The idea behind an idea: chasing meaning by Alex Tamulis

THE IDEA BEHIND AN IDEA

Brief Preface The goal of this essay is not to devise a theory of ideas or to debunk previous ones in order to persuade people to believe what I have to say. In fact, it is just an exercise to put my thoughts into words and to reflect on the notion of truth, belief and knowledge. I will particularly focus on the concept of “idea”, seen as a definite mental construct. My thoughts are a reflection of the stuff I’ve read and deemed plausible, with a few quirks here and there to spice up what I’ve witnessed empirically (and also vicariously) through other people’s texts on the matter.

The Idea Behind an Idea: Chasing Meaning

The Idea Behind an Idea

The idea is not “any idea”. It cannot be perceived as “an idea” (with an indefinite article), for the latter denotes an ambiguous one, as Bertrand Russell beautifully puts it on his “On Denoting” article. In order to reflect what goes on behind the mental process that takes place before the conceptual idea is linked to a linguistic entity, it is appropriate to mention the use of the definite article “the”, since the focus is on a specific iteration, and not on every instance or occurrence of ideas out there. Conceptual metaphors can help us picture complex thoughts. Therefore, we can come up with an analogy between an idea and a baseball, for example. The roles of pitcher, batter and the baseball itself will serve as an allegory for us to picture how shared abstraction can be understood. A pitcher P is responsible for the cognitive birth of “ideaness” (the thought), while the receptor of this idea can be seen as a batter (represented by B). I use indefinite articles for those two roles due to the fact that, in this case, the roles of producer and receiver are assigned to ambiguous people, since creation and perception are commonplace in society (people create and interpret concepts intuitively). Thus, those roles behave like mathematical variables. You can fit any person in that role, due to the ambiguity of the “illusion of the self”, meaning that any person (any “self”) will relate to the concepts described above. A pitcher (any pitcher, an ambiguous pitcher or even the concept of “pitcherness”) throws the ball from their mound toward a batter. This pitcher holds the idea (the baseball) in his glove and is therefore responsible for throwing it to the batter. Abstract ideas (the original representation, the “thought before the thought”) are never truly part of the self; coming up with the concept and planning it concomitantly “dents” the final product. It’s a “refracting bias” towards the “intrinsic source”. But would this source be akin to platonic forms? Is it an ideal that exists beyond the limits of our own understanding? If it is so, it might as well be nonexistent, for it is not truly part of us, of our “illusion of the self”. Not being part of any mind, it cannot exist on its own. It is nothing. Existence is perceived by interpretation. A tree falls in a forest; is there anyone out there to hear the sound it makes when it falls? If no being with sensory receptors is present in the scene during the phenomenon, then it cannot possibly make a sound. Knowledge of reality has to be linked to observation (albeit a biased one). Back to our pitcher: being the one who devised the construct, the pitcher gets to throw the idea to other players of the “game of social interaction”, and those people (represented here as the batters) will either hit it or miss it, interpreting the idea through refracted observation. The idea of the baseball itself is something we have no immediate acquaintance to. Well, you may think I’m crazy because you are well aware of what a baseball is and it is quite obvious that everyone out there also knows what a baseball is. This cannot be so, I am afraid. A mental construct is a unique experience, no one can live this experience in your stead.

It is like the concept of pain: each person has their own perception of pain; the same thing goes for the perception of the creation of the idea itself. Russell also states: “there seems to be no reason to believe that we are ever acquainted with other people’s minds, since these are not directly perceived”, (pg 480). You can describe your pain to others, but no one will ever be able to know exactly what that pain really means to you. You can also describe what an ideal baseball is, you can even show a specific baseball to a person; all fine and dandy, the baseball becomes “this baseball”, something I can touch, it has a true referent in the world. But what you’re doing is basically linking a concept described by linguistic entities to a physical object, one that can be found in the real world, one that is a referent. It cannot sit for every possible baseball out there, since it lacks that mathematical variable aspect of representing ambiguity. It cannot be an x, y or z. It is just that one “instance”. Putting it into other terms: an idea is a thought, a thought is a mental construct and an abstraction has no meaning until meaning is assigned to it, through the limits of linguistic description. Can we share an abstraction? If we can, that means we can also share this idea of “idea” I’m trying to describe here, not as eloquently as Russell, Frege, or Strawson would, I admit. We can all think of a triangle, but how am I going to be able to know if your triangle is the exact same as mine? Is it scalene, isosceles, equilateral? Maybe mine has vivid colors and a matte finish on the vertices; maybe yours is made of an alloy found in the depths of the oceans of Europa. That shows we’re stuck in limbo when it comes to perceiving what is pictured by other people’s minds, since our own minds output churned and fuzzy images of various concepts, which we are not very familiar with. This essay is itself “an idea”. It sits within the conceptual domain (it lies dormant on the page) until it is read by a brain out there, by a coherent organization of previous experiences, a computing machine trying to make sense of everything, comparing this text to previously lived situations that could somehow potentially help decode its “true” meaning. Pitcher-batter negotiation Activation-inducing pitchers evoke perceptual batters who then negotiate towards a common agreement (or disagreement). Fancy way to say one can link negotiation to co-perception; however, this would imply that the previously mentioned triangle is “co-imagined” by interlocutors; it would imply that two painters working on opposite-facing canvasses would ultimately paint the same painting, just because they’re looking at (or thinking about) the same model. The substance, seen as an abstraction, as an ideal baseball, as an ideal model, represented by the referent in the world, is something we will never be able to reach. Being transcendent, it is beyond any theory of knowledge and can therefore be considered nonexistent. Things have to be perceived in order to cognitively come to life. But this perception is biased; it changes the original state of the idea, because it has to be sifted through the sieve of language. The thought of throwing a curveball comes before the grip and hand movement involved in the process of physically doing so. Not a visual activity, left to its own devices, yet the resulting performance will be done in visual space. Rationality is not visual, but it does feel like an “inner theater”, a play, taking place within your mind, with synaptic actors wearing specific masks for the tasks at hand. Is the idea a linear process, then? Why do we picture ourselves as the spectators, since we’re actually the playwrights?

Chasing meaning The thought of throwing a curveball can be seen as the Russellian “meaning”. Physically throwing it becomes the denotation of this meaning. I may be oversimplifying Russell’s theories here, however, it is crucially important to highlight that meaning is something that may be unattainable. Russell might have thought that he could arrive at the true meaning of meaning and his contribution to the field of philosophy of language is huge, but the idea here is not to find the exact bridge that connects logic and linguistics; we are after meaning before it becomes a linguistic entity. Meaning comes to life through the utterance. Does it mean it is dead before it is uttered? Does it mean it is just like that one second before the Big Bang? No one seems to have a clue about it, unfortunately. A pitcher will throw a ball based on the thought he or she had about which type of fastball to throw in order to retire the batter. Yet, the thought and the throw are not the same thing. Did the pitcher watch the scene of a pitcher getting ready to throw the ball, just like the spectator of a theater, before throwing the ball? What is taking place in this case? This adds to the fuzziness of interpreting abstract concepts, linking them to the web of experiences that makes the “idea of self”, whether a pitcher or anybody else, both the producer and the receptor of thoughts and concepts. Ideas and communication The fact that an idea has to be expressed within the confinement of language proves that the mental construct that once was the original idea will be inexplicable and empirically unverifiable, making us come to terms with the fact that what we’re left with as proof of existence of any given idea is the “dented” reality, the linguistically-altered idea, the one that had to be “translated” from Mentalese (to use a term coined by Steven Pinker) to natural language. Using language to talk about language, or to talk about things that are precedent to language itself is indeed something the illusion of my own self is not happy about. As it has been previously discussed, an idea has to become a linguistic entity in order to come to life. The fact that I dub this idea “an idea” is itself contradictory, since the meaning of such word can change depending on context constraints. If I use quotation marks to describe the concept behind my idea, as the “idea”, the one that comes before the linguistic sequence or letters or sounds, I’m left with no devices to talk about it. No wonder Leonard Bloomfield stigmatized it as “mentalistic” and sought to banish it from the realm of grammar (1936:93). I myself side with Chomsky on the fact that a universal theory of meaning would be something extremely intricate to be brought forth. Yet, the idea is still out there. It comes before its own utterance. It is born before leaving the placenta. The mind uses language, even in thought. We can’t separate semantic representation from linguistic knowledge of the world around us. Therefore, the idea that is conceptual at first is consciously devised with the help of lexemes. Knowledge of an idea versus belief of an idea The concept of idea is linked to knowledge itself. In this case, it is partaking a feature that is both being and not being, and is therefore subject to opinion. Hence the difficulty on pinpointing it. It shows that the absolute and the immutable are very unlikely in a universe that’s ever changing and always relative to its observer. Can we separate knowledge and belief? Is this “conceptual idea” of a mental representation something I’m aware of because I know it, or something I believe I know? Does it meet Platonic conditions for knowledge? In order to do so, it has to be true, believable and sufficient evidence must be produced. All of a sudden, my reflections on the matter are entrapped in philosophical quagmire and it gets harder and harder to get out of the circularity of reasoning over something that linguistic aids cannot fully describe.

If I chase truth, I need to find a way to link agreement of cognition (the conceptual idea) to its object (the linguistic entity). This has to be granted and presupposed (the Kantian a priori concept). But it still won’t let me test it if it’s true. The only way to do so is to reason over my own judgment of the idea, through my own cognition, and I would get back to the “denting” of reality, to the subjectivity of my own thoughts, to the circularity of cognizing over something which is beyond the grasp of truth-value. Linking a linguistic expression to a mental construct in a perfect way gets further and further from my grasp. The only thing I’m left with is the possibility that the baseball could act as a simulacrum. It conceals the untouched truth. The simulacrum becomes the true thing, as reasoned by the great French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. We simulate the abstraction; we try to chase its true meaning, yet all we get is fuzziness. We end up placing simulacra in its stead, with the aid of linguistic entities, which behave very much like Russellian variables, remaining meaningless until meaning is assigned to them through a subject-predicate type of utterance. The pitcher throws a distorted baseball and the batter hits it with a distorted bat. Since perception is the only thing we’re left with, these simulated ideas are not concealing truth; they become truth, for they are the only things we can get acquainted with, through biased [cognitive+linguistic] processes. References Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York   Chomsky, N. (1955). Semantic Considerations in Grammar. Georgetown University. Immanuel K. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge Univ. Press Massumi, B. Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari. Available on http://hrc.anu.edu.au/ Plato, ., & Cobb, W. S. (1990). Plato’s Sophist. Savage, Md: Rowan & Littlefield. Poster, M.; Baudrillard, J. (1988). Selected writings. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Russell, B. (1905). On Denoting. Mind, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 56. (Oct. 1905), pp. 479–493

Biodata Alex Tamulis was born in 1982 in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s a linguistics major at the University of São Paulo. He’s the author of several essays and satirical novellas, such as “Elliot Atop The Landfill Mound”, “Dimwit in the Land of Bad Grammar” and “Vampiric Beings”. His main interests are theoretical linguistics and the origins of language. You can check his work on http://issuu.com/alextamulis or www.alextamulis.com (under construction) and on websites such as Research Gate and Academia.