Just Cause Eidos
The Language Cosmology: From Antimethod To Ideolinguistics
From Anti-Method to Ideolinguistics |Zainurrahman
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Language Cosmology
From Anti-Method to Ideolinguistics
This short discourse will discuss the very basic principle of language and reality from the philosophy point of view. There are some discourses have discussed about the philosophy of language. In this chance, I will discuss it again but we should try to get the understanding from other point of view. Habitually, philosophy of language is started from how people receive and produce a meaningful language by basing on some philosophy sects such as logical positivism, atomism and so on. Here, I try to find out how language is seen from a pioneer of anti-method thought and relate it with my Ideolinguistics principles. The discourse will be “The Language Cosmology” that discusses about how language and reality fits each other.
Positivism assumes that language is the reflection of reality or picture theory. Feyerabend rejects this positivism assumption. Feyerabend believes that realities are actually depended on the theories. Reality is reflected by a theory. For the example, all things fall down; this reality is understood by theory of gravitation. In other words, there is theory that mediates the understanding of reality. Meanwhile, experience and understanding occur through language. In Ideolinguistics, experience and understanding in daily life will construct idea. It refers to the definition of idea as derivation from eidos (Greek) that mean what is seen or what is recognized (further reading: The Original of Ideolinguistics) and language and idea is an unbreakable couple. Meaning that in language the experience and understanding of reality is occurred.
However, Feyerabend states that language is always limited. Language cannot reflect the totality of experience. People never understand reality purely by utilizing language. Of course, Ideolinguistics believes that here mind plays important role to reconstruct the objective reality to be a subjective reality (imaginary reality). In connection with this, Feyerabend then stated that “No experience which is pure, all is interpreted.”
Feyerabend assumes that there is an absolute mutual relationship between language and human reaction poles. Further, language is not only tooled to recognize facts or reality, but language also sharpening facts, reality or events. In this case, Feyerabend agrees with Benyamin L. Worff that language has certain cosmology that is a comprehensible outlook of world, situation that affects human mind, behavior and perception. In line with this, both Feyerabend and Worff agree with Determinism that human even think through language, human interpret reality through language.
Understanding of reality is relatively affected by culture and theories that basing it. Meanwhile human also percept, interpret and understand reality through language. It is important to keep in mind that theories are constructed in a certain space and time and it can be accepted or rejected in other space and time. Simply, it is very relative and contextual-cultural bound.
A construction of concept (concept of a reality), according to Worff, is closely related to certain culture and world view. Therefore, reality cannot be understood without understanding the language cosmology. It can be said that culture and world view help human to understand reality, however it must be a contextual understanding, not a universal understanding; there are contextual elements that basically affect object interpretation or reality. However, as human language, it must be universal. Reality must be universal for all. Here we should understand first of what the cosmology is.
Cosmology is the philosophical thought of the nature of the universe. Cosmological principle is the uniformity of universe; in any point and any direction, observers should look universe is homogeneous. It means that reality should be seen similarly from one observer to another. In connection with language, as Ideolinguistics believes that human language is universal as their idea. What produced or received by human are words, language is in human idea.
Every people have same idea about fire. They also have same perception about ice. However, when fire and ice is reinterpreted or reconstructed, here the culture plays its role. Fire for some cultures is holy and even sacral. In Islamic paradigm, fire is symbol of hell, and so forth. When fire is reflected by language, it will be defined in words such as fire is hot, etc. Here, words deal with difficulty to give a comprehensive understanding of fire, because some people may have different understanding of fire. Not all reality can be spoken or written by using words. However, human experienced it purely and there is idea about fire in their mind and that is language in Ideolinguistics principle; and every people have the same idea of fire. There are some exceptions, if someone cannot feel or experience fire because he or she has certain disease of skin or something, his idea about fire must be different. However, in this line, we are talking about experienced reality that constructs idea. Thus, inexperienced thing cannot be an idea; and this is out of Ideolinguistics context. Ideolinguistics principle that the primary language is what is seen (picture or gesture) or what is recognizable. Human recognize fire in the same way; touching or seeing it. What is produced to reflect the idea or object interpretation is words and not language.
Language cosmology
Language cosmology is the nature of language movement in fitting with human idea to give meaning to reality. In very early time, human use picture and gesture to communicate or to transfer an interpretation each other. However, they realize reality and interpret it by seeing, observing, and involving the reality in their mind and soul. For example when Abraham saw sun and moon and then he thought that it was God, but then he rejected by said it was not God. It does not really matter how Abraham produced words or in what language Abraham spoke was. The matter is how did Abraham analyze and conclude his observation? Just come back to the background that underlain the history. Abraham was faced with some paganism beliefs that God was the fetish they created. Abraham’s idea about god was from natural and supernatural experience that inspired him to look for the God who creates him. Naturally, he did not see that the fetishes are doing universe or even a mosquito. Supernaturally he felt that there was a calling from his heart. All these are accumulation of experience and reality and these inspire Abraham to find out the truth. His curiosity to find out the truth (at least for himself) made him had to “re-collect” the information from the reality, experience and common sense. Here we can see that Abraham created a dialog between him and himself. He tried to correlate one idea to other, relate one reality to other and one experience to other. Finally he should to explain the correlation, in order to get a conclusion. In his great job he was done, of course, language in his mind would not stop working. He needed to utilize language to correlate all those mentioned above. This is the example how language fits into experience, reality and common sense. Ratio is directed by language, idea and language is a couple; that is the point. In other words, without language (inner language) human cannot correlate idea, experience and reality. Words (outer language or produced language) are also help human to develop and to manage idea beside it function to share or communicate idea. It is obviously seen that there are words in everything in the world, because the things are named by human.
Language Macro-Cosmos
Nowadays, language is associated with words, phrases, sentences, and so forth. Language is also divided into two kinds; spoken language and written language. Based on the function, language is divided into some functions such as imperative, expressive, directive, persuasive, preventive, impressive and so on. The point function that is focused in Ideolinguistics is language direct human to construct and to sharp idea. Ideolinguistics never ignore the absolute relationship between language and idea.
Language forms such as words, phrases, sentences are the macro-cosmos of the language itself. Here, language is associated with the reference. Every form of language has certain association, but language macro-cosmos is more appropriate to be associated with the outer language.
When Abraham saw moon and he said that “This is God”, the word “God” here was associated with “moon”, something out of Abraham self. The phrase or sentence uttered by Abraham above is directly referred to something shining in the sky. The meaning of the utterance is clearly understandable by syntactical analysis and without ignoring the semantics environment when the sentence was uttered. Physical context is also considered to gather the meaning of the sentence. Those are the macro-cosmos of the language.
Language Micro-Cosmos
When Abraham stated or uttered the utterance above, language was working in his mind to correlate one thing to another, his idea was “speaking” to direct him to gather a conclusion. That is what I call language micro-cosmos. If macro-cosmos is the objective universe or objective reality that has been named in words and can be represented by words, language micro-cosmos is the imaginary universe or imaginary reality that is explained by inner language. Someone who is thinking is actually speaking without producing words. Some other one is thinking by speaking to himself by producing words. However, it should be distinguished which one is the macro language and which one is the micro language?
Let us make it easier, look at the example:
Mr. John tells his son to move the table “Michael, please move that table” he points the table. The utterance has direct reference and the utterance is produced. The words “table” refers to the thing pointed by Mr. John. The table of course more exists as the objective reality than imaginary. In this case, Michael tries to analyze the utterance and as an adult he can easily understand it, because he is in the same room with his father. This condition causes the language become “macro” or in other words we can associated the term “macro” with “verbal”. Michael can understand the utterance easily, even without analyzing it. The utterance stated by his father is referred to certain things and it reflects what his father wants to do. I hope it is clear, now we come to the next example.
Mr. Franklin is reading a book, after that he thinks how possible it was flying without wings. He says to himself “I really do not understand how he can fly without wings”. Here, Mr. Franklin is thinking and trying to find out the answer by correlating one idea to another idea. However, the reference (inference) of each inner language in his mind does not have real object. It is more imaginary reality than objective. In this condition the micro-cosmos of language is taking place. From those examples, language can be divided into two cosmoses; they are macro-cosmos (macro-language) and micro-cosmos (micro-language). Micro-language is associated with these aspects: mental, psychological, and idea. Macro-language is associated with these aspects: social environment, real object and verbalism. Furthermore, meaning can be divided into two types; macro-language meaning which is determined by the utterances or outer language, and the micro-language meaning which is determined by idea. It is important to know that although every sign has meaning, but the meaning is never embedded with the sign. Macro-language meaning is conventional and the micro-language meaning is intentional. You can compare this with the theory of langue and parole.
About the Author
Zainurrahman, was born on March, 5th 1983 in Ternate (An Island in North Maluku, Eastern Indonesia). He is an English Lecturer and a creative writer. He has written more than ten ebook titles that can be downloaded on http://zainurrahmans.wordpress.com and/or http://majelisaljabbar.wordpress.com
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