Wednesday, May 6, 2009

possibilities of dialogue are infinite

To take a stab at John's problem I am going to look real quick at what I think Gadamer means by language being infinite. For Gadamer language creates a finite world for us in that we can only understand or even think about that which can be expressed in language. In this way language becomes an ideology because the world is now trapped within the confines of the way our language allows us to examine, understand, and speak about the world around us. It forms the basis of our thoughts and creates the way in which we develop value judgments about ideas and things in the world by the way in which they are understood through language. Yet at the same time the possibilities are infinite in that given the lexicon of language there are an infinite compilation of words to create and infinite amount of phrases and ideas to understand the world even in it's finiteness.

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