Can we meaningfully assert an "outside" to language without performative contradiction?

[u/Global_Nectarine3153]

In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6), Wittgenstein says there:"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." I've been thinking about this lately. About the usual rebuttals to this. But I came to the realisation that: language cannot step outside itself to survey the relationship between words and an unconditioned reality from an external vantage point. I decided to ask folks here to see what y'all think. Maybe there's a perspective I'm missing.

To elaborate, consider the standard realist insistence that "the map is not the territory" or that there exists an objective, mind-independent reality beyond the boundary of human signs.

But what I find is that to speak of an "extra-linguistic reality" or an "unmediated territory" relies upon an internal spatial distinction ("inside" versus "outside") created by grammar itself. "The territory" and "reality" are nouns operating within our vocabulary, governed by the syntactic rules of subject and predicate. So, any attempt to specify, refer to, or demarcate an unconditioned reality outside of language is itself an internal move within language. And so any realist posit of an "extra-linguistic reality" does not retain any cognitive content and reduce to an empty grammatical counter.

To put the challenge directly: Can a metaphysician formulate a coherent defence of an extra-linguistic ontology that does not refute itself performatively in the very act of being stated?

[u/No_Logins_Required]

Before humans developed grammar, we must have still had minds of some sort capable of knowing things. We taught our descendants how to make tools, and that knowledge is not instinctual for us.

[u/Global_Nectarine3153 → u/No_Logins_Required]

A follower of Wittgenstein could say chimpanzees teach their young to fish for termites with twigs and crows fashion hooks from wire, yet neither is making a metaphysical commitment to an 'extra-linguistic reality.' Then we get to the fact that the physical action is simply a body striking a stone. It is only when we describe that action using abstract nouns like 'minds', 'knowledge' 'things" and 'instinct' that it takes on the appearance of an epistemological argument. Perhaps we should note at the sentence used to make your point: 'Before humans developed grammar, we must have still had minds...' which is to say that to defend this pre-linguistic realm, you had to construct a retrospective historical proposition using temporal connectives, modal auxiliaries, and subject-predicate syntax.

[u/No_Logins_Required → u/Global_Nectarine3153]

I mean in your model a mind cannot exist without language as a tautological truth.

I don't see why Crows and Chimps can't have metaphysical understandings of the world.

[u/Global_Nectarine3153 → u/No_Logins_Required]

What is "tautological" is is that the nouns 'mind', 'exist', and 'world' are words inside human vocabulary. The moment you package physical actions into the propositional claim 'a mind exists', you are operating inside the rules of language. I'm not sure Im understanding your last point. Is it that a crow for example can ponder ontology, substance, or whether 'the world' exists independently of perception? I imagine what you mean is that a crow poking a stick into a hole somehow counts as a 'metaphysical understanding of the world" but I don't think thats what you meant?

[u/No_Logins_Required → u/Global_Nectarine3153]

Why not?

[u/Starduster75]

I mean, I can get down with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to some degree, in that much of our experience of reality at least is shaped or influenced by the language(s) we speak (and how those have sort of directed our synapses into a structure for thought). I know that I and another can look upon a moment in time, and we shall have constructed two somewhat unique variations of reality. But beyond just straight speculation, I don't perceive for there to be a necessary independent and somehow isolated reality existent beyond the messy mechanistic constructors of our conscious perceptions. And I allow myself such a decadent postulation primarily because this is a metaphysics sub.

Edit: I can't type.

[u/zaidazadkiel]

the challenge stated here is part of the paradox of language, which personally, im going towards the difficulty of proper communication between two people.

the extra-linguistic part is a completely undescribable thing, but which can be only pointed at as an experience that was, in some way, real for the person

something as simple as looking at something without categorizing things into words, the heightened emotions of watching and feeling oneself to be in a particularly interesting situation

but thats uncommunicable since there are no words that can possibly do justice to whatever that was

[u/jliat]

To put the challenge directly: Can a metaphysician formulate a coherent defence of an extra-linguistic ontology that does not refute itself performatively in the very act of being stated?

I think you find this in Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology*. And remember the Tractatus was not Wittgenstein's last word.

*Graham Harman places his objects behind 'fire walls'.

Badiou sees set theory as Ontology...

[u/elibertowpaparulox → u/jliat]

Badiou, Graham. Todo eso sigue siendo lenguaje igual.

[u/jliat → u/elibertowpaparulox]

No they are not, mathematics for some has no reality, languages can be performative, or poetic, or offer a differed meaning.

"A work of art cannot content itself with being a representation; it must be a presentation. A child that is born is presented, he represents nothing." Pierre Reverdy 1918

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

"il n'y a pas de hors-texte"

"The semantic horizon which habitually governs the notion of communication is exceeded or punctured by the intervention of writing, that is of a dissemination which cannot be reduced to a polysemia. Writing is read, and "in the last analysis" does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to the decoding of a meaning or truth." - Signature, Event, Context -Jacques Derrida

[u/elibertowpaparulox → u/jliat]

My comment was aimed at the Badiou and Harman recommendation; I don't share the post's conclusion. Its premise is that any formulation of an outside already takes place within language. Badiou formulates his ontology through set theory, which means axioms, distinctions and rules. That is also a formulation, so it falls under the premise like any other.

Your reasons don't take it out of there. If for some mathematics has no reality, that makes it even more of a formal system. That a language can be performative, poetic, or present rather than represent speaks to other functions of language, and it is still language. And your own Derrida quote, "there is nothing outside the text," includes set theory too.

[u/jliat → u/elibertowpaparulox]

Badiou formulates his ontology through set theory, which means axioms, distinctions and rules. That is also a formulation, so it falls under the premise like any other.

Yet my understanding from my reading of Badiou - and it was awhile ago- was that an 'Event' is the occurrence of a breaking of these rules.

Your reasons don't take it out of there. If for some mathematics has no reality, that makes it even more of a formal system.

Only isn't it incomplete? So again exceptions.

That a language can be performative, poetic, or present rather than represent speaks to other functions of language, and it is still language. And your own Derrida quote, "there is nothing outside the text," includes set theory too.

So everything is language, only some languages are more different to others? And as such has aporia, some not a formal system.

[u/storymentality]

I’d say the limits of your stories about your world are the limits of your world.

[u/Thurstein]

Consider:

"Mars" has four letters.

Mars has polar ice caps.

We all understand the distinction, and it's pretty hard to say what that distinction is without distinguishing between linguistic and non-linguistic items.

[u/Electronic-Worry-196]

Language by nature is a compression algorithm. It will never be able to comprehensively explain truth or reality.