Words and Worlds

or:

Poignant examples of humanity's search for meaning in its linguistic experience.

By Mark Heyne Dec.2006

Formally speaking, the heap paradox can be transcribed as a logic argument with an unconditional premise ("1 wheat grain does not make a heap"), a general conditional premise ("If i wheat grains do not make a heap, then neither do i+1 wheat grains") and a conclusion like "10000 wheat grains do not make a heap" (10000 can be replaced with no matter how large a number). Vlad Vieru.

Paradoxes show loopholes in the fabric of logic, but some paradoxes are resolvable by linguistic analysis. Here, a vague concept is one with borderline cases, and these are best dealt with in the following ways: by defining the concept clearly, or by admitting the relative nature of the attribute, so allowing a sliding scale of shades of grey between black and white.

Firstly, it may be a matter of definition.

We might easily define the ‘heap’ problem out of existence by saying a ‘heap’ is different from a ‘pile’: a pile of books is neatly organised while a heap of books is disorganised. So it is not a matter of quantity at all, but of organisation.

It is obviously merely a matter of definition when we ask if a person is pregnant or not, dead or not, where that really is a yes / no type of situation.

If we officially define a bald man as a man with no hair, then a man with one or two hairs is not bald, but there are loose usages of the word, so we can qualify ‘bald’ with ‘almost’, ‘completely’, ‘practically’, or ‘-ish’.

A person is said to be obese if we apply a technical definition involving the ratio of weight to height, and here we might if in doubt say “he is ‘technically’ obese even though he doesn’t look it!”

It is also a matter of definition when we ask if a mixed breed animal is a zebra, a horse or a donkey, and we may resolve that by applying a new label, such as ‘zeedonk’ or ‘mule’.

A fish-or-flesh question occurs in most types of hybrid, and the solution by renaming is a common one.

Definition doesn’t help when we have a genuinely vague concept however, such as ‘rich’.

Is George Soros sitting on a heap of money? By most standards, yes, but sat alongside Bill Gates at the Billionaires’ Ball, maybe he would feel embarrassingly not rich enough.

So we may have matters that are relative in comparison with other incidences.

Perhaps an economic formula could be developed to define the borderline between ‘developing’ society and ‘rich’ society that involves per-capita income, GDP, and so on, or a ‘rich person’ could be defined as one whose means exceed his needs by such and such a percentage.

‘Beautiful’ is another case in point. There is no formula that can be applied to adjudicate in this most delicate of matters, and if pressed it is recommended to take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination.

The logical rule of the law of the excluded middle, by which every proposition must either be True or False, may not be appropriate in these cases. When Parminedes proposed the first version of this law, Heraclitus said controversially that things could be simultaneously True and Not True, while Plato laid the foundation for what would become ‘fuzzy logic’ by indicating that there was an area beyond True and False where these opposites "tumbled about."

[Modern Philosophy is often refered to as mere hyperlinks to Plato, but I cannot find the original Platonic source of this widely quoted factoid.]

The sense that natural language does not have an adequate grasp on the world is far from new: Roger Bacon said “For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.” Galileo agreed: 'The great book of nature can be read only by those who know the language in which it was written. And this language is mathematics.” Vague concepts may be inconvenient if the aim is to be logically precise, and this sort of frustration may lead one to feel like Frege that one is struggling against the inherent imprecision of natural language.

“ Something in itself not perceptible by sense, the thought is presented to the reader – and I must be content with that – wrapped up in a perceptible linguistic form. The pictorial aspect of language presents difficulties. The sensible always breaks in and makes expressions pictorial and so improper. So one fights against language, and I am compelled to occupy myself with language although it is not my proper concern here. I hope I have succeeded in making clear to my readers what I want to call 'thought'.” (Frege. ‘Thoughts’ 1918 :333f ).

Which sentiment Witgenstein echoes closely in saying: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” As Russell put it in his foreword to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, “ Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism, i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence `means' something quite definite. In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise. Thus, logic has two problems to deal with in regard to Symbolism: (1) the conditions for sense rather than nonsense in combinations of words; (2) the conditions for uniqueness of meaning or reference in symbols or combinations of symbols. A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a definite and unique meaning. Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language -- not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfills this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.”

The chimera of a logically perfect language has fascinated the greatest minds in history.

Apart from Frege’s Begriffschrift we might reference Leibniz and his project of a ‘Characteristica Universalis’, or universal symbolic language based on Chinese ideograms. None other than the great logician Kurt Gödel believed that the characteristica universalis was feasible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

Similarly, John Wilkins, a founding father of the Royal Society and Dean of Wadham Oxford for ten years from 1648, though more renowned for being Master of Trinity Cambridge for one, attempted to construct a universal philosophical language in which every concept would have a unique 'non-arbitrary' name.

http://reliant.teknowledge.com/Wilkins/

Symbolic representation.

Russell continues; “Wittgenstein also asserts that in order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr. Wittgenstein's theory.”

``In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all. What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner -- rightly or falsely -- is its form of representation'' Wittgenstein, Tractatus 2.161

Do we mean more than the ability of language to ‘reflect’ reality, with a structural similarity between language and the world, a grammar of the world we might say, in the way we might entertain Lacan’s idea that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’?

Or maybe this is similar to Kant’s saying "Human reason is by its nature architectonic."

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein is coy about exactly how this picturing works: Russell explains that “the structure in common cannot be put into words since it is a structure of words as well as of the facts to which they refer.” So language cannot be used to explain what language does, on the view that language is also a part of the world , and a hierarchy of languages would be needed to do so.

Wittgenstein says “Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”

This is a possible approach that considers the relation of natural language to the world as ‘given’ or unanalysable [so ‘mystical’]. The Chomskian idea of innate grammar is a Kantian solution to the issue, seeing natural language in a necessary position mediating between reality and the mind, though this expression tends to imply a dualism we might want to avoid.

In ‘picturing’ the world, sentences as bearers of meaning by necessity have a unique symbolic relation to the world. For explanation of this symbolic representation we return to Frege:

“I do not deny that even without symbols the perception of a thing can gather about itself a group of memory-images; but we could not pursue these further: A new perception would let these images sink into darkness and allow others to emerge. But if we produce the symbol of an idea that a perception has called to mind, we create in this way a firm, new focus about which ideas gather. We then select another idea from these in order to elicit its symbol. Thus we penetrate step by step into the inner world of our ideas and move about there at will, using the realm of sensibles itself to free ourselves from its constraint. Symbols have the same importance for thought that discovering how to use the wind to sail against the wind had for navigation.... Also, without symbols we would scarcely lift ourselves to conceptual thinking. Thus in applying the same symbol to different but similar things, we actually no longer symbolize the individual thing, but rather what the similarities have in common: the concept. This concept is first gained by symbolizing it; for since it is, in itself, imperceptible, it requires a perceptible representative in order to appear to us" (Frege 1882:83f.)

We should note here the dangerous ground in Frege’s writings of an ‘imperceptible concept’ which is made perceptible to the mind through symbolism.

Later, Frege postulates a further imperceptible entity which perceives this concept, thus opening up a regression of immaterial entities constituting the mind.

Language Traps

One of the most important strands of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is the conviction that our use of language can seriously mislead us in thinking about philosophical matters.

He famously likes these confusions to being trapped like flies in a bottle. The purpose of philosophy in ths view is to clarify linguistic misunderstandings and so show the way out of the philosophical bottleneck. Though this sort of ‘linguistic’ philosophy may no longer be as popular as it was fifty years ago, there are vital lessons to be learned from this approach.

For example, the reification of concepts can be deceptively easy:

“ to 'thingify' an idea, treating a relatively abstract signified as if it were a single, bounded, undifferentiated, fixed and unchanging thing, the essential

nature of which could be taken for granted. It is a representational practice which functions to establish the self-evident 'reality' of the concept in question, treating it as if it has the ontological status of a specific physical thing in an objective material world. Reification suppresses the human intervention involved in the defining process as if the signifier were neutral and had been an integral part of a pre-existing thing in the world.” Daniel Chandler

Being is not an attribute, says Russell, and this clarifies confusions arising from the similarity of sentences like “ My car is red” and “Ghosts are scary!” where the similar function of the verb seems to bestow existence on ghosts. We might say that natural language is agnostic on these matters. In a classic phrase, AJ Ayers warns us that the grammar of English can confuse us into giving unwarranted ontological status to some things best left fictitious:

“ The postulation of real non-existent entities results from the superstition that to every word or phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence, there must be a real entity corresponding…to this error must be attributed the utterances of a Heidegger who bases his metaphysics on the assumption that ‘Nothing’ is a name that is used to denote something particularly mysterious...” Ayer LTL 59

The Language of Life

If we say that Wittgenstein was not in fact interested in constructing a universal language, and had great confidence in the ability of everyday language to carry significance, then we can move away from the need to look for truth-values in each proposition or utterance. With linguists like Roman Jakobson and philosophers like Paul Grice, we can join Wittgenstein later in life speculating on the way everyday language carries meaning in ‘games’. This period of language philosophy is more British than Germanic, with the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers endorsing natural language as a carrier of meaning in the 1940’s and John Austin putting forward the idea of ‘Speech Acts’ in 1955.

While Wittgenstein’s later thinking on the subject may have been influential within Oxbridge philosophical circles, his text of ‘Philosophical Investigations’ was only published in 1953. Contextual or constructivist views of language use start with Roman Jakobson and his emphasis on the communicative contexts of utterances, culminating in a philosopher like Paul Grice who emphasizes the underlying etiquette of communication as a social construct.

The later Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language games’ has thoroughly entered into the culture. This contextual or constructivist approach to language has become widespread and may be described as the orthodoxy of the moment, with every competent language teacher in the world sporting a plaque over his desk inscribed: “Meaning is Use. Period.”

The language of life, as Frege calls everyday language-acts, is formed out of human interactions. It is not an abstract system that somehow resides in the mind and comments on our behaviour. Wittgenstein comments: “it is the form of life common to humankind, ‘the common behavior of mankind’ which is ‘the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language’” (PI 206). Words and sentences arise out of social interactions, and only have their meanings in those contexts. Says Wittgenstein, “It is our acting that lies at the bottom of the language game,” and, “the meaning of a proposition rests ultimately in the use we make of it.”

However, we might ask if meaning is socially constructed, against what sort of criterion can we measure its truth or veracity? That is to say, how can we be sure that a community-constructed language game with its inherent value system has underpinnings relating it to reality? For example, the good citizens of Salem Mass. may all have agreed on the definitions of ‘witch’, ‘possession’, ‘evil’, but how can we leave our own judgements at the door of history here? It does seem that the system of the later Wittgenstein abdicates all responsibility for evaluation or judgement. Religious and ethical matters are declared self-contained ‘games’ with their own rules and regulations, and we cannot comment on their outcomes. Unfortunately each ‘language game’ seems to be untouchable. So the language-game of Sharia law can be defended on the grounds that it is a social construct with its own circle of interlinked definitions, which cannot be compared with any other system such as the Napoleonic Code of France, or the constructs through precedent and reinterpretation in British law. Yet there is definitely a sense in which we would want to compare and confront these differing ‘legal games’, and find some way to adjudicate between them in terms that transcend the individual circumstances from which they arose, measuring them against a yardstick of universal human interests.

References :

A.J Ayer. Language, Truth and Logic 1935.

Daniel Chandler. Glossary of Semiotics

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html

Gottlob Frege "On the Scientific Justification of a Begriffsschrift".1882

Bertrand Russell. Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Text at: http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/aintro.html

Vlad Vieru . Vague Concepts and Sorites Paradoxes

Machine Intelligence Research Laboratory Ottawa.

Text at: http://www.ici.ro/ici/revista/sic1998_3/art09.html

We Sign-Wielding Primates.

We Sign-Wielding Primates. Mark Heyne

“That the principles of language and natural logic are known unconsciously and are a precondition for language acquisition is the general supposition of Cartesian Linguistics.” Chomsky 1966.

Noam Chomsky, in his book ‘Cartesian Linguistics’ states clearly the rationalist heritage from Descartes to Kant that supports his view of language acquisition and development. A ‘deep structure’ of syntax underlies the forms of language the child comes to use. This has become a commonplace in language teaching in recent decades, but it is an unexamined one.

Firstly, what use is the hypothesis of an innate structuring of language if this deep structure is so malleable and indefinite as to allow transformation into whatever structure applies in the child’s environment? If it can be triggered by any actual language in any direction, then it is as vague a concept as a ‘language instinct’, or predisposition.

Many of the observations that lead one to suppose pre-existent mental structures, such as the rapidity of acquisition and ‘creativity’ of children’s language use, have been exaggerated. They can be equally explained by the ten years of exposure to adult verbalisations that an average child needs to become fluent, and by an appeal to factors of general intelligence. I keep coming back to the idea that the growth in general intelligence in infants around 3 to 6 years leads to a growth in the ability to think metaphorically and symbolically. It is this new ability that is expressed phonetically in language.

Generalisation, abstraction and analogy are the processes that other linguists such as Bloomfield, Sassure, Jesperson and others claim provide the mechanisms for the creativity of language use.

I would note here a common definition of learning, that data should be classified first, then reapplied in a new context to demonstrate that it has been understood in the abstract, and not only in its original sense. This is what language learning means too, not just rote memorizing of lexical items, but the reapplication of words and phrases to new situations. And it is the meaning of those phrases more than their form that is picked up and repositioned in new discourse.

One of Chomsky’s arguments against behaviorist reinforcement as a means to the learning of usage is that parents will often approve utterances that are grammatically incorrect, such as ‘doggy sleep’ which would only be corrected if the dog were in fact not asleep. Chomsky says this shows that the child ‘knows’ the correct form from an innate syntax despite the reinforcement of a mistake.

This however might more simply point to meaning being the prime aim of the communication.When we think of those earliest sign-wielding primates it is the semantics of their signing, rather than the syntax, that was of primary importance to them. We are the inheritors of that semantic ability.

Borges on John Wilkins

I have a new-found soft spot for a gent called John Wilkins, who Luis Borges refers to with typical fascination for Wilkins' Quixotic pursuit of a Universal language.

" The words of the analytical language created by John Wilkins are not mere arbitrary symbols; each letter in them has a meaning, like those from the Holy Writ had for the Cabbalists. Mauthner points out that children would be able to learn this language without knowing it be artificial; afterwards, at school, they would discover it being an universal code and a secret encyclopaedia.
Once we have defined Wilkins' procedure, it is time to examine a problem which could be impossible or at least difficult to postpone: the value of this four-level table which is the base of the language. Let us consider the eighth category, the category of stones. Wilkins divides them into common (silica, gravel, schist), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insolubles (chalk, arsenic). Almost as surprising as the eighth, is the ninth category. This one reveals to us that metals can be imperfect (cinnabar, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), recremental (filings, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper). Beauty belongs to the sixteenth category; it is a living brood fish, an oblong one."

" In the universal language which Wilkins invented in the seventeenth century, each word is defined by itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1629, had already noticed that, using the decimal number system, it may take only one day to learn how to name all the numbers up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, namely that of ciphers; he did also suggest the creation of a language similar to this former system, a general language, organizing and covering all human ideas. John Wilkins, around 1664, started to work on this task."

http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html

Following up on Wilkins, who Borges rightly laments is no longer referenced in the Brittanica,
I found Wikipedia helpful as always: he was Warden of Wadham Oxford, my old college, for ten years, though he is usually given more credit for being Dean of Trinity Cambridge for one.
He was one of the originators of the Royal Society, and a supporter of that great British democrat, Oliver Cromwell. A proud engraving of him now resides on my office wall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins

THE -ISMS OF HUMPTY

Humpty Dumpty, the egg who had a great fall in the nursery rhyme, claims

“ When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”.

“The question is,” says Alice, a spirited visitor from the land the other side of the mirror

“ whether you can make words mean so many different things”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master, that is all.”

Though Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’ may be a nonsense story,

Humpty Dumpty, or HD as I shall refer to him, is not talking nonsense.

Alice is too puzzled to reply, but HD has prepared the ground for his claim that his interpretation of meaning is to be ‘Master’. He proclaims ‘glory’ for the superiority of his interpretation of the birthday gift-giving ritual. 364 Un-Birthday presents would obviously be better than one Birthday present. HD’s logic here is impeccable.

His contempt towards Alice attitude in imposing his interpretation is quite imperious.

He claims that Alice does not understand what he means “until I tell you.”

Synonymous with his triumphant ‘glory’ , HD describes his superior interpretation as

“ a nice knock-down argument”, with its undertones of agression and finality.

HD glories in his superior argument, and rightly asserts that his interpretation is to be ‘master’.

HD imposes his definition of a word on others, and Alice obediently accepts his mastery of such unruly objects as proud verbs and malleable adjectives.

“Impenetrability!” says HD, maybe expressing his frustration at his inability to penetrate fully the issue and implications of “might makes right” and giving up with “ we’ve had enough of that subject.” Nevertheless he continues to battle with unruly words that are reluctant to do his bidding by “paying them extra” for carrying more than one meaning. Fanciful as that is, to have a mecantile answer to a linguistic problem, at least HD recognises the multiple meaning of words to be a problem.

When Alice first sees Humpty Dumpty, she recognises him as a character from a nursery–rhyme, and is certain of his identity: “ I’m as certain of it as if his name were written all over his face” she says. She immediately associates his shape, an egg with a face, with his name.

Later, HD complains that the name Alice signifies nothing to him: it is without associations,

and above all, it is not descriptive, as girls’ names like Daisy or Mary might be.

“With a name like that, you might be any shape, almost.” he says.

“Must a name mean something? asks Alice, and HD replies that it must.

“My name means the shape I am…” says Humpty.

“Must a name mean something?” Asks Alice

“Of course it must!” He says, betraying an early prejudice of naming:

HD shows a commonly mistaken conception of names, that they should be descriptive. Even though our own association with Humpty Dumpty allows us to see him as egg-shaped, without that specific cultural background we would not be able to do so.

Alice as a name is not pictorial like Daisy or allusive like Mary, but nowadays has cultural associations which give it a certain significance, in this case from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books themselves.

Names are philosophically important for the link they show between sign and concept, and as a part of the whole importance of language as a medium of truth-telling.

“In ‘On Sense and Reference’ Frege appears to focus on the question relative to what value or aim the relation of proper names has to the objects they stand for - that is, their reference.

“ It is significant relative to the scientific value of truth alone, and this is a value that only sentences can have.” #

Names, nick names, patronyms, surnames, tribal names, all of these naming actions are attempts to define and so limit the person by claiming their identity with family, tribal or clan groupings. Above all, we see that naming of objects is an attempt to exercise control in some way, by sympathetic magic calling on an association of the word to the object which gives a power to manipulate reality through words.

It is this mystical connection between names and objects that is at the root of the Idealist confusion over essences, that named mental objects have an existence simply by virtue of being given a name. In Plato, this named object is the Idea, which is supposed to precede experience, just like the post-Kantian formulation by Chomsky of a mental template which preceeds actual experience of language.

These mental objects seem to have a stability and fixedness that is quite illusory.

Instead we realize that ‘ goodness’, ‘love’, ‘nation’, ‘the people’, do not refer to fixed entities, but are categories that are reconstituted each time we refer to them.

Wittgenstein objects to the descriptive view of names, specifically in Saint Augustine’s formulation that "individual words in language name objects," and that "sentences are combinations of such names" (PI 1). Instead he introduces the idea that how a word is used is its salient character. "For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language"(PI 1). And

"if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use" (BB 4).

Alice hits on a relevant observation when HD claims

“It’s my turn to choose a subject”, and Alice reflects that

“ He talks about it just as if it were a game!”

In fact this is HD’s game of interpretation, as he quibbles pedantically over the difference between “ How old did you say you were” and “ How old are you?”,

triumphantly pronouncing Alice’s interpretation “Wrong!”

Unlike HD, who was reduced to bribery in his effort to control unruly words, Wittgenstein embraces the countless uses of words, their un- fixedness, and their flexibility in a game called language: " The term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" (PI 23)

This view is very like that of Vygotsky, in that language is seen as a social construct, and intrinsically opposed to the Chomskian view that language is something built-in to humans.

Chomsky holds that language is something built-in to the brain, without which language learning could not take place. This is a Kantian view of the remarkable progress young children make in the learning of their mother-tongue. Where Kant has categories of understanding built into the brain to process time, space and causation, Chomsky suggests that linguistic capability is also built-in, and accounts for our almost instinctive grasp of the inner transformations of language. Thus knowledge of a language must depend on an inner template of language structure which is activated by actual examples of language being heard by a child.

However, seeing that mental activity preceeds linguistic activity in the child by at least a year or more, what rather might be innate is the system of discrimination and organisation that can carry the verbal information provided by speech, and this is actually a genetic inheritance from the first language-using tribe that came out of Africa. The ‘deep grammar’ that Chomsky and others see in the relations between widely-dispersed languages are directly attributable to this fact, that we descend from this original language-gifted tribe.

A system of perception, comparison, categorisation, association and synthesis is active from the beginning in newly-born children, and even in pre-natal infants. Given that information is being processed by the brain from the very first perceptions of the mother’s heart beat, fluctuations in warmth and the sounds of language penetrating the walls of the womb, it seems unnecessary to posit a separate language-structuring device in the brain. Rather, the structure, inherited from forebears, that forms and orders all perception is Ratiocination. Some would like to call it Reason

but that would imply a large number of relationships which must have developed from some few primitive groupings of perception, such as present/absent, one/plural, which would be the beginning of numbering, and, deriving from the instinct for survival and reproduction, interesting or not interesting. This sense of some things being more ‘interesting’ is notable in babies, and can be experimentally verified.

Whether it is actually necessary to assume an innate Language Acquisition Device to account for eventual outcomes in language performance seems to me a matter that could be experimentally tested. If we can account for L1 learners’ linguistic behavior entirely in terms of input of thousands of vocalisations by parents and siblings over a number of years, the LAD is redundant.

On the other hand, investigation of gender differences in language learning, since it seems that females have an advantage in this matter, may provide ammunition for the other side. If structures in the brain could be isolated which aid language learning, then a nativist argument would be supported. All the same, these structures are more likely physical than metaphysical.

The popularity of the innate theory is hard to overcome, as it fits easily with other widespread beliefs in non-physical aspects of the human being such as souls, spirits and minds.

The nativist view of language learning may be comfortable and reassuring, but the evolutionary view is humanist and confers value on human learning. Above all, the LAD seems to me to downgrade the value of a specifically human construct, that is the codification of information in a symbolic communication system called language.

Mark Heyne. June 2006

FOOTNOTES

*HD is a well-known children’s nursery-rhyme character who is in fact an egg.

He suffers an unfortunate Fall which can never be remedied. As the nursery rhyme has it,

“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”

In Carroll’s version, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men “ couldn’t put HD in his place again”, a variant reading which may well reflect the political allegory behind the nursery rhyme….

“Humpty Dumpty was in fact an unusually large canon which was mounted on the protective wall of "St. Mary's Wall Church" in Colchester, England. It was intended to protect the Parliamentarian stronghold of Colchester which was in the temporarily in control of the Royalists during the period of English history, described as the English Civil War ( 1642 - 1649). A shot from a Parliamentary canon succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty causing the canon to fall to the ground. The Royalists 'all the King's men' attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall but even with the help of ' all the King's horses' failed in their task and Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting eleven weeks.” www.famousquotes.me.uk

REFERENCES:

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. 1872

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (PI), 1953,

http://heyne-satz.blogspot.com/

Matrix Unloaded

THE MATRIX UNLOADED

What if you were told your whole life was an illusion, and in fact you are being used as a human battery, a source of chemical energy plugged into a computer, like some sort of Energizer Bunny?

Scary though it is to imagine, this is the state of the people in the world of the Matrix, exploited for their electrical potential, while dreaming that they are going about their normal lives as husbands and wives, office workers and good citizens. The Matrix of computers they are plugged into provide them with a virtual-reality experience from which they never wake.

What everyone remembers about the Matrix films is the stunning visual imagery, with ultra-rapid fight scenes and death-defying leaps and jumps over buildings. However this is not their main quality. The subject of the films is the subject of Western philosophy from Decartes to Kant: how can we know our world is real if all we know is our own minds? The Matrix movies deal with this puzzle and decide: our present reality is mental, not physical.

The main characters are Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, Oracle and Cypher.

Morpheus, and the name suggests a dream-maker or shamanistic shape-shifter, is awakened and aware of the diabolical situation humans are in, and can awaken others from their computer-programmed illusion. Such a person is known in India as Boddisatva, one who turns back from enlightenment to enlighten others. In Christian terms, he is like John the Baptist, who announces the Messiah, and wakens others to the truth. He has himself been awoken from his dream or trance of illusion by the Oracle, who we discover later in the story is herself a glitch in the Matrix program. Morpheus awakens Neo, who he believes is ‘The One’ prophesized, born and destined to be the savior of the enslaved human race.

If this all sounds vaguely Biblical, you are not mistaken. The Matrix trilogy of films are science-fiction with a mythic ring. There is a whole level of the Matrix movies that is based on a Christian narrative structure of redemption, Messianic return and salvation. The haven of the fight against the Matrix is called Zion and the main female character is called Trinity. In Catholic theology this is the three-fold nature of the godhead: essence, incarnation and creative energy in movement. She is ironically named for representing the essential but elided female aspect of the creation, known to all good Catholics as the Mother of God. She is Neo’s lover and is his reason for rejecting the opportunity to destroy the Matrix. Instead he chooses love over victory to save her from death.

This sort of framing of the characters is well designed for the Western audience, who will be quite familiar with the underlying mythic structures from stories like The Parable of the Cave, Orpheus in the Underworld and the role of prophesy in the Bible. The bros. Wachowski seem to have given up on the idea of sacrifice though , as both Neo and Trinity get saved at the last moment when they are about to die ‘for the cause’. Morpheus in Christian terms is John the Baptist, who announces the Messiah, and wakens others to the truth. He has himself been awoken from his dream or trance of illusion by the Oracle, whom we discover later in the story is just a glitch in the Matrix program. In fact, there are a number of glitches in the program, which make it possible for those once awakened to fight back against it. For a start, they are able to hack into the Matrix code, and the illusion the system provides is not always perfect. There is even reference to another version of the matrix that failed, as it was too perfect…the illusion it provided was too satisfying to the humans entrapped within it, which says something the machines misunderstood about human nature; that it thrives on conflict and problem-solving.

Apart from this structure of slavery and redemption, there are other elements in the Matrix , such as the whole aspect of illusion, delusion and enlightenment that the writers, the Wachowski Brothers, borrow from a different tradition. If we look at the Parable of the Cave as told by Plato, we see a basic source of the concept that we are living in illusion, that what we take for reality is but a shadow of the Real. Plato took the ‘real’ to be the world of ideas and mathematical concepts that are independent of our sensory experience, and that idea is modified in the Christian tradition by Saint John and Saint Augustine, who say that “now we see but through a glass, darkly, but then we will see face to face”. In simple terms, they say the spiritual world of Heaven and Hell is real, while our physical experience is not. Morpheus, in contrast, awakens people from the illusion of a mental construct to confront a harsh but actual physical reality.

What Morpheus teaches Neo is that he can have mental control over his reality. This is a higher consciousness that Neo develops gradually, until he can stop bullets by willpower, heal the dying and fly like Superman. This may seem ludicrous, but it comes from his own mental capacity and greater concentration which can overcome the virtual-reality projected by the Matrix computers. Morpheus’ message here is that reality, our everyday experience of the world, is a mental event, and we can learn to control it.

The character Cypher is the Judas of the story, betraying his friends as he opts for the comfort of the Matrix-illusion rather than face the everyday reality of synthetic food and constant peril.

He enjoys his gourmet restaurant food even though he knows it is not real. He is an ammoral hedonist, but we have to ask ourselves, is his choice so illogical? What does he lose if what he enjoys is a mere representation, when the same can be said of all experience? The fact is that we know only what we perceive in our brains, the input of our senses, so what’s the difference? The answer is suggested by another character in the film, the Oracle.

Neo is prophesized to be the One, though he doesn’t believe it himself. He discovers his mental powers gradually, through instruction and practice. The Oracle also predicts that Trinity will die, but when he has the choice, Neo exercises his freedom to save her rather than destroy the Matrix. So, the prophesy can be subverted by the exercise of free will. The same goes for Cypher. What he loses is the difficult but rewarding exercise of response to actuality, rather than the passive acceptance of an illusion.

Wittgenstein's can of worms.

Comments on Pathways Language and the World, Unit 1. Dec 1 2006

Wittgenstein’s questioning our ‘pointing inwardly’ to a sensation and labeling it, his calling this a ‘ceremony,’ presumably a ‘mere’ ceremony without real value, opens a can of worms in the heart of western philosophy.

If we associate a sign ‘S’ with a particular sensation, Wittgenstein doubts that in the future we will be able to correctly assign this same marker to a repeated occurrence of the same sensation. He doubts that there is any way to be sure that the sensation labeled S is exactly the same as any other perceived sensation we think identical to S.

“Whatever is going to seem right to me, is right.”

In other words, there is no have repeatedly shown. However, we do trust it and build on it, and we might ask how far a memory would have to stray from an original fact to become false.

An experience identified as ‘S’ would take place in a certain context. As Heraclites put it, you can’t stand in the same river twice, not least because apart from the water of the river being in flux, you too are in flux, and changing from one moment in time to another. So a repeated experience of ‘S’ would have to be called ‘S1’, ‘S2’, ‘S3’, and so on, each existentially different from the other. How these can be related in memory however, would be by their shared qualities, their membership of a set: as David Hume said, “When we have found a resemblance among several objects that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences we may observe in the degree of their quantity and quality, and whatever other differences may appear among them.”

Hume, Treatise, I. i. 7.

Let’s agree that the main functions of language are firstly to represent our thoughts to ourselves, and secondly to convey those thoughts to others.

For the first function, maybe I can decide to call a certain taste “S” and that serves as an adequate reference to myself. In that usage of ‘language’, the representation of thought to myself, the internal labeling can be as arbitrary as I like, so long as I remember what label I attached to which thought. If we make the mistake of assuming that our private code is going to serve the second function of language, we will be sorely disillusioned. One viewing alone of the execrable Jodie Foster film “Nell” should be enough to convince us of this. However we could say a representation can be private and for oneself alone and can be trusted if it is in some constant propositional language with its own internal syntax against whose criteria a logical or factual error would be seen to diverge.

For the second main use of language we will need common agreement that when I say “S” I mean the 19^th letter in the alphabet, and not something else. If we talk about communication with others then a social dimension is necessary in which agreement is reached by a community on the usage of a sign. If George Bush says “It’s so hot some of us are going to fall out”, and no-one but a solitary Texan standing nearby understands that he means “keel over”, then the social requirement of language communication has nevertheless been met. If there are no Texans nearby, the communication will not succeed, and we might say that the President is only talking to himself.

If this were all there is to Wittgenstein’s misgivings, we might turn to a number of language theorists such as Roman Jacobson to find a similar argument, but it seems that more is at stake here.

When he doubts the identity of an experience with a similar one stored in memory and labeled ‘S’, Wittgenstein may be questioning more than just the accuracy of our memory or the lack of external verification. He is questioning more than just the value of subjective judgments. He is really doubting the value of the introspection itself. And his unhappiness with the labeling of sensations is really a mistrust of that method of philosophizing in which internal judgements stand without any means of verification. The self that is known by looking within and the certainties that are obtained by mentally stripping away all doubtful elements, to Wittgenstein are still fundamentally unstable.

What this signifies for us is the undermining of an established identity in the Lockean tradition where continuity of memories entails the continuity of a Self. This is a conception reflected in common usage like

“He is no longer the man he was,” said of an Alzheimer’s victim or a forgetful elderly person. Alongside the Christian idea of an immaterial ‘soul’ as identity, this materialist concept of the self consisting of the accumulated memories of a person is very widespread.

[Not that it is universal however: some groups of people such as the Piraha tribe apparently do not value memories of the past or locate events linguistically in a past tense. Their identities reside almost exclusively in their ongoing present experience.]

Wittgenstein’s radical doubt has serious ramifications for our knowledge of the world and for our own sense of personal identity.