Talk is in a sense more complex than writing. Writing can convey more and more complex ideas but talk is in itself like Bateson's play but with the variables that are operational greatly multiplied. — mcdoodle

This is generally the case, but it's important I think to remember the power of writing to participate in these kinds of variables. Think here of say, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, or basically any work of satire - it's essentially 'play' (in the above sense) operating at the level of writing itself, where the higher-dimentionality is nonetheless embodied not in the words but in the social milieu in which they are placed. Many of the variables you mentioned - education level, political affiliation, power relations can and are at work in here too. And this sort of thing is operative at the level not just of meaning but even grammar itself. As Deleuze says somewhere, 'a rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker' - hence the racial, social and power relations that play out with the use of ebonics, say.

Cheers - I've actually come across that book a couple of times but haven't yet gone out of my way to pick it up. I've got a list as long as my arm of books to read this year, but when I get around to "Bergsoning" again, I'll definitely keep it in mind. Speaking of - currently reading:

Noah Roderick - The Being of Analogy
Kaja Silverman - Flesh of my Flesh

You're all positively barbearic.

As the dimensions of written language increase its functional repertoire should (I think) increase. — TheMadFool

I would suggest we do have something like this already too, except this higher-order dimensionality resides in nothing less than human behaviour itself, rather than language as such (or rather, one should say that language just is this holistic phenomenon involving both words and behaviour). Consider, for example, Gregory Bateson's famous theory of play. For Bateson, play always involves at least two 'levels' of communication. First there is the level of 'what is said', and then there is the 'meta-level' regarding how the object-level statement ought to be understood. The example he gives is of the difference, in animal play, between the playful bite and the aggressive bite. The aggressive bite is straightforward, but a playful nip is a bite that comments on itself, as it were, to indicate that it is 'not really a bite'. Here is how Bateson puts it:

"Now, this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of meta-communication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message “this is play.” ... Expanded, the statement “This is play” looks something like this: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.” ... If we now substitute “which they denote” for the words “for which they stand” in the expanded definition of play, the result is: 'These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.” The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite." (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy").

Would this not be something analogous to the multi-level organisation of the protein? And of course, one can add to the above example, such that play itself may or may not be communicative of flirting, say ("this play is flirting/this play is not flirting"). There is nothing, in principle, that limits the 'levels' upon which meaning can function (apart from our own cognitive capacities perhaps). Would this not be, in some sense, the 3D writing you're after? Is there not already a kind of multi-dimentionality inherent to meaning and language in everyday life already?

Not necessarily. The unimaginable power of language comes precisely from it's reduction of dimensionality: being able to compress so much information in such little space (consider the difference between the graph and the formula of the benzene molecule) allows us to perform incredible feats of abstraction because an entire set of elements can be treated as a single data point, which can in turn be manipulated with ease.

The elements a,b,c, for example, might be said be belong to set X, and the ability to speak of and manipulate an entire set X (without referring each time to all the elements of the set) allows for some incredibly powerful and economical means of control. Thus in math for example, one can perform mapping operations on entire sets of numbers in order to produce non-trivial results. This is more or less how Cantor argued for the existence of infinite sets of different sizes - a result whose importance is hard to understate. Higher dimensionality can be a massive inconvenience for thought. Again, notice how much easier it is to speak of C6H6 than it is to speak of:

But we can already employ language in higher dimensions than two. Consider:

Sky
--
Earth

Here, the spatial distribution of the words conveys information in a higher-order dimension than linear writing. Given a fixed syntax, the above might translate: "the sky is above the earth, and the earth below the sky". In chemistry, this is exactly what happens when we abbreviate the structural graphs of chemicals with linear ones, as when Benzene, which looks like this:



...and is abbreviated (in a lower-dimension) to look like this: C6H6. The structural graph, with it's vertices and edges, conveys more information by dint of it being of a higher order dimension than the linear formula. This becomes especially clear in chiral or mirror molecules in which the chiral orientation ('left-handedness' or 'right-handedness') of the molecule might give rise to very different bonding effects. L-alanine, for instance, is found all over our genetic code, whereas R-alanine is generally found in entirely different parts of nature;



In this case, the higher-dimentionality allows one to convey information that actually can't, in principle, be captured by the linear formula. Moreover, one might think of a moving picture as an even higher-order language: by adding the dimension of time, we can add additional information which which takes it's 'lower dimensional' counterpart alot longer to convey. Of course from here you can open fascinating questions into the nature of information by taking into account compression (as with .zip files) and so on. In any case, high-dimensional language isn't at all a far fetched idea. It's actually quite pedestrian - all around us in fact.

Either Plato... or Deleuze. Plato it is.

Ya, Arendt is fucking awesome (voted!). This list is a rather sad, barebones one though, missing some pretty much all of my favorites - Alicia Juarrero, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adriana Cavarerro, not to mention some incredibly important lasses I'm not that big on - Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, etc

It's between Kant and Nietzsche, but I went with Nietzsche because he's a bigger influence on me, and far more fun to read than Kant!

Denise Riley, but she isn't here :(

Dunno about *best*, but my favourite modern trio would be Alva Noe, Andy Clark, and Evan Thompson. Only Clarky is there so he gets my vote. Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty would be in the running too, but they're a lot more than just philosophers of mind.

I post truth all the time!

I don't really talk about philosophy outside of the circles of those who are familiar with it already, unless people ask. It's just kind of hard to, because there's no real one to three-line explanation of what involved, and it's just not just a great causal conversation sorta thing. I've recently taken to keeping a couple of 'sexy' ideas from the history of philosophy in my back pocket to throw out there if someone really presses me (Nietzsche's eternal return as an ethical test, psychoanalytic approaches to eroticism, speech act theory), which are generally quite fun to discuss if it comes up.

Otherwise, if you're looking to talk to people in real life outside of academia, look for conferences or seminars held by academics in whatever city you live in. Some are free, some you'll have to pay for, but it's where the types who are keen on this stuff tend to gather, and they're all generally itching to talk to other people as well. Just try searching things like 'philosophy conference [your city here]' in Google. Or look for the facebook pages of active philosophy circles, where they generally advertise this stuff and are great for keeping up to date.

As per usual, here's the 2016 list:

Deleuze reading:

Gilles Deleuze - What Is Philosophy?
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition* (reread)
Gilles Deleuze - Bergsonism
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet - Dialogues II
Jeffrey A. Bell - The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructualism
Jeffrey A. Bell - Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference*
Jeffrey A. Bell - Deleuze and Guattari's 'What Is Philosophy': A Critical Introduction and Guide
John Protevi - Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic
Helen Palmer - Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense
Sean Bowden - The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense
James Williams - Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide
Henry Somers-Hall - Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Eric Alliez - Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?
Daniel Smith - Essays on Deleuze (currently reading)

Science-y reading

Robert Rosen - Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life* (reread)
Robert Rosen - Essays on Life Itself
Gregory Bateson - Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
Manuel De Landa - Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (reread)

Anthropology

Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech*
Marcel Mauss - The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Marcel Mauss - A General Theory of Magic

Misc.

Brian Massumi - Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
Donald Landes - Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression*
Paul Bains - The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations
James Williams - A Process Philosophy of Signs
Emanuele Coccia - Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image
Anthony Wilden - System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange*
Arkady Plotnitsky - In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious
Vicki Kirby - Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large
Eugence Thacker - Cosmic Pessimism

Asterisks indicate my favourite ones. Lots of Deleuze, as per usual, but I'm actually attending seminars on the stuff this year, so not unexpected. A bit dismayed by the lack of female authors - again - this year, can only hope for more next year. Could have used a bit more pilitics too. Didn't read as many as last year (32 as opposed to 40 something) but I'm putting that down to having read some pretty hefty ones this year (Leroi-Gourhan, Wilden, Plotnitsky, Rosen). Next year's plans include reading on gesture, sensation, metaphor, technics, the analog, and more psychoanalysis. Also, Marx's Capital. Happy holidays all, and good reading!

Only have time for a quick schematic reply but the singular <> the particular. It's not nominalism. The singular exemplifies a universality: the particular stands for nothing but itself. The para-digmatic, is what 'stands beside itself' (qua the Greek prefix, para), unable to be subsumed under general rule and thus not a particular. Will try and reply in full later. Christmas shopping to be done!

Yes, that is the (singular) actuality. But then that still leaves the question of how best to deal with the two aspects that are required to produce such a history. And you did seem to be collapsing them in talking about this confusing thing of a "singular generality". Your choice of jargon seems unhelpful here. — apokrisis

Yes, but then, I'm elaborating in 'enemy territory' as it were, and if I could give up the use of generality altogether, I would. In any case what I'm getting at with the singular is more akin to what Aristotle understood as the 'example' or the paradigm, which more or less explodes the general-particular matrix altogether. Consider the following passage by Agamben (which should have you thinking along the lines of Pierce's 'abduction'): "The locus classicus of the epistemology of the example is in Aristotle's Prior Analytics. There, Aristotle distinguishes the procedure by way of paradigms from induction and deduction. "It is clear,” he writes, "that the paradigm does not function as a part with respect to the whole (hos meros pros holon), nor as a whole with respect to the part (hos holon pros meros), but as a part with respect to the part (hos meros pros meros), if both are under the same but one is better known than the other." That is to say, while induction proceeds from the particular to the universal and deduction from the universal to the particular, the paradigm is defined by a third and paradoxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular. The example constitutes a peculiar form of knowledge that does not proceed by articulating together the universal and the particular, but seems to dwell on the plane of the latter.

Aristotle's treatment of the paradigm does not move beyond these brief observations, and the status of knowledge resting within the particular is not examined any further. … The epistemological status of the paradigm becomes clear only if we understand - making Aristotle's thesis more radical - that it calls into question the dichotomous opposition between the particular and the universal which we are used to seeing as inseparable from procedures of knowing, and presents instead a singularity irreducible to any of the dichotomy's two terms. … A paradigm implies the total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference. The rule (if it is still possible to speak of rules here) is not a generality preexisting the singular cases and applicable to them, nor is it something resulting from the exhaustive enumeration of specific cases. Instead, it is the exhibition alone of the paradigmatic case that constitutes a rule, which as such cannot be applied or stated… A paradigm entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity and, without ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule that can never be stated a priori." (The Signature of All Things - this is for @aletheist too).

Those familiar with Wittgenstein might recognise here the discussion in the PI regarding the meter rule in Paris which is neither a meter nor not a meter long, but simply an exemplar of a meter. Anyway, the point is that I don't align singularity with what you refer to as actuality: while actuality is indeed singular, what the above is meant to convey is that singularity runs diagonal or transversally to the general-particular couple, and that it is not confined to 'actually exiting things'. It applies no less to a (general) meta-stable system than crystalization of particularities engendered from it. So while I understand where you're coming from, I'm after something different. The stakes are ultimately ethical and political (and ontological, when it comes to thinking in terms of novelty and the new), but I'll not go into that here.

Sure. For an excellent discussion of generality and particularity, check out the Introduction to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. For a discussion of singularities and their relation to generality, see chapter 1 of Giorgio Agamben's The Signature of All Things, particularly §5-9. See also chapter 4 of Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Slavoj Zizek's various reflections on universality - which subtend his work - also inform much of what I say, but check out The Parallax View and chapter 4 of The Ticklish Subject as well. There are probably other sources which feed in to all of this, but also of this is latent and ingrained from much of the various reading I do into this stuff.

It is hard for me to think this because it is contradictory, at least as I currently understand the two terms. That which is general - including all processes and regularities - cannot be singular, and vice-versa. If everything is truly singular, then nothing is truly general. — aletheist

Not at all - generality is opposed to particularity, and not singularity; the particular is what is replaceable, interchangeable, amenable to generalization, while the singular is not. Singularity (and it's natural 'pairing', universality, which is in turn not generality) cuts across the general-particular dichotomy, such that a general regime may itself be particular. It's all a bit abstract when put this way, but it's quite pedestrian when, if your generality is 'climate', it's possible to recognize a singular, Earthly climate, which nonetheless remains general for the particular weather patterns that form in it (hence the very distinction between climate and weather - weather may change from day to day, climate remains constant).

I think the issue is that we say that the manner in which the snow was formed here is the same manner in which the snow was formed there. So there's something that two particular singulars have in common; this thing in common not itself being a particular singular.

Else when snow forms in two different places we have three particular singulars; the snow forming here, the snow forming there, and the shared manner in which they form. — Michael

But this is just a 'issue' of granularity, and how one pitches one's analysis: if your analysis is fine grained enough, literally every single snowflake - even in the 'same' weather system - is unique (hence the phrase 'unique snowflake'!). On the other hand if you loosen your analytic criteria, it becomes possible to generalize over a set of singularities by disregarding information and treating them as particulars. Generality and particularity are, in this sense, properly epistemic categories; they help us think.

And further, one has to recall (again) that singularity does not mean 'absolutely random/unique'. It simply mens that all singulars are subject to it's own, singular process of becoming which is generalizable only at the price of 'losing' information about that particular individual.

Perhaps part of the problem here is (human) scale: if you scale out and treat the Earth as a singular system with consistent weather patterns across it's various climate zones - if you take an entire planet as your 'base' unit of analysis, 'here' and 'there' don't really begin to mean all that much at all.

No. This just repeats the metaphysical mistake of encountering a dichotomy and trying to turn it into a monism where one pole of being is primary or foundational, the other somehow illusory or emergent.

So sure, existence might be singular in the sense that substantial being is always the hylomorphic outcome of some developmental history. But every snowflake is still the unique outcome of a common process. The geomorphic world has a general habit of producing particular snowflakes. So the general part of the story is as fundamental as the particularity.

I would agree that the usual conception of Universals is faulty because it does express the monistic fallacy. It wants to treat the general as the foundation of being - as in Plato's ideas. But it is just as much a mistake to turn around and argue some variety of nominalism. — apokrisis

I'm not auguring for nominalism, and the whole appeal to process is to undermine, as I think you recognise, the rather stale debate over which 'side' to take between the nominal and the universal - both of which ignore the issue of ontogenesis. On the other hand, to give up the vocabulary of the general and the particular in favour of an ecology is precisely to short-circuit both 'poles' without, for all that, 'siding' with one or the other, as your charge holds. An ecology, environment, or even cosmos is precisely - a singular generality - a short-circuit between the poles that is precisely designed to avoid collapsing one into the other. That said, I realize that you're irrevocably wedded to your vocabulary, which in the end' works' much in the same fashion, but I'd rather avoid it all the same. It remains too musty for my liking, even when dusted off and treated anew (even 'hylomorphism' leaves a bad taste in the mouth...). But these are minor quibbles.

I deleted it. Feedback threads are fine but that was four pages of pure infantilism. I'll soon get rid of this one too, if it remains that way.

I am talking about the process that produces snowflakes. How can it be singular if it is the same everywhere? How can "a bunch of dust particles floating around in the right atmospheric conditions" occur in more than one place and at more than one time, if this situation is always just a collection of singulars? What enables us to predict the formation of snowflakes before it happens?

I don't quite understand the perplexity here: the Earth has certain zones of climate, formed over the course of millions (billions?) of years of geogenesis, itself subject to differential processes of production, etc etc; Moreover, snowflakes are indeed all individual, their shapes differing depending on the trajectory they take as they fall through the air such that one can say that "the very structure of a snowflake ... embodies the conditions under which it was created" (Juarrero, 1999). It's singularity all the way 'up' - and all the way down. There is nothing not subject to history, to process, to becoming.

If we can predict - to some extent - the formation of snowflakes, it's because of certain climactic regularities, stabilized over time through the roughly self-regulating ecosphere that is the planet. Singularity doesn't entail pure randomness - rather, it entails that any regularities that do occur are themselves subject to processes by which they come into being. Even singularity is the product of a process. At no point do you 'bottom out' into the abstractions that are 'Forms'. The hard thought to think here is that generality - in this case climactic regularities - are themselves singularities (hard because we're we're cognitively - evolutonarily - wired to think of generality in terms of genericity*).

*Which is why I think the vocabulary of the general and the particular has a tendency to obscure more than it does clarify, bound up in a set of lexical associations which it is better to avoid. Better, I think, to speak in terms of ecologies, environments and contexts, all of which impart a flavour of the singular over and against the abstraction of the general.

What do you mean? Snowflakes dont preexist the processes by which they come into being - if there happen to be a bunch of dust particles floating around in the right atmospheric conditions, snowflakes will be the result. What's surprising here?

Probably one of the best ways to think about it is in terms of morphogenesis (the genesis of form). Does a soap bubble look like a soap bubble because it instantiates a universal bubble Form? Or is does the soap bubble come about because of certain processes which individuate it accordingly? Turns outs, the latter is the case - soap bubbles look as they do because they tend toward minimizing surface tension, which is how they acquire their (roughly) spherical form (spheres are the best shape to be in to minimize ST). For something more complex like a snowflake, they all tend toward forming six-sided stars because of the particular way in which hydrogen bonds form as a particle falls through the air (which they do because gravity takes hold once the freezing process takes hold, which makes the particle heavier and heavier).

In these cases, universality does not explain why the soap bubble or the snowflake looks like it does: rather one must explain the universality of both in terms of the (singular) processes which give rise to them.

I don't know about physicalism, but Gilles Deleuze once remarked that the first principle of any empiricism ought to be that universals do not explain, but must themselves be explained. Whatever one's stance here, I think this at least situates the debate at the right level: its not a question of whether or not universals exist, so much as assigning to them their proper place: explanandum or explanans? After all, I think its pretty clear one can find 'universals' everywhere if one looks hard - or creatively - enough. So not existence, but function ought to be the wheel upon which the debate turns.

Hmm, the videos were fine, but I was surprised that you didn't really go into the scholastic context in which these terms were defined: i.e. univocity/equivocity/analogy as differing takes on the relation between God and creation. I think that without this background, it becomes quite hard to understand the relavence of such themes, as well as making it hard to pursue further reading. These just so much to discuss - I'm thinking here Aristotle, Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa, and Meister Eckhart for example - that it's a shame that it's not in your videos. I understand they're meant to be introductory, but there's room for them to be far more interesting than they currently are.

Kripke more or less uses the word 'essence' as a synonym for necessity (or rather necessity as a synonym for essence), and to the degree that he does employ the term essence it is in order to mark the distinction of necessity from a prioricity and analyticity (an anti-Quinian move). The attribution of essence to necessity simply serves to pick out necessity as what constitutes the specificity of a rigid designator. See, for instance, the discussion of gold, where he directly equates necessity and essence ("...though each of these items is, indeed, essentially (necessarily) gold, gold might have existed even if the items did not." (p.135)"), and even more tellingly in the index, where 'necessary property' simply asks the reader to refer to 'essential properties' (p. 169).

This also explains his attempt to distance himself from Geach in the long note on p. 155, where he explicitly distinguishes between Geach's 'nominal essence' which is marked by it's appeal to "a prioricity, not necessity, and thus is quite different from the kind of essence advocated here." Finally, he is explicit that 'essential properties' do not serve to pick out objects in either possible or actual worlds: "Some properties of an object may be essential to it, in that it could not have failed to have them. But these properties are not used to identify the object in another possible world, for such an identification is not needed. Nor need the essential properties of an object be the properties used to identify it in the actual world, if indeed it is identified in 'the actual world by means of properties". (p. 53).

I'm happy to maintain to to speak of essences in Kripke is basically playing with fire: what is 'essential' is not essence, but necessity. Essence, if and when it is employed, serves a rhetorical rather than conceptual role. Soames in any case seems to lean on the notion of an 'essential property' far more than Kripke himself, perhaps I think to mark a distinction from Quine's anti-essentialism. But Kripke's own emphasis is always laid not between essentialism and anti-essentialism, but between necessity and a prioricity, which captures the break from Quine in a far sharper - and more philosophically useful - manner. Too many readers of Kripke take essence as primary. This couldn't be a worse mistake.

Standard sense=a way a term is normally, conventionally used, at least in a particular milieu (so in this case, philosophy, and we could specifically say both metaphysics/ontology and modal logic). So it's not specific to a particular author. — Terrapin Station

In modal logic? You mean the thing Kripke invented? Yes I can see how his usage would be soooo outside of the standard usage of modal logic.

Nah, p. sure 'standard sense' = 'terrapin sense', but that's no sense at all! And anytime someone says Kripke is dealing with essences, you can be 100% sure they don't know what they are talking about.

That's... really not it but OK.

Standard sense? Author and publishing date pls.

Truth, dude, truth. The whole payoff of the theory has to do with truth.

So... If the law of identity didn't obtain, the concept of the rigid designator wouldn't be useful... as a signpost that the law of identity obtains?

Necessity qualifies truth. This is rigid designation 101 dude, if this confuses you maybe you need to read the book again?

The law of identity matters in virtue of this discussion because if it didn't obtain the concept of "rigid designator" wouldn't be useful. Rigid designators only work if the law of identity obtains, — numberjohnny5

I still don't understand your conditional: "if the law of identity didn't obtain the RD wouldn't be useful"... But useful for what? What (as-yet-unspoken) premise gives rise to this 'if'?

Dude, I intervened to try and clean up some misconceptions in the thread, I legit don't care about your dinner table opinions like 'I dont get it'.

Ah, yes, I remember that time I presented the 'I can't wrap my head around it' argument, coupled with the irrefutable 'it struck me as untenable' corollary that really got me that summa cum laude way back when. Good times.

Good for you?

Hmm, I'd say the theory is 'existent-neutral' though: it applies to Pegasus no less than it applies to the Eiffel Tower. But perhaps I'm using the word 'existent' in a different way than you. Perhaps a counter question to understand where you're coming from better: what matter if the law of identity is acknowledged or not? Like, what difference does that difference make?

Here you go: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rigid-designators/#BasChaRigDesTheInt

To clarify, necessity here qualifies truth - it is necessarily true that this is Earth - by virtue of it being called that. I'm not sure what it means to speak of "a particular exist[ing] in the way that it does", so I can't really comment on that. Again, naming, not 'existence', is at issue.

Ah. Yeah, I think that follows. Insofar as we both recognize that we're talking about the Earth, even through we've been wrong about what it is this entire time (the terrain is a projection conjured by super-intelligent aliens - with a heat shield to boot!) it's still 'the Earth' we're talking about.