Words

“THE MEANING OF A WORD IS ITS USE IN LANGUAGE” ~ LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

8 comments - The latest ones

Dinesh ^club

Kahneman & Tversky (Psychologists) demonstrated the influence of the Example rule [One of the Gut’s simplest rules of thumb is that the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more common that something must. This is “availability heuristic,” which I call Example rule] in a typically elegant way. First, they asked a group of students to list as many words as they could think of that fit in the form _ _ _ _ _ n _. The students had 60 seconds to work on the problem. The average number of words they came up with was 2.9. Then another group of students was asked to do the same, with the same time limit, for words that fit the form _ _ _ _ ing. This time, the average number words was 6.4

Look carefully and it’s obvious there’s something strange here. The first form is just like the second, except the letters “I” and “g” have been dropped. That means any word fits the second form must fit the first. Therefore, the first form is actually more common but the second form is much more easily recalled.

Armed with this information, Kahneman and Tversky asked another group of students to think of four pages in a novel. There are about 2,000 words on those four pages, they told students. “How many words would you expect to find that have the form _ _ _ _ing?” The average estimate was 13.4 words. They then asked another group of students the same question for the form _ _ _ _n _. The average guess was 4.7 words.

This experiment has been repeated in many different forms and the results are always the same: The more easily people are able to think of examples of something, more common they judge that thing to be. ~ Excerpt Page 47 (The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner)

8 years ago. Edited 16 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Do words even exist? Are they part of your ontology? Should they be? This talk of words being made of information” is pretty dicey, isn’t it? Just a lot of hand-waving? Some philosopher will bite the bullet at this point and insist that words “don’t exist” strictly speaking. They have no mass, no energy, no chemical composition; they are not part of the scientific image, which they say should be considered the ultimate arbiter of ontology. But words are very prominent denizens of our manifest image, and even if science doesn’t have to refer to them or mention them, you couldn’t do science without using them, so they should perhaps be included in our ontology. They loom large for us, readily occupying our attention. ~ Page 203 - Excerpt “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” ~ Author Daniel C. Dennet

4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

Words, for Emerson, are signs of natural facts, and these signs are used as symbols of “spiritual facts”. Many of the words we use to express amoral or intellectual factor can be traced to their derivation from some material appearance. Something is ‘right’ if it ‘straight’. The ‘wrong’ is ‘twisted’. The word ‘spirit’ is derived from ‘wind,’ ‘air,’ ‘breath.’ ‘Supercilious’ refers to ‘raising’ one’s eyebrows. Words derived from descriptions of physical appearance are transformed into ‘spiritual’ or mental phenomena. Emerson’s insights in the segment in ‘Nature’ under the rubric “Language” even touch upon the structralist notion of an unconsciously derived set of basic concepts. For he maintains that “the process by which this transformation [of words used to describe things into words used to denote spiritual phenomena] is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. . .and savages.”

Words symbolize things and natural phenomena symbolize cognitive “facts.” What is stressed, in this rudimentary notion of semiotics, is the ‘metaphorical’ nature of language. By means of language, “outward phenomena” are converted into something in human life. The world we perceive and know is “emblematic” or symbolic. In fact, nature may be conceived of as “a metaphor of the human mind.” Even technical statements have a certain meaning borrowed from human life and judgments. Language translates experience of external phenomena into metaphorical, symbolic word-image that have an anthropomorphic significance. ~ Page 146 ~ Excerpt " Nietzsche and Emerson" Author - George J. Stack

4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

But the fact remains: words end in words. Pictures are pictures. There can be no password to the beyond. The Gorgias of irrefutable logician showed, there can be no proposition that does not entail the obverse of its own negation. Or, as Kant and Wittgenstein teach us, though with scrupulous sadness, attempts to demonstrate God’s existence via reasoned arguments, via human discourse, are doomed to absurdity. Strictly considered, all theology, however profound or eloquent, is verbiage. ~Page 204 ~ Excerpt: “My Unwritten Book” ~ Author - George Steiner

4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . Only when we realize that what words refer to are other words, that any speech-act in reference to experience is always a ‘saying in other words’, can we return to a true freedom. It is within the language system alone that we possess liberties of construction and of deconstruction, or remembrance and of futurity, so boundless, so dynamic, so proper to the evident uniqueness of human thought and imagining that, in comparison, external reality, whatever that might or might not be, is little more than brute interactability and deprivation.

Thus the self-referential, self-regulating and transformative cosmos of discourse is neither like the world, nor unlike it (how would we know?) it is not, as neo-Platonism and Romanticism would have it, a luminous veil behind which we discern the lineaments of a higher, more beauteous and consoling order. We do not, via language, transcend the real towards the more real. Words neither say nor un-say the realm of matter, of contingent mundanity, of ‘the other’. Language speaks itself or, as Heidegger, in direct reprise of Mallarme, puts it, “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks) (but just this, as we shall see, in Heidegger’s initial step out of nihilism and towards a counter-Mallarmean ontology of presence.) ~ Page 97 Excerpt "Real Presences" Author George Steiner

3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

“Nothing can be where the word fails” ~ Stefan George

3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

Over four hundred years ago, Shakespeare had a vocabulary of at least twenty-one thousand different words: some have estimated that with the combination of words, this could have reached thirty thousand. Comparison are entertaining; the King James Bible of 1611 used about ten thousand different words. The average educated man today, more than four hundred years on from Shakespeare with the advantage of the hundreds of thousands of new words that have come in since his time, has a working vocabulary of less than half that of Shakespeare. ~ Page 135

20 months ago. Edited 20 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . the emphasis upon direct personal experience is philosophically expandable to the point of prescribing how words must derive their meaning. The prescription would be: If any given word is to be ‘meaningful’ then it must be traceable back to some sensory experience. Otherwise, the word should be regarded as only a meaningless sound. This experience-tied theory of meaning was advocated by the Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711-1776).

Hume was an empiricist philosopher, when an “empiricist’ is someone who holds that what exists or what is true is a non-trivial sense, can be known only through some observation about how the world is. To know anything, there must first be some sensory experience. The eighteenth-century British empiricists accordingly supposed that the mind is empty when experience begins, like a blank writing slate or ‘tabula rasa’, as the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704) described it. Sensory experience ‘writes’ upon our initially blank tablet, so to speak. ~ Page 32

16 months ago. Edited 16 months ago.

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