[Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein and "Brain Scripts"
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:40:06 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
>
> (reply to Josh)
(not sure exactly what it is a reply to)
> One is never to ask what a word means. One only asks what is the brain doing
> with it?
Very frequently what the brain is doing with it
*is* following a simple look-up convention for meaning,
just because it is not "always" does not make it "never".
> Here is what I want to say: grammar is the processing language the brain
> learns to make sense of ordinary language. There is a sub-surface system of
> processing that is going on.
>
>
> Wittgenstein:
>
> "It seems that there are CERTAIN DEFINITE mental processes bound up with the
> working of language, processes through which alone language can function. I
> mean that processes of understanding and meaning. The signs of our language
> seem dead without these mental processes: and it might seem that the only
> function of the signs is to induce such processes, and that these are the
> things we ought really to be interested in. [BB, p. 3] (See also, PI, sect.
> 358). [note: allcaps used in place of italics sw]
And Turing, and the computational and cognitivist camps, have
been detailing those certain definite processes ever since.
If these camps have made errors, it was only in assuming the
answer was narrow, indeed they may make just the kinds of errors
Wittgenstein warned us to avoid. A computationalist essentialism
is no better than a non-computationalist essentialism. The problem
does dissolve, I think, and terms like "certain definite mental
processes" are just the kind of misleading language that needs to be
dissolved. They are not certain, because they are multiply
realizable - what is meant is more like "particular". They are not
definite, because they are not cannonical, by Wittgenstein's own
guidance. They are not "mental" because "mental" is not an
explanatory category. And it is not a "process" because that word
connotes a closed system, rather than the embeddedness of anything
we are going to recognize as a thinking being.
Josh
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