At this point I would like to announce a new project which I am taking upon myself as a blogger concerned primarily with western philosophy. It has been argued that the main reason behind both the difficulties which the West has with the Middle East as well as the “solutions” which the former has “offered” the latter, derive from the fact that the latter simply has not experienced an Enlightenment while the former has. It will thus be the task which I will take upon myself to, beginning with the Enlightenment, review the way in which the pre-Enlightenment mind became how it is today by describing, in a relatively chronological order, the great minds and ideas which have shaped the West.
What will be of central importance as we embark on this intellectual journey will be describing and understanding the thought of those who came before us, rather than attempting to argue for or against them, though this will take on, at times, a secondary importance. Nevertheless, this will be more difficult than it may at first seem.
Continuing with the difference between the West and the Middle East, some feel that one simply needs to merely learn the social, political and economic behaviors to pretty much understand another culture. Such, however, is simply not the case. When one is submerged in a foreign culture, the social, political and economic behaviors are relatively easy to internalize, but the problem is that these things are internalized according to a language of thought which is native to one’s native culture.
It is by means of this “language of thought” that the social, political and economic behaviors are mediated, and another language of thought is VERY difficult to learn. While learning new social, political and economic behaviors can easily be done by using one’s native language of thought, learning another language of thought simply cannot be done in this way. Indeed, one wonders if it is actually possible to really learn another language of thought.
Let me be more specific about what I mean by “language of thought.” A language of thought consists in a culture’s attitudes concerning ontology, epistemology and causality. Note that I did not say “beliefs concerning…” for beliefs, I am convinced, are more reports on these attitudes, the attitudes themselves being prior to the beliefs. These attitudes consist of what we take knowledge to be and how it is achieved. It includes how and why things happen. It involves what objects, both ontologically objective as well as ontologically subjective, existent as well as fictional, exist in the world.
It consists in our attitudes concerning the nature of authority and our relation to it, our inclinations to what is and is not possible, our sense of what is morally right and wrong and the potentials as well as purposes of human life. All these things might be reflected in the social, political and economic behaviors of a culture, but they are not themselves a part of them. To use Quine’s image of the web of belief, the language of thought is to be found at the center of the web, as far away from the empirical edge as any thing in the web can be. The social, political and economic relations are more toward the outer edge.
There are surely a number of reasons why learning another language of thought is so difficult. One is that everybody believes their language of thought to be the true one; that is why it is their language. (Actually it is probably the other way around.) Each person believes their views concerning authority, morality, possibility, teleology and so on to be the right view, due to the mere fact that their language of thought is simply the language of thought.
The question of rightness or wrongness of this language does not arise until after the language is already in place. Indeed, it is only in terms of some language of thought, that a part of such a language (be it the same one or a distinct one) can be analyzed. Rather than each person considering their language to be the right one, it would probably be more accurate to say they consider their language to be the natural one. It is for this reason above all that we should be more concerned about describing and understanding rather than critiquing and engaging.
The language of thought of the 17th century Westerner was quite different from that of the contemporary mind, just as the mind of the modern Westerner is quite different from that of the modern Middle Easterner. It has been said that the philosophy of one generation is the common knowledge of the next, and such is certainly the case as the philosophy of the 17th century was popularized in the 18th century. Following this time line, we will be able to see how many of the ideals which the West is now trying to export to other cultures are historically contingent in a significant way.
