Let’s get specific. I’m going to take Kenneth Gergen’s
approach to psychotherapy as reasonable proxy for Foucault-Deleuze.
For Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition [end p.43] seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture" (MSp.9). For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up. — Joshs
Wittgenstein is making a distinction between thinking as classical reflective cognition and his notion of practice [...where], according to the traditional notion of reflective cognition , one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private.
But Wittgenstein did not have available to him other ways of conceiving ‘thinking’. — Joshs
It has been noted that the trip to the grocer that Wittgenstein
presents us with in the opening remark of Philosophical Investigations
is apt to strike readers as somewhat odd (see Mulhall 2001; Hutchin-
son 2007). The grocer seems dumb (or extremely miserable and rude);
moreover, he seems in need of colour charts so that he might associate
the word “red”, as written on the note passed to him by the shopper,
with the colour of the apples, which he keeps in drawers. Is there a
reason for such an eccentric presentation of an otherwise familiar and
mundane scenario? I submit that there is. Wittgenstein structures the
story of the trip to the grocer as such to reflect the form of a dominant
picture of “inner mental processes”. Wittgenstein tries to tempt his
reader/interlocutor into asking for more, into asking for something
that will serve as grounds for predicating of the grocer understanding.
His interlocutor in Philosophical Investigations obliges: “But how does
he [the grocer] know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’
and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” Wittgenstein thus succeeds
in tempting the interlocutor into undermining her own prejudices. As
Stephen Mulhall writes, commenting on this passage in his book Inher-
itance and Originality: “If the public, externalised versions of such
procedures were not in themselves enough to establish the presence of
understanding to the interlocutor’s satisfaction, why should their inner
counterparts?” (2001: 45).
Let us consider this for a moment. Can it be that inner processes
would be more satisfactory to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in virtue of
their being simply inner? If we theorize modules and elicitation files
matching mental images of colour with files having semantic content,
then why should this satisfy the interlocutor when the grocer, having
done the same externally in the scenario, failed to so satisfy her? Surely,
“going inner” is not enough?
The subtlety of Wittgenstein’s example does not stop there. Mulhall
writes,
If Wittgenstein’s shopkeeper’s way with words strikes us as surreal
and oddly mechanical, to the point at which we want to question
the nature and even the reality of his inner life, and yet his pub-
lic behaviour amounts to an externalised replica of the way we
imagine the inner life of all ordinary, comprehending language-
users, then our picture of the inner must be as surreal, as oddly
mechanical, as Wittgenstein’s depiction of the outer. (Ibid.: 46)
Of course, one of the driving forces behind the interlocutor’s ques-
tion (her craving for more) is the thought that the outer behaviours
described by Wittgenstein in this scenario are merely contingent,
merely accoutrements: for, obviously we can imagine a grocer who
simply picks up five red apples (without the use of colour charts etc.)
and of whom we are happy to say that they have understood the
request. This makes the interlocutor assume that something general
must be going on “behind the scenes” – in the grocer’s head – that
affords us the right to attribute to him understanding. What this sce-
nario does, therefore, is facilitate one’s realization that what is at issue
is not whether certain practices are internal or external, mental or
physical, but rather what would count for us (for Wittgenstein’s inter-
locutor) as a grounding for an attribution of “understanding”. The
craving for generality [that W is attempting to subvert] leads us to
look for general grounds underlying all instances of understanding. — Phil Hutchinson
You might have an interesting point to make, but your conspicuous misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy isn't helping. — Luke
There is the apparent controversy: from one side, one can make choices in an ever-expanding range of situations; one becomes responsible for the creation and construction of a 'life of one’s own.’ Human identity is being transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ with the responsibility for performing that task and for the possible consequences and the ‘side-effects’. Therefore, the role of intentionality, self-reflexivity and personal accountability has dramatically increased over the recent time. From the other side, we evidence that our ways of life, social engagements and personal experiences are shaped, reproduced and incorporated into the dominating social order. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. Foucault’s conceptualization of contemporary subjectivity could help to understand the reciprocity of the growing individuation and the overwhelming socialization. He characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of socialization and power as ‘environmental’: “governmentality acts on the social environment and systematically modify its variables…Biopower’s formula is to ’make live or die’. It seeks to optimize a state of life by maximizing and extracting forces…Neoliberalism finds its rational principle in an artificially arranged freedom: the creation and management of the competitive behavior of economically rational individuals in the regulated environment ” (Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’).Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants.
— Number2018
How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent? — Joshs
Coming back to our discussion of the concepts of context and unconsciousness, priming-like notions would be more appropriate to consider our situation than the philosophy of radical temporality. Derrida’s differance or mark cannot explain the structuring iterative unconscious forces that impact us. People have similar experiences primarily due to the fact of being immersed in the common highly organized, but shocking and affectivily charged environment.Radically temporalapproaches , by contrast , sees each person as only being able to relate to, assimilate , construe that in the social sphere which can be construed on some basis of similarity with respect to one’s history of understanding. So we find in Kelly, Gendlin, and Heidegger a description of the ongoing history of an individual’s experiencing in terms of an overall pragmatic self- continuity: — Joshs
In Kelly’s approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one’s own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is
that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and
between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds
of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”
One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways’ that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same’ cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.
Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory.” — Joshs
You need to make your point yourself, instead of throwing a long quote at me and then concluding that I completely misunderstand Wittgenstein, without telling me how specifically you are interpreting my claims, and how the quote refutes them. I may indeed completely misunderstand Wittgenstein , but please make the argument yourself so I know what the hell you are talking about. — Joshs
316. In order to get clear about the meaning of the word “think”, we watch ourselves thinking; what we observe will be what the word means! — But that’s just not how this concept is used. (It would be as if without knowing how to play chess, I were to try and make out what the word “checkmate” meant by close observation of the last move of a game of chess.) — Philosophical Investigations
36. What would we reply to someone who told us that with him understanding was an inner process? —– What would we reply to him if he said that with him knowing how to play chess was an inner process? — We’d say that when we want to know if he can play chess, we aren’t interested in anything that goes on inside him. — And if he retorts that this is in fact just what we are interested in, that is, in whether he can play chess — then we should have to draw his attention to the criteria which would demonstrate his ability, and on the other hand to the criteria for ‘inner states’.
Even if someone had a particular ability only when, and only as long as, he had a particular feeling, the feeling would not be the ability. — Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment (aka Philosophical Investigations part II)
Newer approaches have discarded the computer analogy in favor of organismic metaphors. Cognition belongs to an embodied self-organizing system. Processes like cognition and perception are not the processing of raw stimuli but forms of interaction and self-transformation. Memory, then, is never veridical because it is not the retrieval of data from a filing cabinet. Rather it is a reconstructive activity that changes rather than retrieves. — Joshs
Here’s Heidegger:
“In its familiar being-in-relevance, understanding holds itself before that disclosure as that within which its reference moves. Understanding can itself be referred in and by these relations. We shall call the relational character of these referential relations signifying. In its familiarity with these relations, Da-sein "signifies" to itself. It primordially gives itself to understand its being
and potentiality-of-being with regard to its being-in-the-world. The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.“
Can you imagine Deleuze assenting to this way of describing moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation? — Joshs
You stated - or, at least, strongly implied - that, for Wittgenstein, 'thinking' is a "classical reflective cognition" according to which "one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private."
This is exactly the type of view that Wittgenstein was attempting to undermine in his Philosophical Investigations, particularly with his remarks on family resemblances, the private language argument and rule-following, but also more generally throughout. — Luke
You misunderstood me. I agree with you. The view that thinking is reflective cognition is the view Wittgenstein is opposing. — Joshs
My point was that there are alternatives to reflective cognition, such as certain phenomenological philosophical perspectives like that Heidegger’s. took of thinking or Metleau-Ponty’s embodied intercorpoeality, that do not posit a hidden inner repository of meaning, and yet offer an origin of language that is more primordial than Wittgenstein’s interaubjective grounding of language. — Joshs
AFAIK, Wittgenstein never attempted to “offer an origin of language”. — Luke
Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. — Number2018
I feel that I need to come back to answer your post and to discuss time again.The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "being-in-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating
analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach." — Joshs
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