What does it mean to have meaning?

Disclaimer: The following is merely a stringing together of a group of posts from my weblog, and there is no pretension to stylistic quality. I post it merely as a convenience to those who may wish to read what has come before without clicking through the calendar. Also, I have not included comments or references to them, and this probably decreases the quality of the content herein. I will try to edit on some future, more disciplined, day.  This story includes posts from September 14, 2003 through October 3, 2003.

What does it mean to have meaning?

So, maybe I can go on and give a general description of things, as I understand them. I submit the following in all humility, knowing that it probably contains many flaws, but recognizing that getting it in writing is the first step towards uncovering the problems. Help me in that project if you wish.

My understanding of the way that the parts of the world fit together is based on the way language fits together. In language we have names, sentences, and paragraphs. We have grammar and logic, and tense. In the world, we have subjects, facts, objects, space, time, maybe other stuff.

Some of my thinking is based loosely upon Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but many Wittgenstein scholars would say the connections are very loose indeed. Unfortunately, I have misplaced my copy of the book, and the translation I prefer is out-of-print, so I cannot just go out and buy a new one. I have one on order, but I don’t have it with me today. Perhaps later I’ll go back and put the references into the following text.

Language may or may not be our fundamental mode of interpreting reality, but it is definitely philosophy’s fundamental mode, and, as such, we must connect the world to our language in some way in order to begin at all. This is an epistemological issue. What I can claim to know is limited to what I can meaningfully communicate, and that is limited by the language that I speak, and its modes of conveying meaning.

Meaning or reference in the simplest sense happens when a sentence refers to an actual fact or state of affairs in the world. Language divides into sentences. The sentence is the fundamental unit of meaning. Names or verbs do not mean anything by themselves, and there are no objects which occur by themselves. Only in the sentence do the words refer to a specific state of affairs, and only in the fact is the object discernable as a discrete entity. We encounter no solitary objects. We encounter objects in relation to each other. Or, it might be better to say, we encounter the world in all its complexity, and we pick objects out of it with names in sentences. (Names or nouns– I suspect that the word is the same in German (?) and translators of L.W. choose to translate the word as ‘name’ instead of ‘noun’. In any case I mean for them to be interchangeable here.) We refer to these sets of objects and relations (facts) with nouns in sentences.

Language is also a collection of objects-- letters, splashes of ink on paper, electric signals in the brain, light designs on the computer screen, bursts of sound-- arranged into facts. A sentence is a fact. A thought is a fact which relates events in the brain to each other. Once an object has been, via a sentence, identified, we can point to it, but not before.

Sentences in a paragraph can depict the passage of time, or the changes which objects undergo. Paragraphs can also represent more complex combinations of objects. There are no elementary objects or facts, however. [This is one place where I diverge from Wittgenstein, as I discovered in a heated discussion with a previous professor.] In a sentence, the objects named are taken as simple. Being a part of something is a possible factual relationship, requiring one object to be more complex than another, but in the sentence, the larger object is picked out as a whole, as is the part. Facts overlap and nest inside one another, as we move through the world considering things.

Some sets of facts can be arranged in a metaphorical parallel, such as thought, spoken sentence, written sentence, typed sentence, sentence sung to a melody. These are all different facts which can refer to the same state of affairs in the world. They all refer to each other, even if there is no objective state of affairs (in the world) which they represent. The possibility of this metaphorical arrangement probably suggests to us the possibility of metaphorical meanings, discussed below.

It doesn’t make sense to think about the number of objects or the number of facts, because facts and objects only occur in the relationship between a subject and the world. This does not mean that there is no objective reality, simply that there is no sense in talking about an objective reality which is in relation to no subject. There is nothing to say about it. There is no way to consider the world as it might be when it is unobserved by any subject. There is also no way to think of a subject abstracted from the world.

False sentences or sentences which refer to possible states of affairs are also meaningful. We can also make sentences with made-up names which don’t refer to any real objects. These sentences are necessarily false in the simple sense. They may have metaphorical truth.

Meta-sentences and paragraphs are possible, but they are not meaningful in the simple sense. Although they may convey some meaning from a subject to another subject, they do not refer to actual or possible facts in the world. These sentences which I am writing are meta-sentences. All theories have meanings of this sort, and this is why they can be useful for organizing our sentences into paragraphs even if they are untrue. These sentences are problematic in a way, but I’m not sure of the solution just now. Some are certainly tautological, but not all, I suspect. They may create imaginary entities (‘forces’, ‘values’, ‘meaning’, ‘truth’?) in order to organize facts or objects into a pattern which is easier to think, or something like that. That sounds pretty good for now.

Logic is different. Logic is simply a special kind of relationship between objects, which involves dyads of opposing qualities: true or false, off or on, open or closed, same or different. The last appears to be the fundamental linguistic dyad. The tautology represents sameness and the contradiction difference. These, again, are not strictly meaningful, but they are often useful, nonetheless. They are extreme cases, sort of like the zero and infinity of language.

Mathematics is a different language with its own rules, and its own way of referring to the world.

Metaphorical meaning is a way of using false sentences to refer to a truth which is difficult to convey through mere description. Fiction is a collection of false sentences which amuse or convey general truths about human psychology or behavior.

The meanings of words are established through their use in human communities. ‘Blog’ is a word which probably doesn’t appear in any dictionary yet, and which hasn’t been in use for very long, but its meaning is quite definite. Words arise through the creativity of the speakers of a language. Meanings of words also change through use. The word ‘minute’ is undergoing such a change now: in reference to time, it used to always mean a sixtieth of an hour; it is now also beginning to mean ‘a few weeks’.

Inductive reasoning is our most powerful tool for gaining information about the world, and it is fallible. All of our knowledge, vast as it is, is never certain, and it never acquires real objectivity. It is also limited by our methods of interacting with the world and by the structure of our language. Nothing beyond the limits can be properly ‘known’ or described. In some cases, the line denoting the limit can be clearly drawn. (That was a metaphorical sentence.) Doing this is important to understanding the nature of the self, or other people and sentient beings, and of God, or anyone else who inhabits the realms beyond the reach of simple linguistic description. And I’ll get into that tangle of thought when next I write.

Consider what I said above about metaphorical parallels:

"Some sets of facts can be arranged in a metaphorical parallel, such as thought, spoken sentence, written sentence, typed sentence, sentence sung to a melody. These are all different facts which can refer to the same state of affairs in the world. They all refer to each other, even if there is no objective state of affairs (in the world) which they represent."

Wittgenstein believed that the power to see, grasp, understand the connection between these sets of facts is the defining action of the self. The self recognizes a "logical form" which is shared, primarily, by facts and the sentences which refer to them, and secondarily by all of the various facts which reflect the same form as the sentence. Analysis of this form through symbolic logic reveals, however, that it has no content. The analysis always reveals a tautology. When he traces down the "general form of proposition", it turns out to be the trivial: "Such and such is the case". One way to say this might be that the primary function of the language-using self is to recognize sameness. Those of you who understand binary code might see this more easily than the rest of us. As I understand it, however, all of the computer functions which gets this message from me to all of you reduces to signals of "off" and "on" transmitted through electrical lines. Comparisons of facts, and the recognition of sameness and difference between them, is the foundation of language.

There is a problem here, however, because we do not ordinarily think of the typed sentence as meaning the thought in my head. We think of it as meaning the state of affairs in the world. Consider a simple descriptive sentence in order to grasp this point: The dog is sleeping under the desk. The same relation holds between the thought when I have it and the sentence which I have typed as holds between the sentence and the dog, desk, and the act of sleeping. But we think of one correspondence as meaning and not the other. For there to be a difference here, there must be more to one relation than to the other. But what?

One quick thought.

What it is, I think, is that in events which have meaning, or relations between potentially meaningful facts have meaning only if a subject is involved. It is the subject which relates the fact of the sentence to the fact in the world. It is important not to get stuck in the difficulties which come from thinking of thoughts as some kind of special event, here-- the mind-body problem is a quagmire as deep as Iraq. But there is a special role played here by a subject. I wrote yesterday that:

"Wittgenstein believed that the power to see, grasp, understand the connection between these sets of facts is the defining action of the self. The self recognizes a 'logical form' which is shared, primarily, by facts and the sentences which refer to them, and secondarily by all of the various facts which reflect the same form as the sentence."

I think today that 'defining action' may be going too far, although the ability to recognize sameness and difference certainly is central to the action of a subject. And today I want to say that meaning depends upon the action of a subject, either as originator of the meaningful sentence or as interpreter of a sentence in 'writing' somewhere. This may sound trivial, but really, having evidence that there is some role for a person beyond generating biochemical events based on sensation is necessary unless we want to abandon our ordinary ways of thinking about ourselves altogether. This recognition of similarity may not be much, but, in a materialist world, it may also be all that is left of a soul, and the freedom which we associate with it.

A little about falsehood.

To think for a minute about different ways that a sentence can be false:

1) It can be the negation of a true sentence, that is, a sentence which accurately describes a state of affairs. 'The dog is sleeping under the table' is true; 'the dog is not sleeping under the table' is therefore false.

2) It can be another sentence which means the same as the negation of the true sentence, or which implies the negation of the true sentence: 'the dog is playing in the back yard' is false.

3) It can include a name with no reference: 'the jabberwock is sleeping under the table', or other imaginary elements: 'the ship's captain was beamed down to earth from the orbiting spacecraft'.

4) It can inaccurately describe facts from the past, or entail the negation of facts from the past: 'Saddam Hussein was involved in planning the destruction of the World Trade Center' and 'Elvis lives!' are both false.

Some sentences are inherently unverifiable, such as concrete assertions about the future and assertions about the past which we have no way of checking. These are not exactly false, but they aren't exactly true, either.

I'll see if I can think of any others by the weekend, and then we can look at the ways that we can make false sentences true through metaphor, and we'll try to characterize the sentences in theories and definitions. I'm trying really hard not to get bogged down, here, but I believe these are important issues, really.

Laws of science, and other generalizations.

We have to talk about generalizations. These are sentences which say something about all members of the class of objects which are typically picked out by a name ("All dogs chase cats", "Parallel lines never intersect", "Every event has a prior cause"). There is no question of calling them meaningful in the simple sense. Simple descriptive meaning requires a direct connection between a subject and a fact, and no subject can have that connection with all of the facts which are described by these sentences. In science, we admit a community of subjects who are pledged to report their observations truthfully, but even they can never observe all instances of a law being followed in nature. They can simply observe more instances, which increases the probability of the generalized description, but never makes it certain. (In cases in which the connection is in fact possible, the generalization is so limited that it wouldn’t lead to any trouble, anyway: "All of my children are female" is both meaningful, and, when I say it, true, "All of my cats are female" is meaningful and false.) Some of these generalizations are definitions and tautologies: "All molecules are composed of atoms". These are not problematic; they simply indicate the correct ways to use our words in descriptions. But what about all of those other generalizations? Some of them are quite important to our daily functioning. What kind of meaning, and what kind of truth can they have?

Perhaps they aspire to become tautologies, but, because the only proof for them is through inductive reasoning, they can never quite lay claim to that distinction. Even generalizations which are not in discord with any observed facts for several centuries, such as Newton’s laws of motion, can still be disproved eventually. Our methods of observation may have had to evolve and the extremes of motion may have to be considered before the ‘laws’ fail to work, but the generalization fails none the less. And when a revised statement of the law is generated, ruling out the circumstances under which the law does not hold, then the scope of the generalization has been reduced to the cases which actually have been observed by a community of subjects.

This is why verification is a good rule for limiting the number of generalizations which we will admit to our scientific store. Unless the generalization can be tested in some way– unless there is some conceivable observation which could disprove it– there is no sense in taking it as meaningful, as either true or false. I’m having trouble coming up with an example of this just now, but I take it that most of you are better versed in science than I in any case, so I assume you know what I mean.

One popular example of a ‘truth’ which has been established by inductive reason is "The sun will rise tomorrow". We all know, however, that a tomorrow will come, perhaps not until the sun explodes, but eventually, when this statement will be disproved. And, given the things that we try to do with our knowledge these days, consideration of the extreme cases is certainly necessary. This does not mean that in our ordinary day-to-day conversations we cannot treat these statements as ‘true’ in a pragmatic sense. I said early on that ‘meta-sentences’ can be useful even if they are false. Newton’s laws are useful, even though we know that they don’t hold up under extreme cases and therefore are not strictly true. Euclidean geometry is useful in architecture, if not in calculating the positions of distant galaxies. There is nothing shocking in the observation that these laws are false. What could be shocking to us would be the discovery that some of the laws which we take for granted, and which have seen no counterexamples so far, were not universal. Again my imagination fails me in looking for an example. At least for today.

Are the sentences which I write here generalizations or tautologies? Can we make attempts at writing tautologies which may not work to define the processes under consideration? Have I gotten too far away form the central question about lying? Who really cares?

Alas, it is my misfortune, or perhaps my character weakness, to really care. Sorry I still haven’t gotten to metaphor, as promised. But really, I’m thinking as fast as I can, here.

Oops. Caught a mistake. This claim, from my post on generalizations, below: "when a revised statement of the law is generated, ruling out the circumstances under which the law does not hold, then the scope of the generalization has been reduced to the cases which actually have been observed by a community of subjects" is not right. The complete set of instances still hasn't been observed by the community, in most cases, even after the counter-examples have been. Further revision may, therefore, be necessary.

The big question is, of course, if all of these things are not meaningful in the simple sense, then why the hell do we seem to understand and accept them so readily? So far, I've determined that all of the following are challenged in the department of meaningfulness: (1) most generalizations which are not tautologies, including scientific laws, (2) assertions about the future, (3) unverifiable assertions about the past, and (4) any statements which try to reach beyond the limitations of our methods of interacting with the world and the structure of our language. And here are several kinds of sentences which are false. It appears to be no surprise that I am an atheist. I hardly believe in anything!

Pragmatism, based on mathematical probability, as I've noted somewhere, fills in a lot of the gaps. Many of our generalizations are useful even after we have decided to limit the scope of their applicability. These constitute the bulk of our scientific knowledge. Generalizations also constitute the totality of our stereotyping, prejudices, and other kinds of dangerous pseudo-science so we should continue to treat them all with the greatest caution. Generalizations appear to be comprehensible because they mimic the form of tautologies. By taking the structure of a sentence with a real meaning, they allow us to communicate between ourselves without actually depending upon a reference to the world.

Beginning metaphor, at last.

I believe I have probably been putting off the writing about metaphor, because I really needed to do some more thinking about it first. I believe I might be ready to start now. So here goes.

Even though the events of the body, in the body, the human body, are factual, there is a distinction to be drawn between facts of the body and facts of the outside world. The facts in the world, we’ll call them public facts, are observable and describable by more than one person. The facts of the body– call them private– are perceived and described by one person, then communicated (or not) to the second, and others. I believe this distinction has led to a difference in the language that we use for public and private facts. A cat, for example, is a public object with a name, which we teach to our children by saying cat when the cat comes around, and eventually by working it into sentences. A pain, or hurt, is a different matter. We see our child do something that we think should hurt, and we ask "Does it hurt?". We guess at their inner condition in order to name it for them.

Because there is always this guessing about what is going on with another person, the language which has developed to describe private facts is less determinate than that we use for the public events of the world. We do a certain amount of guessing in ascribing feelings to ourselves, as a result. This indeterminancy extends from physical feelings like pain or warmth to emotions or feelings (which are always partly physical, as well) to moods and some of what we might call our ‘spiritual’ experience.

Consider for a moment the words for feelings and what they try to do. Consider anger. This one small word can encompass a range of facts which might include all of the following: a rising heart rate, a feeling of nausea or a tightening of the stomach muscles, a tightening of other muscles in the fight or flight reaction, a mental sensation which we call ‘rage’, a desire to do violence to persons or things, a desire for revenge for the pain that triggered the anger, maybe some tearfulness or tears held back, and so on. The feeling words often seem inadequate to encompass all of this, and therefore we bring poetry to the task. We use words in novel ways in order to more fully capture the complete event, and we may pay attention to the similarities between the feeling and public events as well as using the words for their sounds, rhythms, etymologies and connotations in addition to their meanings. We might bend or break the ordinary rules of sentence construction. We might set the words to music which tries to evoke the feelings which should accompany the ideas. We might use graphic presentation to give the words more impact or a different impact. All of these techniques expand the meanings of language by breaking the rules of ordinary meaning, or by adding more to the sentence than the mere words and grammar. Metaphor is one of the most powerful weapons in this armory, but it is by no means the only one, and it is rarely used in isolation from the others.

All of this enrichment of language is fine and good and aesthetically pleasing and even useful, but we can confuse ourselves if we allow ourselves to forget that it is going on when we try to produce logical and scientific descriptions of the world.

I'm going to stop here today, but Scott Rosenberg just posted this link to a blog entry which demonstrates the use of metaphor in computer programming very well. Geoff Cohen points out that programming is really "designing a series of electrical charges and impulses to act in concert, manipulating other charges that, in turn, stand for the abstraction of numbers, or further layered abstractions of other functions or locations", but the language for describing this gets strained, so we resort to metaphor to aid our understanding and communication.

Approaching the unknowable.

In the world, there are at least four regions of knowledge to which our access is strained, in the way that our access to the private experiences of the body are. Our own emotions and other inner workings are difficult to describe. The interior experience of others must be guessed at (especially since many of them are capable of lying, so even their descriptions of themselves are never 100% dependable). Whatever 'reality' there may be in objects which lies beyond our perceptions of them is quite absolutely unknowable. (I'll say a little more about this today.) And there are questions about the origins of things, the purpose of things, the totality of things which surpass the limits of our ability to know. If there is a God, she inhabits that realm. When faced with the task of discussing any of these four regions, we usually resort to poetry of the kind that I described in my last entry.

Notice that when we try to describe sub-atomic particles, we are already resorting to poetry to explain our observations. (Forgive me for not doing the research before writing this, but I'll correct any errors when I have more time.) The problem that we encounter with the subatomic particles which are directed through two slots and detected on the other side is not that we don't know what we are observing, but that we don't have words which are appropriate to describe the observations. 'Wave' is one metaphor for the subatomic stuff and 'particle' is another, and neither of them works fully to account for the data of the observation. When face with the tasks of distinguishing quarks from each other, the scientists realized that it didn't matter what words they attached to the various qualities: it could be traditional scientific terminology like 'positive' and 'negative', or fanciful words like 'charmed' and 'uncharmed'-- any words would do the job equally well because the observations corresponded to no previously named facts. Read about our metaphors for electricity in computers in the previous entry.

Unknowables and analogies.

Did I say four regions where language gets strained? Okay, then, let’s try to work with that.

We have (1) inside the body (my body), (2) inside the objects (or beyond the reach of our observational tools), (3) inside other people, and (4) out there near the origins and teloi of things, where ultimate meanings reside. Our sentences depend upon analogy and metaphor and other poetic devices in order to meaningfully describe these regions, by necessity. Meaning is here understood as the connection between the sentence and either the subject with whom it originates or the subject who comprehends it. Neither of those subjects, nor any other human subject, has the kind of direct public access to these four regions which enables us to create meaningful descriptions of them, in the simple sense. Anything meaningful which is said about these regions, is therefore meaningful in some other sense of the word. This is what we must try to understand.

As I have suggested earlier, simple meaning in language is fundamentally a function of analogy. The subject recognizes when things are the same or they are different. The arrangement of words in the sentence is recognized as a analog to an arrangement of things in the world. We also know when the use of common words is appropriate through analogy. This is an old joke between my husband and I, because when I first met him I had been immersed in these matters for about the four previous years. He has very little background in philosophy, and he thought it was cute that I was interested in tautologies. Then I told him to start looking for them, because people use them absolutely all the time in ordinary speech, most commonly in the form of "A is exactly like B, except for the ways in which it is different". We still laugh when we hear someone say something like this, because it is, after all, a completely meaningless sentence. It is the basis for our use of words, however– My neighbor’s dog is exactly like my dog, except he’s a different breed and he has different colored fur and eyes. The similarity is, however, enough that we can call both of them dogs. The objects to which a name refers, as Wittgenstein showed in his later writings, do not always have some distinct set of qualities in common– rather they reflect a ‘family resemblance’ to each other. This resemblance is built up by lots of individual instances of some person thinking to themselves, "This is just like that, except in the ways that it is different. I suppose I can use the same name for it." Imagine going to a new website for the first time. Is it a weblog or a web page? How do you know?

Still drifting around the subject..

I’m feeling a little stuck here, so I’m going to drift for a while and see where that gets me.

Most of these ideas that I record here developed out of my attempts to explain Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to myself. Many of my ideas turn out to be rather different from those that L.W. put forth in his book, but the bones are the same: the picture theory of language, the limits to the scope of language, logic as the (meaningless) form of representation, etc. Anyway, I had misplaced my copy of the book, sometime in the last four years or so, and since my stuff is mostly in boxes for a home renovation project, I decided to buy a new one instead of trying to figure out where I packed the old one. And then I discovered that the translation I prefer has gone out of print. So I ordered a used copy, and it finally came this week.

Now that I have this book, I’m glad I didn’t have it when I started writing all of this down. I believe that I’ve allowed myself to diverge farther than I would have if I had the book in front of me the whole time. Now I’m going to point out one of those places I’ve diverged.

L.W. says, at 3.323- 3.325 that the main source of confusion in everyday language is that we use the same words to mean different things and we sometimes use different words to refer to an identical thing. He believes that the development of an ideal logical symbolism will help philosophers by eliminating these areas of ambiguity or confusion about the reference of words.

What I am believing is that the problems come from not recognizing when we are using poetic language. This is not an entirely original thought, mind you. Without actually showing the self-discipline to track down the references, I believe that I can safely say that a lot of Derrida’s early work was a critique of the priority that we tend to give to the metaphor of speech in our philosophies of language. He exposes and undermines that metaphor by looking at textual treatments of the opposing metaphor of writing throughout history. Because speech is connected to notions of spirit and writing to more material things, the whole exercise is simultaneously a (devastating) critique of metaphysics as a whole.

Wittgenstein actually doesn’t prioritize speech, and his linguistic theory is more sophisticated than the one Derrida depended upon (Saussure’s), but he errs (in the Tractatus) by believing that, well, that the substance of the world is immutable, I guess. (He developed most of the ideas for this book while serving in the Austrian army in WWI.) He says: "Objects [by ‘objects’, here, he means something like sub-atomic particles] form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound. If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false)."

He is right in that the (by now well-established) mutability of substance makes it impossible to generate a permanent picture of the world. Fortunately most ‘matter’ is stable enough that our temporary pictures are entirely adequate for practical science. It is not stable enough, however, for him to accomplish what he wanted: a symbolism which would reveal the permanent structure of the world by stripping away everything that is changeable in language, in order to show those points where language and reality meet up, as it were. In fact, the points where language and reality meet up change over time, so that the meaning of our sentences actually is relative to those other sentences which show the correct ways to use the words, rather than being relative to the world to which the sentences refer. Wittgenstein tackles this and related problems in his later works, but he never puts his ideas into systematic form again (never publishes another book, in fact– all of his later writings were published posthumously).

So. The picture theory of meaning cannot show us the permanent structure of the world, but it does suffice to give us science and all of the technological benefits thereof. The question remains: where does this leave philosophy? If philosophy looks for immutable truths and final meanings, isn’t it screwed? Or, as MacIntyre asserts, is it merely historical? Probably it is historical (as, in fact, science too has turned out to be). If so, our present philosophy suffers from a lack of ethical theory, and it seems worthwhile to try to address this before we destroy ourselves through our bad behavior. Whether or not ethics is also regional is a question which gets debated in the newspaper columns and weblogs today, if you haven’t noticed.

The last word on metaphor (at least for now).

Are there rules for meaningfulness in metaphors? We laugh at mixed metaphors, and groan at really bad ones, but in drawing comparisons, anything is probably fair, is it not? What about truth? In a strict sense, no metaphor is true, because it says that thing A is something that it most assuredly is not: thing B. In a human sense, however, a metaphor may seem to be more true than a scientific description. Metaphor can also make difficult notions easier to understand, or easier to remember. In this role, they also facilitate communication or teaching. There is a lot that is good about poetic language. So how does it get us into trouble, philosophically?

One problem is that metaphors can be interpreted in different ways– the message is less controlled than the scientific description’s message. For example, what is the story of Adam and Eve about? Recently, Real Live Preacher wrote a story describing a child’s discovery of evil in the world, and comparing this to the eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil– a loss of innocence kind of thing. But maybe the Garden of Eden story is about how human beings would rather have freedom and knowledge than to live in paradise, about the innate human desire to rebel against restrictions, to try to become their own Gods. Or maybe it is about the essential sinfulness of women, the need to keep them under control so that they don’t trick men into bringing even more hardship and evil into the world. Or maybe it is about the original sin of all human beings, about how we are all born sinful and will die deserving punishment unless we seek the salvation of Jesus Christ (and therefore unbaptized babies are in serious trouble if they die). What does that tree really stand for? And, if we can’t settle on one interpretation, how can we call any of them true?

Another problem is that metaphors sneak into our ordinary language without us paying much attention to them, and this is not a problem, unless we begin to use those metaphors unwittingly in our philosophical discourses. Consider, for example, the word ‘spirit’. As best as I can figure it, this word came into English through the Vulgate translation of the Bible, which used the Latin spiritus to translate the Greek word pneuma. This is a good translation– both words mean ‘breath’. When the Bible was translated from Latin into English, however, instead of translating spiritus back to ‘breath’, the translators created the English word ‘spirit’. (Note that Greek has another word which translates as air– the Greek element which Aristotle groups with earth, water and fire to make the four elements. Pneuma is distinctive– it is the breath which enters and leaves our bodies, and the wind, which, presumably, is the breath of the gods [or perhaps merely like the breath of gods].)

Now, what do you think was going on here? Did the ancients believe that the soul of Man was equivalent to his breath, not knowing that breath was actually composed of gases, and when a person stopped breathing it was due to the soul’s departure of the body for other realms? Or did they merely believe that the soul was like the breath, partly because the soul departs at the same time as the breath? We may never know. If it was meant literally, however, that meaning has been lost over time, as the word ‘spirit’ gets used in all kinds of ways that the word ‘breath’ never would have been. Look at the top of my page for one example.

Don’t get me wrong– I like this metaphor a lot. I think that respiration is as good a sign of life as any other, and life is, as Madonna says, a mystery. In fact, a lot of philosophical confusion might have been avoided if the word ‘spirit’ had never been coined in English. People try to make it into some sort of special reality, these days, which is important yet indescribable, everywhere but undetectable (except by the initiated), and so on. Breath is a much more manageable concept.

I think I’ve strayed from the point however. The point is that this word, ‘spirit’, was originally meant to be either a literal description or a metaphor– and now it is treated as neither. We certainly don’t use it as another word for ‘breath’, and we do not think of it as a metaphor. We take it as a new name for another kind of entity altogether. This seduces us into thinking that we can discuss it in the same way that we can discuss cats and dogs and dinner plates, when, actually, it might be the sort of thing which we can only discuss through metaphor, because our language cannot appropriately reach up to it.

And that’s a thought about metaphors that I can stand behind, finally. If we’re going to use them in philosophy, we must be careful not to let ourselves be tricked by them. There may be aspects of the world which cannot be appropriately described by the language of descriptive science, and we may resort to metaphor when we want to try to talk about these things, but we should never let ourselves forget that we are merely gesturing towards something which cannot be properly named– our language never amounts to an accurate description of those unknowable regions.

So, what do we experience after death? You may say heaven or hell, and they may say reincarnation, and another one may say nothing at all, but these are all poetic answers to the question, and there is no answer at all in science– "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" [Tractatus, 7].

Feelings, other people, psychology, the subject.

I’ve said earlier that our language for describing our inner states is less determinate than that we use to describe the public world. Here are some other thoughts along that line.

In group therapy for addicts, a common practice is to give the patients a list of "feeling words" and ask them to describe their feelings: emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, and sometimes socially. Most groups begin with this exercise every day they meet. Addicts find this challenging. Using drugs has kept them out of touch with their real feelings for so long that they typically have no idea how to connect words to their inner states at first. Some therapists, to make it easier on them, reduce the word list to a few key categories: mad, sad, glad, guilty, ashamed, afraid, lonely– and just ignore any subtleties. In spite of the difficulty which people have with talking about their feelings, however, we find that everyone is remarkably similar on this level.

Often, after a first visit to a psychiatrist or therapist, people get the feeling that the therapist labeled them too quickly, or didn’t know enough about them yet to determine what kind of medicine to try, or something similar. And certainly diagnosis is a skill which has to be learned through a great deal of study, but, actually, there just isn’t all that much variation between people. The major psychiatric diagnoses (of which there are only 5 or 6), stand out because they are incapacitating in predictable ways. And the personality disorders (I believe there are 12 to 15 of these in the current book) have distinctive markers as well. In sum, we are not nearly as unique as we think we are. Unique, yes, but in fewer ways than we imagine.

It is partly because of this similarity among people that psychology as a scientific discipline is possible. Given the indeterminateness of their self-reports, it takes a high degree of similarity among people to produce enough statistically significant data upon which to generalize about human personalities. If we were really as unique as we feel ourselves to be, there would be no scientific descriptions of us as a group. Still, the percentages with which psychologists work, in their inductive studies, are far lower than those which a physicist demands. It is that higher margin of uncertainty which is captured in the poets’ descriptions of us, but not in the scientists’.

Our study of psychology and physical feelings is also helped along quite a bit by the fact that we know, through operations on cadavers, and other non-introspective methods, quite a lot about the inner workings of our bodies. We know that we can generalize from one body to another. Thus, there is a difference between our knowledge of the public world and the private one, but we still have considerable knowledge of the inner world.

This saves us from solipsism. In fact, the indeterminateness in our descriptions of others is similar to the indeterminateness with which we must describe ourselves. And the mystery of their point of view is no more mysterious than the mystery of our own point of view. We stand on almost as secure ground with respect to others, that is, as we do with respect to ourselves, in terms of knowledge. Wittgenstein discusses this in an often quoted passage:

He then provides his way of accounting for this: "The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world." (5.632)

Finding the limits.

The next subject is a little difficult, which probably just means that I don’t know enough about what I’m saying to render it into easily understood prose. But, whatever. We have to get over the hurdle of limits in order to get to an understanding of the subject and ethics from here.

The key phrase here is "the conditions for the possibility of meaning in language", which is a descendant from "the conditions for the possibility of knowledge". This is a variant of a project which Kant undertook in The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant looked for the conditions under which knowledge was possible so that he could distinguish the realm of knowledge from the realm of faith. Actually, now that I look at it on the screen, it appears that what we might really need here are the conditions for the possibility of truth in language, rather than for meaning. Wittgenstein didn’t see the problem this way, but that is because he didn’t allow for any meaningful sentences which were not either true or the converse of a true sentence. We have discussed the ways that metaphorical sentences can be meaningful and false, but these don’t have a true converse paired with them. Sentences which contain the name of an imaginary object ("The troll sleeps under the bridge") are also meaningful and false, and their converses ("The troll doesn’t sleep under the bridge") are too. So the sentences which describe the known world must be all of the true sentences, and not, as Wittgenstein believed, all of the meaningful sentences. Wittgenstein delegated a lot of what we say to the realm of nonsense, which led to a lot of trouble for ethicists for a little while, and which led a great many people (the logical positivists) to misunderstand him badly (and infuriate him). We’ll try to avoid that trap.

The key thing to notice at this point is that there are certain operations that every ordinary human being can do without any thought at all. These are simply obvious things to anyone who has the pertinent information. One is the recognition of the true sentence in a pair of converses which describe a present fact. If I ask my husband, "Is it true that you have the magazine we received in the mail today?", he doesn’t have to do any reasoning or thinking of any kind in order to determine the answer. It is simply observed, perceived. I am writing in the library, my daughter is reading in her bedroom, and my husband is eating a sandwich at the dining room table. All true. The dog is outside and the cats are inside. Both false, unless one of the cats has slipped in without my knowing.

Another operation which is instantaneous in the same way is the recognition of sameness and difference. It can take longer than an instant to solve one of those puzzles we give children where there are six drawings and only two of them are identical, but that is only because we have to compare so many pairs of drawings in order to find the correct pair. There is no confusion over what conditions we are looking for. Identity isn’t something we reason to, it is something we simply see. It is there or it is not.

Identity and truth are not simple qualities or relations, either. We must be able to recognize these before we can pick out anything that is a quality or a relation. They are logically prior to all factual assertions– a fact requires that things be differentiated from each other while in a relationship. A fact must be a definite state of affairs, one that can be truly described, no objects which flicker in and out of existence, or which occupy more than one position at a time. These are also not synthetic a priori statements of the kind which Kant sought. To put any statement about identity into a sentence generates a tautology: I am what I am. And to say "proposition ‘a’ is true" is to say no more than "a". (If I say, "It’s true that I like Diet Coke", I’m saying the same thing as "I like Diet Coke".) They are a priori, and they encompass an operation of the human subject, but there is no synthesis involved– just truth and identity, matching things which are the same, not relating things which are different.

Let x = x.

To say that identity is a necessary condition of making true statements is to say that, before we can say anything true, objects must be nameable. In order to support a name, an object must have an identity, identity with itself, or, in other words, it must have what we call existence. It must be something that we can name, that will be there with its name, that will be.

Wittgenstein says, in one of the most cryptic passages in the (fairly cryptic) book:

The same condition hold for us as the subject– we must persist, exist, in order to recognize the existence of those things that we name. This is no existence independent of our perception of things, however. It is simply what is required of a thing before we can properly perceive it.

The "knowledge" that we have of identity, or of what we call existence, is of a fundamentally different kind than that which we have of the facts of the world. Sometime it appears that Wittgenstein is trying to elevate the study of logical tautologies to a mystical appreciation of Being, and this might be the case. ("Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is," he says near the end of the book. We’ll get to that soon. [6.44]) In any case, he assigns a different word to our apprehension of this identity: it shows itself, and there is nothing which can be said about it. When we try to make sentences about our apprehension of identity, we generate tautologies, which are meaningless. Anything that can be truly said cannot be a tautology– it must be a well-formed sentence or proposition.

In some ways, I believe, this is probably similar to Heidegger’s notion of ontological difference, that the Being of beings is not itself a being, and therefore cannot be described in the same ways that we describe ordinary beings. And there is no doubt that Heidegger saw something transcendent in his Being, although it probably still falls short of any normal theism (negative theology, maybe, but that’s not normal). If I knew Heidegger’s work better, I might say it is the same notion, but I do not. If it is, I doubt that Heidegger arrived at it in quite the same way (although he worked from a Kantian base, too, I believe. Any closet Heiddeggarians out there?).

The monkeys might shoot the fish.

Some great mixed metaphors arrived in my e-mail this morning, courtesy of the monthly Dilbert Newsletter. I couldn't find any copyright notifications, but if I'm violating the law by publishing this, I'll cheerfully take it down or put up a notice of who holds the copyright (Likely Scott Adams, if there is one).

From the Dilbert Newsletter:

"Observant DNRC [Dogbert's New Ruling Class] members continue to send me true quotes of
Induhviduals. After staring at the list for a while I realized that if
I put them together they make an excellent story:

Excellent Story:

We were sitting on our hands, twiddling our thumbs, when suddenly the
door opened. It made the hair on my back stand on end. He was smoking
like a fish and swearing like a stuck pig. I could tell from his shifty
eyes that he might try to pull the fox over my leg.

"Do you have a pen?" he asked. "I need to make a mental note."

I didn't want him to stick my pen into his ear, but I also didn't think
it would be a good idea to rattle the barrel because the monkeys might
shoot the fish. So I offered my pen.

"Do you seriously think I came up the river on a banana tree?" he
growled before slapping the pen from my hand.

I wanted to fight him, but I already had too many hands in the fire.
Still, you have to kill the stone with the bird while you can. He was
slow as Moses. I kicked him where the moon don't shine. I didn't want to
beat a dead bush, so I waited for his next move. The ball was in his
camp now. He didn't look like he had both oars in his basket, but maybe I
was trying too hard to read between the tea leaves.

The End"

Back to the Enlightenment Project.

In response to my comments on "Let x = x": I see that I've not given enough history of epistemology along the way, here. So now, it's back to the Enlightenment we go.

Here's a brief explanation from The Philosophy Pages:

"Kant's aim was to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalists had tried to show that we can understand the world by careful use of reason; this guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge but leaves serious questions about its practical content. The empiricists, on the other hand, had argued that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience; practical content is thus secured, but it turns out that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken assumption.

Progress in philosophy, according to Kant, requires that we frame the epistemological problem in an entirely different way. The crucial question is not how we can bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood by us. Instead of trying, by reason or experience, to make our concepts match the nature of objects, Kant held, we must allow the structure of our concepts shape our experience of objects."

This can be a difficult thought to get one's brain around, because we are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the passive recipients of information from the world. Kant was disturbed because David Hume, empiricist par exellence, had demonstrated that if one uses empirical presuppositions, the law of causality cannot be proven. Scientific discoveries based on inductive reasoning were thereby demonstrated to be less than certain knowledge. Kant believed that there must be another way, so he turned the epistemological project inside out (common philosophical parlance calls this his 'Copernican Revolution'). His approach was to try to determine what knowledge is possible based upon the structure of human reason. Our approach herein has been similar, except we have been looking at the structure of language rather than thought, because it is more easily nailed down (so to speak).

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