[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.)

[snayan]

Na, your argument makes sense. Loving this discussion.

Ok, so I don't agree that it implies language cannot expand. I believe it's a bit more nuanced than that, I believe what he's trying to say is that it cannot expand sufficiently to truly capture the experience. We will inevitably dumb it down or lose fidelity or whatever. The 'unsayables' as he called them, I believe he felt he was trying to protect their integrity by saying we should not attempt to distill them down to words.

As for the I cannot experience what I cannot describe... I agree with this statement deeply. Well, I think it's a function of ego or whatever you want to call it. We go through life and are shaped by our experiences. As we continue to experience life, we have more and more beliefs bouncing around in our head as a function of more experience. Ahhh, this just happened, it's like when I did X, etc etc. As we get older we get more and more bogged down by these limiting beliefs until everything we experience is going through our personal interpretive filter rather than just being experienced for what it is.

It's the Buddhist idea of the finger pointing at the moon. Don't mistake the finger(thoughts, words, etc) for the moon (the direct experience).

Well, that's been my personal experience, until I started looking inside and poking around at my belief structure, I had noooo idea how much my interpretation of the world had been shaped by prior lived experience, personally, and societally.

In your cold example... If you had no word for it, I believe most people would end up using the closest approximation out of the words they do know effectively blinding themselves to the reality of this new/unique experience for them. How though, would someone know, ahh there is no word for this, lets expand the language.

Gotta embrace not knowing/the beginners mind, and in my personal experience this is a process of subtraction rather than addition.

[em-bee]

I had noooo idea how much my interpretation of the world had been shaped by prior lived experience

this is an interesting point. it's very true of course. there is probably some philosophical or biological explanation for this, something about optimization, because interpreting every situation from first principles takes to much effort. living in a different culture is one way to teach you to look at things differently.

but i think it is an issue independent of language. the problem is not lack of ability to describe the experience, but mistakenly using an already familiar abstraction to describe a new experience. but that's not the end of it, because repeatedly making that experience eventually helps you realize that the description you used is wrong, and you adjust to create a better description.

actually a better example than cold is the word umami. in our languages we have terms for sweet, sour, salty and bitter. turns out our body has dedicated receptors for umami, but we were not aware of that, and we never named it. even today it still feels like a foreign concept, but we have evidence that it is a real biological experience and not just a cultural idea.

the thing, is we certainly experienced umami in some way, but we could not talk about it, we were not consciously aware of it. and we still are not. i can tell very sweet from somewhat sweet to not sweet at all, but what's very umami or not umami? how does that even work? there is a whole dimension of language that our culture is missing. but, it's a cultural problem, not a linguistic one. because now we do have a word for it. and still, at least i struggle with the concept.

interestingly i think this example shows how humans learn from context. our (western) culture is missing the context for umami. we need to build up that context to allow others to learn about it.