Quark
04-24-2007, 05:54 PM
What is the basis of communication? How does understanding work? If I wave to someone across the street, how do they know that I am greeting them? Or, do they know that at all?
Transcendentalist like Emerson or Whitman argued that people all participate in a spiritual togetherness called humanity. A person communicates to another by saying something that resonates with this common humanity. Emerson says, "The young man respects the man of genius because, in truth, he is more himself than he is". Can we say that we understand one another because we are each other?
Later on, in the twentieth century, people like Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn argued that understanding is based on a common set of associations or a shared set of rules. Kuhn writes that events cannot be understood through themselves alone, but require active participation of the witness: "No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation and criticism...which must be externally supplied, perhaps by a current metaphysic, by another science, or by personal and historical accident". With this idea, I might say that the person across the street I waved to understands I'm greeting him because we are both a part of the same society which respects the wave as a sign of greeting.
It also could be that we understand each other, not because of consistent set of societal rules, or because a shared humanity, but because there is reality outside of human being which we each react to. This reality is not combined with the chance accident of phenomenon; instead, it is ideal and without form--much like Kant's idea of a noumenal realm.
All of these ideas seems plausible, but none of them completely satisfy me. I was wondering if anyone else had some ideas on this. (And better yet, original ones--unlike mine).
And my question is more about the philosophy of understanding than the linguistics involved in communication
Transcendentalist like Emerson or Whitman argued that people all participate in a spiritual togetherness called humanity. A person communicates to another by saying something that resonates with this common humanity. Emerson says, "The young man respects the man of genius because, in truth, he is more himself than he is". Can we say that we understand one another because we are each other?
Later on, in the twentieth century, people like Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn argued that understanding is based on a common set of associations or a shared set of rules. Kuhn writes that events cannot be understood through themselves alone, but require active participation of the witness: "No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation and criticism...which must be externally supplied, perhaps by a current metaphysic, by another science, or by personal and historical accident". With this idea, I might say that the person across the street I waved to understands I'm greeting him because we are both a part of the same society which respects the wave as a sign of greeting.
It also could be that we understand each other, not because of consistent set of societal rules, or because a shared humanity, but because there is reality outside of human being which we each react to. This reality is not combined with the chance accident of phenomenon; instead, it is ideal and without form--much like Kant's idea of a noumenal realm.
All of these ideas seems plausible, but none of them completely satisfy me. I was wondering if anyone else had some ideas on this. (And better yet, original ones--unlike mine).
And my question is more about the philosophy of understanding than the linguistics involved in communication