Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: meaning and interpretation

Limits of Language

Language does not simply describe the world we inhabit. It arranges the conditions under which that world becomes intelligible, and in doing so we gradually reorganise experience into forms that can be named, remembered, and exchanged. Perception, memory, and social coordination all lean on this process. Human environments therefore become saturated with symbolic scaffolding: categories, […]

Tags cognition and language, communicative systems, complexity and communication, description versus reality, epistemic limits, interpretation and knowledge, language and experience, language and perception, language and reality, language and social coordination, limits of articulation, limits of description, linguistic construction of reality, linguistic mediation, linguistic structures of thought, meaning and interpretation, meaning as relational tension, orbit of description and reality, perception and naming, phase lag in language, philosophy of language, philosophy of meaning, representation and reality, semantic drift, semantic fields, semantics and ontology, symbolic scaffolding, symbolic systems, Wittgenstein language limits

cybernetics

Philosophy of Language

My position is that the most consequential features of language, meaning, and coordination cannot be exhaustively defined without being distorted, and that this is a structural necessity rather than a theoretical shortcoming. Certain terms must be taken as primitive, not out of convenience, but because definition is itself a secondary operation, already dependent on relational […]