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@MercurialBlack @ai @gav We don't understand the world by language. We describe the world by language. Language comes in three forms. A: a reference to a symbol. B: contextualisation or modification of A. And C: both at once (Adjectives.) When describing something which the other person has not seen, we create a "definition," or write a story about it. That is we use language to outline a symbol and hope the other person gets what is outlined. We are using symbols that the person is already aware of and extrapolating them to reference an unseen symbol. The world always precedes language and the world is always understood as it is before language describes it. Language allows us to extrapolate understanding of the world into something abstract, separate from the world itself. We are able to create new symbols out of our previously known symbols. We are able to do this to such a great degree that through language we can envision an entirely different world with it's own rules and reality. But either way that world and all extrapolation is dependent first upon the symbols of the world we reside in. Without the world, language would mean nothing at all; because it could symbolise nothing at all.

The Platonic Ideal is difficult because you have to ask whether the Ideal is about symbols themselves, or about a higher essential world that he sensed, or whether he equated the two. His focus on the Platonic Ideal as something metaphysical but his insistence that say, a tree, is lesser than the symbol of a tree, makes me think that he equated the two. While trees have old and wise souls I do not believe that those are higher than the tree you can reach out and touch, and I certainly do not believe that the symbol of trees that exists in our head is higher than the trees of the world.

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