were it physically possible for houses to turn into flowers). — Michael

That's exactly the kind of stipulation of context I was trying to highlight in my post. I take one of the major points the OP is trying to illustrate is that such stipulation is a response to weird shit going on. If some weird shit wasn't going on, we wouldn't need to stipulate a context, or possible world, in which it made sense! This act of stipulation being a pre-requisite for an interpretation of the phrase signals a shift from the usual way we interpret the words. What was the meaning of 'houses are turning into flowers' before any of these stipulations?

What was the meaning of 'houses are turning into flowers' before any of these stipulations? — fdrake

The brick enclosure which keeps me dry and warm losing/gaining protons and/or neutrons in such a manner that they transmute into complex proteins of the sort that I would gift my mother on her birthday when I remember.

Either it can happen (like mercury into gold) or it can't. It's a truth-apt concern that science is best tasked at answering.

If some weird shit wasn't going on, we wouldn't need to stipulate a context, or possible world, in which it made sense! — fdrake

I'm not stipulating a possible world in which is makes sense. I'm stipulating a possible world in which it is possible. It already makes sense. It just can't happen because our world doesn't behave that way.

There's a difference between incoherence (four-sided triangles) and impossibility (faster-than-light travel). Houses into flowers is of the latter kind.

The brick enclosure which keeps me dry and warm losing/gaining protons and/or neutrons in such a manner that they transmute into complex proteins of the sort that I would gift my mother on her birthday when I remember. — Michael

Saucy.

Yet people understand houses and flowers before understanding proteins, protons, neutrons, 'enclosures', changing atomic numbers, complexes, the relationship of atoms with solid objects... At least personally, I have to do some perverse exercise of imagination to identify a house as a complex of atoms transforming in some non-specified-way-I-gloss-over-the-details-of into a flower.

Perhaps you really do understand houses in terms of atomic physics. I personally doubt that though. I think it's more likely that you're stipulating a context of understanding for 'houses are turning into flowers' precisely because it generates lots of interpretive difficulties. I doubt that your understanding of 'houses' differs too much from 'houses' in 'houses are turning into flowers' when reading:

'Houses are turning into a poor investment nowadays'

you certainly wouldn't need to specify physical transformation in that scenario.

Yet people understand houses and flowers before understanding what proteins, protons, neutrons, 'enclosures', changing atomic numbers, complexes, the relationship of atoms with solid objects. At least personally, I have to do some perverse exercise of imagination to identify a house as a complex of atoms transforming in some non-specified-way-I-gloss-over-the-details-of into a flower. — fdrake

I don't see the relevance of that. People understood the Sun long before they knew anything about plasma or nuclear fusion (and that's true of lots of people today) but it either is or isn't a fact that the Sun is hot plasma and undergoes nuclear fusion at its core. So we can understand houses without understanding the physics of atoms but it either is or isn't a fact that the type of atoms which make up our houses can turn into the type of atoms which make up flowers.

I don't see the relevance of that. People understood the Sun long before they knew anything about plasma or nuclear fusion (and that's true of lots of people today) but it either is or isn't a fact that the Sun is hot plasma and undergoes nuclear fusion at its core. So we can understand houses without understanding the physics of atoms but it either is or isn't a fact that the type of atoms which make up our houses can turn into the type of atoms which make up flowers. — Michael

Let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Personally, I understand houses and flowers largely through the medium of cartoons. What you're saying doesn't make any sense, because the laws of physics don't apply in cartoons. So 'houses are turning into flowers' is true.

Why is your interpretive context the only appropriate one?

What Cavell says about houses turning into flowers in The Claim of Reason appears in a chapter entitled: “Skepticism and the Existence of the World”. He is responding to Norman Malcolm’s criticism of the verification argument. He says that there is overwhelming evidence that printed words do not undergo spontaneous change, and in the same way there is absolutely conclusive evidence that houses do not turn into flowers. Cavell says that in denying that we have conclusive verification that houses do not turn into flowers he is not to be understood as asserting that we do not have verification of it:

I am asserting, rather, that we do not yet know what verification for or against it would be … both [the denial and assertion] rest on the same concept of what knowledge is, or must be … Both, in a word, use “absolutely conclusive verification out of its ordinary context.

He goes on to ask and say:

What are we imagining when we think of this as merely “in fact” the case about our world, in the way it is merely in fact that the flowers in this garden have not been sufficiently watered …? It is my feeling that such things could present themselves to us as just more facts about our world were we to (when we) when we look upon the whole world as one object, or as one complete set of objects: that is another way of characterizing that experience I have called “seeing ourselves as outside the world as a whole” … This experience I have found to be fundamental in classical epistemology (and, in deed, moral philosophy). It sometimes presents itself to me as a sense of powerlessness to know the world, or to act upon it; I think it is also working in the existentialists (or, say, Santayana’s) sense of the precariousness and arbitrariness of existence, the utter contingency in the fact that things are as they are. (Wittgenstein shares this knowledge of the depth of contingency.

…

The philosopher’s experience of trying to prove it [objects or the world] is there is I will now add, one of trying to establish an absolutely firm connection with that world-object from that sealed position. It is as though, deprived of the ordinary forms of life in which this connection is, and is alone, secured, he is trying to reestablish in his immediate consciousness, then and there.

In the ordinary sense I know that houses do not turn into flowers, but this in not what the philosopher demands of claims of knowledge. Given the contingency of existence we simply do not have knowledge in an absolute, apodictic, infallible sense.

This might be my last post for a day or so as it's ANZAC day tomorrow and I'll be out gambl... celebrating the war effort all of tomorrow, and I need to sleep now.

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

Because it is not even false that houses can turn into flowers at this point in time. A word about truth and falsity: both of these are subject to, conditioned by sense. Consider that when something is false, we know how to react to this, as it were - we know the significance of a false statement. "It is false that the cat is on the mat" -> "then I shan't go looking for the cat on the mat" [verbal response]; Or, *I don't look for the cat on the mat* [action]; (statement -> significance). To understand the 'game' of truth and falsity - and, a fortiori for something to be true or false - is to 'know one's way about' (in Wittgenstein's words) a true or false statement.

But what kind of significance does saying 'it is false that houses turn into flowers' have? How, even in principle, does one go about rendering any sense of significance to this? Think again of the child who affirms the truth of this statement ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!): one's immediate (adult?) response is something like: 'this child doesn't know what truth is'; or, 'this child doesn't quite understand how houses, or flowers, or change works', or "how adorable". This child doesn't understand concepts and how they relate to other concepts - at least, not like we do. Her language is in error (according to our standards). That's the immediate adult response, not: 'No darling, houses do not turn into flowers' (at least, it's not the response parent who isn't tired and just wants to get through lunchtime with bub; or, the adult could say this, but she's being somewhat pedagogically irresponsible).

To 'flatten' possibility in the way you're doing - to say that anything is possible, anything can turn into anything - is to loosen all communicative constraint to the point of non-sense. It's fine if we're talking about a localized case of houses turning into flowers - but take that logic all the way: anything can turn into anything else: language would lose its grip on the world, no one would 'know their way about'; this though, is just the condition of the child, who has yet to master language, who has yet to grasp the grammatical (not physical, not imaginative) constraints that allow sense to be made. One last, more abstract way to put this: distinctions with significance require asymmetry of response: if anything is possible, then anything follows, and one cannot say anything significant about anything at all.

Constraints need to be placed on our grammar such that one responds this way to a truth and this way to a falsehood: this asymmetry is the condition for language to function at all. But no such asymmetry exists in the case of 'it is false that houses turn into flowers'. One can only blink in bemusement: "he hasn't mastered a language yet";

Also, I was going to quote the exact passage of Cavell's that Fool just posted, but with a bit more: "In denying that we have conclusive verification for this last statement , I am not to be understood as asserting that we do not have (conclusive) verification for it. I am asserting, rather, that we do not yet know what verification for or against it would he. Nor am I saying that such a statements can have no use: only, we have got to be told what its use is. (And when we are told, it is not likely to be a use which requires anything like verification at all- it might, e.g.. be an accusation or an insinuation)" (Cavell, The Claim of Reason).

Packed alot into this, but like I said, last post for about a day or so. Hopefully there's alot to chew on.

Because we're talking about real houses and flowers, not cartoon houses and flowers? If you want to talk about cartoon houses and flowers then we can, and say that houses can turn into flowers.

Regardless, the issue here isn't whether or not it's true that houses can turn into flowers; the issue is whether or not it makes sense to say that houses can or can't turn into flowers. And I'm saying it does. I know what it means for something to be a house, I know what it means for something to be a flower, and I know what it means for something to change into something else (mercury into gold, caterpillars into butterflies, trees into sheds), and so I know what it would mean for a house to turn into flowers (even if I don't understand how it would happen). If scientists were to determine that it is possible (via some complicated physical process that I'm too ignorant to understand) I wouldn't have to revise my concept of houses or flowers; I'd just have to revise my understanding of what's possible in the world.

Because we're talking about real houses and flowers, not cartoon houses and flowers? — Michael

I wasn't. My intuition was to turn the phrase into a truth by supplying the context of a poem. In that regard I understood the phrase 'houses are turning into flowers' as part of a post-apocalyptic story where the houses were all decaying and nature was colonising the architecture, making it a metaphorical description of fictional events.

Atoms had far less to do with my understanding of the phrase when true than the poetic connotations of the phrase.

I was still talking about an imagined real poem. Your invocation of the laws of physics, in this regard, is just as much an interpretive fantasy as mine. Only yours has the benefit of your interpretive habit of equating what is real (edit: or possible) and what is consistent with the laws of physics. Mine, of course, has the much better benefit of being a realistic scenario in which the truth of the phrase would be encountered; houses turn into flowers in fantasies. Note that my story too was consistent with the laws of physics, but did not require the reduction of houses and flowers into atomic configurations.

Whether science could determine if houses could really turn into flowers is irrelevant to my interpretation.

But what kind of significance does saying 'it is false that houses turn into flowers' have? How, even in principle, does one go about rendering any sense of significance to this? — StreetlightX

I’m not sure what you mean by “significance” here. Do you mean it in the sense of importance/relevance? I don’t know if it is important if it’s false, but it would be important if it were true, and it seems strange to say that it’s only truth-apt if it were true. And there are plenty of falsehoods that have no significance; e.g. Napoleon’s last meal was Weetabix.

I’m not sure what you mean by “significance” here — Michael

Difference that makes a/any difference.

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

The problem with this is what determines "what it makes sense to say" about x?

That can't be limited to the way that x normally behaves. If we're saying that, we're ruling out imagination period, because . . . well, I don't know why we'd be doing that. At any rate, Streetlight said that the issue isn't about the physical stuff that's being referred to.

Is it limited to what's possible re x? Possible in what sense? Logical? Metaphysical? If we're talking about conceivability, that amounts to either imagination or possible in one of these senses. If we're talking about what's physically possible, Streetlight said he wasn't talking about that again.

Is it about the concept qua a concept? If so, we're back to how people think/what they can imagine. Also, Streetlight said that he wasn't talking about concepts turning into other concepts.

So just what is "what it makes sense to say" about here?

Is it limited to what's possible re x? Possible in what sense? — Terrapin Station

That's the key question really. You can see the different interpretations of 'houses are turning into flowers' as ways of ascribing a notion of possibility to the transformation. For Michael, mine apparently makes little to no sense, you seem to want to allow imagination to rule like I did.

Take that we brought different interpretations to it as data, the important thing to notice is how we did it, how we ascribed the notion of possibility, not the mechanics of that notion of possibility (in terms of accessibility relations if you must). I assumed that it was really natural to interpret it as poetic, Michael assumed it was really natural to interpret it as a physics problem.

What matters is that we supplanted a context to the phrase based upon some interpretive process, and we did so as a matter of interpretive habits. Nothing about the phrase tells us precisely how to make sense of it - the existence of various interpretations going against the grain of the usual understanding of houses and flowers attests to that.

If you're demanding that I precisely define 'what makes sense to say of houses' in order for you to understand the phrase, I counter demand you precisely define every single word and phrase in your post before I claim I understand what you're trying to say. I won't play that game.

If things like 'houses can be made of mud, concrete, bricks, wood...', 'people live in them' don't help you understand what I mean by 'things that make sense to say of houses', I don't know how to teach you what things are sensible to say of houses. Or flowers, for that matter. Consistent with the usual conventions of use of those words.

Was there something I wrote that implied that such temporal 'glue' ought to have no place in any analysis of language and normativity? — StreetlightX

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 — StreetlightX

You are a thoughful and well-read philosopher. I'm absolutely certain that some sort of temporal 'glue' has a place in your analysis of language and normativity. I am just as certain that you recognize differentiations within groupings. It's a question of what sort of glue and differentiations you have in mind , and how those differ from what I have in mind.

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. — StreetlightX

I wrote a ridiculously superficial summary of what I was after. My point wasn't to present a completed argument to you. It was to see if I could get past your hostility and already formed presuppositions about what I had in mind, in order to open up a space to examine certain parts of your op. I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills and less of your invective. Just try and pretend for a moment that there is a tiny chance I am not the realization of all your worst assumptions concerning Derrida.

Cool. So statements about the world imply a weird vantage point, as if we're in the painting and also observing it from the outside.

I wrote a ridiculously superficial summary of what I was after. My point wasn't to present a completed argument to you. It was to see if I could get past your hostility and already formed presuppositions about what I had in mind, in order to open up a space to examine certain parts of your op. I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills and less of your invective. Just try and pretend for a moment that there is a tiny chance I am not the realization of all your worst assumptions concerning Derrida. — Joshs

I would actually be interested in you applying these ideas to the OP to see what happens. I'm sorry for my earlier hostilities too. It's not really your fault I've had many incredibly frustrating experiences with Derrida fans.

In the mathematical subject of topology, it is joked that donuts are coffee mugs and cows are footballs; because their shapes can be morphed into one another without the cutting or gluing of substance.

Likewise there is a similar geometric sense, albeit involving cutting and gluing, in which a "house" could morph into "flowers" or even be regarded as equivalent.

The author is possibly conflating natural language semantics with formal semantics. Any formal definition of transforming type A into type B requires a notion of similarity, which in turn requires that A and B can be projected into a common conceptual space.

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. — StreetlightX

Yeah, that makes sense. My cosmogenic framing doesn't really work, since regularity can't arise without some singular situation which exhibits regularity. You can't treat one as temporally prior.

Still, there is a sense in which regularity is separable in principle from local conditions*, in the way any platonic idea is separate from its instantiations. [deleuzian caveat that ideas are themselves emergent, rather than imposed from without.]

The reason I mention this is that you'd responded to my focusing on the specificity of the example, by bringing it back to cinnabar, sunrises etc. The only way I can understand that response is to see 'houses become flowers' as really meaning 'things can't just turn into something else willy-nilly (tangential historical curiosity : Didn't Husserl, in Ideas, use this idea to try to show how consciousness can survive the destruction of the world?)

Or to put this another way - if the example is meant to show how local conditions are enough, without drawing on 'deeper' transcendality, then something has gone wrong when the example is shored up by explaining how its not houses and flowers per se, but the cinnabar thing.

The only reason I'm being so nitpicky here, is that I'm really, really interested in what the current situation is. If the example doesn't work except as an illustration of a more general principle, I think that does leave it very open to a Derridean take. Houses can turn into flowers, easily enough. What transformations can't we think (which transformations really make us strain)? I think that that by definition is a more challenging question, but its exactly what thinking otherwise is all about. (one more plug for Sloterdijk. Love his views or hate them, this is what I belive he tries to do.)

For all the (justified) spleen against Derrida (which I share), the OP seems to be right in his wheelhouse, so maybe @Joshs is justified in his approach to the OP


-----------
*maybe 'distinction of thought' is more approprite here.

Uh oh. Now the burden is on me not to disappoint.. That may not be easy. It may be a good idea for me to avoid Derrida's terminology as much as possible, in favor of Heidegger, since in my reading Derrida's most important ideas come from Heidegger, and since Heidegger ,at least in his Being and Time period, achieved a degree of definitional thoroughness lacking in Derrida.
I am also comfortable in just using my own terms.

What interests me is the question of what the real and the actual teach us from a philosophical perspective in the guise of the singularity. Houses are turning into Flowers is presumably one such example of an opportunity for revision of a way of thinking. We see in myriad authors, from Kuhn and Foucault to Cavell ,Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, attention to the sort of event which prompts conceptual revolution, gestalt shift, wholesale reorientation of sense, differend, etc.
What's striking to me about Being and Time, by contrast, is the apparent absence of interest in such breaks and transformations, apart from the way that experience already unfolds moment to moment. Many modes of relating to a world are introduced, but Heidegger's intent always seems to be getting back to the primordial condition of possibility of having a world and of relating to beings. There are , of course, many clashing reading of Heidegger, and many camps(right vs left Heideggerians, existentialist vs postmodern ). My own take is that Heideger developed an odd and fascinating approach to grounding meaning , via his equiprimordial concepts of temporality, care and attunement.
My interest is in examining how these linked concepts determine factical experience in and through the sorts of contexts that would include the op's example, such as to reveal why Heidegger may have viewed the notion of singularity in a distinctly different way that the authors I mentioned.

Even where Heidegger seems to treat science in Kuhnian terms, he subordinates its achievements and methods to a more primordial 'ontological understanding of being'.
]
"Whether or not the importance of the research always lies in such establishment of concepts, its true progress comes about not so much in collecting results and storing them in "handbooks" as in being forced to ask questions about the basic constitution of each area, these questions being chiefly a reaction to increasing knowledge in each area. The real "movement" of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In these immanent crises of the sciences the relation of positive questioning to the matter
in question becomes unstable."(BT,p.9)

Questioning, revision and crisis are grounded for Heidegger in the odd equi-primordial structure of temporality-care-attunement. What is most strange to me about what he does with these concepts is that he doesn't begin from structure, state, form, value and then have these entities interaffect each other to form an inter-subjective world. He doesn't even seem to begin from Deleuze's starting point in structures which are already in differential relation to other structures within always plural contexts.

I would have to go into much detail to make any real sense of what i've said so far but we're already deep into the rabbit hole. It may be better to see how or if you want to refocus this discussion on the specifics of the op.

I would have to go into much detail to make any real sense of what i've said so far but we're already deep into the rabbit hole. It may be better to see how or if you want to refocus this discussion on the specifics of the op. — Joshs

I don't see much relation to the terms in the thread, I can see how you've substituted the general concepts in, into which house, flower, and turns into transform. The phenomenology of that 'turns into' would be pretty interesting, as you'd actually be giving a description of a phenomenal event of context constraint which occurs during the interpretation of the phrase. Related to the 'folding the transcendental into the empirical' sub-theme in the thread.

StreetlightX just used the rubric of changed foreground against a stable background world , an approach consonant with Merleau-Ponty, to illustrate the dynamic of 'turns into'.
For Heidegger World is always a specific pragmatic totality of relevance within which our interactions with others have significance. His famous hammer example shows how we only notice the hammer as hammer when something malfunctions and our engagement with the meaningful task of using the tool is interrupted. Notice that unlike the foreground -background model , within the totality of pragmatic relevance, the broken tool still has sense, since that relational totality takes account of the idea of tools not only functioning properly but also breaking. Such possibility of failure, absence and malfunction is implied in the pre-understanding of the situational context. Can the example of the borken tool be applied to that of a 'broken' phrase like Houses turning into Flowers? If so, then the phenomenal analysis of 'turning into' would reveal that while at one level the phrase breaks from the context of use, at a more general level it is taken into account in some way, either as nonsense or as an exception exposing the larger totality of relevance framing the discursive situation. As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. In other words, the possibility of the breakage of the overall sense is taken into account in the situation where we don't simply label the phrase as nonsensical. Thus, the totality of relevance can make intelligible both a narrower and a more general context.
This is what give us the tools, if we conclude that a revision in our understanding is required , to accomplish such revision. What do you think?

This is what give us the tools, if we conclude that a revision in our understanding is required , to accomplish such revision. What do you think? — Joshs

Honestly? That we've done just fine supplying relevant contexts to the phrase to interpret it without all the theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular. It hasn't really told us about what senses of possibility or transformation are immanent with respect to the phrase and which aren't, just made us suspect that they exist.

Edit: though, I probably wouldn't've understood what you wrote if I hadn't travelled similar theoretical ground before.

Edit2: the major disagreement I have is quite pedantic, but I think it's important.

As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. — Joshs

Putting it very densely; looking at it, I don't think it's quite right to say that the interpretive contexts adjoined to the statement are necessarily presupposed, as if fitting together with a system of inferential rules and reasonable conduct. The act which adjoins the context to the phrase is creative and spontaneous as much as it is following cues from our previous conventions. And thus in this regard it's not so much a philosophical presupposition of a pre-existing interpretive framework or an undecidable schism between interpretive frameworks (which marks why our interpretive decisions are creative as well as inferential), but an act of concept creation tailored to the phrase to give it a philosophical grammar which makes sense of it. If a presupposition is something which can be refuted through sufficient analysis, the act of interpretation here contrasts to presupposition. This is because the application of a philosophical grammar to interpret the phrase generates a novel conceptual space (as @sime puts it) which is equivalent (sortally, if anyone else is tracking when they crop up) to our understanding of the phrase when interpreted as an interpretive act; in that regard we can't so much refute the interpretation as reject or fail to understand the framework which comes along with it.

Edit 3: but perhaps I have been smoking too much Laruelle recently.

Cool. So statements about the world imply a weird vantage point, as if we're in the painting and also observing it from the outside. — frank

He is referring to "philosophers" or those on either side of the verification argument who see themselves as outside the world as a whole, as if the world is an object that one observes. Cavell, following Wittgenstein, points to forms of life -

It is as though, deprived of the ordinary forms of life in which this connection is, and is alone, secured, he is trying to reestablish in his immediate consciousness, then and there.

My concern with it is primarily the claim that someone can have the normal meanings in mind by the terms. I don't think that really follows from anything.

My concern with it is primarily the claim that someone can have the normal meanings in mind by the terms. I don't think that really follows from anything. — Terrapin Station

You know, it's funny, a lot of the discussion here is precisely disagreeing on what the 'normal meaning' of the phrase is. Your suspicion's right, I think, that anyone fluent in English would immediately understand the phrase through some imaginative exercise. But the interesting thing here is why it is necessary to understand the phrase in this way, and where do the imaginative contexts come from?

I think there's a really interesting epistemological issue here. How can we ensure that we're being true to the thing we're interpreting when it provokes a suspension of the usual order of things?

He is referring to "philosophers" or those on either side of the verification argument who see themselves as outside the world as a whole, as if the world is an object that one observes. Cavell, following Wittgenstein, points to forms of life -

It is as though, deprived of the ordinary forms of life in which this connection is, and is alone, secured, he is trying to reestablish in his immediate consciousness, then and there. — Fooloso4

Doesn't awareness of forms of life also imply a transcendental vantage point?

[quote="fdrake;281318"We've done just fine supplying relevant contexts to the phrase to interpret it without all the theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular. It hasn't really told us about what senses of possibility or transformation are immanent with respect to the phrase and which aren't, just made us suspect that they exist.[/quote]

Hmm. What would tell us this? I suppose only the actual phrase in the actual context given. But there's a difference between how we actually make our way through such situations of interpretation and how we talk about the way we make our way through them. Aquinas, Descartes and Hegel would all have different takes on what such situations of interpretation entail. And isn't it the implications of their explanations that determine the political, ethical , literary structures of their era?
The issue comes down to how I am inclined to judge someone who fails to come up with the same interpretation that I or my peers do. Or how I judge myself when I fail to make the transition from one gestalt to another. Cultures kill over realities that they believe are absolute and universal, founded upon just the sort of thinking that doesnt recognize the very concept of gestalt shift.

It seems to me that everything that is supposed to make philosophy relevant is at stake in not leaving things to the singular, if the singular fails to also teach us anything about form and pattern.

How do we enable ourselves to slip within the perspective of others whose moral compass appears very different from our own? Our current cultural climate is dominated by blameful moralism on both the right and the left that manifests a failure at some level to achieve a 'houses turn into flowers' shift. Is it closer attention to the singular that is needed? Or a way to understand the singular within the context of commonality and relationality?

With respect to concepts giving us access to the thinking of another from their own perspective, do we really do just fine supplying relevant contexts to those concepts to interpret them, when we find ourselves rejecting an other's way of life? Is it simply the fault of 'theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular' here? Or is it the fault of a machinery that ends up concluding that the other is utterly singular and unassimilable with respect to our own concepts? Isnt what we strive for an approach to singularity that allows us to look for continuities and connections between the alien other and ourselves that avoids the alienation and incoherence of pure singularity?


It is not enough that senses of possibility or transformation are immanent in the actual. They lead to violence without a way to intimately relate the singular with the general without one dominating the other.

It seems to me that everything that is supposed to make philosophy relevant is at stake in not leaving things to the singular, if the singular fails to also teach us anything about form and pattern. — Joshs

Do you actually attribute this belief to me, based on what I've written, or are you speaking hypothetically?

No, I think what you're arguing is rather close to my view.

I don't think it's quite right to say that the interpretive contexts adjoined to the statement are necessarily presupposed, as if fitting together with a system of inferential rules and reasonable conduct. The act which adjoins the context to the phrase is creative and spontaneous as much as it is following cues from our previous conventions. — fdrake

I would only add that when looking at the two temporal ends of the actual act, I follow Heidegger. At the end where history partakes of the present, the context that is joined to the phrase is already, as having been , changed by the current phrase. thus, 'having been arises from the future'. The 'now' is ahead of itself as itself, as the 'not yet', it projects, anticipates, as fore-having, fore-structuring. But this fore-having is not pre-supposition. The current phrase, then, is an in-between. It is neither just what was pre-supposed nor is it an absolute novelty. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It understands, interprets, and articulates, and thereby takes apart and changes what it affirms. .
So what you wrote sounds quite compatible with this.

I think what I was really trying to argue before was that in a way the machinery of generalization is its own kind of singularity. What gives hegemonic discourses their violence is that they only glimpse a particular, limited reality. The are called general , but what limits them is what they oppose, exclude or repress.

It occurs to me that what distinguishes philosophers of different eras isn't precisely that some privilege the general over the singular, but the nature of the relationship between what is unique and the covnentional. Deleuze, for instance, doesn't abandon theory. The world is such for him that there is something that is true everywhere, always, for everyone. For him it isdifferential and plural structural relations and assorted other details, that are primordially true. Ut they are only true in this general sense by being true always in particularity actual instantiations. Note that this account lends itself to a critique not unlike that you and Streelightx level against the Derrideans. Whereas you see Deleuze doing justice to the particular, opponents perceptive the way in whicih all particulars interrelate within a world as smelling of a preimposed theoretical machinery. Their world of sharp opposition and dichotomies, of proper and improper formations, is seemingly flattened after the post-structuraslists get done with it.
It is clearly not Deleuze's celebrating of the singular that leads to this impression but his discovery of a world of a radical interconnectedness that opponents simply don't see, and thus misread as abstract theorization,as stampeding over the particulars as they understand them..

At some point, I want to attempt to show how Derrida, or at least Heideger, may be read such that the impression of a machinery of generalization is removed.