Atheism and agnosticism

[Baruch]

Theists claim to know God; atheists claim God is impossible. As an agnostic I don’t know whether “God” exists because don't understand the nature of my own existence or even understand that which I consider to be my “self”.  We each exist in an internal world of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations that no one else will ever experience. The things that comprise my “self” -- ideas, memories, my cells, my relationships-- are all created, transformed and eventually lost. My subjective reality changes as my perceptions and internal responses constantly, and often without conscious control, shift. What I consider “I” is in a constant state of flux; “self” is an illusion. I can’t completely understand how my consciousness works because the moment I think about my thoughts I change them and when I focus on one sensation I lose the others. I can't even remember when I first became my "self".  For me the question of God is: Are my thoughts and perceptions solely my own, am I forever alone in my head, or is there something else beyond what I perceive to be my "self"? When I cease to exist did something know my "self"? Is denying anything other than "self" narcissism or is the idea of something more than "self" a fantasy? This is impossible for me to know. If a "God" exists I believe it is unknowable because if I cannot perceive all that is “I” then God, which is more than “I”, is inherently beyond understanding. If a God exists it is unknowable and therefore I live my life like an atheist, however unlike a strong atheist I don’t accept that just because I can’t comprehend something it doesn’t exist; I can’t fully comprehend my “self” yet it is the one thing in the universe I am certain exists.

(This is probably my worst post ever but these are my thoughts at the moment.)

That was a wonderful post ... struggling with such woo woo questions is what got the Buddha trying to resolve them, in his case, by coloring outside the Hindu lines.  From the Mahayana perspective, the answer was "yes and no".

Specifically, because I will claim that I have resolved the "self" question to my satisfaction ... that is why I can handle metaphysics, theist or atheist.  Studying Buddhism was essential to my self-realization.  Though that doesn't mean I am part of the Buddhist religion.

[drunkenshoe]

No, I got the point. I just think those people are talking out of their asses. How are they supposed to prove such a thing? How are they supposed to show that, of all the factors to influence the development of Greek philosophy, it is their language that enabled them to develop? They can't. It's bullshit.

The truth is that Greek was being spoken for a long time before Aristotle, yet formal logic evaded them. What we call classical philosophy can trace itself to a very restricted region of Anatolia, the Ionian region. This is where some Greeks settled after the fall of their own civilization back home, and here, cut off from support from the mainland, they had to develop their own life here. In order to surivive, they had to take a hard-nosed look at everything around them and figure out how things worked. Their old culture and myths would be of little use here, for their familiar patterns of life would not suit their new environment. The culture that developed was at the same time recognizably Greek yet quite different from both their contemporaries on the mainland, and from the Achean culture they came from in the past.

They had to. Their circumstances â€"their environmentâ€" forced them. Their very surivival depended on being able to tease apart the world around them to find out how it worked.

If Homer's narrative was the only one available at the time, how did Parmenides have such difficulty expressing his thoughts in them? The observation that you can have difficulty expressing a thought in your language is prima face evidence that there is a difference between the two. When the respresentation is the same, serialization is dead easy. Parmenides shows the opposite of what you intend to prove here.

No, you don't. You lack information and you think in mathmetical patterns. There is no use of pushing this. Your approach is 'It can't be, it is bullshit". You just want to dismiss a whole mountain of accumulation of knowledge, a huge field, interdisciplinary research and some connections accepted as principles, because you cannot make the connection. And you lack information -the 'that Greek was being spoken for a long time before Aristotle, yet formal logic evaded them' is a flashing sign that you don't know much about philosophy-linguistcs-doxography...etc- on this topic which is perfectly natural, you obviously are not interested in. However, you are treating long standing accepted notions and connections as if I just invented them and pitched you right in this thread.

The part with Parmenides was taken form Burnet which is old and the idea is far more developed and taken further now.

Please do not take this as condescension, but this sort of knowledge we are dealing here does not have a tidy structure that follows itself neatly piling on with forward, linear relations and outcomes. This is not natural science or math with equations and formulas. If you think in them with this nformation, you are handicapped. While it looks crude and nonsense on the surface, the 'information' looks as if it is floating on the air, because it needs time to connect it. It's not like natural science with equations and formulas and a mind that tends to recognise patterns that way, just sees a 2 dimensional map. It's not.

Defining 'those people' as 'talking out of their asses' is like someone who cannot put his mind to evolutionary theory dismissing the whole thing at 'eeh we can't be having arms because some freaking ancient fish had fins ffs!' What are you 'fighting' against, Hakurei? I get your resistence, I accept it, fine, but I do not get the crude dissmisal based on an attitude 'I know better'. No, you don't.
Neither do I or anyone else for that matter here in this forum.

Language being defined as a main force shaping the way we think is not some random thought offer by a few liberal arts hippies, nor even a new thing.

Also in my opinion, I think you sometimes confuse 'language analysis' with linguistics. The former is a little part of the latter.

I want to talk about this, not have a debate and 'convince' you or others to accept what I think. I am sceptic about it as always with everything. I just think, there is development and a dawn, a turn in the last 30 years. What is going to turn out to be? Who knows.

It puzzles me greatly how anyone can say that the Greek language was the enabler of logic when the rest of the mainland was still steeped in the same old religion and ways of life. No, it the language was involved at all, it was but one part of a very large set of circumstances present in Ionia.

See, this statement is another flashing example of linear thinking of history; seeing ancient logic as one thing created at one time or as if something that had anything to do with daily life, way of life or religion of the time.

And by the way, why do you keep pointing out "one part of a very large set of circumstances present"? Enabling factor or the main shaping force does not equate the only factor, I have never said this -I kept remind that I haven't- neither any of those guys.

What? The Egyptions didn't even know that the brain was a vital organ. That's why they threw it away when embalming. No, every culture figured out what the basic parts of the human body are (that's why we have words like "brain," "stomach", "lungs" etc. in the first place) â€" they just didn't know what they did.

Eyptians removed many of the organs for mummification, because they are the first to decompose. It has nothing to do with the function of the organs. Yes, they didn't preserve the brain, but this has nothing to do with the example I gave about Egyptian knowing human anotomy related to art. I was talking about the way they depicted them. (They are often depicted in a way human body doesn't stand or pose.) And the difference between how Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek choose to depict human body.

I have read Joseph Campbell, DS, and no, that's not how myths work. The basic skills of life are taught just like anything else: by rote or discovery. Myths are signposts guiding you through the transformations in one's life, and to act as a context for which rituals to carry one from one stage to the other. This can be from season to season, or rites of passage and so forth. Myths are catagorically not the only piece of information available to a primitive person. There was no myth to tell you that you how to cook meals (although there may be myths of why you cook those meals), or that one ear of corn and another ear of corn is two ears of corn.

LOL, Hakurei, what  I am saying is AGAINST Campbell. I am saying there is no one great model, but countless different ones evolved in different ways and one model survived because of many other factors. 

About your 'how to cook' example. I specifically said that in my previous post "-other than the ways of fighting with the nature to survive-" which was included to get you understand that I'm aware there are other form of knowledge available to primitive people, bıt was not talking about them.

Hell, Egypt had not only myths, but a whole bureaucracy held together by numbers, and even diplomacy. We have the letters and the records to prove it.

Also from Ancient Greece and 16th century Italy we have enormous archives survived to our day and each have pretty good evidence on from how they handled literacy and used the versions of their language, how the language change according to different domains. Not the grammnar or the alphabet. The usage of language in different domains like; family, business, military, religion, state...etc.

What 'other way around' are you talking about? I did not say that logic was the core or seed of language. I said that the two have the same core. No matter what language you are talking about, they all have at their core formal rules of being put together at all levels: from phonetic formants to syntax. Language follows rules; formal logic follows rules. Anyone can look at their own language and discover that it follows rules. The potential for that insight is always there, no matter what language you speak.

You said "the core of language is the seed of logic." No. Language came first and then the logic was born according to a specific language. Seed is not one absolute seed. Also the 'rules' of 'languages' as we know today came later and constantly developed until it reached the standardised form -ater standardised universal education. There are no rules or standards; THERE ARE NO LANGUAGES before French Revolution. What you refer to is 'vernaculars' only.

So the 'theological knowledge' of god's existence is not knowledge. But you know what is also not knowledge? The 'theological knowledge' of god's non-existence. You can't prove that assertion any more than you can prove god's existence. It, too, is a statement that is not knowledge. Hell, there's a lot of statements about the real world that are not knowledge, either, even though we know that one of the alternatives is definitely true.

What I am saying is 'agnostic atheism' is the 'theological knowledge' of the non existence of god based on the knowledge that 'theological knowledge' is not knowledge and application of falsifiability to balance out that non-knowledge status of 'theological knowledge' thus treating that absence of 'knowledge' -which is just a negative symmetry of 'theological knowledge'- like some empircial data to work with. OK? It's freaking theism with a different make up, because except atheism as nonexistence of god all those concepts -agnostic, gnostic- are created from their theistic counterparts and with theology it is a one way road.

This is why agnostic atheism is a viable position: it is the acknowledgement that the statement 'god does not exist' is not knowledge any more than the statement 'god does exist' is.

I don't accept this. See above.

It doesn't matter why the possibility is there. Once proposed, the genie is out of the bottle and remains a technical possibility until proven otherwise â€" and a proof is unlikely.

The absence of something in an ocean of that something looks like a something itself. In a culture steeped in religion as a background, the absence of same looks like it is something rather than nothing, in the same way the absence of an electron in the Dirac sea looks like a positron. The only reason I call myself an atheist is a begrudging acceptance that the religious are going to call me one whether I like it or not.

Labels are a completely different discussion.

[Hakurei Reimu]

I want to talk about this, not have a debate and 'convince' you or others to accept what I think.

I'm putting this at the head of my reply because I want it to be clear.

I want this to be a talk, too, but I want it to be a talk, and not just a lecture presented by you. That means back and forth. You talk to me, not at me. You are not going to lecture at me. I am going to be trying to fit what you say with what I know and have been able to confirm, and if there's a discrepency, I'm going to say something about it.

If you agree to this, super. Otherwise...

Your approach is 'It can't be, it is bullshit". You just want to dismiss a whole mountain of accumulation of knowledge, a huge field, interdisciplinary research and some connections accepted as principles, because you cannot make the connection.

WHAT knowledge? WHAT principles? I have accepted that linguistic reletivity is a thing, that language influences society, but that's all it is â€" an influence, and not a determinator. The structure of your language does not determine what form your society takes. Aristotolian logic may have been invented by the Greeks, yet every other advanced society managed to learn and work with it, people who largely do not speak Greek, and therefore would not have the same grammatical apparatus that the Greeks had. I, for instance, can't speak Greek any better than I can speak Dakotan, yet I can deal with the Aristotolian logic as well as any other modern person â€" and no modern person speaks Aristotle's Greek (unless they are scholars specializing in it).

I am always immeditely suspicious whenever anyone tells me that some thing in history was determined by any one factor. It doesn't matter if it's pr telling me that Islam determined the Muslim world's history of violence, or you telling me that Greek determined Aristotle's logic.

And you lack information -the 'that Greek was being spoken for a long time before Aristotle, yet formal logic evaded them' is a flashing sign that you don't know much about philosophy-linguistcs-doxography...etc- on this topic which is perfectly natural, you obviously are not interested in. However, you are treating long standing accepted notions and connections as if I just invented them and pitched you right in this thread.

Don't tell me what I'm interested in and what I'm not! There may be something to what you are trying saying, but in many ways you present a terrible case for it. It just plain doesn't make sense. You have no answer for why, if "we people think as the language dictates," (and yes, you did say that; I copied that right from your post!) there could be any phenomenon of not being able to put your thoughts into words. You have no answer for why, if "we people think as the language dictates," that we can understand the Aristotolian logic even though the language Aristotle wrote in is now long dead, and yet people who never learned Greek, and speak languages as diverse as English, Russian, French, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, etc. all can understand the Aristotolian logic. Seriously, how could this be if the conception of logic was so critically dependent on a particular language?

I have studied linguistics as an undergrad as an elective. One of the big things you learn is that all human languages are actually remarkably similar to each other. When you strip away all the fiddly little details, you find relatively few patterns. Furthermore, when children acquire language, they tend to avoid mistakes that would certainly happen if language were as arbitrary as you make them out to be, and yet they tend to make "mistakes" that are actually grammatical in other languages â€" like they'are already pre-equipped with a universal grammer, and are only seeking out the specific instance of that grammar in their environment. And, of course, language is generated in a specific set of functional modules in the brain. Some commonality in how languages work is to be expected.

Every langauge has some sort of syntax, even if the practitioners don't always adhere to its rules â€" they're not learned as explicit rules to be obeyed but as rules deduced through observation, automatically by the process of language acquisition. If Aristotle spoke Chinese, sure, the logical calculus may have a different appearance, but that's just window-dressing. It would still need to embody all of the logical constructs and derivations that had been discovered up to that time. Aristotle, after all, used formal logic and all its trappings as a tool to explore the universe (Chinese Aristotle would have been a good fit for the Taoists); if nothing else, it would have had to be fit for purpose.

I would certainly believe that we may be leveraging the lanugage modules of our brains to do logic. However this is a long way from saying that our language dictates the logic of our thoughts. Like all other parts of our brain, the language center is plastic even late into life â€" you can learn new languages with difficulty, and you are always learning new vocabulary of your own language(s). Our language, too, has to be plastic to keep up with the new kinds of thoughts that we throw at it.

Please do not take this as condescension, but this sort of knowledge we are dealing here does not have a tidy structure that follows itself neatly piling on with forward, linear relations and outcomes. This is not natural science or math with equations and formulas. If you think in them with this nformation, you are handicapped. While it looks crude and nonsense on the surface, the 'information' looks as if it is floating on the air, because it needs time to connect it. It's not like natural science with equations and formulas and a mind that tends to recognise patterns that way, just sees a 2 dimensional map. It's not.

No shit. I never pretended it was. Thing is, I do know some things about languages in general, particularly the fact that all languages are rule-governed, their universal similarity in the broad strokes, and the total discreditation of linguistic determinism â€" which is, to put crudely, exactly the "we people think as the language dictates" position you've advocated. This is basic stuff I'm talking about, stuff they teach in classrooms, stuff they wouldn't teach unless the experts in the field are quite sure that they are as correct as they can be, and in general what you say slams face-first into what I have learned.

Defining 'those people' as 'talking out of their asses' is like someone who cannot put his mind to evolutionary theory dismissing the whole thing at 'eeh we can't be having arms because some freaking ancient fish had fins ffs!'

Don't try to distort my words. By 'those people' I meant people who would assert that a Chinese Aristotle would have invented a different form of logic, and I say that they are talking out of their asses by saying that, as I would anyone who would argue a point of history was determined by one factor. Again, how would you prove that a Chinese Aristotle would really come up with a different form of logic, rather than a logic that looked different but operated in much the same way and come up with identical results? You can't. No one can. Hence, it's bullshit.

What are you 'fighting' against, Hakurei? I get your resistence, I accept it, fine, but I do not get the crude dissmisal based on an attitude 'I know better'. No, you don't.

Neither do I or anyone else for that matter here in this forum.

What? Even the people on the forum who studied linguistics? The very thing you're trying to explain to me? One of the things that I have passed a college course about? Are you are assuming that everyone on this forum has the same educational background as you? Good grief. You will find experts on many diverse subjects on this forum, from particle physics to sociology. (Not that I'm an expert in linguistics by any means.)

What am I fighting against? Untruth and bullshit. We have quite enough of that around without us spreading it purposefully.

Language being defined as a main force shaping the way we think is not some random thought offer by a few liberal arts hippies, nor even a new thing.

Again, no shit, but you're taking it too far. You are taking it to the point of linguistic determinism, a theory that has been discredited for a long time. Have you heard this aphorism? "A picture is worth a thousand words"? You can memorize details of the Mona Lisa in a time far too short for you to describe them to yourself. You can memorize and immitate a sound faster than it would take you to verbally describe it.

See, this statement is another flashing example of linear thinking of history; seeing ancient logic as one thing created at one time or as if something that had anything to do with daily life, way of life or religion of the time.

Ancient logic did have something to do with daily life. It formed the basis for the natural philosophy of Thales of Miletus (remember him?). That natural philosophy was so useful that it actually made Thales rich. You read that right: Thales used his natural philosophy to make a killing on the olive bounty that happened one summer by buying up all the olive presses the previous year and then renting out those presses to the olive growers who would need them.

Enabling factor or the main shaping force does not equate the only factor, I have never said this -I kept remind that I haven't- neither any of those guys.

Again, you exaggerate the role of language by characterizing it as an "enabling factor" or "the main shaping force" â€" what justifies this? Maybe "those guys" are onto something, but you (yes, I'm singling you out here) have so far presented a very poor case.

I was talking about the way they depicted them. (They are often depicted in a way human body doesn't stand or pose.) And the difference between how Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek choose to depict human body.

If you actually take a look at Egyptian sculpture, rather than relief carvings on their funiary walls, you'll find that they're proportioned and posed quite reasonably. They're stiff, but reasonable.

As to the carvings, I think that had to do with economy of expression rather than some bogus dications of whatever, because the Egyptians had very little space and very little time to carve those figures on their temple walls â€" their chisels were exclusively made of copper, whereas their longer-lasting tombs were made of granite (bronze was for weapons exclusively). Thus, you wanted to carve that person as few times as you could get away with, so you wanted a style that conveyed as much information about the person's status and character as possible. That meant a profile, except for twisting the chest and eye toward the viewer. But for those two distortions, the relief figures look quite like the statues.

LOL, Hakurei, what  I am saying is AGAINST Campbell. I am saying there is no one great model, but countless different ones evolved in different ways and one model survived because of many other factors. 

Cambell's mythological model is a generalized model of how myths came into being and what their purpose is. It is a grand unified theory of cultural anthropology. He explained that, while each individual mythology is different in its detail, just like all human language is remarkably similar in form beneath the surface details, all mythology is remarkably similar in form and function underneath the specific expressions.

About your 'how to cook' example. I specifically said that in my previous post "-other than the ways of fighting with the nature to survive-" which was included to get you understand that I'm aware there are other form of knowledge available to primitive people, bıt was not talking about them.

For primitive people, what else do you need, but that practical knolwedge and myth? It also proves that there's more to the primitive mind than the language of myth.

Also from Ancient Greece and 16th century Italy we have enormous archives survived to our day and each have pretty good evidence on from how they handled literacy and used the versions of their language, how the language change according to different domains. Not the grammnar or the alphabet. The usage of language in different domains like; family, business, military, religion, state...etc.

Well, you would expect the experts in a specific area to be able to communicate with non-technical people, and you're not going to invent a full, new language just to communicate some new concepts. That's just silly. But languages, including syntax and alphabet, evolve with time. We've seen it over the course of English history, changing from something that looked like Dutch to what it is today, using a completely different alphabet to the one we use now. So riddle me this: why do you think the language changed the way it did?

You said "the core of language is the seed of logic." No. Language came first and then the logic was born according to a specific language.

Of course people were speaking languages before logic, and the person who invented formalized logic would speak a specific language. But "according to a specific language"? Again, overreaching.

Also the 'rules' of 'languages' as we know today came later and constantly developed until it reached the standardised form -ater standardised universal education. There are no rules or standards; THERE ARE NO LANGUAGES before French Revolution.

LOL! Who doesn't know linguistics again? I'm not talking about the prescriptive grammars made at that time and taught in schools, but rather that the descriptive rules detected to be in operation in long extinct languages like Sumerian or ancient Egyptian before anyone even THOUGHT of writing down rules for language, rules that every child knows about their own language without even being taught, and rules that every person follows whether they are educated on them or not. Even primitive people who have never encountered outsiders don't speak in word salad.

What I am saying is 'agnostic atheism' is the 'theological knowledge' of the non existence of god based on the knowledge that 'theological knowledge' is not knowledge and application of falsifiability to balance out that non-knowledge status of 'theological knowledge' thus treating that absence of 'knowledge' -which is just a negative symmetry of 'theological knowledge'- like some empircial data to work with. OK?

Then you are defining 'agnostic atheism' quite differently then the way I am, and most other atheists do. To me, it's a matter of degree of certainty towards a particular proposition: "God exists." Argue all you want about 'theological knowledge' or whatever, it's there, I know of it, I know what it means, and I have assigned it some degree of certainty. The fact that I do not assign either 100% certainty nor 0% certainty (and realize that) is what makes me an agnostic, and the fact that it is near zero, enough to reject the proposition, is what makes me an atheist. Thus, I am an agnostic atheist.

I think it is a viable position. The Aristotolian logic says that it is a viable position. And I don't give a fuck if you think Aristotolian logic is an artifact of the Greek language or not. It's consistent, and it works. Until you prove otherwise (using what logic?), it still rules over any petty narrative.

[Baruch]

This is why Continental philosophy can't get along with Anglo-American philosophy and vice versa, and we can't have nice things either.  The Anglo-American analyticism, has tried to divorce itself from language (and Wittgenstein), and originate from logic outward, not derive logic from language, inward.  It is normal in reductionism ... which Anglo-American analyticism is a part, to invert things.  Though historically, the development was from language to logic, as Aristotle demonstrated in terms of the Greek language.  And of course he was laying bare, what was already there implicitly.  He made certain ways of speaking into syllogisms, into technical jargon.

As an abstraction, logic is easier to move to another culture/language, than other aspects of Greek culture.  Modern logic is far more abstract than what people were using as recently as the 19th century.  Of course it is the language of the user of logic, his semantics, that decide what kind of axioms are advanced ... what is important, how it is structured etc.  The logic is a bare skeleton lacking in all flesh.

[drunkenshoe]

I am not lecturing you, nor talking at you. You have a chip on your shoulder. I'm trying to put things together trying to explain my tendency in thinking about something, because you asked me to explain my position. And I am using the available common knowledge which you lack and also reject as bullshit.

You are on an alien soil and you want me to explain something as old as written culture, a subject which has a huge mountain of knowledge and history of itself with perfectly articulate expressions in a post and convince you on something you reject from the beginning just as a principle. It's stupid.

You are perfectly fine with it when you are pointing out what is and what is not, but you cannot handle it when somebody tells you that you don't know jack squad about a particular subject to come to a conclusion.

You pompous, narcissistic idiot. All you fucking care about is having an American hot shot, 'I know it all debate' that you get to say what is right or wrong according to your own perspective.

I am always immeditely suspicious whenever anyone tells me that some thing in history was determined by any one factor.

What? Are you doing this on purpose? This is bullshit. I haven't said anything like this and actually I have repeated a few times that I haven't.

[drunkenshoe]

Baruch, analytical philosophy is philosophy of language and it is defined as British-American (20th century English speaking culture's) Philosophy.

'Continental' Philosophy does not need to get along with British American Philosophy, the latter has to get along with the former, because it is just a part of it.

Get your ass down to earth.

[Baruch]

Baruch, analytical philosophy is philosophy of language and it is defined as British-American (20th century English speaking culture's) Philosophy.

'Continental' Philosophy does not need to get along with British American Philosophy, the latter has to get along with the former, because it is just a part of it.

Get your ass down to earth.

Spoken like a Continental type philosopher ;-)  Or are you micro-aggressing Analysts, by appropriation?  Don't be a very White British person, claiming you are making genuine Indian chicken curry.  Of course all philosophers use language, but that doesn't make them all, Continental.

"Analytic Philosophy (or sometimes Analytical Philosophy) is a 20th Century movement in philosophy which holds that philosophy should apply logical techniques in order to attain conceptual clarity, and that philosophy should be consistent with the success of modern science." aka it is the step-mother of scientism.

Habermas is about ... communicative rationalization:

Rationalization in this context ... "In sociology, rationalisation or rationalization refers to the replacement of traditions, values, and emotions as motivators for behavior in society with rational, calculated ones." and ...

Habermas' position ... "Jürgen Habermas has argued that to understand rationalization properly requires going beyond Weber's notion of rationalization and distinguishing between instrumental rationality, which involves calculation and efficiency (in other words, reducing all relationships to those of means and ends), and communicative rationality, which involves expanding the scope of mutual understanding in communication, the ability to expand this understanding through reflective discourse about communication, and making social and political life subject to this expanded understanding."

Your POV, and mine, is closer to Habermas, not Gettier.

[drunkenshoe]

LOL Baruch, I'm reacting to a 'white British' out look here. It's interesting that you percieve that as being a 'very white British person' way of looking down to American thought. ;) You are generally right about how the American thought is isolated though. *Whistle. Don't you think it is an interesting subject of it's own that what crosses the pond and what doesn't. Or most importantly didn't? Uncle Noam has a good map of that in the last few decades up to academic research titles..

I was being obnoxious. I meant it is a whole thing and one is just a small part of another. 

And you get 5 internet points just for quoting uncle Jürgen. I think he is important to us about critical theory in general too. Don't you too sometimes feel like screaming with a knife in hand  'die, postmodernism die!'

Look what I have. Want to share a good cookie? It's a monday for pessimists.  :040: 

https://pdf.yt/d/TJ7HxrAly-MtUP4B

[Baruch]

LOL Baruch, I'm reacting to a 'white British' out look here. It's interesting that you percieve that as being a 'very white British person' way of looking down to American thought. ;) You are generally right about how the American thought is isolated though. *Whistle. Don't you think it is an interesting subject of it's own that what crosses the pond and what doesn't. Or most importantly didn't? Uncle Noam has a good map of that in the last few decades up to academic research titles..

I was being obnoxious. I meant it is a whole thing and one is just a small part of another. 

And you get 5 internet points just for quoting uncle Jürgen. I think he is important to us about critical theory in general too. Don't you too sometimes feel like screaming with a knife in hand  'die, postmodernism die!'

Look what I have. Want to share a good cookie? It's a monday for pessimists.  :040: 

https://pdf.yt/d/TJ7HxrAly-MtUP4B

I like ;-)  Reading the critical Concept of Enlightenment (first chapter).  Looks promising to whit: "Enlightenment's mythic terror springs from a horror of myth."  Are we always trying to break into the Omega Point, by philosophizing with a hammer, smashing the latest generation of Francis Bacon idols?  Is the next stage already here, methinks metaphysics may be called to the bar once again ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism.

A turkish delight back at you:
https://archive.org/details/TwilightOfTheIdolsOrHowToPhilosophizeWithAHammer

Both books struggle with the fate of Francis Bacon, who preternaturally died while trying to invent fresh frozen chicken, though salisbury steak sounds more English.  If he had been as genius as Leonardo, he would have invented the TV dinner, centuries before TV.  Here lies the inventor of modernity, dead by a deed most foul, if anyone can claim to have invented it ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon

I had a friend who almost died of infection, when attacked by a frozen zombie whole turkey he was trying to prepare for Thanksgiving.

[Solomon Zorn]

... you cannot handle it when somebody tells you that you don't know jack squad about a particular subject to come to a conclusion.

You pompous, narcissistic idiot. All you fucking care about is having an American hot shot, 'I know it all debate' that you get to say what is right or wrong according to your own perspective.

Can you honestly recall any instance, where someone made a comment in disagreement with you, who wasn't a "pompous, narcissistic idiot?"

[Hakurei Reimu]

I am not lecturing you, nor talking at you. You have a chip on your shoulder. I'm trying to put things together trying to explain my tendency in thinking about something, because you asked me to explain my position. And I am using the available common knowledge which you lack and also reject as bullshit.

That line you just stated there... it's not true. What you call "common knowledge" is not knowledge; they're common misconceptions. They are things that a lot, or even most, people think are true, but actually are not.

Right at the moment, you are lecturing me: you are telling me that I "don't have knowledge", when in fact, I do have knowledge, particularly of language. You are pitting your "common knowledge" against concepts I learned in a college course on that very same subject. I don't claim to be an expert on languages by any means, but I do understand the basics â€" basics that clobber common misconceptions on that subject.

No, being bilingual doesn't give you any unique insight into language that is unavailable to those who have studied the subject as an academic discipline. Real linguists study polyglots as well as monoglots.

You are on an alien soil and you want me to explain something as old as written culture, a subject which has a huge mountain of knowledge and history of itself with perfectly articulate expressions in a post and convince you on something you reject from the beginning just as a principle. It's stupid.

Theorizing what might have happened in history under different circumstances is not history or culture. It is speculation. It doesn't even rise to the level of knowledge because there's absolutely no means to verify what you are saying is true. You have never, ever answered why it would be that a Chinese Aristotle would have come up with a different logic. That "why" is critically important to a skeptic, or indeed any intellectual â€"more important than the statement itselfâ€" for without the "why", that assertion is just that: an assertion without evidence, and thus falls to Hitchens's razor.

IYou are perfectly fine with it when you are pointing out what is and what is not, but you cannot handle it when somebody tells you that you don't know jack squad about a particular subject to come to a conclusion.

Again, more lecturing. More chastizing. More treating me like a sponge who's only fit to absorb your word without question. This is exactly what I was talking about at the head of my last message. You assume that I have no knowledge of what you're talking about, and therefore my rejections are the product of "not knowing" or "not wanting to know" about a particular subject.

You pompous, narcissistic idiot. All you fucking care about is having an American hot shot, 'I know it all debate' that you get to say what is right or wrong according to your own perspective.

Projecting much? I find it hillarious that, instead of going back to your sources to construct a proper rebuttal to my replies, which to everyone else are obvious problems in your position, you instead call me names.

You bilingual Turkish hot shot! 

What? Are you doing this on purpose? This is bullshit. I haven't said anything like this and actually I have repeated a few times that I haven't.

The hell you haven't. I quote:

Are you familiar with the quote, "If Aristoteles had spoken Chinese or Dakotan, he would have come up with a completely different logic system"?

Yes, I gave religious concepts as examples, however they are the ones we can easily pinpoint in this subject as fantasy, because for a long time now it has been obvious to our accumulation of knowledge that they are fantasies. (That actually is a part of what I am saying) But when I say the link between language and thought, I mean the whole kind of concepts, their development, including the 'secular' ones, which are not realy secular but created in constrast, in comparison in a language that has evolved from myth and fantasy, before creator or god 'towards' the concept. The very reason why people managed to reason out that thought about challanging those specific concepts created related to god is that they were defined/existed in language in the first place. Comparison is the most basic, simple way of critical thought. When you create a concept in contrast, it is bound to be in comparison and therefore actually very related and it is in the end a counterpart.

You used the quote as a preface to your longer paragraph about how language creates artificial divides that are somehow supposed to determine how we think. The problem with this argument is that this kind of division between X and not-X is not linked to language at all. Cats (or any other territorial animal) also divide the world between X and not-X when they stake out their territories. You cannot have territories unless you have some sort of understanding of "mine" and "not-mine," even if that understanding is on the instinctual level. Deciding whether to eat something in a world full of poisonous plants and venomous animals also requires this kind of understanding: "safe for me to eat" and "not safe for me to eat." These understandings may not be symbolic, but they are there â€" they are basic tools for survival. The divisions and contrasts you speak of are not the fault of language, but are actually far more basal concepts that language allowed us to put labels on.

If what you say above could be taken at face-value, then it would have obvious implications for Aristotle and his logic. Contrasts map onto logical negation pretty straightforwardly, for instance. But you asserted that these contrasts are somehow the fault of language, rather than the language acquiring a means to express these contrasts because of a preexisting need to divide the universe between god and secular. Your reasoning puts the cart before the horse.

I don't think you understand what the quote refers to. It's not about Aristo or his logic. People who offered that anology are perfectly aware that Chinese have their own philosophy, Dakotans have their own mythology and that Aristo's logic is a product depended on schools that preceedes his. This is EXACTLY what they are saying in a higher level of a category. They are pointing out that they are all as results, strictly bound to their respective linguistic development in their own circumstances.

Again, a direct statement that it was the linguistic development of Greek etc. that enabled Aristotle to develop his formal logic, rather than the needs of formal logic that compelled Aristotle to repurpose some of his own language to suit it. Repurposing the language is something that happened to every other language that had to incorporate the Aristotolian logic, so why not Greek itself?

Like in other posts, you fail to elaborate why it was not the latter case in favor of the former. Again, the "why" is very imporant if you don't want to fall victim of Hitchens's razor.

Anyway, you have this tendency to assume that you are the one who knows things and others on this forum do not when we disagree with you. This is patently not true, as I have demonstrated repeatedly in the past. Maybe it's time to take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself if the one with their head up their ass is me, or you.

[SoldierofFortune]

idea/concept comes before language...for exampe:

In very early times of humanity, there were emotion of justice in the hearts of men...even the word that symbolize the concept ''justice'' didn't exist...

[Baruch]

Now fight nicely ... like cold blooded academics do ...

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/25/1520752113.abstract.html?etoc

This recent scholarly article has bearing on if there are universal semantic structures in the human mind, such that it doesn't matter what language(s) you use to express yourself, or what cultural context you do it in ... because there is a human cognitive high ground, and the first group of eggheads that seize it, will be uber-mensch!

I think there are no universal semantic structures in the human mind ... because the human mind is a universal machine, not a universal truth.  And like all machines, it is garbage in, garbage out.  Turing was motivated in his researches, by searching for just such a structure ... because if it was an algorithm, then it could be programmed, and if it could be programmed, then a machine executing the program would be a mind.

Really un-cognizant of the researchers ... such universal semantics is what metaphysics, and Roget's Thesaurus ... have been all about for centuries.

[SoldierofFortune]

Now fight nicely ... like cold blooded academics do ...

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/25/1520752113.abstract.html?etoc

This recent scholarly article has bearing on if there are universal semantic structures in the human mind, such that it doesn't matter what language(s) you use to express yourself, or what cultural context you do it in ... because there is a human cognitive high ground, and the first group of eggheads that seize it, will be uber-mensch!

I think there are no universal semantic structures in the human mind ... because the human mind is a universal machine, not a universal truth.  And like all machines, it is garbage in, garbage out.  Turing was motivated in his researches, by searching for just such a structure ... because if it was an algorithm, then it could be programmed, and if it could be programmed, then a machine executing the program would be a mind.

Really un-cognizant of the researchers ... such universal semantics is what metaphysics, and Roget's Thesaurus ... have been all about for centuries.

For example, for me, making the understanding of the relation between concepts and imagery without using the instrumentality of turkish gramer and symbols...with the language of noam chmsky, conversion of the deep structure without turkish, but with english to surface structure...

[Baruch]

Chomsky is more about syntax than semantics ... there are 4 levels:

1. Lexical analysis - this is what the researchers are trying to combine with #3, and seeing recurring patterns
2. Syntactic analysis - this is what Chomsky did his research ... on English.  It won't apply with all languages
3. Semantic analysis - this is where no man is an island, this is culturally determined
4. Pragmatic analysis - this is where you put the stuff that doesn't fit above