[lit-ideas] Re: The Order of Aurality
- From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2012 15:47:25 -0600
I've reported this before, but I still stand in confusion before it. One
of my nieces caught memingitis before she was six months old. That was
about 30 years ago now. She survived,but profoundly deaf. About ten years
ago or so I asked her if in her dreams hearing-people used sign language.
"No," she said, "in my dreams, I can hear. Even deaf friends hear and
speak." I was nonplussed. How can that be? WHAT DID SHE HEAR? AND HOW
COULD SHE KNOW SHE WAS HEARING? I know that bilingual people do not need
to translate into their native language to know what is being communicated,
and true bilinguals can catch the cultural conontations of expressions.
But they are dealing with words -- this word for that word. My niece has
no experiential concept of words. When I listen to Spanish speakers, all I
hear is one endless word composed of two thousand vowels. But I know that
if I would put some effort into the listening, I'd learn how to listen.
But my niece has no experience of language -- none whatsoever! And yet
she understands language. Not only understands it -- but creates it --
creates an oral language. How I wish I could hear it.
So how does any of this fit into this discussion? I don't know. Maybe not
at all. Or maybe language is inherent in higher species and that we create
language because we have to, genetically. God and philosopy and music and
poetry be damned. Or maybe language is just the excresence of our
ignorance.
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
> **
>
> We might perhaps admit that "For Wittgenstein, any language is, in
> principle, open to understanding by any language user who shares a
> sufficiently similar 'form of life'" but not that, without that 'form of
> life' qualification, "For Wittgenstein, any language is, in principle,
> open to understanding by any language user (irrespective of whether their
> kind of language and 'form of life' bear any similarity to the language in
> question)".
>
>
> >I don't understand the sentence in quotes. It seems just mistaken. The
> reason it's mistaken is epitomized at 327 in 'Philosophy of Psychology—A
> Fragment,' [Hacker and
> Schulte's revised translation of the *Investigations*]: 'If a lion could
> talk, we wouldn't be able to understand it.'>
>
> I don't quite understand what Robert does not understand here. There aretwo
> sentences
> in quotes, and they represent two incompatible claims. They are attempts to
> reframe Phil's unqualified claim that "For Wittgenstein, any language is,
> in principle, open to understanding by any language user" in terms of
> whether or not this claim must be qualified by the additional words "who
> shares a sufficiently similar 'form of life".
>
> I should perhaps add that, while this paragraph begins "We might perhaps
> admit", we might perhaps not admit: in particular, even if a 'form of life'
> qualification is required here, such a necessary condition may not be, for
> Wittgenstein, a sufficient condition to make any given "language, in
> principle, open to understanding by any language user". And so further
> qualification on when "any language is, in principle, open to understanding
> by any language user" might be required.
>
> Also I don't understand how "If a lion etc." at all shows how the first
> of these sentences in quotes is mistaken; nor is it, of course, an
> argument that the second of the sentences in quotes is mistaken, so much
> as a way of 'epitomizing' that it is mistaken [because 'Aslan' would not
> share our 'form of life'].
>
> Donal
> Spring nearly sprung
>
>
>
>
> In fact, I suggest the phrase "in principle" may be dispensed with here
> as otiose, and "open to understanding" is misleading here: for, though we
> might say that the PLA tells us that any given language must be "open to
> understanding" by some others, it does not necessarily imply that it must
> be "open to understanding" by all others who use a language of any kind,
> where this would include any creature with any kind of 'form of life' that
> uses any kind of language .
>
>
> Right. See above.
>
> While I think I understand the drift of Phil's points, I suggest they
> mistakenly conflate the role of 'form of life' and the PLA. In short, it is
> unclear to me how the so-called PLA imples that "any language is, in
> principle, open to understanding by any language user" without any 'form
> of life' qualification, as it seems to me that such a 'form of life'
> qualification would not make any language 'private' in the way the PLA
> denies.
>
>
> True. It would seem that the Diarist, as he's sometimes, is either
> (somehow) divorced from any form of life—which seems prima facie absurd— or
> he's writing in a code,
> which by definition would be translatable into a common language.
>
> Robert Paul
>
>
>
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