Also some times a cat is just a cat. When you see an actual cat on an actual heater, it's not symbolic, it's a thing being itself. It might become a symbol when you recall it later as memory or knowledge, but I'd argue it's only trivially a symbol for the sole reason that your memory is not the actual cat.
The phenomenon itself of seeing a cat is not linguistic, but I think this stops being so obvious from the very moment that one thinks "a cat is just a cat", actually. Thinking that "a cat is just a cat" is very different than just seeing a cat. The former involves wondering about what "a cat" is, using the symbol
cat for the animal that one sees that is a cat, etc. I'd be inclined to think linguistically about that thought.
It's just my opinion that philosophy and science don't exist in separate worlds. I provided an alternative perspective from another discipline.
I would tend to agree with that
although philosophy is not science, the more rigorously scientific it can be about its claims, the better in my opinion. It's just that some sub-disciplines (like logic) will be more open to that than others, like ethics or aesthetics. Regarding your observation that the social nature of knowledge cannot be tested, my question to you would be: does that make you assume that then, knowledge must not be social in nature? Because that seems untested as well.
That is not exaclty possible for everyone. Because what you think at any one time is still less than the knowledge that you have. What you can do, though, is expand your knowledge by putting your knowledge in a different perspective to create new thoughts, and therewith new knowledge.
What I mean is that what you know can't be what you think, because everything you know influences what you think and the other way around.
I am only 80% sure about what you're going for here but if I got it, I'm not really seeing it being in contradiction with the paragraph that follows the quote you selected. I was trying to say: let's not focus on knowing, but on thinking, and on thinking an as activity that
may lead to new knowledge, in opposition to a mere mental representation that only repeats an experience without "opening" it to scrutiny. For example: wondering about whether a cat is just a cat (scrutiny, openness to new knowledge), versus simply replaying having seen "the animal that was a cat" in one's mind (no scrutiny).
What you haven't thought of,
@Ren, is that there must have been means of thought before there was communication, or words and signs to communicate with. Otherwise, we wouldn't have any means of communication now.
Yes! I honestly think the question about the genealogy of thought formation is the strongest argument against Wittgenstein's position, so far. Thank you for having mentioned it. I have in fact been thinking about it, but did not include it in my post because the post was already very long.... but no actually the real reason is that I don't have a genealogy consistent with W's claim yet
However, I have a strong intuition that it is possible to offer such a genealogy. I will have to think about it more and hopefully, when the different fragments of thought coalesce I'll be able to propose something of the sort here. It is absolutely necessary, I agree. But again, I think it's possible.
Now let's define thought as our cognitive capacities. (...)
But in order to talk about this object, the child must already have identified and isolated objects into 'concepts' with certain properties in his mind that correspond to the objects in the outer world.
I think thought is more than our cognitive capacities, because of what I pompously called its "aboutness" in an earlier message. Thought (or so I claim, but I'm not the only one) is fundamentally
about something, it is projected onto objects, in a way that the mere cognitive capacities are not. There is something more to thought, and (possibly) language is woven into this something more, as per the argument I laid out above. As for properties in the mind corresponding to objects in the outer world: well, my dear Lady Kant, I would agree that this conditions the possibility of the unity of perception, perhaps even of consciousness itself, but I am not sure that it constitutes the substance of thought or set its limits; I see it more as a formal property of the mind, not an "organic" part the process of thinking.
As I see it there is no objective meaning. Data is data. A tree is a tree, but it doesn't have any inherien meaning. When we communicate it won't mean anything unless we know how to decipher it. Sure, there is intent in what we might say but I wouldn't equate that to saying there is meaning in it. As I see it objective meaning doesn't exist for whatever it's worth.
Do you mean that you don't believe at all in the possibility of objective meaning? This seems extreme, and a challenge to the very possibility of scientific progress, universal systems of ethics, etc. But I think you might have meant something else... I'd be curious if you could expand on this, as the question of meaning is one that interests me a LOT
