irritants revisited

after spending some time with that last post, i kinda want to delete it. it's pretty silly to assert that words are names of concepts and things, or at least that they exclusively name. the current wiki page on names suggests pretty broad usage, saying that they "can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context." i think my temptation to overextend 'name' could be blamed on a weird fascination with ostensive definitions, which rarely come up but in trying to communicate with children or foreigners (oh, and the private language argument, :P). ostensive definitions are employed after a word's use has already been established, while the idea that words are names has to do with the original dubbing process of a new thing or concept.

now that i've been marinating on it for a while, maybe it's not so silly to think that words largely function as names. in so far as words have sense and reference, they're names for what's referred to. do words like 'ouch' or 'hooray' refer to anything? they report sense data, but at best inelegantly refer. more interestingly, according to emotivism, the whole body of language about ethics has no reference!

my brain is falling apart thanks to the stress of my living situation. i'm going to use this present breakdown of focus as an excuse to drink heavily and play pinball.

irritants

reading wittgenstein (and works about him) has renewed my interest in a philosophical question that preoccupied me when i was studying at cal. what it is language's relationship to thought? is language one and the same with thought, as a few have asserted?

to risk an overly strong assertion in the theory of meaning, let's say that words are names for things or concepts. it's surely possible for there to be things and phenomena that we are unable to name, on account of having no experience of them. things are clearly not dependent on our having words for them (or ideas of them, for that matter). as we discover novel things, we name them. so far so good, but the questions get stickier when i try to make sense of how words relate to ideas.

are we able to have concepts without having names for them? sure we can -- for example, i can think up a sentient species of acid-spitting cats, with spiraled horns on their heads without having a name for them (though i'll now name them chococats). the sentence "chococats are way cooler than unicorns" makes sense (and is true!) despite the terms having no reference in the real world. what about 'pure concepts', or concepts that don't involve the capacity of reference to a potentially existing thing, say the largest possible prime number? it's quite impossible for there to be such a thing (right?), but i know what the description means. it seems that any concept requires some capacity of being described, and that words for ideas name a bundle of descriptions. is it indeed possible to have a concept that's incapable of being described? it seems not... it's possible to have concepts without having names for them, but maybe impossible to have concepts without having words to speak about them.

unorganized babbling, and unprofitable to boot. i'll come back to this later.

requilary of misc.

i've a few moleskines that are filled with writing that is necessarily of a different sort than any writing through a screen. typing is faster than dragging pen on paper, and computer aided rewriting need not involve the literal rewriting of entire passages. i wonder whether the freedom to restructure/ammend/remove sentences makes for language that's a bit too deliberate? rereading the moleskine stuff is embarrassing, but it's somehow easier for me to fall into and follow a groove when i'm unable to easily fix flaws. pen and paper don't allow my perfectionist whims (i have them, if you'll believe it!) to steer the writing into too-muchery. i don't know enough about literary theory to speak to how [potential] audience effects a writer's work... in my own case, i usually write to hash out problems and ideas in an insular, "even i don't have to read this" kind of way.

i was way too anal in my previous blog, probably because i knew the work was going to be public. though, that blog failed for a number of reasons, well beyond the specter of the reader. i thought that the constraints of focusing on one thing would help me better understand that thing. for what four posts are worth, 'an informed year' did force me to digest the economist differently than when i was reading it for its own sake. honestly though, knowing that i was supposed to consistently have something to say about so narrow a subject matter was enough to turn me off the project. for better or for worse, i may have to resign to being an intellectual generalist.

god, is it annoying to read writing about writing? ffffuuuuuuuck, now i'm writing about writing about writing!