So I suppose the extent to which one is content with an evolutionary frame is the extent to which one is willing to allow for other influence. — Isaac

No, I think by the time you're arbitrating between evolution or alternatives, you've already resolved the problem, or put it on hold. It's no longer relevant. The problem is conceptual and starts before that; at the conceptual stage. [EDIT: I'll leave the previous sentence in; I like it in all its ineptness. It perfectly expresses the muddle I feel when confronted with this problem.]

It's a very hard to grasp concept, which is why we help ourselves with conecepts such as p-zombies. A p-zombie and a person with first-person experience would both behave the same, and thus share the same evolution. What sort of test could we devise to tell if one is a p-zombie or not? If p-zombies are impossible, how can we conceptualise evidence for this?

P-zombies aren't the point. They're a wishy-washy pin-point of some intuitive niggle people have. But the niggle's there. And the problem's bigger: there's a continuum that starts with solipsism and ends in pan-psychism.

I personally am a mysterian - in the context of science: I don't think it's possible to resolve that, because for first person experience (the ultimate subjectivity possible) there's only ever a sample-size of one; and the sample possible is different for each scientist (always only their own). Normally, talking objectively about subjectivity is not a problem; subjects can be operationalised so you can talk about them. Neuroscience is definitely evidence of that. But you can't do that for the hard problem; the empirical substratus this is about goes away, if you do. You assume the outcome one way or another and go on to more interesting questions (evolution of brainstuff being one of them).

I think the doubling of bodies as something you have and something you are is relevant here (Helmuth Plessner has talked about that, I think; it's been years and I've forgotten too much). When I say that my keyboard is made up of atoms, I can conceptualise this a matter of scale. It's easy. When I say, consciousness is made up of neural activity (which is my default working assumption), all I have is a correlation; the nature of the connection eludes me. Given that I tend to figure stuff out by comparison, and given that I'll never be able to entertain more than one first-person-experience at a time, I suspect it'll continue to elude me.

(For what it's worth, the hard problem is little more than an interesting curiosity to me. When viewed as a problem it's hard, but for me it's hardly a problem.)

More generally, the liberal capitalist state is an atheist organization, at least intentionally speaking. — Moliere

That's... muddying the water even further. I feel obliged to bring up the word "secular" here. And the secular isn't... exactly antithetical to the religious. It's a space where various faiths can meet. The separation of church and state isn't a dividing line between monotheistic religion and atheism, or not only. A secular state can allow various incompatible faiths to live in close proximity without too many problems. I'm no expert, but I think that most of the Christian denominations who see themselves as part of the oecomene would also favour a secular state? (I think a popular goes "Give Caseser what belongs to Caesar..." I wonder who said that?)

This is the problem I have with the use of "atheist" in the sentence I quoted. Theists can be fine with a secular state; not with an atheist one. There's a faultline here somewhere, but it's hard to detect. You never quite know when you've crossed the border.

I know people like to say that "atheism" is just a lack of belief in God (or gods), and for most contexts that's a pretty good line to follow. But we end up with absurdity when we count rocks and shoes as atheists. So is it people who don't believe in God? Poeple who don't believe in God, even though they'd have had the opportonutiy to do so? Again, where do we draw the line?

I mean I think "God" is nonsense; something that doesn't make sense. That's what makes me dismiss theism as of no value to my world view. And that's why I'm an atheist. It's not just non-belief. But it's also definitely not a believe in the negative.

New Atheist may scapegoat religions, but it's any cause really. Gather enough people under a shared cause and you get a small share of radicals, a larger share of well-intentioned people Who Know Best, an a really small share of people who actually do manage to draw strength from their cause and do good. The rest, which I think is the vast majority, just muddle through somehow (kind of like I do without a cause). For what it's worth, I'd consider the New Atheists "Well-intentioned people Who Know Best", for the most part. They're not really radicals from what I hear from them (though there is the occasional tendency maybe). As a muddler-through, they don't really represent me.

Individual a/theists and their beliefs aren't as important as the success of general social structures — Moliere

If you view it like this... I think it's in the nature of atheism to be "less successful" (interpreted as evolutionary success) than theism. I mean, if the theism goes away, so does atheism. What's the point? But theism can go on indefinitely, with or without atheists.

I mean there's stuff like naturalism or nihilism; atheist stuff. And that can go on without theism, too. But none of that would be atheistically tinged, without theism reaching enough social power to disadvantage those worldviews. Atheism depends on theism. It's reactive. It's never going to be more successful than theism. (Though it can be more successful in certain contexts, say Academia.)

But then, also, secular humanists (atheists) have more in common with many theists than with nihilists (also atheists). Atheism has no content without theists; and in the absence of socially powerful theists, the potentially atheistically interpreted world views are likely to quibble amongst each other, drawing different borders in the process. (And it's not like theists all agree, when among themselves.)

Cool. I understand. — Moliere

I've been looking for a word to use that fits better than "belief". The best I could come up with was "impression". The concept could be incoherent in itself (whatever that means - I'm a relativist, so I don't think that's the case). Or I could be missing something. Or it's incompatible with the way I think. Or... something I can't think of.

I figure you have to understand truth at some level to survive -- I am a realist of some kind, though I get confused in the discussions there -- but the specific meanings and claims of various religions, while wildly different in that particular sense, seem to have some kind of general coherence that got our species this far (just assuming the scientific picture true) — Moliere

I see turth a tool of some sort. Something we make to get a grip on reality. As I said, I'm a relativist.

So, if you stand in the middle of the road, you're likely to get run over by cars. Now, let's say you have some cognitive impairment that doesn't let you conciously perceive cars, and you don't like admitting something's wrong with you. So you develop a worldview without cars. There's a divine taboo to stand in the middle of the road, and you still instinctively detect movement on the road (you're brain just doesn't make them into cars). So you're convinced that cars don't exist, but you still won't stand in the middle of the road, because some sort of divine taboo, and you don't cross a street when cars are about, but you edit out the actual vehicles, and in its place you have some sort of intuition which you interpret as divine guidance. (And this is where this analogy becomes to silly to continue, because how you avoid getting rides is sort of harder to explain; but luckily the point is about not dying in the road here, so it doesn't need to be plausible or coherent, just sort of illustrative - which I hope it is):

Anyway: as long as you don't get run over, it doesn't matter whether it's because of "the truth". "Truth", unlike reality, needs some system of... axioms and transformation rules? Not sure. Something. Truth conditions. And for such a "truth" to be useful, it needs to compatible with reality. How much compatibility you need? Well, reality's the judge of that. So not just anything goes (and that's why the no-car example above is ultimately silly, but to me it feels more like extreme hyperbole than a category mistake).

Of course, "truth" is always social, too, which complicates matters.

I just think some things are so high up the abstraction ladder that the meaning of this is most closely related to the one making the abstraction. And an abstraction can be so habitual, that it's just felt backgound and not accessible to introspection without difficulty. A lot of it can just be random variation that cancels out statistically: some theists survive, some atheists survive - none of it matters from a survival point of view. Is that true? Who knows?

I'm skeptical about anything that sounds like evolutionary psychology. It feels a little too much of a mix between hermeneutics and empirical pea counting to be useful. But then I have sociology degree and that discipline isn't all that different in some of its incarnations.

While I'm rambling about playfully, I might as well share my hermeneutical indeterminacy principle: of a proposition you can either know whether it's true, or what it means, but never both at the same time. There you go. That's the sort of atheist I am.

I suspect where we land often boils down to people's aesthetic experience of the world. The idea of a transcendent being (magic man) seems right and beautiful to some folks, wrong and ugly to others. — Tom Storm

Sometimes it doesn't. It's not necessarily a problem if you don't believe but like the concept. You can just get something out of your religion of affinity via metaphor or so. (Though if that doesn't work out, you might feel a strong sense of discontent with the way the world is?) But it's gotta suck to dislike the concept but believe it. I expect a common reaction is guilt and slef-doubt? Just guessing, really.

How do you get to the belief that the concept of God is nonsense? — Moliere

It's not a belief. Anything I can't make sense of is nonsense to me. Once I try to understand a concept I sometimes make progress. With God it's a random number of steps in a random direction (I can't even tell where forward is). Since I need a worldview I made mine with placing God into the category of things that other people say but make no sense. I fear I'm old enough now that there's a crust of dust around it. I can't scale back my own worldview far enough to make sense of God and still have enough concepts left to think with. But maybe not. There's always the chance that someone says something, or something happens, that makes me suddenly experience a... shift? Maybe a change in the hardware'll do it? A stroke, maybe?

...but atheism as a starting point? "OK, God doesn't exist. Sure. So why in the world does this idea have so much influence today, and why did it have influence before?" — Moliere

Ah, see, that's already a step too far for me. That's what I mean by flytrap: the moment I say "God doesn't exist," I get tangled up in a conversation of the type winning-losing that I can't win. I've admitted too much already, and now I'm comitted to a statement I ultimately feel is meaningless. I can argue back and forth in that groove, but I get more and more alienated by the stuff I say. And I can't get away.

The truth is, if you ever catch me saying something like "God doesn't exist," it's most likely a bid to end the conversation. It's more a hyperbolic demonstration of my worldview in a simplified manner that my interlocutor can easily understand. The problem is, though, I project a false view of myself. I'd have to say something like "To me, the concept of God is nonsense," which would be closer to the truth, but it's about my intuition and doesn't easily lead to rational talk. And, also, people tend to miss the "to me," so I have to explain that I'm a relative of some sort (which sort I'm not even sure of myself), and... So it's just easier to say stuff like "God doesn't exist." But I use that rarely, and only as a conversation ender, and only if I feel the person I'm talking to isn't going to view this as a challange.

I grew up the son of Catholic person, but my belief in God to the extent that it was there to begin with never grew up with me for some reason. I always knew who got my Christmas presents; my parents made no secret of it. But around Christmas they'd never admit to that; it's always the local equivalent of Santa around that time of the year. (Add to that me being an animal geek and never seeing the easter bunny as anything else than an amusing absurdity.) It's possible I thought believing in God was a similar game? To be honest, I don't remember. I do know I don't remember a moment when I realised I didn't believe in God. I do remember worrying about telling my mother about it (which would have had to be somewhere between 9 and 12 I think?). I don't know how that came to be.

I'm fairly relaxed about being an atheist, mostly because I'm living in a fairly secular society (Austria), and religion is mostly a private affair people don't ask about, and when they learn you're an atheist people aren't prone to argue (unless there's nothing else to do; most of my face-to-face discussions happened in trains). There are... incompatibilities. For example, when my mum's down turning to God's a source of comfort, so God talk would come naturally to her when sees me feeling down, but that's precicely the moment I have the least tolerance for God talk. I can't or don't want to spare the effort to translate.

A computer metaphor might help: I'm running the OS unLucky-relativist, and it doesn't natively run programs written for DeusVult; all that's available is a shoddily written emulator and it takes up a lot of processing power, and the programs won't run as intended anyway. So when I need to run intensive debugging routines because the OS acts up, also running the emulator could crash the system. But not running the emulator might cause background processes like Interaction to crash...

Hm, I remember when The God Delusion hit the shelves. I knew of it before I ever saw a physical copy, so I was curious when I finally cam across one and picked it up to read a little. I read an excerpt about the evils religion wrought, I think I remember the section being about Australian aboriginies, and I wondered, so what about the British Empire and it's take on civilisation? I wasn't impressed. It felt too much of a simplistic polemic, so I put it back. Over the years, I found I liked some of Harris and Dennett, but Hitchens has always been nails on chalkboard for me. All in all, I'm not well-read in them, though.

I'm an atheist. I'm not inherently against religion, but personally I'm bored by ritual, and I've just never found anything to be certain about (which as a negative effect means there's a constant background-radiation anxiety underlying anything I do, but when I'm fine it expresses itself a good-natured ironic attitude towards life - or so I hope).

I'm interested in philosophy, but I'm not well-read in philosophy. On the topic of theism... my main drive is understanding what theists are trying to tell me when they talk about God. The topics themselves don't interest me much; what's interesting is why they interest others. When it comes to questions such as "Does God exist," I'm not keen on joining discussions, and I feel like building a philosophy around this is... walking into a trap? It feels like fly paper... I can never tell if I'm strawmanning, or if they're shifting goal posts. I can't tell the difference. It's not native mind-space, and I have no good map.

Atheism, then, interests me more as a social phenomenon than as a topic for philosophy. I just can't see enough substance to gods to start serious thought.

But it's the only thing we can really expect... — MojaveMan

Not really, no. People die only once; the rest of the time they can expect to live. Plenty of stuff to prepare for inbetween, like your next meal maybe. What's so important about that single moment that all your energy should be directed towards it?

As a kid, I confused fear of death for fear of dying. I was, am, and probably will be afraid of dying, but mostly because it's very likely going to be one of the more unpleasant moments of life. After the dying's done with? Nothing. So nothing left to worry about.

Well, that's a bit of a simplification. I do think beyond my death. I don't like the idea of my left-overs causing trouble (if I were involved in a messy accident, for example, I imagine I'd feel like apologising to the people who have to clean up, except I know won't be able to, me being dead and all). So I'm no stranger to projected unpleasantness. However, the mere fact that I'm here now, but won't be in a hundred years? This is something I'm entirely indifferent to.

I read the terror management article, and interestingly the coping strategies they mention are (all? mostly?) things I don't care for either: Leaving a legacy? What for, if I'm not around. Continuing my gene pool? How am I supposed to derive value from this? And so on. I don't think I ever really experienced that existential terror in the face of death. Other people dying, loss, is far more frightening than my own future non-existence.

Just looking at linguistic institutions, it seems to me that all linguistic institutions do the opposite of making certain marks count as utterances. They categorize what happened to work before, but it wasn't the institution that made the utterance, but the other way around. Language pre-dates institutions, after all. — Moliere

Language itself is an institution (at least in sociology). I'm not sure I remember how Marx used the word, but I doubt modern Marxist sociologist would find the idea that language is an institution surprising. There are many different theories, but as a rule of thumb, sociology considers any suriving regular social behaviour an institution. When you speak of linguistic institutions above do you mean stuff like dictionaries, linguistics, crossword puzzles...? Or the organisations that make them?

Yeah, the utterance makes the institution: without the utterance, no language. But, generally, people draw on their expectations of the institution to make those utterances. Chicken-egg situation, at that point.

But it's a real wall, not part of a dream, through which you cannot walk.

That is, the phenomena of a dream wall are not the same as the phenomena of a real wall. They are different, at the phenomenological level.

Hence, it is an error to suppose that what the dream wall and the real wall have in common is phenomenological. — Banno

I find this really hard to talk about, as I'm not that firm with the terminology. Maybe what I'm getting at is more conceptual than phenomenological? The phenomenon of a dream wall is certainly different from the phenomenon of a real wall, but I do think they have things in common (otherwise we couldn't make the connection of both being "walls"), and I think it's because brains are involved in constructing them from accrued baggage, some of which are likely shared. Maybe I should bow out, as I'm feeling out of my depth both with brains stuff and philosophy stuff, here.

It's more that I don't see how "contents of consciousness" might be "real or not real". — Banno

Yeah, I could have phrased that better. I do agree with the quote that follows what I've just quoted (and I remember you saying that more than once, too).

But when you said in your reply to my first post:

Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be. — Banno

When I'm dreaming of walking through a wall, my wet ware robot isn't even attempting to walk through a wall. It's sleeping. I might be able to walk through a wall in my dream, but the wall isn't a real wall, and the I that walks through it is not my wetware robot (which is sleeping).

On the physical level, a real wall is a wall, and a dream wall is... synapses firing? That seems like a weird comparison to me. We only make that comparison because our phenomenal trees are very similar, I'd say. So, for the present topic, I think the reality of firing synapses is more important than the reality of any walls; that's secondary, I think. Or differently put, wall phenomena connect real walls and dream walls, and they're the only reason I can think of that we can make the connection. Trees and synapses are rather different, otherwise. But since we can connect walls trees and dream walls via wall phenomena, we can compare synapses to sysnapses (well, I don't think we can recognise wall-phenomena-inducing synapses yet, but I hope you see where I'm going with this).

So "virtual reality" isn't quite the right metaphor. — Moliere

I think metaphors are always tricky, and they're never quite right (because if the thing you're comparing it to weren't different, it wouldn't open up a perspective). For example:

Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be. — Banno

Part of this response might be due to the metaphor I used: "contents of consciousness". I mean, in that very post I indicated that I thought consciousness was a "flow" - more generally, I think it's a process. It's not literally a container and therefore doesn't acutally have "contents".

We don't always realise why we use one metaphor over another and that can cause confusion. So, on to the whole section:

Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be.


By way of pointing out that you are first embedded in the world. You are not sitting in your mind looking out — Banno

There's nothing here I disagree with, but when we're talking about the brain I suppose a wall is - to some degree a wall. If I dream of a wall, the wetware robot is sleeping. My non-brain science take here is that wall is a meaning that can trigger in different circumstances - with walls, with words, with dreams, with illusions... I'm not entirely sure how to talk about this, and I'm no expert in the history of philosophy either.

From the Davidson/Derangement thread I remember we don't disagree about much, but there always comes a point where I can't grasp what you're getting at. Here, for example, I disagree about nothing but I can't figure out what triggered this particular reply.

I'm having trouble with the metaphor. See, the brain's first and foremost a wet-ware robot control system. Part of that includes a process we call consciousness, but I'm not sure I could say that consciousness *is* virtual reality. I'm not knowledgable enough about the brain, but as I understand it consciousness is to a small part sensory input and to a large part pre-existing sturcutre. Except in dreams, where the stimulus for experience is not snesory input. And sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations, too.

So whether or not the contents of consciousness are "real" or "not real" is down to the functioning of the wet-ware robot in daily life. But it's still all a brain process, no? So the real life VR that serves as reference to the metaphorical VR are on different levels: Real world VR is computer generated sensory input for biological perception systems (sensory organs, nerves, brains...). The metaphorical VR is neither input nor output it's just... a flow? It's this disjunction that makes the question hard to answer.

I certainly don't think that brain provides VR as output for a disembodied consciouness. Or at least, I wouldn't know how to make sense of it. This is why I'm with Chalmers: I have no idea how to connect that "experiential flow" with the physical processes. The only reason I know what we're talking about is that I have that sort of flow myself. So, yeah, there's this brain process, "consciousness", and it's part of the total functioning of the wet-ware robot; and there's this first-person experience on top of it.

So to the extent that we can call that VR, it doesn't make sense to differentiate between illusions and reality for the VR status; it's *all* generated. We'd be talking about types of input, rather than the process. But types of input matter, too. Does it travel along the nervous system? Is it generated somewhere else in the brain? People with more insight into the brain might be better fit to talk about this (say, Isaac). But the process itself shouldn't be all that different.

Just a short note: in that post about phrases I used the term "Determiner Phrase". I'd advise you to ignore it. It's a minority theory and might be more confusing. Also, even under the DP-theory, I forgot to account for the determiner on level 2. And finally, it's important that this is only one way of looking at things.

I like immediate-constituancy-analysis, which this is supposed to be, but IC-analysis doesn't usually use determiner-phrase theory. All of this is probably beyond what people in this thread need, but... well, it's best to ignore the term "determiner phrase", as if you look up phrases you're not likely to encounter it (or at least not as used here).

This is what IC-analysis looks like: within square brackets, there's a phrase: [the [[red] [apple]]] Note that I didn't put a square bracket around "the"; it's not clear to me at the moment whether I sould have.

The next step would be naming the phrases:

NP[the NP[AP[red]NP[apple]]]

Whether you call the whole thing a NP or a DP phrase isn't all that important until you understand the theory thoroughly (which I'm not sure I do, actually), and it's probably best not to default to a minority position.

(Note that Constituency grammars order phrases differently than, say, dependency grammars.)

My mistake here can be summarised as: too much theory, too unsystematically presented.

Forgive a bit of self-indulgence, but here is my shopping list poem: — T Clark

I tried to google "shopping list" and "poem" to maybe find some hint as to what I remember. Instead I found a whole host of shoppinglist-poems. Seems to be a popular topic.

Have you seen the meme - Shakespeare Quote of the Day: "An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made." — Cuthbert

I haven't. Heh. It's perfect.

Bagels
Cream Cheese
cleaning rags — Moliere

Definite rhythm: dam-da dam-da dam-da-dam

Also: line 1 and 2 = food; line 3 =/= food.

Also very nearly an alphabetic progression of the first letters of each line. Definitely so far no line starts with a letter that comes earlier in the alphabet.

I think there may be a fear here in that we don't want to limit poetry, too. — Moliere

I think what this episode shows is that what institutionalises poetry might be part of every-day language, just not emphasised in either production or exception.

Take for example Roman Jakobson's Functions of Language. Jakobson identifies 6 factors involved in language: Context, addresser, addressee, contact, code and message, and assigns functions to language according to those factors. "Meaning", as most people usually think of it, would probably fall under "reference" which is the function of context, "expression", which is the function of the addresser, and the "conative function", which is the function with respect to the addressee. The "poetic function" is concerned with the message itself (how it reads, sounds, what words are used - all the formal stuff).

If you think of the poetic function of language as a subtype of "fun with pattern recognition" (alongside seeing bunnies in clouds and such), that might even have contributed to the creation of language in the first place. Shared social grunt-play. Would make sense to me.

A scene from the anime Yuyushiki that may or may not demonstrate what I mean (depending on how much sense I make):

I intended my comment to be complimentary, even if my characterization of your post was inaccurate. I found it very helpful. — T Clark

Thanks. To be honest, I'm not sure if you're characterisation of my post was inaccurate; what I think I write isn't always what ends up on the page, even before possible interpretations of others are taken in account. If you could see me produce the posts in realtime, you'd see me type, backspace, retype, delete a paragraph, delete everything, try again, go away, come back later, and try again. I confuse myself writing my own posts, and I often write myself not into a corner but into a wide open space with no direction clearly being forward (corners are comfy, actually, by comparison.) I didn't mean to correct you so much as find my bearings.

I find the question interesting, actually. I feel like formal aspects of poems are a type of meaning, too (the main anchor of nonsense verse like the first stanza of Jabberwocky, for example). There's a back and forth, and in poetry, where the importance of those formal aspects is institutionally raised, the word meaning and sound meaning give rise to each other in a chicken-egg relationship, only more chaotic.

Also, I think of language as something meaningful along a lot of other meaningful things, and meaning is how consciousness connects to the world. We engage differently with a text if we think it's a shopping list than if we think it's a poem. (I've heard of a teacher providing a shopping list as an example of a poem, encouraging analysis. It's not something I've come up with. I wish I still had the reference, but it's just something I heard in a course a long time ago.)

Calling Dawnstorm - would you agree? — Amity

I'm not sure with what?

I'd be interested to hear how well the music, song and singer interpret the poem and the phrasing.
Any ideas? — Amity

I don't speak much French, but turning a poem into song lyrics... changes things. To different degrees, depending on how it works.

What I notice about the sheet music is that it doesn't only have German lyrics (my mother tongue, by the way), it has two different versions of the melody to account for extra notes. "Tom-be", two syllables, for example is accounted for by a half-note and a quarter note (with the half-note going to the stressed syllable), while the German "Grab" is accounted for by a dotted half-note. And so on.

In general, music tends to emphasise duration over pitch and volume in a melody. And then you have chord quality, which is rather interesting here. Right from the start we get Gminor --> G7 --> Am7 --> Bb --> Cm7/Bb (?) and so on. There's a lot of modulation here, before we even establish a clear key. The key signature suggests either G-minor or Bb-major. Songs about graves tend to be in minor, and sure enough, we start with a Gm chord, but then we immediately go into a major seventh chord, which is - obviously - not in the key of G-minor. Seventh chords are often used to modulate - and so I'd have expected to get a either C-major or C-minor, and for a while I thought I got C-major, until I noticed that the bass was playing an A, so what I really got was Am7 (which you could also interpret as C/A, especially after G7). And then it goes up a half-step and switches from block-chords to arpeggios... And from there, then, you'd need to figure out where the melody creates dissonance that "wants to resolve"...

That's a lot of work, just to have the bare facts of both syllable count and music. And then you'd need to analyse how this connects... And you'd need some sort of theory to do so, because this type of singing has little in common with speech. My hunch is I'd have to start with relative duration of syllables (within the song), since the most obvious difference is that when speaking the poem, you're done with a line much sooner. Beyond that I have little intuition, and part of it is that I'm not as familiar with French as I'd need to be. I don't feel confident to say much here.

I wonder why you say the word 'crack' is odd. — Amity

Oh, sorry. I meant the word "terse" is odd: I associate it with speech, behaviour of people. It's the first conspicuous time I noticed that nature was being personified. It's odd for a chest nut to be terse. I mean, it was right there with the sentry parade of trees, but at that point that was just imagery to me. They stand around like guards.

I should have put quotation marks around "terse", too, maybe rephrase that bit.

Is what you've written intended to be about meaning? It doesn't seem so to me. I wrote earlier in this thread and elsewhere that I don't think poems mean anything beyond the experience of the person reading or listening to it. Your post seems more like an explanation of how the poet has used language to help us share that experience. — T Clark

To be honest, I find this hard to answer. First the last sentence: my post is more about how I read the poem than about the what the poem did. I've experienced time and again that the same words can be read differently. For example, key to my reaction is that I slow down while reading the last line, but there's nothing in the poem that forces me to do so. A poem, read aloud, is always already an interpretation (though not necessarily consciously so). And I don't think the differences in reading are random.

Some readings may fit the formal characteristics of a poem better than other readings. I remember thinking (not only once), well, that's awkwardly phrased, until I heard someone else read this. For example, speeding through two consecutive syllables might allow to linger on a different one that would be an "unemphasised slot" otherwise. I wish I still had an example, but it's been at least 20 years ago, now. I remember the feeling of the dropping penny, but not the specifics of the poem(s).

I like it too, and I it made me ask myself something. If I wrote "I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold."

Is that still a poem? If not, what made Williams' version one? The pauses at the end of each line? The way it flowed differently? The way it looks? What about the stanzas? Were the breaks between them just for visual purposes. — T Clark

I'm guessing it's that linebreaks slow you down, and you pay more attention to the words in themselves. We're conditioned to read prose for meaning first. (Though some prose can override that for me, like the final paragraph of James Joyce' "The Dead".)

Oh dear, there's way too much going on here, and.. well, it's a secondary topic I've studied on university level, so my problem is mostly how to be brief and not too technical. Easy things first: What people say about sonnetts here is all correct; Amity is right about the form the of Shakespearean sonnets, and Srap Tasmaner is right about Petrarchan sonnets.

Next: metre is more something you approach assymptotically than keep to slavishly. Strict regularity is more a feature of poems that are supposed to entertain. A Limerick or a doggerel is going to be more regular metre-wise than a sonnet, on avarage. Regularity creates a sing-song feeling that many poem types (especially the more serious forms) wish to avoid.

Next, semantics. I've never liked truth-conditional semantics too much. My hunch is that meaning needs to be there before you ever get too truth, and truth itself needs to be a meaningful concept. I think that meaning is pre-linguistic even. For that reason, I'm not too fond of a simple reference semantic either. I tend towards cognitive semantics. But I've never looked into semantics too much, so I'm not an expert what they actually say. If you go by the usual semantic triangle, of sign - thing - concept (whatever the different versions might conceptualise the points of the triangle as), I'd say that the concept is central, and both the sign and the thing evoke the concept, but in different concepts. Truth is irrelevant until rather late in the game. A poem, especially a long one as the Wasteland, will have its own meaning, both while reading, and after reading as a memory trace, which then influences a consequitive reading, and so on. You can never read the same poem twice.

The term phrase is rather precise in linguistics (but doesn't only have one meaning, since there are different theories). Language is compositional. Basically morphemes make words make phrases make clauses, and after that you get into text analysis and leave the realm of syntax. A phrase can be composes of words and other phrases and even clauses. For example, one way to count phrases, could be the follwoing: "the red apple":

1. Determiner Phrase: "the red apple"
2. Noun phrase: "red apple"
3. a) adjective phrase: "red"
3. b) noun phrase: "apple".

Not all ways of counting recognise determiner phrases. The numbering shows compositional levels, and goes inwards. If 3. a) were "red and yellow" (as in "the red and yellow apple"), for example, you'd have to decide (by your theory) if it's meaningful to count "red" and "yellow" as their own phrases. I could say that at that point we just have a co-ordination of adjectives. It's not that easy, though, since you could have "the mostly red and somewhat yellow apple", which then would make you decide what to do with the adverbs. In that case, I'd count "mostly red" and "somewhat yellow" as adjective phrases, since while the adjectives are co-ordinated, the adverbs are not co-ordinated, which means the co-ordination is on the phrase level. If all it takes to get phrases is a modification of the adjectives, though, there's no good reason to not also see the unmodified version as co-ordination of phrases rather than words.

Next, "phrase" is also a word used in music theory: a phrase is built from lower level stuff, too, like, say, motifs, but I'm not that knowledgable here. In any case, if you riff of this term, you might consider a phrase a compositional unit that somehow completes a rhythm. A phrase might co-incide with a line, with half a line, with a couplet... depending on the poem. You can then compare the rhythmic units with units of meaning: Do they co-incide? Do they overlap? And so on.

Meaning tends to influence rhythm as much as the other way round, and different people might emphasise different words. A short Poem:

Danielle Hope, "The Mist at Night" (from The Poet's Voice, 1994):

Perhaps it's the trees, look -
on sentry parade by the lake,
October weighting their branches,
a flotilla of shadows
casting nets over the water.
Perhaps it's the black-out under the trees -
terse chestnuts crack underfoot.
The water-rat snores from dumb roots,
the hawthorn racked red with doubt.

Perhaps it's the mist - wide awake
like a child before Christmas -
or that you think the air weeps
and you don't want it to stop.
So you tug up a tough ugly stump
to wake the lynx that sleeps
just under your heart.
To chase the sleepy lynx out of its lair.
To run wild in the mist in the night.

You get two ten-line stanzas, both subdivided into lines of five. The most striking means of subdivision is the repetition of "Perhaps it's the...", which gives the poem its structure, until the final five lines are introduced with "So," initiating a conclusion (which is what the word "so" often does). On the semantic level, the "perhaps" refuses to make a definite statement, and the "it" is indeterminate, never telling you what it's talking about. So you have a sort of vague, dreamy feel just from non-sensual words.

The mist from the title doesn't come in until the start of the second stanza. The first stanza gives the setting, but does smuggle in impressionistic figurative language. What strikes me are the adjectives that sort of hint at communication, but with inanimate nouns: "terse chestnuts", "dumb roots" - until the stanza ends with "doubt" attributed to... hawthorn?

Phonetically, the first stanza starts out with frictatives and long vowels (the first line ends with a plosive; so does the second one, the same one, "k", but this time with a diphtong, which sounds more relaxed). The other three lines end in unstressed syllaber. All in all, I read this in a quite relaxed, tone - with "look" standing out as an exclamation of excitement. The next five lines start out in a similar vein: this time it ends on "trees", a long-vowel word. But then you get the terse chest-nuts: the line has lots of plosive and darker vowel sounds. It's a change in the mood (and the "blackout" foreshadows this, actually). Semantically, the chestnuts being terse fit well with a "crack", but the word is a little odd. The water-rat line feels a little more relaxed again, but not quite as much as the trees-line, and the hawthorn line ends on the plosive of "doubt".

Then we get to the mist, and here we have a intra-line break, like the first line before "look", but we're now fully in the poet's projection space: it's not the mist that's wide awake, it's... the poet? the reader? the adressee? To me, the lines that follow have the strongest run-on quality so far in the poem: it's a consecutive idea that mixes the outer world with the inner world, and then it gets explicit with the next three lines.

Phonetically the so-line is one I hurry through. Very dark vowals, and a very interesting phonetic construction in "tug up a tough ug..." You're almost repating the sounds with switched letters: tug and ugly - and up and tough (not quite perfect, but both unvoiced vowel sounds. The line ends with another "p", and then the poem slows down again (or at least I do when I read it). The seciton ends with lynx sleeping explicitly under "your heart", now. The mix-up between the inner and outer world is out in the open. And we get a full-stop here. That slows the poem down even further. You could co-ordinate the following to-lines with commas (the poem's used commas before), but it doesn't. The lines slow down, until the last line has internal repetion of "in" - which to me creates a three-part rhythm in a single line. I tend to svaour this, reading the line. I end the poem at its slowest (even though semantically, the poem's adressee is supposed to run wild).

There's a very clear mood to the poem for me, and a great sense of progression, but there's no clear meaning that's explicable. The phonetics, the punctuation, everything guides the reading. I'm not reading this poem at a constant speed; I can't. And that wraps into content of the metaphors, too. Oddly, I calm down when the poem invites you to run wild, but that sort of gives me a perfect sense of catharsis. Natural stops and run-on lines are very well placed to that effect. You (or, well, I) don't just get that effect from the meaning of the words. There's the vivid imagery, and the mix up of inner and outer world. (For example, if you tug up a tough ugly stump to wake the lynx that sleeps just under your heart, where was the stump, and did it hurt? It's not like I ever thought about it explicitly like that before I typed those lines, but that's sort of the... mulch of what's going on in my mind when I read that poem.)

It's one of my favourite poems.

PS: I distinctly recognise the plum poem, but the poet's name doesn't ring a bell. This is rare. Normally, when I remember a poem, I remember the name, and if I forget it, it'd at least sound familiar. I might be getting old.

I get what you're saying and don't disagree, but I think there's just a semantic issue here; I don't need to use the terms "form and function", it's just how I tend to think about the thing I'm trying to describe. I can make another attempt with different language. — Noble Dust

Oh, it's definitely just a semantic issue. And there's no need to put it differently. I just wanted to put my bias out there, so if I misunderstand you on you something it's not totally out of nowhere.

There's something I wanted to address in your first reply to me, but I didn't have time:

I worry this is a classic case of "these kids don't know what art is", which is a perennial perspective passed down from generation to generation, all while art manages to evolve despite the old codgers complaining about the kids. — Noble Dust

I've been active on various creative writing boards, and, well, it has always felt more self-inflicted by the kids themselves. Creative writing is all about language, but here you have the difficulty to figure out in what way literary language differs from everyday language, and how to get good at it, with being good at it being conflated with recognition by the publishing industry. There are creative writing courses to address that need, both academic and otherwise. And there are a lot of theories out there on how to get good.

Now what I've seen is writers offering up a text to critique amongst peers, getting a couple of the same few old canards (like beware adverbs and the passive voice, show don't tell, etc.). Then there's an edit, and a rough text is both more polished and less interesting as a result, but the author sees the more polished part and is pleased. It's not passed down from above. There's no judgement from above. Just a couple of guidelines you deviate from at your own peril. I've seen them pushed on blogs by editors. Some of them have made it into books by writers (such as Stephen King's On Wiriting). It's easy enough to demonstrate that no writer ever fully uses these rules, but then you're told, well, they're the basics you need to know before you develop your own style, and anyway, nobody says they're rules, just guidelines. In some cases, what has once been a well-defined term in one discipline (e.g. passive voice) has acquired a new nebulous meaning, as people who don't what "passive voice" means try to figure out how to avoid it (and if you avoid it it must be something bad, so it can sometimes be okay, too). In the end, you get a bundle of "don't be wordy," and "don't be vague about agency", and such. It's like you're trying to solve a puzzle.

Sometimes you get a few techniques: replace "verb + adverb" with a stronger word. So people go ctrl+f their way through their document and find instances of "ly " to see if they can replace a verb/adverb combo with a stronger verb. But that's a different mindset from reading the text and seeing if it works. It's entirely possible that a text might improve by that technique, but just by using it you drive a text towards a particular style. And if many people are doing it...

I think a lot of this push for regularity comes from the increasedly common place use of software, too. If you read through your text with your own eyes for verb/adverb, you go through it all. You have more context, just by doing it. You're also likely to miss perfectly fine usage that doesn't stand out. Ctrl+f through your document for "ly ", and you hop through your text from word-final -ly, some of which won't be adverbs, and the rest of which will be scrutinised. It's a different mindset of editing: regularisation is much more likely and much more thorough with software. I think that's true whether you use text editors or music editors. If it's easy to regularise something with a few clicks, you're much less likely to wonder if you should.

So basically I think it's a combination of unreflected prejudice and technological ease. Come to think of it, of the two only technological ease is new. I suppose we still need to adjust to technology, and I'm not even talking about AI at that point. And it's not just art. I remember, when I studied sociology in the early 2000s, I was once told that statistical software has changed the way social science has been conducted: since calculating has become a lot easier, there's been a growing trend from think first and calculate to calculate first and see whether there are any surprising results and then interpret them. (It's neither better nor worse; you have to think anyway.)

Function is technique. Music is the most familiar art to me, so I'll use that; apologies. Function is key signatures, time signatures, transpositions, modes, composition forms, approaches to improvisation, proper physical technique (ways to play the piano, hold drum sticks, strum a guitar, etc). Form is more the sound of it; do you like a silky blues guitar tone or a jarring metal tone? Do you prefer Baroque music or Romantic era? Do you like the chill vibe of rock steady or the paranoia of industrial metal? — Noble Dust

Just a little note on what my intuition tells me when I hear the terms form and function in relation to key signature: A key signature is neither function nor form; it has both. Consider a signle note: F#/Gb: Same form, different function.

Different example: The following notes in this sequence make up a chord: C/A/E/G. C6 or Am7/C. Same form, different function.

Maybe, function is the way a lower-level form contributes to a higher-level form: a note to a key; a chord to a progression. The same form can contribute to different higher-level forms; and a different function can lead to a different name.

Given this intuition it's a little hard to switch over to your usage (to the extent that I understand it), because the intution insists on getting in the way. It's no big thing. I can adapt; I'm not likely to use the terms going forward, though. Too insecure about getting them right. I do think I can read them without too many misunderstandings, though.

.

Am I missing something? Is there a sense in which artistic function is bottomless/eternal, or am I right in demarcating it's beginning and end points? — Noble Dust

I think I understand approximately what you're saying, but there are two things I find difficult:

(1) What is artistic function? It's mostly semantics, but I find the distinction very unintuitive in that context. Any item, in art, has both form and function, and often items compose bigger items. For example, a iamb is a form which has a function within iambic pentameter. A line of iambic pentameter has a function within a stanza. And if a stanza has a particular form, it can have a function within a sonnett. That's true to some extent or another, whether the form "sonnett" is still evolving or pinned down. And forms that are no longer evolving can still serve a function within a bigger unit.

(2) I'm not entirely sure about the boundaries of interest here. You sketch out the usual development of artistic movement, and I tend to follow you there. I think it's pretty much true that movments run themselves out and leave behind "rules" of composition without reflection to give them further meaning. It's a movement from "can" to "should". It's the fledgling artist admiring the master and thinking "that's the way it should it be done, if I want to be successful." It's the book-keepers selecting the familiar over the risky. And it's the creative getting tired of having their well-intentioned rhetoric hijacked for slogans and dispersing, moving on (or stagnating themselves). After a little while and a little distance some things might repeat, with new rhetoric and new energy. For example, in science fiction/fantasy the 90ies New Weird movement felt a lot like a retread of the 60ies New Wave (with some of the same players involved). It didn't last because marketing departments took up the rhetoric, and the movment wasn't necessary to what any of them were doing. And it didn't really leave behind a form, either. Just a familiar set of rhetoric about creativity.

Basically, when the marketing departments perk up their ears, the vanguard loses interest, and the anxious rear guard wants to get it right. Economic pressures exist. Some of the vanguard directs their interest elsewhere, some do what they're used to in order to make a living. And some of the rear guard grow out of success anxiety and try new things. All the while the enfants terrible march to their own beat, and do what strikes their fancy. Their visibility is low, limited to fans, mostly. They won't catch attention of the marketing departments, but the vanguard might spot them and pick up what they abandon.

I'd say what matters is what motivates the artists:

The tinkerer likes the process of creating. The communicator wants to have created. And the book-keeper wants success (praise and money both apply). I'd say all artists are a mix of the three. The tinkerer likes experiments and results. The communicator sees means and ends. And the book-keeper looks back at what worked in the past. If you get some sort of visibility, you probably have all three to some extent.

I think the key point for this thread might be "regularity" and various intuitive attitudes to it? For example, in current pop music, production softwar makes it easy to snap voice and instruments to pitch and beat. Unprecedent regularity. The question too few people ask is what you should do with it. And because too few people ask what to do with it, the discourse tends to assume regularity is a goal. It's my impression that people familiar with music theory criticise that snapping music to pitch and beat gets rid of the musicians expression, while the more general public tends to say things like "these singers don't even need to sing," (which I read as: it's good that they're on pitch, but they should do it themselves). In the end, it's about the emotional reaction you get from listening to the track.

But there's a catch, too. We train our ears for music early in life, and if you train your ear on pitch-snapped music, will you hear expression, or will you hear mistakes? Personally, I don't like opera singers. I can appreciate their skill, but listening for that is a conscious effort I need to make. It's something I deliberately taught myself. I used to hate the sound of opera. No longer. But there's a limit. I can appreciate operatic singing, but I never managed to make myself like it. And I think part of it is that I trained my ear on microphone-recorded music.

There may be subtleties to pitch'n'beat regularised music that I simply can't hear and respond to. My intuitive response is, though, that it's sad that I have to hear a singer live before I can judge if they can sing or not. But what that means is that my intuitive ideal is microphone recorded music. Pitch'n'beat regularised music, digitally processed music, is here to stay, and I'm fairly sure people will do interesting things with it (if they're not already doing it with me unaware), and that I won't get it, unless I put in a lot of effort. And I'm not motivated.

The ultimate problem is this: when book-keeper mentality dominates, you tend to repeat what worked in the past - but based on theories why they worked (which are often dubious), and without allowing for diminishing returns. Diminishing returns, though, are a very real economic factor, too. So at some point there's bound to be a "suprise hit" where the book-keeper isn't looking. It's systematic.

My point, if I have any, is probably that we shouldn't look at the shed skin of a snake and mourn its death, while it's alive... elsewhere.

The issue is that this is based upon personal perspectives and choices about language, intent, mood, culture. Translators do not always agree on how things should be reconstructed and all they can point to is our personal preferences and justification. — Tom Storm

I'm enough of a relativist (intuitively) to feel this keenly, and I'm also aware of different philosophies in translation. A big topic is "How much culural localisation?" The idea behind localisation is that if you're unfamiliar with the source culture, you'll not have the same experience as a native speaker. So someone versed in both, creates a similar experience for such readers via localisation. And that could be "getting closer to the poem" (a phrasing I used). However, you also accept differences and avoid... contact. That which is untranslatable disappears without a trace. If you use less localisation, there's a certain strangeness to the poem that isn't there for the native speaker; but there's an opportunity to learn, because your ignorance isn't glossed over. Very few translators keep to extremes, but the debate is often "how much localisation".

So, yeah, definitely. Whatever path you take, whatever words you choose: preference is inevitable. There's no neutral ground, for example, on the localisation line. Maybe a little more? Maybe a little less?
At some point you just fix the text and move on, or there's nothing at all to read.

Ahhh!

This was lovely to read. It's the exact sort of thing I'm looking for. — Moliere

Glad to hear this. I often feel like I'm rambling on and say nothing much at all.

It has always struck me that when I read a translation, I'm reading something new, not the original. It seems like translating a novel, story, or poem would be harder than writing it in the first place. — T Clark

I never expect translations to be the same as an original. They are their own thing. — Tom Storm

I tend to agree when reading. Interestingly, when translating, I feel a sort of responsibility to get as close to the poem as I possibly can (even if the only judgement I have is mine, and even if I know the poet wouldn't care). It's a weird doubling.

I've translated poems from English to German at university in a workshop. I took the workshop each semester (beyond need for the degree), because it was just so fun. I published two translations with an accompanying article in the course of that workshop. The article was bad and is best forgotten (I cringe remembering it), but one of the translations must have been at least decent, since it got reprinted in a local mag.

Translating is hard; and I never once felt I did the poem justice. In the translation that got reprinted I chose to focus on atmosphere, because I simply couldn't reproduce the wit. So whatever I said about the translation above wasn't actually meant to denigrate the translation. It's just the sort of thing I would have said in that workshop (with the difference that the translaters would have been present to respond).

What I said about the translation is also marred by my rather embarrassing misreading of "hat" for "baut". Well, a "b" and an "h" do look sort of similar, but I do seem to have smuggled in an extra "u". So I basically can't even trust my initial take anymore.

It's interesting to read the translation of the Rilke poem. Here's the German version, for those who speak the language, or for those otherwise curious. German's my mother tongue, and while I haven't read too much Rilke, I've liked each poem I read by him. Interestingly, the language felt... wrong? I got a Rilke feel from the content, but not the language.

There are quite a few things I'd have translated differently. The translation is very loose on structure. For example, the poem opens with: "Herr: es ist Zeit." Basically, "Lord: it is time." And then, in the same line, "Der Sommer war sehr groß." (The article is hard to translate; you either remove it or say "this". It means, literally, "This summer was very great.") The language is declarative and simple, here. (I'd probably use "quite" instead of "very" for rhythm reason, but it'd make the language more casual, less solemn, so I'd actually be on the lookout for a better word.)

"After the summer's yield, lord, it is time..." is a lead-in that flows into the next line. There's no grand declaration, no "it is time." From the outset, the mood differs, for me. The wine, in the original, is "heavy"; sugesting both sweet and sluggish, to me. It's at that point, that I get a sense of aging in the German version (blood thickens, the juices don't flow as they used to...) that I didn't get in the translation.

[edit: Warning, this paragraph is incorrect. I misread. The translation is correct.]Finally, the opening of the third paragraph "Who builds no house now, will build no more." There's a sense of agency. Basically, I get the opposite feeling: "Whoever's homeless now will build no shelter" in the translation, vs. "Whoever's not building a shelter now, will be homeless..." The poem doesn't predict what people will do; it predicts what will happen if they don't.

The translation is quite a nice poem in its own right, and I'd recognise the original in it, but I get different things out of both of them.

I think I'm getting better now, where you come from. I don't much care about real-world truth, when I read a poem. I was tempted to say I don't care at all, but if I know a poem is autobiographic and I know the poet, I do think it'd shade my experience. I think it's true to say of myself that real-world truth is never a priority to me. For example, if I came across a four-liner scribbled on a napkin (like my cat thingy), it wouldn't even occur to me to wonder if that really happened. I'd just take the words for what they are (and default to intra-poem true until I'm given hints that the lyrical self [equivalent to the narrator in prose] might be unreliable).

Also, I noticed I typed "simily" when it's "simile". Ah, well...I'm not sure about the role of "substitution" in metaphor; I haven't thought about it too much. At some level a lot of metaphors just substitute one word for another that's linked through some sort of commonality. But there are other types of figurative language that's often referred to as metaphor (in cognitive linguistics, for example), where you think of one domain in terms of another. Feelings, for example, are hard to talk about without referencing some other domain. "I'm feeling down (=direction), blue (=colour), etc.". If you go down the cognitive route it feels more like... borrowing than substitution. Unsure...

***

I've read the Yeats poem as a three parter:

- Your beauty's always going to distract these young men; you have to live with that.
- But what if I down-play it?
- You can't, my dear, you can't. (Too beautiful.)

Just with a lot more wit.

One thing about the poem I wasn't sure how to read was "yellow hair". "Honey coloured" is familiar. "blond(e)" would have been, too. Golden, flaxen, wheat... I'm not sure I've ever come across the simple "yellow" before. (And this is one of the areas where I would go back to the context of creation. How common is reference to "yellow hair" in 20s/30s Ireland? What's the register? Tone? Considering that "ramparts" aren't exactly an obvious comparison to hair, and ramparts aren't exactly renowned for their beauty, it's possible that we have a tongue-in-cheek downplaying of the beauty, perhaps for the poet to bring some distnace between himself and the despairing youth. I'm thinking "yellow" might be deliberately mundane. Works for a personal reading, but too unsure to accept this sort of interpretation at that stage, if were to, say, tranlsate the poem into German.

Btw, the old religious man feels like a good-natured fib to me. It's far to specific a thing to get from a scholarly text; I doubt the girl's supposed to belief that.

The literal meaning is, reducing the poem to P

"P" is false

The poetic meaning --

in the context of the thread the poem is clearly about the superfluous nature of poetic meaning, how it's an amorphous concept and so it depends upon what we mean when we mean poetic meaning.


Did you buy a cat today? — Moliere

I'm not sure I can follow what you're saying.

No, I didn't buy a cat today, and it follows that none of the other lines are true either. Is that what you mean by "'P' is false"? If so, yes "P" is false. If not, what are you saying isntead?

I'm not sure why a paragraph of contextual meaning is sandwhiched between two references to truth. As you probably guessed, I didn't buy cat today. I don't quite see why this important. If I did, you might arrive at a different poetic meaning, or you might not, depending on your approach. Does the literal meaning change at all? I'd say no.

What's "P"? The words of the poem? P for proposition?

As for metaphor, I find it interesting that you provide a hierarchy of complicated that goes from basic to more complicated like this: synonymy -> metaphor -> substitution. A similar hierarchy I would have thought of is: simily -> metaphor -> conceit.

I'll probably have to read you more carefully before I understand what you're saying.

I like the poem. It's simple, descriptive. Maybe a little sad. When I read it, I wanted to do this. Forgive me. — T Clark

Thanks, and no need for forgiveness. I find edits interesting. They point towards a different take. And I generally like this version, but I find the "And it was fun," line jarring. Not sure why. Something in the sound of it? Not sure.

On either way, though, we can make a distinction between the poetic and the literal, right? — Moliere

Depends on what you mean by "poetic". I just improvised a four line poem with no metaphors in it whatsoever:

I bought a cat today
She came to me to play
And play we did and it was fun
She went away when she was done

So what's the poems poetic meaning as opposed to its literal meaning? Since I didn't have anything in mind but just to assemble lines without figurative meaning in them, I didn't make a figurative meaning for the poem as a whole, either. Which is to say I didn't put it in consciously. If I look at the lines I notice that the poet's initiative opens the poem, the cat's initiative continues the poem, then there's joint activity, and the cat's initiative ends the poem. Then there are cultural associations with "bought" that might have implications on agency (you buy a human, it's slavery - you buy a pet, it's...?). And I can go on like that, and get some sort of gestalt of the poem in my mind as a result. But that just leaves... stuff unsaid, implied. In what way is this different from being literal? Couldn't I pretend any old literal text is a poem and give it that sort of questioning?

What makes the above seem like a poem in the first place is: linebreaks, no punctuiation, rhythm and rhyme. Formal language characteristics not primarily about meaning. So what if "poetic meaning" is dependent on what you do with a text once you decide it's a poem, and not on what's actually in the text? Savouring rather than resolving ambiguity, for examples, might be one of the things that gives rise to "poetic meaning". In such a context, what would "literal" mean?

The phonetic "Chair" stands for a chair I'm sitting on. In a way it is the most basic metaphor -- to treat a sound as a differentiated object of meaning. — Moliere

No, mere substitution doesn't make a metaphor. Metaphor implies a comparison between two things. But the sound or written body of "chair" doesn't have anything to do with the thing, other than marking the concept. It's, as linguists say, an arbitrary symbol.

This picture was generated by artificial intelligence and won a fine art competition — T Clark

The article says he won first place for digital art. AI is definitely a digital tool. I see no problem.

From the article:

He told 9News that he made 900 iterations of the art before the piece he eventually submitted, edited it on Photoshop, and spent 80 hours on the art.

If he'd submitted the first iteration, unedited, would he have won? We can't know.

I don't know the first thing about AI, but you do have to set parameters. What's involved in those 900 iterations? Just hitting refresh until you get something you like? Looking at the result and deciding what parameters to tinker with?

In any case, I like the picture. I like the colours and the composition. I'm not fond of the... 3D effect? I can't seem to get into that (even in modern movies). The figures stand out too much, almost as if they're not in the picture. I don't know anything about art, so I can't explain properly. But it's a minor quibble anyway.

Anyway, if some people are better at getting favourable results using AI than others, using AI is a skill, too. I'd agree with the artist in saying that AI is a tool, too. If using it isn't your thing, don't use it. It's not a vital tool.

Some writers within the tradition of sociology do explore the nature of subjectivity in relation to a sense of otherness, such as GH Mead. Also, Erving Goffman's understanding of the social presentation of self in everyday life do explore the social construction of human identity. — Jack Cummins

Mead's pretty important, yes. He's conceptualising the self as a social process, the dynamic between the "me" (what you think you are in the eyes of the others) and the "I" (what reacts to the me). The self emerges from that process. Mead would have to be one of the first to import the mind of subject into sociology.

Goffman's more of an excentric in sociology. He's had pretty influential ideas, but unlike many others he doesn't present a clear theory. One of the most interesting ideas, I think, from Presentation of Self would be role distance. A social role is some set of perceived expectations based on some trait you have: your job, your gender, your relationships... anything. So, when you're playing the role of "waiter" in a restaurant, then there are things you're supposed to do, and things you're not supposed to do. You can accept or reject the role. It's possible to play the role in a way that makes it clear you'd rather do something else. Goffman calls that cynical roleplay. However, no role completely determines your behaviour, and there are many ways you can "bring yourself" into the role (my words, not Goffman's; it's been too long since I read him, and I read a German translation to boot, because that's what was available). To the extent that you bring yourself into the role, you display role distance. Displaying role distance can be a way to reject the stricures of role play, withoug rejecting the role. It's not cynical role play. Interestingly, people who exhibit no role distance, Goffman says, are often perceived as "overly correct", or "creepy" (certainly my words). So role distnace is part of the expectations that come with playing social roles, but they're not part of the expectations of any specific roles. This is what allows people to have "their favourite waiter", for example. Public roleplaying is always geared both towards your role and what you bring to it personally.

I don't really remember what Goffman said about that beyond that; but I figure, in the context of this thread, this means that it's a structural property of life that you have to invent yourself in public. How much of yourself are you supposed to give up? Too much and you're imposing; too little and you're too reticent. That puts more pressure on the being-yourself-part than it would among "friends". You're supposed to be organically or spontaneously yourself, but in public you need to claclulate yourself, too. And if you get into the habit of playing roles and see "friend" as a role, too, eventually you might end up feeling that you can only "be yourself" when you're alone, but there's little you can do alone, and you feel like there must be some sort of mythic "true self" - something you can be anywhere, anywhen - no matter what role you play - without effort. (That's me riffing off Goffman.)

This is an area which I have been thinking about, especially in relation to modernity and postmodernism, and reading, 'Modernity and Self-Identity in the Late Modern Age', by Anthony Giddens. He argues that this involves self-knowledge and that,
'To be true to oneself means finding oneself, but since as an active process of self-constuction it has to be informed by overall goals_ those of becoming free from dependence and achieving fulfilment'. He points to the rites of passage in social life and the sense of meaning, including honesty and integrity. He looks at the way in which identity became mobilised through modernity and how bodily appearance became more significant, including lifestyle regimes. — Jack Cummins

I didn't expect to come across a post riffing off Giddens. For context: I have a degree in sociology, but I haven't been keeping up with the subject matte, and it's been about 20 years since I last read sociology. I did a little linguistics on the side, and did keep up with that a little better over the years, so as a result I'm more confident with my linguistic knowledge now than I am with my sociologogical knowledge. However, I do remember Anthony Giddens fairly well. I've found him fascinating; among system theories and hermeneutic theories he stood out by proposing a theory based on an ongoing process of structuration, and his methodology involves (among other things) a focus on time and space, something that was rarely as central to sociology at the time as it was to his approach.

I haven't read Modernity and Self-Identity, but I do own his Constitution of Society. A short summery of his theory of structuration might read like this (if my memory serves well): Knowledgable agents skillfully reproduce social structures through their daily activity, but due to unacknowledged conditions of action and unintended consequences of action, there's no guarantee that you end up reproducing structures perfectly, and thus every instance of reproduction of any social structure comes with the potential for change. In effect, that means that any social structure is best viewed as an ongoing process of structuration. Things like self-identy are (at least partly?) social structures, so it makes perfect sense to me that he'd say that to be true to oneself/find oneself is an active process of self-construction. I doubt Giddens would see the "true self" as something there, something to be discovered. You have a person who moves through time-space, interacts with others, and uses the concept of self in the process, and as a by-product reproduces self. I sort of think of the true self (as seen through a Giddens-lense) as the carrot dangling from the stick that keeps the donkey going. (The donkey might eat the carrot at the end of the day, but it turns to shit, and there's a new one the next day... maybe I'm taking my metaphors too far?)

I haven't read the text in question, but I'd guess that for the question of the "true self" to arise you'd need a life-style that... fragments your social contacts? I mean, before the industrial revolution you often lived where you worked. You were part of the village you lived in. You were the village blacksmith, or the milkmaid on Mr. Brown's farm. There's a typical (but not universal) time-space unity here. You move through your biography fairly linearly. With the industrial revolution, you start to get things like opening and closing times of fabrics, a typical (but not universal) distinction between where you live and where you work, and as time goes on, there'd also be the places where you spend your spare time. There will be transitional spaces (roads in your own car; mass transport...). And you behave differently everywhere, you meet different people everywhere... etc. So you're this social vortex who accumulates different practises, but you're also the only you to move through your biography; so there's now an increased need to integrate disparate skill sets into one personal package. What is it that ties all those disparate patterns together? Who are you? Basically, the more fragmented your social space becomes, the more important such questions tend to become.

I'm not sure that's what Giddens says here; I might have gotten it totally wrong. But I'd imagine it'd have been something like that. This post was mostly just an excersise for myself, and I hope there's something interesting in it. I'll probably look up the text some time in the future.

The use-mention distinction is important. There's a difference between using the word "iron" in the context of saying "iron has 26 protons" and mentioning the word "iron" in the context of saying "'iron' refers to the element with 26 protons". Isaac and StreetlightX appear to be saying that because the latter is an institutional fact then the former is an institutional fact, but that's a non sequitur precisely because of the use-mention distinction. — Michael

They don't appear to me to be saying that, though.

See, the use/mention distinction is only relevant to the word iron. And words occur in the instituion of language.

"Iron has 26 protons," is not an instituional facts because "'Iron' refers to the element with 26 protons." is an instituional fact. They're both institutional facts because you need to understand chemistry to make sense of it.

"Iron has 26 protons," is an instituional fact within the instituion of chemistry. It's meaningless if you don't know what protons are, and why they're important to the periodic table.

"'Iron' refers to the element with 26 protons," is an instituional fact within the instituion of language. You still need to know about chemistry (because it's the specialised language of chemistry), but before that you need to know that what it means for words to refer.

Both these sentences express an instituional fact, but you can just demonstrate knowledge of those facts by engaging in relevant institutional activity (looking through a microscope and counting protons; using the word "iron" correctly).

I think the cunfusion here comes from an overfocus on language (understandable in a thread about Searle). Language, as a social institution, is used to talk about relevant things. And it's hardly a coincidence that instituions form around relevant things. Without boundries of relevance, you can't demarcate facts of any kind, and since relevance guids action, and we live together with other acting people, our personal relevance structure grow together with those of people around us. That's how we get institutions: a stream of call-and-response, consistently meaningful to all successful participants. That you talk about iron in terms of protons tells me you're more likely to wear a lab coat than a blacksmith's apron.

Instituional facts are the imputed shared meaning that makes instituions work. They needn't be expressed in words, and if they're not, there's really nothing the use/mention distinction could be applied to. If the imputation of shared meaning fails, what you thought was institutional fact ended up merely a personal, mental fact, and you need new theories.

Okay, I have a few thoughts on this.

First, language is an instituation, and it's a pervasive one. Almost all other institutions will involve langauge in some capacity, but it's not central. For a bishop to be a bishop, you need to treat it like bishop while playing the game. Calling it a "bishop" is one way to treat a bishop like a bishop, but it's not a necessary part of playing the game chess. I, who speak no Chinese and don't know what chess pieces are called in Chinese, can play chess with a Chinese player of chess who doesn't know what chess pieces are called in any language I speak. If we announce our moves in our respective language, we can learn those terms, and I'd argue that we'd have learned more about each others language than the game of chess, which we were using to learn.

In terms of "collective intentionality", we share the institutional context of chess, which is why my meaningful move is followed by my opponents meaningful moves. If I say, "bishop d 2 - e 3" and move my bishop, and if this goes on long enough, a non-English speaker could eventually figure out what the piece is called, and what the letters and numbers are. But I could be pranking them and say "knight d2 - e3," while moving my bishop (and be consistent all through the game). This would lead to false assumptions about the language of chess, but the game would go on without a hitch.

The point about institutions is that you can only meaningfully engage in them, if you share assumptions. Austin/Searle divide, for this reason, speech acts into illocutionary acts (what you intend to say), and perlocutionary acts (what actually gets across). A successful speech acts needs both illocutionary and perlocutionary acts to succeeds. In layman's terms, if you talk to me in a language I don't understand, you're not really saying anything to me.

Collective intentionality is easiest to understand with formalised transactions. Consider the following sentence:

"I sold you my car, but you didn't buy it." Out of context, that's rather hard to make sense of. If I succeed in selling you my car, you bought it. On the language front, that's just ye olde married bachelor. Selling and buying are the same transaction viewed from the perspective of two different stereotypical participant roles. That's what the institution is.

Selling isn't an "illocutionary act", because the locution-part means speech. But it's the equivalent half of institutional behaviour. "Buying" is the other. If two people aren't on a page, a muck-up may occur, and then saying something like "I sold you my car, but you didn't buy it," might make sense (and mean something like "I thought I sold you my car, but you thought it was a gift.") We can understand the sentence as institutional failure: what we have in common is not the institutional transaction of buying or selling, but the situation of the muck-up (and only after we both realise that there's been a muck-up, and what it's nature is).

"Institutional facts" are what we need to know to perform institutional acts. And performing institutional acts, is what reproduces institutional facts. We create a chicken-egg situation, here. And metaphorical mutations are possible: Institutions change, sometimes by conscious negotion, sometimes by unacknowledge "reproduction error".

I feel like Michael's distinction between mention and use is a red herring, because institutional facts aren't about language in the first place. They're about shared meaningful behaviour, such that whenever I sell something to someone that person buys that thing from me. Institutional facts aren't absolute or eternal; but they must hold to some degree for their to be any interaction in the first place.

That English is a nominative accusative langauge and not an ergative absolutive language is an institutional fact about English, and that we have these terms is an institutional fact about linguistics. What this means is:

Yes: [I'm eathing a cake.] and [I'm eating.]
No: [I'm eating a cake.] and [Me's eating.] [Disclaimer: I don't actually know about verb agreement in ergative absolutive language. It might have to be "Me am eating." I don't know. Anyone here speak Basque?]

Basically, an ergative absolutive language treats the agent of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb. It's... weird if you're not used to it; normal otherwise.

(It's possible that some dialects display situational eragtivity in that way. Not sure. It's not the default.)

Linguistics describes this state of affairs; it's native speakers who create and recreate it. It's rooted in their practical consciousness to a degree that it's invisible and it takes awareness of other languages to see that what they do could be different. The sentence "I'm eating," and the linguistic analysis of this sentence occur in different institutional contexts. This means in practise that native speakers of English use "I" instead "me" before an intranstive verb like "to eat" (as opposed to it's transitive version "to eat something"), without being able to use linguistic terms to describe what they do. That linguists might not agree with other on how best to describe this instituional fact does nothing to change this. Non-linguistically-trained people can't even join that conversation; they lack knowledge of the relevant instituional facts - how to talk like a linguist about what they routinely say.

Each and everything we ever do, whatever is meaningful, occurs in an instituional context. So much is true. We can talk about the number of protons in iron till the cows come home, but we've been processing iron for longer than we've known about protons. Iron itself isn't an instituon, but whatever we do with iron occurs within instituions, and those instituitions are interconnected. Forging a sword from iron, and then cleaning it so it won't rust as quickly doesn't require knowledge of the periodic table. There's a cultural connection, an we can trace a memetic path for iron through inconnected institutions. We can't talk about iron without referencing institutions. We can't use iron without engaging in instituions. But iron itself isn't something we do; it's something that means different things in different contexts and provides cross-intstituitional continuity, by virtue of being real. But at the same time, whatever is real about iron doesn't necessarily need to give rise to "iron" as cross-instituitional cutlural practise (of which language and naming is a minuscle albeit pervasive part).

Long post, and i'm not even sure I made sense to myself.

The words, alone, don't make something the case (except perhaps in the case of the bet). Anyone may pronounce someone husband and wife, or name a ship something, or say they bequeath something to someone, and no marriage will result, nor would a ship be named, or a watch bequeathed. The officiant at the marriage must be authorized to marry others, the person naming the ship must be authorized to do so, the bequest must be enforceable under the law. — Ciceronianus

This is important. The institutional facts don't only care about what is said, but also about where, when and by whom it is said. For example:

All stories might be preceded by the unspoken "in the story...", and so it becomes a declaration about a fictitious story. It is false that 'in the Lord of the Rings' Aragorn takes the ring to Mordor. — Isaac

The novel is both an artifact: the book you're actually reading, and an institutional context. The production of the artifact side excludes readers, but involves authors and editors (and printers, and literary agents, and beta readers...). The reading process itself is often solitary (though there might be a public reading), but the reception side has stuff like reviews, criticisism, fan fiction, fandom conversation... It's one huge institutional context. So it's declarative for an author to write the story, but assertive after the fact to say that Aragon doesn't take the ring to Mordor. You can construe the novel - the artifact - as a speech act, because at the time and pace of the reading the artifact is all there is on the other side of the reading. But the novel is itself a product of many different speech acts (drafts, author-side edits, manuscripts, publishing-side continutiy edits, publishing-side copy edits... would type setting or printing still count as speech acts, or are they "only" reproductions? Hmm....) It'd be imprecise, if not entirely wrong, to assume a novel represents only the speech act of the author whose name is on the cover. (It's even more obvious if you're reading a translation.)

Basically, it's not only the content of the speech act that's bounded by the instituational context, but also the participant roles of the people involved in the production and reception of the speech act, and if words get written down you produce something that moves through space time indipendently from the originator and can be modified by anyone. Which is how we get, say, intellectual property laws. Institutional contexts connect to other institutional contexts. You need to be very clear what you're talking about.

A sentence like "It is false that 'in the Lord of the Rings' Aragorn takes the ring to Mordor," is most likely assertive about the novel. The words in the novel themselves are declarative; without that declarative act, no such assertion would be possible. We attribute the speech act consituted by the novel to the author (Tolkien), but that attribution is itself institionally bound, and elides, for example, the backstage roles taken by editors and printers, all of which might introduce changes along the way to the finished product. Often, for example, translators would like more public credit. (Topical, here: I've read Searls Speech Acts in a German translation, but I couldn't tell you the name of the translator without checking. I can read and understand the original English - the German translation was just easier to buy. So how would I compare the versions?)

If you're looking at institional context, you'll need to consider who says what to whom in what sort of situation, and some of the interesting questions to ask are stuff like what counts as a successful communication, and why?

And if wishes were horses the peasants would ride. I don't believe "human nature" is infinitely malleable. We are not all that nice, a good share of the time, — Bitter Crank

It's not even about human nature, for me. I think any kind of utopian ideal, perfection, or whatever you may want to call it ignores inconvenient apsepcts of reality. Or differently put:

Dawnstorm: I wish people weren't like that.
Unbeknownst to Dawnstorm somewhere a monkey paw's finger curls.

Regarding the poll, I voted undicided/no theory, and I'd have voted the same for the final question, except there was no option for that, so I voted "never" - I'll explain.

First, your theory is less implausible than limited, and unless I get the whole picture, I can't really judge your theory.

I'll start with laughter. You say, laughter is the natural response to humour - so what's the relationship between laughter and humour? If I'm not mistaken, babies start laughing at around 3 to 4 months. I'm sure they're not old enough to understand narrative jokes, which your theory seems to rely on. Laughter seems to be more basic, to me, than what you seem to be interested in.

Second, jokes. I'm not convinced all humour is about peril. Visual gags are often about impossibility, or incongruity. I'm thinking, for example, about the lolcat craze a couple of years back, which was kitty picture with captions in faulty grammar. There are non-narrative jokes ("What's the difference between a banana?" - "Huh?" - "Exactly." - Some people find that funny, some don't.)

I can see your theory making sense under a more abstract mother theory: for example - humour involvest he unexpected - unexpected stuff can be dangerous - relief when it isn't. Not sure I buy that, though, since baby laughter seems to be more about enjoyment than relief, but again, not sure.

As for the final quesiton: I think people shouldn't laugh at someone else's expense. Your final options talks about the "audience", and, well, I don't trust an audience to judge what's "benign", and part of it is that I seem to connect humour to pleasure more than you do (not only, but also), and that I think laughing at others misfortune gives some people pleasure, but it might be something they don't like to admit to themselves, because they might end up a little unhappy with themselves. So I ended up voting the "never" option, which I'm not completely happy with either, since my response is more based on a I-wish-people-weren't-like-that pipe dream. Bascially, I could have chosen any option, here, and I'd have been about equally unhappy. Maybe I should have picked the third option, after all.

However, it could be that the idea of God is a metaphorical truth, and that may be how Einstein saw the idea of God, and Jung too. — Jack Cummins

That's always been my working assumption when approaching he question of God and talking to others about God. I'm the son of Roman-Catholic parents who grew up to be an atheist by increment, without any notable outside input. As my worldview matured, my concept of God didn't mature alongside it. Apparently, I was a pretty naturalist-minded kid in elementary school. A couple of years ago I met my old religious-education teacher, who remembered me better than I remembered her. She said it's hard to forget a kid defending the honor of snakes when hearing about the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Apperently, what I took from the story at the age of six was that it slandered snakes. (In German, the word "Schlange" is used both for serpent and snake, so it would have been the same word.) I have no memory of this myself, but it sounds like something I could have said.

So when all you have is a maldeveloped concept of God that remained undifferentiated from early childhood on, you'll have trouble believing that otherwise smart people would believe something so obviously stupid, so you develop a sort of split sense of meaning: my God, the one I specifically don't believe in, is different from your (general "you") God, the one you do believe in, though they're both gods grown in the same cultural soil. (I also don't believe in Zeus, Odin, Quetzalcoatl, or Amaterasu - but with the exception of Odin I've never talked to a believer). So how do we bridge the gap?

I've always thought metaphor, thinking of something in terms of something else, is pretty much the only hope there is. Take a the idea of a "creator God". I have to approach the creation part as a metaphor for it to make sense. And you have to bracket some question: it doesn't, for example, make sense to ask what God created the universe from, or who created God. I know it makes no sense to ask these questions only because of the reactions of theists when I ask them. No metaphor is complete. You circle around all the questions you can think of, and cross out the ones that the people trying to communicute with you don't find helpful. Then the questions you have left may or may not create a useful image for you. Nothing useful ever emerged for me, and I'm not really optimistic it'll happen in the future, since of most of the stuff I hear on that issue isn't new.

Basically, there's this metaphor with an extensive vehicle but not tenor at all. I don't get it. The only reason I bother(ed) at all to understand the topic at all is social. Spriitually this is all empty talk to me.

But here's the thing. What I have to approach as metaphor, someone else might have encoded differently and there may be no need to understand something in terms of something else. If someone's got an integretated understanding of "creation" such that God creating the universe isn't essentially different from a watchmaker making a watch or a sculptor making sculpture, then there'd be no need for a metaphorical layer to intervene.

And that might be why "God" is evident. This isn't scientific evidence. It's a basic intuition of a type that didn't grow in me.

But at the same time, that's not the whole picture, because there are atheists who deconverted from a believe in God, which involved rational thought. And this where I start getting confused when I think about "metaphor". It's obviously possible to think about God rationally and go from "God exists," to "God doesn't exist." I didn't have that experience. The experience was closer to "Wait, they really do believe in God, and they don't just pretend like with the Easter Bunny?" Though it wasn't a singular experience and it was far less tangible a development than that.

Basically, the only thing about God that really interests me is how minds work. Maybe the cognition of metaphor? Not quite sure.