Evolution does not innovate. You need consciousness for that.
There is a real, hard and incorrigible distinction between somatic/ genetic evolution and what is now called memetic evolution but we were happy enough to call social evolution.
And that distinction is that the later involves the artificial selection of traits, and NOT natural selection of traits.

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

if perception is mediated, then doesn't it involve its own sort of grammar, in the Wittgensteinian sense?

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

Let's say that I look at a painting. My eyes take me sequentially through regions of the scene as I perceive changes in color, shape and form. Even if I am not forming words from my journey through the scene in front of me, I am perceiving changing senses, and a narrative of sorts. Not a narrative of word concepts, but of meanings nonetheless. The mind creates pattern out of detail. Memory organizes discrete elements into chunks. Chunks of letters on a page like the one you are reading now form words, words are organized into sentences of subject and predicate to express change. Subject and predicate can be subdivided further into features such as noun , adjective and adverb. Sentences organize into paragraphs, etc. It's a process of pattern within patten, chunk within chunk. These terms express the fact that meaning divides itself into sub-meanings.

In making my way through the visual experiencing of a painting, I will organize this process into meaningful chunks. Individual bits of texture will give way to an outline of an individual form, such a a tree or hand or rock, (or something more abstract)depending on how much, in what way, semantic content is informing and directing my assimilationof the painting. This form will then appear in relation to another form. As my gaze moves from form to form, each form can become the visual subject for a predicate. So the visual equivalent of a series of paragraphs composed of sentences, structured as subject-predicate changes, unfolds as I process the artwork, all without any word concepts being involved.
One could do a similar analysis of music, dance or massage.

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

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

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

I feel like this statement gets closer to disagreements we've had on incommensurability before. (I'm sorry to Streetlight for going astray of the thread. alas I suppose that's what I do at times)

I have definitely tried to utilize ways of communicating with people who seemed totally other to me. I have mirrored them and even did get "a sense" of their world through such action.

When you describe such activities it makes me wonder how you are such a staunch defender of commensurability to be honest. (bad spelling aside)

I long ago acknowledged how Davidson shewn that incommensurability is not logically defensible in the sense that the very idea of it can lead to contradictory results.

But here it seems -- to use a method by example -- that you would agree with what I thought of incommensurability at least.

I just highlight that because we were so unable to find where our disagreement lay before. Maybe this shines a light?

It is incontestably the case that evolution innovates — StreetlightX

This is an abuse of language.

I think W's point was that language is a feature of a way of life and our ways of life are so different from those of lions that a common language would be impossible. Speaking animals in stories are actually people in the shape of animals.

On the other hand, if a lion were to leap at me with the words 'Food! Get ready to be eaten!' I would not be at all puzzled as to his meaning. And he would definitely still be a lion and not a person.

So much the worse for your understanding of language.

: "The point of grammar is that it acts as a constraint on linguistic kinds: certain kinds of words must, of necessity, follow certain kinds of other words." In the D-J example 'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?', whether this sentence is deemed nonsensical is, you would agree, a matter of context. I would add that exactly how this sentence is read is a matter of individual interpretation. We conventionally say it's 'non-sensical', but 5 individuals reading this sentence in a given context will describe it in slightly different ways, since a strange sentence like this doesn't evoke the identical response in every reader, under any situation. We could of course set up a context within which this sentence would not likely lead to a judgement that it is incoherent . For instance, if this sentence appeared embedded within a certain type of poetry, there would be an effort to read it as making use of some sort of literary device, albeit one that could lead to varying interpretations, just like your argument concerning art.

But this doesn't contradict the point youre trying to make, that within a given language game, grammar constrains linguistic kinds. Lets look again at the sentence 'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?'. To the extent that it will evoke a response judging it as non-sensical or incoherent, why is this the case? What rules is it violating? A series of unfolding expectations are being sequentially set up as one begins to make ones way through the sentence. it begins with a question, 'what', priming one to look for a further development along these lines.

Once the sentence gets past the word 'kiss' (even the word kiss begins to ring alarm bells , given that most girls prefer kissing a who, rather than a what) it challenges one to piece it together as an inquiry into an action, which is what one is attempting to do based on its first few words.One could say it behaves the way certain optical illusions do, such as the three pronged object that extends from a two pronged base. The object as a whole doesnt cohere, its nonsensical.There are of course many visual situations one could cite where such violations of expected regularities occur, such as violations of perspective. The artist M.C. Escher was a master at this. Would the constraints provided by perspective not be considered a visual grammar? You say that art is bound to no such rules? Are there not artistic language games? Within realistic painting of a certain era, for instance, perspectve, proportion and accurate rendering of light source matter, and a landscape in which there are gross violations of any of the constraints will lead to experiences of incoherence.For instance a Renaisance painting from 1520 telling a biblical story in which part of the scene consists of something that looks like a cubist image will violate the grammatical rules of that particular narrative, within that particular game, in as jarring a fashion as the d-j sentence.

In a piece of music of a particular genre one can pick out an off key note or errant chord, because such kinds of meaning dont make sense within the rules of that communicative discourse. An example that offers perhaps a closer parallel to d-j's nonsensical sentence would be a pice of music that begins as a jazz score and suddenly becomes a classical piece without segueway. The effect is of two fragments that cohere within themselves but are inconsistent with each other, just as d-j's sentence contains fragments that make sense as far as they go('What did the girl kiss', 'the boy who delivered?', or 'kiss the boy who delivered?'). As you know, musical communication within its various genres depends on highly structured grammars.




.

.

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

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

This is an abuse of language. — charleton

I don't think so, though I would like to see this idea properly developed and supported. "Evolution" refers to a particular theory. That theory is associated with the existence of living beings, and their activities. So there is a particular type of activity of living beings which is referred to as evolution. SX's claim is that this activity innovates, which means to make changes, and create new things, and this appears to be exactly what evolution does. The only remaining issue is the relationship to "consciousness". The evidence is that there isn't even a hint of "consciousness" as the word is normally used, in simple life forms, which have evolved in an innovative way.

So instead of denying that this is the case, we ought to look at how this is possible. How is it possible that an activity, which is not driven by a conscious mind, can innovate, and create new things? We can understand such activities of the human being, as being driven by consciousness, bit if we remove consciousness in order to account for these activities in non-conscious beings, then what drives these innovative activities in life in general? What is the agent of innovative activities, if it is not the conscious will?

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

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".presents us with a sentence with a semantically meaningful subject(ideas) and a meaningful grammar only in the sense that we know we are being told that the subject has certain attributes(it is colorless and green) and behaves in a certain way(it sleeps furiously). What we have difficulty in making coherent is the HOW its attributes refer to it(In what way can we understand an idea being green, in addition to being colorless), and HOW ideas are able to sleep, much less furiously sleep. So the grammar is at one level consistent but at a more detailed level inconsistent.

In the sentence 'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?' We have a coherent subject (the girl) but unlike the Chomsky example we cant say that there was an activity or behavior at all, even a ta higerh level. Just fragments of subjects and an activity that we dont know how to connect to either subject.
So the difference between the two sentences is that the first has a more extented coherence, we can go on within it longer.The higher order grammatical consistency allows us to forgive to at least a small degree the lower order grammatical inconsistency.

As you say, the Chomsky example may be usefully compared to an Escher drawing. But my examples of a narrative within realistic painting interrupted by an inconsistent grammar from an entirely different stye(cubism) , or a 19th century classical ballet sequence suddenly becoming tap dance, is consistent with the d-j sentence.

It also seems to me that the subject in both sentences isnt itself strictly a semantic content, but also functions as a grammatic element in relation to a prior context.
After all, we dont perceive objects of emaning out of thin air. They emerge for us always out of a context. Thus, they transform that context at the same time that they have to be consistent with that previous background to at least a minimal extent in order for us to recognize it as object in the first place.
In this sense a subject is also a behavior, an activity, a coming into being or foregrounding of something out of a background. Ti would seem then the distinction between grammatical form and semantic content is not clear-cut.


" Art, and even perception may revel in precisely this kind of grammatical promiscuity, switching codes willy nilly, even if allowing for fleeting instances of consistency, as indeed single works or oeuvres might have. " This would seem to be a recent self-understanding of art. Mimesis, the veridical mirroring of an external world, was taken to be the task of Western art until modernism emerged. From that point on, grammars in many art forms were radically reinvented and warped(including, of course, in poetry and literature, with use of sentence fragments, stream of consciousness, etc).
It should be noted that switching of grammatical codes, rather than willy nilly, would be undertaken in relation to larger philosophical commitments(avant garde abstraction and Kantianism, ironic critical art and Marxism-postmodernism). Audiences would be encouraged to recognize these commitments within the art itself, that is, to learn a new code. A collection of art considered to belong loosely to a particular thematic or philosophical commitment could be read via a shared meta-code.
Its interesting to me that in music, the abandonment of long-standing conventions with the rise of Schoenberg, Boulez and Cage alienated many listeners and perhaps never recovered from this move into grammatical incoherence. For what its worth, respected art critics Arthur Danto and Clement Greenberg believed art had reached the end of its ability to say anything philosophically interesting with the advent of the 'anything goes' era after pop art. It was at this point that discernable movements in art disappeared. Im tempted to draw from these observations the lesson that there is nothing particularly unique about verbal language in comparison with non-linguistic meaning when it comes to the importance of grammatical consistency.
"the power of art is precisely in it's ability to warp just such rails even while respecting - although this is not at all necessary - local moments of consistency."

One could also argue the opposite point. Whether meaning inconsistency or incoherence is deliberately chosen as a strategy in art or psycho-linguistic research, the fact that it is chosen to make a point reinforces the necessity of consistency at a superordinate level . Making a point or statement out of a creative act of nonconformity is subsuming a lower order inconsistency within a larger sense-making theoretical framework,Without this superordinate coherence, we dont recognize meaning but instead perceive noise and chaos.

The evolution is genetic terms would not necessarily extend more than the use of the phrase "fancy a fuck baby". — charleton

How a peafowl says:"fancy a fuck baby?"

Language might be human plumage.

In the sentence 'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?' We have a coherent subject (the girl) but unlike the Chomsky example we cant say that there was an activity or behavior at all, even a ta higerh level. Just fragments of subjects and an activity that we dont know how to connect to either subject.
So the difference between the two sentences is that the first has a more extented coherence, we can go on within it longer.The higher order grammatical consistency allows us to forgive to at least a small degree the lower order grammatical inconsistency. — Joshs

You seem to take it for granted that we know what a subject is (I'm grammatically illiterate). I would think that "the girl" refers to a particular object, and in this context, this object is referred to as "the girl". Why do you think that "the girl" refers to a subject and not an object?

It is not necessary that a language - broadly defined - has a grammar, and neither is grammatical structuring necessary for interpretation. — StreetlightX

Hm.

One needs to take care not to define language in a way that is too broad.

Is this language?


We might speak of it as steeped in meaning, or as "speaking" to my soul, but such uses might be metaphorical.

anyone lived in a pretty how town?

Is this language? Is it interesting precisely because it breaks the rules?

We could fix a firm line between showing and saying, and claim that this is the line were language starts. You hinted at this:

the most basic grammatical function being that of negation. — StreetlightX

So let's start by understanding language to be anything that at least in part can be interpreted using a syntax of predication. Language a the least contains identifiable negation and conjunction, nouns and predicates.

"Language a the least contains identifiable negation and conjunction, nouns and predicates." Does this mean musical, visual and movement arts are not languages. Where do such abstract categories as nouns and verbs come from? Obviously we invent them, but do they point to arbitrary aspects of verbal communication, grammarical features that just happen to structure one form of meaningful expression( verbal and written language) and not others?
Or do these grammatical categories derive from more fundamental grammatical features common to music, art and perception in general?

Does this mean musical, visual and movement arts are not languages. — Joshs

Only if you cannot interpret them in a predicate syntax...

If we are going to throw around words like syntax and grammar we ought at least check out how they relate to each other.

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)

The whos become ams. When does art become language?

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

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

Show and say.

My favourite part of PI remains ❡201. Here I find the point on which the whole balances. It shows how use lies at the heart of meaning. It says that there is a way of understanding a rule that is not set out in words, but demonstrated in our actions.

To interpret is to replace one sentence with another. Interpreting French is replacing "il pleut" with "it rains".

But understanding is not interpreting. Understanding is going out to splash in the puddles.

Interpreting French is replacing "il pleut" with "it rains". — Banno

Translating would be "He rains".

Language a the least contains identifiable negation and conjunction, nouns and predicates. — Banno

Nouns and predicates? isn't that a mixed metaphor? Don't you mean subjects and predicates? I think that the predicate often contains a noun.

You are right. Use the above instead.

do they point to arbitrary aspects of verbal communication, grammarical features that just happen to structure one form of meaningful expression( verbal and written language) and not others? — Joshs

I'm suggesting that being interpretable in First Order Predicate Logic is the least structure needed for something to be called a language.

I'm suggesting this as a starting point to which we can tie the discussion.

What are you saying? I thought we were talking about language use in general, not this specific type of language use, predicate logic. You don't really believe that something has to be interpretable by the rules of first order predicate logic to qualify as language do you?