Fleeting thoughts: See who speaks, or the boundary between the interpreter and the ‘liar’

Background: 

The philosophy of ordinary language means always some human being(s) who speak(s). The opposite abstract philosophy of language tries to reduce language to a formal procedure preferably even logical and mathematical, which would be independent of who speak(s) absolutely. The human beings in the former case are necessary for the existence of language as interpreters rather than as speakers, writers, listeners or readers. The interpreters determine what any linguistic unit such as a word, a sentence, a text, etc. means. They assign a certain meaning to each of those. The language reduced to a formal procedure in the latter case should remove the necessary meditation of the interpreters postulating an area of unambiguous meanings therefore doubling any linguistic unit such as above. Then, one might understand the language as a “second” reality necessarily coinciding with the reality by itself as ontology: that logic originated from language (logos), which is the world itself. The linguistic units (e.g. words) are the things themselves and by themselves. Furthermore, even the “interpreter” can be introduced secondarily as who chooses the true meaning for any linguistic unit and thus understands it. That pathway had been passed by the philosophy still in Greece.

Problem: 

The “interpreter” turns out to be contradictory in that philosophy, in which the language is understood as ontology. This had been demonstrated by the aporia of the “liar”: one single true meaning should be assigned to the interpreter, but this turns out to be impossible.

Thesis: 

The aporia of the “liar” can be understood as an argument reductio ad absurdum in favor of the ordinary language philosophy. The alternative philosophy of abstract language is either inconsistent or incomplete for it either should include the interpreter as the self-contradictory “liar” or should exclude any interpreter therefor remaining incomplete. That statement possesses the same formal structure as the famous Gödel (1931) incompleteness argument.

A few main arguments in favor of the thesis:

(a) The aporia appears only if the ordinary language is substituted by the abstract language for the latter is not forced to assign any constant meaning of each linguistic unit including to the “interpreter”. The interpreter determines its meaning in each case of use and it is variable.

(b) Wittgenstein’s conception of language within TLP corresponds to the abstract language described in TLP 1-6, which is furthermore necessarily incomplete (7).

(c) Wittgenstein’s conception of language-games interprets language as the ordinary language, in which the preliminary and constant meanings do not exist for they can be established only right by language-games and ad hoc to them. The same “thing” including the “interpreter” can possesses different meanings after different language-games.

(d) The Gödel incompleteness argument (1931) can be interpreted linguistically after arithmetic and counting have been understood as defined by the determining property of the abstract language: the one-to-one mapping of all things into their corresponding meanings and thus their counting. Then, Gödel’s argument implies the thesis.