B9
Bluelight Crew
I couldn't read all the thread but the answer is that knowledge does not require language, look at the beasts of the field & ye shall see this
Y'all should look up the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. I think it's mostly been discredited, but is something to think about.
While Saussure is fascinating in making this observation; it's the thinkers that come after Saussure that offer more. While your description of semiotics is basically correct, you've left out the most important part - that of the referent: A sign is made up of a signifier and a signified, but the signified "refers" to a "thing" or a referent. This is important when it comes to homonyms such as bank (I'm going to the bank to withdraw some cash) and bank (let's go sit on that grassy bank over there), as it draws attention away from single words, and places the focus upon groups of words or sign system.
According to Saussure (and other structuralists) signs are "arbitrary", as in a signified and a signifier will always appear together, and in this way meaning is made - a structuralist would say that words (signs) always refer to a "thing", and so there is a body of meaning that is structured or organised into being through language.
The post-structuralists, like Derrida, play on this notion of sign systems in order to demonstrate that the sign is anything but arbitrary due to the manner in which it has to differ from other signs so that we can deduce a meaning (like my bank example above). So in this respect, words only "mean" what they mean depending on what they are not (the other words/signs they appear with in any system/linguistic structure).
i think its dangerous to rely on language to gain information rather than learning natural cause and effects in nature.
launguage can lie much easier.
Is the surface antigen of a virus a sort of knowledge - insofar as it becomes relevant (at all) only when it comes in contact with a white blood cell. Did the white blood cell "know" the virus? Or is this just the way things are?
The way I view it, there is definitely a semiotic process here, but it is so only by the fact that we linguistic creatures interpret it. There is a process of signification - it led to action (the white blood cell destroying the bacterium)... but was there any knowledge involved, besides ours?
Ya know, I don't mean to sound 'obnoxious', but... why not try wrapping what you think you know around the presence of such thoughts?^ these things go hand in hand,
in almost everything around us...
not wrapping what we think we know around the presence of such thoughts, is what keeps me moving forward, inward, and upwards.
Ahhh... peeps "miss it" again and again, due to the persistent notion of volition/doership.I think this is really a stretch, and not a point I can agree on. If one hands over the mind and its activities to (eg - an exclusively neuroscientific approach), whilst in addition reducing all knowledge to the mind - hardly controversial then one of either two conclusions emerge: That knowledge requires language; or language requires knowledge. I don't believe that neuroscientists offer a naturalistic, objective 'language of the brain' of any depth.
Do you really think anyone is able to 'hand over the mind' or 'surrender'?
naturalistic, objective 'language of the brain' of any depth.