Negotiations Through Language: Selling a View

From "Why Economic Inequality is Not Good for the Economy" by Rob Urie in Counterpunch.

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Note: Derek Phillips once wrote, "Wittgenstein now argues that human language in a sense creates reality." (Phillips, 1977, p. 30). In this sense, we can influence our actions and our judgements by how we describe events. As they say, there is always more than one way to tell a story.

"The general perception post-modernism is from the political ‘left,’ following from later (Ludwig) Wittgenstein and ‘transactional analysis’ in psychology, post-modern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard developed his concept of ‘language games,’ the social practice of localized negotiations through language, just as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began selling corporatist imperialism as atomized individualism to an unsuspecting world. Setting aside the Marxian conceit that who has voice in society is a function of political-economic relations, Mr. Lyotard places social ‘negotiations’ in silos where local truths replace the grand ‘Truths’ of earlier centuries. The various disciplines of ‘economics’ constitute such silos."

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

From "Is silence golden?" By Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini in the Financial Times Magazine (18 Jan 2013)

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"Is Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' a profound truth? Or is it a banal truism, along the lines of 'That which you cannot move, you must leave where it is'? It may sound platitudinous, but if you think about what exactly lies beyond the limits of language, matters soon become much more opaque.

"Consider all those occasions when words are simply not enough, such as when we try to express some of our deepest emotions. Phrases such as “I’m sorry for your loss”, “I love you” and “that’s awful” can all be true yet sound pathetically inadequate compared to the intensity of our feelings or the enormity of what has happened. Perhaps that is why the tradition of a minute’s silence for the dead is so powerful: it is not so much a mark of respect as an acknowledgment that nothing we can say or do is up to the task of capturing what has been lost."

Google is always influencd by context

From "Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph" in The Guardian (19 Jan 2013)

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"We may think we are learning all the time from Google, but by virtue of this ongoing trillion-click analysis, it is learning far more from us.

"In this way, as far back as 2002, Singhal introduced a refinement based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on how the meaning of words is always influenced by context. Searches for ambiguous terms began to look beyond the search terms for other related words. So a phrase such as 'hot dog' would be understood in relation to mustard and baseball games, not overheated canines. 'Nuance,' he says now, 'is what makes us human.'"

Is the world really the case?

From "What do Lindsay Lohan and Wittgenstein have in common?" by Sarah Nardi

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"And that, patient reader, brings us to Wittgenstein, who began the Tractatus with the proposition "The world is everything that is the case." It sounds simple enough on its face but think about it long enough and it's a devastating mindfuck. How can we ever know with certainty what is or is not the case? Language? Language is a social construct. If you and I agree that the sky is blue, is it necessarily the case that the sky is blue? What is blue, really? It's a sound we've all agreed to make in reference to a visual phenomenon. But because what we've all agreed to call blue can only be perceived on an individual sensory level, how can we know with certainty that we're all perceiving the same thing in the same way? Follow this thinking long enough and you may end up where Wittgenstein once did, believing that we can never know with certainty anything beyond ourselves. We can't know anything of the external world because we can't confirm anything as objectively being the case.

I often think of Wittgenstein when considering photography because much in the way we assume words correspond to reality, we think of photographs as representations of objective truth. Photography is the medium of documentary, after all. And though we all know it can be staged and manipulated according to the photographer's point of view, we assume that photography, to a significant degree, captures elements of reality as they objectively exist. But does it? Is there any such thing as an objective reality or does everything in our world rely on the context that we ourselves create?"