Did you cite the critic in acknowledgement? Probably would have been a good idea. But don't fret too much. You did the work - the reading - along with the understanding that allowed you to write your own essay, and well enough to get a good mark. At a high school level that's pretty cool. In future, all you need to do is cite your sources, and you're usually fine.

Which is not to say the only topic worth talking about isn't nuclear war.

§122, §123

A lot of ink has been spilt on Witty's understanding of the 'survayability of grammar' (@Fooloso4 linked to a nice article on it here), but I want to try my hand at reading it on my own terms.

In particular, I want to link the idea of survayability with Witty's comments on explanations and boundaries, in the sections around §70-§90 or so (the comments on 'staying roughly here' and on defining names). Recall that in those sections, Witty argued that boundaries and explanations were always adequate to the degree that they fulfilled their purpose. To say 'stay roughly here' would fulfil it's purpose, for example, were I to go away and come back and were able to find you again (you didn't wonder off while I was away). That the exact borders of 'here' were not exhaustively defined is irrelevant (§87: "The signpost is in order - if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose".)

Now, another way to put this is that all explanation is local. The grammar of 'staying roughly here' only needs to be as 'deep' as it needs to be to facilitate the activity of me being able to find you again later on. It doesn't ramify any further, so that, say, I can pick out the ring of atoms that 'here' 'ultimately constitutes' or whatever. Explanation doesn't go 'all the way down' - it is not global. Now, to say then, that "we don't have an overview of the use of our words" is to say that you can't 'zoom out' to a global level and see how the grammar of our words is every laid out in some a priori fashion; grammar is 'purpose relative' and our purposes are always 'local', beyond which they change (if I'm doing a scientific experiment, I may indeed need to know where the 'exact', 'atom-level' boundary of 'here' is).

In this regard, to create a 'surveyable representation' is to create a kind of 'local map of grammar': it is to understand how the/a grammar of use relates to the particular activities (forms-of-life?) in which that grammar finds its purpose. Importantly, it is also to recognise that that grammar does not extend beyond that purpose: there is no grammar that would encompass all instances of use: there is only ever this or that use, in this or that language-game. This is what is means to say that "our grammar is deficient in surveyability": there is no Archimedean point from which one could survey (all?) grammar from without (no ideal) - one must only ever work with actual (local) grammars.

One of the reasons I'm employing these cartographic terms (map making terms) like 'local' and 'global' is that it helps account for §123, which talks about how philosophical problems consist in 'not knowing one's way about'. It is to be 'lost', to not have a 'map', to not understand the local grammar, and how that grammar relates to the purpose and activity from which it gains its life. A few things I've left out in this exposition ('Weltanschauung', 'intermediate links', 'seeing connections'), but will leave off here for space's sake.

§121

This one's pretty straightforward on the surface but I just want to quickly relate it to the passages around it, because it can seem to come a bit out of left-field (as it did for me). I'm admittedly cribbing a bit from Hacker and Baker, but §121 needs to be read in light of the distinction established previously between theory/explanation and description (§109).

To deny that there can or ought to be 'second-order philosophy' is to deny that there can be a 'theory of philosophy': any account of philosophy would or can only remain at the level of description. We can only describe this or that (actual) philosophy as it stands, not provide a theory of philosophy (a metaphilosophy) that would account for what philosophy 'is'. Or rather: philosophy is as philosophy does.

Ahh, this is so interesting! Have you looked into the connections between physiology and perception? Or more generally animal ethology and perception? A classic would be something like Jakob von Uexküll's A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, in particular the concept of the umwelt ('experienced world', roughly).

Another line of interest might be animal aesthetics and coevolution, where the specific evolution of animals can be put down to aesthetic reasons (rather than 'mere' survival - see Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty), or where species evolve along-side each other for mutual benefit (like the orchid and the wasp). These might seem a bit tangential, but I'm a big believer in morphology and how it 'affects' or gives rise to mind, especially with respect to how animal bodies are put to use (how animals move, how they interact with their environment and other animals, etc).

In this regard you wanna look up research in line with Maxine Sheets-Johnston on movement and mind, like this paper for instance. In fact, the journal where that paper is from (Animal Sentience also seems right up your alley (lots of stuff about fish!). Otherwise, one of my favourite books that deals with similar themes is Hans Jonas's The Phenomenon of Life. Anyway, it's a super interesting line of research to pursue - good luck!

Okay, I apologize, and I'll try not to speak like that to you in the future. My frustration comes from the fact that you're responding in terms that have nothing to do with the OP (you literally wrote a paragraph of questions about Heidegger - ????), and you continually respond to things I don't say. All I'm asking is that if you respond, you do so with the terms of the OP, or if not them, set out, explicitly, how your own might relate to it and are relavent. I'm not here to talk about Derrida, or Heidegger, or Deleuze, or 'centres', or 'structures', or 'presencing', or even Cavell for that matter. If I cite names it's a matter of acknowledging providence and paying intellectual debts, that's it. Don't use proper names as a crutch or substitute for conceptual analysis. I used to do that - still sometimes do - and it's a horrible, philosophically stultifying habit, especially on a public forum.

I've posted plenty about what I do take this thread to be about, and perhaps you can take cues for further discussion from those posts, or at least ask me where things seems unclear or problematic. Hell, if you want to have a different discussion than the one here, PM me and we can hash something out.

OK, well I guess the point - or at least, my point, my takeaway, is something like: don't take your eye off the transcendental. I think this is what I was gropingly getting at in the OP when I tried to emphasize that more than just facts were at stake in denying that houses can turn into flowers. I hadn't employed the vocabulary of the 'transcendental' to make the point - I was a bit too caught up with exposition - but I think it's appropriate and I think it puts into relief what's at stake.

Perhaps it's not necessarily a 'deep' point, but it is, I think, one worth making, especially considering the chorus of voices that have replied that 'houses don't turn into flowers' just is another (physical?) fact. But even saying that, that's not the 'only' point to be made. Leaving aside the context regarding this all arising as a response to skepticism (which I think I've elaborated upon enough), the other side of this is something like: okay, if it's important that not everything attests to just another fact, if it's important that one takes the transcednental into account, what kind of thing is the transcendental?

And this, in turn, is where 'living' our transformations comes into play: I'm trying to insist (using another term I've not yet employed) on the immanence of the transcendental, on the way in which it is mutable and occupies the underside of the empirical (of 'facts'), rather than being 'transcedent' and fixed beyond the world. The cinnabar-sunrises connection is just a way of trying to specify how this all fits in the broader philosophical tradition, trying to show how all this can be seen as a response those concerns, rather than just being some kind of idiosyncratic, weird example drawn from outta nowhere for no particular reason.

I think so. At least, he spends alot of the paper comparing Cavell with other readers and seems to 'side' with Cavell against them. It's more expository than argumentative. The tone seems to imply agreement though.

I know you have an interest in Deleuze(you referenced him earlier in this thread in response to another poster), which is why i mentioned him. I also mentioned him because I think he is among the most rigorous representatives of the kind of position you are supporting and which I am critiquing. — Joshs

No, you mentioned him because you saw another generic opportunity to wheel out your pet concerns which are tangental and irrelavent to the thrust of the thread. Derridians are like the fucking Borg, assimilating indiscriminately while bleeting on about differance. No one is here to talk about bloody affect. Buzz off.

§120

§120 largely trades on the distinction between the ideal (what language 'ought' to be) and the actual (what language 'is') that Witty has previously set up in a few places (§101, §105, §107). The general gist of it is: you're going to have to use actual language (in all its messy coarseness) to set-up your ideal language, so exactly how are you meant to set it up as ideal to begin with? Once again it's worth noting that when Witty says: "And your scruples are misunderstandings" - the sense of 'understanding' here is once again the quasi-technical sense of it: as relating to the understanding - that is, not facts, but to our expectations of language (of what it 'should' be).

This theme, of shedding expectation and ideality in order to deal with actuality ('alone'), helps explain the critique that closes §120: a critique of the distinction between word and meaning. For the distinction only 'works' if one posits an ideal of how language 'should be', as distinct from how language is actually used: only if you have this distinction in place, can one subsequently distinguish between a word and its meaning. But abolish or disactivate the former distinction, and so too is the latter distinction abolished or rendered inoperative as well.

This insofar as, if only actual use matters, then a word is a word only insofar as it has meaning - only insofar as it is used in a language-game (without which, one might say, it's just a scribble on a page). This also helps explain (again) §117, where Witty also critiques the idea that meaning were distinct from a word ("As if the meaning were an aura the word brings along with it").

This is a great paper that deals with Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein, and just so happens to also comment on §117 in a way that might help w/r/t the discussions that were going on before:

"“The meaning of an expression” is not something which an expression possesses already on its own and which is subsequently imported into a context of use ... What we are tempted to call “the meaning of the sentence” is not a property the sentence already has in abstraction from any possibility of use and which it carries with it—like an atmosphere accompanying it— into each specific occasion of use. It is, as Wittgenstein keeps saying, in the circumstances in which it is “actually used” that the sentence has sense. This is why Wittgenstein says in the previous passage from On Certainty: the words “I am here” have a meaning only in certain contexts— that is, it is a mistake to think that the words themselves intrinsically possess some sort of meaning apart from their capacity to express a meaningful thought when called upon in a context of use. The problem with the pseudo-employment of “I am here” under consideration in the passage above is that the meaning of the words “is not determined by the situation”; that is to say, it is not clear, when these words are called upon in this context, what is being said—if anything.

The philosopher, Wittgenstein says, tends to think that he understands “the meaning of a sentence” apart from and prior to any concrete occasion of use ... The philosopher takes there to be something which is the thought which the sentence itself expresses. He takes himself already to know what it means: what it means is a function of what these words combined mean. To consider the use of the sentence for such a philosopher, is to consider an additional dimension of meaning. An investigation of “use,” for such a philosopher, is an investigation into the relationship between “the meaning of the sentence”—which we are able to grasp independently of its contexts of use—and the sorts of things this sentence can express or imply (over and above what it means taken by itself) when brought into conjunction with the various contexts of use into which it can be intelligibly imported. Questions can be raised about why what is said is said and what the point of saying it on a particular occasion of use is.

But the very possibility of asking such questions presupposes that it is already reasonably clear what thought is expressed, and thus what it would be for the truth to have been spoken on this occasion of speaking. Cavell’s Wittgenstein is concerned to contest such a conception of the relation between meaning and use. What your words say depends upon what they are doing—how they are at work—in a context of use".

Oh my God are you at all capable of arguing about ideas rather than names? Rid yourself of this continental disease, it's philosophically asphyxiating. I didn't even mention Deleuze in my response to you ffs. I mean who tf is talking about 'enactivist approaches' and empathy or whatever irrelavant shit you're talking about? This Derridian regurgitation is fucking insufferable, please fucking stop.

But is there a dynamic more intricate than the order of 'things' as starting point, such that change, transformation, novelty don't have be seen as a problem to be explained? Is it possible to think change, transformation and novelty not as possible outcomes but as the most primordial ground of experience? — Joshs

Of course it's 'possible'; Derrida and co. have never left the plane of the 'possible' - that's the only thing they are acquainted with. The question is what analytic pay-off you get by doing it. And frankly I don't see much use in trying to 'think change' by swamping everything with it; when everything is 'change as primordial ground' or whathaveyou, what you lose is precisely the ability to think change. If you make it your point of departure, any attempt at distinction is lost in the white noise of 'change': Derridians or whatever see this as a feature; I think this is a monstrous bug.

This is why Derridian responses to the OP have only ever been totally irrelevant. The price you pay for seeing change everywhere is an inability to see change anywhere. It's self-imposed analytic impotence.

Here you go [pdf]

What transformations can't we think (which transformations really make us strain)? I think that that by definition is a more challenging question, but its exactly what thinking otherwise is all about. — csalisbury

Perhaps one response to this is to transform the question from 'what transformations can't we think?' to: 'what transformations can't we live?'. This, perhaps, is what gets to the heart of what Cavell takes from Wittgenstein: at the end of the day, of course we can say - and think - if we want, with all abandon, that houses can turn into flowers. We can think this. We do think this, insfoar as we do (a tautology). We say it: houses can turn into flowers. But can we 'live' this? To say this, and perhaps more importantly, sustain it's 'saying', is to have to transform how we relate to houses and flowers, insofar as we live those relations. This is why, I think, when Cavell asks the question, he immediately turns to questions not 'immediately' related to houses and flowers, but to questions about 'growing' and 'gardens' and 'seeds' and 'stones':

"What would "houses" or "flowers" mean in the language of such a world? What would be the difference between (what we call) stones and seeds? Where would we live in that world, and what would we grow in our gardens? And what would "grow" mean?"

I think the 'style' of questions here are significant, and they remind of Deleuze's dictum to not ask 'what is?', but "who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?": Cavell's questions are in this vein, it seems to me. Even when they ask 'what', they are not 'what is?' but 'what would we grow?' and 'what's the difference?', questions that bear on relations and their significance, on how we relate, how we live with our ways of speaking, and how ours ways of speaking (and thinking) and embedded in ours ways of living.

Another way to put this is that the question 'do houses turn into flowers?' cannot just be about houses and flowers: it's also a question about growing, about gardens, about stones and seeds, all of which it carries in tow like an umbra which is easily missed if one doesn't make sure to pay attention to it. So to bring this all back to transcendentality: would it answer your concern to say that the 'missing bridge' between 'deep transcendentally' and 'local transcendentality' is just us?

Just going to try and respond to bits and pieces to catch up a little bit:

If so, then the phenomenal analysis of 'turning into' would reveal that while at one level the phrase breaks from the context of use, at a more general level it is taken into account in some way, either as nonsense or as an exception exposing the larger totality of relevance framing the discursive situation. As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. — Joshs

Don't you find this kind of approach just absolutely suffocating? I mean, Hegel gets alot of shit for being 'belly turned mind' (in Adorno's wonderful phrasing) in which the dialectic just gobbles up everything in its path, but this is in some respect even worse. Everything here is pre-digested and already accounted-for, everything has a place in an (oxymoronic, monstrous) economy of contingency, where every non-sense is already the other side of sense. Nothing escapes, and the engulfment into Theory is total and asphyxiating (the response to which is to self-flagellate by dwelling in paradox, writing 'under erasure', sous rature, and bringing to bear a whole Christian (?) theology of guilt and sin on philosophy, self-conscious to the point of immobility, like so many miserable Benedictine monks).

By contrast to this absolutisation of philosophy and its suffocation, a phrase like 'houses are turning into flowers' (or at least, situations analogous to it) ought to mark a point genuine - that is to say, creative - crisis, a point where sense needs to be reoriented by our grasping our way about, by our readjusting - however much we need to, and on whatever basis our lives are lived and contested - how we understand and relate to the world about us. There needs to be a way for change, transformation, novelty (and not just the forever oscillating pin-ball between differing and deferring) to occur in the order of things, the conceptual and lived matrix by which we relate to the world and ourselves. Breath.

And the only way to do this is to begin in the middle of things, to begin by ‘cognitively mapping’ (as Csal said) how things stand right now, in order to assess the possibilities of transformation, to measure the transcendental from within, rather than continually reaching the abstract, tired and useless shibboleth that everything is always-already other from the very beginning (which in any case is the reply of the reactionary: “everything is always-already other, what more could you possibly want?”). Philosophy needs to be innocent, aerial, unabashed - unlike anything the monastic stodginess of the Heideggarian legacy leaves us.

Ugh, away for a day and my thread is a Heidegger cesspool that only people who can speak the jargon can participate in. Yuck yuck yuck.

I’m not sure what you mean by “significance” here — Michael

Difference that makes a/any difference.

This might be my last post for a day or so as it's ANZAC day tomorrow and I'll be out gambl... celebrating the war effort all of tomorrow, and I need to sleep now.

How is that any different to simply stating that it's false that houses turn into flowers? — Michael

Because it is not even false that houses can turn into flowers at this point in time. A word about truth and falsity: both of these are subject to, conditioned by sense. Consider that when something is false, we know how to react to this, as it were - we know the significance of a false statement. "It is false that the cat is on the mat" -> "then I shan't go looking for the cat on the mat" [verbal response]; Or, *I don't look for the cat on the mat* [action]; (statement -> significance). To understand the 'game' of truth and falsity - and, a fortiori for something to be true or false - is to 'know one's way about' (in Wittgenstein's words) a true or false statement.

But what kind of significance does saying 'it is false that houses turn into flowers' have? How, even in principle, does one go about rendering any sense of significance to this? Think again of the child who affirms the truth of this statement ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!): one's immediate (adult?) response is something like: 'this child doesn't know what truth is'; or, 'this child doesn't quite understand how houses, or flowers, or change works', or "how adorable". This child doesn't understand concepts and how they relate to other concepts - at least, not like we do. Her language is in error (according to our standards). That's the immediate adult response, not: 'No darling, houses do not turn into flowers' (at least, it's not the response parent who isn't tired and just wants to get through lunchtime with bub; or, the adult could say this, but she's being somewhat pedagogically irresponsible).

To 'flatten' possibility in the way you're doing - to say that anything is possible, anything can turn into anything - is to loosen all communicative constraint to the point of non-sense. It's fine if we're talking about a localized case of houses turning into flowers - but take that logic all the way: anything can turn into anything else: language would lose its grip on the world, no one would 'know their way about'; this though, is just the condition of the child, who has yet to master language, who has yet to grasp the grammatical (not physical, not imaginative) constraints that allow sense to be made. One last, more abstract way to put this: distinctions with significance require asymmetry of response: if anything is possible, then anything follows, and one cannot say anything significant about anything at all.

Constraints need to be placed on our grammar such that one responds this way to a truth and this way to a falsehood: this asymmetry is the condition for language to function at all. But no such asymmetry exists in the case of 'it is false that houses turn into flowers'. One can only blink in bemusement: "he hasn't mastered a language yet";

Also, I was going to quote the exact passage of Cavell's that Fool just posted, but with a bit more: "In denying that we have conclusive verification for this last statement , I am not to be understood as asserting that we do not have (conclusive) verification for it. I am asserting, rather, that we do not yet know what verification for or against it would he. Nor am I saying that such a statements can have no use: only, we have got to be told what its use is. (And when we are told, it is not likely to be a use which requires anything like verification at all- it might, e.g.. be an accusation or an insinuation)" (Cavell, The Claim of Reason).

Packed alot into this, but like I said, last post for about a day or so. Hopefully there's alot to chew on.

I don't think most people who use the term 'identity politics' know what they're referring to. I think they just see words like 'race' and 'gender' and then start frothing at the mouth, much like Pavlov's little mutts.

The same, I should probably add, goes for the term 'post-modernism'.

But as at least one other poster has brought up with the magic example, we can conceptually understand houses being turned into flowers by some special means. And this sort of imaginative leap happens quite a bit in fiction, and not so infrequently in theology. Think of the Catholic Eucharist.

But let's say the language is meant to be everyday real-world and not magic or metaphysics. Is there anything physically preventing a house from being turned into flowers atom by atom, given some really unlikely scenario or with advanced technology?

Let's say time travelers or aliens leave a device behind that can rearrange matter however we like. Someone uses it to turn an abandoned decrepit building into flowers. Does this require us to alter our conceptual understanding of houses or flowers? Or does it just broaden our knowledge of what's physically possible? — Marchesk

I've been trying - and failing - to articulate to myself why this approach doesn't sit right with me, but I think I've hit upon why. I think for the example of 'houses do not turn into flowers' to bring out what it's meant to bring out, it needs to hold ceratus paribus - all else equal. To say that what we call houses and flowers are not the kinds of things that turn into one another, is to say (to mean, to imply) that (among other things) the world in which these terms take on their significance is not one in which that kind of transmutation is possible. That is, not different from this one. Of course, this world can change: there may be super-advanced tech, or magic that we discover down the line. In which case that world and its possibilities are themselves not what we are now familiar with.

And insofar as the OP is trying - among other things - to bring out a distinction that can exist between the addition of new facts on the one hand, and the reassessment of concepts on the other, the example needs to be made in a context in which what I've called (following Cavell) 'the world' is held steady, as it were, while only the possibility of houses turning into flowers - without magic, without tech - is made different. It's like: you need to hold the background steady in order to properly see the change in the foreground. Otherwise the point is lost, and the transformation of a house into a flower (given new tech, given the discovery of magic, or whathaveyou) becomes just another fact. The conceptual point is lost.

Incidentally, this might be a point that @Joshs might appreciate, although a typical Derridian might still insist on how the distinction is 'always-already' reversible and then we're stuck into the black mud of deconstructive formalism again.

I ignored it because it's quite obvious that there are issues of race and gender that can and ought to be politically redressed.

What folks are probably referring to with "identity politics" are the squeaky wheels who focus on things like race and gender essentially as a means of controlling what other people can choose to do — Terrapin Station

All politics is an effort to control or change what people can 'choose to do'. So this is unhelpful and unspecific.

Well I'm sorry, but that has the same ring of hypocrisy to me. I craft coalitions of interest and ideology, but when anti-racists and feminists — unenlightened

But feminism and anti-racist movements do not largely conform to the description I gave above. I think - though I could be wrong - we might agree on this. Those who like to wield and weaponize the term 'identity politics' do make it seem as though they do though. Which is still not to say that the description is not useful, or true of some politics.

This, by the political scientist Corey Robin, might be helpful:

"One last word on identity politics: Every form of politics can take its identitarian turn. Here's what I mean by that: Everyone in politics tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. Identitarianism is not peculiar to a politics of race or gender or sexuality, not at all. The original identitarianism is nationalism or religion. There are terrible identitarianisms of class. (That's why I cringe every time someone depicts the working class as a brawny factory worker. Or of Joe Biden as somehow a "fighter for the working class." Or the notion that the working class is automatically something.)

All of these identitarianisms sidestep, as I say, the need for moral and political argument, the need to craft coalitions of interest and ideology that are not immediately apparent or present but that have to be created. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. Kafka said, "What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself." All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."

There's been some good discussion here with those who've had no such issues. Considering that I've had to correct some basic grammatical comprehension on your part, I think you've misdiagnosed the source of the issue, to put it politely.

The proponents of this odd approach would argue (or at least this proponent ) that one is not effectively thinking through the actual if one is relying on an understanding that fails to adequately perceive the glue that binds what arises as actual from the having been that frames it and is in turn framed by its future. — Joshs

What failure? Was there something I wrote that implied that such temporal 'glue' ought to have no place in any analysis of language and normativity? Or is this just a projection made so that you can engage - blindly, without motive - the Derridian/Heideggarian interpretive machine? This is exactly what I despise about this kind of reading: for all the rhetoric and banging-on about how Presence is always contaminated by Death and how all immunity is always-already auto-immunity or whatever, the reading only proceeds by Totalizing, absolutely, it's subject. It's takes distinctions, absolutizes them, then, lauding itself for its own genius at finding how they can't, in fact, be totalized, says: look! You haven't considered the 'differenciations within groupings'!

It puts the rabbit in the hat and then acts surprised - and more theoretically sophisticated - when it finds it there. Did I deny that there might be (can be? must be?) 'differenciations within groupings'? Or do you see a word like 'whole', and, ignoring any sense of nuance whatsoever, find a nice and convenient spot to jam in the deconstructive lever? It's thoughtless, mechanistic reading, pre-fab theory for factory-floor application.

I might have even been more willing to work through with you, what I was trying to bring out with the OP. But why bother? You know what you want to conclude, and your only effort of thought is how you want to arrive at it. I cannot be bothered laying down tracks to your ready-made destination.

Can I ask that you look at the conversation between me and Csal a bit earlier on in the thread? Particularly these exchanges: these four posts here which cover much of the ground you're going over. Let me know what you think, and if they address what you're after.

Would you make the same argument about Heidegger? What is the actual for Heidegger? What would he do with your 'Houses are turning into flowers' example? Would he consider it a dislocation of a normative region of phrases? How does the realm of the ready to hand and the Mitdasein treat the distinction between the intelligible and the unintelligible? — Joshs

This is not a Heidegger thread; why would you think these questions are relevant?

I've been thinking about this a bit more. Building on what's been said. It seems like there's two conversations going on, and most of the confusion comes from that.

One is a kind of Wittgensteinan conversation about local conditions of sense. This was what I think I was going on about.

The other - cinnabar, sunrises - is far more general. It's also transcendental, but a deeper - or logically prior - transcendentality, which is about the necessity of regularity to talk about anything at all. — csalisbury

But I think what I want to say that local conditions of sense are already this 'deeper' sense of transcendentality; or that the deep manifests itself in the local, and only as the local. So in this sense one can speak of something like a 'transcendental empiricism' in the vein of Deleuze: in which the transcendental is manifest at the level of the empirical, without collapsing into it. Or: the two senses of the transcendental can't be - should not be - treated as separate.

(I wrote to fdrake in a PM once: "This is an attempt to 'empiricise the transcedental', without, for all that, giving up on the status of the transcendental as transcendental. These terms might serve more to confuse than to clarify, because at stake is a kind of paradoxical effort to ‘collapse’ the transcendental into the empirical while still insisting on a distance between the two. To put it with a bit of poetic flourish, one might say that all thought is the effort to articulate the distance and the nearness between the two, without collapsing the one into the other.")

Or: every singular situation produces its own articulation between the transcendental (the 'background') and the empirical (the 'foreground'?), and the task of thought is to measure that distance, each time anew: this how thought becomes equal to whatever it is that thought is 'about'. And it's once you do this that you can, as you put it, "know where to go". Or in your terms: the cognitive map produced by local conditions already answers to the deeper sense of transcendentality dealt with by Kant, Hume, etc.

Wittgenstein once wrote something like: "philosophical problems happen when you don't know your way about"; one wants to reply: to find or invent a way about just is the task of philosophy.

In any event, so what we're imagining is a physical thing transforming into another physical thing — Terrapin Station

Like Michael, you're simply mapping your concept of a house (and a flower) to the physical: you're just begging the question (yes, I'm ignoring what terms you've 'resevered'). But it is clear that the concept of a house (or a flower) is not exhausted - if it refers to it at all - by the physical. And importantly, this is a point not about houses or flowers, but about language and our use of it.

There was one on Voice and Phenomenon here a while back.

No, that would be silly. As would any reading along those lines. It's

There would be a concept of [a house that one could imagine turning into a flower]; Not:
There would be [a concept of a house] that one could imagine turning into [(a concept) of a flower].

The last and only thing I'll say about Derrida in this thread from here because it is off-topic, as are most invocations of Derrida in anything whatsoever: Derrida is the most rigorous thinker of (im)possibility that there is, but his thought is only ever operative at the level of (im)possibility. He utterly lacks the conceptual resources to think though the actual, and his entire corpus from end to end is vitiated by his formalist proclivities. History dies in Derrida (for the sake, ironically, of time). The man only ever had one interesting idea - one of the most interesting ideas in philosophy - and then proceeded to cannibalize everything he touched with it. It's fun for a moment - then you get over it and move on to other, more interesting things

They are undeconstructible because they count, for Derrida, as among the conditions of their deconstruction. Deconstruction would be 'impossible', would be unable to take place, were they deconstructible. It's probably easier to show this for democracy than it is for justice, so we can stick with that. Recall that for Derrida:

"Democracy is the only system, the only constitutional paradigm, in which, in principle, one has or assumes the right to criticize everything publicly, including the idea of democracy, its concept, its history, and its name. Including the idea of the constitutional paradigm and the absolute authority of law. It is thus the only paradigm that is universalizable, whence its chance and its fragility. ... The expression “democracy to come” takes into account the absolute and intrinsic historicity of the only system that welcomes in itself, in its very concept, that expression of autoimmunity called the right to self-critique and perfectibility." (Rogues).

This universality of self-critique, in which democracy can, by its very nature, undermine itself, functions as a condition for its deconstruction: were some part of democracy closed-off from self-critique, were some aspect of democracy a priori placed outside the space of re-evaluation, then there would not be democracy. This is the 'idea' of democracy that cannot be deconstructed, without undermining the very possibility of democracy itself. One can think of it like: democracy is always in the making, always in process - constitutively. Were one able to say, definitely, once and for all ('outside' time, one might say), and with some kind of a priori guarantee that 'this is democratic', then this would be, precisely, undemocratic (it would not be open to re-assesement by the demos, because already established and guaranteed before hand).

With the 'idea of justice' the idea is similar: were one able to achieve justice once and for all, were justice not always open to re-evaluation, there would be no such thing as justice. The argument here is a bit more complex, and there's an element of time or temporarily that I've not discussed that makes proper sense of the 'undeconstructibility' of the idea of justice, but that's a bit much to go into right now for me. Long story short: deconstructing either the idea of justice or the idea of democracy would undermine each.

§118, §119

As per what I said about §116, §118 and §119 are best understood in light of the distinction between the understanding on the one hand, and the empirical on the other. Recalling that the investigation here does not 'uncover new facts', and equally, does not offer any new theories (where theories are understood to be theories of how language 'ought' to function (ideally), apart from how language does function (actually)), Witty's takes the import of the Investigations to be mostly negative in character. They tell us less 'what to do' than they tell us what not to do when investigating language.

So when Witty says, in §119, that "the results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language" (my emphasis), 'the understanding' here must be understood in the quasi-technical sense that Witty has given this term, as that relating to our expectations about language, and not facts or empirical discoveries about it. Similarly, the 'ground-clearing' of §118 refers too to this effort to divest ourselves of idealized notions of what language ought to be, should be, or strive after and aim at, apart from what language 'actually' is.

To anticipate a bit, this is why Witty will say, a little later down, the these investigations thus "leaves everything as it is" (§124); - in terms I used earlier, the Investigations are subtractive, not additive.

That our concept of houses is different to our concept of flowers doesn't mean that we can't talk about houses turning into flowers — Michael

Right, which is why I didn't say we can't. I said if we did, we'd be talking about something else. Or if you like - we can't if we want to talk about the same thing as the houses and flowers that we're familiar with.

Cool, so you've gone ahead and mapped the concept of flowers and houses to the physics, and then, on the basis of that, told me that concepts have nothing to do with it; but of course, you wouldn't even be able to furnish your barely-there explanation if you didn't already know what it is you're talking about. You can't even get the critique off the ground without implicitly invoking the concepts.

Go on.