Michael, the panel everyone will skate past is the first, and I think it quietly carries the other two. The waking words came to you unauthored. You did not think them; some let themselves be grasped, others stayed anonymous. So before there is any gap between my mind and yours, there is already a gap inside one mind. That makes the privacy you defend stranger than the quarrel with Wittgenstein needs it to be. The faith you describe runs outward, toward a listener you cannot survey. There is an inward version too, the faith with which a single mind receives words that arrive like guests, from elsewhere. Your son's 'mamowah' sits between the two, a word making a whole world with no listener at all. So perhaps it is not only that recosubcreation takes all of us together. A word always comes partly given, past the full reach of whoever holds it, whether the room holds one of us or two.
Topical:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250911084402/http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/03/area-philosopher-constructs-definitive-refutation-of-the-private-language-argument-unable-to-explain.html
That’s very funny. Thank you!
Michael, the panel everyone will skate past is the first, and I think it quietly carries the other two. The waking words came to you unauthored. You did not think them; some let themselves be grasped, others stayed anonymous. So before there is any gap between my mind and yours, there is already a gap inside one mind. That makes the privacy you defend stranger than the quarrel with Wittgenstein needs it to be. The faith you describe runs outward, toward a listener you cannot survey. There is an inward version too, the faith with which a single mind receives words that arrive like guests, from elsewhere. Your son's 'mamowah' sits between the two, a word making a whole world with no listener at all. So perhaps it is not only that recosubcreation takes all of us together. A word always comes partly given, past the full reach of whoever holds it, whether the room holds one of us or two.
I appreciate your careful reading and reaction. Thank you.