Mason's Parmenides and Language

So Parminedes view of mortal language is that we distinguish opposites and establish signs, and less specifically names for individuals; through his poems he implies this is erroneous or mistaken. Plato makes the point that "'the possibility and power of dialectic' depends upon individuation, without this indentification we could not make sense of each other. Parmenides isn't saying people can't make sense of one another, but merely that one cannot claim that mortals are speaking about reality. It is somewhat chronologically out of sync to suggest this, but he would agree with the view that the possibility of sense is unrelated to the success of reference. It must be understood though that in no way does this imply that he had some sort of ancient theory of meaning pertaining to language. It is a huge step to go from saying that Parminedes believed mortal language is misleading to saying that he believed it is meaningless because it has no reference.

Nussbaum believes that the true object of reference is in the goddess's discourse, but with the many individual references made in the discourse it is hard to push this argument for

"if 'nothing in the sensible world' can be a 'possible object of speech and thought' then even the goddess should not be able to make sense of her talk about the mares and the house." (p152)

From her discourses, it is argued that Parmenides never claimed that language is meaningless, thus he can't be accused of contradiction by making the goddess use the same mortal language. Gallop also suggests that she can speak correctly and truthfully because she is a goddess. Along those same lines, Reinhardt believes that the contrast should be made in terms of truth instead of meaningfulness. Mainly what we are trying to get to is solving how the goddess's discourses get beyond condemnation of other statements. Mason offers three possible solutions to this troubling issue. First, he suggests one view where positive statements about reality are allowable where as negative statements (false) are not. The most obvious response to this argument is that Parmenides wasn't making this distinction rather it was all language that pertained to individuation. This seems to bring about the case that no statement is a right one, and that Parmenides may have gone to far in making any kind of language impossible.

The next two views are about the same in that they don't present us with a viable answer to what the goddess is even saying. I keep wondering though, isn't it part of the goddess's job to be deceptive? Also, Parmenides points out that it is impossible to describe the REAL reality in linguistic terms because our language is based in the illusory world. So I think that the goddess's statements are perfectly explainable. She must communicate through our language so in doing so the faults with our language will be reflected in her own statements. She is merely showing us our own faults in our beliefs. So we err in our individuation and predications in our use of language and so

"[Our] alleged errors are therefore not basically linguistic, but derive from erroneous beliefs: for example, about the non-connectedness of things." p.155