Flights of Fancy

PRE-ORDERS for Dead Balagtas Volume 1 open on November at KOMIKON. Publication is set on December. Sabayan ang Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa sa aming komiks. check out more at facebook.com/deadbalagtas P.S> para to kay Leobel darling haha.

Human beings therefore live with two languages, an inner one and outer one. They constantly experiment with the inner language, and find arrangements which are more effective than those which have become standard in the outer language. In the inner language, these arrangements are information, that is, cognitive assertions; and they are then transferred to the outer language in the form of practical instructions. The inner language of each of us is open, in the sense that its words are not unambiguously defined. The outer language which we all share is closed, but unlike the language of animals, it is only provisionally closed; we are constantly enlarging it bey bringing in new distinctions that have been uncovered in the inner language. 

In the nature of things, most of the words in any language stand for concepts, and do not name individuals but classes of objects or properties or actions. They are therefore subject to the ambiguities which blur the outline of almost any general concept. The process of experiment in the inner language amounts to a testing of these ambiguities in practice, and all our cognitive discoveries (for instance, in science) can be regarded as a progressive resolution of ambiguities. We are, as it were, always transferring to the outer language the stricter meanings that we have discovered to be hidden in the inner language. In this way, we are trying to turn the outer language into a formal description of reality in which we can communicate rigorously without ambiguity. If we were to succeed in doing this, the other language would be finally closed, and out inner languages would have nothing to contribute to it except confusion. 

We know that this is not an attainable end, even in principle (Bronowski 1966). This is because the inner language includes assertions about language as well as about nature; and this makes it impossible to construct a closed language from it (Tarsi 1944). It is a cardinal feature of human thought that it can refer to itself, and of human language that it contains its own metalanguage. In a sense, this is the essence of internalization: that not only can we choose between different sentences (in the language) but we can give reasons for our choice (in the metalanguage). to us, the conformity of what we say to logical rules is as much a part of knowledge as is the orderly description of the world outside us.”