Paradox

god as a fractal: intricate relationship between patterns too larg and too small for us to comprehend...'ain't it fun.

Howdy Zay!

Wow, that's a lot to respond to. I'll give it my best shot, but I’m afraid tangents are inevitable.


My use of language to solve the paradox:

Okay, first let me make it clear that I’m not advocating the view that some particular use of language solves ALL paradoxes. What I am saying is that having a particular understanding of the relationship between language and the world solves this particular paradox, and several others (the barber paradox is another example), but certainly not ALL paradoxes. My understanding of the relationship between language and the world is mostly influenced by naturalized epistemology and Korzybski’s general semantics.

Naturalized epistemology is an approach used by many contemporary philosophers. The basic idea is that when we do theory of knowledge, a good starting point is the individual human nervous system functioning in an environment. This is very different from the starting points of other approaches to epistemology. For example, Descartes started by wondering how he could be sure that he wasn’t dreaming. Where you end up in epistemology depends a lot on where you start. Cartesian epistemologists end up looking for a priori truths of “pure reason.” Naturalized epistemologists look to empirical science (especially the neurosciences) to construct an increasingly accurate model of the world and our relationship to it.

General semantics is a theory of the relationship between language, experience, and the world. It rejects certain principles of Aristotelian logic. I can’t explain it with any justice as a tangent in a post about a paradox, but if you’re interested and have a little time to kill, this site aliciamattgs.tripod.com/index.html is a pretty good introduction. The first principle of general semantics is that “the map is not the territory”. In other words, our words are not the things they represent. This may seem trivially obvious, but ever since I’ve been exposed to general semantics, I’ve become aware of just how often people mistake their words for the things they represent, and make errors based on this confusion. General semantics also gives a theory of abstracting—that is, how we go from experience to abstractions, to abstractions about abstractions, to abstractions about abstractions we’ve made about other abstractions, and so on… Another key point is that general semantics encourages fact-based orientations rather than definition-based orientations. That is, our definitions must be held accountable to the apparent facts, not the other way around. I don’t know how much I should blather about this because I’m clearly getting off on a tangent…

Now that I’ve said a bit about where I’m coming from, I’ll try to explain what all this has to do with the paradox by way of addressing your points directly. Does the logical structure of language reflect the logical structure of thought? My answer to this is “yes and no.” I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “logical structure,” but I certainly think that the categories and expressions of our local language influence the semantic component of our thoughts, which influences other aspects of our cognition (like mood, self-concept, etc), and that this usually happens in an unconscious way. But now I also find myself wondering what you mean by “thought.” Are you narrowly limiting this just to the linguistic aspects of our cognition, or is it all the functions of the brain that exhibit this “logical structure?” I’m also unsure of what you mean when you say that reality has a logical structure. You made an argument for it but I’m not sure what the term means so I can’t really say much about the argument. What is the nature of this structure, and it is made of 2 valued (true/false) logic, 4 valued (true/false/indeterminate/meaningless) logic, Aristotelian logic, probabilistic logic, mathematical logic, or some other kind of logic? Could you say more about this since a lot of your later points seem to be based on it?

<“language reflects a real logical structure of reality.”>

Which language are we talking about here? 21st century American English? 14th century Swahili? Predicate logic? Binary? The ever-elusive “language of thought?” I don’t know what to make of this claim. Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re saying, or what you mean by “reality” and “logical structure” but it seems to me that our perceptions only capture *some * aspects of the external world, and that our language only captures *some * of our perceptions. Language is a fairly coarse map of the actual physical world. Earlier today I was reading a book by naturalized epistemologist Paul Churchland and he put the point better than I can:

“Our capacity for verbal description comes nowhere near our capacity for sensory discrimination. This disparity arises from a fundamental difference between the coding strategy employed in language and the coding strategy employed in the nervous system. Language employs a set of discrete names, decidedly finite in number, and it falls back on lame metaphor when the subtlety of the sensory situation outruns the standard names, which regularly it does. By contrast, the nervous system employs a combinatorial system of representations, one that permits a fine-grained analysis of each of the sensory subtleties it encounters. This allows us to discriminate and recognize far more than we can typically express in words.”

And I can’t resist one Koan on this theme: Can you ever say ALL about a single grain of sand?


Maybe this is why we have been talking past one another, you say:

<”So, I don’t view language as some sort of artificial system we project onto reality. I find such a view fundamentally meaningless and incoherent.”>

Good, because that is exactly my view. Language is an evolutionary product of the human nervous system (well okay, lots of nervous systems interacting over time), and its primary functions are to map our experience of the world, communicate those experiences to other people, and generally solve problems. Insofar as the map is not the territory, language would seem to be an “artificial system” and if reality is the external world, we certainly project our language onto reality. I don’t find this meaningless or incoherent. I see it as a view of language use that has benefited from the world-view of modern science.


<“It seems to me that following an argument of radical individuality (nominalism), we’d have to even deny our own reality. After all, we humans are specific collections of atoms.”>

Yes! The dynamic process-world we live in means that we have to accept a certain amount of non-identity. Zay at age 14 is not exactly the same (anatomically, mentally, in appearance etc.) as Zay at age 25, and the 1985 model of Geoff bears little resemblance to the 2005 model. Identity in the strict sense exists only in Platonic heaven, like perfect circles, perfectly free markets, and perfect women. Alas…

I didn't address all your points, but this is turning into a goddam dissertation so I'll give you a chance to chime in.