We may find a proposition, no matter what it is, to be ambiguous or inexact if that is what we want to do. We can also find any thought not to be a thought but rather a sort of mental fart if sufficiently provoked.
Consider the following series of mental farts from David J Lobina who writes in 3 Quarks
It is often stated
by cretins who have made a career out of mental farting
that natural language is both ambiguous and inexplicit to be the medium of thought
most thoughts aren't just ambiguous or inexplicit. They are actively shit.
– to be the medium in which we think, as opposed to the conceptual language of thought
Anything at all can the conceptual language of stupidity.
I have gone on about for some time here at 3 Quarks Daily. But what do we mean when we say that language is ambiguous and inexplicit?
It means that anything at all can be said of anything at all.
In the case of ambiguity, there are two relevant cases: lexical ambiguity, where a word may mean different things in different contexts (think of the word bank and all the things it can refer to);
but all words can mean the same thing in certain contexts- e.g. providing proof of life or the ability or willingness to communicate as in response 'Say something! Anything!'
and structural ambiguity, as in the sentence below, which can receive different interpretations depending on what part of the sentence the phrase in Paris actually modifies.
The author of Stephen Hero decided to write Finnegans Wake in Paris.
That is, did the decision to write Finnegans Wake take place while the noted author was in Paris, or did the author of Stephen Hero decide that Paris would be a suitable place in which to carry out the foreseen writing?
Or did James Joyce at a time when he was only capable of authoring Stephen Hero, not 'Portrait', envisage writing a Wake type novel 'in Paris' as opposed to 'in Montmarte' as the guy who abandoned 'Hero' in Trieste self-satirically informed Stanislaus
Or to put it in more linguistic terms: does the prepositional phrase in Paris modify the overall phrase decided to write Finnegans Wake or just the internal and thereby shorter phrase to write Finnegans Wake?
It can modify anything at all we care to stipulate.
Given the differing interpretations, such a sentence couldn’t possibly constitute an object of thought,
Sure it can. The point about Stephen Hero is that it wasn't authored, it was aborted. Thus 'Author of Stephen Hero' is like 'son of the barren woman'. Anything at all can be predicated of the designator.
for there is no such thing as an ambiguous thought.
only because no thought is a thing
How could a person even have an ambiguous thought?
How could she not?
Indeed, whoever utters such a sentence is in no doubt as to what they mean by it,
unless they aren't. The fact is, anyone who speaks of 'the author of Stephen Hero' and then mentions 'Finnegans Wake' is unlikely to be making any very explicit or clear cut claim.
and that’s not only because an unambiguous thought has been entertained.
Ambiguity arises in connection with any x which, for some purpose y, can be linked to y & z even if y & z are otherwise indiscernibly identical for a large class of purposes.
The utterer has, in addition, internally constructed a syntactic object of the right hierarchical structure, a construction that necessarily precedes producing the string of words, one by one, that the hearer or reader actually experience in a communicative interaction.
Not if the cunt teaches a worthless subject in a shitty University Department or enjoys gassing on about Finnegan's Wake.
The structural ambiguity only arises for the hearer,
only if he doesn't know that Joyce was in Trieste when he embarked on Stephen Hero which however wasn't authored at all. It was aborted though, no doubt, it is genealogically related to 'Portrait'.
If it is possible that Joyce in Trieste said to his brother 'I'm going to write a book called Finnegan's Wake once I'm established in Paris, then the statement is potentially informative. It may then be worth looking at syntax. But why bother otherwise? Incompossible worlds are under no obligation to correspond to any type of generative program, linguistic or otherwise.
and this is so only on account of the manner in which (verbal) communication is conducted – in a segment-by-segment basis. But there are two syntactic objects associated to the string above; one’s linguistic system generates two different structures for the same set of words. Thus, what is linguistically represented in the mind of a speaker in the case of the sentence above are two syntactic objects respecting the hierarchical relations laid out, simplifying significantly, below, where the bracketing and underlining are supposed to mark the right dependencies.
The author of Stephen Hero [decided [to write Finnegans Wake] [in Paris]].
The author of Stephen Hero [decided [to write Finnegans Wake in Paris]].
If this is so, then the case of structural ambiguity in language and thought is a bit more nuanced, given that the language faculty generates unambiguous structures,
They can always be presented as ambiguous. It all depends on what you mean by 'mean' or what is meant by 'is'.
and as such language is, in this case at least, perfectly capable of appropriately differentiating the contents, or thoughts, of two different conceptual representations.
But language can't capture at least some aspects of those conceptual representations in so far as they are compossible. Otherwise, facts about physics and chemistry and neurobiology would be discoverable from purely linguistic research.
It just so happens that the linguistics representations become ambiguous in the process of converting hierarchical structures
an imputed syntactic hierarchy which does not actually exist
into an appropriate signal for communication – linear strings of words – but this an altogether different matter.
If this is true then all that is entailed is that generative linguistics is meaningless shite.
The issue of whether language is explicit enough to account for the thoughts we do have on a regular basis possibly carries more weight.
Language can always be made more explicit. This is one reason why divorces happen.
This is the claim that very often language is rather unspecific regarding what content it expresses; or put differently, that linguistic phrases say less than what a speaker is mentally representing in their mind at the point of utterance.
and what the speaker is mentally representing is less than what his mind is farting
Lobina gets very excited about 'deixis' or 'indexicality'- i.e. the way we interpret sentences as pointing at specific things. But this is merely a thought and another thought which points at whatever the first thought could be usefully seen as pointing at.
thoughts underlying linguistic expressions must be propositional in nature (or at least close enough),
Propositions aren't natural. Nothing can be of their nature. Everything is close enough to everything else except when it isn't.
which brings us back to all those entries on the language of thought, and as such they would not contain deictic terms, a constraint that would in addition rule out many other word types from having an analogue in thought.
What a stupid thought! Nothing can rule stuff out for itself on the basis of an argument which is only meaningful within a dialect of stupidity.
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