Language is not coterminous with reality itself, but with human cognition of reality. To the extent that languages coincide with how they construct the "map" of reality, this is what the human cognitive map of reality is. Spacial and temporal relations; everything that language is good at doing.
Where language is bad at something, or not as good, then it because there are parts of cognition that are linguistically efficient. For example, you could describe a musical score with words, like saying: the sopranos have an E# quarter note, then a dotted C# eighth note.
I guess language is not experiential, in the sense that it depends on the experience with which it coincides. It cannot convey new experiences to someone who hasn't felt them before, or convey qualitative things in their full immanent presence, or transcendent experiences. It is an abstract system. But then, there is poetry, which makes experience palpable by using the sound and presence of the Word. The poem itself is an experience.
1 comment:
"Maps co-extensive with the territory defeat the whole purpose of a map, which is the scaling of it," you said the previous post. It got me thinking.
We can have a map of an electronic circuit that is much larger than the circuit itself but actually let's us see how it works.
Likewise, a 1:1 map of a territory would have a purpose as long as it was cut into pieces and put into volumes that could be easily archived and retrieved.
Consider a 1:1 map of a war-torn country. The map would presumably not be on the territory. So moving around on the map would be less dangerous than moving around in the territory.
I imagine you can in principle zoom in on Google maps so that the scale is 1:1. The usefulness remains as long as you travel at arbitrary speeds from one part of the map to another.
This is what language (including cartography) does: it transcends space and time. In language, you can move from any point in the past to any point in the future, and cover any distance in the universe, within a single sentence. You can fold and unfold a map much more easily than you can cross an ocean.
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