[lit-ideas] Re: The Order of Aurality
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2012 13:33:57 +0000 (GMT)
________________________________
From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
> I fully accept social construction of meaning
a 'la Wittgenstein's "shared way of life,">
I recall it is typically "form of life" rather than "way of life".
This may be of no difference as Eric used the expression but here is a
difference: being a layabout or workaholic, being an addict or being free of
addiction, living in poverty or in luxury, being a priest or a housewife or a
soldier or a musician - all these may be a "way of life" (and in, perhaps,
distinct senses) but we do not need to share any "way of life" in these senses
to have shared meanings from language. The sense in which we share a "form of
life", for Wittgenstein, is not dependent on sharing any specific "way of life"
in the above senses - to get W's sense we need to imagine a creature that could
not share the meanings of [i.e. understand] our language because it lacked a
"form of life" sufficiently like ours.
Presumably W's point, insofar as it involves explaining why such a creature
cannot understand our language because it does not share our "form of life", is
not a point merely about imagining a creature lacking cognitive capacities to
grasp language. The point cannot simply be that a creature without a capacity
to understand language would not understand our language, but that a creature
with a capacity to understand its language may not understand ours becauseits
"form of life" is so different toours.
If this is right, we might ask a Wittgensteinian to flesh out some examples of
such creatures (as we might ask the early Wittgenstein for an example of
so-called 'simples'**).
But perhaps this could not be done:- because their language [as we might try to
conceive it] would be as opaque and incomprehensible to us as ours is to them,
and so unspecifiable to us using our language:- for if a creature with a
capacity to understand its language may not understand ours becauseits "form of
life" is so different toours, this would seem to hold also in reverse.
And so, perhaps, "form of life" turns into another of those "unsayable" things:
it is something we can "show" perhaps, by exhibiting an example of meaning that
reflects a "form of life" required for its understanding [namely, our "form of
life"], but not otherwise or more generally "say".*
However, it would seem that, in W's sense, (almost?) all humans on earth share
a sufficiently similar "form of life" to understand each other.
(On a parting shot: from a Popperian POV, Wittgenstein's point here is not so
much mistaken as theoretically underinformed and, therefore, as an explanatory
approach somewhat naive.)
D
*Who has long suggested that both the early and later Wittgenstein's philosophy
amount to two distinct doctrines of 'what can be said and what can only be
shown' [i.e. of the, in a word, 'unsayable']: see my forthcoming monograph,
"What about Aslan? Reflections on 'If a lion could speak, we could not
understand him'"
**It turns out no such example can be said. (Declamatory catchphrases by
advertising meerkats do not count).
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