Just-language, without any irl stuff, probably doesn’t really achieve communication. Because the words don’t carry their definition. And they definitely don’t carry any real experience-stuff (sight, sound etc) either.
It’s just assumed that you’re connecting the word to the definition/experience, in your head, in a way that makes communication happen.
And that’s a big assumption. It might be only 80% congruent. Or 50%. Or 5%. We could be a race of Chinese boxes for all we know.
IRL there is a verification to the process. If I order a pizza and I get a pizza then that’s a pretty good sign that the communication is working.
But on the Internet, where it’s just-language? Forget it. Howling solipsists all the way down.
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Good enough, apparently.
If it’s good enough, and it’s all howling solipsists, then that suggests that people are very similar. Because that’s how talking to yourself and talking to other people overlaps.
We’re similar enough.
The similarity and the communication-success are directly proportional. I mean, it follows. So you get a kind of 90% social solipsism. Is that the same as an echo chamber? A 90% echo chamber?
Linguistic communication is shown to be effective enough to coordinate action of individuals and groups of various size, not just repeat sounds to each other as a chattering of animals. This would indicate that the communication is more than just an echo chamber of call and response, even if the individuals don’t use their words in perfect alignment.
dunno what you mean
OP doesn’t either …
From their posts they just learned about Plato’s cave, or more likely just saw The Matrix.
But they keep dancing around the cave allegory and not really understanding it.
I think Ferdinand de Saussure’s intuition is closer to the truth than the idea that words have a 1:1 congruence to objective reality, or that they’re truly defined by their dictionary “definitions”. Rather, all the words in a language define each other simultaneously via their correlations, and the resulting network of correlations forms a unified structure that corresponds to a similar unified structure we impose on reality.
Because this structure is entirely contained within the usage patterns of the language itself, it doesn’t need to be communicated via any extra-linguistic channel.
You might be interested in reading about the knowledge argument aka Mary’s Room, a thought experiment about knowledge. See also: qualia
Basically this: Mary is a brilliant scientist who spends all day every day in her room. She has no color of any kind in her room. But, being a brilliant scientist, she has learned everything there is to know about color. She knows about frequencies and wavelengths, she knows all about the eye and the brain and how they interpret light to form the sensation of color. She has studied art from all of human history and knows how artists use color and understand all of their cultural associations.
But she has never seen red herself. So in all of her learning, does she really understand what red is? She’s missing the qualia, the subjective experience of a thing. No amount of language and communication can bridge that gap.
I understand the point of the story but if she’s studied art from all of human history she’s seen quite a bit of color.
In our language there’s a missing providence-thing. Like, when aomebody mentions “red” there’s no thing telling us if they mean “red gleaned from a book” or “red gleaned from seeing”. They’re treated the same.
In fact, language stuff is generally treated as equivalent to experience stuff.
Madness, right?
I’m not sure “madness” is the term I’d use but I see what you’re getting at. Communication is a weird thing if you think about it long enough, the idea of trying to recreate a subjective experience in someone else’s mind.
All forms of communication have advantages and disadvantages. I’m old enough to still have written actual letters to lovers and friends. There’s something to be said for collecting your thoughts - sometimes for days - and putting them on paper in concentrated form.
All in all I think the dangers of misunderstanding each other are just as big as with any other form.
Unless you had some other type of effectiveness in mind.The ability to refer directly to a shared experience definitely sets that form of communication above other types. Definitely moves it in the direction opposite solipsistic howling. Wouldn’t you agree?
You asked a question with something specific in mind, but that isn’t actually reflected in the question. Well, in the very last sentence it is.
I answered a different aspect of the question.
Effective communication?
Ignoring my question reflects more on the answerer than the process, I’d say.
I didn’t ignore it though. I answered - from my pov.
This is the only bit that hints at the direction you wanted this to go - and you answered it yourself:
But on the Internet, where it’s just-language? Forget it. Howling solipsists all the way down.
I think you’d do well to take a college communications class. You’d get exposed to diagrams like this that examine and explain what communication is, and how language works to facilitate communication:
There’s a typo in the diagram. Allthough it doesn’t hamper the way it communicates its message.
Language is inherently imprecise, I would say actually that it depends on that imprecision as 1:1 communication of an idea is impossible. It certainly couldn’t be any more precise than our already incorrect experience of reality. Sometimes I think its pretty incredible that our emotional and physical experiences are similar enough at all for communication to be possible.
It’s shit, but it’s the best we’ve got.
