“ D Edward Tarkington, I have trouble following your writings because you use open parenthesis ( but never close any of them.
So your writing goes from one point with an aside remark and never returns to the first point but continues on the aside and then makes another aside remark and continues on the aside and never returns to the first aside and so on.
It’s like you never get to the point you first started out to make.
It’s very difficult to follow and hard work to figure out what your point is.” –Lorraine Bray: facebook.com/groups/philoso … ent_follow
“Then you’re getting the point of it, Lorraine Bray.”
“So your point is to ramble on pointlessly?
OK, I’ll leave you to it.”
Actually, I prefer to think of it as wandering aimlessly to see what happens. There is always a point. And I always try to get back to that point via a chance process of digression. My one way parentheses are merely a means of playing with the way we actually think –which is never the methodical building of an argument such as we see in the writing of John Searle. And my guess is that had I of just replaced the parentheses with commas, I would have stolen an opportunity from you to point it out while leaving you no less confused about what I was saying. And it’s not like conventional approaches fair much better –especially in philosophy. It has not been uncommon for me to encounter sentences (especially compound ones (that took me several readings before I got the logic of them.
“But, any language comes as an after thought to the brain reasoning.
Any logical thought process in the brain is not done with logic language symbols.”
I think one of the main problems we’re having here is that we’re dealing with 2 different understandings of what constitutes a language. What you’re working from is the classical technological notion as that which we can speak or write. What I’m working from is a more postmodern/semiotic sense of a system of signs that convey information. This is why the postmodern sensibility can comfortably define a text as anything that can be interpreted –the hermeneutic approach. Take, for instance, medicine which is a matter of reading a system of signs (symptoms (which the doctor must read and interpret in order to reach a diagnosis and, hopefully, a cure. And I do as much as a maintenance tech with a building or campus that is a complex of systems that expresses themselves through a system of signs. The very computer you are reading this on does as much. It converts a basic binary on/off semiotic system into programming (which is kind hard to deny is a language (into the words you are reading right now. And as neuroscience is showing, the brain with its system of cells pretty much works the same way.
So you would be right if we all shared your human centered understanding of language. But how different is what we do when we speak or write than the chirping of birds during mating season, the on/off digital language of a computer that produces everything we experience through computers, or the grunts and silences of the physiological brain?
I agree with you: all the discipline of Logic does is isolate the natural means by which the human brain (via the mind (adapts to its environment. But the two are too closely intertwined to act like there is that big of a difference: to act like the language of the brain is any less of a language than the language we translate it into. You have to ask yourself: at what point in the spectrum between the binary grunts and silences in the brain of any living thing, the chirps of birds in mating season, and what we do here do we demarcate between non-language and language?