Why Language is cool and the Relativity of Inquiry

Language is an underrated epistemic tool. In post Wittgensteinian philosophy, language is incredibly important in forming our world view. Kinda wish I read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus when it was assigned. My point here is a more personal excitement about language. Language gives us the tools to conceive, experiment with, express, even experience the lifeworld of different groups of productive knowledge making. The trouble is when members of these communes fall into gatekeeping and linguistic obscurantism to keep the general population of minds out. Knowledge production is more productive when it’s decentralized and opens its doors to all who are curious of the wisdom and understanding they’re accumulating. We open those doors by making the language and the operational concepts of different schools of living and interwoven though, accessible. Philosophy shouldn’t fragment its living essence into combative and oppositional camps that fail to see the larger truth all camps are trying to capture throught their relative frameworks, shouldn’t fail to synthesize their views however contradictory; all camps must house their epistemic humility and suspension of disbelief on the tips of their pens. 

For Kant, while thinking is merely a concept produced by the faculty of our own understanding, knowing something requires a concept to interact with an intuition that is imparted from the world onto our senses. Thinking takes the form of free-floating concepts that are neither grounded in an object that our senses can experience (B147), nor the spatiotemporal conditions that underlie our perceptions of the world around us (B148). When I call on the concept of a cloud, the image that pops in my head is a foaming white puff floating on clear winds. Whether it's rainy or sunny outside, this cloud doesn’t extend past my mind and into the sky nor change its white puffy composure. This concept isn’t subject to the same pure intuitions of space nor to changes with the linear course of time which human sensibilities are conditioned by. If I decided to attend the annual cloud convention in Mississauga and discuss my findings on clouds, my concept of a cloud alone wouldn’t suffice to produce knowledge that can be empirically verified nor reconstructed by the form of our pure intuitions. In Wittgensteinian fashion, this concept would remain an infallible private language, ostracized from the knowledgeable world of intersubjective claims. Where thinking lacks in “objective reality”, knowledge is remedied by its synthesis of concepts with their empirically experienced counterparts (Kant B148).  

When we look to a cloud from the perspective of possible human experiences it is at first shapeless. Once a human actually experiences the cloud, they give the cloud a shape through their perception, their associative imagination’s ascription of form to the cloud gives the cloud an identifiable shape that other conscious minds can notice in the outline of the cloud as it shifts on the winds of time. They may also not see the shape you’re outlining, they may see something entirely different when they look to the cloud. So what is the shape of the cloud, as it is, in-itself, by itself, without any watcher to point out its shape to itself? Surely the concept of a shape describes some actual geometric quality of the cloud, its substance, consistency, trajectory over time. So whether there is an observer to evoke the concept of a shape for the cloud, the actual properties of this fluffy form are still real. The closest perspective and sensible attitude we can assume while experiencing and investigating the shape of the cloud as it is in itself, beyond the observer, is Love (or positive, methodological and scientific investigations too).