(Original Review, 2015-08-20)

I must first admit that I know nothing about philosophy and therefore attempting a review of a book of this magnitude makes me approach it with a certain degree of trepidation. But reviews are free so why not take the plunge and as it interests me how we live within this world and make sense of it and how language both facilitate and impedes that process, I might have something to contribute if only my ignorance. Having read through the book it seems we know what is true and how truth is conveyed in language seem to have become important to the philosophy’s importance argument. So here are my thoughts for what they are worth.

I cannot enter the discussion using philosophical jargon cause I don’t really know any and it would just make me feel even more of fool than I do already if I did so. So in order to get my ideas across I want to use an analogy from my everyday life on which to hang a number of thoughts.

For the past few months, four times a week in the mornings, from 12.30am to 13.30pm I go to Chi Kung classes at Sheraton Hotel in Lisbon (near the place I work in Lisbon.) The class consists of a group of a dozen or so members and a teacher. The room we use is arranged much like an Amphitheatre with a stage surrounded on three sides by seats. At a given time the teacher takes to the stage and does hos brocades and we, the members of the class must make a try imitating them, during the 3, 5 or 8 minutes that each teacher’s brocades lasts. From this I think we can make a number of analogies concerning how we deal with the world that surrounds us, how we represent reality and how we use language to signify that reality or at any rate navigate through it.

First of all I should like to treat the teacher as a given reality, as a thing in itself. I know that this is taking quite a leap and there are those who would say that I cannot make such an assumption but I do not thing that I could live in a world that did not allow my perceptions some basis in everyday reality nor could I be satisfied with Plato’s notion of an absolute reality outside my cognition that I can only dimly aspire to know and only if I’m very good--- or I think that is what he is getting at in his parable of the cave, any way to get back to my Chi Kung classes.

At the end of each brocade, each one of us from our different vantage points in the Amphitheatre will have made a representation of the same brocade. Some of us will use our modes of corporeal movements, whatever takes our fancy, whatever mode of expression at that particular moment we feel will suit the brocade and each one of them will end up with a more or less true representation of the same master brocade in the same pose that is a dozen or so representations of the same reality.

There are some caveats to my description. Some of my classmate are better pupils than others and can give a better account of what they see than others, we will all have our own intentions, if you like, agendas, of how we wish our brocade to appear, its formal qualities, and our own particular skills. Some of us will be such skilled pupil and so pleased with the way in which we perform the brocade that we no longer really look at the reality in front of us but repeat the same brocade again and again.

All this I think has much in common with language. Language is contingent for its meaning on the circumstances in which its words are uttered, on who say what to whom and when and were, on expression and gesture on tone of voice. We have the capacity to describe thing in many different ways as we have the capacity to see them in different ways. Likewise the truths language conveys are neither absolute nor unchangeable. As for the truths of mathematics I don’t know though 2+2=4 always seemed a bit of a tautology to me but then math was never my strong point.

This is my way of capturing the eminently plausible common sense view most of us endorse until we read some bad and pretentious postmodernist stuff (crap?) which tries to show that this simple and plausible account is naive and stupid and allegedly opened to crippling objections.

Well, my Chi Kung teacher is absolutely right; it is not stupid; it is not opened to any good objections (objections are largely based on easy to refute claims about language) and in fact what Plato not so nicely describes is what most philosophers and scientists hold anyway. ( )