There's no such thing as a stupid question, just stupid people. (To say a question is stupid would be to personify it).
Language is incredible. It is not essential for thought, although it relates to the famous philosophical conundrum, the "problem of other minds", and you are linguistically determined (sorry to break your heart).
Language reveals deep truths about how our minds work. Little kids, who are expert teleologists, say that caves were built "so that people could have shelter", and that food exists "so that we can eat", eerily echoing later Intelligent Design theories put forth by weak, religious minds, and Conspiracy Theorists.
There is no such thing as "positive" or "negative" language, nor is Maths, which deals with tautologies, syllogisms and the like a "language"...although it'd be nice if the Google-using public could 'speak' Boolean. Stop fucking up my Google results, it's in-fucking-credible.
Although you can parse them, you cannot point to a "bunch of grapes", and you cannot "feel like food". Nor is IT ever raining. And how can you be afraid of The Devil, if "Devil" does not refer to anything real? If I communicated properly with you, you'd see how impotent language really is.
If we say “The young man’s urge to defecate even while dressed in full school attire was not suppressed” it doesn’t create as bad an image as “The kid crapped all over his pants in class”. It seems we work on imagery rather than meaning (although I don't), which presents limitations on your ability to communicate, and reinforces your susceptibility to propaganda.
There is no 'purpose' to this post, although there was a mechanism as to how it appeared on this blog. Think about that. It's a shame you can't hear my mocking tone. But yeah, the feelings are mutual, I likewise don't care what you think of me, although I'd be pleasantly surprised to see somebody sharp enough to read the undertones of my posts.
My vocabulary is larger than yours, by the way, and I'm more intelligent. Objectively speaking. Because, if "All things are subjective", then so is that statement, which would make everything...Objective. I'm also cooler than you in real life. What's more, despite the supposed indeterminacy of translation, my thoughts will eventually be understood by all.
After all, even two theories can map perfectly on to each other. If two theories always predict the same thing, they are the same theory. Although one could be a series of chemical equations, and another could be a developmental theory of psychology, there must be a map from representation to reality, and back to a different representation. And so Englishmen can understand Frenchmen after all.
Koro is a mental illness in which a man thinks his penis is disappearing in to his body. There was a mass outbreak of it in Singapore in 1967.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Language is indeed a source of endless fascination to the intelligent.
(So I'm not sure why it fascinates me.)
I was reading a book about ancient Egypt the other day, in which the author insisted: You could correctly transcribe every hieroglyph on a certain papyrus roll, even write out the sentence in English -- and still have no clue to what the original author was actually thinking and what the words he wrote actually meant according to his mindset.
Hey,
Thanks for reading that far, I appreciate it!
Why're you playing down your own intelligence man, you don't seem dumb...at all! Maybe being arrogant about it like I am isn't the best idea, but don't be self-deprecating either!
I suppose often you can't truly understand, from the things that people have written, what they were actually thinking. Eg Reading some 18th century novel. But in that same sense, you also can't perfectly understand what your own grandmother is thinking from what she says/writes. Or your friends. Indeed, if you look at what you wrote in the past, you may no longer understand totally understand what YOU wrote!
But I'm not sure that this proves that there doesn't exist a map from a word, or a hieroglypth, in one language to word(s) in another language, or from Ye Old English to The Old English. Or the possibility of understanding what you once wrote.
I can see how there would be certain words/symbols, especially ones pertaining to culture and customs, which would not translate easily in to other languages, if at all.
But some books from the 15th century are very easily intelligible to modern readers, especially if they were expressed well. And if they're not, expert linguists can usually do a very very good job at tracing the evolution of the meaning of words, when we give them the time and the opportunity to do so.
So couldn't our inability to understand the thoughts of long-forgotten authors say less about the impossibility of understanding their thoughts, and more about how they originally attempted to express those thoughts?
Post a Comment