Sun-hong’s online journal

Part two

Language and reality

For Vygotsky was plainly a genius. Yet it was an elusive form of genius. In contrast to, say, Piaget, there was nothing massive or glacial about the flow of his thought or about its development. Rather, it was like the later Wittgenstein: at times aphoristic, often sketchy, vivid in its illuminations. (p.72).

The usual way to begin such an inquiry is by reference to three traditional aspects of language. The first, the syntactic, rests on the criterion of well-formedness, or conformity to the grammatical rules that are hypothesized to govern the language…

The second aspect that provides criteria for assessing language phenomena is meaning.

which leads directly to the third criterion:the pragmatic one. It is presumed to deal with use. Traditionally, pragmatics was supposed to deal with how people used their language, in contrast to how the language was structured syntactically and what it meant semantically. (p.82).

The brunt of my argument in the opening chapters was that the “reality” of most of us is constituted roughly into two spheres: that of nature and that of human affairs, the former more likely to be structured in the paradigmatic mode of logic and science, the latter in the mode of story and narrative. The latter is centered around the drama of human intentions and their vicissitudes; the first around the equally compelling, equally natural idea of causation. The subjective reality that constitutes an individual’s sense of his world is roughly divided into a natural and a huma one. (p.88).

Where the story of creation is pitted against the theory of evolution (p.88).

So Goodman’s answer lies in drawing a distinction between “worlds” and “versions.” He remarks that a “world is not the version itself; the version may have features – such as being in English or consisting of words – that its world does not” (P.34).

We become increasingly adept at seeing the same set of events from multiple perspectives or stances and at entering the results a, so to speak, alternative possible worlds. (p.109).

We even create bricks-and-mortar realities like jails to deal with people who fail to confirm to the felicity condictions on certain forms of promising. (p.110).

Emotion is not usefully isolated from the knowledge of the situation that arouses it. Cognition is not a form of pure knowing to which emotion is added  (whether to perturb its clarity or not). And action is a final common path based on what one knows and feels. Indeed, our actions are frequently dedicated to keeping a state of knowledge from being upset (as in “autistic hostility”) or to the avoidance of situations that are anticipated to be emotion-arousing.

It seems far more useful to recognize at the start that all three terms represent abstractions, abstractions that have a high theoretical cost. The price we pay for such abstractions in the end is to lose sight of their structural interdependence. At whatever level we look, however detailed the analysis, the three are constituents of a unified whole. To isolate each is like studying the planes of a crystal separately, losing sight of the crystal that gives them being (pp.117-118).

The genuine and significant differences between art and science are compatible with their common cognitive function; and the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art are embraced within epistemology conceived as the philosophy of understanding…Since both science and art consist very largely in the processing of symbols, an analysis and classification of types of symbol systems…provides an indispensable theoretical background. (pp.146-147).