Why? What specifically is anti-realist about it? Third time I'm asking dude.

(Nope. Fuck Judith Butler and everyone who looks like her.) — Pneumenon

Would you say this about a man? :-|

Have you done any secondary reading on it? It's a very, very, very hard book.

Regardless, preliminary advice would be this: start with chapter 3 on the Image of Thought.

What specifically makes it anti-realist or idealist though? Like, you're missing a step.

1. Meaning and truth of statements like "the chair exists" is being tied up in/is dependent on empirical and conceptual behaviours/events rather than something else.
2. ???
3. Therefore this account is anti-realist/idealist.

I'm not sure I follow. Why would it imply that?

I don't think the classical problems are regarding simply how to 'bridge' the 'divide' between language and reality but between, for example, the string of symbols "chair" and the thing upon which I'm sat. I think it obvious that language is an "instance" of reality (which I assume just means that language is a real thing that really happens) but less clear is how this "instance" relates to some other (often very specific) "instance". — Michael

But once you cash language out as a kind of significant behavior - as an action - it's no less puzzling than how me pointing to a chair 'refers' to a chair. Frankly, my pointing doesn't 'refer' to anything whatsoever. My pointing gesture is not a 'stand in' for the chair any more than the string of symbols 'chair' is. Instead, for me to understand what your pointing 'means' is just for me to be able to act or react to your gesture in the appropriate manner, given the particular circumstance in which the pointing has taken place. This is why it pays to 'dissolve' language into a wider realm of significance in general: it allows us to show just how wrongheaded it is to ask how a string of symbols 'relates' to something. It's not the string of symbols that's doing the relating - I am, insofar as I am a product of an education which has thought me how to use language and act appropriately in certain circumstances of those usages (to respond correctly, etc).

Think about, for example, how I know I can't walk through walls. The wall holds a particular significance with respect to my body - try as I might, I've learnt that it ain't gonna happen. Similarly, I learn that to use language in a certain way - to say this, rather than that - is to afford certain outcomes, to bring about certain states of affairs. The wall doesn't 'refer' to my inability to walk through it any more than words 'refer' to things. Instead, I come to know the significance of both the wall and the inky scribble arranged just-so on the page in front of me. In each case I have a practical knowledge of things, a way of moving about the room in one case, a way of responding appropriately in the other. This dimension of praktognosis (practical knowledge) and it's importance is very hard to parse if one treats language in isolation without recognizing it's imbrication with the world.

Yes, I realize that I might be missing a lot for not having read the other threads. But I do wonder where you are seeing these broad tendencies. At least within my own milieu, the ideas you seem to be going against are not even remotely popular. Wittgensteinian is dead, and postmodernism has never been popular among the English-speaking philosophers (cue Wittgensteinians' heads exploding over being associated with postmodernists). — Postmodern Beatnik

Interesting you say that because the traditions that I draw these ideas from are almost exactly these two quarters: 'postmodernism' and Wittgensteinian approaches to language. With the so-called 'post-modern' authors in particular, alot of the furor directed at their ideas was based precisely on the misunderstanding of their affirmation that sense extended far beyond the linguistic realm. People thought that this meant something like 'everything is language', when in fact, it meant the exact opposite: that language as we know it is in fact just an exemplary subdomain of sense, the study of which would allow us to cast light on phenomena not traditionally understood as linguistic. Frankly, I'm not convinced that the ramifications of their insights have been truly absorbed, even today.

From what you had written above, it seemed like you were arguing in favor of linguistic idealism (which would thereby increase my sense that what I was reading was both confused and confusing). — Postmodern Beatnik

Perhaps this is a symptom of what I mean when I say that these insights haven't been absorbed. When I said that one shouldn't speak of an 'extra-linguistic reality', this is because the whole point is to dispute the very idea of a sharp (a priori) diving line between what would constitute the linguistic and the non-linguistic. At the very least, such a division would be one that would be instituted historically, institutionally, pragmatically, for the sake of setting down some limits to analysis. We have to change not just what we think but how we think: we can no longer naively appeal to categories like 'inside' and 'outside' (of language - or thought, for that matter), without qualifying ourselves. It's one thing to say that one recognizes the evolutionary-developmental rootedness of language. It's another to pursue it's implications all the way.

Less as rhetoric than as incantation:

"To make metaphysics out of spoken language is to make language convey what it does not normally convey. That is to use it in a new, exceptional and unusual way, to give it it's full, physical shock potential, to split it up and distribute it actively in space, to treat inflections in a completely tangible manner and restore their shattering power and really to manifest something; to turn language and its basely utilitarian, one might almost say alimentary, sources, against its origins as a hunted beast, and finally to consider language in the form of Incantation." (Antonin Artaud, "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scene")

Would it not be better to say that the difference between language and reality is a difference that insinuates itself as reality? The way to cash this out course - or at least my preferred way - is in terms of affect. To use language is to induce affects, to brighten the mood, to forge or break bonds of friendship and community, to pass the time, to seduce, to insult, to help one think, to enjoy another's company in humor, to establish your position of power over another, to submit to another, and so on. Language is a species of doing, a practical activity. We tend to think of language as a tool for communication; it is that, but 'communication' itself is a function of language's far more primordial power to affect: we don't induce affects by communicating in language; we communicate by affecting with language. This is one of the consequences of the reversal of hierarchy that the OP tries to get at: language as species, not genera.

I think one needs to be careful with language here - I don't want to say that language is 'derived' from a more general set of behaviors so much as I want to say that it is an instance of those more general set of behaviors (albeit one that has it's own distinctive set of qualities). The point is that once this is acknowledged, the classical problems regarding how to 'bridge' the 'divide' between language and reality become a lot less pressing: language is no longer situated on a different plane than reality so much as it becomes an instance of it. Hence my dismissal of any notion of 'extra-linguistic reality' - not because such a thing doesn't exist, but because such a notion has no sense; the divide between what is 'linguistic' and 'extra-linguistic' here becomes nominal, a matter of convenience without ontological import.

Also, the quoted passages in the OP seem to beat a dead horse of "Language is about restrictions and rules and smothers the free play of the child's naive mind!" Well, okay, but what are we supposed to do with that? — Pneumenon

Not in the slightest. Constraints are always enabling constraints: their valence is entirely positive to the degree that 'restrictions' on the free play of language always always for new and far more complex moves to be made, not less. To eliminate is to enable. The account given in the OP is descriptive, not prescriptive, it's not a 'judgement' of language, it's just stating how it is. I think you're projecting things here.

Ooo, that Foot article (which I voted for), reminds me of another that might make for good reading the month after: G. E. M. Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy. Wanted to read both for a long time now.

Ultimately, it is unclear what you are trying to get at here. But I'm less concerned about the conclusion (indeed, some of what I've written might be seen as helping that along) than I am with the argument for it. — Postmodern Beatnik

That's fair enough PB. I guess I didn't name any explicit targets because A) I'm trying to aim at broader tendencies and attitudes in philosophy than any one particular position, and B) I meant this thread as a continuation of some themes I've been exploring and poking at in some other recent threads I've posted. Specifically, I'm interested in the perceived overlap between language and sense, and my 'target' are those positions which conceive of sense as a strictly linguistic phenomenon. In both this thread and the one on autism, I'm interested in looking at phenomena which exhibit sense while at the same time exceeding the linguistic sphere as we know it (the babble of babies, the movements of austistics) - thereby breaking the correlation between sense and language. There are at least two ramifications I want to draw from this:

1. First, it allows us to precisely specify the status of language as simply one element among a broader world wherein it holds no particularly special place. This perhaps seems rather commonsense, but it short-circuits the vulgar arguments about how we can never 'get outside of language' or how 'language can only refer to language', fueling the fires of some varieties of linguistic idealism. This is why speaking about the status of language matters: it's no good to say 'the status of language is the status of language': if we don't situate it among a broader plane of sense which extends beyond - or rather through - it, you can lapse into positions which treat language in abstracto, divorced from it's evolutionary-developmental history.

2. Second, it paves the way for a naturalization of sense. The question of sense is a particularly vexed one in philosophy, insofar as - excepting religious discourse which tries to attribute some conceptually incoherent and divinely ordained 'meaning' to the world - sense is very often understood to be some sort of 'subjective' veneer thrown over an asensate 'objective' state of affairs. But if we can untether sense from language, we can begin to understand sense as more than just a sort of subjective epiphenomenon that tends to be tied to language in it's syntactic, grammar-bound (and hence 'merely' human) form. One can begin to speak of an alinguistic sense that is operative at the level of bodies - whether it be in the movements of autistics or the tonal inflections of crying babies.

Both Sheets-Johnston, who I quote here, and Erin Manning, who I cite in the thread on autism, speak, for example, of a manner of thought that occurs as movement; movement here not understood merely as a displacement in space, but as an active relational engagement with an environment. This is why I refer to language as being constituted by more than 'adult' language - language which extends beyond the rule-governed rationalist conception we tend to understand it by, and which is instead operative at the level of sensation and affectivity. By paying attention to the liminal cases of sense - the movement-language of autistics and the jouissance inflected language of babies - we can see how so-called 'normal' language is simply a subspecies of a wider genera of naturalized sense production which has it's roots deep in an affective-coporeal realm which is often overlooked in reflections on language. I'm clearly not addressing you point by point here, but I just wanna give a taste of the motivations at work in the OP.

I don't think it is all about discrimination or elimination. It starts off as mimicry, cooing back to the mother. Discrimination or elimination seem to be a latter development. — Cavacava

Great quote. And I hasten to say that I don't disagree - if anything, these sorts of studies underline just the point of the OP: that the use of language we tend to call proper is indeed a derivitive mode of language use. Indeed, one of the points made in the Johnston article I cite is that these 'material' aspects of language ("babbling infants joyfully and idiotically reveling in the bodily pleasures of pure, senseless sounds") must be attended to if we are to properly understand what it means use language. In a psychoanalytic key, Johnston continues, "an infant’s babbling, prior to his/her acquisition of and accession to language as a system of signifying signs employed in exchanges of ideas, frequently involves playing with phonemic elements of his/her auditory milieu as meaningless materials to be enjoyed for the sensations they produce in the libidinally charged orifices of the mouth (when vocalized) or the ears (when heard)."

In fact, if one is to take the studies you cite seriously, one should perhaps be careful in calling these cooing and warblings 'senseless': the different intonations of the babies cries seem to testify to another sort of sense at work, a sense that belongs to a different - sensual - order than the rationalist notions of sense that we tend to be accustomed too (and that are associated with language-proper). In the psychoanalytic literature, this type of sense if often referred to as jouis-sense, a 'enjoyment-sense' that revels in the rhythms of assonance and mimicry that constitute the babbling of babies. Maxine Sheets-Johnston, in her studies on movement, in fact decries those positions which attributes sense only to linguistic structures, and notes that for infants, sense primarily takes form in the mode of movement:

"Not only did we all learn to walk and to speak, but prior to these fundamental “I cans,” we all discovered ourselves in the acts of sucking, swallowing, crying, kicking, turning, stretching, reaching, smiling, babbling, and much, much more. In the process of discovering ourselves in all these ways, we expanded our repertoire of “I cans”; we learned possibilities of movement and became progressively aware of our capacity to move effectively with respect to these possibilities — by moving ourselves." Language here can be seen to be one specific type of precisely these 'learned possibilities', one grounded in a far more primordial experience according to which "quality [and hence sense - SX] is both fundamental and fundamentally kinetic. Before language creeps in and a typically Western adulthood settles us down to a blindered and reductive ... outlook, we perceive a world abounding in quality and we sense ourselves moving in qualitative ways." (Sheets-Johnston, The Primacy of Movement)

Again, the point is language as we know it is developmentally continuous, rooted in a world of which it is one element among a vast assemblage of things, movements, bodies, institutions and so on. One can't treat language as a reified world-unto-itself without ignoring the very conditions by which language can be what it is.

Francois Zourabichvili - Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event & The Vocabulary of Deleuze

Yay, an @Andrewk!

Eh, I'll try and speak in the idiom of those I'm conversing with for convenience sake. If I were to be honest, realism - of any kind - is not something that interests me, intellectually. My own (roughly processional) metaphysical leaning is one that privileges relations over terms - processes of individuation over individuals, fields of differentials over identities - and to the extent that the anti/realism debate by definition requires an already constituted entity (number/mind/perceiver/language/world/etc) to be anti/realist about, I think the whole problem is essentially a badly posed one. Gun to my head I'll call myself a realist - and on this community it gets a rise out of people - but only because it shades closer to the truth of things even while it doesn't attain it.

1. You seem very keen to avoid leveraging the concept of representation, and I wonder if the abandonment of this concept is strictly necessary. I wonder if we can resurrect a servicable account of representation on the back of something like your concept of significance (i.e. representation as a species of differential meaning). Why would we want to do this? My worry is that if we abandon the concept of representation then we have to abandon anything like a correspondence theory of truth. Now, you're probably thinking that this is exactly what we should do because the correspondence theory of truth is a lost cause, but I'm not convinced that this is the right move for anyone who wishes to defend a genuine metaphysical realism (but perhaps you don't(?)).

More on the correspondence theory of truth: I'm not suggesting that we ought to try to explain truth entirely in terms of correspondence. We can make true statements about fictional entities like Harry Potter, and we wouldn't want to try to cash out the truth of those statements in ontological terms. I tend to think that the theory of truth needs to be split across ontological and semantic dimensions. So the semantic dimension deals with what it is for a claim to be correct - to satisfy certain norms of discourse - and then we can identify a subset of claims where the norms governing their correctness dictate that we cash that correctness out in ontological terms (e.g. in successful representation). This is, perhaps, where we could appeal to something like Terry Deacon's dynamical theory of representation, which roots it in a specific, 'substrate-independent' dynamical form (i.e. teleodynamics) to explain what it is for one process/state to represent another. I'm still digesting Deacon so at this point I can't say that I completely endorse his account, but I think it seems promising (as do some others that I have encountered). — Aaron R

Trust you to ask the hard questions @Aaron R! Anyway, I'm not entirely averse to rethinking representation, and if I come off as being so, it's more because I'm using representation as a foil to clarify the specificity of my own position. I think there is room to rethink representation along the lines you mentioned above, but for reasons that are perhaps more nominal rather than metaphysical. After all, it's just too darn convenient to speak of language as referring to things. When I say rather than metaphysical though, I mean that I don't really share your concern that a correspondence theory of truth is needed to secure metaphysical realism. I think that once you've relativized the status of language as a mere regional aspect of the world, there no reason to try and secure realism within language. There's no reason, in other words, why realism should be dependent on the vicissitudes of an empirical phenomenon developed amongst some highly evolved apes on a small corner of the universe. One your tether your realism to language, you've lost it before you've begun.

2. A word about normativity: the notion that language-use (and even perception) has a normative dimension doesn't seem to be too popular on this forum, but I can't see how it can be avoided. To make a claim is to implicitly have a stake in the specification of how things "ought" to be done. Not only can we make claims, but we can make claims (argue) about claiming (arguing) itself - that is, about how we "ought" to argue or make claims. So why does this matter? It matters because, in accordance with Hume's law, I don't think that the normative dimension of language-use can be naturalized, ever. If this is correct, then language (syntax, semantics, prgamatics) cannot be fully naturalized, ever. And that's where I tend to think that we simply cannot avoid developing something like a transcendental account of thought/language, as much as we might wish to avoid it. — Aaron R

I absolutely agree that language-use has a normative dimension, but on the other hand - and this is perhaps controversial - I reject the Humeian position that normativity cannot be naturalized. The trick, however, is to rethink at the same time what it means to speak of nature. It might be a bit much to write out a whole naturphilosophie in a post, but the gist of it is that if you hew to a process-orientated ontology, one can upend the traditional understanding of nature in terms of objects-displaced-in-space-and-time and think instead in terms of tendencies, forces, affects and imperatives which comprise the primacy 'units' of ontological analysis as it were. To cash this out in phenomenological terms, consider this passage from Alphonso Lingis, in which he links both language and perception in terms of their respective implication within the world in which they operate:

"Our remarks, exclamations, and ruminations respond and correspond— in their tone, pacing, and precision of wording—to the way light and shadow, colors, shapes, and horizons take form, are drawn out, break up, intensify, move andante or with staccato outbursts with the pacing of our walk and the sweep of our gaze. Our words do not simply depict the forest that is visible; they actively explore and reveal; they slow down and intensify the contact our bodies are making with things and events or accelerate them, turn them in new directions, focus the eyes and the hearing or let them drift. And the forest for its part thrusts events and shifts vistas before us that arouse questions and exclamations and reanimate our commentary.... Our voice is a wave rising and being moved across the rumbling and rustling, pounding and chattering earth and city. It relays and responds to the voices of things." (Lingis, The First Person Singular, p. 25)

If one could speak unironically about an essence of language, this would be it: the mobilization of language is primarily a way to induce affects which in turn move and co-compose both self and world in mutual becoming. To speak of truth, to argue over claims, to relay 'information' though language is just one 'regional' method of doing precisely this (a method we tend to mistake as comprising the main purpose of language). The difference then, between our respective conceptions of normativity turns upon whether to think of it primarily in terms of rationalist or sensualist lines. I think of rationalism as something like a highly constrained, rule-orientated method of sensual operations. And sense - significance - is, I think, something entirely amenable to naturalization - especially once you admit top-down or recursive causality.

There has been research suggesting that autistic people do not (or cannot) filter sensory input in the way NTs do and so are exposed to a far higher volume of information to process and get overloaded and can't cope way more quickly than NTs. — bert1

This makes sense to me, both from a phenomenological perspective - Baggs writes alot about overload on her blog - and in terms of the language of constraints that I've tried to employ above. When Baggs writes of how people tend to only engage with a limited part of the world, these limits are themselves derived from an ability to parse differences amongst an environment. One can put this in terms of background/foreground relations. It's possible to say that our engagements with the world largely take place by backgrounding a great deal of the environment around in order to engage with specific, foregrounded elements; this book, that computer screen, this path, that noise. For those like Baggs, this relationship is reversed; the primary experience is one in which the background is in some sense foregorounded, as when she says that she is in "a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings."

In some sense, Baggs's self-experience is not one which separates her from her environment as an agent-acting-in-an-external-surrouding, but one in which is she is part and parcel of the environment. Erin Manning, the philosopher whose writings lead me to Baggs's video, writes of how "autistics do not tend first and foremost to abstract themselves - their "self" - from the emergent environment... it is this intensive relationally, the video suggests, that often makes it difficult for autistics to interact with others." In one of her blog posts, Baggs describes the perplexity she is faced with when she is asked what she is thinking, and the inability for alot of people to appreciate her answer: “The dark behind my eyelids. The sensation of pressure on my arms. The sound of rustling.” To which the reply is: "[But] that’s a feeling. What were you thinking?". For Baggs however, "As far as I’m concerned, processing sensory input, including emotional responses from inside my body, are part of thinking. They are the main part of my thinking, at that. Yes, I do have the kind of thoughts that everyone calls thinking, but not all the time. Not most of the time... That kind of thought takes work and work takes energy... So that’s yet another common assumption: That everyone uses that standard kind of thinking. So much so that many people (including many people like me) decide that my predominant way of thinking isn’t thinking."

Yet just as her language is of another order, so too is her thinking. Like her language, her thinking also constitutes a positive modality which, to a large degree, we do not have access too. The primacy of background is not something we tend to experience. Autistic 'overload' is what takes place when this residency amongst the background is broken, when too much is foregrounded and the relation to the background is broken. Again, the point is to be careful with instituting a hierarchy of experiential categorization. Baggs's experience breaks the sort of input/output model of sensory experience that we tend to take for granted. The demarcations that would make a division between an inside and an outside are not necessarily present until certain exigencies make them arise. Manning for her part writes thus of the way in which Baggs's rhythmic movements don't take place in an environment so much as with an environment, co-emerging along with it.

Yes, but meaning is the parameter of distinction here; with respect to meaning, can we draw any metaphysically significant division? The argument says no. The distinction between any two terms needs to be related to a third in order to itself be of significance - and 'meaning' here is our third.

Actually @Michael, @Aaron R is on point here, which is that once you include 'non-linguistic components' within the ambit of the linguistic, any hard and fast metaphysical distinction between the two becomes impossible to sustain. The differentials that constitute meaning cannot be atomised at any point, once you admit that semantic atomism cannot hold. This is what I'm driving at when I said language is of the world; with respect to meaning, language has no 'special' place - hence my perhaps oblique comment that language is a "laterally situated 'regional zone' among a far flung milieu of semantically generative ecosystems."

As for your question @Aaron, I guess the point would be to recognise what we might call the "amodality" of meaning. A way of understanding this is to replace the word meaning with "significance". As far as I'm concerned, what we call meaning is just a linguistic sub-species of a more generalised notion of significance, a notion which I think we implicitly recognize as not necessarily being linguistic in nature (although there is a resonance as when we ask "what is the meaning of life?" - which, again, isn't a question about semantics!). And to perceive of course is just to recognize what is significant in a field of perception; the affordances of the doorknob for gripping and twisting, the glowing red of the hotplate as something to avoid touching to avoid being burnt. What we call meaning - as far as language goes - is just a nominally more specific instance of this: to respond to you in conversation is to know the significance of your words, and to respond appropriately - or inappropriately, if the mood strikes; not unlike how I respond to the world I perceive about me. Meaning is a kind of doing. We move amongst the foliage of language like we do the forest.

So I don't think it's quite right to phrase it such that "the meaning that is produced in perceptual contexts transcends the meaning produced in linguistic contexts"; I don't think it's a matter of two 'types' of meaning, each produced by a 'different' mechanism. Perhaps another, more awkward way of putting it would be that meaning is 'substrate independent' - an ugly phrase, but one I hope gets the point across. It was Merleau-Ponty, who, towards the end of his life, began to recognize the resonances between what he called expression in language with a more generalized notion of expression operative in perception, and in tun, ontology more widely. When I get the time, I'm going to try and write up a post on the language of autistics, who give silent voice - to use a favorite term of Merleau-Ponty - to this mode of significance.

Content, content, content. Just fill this motherfucker up with content.

There's not much sense in talking about 'realism' or 'anti-realism' as abstract categories. One needs to speak about these things with respect to some domain or another: a realism of lingusitic reference, of numbers, of Platonic ideas and so on. My target here is specific to semantic anti-realism and the implications that can be drawn from it. Frankly I think that any anti/realism divide - regardless of the domain you choose - ends up being meaningless and amenable to the same deconstructive practice demonstrated in the OP. Most anti/realism debates are the results of badly posed problems, and subject to dissolution after rather cursory investigations.

whereas philosophers have been inclined to think that natural language mimics ideal logic forms, often imperfectly, I now believe that logical systems are basically crude, toy semantics, abstracted from the living complexity of natural semantics, which we're only now beginning to study seriously... At this stage reflections on the interface between linguistic semantics and non-linguistic semantics are still in their infancy. — The Great Whatever

It's precisely this nexus or interface, as you call it, that fascinates me so much. Once meaning becomes unmoored from language, you open yourself up to a whole new universe of study; the world itself becomes a vector for meaning (which is not to say things are inherently 'meaningful'), which is something I think the phenomenologists have understood for a long time, although without ever framing their investigations in terms of semantics. And now of course there's a shit ton of work being done in biological circles with respect to environmental or ecological semiotics, as well as studies of meaning (or rather, significance) that operate at the level of child development or even autistic thought - areas of the human experience once considered devoid of 'proper' cognition (where cognition is indexed by language). Instead, language as we classically know it is pretty much simply a laterally situated 'regional zone' among a far flung milieu of semantically generative ecosystems which run orthogonally to human proclivities and ideas of exclusivity.

Couple all this with the realization that semiogensis can be understood according to the same mechanisms as morphogenesis, and you have this incredibly fertile field where language, evolution, ecology and the human experience can all be seen to shed light upon each other in a way that is just mind blowingly interesting. Anyway, that's more or less the path of thought I've been traversing for a while now. And then you get to read someone like Davidson and you think - for all his genius... how petty.

I don't think rooting language back in the world again will help. You'll just get more dumb correlationist paradoxes. I think it would be better to work through language's logic from the inside, ironically, until it can be systematically untangled, and allow the world to collapse with it. No more realism or naturalism then. — The Great Whatever

Surely you can give me more to chew on than this?

@Baden - Yeah, I think that is perhaps what I find stale, or at least artificial about some analytic approaches to language; it's treated as a sort of world of it's own which can be captured as being composed of certain moves in a game of logic or something. Language is entirely deprived of it's affective resonance, it's ability to act on bodies, rather than simply mean things. Speech act theory made some headway here, but it consistently gets domesticated into frameworks which it is meant precisely to explode (cf. Searle's mind-numbingly lame reworkings of Austin).

Stanley Cavell - one of the great analytics - has a great little quip about how some philosophers "seem like the drunk in the story who, having dropped his keys trying to open the front door, has gone around the corner to look for them under the street lamp because the light makes it easier to find things. Or perhaps like a second drunk who, looking at the difficulties of the first, tries to convince him that he hasn't dropped his keys because they are obviously not under the light." Cavell is speaking of ordinary language philosophers in his passage, but I feel sometimes the same way about those who would prefer to treat language wholly on logical terms, because frankly, that's simply what their training has thought them to be good at. That's not to say it's all like this, but exceptions seem to be deviations from the rule, rather than constitutive of it.

"Cuban" goes for 3! - and does not end up at "philosophy".

Oops, didn't read the rules. 13 it is!

Takes 4 for goat. This is clearly significant.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with 'partial theories', and the onus is on you to show that language functions univocally if you want to make the rather far-fetched claim that 'partial theories are dubious if not outright bad ones'.

A word on what I like about the whole Davidsonian approach to language, although it's not specific to this paper as such (hopefully it might throw some light on it for others!): I think Davidson is on to something important in terms of his attempt to impart a certain immanence to language. I don't imagine that 'immanence' is a term Davidson himself would use, but I think it gets at what's (partially) at stake in his work: the idea of shedding the representational function of language so that language no longer simply 'represents' things 'out there' in the world, but rather - as far as meaning and reference goes - works according to its own terms. Language, as seen through the Davidsonian lens, 'works' (that is, is able to be understood by language users) without the need for "direct contact" with the world, as Davidson puts it. I think this is generally the right way to go about thinking things.

Elsewhere and in a different context, he actually makes this goal quite explicit: "Beliefs are true or false but they represent nothing. It is good to be rid of representations, and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it is thinking that there are representations that engenders intimations of relativism" ('On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme').

I still feel uneasy about the manner by which he goes about achieving this aim - via a truth-centric semantics - but I'm not well versed enough at this point to give that unease articulation.

Right, gonna reel some thoughts off in order to work them out in the process of writing. It seems to me that the thrust of Davidson's paper is something like this: "Look, a theory of truth can do without a concept of truth, so why not a theory of meaning without a concept of reference?". He begins by acknowledging that a theory of meaning without a concept of reference does in fact sound a bit odd - after all, "explaining the truth conditions of a sentence like 'Socrates flies' must amount to saying it is true if and only if the object referred to by 'Socrates' is one of the objects referred to by the predicate 'flies'." To work himself up to the challenge of meaning-without-reference, he begins instead by looking at truth - specifically Tarski's Convention T.

Without going into the specifics of the theory (Davidson summerises it quickly in the third paragraph of the paper, and discusses it more fully in his paper, "In Defense of Convention T"), the upshot of the theory is that while it doesn't tell us what truth is, it allows us to specify what does and does not count as a truthful sentence in a particular language. He notes that objections have been made to the effect that if this is so, this theory of truth is in fact only something like a partial theory, one that does not 'give a complete account of the truth of sentences'. It is at this point that Davidson essentially grasps the nettle and says something like 'so what? - the theory does it's job, and we use notions like "reference" and "satisfaction" merely as 'posits' or 'theoretical constructs' that allow us to employ the theory of truth'. In Davidson's own words, "their role is theoretical, and so we know all there is to know about them when we know how they operate to characterize truth. We don't need a general concept of reference in the construction of an adequate theory."

The reason that Davidson can get away with this is that he sets up his theory of truth to abide by a particular set of criteria: whether or not someone who speaks a language L would have enough information to interpret what a speaker of that language says, based purely on the theory so provided. On this count, says Davidson, the Convention T would allow a speaker to have exactly this information. It is important, says Davidson, that by appealing to this criteria, we allow ourselves to interpret references in terms of "non-linguistic concepts". In other words, the criteria that Davidson sets up here are 'empirical': if, on the basis of the theory of truth, one can understand how it is a sentence can be true, then we don't need to explain what truth is. Similarly, if, on the basis of a theory of meaning, we can understand how words refer, then we don't need to explain what reference is.

The key for Davidson of course is that his whole project is concerned with explaining meaning by recourse to a theory of truth. In so doing, Davidson hopes to get rid of any appeal to 'intentional' elements in a theory of language (where meanings are dictated by intentions, desires, beliefs and so on), situating meaning wholly on an 'extensional' level. In effect, Davidson wants to give a theory of meaning that does not at all appeal to any concept of 'meaning'. In the paper under discussion here, Davidson's attempt to do without reference is of a piece with precisely this project to shed language of any intentional elements.

Anyway, at this point I'm just trying to make sense of the paper, so I don't have any concrete critical comments either way. Given the number of threads that run through the paper - which is anything but self-contained - it's actually pretty hard to assess without at the same time addressing Davidson's entire philosophical project. I will say that's it's an awfully clever paper, even if, at a purely intuitive level, the whole thing strikes me as a bit cold and austere. I'm not caught up with the analytic literature on Davidson, but I think the open question is whether or not Davidson's theory meets the criteria he sets out for it. Davidson says that a theory of truth will allow a speaker to understand how truth functions - and similarly with reference - but is it in fact the case? Can counter-examples be provided? Have they?

PS. What happened to the link in the OP?
PPS. This is such a bitch to read. Would rather read a division of Being and Time any day!

This is interesting Streetlight, but I still think that the virtual space of video games is categorically different than natural perceptual space, even if not phenomenologically so. I think it is categorically different by virtue of its being able to be exhaustively explained in terms of the mechanisms by which natural space is simulated. It seems to me that it would cease to be able to be exhaustively explained only at a point where explanation is demanded for natural perceptual abilities. — John

Oh don't get me wrong John - my point is that it's precisely because VR or video games are never 'purely' video games, because the 'space' involved when we interact with them is not at all reducible to the 'flat projection' which they seem to employ, that citing video games as an argument against the OP doesn't work. In some sense what I'm saying is that there is no such thing as a 'virtual space of video games', as if such a space could exist 'in itself'. Such a space always has roots in a corporeality without which 'experience' of it begins to come apart at the seams, as in the case of the nauseous simulator subjects.

One shouldn't have to 'side' with reality over virtual reality (as you are doing), or vice versa (in TGW's case), when the very line that demarcates the two is porous to begin with.

With respect to video games, I actually agree with TGW here, but not necessarily for reasons he might appreciate. I think that it is indeed disingenuous to think of the experience of video games as categorically different from so-called 'real life' - but precisely because video games are far more somatically grounded than we traditionally care to think. There's a reason, for example, that virtual reality headsets are often described as nauseating after long periods of use, and that pilots who emerge from long periods of simulated flying are not allowed to drive cars, or in fact fly planes at all, for fear of their perceptual capacities having being compromised by the simulation. Recently they found that putting an image of the bridge of a nose on VR headsets can help decrease the feeling of motion sickness - no doubt because the nose functions as an phenomenological invariant by which bodily orientation can take place, a function of it's being just so in 'real life', without which it would be just another visual coloration in image-space:



And video games still abide by the phenomenological if-then relations that characterize body movement, relations which remain somatic: if I move my hand/mouse in this way, my point of view will change accordingly. If I type out this string of instructions, that event will take place. Further, as Vicki Kirby warns, trying to institute a hard and fast divide between so-called 'real life' and VR simply redoubles the Cartesianism which embodiment tropes are meant precisely to avoid: "Thus far, the literature on VR/cyberspace, despite its attention to the vagaries of identity, remains committed to a recipe of self-present ingredients... The mind/body division [in this literature] presumes supplementation, articulation, interfacing, and progress, such that the body is figured as a tool or as an instrument of the mind. ... [Yet], there never was an unmediated integrity before difference. Instead of mind and body, the conjunction that assumes that difference happens at one interface, between entities, we might think the body as myriad interfacings, infinite partitionings—as a field of transformational, regenerative splittings, and differings that are never not pensive." (Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, p. 148).

Sounds good to me! I think you're entirely right to say the the LEM in Simondon is not false per se, but simply inapplicable, or rather only applies ex post facto, and cannot be called upon in thinking about ontogenesis. Also a big fan of your equation of 'exist' with 'sustain itself', because it highlights the fact that ex-istence is a continual matter of 'going on', or processuality. I would be weary, however, of the lexical resonance between 'sustaining oneself' and 'surviving/adapting' insofar as for Simondon, the living being does more than simply 'adapt' to a 'given' situation, but rather always remains in a state of productive tension with it: "The living being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself - which is to say, by modifying its relationship to its milieu (something a machine is equally able to do) - but by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems."

Deleuze, in particular, will take up this notion of 'problems' and reread ontology in it's light, with his own attempt to rethink being along the model of an open-ended problematic: "Being (what Plato calls the Idea) 'corresponds' to the essence of the problem or the question as such. It is as though there were an 'opening', a 'gap', an ontological 'fold' which relates being and the question to one another. In this relation, being is difference itself. Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather, it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question ... Beyond contradiction, difference - beyond non-being, (non)-being; beyond the negative, problems and questions." (Difference and Repetition, p.64)

This is the root of Simondon's (and Deleuze's) critique of Hegelian dialectics, which, according to both, begins from individuals and then tries to think their becoming through negation, rather than beginning with the process of ontogenesis, and inscribing negation 'positiviely' within that process. Simondon: "In this investigation, the above-mentioned course is obliged to play a role that the dialectic is unable to play, because the study of the process of individuation does not seem to correspond to the appearance of the negation that follows as the second step, but rather to an immanence of the negative in the primary state, the precondition for what follows, in the ambivalent form of tension and of incompatibility. Indeed, it is the most positive element in the preindividual being - namely, the existence of potentials - that is also the cause of the incompatibility and the nonstability of this state. The negation is primarily an ontogenetic incompatibility, but it is also the other side of the richness of potentials. It is not therefore a negation that is a substance. It is never a step or a stage, and individuation is not synthesis, a return to unity, but rather the being passing out of step with itself, through the potentialization of the incompatibilities of its preindividual center." (Genesis of the Individual)

Compare Deleuze: "Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference: heteron, not enantion. For this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being. In this sense, it turns out that the infinitive, the esse, designates less a proposition than the interrogation to which the proposition is supposed to respond. This (non)-being is the differential element in which affirmation, as multiple affirmation, finds the principle of its genesis. As for negation, this is only the shadow of the highest principle, the shadow of the difference alongside the affirmation produced. Once we confuse (non)-being with the negative, contradiction is inevitably carried into being; but contradiction is only the appearance or the epiphenomenon, the illusion projected by the problem, the shadow of a question which remains open and of a being which corresponds as such to that question (before it has been given a response). Is it not already in this sense that for Plato contradiction characterises only the so-called aporetic dialogues?" (D&R, ibid)

Erin Manning - Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning - Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance

Sure.

A lovely article, Jamal, one in keeping with my own sensibilities. I think one thing to keep in mind re: the pervasiveness of the argument is that it's not just a matter rejigging our ways of thinking due to a historical legacy that stems from Hume/Descartes, etc. In some ways, I suspect, we are evolutionarily predisposed to thinking about the world in the terms that 'The Argument' presupposes. In some sense, our survival depends on our ability to 'fix the world in place' in order to act effectively in it. Our ability to act in the world is tributary to our ability to treat it as a fixed 'thing' whose elements can be manipulated, changed, acted upon, etc. There is pretty much an evolutionary imperative to divide the world into subject and object. We have to work so hard to divest ourselves of this idea precisely because it comes, in some ways, 'built in' to who we are as creatures. No matter how much we come to know, 'intellectually', that this is not the case, we may never get rid of 'the Argument' once and for all. Hence the need for articles like this!

Nonetheless, I'm coming to realize just how preliminary arguments like the ones in the article are. They do good work in 'demolition' as you put it, and only begin to point out 'where to go next' as it were. And there are indeed, issues with that demolition itself. TGW, as much as I disagree with his general outlook, for example, make some excellent points which do need to be addressed. I think you're entirely right, for example, to take 'inferential' accounts of perception to ask, but rather than discard with inference altogether, what I suspect is needed is a reintegration of inference as something like an 'additional layer' of perceptual experience which can work in tandem with the more 'primordial perception' which your own arguments seem to want to tend towards. I think one of the challenges of future accounts of perception will precisely to show how inference can function in a 'top-down' manner upon the more 'bottom-up' conceptions of perception which are very in vogue at the moment.

There will need to be a dialectical integration of concept formation with perceptual exploration that will complicate any straight forward move to ground perception in the body, etc. This is where I think the trend toward 'embodiment' and so on is ripe for another revolution: one which will show how idealities can structure our perceptual capacities even as they have their genesis from out of that perceptual ground. In other words, articles like yours will need to be seen to constitute the first part of a two-step account of perception: the first consisting in the rejection of the naive 'sense data' accounts of perception wherein perception is a matter of inferential extrapolation from brute sense data, and the second consisting of a recuperation of inference as that which operates as an 'expanded' or extra modality of perception which can enhance and augment the 'primary processes' of perception as given in embodied accounts.

--

Second, I think TGW is entirely right to highlight the autonomous role of sensation with respect to perception. The challenge is to accommodate this autonomy without falling back into the old paradigm of sense data/inferentialism. There's been some really good stuff written on this matter by philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Alphonso Lingis, and more recently, Tom Sparrow. To draw on Lingis however, as he points out - with respect to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in particular, "what is lacking in the phenomenology of perception is sensation... [P]henomenology, making perception primary, veers toward a certain idealism. Is not something lost, in the measure that sensation becomes the perception of a sense - that by which sensation is sensuous? The exposure to the field of the sensuous is not only a capture of messages, things tapped out on our receptors; it is contact with them in their resistance and materiality, being sensitive to them, susceptible to being sustained and wounded by them. Sensation also means feeling pleased, exhilarated, or being pained by the sensible. A sentient subject does not innocently poise objects about itself as its decor, it is not only oriented by their sense; it is subject to them, to their brutality and their sustentation."

Thus, against Merleau-Ponty's argument that to perceive is to see a figure against a background, Lingis argues that "the sensible field does not consist only of configurations against a background of potential things, or instrumental connections, or paths and planes. There is also an unformed prime matter.... Sensibility occurs in a medium which is pure depth, but not empty space; filled with qualitative opacity. It has no contours, does not present itself through profiles, does not have sides, is depth without surfaces. It is neither delimited, nor positively without limit: it is indefinite, apeiron ... Colors concretize in a chromatic medium, solids and vapors form in the density, sounds emerge in the sonorous element.... The things do not crystallize along the axes of a space-time framework, or at the intersections of instrumental pathways; they solidify in a depth-in the day, in the atmosphere, in the density and din of the world." (Lingis, Sensation)

A phenomenology of sensation, rather than perception, would have us pay attention to these un-phenomenal 'vapours' that cannot themselves be captured by the intentional structure perception (one wonders if this would be a 'phenomenology' any more...). There is, in other words, a double challenge that the phenomenology of perception needs to meet. The first is with respect to the role of conceptuality and inference, which cannot be so easily discarded as one would like. The second is the challenge that sensation poses, which also cannot be captured by the strictures imposed by the perception of 'things'. I like to think of it in terms of a continuum which runs both forward and backward, looking something like this: sensation <-> perception <-> inference. Anyway, the point of this is to say that while I agree entirely with the spirit of your article, one must be careful of the sorts of conclusions that we can draw from it: is inference the 'enemy', or must we instead rethink the role of inference in perception? Equally with sensation - is sensation the equivalent of sense-data, or is sensation more complex, more interesting that that?

*Attached is a link to Lingis's article on Sensation, which is a great read in itself, and speaks to some of TGW's concerns here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_WcK7Wdttxqc19fWm1SXzFDcVU/view?usp=sharing (Google Drive, pdf, 12 pages)

Aw, I'm going to miss my brief stint with the banhammer. In any case, it's simply best not to go about mentioning this place on PF anymore, not even in internal PMs. Eric and Soren are quite sensitive at this point, and there's simply no need to inflame things just to wring another member or two. Stick to philosophy if you're going to post there, and frankly, I'd prefer if we do the same here too.

Quine is always fun to read, and his "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and "On What Is" have alot to be discussed in them. Otherwise, some other, more left of field ideas:

Michel Bitbol - "Ontology, Matter and Emergence" (on emergence and causation): http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4006/1/Emergence1.pdf

Ed Casey - "The Element of Voluminousness: Depth and Place Re-examined" (phenomenology of depth) - https://philosophydocuments.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/13-element.pdf

Judith Butler - "Merely Cultural" (a defense of cultural analysis): http://www.uky.edu/~tmute2/geography_methods/readingPDFs/butler_merely-cultural.pdf

Stanley Salthe and Gary Fuhrman - "The Big Bang and the Second Law" (On causation, cosmology and thermodynamics): http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/18/36

Ray Brassier - "Concepts and Objects" (On Realism and Conceptuality): http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ray-brassier-concepts-and-objects.pdf

Claus Emmeche and others - "Levels, Emergence, and Three Versions of Downward Causation" (as per the title) http://www.nbi.dk/~emmeche/coPubl/2000d.le3DC.v4b.html