Significant interaction with other people beyond being given food by them is required to acquire language and to recognize the existence of other people. I don't need to argue about this, because the cases are real and actually happened.

A couple things.

First, I found the place where Derrida implies the twofold reason for thinking language is indicative when used communicatively. It's on p. 19.

Since contamination is always produced in real colloquy (at once because in real colloquy expression indicates a content that is forever hidden from intuition, namely, the lived-experience of the other, and because the ideal content of the Bedeutung and the spiritual side of the expression are united in real colloquy with the sensible side)...

I have a copy of the Investigations now, and am looking to see what Husserl says about this second point.

Second, here is an interesting passage that my summary didn't address, on p. 18, insertions mine.

...we would be tempted to say that this hiatus [between fact and essence], which defines the very space of phenomenology, does not preexist the question of language, and it is not inserted into phenomenology as within one domain or as one problem among others. It is opened up, on the contrary, only in and by the possibility of language.

I hadn't realized on my previous read that this claim was so strong – Derrida seems to claim that the fact/eidos distinction is one that can't exist without language, and that indication and expression more or less stand for either side of the divide. There's no justification for this statement here, and having read forward I have not found any yet, but this sort of move seems to be indicative of what Derrida will be doing throughout the whole text.

Again, this points to the question of why 'needed for language' means 'needed for everything.' It also seems to me, at least at this stage, not to get the distinction right: there can also be an essential component of indication, and a fact of a particular expressive intention. Derrida makes this distinction a lot, and I can't find out where it's justified. He seems just to assume that if indication is (or needs to be) present at all, then the phenomenological method of the reductions just can't go through, because reductions 'bracket' the empirical, but this as I said in the previous thread seems to be a misunderstanding.

I'm very skeptical about any such experimentation. Wouldn't that be harsh cruelty, punishable by law, to keep a child locked away, and only show up with food and water now and then? Were do you find these "feral" children, and how do they live after being born if there is no one feeding them? How can you take a baby and meet that baby's physical needs, then claim that the child has had "no significant interaction with others". Clearly you are in contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Case studies have been done with naturally occurring feral children that are the result of neglectful parenting. You can feed a child without speaking to it or cuddling it.

I don't want to dig my heels in too hard on this because these are only the beginnings of arguments. But I don't see how the first paragraph addresses the first point, and as for the latter two, I think I conveyed that they are neither about autism nor grammar, respectively, but about an outward signal of self-consciousness being present while an outward signal of other-consciousness being absent.

Sherlock Holmes rock opera.



And some heavy Haydn.

I'm starting to read a little on this topic, and there seems to be some psychological evidence that the OP thesis is false – apparently feral children raised with their physical needs met, but with no significant interaction with others, learn to distinguish between themselves and physical objects in order to gain the requisite non-communicative skills required to feed themselves, avoid obstacles, etc., but do not gain the ability to recognize the existence of other people, effectively existing in something like Husserl's solipsistic reduction to the sphere of ownness perpetually. With personal contact renewed, this defect can be ameliorated but not fully remedied, past a certain age.

There is also the matter of theory of mind tests that young children, and autistic children later on, are unable to pass, that apparently require some degree of self-consciousness (the ability to recognize one's own memories and perceptions, and the difference between 'what I know' and what 'I don't know'), but evidence struggle with the notion that other people have analogous self-consciousness. This shows that other-consciousness develops at some ontogenetic stage, and probably at a later stage than self-consciousness.

Children also show a telling pattern when mastering first and second person pronouns. On the production side, they master the first person pronoun before the second. On the comprehension side, they master the second before the first. In other words, children learn to recognize themselves as referents of pronouns before recognizing an other or addressee, even when grammatically they have mastered the discourse function of both the first and second person. In other words, the grammatical category appears not to be missing, only the psychological category of an other – the first and second person make sense just fine, but only when the child understands itself to be the reference, as author or addressee.

Yeah, this confused me too. I don't speak French, but there is a cognate in Spanish, querer decir, which also means 'mean,' but you commonly use it to ask what a word or piece of language in the abstract means, like ¿qué quiere decir 'caballo?' – 'what does 'caballo' mean?'

The translation is confusing because 'want' in these cases don't actually have to tie to volition, which is the parallel Derrida draws later.

Reading through this some more, and looking ahead to section 3, I think that I have been going about expression in slightly the wrong way, and 'semantic content' might be a misleading way of putting it, because it conjures up the way modern linguists think about meaning. It seems to me that what Husserl means by expression (and the way I just used the word there <- is an instance of this use) is the sense in which we say 'but that is not what I meant,' when someone misinterprets us (and note here, far more is required than semantic competence to figure out what someone 'means'). It appears not to be the abstract semantic value of a bit of language at all, but something imbued with the desire to make public something gleaned from a private intentional act. This becomes clearer later in the text.

It may be that for Husserl, as for many philosophers of language prior to the mid 20th century, this notion of meaning to say something is one and the same as the meaning of the piece of language simpliciter. But I'm not so sure about that either: Husserl also was on his way to formulating, along with Frege, an abstract combinatorial semantics based only on interpretaiton of abstract syntactic categories. In any case, what Husserl is concerned with here, and Derrida's target, is meaning in this sense, 'intention,' and yet at the same time not the sort of intention that can be conveyed without language. It's a very specific sort of thing, that combines the Gricean notion of 'meaning-NN' but in such a way that it applies only to linguistic signs.

It therefore might well be that Husserl would simply deny that the signpost or the program mean anything at all in this sense, that not all productions of language are sufficient to be expressive, since after all in this sense a signpost indeed doesn't mean anything (but of course in a wider sense it does). There still remains the question to what extent Derrida's criticism relies on this weirdly parochial view of language.

I don't think it matters – you can accompany it with a phonological component to pronounce the words with differing stresses, etc. Still it's not meant to be used to communicate, and still there is a layer of meaning that we can discern merely in virtue of our semantic competence.

As for whether there is any expression going on in these cases, it seems there must be if our concern is 'logicity;' we can understand, for example, that certain arguments are intuitively valid even if not used communicatively (in fact, logic itself would be impossible if we could not do this, and so extract truth preservation in virtue of form).

Rather than contest these examples, I think it would be easier to try to make the point even clearer. Suppose we had, first, a language learning class, in which we're taught sentences and their meanings on a blackboard. We can understand these, and do so, without using them in any concrete communicative context. In fact, the whole point of using sentences in this way is not to actually employ them in a communicative act at all.

Or suppose we had a simple grammar that constructed a variety of simple English sentences according to a couple simple structural principles. We hit a button and a sentence of English, randomly constructed according to these principles, appears on the screen. No one is saying it; there is no sign-maker; there is no intelligence to which the sentence, being generated by no speaker or thinker, refers; we understand it as pointing to no one's thoughts. Nevertheless, we know perfectly well what it means, in virtue of knowing how to speak English, and we do not recognize it as employing any communicative function.

Is there some problem with circumventing the issue altogether and using printed words on a page or road sign, then?

Even if we don't, it seems absurd to me that part of using an expressive sign essentially involves indicating the speaker's thoughts. Surely I know what the sign means in virtue of my linguistic competence, and not in virtue of my ability to mind-read; and furthermore the word would mean the same thing, in the sense we're interested in (logicity), regardless of who said them, excluding first-person indexicals and so on. That's not to say anything of the fact that I might hear what someone says and, being uninterested in what they're thinking (a flight attendant asking what I want to drink), my lived experiences are animated with no such indicative intentions.

I just don't understand what the problem is or why Derrida thinks this is such a sticking point. Also, I think Derrida at least means 2) as well, but he only alludes to it without saying it outright, and I'm having trouble finding the quote (it's a parenthetical remark where he alludes to the twofold reason).

Also, this is telling me I do need to reread the first investigation, so I will (and report back) once I can get to a library that has it.

I'll be honest and say this question doesn't strike me as that interesting, because the ambiguity of the word 'sign' seems like an artificial one foreign to ordinary discourse. So far as I know people generally take 'sign' to mean indication. This might just be a feature of English, since Husserl apparently claims the reverse. It's only really in formal disciplines that people start talking about 'signs' in this expressive sense.

And there's not much to worry about in the mysteries of why a technical term should have been invented that has something to do with a non-technical one.

Also, without looking too far ahead to the third chapter, if the category of indication seems a little fuzzy, it's perhaps best to consider it a purely negative category for now; it is everything that does not fall under the ambit of expression. Whether or not this should remain a provisional move will remain to be seen. — StreetlightX

To be clearer, I don't really have a problem with the notion of indication – it makes intuitive sense and I have enough of a working understanding of it that employing it doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is the claim that all (actual) uses of linguistic signs are necessarily indicative. This is certainly not obviously true, and it's not clear to me why Derrida/Husserl thinks it is.

Does any of that seem legit or does it feel like bullshit? Be honest <3 — csalisbury

No, I get it, but I'm wondering if, even if we have the distinction in hand, we will be able to justify the thesis that all uses of language are indicative in the relevant sense. It is still not clear to me why Derrida thinks this, unless he is merely as you say piggybacking on Husserl's own conceptions. But then, Husserl might just be wrong about something pretty pedestrian, and not open to the more basic criticisms Derrida wants to level at him.

Even taking the rudimentary knowledge we have now of what indication is, my question is: why should we think all uses of language are indicative? This is in my view not at all obvious.

As to the association ideas, this is really complicated because as I understand it, Husserl also believes in a kind of transcendental association of ideas that I never quite understood. Derrida alludes to that in the footnote as well.

For one, I think discussing the premise 1) in the summary above would be helpful. From this first chapter, it is not clear why Derrida takes this to be true, and so we can't evaluate whether the reasons for him thinking so are plausible. If he is just deferring to Husserl, then we need to know why Husserl thinks it is plausible.

To start with, what does it mean to say a linguistic sign is indicative? The clear cases Derrida alludes to in Ch. 2, like brands and canals and chalk marks, make intuitive sense. But what is the linguistic expression 'indicating' in this way? It's not at all clear, and so the initial problem seems to have little compelling intuitive evidence.

There are scattered clues that Derrida (and possibly Husserl in turn) actually mean two separate things by language always having an intermixed indicative element:

1) The linguistic sign indicates the mental state of the speaker.

2) The linguistic sign is attached to some sensible sign-vehicle, like a written word, that indicates its expressive content? Or the expressive sign itself, which is separate from this sensible component? It's not clear what's meant here, and several allusions are used interchangeably without clarification.

As for 1), it's very unclear, I would even say outright dubious, that the purpose of linguistic expression is to relay some mental state of the speaker. Usually we are concerned with whatever the sentence is talking about, not what the speaker is thinking about at the time of uttering it – and certainly whatever the sentence is talking about is what its expressive content deals in, not the speaker's thoughts or experiences! Certainly the speaker's thoughts can be expressed in virtue of talking about something else, but the 'logicity' Husserl is concerned with, its truth conditions, are separable from this in principle; and anyway, even if this is the case, we do not need to infer anything about the speaker's mental state in order to understand what is literally said, and in fact Derrida's own characterization seems to imply that whether a sign indicates anything about a person's experience is depending on how that sign is experientially construed by the speaker. To make the point more vivid, note that a road sign, which has no thoughts at all, can just as well say something in virtue of having letters printed on it, and make use of expressive linguistic signs, and we can understand it. So why should 1) be plausible? Can we really think that linguistic signs serve as indications of the experiences of those who think them whenever they are used?

As to 2), the metaphysics are just not clear enough to me to pass judgment. What is going on, exactly? Is the sensible sign-vehicle separate from the expressive sign? Does it indicate that expressive sign? But if so, then the expressive sign itself need not be indicative in virtue of the sensible sign vehicle. So it must be that the sign vehicle itself is somehow both indicative, in virtue of being sensible, and expressive too? But then, what is it indicating? I can't make sense of it in terms of the simple canal examples and so forth.

Perhaps what is meant is something like, the expression indicates some state of affairs? But that doesn't seem right either. And there seems to be no textual evidence that this is what Derrida has in mind.

So what is it that makes 1) in the OP plausible, can either of these two suggested explanations be made sense of? And if this is not intuitively compelling to begin with (that all expression is indicative), then does this have consequences for the further argument?

It's confusing because Husserl concedes the point that every actual use of language makes use of indication. Husserl retreats to the position that therefore we must find purely expressive signs by examining language without actually using it. This apparently occurs when speaking to ourselves privately, because in so doing we don't communicate to ourselves at all.

So for Derrida, the question becomes "what is the sign in general". — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not clear to what extent Derrida tries to answer this. He explicitly says at one point that he won't be trying to answer the question, at least for now, but also hints that he will return later to how the question is important for the foundations of phenomenology. But there are a lot of allusions in the text that so far as I can tell Derrida doesn't ever cash in on.

Some preliminary summary of Chapter 1.

Derrida begins with Husserl's distinction, found in Investigation I of the Logical Investigations, between two kinds of sign: indication and expression. Indication is something like a Peircian sign, something that stands as a mark pointing to something else, a signified, by whatever mechanism (iconic resemblance, symbolism, etc.) and whether naturally or artificially made. Expression by contrast is something imbued with semantic meaning in particular: it holds the 'exclusivity to pure logicity' (p. 16), which I take to mean that it is truth-conditional and compositionally built out of smaller truth-conditional pieces, in the way that only (declarative) language can be, allowing it to take part in all the hallmarks of reasoning and logical deduction. Derrida says it is the exclusive domain of 'spoken discourse' (German Rede), but at this point it seems that this means language generally, and not only that which is literally spoken (and as we shall see, apparently, not that which is literally discursive, in the sense of communicating information to someone else). All that's required of expression is that it have 'meaning' in the way that only a bit of language can, in the way that meaning can 'tell the truth' as opposed to merely being a signal for something else.

Husserl draws this distinction because he thinks it's important to keep the two apart. Uncontroversially (and Derrida seems never to challenge this point), there are signs that partake in indication without expression – a boundary stone, for example, points to the division between two distinct territories without in the strict sense saying anything (as a sign with printed words might: 'here is the border between...'). Husserl will also claim that some signs partake in expression without indication as well, which Derrida will protest. Somewhat confusingly, Derrida opens by saying that indication '...is different from expression because it is, insofar as it is an indication, deprived of Bedeutung or Sinn [meaning, or sense]' (p. 15) – this isn't true for either Husserl or Derrida, since for both an indicative sign can also have meaning in the stricter linguistic sense, so I take this to mean something like 'mere indication.' The point, then, is that what we call meaning in the strict sense, Bedeutung, belongs only to language and expressive signs. Indicative signs signify something, but in the strict sense, if they don't express anything, they're meaningless. A less confusing English translation for Bedeutung might be 'semantic content,' since we can indeed talk of a merely indicative sign, like a boundary stone, as 'meaningful' too. Derrida uses the French vouloir-dire ('to want to say, to mean') in order to capture the relation between language and expressive meaning (and also, as we'll see later, between volition and expressive meaning). Husserl also acknowledges a wider range of meaning, in the sense that all intentional acts of consciousness besides linguistic communication (wanting, wishing, intending, perceiving, willing) are meaningful too: he reserves the term Sinn for this wider domain of meaning, and uses Bedeutung for the restricted linguistic domain, for the meaning carried by expressive signs. Note that this distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung bears no relation to the one drawn by Frege.

This distinction isn't an either/or deal, though. For one thing, the same sign might be indicative/expressive or not, depending on the situation. Things aren't signs all by themselves, but have to be 'animated' by experience to act as a sign (if no one sees the boundary stone as a boundary or treats it that way, it's just a rock, and indicates nothing). Likewise a series of marks might be construed as linguistic signs or not, depending on who looks at them. Second, since it seems we can have indication without expression, the question arises whether the reverse is true, whether there can be expressive signs with semantic content, but which indicate nothing. Husserl's position here is twofold:

1) Insofar as signs are discursive, that is, insofar as they partake in concrete communication of some information between parties, they must be indicative
2) Insofar as a sign is used in fact, it is discursive, or partakes in communication

So the result is that all uses of expressive signs in fact are indicative as well as expressive. The two are 'entangled' together in ordinary communicative use of language.

So what does this mean for the relation between the two? Still Husserl wants to draw a distinction between indication and expression, but what kind of distinction is it? Is expression a sub-species of indication, just one kind of indication? If it weren't, we would presumably want to find a case where the two were distinct. Husserl wants to maintain the independence of these two notions, and so claims there are in fact expressive signs with no indication. We find these in the 'solitary life of the soul' (p. 19), when a person speaks to themselves (more on this in later sections). So neither indication nor expression encompass the other, even though as a matter of empirical accident expression is in actual linguistic usage intermingled with indication. There is something strange, even paradoxical, about the idea that the essence of expressive meaning, which is usually employed for linguistic communication, is revealed when there ostensibly is no communication taking place, when one is talking to oneself. But Derrida points out that this is just phenomenology's modus operandi: the phenomenologist brackets a certain worldly exteriority, in order to reveal something's essential traits, because in experience itself we find an 'inner' possibility of relating to an outside, and this entire relation takes place 'inside' of experience.

Derrida concludes by questioning Husserl as to what it means for something to be a sign generally, if there really is no species-genus relation between indication and expression, and the two are strictly distinct. In what sense then are both 'signs' at all? Don't we have some prior knowledge of what it means for one thing to 'stand for' another, which both indication and expression take part in? Derrida offers two possible ways of attacking this question. First, we might criticize Husserl as prejudiced, and claim that in refusing to try to understand what a sign is generally, he overlooks essential questions pertaining to the foundations of phenomenology (and the weakness of those foundations). Second, we might praise Husserl for an analytical rigor: after all, part of the phenomenological project involves bracketing prior biases, and we aren't entitled to assume from the beginning that the notion of both indication and expression as 'sign' is anything fundamental rather than an accident of language. Further, such a move allows a potentially revolutionary move on Husserl's part: by claiming that the notion of truth is not applicable to the sign in general, but only to one type of sign (expression), he may be going against the tradition of metaphysics which tries to reduce everything to truth, by claiming that there are modes of signification that lie outside of this domain – a sign 'produces truth or ideality rather than records it' (p. 22). Derrida admits that this revolutionary tendency is part of Husserl's project. But at the same time, he avows that phenomenology has an even deeper commitment than this, which is squarely within the domain of traditional metaphysics, and binds it to 'classical ontology' (ibid.). Derrida's overarching thesis will be that phenomenology weds itself to the traditional metaphysical project by partaking in 'the metaphysics of presence,' on which more later.

--

Okay, bare bones. There are lots of questions with this, but that will do for now.

I would say, unbridgeable gaps or things that don't meet – privacy, idiosyncrasy, lack of commonality, solipsism, loneliness, worldlessness, that sort of thing.

I'd prefer not to, because I think that while brief, Chapter 2 is dense to the point of impenetrability, and especially its last long paragraph is almost impossible to disentangle.

Not gonna lie, got an erection just reading that.

And if there's a teen pregnancy mishap, the Protestant girl is already halfway to aborting it. *thumbs up*

As long as it contributes to the grand theory that Protestants ruined everything.

I never thought about this before, but it may be a bleeding of the style of German theology into mainstream philosophy. I haven't read enough of it to make the connection, though it seems like a plausible avenue.

No. People point to Kant, but Kant to me is like Husserl – overly academic and self-conscious about rigor. To read Kant and Husserl, you just need to sit down and go through word by word with patience. That does not work with Hegel, to put it simply.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel has a brief defense of his own writing style at some point during the Preface. I don't think it's convincing. You can have the cynical Schopenhauer view...but I think it's more likely he felt unable to express his own depth. The continental-philosopher-as-prophet predates Hegel, but Hegel develops the appropriate linguistic flair for it.

Yeah, I hate Heidegger's style, but the 'continental' way of writing is ultimately Hegel's fault. It just becomes ubiquitous following Heidegger.

One of the second-generation continentals, I forget who it was, had this great quote about being proud of mastering Heidegger's jargon, as if it gave he and his friends some sort of intellectual hermetic power, and that that feeling dissipated with time.

Fo the record, Nausea is a hilarious book that deserves a read. Lines like the one in the OP aren't at all uncommon. I pretty much agree with the sentiment and think the spiritualization and sentimentalization of music can get a little gaudy, even in philosophers.

I've had very specific pieces of art console me in my life, though, which have very specific meanings for me that are probably irrecoverable. In general, I think religious works are superior to both those of art and philosophy at providing concrete consolation, and the power of the latter is overstated. I think this becomes especially true as time goes on and I feel everything less powerfully – downs don't seem so important, and ups don't seem so exciting. Squiggles in your ear can't uplift the human condition at the end of the day. Nothing, not even the most delicate or powerful mass, comes close to Job or Ecclesiastes, and as for something as tepid as a Vivaldi concerto or whatever, forget it. This was one reason in my youth I found religious sentiments so plausible – the proof was in the pudding, mankind's works apparently impotent compared to the sheer and obvious power of the divinely inspired that Scripture seemed to provide. Although that impulse has dimmed as I've come to realize that some other works, such as the Illiad, strike me as similarly inspired. It may be that truly great art cannot be 'fine,' but must be deeply traditional, rooted in mankind's old and painful memories, that tug at deeper wells than an individual author is capable of channeling, no matter how well-educated or clever or passionate. I feel that at the end of the day, the best modern subjectivistic or academic literature or music can do is distract, though that distraction may be sensuously powerful or mentally occupying, even exhausting. True consolation needs to come from edification, not mere impression.

Here are some pieces of music that hit me below the belt:

There are formal accounts of subjective truth being developed by Peter Lasersohn, John MacFarlane, Mark Richard, and Max Kölbel out there. I think they're mistaken, but the idea has gained some traction. It seems to me that 'Licorice is tasty' is truth-apt in the ordinary way, and that the idea of 'truth for someone' can't be made sense of (unless '"Licorice is tasty" is true for me' just means 'It's true that licorice is tasty to me').

No, I haven't. I don't really have a strong background in literature so he's a little intimidating to me. It could be, but then people who write both competent philosophy and competent literature are rare. That's something I think that Sartre, for all the criticism he gets, deserves some respect for. It could be that Proust is just a genius who never bothered, but then it'd be nice to see the results.

A bit of a daunting listen, but very rewarding.

I'm a bit of a semanticist, and my take on truth is the following, not representative of anyone else's.

Truth and falsity are just values distinct from one another, that can be represented however you like: classically, 1/0 or T/F. They have no significance beyond the fact that they are distinct from one another. Using this binary distinction, you can build a truth-conditional semantics (bracketing issues of non-classical truth values, truth value gaps, truth value gluts, fuzzy truth values, and so on).

A semantics for a language is just an abstract set of ideal rules that can be mathematically modeled for interpretation, much in the way that an artificial language can be semantically parsed or interpreted. In this state, it has no real-world application, but nevertheless various real world linguistic practices can be seen as implementing this abstract structure for certain ends, just as when one plays a game like chess, one employs a mathematically describable set of rules, but these rules themselves are not tied to the playing of any particular game, or the employment of any particular strategy. (And the semantics of natural language are far, far, far more complicated than any deliberately constructed game, just as a fact of nature and because, well, it's natural, not artificial, and so the rules manifest without stipulation, and so are never completely precise and never set in stone, always eluding complete formulation).

Truth and falsity simply function as binary values within this abstract set of rules. They do not have any pragmatic significance. Where they gain their significance is when you plug them into some linguistic practice that makes use of these binary values for various ends. So, for example, there is a presumption that one tells the truth, and so an assertive speech act in some sense privileges one value of this binary over the other, and makes it the goal of assertion. Within this pragmatic framework, these mere abstract binary values are imbued with useful sense inside of a linguistic community, and we allow ourselves to conduct our behavior meaningfully and systematically in such a way that the 'yes'/'no' difference gets involved in all sorts of intersecting conventional practices.

Semantically, truth is nothing but this binary opposition to falsity; in actual practice, it is nothing but what this binary opposition is put to use for in the employment of the language's abstract mechanics according to a certain way of speaking (just as two people can play chess with the same abstract rule set, but with different meta-game strategies, and even with entirely different goals in mind: one can still be playing a legal game of chess while trying to lose, for example, instead of trying to win; and trying to win is something like trying to tell the truth in this analogy).

In real life the abstract semantic system that governs linguistic usage doesn't float freely of course, but is always embedded in some pragmatic use of language. The point is, though, that any such use emergently manifests a regularity in semantic behavior that is in turn describable by such an abstract set of rules, and in particular making important use of a certain binary attaching to the semantic valuation of a privileged syntactic class of linguistic vehicles used for utterance: sentences. Thus, sentences have a truth value, they are either true or false (or rather, utterances of these given a context and appropriate parameters of evaluation are). And then we can imagine this abstract set of rules being applied to foreign uses, if we please.

Therefore to ask what truth and falsity are is just to ask for a description of the semantics of the language as a whole. When we do the work of semantics, we are already describing truth and falsity in so doing: there is nothing else to do once this work is finished. It is a semantic question, for linguistics, and not for philosophy (although what I have just told you is a philosophical, and not a linguistic, position). So to see how truth and falsity function in a current semantic theory, one need only learn that theory. In classical Montagovian semantics, they act as binary values that exhaust the domain of a fundamental semantic type: so-called type t. And semantically meaningful bits of languages are in turn compounded to create syntactic objects of a certain type, viz. sentences, which in turn have a truth value as their denotation. The theory shows how truth and falsity function, and is implemented once a pragmatics is given. To the extent that such a pragmatics combined with our semantics results in a realistic model of linguistic behavior, we have explained what it is that truth and falsity are.

Hence the charge that the Wittgensteinian maxim is ignored is misplaced: truth-conditional semantics does not in principle divorce meaning from use, in describing meanings as certain mathematical objects, because the whole point is that the use of language can be mathematically described in conjunction with a pragmatics. Semantics should no more be a philosophy of action, or provide one, than a rule book of chess should explain the optimal way for white to open. And to complain that a rule book of chess only mathematically defines well-formed games of chess according to legal moves of pieces, to say that it was inappropriate or mistaken because it did not tell you how the player is to supposed to win, or what strategies people typically use, is equally absurd.

Also, there is definitely, definitely truth in fiction; and aside from that, massive amounts of everyday use do deal with the exchange of information,and to pretend otherwise seems disingenuous. And finally, even where it does not, the purposes of the conversation use truth-conditional vehicles to make their point, and the point they are trying to make would not make sense if this were not so. If I don't understand the conditions under which 'you look nice today' is literally true, I cannot make sense of how a sarcastic utterance of this same sentence intends to subvert those conditions.

A Socratic question is appropriately penetrating, not something about a factum. A writer can objectify and aestheticize a certain theme without being able to articulate a defense of it, or analyze it even into two pieces: all that a writer requires in inspiration, and then craft. Inspiration just happens to you, it requires no thought. Philosophy begins in inspiration too, but it goes nowhere until you start asking yourself uncomfortable questions and systematizing responses to them. Writing doesn't require this – it only requires a talent for molding inspiration into something evocative. A writer is convincing without argument. But there is something to be said for argument as well.

And you could say that people like Ligotti are writers at heart whose weakness shows through when they try to write as if philosophers when they don't have the chops. In other words, if Proust sat down and tried to write something like An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he might look like an idiot where before he looked brilliant. Suddenly in the harsh light of plain prose and open to the demands of questioning, what was profound looks banal.

I'm not sure. But one of the things philosophy gives a person, in my view, is the ability to continue a Socratic conversation up to a certain number of lines or to have themselves survive a certain number of questions.

Even the best writers, in my view, are not really capable of this. They feel deeply and are aware of how to turn depth into form. But it usually doesn't amount to rigor, which can be emotionally satisfying in its own right in a way that no amount of writing will ever get you.

As thinkers, or as writers?

If analytical philosophy is a genre of poetry, I don't think the people practicing it are necessarily worse-off. There's a banality to writing that has no formal chops as well.

is that the Cyreniacs don't allow for any persistence of identity across time at all — John

Some scholars have argued this, but I don't think there's any textual evidence for it. If you want to go that way, that's a possibility, but I don't think it's necessary. I think the deeper point is that time is kind of a red herring. At any given time, you'll have what you want to do, so the issue of how much time to allow for or strive for never really arises. Your whole live is lived in a single instant, basically.

in principle, why the time frame could not be extended indefinitely allowing us to, more prudently, seek eudamonia across an entire lifetime — John

You can do whatever you want, but your life won't be any better for it. How long you live doesn't matter, what matters is what's going on now, since that's where you always are. You can have an opinion that doing certain things in the past made you better somehow in the sum total, but that's just an opinion, which is equally good as the opposite opinion, with no evidence ever to show it was better. And in philosophy we're interested in knowing, not opinion (since anyone can have an opinion, and any opinion is as good as any other).

Judging from your depiction of them, the Cyreniacs only allow for immediate pleasure as the good. But that begs the question as to what is immediate in this context? How long does, or can, immediacy last? — John

This rhetorical move is a little weird in that you have introduced the term 'immediate' and then demanded of me what to make of it. But I don't know, because you said it, not me.

To make things as clear as possible: pleasure is good because it feels good: to be pleasant is to feel good (these are semantically synonymous). So pleasure is good precisely as long as it's being experienced, but since pleasure is just that experience, it's good so long as it exists.

He comes back to it later I think.

Anyway this is kind of neat, it's like a big word puzzle. You have to stare at the sentences for a long time and figure out how the words fit together. Good mental exercise.

We may need to put up sentences and see who can 'crack' them fastest, maybe give out cash prizes. I also think I may need to reread the Investigations or Ideas, which I was kind of hoping not have have to do.

We will probably talk about the in the group, but a large part of the project here seems to assume that if 'indication' were ineliminable from expression generally then Husserl would be in big trouble. This is asserted several times, but I can't figure out why. Maybe it would mean that Husserl was wrong in thinking one could be isolated from the other – but the broader implications for phenomenology are unclear.

Part of it seems to be an insistence that as indication belongs to 'mundanity' and the empirical, it is supposed to be cordoned off by the transcendental reduction, and that if we need it (although here I'm not clear on why 'need it for the analysis of language' means 'need it' simpliciter), then the reduction cannot be pure in the way Husserl wants it to be, since an empirical 'outside' that is non-ideal will always contaminate it.

But this just can't be Derrida's line of thought, because it betrays a very basic misunderstanding of the epoché as something that 'removes' some aspect of experience in favor of focusing on some other (and I worry about this because SX's summary post above seems to labor under this same misconception, and wrongly conflates the transcendental and eidetic reductions). On the contrary part of the point of the epoché is that it deprives us of nothing, and leaves us with all the richness of the empirical world just as it was, but now as 'world-phenomenon.' We expect indication to be included in the reduction, and indeed as Husserl says (and Derrida quotes him as saying), he intends phenomenology to investigate indication as a phenomenological theme in its own right.

Even if Husserl were mistaken that expression could be cordoned off from indication in soliloquy, this would just mean that in examining expression we would need to see how it intrinsically relates to indication, which isn't made any less possible from the fact that phenomenology deals in idealities. The whole point of the eidetic reduction is to extract essential structures from particular facts, and Husserl even seems to claim that it's impossible to perceive essences except via facts.

I wouldn't know – but I'm having a very hard time reconstructing the points being made. Chapter 2 feels like a chunk is missing. He says some things, makes some distinctions, and suddenly we're over here and I can't for the life of me understand how we got there, even if I go back sentence by sentence.