These two posts (see part 1) are an exercise in Alt-Epistemology.
Those of us old enough to remember the heyday of Donald Rumsfeld will recall his remarks on knowns, unknowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. That was back in early 2002.
However, what about unknown knowns? Check this out:
The problem of the unknown knowns.
Unknown knowns as those which some people have complete knowledge of, but that they deny the truth of. The things that they lie about to keep themselves in positions of power.
For example, all the politicians in whatever country know, but do not say, that they can “create money out of thin air.” In fact, they lie about it.
Meanwhile, it does appear that the only reason we know how to lie is that we use language!
Dogs don’t consciously lie; nor do cats, horses, clouds, trees, and so on. Only humans, at least on planet earth, enjoy/endure the capacity to lie.
That which allows the child to expand beyond his or her own bodily reality is first of all, pointing. By mimicking adults, the child learns first, to point to some object in the space around him or her, and second, to give that object a name.
And with naming, language is born.
Do animals point? No. Though some do understand human pointing.
But: languages differ in the ways they carve up the world outside our own skins. See the Whorf Sapir hypothesis.
For example, the subject/predicate/object structure for declarative sentences in Indo-European languages differs markedly from, for example, the Hopi. Whereas the Indo-European languages categorize time in terms of past, present and future, the hopi language has a different way of acknowledging time. Instead of “Tom threw the ball,” they might say “there is a ball throwing.”
I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between language and thought, and how language, at least in part, structures thought. In this, I’m reminded of the Kantian hypothesis: that the forms of space and time are innate within the human brain; that they constitute an intrinsic, unlearned internal frame within which all thought is conceptualized. Kant was seeking to integrate empiricism (based on inductive logic) and rationalism (based on deductive logic), and this was his way of bridging that divide. However, Kant, remember, lived inside the Indo-European tradition. Hopi ways were unknown to him.
To conclude, let’s go further out, shall we? As usual, Quantum Tumbler fascinates.
https://x.com/quantumtumbler/status/1943191150317420632?s=61&t=aUBDiSUrvn0aSlRBtZx0wQ
