Friday, February 1, 2008

Does Language and Words correspond to reality?

The next group of Philosophers we will look are those who deny that Language and words mirror reality. For the Nominalists language is purely designative, we give objects names according to words we have thought up or invented. There is no absolute relationship between our words and the objective world of objects. For the Nominalist there is no reason why something must be called what it is as language is just labeling things in a unit of agreed expressions. In the absence of things there is no meaning and the world is not a meaningful order interpreted by God. Basically for them, groups of people agree on an interpretation and express it on to the meaningless order of the world.

Language exists because we have designated the connections between words.
I think this is false because we have concepts in our heads, which are universal and even if the concept is used with a different language it is still representing the same thing. And Language studies have found that Languages are very interrelated in there make up. It’s not as if we have just made up words from nothing. But the Nominalist is right, if there is no God, then we are just making up our own words and labeling reality and we can call any object any name. So can one group of people call evil good and good evil? Or does evil, the concept that must be bound to some word to know it correspond to an objective reality making it an absolute.
The true rationalist is also doing the same thing as the Nominalist and if empiricists are correct, language is just a collection of independent words or sounds, as they can not be found in the objective world. Language and words are just labels and are beyond the empirical and can not be tested to be true.

The Postmodern thinkers of our age have taken this theory on board and believe that we create reality and truth. Postmodernists realize that a naturalistic worldview renders transcendence impossible. There is no "God’s eye view" of anything, and all human eyes are hopelessly prejudiced. Truth dissolves into endless perspectives, which are accountable to nothing out side themselves.

This leads us to the final stage of the failure of unbelief "Nihilism" that the world is utterly meaningless and knowledge of anything can not be known.

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