The “Unexpected Way” by Paul Williams explores the “mystical” depths we’re all orbiting, yet our trajectories often conflict and confuse us. Williams was Professor of Tibetan Philosophy and Head of Bristol’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies. His repudiation of the existential implications of Buddhism and shift in his worldview speak to a different mystical framework. It’s worth reading.
I absolutely agree with your infinite meta-language description. This is something Hilary Putnam missed, in my opinion, chalking it to “just more meta”, suspending the infinity of hierarchical generality. As for your “shut up and calculate” read of Wittgenstein, I laughed; that’s quite good. But with Wittgenstein, at least his Tractatus, I wonder if he really meant “shut up and observe/experiment” simply because he would have seen mathematics as a potential linguistic ladder to climb and then throw away after its use was exhausted / no longer meaningful.
The great dissenter from the apophatic tradition you cite (Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides) is Spinoza, who inverted it completely: Ethics IIp47 claims the human mind has adequate knowledge of God's essence — God as the most intelligible thing, not the least. On his account divine ineffability is always your Tarski kind, never a fact about the object: the vocabulary was too small, like √-1 before the Italians. Your own argument is closer to Spinoza than to Maimonides, which raises the question the post leaves open — do the averted-vision cases ever resist that treatment, or are they facts about attention rather than about what can be referred to? You can't watch yourself fall asleep, but "falling asleep" is perfectly describable. If so, the mystics may be right about the practice and wrong about the metaphysics.
A worthwhile interpretation, but it could lead us elsewhere. Perhaps it's a false choice: Instead, the mystic is right about the metaphysics AND right about the practice. The limitation isn't that God is a logical paradox or an illusion. The limitation is simply that God is infinite, and the human mind is finite. We are like plankton trying to comprehend the entire ocean—our knowledge is partial, but it is completely real.
I'd take your ocean analogy and push it one step: the plankton can't survey the ocean, but it can know completely what water is. That's Spinoza's actual distinction — adequate versus exhaustive knowledge. IIp47 claims the finite mind grasps God's essence perfectly; what it can't do is enumerate the infinite modes. Partial in scope, complete in kind. So "our knowledge is partial, but completely real" is, I'd suggest, Spinoza's position rather than the apophatic one — Maimonides denies we know what God is at all. On that reading you may be more of a rationalist than the mystics you're defending.
You’re treating ineffability primarily as a problem of language or representation. My view is different.
I won’t go into details but the issue isn’t fundamentally language. It’s the relationship between the observer and reality.
Ineffability isn’t primarily a limitation of language at all. Language can always grow. The deeper limit may be that explicit description is never identical to participation. A map isn’t the territory because representation and reality are different kinds of things. Some truths aren’t unspeakable because they’re beyond words; they’re unspeakable because they must be lived before they can be recognized.
I don’t even think the deepest distinction is between the explicit and the implicit. It’s between representation and reality. Language can become arbitrarily rich, but no representation becomes the thing it represents. The problem isn’t that words fail. It’s that participation cannot be replaced by description.
We also diverge on the mystics.
“There are truths that resist formalization.”
Nope. I would probably say:
“Reality isn’t resisting formalization. It’s correcting the assumption that symbols are the same thing as what they symbolize.”
That’s a subtle but important difference. I’m not advocating for mystery over reason; I’m saying that symbols, language, and models are always relational tools, not reality itself. Reality remains the reference point.
In this context I believe (sic.) it's important to remember that the miracle of human being is that we CAN be simultaneously both knowing subject and known object. Subjects and objects are mutually constitutive, exploding into their temporary existences upon contact with each other. We bring ourselves into existence (when/if we consciously attend to our selves). Straightforward Heidegger ...
Curt, I am soooo glad you are doing this work. Your perspective is beautifully precise. You even precisely delineate any necessary imprecisions, which I deeply respect and appreciate. I get so much value from your writing, it's worth way more than the subsciption price. So...thank you!
Seeing that this post is preternaturally inspiring, here are some more thoughts about Wittgenstein and how the limits of language are evidenced through the sense/nonsense distinction as well as the saying/showing distinction, and why the descriptive method does not need to be grounded as it is based in a form of self-evidence that is contingent on context and activity.
To begin: the assumption underlying arguments like “we have free will/we don’t have free will” is the assumption that the meaning of words have a direct bearing on reality. That is to say, that if we could just get the argument right we would know something about reality because the meaning of words are somehow directly connected to what truly is.
But they aren’t.
Words take their meaning from the activity in which their use makes sense. Wittgenstein has demonstrated this quite convincingly (Blue Book, Philosophical Investigations), but it is also something anyone can easily confirm from their own experience.
We are able to describe the situations in which the meanings of words are clear. This is how we clarify what we mean.
When we use language out of context, like when we ask, “Do we have free will?”, we immediately realize that we do not know what “free will” means. Out of context, language does not have a meaning. Its meaning comes from the contexts in which it makes sense. Outside of these contexts, it stops making sense.
What is the critique of metaphysics? It is the critique of the expectation that we can make valid a priori arguments about reality based solely on the self-evident meaning of words, as though words contain the seeds of reality within them and if we could only get the words right, we could get these seeds to grow into a tree of knowledge.
Words do not contain seeds of reality, they contain seeds of their use. They grow in contexts of meaningful application. We must describe these contexts if we want to understand what words mean. Our descriptions are grounded in the immediacy of the appearances they depend on, with all their incumbent limitations. The check on the accuracy of these appearances comes form the reliability of our actions at bringing about expected outcomes, and our competency at engaging spontaneously with other people and nature.
That we can use words in certain definite ways tells us something about reality, but in the way that a screwdriver tells us something about a screw. It is difficult to articulate exactly what it says.
If in any situation if we ask ourselves “How do I understand the meaning of what is being said?” I have to describe the aspects of the situation that bring the meaning to light.
This description takes its meaning directly from the objects/events of immediate experience, it uses these objects/events to give expression to what is meant. Elements of the world around us enter into language to give expression to what is meant in the description. “What is a guitar?” “That instrument there.” Can I say definitely what it is? No. Do I know what guitar means? Yes. This is how meaning is stitched together by the use of words. This is also the saying/showing distinction in Wittgenstein, and not ostensive definition, see, e.g., Wittgenstein’s analysis of “this is tove” in the Blue Book.
When there is nothing that can show what we mean (object or situation or action etc), language becomes nonsense. This is the sense/nonsense distinction. Meaning comes down to the way the world reveals itself to us in our interactions with it and the appearances that evidence the significance of our language. Our activity is essentially a perspective through which we apprehend what things are. The definite character, what you could call the "form", of an activity grounds the integrity of the perspective in which any given instance of language is used and through which things appear and have meaning. This appearance is not the true nature of the thing as the same thing can play a different role in a different activity and thereby be something else.
The integrity of this form of appearance is grounded in our ability to tell one activity apart from another, which is ultimately grounded in the principle of satisfaction, and as Wittgenstein says, satisfaction plays an essential role in the language game (On Certainty). Satisfaction is a principle for discernment through which we ultimately come to form beliefs about what things are. Our satisfaction is not something we control, it is a response we have to our environment and what happens in it. Use of satisfaction as a principle of discernment involves evaluating how things make us feel. We do this all the time. Meaning is underwritten by the intelligibility of our own activities in our interactions with each other and nature. The form through which activities are intelligible is the "form of life" as mentioned in the previous post. This is Wittgenstein's version of Plato's ideas or Kant's transcendental object = x that is the synthetic principle for organizing experience into discernible situations, events, and objects. That's the story as best as I understand it.
I do think it is worth everyone's while to take a closer look at Wittgenstein before trying to assess the limits of language or answer questions about the "nature of reality". It provides good examples for learning how to tell when uses of language tip over into meaninglessness and how to critically evaluate the significance of abstract philosophical problems.
A few thoughts on Wittgenstein and the limits of language...
What was Wittgenstein’s picture theory of sense and how did it establish a limit on what can be said?
At the time he wrote the Tractatus, Wittgenstein firmly believed that ordinary language had a logical form and contained logically structured pictures that could be used to make assertions about the world. These pictures could only be used to assert that a certain state of affairs existed or did not exist. Language consisted of signs and these were just as much objects as the things in the world that they could be used to depict. A proposition existed in the correspondence between the signs in a logical relationship to one another (i.e. language) and the possibility of a state of affairs where the objects in the world had the same logical relationships between them as the signs in language. When a proposition was true, there were two facts, the proposition as a logical relation between signs, and the state of affairs, where things bore the same relations as the signs in language. When these two facts were pictures of each other the propositions were true and language made sense. We could not directly see the way ordinary language contained these pictures because language was not developed for the purpose of disclosing its logical form according to an analogy where clothing is not developed for the purpose of showing the form of the body underneath.
The limits of what can be said in such a language are immediately clear. Language is only capable of expressing that facts exist or not by creating the corresponding picture with words.
However there is more to the story. In addition to asserting that this or that is the case, Wittgenstein also understood us to be capable of elucidating the logical structure of language. We could do this by observing the logical behavior of signs (symbols). When symbols are used to form tautologies and contradictions, they reveal something about the nature of logic itself, namely its form. However, no matter how clearly we can see or show this form, under the assumptions of the picture theory, we cannot assert what it is. All we can assert is that this or that is the case using a picture. Making an assertion depends on our ability to discern a specific logical organization of objects (signs in language) and their correspondence to other objects (things in the world).
The Tractatus was stylized as a kind of meditation that could be used to discern the logical form that animates language as well as the world and thereby enable the reader to see how language works, namely, by using pictures to make assertions about facts in the world. Since language is part of the world it is structured by the same logical form as any other state of affairs.
Naturally, such a language has its limits. Wittgenstein took these to be elucidated by the general form of the proposition which he understood to be the symbolic formulation for the most general statement possible. The limits of what could be expressed by the general form of the proposition were therefore the limits of what can be said at all. Barring of course the use of language to elucidate its logical form, which could help us to see things more clearly, but could never say anything more than what could already be said by using ordinary language to assert facts.
The general form of the proposition revealed to Wittgenstein that the “I” stood outside of language and was in relation to the world as a whole. This relationship was understood to be mystical in its nature and inexpressible as it was not a logical relationship between objects, it was a relationship between “I” and the general form of the proposition, or otherwise put, to the world as a whole.
Later, Wittgenstein realized that language can be used to do much more than construct pictures of facts and that we are able to describe behavior in addition to making factual assertions about the world. He expanded his understanding of logical form from merely a relationship between objects to what he called the “form of life” that allowed us to understand activities or behaviors in addition to simply discerning relationships between objects. In this latter version, language becomes the language-game, which is an activity (a behavioral form) we can understand. The use of language to depict facts becomes one possibility within language, one such game, rather than the whole of it as he had earlier thought.
He uses a metaphor of a city with a variety of neighborhoods to describe the ever expanding uses of language into new territories, and as Curt points out, to constantly invent new ways of expressing ourselves when the old ones won’t do.
However, the new ways of expressing oneself, or using language, are not refinements of language. They are simply new uses that are discovered and carry all the ambiguities of meaning along with them into their new circumstances. Russel believed that language could be made more precise in order to have a final say on how things are. Wittgenstein rejected this hypothesis even at the time of the Tractatus.
In the latter Wittgenstein, the limits of what can be said continue to be characterized by a distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, as well as the sense/nonsense distinction, but now in the broader context of language games.
Heisenberg in particularly thought that Wittgenstein’s latter philosophy provided a good way to think about the apparent contradictions involved in describing elementary particles as these contradictions could be attributed to the use of concepts outside of the game for which they were made. This is not a matter of encountering the limits of language, just of a certain language game, the game of objective reality that had been so handy until then.
The honest admission that the subject is ineffable and then attempting to write about it anyway is the right move. Most 'spiritual' writing fails because it pretends the words are doing something they aren't. Trying to point at something while admitting the pointing isn't the thing — that's the most you can do. Curious where this thread goes.
4. “Reality is such that we can use math to predict events.”
5. “The nature of reality is such that we can use math to predict events.”
Q: Is there a difference of meaning between these statements?
A: “No. They all mean the same thing. They all express a well known fact about the predictive power of math.”
Q: What does adding ourselves or nature or reality into this statement accomplish?
A: “Nothing.”
Q: Do these additional clauses mean anything?
A: “No. They express nothing. They are meaningless.”
From another perspective, when we add ourselves (“We can use …”) and the "nature of reality" into the picture, we are attributing a cause to an effect. We are answering the questions why or how math can predict events. We are answering the implicit question "How is it possible …?” It is possible because of the nature of reality.
But does this explanation explain anything?
For the possibility X we posit a cause Y such that X is explained by the interaction between an agent A and a substance B due to a nature C.
Is this explanation knowledge or is it simply a description of our own behavior?
Perhaps the nature of reality is a mirror that can only show us a reflection of ourselves.
The expectation that we can “know the nature of reality” seems to ask no more or no less than the old adage “know thyself.”
The better we understand ourselves the more clearly we see nature, the better we understand nature, the more clearly we see ourselves. Reality is no more and no less than the medium of this interplay and it cannot be known independently.
In essence, Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy comes down to the observation that the moment we take ourselves to say anything definite about reality, we are trapped in a picture for which we can no longer give a proper account. To this, I would add, by taking ourselves to know the nature of reality we are at risk of being trapped in a picture of ourselves.
The term “nature” can only be determined by an interaction between an agent (we) and a substance (reality) and consequently represents a fundamentally indissoluble unity between the two.
Reality is, at the same time, the medium of this interplay and cannot be know independently from it. This is why Wittgenstein says the meaning of a word is its use.
There is always something outside of knowledge because we produce knowledge we are always outside of the knowledge we produce. Knowledge cannot simultaneously depict its object and the conditions of its production even though it depends on these conditions and is, as it were, “grounded” by them.
When we know something, we do not simultaneously know that we know. To say we do is to use “know” in two different ways, as a depiction that defines an objective relationship between events, and as awareness of this depiction, how to use it, and what it represents. In the intuitive sense in which we “know that we know” we do not have two pieces of knowledge, we have one piece: a depiction of nature that constitutes knowing something, together with our understanding of how to use this depiction by applying it in a specific context. We do not further understand this understanding or know anything about why it works.
Can we infer anything about reality or is it simply an ether to be left aside once our situation vis a vis nature is correctly understood?
What does the concept of "reality" actually do for us when we are not taking it up as a potential object of knowledge?
"Reality" is the assumption that we are not deceived when we predict events. It is the assumption that our understanding can be correct and that knowledge is possible.
"Reality" is the belief that our experience is "of something". This concept allows us to correct the unreliability inherent in our experience. Because we believe in reality, we understand that our experience can be wrong. If we did not believe in reality, we would take our experience to be a direct and immediate representation of the world and constantly draw incorrect conclusions about it both in thought and in action. Instead of being able to correct distortions in our experience, we would instead live in an “irrational” world.
"Reality" expresses a foundational distinction that allows me to attribute my experience to either an internal or external cause and organize these causes in relation to each other such that my actions have the intended effects and my predictions can be correct.
The extent to which our experience is “of the world” and the extent to which it is “of ourselves” is fundamentally undetermined. All experiential content already contains both these elements as it is the result of an interaction. We use our intellect to separate ourselves from nature, but this separation can never be final or absolute.
Our interactions with the world create a boundary around our understanding and our knowledge. When we encounter the limitation of the application of our concepts, we can no longer tell the difference between reality and ourselves, the irrational and the rational, the real and the unreal, our behavior from how the world responds. This is a unity from which we cannot escape.
This reminds me of Pirsig's Quality, and a sort of observer effect. At the moment of "knowing", we create a conceptual object or meme of the thing which we are trying to understand. Maybe Wolfram's Ruliad space as well. Anything short of experience without cognition creates distance between conceptual objects. Just "being" is the closest we can ever get to unity. The simple act of seeking knowledge creates space between object and observer, and the process of description creates its own description object, which can then spin off its own description, in an infinite hyperreal loop. I imagine that if we were to "Big Crunch" back to a Monad or single object, everything would be that single eye, which can not see itself. Every act of observation and knowledge creation seems to create these bifurcations... though idk, many such ideas from random books i read. need to coalesce it all one day
This is pretty much of a brainstorming session but the essential aspect of language you state at the beginning
“The most meaningful aspects of life often can’t be put into words. At least not without heavily betraying and diminishing them.”
In other words language is always reductive. If I say “she is a beautiful woman” this is fatally impoverished compared to the actual seeing of her. It abstracts a certain quality she has and as such is not completely meaningless. The only way language can enhance this reduction is by means of poetry – poetry as in poems, literature and even philosophy. But this conveys something that still cannot match the experience of her actual beauty.
The essential point about language is that it refers to thought. Each sentence represents a thought and this may be a thought about the world at large, amongst other things. Once this is appreciated language can be put on its proper footing
Your application of logical positivism to language comes up against the old bete noire – the liar’s paradox
“A language rich enough to talk about its own sentences can’t contain a truth predicate for itself. If it could, you could write the sentence that says of itself that it’s not true, and, under ordinary logic, the whole construction tips into contradiction (the Liar).”
But language is not defined by internal logic. It is referential or signifying. “This sentence is false” is simply signifying a nonsense – just like an Esher painting. And it is as profound as an Esher painting. In order words it is trivial and should not be paraded as uncovering some profound truth about language
“Alfred Tarski turned this into a theorem. He said, truth for a language L has to be defined in a metalanguage stronger than L”.
That is surely a road to nowhere but logical convolutions.
You refer to
“the kind of phenomenon that destroys what it’s trying to explicate by the act of attending to it.”
This is taking the necessary reduction contained in language and extending it to destruction. As you say, this is going in the direction of mysticism, and you say this is
“Where I Side With the Mystics ….and the mystics seem to have caught something quite before the logicians did …..As someone who petitions for precision by professional position, I also keep a place for mystery.”
But you do not need mysticism. That is always a cop out – an acknowledgement that you do not have the answer. And mysticism is NOT philosophy, so that is going off piste.
What you need is phenomenology, but as an adherent of that school I would say that, wouldn’t I? Phenomenology sees language as being “disclosed” to us. We do not need Tarski and Wittgenstein to pick it apart.
Language indeed does have a structure which in its deep form is universal as I set out in The Deep Structure of Sentences see https://shorturl.at/bPHSj. And because language signifies thought, language can incidentally reveal a lot about the natural structure of our thought
But language also creates meaning through metaphor as I have written up in another book.
Language is beautiful and intuitive but it is not ineffable or a contrived logical minefield.
“However, it doesn’t seem like all of what we call reality submits to this pattern. Indeed, much of what’s most important to us seems to directly subvert this pattern!”
Indeed, and that is a huge clue. Think rationally, not about what you’ve read or heard in narrative form, but rather your own experiences.
If you think carefully about what conscious cognition actually has gated access to, it all boils down to two things:
Cognitive agency is a requirement of the body’s executive for social cohesiveness in order to effectively veto socially unacceptable impending subconscious impulses.
The conscious cognitive layer (mind) is the evolutionary function natural selection preferred for social cohesiveness in highly complex interdependent social species.
Libet’s RP is likely bandwidth inhibited by our smallest corpus callosum relative to overall brain size in all primates.
Thereby providing humans a brief but extended period of time to linearly contemplate impending subconscious impulses for social cohesiveness and then to allow or veto said impulses.
The “Unexpected Way” by Paul Williams explores the “mystical” depths we’re all orbiting, yet our trajectories often conflict and confuse us. Williams was Professor of Tibetan Philosophy and Head of Bristol’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies. His repudiation of the existential implications of Buddhism and shift in his worldview speak to a different mystical framework. It’s worth reading.
This is interesting. Thank you. I will look into this.
In fact there is a stock phrase in Tibetan for "beyond language, thought, and expression"!
https://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/smra_bsam_brjod_med
I absolutely agree with your infinite meta-language description. This is something Hilary Putnam missed, in my opinion, chalking it to “just more meta”, suspending the infinity of hierarchical generality. As for your “shut up and calculate” read of Wittgenstein, I laughed; that’s quite good. But with Wittgenstein, at least his Tractatus, I wonder if he really meant “shut up and observe/experiment” simply because he would have seen mathematics as a potential linguistic ladder to climb and then throw away after its use was exhausted / no longer meaningful.
x² + 1 = 0 has solutions without complex numbers.
In Spacetime Algebra the spatial bivectors e23, e31, and e12 each satisfy:
e23² = e31² = e12² = -1
The pseudoscalar I = e0123 also satisfies:
I² = -1
Geometry is enough. Geometric Algebra, here as Spacetime Algebra or Cl(1,3), provides the answer with a geometric interpretation.
Thank you, Curt, this feels written with both care for the reader and honesty.
And I dig your point about us disrespecting the words too hastily. They are indeed a part of the way to be walked.
In the words of Zhuang Zhou:
„The trap is needed to catch a hare. When the hare is caught, they forget about the trap.
The words are needed to catch a thought. When the thought is caught, they forget about the words.
Oh, how I wish to find someone who forgot about the words! And speak with them.”
The great dissenter from the apophatic tradition you cite (Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides) is Spinoza, who inverted it completely: Ethics IIp47 claims the human mind has adequate knowledge of God's essence — God as the most intelligible thing, not the least. On his account divine ineffability is always your Tarski kind, never a fact about the object: the vocabulary was too small, like √-1 before the Italians. Your own argument is closer to Spinoza than to Maimonides, which raises the question the post leaves open — do the averted-vision cases ever resist that treatment, or are they facts about attention rather than about what can be referred to? You can't watch yourself fall asleep, but "falling asleep" is perfectly describable. If so, the mystics may be right about the practice and wrong about the metaphysics.
A worthwhile interpretation, but it could lead us elsewhere. Perhaps it's a false choice: Instead, the mystic is right about the metaphysics AND right about the practice. The limitation isn't that God is a logical paradox or an illusion. The limitation is simply that God is infinite, and the human mind is finite. We are like plankton trying to comprehend the entire ocean—our knowledge is partial, but it is completely real.
I'd take your ocean analogy and push it one step: the plankton can't survey the ocean, but it can know completely what water is. That's Spinoza's actual distinction — adequate versus exhaustive knowledge. IIp47 claims the finite mind grasps God's essence perfectly; what it can't do is enumerate the infinite modes. Partial in scope, complete in kind. So "our knowledge is partial, but completely real" is, I'd suggest, Spinoza's position rather than the apophatic one — Maimonides denies we know what God is at all. On that reading you may be more of a rationalist than the mystics you're defending.
If it wasn't obvious, I greatly appreciate your insights and points of view.
Awesome post! A little strange but..
You’re treating ineffability primarily as a problem of language or representation. My view is different.
I won’t go into details but the issue isn’t fundamentally language. It’s the relationship between the observer and reality.
Ineffability isn’t primarily a limitation of language at all. Language can always grow. The deeper limit may be that explicit description is never identical to participation. A map isn’t the territory because representation and reality are different kinds of things. Some truths aren’t unspeakable because they’re beyond words; they’re unspeakable because they must be lived before they can be recognized.
I don’t even think the deepest distinction is between the explicit and the implicit. It’s between representation and reality. Language can become arbitrarily rich, but no representation becomes the thing it represents. The problem isn’t that words fail. It’s that participation cannot be replaced by description.
We also diverge on the mystics.
“There are truths that resist formalization.”
Nope. I would probably say:
“Reality isn’t resisting formalization. It’s correcting the assumption that symbols are the same thing as what they symbolize.”
That’s a subtle but important difference. I’m not advocating for mystery over reason; I’m saying that symbols, language, and models are always relational tools, not reality itself. Reality remains the reference point.
In this context I believe (sic.) it's important to remember that the miracle of human being is that we CAN be simultaneously both knowing subject and known object. Subjects and objects are mutually constitutive, exploding into their temporary existences upon contact with each other. We bring ourselves into existence (when/if we consciously attend to our selves). Straightforward Heidegger ...
Curt, I am soooo glad you are doing this work. Your perspective is beautifully precise. You even precisely delineate any necessary imprecisions, which I deeply respect and appreciate. I get so much value from your writing, it's worth way more than the subsciption price. So...thank you!
Seeing that this post is preternaturally inspiring, here are some more thoughts about Wittgenstein and how the limits of language are evidenced through the sense/nonsense distinction as well as the saying/showing distinction, and why the descriptive method does not need to be grounded as it is based in a form of self-evidence that is contingent on context and activity.
To begin: the assumption underlying arguments like “we have free will/we don’t have free will” is the assumption that the meaning of words have a direct bearing on reality. That is to say, that if we could just get the argument right we would know something about reality because the meaning of words are somehow directly connected to what truly is.
But they aren’t.
Words take their meaning from the activity in which their use makes sense. Wittgenstein has demonstrated this quite convincingly (Blue Book, Philosophical Investigations), but it is also something anyone can easily confirm from their own experience.
We are able to describe the situations in which the meanings of words are clear. This is how we clarify what we mean.
When we use language out of context, like when we ask, “Do we have free will?”, we immediately realize that we do not know what “free will” means. Out of context, language does not have a meaning. Its meaning comes from the contexts in which it makes sense. Outside of these contexts, it stops making sense.
What is the critique of metaphysics? It is the critique of the expectation that we can make valid a priori arguments about reality based solely on the self-evident meaning of words, as though words contain the seeds of reality within them and if we could only get the words right, we could get these seeds to grow into a tree of knowledge.
Words do not contain seeds of reality, they contain seeds of their use. They grow in contexts of meaningful application. We must describe these contexts if we want to understand what words mean. Our descriptions are grounded in the immediacy of the appearances they depend on, with all their incumbent limitations. The check on the accuracy of these appearances comes form the reliability of our actions at bringing about expected outcomes, and our competency at engaging spontaneously with other people and nature.
That we can use words in certain definite ways tells us something about reality, but in the way that a screwdriver tells us something about a screw. It is difficult to articulate exactly what it says.
If in any situation if we ask ourselves “How do I understand the meaning of what is being said?” I have to describe the aspects of the situation that bring the meaning to light.
This description takes its meaning directly from the objects/events of immediate experience, it uses these objects/events to give expression to what is meant. Elements of the world around us enter into language to give expression to what is meant in the description. “What is a guitar?” “That instrument there.” Can I say definitely what it is? No. Do I know what guitar means? Yes. This is how meaning is stitched together by the use of words. This is also the saying/showing distinction in Wittgenstein, and not ostensive definition, see, e.g., Wittgenstein’s analysis of “this is tove” in the Blue Book.
When there is nothing that can show what we mean (object or situation or action etc), language becomes nonsense. This is the sense/nonsense distinction. Meaning comes down to the way the world reveals itself to us in our interactions with it and the appearances that evidence the significance of our language. Our activity is essentially a perspective through which we apprehend what things are. The definite character, what you could call the "form", of an activity grounds the integrity of the perspective in which any given instance of language is used and through which things appear and have meaning. This appearance is not the true nature of the thing as the same thing can play a different role in a different activity and thereby be something else.
The integrity of this form of appearance is grounded in our ability to tell one activity apart from another, which is ultimately grounded in the principle of satisfaction, and as Wittgenstein says, satisfaction plays an essential role in the language game (On Certainty). Satisfaction is a principle for discernment through which we ultimately come to form beliefs about what things are. Our satisfaction is not something we control, it is a response we have to our environment and what happens in it. Use of satisfaction as a principle of discernment involves evaluating how things make us feel. We do this all the time. Meaning is underwritten by the intelligibility of our own activities in our interactions with each other and nature. The form through which activities are intelligible is the "form of life" as mentioned in the previous post. This is Wittgenstein's version of Plato's ideas or Kant's transcendental object = x that is the synthetic principle for organizing experience into discernible situations, events, and objects. That's the story as best as I understand it.
I do think it is worth everyone's while to take a closer look at Wittgenstein before trying to assess the limits of language or answer questions about the "nature of reality". It provides good examples for learning how to tell when uses of language tip over into meaninglessness and how to critically evaluate the significance of abstract philosophical problems.
A few thoughts on Wittgenstein and the limits of language...
What was Wittgenstein’s picture theory of sense and how did it establish a limit on what can be said?
At the time he wrote the Tractatus, Wittgenstein firmly believed that ordinary language had a logical form and contained logically structured pictures that could be used to make assertions about the world. These pictures could only be used to assert that a certain state of affairs existed or did not exist. Language consisted of signs and these were just as much objects as the things in the world that they could be used to depict. A proposition existed in the correspondence between the signs in a logical relationship to one another (i.e. language) and the possibility of a state of affairs where the objects in the world had the same logical relationships between them as the signs in language. When a proposition was true, there were two facts, the proposition as a logical relation between signs, and the state of affairs, where things bore the same relations as the signs in language. When these two facts were pictures of each other the propositions were true and language made sense. We could not directly see the way ordinary language contained these pictures because language was not developed for the purpose of disclosing its logical form according to an analogy where clothing is not developed for the purpose of showing the form of the body underneath.
The limits of what can be said in such a language are immediately clear. Language is only capable of expressing that facts exist or not by creating the corresponding picture with words.
However there is more to the story. In addition to asserting that this or that is the case, Wittgenstein also understood us to be capable of elucidating the logical structure of language. We could do this by observing the logical behavior of signs (symbols). When symbols are used to form tautologies and contradictions, they reveal something about the nature of logic itself, namely its form. However, no matter how clearly we can see or show this form, under the assumptions of the picture theory, we cannot assert what it is. All we can assert is that this or that is the case using a picture. Making an assertion depends on our ability to discern a specific logical organization of objects (signs in language) and their correspondence to other objects (things in the world).
The Tractatus was stylized as a kind of meditation that could be used to discern the logical form that animates language as well as the world and thereby enable the reader to see how language works, namely, by using pictures to make assertions about facts in the world. Since language is part of the world it is structured by the same logical form as any other state of affairs.
Naturally, such a language has its limits. Wittgenstein took these to be elucidated by the general form of the proposition which he understood to be the symbolic formulation for the most general statement possible. The limits of what could be expressed by the general form of the proposition were therefore the limits of what can be said at all. Barring of course the use of language to elucidate its logical form, which could help us to see things more clearly, but could never say anything more than what could already be said by using ordinary language to assert facts.
The general form of the proposition revealed to Wittgenstein that the “I” stood outside of language and was in relation to the world as a whole. This relationship was understood to be mystical in its nature and inexpressible as it was not a logical relationship between objects, it was a relationship between “I” and the general form of the proposition, or otherwise put, to the world as a whole.
Later, Wittgenstein realized that language can be used to do much more than construct pictures of facts and that we are able to describe behavior in addition to making factual assertions about the world. He expanded his understanding of logical form from merely a relationship between objects to what he called the “form of life” that allowed us to understand activities or behaviors in addition to simply discerning relationships between objects. In this latter version, language becomes the language-game, which is an activity (a behavioral form) we can understand. The use of language to depict facts becomes one possibility within language, one such game, rather than the whole of it as he had earlier thought.
He uses a metaphor of a city with a variety of neighborhoods to describe the ever expanding uses of language into new territories, and as Curt points out, to constantly invent new ways of expressing ourselves when the old ones won’t do.
However, the new ways of expressing oneself, or using language, are not refinements of language. They are simply new uses that are discovered and carry all the ambiguities of meaning along with them into their new circumstances. Russel believed that language could be made more precise in order to have a final say on how things are. Wittgenstein rejected this hypothesis even at the time of the Tractatus.
In the latter Wittgenstein, the limits of what can be said continue to be characterized by a distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, as well as the sense/nonsense distinction, but now in the broader context of language games.
Heisenberg in particularly thought that Wittgenstein’s latter philosophy provided a good way to think about the apparent contradictions involved in describing elementary particles as these contradictions could be attributed to the use of concepts outside of the game for which they were made. This is not a matter of encountering the limits of language, just of a certain language game, the game of objective reality that had been so handy until then.
The honest admission that the subject is ineffable and then attempting to write about it anyway is the right move. Most 'spiritual' writing fails because it pretends the words are doing something they aren't. Trying to point at something while admitting the pointing isn't the thing — that's the most you can do. Curious where this thread goes.
For what its worth, consider the following:
1. “Math can predict events”
2. “Math can be used to predict events.”
3. “We can use math to predict events.”
4. “Reality is such that we can use math to predict events.”
5. “The nature of reality is such that we can use math to predict events.”
Q: Is there a difference of meaning between these statements?
A: “No. They all mean the same thing. They all express a well known fact about the predictive power of math.”
Q: What does adding ourselves or nature or reality into this statement accomplish?
A: “Nothing.”
Q: Do these additional clauses mean anything?
A: “No. They express nothing. They are meaningless.”
From another perspective, when we add ourselves (“We can use …”) and the "nature of reality" into the picture, we are attributing a cause to an effect. We are answering the questions why or how math can predict events. We are answering the implicit question "How is it possible …?” It is possible because of the nature of reality.
But does this explanation explain anything?
For the possibility X we posit a cause Y such that X is explained by the interaction between an agent A and a substance B due to a nature C.
Is this explanation knowledge or is it simply a description of our own behavior?
Perhaps the nature of reality is a mirror that can only show us a reflection of ourselves.
The expectation that we can “know the nature of reality” seems to ask no more or no less than the old adage “know thyself.”
The better we understand ourselves the more clearly we see nature, the better we understand nature, the more clearly we see ourselves. Reality is no more and no less than the medium of this interplay and it cannot be known independently.
In essence, Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy comes down to the observation that the moment we take ourselves to say anything definite about reality, we are trapped in a picture for which we can no longer give a proper account. To this, I would add, by taking ourselves to know the nature of reality we are at risk of being trapped in a picture of ourselves.
The term “nature” can only be determined by an interaction between an agent (we) and a substance (reality) and consequently represents a fundamentally indissoluble unity between the two.
Reality is, at the same time, the medium of this interplay and cannot be know independently from it. This is why Wittgenstein says the meaning of a word is its use.
There is always something outside of knowledge because we produce knowledge we are always outside of the knowledge we produce. Knowledge cannot simultaneously depict its object and the conditions of its production even though it depends on these conditions and is, as it were, “grounded” by them.
When we know something, we do not simultaneously know that we know. To say we do is to use “know” in two different ways, as a depiction that defines an objective relationship between events, and as awareness of this depiction, how to use it, and what it represents. In the intuitive sense in which we “know that we know” we do not have two pieces of knowledge, we have one piece: a depiction of nature that constitutes knowing something, together with our understanding of how to use this depiction by applying it in a specific context. We do not further understand this understanding or know anything about why it works.
Can we infer anything about reality or is it simply an ether to be left aside once our situation vis a vis nature is correctly understood?
What does the concept of "reality" actually do for us when we are not taking it up as a potential object of knowledge?
"Reality" is the assumption that we are not deceived when we predict events. It is the assumption that our understanding can be correct and that knowledge is possible.
"Reality" is the belief that our experience is "of something". This concept allows us to correct the unreliability inherent in our experience. Because we believe in reality, we understand that our experience can be wrong. If we did not believe in reality, we would take our experience to be a direct and immediate representation of the world and constantly draw incorrect conclusions about it both in thought and in action. Instead of being able to correct distortions in our experience, we would instead live in an “irrational” world.
"Reality" expresses a foundational distinction that allows me to attribute my experience to either an internal or external cause and organize these causes in relation to each other such that my actions have the intended effects and my predictions can be correct.
The extent to which our experience is “of the world” and the extent to which it is “of ourselves” is fundamentally undetermined. All experiential content already contains both these elements as it is the result of an interaction. We use our intellect to separate ourselves from nature, but this separation can never be final or absolute.
Our interactions with the world create a boundary around our understanding and our knowledge. When we encounter the limitation of the application of our concepts, we can no longer tell the difference between reality and ourselves, the irrational and the rational, the real and the unreal, our behavior from how the world responds. This is a unity from which we cannot escape.
I'm at the intersection of faith and reason, having made a leap of faith.
This reminds me of Pirsig's Quality, and a sort of observer effect. At the moment of "knowing", we create a conceptual object or meme of the thing which we are trying to understand. Maybe Wolfram's Ruliad space as well. Anything short of experience without cognition creates distance between conceptual objects. Just "being" is the closest we can ever get to unity. The simple act of seeking knowledge creates space between object and observer, and the process of description creates its own description object, which can then spin off its own description, in an infinite hyperreal loop. I imagine that if we were to "Big Crunch" back to a Monad or single object, everything would be that single eye, which can not see itself. Every act of observation and knowledge creation seems to create these bifurcations... though idk, many such ideas from random books i read. need to coalesce it all one day
This is pretty much of a brainstorming session but the essential aspect of language you state at the beginning
“The most meaningful aspects of life often can’t be put into words. At least not without heavily betraying and diminishing them.”
In other words language is always reductive. If I say “she is a beautiful woman” this is fatally impoverished compared to the actual seeing of her. It abstracts a certain quality she has and as such is not completely meaningless. The only way language can enhance this reduction is by means of poetry – poetry as in poems, literature and even philosophy. But this conveys something that still cannot match the experience of her actual beauty.
The essential point about language is that it refers to thought. Each sentence represents a thought and this may be a thought about the world at large, amongst other things. Once this is appreciated language can be put on its proper footing
Your application of logical positivism to language comes up against the old bete noire – the liar’s paradox
“A language rich enough to talk about its own sentences can’t contain a truth predicate for itself. If it could, you could write the sentence that says of itself that it’s not true, and, under ordinary logic, the whole construction tips into contradiction (the Liar).”
But language is not defined by internal logic. It is referential or signifying. “This sentence is false” is simply signifying a nonsense – just like an Esher painting. And it is as profound as an Esher painting. In order words it is trivial and should not be paraded as uncovering some profound truth about language
“Alfred Tarski turned this into a theorem. He said, truth for a language L has to be defined in a metalanguage stronger than L”.
That is surely a road to nowhere but logical convolutions.
You refer to
“the kind of phenomenon that destroys what it’s trying to explicate by the act of attending to it.”
This is taking the necessary reduction contained in language and extending it to destruction. As you say, this is going in the direction of mysticism, and you say this is
“Where I Side With the Mystics ….and the mystics seem to have caught something quite before the logicians did …..As someone who petitions for precision by professional position, I also keep a place for mystery.”
But you do not need mysticism. That is always a cop out – an acknowledgement that you do not have the answer. And mysticism is NOT philosophy, so that is going off piste.
What you need is phenomenology, but as an adherent of that school I would say that, wouldn’t I? Phenomenology sees language as being “disclosed” to us. We do not need Tarski and Wittgenstein to pick it apart.
Language indeed does have a structure which in its deep form is universal as I set out in The Deep Structure of Sentences see https://shorturl.at/bPHSj. And because language signifies thought, language can incidentally reveal a lot about the natural structure of our thought
But language also creates meaning through metaphor as I have written up in another book.
Language is beautiful and intuitive but it is not ineffable or a contrived logical minefield.
“However, it doesn’t seem like all of what we call reality submits to this pattern. Indeed, much of what’s most important to us seems to directly subvert this pattern!”
Indeed, and that is a huge clue. Think rationally, not about what you’ve read or heard in narrative form, but rather your own experiences.
If you think carefully about what conscious cognition actually has gated access to, it all boils down to two things:
Cognitive agency is a requirement of the body’s executive for social cohesiveness in order to effectively veto socially unacceptable impending subconscious impulses.
The conscious cognitive layer (mind) is the evolutionary function natural selection preferred for social cohesiveness in highly complex interdependent social species.
Libet’s RP is likely bandwidth inhibited by our smallest corpus callosum relative to overall brain size in all primates.
Thereby providing humans a brief but extended period of time to linearly contemplate impending subconscious impulses for social cohesiveness and then to allow or veto said impulses.