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You're not seeing the difference.  In order to describe love through the language of biochemistry, you first have to define what love is in a way that biochemistry can provide provide meaningful evidence. For example, you could define love as sexual attraction or emotion.

However, that reductionist definition of love is not what two lovers mean by love.  Rather, they are interested in something else by the word love, and knowing more about the biological attraction part of their feelings is simply not an interesting part of their thinking on love -- its nonsense. (If the biochemical explanation of why they might be about to commit adultery is helpful to them, they probably should call it quits before things get more complicated.)

Wittgenstein's insights are important here because of his systematic exploration of how we go about finding truth in the world. Specifically, he notes that just because we cannot speak of things in truth-proposition terms doesn't mean we can assume they don't matter -- just that we can't speak of them.

by santiago on Mon Oct 26th, 2009 at 01:55:31 PM EST
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santiago:
For example, you could define love as sexual attraction or emotion.

Yes, that's exactly what you do.

santiago:

Rather, they are interested in something else by the word love, and knowing more about the biological attraction part of their feelings is simply not an interesting part of their thinking on love -- its nonsense.

No, their thinking is nonsense, because they're not thinking at all.

They're convinced their incredibly important feelings are the most real thing in the world, when the reality is that the incredibly important feelings tend to fade rather quickly, and are - in truth - easily transferrable to other people.

The point is the experience tells you nothing useful about the likely outcome, nor how to achieve what both people in that state want - which is usually a successful relationship.

If you want more people to have successful loving relationships you can safely ignore their all-consuming emotions, as soon as you realise how transient and trivial they are.

Instead you find out what actions they can take to improve clear communication, balance expectations, increase trust, and all of those other boring adult things that actually make relationships work. You can do this empirically with surveys, interviews, lab work, workshops, and so on.

If you do it, you get happier people, as any competent relationship psychologist can demonstrate.

If you don't, you get conditioned hormonal idiots completely driven by Darwinian instincts, who are as likely to kill themselves or each other as be happy. (q.v. almost any tragic opera you care to name - not to mention a surprising number of suicides and murders every year.)

Some people enjoy being swept away by a tidal wave of feeling, so this seems rather dull to them. But it can actually save marriages and save lives - in a very literal way.

santiago:

Specifically, he notes that just because we cannot speak of things in truth-proposition terms doesn't mean we can assume they don't matter -- just that we can't speak of them.

This is irrelevant here, because there isn't any problem speaking of them.

What isn't being done is mystification and unconscious sanctification - which are something else entirely, and unlikely to have been officially approved by Wittgenstein.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue Oct 27th, 2009 at 07:57:06 AM EST
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Hmm, seems like you must be missing out on a lot of life if the only way you can engage things is by first making them conform to your own, a priori assumptions of what the world is.

By redefining love to only mean sexual attraction or an emotion, you've changed the meaning of the word to something not originally intended.  I don't think any linguists would agree, for example, the "love" and "sexual attraction" mean the same thing.  You've substituted an observable proxy of sexual attraction for an unobservable meaning of love in the same way that economists substitute "income" for "well-being" -- it's something they can measure even if its not the same thing.  This is what Wittgenstein refers to as "nonsense." You can have a sophisticated technical explanation of sexual attraction that conforms to observable evidence about it, but someone can just say, "Um, that's neat, but it's not really what I meant by the word, "love."

An honest approach to knowledge requires accepting that language imposes restrictions on meaning, so analytical symbols are often just proxies for the concepts we are really interested in, not the concepts themselves.

If the only way you can make sense of a word such as "love" is by assuming, a priori, a narrower definition than what others might ascribe to the word, then you haven't engaged in truth seeking. You've just engaged in avoiding a harder problem -- you've been lazy.  That's a dishonest approach to knowledge at a very fundamental level, but it is also a very common one.

by santiago on Tue Oct 27th, 2009 at 10:55:55 AM EST
[ Parent ]
santiago:
An honest approach to knowledge requires accepting that language imposes restrictions on meaning, so analytical symbols are often just proxies for the concepts we are really interested in, not the concepts themselves.

That's very Platonic of you, but it's at best misleading, and at worst, completely wrong.

Do you think 'love' exists outside of human experience?

As someone who is - presumably - human, how do you know this?

What exactly is an 'unobservable meaning', if no one can observe it?

Lazy thinking is much better at imposing restrictions on meaning than language is. Language is just as able to expand meaning and insight - as long as it's used correctly.

What expands insight is pattern recognition - understanding how experiences repeat, and relate.

Do you think 'love' is completely amorphous and freeform, and everyone's experience of it is completely original and unique?

Or are there certain stories, roles, scripts and outcomes that are common enough to be recognisable, and even predictable?

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Oct 28th, 2009 at 09:32:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Do you think 'love' exists outside of human experience?

No. But I don't need to know this in order to think this, because it wouldn't change my thinking if it could be shown that love does exist outside of human experience, so your question seems irrelevant.

"Unobservable" refers to abstract concepts, and philosophers use that term to distinguish it from "unobserved" -- something that should be able to be observed if we only had the senses or tools to do it. A geometric proof is an example of an unobservable meaning in that might be impossible to observe in nature (such as true vacuum is), but it can nonetheless be shown to be true, so it belongs to the set of things in the world that can be shown to exist by using language. (Wittgenstein's truth-proposition framework.)

Other unobservable things, such as the meaning of love and death to an individual, do not belong to that set of things that can be proven to exist using language because whether or not they do exist are irrelevant to further thinking about them. Existence is not a relevant question for an abstraction such as love, but communicating what one means by love still may matter nonetheless, which means that it is still part of the world.

Do you believe there are no such things as abstractions in the world? If so, can you prove it?

Lazy thinking imposes restrictions usually by misusing language.  Misusing language is akin to using language as a crutch, much like we complain about religious people using faith as a crutch. Lazy thinkers fail to imagine meaning beyond present definitions of symbols, and they fail to appreciate how the definitions of the symbols they been given by others must necessarily restrict their ability to think about the world. Non-lazy thinkers, which are rare, are those use their recognition of the limits of language to generalize beyond those limits and thereby make new discoveries about the world.

Do you think 'love' is completely amorphous and freeform, and everyone's experience of it is completely original and unique?

No, I don't. Uniqueness is not a relevant concept to my understanding of love. (I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up.) Whether love is the same or different for each individual has nothing to do with wanting to think about and communicate one's own personal experience of it. It is enough that I think that each individual being is unique. (Which can be proven using only simple characteristics such as time and space to show that at least in those two dimensions no two individual beings are the same.) That's why you can't universally define "love" as "sexual attraction." (Again, how many people can you find who really think those two words mean the very same thing? I know you won't find many philosophers or other people who have really thought deeply on this subject who do.)  

There certainly are stories, concepts, roles, etc, that are common enough to be recognizable and predictable. But that's not important to our discussion here. What matters in many cases are not the odds of prediction, but individual, unique experiences at hand. Although there are billions of people in the world, the only experience of it that I can answer to is my own. I'm the only one who will die my own death, and the bio-chemical description of that death will be irrelevant to my experience of it, even if it is relevant to my experience of others' deaths.

As a banker once told me regarding his lack of trust in portfolio risk management techniques, "When you're the one who's diving head-first into a pond, it doesn't really matter what the average depth is, does it?"

 

by santiago on Sun Nov 1st, 2009 at 12:33:46 AM EST
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