Do you read Derrida as offering a “generalized logic of singular perturbation“ and ‘conceptual distinction?
Is that how you’re understanding deconstruction? It certainly is the way many acolytes understand and ‘apply’ it, but it is a profound misreading of Derrida, who has insistently argued that the general and the singular are indissociably linked in any context of understanding.
Alll thinking is already deconstructive thinking. When Derrida interprets Kant or Plato, he is contributing to a text that is already in process of deconstructing itself.
That is why his ‘theory’ is always embedded within the most sensitive and local contexts of those who he interprets , and that is the meaning of his famous phrase ‘nothing outside of the text’, which refers to the immediacy and precision of local context. Even when we claim to be transcending local context in generalizing and abstracting, we are never leaving the locality of our own specific context in forming such abstractions. This is what a deconstructive reading brings out. It was also Heidegger’s understanding of existence as temporality and history.

Just as you don’t “subordinate its terms of expression ito a pre-established logic of perturbation and singularity,” you don’t simply use its singularity to tailor concepts to it. Because what makes a singular singular also ties it s a historical context such that what gives it its meaning as unique also joins it thematically to a history. Any meaning is both utterly unique and utterly conventional and there is no thinking, no discourse which operates beyond this historicizing locality.

So I could engage specificallly with the example of the op, or speak more generally as I have, but my argument always had in mind and was organized around the specific example. To move back and forth between the more ‘ general’ and op-specified context with regard to the sentences provided would not result in much of a change in the argument. Not because the general approach ignored the ‘singularity’ of the context, but because that singularity carried forward, even in its particular instanstiation of it , a certain thematics
of thinking. House and flowers were the specific instnatiation I had in mind and tailored my argument to.
This is brcause there is always a specific singularity, regardless of whether meaning to make the general argument or the particular, or whether one is supposedly remaining within a normative region or traversing it for another.

The whole alleged problematic about needing to protect the singularity of a context from abstract logic, it seems to me, implies the assumption that singuality and generality can be thought coherently in separate terms.

But the point being made is not about things: it is about concepts (or language). It's not about physical possibility. It's about conceptual possibility. And importantly, it is about how the one does not mirror or track the other (at least, not in any pre-established way - hence the bit about 'pre-established' harmony - an old theological notion). One way to put all this is that language is normative: we call things what we do not because (or not only because) of their 'physical properties' but also because of what we imagine things 'should' be: a 'house' is roughly what we call something to be lived in; — StreetlightX

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

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

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

Because we know that it's impossible for houses to turn into flowers. — Michael

We don't know this, and it probably isn't impossible. We just aren't anywhere near that technologically advanced. But I doubt it's physically impossible.

Do you mean there is no non-technological way for houses to turn into flowers? My guess is it's merely highly improbably, but QM would allow for a non-zero possibility of such an arrangement coming about in an infinite universe or given enough time.

However, to Street's point, if we ever do get that technologically advanced, houses might become more like living things that can morph themselves into whatever suits the moment. In which case our conceptual understanding of houses and most of the world around us will have shifted into some highly technological symbiosis between the environment and ourselves.

Or we go extinct before then.

The whole alleged problematic about needing to protect the singularity of a context from abstract logic, it seems to me, implies the assumption that singuality and generality can be thought coherently in separate terms. — Joshs

This is exactly the Derridean response I was expecting.

The idea is that there would be a concept of a house that one could imagine turning into a flower, — StreetlightX

Wait, we're supposed to be talking about "concepts turning into other concepts"?

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

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

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

But that's just metaphysical possibility, which seems to be on the verge of collapsing into logical possibility, only kept uncollapsed by the sheer will of David Chalmers.

I thought the OP meant that the meanings of general terms are bound to background language games, those ancient scaffolds behind the world we take to be real. In dreams those structures may bend and twist so that people can fly and monkeys can talk.

Cats are gigantic and, so on. It is a bit of a mystery how we know the difference between real and unreal. There isn't really any criteria for it.

All we know is that we'll end up like that guy in Beautiful Mind if we dont keep our shit together.

I would call that something we could imagine, rather than a concept. I reserve "concepts" for type/universal abstractions.

In any event, so what we're imagining is a physical thing transforming into another physical thing. If you're imaginative enough, you can imagine that so that the terms are being used in the normal way re "house" and "flower."

We imagine things like that often in artworks--paintings, novels, films, etc. a la fantasy, surrealism, etc.

@StreetlightX

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

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

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

If you were to write a cosmogenic poem, you'd have chaos first, then a baseline regularity, then the emergence of specific concepts - houses, flowers etc. The deeper, or prior, condition would be the condition for later conditions.

One conversation brings us back to Kant. The other is an invitation to create some kind of 'cogntive map' of the present in order to pinpoint areas with some potential to disrupt/create new senses. (Though that makes it sound like disruption or novelty are intrinsically valuable. It would probably be better to say something like : if you know where you're at, then you'll know where to go.)

This latter approach characterizes thinkers like Sloterdijk or Lyotard (I'm of course evangelizing for my faves).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He utterly lacks the conceptual resources to think though the actual, and his entire corpus from end to end is vitiated by his formalist proclivities. History dies in Derrida (for the sake, ironically, of time). — StreetlightX

Would you make the same argument about Heidegger? What is the actual for Heidegger? What would he do with your 'Houses are turning into flowers' example? Would he consider it a dislocation of a normative region of phrases? How does the realm of the ready to hand and the Mitdasein treat the distinction between the intelligible and the unintelligible? Seems to me he preceded Derrida in depriving the actual of the power to produce wholesale revisions of sense, but I may be misreading him. Looking at just Being and TIme, with all of the modalities of the inauthentic(the ready to hand, present to hand, mitdasein) and the authentic he introduces in the book, nowhere does he seem to give factical particulars the capacity to reorient sense in the way you depict it in your Houses-Flowers example.

Like Michael, you're simply mapping your concept of a house (and a flower) to the physical: you're just begging the question (yes, I'm ignoring what terms you've 'resevered'). But it is clear that the concept of a house (or a flower) is not exhausted - if it refers to it at all - by the physical. — StreetlightX

I’m not saying that the physical part exhausts the concept. I’m saying that even if there’s more to the concept than the physical part we can still ask if houses can become flowers - and still be talking about houses and flowers as we understand them. I’ve already offered the real examples of mercury into gold, of trees into sheds, and of cows into leather jackets. How is the case of houses into flowers in principle different?

The only difference I see is the practical difference that houses turning into flowers is (as far as I know) physically impossible. Stating this (presumed) fact doesn’t require a revision of meaning. It’s a perfectly ordinary and appropriate rejection (and even if it were possible my point stands).

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

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

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

The hell with Heideger. I' m making the argument that you're going to misinterpret any attempt to claim that your distinction between a normative regime of sense and its dislocation is an abstraction that doesn't get to the heart of the matter Not my matter, your matter. I know you don't agree with the thesis, but don't discard the whole line of reasoning as irrelevant, unless I've misunderstand the topic. You invoked Cavell and Wittgenstein. Are you disallowing discussion of any other authors? Since you can't disallow my input I'm perfectly comfortable in going it alone and making the points that Heidegger and Derrida would make. Even if they wouldn't make those points, I'm going to,

One way to talk about the transcendental empirical , as Deleuze puts it(I guess its alright to mention him), is to make the kinds of normative vs gestalt shift distinctions that your example wants to point to. Another way is to begin by closely examining what takes place within the normative regime, determining how the moment to moment unfolding of meaning making is structured. A certain kind of understanding of the basis of state, structure, pattern, form and presencing can be seen to justify a range of explanations(Cavell, Deleuze) that talk about such things as whole sale revisions. Another way of determining the basis of the actual in its moment to moment unfolding reaches a rather odd conclusion concerning the glue that holds past , present and future together in the constitution of meanings.
From the vantage of this kind of thinking, an ongoing belonging of what is actual to what it arises out of
results in a different formulation of what would otherwise be understood in terms of notions like whole sale revision of sense. There would indeed arise distinct differentiations, groupings, thematics , epoches, but the differences would among them would become little more interesting than the differentiations within these groupings.

The proponents of this odd approach would argue (or at least this proponent ) that one is not effectively thinking through the actual if one is relying on an understanding that fails to adequately perceive the glue that binds what arises as actual from the having been that frames it and is in turn framed by its future. For their part , the adherents of the norm-wholesale revision approach will be tempted to misread all this as an attempt to subordinate and flatten actuality for the sake of high theory. And that's where things stand now. Perhaps the oddball theorists have it all wrong. But that's different than being off topic.Unless I've misunderstood the topic. What is it, by the way?Is it :'Let's discuss the mechanics of wholesale revision with respect to the language example given'
or : 'Let's discuss both the mechanics of and the justification for the overarching presuppositions framing linguistic norms and their wholesale revision'. If it's the former then I apologize for being off-topic.

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

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

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

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

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

Then you're hopelessly muddled regarding what the heck you're even talking about. You're not talking about concepts per se, you're not talking about imagining a house turning into a flower, you're somehow talking about language and our use of it without talking about either of the two things above. How the heck would that work? And there's some sort of mysterious "exhausting" versus "not exhausting" a concept.

You'd need to be more explicit/straightforward/detailed about what you are talking about if you're going to respond to everything with "I'm not talking about that"

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

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

If I say that I'm surprised that you're not bothering to try to explain it better, and that I'm surprised that you not bothering would come with an "ad hominem" attached, would you believe me?

I asked roughly the same questions on the first page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To say that what we call houses and flowers are not the kinds of things that turn into one another, is to say (to mean, to imply) that (among other things) the world in which these terms take on their significance is not one in which that kind of transmutation is possible. — StreetlightX

"is possible" is important there, though, because it's not possible per what?

To say that what we call houses and flowers are not the kinds of things that turn into one another, is to say (to mean, to imply) that (among other things) the world in which these terms take on their significance is not one in which that kind of transmutation is possible. — StreetlightX

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

And what about other kinds of falsehoods? To borrow your wording, to say that what we we call a car isn't the kind of thing that can travel faster than light is to say that the world in which these terms take on their significance is not one in which that kind of movement is possible. But there's no controversy in claiming it to be false that cars travel faster than light? What is the difference between these two cases?

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

If you want a mathematical gloss on it, I'm thinking of it as something like:

We have a sortal concept of 'house', some things count as a house, some don't. Embedded in this sortal are all the things we'd call houses. Imagine this as a set (which is already a simplification). If you consider associating with this sortal a set of expressions which make sense to say of houses. Like "houses are where people live', 'that house is crumbling' and so on. Further imagine that we've collected all things that make sense to say of houses, and associated this with each house in the house sortal - call this the 'philosophical grammar' of the house sortal.

So, say, if I were to describe a mud hut as 'made of concrete', that would be false, but it would still be something I could produce from my understanding of houses (the house sortal) and the kind of things I could say about houses. Analogise this to the distinction between a not-well formed formula of a logic and a falsehood of a logic; like "P & &" is not a well formed formula of classical propositional logic, but "P & not-P" is a well formed formula but is always false. So this set of 'well formed formulae' is the set of things we can express of houses (as a sortal) because it works for every house.

Do the same thing for flowers, make a flower sortal, and all the things that could sensibly be said (even if false) of flowers.

With this set up 'houses are turning into flowers' isn't true or false in either logic, it's not a well-formed formula of either system of objects and sensible statements about them. So to say 'houses are turning into flowers' is simply false is to stipulate a different sortal concept of house/logic of house expressions or a different sortal concept of flowers/logic of flower expressions. One in which 'houses are turning into flowers' is a well formed formula.

We absolutely can do this; we could set up an interpretation of 'turning into' that makes sense of the phrase, be it through raw degredation as @Banno suggested, a physical transfer of atoms as @Marchesk or @Michael suggested, or allegory as I suggested. Edit: note, these tellingly all contain an act of imagination!

But the fact that you can set up such an interpretation introduces a context in which 'houses are turning into flowers' is a well formed formula of the logic, which is required before assigning truth or falsity to it. A mathematical gloss on this is that we tweak the relationship between the house-sortal and the flower-sortal to range over various meanings of 'turn into', which can be truth-apt given some alternative interpretation of the house sortal, the flower sortal, and the relationships between them.

You could say that we may interpret this 'completely literally', perhaps against the usual norms of the words (here identified as sortals) 'houses' and 'flowers', and since physical houses don't actually turn into physical flowers through some act of magic, it would be false. But in a cartoon, it could be true.

We have a sortal concept of 'house', some things count as a house, some don't. Embedded in this sortal are all the things we'd call houses. Imagine this as a set (which is already a simplification). If you consider associating with this sortal a set of expressions which make sense to say of houses. Like "houses are where people live', 'that house is crumbling' and so on. Further imagine that we've collected all things that make sense to say of houses, and associated this with each house in the house sortal - call this the 'philosophical grammar' of the house sortal. — fdrake

If this were the case then surely it wouldn't have made sense to say that the morning star and the evening star are the same thing, as "appearing in the evening" wasn't part of the morning star sortal, but as a matter of fact they are the same thing – Venus.

It's not as if after discovering this fact we are no longer talking about the same morning star and evening star as we were before. We are talking about the exact same morning star and the exact same evening star; it's just that we've learned a new fact about them/it. And conversely if they were in fact different things to state that they are the same thing would be a perfectly ordinary falsehood, not some subversion of meaning or whatever.

If this were the case then surely it wouldn't have made sense to say that the morning star and the evening star are the same thing, as "appearing in the evening" isn't part of the morning star sortal, but as a matter of fact they are the same thing – Venus. — Michael

The issue is alleviated here by both being stars, the new information about their identity doesn't violate any rules of sense, it rather allows us to reconcile one sense with another through the discovery of 'morning star' and 'evening star' co-referring.

Edit: an analogous situation to the co-reference would be a house that is a flower, which is quite different from a house turning into a flower, even if you could interpret someone saying 'houses are turning into flowers' after watching a cartoon in which a person lived in a flower. It still requires an act of imagination to construct the example, in contrast to recalling norms of use.

But isn't "Houses don't turn into flowers" a comment about the world itself? If I say it to a child, I'm explaining something about this world.

As someone said, it's about where we are. Our location in the sea of possible worlds.

it rather allows us to reconcile one sense with another through the discovery of 'morning star' and 'evening star' co-referring. — fdrake

Then we could reconcile one sense with another through the hypothetical discovery of "my old house" and "my new flower" co-referring (were it physically possible for houses to turn into flowers).

It really is just a matter of ordinary facts that can be determined by scientific analysis. Either the physical stuff that makes up my house can or can't turn into the physical stuff that makes up a flower. As far as I know, it can't, so houses can't turn into flowers.