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.