Martin Fischer said "Whenever ideas fail, men invent words" - thoughts?

In order to express an idea one must put it into words. Whether or not the idea needs to be expressed is another thing altogether.

I think failure quite often is an unexpected end result. I don’t know of many who set out to fail so it often comes as a surprise….you go “WTH”!! Goosefruble!

“This way of thinking characterises what I want to call the discontinuous mind. We would all agree that a six-foot woman is tall, and a five-foot woman is not. Words like ‘tall’ and ‘short’ tempt us to force the world into qualitative classes, but this doesn’t mean that the world really is discontinuously distributed. Were you to tell me that a woman is five feet nine inches tall, and ask me to decide whether she should therefore be called tall or not, I’d shrug and say ‘She’s five foot nine, doesn’t that tell you what you need to know?’ But the discontinuous mind, to caricature it a little, would go to court (probably at great expense) to decide whether the woman was tall or short. Indeed, I hardly need to say caricature. For years, South African courts have done a brisk trade adjudicating whether particular individuals of mixed parentage count as white, black or coloured.”

Richard Dawkins (1993) Gaps in the Mind

He uses the same argument in The God Delusion.

What is the “failure of an idea?”

@wundayatta Excellent follow up q – was wondering this myself as I type this.

Without words, few of the ideas of today could have been invented. One would never have invented a timepiece without words that could describe things like time, escapement mechanism, gear rations, spring, pendulum, hands, dial, etc. You simply could not think about how to build a clock without words to do the thinking. Ir’s how we invent all modern ideas.

There appears to be a “Mentalese”—a language of the brain—that we are all equipped with, and it is designed by natural selection to help us think about those things necessary to survival as a hunter gatherer. To get past that, we needed language. Even to be great at hunting and gathering, we needed language. All of our complex thoughts depend on language. And natural selection designed our brains and our mentalese specifically to invent, learn and use language.

In fact, Martin Fischer couldn’t have expressed his idea that words are poor substitutes for ideas without using words, could he?

Ideas only fail when they’re forgotten.

Maybe that’s what it means. Socialism isn’t necessarily a failed idea, but when people make it only a word, that word becomes a failure.

So, as long as you keep your ideas more than the words you use to represent them, they can remain active and continue to be understood and adapted.

Well, like all comments constructed in an aphoristic style they tend to sound like an edict proscribed from on high. It’s an often hollow rhetorical device. Surely when ideas fail we should be inventing new ideas not words.

[mod says] Minor typo in title corrected via internal edit.

But it depends on the context, for example politicians ceaselessly invent new words to disguise the policies that have become unsavoury.

I don’t really understand the quote. I think we invent new words as a short cut when new situations come up or new things are invented. We could describe what we want to convey, or develop a new word that quickly encapsulates all that we wish to say.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir I don’t see how the words that you mention, which describe you result from failure in anyway. Not on your part or the worlds.

Maybe I am missing something?

Someone had an idea for a round thing that could roll like a log. Put a pole on it and attach it to a flat plane. The idea didn’t fail. It worked. Now, we call it the “wheel”. Lever, hammer, axe, pliers, television, phone iPod. We don’t have a load of words for ideas that didn’t work. But we have a dictionary full of words for ideas that did.

Very true. There was a time when people were liked and appreciated for what they were: human beings. Small companies were like families. Departments in larger companies were like families. With people helping each other out when necessarily.

When this idea failed, men invented words like shareholder value and human capital.

People became capital.

@mattbrowne I agree with some of that but there was always a time when other people were also animals aka slaves.

I think that the quote is bunk. Words are invented to identify heretofore unknown phenomena, not as fallout from a philosophical meltdown.

@Nullo Nicely put.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Keep that post in mind the next time I stay up too late and end up sounding like a gibbering idiot. :D

@Nullo You got it!