Language and the Actions into which it is Woven. Bridging the Tractatus with the Philosophical Investigations.

by Casian STEFAN, Principal Researcher at Essentia Mundi AI Lab. Contact: ai-AT-essentiamundi.com / ai.essentiamundi.com
Written between 1-8 Aug. 2024.

Please consider citation with link, if you derive work. Or contact me for collaboration. Thank you!

Abstract.

From Piaget to Wittgenstein and a multitude of former philosophers, scientists and artists have come to some lower representation of meaning, from the cognitive insights to the abstract constructs of what the Universe consists of at the bare core, to theories of everything or depicting through artistic works the "unspeakable" and "unknown", to God to quantum foam, a back and forth stretch through the doxastic and credal realms to the most abstract mathematical, geometrical representations. And yet, they being so close to grasp at something, the demise of the endeavor was always at the horizon: unavailable, undefinable, other entities out there, a simulation, the unconscious, un-graspable, qualified as not science terrain - as if science is not metaphysically informed - yet for me, a just slight step into the more exploratory terrain in that direction (as seen in my Denkbewegungen in the former articles,) and a slight borrow from that, conducted me to thing of that kind of representation exactly for that not named so far, till now, the Symbol.

Position.

With this article I want to make a position in which the former work of Wittgenstein, the Tractatus can be seen in a slight new light and actually to bridge it to his later views, most of refuting the former and without theory advancements, but constant phenomenological insights, use of words, meaning grasp and forming, through the intricacies of language games and forms of life, and explanations within the framework of his eg. Philosophical Investigations. (Traces of it actually to be seen in the pre-PI era, like publications in the form of: Blue Book, Brown Book, On Certainty, On Color, On foundations of Mathematics, Zettel and the Typescripts, Nachlass etc. making PI just a slice!)

My position proposes the extension as seen through Tractatus' picture theory of meaning (the ABBILDUNG* devoted to that meaning search for past over 24+ years) as the core of metal representations, being seen as a gluing, new entity that it is able to bridge and from here a multitude of interesting consequences that remain to be explored.
The name posited here - only as a means of naming it in a way - which is of course beyond signs and symbols in the traditional senses of folk and scientific milieu is the Symbol (with the capital "S").

On Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein is also famous of giving little thought on what others have said before him. He set himself apart from the Continental philosophy, he left the Vienna Circle, he distanced himself from Cambridge. He kept an active correspondence with few and always was looking for places of solitude (see the Norwegian hut), of a certain liminal form (see the Wittgenstein's house architecture), a small companionship (see correspondences with a few close), where the deeper insights and some concrete thoughts were able to take form (a battle from which he was able to dismantle philosophy, science, meaning, logic, language, mathematics - a whole host of demarcations.)

Seeing it all from this perspective he was less concerned with "ism"s, trends, currents in philosophical thoughts, he dedicated himself to pursue, unaffected, on a quest to disentangle his own mind and our form of life. He opposed the further creation of theories, he sits in between realism and idealism, he sits above, paradoxically by embracing the "groundless grounds," a belonging to no path philosopher.

A rising ontology.

With this article I try to follow a track, in which, from his notions of language-game, meaning is use, context-dependence and many other ideas, that is converging to a new ontology. Although never positioned as such before, I would express there is a broader pattern emerging and that from this higher view, one can cast an extension to his views, to a bridging between the so called separate periods of his philosophy.
It may seem that one wants to create a new theory, while this is no the case, and certainly not what Wittgenstein would have endorsed, I would only allow myself to extract the setup made by him, to see some emerging patterns, and expose this effects in a new light. In the light of my personal perspective, from the already discovered Symbols Framework, within that framework that seems to get its validity from exactly this kind of dissemination.

The Symbol, as the seed of representation.

He repeatedly draws attention to the context. This context is always there like a ghost. In relation to the Symbol, this can be extended as the contextual web of other Symbols a Symbol is made of.
At the same time there is an openness to it and that "meaning is use," accounts for that openness and also appeals to a shared meaning. Which is always not a fixed operator either.
So this context dependence is what makes the realization of the abstract side of the Symbols basin: a small, organic, dynamic, living entity that is drawing itself from among others. The main issue with the practiced analytics of language is that: "what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words" (L.W.).

A hint again to the properties of language as a means of an interface only to thoughts, a simple mono-dimensional abstraction of thought, a simple glimpse that has no depth, just a tip of a giant iceberg - a means of communication of something deeper - at the same time being to the surface, a means of misunderstandings and concealing games (the concept of "other clothes" of the thought.)

Language as just an interface.

"Languages disguise the thought, so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe..." and the whole of the Symbol formation from the substrate of the consciousness, from the deeper levels of the Symbols and the interactions and that: "...because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body to be recognized", is not just an interface but a very slight different entity that is only slightly touching a convey form.

And to begin to study thought from the language is only underlying that very slim interface - one would not be advised to employ further. He is always imagining a variety of surroundings in which a word or expressions can be uttered - by which the final sentence would bear very different interpretations.

From these my extensions to that discussions is that in retrospect he could have used a next definition of some entities that result in these very everyday use of words situations: that of the Symbol. And I would try to make this for him myself: the Symbol is the entity that accounts for that depth, openness, context shifting, web of adjacent Symbols it implies, and also his mono-dimensional uttering through the sound produced: a word, an expression to something, to some sense of meaning. A sense attaching entity, to a sound, with an open core.

The Symbols Framework.

Discussions about reality, consciousness, and all the multitude of philosophical, phenomenological and ontological realms - maybe not that "real" as expected - or as cemented in current science, remains to be further explored through the enacted framework here, the Symbols Framework.

The Symboliad.

The actions (lets keep for the moment aside the "free will" or meta-cognition mechanics) in turn, are enacted when more of the Symbols are employed. From between them, within a context (also spatial, sensorial, collective, hierarchical) from their woven space some (meta-)actions are to be emerged. Some say "the big other" although my mission is not to delve too much in the ideology, as there are others that have done it (eg. Hegel, Lacan, Zizek nowadays).

I name this whole bathing medium for the Symbols, taken as the whole interactions and emergence, as the Symboliad.

_____________________________________
Exploration by C. Stefan, 1.Aug. 2024 [about]
Last update: 8.Aug. 2024 (versions: *) [versions]
"Essentia Mundi" AI Research Lab. [home]
Copyright © 2024 AI.EssentiaMundi.com, all rights reserved.
_
References:
L. Wittgenstein - P.I.
C. Stefan - The Basin of the Symbol...[here]