Category: Epistemology and Method

LANGUAGES, GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY, MEANING, KNOWLEDGE AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF TESTING MEANING

(why our religion fails)

My sister Ellen asked me to help her understand other people’s ‘belief’ in god and religion when she was in high school I think – when we were both in catholic schools. And I said that it was very simple: that it was a very long time ago, and that the levant was a very poor and backward ghetto of the empire, and that while we had roman rule, law, and commerce, and greek philosophy, reason, mathematics, the primitive people had only their primitive language to speak with and they did the best that they could – they spoke in primitive language. Like the few primitive people living today, they had no reason, no philosophy, no science, no mathematics. And so they had to say something was good or ‘true’ because it was commanded by the gods, not because it was reasonably comprehensible, rationally consistent, philosophically sound, scientifically demonstrable, or mathematically consistent. They had only ‘because the boss says so’ to use as ‘this is true’. We can, today, say the same things without primitive language, and by making truth claims using reason, rationalism, philosophy, science and mathematics. But … our words, grammar, and pronunciation, are not the only content of language, but the meaning, values and emotions that we describe with those sounds, to produce those words, using that grammar. So just as we have difficulty losing our accents, and our grammar, we have difficulty losing the ideas that we learned with which to produce those sounds, words, grammar and language. We all have trouble losing our vocalized and intuited ‘accents’ – what we call ‘biases’. They are the foundations upon which all our consequential words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories depend. So just as the chinese sound very differently from region to region, yet use the same character set for writing, we can, in the same culture, do similarly: use the same words and grammar despite very different meanings, and values in our minds that we describe them with. And so, if someone is raised using english, but learns archaic semitic parables; or someone is raised using english but learns historical and biographical parables; or someone is raised using english but learns scientific and mathematical principles “parables”, then these are very different internal meanings using very similar words. The difference between the ancient parables, the historical parables, and the scientific parables, is that we can empathize with anthropomorphized parables without much general knowledge, empathize a bit less with historical parables with quite a bit of general knowledge, and empathize with sciences only if we possess very specific knowledge in addition to general knowledge. So that the cost of learning to speak each language increases in time, and effort. And so we tell primitive people and children parables of animals and people and gods and heroes. We tell young adults rules that require reason. We tell adults about law that is internally consistent requiring rationalism. We educate specialists in the sciences where specialized knowledge is necessary. And the old and wise, among us who have studied all of the parables, the histories, the laws, and the sciences, can try to provide answers for all those groups in the languages that they can hopefully one day understand. Once you grasp that we use spoken languages with common, uncommon, and specialized terms, across all people in a political system. But within that system we use multiple languages of MEANING. And that each of these languages of meaning, relies upon that universal spoken language; and that each of these languages of meaning uses a technology of ‘validation’ or ‘truth testing’, that varies from the primitive and experiential, and anthropomorphic, to the historical analogy, to the legal evidence, to the scientifically precise; and that it requires much more knowledge and often, much more intelligence, for each additional level of precision that we add on top of the anthropomorphic. Then you realize that while we use the same basic words and grammar, we do not use the same vocabularies; and that vocabularies tell us which technology of understanding that a person relies upon, the relative inferiority or superiority of that language in solving problems of increasing precision; how much general knowledge is requires for that person to retain that technology of meaning; and the likelihood of the intelligence of that person who employs that technology of meaning. And this is what we do. We form hierarchies and classes and each class uses the same root spoken language and grammar, but uses the language of meaning suited to his upbringing, his degree of ability, and his degree of accumulated knowledge. So we do not only judge people by their dress, and by their body language, and by their manners, but by the spoken language, and language of meaning that they rely upon. Because these are demonstrated rather than reported evidence of the person who acts, speaks, and thinks by those dress, actions, manners, and words.