TS, your talk about map/terrain is good to the extent that it punches up the fact that language does not capture or fail to capture reality but rather is a tool for using reality.
I’m good with that language.
But talk about isomorphisms between the map and the territory and language and reality has some issues for me. First of all, language is of course part of reality rather than a mirror of reality. We can never* say* where the language part of reality begins and ends so long as we are doing our *saying *with language.
Yes, we are bewitched by language, as Wittgenstein put it. Good so far, here, too. As a materialist, my conclusion is that language is a physical phenomenon, and just as much a part of the real world as any other. “Strange loops” as Doug Hofstadter would put it, physical processes working in such a way that we have a meaningful context to say that physical processes are “talking about” physical processes.
Also, Betterave is right to say that you seem to be promoting the correspondence theory of truth that I and all pragmatists reject. Though it is possible to make useful correspondences between bits of language and bits of reality in the sense that the word “chair” can represent that wooden thing I’m sitting on, I deny that language and truth function essentially as correspondence.
Well, I think correspondence theory is a confusing concept here, it’s not label I apply to me view, for the very reasons you point out just below – “correspondence theory” as commonly used typically gets constrained to “physical reality” as the “territory”. Language as symbolic isn’t tied to physical reality only as the “territory” it maps. This gets tricky to discuss because the “territory” can be a ‘conceptual landscape’, rather than some concrete, physical terrain, but then again, when you factor in that concepts themselves are physical phenomena, it’s
all folded into a natural context. Nevertheless, as long as all parties are aware of that distinction, good communication and exchange can obtain.
The map/terrain metaphor works fails apart when we try to use it to make sense of sentences like “there exist potential infinities but no actual infinities” or “that is a good dog” or “slavery is evil.” To preserve correspondence theory, people then start concocting essences like the Good to make sense of such sentences as corresponding to something. For example, Plato said that even numbers share in the essence of Duality and sick people have Fever.
I’ve no interesting in maintaining correspondence theory as such – that’s for someone else to defend if they’d like. The map is not the territory, but the territory is not (just) concrete nature. I’d say (and have said) I’m as thoroughly pragmatist in my sense-making for sentences like “that is a good dog” as any.
Perhaps the key point is just to realize a subtle limitation of the rejoinder:
the map is not the territory. That phrase, I have found, is immensely helpful and powerful in getting the
basic idea across, bringing to light the elementary error of conflating the symbols with their referents, and it’s good pedagogy as far as that goes. But “map” and “isomorphism” I think breaks down under stress as a metaphor where it is understood to be something as simple as “correspondence”. Indeed, that’s what a good map does, like a map of your town; the points and lines correspond tightly in some geometric (top looking down) way to the land being mapped.
But “this is a good dog” begs of no correspondence to any
physical or
real “Good”, as essence, form, or anything beyond pragmatic constructs in the various minds (or just mind) that has a framework concept of “good” to apply. The mapping is not from “word” to “essence” or “value” where “essence” or “value” has some tangible (extra-mental) turf to point to. It’s a map to a map (and possibly continuing through many levels of indirection) that gets meaning from something entirely pragmatic – a visceral desire, or some biological imperative, some acquiescence to a social ideal advanced in that particular community. Or maybe nothing at all, for someone who doesn’t have any grounding for the term “good”.
I’m not aware of any other aphorism that gets the key point across so well, however, despite it’s difficulties in mapping to maps, which map to maps, etc. All metaphors break down somewhere.
-TS
