Directions

Obviously I’ve not been posting on the blog very often, lately.  I feel like I’ve said what I want to say about scripture, religion, and so on, for now.  Probably in the future I’ll write about Language, in general, drawing on Wittgenstein and my own studies.  That’s the plan…

There’s no single way to determine whether someone is speaking a pidgin, a creole (said to have developed from a pidgin), or a “mature” language.  Various tests can be given to diagnose, as it were, the nature of the speaking.  One significant feature lacking in a pidgin, however, seems to be the ability to speak about the pidgin using the pidgin.  It lacks reflexivity. Another feature is the lack of oral traditions, in the form of stories.  No one philosophizes in a pidgin, nor tells their own mythologies with a pidgin.  Meaning, a language also is a mythology, a speculative tradition, an imaginary.

Languages generate a speculative framework (covered in my 4B volume in the Cultural History of the Book of Mormon) governed by grammatical analogies.  Importantly, the products of said framework can appear non-linguistic (in origin, operation), as philosophy has been perhaps identified with by Wittgenstein; or theology, and so on; as if merely a matter of “mind” or whatnot.

So, one thing speaking a language does, is generate misunderstanding about language, and also create many superstitions (regarding mind, causality, etc.).  But perhaps this is akin to a pidgin lacking reflexivity altogether?  Meaning, we don’t take up absolute reflexivity — transparent understanding of Language itself — when taking up a written-spoken-signed language used, say, in professional disciplines.  As a result, we don’t understand Language, except in as much as Language reveals Language through language: a mythology, a philosophy, an ethical code, and so on.

My son wears corrective lenses, and yet when he tries on frames for the lenses at the optometrist, he cannot see if he would “like” one frame or another, without putting on his old glasses.  And of course, the practice of optometry itself presupposes a certain vision, say, 20/20, when one fabricates eye-charts, machinery, and so on.  Imagine if the first person to design an eye-chart had been far-sighted?

I’m wondering what a language would do, if alongside speaking and writing, it also gave us insight into itself?  Rather than what modern languages seem to do, which is confound speakers/writers, particularly when they turn their language-game onto itself… are we stuck with Doing, and looking at what we’ve done through the lens of a language?