Topics Truth

Question If everything so far found in reality has been captured in words, and words are built upon letters which are also a creation of man's imagination, is not everything a construction of the human mind to categorize the world, to make it familar and give it definition? Given that this is true, then are not most if not all philosophical questions (made up of our tools of language) redundant and pointless because they are rendered meaningless by the fact of their imaginary basis? So the only real questions of philosophy should be only those relating to emotions like hunger, satisfaction, pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness? Everything else is metaphysical .... so rights and freedoms, ethics and morality is all relative to the extreme and basically non-sensical. What is the answer?

Accepted:
October 14, 2005

Comments

Yes, we use language to describe the world. Yes, we need language to describe the world. Let's even assume that language is a human construction — say there was a committee a long time ago that got together and created human languages. And finally, let's accept that the theories we elaborate within those languages are also constructions of human beings. I don't understand why you think that it follows that the views we've arrived at are just products of our fantasy that bear no connection to reality. We don't just make up stories about the world, do we? We test our stories against the evidence, we drop the stories that don't help us organize and understand the evidence, and we accept and elaborate those stories that do. Yes, scientific theories are "constructions of the human mind", but not just any construction will do!

Whenever we talk about representations (and philosophers can't stop talking about them), it is important to distinguish between the representations and the things they represent. Representations, such as sentences and thoughts, are human products, but what they represent need not be. You can't think without thinking; it doesn't follow that you can only think about thinking.

Still, one might worry that it would be an incredible coincidence if human categories lined up with the categories of the world as it is in itself. But work in the philosophy of language in the last few decades as suggested a way this might not be a coincidence, by showing how the shape of our own categories may in fact be determined by the world's categories. If you would like to follow this idea up, read Saul Kripke's wonderful Naming and Necessity. (And then if you would like to start worrying all over again how the mind could shape categories, read his equally wonderful but more disturbing Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.