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By Wellsy
#15089087
What is the relationship between language and reality?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03p.htm
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.

[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/what-is-a-subject/[/url]
In his analysis, he describes the ego as a linguistic construction – just as we assume that an activity must have an actor, we assume that thinking must be done by a subject. A closer analysis shows that this is not the case, since thoughts are not produced “at will” – when a thought comes to one’s mind, who is the actor? We get confused about who we are, because we use language as if it were reality, and since we operate as masters within speech, we automatically assume that the ability to speak about reality also gives us the power to shape and transform this reality. But reality is not synonymous with language.
The reason for this confusion lies in the symbolic nature of the human subject. Language consists of a system of signifiers, and signifiers are a special class of non-natural signs. For them, the relation between the sign and what it signifies is not naturally determined; therefore signifiers can represent anything, even the void itself. Once humans begin to express themselves within language, by giving names to objects, or representing themselves within language through the pronoun “I,” a symbolic world of inner experience has been created. Symbols and signifiers that express the subject in relation to its environment are the materials that create meaning for us. The reality in which subjectivity constitutes itself is random and opaque; but the human being is a creature who is driven by this instinct to generate meaning, just like birds build nests. Everything that enters our lives becomes the material by which we create meaning and identity when it is translated into language. This meaning can range from mythologies, religions, philosophies and ideologies, to sophisticated scientific world-views. The events that form our lives are oftentimes trivial, random, or ugly, but they initialize our existence and make life real, not just a thought process. We begin to free ourselves from the randomness of these events by ritualizing them, repeating them, or assigning a meaning to them that originates in our needs rather than in reality itself. The constitution of subjectivity itself can be compared to the creation of a language. Signs become symbols when people use them in order to create their own definitions of what things are. Language, therefore, does not primarily describe reality for us; it mainly carries a system of order that originates in the human need to organize the world according to our needs.
A language cannot be created at will; a context of interpretation has to exist prior to the creation of any language. This implies that there is a dimensional shift, a gap between reality and language. Neither language nor the subject emerges continuously from reality; each comes into existence as a discontinuity. Once it exists, it transforms the reality within which it exists forever, because it creates new systems of signification which are themselves real. The human being is random, contingent, and nevertheless absolute. It bridges the gap between the symbolic order and the real: As ego it is an object of language, and at the same time it is the subject that speaks, the animal capable of language, and therefore caught up in a process of meaning-making. Language creates reality, but it is also a symbolic space that tries to mirror and describe “real” reality, that which lies outside the human mind. This duplication causes the confusion that has haunted our thinking for millennia, and has caused all kinds of philosophical errors.
By late
#15089380
" The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy” – a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too “literary,” they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach."
Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm

Rorty is a fave of mine. He did brilliant work in a number of areas. He's also a transitional figure, he's the Moses of philosophy. He's the guy that pointed the way towards a new type of philosophy.

You can find that new era with Ronald N Giere. I am sure there are others, but he's the last philosophy I read.

Giere is one of the scientists who wanted to do philosophy of science, right after they ditched nearly all of traditional philosophy.

There are a number of guys that are also worth a look. Like Derrida:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/

He's one of the French language guys. I found their work infuriating at first, but eventually realised they had a point, even if it needed to be constrained a bit.

Marshall McLuhan isn't a philosopher. But I feel his thinking on the effects of technology on communication provide a person with an intellectual grounding that's a little firmer, and broader. Face it, this area of thinking is a thorny pain in the ass. I don't know about you, but I need all the help I can get.
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By Wellsy
#15091549
@late I think the reason I raise the topic as thorny and ineducated I am is the felt outlines I have about the oddity of language for some lines of thought. Like how it creates dualities where as reality is a oneness, how it does more than describe what exists (being) but can express what what doesn’t exist/nothingness and we create works that express more than descriptive detail. The amazing power in communication itself where based in certain relations I can tell someone to do something with a felt legitimacy. And I’ve been thinking a bit along the lines of how what is true is derived from reality but language necessarily splits us from reality but it is also the means for our extensive knowledge as opposed to eidetic thinking like primitive persons, we abstract things. But we are also prone to all sorts of illusions and fetishes because of language can be mistaken for reality quite easily. We don’t have open eyes for what is.

It is very concerning because of ideological inclinations I believe. But I quite enjoy the sort of anti philosophical position that there can’t be a perfect language in a positivist sense to clarify truth and reality, the clarity of language doesn’t overcome the impasse between language and reality. This is found with wittgenstein, buddhism, and I suspect with Lacanian Psychoanalysis. This doesn’t foreclose knwoledge in a postmodern extreme of practixally only wxaminine language/texts and making it all powerful despite the materialist intuition that reality has a tendency to resist thought and gives feedback that breaks through illusions at time that can’t be ignored.
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By Wellsy
#15101061
The relationship between language and reality also seems to be pivotal in trying to develop a concept of concepts. Where some literally treat concepts as a mere name for objects although there have been some improvements upon this.
Also gets into epistemology where we are not independent of a socialized nature, we grow in a social world of language and activity.

The nature if trauma is interesting here where there is a tendency for cognitivism or anticignutivism. Where some people write in order to. Work through their trauma but there is a clear lacking in how well language can describe the actual experience.
And with trauma is also an interesting sense of temporality in which one is stuck in past experiences as if they’re present (flashbacks). This occurs with grief even where a person has to work through the past sense of reality to a new one that sub lates there old self. Because ones sense of the world is shattered by trauma, how it seemed symbolically ordered is impossible and must adjust.
A consequence of entering language is that we lose direct and immediate connection to reality, it is mediated by abstract language.

Which raises issues on how to accurately reflect reality in language.
#15101070
Wellsy wrote:A consequence of entering language is that we lose direct and immediate connection to reality, it is mediated by abstract language.

Which raises issues on how to accurately reflect reality in language.


As language/human conceptualization develops it becomes separate from reality. The further it grows from reality the less it is a truthful representation of reality. It's like the original religious inspiration that grows into the dead shell of the religious organisation that is more concerned with politics than with the original inspiration of the founder.

Thus, language/conceptualization that's alienated from reality is a dead shell without life that'll grow into an abstract monster until it collapses to be replaced by something else. But the reality which is the original inspiration for an idea doesn't go away. It's always there. We can reconnect with it any time, if we are willing to question the abstract thought constructions we have grown fond of.

I think most great ideas (religious, artistic, scientific, or everyday) are based on such a re-grounding in reality. We may have the illusion that we arrived at something by a logical thought process, but it is often a case of halting or exhausting all thought processes, for a novel idea to spring up out of nowhere. Heisenberg said that he got his idea of quantum mechanics while relaxing on a walk. Weeks of thinking had led nowhere and then, all of sudden, he spontaneously conceived of the idea when he stopped looking for it; after which he returned to his room to fill pages with formulas. Afterwards, he didn't know how he got the idea.

Ultimately, we can only know the truth by pure being without the intermediary of language/conceptualization. Thus, a truthful linguistic representation needs to be grounded in reality. That reality is enough in itself. It doesn't need anything else. We only need our dualist thinking to deal with the practicality of life: do I have something to eat or don't I? From which follows being and non-being; however, since our dualistic thinking is functional or practical it's not suitable for answering ultimate questions about life and meaning. Therefor, the question of whether god/the universe exists or does not exist is nonsensical since existence requires non-existence just as black requires white and short requires long. You can't have the one without the other.
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By Wellsy
#15122289
I think there is good reason to consider how thinking emerges from activity within a socialized/humanized world of collaborative projects.
We don’t exist purely within language but language is the means of grasping the world. The distinction between language or ideas and material reality doesn’t mean there is a dichtonomy between them except in a confusion of their ontologica distinction for an epistemological independence of the human subject from the objective world. But we do not develop knowledge as asocial individuals but as social beings in an established world of meaning which aren’t able to be dispersed with as merely subjective meanings. The value of a currency isn’t dependent on the individuals consciousness although one requires a human consciousness to experience its functional value.


Language might be seen as some obstacle to reality but it is in fact an amazing means of grasping it in a way that is more generalized than when humans first existed.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/weedon.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm
the lesson of Engels' Anti-Duhring: the fact that we understand reality through language does not mean that reality is made by language.
...
In his interrogation of Berkeley, Lenin points to this dilemma that runs through all forms of idealism: the epistemological unwillingness to make distinctions between 'ideas" and "things" (Materialism 130-300), which is, of course, brought about by class politics.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/concepts-activity.htm
But language-use cannot constitute an activity by itself. Speech, including written speech, if it is to be meaningful, must be directed towards the realisation of some volitional task, which in turn can only be meaningful only to the extent to which it furthers some project or resolves some problem arising in social practice, ultimately beyond language-use.
...
Via word meaning, words function as a connecting link between thinking and behaviour, such as speech. Word meaning is the psychological form taken by concepts, since a word functions as a sign for a concept, and the concept is a unit of thought. But as Vygotsky pointed out, when a concept is completely assimilated in thought, it becomes independent of the particular signs used to indicate it, just as a true concept can be defined in an infinite number of ways.

Thus, the processes connecting thought and words are extremely complex and dynamic. Equally, the relation between actual word-use in the course of social interaction, and the concepts for which the words are signs, is extremely complex and dynamic. But concepts are activities which transcend the immediate context in which words are used, just as the actions by means of which any project is realised are meaningful only in the light of the project being realised. A house is built by a bewildering variety of disparate actions and interactions, which nonetheless make sense as part of the completion of the house. The relation between any activity and the component actions through which it is realised is complex, and so is the relation between word meaning and concept. A concept is only really understood when we can identify its source, and the relation of all the actions by means of which it is realised will make sense.
...
It is one thing to form a general conception of what is meant by the ‘Big Bang’ but quite another to understand this term in the context in which it arose in making sense of measurements of cosmological radiation. Likewise, we all know what is meant by ‘war’ but how many of us know this concretely, as active participants? Through language, the words which function as signs for a concept disperse much more widely than the systems of social practice to which they are native, and long after a social practice may have disappeared, the words it coined may continue to carry the concepts which were created by that social practice, albeit in a modified form. It is evident that outside of participation in the forms of social practice to which the concept in question is indigenous, only a superficial, abstract knowledge of a concept can be acquired. Under these circumstances, people may not form true concepts of the situations they come to know by hearsay, so to speak. More likely, people form an abstract general concept of it. But everyday life is not something other than the social practices of the various institutions in society. Rather, everyday life is a kind of mosaic, melting pot or organic combination of these institutions, all interpenetrating and modifying each other, as Hegel described in the section on Objectivity.
Even participation in the relevant form of practice need not be sufficient to acquire a true concept of a practice or the situation to which it is responding. An employee performing relatively routine tasks – ‘abstract labour’ in the Marxist sense of this term – may have good practical knowledge of the process, but lack a developed understanding of the larger context, and so may develop only a potential concept of it. Equally, someone performing a supervisory role may well understand the place of an activity within the larger scheme of things, but without experience and competence in the practical tasks entailed, may have a true, but abstract and undeveloped concept of it.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htm
In pedagogy, there is a troubling and (when you think about it) strange problem that is usually described as the problem of “the practical application of knowledge to life.” And it is in fact true that the graduate from school (whether high school or college) finds himself in the quandary of not knowing how to “apply” knowledge to any problem that arises outside the walls of school.
This seems to imply that human abilities should include the special ability of somehow “correlating” knowledge with its object, i.e. with reality as given in contemplation. This means that there should be a special kind of activity of correlating knowledge and its object, where “knowledge” and “object” are thought of as two different “things” distinct from the person himself. One of these things is knowledge as contained in general formulas, instructions, and propositions, and the other thing is the unstructured chaos of phenomena as given in perception. If this were so, then we could clearly try to formulate rules for making this correlation, and also to enumerate and classify typical errors so that we could warn ahead of time how to avoid them. In instructional theory, one often tries to solve the problem of knowing “how to apply knowledge to life” by creating just this kind of system of rules and warnings. But the result is that the system of rules and warnings becomes so cumbersome that it starts to impede rather than help things, becoming an additional source of errors and failures.
Thus, there is every reason to believe that the very problem we are trying to solve arises only because the “knowledge” has been given to the person in an inadequate form; or, to put it more crudely, it is not real knowledge, but only some substitute…
In fact, knowledge in the precise sense of the word is always knowledge of an object. Of a particular object, for it is impossible to know “in general,” without knowing a particular system of phenomena, whether these are chemical, psychological, or some other phenomena.
But, after all, in this case the very phrase about the difficulties of “applying” knowledge to an object sounds rather absurd. To know an object, and to “apply” this knowledge – knowledge of the object – to the object? At best, this must be only an imprecise, confusing way of expressing some other, hidden situation.
But this situation is rather typical.
And this situation is possible only under particular circumstances – when the person has mastered not knowledge of an object but knowledge of something else instead. And this “other thing” can only be a system of phrases about an object, learned either irrespective of the latter or in only an imaginary, tenuous, and easily broken connection to it. A system of words, terms, symbols, signs, and their stable combinations, as formed and legitimized in everyday life – “statements” and “systems of statements.” Language, in particular, the “language of science” with its supply of words and its syntactic organization and “structure.” In other words, the object, as represented in available language, as an already verbalized object.
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By Odiseizam
#15175400
it is out of this world or knowledge from above in my opinion, concepts of cognitive creativity and imaginable persuasion resting on patterns of sounds as belief what is what i.e. reality in becoming [1] altho as theory every one expressed as scientific argument could be forced as true even if Chomsky as authority on the matter will say its word for natural computation [2] what is strange tho is how through the ages popped up completely opposite meanings for the same words between the slavic and english language (here I talk from macedonian perspective) eg. 1. for sin we mean son, 2. for ill we understand light, 3. for love we resonate about hunt, etc. etc. till now resembled more than 20 crucial antonyms, I mean how so when slavic people werent in some direct clash with brits both ended up with such amount of contra meanings in their understanding what is what and labeled like that, yet maybe this suggestion is just plain circumstantial occurrence, but it strikes one when examining the language as live form of the art of mutual understanding ...
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By froggo
#15175427
I once knew a man who was extremely cautious about his speech, because he was convinced that the words he spoke shaped reality. He said that the universe doesn't recognize the negative and so saying something like "I do not want something bad to happen to me" would be cast to the universe as "I do want something bad to happen to me." He was very militant in controlling the speech of those around him because he wanted to ensure the best possible scenario to come forth in his life. Anyways, probably not what the OP had in mind (honestly I havent read the thread yet, just the title!).... just a little anecdote of how some people perceive language and its effects on reality xD

Now, I don't entirely agree with how directly this fellow attributed language to reality (nor do I agree that its effects are as guaranteed as he did), however I think language is an operative tool which takes the will of cognition and manipulates the actors/actions of reality.
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By Odiseizam
#15175663
@froggo what You suggest it depends of his will ... but as the Apostle Paul said > If you have faith as (small as) a mustard seed, and you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matt. 21:22, 17:20) [1]

    but to reach such degree of free will that means he is connected to Our Lords Will what is not so regular occurrence ... yet who knows the hearts of man except Our Lord so maybe to someone is given some gift that he is afraid from ...

we live in one big conscious bubble some are calling it noosphere, and I'll say Soulful Grace only time when the same could be misused by someone in wrong manner is when we are loosing our already gathered Grace through decadent lifestyle, then even we have best shelter the mountains will fell on us coz simple spike of marble in kids hand!
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