The Real

What can be said to be real can only be said to be real in language.

This sounds like something profound or metaphysical on first blush, but on deeper reflection, it can be seen to be only a statement of the obvious.

With language/ we can refer to something outside of language.  But when asked to show what we refer to/ we can only point to something manifest in our own private experience. . . can you see it?

For there to be a world, for there to be an "objective reality", what is required is not a harmony of private experience but a harmony of what we say, a harmony of our language, behavior, judgments and customs.  It does not matter what the color blue looks like to you/ if you can fetch a blue magic marker when I ask. 

What clearly drops out is the need for something existing on its own, a thing-in-itself, behind or outside of its presence in human experience.  We don't need a harmony of experience, and the existence of a thing-in-itself could not contribute to the harmony of experience even if we did.  It, by definition, could not touch it.  (What counts as truth in mathematics or in measurement is not a consistency in objects but a consistency in results.)

If we were to construct a false idol, it should be fashioned out of interpenetrating lights, not atoms floating in isolation in a void.

We can fashion descriptions of a world for a common purpose, that is, we can agree on our language, behavior and customs.  But the "ultimacy" of any description would depend on the ultimacy of the common purpose.  This statement is not intended to abolish natural science, but to point out that the facts are parasitic on the existence of common meanings, common norms, and common ends.  It would be a conceptual mistake to start from any factual description of the world and attempt to construct an explanation of meaning or ethics (just as the reverse would also be a mistake).

This is not to imply that nothing lies beyond the limits of language.  But it is to say that we cannot talk about it, for it can't be a something either.