You write:
“First, let me clarify what I mean by perception. I don’t mean the simple act of seeing an object or sensing it using one of the other senses. I mean by perception the act of seeing an object as meaningful, as expressing a certain meaning. It is this latter sense of perception that I argue language plays a productive role, not the former. Obviously any animal with eyes can perceive in the former sense, but only an animal capable of language can perceive in the second.”

I would like to make two points.
A) Perception is a complex interaction between subject and object and in this interaction the subject is not passive, as in a tabula rasa, but orders, shapes, selects, etc., the datum received according to the limits of the sense organs. To use the somewhat crude analogy of a computer, there is the software and the hardware. The hardware roughly corresponds to the sense organs while the software to the “language” issue that you mention. While I think we can make a logical distinction between the two, as far as perception goes, it is proper to the combination and interaction of both. But just focusing on the hardware for a moment, even here there must be a distinction between what is received and the stimuli. For example, in the case of a human ear, we do not have the capacity to receive or register certain waves, such as sonar waves, as bats do, so although we may say that the stimuli is the same for bats and humans, the sense-perception is not. By “sense-perception” I do not mean perception itself because whatever these nerve signals are, we do not perceive them, they are the signals that the sense organs send to the brain that are the material basis for perception, much as the signals from a microphone to a recording instrument are not sound but signals that convert the stimuli of sound waves into something that the recorder can process. So even on this level there is already a vast difference between what the sense organs receive and send and the objective stimuli that acts upon the sense organ. What is received can only be received according to the capacity of the receptor.

B) When we get to the “software” there is a much more complex problem. First of all the brain itself is not software, but hardware, so the selecting, organizing, imaging, remembering, re-arranging that goes on by the very capacity of the brain to process the nerve-signals it receives must also be understood as affecting what eventually will become the perception experienced. All this is true for animals as well as humans, it is part of what it means to have a sense-body. But just regarding the software, which we tend to think of as “language”, is it really the case that animals don’t have any and only humans project meaning onto the processed data that the brain presents to the mind? Here I think it is important to distinguish the many levels of language, as I tried to do in an earlier post, and here again I think the analogy of a computer is helpful. First there is the basic language of the operating system itself. Then there is the language of the specific programs that themselves must sync with the larger operating system. I think you are using the term “language” in the second sense as in the application Word (Microsoft?) whereas there is a deeper, more basic meaning, more like the operation system, no matter how basic it might be. The hardware doesn’t really work without an operating system of some sort. So in this sense don’t animals have to have some kind of operating system? Certainly they cannot formulate words, but they must have some kind or organizing system that processes and makes sense of the signals they receive, they must have some kind of “mind” which changes the digital signals into analog experience. This crude analogy of the computer breaks down, I think, when we start to think of mind as something that occurs at the end of a long process. But perhaps the operating system/mind is the unifying element in the holistic system. Its not that mind is added on to body, a by-product of body, but that the body is always already organized by the “mind”. In the human this is specifically evident as here we have a mind in the proper sense of the word, which is why what a person knows really affects his perception. For example a person trained in music can hear the pitch and tone of sounds while most of us “tin ears” cannot.

Thank you for the criticism; it helped me clarify my own thinking on the matter.

Thanks for the feedback. It’s clarified your ideas for me a bit.

Thank you for commenting and for putting my ideas to the fire. You’ve written a lot, and I may not do justice to your criticisms in this response, but I’d be happy to debate the matter further.

First, let me clarify what I mean by perception. I don’t mean the simple act of seeing an object or sensing it using one of the other senses. I mean by perception the act of seeing an object as meaningful, as expressing a certain meaning. It is this latter sense of perception that I argue language plays a productive role, not the former. Obviously any animal with eyes can perceive in the former sense, but only an animal capable of language can perceive in the second.

You wrote:

Then you cannot know that you cannot know reality as it is in itself, because by its very essence, reality could in fact be knowable. Hence, your thought is self-refuting.

I don’t deny that we can know reality, only that we know reality in a way unmediated by language. However, to quote G. K. Chesterton, “it is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” We assume, reasonably I think, that what we know is reality.

Moreover, experience is not mediated by language. Language is mediated by experience.

Why not both?

However, just because a mind does not or cannot label one of its experiences of an aspect of reality, does not mean it does not know that aspect of reality.

At least at some level, yes.

Furthermore, the statement, “As an object of our experience and a content of our knowledge, reality is a product of the functions of linguistic mediation,” is false.

Not false, but not the whole story. I clarify the point near the post’s end. Consider it a statement intended to raise eyebrows.

Obviously, linguistic mediation is a product of reality, so you’ve got it backwards. Aspects of our reality, which we acquire through the senses, are the material cause of our language.

I haven’t addressed where language initially comes from, only that language functions at a level prior to perception, by which I mean the perception of an object as meaningful.

Then how did language come to be in the first place, hmmm?

An excellent question. I’ll post on it in the near future.

This reasoning cannot go back ad infinitum. The truth is that yes, everyone perceives the whatever-majigger on the wall. However, through experience, you know that it correlates to another experience or aspect of reality known as “writing.”

To see the meaning of the object as writing, one has to have some sense of writing in the mind. Otherwise, the object on the wall will not be seen as meaningful in that way. Obviously one had to learn the meaning of writing in another experience for him to perceive writing on the wall in this experience.

All this means is that you can’t know an aspect of reality you haven’t experienced yet. It implies nothing about language determining perceptions.

Sure it does. Without knowing at some level the linguistic category of writing I cannot see the writing on the wall as writing.

Our perceptions form the boundary of our language. If we have not experienced an aspect of reality, we cannot label it with a symbol.

That we learn a language through experience doesn’t, to my mind, prevent language from affecting our experience.

Words do not create meaning; they merely recall shared experiences in the mind of another and then re-order them.

The poet would disagree. Why are both not possible?

Language does not alter our perception of reality.

Not at all? Words carry denotations and connotations that often affect how we see reality. Politicians use language all the time to create a perception that benefits them politically.

Metaphors in particular alter our perceptions when we perceive a thing through them. Consider two metaphorical constructs by which we think of knowledge: sight and touch. The sight metaphor is in effect whenever we think of knowledge as “seeing” or truth as “light.” Do you see what I mean? The sight metaphor often implies a distance between the knower and the thing known. The touch metaphor, in effect in such expressions as “Do you grasp my meaning?” or “I touch upon the truth” or even “I have the truth,” implies an intimacy with truth, a closeness, but perhaps such a closeness that the knower touches one part leaving most of the known object untouched. An epistemology founded on only one metaphor could develop keen insights, but it would not be the whole picture (picture – another metaphor!); moreover, and more to my point, the metaphor molds the way we know the thing called knowledge. When the metaphor is at play, we understand the abstract object metaphorically, hence in a way that our understanding is mediated by the metaphor. Even the word “understand” is metaphorical, implying a standing under something, getting at the roots of something, or looking at the foundation of something from underneath. It incorporates both the metaphors of sight and touch. How I perceive, and then understand, the object knowledge will depend upon what metaphors I think in terms of.

Yes, but do you understand what he’s saying, outside of your postmodern framework?

Your question here illustrates the very point I’m making. We approach reality through frameworks.

But you’re not alone in misunderstanding words in this paragraph. I’m completely lost as to what you mean by “far more conservative.” Does that mean he favors smaller, less powerful philosophies? Or is it that he wants to protect the old regime of philosophies? Where does truth come into play here?

I call Clarke more conservative than Caputo because Clarke is concerned with conserving the metaphysical project, whereas Caputo has more or less abandoned it. However, both philosophers think within their historical situation; Clarke doesn’t do Thomism as if modernity and post-modernity never happened. Despite the modern and postmodern focus on the limiting conditions of language, Clarke argues that we can know universal metaphysical truths that transcend time and culture. He wants to keep philosophy focused on the permanent things, so to speak. Caputo’s attention is directed more at the future, at what is to come, and he’s more attuned to the flux.

If we cannot know the thing as it is in itself, we cannot know if our ideas really do, in fact, correspond to it. Sorry, relativism is absolutely inescapable here.

Our knowledge that our ideas correspond to reality is rooted in an assumption, an act of faith, really. But putting that aside, why wouldn’t knowing something of reality be enough to know that our ideas correspond to reality? Why do we have to have a pure, unmediated knowledge of reality to have a basis for knowing that what we know is real?

We learn language first by being exposed to pure, unmediated reality, by which I mean the raw input received from our senses.

We learn language from experience, yes, but that experience is subjective (and objective) beyond the functions of linguistic mediations.

This last part sounds fairly reasonable, but needs clarification and elaboration.

Everything I say needs clarification and elaboration.

My final criticism is that you seem to have an incomplete knowledge of the correspondence theory of truth.

Possibly, but then I have hardly given a comprehensive explanation of the theory. I’ve “touched” on it just a little.

Then you cannot know that you cannot know reality as it is in itself, because by its very essence, reality could in fact be knowable. Hence, your thought is self-refuting.

Moreover, experience is not mediated by language. Language is mediated by experience. Symbols stand for experiences common to various minds. When these minds come into contact with a new aspect of reality, they use a symbol to label it. However, just because a mind does not or cannot label one of its experiences of an aspect of reality, does not mean it does not know that aspect of reality.

Furthermore, the statement, “As an object of our experience and a content of our knowledge, reality is a product of the functions of linguistic mediation,” is false. Obviously, linguistic mediation is a product of reality, so you’ve got it backwards. Aspects of our reality, which we acquire through the senses, are the material cause of our language.

“By using a word as a signifier, we identify the object signified as one thing and not another. A word establishes distinguishing boundaries, revealing what is contained within and concealing what resides without. Words used together construct meaningful structures and frameworks, and these more complex structures and frameworks also establish boundaries that reveal and conceal the signified objects.”

Generally speaking, you have this right. However, I would argue that our knowledge is primarily positive. For example, if you say something is a chair, then I think of an object that you can sit on that has four legs. Only by further thought do I arrive at what a chair is not. The symbol “chair” only communicates what a chair is, not what a chair is not. I have to figure that out by discerning, through comparison to other experiences, what is contradictory or not essential to something being a chair.

“The linguistic function of establishing boundaries begins not after the experience of an object but rather prior to the experience. The object which we experience, reality included, is not immediately present to us, for the functioning of linguistic signs grants us passage to and mediates our encounter with that object. Language is already functioning at the start of our experience of reality.[i]”

Then how did language come to be in the first place, hmmm?

“Say I am exploring a cave and come upon some writing on the cavern walls; I might say that I first encountered the writing when I first perceived it and that language comes into play following the initial perception of the writing on the wall. After seeing the writing on the wall, I can then formulate in language an expression indicative of this perception of writing. Language, however, functions not only at this stage in the experience: following the perception; it makes the perception possible in the first place. Language functions prior to the perception.”

Nope, at least not ultimately. Perception is the driving force behind language. The concept of “writing” is created by noticing a connection between an experience and another experience, namely a symbol, that represents the first. For example, an infant learns to call its female parent “mama” or male parent “dada” by noticing the association between those words and the persons they correspond to. In other words, language can be described as the process of correlating experiences.

“In order for me to perceive the writing upon the wall I have to have in my mind some concept, however vague or precise, of writing. If I possess no such concept, then I will not see writing, but instead something else, perhaps markings on the wall. But for that perception of markings to occur, I would need to have some concept in my mind of markings.”

This reasoning cannot go back ad infinitum. The truth is that yes, everyone perceives the whatever-majigger on the wall. However, through experience, you know that it correlates to another experience or aspect of reality known as “writing.” Others might not share your experience, nor the experience of the person who did the “writing.”

All this means is that you can’t know an aspect of reality you haven’t experienced yet. It implies nothing about language determining perceptions. In fact, you could very well argue that perceptions determine language (And they do, that’s how concepts start. Perception is basically how we learn language).

“Whenever we perceive a thing, we perceive it as something, as it fits into the boundaries established by our language.[ii] What fits inside the framework may be revealed to us; what lies outside will be concealed from us.”

I disagree. Our perceptions form the boundary of our language. If we have not experienced an aspect of reality, we cannot label it with a symbol. When we experience something new, we can assign a symbol to it. Also, we can look for patterns in experience and notice correlations between different aspects of reality, such as the connection between a symbol and the experience it represents.

“Given this, we might still be able to know reality as it is in itself in so far as reality fit into the boundaries established by the words of our philosophical constructs; however, while the signified may be revealed in the signifier, the revelation within the boundaries is not transparent.”

Again, you fail to ask the important question here. Where are these words and philosophical constructs coming from? Obviously, since the “boundaries” of language change, something is changing them. I clame that it is new experiences that do not fit into any existing constructs. Hence, we create new symbols for them. The symbol and the aspect of reality we perceive are not necessarily dependent on each other, in fact, ultimately they must be independent.

“A professor of mine remarked that if you want to understand a philosopher, study his metaphors. Metaphors, and more generally figurative and symbolic language, are a fundamental component in the constructed frameworks by which we understand reality. In addition, words bearing literal significance are fashioned in and inseparable from their historical and cultural birth and functioning. Language lives by the blood of history and culture, time and place. Whereas figurative language creates meaning, all language rooted in historical and cultural significance produces meaning, in so far as the meanings of words are marked by the world in which they were born and live. To speak metaphorically, they radiate the colors the age; they emit the scents of their times and places. They are not transparent windows through which we see the things themselves as they really are. The window is not so open that we can smell the natural fragrance with no artificial scent added: the window frame has its own scent that is added to that of reality. The window glass is stained, revealing and concealing the picture beyond, and adding to and subtracting from what we see.”

Okay? Again, we use words to express meaning, experience, aspects of reality, whatever you want to call it, that we first perceive through our senses. Words do not create meaning; they merely recall shared experiences in the mind of another and then re-order them. For instance, if the other person in question has the following three experiences and their corresponding symbols in memory…

1) A man standing up from a chair
2) A man sitting down in a chair
3) A man walking

…then he can understand the sentence “A man walked over, sat down in the chair, and then stood back up.” The order of his experience has been changed. You might say its accident is altered, but its substance remains the same. Nothing substantially new is created. Old meanings are arranged in a new order, but nothing more is accomplished.

“The mediations of language, which give us access to reality, function beyond setting boundaries. Reality, in so far as we know it by means of language is in a way a product of language. The reality that we know, that our philosophical acts pursue, we in truth partially produce. The natural is in a sense artificial. The philosophical realist, either metaphysical or phenomenological, should consider that language mediates – indeed, shapes – our perception and interpretation of reality, whether that reality is formulated in terms of “forms,” “being,” “essence,” or the “things-themselves.” “Every time metaphysics takes a stab at determining ‘Being,’ it comes up with some sort of being (substance, form, will, mind, etc.),” writes John D. Caputo in Radical Hermeneutics.[iii]”

Language does not alter our perception of reality. It merely orders it. Now, you could use euphemisms to downplay some horrible event when discussing it with someone else. They will “experience” the aspects of reality they associate with the symbols you use, true enough. However, once again, reality effects how the language is understood, not vice versa. Someone who has experienced your euphemisms before and has experienced the aspects of reality they really express will see through your subtle linguistic deceptions in a heartbeat.

Experience produces language, and experience decodes it through correlation and association.

“W. Norris Clarke, S.J., a Thomistic metaphysician and far more conservative than Caputo, agrees that “the conceptual-linguistic expression of what [metaphysicians] have discovered will always have to resign itself to being incomplete, falling short of the fullness of the real, in a word, perspectival, seen from within the resources of thinking, speaking, imagining, and feeling of the metaphysicians own culture in its situation in human history.”[iv]”

Yes, but do you understand what he’s saying, outside of your postmodern framework? Have you gone out and experienced the reality to which his symbols refer? If not, then you’ve misunderstood him. And I think you have misunderstood him.

But you’re not alone in misunderstanding words in this paragraph. I’m completely lost as to what you mean by “far more conservative.” Does that mean he favors smaller, less powerful philosophies? Or is it that he wants to protect the old regime of philosophies? Where does truth come into play here?

“The mediations of language do not condemn the philosopher to an absolute relativism, which denies that we can know reality. These mediations merely mean that we cannot know reality as it is in itself, not that we cannot know reality. Whereas realism assumes that our ideas correspond to the way things are, relativism assumes that no such correspondence exists. Relativism denies the correspondence between our ideas and reality, throwing the correspondence theory of truth to the wind. The functions of language here described mean that any such correspondence is not one-to-one.”

If we cannot know the thing as it is in itself, we cannot know if our ideas really do, in fact, correspond to it. Sorry, relativism is absolutely inescapable here.

“That said, the correspondence theory of truth takes a hit from the functioning of linguistic mediations. No one has a pure, unmediated access to reality. No one sees reality as it is in itself, nor knows it as such. Rather, what we each see and know, if reality is really the object of our perception and knowledge, is in a way a product of our making, a social construct, if you will.”

No, it’s not. What? Are you telling me that a newborn bade learns language only by filtering it through a linguistic seive? Impossible. We learn language first by being exposed to pure, unmediated reality, by which I mean the raw input received from our senses.

“The correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition’s truth is determined by whether or not it corresponds to reality, but no one can fully test that correspondence.”

Yes they can, unless they jack their skepticism meter up to insane levels, wherein their reasoning itself ceases to correspond with reality.

“Reality as it is in itself lies ahead of our experience, ahead our perception, ahead our interpretation, ahead of our knowledge. We test a statement not by reality itself free of our subjectivity, but by what we know of reality; and what we know of reality we have perceived and understood, but also produced and constructed.”

This last part sounds fairly reasonable, but needs clarification and elaboration.

My final criticism is that you seem to have an incomplete knowledge of the correspondence theory of truth.

The problem is Buddhist discussion will always be on the level of the first level of truth, and not absolute, following the two-truths of Nagarjuna. The construction of how that truth is relayed is important, and can only be done after the experience of the second. Until then, while we might realize everything we said is a pointer, and point out philosophically the limits of our construction because of it (which is what I must do, I admit), the realization of the second, the transcendent experience (so to speak) becomes the true means by which we can become the master of our words and experience more than they give us, instead of the other way around. And to put it in Christian terms, as children, we first have an image of God, often quite simple, but sufficient for youth; that image, as we grow up, we find is wrong, and we must deny it, cleanse ourselves from it (those who don’t either don’t grow spiritually or end up as atheists). Only by the greater experience of God can we re-explain God, and know that our words do not grasp God, but only point to him.

Kyle: It’s difficult, trust me. I am trying to keep it simple without going into all the philosophical details now. I will do so in the near future, once I move out of my Balthasar phase of my research and head back into the Buddhist details. I chose Yogacara, and this is a key philosophical point they bring up. While I have the “basics understood” of it, it’s now been awhile since I’ve worked within its domain. I can give “some answers,” if really pressed, but I would rather wait so I can give it in a more comprenshive form once again, and the details which would otherwise not be in my presentation could be there.

I would, however, suggest a book — for now; I know I’ve done de Maistre already, but this should also help (it’s a translation of a part of a Yogacarin text; the acutal meditational practice which I alluded to earlier is not to be found in the text, but the philosophical discussions of it is): Janice Dean Willis, On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi. It’s not an easy work (much of the text is a commentary).

The Christian discussion of how to attain what we are talking about is: to die to the self, the way of “nada” of St John of the Cross.

I’m still a bit fuzzy, Henry, on how experience can be free of subjectivity, given that we are situated in time and place, as Gabriel Marcel would say, and that “situatedness” prevents us from ever having a pure objective experience of anything. But hey, perhaps the Buddhists discovered a way. Ah, so much to learn.

Funny you should bring it up; I’ve skimmed through parts of it, but started to read through it as a whole today. It’s work, like Poetic Diction, I can get through parts, but something always gets in the way from finishing.

I would say that our expression of reality will always be constructed and with words, which is why we must always understand, as the Buddhists say, the truths; however, our experience of that reality can be and is often one which transcends words. There are two ways this can be, in the infantile stage, or in the meditative stage; the second, of course, then is what allows us, once we have experienced the real, to come back and, in the realm of “samsara” so to speak, express what we have encountered, and instead of being led blindly by the language, we become the one who shapes it and how it constructs the world around us. So I am always for that subcreative stage, but would say it can only be done once the transcendent is experienced beyond words and as The Word which is beyond all names (and therefore, words); then and only then can our constructions be used positively instead of as traps.