Language

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

So language is a hybrid. It evolved from music and in this part of its history represented the urge to communicate; and to the extent that it retains right-hemisphere empathic elements, it still does. Its foundations lie in the body and the world of experience. But referential language, with its huge vocabulary and sophisticated syntax, did not originate in a drive to communicate, and from this point of view, represents something of a hijack. It has done everything it can to repudiate both its bodily origins and its dependency on experience – to become a world unto itself.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Why do I emphasise this bodily origin of thought and language? Partly because it has been denied in our own age, not by any means only, or even mainly, by de Saussure and his followers. More than that, the fact of its denial seems to me to form part of a general trend, throughout the last hundred years or so, towards the ever greater repudiation of our embodied being, in favour of an abstracted, cerebralised, machine-like version of ourselves that has taken hold on popular thinking – even though there may be more recent trends in philosophy that attempt, with widely varying degrees of success, to point away from such conclusions. As Lakoff and Johnson make clear, the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason … Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in ‘lower’ animals … Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.
The flight of language from the enchantment of the body during the last hundred years represents, I believe, part of a much broader revolt of the left hemisphere's way of conceiving the world against that of the right hemisphere, the theme of Part II of this book.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Language has done its best to obscure its parentage. It has increasingly abstracted itself from its origins in the body and in the experiential world. It developed its current form to enable us to refer to whatever is not present in experience: language helped its re-presentation. This had the effect of expanding its usefulness to communication and thinking for some purposes, but reducing it for others.
In the process important aspects of language, the denotative elements that enable precision of reference and planning, have taken up residence in the left hemisphere, while other aspects of language, broadly its connotative and emotive functions, have remained in the right hemisphere. And the understanding of language at the highest level, once the bits have been put together, the making sense of an utterance in its context, taking into account whatever else is going on, including the tone, irony, sense of humour, use of metaphor, and so on, belongs once again with the right hemisphere.
The way these aspects of language have sorted is, as we have seen, not random, but in keeping with the overall nature of each hemisphere. Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and by which the ‘parts’ of the world which language appears to identify retain their connectedness one to another. Literal language, by contrast, is the means whereby the mind loosens its contact with reality and becomes a self-consistent system of tokens. But, more than this, there is an important shape here which we will keep encountering: something that arises out of the world of the right hemisphere, is processed at the middle level by the left hemisphere and returns finally to the right hemisphere at the highest level.

Franz Kafka wrote:

Language can be used only very obliquely of things outside the physical world, not even metaphorically, since all it knows to do--according to the nature of the physical world--is to treat of ownership and its relations

Mcgilchrist wrote:

Because our use of a term such as ‘being’ makes us feel that we understand what being is, it hides the sense of radical astonishment we would have if we could truly understand it, and subverts our attempts to do so. I am reminded of Cantor's perception that treating infinity as just another kind of number stopped us understanding its nature and hence the nature of the world. But just as that did not mean that we should abandon mathematics, Heidegger's insight does not mean that we should abandon language. It just means that we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language's attempt to undermine our understanding.

Mcgilchrist wrote:

And that does not go just for works of art. Things are not whatever we care to make them. There is a something that exists apart from our own minds, and our attempt to apprehend whatever it is needs to be true to, faithful to, that whatever-it-is-that-exists and at the same time true to ourselves in making that apprehension. No single truth does not mean no truth.
To speak of truth sounds too grand, too filled with the promise of certainty, and we are rightly suspicious of it. But truth will not go away that easily. The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’. If we had no concept of truth, we could not state anything at all, and it would even be pointless to act. There would be no purpose, for example, in seeking the advice of doctors, since there would be no point in having their opinion, and no basis for their view that one treatment was better than another. None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.
The word ‘true’ suggests a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be ‘true’. It is related to ‘trust’, and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one's trust. Such a situation is not an absolute – it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith, and it involves being faithful to one's intuitions.

For Heidegger, Being (Sein) is hidden, and things as they truly are (das Seiende) can be ‘unconcealed’ only by a certain disposition of patient attention towards the world – emphatically not by annexing it, exploiting it or ransacking it for congenial meanings, in a spirit of ‘anything goes’.
Heidegger related truth to the Greek concept of aletheia, literally ‘unconcealing’. In this concept a number of facets of truth are themselves unconcealed. In the first place it suggests something that preexists our attempts to ‘dis-cover’ it.48 Then it is an entity defined by a negative – by what it is not; and in opposition to something else (unconcealing). It is come at by a process, a coming into being of something; and that process is also, importantly, part of the truth. It is an act, a journey, not a thing. It has degrees. It is found by removing things, rather than by putting things together. This idea of truth as-unconcealing contrasts with the idea of truth-as-correctness, which is static, unchanging. Truth as unconcealing is a progress towards something – the something is in sight, but never fully seen; whereas truth as correctness is given as a thing in itself, that can in principle be fully known.
For Heidegger, truth was such an unconcealing, but it was also a concealing, since opening one horizon inevitably involves the closing of others. There is no single privileged viewpoint from which every aspect can be seen. It may be true that, to quote Patricia Churchland, ‘it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter … electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46μm’ [emphasis in the original].50 That is, I suppose, a sort of truth about the colour blue. That is one way in which blue discloses itself. Most of us would think it left rather a lot out. There are also other very important truths about the colour blue that we experience, for example, when we see a canvas by Ingres, or by Yves Klein, or view the sky, or sea, which are closed off by this. It is, in this sense, like the duck–rabbit: we can have only one ‘take’ on it at a time.
We see things by seeing them as something. In this sense too we create the world by attending to it in a particular way.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The direction of writing
The right hemisphere prefers vertical lines, but the left hemisphere prefers horizontal lines. If lines are vertical, the left hemisphere prefers to read them from the bottom up, whereas the right hemisphere prefers to read from the top down. In almost every culture writing has begun by being vertical. Some, such as the oriental languages, remain vertical: they are also generally read from the top down, and from right to left. In other words, they are read from the maximally right-hemisphere determined point of view. Although both oriental and Western languages are generally read from the top down, so that at the global level they still conform to the right-hemisphere preference, at the local, sequential level they have drifted in the West towards the left hemisphere's point of view. This process started with the move to phonetics. While ‘almost all pictographic writing systems favour a vertical layout … practically all systems of writing that depend exclusively on the visual rendition of phonological features of language are horizontally laid out.’88 So it is that vertical writing began to be replaced by horizontal writing, and disappeared altogether in the West by about 1100 BC. By the eleventh century BC, Greek was being written horizontally, although right to left.
It continued to be written right to left until the seventh century BC. However, at around this time a fascinating change occurred. Between the eighth and sixth centuries, Greek began to be written in what is known as boustrophedon, literally ‘as the ox ploughs’, which is to say going to the end of the line, turning round, and coming back – alternating direction line by line. By the fifth century BC, however, left to right was becoming the norm, and by the fourth century the transition was complete, and all forms of Greek were being written left to right.
Reading left to right involves moving the eyes towards the right, driven by the left hemisphere, and preferentially communicating what is seen to the left hemisphere. And it turns out that, while virtually all syllabic languages are written right to left, almost every phonemic language, such as the Indo-European family of languages, being composed of a linear sequence of independent elements, is written left to right.
Phonemic languages put merely contiguous relationships in the place of contextual relationships, digital in the place of analogical relationships, and sequence in place of form. Moreover the addition of vowels makes an astonishingly clear difference to the direction of writing: according to de Kerckhove, ‘95% of phonological orthographies that include markings of vocalic sounds [e.g. vowels] … are written towards the right, whereas almost all the systems that do not include letters for vowels are written towards the left, and have been rendered so almost from the beginning, for over three millennia.’90.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist wrote:

See, e.g., Foldi, 1987; Bottini, Corcoran, Sterzi et al., 1994. There is some confusion over what is meant by metaphor. Obviously there is metaphoric content to almost everything we say – language is essentially metaphoric in nature, at the simplest level. If the chosen ‘metaphor’ for an experiment designed to distinguish between the hemispheres is so bland, obvious or banal that it requires no imagination, presents no novel thought, and does not bring together disparate meanings, little is likely to be discovered. We know that unfamiliar phrases activate the right hemisphere, while familiar ones activate the left hemisphere (Bottini, Corcoran, Sterzi et al., 1994; Eviatar & Just, 2006; Mashal, Faust & Hendler, 2005; Mashal, Faust, Hendler et al., 2007). So when it comes to metaphor, it is in keeping with this that poetic phrases, such as ‘rain clouds are pregnant ghosts’, are understood by the right hemisphere, while clichés, such as ‘babies are angels’, are processed by the left hemisphere (Schmidt, DeBuse & Seger, 2007). Specifically, it is not just the novelty inherent in metaphor, but the combination of novelty with the bringing together of disparate ideas that involves
the right hemisphere (Mashal & Faust, 2008). Although two recent studies, bravely aiming to repudiate a consensus built on thirty years of research, have purported to demonstrate that it is the left hemisphere that is principally involved in the appreciation of metaphor, they have only demonstrated what we already know, that the left hemisphere has a predilection for cliché. As long as a phrase is comfortably familiar, the phrase will activate the left hemisphere only. The metaphors used in one of these studies (Rapp, Leube, Erb et al., 2004) were ‘very simple statements’, such as ‘the alarm clock is a torturer’. Reference to ‘torture’ is a used, and overused, way of expressing displeasure – ‘it was torture having to drag myself out of bed this morning’. This phrase is not essentially different from ‘babies are angels’. Bottini and colleagues, who found a right hemisphere pre-eminence, used phrases that still required the bringing together of two distinct ideas, e.g. ‘the policeman who didn't give straight answers was jumping ditches’. Rapp and colleagues justified using such simple phrases by referring to the fact that the right hemisphere is known to be involved in understanding more complex sentences. Maybe, but there is nothing whatever complex about the sentences, as sentences, in the Bottini examples – the only thing that is ‘complex’ about them is that they require seeing the connection between two disparate ideas. That is the essence of metaphor, and it turns out to be beyond the capacity of the left hemisphere. The other study (Stringaris, Medford, Giampietro et al., 2007) was similarly unlikely to test true metaphorical understanding:
indeed the paradigm ‘metaphor’ they report using – ‘some surgeons are butchers’ – is hardly a metaphor at all; probably, if anything, less so than ‘babies are angels’. But when the metaphor is of the kind encountered in poetry, rather than cliché, it is clearly the right hemisphere that is involved (Faust & Mashal, 2007).

Biblical Scripture wrote:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1

Satyr wrote:

Philosophy, in the future, will be completely esoteric - spiritual and esoteric that nobody will be able to find anything of applicable value in it; used, like any other forms of spirituality, as a method of coping and of escaping. In all else Philosophy will become a pastime for the well-ff, looking for another distraction, wondering why none of it is fulfilling, or can ever offer anything of sub stance - detached abstractions becoming vehicles for those seeking detachment from the real; empowering hyperboles offering power to the powerless; pleasing metaphors offering pleasure to those suffering an insufferable world.

If you disambiguate and deplatonize the disciplines you end up with logical facility, grammatical facility, and language as the point of the triangle, and the physical (before), behavioral(during), and evolutionary(after) laws as a spectrum across the base.

— Curt Doolittle (Gab: curtd) (@curtdoolittle) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]