[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:38:40 -0700
Just a note on part of what John McCreery wrote this morning.
From an earlier perspective, the language in question would, of
course, be the inerrant Word of God. And I think it was Leibniz who
pointed out, as Robert Paul has done, that it would consist entirely
of analytically true statements. It is only due to the limitations of
human understanding that any true statement appears to be synthetic.
Not being omniscient, we simply haven't grasped all the premises.
Leibniz did claim that what to us appear to be contingent statements are
really analytic, although only God can perform the 'infinite analysis'
needed to show this. (It isn't a matter of grasping premises, but of
seeing how predicates are contained in subjects.)
Donal asks why this should be so—why all propositions should be
analytic. The answer is that there can be no 'looseness' in the world:
God has chosen this world from an infinite number of other possible ones
because it is the world compatible with the most perfection; in choosing
it he didn't choose 'just any Adam,' e.g., but the one who ate the
apple, etc., for this Adam best fits with everything else—every rock and
every toadstool, every mouse and every man. And so with the rocks and
toadstools. God acted of necessity (theological quibbles about God's
free choice are taken up on other lists). God does nothing without a
reason, as Einstein too believed. Every aspect of the world is as it is
of necessity. At bottom, things could not be otherwise.
Nowadays, we doubt the possibility of constructing this perfect
language. The incompleteness theorems imply that any attempt will end
in an infinite regress. But Wittgenstein's conclusion that we cannot
talk about the really important things is far from novel...
The claim is not that it is novel but that he has characterized both
sides of the 'sayable/unsayable' divide in a way that seems not to have
been done before. It's one thing to say that certain things are the only
important ones and the rest is not worth considering (which is my crude
take on many of the various forms of mysticism) or that the contingent
world is an illusion, and that one should scorn the things in it; it's
another thing to say that the facts in the world can be clearly
articulated although what is important lies outside it.
Robert Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
