Quote

[Jeff K.]

But I agree that we 'experience language' but that doesn't mean language is an experience.

I speak three and have lost the ability to speak a fourth. The language itself is most definately an experience in and of itself. It is one reason jokes do not translate well.

Edited August 8, 2011 by Jeff K.

[elguanteloko]

I speak three and have lost the ability to speak a fourth. The language itself is most definately an experience in and of itself. It is one reason jokes do not translate well.

Even if I agree that language is an experience "in and of itself" all you're doing is, when discussing the relationship between engine and wheels in a car, say that they are parts of the cars... they may be but that's not what we're discussing. The meaning and the words may be both "experiences in and of themselves" but that doesn't help clarify what the relationship is. Again, the concept of significance without signifier and signified seems incoherent.

Edited August 8, 2011 by elguanteloko

[Jeff K.]

Even if I agree that language is an experience "in and of itself" all you're doing is, when discussing the relationship between engine and wheels in a car, say that they are parts of the cars... they may be but that's not what we're discussing. The meaning and the words may be both "experiences in and of themselves" but that doesn't help clarify what the relationship is. Again, the concept of significance without signifier and signified seems incoherent.

Is a wheel a tire or is it the round thing on the road. How well will we travel when I say "take the wheel". Language and its use reflects the cultural mores of a people, the language is a direct reflection of the culture. Puns are an act that shows language itself to be an experience.

One can also transmit meaning without saying or writing anything, the word often used is empathy, it can be voluntary or involuntary. Language is any method of communication.

[elguanteloko]

Is a wheel a tire or is it the round thing on the road. How well will we travel when I say "take the wheel". Language and its use reflects the cultural mores of a people, the language is a direct reflection of the culture. Puns are an act that shows language itself to be an experience.

I just explained why saying it is experience is irrelevant.

One can also transmit meaning without saying or writing anything, the word often used is empathy, it can be voluntary or involuntary. Language is any method of communication.

Whatever. Address the issue of "significance without signifier" now and the incoherency of the concept, will you?

[Jeff K.]

I have, you just don't "understand"

[CARPE DIEM]

A problem with that idea is that if God communicates the message with a given language then there's little room for secondary interpretations and theology is reduced to scriptural exegesis only.

I personally like the official Catholic position in which the scriptures and the tradition are attempts at expressing the divine spiritual deposit.

I personally like the official Catholic position in which the scriptures and the tradition are attempts at expressing the divine spiritual deposit.

Point well made!

[mfbukowski]

Feelings are not language and experiences are not language.

Lets debate that one in a few years. The way we experience things is completely conditioned by our culture and, surprise surprise, our language. You cannot separate the way we experience things from the way we speak about them.

A major portion of how we experience things is our interpretation, and that is inseparable from language.

Underlining added

http://plato.stanfor...upplement1.html

Relativism and the Constructive Aspects of Perception

1. Empirical Aspects of Human Perception

To keep discussion manageable, we follow the usual, though not entirely salutary practice, of focusing on visual perception.

1.1 Top-Down Processing

The early, largely automatic stages of human visual processing involve things like feature detectors (e.g., edge detectors) that do not involve our concepts or beliefs. These stages are called data-driven or bottom up aspects of perceptual information processing. But in the later stages of processing perception often is affected by our concepts, beliefs, and expectations. Such processes are said to be hypothesis-driven or expectation-driven; they are also known as top-down processes. There is debate over how large a role top-down processes play in everyday perception, but there is little doubt that they can be important (Palmer, 1999, Ch. 9 contains an up-to-date discussion of the issues).....

Perceptual Relativism

Many writers have argued that the way we perceive the world is strongly influenced by our concepts (or our words) and beliefs. In a number of prescient passages the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce noted such examples to argue that perception was in fact a type of interpretation or inference (as Helmholtz had urged earlier).

...it is not necessary to go beyond ordinary observations of common life to find a variety of widely different ways in which perception is interpretative (CP, 5.184).

In all such visual illusions of which two or three dozen are well known, the most striking thing is that a certain theory of interpretation of the figure has all the appearance of being given in perception. The first time it is shown to us, it seems as completely beyond the control of rational criticism as any percept is (CP, 5.183).

The point is often linked quite explicitly to relativistic themes. Thus Ruth Benedict tells us that “no man sees the world with pristine eyes” (1934, p. 2), while Edward Sapir urges that "even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose" (1929, p. 210). And here is Whorf:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds …We cut nature up and organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance…. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe (1956, pp. 213-14]).

The anthropologist John Beattie tells us it is an “epistemological commonplace” that

people see what they expect to see, and that the categories of their perception are largely if not wholly determined by their social and cultural background. So members of different cultures may see the world they live in very differently. And it is not just a matter of reaching different conclusions about the world from the same evidence; the very evidence which is given to them as members of different cultures may be different (1966, p. 75).

"Sure it is happening in your head- but why on earth should that mean that it is not real"?

Edited August 9, 2011 by mfbukowski

[elguanteloko]

Lets debate that one in a few years. The way we experience things is completely conditioned by our culture and, surprise surprise, our language. You cannot separate the way we experience things from the way we speak about them.

Surprise surprise, you just did. Think about why you had to do it and in what sense you can do it.

[mfbukowski]

I personally like the official Catholic position in which the scriptures and the tradition are attempts at expressing the divine spiritual deposit.

Point well made!

I know. That is exactly what I am criticizing.

This is the same "bank" from which indulgences were once sold.

Edit:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm

In granting an indulgence, the grantor (pope or bishop) does not offer his personal merits in lieu of what God demands from the sinner. He acts in his official capacity as having jurisdiction in the Church, from whose spiritual treasury he draws the means wherewith payment is to be made. The Church herself is not the absolute owner, but simply the administratrix, of the superabundant merits which that treasury contains. In applying them, she keeps in view both the design of God's mercy and the demands of God's justice. She therefore determines the amount of each concession, as well as the conditions which the penitent must fulfill if he would gain the indulgence.

Edited August 9, 2011 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

Surprise surprise, you just did. Think about why you had to do it and in what sense you can do it.

Yep

And so do you! Welcome to the wonderful world of reality!

[elguanteloko]

Yep

And so do you! Welcome to the wonderful world of reality!

wait.. you were supposed to answer "No" and clarify the contradiction.

You said: "You cannot separate the way we experience things from the way we speak about them."

...but now you accept that you did (what I said)..?

Seems like we are making progress, then.

[Robert F. Smith]

"Scriptures and tradition" EXPRESS some reality - or thing- or whatever it is- which is the "divine deposit"- in other words, some reality which is NOT experience. I haven't seen any "divine deposits" recently.

Elguanteloko is speaking of the official Roman Catholic "sacred deposit of the faith," which is maintained by the Church through its priesthood and through catechetical training.

[Robert F. Smith]

A problem with that idea is that if God communicates the message with a given language then there's little room for secondary interpretations and theology is reduced to scriptural exegesis only.

I don't think so. II Peter 1:20-21 advises us that "no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."

The resultant hermeneutical circle posited here opens the interpretation to control by the source from which it came. Thus, during translation of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith presumably received the conceptual meaning in his mind (interacting with the stone transducer) and translated it into the plain language which he understood and dictated to his scribes -- ungrammatical though it might seem to us today (based on the manuscript evidence).

I personally like the official Catholic position in which the scriptures and the tradition are attempts at expressing the divine spiritual deposit.

Is this an archetypal Platonic concept? Is the sacred deposit of the faith in heaven?

[elguanteloko]

Elguanteloko is speaking of the official Roman Catholic "sacred deposit of the faith," which is maintained by the Church through its priesthood and through catechetical training.

No, I wasn't.

[elguanteloko]

I don't think so. II Peter 1:20-21 advises us that "no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."

Brother, this is exactly what I'm saying. "Private interpretation" includes everybody... including the prophets who spoke moved by the Holy Ghost. That is, the message of the Holy Ghost is one in which we subsequently reflect upon (the spiritual deposit being the message of the Holy Ghost). The OP-type of idea, however, is that the Holy Ghost gave a message already WITHIN the paradigms and language of the speaker (the prophets). IOW, the message by the Holy Ghost is a private interpretation already. This is how theology is reduced to mere exegesis since what the author meant is what the study focuses on, and not as reflections upon the "spiritual deposit" given through the Holy Ghost.

The resultant hermeneutical circle posited here opens the interpretation to control by the source from which it came. Thus, during translation of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith presumably received the conceptual meaning in his mind (interacting with the stone transducer) and translated it into the plain language which he understood and dictated to his scribes -- ungrammatical though it might seem to us today (based on the manuscript evidence).

Again, this IS EXACTLY what the verse you cited is against. You are making here the message WITHIN the private interpretation of the prophet (his paradigms, ideas, languages, etc).

Is this an archetypal Platonic concept? Is the sacred deposit of the faith in heaven?

No to both of those. The sacred deposit is the result of us being in contact with the divine influence upon which we reflect. An analogy would be, "Love is the result of us being in contact with our mothers" and trying to think about love would be the reflection.

Edited August 9, 2011 by elguanteloko

[Robert F. Smith]

Brother, this is exactly what I'm saying. "Private interpretation" includes everybody... including the prophets who spoke moved by the Holy Ghost. That is, the message of the Holy Ghost is one in which we subsequently reflect upon (the spiritual deposit being the message of the Holy Ghost). The OP-type of idea, however, is that the Holy Ghost gave a message already WITHIN the paradigms and language of the speaker (the prophets). IOW, the message by the Holy Ghost is a private interpretation already. This is how theology is reduced to mere exegesis since what the author meant is what the study focuses on, and not as reflections upon the "spiritual deposit" given through the Holy Ghost.

The text of II Peter 1:20 says, to the contrary, that Scripture is not subject to personal, private interpretation, but that it must perforce be interpreted by the same means in which it came -- via the Holy Spirit. That does put a heavy burden on the reader, but an essential one.

NRSV "you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, . ."

NEB "BUT first note this: no prophetic writing is a matter for private interpretation."

Goodspeed "You must understand this in the first place, that no prophecy in Scripture can be understood through one's own powers, . . ."

Again, this IS EXACTLY what the verse you cited is against. You are making here the message WITHIN the private interpretation of the prophet (his paradigms, ideas, languages, etc).

Not at all. I can imagine an evangelical Protestant sola scriptura interpretation along such lines, but that constitutes eisegesis -- making the text say what one wants it to say -- since they do not believe in modern prophecy or continuing revelation.

No to both of those. The sacred deposit is the result of us being in contact with the divine influence upon which we reflect. An analogy would be, "Love is the result of us being in contact with our mothers" and trying to think about love would be the reflection.

The depositum fidei is transmitted by the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, as taught in the official cathechism here.

Edited August 9, 2011 by Robert F. Smith

[elguanteloko]

The text of II Peter 1:20 says, to the contrary, that Scripture is not subject to personal, private interpretation, but that it must perforce be interpreted by the same means in which it came -- via the Holy Spirit. That does put a heavy burden on the reader, but an essential one.

NRSV "you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, . ."

NEB "BUT first note this: no prophetic writing is a matter for private interpretation."

Goodspeed "You must understand this in the first place, that no prophecy in Scripture can be understood through one's own powers, . . ."

You aren't addressing what I said. If the OP is correct then it goes against these 2 Peter verses you quoted since the message given is intrinsically modified by the paradigms and ideas of the person receiving them.

What I'm saying doesn't even imply that the "reflection" shouldn't take place without the aid of the Holy Ghost. Actually, this is why it is reflection ABOUT the spiritual deposit (or the influence of the HG).

The depositum fidei is transmitted by the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, as taught in the official cathechism here.

I never talked about the deposit of faith but the sacred deposit by which I referred to the influence of God.

[mfbukowski]

Elguanteloko is speaking of the official Roman Catholic "sacred deposit of the faith," which is maintained by the Church through its priesthood and through catechetical training.

Yes, and that, for the third time, was what I was criticizing.

[mfbukowski]

Elguanteloko is speaking of the official Roman Catholic "sacred deposit of the faith," which is maintained by the Church through its priesthood and through catechetical training.

Ah, now I see what you mean. I had it confused with this "deposit" in the "Treasury of the Church"

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm

The treasury of the Church

Christ, as St. John declares in his First Epistle (2:2), "is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world." Since the satisfaction of Christ is infinite, it constitutes an inexhaustible fund which is more than sufficient to cover the indebtedness contracted by sin, Besides, there are the satisfactory works of the Blessed Virgin Mary undiminished by any penalty due to sin, and the virtues, penances, and sufferings of the saints vastly exceeding any temporal punishment which these servants of God might have incurred. These are added to the treasury of the Church as a secondary deposit,....

I was wrong, you were right, and I apologize to anyone else who I misunderstood on this point- I guess elguanteloko as well.

Sorry for being even more jerky than usual!