[lit-ideas] Re: The Order of Aurality ratification of fiction

  • From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:17:41 +0000 (GMT)

Yesterday my post omitted a key "not" where it read:


From: Donal McEvoy donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx



>But we can also imagine another creature whose "form of life" allows it to 
>understand the "language of chess" as we understand it yet this creature 
>cannot understand our "language of morals" - for perhaps within that 
>creature's "form of life" there is no role or scope for moral choice, moral 
>evaluation etc., and this is lacking to the extent that our "language of 
>morals" would be incomprehensible to them i.e. they just would understand it 
>when one human said "All humans must be treated with respect and not like they 
>are simply a disposable piece of machinery", or the role of some such claim 
>within our "form of life".>

Probably some (at least in some possible world) cognitively put the "not" in 
for me (I might have done the same for them): but emphatically here it is as it 
should have been:-
i.e. they just would NOT understand it when one human said "All humans must be 
treated with respect and not like they are simply a disposable piece of 
machinery" etc.

Taking DR's advice to "carry on":- A further example of how specific aspects 
of a "form of life" might allow access to/understanding of one language game 
but not another: imagine a bee-type creature with a bee-type form of life. We 
grant this bee-type creature the cognitive capacity to grasp language at the 
level at which a bee can, for example, understand the 'directions' expressed in 
the dance of the bee (which is an expression of "bee language"). This cognitive 
capacity would mean it has access to/understanding of the signalling function 
of language - it could therefore perhaps (in principle?) understand what was 
going on in another language that used the signalling function e.g. the 
language of semaphore flags, suitably restricted to a signalling function, 
would not in principle be incomprehensible to this bee-type creature because of 
"form of life" differences, albeit it might be incomprehensible because of 
cognitive deficiency. But if we grant
 this bee-type creature sufficient cognitive capacity to consciously understand 
its own bee-type language, we might also grant it could understand a "language 
game" such as one of semaphore signals where these give directions.

We might debate whether the bee-type creature also would have the grasp of the 
descriptive function or use of language, depending on whether we assigned some 
descriptive function to its own "bee-type language".

We can understand this bee-type language (in principle) because our own 
language has many forms of language that also deploy the signalling function of 
language, and their presence within our "form of life" means we can understand 
them within the bee's form of life - they are not incomprehensible to us 
because our "form of life" is sufficiently like the bee-type creature's in 
respects necessary for understanding the specific language in question.

But it does not follow that what is (in principle?) shared access 
to/understanding of these specific languages [bee-type language and 
semaphore] means that all language is open to such understanding all the 
creatures, no matter their kind of language or "form of life". In particular, 
the bee-type creature may have nothing in its "form of life" that corresponds 
to arguing and therefore to the argumentative function of language, and it may 
have nothing that corresponds to ethical claims and to the 'language-game' of 
making and discussing ethical claims. And so, because of the key difference in 
its "form of life" here, and irrespective of cognitive capacity, the bee-type 
creature would find our arguing and our "language of morals" incomprehensible - 
it might at best think we were engaged in some strange or weird form of 
signalling, as this is what it does understand within its "form of life" and 
specific bee-type language.

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