Well burrowed, old mole!

A Cluster of Problems

I.  Series’ and Meaning                                                            

When we think of the meaning of words, we think usually of their use in propositions and sentences.  Some of these sentences are attempts at definition by various dictionaries and scientists and so on.  If we look in greater detail at these definitions we can see that they refer to other definitions, which in their turn refer to other definitions.  This is called the ‘infinite regress’ and this is the essential and irreducible feature of language, its fundamental truth. 

     It is possible to view this chain of reference as being one of many which construct a web or a field which is the matrix from which uses of language draw, and which, on the whole, constitutes a language’s semantic structure.  When looking at definitions, we see certain concepts or signifiers which are used in an attempt to stabilize the system of reference.  These can be called centers, and language can be said to rely on a network with multiple centers from which it draws meaning.

     The idea that language has stable meaning is analogous to the way a counterfeit bill remains ‘legitimate’ so long as it is passed from hand to hand.  What this process requires is not a positive belief in the legitimacy of the bill; it requires the non-presence of disbelief in the bill’s legitimacy.  Despite what the logician might say, ‘I believe’ and ‘I do not disbelieve‘ express two differing positions. One of which is a positive belief and one of which we can call a negative belief.

II. Sign and Code

  We shall being with a code. If a code needs to be in place in order for signs to acquire meaning, do not signs have to be in place for a code to have its meaning? Which is prior, code or sign?  I have never, as no individual ever does, encountered the entirety of the code; the only positive evidence from which one can infer the existence of a code comes through the signs to which it gives meaning.  However, one could also say that the positive is not the only type of evidence. It sometimes happens that we see a thing which seems to be a sign from which we can not infer a meaning; we feel that there is some meaning there which escapes us.

   According to the above characterization of the code-sign relationship, one must infer that the code is prior to the sign, and this presents a problem because, in terms of existence, the sign is the only existence of the code, the code exists as a relationship between signs.  The sign only exists as sign once a code is conceived of, but in order for there to be a code, there must be signs for it to function as a code for. Peirce’s concept of the legisign may help us here.  In his view the legisign is a law, or general constraint, however, it may be only be instantiated by a second order sign which derives from the iconic sign which is the encoding which is perception.     

III. Is Language ‘Natural’?

     Language is a very privileged form of communication, but what is language?  It seems that most theorists and researchers distance themselves from this question in order to approach it, as if they would trick it into revealing itself by misdirection.  The language of indirect communication, of implication through the gaps in language that it creates for itself, is our best source of understanding about the origin of language. Whether we see this in slang song or literature, it points us toward a hypothesis, namely that languages were made by human beings.

     From what did human beings fashion language? The likely answer to that question is that they learned it from exposure to some external influence. What influences were ‘pre-language’ humans exposed to? Earth, Air, Water, Fire, animals plants light and so on, they lived in Nature as animals, like any other animal.  It is through the ability to comprehend their environment that creatures survive in Nature, we must understand that which is not within the immediate reach of our eyesight, therefore we must use among other organs our ears and nose in order to perceive danger in advance.

     Before people spoke they were fluent in another ‘language.’  They would read the book of nature and interpret it to survive, only it was not a book as we understand it, it was more similar to the internet, except it was nature, there may not have been words as we know them, but there was the process of interpreting signs. Were our first primitive grunts only our desperate attempt at the embodiment of a pre-existing sign system?

    The other half of language is music, music may have preceded language, this may have been a simultaneous birth, for who has not heard a language of which he is completely ignorant and wondered at its musicality.  These two things partake of many similar principles such as the use and manipulation of pitch and rhythm; every word in a language to which one has never been exposed before is poetry, language divested of sense is song pure song, one can understand certain themes, as new words are born in a burst of song a string indistinguishable from one another.

    Notes in music gain meaning by repetition, as do certain principles and patterns in nature make themselves apparent to every form of life, these may not be the same patterns for every form of life. They can also be called fields of possibility.  By what means are these fields of possibility apprehended? Here we find the first mathematician, and scientist in the generalization of statistical regularities, and here we see yet another face of language. This seems to be how many animals find their niche in nature 

     This is based on the so called ‘survival instinct’ in animals, which I prefer to call the ‘will to survival’ because imputing all animal intelligence to ‘instinct’ dehumanizes the animal.  We dehumanize the animal before we study it lest we should find that same will in us.  Lest we should find the same mundane genesis for mathematics for language and for music as we find for our very own species we are born of this Earth and these things flow from our contact with it.         

     What we call ‘animal instinct’ is statistical perception of the environment in order to facilitate survival. Animals are said to posess instinct because they normalize and tend to remain with one fixed norm of adjustment to their environment or to fluxuate between several variations on that. 

        Language was once subject almost totally to what one might call natural causes or natural selection however insofar as we have become conscious of it and began to sketch its architecture we have reclaimed it from its place in nature and re-created it as a human artifact. Dresher (2001) refers to Halpern (2001) who gives a principle which can explain the misapprehension of this situation “almost everyone these days is labouring under the Fallacy of Linguistic Autonomy, which holds that a language is `a living, growing thing’, and as such has a will of its own and follows its own developmental laws.” If language is natural in the sense that a Tiger in the wild is natural then Autonomy is not a fallacy.  However, when the first grammar of a natural language was written this tiger began to cease to be wild.  By the 19^th century this Tiger was strolling around in captivity, for human observation in a zoo.

        Halpern’s fallacy is another version of the ‘appeal to nature’ fallacy.  It has been formulated as ‘the law of nature’ or ‘natural law’ which can not be proven but is self evident and can only be apprehended by a sort of transcendental instinctual connection. It can’t be explained. Through proper breeding one grasps what is natural. Bertrand Russell formulated this instinctual connection in his 1948 Reith lecture on social cohesion.  He would have us believe that in the period before large human social organizations came into existence people lived in small tribal groupings without need of law because they all posessed an instinctual sense of social duty.  This allowed these people to live in seeming anarchy without leaders or law codes without police or any form of external law formulated and enforced.  As society advanced there emerged two classes of people and two motives for loyalty, first there were the free people who had been with the group for generations who obeyed from this original instinctual connection, and the slaves whose tribes had been conquered and obeyed out of terror.    

IV. Knowledge, Myth and Axiom

  Knowledges, in however rational a light they may be presented, always contain myth at their foundation.  It is from this premise that one may begin to speak of the ideological nature of knowledge; for, myth and ideology share a very important metaphysical function; one could speak of ideology as the modern form of myth for this reason. This function is to be the first premise from which it is necessary to deduce in order to establish a universalizing discursive construction of nature. Thus, one may even speak of the ideological nature of nature as well.

   If one should accept as alethetic the proposition that human beings are constituted at least in some part by their experience, the foods and goods they consume, the various historical circumstances they are thrown into etcetc, and that this experience does not cease until the very moment of death, and the proposition that no two human beings are exposed to the exactly identical experiential garbage-heap of historical accidents, then one could infer that (1) that human beings are never completely formed, and (2) that each individual human being is unique, singular.

    A pair of oppositions arise; one between experience and knowledge and one between myth and knowledge. Within these oppositions it is the buzzing chaos,  the unique singular and incommensurable character of experience, and the unquestionable and unfalsifiable certainty of myth which bookend knowledge. Could knowledge not be situated negatively as man once was between animal and god? No, these are the conditions of possibility of knowledge, it arises from these two, with myth acting to unify experience. One can note an interesting parallel between Sorel’s useful social myth, and the pragmatist definition of meaning as formulated by Peirce. ”The rational purport [meaning] of a word or other expression lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing on the conduct of life.” From this it is possible to assert that the meaning of truth is this acting as a useful social myth which would unify experience.   

     Axioms are mini-myths, self evident truths and so on also partake of the mythic.