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Philosophy

Language Divides Us Against Ourselves

There are senses in which the act of definition and assertion of epistemological necessity or structure upon any context, evidence or experience is already (in a limited sense) an act of violence, of difference and disassembly. Our taxonomies and lexicons are in many ways not of the world so much as they are forced upon it and the interpretations (and misinterpretations) we seek there are already prefabricated, made necessary by those axioms of knowing with which we begin. Our definitions of reality force the truth, but rarely account for the facts beyond fairly limited emotive or ideological and institutional conventions.

Granted that my own assertion(s) may not be entirely justifiable (or to everyone’s tastes), the projection of explanation and ordered grammars of causal attribution or other sharp tools and implements of historical interpretation are always already likely to be attracted to violence and spectacular catastrophe in just the same ways that news and media are borne aloft by the information entropy of terrible events. Our language is na(t)ively-biased towards diffusion, disassembly in ways which might also (and recursively) bias our minds and our cultures or shared histories towards disorder and chaos.

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