[em-bee]

and what is this quote supposed to explain?

that language prevents a child from learning nuance? sounds like nonsense to me. a child first learns broad categories. for example some children as they learn to speak think every male person is dad. then they recognize everyone with a beard is dad, because dad has a beard. and only later they learn to differentiate that dad is only one particular person. same goes for the bird. first we learn hat everything with wings is a bird, and later we learn the specific names for each bird. this quote makes an absurd claim.

[nimonian]

Wittgenstein famously said "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Alan Watts suggests people like Wittgenstein should occasionally try to let go of this way of thinking. Apologies if it is sentimental but I hope you'll give him a chance, it's quite short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=heksROdDgEk

In reflection of all of this, I think that the quote you're responding to only meant to say that experiencing the world through language means building an abstraction over its richness. (I somewhat agree with you, though, that the quote seems a little dramatic. Maybe that's just my taste.)

One more thought.

I think there's a reason why various forms of meditation teach us to stop thinking. Maybe they are telling us to sometimes stop dealing with our abstractions, powerful though they might be, and experience the real thing once in a while.

[em-bee]

the way i read the quote it felt less like building an abstraction and more like destroying the richness.

but abstractions are mere shortcuts. but everything is an abstraction. to counter wittgenstein, language is not actually limited. we can describe everything to the finest detail. it's just not practical to do so every time.

physics, chemistry, we could describe a table as an amount of atoms arranged in a certain way. but then even atom is an abstraction over electrons, protons and neutrons. and those are abstractions over quarks. it's abstractions all the way down, or up.

language is abstractions. and that fits well with your meditation example. stop thinking -> remove the language -> remove the abstractions.

[snayan]

How can you know that we have language to describe everything in the finest detail? That suggests that we are omnipotent.

There's lots out there we don't know. And it seems to me that the further afield we go from the known, the more likely we are to enter territory where we simply do not have the words.

Can't speak to it personally, but I have heard from a number of people and read countless descriptions of psychedelic experiences being ineffable. Lol, actually, as I type, the mere fact that the word ineffable exists makes a very strong case for there being experience beyond words.

[em-bee]

ok, fair point. what i am trying to say is that when we see/experience something that we can not describe we can create new words for it. we see something, we can name it. this directly contradicts the idea that language is the limit and that we can't talk about things that we don't have words for. that claim just doesn't make sense.

the problem then is that these new words don't make any sense to anyone who doesn't see/experience the same, so it only works for things that multiple people can see or experience. psychedelic experiences will probably never be shared, so they will remain undescribable. quite like dreams, which can also be be undescribable.

[snayan]

Agreed, we can and will always come up with new words that attempt to approximate the experience, but, imo, they will always come up short. The abstracting inevitably leaves fidelity on the floor.

It's necessary based on the way we're wired, struggle to think of a paradigm that would allow for the tribalism and connectedness that fostered human progress without shared verbal language initially, and written word later. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but, language will always abstract away part of the fidelity of the experience imo.

[em-bee]

yes of course, language is by nature an abstraction, so by definition it will never describe the whole world perfectly, but it can describe it as well as we understand it. and the point that matters, once we have a shared experience we can name that experience, and between us it will then describe the full experience, whereas to bystanders it will be an abstraction.

language doesn't replace the actual experience. it isn't meant to. me living in china, and me telling you about my life in china are not the same thing, no matter how detailed my description. but that does not limit my experience. and if you lived in china too, then my description will refer your experience, and in that case the description will feel much more detailed.

the way i understand wittgensteins claim it not only suggests that language can't describe everything, which is only partly true, because it implies that language can not expand. it also means that i can not even experience what i can not describe, which makes even less sense. i can't feel cold because i have no word for it? huh?

(i feel like my argumentation jumps around or goes in circles, it doesn't feel well thought through. i hope it makes sense anyways. apologies for that.)