Kalba ir tikrovė

Straipsniai / Articles 331 NAGLIS KARDELIS Vilniaus universitetas ORCID id: orcid.org/0000-0002-2179-3754 Directions of academic research: philosophy of language, philosophy of antiquity, philosophy of the Middle Ages, philosophy of religion. This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. KALBA IR TIKROVĖ The relationship between language and reality is the most interesting and difficult problem in the philosophy of language to solve. It has many aspects, because reality itself is perceived and told differently in different contexts of philosophical analysis. Thus, it is possible to investigate what we would call the inner reality of the language itself […] the immanent nature of the language, which manifests itself at various levels of language-science analysis. The world of language, which opens up from the perspective of language as a closed system, internal, and judged internally in terms of the language itself, is completely different from the world, which opens up within the boundaries of the language itself. The inherent truth of the language does not coincide with the truth that is revealed beyond the limits of the language itself, which the language is called to speak and about which it must report. The truth of a word, like the truth of the word itself, is different from the truth of the reality of the thing behind it: for example, clarifying the etymology of a word or another, revealing the truth of the word about the thing it refers to, we do not know the truth about the thing itself, about the thing that exists outside the language, although the language can give us valuable insights into how we should think about the thing. Or here's another example: although the immanent reality of language […] the reality of words […] clearly delineates the distinction between objectivity and process, the distinction between noun and verb at the level of morphology seems to accurately show the distinction between objects and processes that exists beyond the limits of language itself, yet it cannot be considered to be an essential […] without local errors and corrections […] characteristic of the philosophy of language, since it is better than the more complex, strange and mnemonic experience opens up: NAGLIS KARDELIS 332 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV Different events […] is an illusion of everyday human experience, albeit very powerful. By the way, this is just one concrete example that we wanted to draw attention to the fact that in the inner reality of the language itself - the reality of words, their meanings, their morphological and syntactic forms - there are no "truths" tapatinti su tiesa apie už kalbos ribų egzistuojantį pasaulį. Tai, ką pavadintume that reveal themselves - we would not have studied the inner reality of the language itself - linguistic philosophy (unless we were big fans of Heidegger) - but the relationship between language and reality is called philosophy. However, it is worth acknowledging that the philosophy of language is also interested in how the linguistic worldview is established in language and how language reflects and depicts the reality beyond language at different levels of its system. Nevertheless, the most interesting thing for philosophy is the radically raised question of the relationship between language and reality. Philosophers, in considering this question, sometimes strike at two extremes, which we will now briefly discuss and criticize. The first extreme is related to the view that the reality of speech exists, but it is not reflected in speech at all, or its linguistic image is completely distorted and inadequate. Some philosophers who hold this view view view reality and language as two disconnected vessels: in the belief of these thinkers, it is not that man has no access to reality at all - he will have the opportunity to experience it through the senses of the body, especially the tongue - but what he speaks of, especially the abstract, removed from the content of reason, is not even a distorted image of the reality of speech, but rather a pseudo-falsity. Such an approach inevitably leads to a suspicious, skeptical, and even nihilistic view of language, with the expectation that it will ever be able to unlock the depths and secrets of the reality behind language or provide the power of philosophical insight. The problem is that the language is not able to communicate kaip, sakytume, filosofiškai ir egzistenciškai neįgalios, vertinimas yra ydingas loginiu atžvilgiu, nes susiduria su neįveikiamais vidiniais prieštaravimais. with the world, and therefore, if the language is not able to communicate with the world, then it is impossible for the philosophers to understand the world, and the philosophers are not able to communicate with the world, because the language is not able to communicate with the world. Simply put, if the speaker were completely disabled in these respects, she would not even be authorized to communicate her disability. It is clear that by formulating such theories of language disability through language and linguistic thinking, namely language […] above all linguistic thinking […] becomes the measure of the commonality or non-commonality of language and linguistic reality and […] language in the person of the thinking and speaking philosopher […] the arbitrator using this measure. He who is born blind is not able to see. Kalba ir tikrovė Language and destiny value the difference between sight and blindness, just as one who does not feel taste cannot perceive and define the difference between taste and helplessness. In criticizing this radical approach to the relationship between language and reality, one might ask a slightly different question: if not language, what is it that makes a philosopher capable of experiencing the inability of language and of communicating the knowledge of it to others? The assumption that language and reality are indeed a kind of two-way conversation, as well as the other assumption that the philosopher, despite his inability to speak, nevertheless has some other access to reality, let's say jusles or non-discursive […] non-language […] intuition power, still remains unclear how such a philosophical inability is able to communicate to others the knowledge of the inability to speak. Thinkers who consider speech and reality to be two unrelated things face another insurmountable contradiction. If the view is held that, despite the inability of language to open up reality, man still has sensual access to it, the unexplained paradox becomes the imagery of language, the mediating power of the representation of sensual impressions in the medium of linguistic signs: after all, it is a well-known truth for every poet and prose writer that in the line of speech it is possible to imitate sensual impressions directly in the lyrics, dramas and words of the novel. Because if we assume that language, as it is radically antisocial, has nothing to do with emotion, it becomes unclear how it becomes possible in speech - albeit indirectly, in a mediated way - to convey subtle emotional impressions accurately and unambiguously. If we acknowledge that it is the senses that give us access to reality, we must also inevitably acknowledge that it is precisely in the way and to the extent that speech, like the sensory impressions of a symbolically mediating medium, is able to imitate the senses, that it - along with the non-mediated senses themselves - also gives us some, albeit weak, access to the reality of speech. By the way, as a separate problem that arises for philosophers who have radically separated the plots of language and reality, it is worth considering the question of whether it is possible to experience the sensory impressions themselves in an absolutely pure, non-verbal way. It is very likely - or rather, it is beyond doubt - that a person experiences sensory impressions so strongly and abundantly not only because of the health and strength of the senses themselves, but also because of the antisocial "color" or "prejudice" that these impressions are given by the mediating power of the sensory experience of language: the physical experience associated with memories, the spontaneous imagination of creativity, the projections of the future, the play of figures or even just the abstract thought of the moment. NAGLIS KARDELIS 334 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. Although we cannot verify this directly, it is very likely that the mediation and amplification of the antiseptic […] symbolic […] sensory impressions provided by language makes even sensory experiences more intense, richer and more expressive than those of non-speaking living beings. Language and linguistic thinking allow us to reflect on emotional experiences, to marvel and enjoy the strength and richness of emotional impressions. This privilege is not granted to beings who cannot speak and think in language. On this occasion it is worth noting that even those thinkers who overestimate language and greatly overestimate the senses, are fascinated by the power of the sensory experience itself, as, by the way, the overemphasized gap between the non-sensory language and the super-sensory language is the ability to communicate to others through language and not through the senses, intuitively, telepathically or otherwise. It is clear that it is language, and not emotions themselves, that give thinkers who deny the power of language the power to perceive clearly and to reflect the impressiveness of emotional experience through thought. So in fact, we can't even say that access to the transcendental reality is provided by the pure senses alone. It would be more correct to say that the access to reality that is generally available to man is provided not so much by the pure senses themselves or by the pure language itself, but rather by language and the senses working together in a unified human experience. The second extreme of the evaluation of the relationship between language and reality is the view that "true" reality does not exist at all, and its illusion is built in a language beyond which there is nothing at all. This approach is most often associated with postmodernist philosophy, which has been greatly influenced by the structuralists' and poststructuralists' desire to analyze language as a closed system, each element of which is defined by its relationship to the other elements, rather than by what is or could be outside that system. Structurally analyzing the functioning of language as a unitary and closed system, it is not necessary to assume that anything exists outside this system, because all the elements of the language system functioning at various levels can be clearly defined based on the relationships of these elements with other elements of the system. The linguists who represent structuralism have explained how the elements of the lower levels of the language, such as phonemes, whose phonological identity is defined not isolatedly, but in relation to other elements of the same level, the post-structuralists and post-modernists have been extrapolated to higher levels of the language system, related to meanings and meanings. In the postmodernist view, the meaning of a linguistic sign at any level, such as a word, arises from certain differential differences that define the relationships of signs in the system, and not from the relationship of the sign's significance to the existence of the other language's significance in reality, because, as postmodernists claim, the identities of the significates, based on the traditional view, Kalba ir tikrovė Language and destiny 335 exists apart from language, which is an illusion caused by the very movement of significance in the medium of language. By adopting the postmodernist interpretation of the nature of language, we should perceive language as "flat" and strictly "horizontal" - in other words, as a syntactic system, and the subjectively experienced "vertical" level of semantic language, which defines the relationship of language to the boundaries of its time, is the illusion of a constant linguistic movement, arising from the "horizontal" level of syntax. Let's take a very simplified example of a hypothetical language system consisting of three elements […] a, b, and c[…]. According to the usual classical approach, the meaning of the linguistic element a in such a three-element system is determined by its relationship to its correspondence A in the linguistic reality. The meanings of the elements b and c, respectively, are determined by their relationship to their non-verbal equivalents B and C (the capital letters are marked with the correspondences of the elements a, b and c of the language that exist in the non-verbal reality, emphasizing their greater ontological reality compared to the elements that exist in the language itself, marked with lower case letters). According to this postmodernist view, the meaning of element a of a language would be uniquely defined by its relationship to elements b and c; the meaning of element b […] its relationship to elements a and c; the meaning of element c […] its relationship to elements a and b. According to postmodernists, this is precisely how "circularly" the meanings of words used in everyday speech (and in general in any language) are established: that is, the meaning of the word "tree" is established not as the result of a certain sound or graphical significance of the relationship with the greenery of the language, but as the result of the horizontal relationships of the word "tree", that is, with the words "dirla", "dang", "saul" and so on. Returning to the consideration of the relationship between language and reality, we could ask how, based on the postmodernist concept of the nature of language, the meaning of the word "language" itself is established in speech. Unlike other languages, which use words that exist in the language system […] as a part of a certain scope […] as singular […]taškiniai[…] elements or smaller scope poaibiai, in the case of the word […]kalba[…] this element of the language […] as a part of the words […] coincides with the whole of the words aibe. This means that in order to define language postmodern, we would have to look for other elements in the language itself as in the largest set of language elements that would allow us to define the meaning of the word language in a circular way. We would immediately encounter an unsolvable paradox: such elements, while being outside the boundaries of the word "language", would still have to be inside the language as a system that includes all the smaller elements. Obviously, this would be impossible […] we would not be able to find such elements in the language system itself as the largest […] all the other elements NAGLIS KARDELIS 336 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV aprėpiančios – aibės viduje, nes kalba jau iš anksto aprėptų bei įtrauktų viską, I don't know what you can say about it. So if we want to define the word "language" in the postmodernist circular way, we have to find something that exists not as an element within the language system itself, but as an independent thing that exists outside of it, based on the basic postmodernist elementas, kurį galėtume pasitelkti kaip kalbos apibrėžimo atspirties tašką. Taprovision (or at least the most radical version of this provision), outside of language there is nothing and therefore outside of language there are no external elements that could become a reflection of the circularity of the word. So based on the logic of the postmodernist argument itself, in order to define the meaning of the word "language", and therefore to understand what language is, there must inevitably be not only language, but something beyond the limits of language itself, no matter what it is or what it is called. Assuming that there is nothing beyond the boundaries of language, it is necessary to recognize that in this case it is no longer possible to perceive and define language based on its relationship with what is beyond its boundaries, which would mean that it would no longer be possible to define it in any way, and therefore it would not be possible to understand what language is in general. In this case, language would simply be all that exists, it would coincide with reality and would be reality itself […] and, by the way, because of the coincidence of reality and language, this reality would be less illusory, because simply there would be no measure of its reality or non-reality. As we have just shown in the argument, the postmodernist belief that there is nothing beyond the boundaries of language, and that reality itself is an illusion arising spontaneously in the midst of language, based on the postmodernist conception of how meaning is created in the system of language, inevitably leads to the conclusion that if there is nothing beyond the boundaries of language that would provide at least one external point of reference for trying to define the meaning of the word. Then we have to recognize that language is reality, because it is all that exists. Thus, true reality, despite the belief of postmodernists that it is merely a linguistic illusion, should in this case be recognized as a way of describing the universe of things that really exist, that are not hidden and that cannot be defined. paisant to, kad ji sutaptų su kalba, nes kalba ir tikrovė būtų tiesiog du skirtingi Paradoxically, the postmodern denial of the reality of reality, based on a specific conception of how meaning is created in language, reveals itself as analytically contradictory and self-denial. Kalba ir tikrovė Language and destiny, in relation to any reality that exists beyond its borders, as a context of perception and definition broader than language itself, must inevitably be thought of as a tangible reality […] in fact as the only reality. The criticism of both extreme views of the relationship between language and reality should give us hope. We have to conclude that the very fact that we -- although perhaps not entirely clearly -- understand what language is, as well as the other important fact that we need it as a bridge that connects us, the speakers, not only with each other, but also with what separates language, clearly indicates at least three things: first, that language and the reality beyond language are different from each other, because if they were, we wouldn't even need language. Secondly, that language and reality, though different from each other, are not entirely separate, for if they were entirely separate, language would no longer be useful to us as a bridge connecting us to what is beyond it. Thirdly, language, however rich, is always poorer than the reality that surrounds it, because if it were as rich, we would want to stay inside the language and not want to go beyond it. Delivered on 17 May 2021 NAGLIS KARDELIS Vilniaus universitetas Faculty of Philosophy University of Vilnius g. 9/1, LT-01513 Vilnius, Lithuania This is a list of universities in Lithuania by number of students enrolled.