but we DO actually manage to communicate some higher level concepts, yes?
Maybe. We also blow a lot hot air. The (positivist) idea was originally that all of science could be understood as a complicated version of "pass the salt" and all of philosophy, religion, and art were basically hot air.
by "constant translation process" do you mean between "what I want on the inside" and "the clumsy words I use to convey my desires to the person with the salt?"
That's exactly what I mean. But it's not clear how we could represent even to ourselves what we want on the inside without those clumsy words--or at least clumsy concepts. So the idea that what we want on the inside could be understood to exist independently of the clumsy words we use to describe them fell out of favor. Instead, the idea is that we are already all enmeshed in shared language. What you need then is an error theory to describe how miscommunication takes place.
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Date: 2007-04-13 07:02 pm (UTC)Maybe. We also blow a lot hot air. The (positivist) idea was originally that all of science could be understood as a complicated version of "pass the salt" and all of philosophy, religion, and art were basically hot air.
by "constant translation process" do you mean between "what I want on the inside" and "the clumsy words I use to convey my desires to the person with the salt?"
That's exactly what I mean. But it's not clear how we could represent even to ourselves what we want on the inside without those clumsy words--or at least clumsy concepts. So the idea that what we want on the inside could be understood to exist independently of the clumsy words we use to describe them fell out of favor. Instead, the idea is that we are already all enmeshed in shared language. What you need then is an error theory to describe how miscommunication takes place.