Dialogue on the Relation of Language and
Thinking

Introduction

The following dialogue between George Drews and Jutta Schmitt
intents to illustrate, why dealing with the relativity of value terms
such as good, bad, true, false, right, wrong, etc. seems to lack
scientific stringency and shows, that in reality "scientific stringency"
itself is a matter of the unilateral parameter setting that counterpoises
value terms in an exclusive "either-or" relation.

George Drews is a techno-mathematician and software developer
with a wide range of interests in Economics, Politics, Sociology and
Philosophy, and Jutta Schmitt is a university scientific assistant with
special interests in Political Theory and Logics.

Their dialogue is part of a series of reflections on the current
philosophical and ideological "world state of affairs", as debated by
our international study group "Pandemonium.Crew" on the Home
Page:  http://www.oocities.org/Athens/Academy/8545 , and is
being submitted for publication in order to be able to share a
different approach towards the relation of language and thinking
with a broader public.

A disciplined philosophic encounter and constant interchange of
thoughts, concerning intellectual labour, philosophy and ideology,
build the framework within which the dialogue arose. One of the
main observations made in the preceding thought interchanges is,
that thinking has been and continues being obstructed by the
well-known, dualistic parameter setting of Formal Logics, which
postulates a single, true principle ("A"), and derives everything else
from it ("non-A"). Up to this very day, the tools of thought - words,
terms and their relations expressed in grammar - are inexorably
interwoven into this two-value pattern, thus forming a strait-jacket
for the further expansion of thought itself.

However, thinking is relating, and there are many more ways to
relate things than suggested by two-value Formal Logics. Whenever
the rules of formal-logical thinking are broken, language has to be
forced beyond its limits in order to appropriately express the new
relations, the new thoughts. Language does not think for us. If we
want to think, we have to use language as a vehicle to express our
thoughts, otherwise we will remain prisoners of language and never
be able to sail to new horizons of thinking, or, as the German
philosopher Ernst Bloch, stated:

"The cat falls onto its feet, but the human being, who has not learnt
how to think, falls into oblivion, into eternal yesterday."
 
                                                     (Bloch, "Subject - Object", 1977)

About the Authors

George Drews, born in 1966, studied Techno-Mathematics, which
includes Informatics and Electrical Engineering, and finished his
studies in 1995 with a University Diploma. He worked as a software
developer from 1986 until 1996 and is currently working in the Civil
Service in an institute of the Ministry of Building and Construction
of the German Federal State of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Since January
1999 he has been enrolled in University for further studies in the
fields of Economics, Politics and Philosophy.

Jutta Schmitt, born in 1965, studied Social Sciences at the Johann
Wolfgang Goethe - University of Frankfurt, which include Political
Science, Sociology and Philosophy, obtaining her Master's Degree in
1996. She has been working as a scientific assistant ad honorem at
the University of The Andes in Mérida in the fields of Political
Theory and Political Psychology.

 Forget about "good" ?

Date: Sun, 06 Jun 1999 13:09:00 -0400
To: franzjutta@cantv.net
From drews2000@online.de
Tue, May 25 16:41:12 1999

Dear Jutta, Dear Franz,

your letters about ideology and Jutta's letter made me think again aboutthe relativity of values. And of course I'm always polluting
the worldwith my poor thoughts. That's what I'll be doing right
now again. So getyour first-aid-bag to be right beside you, just in case you'll get hurtwhile reading the following lines. Right now I'd like to express my thoughts  again ( yes, again?) about the word "good" .

Good ? What is that ? As my mind was trying to build a path into the
jungle of goodness, my mathematical education wanted to get involved too and said : first of all, you have to define the object we're talking about. That seems to be clever, I thought. So my ideas where desperately hunting after a plausible definition, just like the NATO is hunting after the breakdown of Milosevic.

One could say : good is what is positive  But what is positive ? Positive is what is pleasing. And what then is pleasing ? Pleasing is what is of advantage. Oh boy, what should that be,  "of advantage" ? All right, I understand now, this "definition-stuff" only leads me to paranoia. So I send my mathematical education back to bed and state: "Of advantage is what is good", meaning when it comes to evaluation-words, a formal "mathematical" definition is impossible.

So the conclusion is that an evaluation is highly subjective. The same thing might be good for the one subject and bad for the other one, where a subject might be a single person or a group of persons. So if we're talking about the evaluation of a state like hungry, rich or thoughtful that is to be applied to different subjects, the evaluation is dependent upon the subject.

But there is one additional thing that became clear to me: "Good" or "Bad" is highly related to time, because this evaluation is in general nonsense being applied to an infinite small part of  time. Saying
"this woman is good for me" refers to the future of my life and not merely to the second I'm saying this (otherwise I would say "she's good for me right now").

And while discussing these things with Irene Mumvudi, a girl-friend of mine, it became very clear that it's no use debating any more
about whether a certain state is good or bad in general. So, is this
the end of my story ?

Sorry, no ... . I went on thinking about the word good in relation to
a single person. All right, so what if I think that something is good for me. Does this mean it is really good for me ? If there is no clear definition of "good", if it's subjective as stated by myself before, is the mere thought "it is good for me" enough ?

Is the thought the origin of "good" (or bad) ? If I would say "Yes", then I could define "good" the following way : If I think "something is good for me" then it is good for me (!?) And let's be honest : this definition would be the nightmare for all parents ! Just imagine a 6 year old girl telling her mother "from now on, a hot meal for dinner is bad for me, but a big bowl of ice-cream is good for me" . There it is again : the relation to time. If I evaluate something as good, then I do this because I believe the consequences that arise in the future are all together good as well. This is a kind of recursive definition of "good", but I think it describes my view quite appropriate.

And the clue about this definition is: As I am not the only one who can
estimate consequences of decisions, this is the point where other people
join the game again. If somebody else than me can tell the consequences
of my acting and this person knows about my evaluation of good
(or bad), he or she might just as well be able to evaluate, whether my decision is good for me or not. E.g., I think everybody would come to the conclusion, that accepting a job in Yugoslavia on a military airport is
not too good for me, since the birds there are always dropping "smashing" excrements.

And as children grow up, the conflict between the parents and the child grows partly because it's the child that starts to evaluate the future different from the parents. Now the big question is, whether the word "good" is inappropriate altogether, whether it's just a
matter of ideology to use it or not? Is there an ideology where the word good or bad is not usable at all? I believe, that as long as the single human being is part of the ideology, the word good is appropriate in some way. It's not appropriate in all ways, definitely not in the way it's used by the majority, but does the inappropriateness in some ways mean that it's inappropriate in all ways ?

Well, finishing the letter, I'll just mention, that those problems one
can see thinking about "good"  are very similar when we're talking about guilt, innocence, love, hate and all those other words. And I think that as long as we are talking about and with human beings there is a certain point of view from which those words make sense.

Sending a lot of friendly, dancing and smiling greetings from Germany
and of course waiting for a clever response.

George.

   Date:
       Sun, 06 Jun 1999 17:10:29 -0400
   From:
       Franz Lee <franzjutta@cantv.net>
   To:
       drews2000@online.de

Our Dear George,
this is Jutta writing today. Thanks for your excellent reflections on
the term "good", and sorry for not having responded to you earlier, as I wish we could have done. Anyhow, we enjoyed reading your exposition on the topic and the line of arguments you used [no first-aid-bag needed! :)].Your mathematical-methodological headache of how to define the object in question and the following "sending the mathematical education back to bed" brought a big smile onto our faces, however I do think the effort was worth the try! So, George, send our greetings to your mathematical education and tell it to please keep up the good definition spirits, not matter what kind of object it is dealing with!

I completely agree with your line of arguments within the parameters you set up, that is, placing the discussion of the concept "good" within the two-value-range of subjectivity-objectivity. You correctly observed the relativity of the term when it comes to discussing it as a "subjective", relative concept, ("The same thing might be good for the one subject and bad for the other one, where subject might be a single person or a group of persons"); and you also approached the "objectivity" side, that is, giving it an axiomatic connotation, by firstly trying to define it mathematically, and secondly associating it with an absolute connotation in the sense of life-affirming (good), death-negating (bad), as indicated by your Yugoslavia example. As you yourself showed in the course of your exposition, within a given set of parameters, the term "good" sure can be appropriate, and it can also not be appropriate.

You might have noticed, George, that within the parameter setting given above, the subjectivity-side, that deals with the relativity of
the term "good", seems to lack scientific stringency, because we are establishing a kind of relation that is not allowed within the method of Science, Formal Logics, when we are making statements like: "something can be good and bad at the same time". As we make a relative statement, not an absolute one, we sort of "downgrade" the subjectivity-side, saying, that we are dealing with something "highly subjective", thus leaving the field of "scientific stringency", of objectivity. The subjectivity-side, according to Formal Logics, actually does lack scientific stringency, precisely because a different kind of relation is being established than the one suggested by Formal Logics, according to which something is either good or bad, it can not be good and bad. So the main "relation" we are dealing with in Formal Logics is the "or", "not and" - relation. The maximum relation established in Formal Logics is precisely the Either-Or-"Relation", delimiting and denoting only one true, in other
words absolute value. So, only when it comes to the objectivity-side,
scientific stringency is guaranteed, as we are dealing with absolute
truths, and as we are cutting off any possible relations that may exist
between any two values. Even our two-value parameter setting
"subjectivity-objectivity" turns out to be a one-value parameter setting in reality, as only objectivity is "true" and may claim scientific stringency, whereas "subjectivity" is the opposite, thus false and not valid within the scientific realm.

(By the way, in our philosophy, it is precisely "subjectivity" that
determines scientific stringency and "objectivity", as subjectivity
has to do with thinking and reasoning.)

If we leave the parameter setting suggested by Formal Logics behind, we can establish different relations between any two or three or "x" given values. Formal Logics postulates one value, "good". It assigns it’s postulate absolute truth and any quality it wants, and then derives the non-postulate, by assigning it all the respective non-values. Of course, the only relation it can establish between it’s postulate and the
derived non-postulate is an excluding either-or-relation. We can postulate two values, independently from each other, "true", "false", for example. Each of our postulates is assigned absolute truth.

Thus we can identify each of them independently:
"true" , "false"
We can identify both of them, independently, :
"true  or  false"
We can identify both of them:
"true and false"

We can differentiate them:
[true or false]  a n d  [true and false].

We can transcend them:
neither { [true or false] and [true and false]}
nor {[true or false]}  a n d  [true and false]}.

We arrive at:
true  a n d  false AND absurd,

containing "absurd" the two constituent elements: "true", "false",
as well as their specific relation: true  a n d  false, being "absurd"
however "neither true nor false".

To illustrate the above example, we could think of Water and its
chemical components, Hydrogen and Oxygen. Water is neither Hydrogen nor Oxygen, being Hydrogen and Oxygen the constituent elements of Water, and forming their specific relation: H2O (Hydrogen  a n d  Oxygen) the "essence" of Water; thus being Water:

[Hydrogen  a n d  Oxygen]  AND  [Neither Hydrogen nor Oxygen].

You see, George, that the "parameter setting" or method can be different from the Formal Logical one we are used to so much. So, all I want to indicate today, is, that whatever object of study we might have, we will get much further in our analysis taking into consideration, that there is not only one valid parameter setting like suggested by Formal Logics, but an unknown variety of possibilities, how to relate things. This does not mean, that the Formal Logical parameter setting is not valid, but that is is not only Formal Logics, that is valid, but other methods, too. We can come to certain valid conclusions within Formal Logics, a n d  come to different conclusions, that are valid, too, using a different method, for example, dialectics. As you know, both of the methods mentioned have their limits. There are other methods, like ours, that include
the former methods and their limitations, yet transcend them at the same time, if it should be necessary, for instance when penetrating
into more complex and vague matters.

Concluding today's analysis, I want to emphasize that we don’t have any problems whatsoever with the term "good", and accordingly feel good about it! We do agree with you, that it is of no use to "forget about "good", and that the term does make sense, under the condition however, that we keep in mind the different possible parameter settings and always determine the respective setting whenever we come across "good", "bad", and "absurd" things. Your mathematical education can be of invaluable help not in defining an isolated term, but in defining the parameter setting of which the term is an intrinsic part.

Keep the good spirits up, George, and send our regards to your friend, Irene Mumvudi.

Looking forward to hearing from you again:

                                                                        Jutta.

(CONTINUED)