustrate, and very clearly to me, is the origin and usage of the word 'meaning' - and it is shown by how the word is used.

Now consider the statement: Meaning of Life. Many people have written so much about it, while it is very clear to me that it is a blatant abuse of language. Meaning of life expresses nothing in objective reality. It is a misuse of the word meaning. Perhaps a close and correct reformulation of the statement would be: Purpose of Life.

This illustrates how important it is to use words in their original context, otherwise we fool our brain into thinking things which are senseless, in the sense that the rules of language used to expresses those senseless statements have been violated. So while they appear very philosophical, they are pure rubbish.

The issue which concerns me is the following: because the usage of a word is limited to the context, and if I create a unique string for every possible context in the world, then I have a list of all possible contexts possible in the world, and can accurately describe everything possible clearly. Our natural language is a weaker case of this case, and it is so because we cannot do the former exercise. But it is also clear that if I am able to do this monumental exercise, then I will be able to express everything, and the power of this language will not be weaker than natural language, for it will be able to express everything possible.

Now if I have words for all possible contexts, then it follows from my previous arguments that in order to describe or discuss, we cannot use words belonging to different contexts in our discussion. So if the stronger language I have created cannot express anything other than all possible contexts in the world, how can the weaker language (natural language) express anything higher? It therefore appears to me that the entire exercise of discussing philosophy is an illogical task which only makes people believe they are discussing something very important, when in fact they are just arguing about senseless things. One direct consequence is that texts talking about existence, abstract entities become void, for they are an abuse of language.

Answer 1

This answer only offers a possible alternative to the hypotheses in the question. Those hypotheses are two-fold:

1. One assumes that one can "create a unique string for every possible context in the world".
2. One assumes that such a language is "stronger" than natural language.

Not everyone agrees that (1) is possible or that (2) such languages are stronger than natural languages. For example, Michael Polanyi claims the following: (page 7)

...all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.

The language that creates a unique string for every possible context in the world would be an example of "explicit knowledge", not "tacit knowledge". It is an objective language. Wikipedia describes such knowledge as:

Explicit knowledge (also expressive knowledge) is knowledge that can be readily articulated, codified, stored and accessed. It can be easily transmitted to others. Most forms of explicit knowledge can be stored in certain media. Explicit knowledge is often seen as complementary to tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge, which Polanyi claims roots this explicit knowledge, is described as:

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example, that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language, ride a bicycle, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other people.

If Polanyi's position is correct, and this would be a different hypothesis to the one offered in the OP's question, then the first assumption would be false. One could not then create such a language. Furthermore, if natural language is closer to tacit knowledge then it would be stronger than any such explicit language expressing every possible context.

Of course, Polanyi's position might not be correct, but it is one to keep in mind as a position one would have to argue against if one accepted the two hypotheses mentioned above.

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Polanyi, M. (1966). The logic of tacit inference. Philosophy, 41(155), 1-18.

Wikipedia contributors. (2019, April 14). Explicit knowledge. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:20, May 25, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Explicit_knowledge&oldid=892485038

Wikipedia contributors. (2019, May 14). Tacit knowledge. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:32, May 25, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tacit_knowledge&oldid=897032930

Answer 2

There's a cardinality error in your "strong (enough for all contexts) language" project.

To wit:

The space of "all possible contexts" (I'd say all possible experiencings) has the cardinality of the continuum – aka real numbers.

The space of (finite) strings over a finite alphabet – any language including your strong language – is equipotent to the integers.

The former is a strict superset of the latter

And therefore the 2 sets are not "one-to-one-correspondence-able"

As an image:

• Imagine you are setting out to study Spanish
• And building your own English-Spanish dictionary as you go along
• That dictionary will have zillions of gaps – English words whose Spanish you yet don't know

The situation here of a context to strong language mapping is analogous.

In short your project is not "monumental"; it's impossible

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Added later

Reading this again and the ensuing exchange, I see that the word "experience" is becoming a blocker.

In that case I suggest replacing "experience" with "sense-input". Or even more rigorously: "5-tuple (vector) of sense-inputs".

Answer 3

Sense is the meaning of a word in a certain context. The ability of the human mind to even create sense at all is philosophy. Your higher language already exists. It is practised here. Language is not abused or void if people discuss existence or entities, because these senses are rooted in etymologies originating from concrete senses. Each existence means ‘ex-ist’ or ‘out of being’ thus coming from something that is. It is a consequence. If we apply your high language rules, speaking would be without consequence. Noone would be able to hear you. Your speech is existence itself. We can not mimick that in language.

Answer 4

If I had a dollar for every time someone fell into the self-referential trap of trying to debunk philosophy by engaging in philosophy...

First problem: even if you could "create a unique string for every possible context in the world", you still would not have captured every combination of words that can be used in that context. To use Wittgenstein's analogy, I could write out the rules of chess in a couple of pages, but if I do that have I written out every possible chess game? I've certainly captured the game context completely, but not the implementations. I can imagine a Big Book of Games that lists out the rules for every known game in the world, but that wouldn't even scratch the surface of the things that can be done within those contexts.

Second, you have to recognize that use-value is a subtle and cagy concept. If I place a hammer in the middle of the dinning room table at Sunday dinner, someone might find a use for it. It won't necessarily be the use the hammer was meant to fulfill — i.e., driving nails — but the tool can be used constructively for other purposes. Where you've invoked 'the meaning of life' as an example, above, you've tried to claim:

1. that 'meaning' should be understood within the context of a particular language game (invoking the particular rule: "a word is an arbitrary string denoting a particular context"), and...
2. that 'meaning' has no relevance in any other context.

But making that restriction is itself nonsensical, like saying that a king must always move one square in any direction in every game (chess, checkers, poker, Dungeons and Dragons...), otherwise it's meaningless.