We do not use language, it uses us and its greatest trick is to easily persuade us otherwise. Language defines or prescribes personality in ways which few of us are prepared to admit. The different patterns and structures of cognition implicit to any linguistic pattern of communication must inevitably shape and influence the overall ways […]
Tag: language
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Language through Identity
Language, like logic or mathematics is alive with a dynamic and self-inflected metamorphosis of endlessly-extensible, recombinatory abstraction. It is the means of our self-expression, of the essential causal and cognitive architecture of language and the shared experience of culture, and it is the core pattern around which conscious and unconscious self-identity and symbolic processing self-gravitates, […]
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Thin Masks of Self-Deception
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
For all our aspirations to escape the implicit biases and semantic turbulence of cognition, culture and the diverse linguistic or other semi-formal behavioural and conceptual encoding grammars we inhabit, there are very likely intrinsic symmetries in information and communications systems that orient them towards qualititatively dissonant outcomes. Biases are functional amplifications of difference and information […]
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Endless Redefinition of Human Dignity
All meanings are by spoken or unspoken convention, by agreement and – being that every word or mind and context is foundationally dynamic – exist as saliences in distributed fields of communication. In the first few pages of “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell raises an irreducible spectre (or is it an angel?) of circularity […]
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The Immortal Game
It remains endlessly problematic that the words and the knowledge or cognitive information patterns through which we interpret our world are always already and inadvertently alienating and dissociative. The unity we seek is above and beyond and can never be bounded by the very language and thought which aspires to understand it. It is and […]
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Reflection on Meaning
Meaning is an associative property. We define terms in reference to other terms and then those definitions tend by a trick of the (circularly recursive or holographic) light to assume standalone substance and significance but at the base there is nothing, no foundation or ontological anchor upon which to secure our languages, our selves and […]
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Semantic Ambiguity
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
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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 […]
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Building Peace
Curiouser and curiouser: observe how an aspiration to coordinate or construct and administratively or diplomatically assert peace becomes itself yet another game and grammar of difference, of competition, of jockeying words, behavioural idioms, contested concepts and roles; exclusive and self-sustaining as a professional career or community of experts which, while the endeavour is nominally admirable, […]
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Embracing Emptiness
Wittgenstein once remarked that when addressing mystery and that which lies beyond language (and thus – beyond cognition) we should remain silent as there is nothing useful that can be said. He was correct, but for the wrong reason. That which lies beyond language and structural or grammatical utility does not necessarily (or at least […]
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Change is as easy as A, B, C
As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
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