Why does so much contemporary philosophy say things like "language is the root of all understanding" or "all thought is language?"
I understand that language is important, maybe even fundamental to consciousness, but aren't there many kinds of thought that AREN'T linguistic? How does visualising a triangle involve language unless I try to express what I "believe" or "feel" about it?
>>8162579
you can visualize a triangle but where is that going to get you? if thinking is the basis of philosophy, you need a language to express it.
telepathic philosophy when
>>8162579
Read Jerry Fodor's "Language of Thought". That's where the case is made (whether or not you end up buying it).
>>8162582
I agree, but these people EQUATE thought and language. I understand if one naturally, or even inevitably follows the other, but they seem like they're making a claim of identity.
>>8162587
So this kind of thing generally means language in the sense of "symbolic apprehension?" Language in the figurative sense of a deep symbolic grammar, a kind of neo-Kantian thing, NOT in the sense of actually "thinking in words?'
>>8162579
>but aren't there many kinds of thought that AREN'T linguistic
There are certainly many kinds of *metal phenomena* that aren't linguistic. The LOT hypothesis only concerns mental phenomena with propositional content. From the SEP article:
LOTH is an hypothesis about the nature of thought and thinking with propositional content. As such, it may or may not be applicable to other aspects of mental life. Officially, it is silent about the nature of some mental phenomena such as experience, qualia, sensory processes, mental images, visual and auditory imagination, sensory memory, perceptual pattern-recognition capacities, dreaming, hallucinating, etc. To be sure, many LOT theorists hold views about these aspects of mental life that sometimes make it seem that they are also to be explained by something similar to LOTH.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ScoLOT
>>8162614
Am I wrong in thinking that the LOTH is an Anglosphere / Analytic thing, and distinct from, or at best analogous to, the French version of "language is everything, man!"?
>>8162622
LOTH is certainly a philosophy thing. No one knows what the French are on about.
>>8162632
Yeah, looking at the bibliography of the Stanford article & the Oxford Biblio page for the topic, there's zero crossover or mention of, e.g., hermeneutics.
I think that's what was confusing me so much.
>>8162579
Very good question because it is a primary concern for philosophy. Since Kant at least, but there are probably hints of it before him, we talk about a philosophy of reflection in the sense that thought passes through language whether thought is formulated with words or not. Merleau-Ponty somewhat jokingly remarks that Sartre and his disciples used to search for moments where that was not the case, such as when hearing a sudden and surprising noise, in that split of a second before attributing some explanation or question to that phenomenon. For this type of philosophy, a non-linguistic thought would be something like a Lovecraftian monstrosity that defies all categorization. The consequences of this approach are serious since they question whether subjectivity forming phenomena (such as music instead of sound, literary narration instead of ordinary fact description or voluptuousness of body instead of mere bodily shape, colour, etc. - to name a few of Proust's contributions) are themselves dependent on all thought passing through language. Psychoanalysis would probably answer yes, making all thought even more detached from the object "out there" than it already is (since language works through what Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal: "love" does not exhaust instances of love so why love in the first place?). The standard reading of deconstruction, that discourse provides its own traps which are all over the place, also makes the problem of language-thought relation a crucial one.
I'd go on about how Deleuze and his ilk severely limit the role of language by searching for percepts and affects alongside concepts, but it's a very difficult subject and I'm not convinced that it truly escapes language, even though it does its best to move focus towards intensities, flows, non-linguistic phenomena etc.
I'm not familiar with how the problem is treated in Analytic Philosophy sadly. I'm not all that familiar with it in Continental Philosophy either, but hopefully my generalized ramblings will help you nonetheless.
>>8162638
>>8162632
>>8162622
I think a new rule needs to be added to the sticky: you may not post about philosophy unless you simultaneously complain about either continental or analytic philosophy.
>>8162718
>I'd go on about how Deleuze and his ilk severely limit the role of language by searching for percepts and affects alongside concepts, but it's a very difficult subject and I'm not convinced that it truly escapes language, even though it does its best to move focus towards intensities, flows, non-linguistic phenomena etc.
Deleuze does not limit language so much as the anthropocentric shit involved and the structuralist model of signifiers signify signified. He recognizes that when he thinks about something pre-linguistic like the virtual he must do so with language, but he aims to do that better by abandoning that model to instead "palpate" concepts, as I've read it described - that is, using language to poke and prod around a subject which essentially transcends language but can be conceptualized to varying degrees in this way. Needless to say, as he also has a strong (and connected) materialist stance, perception/affect/action of light beams entering your eye ain't got shit to do with language.
>>8162718
So basically the hyper-focus on language is, at its core, nominalism.
And basically if I'm, say,a Platonic realist I shouldn't take this shit seriously at all.
>>8163789
"-Isms" are really confusing when taken as meaning something very precise when in fact there are different versions of each (and yes, I see the irony of talking about nominalism this way). Maybe it helps if I tell you that Lacan explicitly rejected a certain understanding of nominalism because he thought that Signifiers had a fundamental effect on the Unconscious (and hence on almost everything about a person's life, including the body of language that has effects on the real body) despite being nonsense. So "Love" as a word in a language doesn't have a unique Signified, meaning in itself, that can mean the same thing for all subjects, but this doesn't stop it from having all sorts of unconscious effects that make it seem like an Universal for that subject, whether he knows it or not.
Unless I misunderstood your point, I can conceive of a platonic realism that admits the limits of language as well as its transcendental character (influencing all or almost all aspects of the mind before they are made conscious) and still admit the possibility that language can be used to describe universals. Plato wouldn't deny that language can be used in wrong ways.
Hobbes on triangles and language:
>"By this imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations. For example: a man that hath no use of speech at all, such as is born and remains perfectly deaf and dumb, if he set before his eyes a triangle and by it two right angles, such as are the corners of a square figure, he may by meditation compare and find that the three angles of that triangle are equal to those two right angles that stand by it. But if another triangle be shown him different in shape from the former, he cannot know without a new labour whether the three angles of that also be equal to the same. But he that hath the use of words, when he observes that such equality was consequent not to the length of the sides nor to any other particular thing in his triangle, but only to this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three, and that that was all for which he named it a triangle, will boldly conclude universally that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever, and register his invention in these general terms, ‘every triangle hath its three angles equal to two right angles.’ And thus the consequence found in one particular comes to be registered and remembered as a universal rule, and discharges our mental reckoning of time and place, and delivers us from all labour of the mind saving the first; and makes that which was found true ‘here’ and ‘now’ to be the true in ‘all times’ and ‘places.’"
Because that's a misunderstanding of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that was popular some 80 years ago and it takes about that much for philosophers to catch on the latest ideas (see Freud for example, still hugely influential in literary theory).
>>8162579
triangles are symbols of the illuminati and so are related to the /lit/erati and therefore you need language before you can triangle.
