To the degree that there is a 'specialness' to philosphy, I've always considered it to lie in its generality: it's non-specialness. Sellars' definition has always been attractive to me: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (though Thesis XI competes for top spot here). There is, of course, a specificity to dealing in just such generalities (philosophy requires discipline and taste), but it's the broadness, its openness to exploring so many different and varied fields, that I find really attractive.

I don't think there's any use in speculating on negatives.

May I suggest:

Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Isabelle Stengers, Peter Galison, John Dupre, Bruno Latour, Lorraine Daston, Alexandre Koyre.

None of these are quite like Fereyabend - no one is quite like Fereyabend - but they share many of the same impulses, I would suggest.

Also, I really liked your paper. The second half - on the 'phenomenology of writing' - although I don't think you use the term (very reminiscent of M-P's Prose of the World!) - also really reminded me of one of my favourite lines from Deleuze:

"How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow - or rather, to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death."

I really like the move from this kind of account to one that holds equally for intersubjectivity, and the diffusion of solipsism it allows. Cool stuff.

Ah, well. Your thread. I tried. — Banno

Not really. To nick a saying of Feynman's, FOPL is as useful for talking about grammar as ornithology is to birds. You're not engaging with anything by invoking it, because it's completely tangential to any discussion of grammar. Want to talk about cases, genitives, declensions, participles and deixis? Be my guest. FOPL? Nothing doing.

"Imagine" being the operative word. — Metaphysician Undercover

I wasn't going to say it but...

I'm back at work for a day or two which means, ironically, that I have time to respond to interesting posts again! Hopefully the momentum isn't entirely dead...

It would seem then the distinction between grammatical form and semantic content is not clear-cut.

But I agree with this! In fact this was part of the point of the OP: that grammatical categories just are semantic categories. Grammar is not just a formal scaffolding of lingustic organization but reflective of - to use the Wittgenstinian lingo - a form-of-life. The whole point is that this informs Witty's statement that 'if a lion could speak, we would not understand him'. His form-of-life, reflected in his grammar, would be radically different from ours (not to be confused with 'in/commensurte' with ours). The focus on grammar here is to specify a mechnaism which would explain how this difference would come about/operate.

That all said, and thinking a little bit more carefully about your comments, perhaps I was too quick to assimilate art and perception together as two categories to set 'against' language-qua-symbolism. I think on reflection that the category to set apart is perception rather than art insofar as part of my motivation with the focus on grammar was to recognize the way in which it (grammar) allows for the creation of context 'out of thin air', as it were (also, reading back, our conversation began with a discussion of perception rather than art, and I think I allowed myself to get confused in the flow of it).

Anyway, the idea is that with grammar, I am no longer tied to a particular here and now, words can be used not simply as indexes or icons but as full blown symbols (to employ the tripartite semiotic distinction). This is something Dor gets at when he explains the specificity fo language:

"The claim is that the uniqueness of language lies in this very specific functional strategy. All the other systems of intentional communication, used by humans and the other species that we think we understand, work with different variations of the functional strategy that I call experiential: all these systems allow for (different variations of) the communicative act of presenting: “this is my experience”. This very general characterization captures the foundational fact that experiential communication is inherently confined to the here-and-now of the communication event, where experiences can be presented.

Language is the only system that allows communicators to communicate directly with their interlocutors’ imaginations, and thus break away from the here-and-now of co-experiencing: instead of presenting the experience to their interlocutors for perception, communicators translate their experiential intents into a structured code, which is then transmitted to their interlocutors and instructs them in the process of imagining the experience – instead of experiencing it. What the interlocutors do is use the code to bring back from their own memory experiences connected to the components of the code, rearrange them according to the structural configuration of the code, and construct a new, imagined experience." link

So yeah, okay, language is indeed closer to art than I was willing to give credence to, but further away from perception insofar as perception is indeed tied to the affordances of the environment which acts as the 'external' grammar of our perception (it constrains what we perceive, even while our perceptions are co-informed by our 'sensory-motor schemas').

I've cited plenty of links in our discussion so far. Educate yourself.

I'll be a [****] if I want to, especially to someone who is a needlessly aggressive pedant about employing the word evolution to describe a series of linked processes, or indeed, a nexus of causes and effects, as Janus rightly points out. To think of evolution as merely an 'effect' is to subscribe to a pre-modern conception of linear cause and effect which has no place in thinking about evolution. I will say that what you wrote about variation is mostly correct, with the caveat that it is misleading to think that evolution is some simple two-step process of variation followed by selection; evolvability is itself something that can be selected for which makes variability itself a selectable trait: evolution feeds back into itself, which is why speaking of linear cause and effect is indeed an 'abuse of language'. Evolution is as much an explanandum as it is an explanans.

Andreas Wagner's book which is all about - in his words - how nature innovates - might be of especial interest to you. Alternatively, there is also Mary Jane West-Eberhard's pioneering work on adaptive innovation, which is equally interesting and important.

PS sorry I've left this thread quiet, Christmas is a busy time of year, hopefully I can give it some attention in the next few days.

Poor Charleton, who has left both variation and evolvability out of his understanding of evolution.

"Looking at molecular machines has made me realize that evolution is the only way these machines could have come to exist. As we have seen, life exploits all aspects of the physical world to the fullest: time and space, random thermal motion, the chemistry of carbon, chemical bonding, the properties of water. Designed machines are different. they are often based on a limited set of physical properties and are designed to resist any extraneous influences. the tendency of molecular machines to use chaos rather than resist it, provides a strong case for evolution ... The ability of life to somehow incorporate thermal randomness as an integral part of how it works - as opposed to giving in to the chaos - shows that life is a bottom-up process. It is not designed from the top down."

Peter Hoffman, Life's Ratchet

<3

Merry Christmas all! Here's the 2017 reading list (*** indicate favourites):

Political Theory

Hannah Arendt - Between Past and Future: Eight Excercises In Political Thought***
Wendy Brown - States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
Wendy Brown - Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics
Wendy Brown - Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
Wendy Brown - Politics out of History
Wendy Brown - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
Alessandro Ferrara - The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgement
Raymond Geuss - Philosophy and Real Politics (Reread)
Raymond Geuss - Politics and the Imagination (Reread)***
Raymond Geuss - Outside Ethics
Raymond Geuss - Public Goods, Private Goods
Bonnie Honig - Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy
Bonnie Honig - Public Things: Democracy In Disrepair
Bonnie Honig - Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (reread)
Paul Patton - Deleuze and the Political
Linda Zerilli - A Democratic Theory of Judgement
Linda Zerilli - Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom***

Sociology/Political Science

Ivan Ascher - Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction
Melinda Cooper - Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era***
Melinda Cooper - Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism***
Christopher DeWolf - Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong
Nikolas Rose - The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee - To Our Friends***
Loic Wacquant - Punishing the Poor: the Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

Life/Evolution

Lila Gatlin - Information Theory and the Living System
Peter Hoffman - Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
Evelyn Fox Keller - Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
Evelyn Fox Keller - The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Culture
Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
Eva Jablonka & Marion Lamb - Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life***
Dorion Sagan & Eric Schneider - Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life

Sound/Analogy

Edward Campbell - Music After Deleuze
Aden Evens - Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience***
Daniel Heller-Roazen - The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World
Noah Roderick - The Being of Analogy
Kaja Silverman - Flesh of my Flesh
Eleni Ikoniadou - The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic

'Theory'

Giorgio Agamben - The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics
Giorgio Agamben - The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
Maurice Blanchot - The Step Not Beyond
Judith Butler - Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Colby Dickinson - Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation
Benjamin Noys - The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
Scott Wilson - The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment
Catherine Malabou - Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality***
Catherine Malabou - Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophyi]
Catherine Mills - The Philosophy of Agamben

Misc.

Hannah Arendt - The Life of the Mind
George Williams and Daniel Reynolds - A Charter of Rights For Australia
Peter Brain and Ian Manning - Credit Code Red: How Financial Deregulation and World Instability are Exposing Australia to Economic Catastrophe
Luciano Floridi - Information: A Very Short Introduction

--

Really happy with this year's reading. Been meaning to revisit both politics and sciences this year, and I think I achieved that. Also super happy with my male/female ratio - this is the possibly the first year I've read as many female authors as I have male ones, which I've been trying to do without success for a few years now. Next year I need to branch out along ethic lines, though I'm not as confident I'll achieve that. Aesthetics, though, is the topic I really want to knock over next year. Have a great year to come everyone!

-

Also, started today:

Hermann Weyl - Symmetry

I will say, in defense of Wittgenstein, that despite the popular (conservative) mischaraterizations of his work, language-games require no determinate other person or society. The language of 'public' and 'private' in Witty is unfortunately misleading: public only means something like 'public-izable', as opposed to what cannot be made, in principle, public. tl;dr: Witty already agrees with you. He is much closer to Derrida than one might think.

Eh, I'm not turning this into a debate on FOLP. It's uninteresting and not worth the time. Academic snake-oil and astrology peddled by philosophical charlatans.

It's the mummification of language, it deals with language as a dead artifact, made for priests and morticians of language.

Grammar deals with declensions, telicity, deixis, genitives, tenses - a whole word of interest removed from the calcified bullshit that is FOPL. There no need to be scared of shadows.

I don't like it because it's abstract nonsense that misses literally everything interesting about language.

Anyway, sorry I'm being short, I mean to reply substantially a bit later, just busy atm.

FOLP can go Flop itself. A bunch of analytic philosophical tripe.

He treated all words as nouns; to be defined by pointing.

Do you agree with this? — Banno

Yes to this though.

Yeah.

Buffeted on one side by someone who says my conception of language is too narrow, on the other by one who says it's too large...

Will have to do a bit of Alice in Wonderlanding...

The literal goddamn definition of evolution is heritable change. 'Abuse of language' more like 'denial of kindergarten facts'.

I think you need to make a distinction between two kinds of nonsense. The first is grammatically correct nonsense, perhaps the most famous example being Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Interestingly enough, grammar is actually being respected here, despite the nonsensicality of the example. One could, with a bit of creative flair, make this into a perfectly intelligible phrase. The second is J+D's example, which does not respect grammar, which we've been discussing: "What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?". This is an altogether different kind of nonsense. With respect to art, what I'd suggest that Escher's work falls precisely into the first category of 'nonsense': Escher's work is precisely a kind of visual 'bewitchment by grammar' that Wittgenstein speaks of insofar as there are indeed constraints laid down by a mixture of the shape of lines and our phenomenological expectations, which Escher is, despite it all, careful to work within.

Of course the pronouncement of 'grammaticality' here is not categorical. What ultimately matters most of all is consistency. One grammar or another may be entirely arbitrary with respect to each other, but must, to qualify as a grammar at all, be at least internally consistent. A grammar must be such that one can learn 'how to go on', as Witty put it, such that the rules don't arbitrarily change by turn of phrase (again, Kant's comment on arbitrary names comes to mind). The point is that art, and even perception may revel in precisely this kind of grammatical promiscuity, switching codes willy nilly, even if allowing for fleeting instances of consistency, as indeed single works or oeuvres might have. One of Wittgenstein's more striking images is that of rules as constituting 'rails invisibly laid to infinity', where the power of art is precisely in it's ability to warp just such rails even while respecting - although this is not at all necessary - local moments of consistency.

So much the worse for your understanding of language.

Surely that whole description strikes you as an incredibly clunky and forced description of any viewing of visual art? Certainly it would be far, far down on a list of possible descriptions of any approach to a painting. But that's neither here nor there. The conceptual point is still missed: the point of grammar is that it acts as a constraint on linguistic kinds: certain kinds of words must, of necessity, follow certain kinds of other words. Grammar also constrains the kinds of questions one can ask of a certain proposition (One of D+J's examples of a nonsense question is: "*What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?"). Such grammatical constraints are the minimum condition for any kind of digitized reference system - as symbolic language is.

Kant actually gets at something similar in the famous passage on the changing cinnabar, in a neglected line that follows that well known text: "Nor could there be an empirical synthesis of reproduction, if a certain name were sometimes given to this, sometimes to that object, or were one and the same thing named sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, independently of any rule to which appearances are in themselves subject." These 'rules' and how they function are of course, just the subject of Wittgenstein's discussions of rule-following in the PI.

Anyway, the point is that art is bound to no such rules. A pirouette does not have to be followed by a releve, which does not in turn have to be followed by a saute. One can string a series of pirouettes together without anyone saying 'that doesn't make sense' - and this for the obvious reason that no one judges art by the metrics of communication, which is another reason why your description of viewing the painting comes across as so forced. Of course, one can construct art by way of such constraints - as with serialist composition or algorithmic/generative art, but such art is precisely a tiny subset of the far wider world of artistic creation, where any effort to read art in terms of grammar would be at best a kind of post-hoc rationalization.

In what way would it involve such a grammar, and why?

It is incontestably the case that evolution innovates, and that it does so without a hint of consciousness. The so-called 'incorrigible distinction' you speak of has been long worn thin by contemporary approaches to evolution, which has recognized the now inseparable imbrication of both development and evolution. A starting point for your reading might be here, here, or here. Alternatively, there is Jablonka's own work on evolutionary innovation, of which she is a pioneer, along with Marion Lamb.

Poststructuralists(Lyoptard, Derrida) would disagree that perception is an unmediated contact with the world — Joshs

I never said that perception is an unmediated contact with the world. Neither did I say that "language doesnt allow the communication of visual or auditory information". Nor are either of these claims entailed by anything I said. It is not necessary that a language - broadly defined - has a grammar, and neither is grammatical structuring necessary for interpretation.

there would be no direct pressure on specific innovations. — charleton

And the authors acknowledge this: "The genetic assimilation of these capacities was most likely partial, rather than complete. It could not have led to a completely innate response, because the on-going process of cultural evolution made sure that the cultural environment to which individuals were adapting was constantly changing. As we have already indicated, this state-of-affairs must have had far-reaching consequences in terms of the genetic evolution of categorization, in our case, linguistic categorization: very specific innovations, such as the meanings of specific words or specific morphological markers, were not assimilated, because they were too variable and context-dependent, and because they changed too rapidly throughout cultural evolution.... Effectively, this process resulted in a cognition biased towards a specific set of semantic categories. These categories did not end up completely assimilated, because cultural change still put a high premium on epistemic flexibility."

The key is to strike the right balance between plasticity and robustness, which, of course, evolution excels at. I encourage you to read the original paper linked in the OP - it would save us both alot of unnecessary effort.

The two cannot be considered in isolation when discussing the genetic assimilation of language.

Genetic assimilation is unlikely to be the case here.... It would be a difficult ask to prove that using words could effect a positive change in the genome. — charleton

I disagree. J+D provide a very plausible account of exactly how such a positive change would come about: "Let us assume, then, that some of the adaptive linguistic innovations of stage N managed to spread and establish themselves in the community. This establishment was very enduring, because it was both dependent upon, and constitutive of, the social structure, and because social traditions are by their very nature self-perpetuating. This cultural change enhanced the communicative capacity of individuals within the community, thus increasing the fitness of the best individual communicators, as well as the fitness of the entire group. Crucially, however, the establishment of the innovation also raised the demands for social learning imposed on individuals in the community: ... In short: the linguistic innovations which established themselves in the community changed the social niche, and the inhabitants of this new niche had to adapt to it.

...Very gradually, however, the increasing cognitive demands set by the evolving linguistic niche started to expose hidden genetic variation. In our terms, residual plasticity was gradually stretched, and individuals found the accumulating linguistic demands more and more demanding. This process must have taken a long time. Eventually, however, after a very long period of consistent, directional cultural selection, genetic assimilation occurred: some individuals dropped out of the race; other survived. The frequencies of those gene combinations which contributed to easier language acquisition and use increased in the population... Obviously, this allowed for the whole process to start all over again: as a result of assimilation, individuals were freed once again to make use of their cognitive plasticity, to invent and learn more linguistic innovations"

It is true that this account, like all accounts of language acquisition, is speculative and hard to verify. However the mechanism is real, the account is evolutionarily plausible, and it certainly belies the incredibly naive charge of circularity. I do agree that epigenetics is poorly understood by the public, but this is a fault of the public and it's education, and not the field.

Please don't explain to me how this makes more sense than Chomsky's position (i.e., language is an innate faculty). — Galuchat

Yeah, I wouldn't want to disabuse you of your now publicly embarrasing ignorance of genetic assimilation and how it works.

This may appear so only as a result of arbitrarily limiting the definition of language to formal symbolization. If we broaden it to include perceptual interpretation of the world, affective gesture and vocalization, then language comes to be seen not as a tool of communication but as a precondition for any experience. — Joshs

Sure, you're welcome to understand language in as broad a manner as you like. However, the introduction of grammar marks a qualitative change in what one can do with language: as I wrote earlier, grammar functions to internalize context into language. Where gesture and 'perceptual interpretation' rely on an environment to provide context for action, grammar imports that context into language itself. Because grammar indexes the kind of word any particular use of word is, grammar marks the shift from index and icon to symbol: it allows us to speak about what it not present-to-hand, with the most basic grammatical function being that of negation. Grammar frees language from it's tether to the 'world',

Daniel Dor, whose work with Jablonka I cited in the OP, rightly notes that this allows for the explosive role of the imagination in breaking with lived experience: "Language is the only system that allows communicators to communicate directly with their interlocutors’ imaginations, and thus break away from the here-and-now of co-experiencing: instead of presenting the experience to their interlocutors for perception, communicators translate their experiential intents into a structured code, which is then transmitted to their interlocutors and instructs them in the process of imagining the experience – instead of experiencing it.... This unique communicative strategy is the key to the enormous success of language and its influence on the human condition." source

It will simply not do to ignore the specificity of language as symbolization even if along a certain dimension it retains a continuity with gesture and perception. One must attend to the discontinuities as well, and the importance of that discontinuity thereof.

Confusion and the need to dispel it; disorientation and the need to get bearings; incomprehension and the drive to resolve it.

Perhaps another way to look at it is that your concentration problem can be fixed. The problem of sustained attention is not yours alone, and is actually rather common these days. If you're willing to try, the first thing to note is that concentration is a habit: it must be developed, worked on, and sustained, it will not just happen overnight. The way to develop that habit is is small steps: set yourself goals and begin by reading in small doses, 5-10 minutes straight say, or even 10 pages or something. Increase this gradually. One way to do this is with multiple bookmarks. If you're reading physical books, place a bookmark as a goal and try to reach it (again, it only has to be 10 pages away from where you are currently are or something).

And all the other usual caveats apply. Read away from your phone or computer. Listening to music might help, or distract, depending on your own constitution. Music without lyrics is best, I find. I really reckon you can do it. It's just like going to the gym or going for a run. It's really hard to start, but after a while, if you keep doing it, it's alot easier.

That our 'access' to ourselves is not an iota different to our 'access' to the world was established by Kant, and has been... well, incorrigible ever since. The illusion is persistent though, precisely because our familiarity with ourselves (and why not - we spend every waking minute with ourselves...) is mistaken for some kind of difference in kind with respect to our knowing. I think every serious reflection on 'mind' recognises this, and you'll find the theme pursued by those like Wilfrid Sellars, Peter Carruthers, Slavoj Zizek, and others. Since you mentioned Fitche, you might want to check out a book that Zizek co-authored with Markus Gabriel, Mythology, Madness, Laughter, which has one of the best treatments I know on this from the perspective of German Idealism.

Here's a teaser: " The real problem of the external world lies in the fact that it entails an even more radical problem, namely the problem of the internal world only implicitly at work in empiricism and finally made explicit by Kant and his successors. ... The self becomes an object among others as soon as it is drawn within the sphere of representation. Kant developed this problem in his First Critique and his argument is as plain as it is striking ... Whatever the object of our scrutiny may be, it has to become an object among others whereby it is determined as such in a wider context. .... We have no grasp of that which constitutes our world even though it is we who perform said constitution. The uncanny stranger begins to pervade the sphere of the subject, threatening its identity from within. Kant is thus one of the first to become aware of the intimidating possibility of total semantic schizophrenia inherent in the anonymous transcendental subjectivity as such. "

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

Sign language has a grammar.

I'm not sure about dance. Perhaps particular dances, or even dance companies, develop or construct fleeting grammars in the process of dancing or choreographing. But I'm not sure dance ought to be measured by the standard of sense - what, exactly, is to be understood in dance?

But then, you've not said a word about grammar, or kinds, or lions, for that matter. You've more or less ignored the thread - and you ask after the point?

But Banno, you have not translated her statements into speech.

If a lion could speak...

Let's not be slippery with terms.

Sigh. Well threaded ground, again irrelavent. Enough of the catechisms, engage.

The 'talk' I'm referring to is the kind of communication she demonstrates in the video, not, obviously, that of her excellent blog.

It's there if you care to look for it.

Well frikkin done (on the Montaigne).