I won't continue to repeat my critique the OP. As you say about my "fair criticism"...

I hope the discussion focusses on this rather than the above disputes. — Philosophim

So I will aim to please.

You are free any time to demonstrate that when most people see man and woman unmodified that they instantly jump to it being a role and not a sex reference. Go tell a random person on the street, "I saw a woman walking through the woods the other day." After some time then ask them, "When I said "woman" did you think adult human female or adult human male?" You and I both know the answer to this. So we can stop pretending otherwise. Free of specific context, woman and man default to a sex reference, not a role. To be clear, its the default of the unmodified term. Its not that man or woman can't mean role, they just need proper modification and context to clearly convey that. — Philosophim

Here you formulate a thought experiment that repeats your appeal to popularity, and then you add an appeal to common sense. The bolded section is rhetorical, and philosophically inadmissible. After all, today's common sense is tomorrow's outmoded ideology, and it's the job of philosophers above all to question it.

But fair enough. You might have been counting on its rhetorical force, assuming that, if I'm being honest, I'll agree with you. You were saying something like "come on, cut the crap," and that might have worked, if we really had shared the same intuition. But the thing is, I genuinely don't. No pretending involved: I just don't share this commonsensical notion, and I don't accept the legitimacy of your thought experiment.

To see what I mean, let's look at the way you put your random victim on the spot in the thought experiment:

"When I said 'woman' did you think adult human female or adult human male?" — Philosophim

This is a loaded question and a false dichotomy, which has your view baked into it. Forcing or strongly encouraging the hearer to come down on one side or the other, it imposes a binary choice on the fuzzy reality that constitutes both the meaning of "woman" and the hearer's thoughts about it. Things are not so black-and-white, either in meaning or in what people think when they hear words used.

Most people, when hearing "I saw a woman...", form a holistic impression that includes many different things: sex characteristics, aspects of gender expression, social role, all mixed in with personal experience. What they do not do is refer to a textbook biological definition. The very idea that they refer to, or use, a definition, whether consciously or unconsciously, is a misunderstanding of language.

In a nutshell, hearers and participants in conversation construct their interpretations according to context, background knowledge, and relevance, which typically produces a fuzzy picture rather than any determinate biological classification.

In case you're tempted to go for a logical gotcha here, note that when I say most people form a holistic impression, etc., I am not inferring the term's proper meaning from that, so I am not hypocritically appealing to popularity. I am countering your descriptive move, to show your prescriptive conclusion to be not only inferred invalidly but also inferred from a false premise. Thus I'm trying to show that your model of meaning is incorrect.

The meaning of a term is never a static definition. It is a matter of public use, logical function, and historically sedimented associations, i.e., the layers of the term's social and ideological history. It is not a matter of tallying up imagined mental snapshots.

You demonstrate some recognition of this yourself:

Lets look at the etymology of the terms man and woman. First, we understand they, in context with each other, were originally sex references. Gender, the idea that males and females have sociological expectations placed upon them, needs a reference to the sex itself. "Male gender" is the sociological expectation placed on an adult human male. Eventually, people started using "Man" as a simile or metaphor. "He acts like a woman." "He's such a woman." But the simile and metaphors don't actually imply the person is 'the other thing', its an implication of traits that are often associated with the thing, in this case behavior. — Philosophim

This is a novel angle, but rather than a historical enrichment of your model of meaning as I just outlined, you commit the etymological fallacy, taking a purported original meaning as the standard for all time, any later meanings being secondary. It's also a just-so story, an unfalsifiable and speculative narrative.

Incidentally, you might not be aware that semantic evolution is significantly driven by the literalization of metaphors, meaning that they are far from being mere embellishments of a central core.

Going back to the thought experiment, another serious problem is that you've conflated two things: the meaning of a word, and what people think when they use it. These are not the same thing. At the very least, if you think they are, you have to argue for it (which, incidentally, would be to go against most (all?) modern linguists and philosophers of language). As it stands, what you have is a folk-linguistic model of meaning.

The central example of this model is the idea of a default or base meaning:

Remove the context, and the base meaning of white as a color still applies. All of this is very important, because if the default is misunderstood, everything built off of it becomes confused. If you started saying, "White unmodified can also mean the feeling of being white", it becomes very difficult to understand language without further context. "Tom is a white man" now all of the sudden becomes ambiguous. Do we mean Tom is white by ethnicity or is actually black by ethnicity and feels white? Suddenly a "White scholarship" can be applied to not be the default meaning, which was ethnicity, but has become unnecessarily ambiguous. Language is now confused, people don't know what it means anymore and thus language has become worse. — Philosophim

I think you're gesturing at something real here, and your intuition is not wrong. People surely do have such expectations, and do mentally reach for typical examples upon hearing a word. And linguistics and cognitive science back this up: it's called prototype theory. People have prototypical associations with words. A starling is closer to the prototypical bird than a penguin. Crucially though, both are birds. The tendency towards prototypical association doesn't justify the exclusion of other members of the category.

Importantly, prototypes are not "default meanings" in your sense. They don't fix what a word means, they don't determine semantic priority, and they can't act as a foundation for claims about correct usage. What they do is describe how people often imagine examples when there is little information available. This is not equivalent to any kind of base or fundamental meaning.

A penguin is not a "modified bird" just because it doesn't fly, and a PhD is not a "modified doctor" because physicians are more prototypical in casual everyday communication. What you're gesturing towards is therefore better understood as a cognitive-linguistic tendency, not a foundation that can determine or justify the attribution of a basic meaning. Conflating the two is your central mistake. Even if sex-based imagery is often prototypical for "man" or "woman" in casual speech, it doesn't follow that sex is the "base meaning" or that other uses are derivative.

So in the thought experiment, you might have shown, not that "woman" has a default definition, but that many hearers have a prototype in mind in the context of a strange philosopher pouncing on them out of nowhere and saying "I saw a woman walking through the woods the other day." They might infer an adult human female (understood biologically), not because there is some "default" ready to be retrieved, but because they are using an inferential shortcut to the prototype, which applies when they haven't been supplied with any other information (before you say this is precisely what a default is, read on).

So...

Free of specific context, woman and man default to a sex reference, not a role. — Philosophim

As I've said, it's more accurate to say that meaning is flexible and dependent on context, and that people understand "woman" in a holistic way, with associations that include many different things including but by no means limited to sexual characteristics. But even if "woman" does default to a sex reference, this has no semantic priority.

Returning to the doctor example, if I say "I met with a doctor this morning," you might imagine a physician, but we can't conclude that "doctor" means physician simpliciter, or by default—nor that people with PhDs are "modified" doctors, or are only doctors in some secondary sense.

Defaults generally happen in languages to avoid ambiguity and create efficient discussion. No one wants to speak to another person saying, "A woman with x sized hips, medium breasts who feels like a male..." People just denote, "A woman" and English speakers understand 'woman' to refer to 'sex' by default. Its just an efficient word to describe a basic concept unambiguously. A "White woman" would default to an ethnic description of a woman by sex. A word that does not have a default is confused and awful in correct language, as language's goal is to accurately communicate a concept efficiently to another person. So the idea of a default for nouns is not flawed, its a real phenomenon in any good language. — Philosophim

This is interesting, because you've moved on from popularity and common sense to argue for the pragmatic requirement for defaults: pragmatically, language must be efficient and unambiguous, and this requires base or default meanings.

But it's not true. Communication in natural language relies on context, pragmatic inferences, and shared background knowledge, not on a single privileged base meaning that's attached to the noun. Communication works precisely because meanings are underdetermined, resolved in context. No core meaning is required.

Ambiguity is not a defect to be eliminated. It is a basic feature of natural language. We have no trouble at all with words that have multiple common meanings, e.g., bank, light, set, doctor, so natural language is routinely ambiguous in your sense. The key is context.

And I don't think it's unfair of me to set out your argument as follows:

1. Language aims at efficient unambiguous communication
2. Therefore nouns must have defaults
3. Therefore "woman" defaults to sex.

There's a lot missing here.

---

As a reminder, this was the criticism that you accepted in a philosophical spirit and addressed at length:

How do you get to that? The logic surely goes like this:

Most people use "man" and "woman" to refer to sex, not gender.
Therefore "man" and "women" refer to sex, not gender.

There is a missing premise there: If most people use a term a certain way, then that is what the term refers to. — Jamal

I don't know if I was clear, but my criticism was not that you missed a premise. We can apply the principle of charity and fill in the gaps no problem. My point was that even with the hidden premise made explicit, and your argument thereby rendered formally valid, it is still fallacious. Note that an argument can be formally valid yet still fail because it relies on informal fallacies such as appeal to popularity or question-begging.

I do appreciate your generous response. The question is, how does it answer the charge? Since it's based on fallacious reasoning and a fundamentally faulty, not to mention unsupported, conception of language, I think it cannot answer it at all.

Sometimes I feel like the lessons of WW2 have been forgotten. — Questioner

Maybe it's worse than that: remembering them doesn't make any difference. — Jamal

Come to think of it, maybe it's worse even than that: the only way the war can be remembered is wrongly, (e.g., as a moral fable, as good guys vs bad guys etc.) such that its repetition is inevitable.

:grin:

Sometimes I feel like the lessons of WW2 have been forgotten. — Questioner

Maybe it's worse than that: remembering them doesn't make any difference.


Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Incorrect. If you want to have this debate and contest that definition, that's your call. First, you have to address what the OP is doing, not what you think it should be doing. I've defined men and women as used by default. Again, contest if you wish. It is not my failing for asserting a definition in an argument that you wish to contest. — Philosophim

Premises which necessarily lead to a conclusion is a deductive argument. Which means that if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. So then we have both acknowledged that the argument I've made is deductive and valid. You want to debate the premises. Which is fine. But I have not lacked in the argument or used poor logic. — Philosophim

I think you're still missing the point. It is your failing if you consider the OP to have made some kind of argumentative achievement.

1. A man is an adult human male.
2. A trans man is not an adult human male.
3. Therefore a trans man is not a man.

(The same pattern for "woman," and interpreting "male" biologically.)

Nobody disputes this argument's validity, but validity is not sufficient for philosophical substance in a contested debate. And yet, you do claim to have shown something philosophically substantive, namely that a trans man is not a man etc., thereby coming down on one side of the actually ongoing debate.

Of course, what you have actually done is attempted to sidestep the central dispute, which is over whether or not your definition is correct. Your conclusion follows only because you have already made it inevitable by assuming the centrally contested definition. This amounts to begging the question (but see below for more about that).

Now, had you taken the time to defend the definition, none of this would matter. Perhaps you just wanted to set things out clearly and simply, and what could be wrong with that? But the following is all you offered in defence:

Most of the world does not view man and woman by gender, but by sex, so the default goes to sex. — Philosophim

This is where you need a good argument—where it's difficult.

---

No, I am not begging the question. The assertion of a definition, and a reason why it is that definition is not a conclusion within the premises. The conclusion also requires other premises in the argument. If I noted "The bible is true because God says so, and the bible is true because its Gods word", that is begging the question. The premise is the conclusion, and the premise is true because it says it is true. But I do not. If the other premises changed, then the conclusion would not be necessarily reached despite my asserted definition of man and woman. — Philosophim

If this were an accurate description of begging the question, there would never be a need to identify it, because it would never exist. This is better: you beg the question when your premises assume the truth of the conclusion. And I think your argument does that, not explicitly but in the context of the ongoing debate. Premise 1 presupposes the conclusion by fixing the meaning of "man" in a way that already excludes trans men. The conclusion is assumed rather than argued for.

In reality, begging the question takes different forms: assuming a disputed claim, building the conclusion into a definitional premise, or stipulating a definition that can only be accepted by someone who already agrees with the conclusion. Some philosophers have made the distinction between intrinsic and dialectical question-begging. In those terms, you have done the latter.

If you have a particular argument against the OP, it is your job to point it out and explain why it counters the premises or conclusion of the OP. If there is a particular debate that you feel is worth pulling in to address the claims of the OP, feel free. But a general reference to unspecified arguments without any demonstrable link to the OP is something I can rationally ignore. — Philosophim

If you just want to win, then sure. But if you want to find truth, then no, you cannot ignore the chance of attaining knowledge. I pointed you in the direction of a respected philosophical authority (the SEP), and mentioned that some thinkers regard man and woman as cluster concepts. I assumed, because you hadn't mentioned anything remotely like that, that you were unaware of all the work that has already been done in the field.

If man and woman operate socially as roles (which they obviously do in many contexts, e.g., bathrooms, marriage, dress codes, comportment expectations), then sex is not the default, but one factor among others. — Jamal

This is a counter assertion, which is good. But this is actually begging the question. If there is not only the objective reality of "Adult human male", but also "the role of an adult human male", there is a missing rational link to "Sex is not the default (majority) meaning for male and female". — Philosophim

I meant to call your statement that sex is the default into doubt, to push back against it with examples. If social position is operative in society in substantial, non-ephemeral ways—and I gave examples—then it shows there is a burden on you to support your statement that sex is the default. It does not rigorously prove that sex is not the default, but I had no intention of doing that.

How so? The majority of people use the term 'majority' to refer to 'the greater number of' right? That's a definition, not an appeal to popularity. I'm claiming a majority of people use the term women and man to refer to adult human females and males respectively by definition. Are you claiming that men and woman cannot be defined as I've noted so far? I don't think you are, so your only viable critique at this point is to claim 'the majority of people don't define men and women that way'. — Philosophim

The thing is, you are not merely saying, "Given my definition, trans women are not women." (Everyone agrees with this). You are also saying that your definition is the default, and that rival definitions, and therefore contrary conclusions, are deviations from correct usage. At this point, the masses are functioning as an authority.

This becomes clear in the concluding paragraph of the OP:

The terms man and woman indicate a person's age and sex, not gender. — Philosophim

How do you get to that? The logic surely goes like this:

Most people use "man" and "woman" to refer to sex, not gender.
Therefore "man" and "women" refer to sex, not gender.

There is a missing premise there: If most people use a term a certain way, then that is what the term refers to. Without it, it's an appeal to popularity. In fact, it's an appeal to popularity even with that premise, because that premise is itself an appeal to popularity.

With that in mind, what is a trans x? First we need to define man and woman.

Man - adult human male by sex
Woman- adult human female by sex — Philosophim

This is the contested definition. To begin here is to begin too late, ignoring the substance of the philosophical debate, making your conclusion inevitable and therefore lacking any weight. The conclusion that trans women are not women follows only because the argument defines "woman" in a way that already excludes them. Thus, despite the internal validity of your argument, in the real context of the trans debate you are begging the question, because the real point you need to make to carry your view is precisely that a woman is an adult human female by sex, a man an adult human male by sex.

So the substantive content of the OP is where you defend the definition:

But sometimes people want to claim that man and woman are 'roles'. What's a role? A gendered label. Most of the world does not view man and woman by gender, but by sex, so the default goes to sex. — Philosophim

This is an empirical claim asserted without evidence, and presumes that it determines how these terms ought to be used. If you're going to derive an ought from an is you will need to put in more work than this. As it stands it's an appeal to popularity. And as I have said, it ignores the relevant discussions that have been going on in philosophy for years, about social kinds and role-based categories, cluster concepts and so on (I pointed you in the direction of the SEP for more detail).

And note that a role is not just a label. It is an actual social position. Minimizing it functions to maintain the very normative hierarchy which is contested in the trans debate. I.e., ...

Sex: fundamental, real, objective
Gender: derivative, optional, subjective

If you are to make any headway, you need to argue that this hierarchy is legitimate. If man and woman operate socially as roles (which they obviously do in many contexts, e.g., bathrooms, marriage, dress codes, comportment expectations), then sex is not the default, but one factor among others.

To call it the "default" is to take sides in a debate--against the recognition of people who want recognition--without adding anything new.

Hello, NDers. I intend to get back to it in February.

@Philosophim Just a reminder that you forgot to respond to my post:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1027962

If you'd rather not navigate back to an old page, I can lay it out for you afresh if you like.

Conventional how? Many of your choices seem pretty far out to me, based on your descriptions. Those of them I've read, I like: Asimov, Clarke, Mieville, Le Guin. I think The Lathe of Heaven is very uderrated in comparison with the Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed (not that it's better).

Adrian Tchaikovsky (or Czajkowski as Jamal's wife might spell it.) — T Clark

She spells it Чайковский. Czajkowski looks like the Polish version.

The new archive site presents all discussions with less than 1000 posts in the form of a single page:

https://tpfarchive.com/

The data is a couple of months old now; I'll be updating it next month, prior to the move to the new platform.

:up:

I should point out that these ones are idiosyncratic choices:

• Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
• Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
• The Doomed City, Strugatsky Brothers

(Roadside Picnic or Hard to be a God would be the normally recommended Strugatsky novels)

• Ubik, Philip K. Dick
• A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
• Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
• Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
• The Doomed City, Strugatsky Brothers
• The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells
• The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

There's no philosophy in this discussion. To the Lounge it goes.

I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations and approach it with a bit of an anthropological spirit in order to appreciate it. — SophistiCat

Certainly, but expectation-calibration can only do so much to mitigate intense displeasure. (And I secretly suspect there is literature written around the same time (and long before) which doesn't suffer from the same faults or has a more lasting power.)

I liked her sister's signature work a lot more, for all that it is more than a little unhinged — SophistiCat

Still haven't read Wuthering Heights. It does sound more promising.

---

Right now, some Russian holiday reading:

Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin.

'm assuming it didn't really "fulfill" or hit any note as far as what people tend to expect from novels? Emotional validation, validation of the human spirit, essence, struggle, experience, etc? You were left unfulfilled at the end of it, as if you wasted your time reading it, I imagine? — Outlander

I wouldn't say I'm ever interested in validation. That doesn't seem like a good expectation when reading fiction.

But I see what you're saying: yes, it didn't interest me and I found it cheaply melodramatic and sentimental.

Like, at what point would you say it took a dive for the worse and became "unsalvageable"? — Outlander

Good question, and I can answer very specifically. The thing is, I liked it quite a lot when it was just Jane against the world, but when Mr. Rochester appeared it was all downhill. Jane lost her independence and interest and Mr. Rochester was a charmless, boring boor who the reader was, I suppose, meant to fall in love with along with Jane.

I didn't read many novels this year, because of all the philosophy. Under the Skin by Michel Faber was interesting and memorable. Jane Eyre was bad. The best fiction I read was probably in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro — Manuel

I read this in the late nineties when I was totally unprepared for experimental literature, so I was quite confused. Even so, I think I probably read it in the first place because I'd heard it was weird. I found it fascinating and compelling, moving and haunting, and it's stayed with me. I've been meaning to read it again, although I fear it will hit much harder now.

Christmas reading:

Moth­er­land: A Fem­i­nist His­to­ry of Mod­ern Rus­sia, from Rev­o­lu­tion to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe.

After the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion of Octo­ber 1917, Sovi­et women gained the right to vote, no-fault divorce, child sup­port, and free high­er edu­ca­tion. Abor­tion and birth con­trol were soon legal­ized. ... Life was a “fairy-tale” for women in the first coun­try to legal­ly eman­ci­pate them, rev­o­lu­tion­ary Alexan­dra Kol­lon­tai would claim. — review

Those gains were real, though Stalin partly reversed some of them. And due to war, terror, and economic hardship, the result was hardly a fairy-tale.

Also some fiction:

Malarkoi by Alex Pheby
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel by Quentin Tarantino

:up:

I banned @Bob Ross for homophobia. He posted a topic claiming that...

• Homosexual orientation is a defective state of being, a "privation of human nature".
• Homosexual acts are immoral in virtue of that privation.
• It would be better for homosexuals not to exist as such, and that they should be cured if possible.
• Society should not treat homosexuality as morally neutral or good.
• It should be illegal to advocate or "evangelize" in favour of homosexuality.
• Children should be taught that homosexuality is bad or immoral.
• Homosexuality is akin to alcoholism, schizophrenia, brain tumours, and other pathologies.

Despite all Bob's disclaimers, this is homophobic. It promotes a moral framework that classifies a group of people as defective, disordered, and in need of correction. It's in clear contravention of the guidelines:

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.

We have been very tolerant, and Bob was warned many times, but he persisted in advancing racist, homophobic, and transphobic positions.

I really love Richard Pryor.

I also love Bashkortostan!

I'll respond openly instead of deleting the topic, because it has already been up for many hours, and it does make an explicit effort to avoid racism. After posting, I'll close the discussion again, leaving the topic in place so that everyone can see where TPF stands on the subject.

The central problem is that the OP takes race essentialism seriously, as a legitimate philosophical starting point. Precisely this presupposition makes it fall foul of our guidelines. And the issue isn't tone or intent, but the metaphysical approach whereby patterns of biological variation are treated as racial groupings which are morally or conceptually significant.

In particular, race is treated as equivalent or analogous to family, disregarding established distinctions in moral philosophy between kinship relations and abstract categories of population. These are conflated, which effectively opens the door to the justification of racial preference. The result is to normalize racial discrimination, even though it's just a thought experiment (thought experiments are not innocent).


Turning now to a more general issue, I want to address accusations made in various posts and PMs regarding censorship and the the ostensibly anti-philosophical nature of the restrictions in operation at TPF.

I know I've quoted this before, but it's worth reading the relevant part of the guidelines carefully:

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them. — Baden

This is not rhetoric. It reflects a substantive judgment about what does and does not count as a legitimate object of philosophical debate.

Every intellectual community draws boundaries around admissible positions. Refusing to treat certain views as worthy of debate is the baseline judgment that makes good philosophical debate possible.

TPF is not a platform for discredited intellectual frameworks, particularly those belonging to a long line of justifications for racial discrimination. Views which presuppose racial essentialism, whether framed biologically, metaphysically, or in thought experiments, fall well within the category of those positions we do not consider worthy of debate.

Future posts treating race essentialism as a legitimate philosophical position will be removed without warning.

Frank flexing his programming skills on the Synclavier in 1986. I've loved this tune since it came out.

2007. What was that like 5 years ago? Come on man. Imagine if we judged every artist by his or her first work. Imagine the kind of world we would be living in. — Outlander

I didn't judge him or his work on the basis of the one book of his I read. I explicitly did the opposite. Also, you appear not to know what you're talking about, since the one I read was one of his later works. I get the feeling that you join these conversations not because you find them interesting or have anything to say, but because you have nothing else to do.

Do not say "come on man" ever again to me, please.

The notion that science is the only path to knowledge is, of course, silly. HIstory (including case histories) is never repeatable. Even scientific experiments are not repeatable -- all are unique events.

The history of psychology and psychoanalysis is replete with meaningful and insightful works that are not "scientific". Freud revolutionized how we see ourselves and our subconsciouses, but his psychoanalyses have not been found effective in treating psychological disorders. Does that mean they are worthless? Freud was, if no more, a literary genius. "Totem and Taboo" is not, perhaps, an accurate history of totemism. Instead, it is a myth -- deeper and more meaningful than history. Sacks books may not have been quite at that level, but they are both insightful and brilliant -- whether or not they contain a few "stretchers".

"Show me a man who does not lie, and I'll show you a man who hasn't much to say," wrote Mark Twain. Sacks certainly had a lot to say, some of it controversial. — Ecurb

:up: Well said, and welcome to the forum.

On the other hand, I never managed to find the insightful and brilliant in his books, because the first one I read was so dull it put me off reading any others: Musicophilia. My loss, I suppose.

The Barbican Estate is one of my favourite places in London. It's peaceful and pleasant just to walk around it, even without going inside the Barbican Centre. It was built for people and it feels like it.

I'm moving this to the Lounge. I don't see any political philosophy.

“The Game,” with Michael Douglas. An underrated David Fincher movie. They currently have it free on YouTube. — Mikie

Yeah I like that one.

I'm thinking there's a movie subgenre, or sub-subgenre, that nobody has identified before: secret organization approaches main character at a crisis in their life and either invites them to employ their (mysterious) services or otherwise begins a program of obscurely guiding their life. Other examples are Seconds from 1966 (recommended), The Adjustment Bureau, and maybe The Substance fits too—it uses a similar structure though it's tonally completely different, delighting in body horror.

For some reason I did not receive a notification of a reply — Leontiskos

I assumed you’d slunk away defeated and whimpering, your tail between your legs.

Anyway, thanks Leon, I appreciate the magnanimousness of your response.

I don't see that Adorno succeeds in brushing away the self-refutation of relativism. What does he do? He calls the objection "wretched," gives a single sentence of justification, and then moves on to a critique that he likes better. And his critique is fine as far as it goes, but he doesn't provide any argument for why the less "fruitful" objection is "wretched." This is probably because he doesn't have one.

[…]

I don't think this is right, but neither you nor Adorno are offering much to respond to in the way of argument. Obviously the person who thinks relativism is self-refuting would say that the "critical vs positive" distinction is _ad hoc_, and therefore it is hard to believe that this is a serious attempt to point up some problem with that objection. Indeed, if by "wretched" Adorno means something like, "The interlocutor would not be amenable to this objection," then his own objection surely suffers from the same problem, no? — Leontiskos

Maybe it’s best not to interpret him as offering a standalone refutation of the charge of relativism’s self-refutation. It’s better to see him as briefly indicating that this charge conflates the logical form of an assertion with the immanent critique of the conditions under which assertions claim universality. The self-refutation charge treats the latter as if it were the former.

In a general sense Adorno's quibble is usually taken into account by speaking about performative self-contradiction rather than simple self-contradiction, and that would include the relativist's belief that he has license to argue "critically" rather than "positively" in order to avoid the matter of applying his own criteria to himself. But in a more general sense, there is a strain of continentalism that sees simple arguments as passé. Like the basketball player who loves to dazzle with complicated plays and maneuvers, they have a disdain for the simple layup, and would almost argue that it should not count. Yet even if such individuals must label it "wretched," it still nevertheless counts. In some sense it counts more, because even (especially?) the uneducated can see that it is correct. — Leontiskos

Your reading takes his critical vs. positive distinction as an evasion, whereas I think what he is doing is describing an actual difference in the form of the claim. That distinction may be rejected, but I don’t think it’s just a hand-wavy gesture.

This is of course related to our differences over validity vs. genesis, direct engagement vs. metacritique, and justification vs. genealogy. Adorno, in the context of the section of ND under the heading “Against Relativism,” is much more interested in the latter of these pairs, because he thinks it is neglected by the focus on formal consistency, refutational success etc.

So in this respect he belongs to a tradition, which includes Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault, for whom insight, interpretation, and experience are modes of philosophical cognition, not reducible to argument or refutation. They are not rejecting reason, but rejecting the idea that reason is identical with formal validity. It’s an expansive concept of reason, a lot like the one explicitly set out in Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I’m sympathetic to this tradition. This might be a fundamental difference between us, although you seem quite far from the ahistorical tendencies of some Anglo-philosophy.

Incidentally, this tension is one of the fascinating things about Negative Dialectics: he is very sensitive to the suspicion that his emphasis on the philosophical centrality of spiritual experience, insight, and rhetorical expression might be interpreted as irrational. So he spends a lot of time explaining why Bergson, for example—who valorizes intuition over reason—is not where it’s at (despite having sympathies).

Puzzles about the one and the many are very old, and there is an established school of thought that favors the universal over the particular. Still, I worry about thinkers who wish to reconfigure the relation of the one and the many based on a practical aim; or who wish to reconfigure speculative reason on the basis of practical reason. To make the truth subservient to our desires is truly wretched, even where those desires are noble. Obviously I am not a Marxist. — Leontiskos

The point is that the division between theoretical and practical reason is itself historical, and that it breaks down historically—after Auschwitz. We can no longer take seriously the idea of purely speculative thought. But this is not the same as subordinating truth to our desires. Adorno is trying to show that the Enlightenment’s own conceptual scheme produced blind spots that had catastrophic consequences.

You seem to be worried about some ideological corruption of philosophy. It’s as if you’re advancing a more philosophical version of the “facts don’t care about your feelings” critique of the Left. I think this is misplaced, not least because much of what Adorno wrote is not easily packaged in terms of ethics; is difficult for the Left to swallow and is written off by most Marxists as pessimistic and counter-productive; and explicitly goes against many of the tenets of revolutionary politics. The whole point for Adorno is how to reach truth—not how to ground a political or ethical project and the truth be damned. The truth is that people suffer and they ought not to (he rejects the complete separability of facts and values).

Well, there are two things at play here. I never thought Adorno's opposition to identity-thinking was a first principle or originary ground, and yet this does not mean that he is not monomaniacal. To be possessed by a singular idea or ideational current is monomaniacal whether or not that singular thought is seen as originary. So Adorno may or may not be monomaniacal, but I don't see that your argument here is to the point. — Leontiskos

If the possession of a singular idea or ideational current is the criterion, then many of the great philosophers become monomaniacal. The distinction Adorno draws is between a fixation that hypostatizes a principle, and a critical focus that traces a structural feature of conceptual thought.

EDIT: Correction: it's not a distinction Adorno draws, but one I am drawing. If Adorno were monomaniacal about identity-thinking, it would be a fixation that hypostatizes the principle that identity-thinking is bad or whatever; whereas I think it's more like "a critical focus that traces a structural feature of conceptual thought."

The critique of identity thinking is not a doctrine, but is the confrontation with the historically dominant form of conceptual mediation, which any immanent critique must confront all the time, simply because it’s so ubiquitous. Calling that “monomania,” despite what you say, does seem to mistake the object of analysis for the ground of a system.

As for totalitarianism, I think it's too easy, or perhaps superficial, to say that an anti-totalitarian philosophy might itself become totalitarian if it goes too far. — Jamal

But wouldn't you agree with someone who says that? — Leontiskos

Sure. The point of my comment was that this truism is not a good criticism of Adorno. There is no totalizing program in Adorno.

I grant that the danger you describe is real: becoming so horrified by X that one becomes doctrinal in opposing X. But Adorno actually resists that move by refusing to convert catastrophe into the foundation of a system or determinate political programme. Instead he is arguing for a particular kind of attentiveness, because philosophy cannot proceed as though nothing happened.

As an auxiliary point, I favor traditions of philosophy over novel, heroic individual efforts. Philosophizing within a tradition (and in relation to other traditions) helps smooth out rough edges and avoid the monomaniacal tendencies I alluded to. This is another reason why I am generally skeptical in cases such as these. But I might be wrong. — Leontiskos

Adorno is steeped in tradition and is alive to both its importance and its dangers. He comes out of Kant and Hegel while also analyzing the genesis of their ideas to reveal their constitutive blind spots. So he is both traditional and anti-traditional.

And like you, he is significantly suspicious of the heroic individual in philosophy. Contrast him with the “heroic” Heidegger (who he hated). Heidegger sought to sweep it all away and start again from the pre-Socratics, and Adorno put a lot of effort into exposing this as a fantasy—the fantasy of starting fresh (one which expresses ideological commitments and presuppositions).

As evidence, two observations:

1. Adorno doesn’t reject the subject-object structure. He doesn’t think we can step outside it or replace it with a better alternative, by fiat.
2. The method of immanent critique depends entirely on inherited concepts and categories and would be impossible without them. The whole point is to interrogate our inherited concepts from within.

EDIT: I missed an important one:

3. Consciousness. He doesn't abandon the Kantian notion of consciousness, which many later thinkers dropped (and criticized Adorno for not dropping).


So I think Adorno is to be commended for his restraint. Even though he has the intellectual range and imagination to attempt a Heidegger-style heroic rupture, he refuses.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon — Jamal

I'm sad to report that after a great first half, I got really bored with this and dropped it.

It's like a spinoff from Against the Day, in the style of Inherent Vice, but without the bite of either. I wouldn't have expected to be wishing, during the reading, that the protagonist did not go to central Europe and had instead stayed in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee section is great fun; the ocean voyage and Hungary become super-zany but lack any real texture or substance.

But maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

I think there's a view you're not considering, one which is probably closer to the way @T Clark sees things. I mean the view that sees the idea that sex is dirty or that the animal in us is something to be ashamed of or to transcend—that this idea itself is what is offensive, rather than sex or the "bestial". In other words, it is disgusting that people find sex disgusting.

The idea that our animal nature is "base" and "dirty" has deep links with philosophy and religion, of course. That's a problem for philosophy. If this discussion could go in that direction, that might be enough to raise it up out of the Lounge.

The traditional scheme is that the good is what is eternal, necessary, pure, and rational. The contingent, mutable, finite, passionate and affective—like life and love (real love, with sex and everything)—are relegated to inferior status, as belonging to the wordly realm that philosophy is meant to transcend.

I am very much against this binary scheme, and I like the philosophers who have challenged it. Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Adorno. Generally, 20th century scepticism towards reason, and its inclusion of the body, saved philosophy from becoming a complete idiot.

One interesting angle is the possibility that a neurotically adolescent view of sex, as expressed in the OP (which is not to say it's unusual), might actually be founded on a long-standing philosophical tradition going back to Plato and Siddhartha Gautama.

Cool. I don't want to always sound like I'm taking a pro-AI stand in a new culture war, but it is worth pointing out that he is against the bubble more than AI itself, against capitalism more than the technology:

AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of. — Cory Doctorow

But then, in his call to action, he conflates anti-AI-bubble with anti-AI, thereby undermining his whole point or at least confusing his audience:

To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.

Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it's worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls will high-tech asbestos.

EDIT: It's more sloppiness than contradiction. In the second quotation, "AI" means the project of monopoly capitalism now underway, whereas in the first quotation it means the actual technology. This is such an important distinction that the sloppiness is unforgivable.

I've ensured that the archive won't be indexed by search engines until we close this site, so at least for the next couple of months, nobody should be able to find a story by searching in Google or whatever.

I could only recall @hypericin and myself being concerned about the visibility of stories, and we're both ok with things as they are, but I can remove any story from the archive on an ad hoc basis—so let me know. I'm not taking any content over to the new site.

I don't know. I'm out of steam. Over to someone else.

e

Ah, it's intelligent.

:groan:

Enlightened.

o