Train of thought

I subscribe myself to the idea that there are no philosophical problems and consequently there is no philosophical thought. What a philosopher does is to clarify some sentences in order to avoid the common linguistic temptations that usually catch the unsophisticated thinker. Of course, this posture has already a background inhabited by some postulates. The most obvious, if you like, is that there are such temptations, that in some way our usual common talk (whose main function is to communicate things in order to coordinate social actions) is loaded with twitches and twirls that will not aloud proper descriptions, or at least, that is loaded in such a fashion that new perspectives on old things will not quite make sense unless we get rid of such burdens. I divide things like that, descriptions on one hand and new perspectives on the other, because another postulate that I think this attitude imposes is that knowledge can only be achieved by the self conscious arrangement of a firmly empirically-based set of sentences of a formal language, i. e., by scientific theories. The "new perspectives" (that have to be driven by a scientific approach) enclose the possible descriptions that we do with our common talk. It, of course, describes the world in a working nonetheless low definition manner.

We have then what we could say is a take on language and knowledge. I think that in order to make sense of it all, we need to view this two from a scientific perspective: Language is just a form of human behavior and knowledge, as a human experience, is a bio-electrical process.

And so the real deal begins: What are those linguistic temptations? Which twitches and twirls, useful as they are to coordinate our behavior in society, can be obstacles and no solutions to problems? I have spoken of one here, but our current spirit is to characterize the problem in general terms. If we think of language as a form of human behavior we can more easily see that is affected (by the environment, by different players, by circumstances in general) in the same ways that any behavior: it can be specialized in such a manner that will not be able to adapt to new circumstances (people talk of microwaves ovens, but also we can search for messages between our neurons of causal connections in quantum phenomena), it can miss his cues (we tend to draw conclusions long before we are entitled to), it can be ill prepared (we quite often don’t have enough evidence even though everything points otherwise), or quite simply fail because is not the right response for the environment stimuli. The problem of course is to characterize all this from our language. To characterize the game using its rules.

I don’t know if I am falling in such trap as described before, but I think the biggest temptation when thinking all this is to see language as the all pervasive, monolithic, self-sufficient possibility of all thought and experience. We need to see that in order to describe language itself we cannot use our previous take on other phenomena. Perhaps is quite problematic to challenge every single rule in chez while playing chez, but of course one has to do so if one wants to create a new game.