Ep. 324: Plato’s “Cratylus” on Language (Part Two)

0:08 Mark: This is a Partially Examined Life Episode 324, Part 2. We've been talking about Plato's Cratylus. Have we gotten through the analogy of naming being like any other activity, which is his argument, Socrates argument for why naming can go wrong. Right Knitting. If you don't do it right, if you don't use good. The good needles, whatever the good needles involve for knitting. I don't. I don't know enough about knitting. Then either you're not knitting at all or you're certainly knitting badly. And so that's the thing, that if it was purely. If naming was purely a matter of convention, then any name anybody gives to anything is just fine.

And there's no sense in naming badly. It's just a matter if, you know, I don't know if your name catches on and other people want to use that name as well, there would be some sort of popularity. But you know, Plato's not going to be saying popularity is any kind of recommendation for something.

1:04 Dylan: Can we talk a little bit about how convention's working here? Because with knitting or crafts, you point to that because there's a sense of understanding, well, what the thing is for. And so if you're trying to build a ship, you want to build a ship. Well. And then you start talking about what the use of the ship is and what it's objective is. And same thing with knitting. If you knit a sweater and it has so many gigantic holes in it and part of the goal of the sweater is to make something that keeps you warm, then you're failing at knitting. Right.

Something like that. In the case of convention, with respect to naming, how does having convention immediately descend into it being whatever name you want to have? Because it still seems like you would have use that would have an objective. I guess what I'm wondering is about why is it that by convention just means anything goes as opposed to it still having an objective? This goes to the question of whether construction is also arbitrary. Right. Even if something is built, doesn't mean that it's not. That means it's arbitrary.

2:10 Mark: Built to last.

2:11 Wes: So Dylan, I think you're pointing to the fact that at this stage of the dialogue, even though he's building an argument for Cratylus's idea that names are non conventional, it looks a bit like convention here. And it looks like a bit like convention might be consistent with correctness or incorrectness of names. Because he's talking about people, people's purposes, rulemakers, rules, rule making that is defined by function, by supervisors or clients, however you want to put it, who turn out to be the dialecticians. But again, we can replace that with the concept of use perhaps.

So this seems to. I don't know, it's odd, it's. It seems to build out the possibility that language could be built on convention in some sense, but also do justice to the things themselves. And as I suggested, I suggested at the beginning of our conversation that we would have to get to the level of grammar perhaps before that became more plausible. Naming is a very hard case to make.

3:20 Mark: Yeah, he's going to say later the enemy seems to be euphony. Right. That is if a name was accurate because it is related to some other Greek words that well describe the concept that he has in mind. And we'll get into some examples of this soon. You can see how over time, people wanted to make it easier to say so. This is something that was pointed out in the Tomasello and Pinker and things like that that we looked at of over time. Phrases get shortened, we have contractions, spellings change. Things change just so that they actually function better, they function more efficiently. And efficiency is the enemy of accuracy as far as Plato's concerned. If on the hypothesis that names are supposed to accurately depict the things that they name, then getting rid of letters or substituting letters for ones that are easier to say, that's all irrelevant. That's all just cosmetic.

4:18 Wes: The way this ends. Before he gets into the etymology stuff, he says to Hermogenes on page nine. So Cratylus is right that not everyone is a craftsman of names, but only someone who looks to the natural name of each thing and is able to put its form into letters and syllables.

4:39 Dylan: Yeah.

4:39 Wes: The way this ends, though, is kind of weird, because we're going to talk about the supervisor. The dialectician must tell us how we can take a thing and create a name from it, put its form into letters and syllables. We got to take the thing, put its form into letters and syllables. Okay, so how are we going to do that? This gets us into the etymology section. Hermogenes asks, what is natural correctness of names consistent?

5:05 Mark: As weird as all this is of names being correct, There is something that's reminiscent of the logicians of the early 20th century that I like here, that Russell or somebody is going to say, no, the basic unit is the sentence. Right. Wittgenstein's Tractatus has something very much like that. The structure of the sentence mirrors the structure of a state of affairs of the world. So we actually do get something like the Cratylist in that much more modern thing. But they are going to deny that. You could break it smaller and say that just the subject could be false, because, you know, of course, a proposition is the kind of thing that can be true or false, but it's still the case.

Then I'm now thinking about the ordinary J.L. austin, the ordinary language philosophers, that the subject or the predicate could somehow go wrong. It could not refer. And you might want to call that false in a larger sense, you know, and maybe that is appropriate for ancient Greece because they didn't have the propositional logic or anything.

6:11 Wes: Yeah, I think Socrates perfectly understands this, that the true Adam here would be the proposition. He's just playing with the idea that you can drill down farther because it produces lots of interesting material to do that. It creates a confusion.

6:25 Dylan: Well, there's also a kind of. We didn't mention earlier that he slams the sophists at the beginning. And then just at this beginning, at. At this section here, there's another aside. He says, they're going to go on to investigate how you do this. And then he comments. Socrates comments on like, like investigation. He says, well, the most correct way is together with people who already know, but you must pay them well and show gratitude.

6:51 Wes: Besides, in the beginning of the dialog, he says, like, you know, I don't think I can do a good job with this because I only took the one drachma course from whatever sophist. I didn't take the 50 drachma course. So, you know, I wish I had taken that. And then here he's like taking this really harsh dig at Hermogenes, where he says, you know, you're better off going and begging the answer from the sophists. And I'm saying, you have to beg the answer from sophists because I know you don't have any money to buy it. So if you had the money, you could just buy it from the sophists. And then Hermogenes says, but I reject Protagoras. I don't agree with all that. And then Socrates says, okay, let's try the Homer and the poets. Let's learn from them.

7:30 Mark: I'd be interesting to hear more about what truth meant to the ancient Greeks, because I'm thinking about Heidegger's essay on the essence of truth, which is a very much doing the kind of thing when Heidegger does these analyses. This is where that cult of St. John's or whatever came from. This Heideggerian cult is because Heidegger, you know, looks at truth. Truth is not just something that applies to sentences. More basically, it applies. It's like, is something genuine or not? So is this gold coin a genuine gold coin or not? And so in that sense, yes, truth actually does drill down not just from the proposition, but to elements of propositions.

So if the individual name that is the subject of the proposition fails to actually name anything, or it includes some improper assumption about the thing, if it misdescribes it, then in an important sense, that name is false and the whole sentence that contains it. If you're going to build something, you know, Plato says it's like building proofs in geometry that if you start with a faulty assumption, then your whole argument is going to be blown off because you didn't have a good conception when you started, of this one word. And there are plenty of philosophers, Aristotle for one of them, who very much think that you have to have good definitions, right?

You have to understand the fundamental words that you're dealing with before you start using a philosophy based on them.

8:52 Dylan: They wouldn't say that you have to understand the words. Wouldn't they say you have to know what, you have to understand what you mean.

8:59 Wes: And Socrates rejects that, right? That's Meno's paradox. We only have a fuzzy conception of the thing we're investigating. We don't give our definitions up front. So you take a sentence like unicorns have horns on their heads and Mark, you're suggesting that that's not a nonsense sentence because it fails to refer, Unicorn fails to refer. But there's something false about it because the name unicorn doesn't really refer to anything. And I guess Russell broke that down in terms of definite descriptions, right? There exists an X such that X is a unicorn and X has a horn on its head, something like that, which would give us falsity rather than meaninglessness. Does that really correspond here to what we're talking about, with names naturally lining up with things? I think Cratylus would say unicorn is not really a name, which is maybe another way of saying we're just doing fiction there.

9:50 Mark: If I call Dylan the devil, I just refer to you, I'm sorry, Dylan, when you're not around, as the devil. And if I start then making comments about the devil, this, the devil that, there's something very false about that, right? There's a baked in assumption, because the devil is not just a word like Sneaky Joe, even Sneaky Joe that I used before, that implies you're sneaky, but you're not sneaky. So there's something false about that name.

10:15 Wes: But that's not an act of naming, that's a proposition.

10:17 Mark: According to homogeneous, it is.

10:19 Wes: No, you're using a name that's already been assigned a concept. The naming is assigning the utterance, the sound devil to the concept associated with being a devil. It's not subsuming Dylan under the concept of devil. That's a proposition.

10:34 Mark: That's what he's relying on, what Socrates is relying on. For you to reject the intuition that we can have private names that what if I call man Horse and I call horse Man? The only reason that would be wrong is because those names are already taken. Whereas if I said, what if I call horse Gary and I call Man Shmoo or something like again, if If Gary and Schmoo don't connote particular things, then there's something less problematic about that.

11:03 Wes: Maybe that's a good segue into the how Homer and the poets are going

11:06 Mark: to help us, which Homer, as somebody who's doing a lot of fiction, actually, according to Socrates, analysis seems to be a really good namer. Right. If Homer is coming up with these fictional characters, and you know that this fictional character is very brutal, and Homer will give it a name that connotes brutality, well, then Homer is a good poet. He's naming appropriately.

11:29 Wes: So we have Astyanax.

11:31 Dylan: You know, the name Kramer is door enterer.

11:35 Wes: Yeah. It derives from krei, dor and mer enter. So Astyanax, he gives an etymological derivation such that it means lord of the city, and this is Hector's son. And Hector also means king as well. And then we get the idea that, well, if Hector is king, he's going to have a son who is of the same kind. And those names need to line up in some way. They need. We can look to consistency as evidence of correctness. So Hector's name means. I forget what it means. Literally, it is suggestive of a king, and so is son's name. Astyanax.

12:17 Mark: Hector is literally possessor.

12:19 Dylan: Yeah, possessor.

12:22 Mark: These are all very loose that like. Well, okay, this literally means possessor, which could mean a lot of things, like possessor of truth. Possessor. But that sounds like possessor of the kingdom.

12:33 Wes: Sure.

12:33 Mark: You know, that's what makes this so sophistical, is that he is putting these interpretations. Oh, it's a stoppage. Well, it's a stoppage of the flow. Or it's. Wait, it's a. It's a stoppage. What was it dawn is longing for? Because when you're, you know, you're longing for dawn to come or something like

12:52 Wes: that day, you're longing for day. Yeah, dawn is longing for day. But this is all just one standup routine. The Stanford article in the Etymology section describes these scholarly debates about different readings and how some scholars don't think this is ironic. I just have trouble wrapping my head around an interpretation which doesn't understand that Socrates is joking.

13:15 Dylan: Yeah, and there's so many other places where he's clearly making fun of something. It feels like this whole section is a version of. Look, I can do bogus etymologies all day long and I'll sound awesome. It goes on too long, but you can't help but imagine him just laughing his ass off while he's writing. This. And then people who are part of his know him or whatever that are laughing the whole time at. Because they know people who are teaching things right out. Hiring rich people in Athens who are hiring sophists to then explain to their children about how all these words mean these things based upon these letters. And he's making fun of them all.

13:59 Mark: Yeah, it's the same with that ridiculous second half of the Parmenides. And you're like, is this serious? How am I supposed to take this? And I guess I think we're going to talk about irony with Kierkegaard before too long. So. And he very much has in mind Socratic irony that it could be. I don't know. I'll refer folks to my 12 days of Christmas song. That the fact that something is sort of a conceptual joke doesn't mean you don't want to play it out to the end. So it takes an hour and a half for that song to complete its cycle of doing that. And I think in here it, you know, he goes through all these concepts, starting with the names of the gods, but then proceeding through really all of his philosophical concepts. And there's something very systematic about that, such that he couldn't have just stopped halfway through.

14:49 Dylan: It goes kind of gently, right? So you start out, this beginning part is feel like, okay, I get it. Hector, possessor. You know, it sounds plausible, but as you go along, you eventually get as well, you know, actually just we have to, you know, keep in mind that rearranging the letters, removing a sound here and there, that's just part of. Part of figuring this out correctly. So eventually you basically rearranging whatever letters you want to, in whatever way you want to. To make up whatever you want to make up.

15:20 Wes: So ultimately, this is a reductio ad absurdum, Right? That's another piece of evidence that it's all ironic. And he's going to give an alternative etymological derivation of things that he's gotten from flow and Heraclitus in terms of stasis. And in any case, he's going to tell us that Cratylus is wrong. But here he's going to do his best to support Cratilus's position. And I think with this first thing that he does with Astyanax and Hector, which I glossed over, now I'm a little bit confused just trying to gloss over it from my notes. So there is this section about we're right to call lion's offspring a lion, and a horse is a horse as long as they're not born monsters, right?

As long as there's no genetic abnormalities. But what about a king for a king? He's going to say, that does kind of work out because again, we can give these different derivations of Hector and Astyanax. What he's saying is that Hector and Astyanax are different names. They sound different. So the idea is that, why doesn't Hector's son have the name Hector in the same way that a lion's offspring would have the name lion? He's conflating purposefully proper names with natural kind names. And the conclusion on page 13 is that Hector and Astyanax can signify the same thing, even though they look different.

So this lends stronger support to Cratylus position. We can't just say, oh, there are different languages for things. And look, there's Gato in one language and Cat in another. Both Gato and Cat can do justice to the same thing, to the same thing in itself, just as Hector and Astyanax do justice to their kind membership, to the fact that they're both kings and the son of a king is a king, and blah, blah, blah.

17:15 Dylan: But isn't there something even in this section? It's still, even though Astyanax and Hector sound different, those names are still fitting in the way in which they were individually fitting, right? At least here there's still that kind of etymological fittingness of the names. It's not like you called it all of a sudden. Sodapop means king, right? Just because some king named their offspring Soda Pop, and then that prince became prince, Soda Pop became king, right? That's not how it works.

17:53 Mark: Just to give a little more context for this, since we're drilling into this example, so it's talking about Hector's son. He's called both Scamandrios and Astyanax in various places in the text. And so the question is, is one of those more correct and, you know, some prima facie argument evidence it gives is, well, the women call him Scamandrios. The men call him Astyanax Homer thinks the men are better, right? So, okay, so that's, that's one reason. But why, why is Astyanax better? Well, the defender or lord of the city Astyanax so that it's putting together the Lord and the city to make Astyanax, which, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing as Possessor, which is what Hector means, but we can see that they're referring to the same kind of activity.

And so it's good insofar as Hector son does in fact resemble Hector. It's good that he has a name that is also in. That names him as a political leader. But ultimately this is in the context of we're gonna stop talking about proper names pretty quickly. Because people give their kids their proper names and they give them. Let's name him after Uncle J. Well, Uncle Jay might have been a great warrior, and J means warrior or whatever, but actually this new kid, why would you think he's going to necessarily end up a warrior? You know, just there's all sorts of random people because the name givers, we can say, oh, they might have even been the gods when we're talking about why is a river called a river?

But you can't call that as why is Jay called Jay? Well, it's because his parents named him that they're very fallible. They're not necessarily in touch with the things in themselves and they don't know the future of their child before it actually is born.

19:40 Wes: Also, a bad son can be born to a good man. So he moves after the Hector example, right into a counterexample and then describes Orestes as ruggedness and ag, while his father, Agamemnon refers to being admirable and a bunch of other things maybe. So he runs in the opposite direction here, right after trying to do something with Hector and Astyanax. So then we get into the gods, right.

20:07 Mark: Or the characters of mythology. So Tantalus, who I guess is not technically a God, but is, you know what he ends up with a Sisyphean sort of task. I forget exactly what the story of Tantalus is, but I guess it means literally most weighted upon. Right. It fits the bad things that happened to him in the story of Tantalus, where he ends up in Hades being tortured in whatever the way is.

20:28 Dylan: Tantalus is the guy who. His punishment is to be thirsty. He's on a rock, he's dying of thirst, he's surrounded by water. And when he reaches down for the water, the water recedes and he's starving and there's grapes above him. And as he reaches up for the grapes, they pull out of his reach. That's right, you're tantalized.

20:48 Mark: Yes, exactly. And so, yes, if you're explaining to a child what tantalizing means, and you could tell that story like, oh, that's pretty good, you know, but that's as far as it goes.

20:59 Dylan: Yeah.

20:59 Wes: It's interesting to hear Tantalus be derived from weightiness when we know Tantalizing is derived from Tantalus. Then we get into Zeus. He starts doing fishy things, right? Saying, well, it can come from two words. How does he. What does he say about Zeus, the cause of life? Yeah.

21:19 Mark: Isn't there somewhere in here there's a preface of, like, we don't know what the gods call themselves. Presumably they have the correct names when they're speaking to each other, but we just have the names we come up for them so that people are trying to grasp the ineffable. We do not know anything about the gods. Literally. We apparently, even though we know the forms, we can't say whether Zeus is actually the right name for him or not. You know, it would be expected that different cultures or different strains in the same culture would come up with multiple names. And so, yeah, Zeus, he has this. I didn't have any idea that there were two different portions or variations of the name of Zeus. Had you guys even heard of this before?

21:59 Wes: No, he's breaking it down into two words which he's saying Zeus comes from two words which means cause of life, Dia being through and zena being life.

22:08 Dylan: And in fact, I mean, there's a footnote here, makes these earlier ones seem not altogether implausible. So he says Zeus, nominative, has two declinations, one of which, as a poetical one, has zana in the accusative and the other the ordinary one, dia. So there's something going on here that's not altogether crazy.

22:33 Wes: He does get crazy. Yeah, he gets as crazy as he likes, like heroes from Eros or rhetoric, sophists, rhetoricians. And so he makes a joke about. Yeah, I think maybe the heroes are just. Are related to the rhetoricians of. The Sophists, are the descendants of heroes of. Of demigod heroes. So obvious, clearly a joke. And then he does the thing about. I do. We're not investigating the gods that would get us into. Into trouble. We're just talking about the names.

23:03 Mark: If evaluating the names means you're evaluating whether it fits the gods, then you do have to investigate the gods to see whether the name is the right one.

23:13 Wes: Is there anything else, like, in the derivation of the name of the gods that we want to mention? You know, the only interesting thing is the fact that Hades, right, Aides means cannot be seen, which is clearly the correct derivation of Hades. But he says, no, that's not correct. It's because he knows everything fine and beautiful and so combined people to Hades with the ultimate desire, which is to be around that sort of person. Because that sort of person who knows everything fine and beautiful will make you a better man. Clearly. Bullshit.

23:43 Mark: So 397D, which is page 115. After he's considered a lot of the names of particular gods, then like, well, what about the word gods itself? So let me just read this quote, just as an example. I suspect theoi is what gods is in. In Greek. Is that correctly called? It probably is. And Socrates says, I suspect something like this. It seems to me that the first inhabitants of Greece believed only in those gods, which many foreigners still believe in today. The sun, moon, earth, stars and sky. And seeing that these were always moving or running, they gave them the name Theoi because it was their nature to run Theon.

Later, when they learned about the other gods, they called them all by that name. This might be the first place where he's really starting on the. The movement thing as the Heraclitean description of. So, yeah, so this sets up Dylan. Yeah, go on to. He's going to talk about body and soul and more philosophically. Interesting stuff.

24:36 Dylan: 118 is where he analyzes body and soul and has a couple different versions of what psuche means. So he's investigating whether soul and body are reasonably named. He has a first derivation of soul. The word in Greek is or psyche.

24:59 Wes: Right.

24:59 Mark: The recognizable version. Am I just right? That these. Whether it's pronounced suke or psyche. Psyche is just a matter that they didn't really spell out their vowels or something like.

25:08 Wes: There is a standard pronunciation that you learn

25:13 Dylan: is breath, and that's the one that you hear the most often, that soul is breath. That word psuke is most conventionally directly related to that. But then he goes on to give a second definition as.

25:27 Mark: What does he say Fuseke is nature sustainer.

25:31 Dylan: Yes. So he's combining a couple. Yeah, Nature sustainer. And if you distorted it a little, you'd come up with another one. But then he goes on to body. So you have soul. The second definition of soul is as nature sustainer.

25:46 Mark: And he mentioned Anaxagoras. So I see this as maybe Socrates is giving. There's real philosophy in here, right. That you might think as Aristotle. I think what the Greek word actually means is that the soul is just whatever the animating force is in the body. But Plato's going to have a theory of soul from Anaxagoras, which as mind, soul, broadly speaking, is what underlines everything. Right. It is the logos, it is the ratio, it is the, you know, the governance of the entire universe. And so let's do our etymology to actually support that philosophy. That soul doesn't just mean the breathing thing, it means the nature sustainer. Like basically God.

26:28 Dylan: Yeah, Philosophical etymology.

26:29 Mark: Yeah.

26:30 Dylan: You referred to Heidegger earlier. That's the kind of thing Heidegger would do too. Right?

26:34 Mark: That's not a joke. I mean, I don't know if it ultimately is, you know, just like he's going to give these Heraclitean etymologies, they are philosophical. It's not Plato's philosophy. There has to be some. Some logic to the madness, even if it is all ironic.

26:50 Dylan: Yeah. And so he refers to body and then links it up with the tomb of the soul, then comes up with enclosure, enclosure of the soul.

27:02 Wes: Sema. Sign.

27:03 Dylan: Yep. The sign of the soul.

27:05 Wes: Sema is tomb or sign.

27:07 Dylan: Sign, yeah. Or the prison in which the soul is securely kept, the sozatai, as the name soma itself suggests. So the body ends up being the enclosure for the soul or the prison of the soul, or the sign of

27:21 Mark: the soul being as Usia, which some call Esia. So Hestia is the goddess you honor first. So connecting the name of Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home, the one that gets the first sacrifices, is fundamental, the fundamental God. In this way, which I'd never heard Hestia described that way before. I thought Zeus is the king of the God, whatever, or Gaia, you know, is the underlying. But no, here it's Hestia. Well, that sort of sounds like, if you stretch it, usia being. So again, we're having a. Yeah, being is fundamental. So it's right there in the word being. What. What a good name that they came up with for being.

27:59 Wes: So in 28 to 29, we get this pivot to the Heraclitean. And there he says that people who gave names in ancient times don't blame that on their internal condition. Right. On convention or on their particular idiosyncrasies, but on the nature of the things themselves. The thinking that being is, quote, never stable or steadfast, but flowing and moving, full of every sort of motion and constant coming into being. So the suggestion is that the first namers are essentially Heracliteans. And then he gives some derivations of knowledge, words like wisdom, phronesis, which is the understanding of motion and flow, judgment as studying what is begotten, what is born.

Noesis is longing for what is new. Knowledge is following the movement of things, Comprehension is journeying with things. And the good is what is admirable about the fast. And that's on page 130. So really interesting pivot here from seemingly more arbitrary derivations of the names of the gods to derivations of epistemological terms in accordance with a specific epistemological theory. Heracliteanism, wisdom, phronesis.

29:18 Mark: Wisdom is the understanding of motion, which is for us, noesis and flow. Right. So noesis is understanding for us, I guess, is motion. Or it might be interpreted as taking delight in motion. For us. Onesis both of those, you know, if you combine them, they sound like phronesis. So in either case, it has to do with motion. I wasn't even really clear. You know, we've used phronesis as a technical term for practical wisdom for Aristotle. I didn't actually realize that it was just the generic term for wisdom and

29:49 Wes: that that's what Sophia is, the generic word for wisdom.

29:52 Mark: Oh, love of wisdom. Of course. Yes.

29:54 Wes: Okay, so phronesis is a more specific term with a different connotation.

29:59 Mark: As for wisdom, Sophia, it signifies the grasp of motion, though this is obscure and non attic. This is on page 130. So this is his out is. If I can't figure out a sensible etymology for it, it's probably because it's from a foreign word, which would explain why we have two different words for it. We have phronesis for wisdom, practical wisdom, and we have Sophia for wisdom. You know, the kind of thing that Socrates talks most about, they probably as in English. Well, this one came from the Latin languages. This one came from Germanic, the same thing. And that's going to break. There is probably some reason for it, but because I don't know this other language, Socrates is saying, I don't know, Lydian or Phrygian or Dorian or whatever. Then I can't actually give the full etymology.

30:47 Wes: I like this idea of justice as the fastest and smallest thing that penetrates all. Sounds almost like atoms. It seems like he's alluding maybe to democritus and atomism. And the idea here is that the fastest and smallest thing generates everything. That's why I'm thinking of atoms and penetrates all being. And then we move on to lots of other flowing metaphors, like the derivation of eros on page 137 from Ezra's influx. Because desire flows in from the outside. Thinking is a motion of the soul.

31:23 Dylan: I just want to read the one for Techne. We should see what the name Techne craft means. If you remove the T and insert an O between the k and the un and the n and the l, doesn't it signify the possession of understanding. Hexis nu. So Hermogenes replies, but yes, but doing so is like trying to haul a boat up a very sticky ramp. This is. That's where I got my opening. And then Socrates goes on to say, but then, you know, Hermogenes, that the first names given to things have long since been covered over by those who wanted to dress them up, and that letters were added or subtracted to make them sound good in the mouth, resulting in distortions and ornamentation of every kind. And then he goes on to talk about how words just get distorted over

32:12 Wes: time, which is very helpful in giving very creative derivations of the words. Yes, yes.

32:19 Mark: I want to dwell on justice for one more second, since why is it the fastest thing? Well, it's because it penetrates everything, that somehow he's making a claim about justice, which it seems like there's lots of things that you could say, you know, any virtue or whatever, virtue penetrates everything, but justice somehow is more penetrative. And because on this Heraclitean view, everything is in motion already. Well, you'd have to be really fast to catch up in order to penetrate. So that's a crazy flight of fancy.

32:50 Wes: Justice is the fundamental regulative principle of everything. That it produces order in the universe and that the thing that produces order in the universe must penetrate everything, must suffuse everything to be its first principle. Sorry, I gave a very bad explanation of that before. And that's why I thought about this in terms of atomism, which may be a little legitimate, but I'm. Because I'm thinking of like particles flying, flying through the air and penetrating everything. But it fits with the idea of atoms as these regulative first principles. So we get, as usual with the Presocratics. It sounds very Presocratic, where we're getting a materialist account of the world and we reduce the normative, reduce justice to some. The facts of physics, let's say.

33:36 Mark: I just didn't realize that that was

33:37 Wes: not something that Socrates wants to do.

33:39 Mark: That that was in the Platonic canon, that justice is the balancing of the soul. And so it would make sense. Just like, you know, mind is something that is the nature sustainer. The justice would also be. We read his cosmology in the Timaeus, and I don't remember justice being the thing that is making all the spheres move the way they are, you know, used in these astronomical terms. Maybe he does. And I just, you know, because we didn't have the Greek in front of us, or I Just don't remember. But it's. That's very interesting to me.

34:10 Wes: Yeah, that's my interpretation. So it could be.

34:12 Mark: No, I think that's right on.

34:14 Wes: I was just gonna move us to the point where he says on 38 to 39, we can't keep doing this forever. So this method of breaking down words as portmanteaus to get their meanings in the way they fit with reality is obviously problematic because what do we do with the component words, the primary words that we've broken things down into? We reach an element that we can't carry back any farther. And that's where he gives us the idea that correctness of those sorts of names has to do with imitation and in particular with vocal imitation, which is not to say like saying ba.

Right. To indicate sheep. That's not really a name, a way of naming them. It's not like painting or music. What we're imitating is not the appearance of the thing, but the essence of things. And somehow we can do that with letters and syllables. This is at page 140. It's not a painter or musician who does that type of imitation, but a namer.

35:09 Mark: Yeah, I mean, this becomes a pretty challenging sort of puzzle, which I think is what he ultimately confronts Cratylus with. This is that you've got these basic names that are, you know, ion, going rion, flowing and down, shackling. Those are ones that, for whatever reason, it seems hard to look at them as compound words. And so maybe they are, as you just said, they directly are picking out aspects of the. The universe, but you're supposed to be able to break those down even further. That. Why is. Why does rion pick out flowing? Well, because it has the, er, sound. And that's a very flowy sort of.

35:50 Wes: The tongue is most agitated when it makes the R sound. So you can see the way he's delivering on this idea that the imitation that he's talking about is not like ba for sheep, but it's capturing the essence flowing. It's getting at a component of a metaphysical theory because of the way we move our mouths and producing a certain vowel sound.

36:18 Mark: And all these end up being. Having to do with either flowing or stopping the flow. Like, is that what the ancients were obsessed with is that they were such Heracliteans. They were not concerned directly with the hunt or whatever. They were concerned with the fact that the hunt is fleeting and flowing and you have to run fast to catch the thing. I'm just trying to interpret this supposed Heraclitean Obsession that he's attributing to the ancients here.

36:44 Wes: Well, they weren't all Heracliteans, obviously there are Democritans or Anaxagoreans, but that's certainly Plato's obsession according to Aristotle. And it's what the forms are for. The forms are supposed to solve the problem of Heracliteanism.

37:01 Mark: Yeah. You would just think that the positing, like a Presocratic would, that the whole universe is flux, is stability, that these would be achievements of a pinnacle of a civilization that has started with just trying to get through the day and do their hunting and then work up to planting and building. And now we're talking about abstractions. But no, no, the ancient namers, they were philosophers actually, before they came up with any of. Before they were doing animal husbandry, they were, you know, bemoaning the transitory nature of existence. Okay.

37:41 Dylan: It is of a piece, Right. It's similar to the. What's the confusion of the meno or whatever is how. How do you learn something that you don't already know? How does something come to be that wasn't always there? Right. And there's this notion a. That it isn't really the thing unless it's eternal. Right. That's part of the deal with the forms. Right. The really real things are the things that always were there. Those are the elements.

38:06 Wes: They must be stable enough to be objects of knowing.

38:09 Dylan: Yes, but the notion that those things are generated in some way is just not part of the deal. In fact, that disjunction is certainly there in all of the Platonic dialogues. To me, one way I would understand the problem that Plato has with Heraclitus is, well, if everything's flow, how do you get fixity? And if you have fixity, then that must be something that didn't come from change. But the idea that something would evolve into something that's fixed, something that would emerge, that's not going on here.

38:44 Mark: This makes it even more amazing that there would be Heraclitean savages, because the savages would be blissfully innocent and they would be more in touch with the forms. Philosophy has not yet polluted their mind with Heraclitean thoughts. So the Namers actually should have been.

39:00 Dylan: I have never seen in Plato. Or it's always origins from the gods, right? Origins from some kind of perfection, as opposed to origins from some kind of something closer to a quote unquote state of nature. They don't have state of nature theories.

39:15 Wes: So my view is that Plato understands that language is an emergent phenomenon. And this is another point of irony. He knows that there aren't rule setters back in the day, back in ancient, ancient times, creating language from on high. That's kind of a crazy notion of the development of language historically. We just did Tomasello where we think about deriving language use originally from certain cognitive achievements. The ability for joint attention and then the manifestation of that and things like pointing. There's a parallel here to norms in that norms originally are emergent and then they get formalized into laws by rule setters so that the normative phenomena have this dual nature where originally they don't come from theory and thought, they just come from practice but they can be modified by theorizing about them.

So we have certain. A society develops certain norms and ideas about what's good and what proper behaviors are and through reflection, theoretical reflection, it can change those norms. And societies of course historically have done that. So I think by analogy he understands that language works the same way and that you maybe could have rule setters today maybe when it comes to language but that originally it must be emergent and that philosophical activity and rule setting is an after the fact modification of something that's already there.

40:52 Mark: Yeah, you could have an idea. You know, just like people name their kids, we're all rule setters to some extent. But which rules, which names are going to stick is not just going to be a matter of arbitrary convention but which ones actually resonate so that, which ones are actually accurate. That if I name a free flowing river hoch. Paul, I guess you know the Klingons are just. They can't talk about free flowing rivers because all they all have all these glottal stops and things. Well that just wouldn't catch on. And nobody else would take my suggestion that that's what we should call river.

It would be nipped in the bud as soon as it tried to pass to a second person. The, the obvious observations would cut that right off. You know we said in the beginning of this discussion sort of how it ends. How I'm still really very interested to hear how Cratylus is giving the first case I've seen of this. No, no, it's not false. It's just nonsense. If you call name something wrongly, it's like you're just banging a pot. You're speaking nonsense that has such a prominent place in later philosophy that I did not realize it was all the way back that there is a proponent of it, a protohuman or whatever in

42:06 Wes: the figure of Cratylus here Mark, you and I could do a close reading of pages 44 through 56 if you wanted. Because this is the part, right? I mean, this is a real twist in the dialogue. And then it gets heavily philosophical again and he says, cratilus, do you agree with all this? And Cratylus says, yes. And then ultimately he's going to end up saying, no, none of this works.

42:26 Mark: And yeah, I will put a pin in that. Any other final thoughts about this?

42:32 Wes: Every time I come back to Plato, I just love it so much. I wish. How many dialogues have we not gotten to yet? We should really.

42:39 Mark: Just a lot, but major ones. I think we've covered most of them.

42:45 Wes: Cratylus would be like the last thing on a Plato syllabus, right? I found it so rewarding and enjoyable and philosophically stimulating as well.

42:55 Mark: When I was looking at philosophy of language syllabi, like, this is on some of them, it wasn't on the one that I had in undergrad. We went straight to Frege. But I feel like if I'd started with this and then maybe throwing a little mill in there or somebody, I don't know who would be the intervening figure. Like, it would have gone down a lot easier before I was just thrown into Frege and Russell. And like, what does this have to do with language? Like, I was expecting something more along the lines of Tomasello about how we actually acquire it and what it is and rather than these.

This weird logical reduction. Because that is kind of what Plato is imagining in the Cratylus here, at least during part of it is that, okay, the language of the gods would be, you know, this is like the perfect language that Wittgenstein and Frege and Russell were looking for during this period. But it would be one where all of the individual phonemes, the individual sounds represent, and those are put together in a way that retains representation and those are put together into compound words that retain representation. And it's just the fact that, you know, our language is such a hodgepodge that evolved over time and involves a lot of just guessing by the name setters of how they think the world is and trying to, you know, so that if you take something serious about this project of naming, I don't know, maybe the reason that we ultimately can't take it seriously is because we can't do it.

Like the gods can. Like, yes, let's imagine this ideal language. And this is sort of parallels the progression from those early analytic figures and their ideal language that would get rid of all ambiguity and get rid of all the tricky philosophical problems that have just risen out of bad language and just throwing that away and instead looking at how the ordinary language philosophers did and how later Wittgenstein, that there's just something appealing about this ideal language idea that just never works out. You spend 20 years on it, then you're just like, screw this.

All this is such bullshit. All right, thanks, folks. Next time we're going to talk about Paul Grice, which is just a name that I felt like we needed to fill in from those philosophy of language syllabi. His most famous essay is meaning from 1957. And then we'll have a couple others supporting that. I've gotten back into posting on our Discord. If you're a supporter, you have access to our Discord server. So that is where you know, if you want to know in advance of me posting it on the previous posting on the website. If you want to know what we're going to do next time and you're a supporter.

Yeah. Get involved in the Discord thing. Everybody has access, of course, to Facebook, to Twitter. We're looking at threads. Is that a thing we should do to people? Do people use that? Let us know if you use that. If that's something that we would love to hear about episodes through that. That means Instagram. Or just email us at pl@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com with your suggestions of what we should cover in the future, either on here or apparently on close reads, too. So thanks, everybody. Good night.

46:02 Dylan: Good night.

46:02 Wes: Good night.