Which is why i think the people discussing physical reality both are and aren't missing the point. I think it does matter that the example has to force itself to work, it needs a lot of intepretive scaffolding. — csalisbury

Your point is well taken, but I think what's missed is the context of the example, which, to be entirely fair, I did not provide. Actually, I mentioned it to Banno in a post previously, but just to rehearse, the example is meant to function in the context of a (limited) response to scepticism, and the ability to doubt. It's a response to the question like ('why can't houses turn into flowers at any point? Can we guarantee that they won't?'). And as I also mentioned to Banno, this kind of question finds its lineage in Hume on induction (maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow), and in Kant on knowledge more generally (the cinnabar that turns red and black and light by turns); More recently in Meillassoux on radical contingency (physical law might and can change at any point, for no reason whatsoever).

So yeah, that's the context in which the example is meant to find purchase: it's meant to approach these questions from a different angle: that of meaning (it's 'post-metaphysical' in that sense, unlike Kant, Hume, Meillassoux, etc). And in some ways your response furthers this even - by attributing a 'background idea of a kind of physical univocity' to a kind of cultural-historical specificity (our singular situation!), you're 'skipping' the metaphysics and going straight into cultural critique, as it were, which I suppose might be exactly one of the upshots of treating scepticism in this way. Perhaps there's something to be said about how the experience of scepticism is changed under the conditions in which 'anything can be something else, or both, with a little help': that would make for an interesting study.

Heideggerian destruction or Derridean deconstruction questioned the justification of the distinction, in the dialectically oppositional way it is presented by Cavell, in the first place — Joshs

Is it presented in a dialectically oppositional way? Or are you simply engaging in the standard Derridian one-upping that leads, over and over again, to the same, tirelessly repeated point about 'being within' or whatever is it Derridians monomaniacally roll out when the whiff of distinction graces the air? It's so tiring and has nothing to do with what's being posted. You want to talk about the 'within'? Fine. But that's a different topic. Or, if it's related, it does so by qualifying what's been said, but nobody asked, and what motivates it other than a 'I'm going to turn on the Derridian interpretive machine now and see what comes out the other end?'.

Look, sorry if I sound salty, but I used do very much the same thing, and I spent literally years learning to wean myself off that incredibly annoying temptation to deconstruct just in order to repeat the same conclusion(s) that Derridians have been reproducing ad nauseam as though novel for the last 50 years. OK, things are within and not between (or, they are between only insofar as they are within! Or whatever cute turn of phrase Derridans like!) - got it! Let's talk about something else now. Derrida - thank u, next.

Derrida — StreetlightX

Derrida :vomit: !

You only get to make that face if you've studied and understand him.

Then it is law

So a few people now have mentioned 'physics' - as though 'physics' could tell us what we call houses and what we call flowers; but this of course is a silly idea, as though one could read our language 'off' the physical characteristics of the world. As though a kind of pre-established harmony existed between word and thing. How ironic that those who speak of physics are theologians in disguise. What is missed is language - human language, and what we do with it. — StreetlightX

I don't really understand this. There's nothing theological about saying that things in the world are made up of matter and that matter of one type can or can't turn into matter of another type. We can turn mercury into gold. We can't turn bricks into proteins. This has nothing to do with mysticism and nothing to do with "read[ing] our language 'off' the physical characteristics of the world" (although to be honest I don't really know what you mean by this). It's just a truth-apt account of how we understand things to behave.

And as I also mentioned to Banno, this kind of question finds its lineage in Hume on induction (maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow), and in Kant on knowledge more generally (the cinnabar that turns red and black and light by turns); More recently in Meillassoux on radical contingency (physical law might and can change at any point, for no reason whatsoever). — StreetlightX

ohhh,ok, yeah. I'd missed your post to Banno. Now I'm in the embarrassing position of more or less agreeing entirely.

That bit about physical 'univocity' and weaker categories and all that was kinda cool, though, right? I felt pretty clever as I was thinking about it and posting, like I was doing DIY marxist epistemology or something. I smoked a triumphant cigarette on my lunch break after posting, lol.

There's nothing theological about saying that things in the world are made up of matter and that matter of one type can (or can't) turn into matter of another type. — Michael

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; the kind of thing made out of weather-proof material; usually has a roof; has connotations of homeliness; may be small; may be big: these things are what a house is because 'we' put them into the concept of a house: it was (communally?) created, not discovered (subject, usually, to lots of constraints).

Or, to put it a bit roughly from the other side of things, there is nothing in 'nature' that just is a house. You can measure particle interactions till kingdom come, and none of them will tell you that 'this is the kind of thing you ought to call a house'. Or, at least, one must have an idea of what wants to call a house before deciding: this is the kind of thing of qualifies as a house (made of the right material, is spacious enough, etc). This is what I meant when I said you can't read language off of the physical. The world is silent about what it wants to be called: only 'we' decide - pragmatically, in concert with others, sometime antagonistically, based off a million and one inscrutable reasons (maybe for no particular reasons at all) - why 'this' thing ought to be called, in our language, this.

We can't be wrong about the rules of a game we ourselves invented. Is that it?

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; the kind of thing made out of weather-proof material; usually has a roof; has connotations of homeliness; may be small; may be big: these things are what a house is because 'we' put them into the concept of a house: it was (communally?) created, not discovered.

Or, to put it a bit roughly from the other side of things, there is nothing in 'nature' that just is a house. You can measure particle interactions till kingdom come, and none of them will tell you that 'this is the kind of thing you ought to call a house'. Or, at least, one must have an idea of what wants to call a house before deciding: this is the kind of thing of qualifies as a house (made of the right material, is spacious enough, etc). — StreetlightX

I agree with this, but I don't see how this precludes the conceptual possibility of houses turning into flowers. It's no different in kind to mercury turning into gold – it just differs in scale and complexity.

And if we look to use rather than material, we turn trees into houses all the time. Is the reverse really "not even false"?

I agree with this, but I don't see how this precludes the conceptual possibility of houses turning into flowers. It's no different in kind to mercury turning into gold – it just differs in scale and complexity. — Michael

The idea is that there would be a concept of a house that one could imagine turning into a flower, but not our concept of a house. But tbh I'm not really that hung up about sticking this this one particular example. The philosophical point is that concepts can be stretched to a point at which they no longer are the same concept, but a different one entirely. At some point, it is not facts we get wrong, but the very identification of what the fact pertains to that we get wrong.

In any case, I still think it's just speculative posturing to imagine that houses can turn into flowers - at least in the context of scepticism I mentioned to Banno and Csal. Were people to really think this - and thoughts like it - outside of the contrived space of a philosophical discussion, communication between humans would be rather impossible. When the child says: "my house turned into a flower!" - we know she is not talking about our kind of houses - unless we were in some sense mentally underdeveloped; perhaps ourselves children. I want to say something like: arguments otherwise are a kind of argument from mental regression.

When the child says: "my house turned into a flower!" - we know she is not talking about our kind of houses — StreetlightX

Because we know that it's impossible for houses to turn into flowers. Whereas if she were to say that the tree in her garden became a shed we wouldn't question it because we know that carpenters are able to do this.

So I think it's entirely appropriate to say that houses can't turn into flowers because the laws of physics as we know them preclude this kind of transmutation. It really has nothing to do with language or our concepts at all.

you were gesturing toward the possibility of deconstructing the difference, so that there was no real difference in kind. — csalisbury

What I should have said was that difference in kind and difference in degree are complicit and inseparable both within supposed normative structures and between them.

We couldn't deconstruct the opposition between center and margin if we didn't already understand the distinction. Maybe the distinction is grounded in this or that; still the difference is there, as a fact of distinction.. So deconstruct away, but you'll need to reconstruct in order to explain the fact of the distinction itself. — csalisbury

In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure
implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in
fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such
singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that
it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of
sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the
central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)

“The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into
account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations
to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this
iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements",
because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory
break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling
presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc p53)."

Even with all this said, for Derrida there are more or less stable contexts within which it is possible to come to normative agreement. So he does not eliminate the possibility of locating cultural groupings, schematisms and the like. Rather, he finds a way to think such topologies without recourse to a structural, thematic center.

Houses can't turn into flowers because the laws of physics as we know them preclude this kind of transmutation. — Michael

The laws of physics eh? The one pertaining to flowers? Or the one about houses? Remind me. Flower =/= House? F =/= H?

Because we know that it's impossible for houses to turn into flowers. Whereas if she were to say that the tree in her garden became a shed we wouldn't question it because we know that carpenters are able to do this.

So I think it's entirely appropriate to say that houses can't turn into flowers because the laws of physics as we know them preclude this kind of transmutation. It really has nothing to do with language or our concepts at all. — Michael

I agree with this. I don't think that there was ever any real problem here to begin with. Do you? Apparently my earlier criticism along these lines, criticism which is unsympathetic to the thoughts and feelings behind the creation of this discussion, was deemed to be worthy of deletion. I'm guessing the excuse would be "low quality".

Apparently my earlier criticism along these lines, criticism which is unsympathetic to the thoughts and feelings behind the creation of this discussion, was deemed to be worthy of deletion. — S

Wasn't me :confused:

The laws of physics eh? The one pertaining to flowers? Or the one about houses? Remind me. — StreetlightX

The ones pertaining to nuclear fusion and fission primarily.

Go on.

I'm not a scientist so I can't offer much of an explanation. I only know that it's concerned with the combining or splitting of atoms so that one element becomes another – something that must happen for a house to become flowers. Given the energy required (as well as the molecular complexity) it's no doubt impossible (or maybe it is possible – regardless, it's truth-apt).

Trees can turn into sheds and mercury can turn into gold, but houses can't turn into flowers. It's quite straightforward and doesn't require any revision of meaning.

Cool, so you've gone ahead and mapped the concept of flowers and houses to the physics, and then, on the basis of that, told me that concepts have nothing to do with it; but of course, you wouldn't even be able to furnish your barely-there explanation if you didn't already know what it is you're talking about. You can't even get the critique off the ground without implicitly invoking the concepts.

Cool, so you've gone ahead and mapped the concept of flowers and houses to the physics, and then, on the basis of that, told me that concepts have nothing to do with it; but of course, you wouldn't even be able to furnish your barely-there explanation if you didn't already know what it is you're talking about. You can't even get the critique off the ground without implicitly invoking the concepts — StreetlightX

I'm not saying that we don't have the concept of flowers and houses. I'm saying that these concepts don't preclude us from talking about houses turning into flowers.Our concept of a tree is different to our concept of a shed, yet we can talk about trees being able to turn into sheds. Our concept of mercury is different to our concept of gold, yet we can talk about mercury being able to turn into gold. Our concept of cows is different to our concept of clothing, yet I have a very nice and expensive leather jacket hanging up in my hallway.

That our concept of houses is different to our concept of flowers doesn't mean that we can't talk about houses turning into flowers. We can – and are. And given what I know of physics I think we can say that it can't happen naturally and probably can't happen artificially (although whether or not it is possible is besides the point here).

That our concept of houses is different to our concept of flowers doesn't mean that we can't talk about houses turning into flowers — Michael

Right, which is why I didn't say we can't. I said if we did, we'd be talking about something else. Or if you like - we can't if we want to talk about the same thing as the houses and flowers that we're familiar with.

You sound lie a reformed alcoholic,You're bored by Derrida. I'm bored by the now standard and ubiquitous celebrating of the normative underpinnings of factual discourse.

."

Is it presented in a dialectically oppositional way? — StreetlightX

I suspect this is at the heart of your boredom with Derrida. If you were pressed to perform a deconstructive reading of Cavell , there likely wouldn't be much of substance you would be able to offer, because your leanings are toward a constellation of thinkers outside the orbit of the Derrida and Heideger that I understand. The vital contribution I impute to Derrida and Heidegger has to do with revealing a profound intimacy in the moment to moment unfolding of temporaity that I see as being missed by Cavell, Wittgenstein and others. In my view, to understand being via this intimacy is to make this starting point vastly more interesting than to begin with normative structures and then celebrate their transformation. My writing and thinking was in this direction well before I ever read Derrida or Heidegger, so I can take or leave them. I find your contributions to be among the most thoughtful of the commenters on this site, and since there are few others here who are willing or able to engage at any level with Derrida , I occasionally see if I can draw you into incorporating him into discussion, even if just in the form of a critique.

These days I'm more interested in Heidegger anyway. Poring through Being and Time, I'm struck by the absence of discussion concerning inter-normative discursive regions. I see this a a deliberate outcome of an approach that subordinates apparent breaks and discontinuities to a radical intimacy of movement.

Ah yes, the world's most problematic metaphysical distinction, the distinction between houses and flowers. The house is privileged over the flower through the ideal structure of instrumental rationality, whereas really houses are derivative of flowers as the sense of revealing in a flower is transcendentally prior to the mechanistic ideology of houses. Given that houses are just a subordination of the flower concept their metaphysical structure cannot be distinguished from that of a flower. One picks a house when one is looking for a place to live, and one also picks flowers, or is that too much identity between the two? If one instead views the flower and the house through the non-metaphysics of difference, one will see that the notions are parasitic of one another and thus the distinction is merely another philosophical pretension of binary between the irreconcilable that has always already been reconciled.

Most profound. I hear Derrida writes stuff that can sort of sound a little like that.

I don't intend what I wrote to be a criticism of Derrida, I was actually trying to satirise your posts in the thread. The on topic posts were about how 'houses are turning into flowers' and like phrases engender a change from the usual understanding of houses and flowers to understand - perhaps it's a cartoon, or a child's fantasy, or a poem -, and usually we don't notice these contextual changes despite them occurring seamlessly in the usual way we interpret stuff.

If you like, as I believe you did, you can present this as a suspension (or bracketing) of the regime of understanding which categorises things into houses or flowers, and the possibility of a suspension reveals a structure of decision to categorise in that way.

You could fork the inquiry in two here, you could either tread the now well trodden ground of articulating the suspension and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning, or you could focus on the singularity of the utterance as a call for context sensitive methods of reasoning and similarly constrained creativity. The first one changes the topic - rather it suspends all discussion except the results of deconstructive impulse; here a methodology without a method and a method without a problem - the second one stays on topic; treating the differences/perturbations brought about by things like the OP as calls for theorising. Prosaically, differences are opportunities for distinctions.

For all the emphasis on attending to singularity and the perturbation of categories, in my experience epigones of Derrida (or Heidegger, really) end up having the same conversation almost every time.

In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure
implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in
fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such
singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that
it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of
sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the
central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences. — Joshs

Sure, but then :

This argument, this structured argument relies on a central concept. This center is the desire for presence, or a center. In order to maintain it's structure it has to has to characterize all metaphysical projects as having, at their core, some desire for a self-present center.

But this is a mischaracterization and such attempts to impose such a center at the heart of all metaphysical inquiry can only be a violence of thought. So it is necessary to begin to think that there is no such center

and then you can perform the same operation on that structured argument, to make a new one, and so on forever, just spinning your wheels, not being able to say anything. And then you want to say - this not being able to say anything is itself what I'm trying to say. So maybe you write being but cross it out, or come up with a term like differance.

Hey, but wait this seems a lot like a center around which a discourse is structured!
No, no, we thought that too, that's why we crossed it out. It's being crossed out signifies that all attempts to talk about it just replicate endlessly into a void and its ultimately futile, but we keep doing it anway, because...


It is sort of like when the alcoholic - it was a good metaphor you used - no longer thinks he'll find satisfaction in drink, but keeps drinking. Before, he was looking for a good time. Now, he's looking for a good time.

But he can't stop. Why?

My hunch: Derrida isn't really talking about 'metaphysics', whatever that is. He's talking about a particular kind of anxiety, and then projecting that anxiety onto everything. And anxious people, or a certain sort of anxious person, can't stop talking.

in my experience epigones of Derrida (or Heidegger, really) end up having the same conversation almost every time. — fdrake

.
Let's talk about these epigones. I find the vast majority of readings of Derrida and Heidegger to be utterly conventional, or worse, semi-coherent insubstantialitites. Over and over , Heidegger gets turned into Kierkegaard, Levinas, Sartre or Gadamer, while Derrida becomes an unserious mischief-maker. Simon Critchely in a recent article deemed Derrida all but irrelevant( That happens to be my view concerning Critchely's work, but that's another story).

You could either tread the now well trodden ground of articulating the suspension and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning, or you could focus on the singularity of the utterance as a call for context sensitive methods of reasoning and similarly constrained creativity.[/quote] Yes, treading the well-trodden ground of articulating the suspension is what most Derrideans do. No wonder Streetlight is so bored with them!

Let me see if I can articulate what I am trying to do, and you can tell me, regardless of whether you agree with it, if it is off-topic.

So the singularity of the utterance calls for context sensitive methods of reasoning. Yes, indeed.
Let me take the position of someone having the realization for the first time that what was for so long understood as invariant, the factuality of statements, is subordinant to normative practices of meaning assignment. Such would be a profound epiphany, having implications in so many realms of endeavor, from the ethical and epistemological to the political.

This is where my Derrida-Heidegger come in. rather than focusing on "articulating the suspension(bracketing) and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning", in my reading, they move within the very heart of context itself and notice an almost imperceptible mobility within what has been rendered as structure, presence, state, form, scheme, element, being, the 'is', as the most supposedly irreducible origin of epxeience. What's most remarkable about this 'split' within the 'I" moment to moment is not that it leads to opposition , incommensurability, negation, suspension. On the contrary, it lends to the ongoing temporization of experiencing, in and through all contexts, a radical consistency, integrity and intricacy that is missing from other approaches. Whether you buy this or not, the implication is that what happens BETWEEN supposed normative regime of understanding to another becomes utterly uninteresting, becasue it is now understood to be only an abstracted and derivative way of thinking the basis of transformation in meaning. The real action has not been made visible yet to those who begin from centered contexts and their transformation.


.

I write and mean something right now, right this moment. Except that now that I refer back to it , it has changed. No center. Yet there is a way of belonging to a thematic without there being a center . There is relative, differential belonging which is changing itself in an ongoing manner ,yet in ways that allows relative consistency. Thus we have at the same timer difference and continuity. And my claims to 'no center' are self-reflexive. They have built into them this consistent- changing rubric. So it is perfectly possible to articulate a notion of transformative that carries along with it relative stability and have this built right into our discourse about it. This is, after all, how meaning operates anyway.

This is where my Derrida-Heidegger come in. rather than focusing on "articulating the suspension(bracketing) and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning", in my reading, they move within the very heart of context itself and notice an almost imperceptible mobility within what has been rendered as structure, presence, state, form, scheme, element, being, the 'is', as the most supposedly irreducible origin of epxeience. What's most remarkable about this 'split' within the 'I" moment to moment is not that it leads to opposition , incommensurability, negation, suspension. On the contrary, it lends to the ongoing temporization of experiencing, in and through all contexts, a radical consistency, integrity and intricacy that is missing from other approaches. Whether you buy this or not, the implication is that what happens BETWEEN supposed normative regime of understanding to another becomes utterly uninteresting, becasue it is now understood to be only an abstracted and derivative way of thinking the basis of transformation in meaning. The real action has not been made visible yet to those who begin from centered contexts and their transformation. — Joshs

The problem here is such 'centres' aren't always metaphysical presuppositions sustained through being inattentive to aporetic shifts in context, they're often non-conceptual in nature. If you want to chart the perturbation away from this centre induced by the singularity of some event, you don't subordinate its terms of expression it to a pre-established logic of perturbation and singularity, you use its singularity to tailor concepts to it. There's a historical element here, you always end up using some tradition of concepts to articulate the singular, but to thematise (and then give an account of) something singular requires you to cash it out in terms inspired by the thing rather than the generalised logic of singularity perturbing conceptual schemes/interpretive habits. You use the thing to tailor the history of concepts you apply to it, it 'organises' the cognitive elements of your historicity if you want to put it in phenomenological terms. Or more prosaically, you let it shape how you think and what you bring to the problems it poses.

It's certainly of philosophical interest to talk about that generalised logic of singular perturbation - what it does to metaphysical accounts - but you can't articulate any singularity through blind iteration of the way singularity as an idea perturbs concepts.

The real's both far more banal and far more rich than any conceptual distinction, all we can do is allow it to permeate our thought from the ground up.

Edit: notice how we're talking about a generalised logic of singularity rather than any specific instance of it? This is a shift from the realm of language convention the thread's problem was posed in.