"Can language convey feelings?" "I feel a very unpleasant feeling in my stomach. I often hear people say that my stomach hurts, so I believe that this feeling is also "pain". So I told you,"My stomach hurts.”Do you understand what I mean? You must think you understand. You're not me, you can't feel the discomfort that my stomach feels, so how do you understand? You might say that you've also had a stomach 'pain' before. You understand the meaning of the word 'pain' based on the feeling you once had, and thus understand what I mean. However, although we use the same word "pain" to express our feelings, our feelings are likely to be different. The point is that we are two different individuals. My feelings can never appear in your consciousness, and you can never compare my feelings with your feelings in your consciousness. Therefore, it is impossible to know whether we use the word "pain" to express the same feeling.
You might say,"Even so, we can still infer what I mean by 'pain' in the stomach through facial expressions, hand movements, and other visible signs that usually appear when the stomach hurts, or even through medical means to find out the cause of the pain such as gastric ulcers and gastroenteritis."
Yes, external signs or medical tests can boost your confidence and make you believe that you understand what I mean by 'stomachache,' but it doesn't prove that your understanding is correct, because none of this changes the fact at all: Your understanding of the meaning of the word "pain" depends only on your feelings. You can't feel what I feel.
You might say,"We don't need to find out whether different people feel exactly the same when they say the word 'pain'. Even if everyone is trying to guess what other people mean by the word' pain', as long as it works in real life, such as reminding the doctor to do some necessary tests, that's enough."
Alright, I completely agree. However, in this way, you are no longer talking about whether language can convey feelings, but whether language can be used in practice.
For example, there was a color-blind person who could not distinguish between red and green and called them both "red". Now let me ask you, did he mean the red you see, the green you see, or a color you have never seen before? You obviously can't answer that, because you can't feel his feelings for color. By the same logic, he had no idea what the " red " and " green " you mentioned were, or why you used different names to call the same color he saw.
"You're not me, so you can't really know how I feel.”For this seemingly irrefutable argument, the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu had a very witty rebuttal. Once, he and Hui Shi stood on a bridge to watch the fish and sighed,""Look at the fish swimming around, how happy they are!”Hui Shi asked,"You are not a fish. How do you know that a fish is happy?"”"You're not me. How do you know that I don't know that the fish are happy?"”Chuang Tzu's rebuttal seemed like a word game, but it actually pointed out the logical contradiction of the above arguments. Since the consciousness of different individuals could not be connected, it was impossible for me to know what you felt. Therefore, whether I knew what you felt was also something that happened in my consciousness. How could you know?”Can language convey thoughts?" "In fact, what is said above about feelings applies to thoughts as well, to a lesser extent. Thought is the understanding of an object or event. However, because everyone is in a different relationship with this object or event, their understanding is also different, but they often use the same words to say different meanings.
For example, many people were saying: "Cao Xueqin is the greatest writer in China.”However, different people used this sentence to express very different meanings. For Cao Xueqin's relatives and friends, the name " Cao Xueqin " indicated the living person they had come into contact with. For the countless readers who read 'Dream of the Red Chamber' and were moved by it, the word 'Cao Xueqin' signified the author of the novel that moved them. The reason and degree of their feelings varied greatly, and the meaning and weight of the sentence they said also varied greatly. For those who had never read 'Dream of the Red Chamber', if they said this, it meant nothing more than: "I once heard people say that Cao Xueqin is the greatest writer in China, but I don't know who Cao Xueqin is or why he is the greatest writer in China.”
Perhaps you would say that this only showed that different people had different understandings of this sentence, but this sentence itself should have a certain meaning, and this meaning would not change because people understood it differently. In fact, some philosophers have argued this way. However, other philosophers would ask: What exactly was the original meaning of this sentence? Was this what the first person who said this meant? However, his intentions only exist in his consciousness. It is impossible for us to know for sure. Moreover, even if he knew, there was no reason to use it as a measure to determine the meaning of this sentence. Was it the truth that this sentence indicated? However, there were no facts that did not need to be explained, and after explanation, the facts would take on a different appearance.
Since ancient times, there had been two opposing views on language, which could be represented by the ancient Greek philosophers Parmenides and Gorgia. Parmenides believed that there was a strict correspondence between language and thought, and between thought and object. Language expressed a certain thought, and thought pointed to a certain thought object. Gorgia believed, on the contrary, that there was an insurmountable barrier between the three. He proposed three famous principles: 2. Even if something exists, it cannot be recognized. Third, even if they could recognize him, they would not be able to convey it to others. What language conveyed was only language, not thoughts, nor the target. Even today, there were still people who insisted on these two extreme views. However, most philosophers seem to prefer a milder view. They do not believe that language has an absolutely definite meaning, nor do they believe that language cannot express ideas at all. Instead, they believe that we can roughly determine the meaning of language and communicate ideas with each other in actual use.”
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