Ok, let’s see. I cannot help but feel like Wittgenstein was trying to get at something quite profound, even though I can’t bring myself to completely agree with it. Still, I’ll try to take his stance and see where that leads me.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. All I know is what I have words for."
On the face of it, this does seem like an easy statement to challenge. Two different sets of words are implicitly conflated here, language-words and world-knowledge. But like
@Ginny and others said, language is not confined to words, it applies to every type of socially derived system of signs. On the other hand, I struggle with the idea of “my world” being restricted only to my knowledge, that is, to what I know or
could know to be true. Surely “my world” is also my emotions, my insights, my dreams, etc. But it seems almost too easy to dismiss Wittgenstein’s statement in that way.
So perhaps we could relax the definition a little, and take what “I know” to mean what “I think” – not that something or a set of things is true, but thinking as an activity that
could yield a true or a false statement – a « proposition with sense », as W himself would have defined a thought. So a thought would have to be about something that can be genuinely scrutinised. Is a mental representation of a landscape a thought under this definition? I don’t think so. When one is picturing a landscape, one is only “thinking” about the landscape in a manner of speaking. There seems something missing for it to be considered a thought (again, under the definition I proposed, if under nothing else.) It is when the question about the aboutness of the landscape is raised that the thought arises, so the question becomes: “Can the aboutness of this object that is the landscape be tackled non-linguistically?”
Here we probably have to provide a definition of language for the sake of clarity. Once again, I disagree with the Wittgenstein of the quote above who associates language with mere words. But let’s maybe define language as a socially constructed system of signs that represents the objects of the world and structures the propositions via which we speak about those objects. I think the key here might be whether, when we think about an object, we really only think about that single object, or whether we only ever think about it
in relation to other objects, the concatenation of which is the thought (the “logical picture of the world” in W’s words). Maybe directing consciousness towards the representation of a single object, just like the landscape, is not really a thought, because it is not really about anything at all, it is “just” a representation, like a mental replay of a sensory experience.
On the other hand, if a thought is a logical picture in that it aggregates various objects in relation to one another, thereby giving this logical picture the possibility of being “original”, “unusual”, “true”, “false”, “nonsensical”, or whatever other adjective – the question that fascinates me is how it is that we manage to connect the objects in such a way as to string a thought together, and create the opening for further strings of thoughts based on it, perhaps even to the articulation of a concept at the end of the road. It is not the objects themselves out there in a world which exhibit this innate, instantaneous connection: it is not written into the DNA of a heater that a cat will come and sleep on it during the winter, yet when we think of a cat sleeping on a heater, we are connecting these two objects together in the mind. How do we do that? How do we
bring about this state of affairs?
Maybe we do that through language. The heater and the cat are things/beings in the world grasped as objects in the mind through the signs (“cat”, “heater”) that we have at our disposal to represent not just each of them separately as mere mental representations, but how they interact with one another in a completely virtual way, by means of signs and through the linguistic apparatus that connects signs together – call it logic or grammar. Of course, when we “perform” such thinking, we are not constantly telling ourselves under our breaths that “this is a cat and he’s now jumping on the heater to have a nice long cozy sleep”. But it’s possible that we are implicitly operating
from the very beginning, without realising it, with an understanding of the heater and the cat as signs (linguistic signs) that can interact with each other through the grammar that connects them. And if we can find a way to show that all objects, circles included, fall into that category of signs, and that only in that way does one articulate thoughts and string them with other thoughts, maybe W has a point.
I should add that to my mind, this understanding of the relationship between language and thought would in no way necessarily “blunt” creativity and original thinking. You could even suggest that the more numerous the objects that interact with one another in thought, and the more complex the grammar that provides the rules under which the interaction takes place, perhaps the more likely the thoughts strung together are to produce novel insights. Language does not limit thought as such, it only provides the boundaries beyond which a thought isn’t a thought, but a mere phantasm. But perhaps the phantasm can be objectified into a sign by means of language, and subsequently made to interact with other objects in thought, to produce a novel insight, perhaps even a new word. Here language really seems omnipresent and inseparable from the activity of thinking: the “voice of thought”, endlessly extending along with thought.
Anyway, this is the best case I can make, right now, for W’s elusive words. It is probably ridden with unvoiced and unsubstantiated assumptions, but I thought it might be useful to offer a counter perspective.
If you hadn't posted this I would have made a similar thread, though it is not rooted in language, but the perceptions of existentiality. The thing you're asking is very much rooted in this question of how reality is perceived. (Though actually my question would have approached the same topic, but from a different perspective.)