Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic? — Joshs

I would say that yes. I am making a claim about human nature, postulating a permanent structure in human experience. Let me note that I agree with the tripartite structure of time. I suppose I'm just making the point that we are still within metaphysics. I love the early Derrida on Saussure. I'm especially interested in the meaning of meaning, in something like the limits of clarification, ineradicable ambiguity, the futile yet intoxicating chase of a luminous plenitude. If ambiguity is ineradicable and ubiquitous, I'm not exactly sure what it means to say so.

Dialectic reminds me that the meaning of signs is external to the subject and inexactly determined by the history of their endless recontextualization within an infinite dialectic, which is not to say we should not strive toward what might be a point at infinity, an impossible mastery of our own signs.

I'm intrigued by the triadic systems approach — jas0n

Hegel was certainly trying to express the triadic logic of systems theory. Peirce did it best, but even he comes at it from at an angle that largely misses the hierarchy theory story.

Once you raise your metaphysical dimensionality from monistic and dualistic to triadic, you are dealing with structuralism at a level that is like trying to to imagine a four dimensional object. If you try to make any part of the whole your stabilising viewpoint, you have already lost the holism you hoped to model.

But then if you combine the many views - Aristotle, Hegel, Peirce, systems science - you get a feel for the way it all connects as an emergent structure of relations.

I relate to this, and I connect it with the difficulty of philosophy. Tie a knot over here and another knot comes undone over there. Or it's blanket too small for the bed. — jas0n

Good analogies. And that is why hierarchy theory seems central to me. It is the basic structure of recursion itself. It is about the self-organisation or emergence of "fit" in any holistic sense.

Good analogies. And that is why hierarchy theory seems central to me. It is the basic structure of recursion itself. It is about the self-organisation or emergence of "fit" in any holistic sense. — apokrisis

Perhaps you can help me with the point of view involved. For instance, is human philosophy conceived of as something like reality's self-knowledge? Are human concepts (or 'dementalized' signs) given 'full status' as entities and not just as representations of some substrate? Is reality made of signs that are neither mental nor physical ? For this distinction is itself a cut of the sign ? Have you looked into Derrida's différance?

What role do we play? Would other intelligent lifeforms play? Is reality best understood as an organism? And us as organs or cells or suborganisms?

Thinking/meaning is historical, more software than hardware, more 'we' than 'I. — jas0n

As I mentioned earlier, even though I think Gallagher and Gadamer misread Heidegger , they at least recognized that he was not dissolving the self into an interpersonal ‘we’ .

Gallagher criticizes Heidegger for not making what MerleauPonty calls ‘primary corporeal intersubjectivity’ primary. He says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer(2006) writes:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed, even as he was developing the idea, he wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted..."Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him."”

Eugene Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to intersubjectivty has much in common with Heidegger’s.

Gallagher claims that:

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

While Gendlin agrees with Gallagher and others that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches
leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and
common to other participants in my community.

Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or
conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency . This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. By contrast , Gendlin’sgrounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.

Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.

“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”

“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”

“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our
bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”

As I mentioned earlier, even though I think Gallagher and Gadamer misread Heidegger , they at least recognized that he was not dissolving the self into an interpersonal ‘we’ . — Joshs

Just to be clear, I consider the impersonal we to be a kind of bottom layer. Of course we have personalities! But who are the great personalities? In general they are those who exploit that which came before. We are time-binding apes. The bottom-layer plugs us in to the network. So this isn't some war against individuality. It's just a critique of Cartesian fiction taken as a necessary starting point. The 'interior monologue' is something that can only come after being a little we-blob. 'The subject is an effect of language' and 'the soul is the prison of the body.' Even if these are overstatements, they at least balance an old philosophical prejudice...the lonely subject, imagined as that which is most primary, most given, most secure...

If I am misreading Heidegger and following Dreyfus, that's fine with me. These names are signs that organize texts, facilitate contextualization, etc. Fame implies no authority.

The 'interior monologue' is something that can only come after being a little we-blob. 'The subject is an effect of language' and 'the soul is the prison of the body.' Even if these are overstatements, they at least balance an old philosophical prejudice...the lonely subject, imagined as that which is most primary, most given, most secure... — jas0n

There is no ‘interior monologue’. Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social. My ‘internal monologue’ is therefore not internal but an exposure to alterity , and this happens BEFORE my engagement with other people.


“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other in the form, precisely, of the eternal return. I love what I am living and I desire what is coming. I recognize it gratefully and I desire it to return eternally. I desire whatever comes my way to come to me, and to come back to me eternally. When he writes himself to himself, he has no immediate presence of himself to himself. There is the necessity of this detour through the other in the form of the eternal return of that which is affirmed, of the wedding and the wedding ring, of the alliance.

From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”

“… how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)

Derrida is not saying that the subject is the effect of language seen as socially imposed norms. It is the effect of differance , writing , the mark, the trace.
The social intervenes already within myself, before my exposure to other persons.

Derrida critiques Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl on the primacy of corporeal intersubjectivity.

“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection. That is a motif to which Husserl remains particularly and fiercely faithful.

... at the moment when it is a matter of orienting Husserl and making him take the other into account in a more audacious way (the other who is originarily in me, or for me, and so forth)-at the expense of a Husserl who is more classical, more ego-centered, and so forth-there is a risk of the exact opposite resulting. One runs the risk of reconstituting an intuitionism of immediate access to the other, as originary as my access to my own most properly proper-and in one blow, doing without appresentation, indirection, Einfohlung, one also runs the risk of reappropriating the alterity of the other more surely, more blindly, or even more violently than ever. In this respect Husserl's cautious approach will always remain before us as a model of vigilance. (P.191)

Even between me and me, if I may put it this way, between my body and my body, there is no such
"original" contemporaneity, this "confusion" between the other's body and mine, that Merleau-Ponty believes he can recognize there, while pretending he is following Husserl-for example, when he follows the thread of the same analysis and writes: "The constitution of others does not come after that of the body [with which Husserl could agree, but without inferring what follows.-J. D.] ; others and my body are born together from the original ecstasy. The corporeality to which the primordial thing belongs is more corporeality in general; as the child's egocentricity, the 'solipsist layer' is both transitivity and confusion of self and other" (Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 174; my emphasis-J. D.). This "confusion" would be as originary as the "primordial thing" and would make possible the substitutions (that we have noted are impossible) between the other and me, between our two bodies, in what Merleau-Ponty unhesitatingly terms "the absolute presence of origins. " In another example, he writes:

“The reason why I am able to understand the other person's body and existence "beginning with" the body proper, the reason why the com presence of my "consciousness" and my "body" is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person, is that the "I am able to" and the "the other person exists" belong here and now to the same world, that the body proper is a premonition of the other person, the Einfuhlung an echo of my incarnation, and that a flash of meaning makes them substitutable in the absolute presence of origins.” (Merleau-Ponry, Signs, p. I75)

And so, must we not think, and think otherwise (without objecting to it frontally and integrally) , that the said "same world" (if there is some such world, and if it is indeed necessary to account for it, and account for its "effect," as "sense of the world") is not and will never be the "same world"?(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.193).

The subject is an effect of language' — jas0n

Eugene Gendlin disagrees with you. Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to intersubjectivty has much in common with Heidegger’s, and also with Derrida.

Gallagher claims that:

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

While Gendlin agrees with Gallagher and others that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches
leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and
common to other participants in my community.

Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or
conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency . This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. By contrast , Gendlin’sgrounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.

Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.

“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”

“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”

“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”

The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.” — Joshs

This may be so, and one can also go in the direction of 'art mysticism' and insist that concept is wrong way to grasp 'Reality' in the first place. On the other hand, it's a move away from a critical and exoteric inquiry/articulation and back into the darkness of intuition and the ineffable. I'm not immune to the charms of the aesthetic or even the mystical. As Nietzsche might say, it may be only those who are secretly sustained by 'dark forces' who can indulge in reckless and thorough criticism.

There is no ‘interior monologue’. — Joshs

Well, sure, but this concept remains legible. I am criticizing a subjectivism that would construct the world from the idea of such a monologue. David Pearce treated the external world as an hypothesis which he mostly accepted, if memory serves, so that he presumably had to discuss within himself whether others existed. I think this is absurd, that such thinking is parasitic on a basic worldliness or with-others.

Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic?
— Joshs

I would say that yes. I am making a claim about human nature, postulating a permanent structure in human experience. — jas0n

So this dialectical scheme is a kind of logic of becoming?

the meaning of signs is external to the subject — jas0n

But it is not external to the Dasein , the self-world relation, or Derrida’s differance, which is the temporalizing
differential that can be understood as the self’s relation to itself from one thing to moment. To say that the meaning of signs is ‘external’ to the subject is not to say that there is no pragmatic intimacy and belonging in meaning to say something. What I mean is always in a relation of a mattering, relevance and significance in relation to my ongoing concerns.

There is no ‘interior monologue’.
— Joshs

Well, sure, but this concept remains legible. I am criticizing a subjectivism that would construct the world from the idea of such a monologue ( — jas0n

But by the same token there is also no meaning of signs absolutely ‘external’ to the subject. Hypostatizing the social simply swings the pendulum from an excessive subjectivism to an equally excessive empiricism.

My ‘internal monologue’ is therefore not internal but an exposure to alterity , and this happens BEFORE my engagement with other people. — Joshs

So a little boy talks to himself before he talks to mommy and daddy?

So a little boy talks to himself before he talks to mommy and daddy? — jas0n

He talks to them as the others to his self-othering monologue, a compounding of otherness. Of course , he will only discover their otherness by their failure to respond to him in as anticipatable a way as his body responds to himself.

For instance, is human philosophy conceived of as something like reality's self-knowledge? — jas0n

Something like that is surely the case. But that is also too flowery language.

What does it mean for humans to ascend to a mathematical level of abstraction in semiosis? As science, it has resulted in us trying to de-subjectivise our inevitable first person point of view to recover the objective third person, or God's eye, point of view. Or better yet, following more insightful approaches like Nozick's Invariances, we seek to dissolve our highly particular view of the world in the mathematical acid of universal symmetry.

So to the degree the world is understood as physical - some blend of fundamental material accident and fundamental constraining structure - we can hold a mirror up to that. We can construct a metaphysics that sees the world in this way. And pragmatically proves itself as a correct view because it offers us control over all the physics involved.

Thus it is not about "knowledge" in some passive Cartesian representational sense. It is instead knowledge in its enactive and pragmatic sense - its modelling relation sense.

This how we get from semiosis of the actually modelled kind - the biosemiosis of life and mind - to recover some kind of semiosis as the pansemiosis by which the cosmos indeed brings itself into being.

One flaw in Peirce is he conflated the two - especially in his "transcendental" mid-phase of thought where he wrote his notorious comments about matter as effete mind, not making it clear enough whether this was pansemiotic metaphor or pansemiotic metaphysics.

It should be clear that I don't subscribe to the Cosmos as having its own model of itself in a biosemiotic encoded sense. And indeed, it is part of the very theory of biosemiosis that the very possibility of a symbolic code only gets born where physicalism reaches its own naturalistic limits.

A symbol has to be a physical mark, even if just a dot being printed, or a blank being left, on an infinite Turing tape. But the great trick of semiosis is that if you can afford to encode information in a way that seems physically costless, then you - as an organism - can escape all the strictures of the material world.

This is Pattee's epistemic cut. Life and mind arise because they can make physical marks - like a DNA codon or a new synaptic junction - which look perfectly meaningless to the physical world that they then sneakily turn out to regulate.

It costs the body as much to code for a nonsense protein as it does for some crucial enzyme. The world - as a realm of rate dependent dynamics - can't see anything different about the two molecules in terms of any material or structural physics. Both are equally lacking in meaning - and even lacking in terms of being counterfactually meaningless as well. The two molecules just don't fit any kind of signal~noise dichotomy of the kind that semiotics, as a science of meaning, would seek to apply.

But then the body does know the difference as the difference is precisely one it imposes on the physics. It says I could be producing molecular junk or molecular messages. You - the world - can't tell and so just have no say in the matter. I - the body - am thus absolutely free to throw proteins into the bubbling stew of metabolic action and see what sticks as the best evolutionary choice.

Evolution doesn't just happen to organisms. They invent the binary distinction of sense~nonsense so as to make themselves evolvable as something completely new - a structure of rate independent information - imposed on rate dependent dynamics of the merely physicalist world.

So yes, the human story has reached the point where it holds up a mirror to the physicalism of the real world. But it can only do that by adding itself as a further trick - the trick of semiotic mechanism - which the physical world does not appear to contain and which is only present because the physical world in fact has strict limits.

The physical world is capable of abolishing all entropic gradients. But it can't even see the negentropy that is the informal structure that an organism accumulates so as to have its own parasitic existence on this world.

It's a splendid irony. A form of transcendence in that a model of the world must transcend that world. And yet the books get balance as that brief escaped from entropy is then paid back to the world with interest. Life and mind earn their way in the cracks of existence by breaking down accidental barriers to maximum entropy - like the way industrialised humans are taking half a billion years worth of buried carbon, slowly concentrated into rich lodes of coal and petroleum, and burning the bulk of it in a 200 year party.

So the answer to your question is that there is further recursion in the physicalist tale as it now has to add the new thing that is life and mind. The mirror we hold up would show the Comos the self that is also now the one with us in it - the informational degrees of freedom that its laws of thermodynamics could never forbid, but which also didn't in any immediately obvious way seem to require.

It is only because entropification must be achieved in any way possible - and life and mind were the one further way possible - that we can be considered part of the natural order.

Is reality made of signs that are neither mental nor physical ? For this distinction is itself a cut of the sign ? — jas0n

This is the epistemic cut issue. As I previously said, the central trick of semiosis is that a sign is really - as Pattee makes clear - a switch. And it is then easy to see the connection as well as the cut. A mechanical switch is both a logical thing and a physical thing. It has a foot on both sides of the divide.

So that fact puts a halt to the homuncular regress. The two worlds - of entropy and information - are bridged semiotically at the scale of your smallest possible physical switches.

And that is what the biophysics of the past decade has confirmed. All life and mind is based on the ability of proteins - molecular structure - to ratchet the quasi-classical nanoscale of organic chemistry.

The nanoscale is the tipping point where all the key physical forces converge to have the same scale. It is the "edge of chaos" or zone of criticality. In material terms, it exhibits the maximum thermal instability.

And in being peak material instability - halfway between the quantum and the classical - it is also the most tippable state. Biological information can get in there and tilt the entropic odds in its own favour.

But all this is extremely new science. Even in biophysics, the fact is still sinking in.

Have you looked into Derrida's différance? — jas0n

Yep. But only doing due diligence. :grin:

Generally post-modernism is the backlash against its own structuralist past. It wants to kill the part of itself that was valuable. It got tangled up in Romanticism, Plurality and Idealism in likewise wanting to distinguish itself from Enlightenment rationalism and the hierarchical views of Natural Philosophy.

As philosophy, it is a self-parodying mess. Yet of course, take any text in isolation and it often says something that could be seen as reasonable and obvious.

So between AP and Continentalism, I stick to Pragmatism as the middle path that offers the most coherence.

But by the same token there is also no meaning of signs absolutely ‘external’ to the subject. — Joshs

Agreed! Call it an overcorrection. I have toyed with denying qualia, not because I don't have the usual intuitions, but because these intuitions are contingently blocking inquiry.

He talks to them as the others to his self-othering monologue, a compounding of otherness. Of course , he will only discover their otherness by their failure to respond to him in as anticipatable a way as his body responds to himself. — Joshs

I think we both need to be careful to distinguish between body and 'symbolic' ego. At times I've preferred an 'external' view, watching bodies learn to emit the token 'I' appropriately. A body is trained to emit tokens interpreted as a self-description internal realm. A body is trained that such a narrative features a single protagonist. This perspective, admittedly one among others, takes 'culture'-coordinated bodies navigating a shared world as primary.

All that comes to mind is that science seems to be employing a host of ostensive definitions - we can point to stuff that science deals in (rockets, shells, and so on). Wittgenstein had issues with ostensive definitions but then science, on the face of it, isn't inconvenienced by them (there's no doubt as to where a shell or a rocket will land once we specify the values of the variables in the correct equation). In short the precision of science (to, some say, the 15^th decimal place) is against the Wittgensteinian view that language is imprecise.

In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.” — Joshs

Plausible but vague and hard to do anything with. Something is gestured at. A Romantic poet might talk of the chains of rigid conceptuality scraping the incomputable flesh of a most elusive goddess.

In short the precision of science (to, some say, the 15th decimal place) is against the Wittgensteinian view that language is imprecise. — Agent Smith

That's math, though, a game of symbols, a generalization of chess, one might say. One can be ultra-precise in this limited domain.

That's math, though, a game of symbols, a generalization of chess, one might say. One can be ultra-precise in this limited domain. — jas0n

"limited domain"? Perhaps you're on the mark, but, from personal experience (haven't had much of that to be frank), I'd say mathematizing issues (transforming it into a mathematical one) goes a long way towards resolving them.

Science is math, if not it can't be a science (physics envy).

That said, it's still unclear to me how and where Wittgenstein is relevant vis-à-vis science. I've stumbled upon a very basic point of contention (ostensive definitions), but science is known for stipulative, operational and theoretical definitions. I'm not sure how all that relates to Wittgenstein-Popper in re science-philosophy.

This is Pattee's epistemic cut. Life and mind arise because they can make physical marks - like a DNA codon or a new synaptic junction - which look perfectly meaningless to the physical world that they then sneakily turn out to regulate.

It costs the body as much to code for a nonsense protein as it does for some crucial enzyme. The world - as a realm of rate dependent dynamics - can't see anything different about the two molecules in terms of any material or structural physics. Both are equally lacking in meaning - and even lacking in terms of being counterfactually meaningless as well. The two molecules just don't fit any kind of signal~noise dichotomy of the kind that semiotics, as a science of meaning, would seek to apply. — apokrisis

This I do understand, and it was your posts on this site that brought this to my attention.

idea

Life and mind earn their way in the cracks of existence by breaking down accidental barriers to maximum entropy - like the way industrialised humans are taking half a billion years worth of buried carbon, slowly concentrated into rich lodes of coal and petroleum, and burning the bulk of it in a 200 year party. — apokrisis

This makes sense too. I think I grok the basics of dissipated structure.

This is the epistemic cut issue. As I previously said, the central trick of semiosis is that a sign is really - as Pattee makes clear - a switch. And it is then easy to see the connection as well as the cut. A mechanical switch is both a logical thing and a physical thing. It has a foot on both sides of the divide.

So that fact puts a halt to the homuncular regress. The two worlds - of entropy and information - are bridged semiotically at the scale of your smallest possible physical switches. — apokrisis

OK, 'smallest possible' is a new thing I hadn't considered before.

Generally post-modernism is the backlash against its own structuralist past. It wants to kill the part of itself that was valuable. — apokrisis

I've focused on Derrida as he follows the logic of Saussure. The signifier/signified is an echo/version of the physical/mental distinction. Derrida (as you may know) destabilizes this dichotomy. Signifiers refer to still other signifiers (not a signified made of pure thought-stuff that shines for/as the ghost in the machine.) I got into Saussure because of Derrida, and I was impressed by how much was already there in Saussure (the systematically or interdependence of signs for their meaning and the idea that language/'thoughtsound' is 'form not substance'.) The points you made in the definition thread were quite Derridean, or at least according to my interest/understanding of D. The life of language depends on a continuous recontextualization of signs that imposes the toll of an ineradicable ambiguity. To be sure, differences that make no (practical) difference can be ignored.

I'd say mathematizing issues (transforming it into a mathematical one) goes a long way towards resolving them. — Agent Smith

Yes. Hence the success and prestige of science/engineering. Math is brilliantly stupid.

I'm not sure how all that relates to Wittgenstein-Popper in re science-philosophy. — Agent Smith

In On Certainty you can find passages suggesting something like Popper's swamp. If I want to check whether a meter reads 35 kilograms, I have to trust my eyes, trust my ability to read numbers, etc. There's a deep layer of unnoticed mostly automatic skill that we mostly don't bother to question. Note that we don't have to agree whether the world is 'really' mind or matter or neither or both or whatever...to launch satellites and facetime a nephew in Spain. The 'foundation' works because we stick to relatively uncontroversial questions like 'did the rock weigh 20 kg?' without getting bogged down in semantics. As practical creatures, we only have so much time for the pleasures and torments of metaphysics.

One point that trips people up is W's claim that belief makes doubt possible. The first quote is how I usually understand this. I trust the meaning of my language as I express my doubt. I trust that I will be heard.

But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.

Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?

Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?

Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

Math is brilliantly stupid — jas0n

:lol: Explain yourself.

In my humble opinion, Wittgenstein sets the bar too high. As the title of his book, On Certainty, it becomes clear that he's critiquing, what he probably believes is, the impossible standards of philosophy (impossible in the sense too rigid, lacking flexibility, exacting, stringent, you get the idea).

This, mayhaps, isn't Wittgenstein, but rather other philosophers who put a premium on precision in re words, which, as per Wittgenstein, boils down to getting a fix on the essence of words which he claims is an illusion.


Mind you, I've never really understood Wittgenstein. He feels wrong and so I've decided to skip him in my qyest to understand philosophy.

Explain yourself. — Agent Smith

Most language is too meaningful, too suggestive, explosively untamed. It needs context, context, context. Philosophy still doesn't know what it means by 'meaning.' But (practical) math requires much less context and yet delivers far more clarity. Math is 'hard' because...most people find it too boring for the necessary concentration ? Or they drag in too much meaning and can't just see it as a calculus? I think it's harder to understand Hegel or Derrida or Wittgenstein than to learn calculus. I don't claim to have mastered any of those thinkers. The dialogue is endless.

he's critiquing, what he probably believes is, the impossible standards of philosophy (impossible in the sense too rigid, lacking flexibility, exacting, stringent, you get the idea). — Agent Smith

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. He offers no system. He pops lots of balloons. He demonstrates an approach to philosophy via examples. The battle is against knee-jerk obedience to something like unnoticed metaphors in ordinary language. But that's one attempt among others to find a theory or main idea in the fog....

Most language is too meaningful, too suggestive, explosively untamed. It needs context, context, context. Philosophy still doesn't know what it means by 'meaning.' But (practical) math requires much less context and yet delivers far more clarity. Math is 'hard' because...most people find it too boring for the necessary concentration ? Or they drag in too much meaning and can't just see it as a calculus? I think it's harder to understand Hegel or Derrida or Wittgenstein than to learn calculus. I don't claim to have mastered any of those thinkers. The dialogue is endless. — jas0n

Mathematics is overrated then, oui? I don't know how to respond to that, math being my hobby and all.

I can say this though: Mathematics helps reduce vagueness (Wittgenstein's family resemblance is ultimately that, oui?).

As for context, I've oft repeated that Wittgenstein hasn't said anything new and I fail to see why all this fuss about his so-called language games. If you disagree you need to tell us how contexts differ from language games. Are you up to the task?

Mathematics is overrated then, oui? I don't know how to respond to that, math being my hobby and all. — Agent Smith

I love math. It's my job. I recommend reading Cantor's work directly, if you are up to the challenge. It's not very formal. I think he trusted that he was working with universal intuitions. His ideas on the order types of sets inspired me to develop a new construction of the real numbers. This just means coming up with a system that satisfies certain criteria. I think of math as (among other things) a sort of 'clay' with which to make 'sculptures.' I've made cryptosystems, new types of neural networks...fun stuff.

I fail to see why all this fuss about his so-called language games. If you disagree you need to tell us how contexts differ from language games. Are you up to the task? — Agent Smith

I don't find the 'language games' spiel all that exciting myself. I do think Wittgenstein is great though. I blend him with Heidegger and Derrida and others. Instead of games, I'd stress how we tend to be imprisoned by metaphors/pictures that constrain our thinking 'invisibly.' These 'pictures' are knee-jerk automatic framings of a situation inherited from the past. Think of culture mistaken for nature, the way we happen to do things mistaken for the way things must be done. If such pictures were 'conscious' or on the 'surface,' it'd be trivial to critique them. The pictures/metaphors/framings I'm talking about dominate/instruct/mislead the critique/discussion of more obvious 'pictures.' Note that I'm emphasizing the metaphoricity of thinking in all of this, flies in bottles, shadow-watchers in caves, Neo in The Matrix,... Some have claimed that our technical/abstract terms are just dead metaphors, their blood having been drained till they are imageless.

Derrida (as you may know) destabilizes this dichotomy. Signifiers refer to still other signifiers (not a signified made of pure thought-stuff that shines for/as the ghost in the machine. — jas0n

That is already contained in Peircean semiotics.

Yes, that is another issue with PoMo. When it was structuralist, it was dyadic Saussurean semiosis it went for and not Peircean triadic semiosis.

But then a closer examination of Saussure says he was actually so much a Saussurean either. He suffered the usual over simplification. :smile:

It’s been a long while since I read any Derrida. And for me, I didn’t feel I was learning anything new at the time. The points were already familiar from social constructionism and Vygotskian psychology.

Well, you have a point although you didn't answer my question which is what's the difference between contexts and language games? It's perhaps being to narrow-minded to say they're the same, but if they're distinct concepts, no one till date has clarified as to how.

As for metaphors, I have nothing against their use - it makes for interesting reading, adds zest to what otherwise would be a dull and boring interaction among ourselves to say nothing of how it makes certain subjects/topics more relatable, oui?

How would you have it? Minus the metaphors would you even grasp the basics (of any subject)? It's hard to say how much of culture is mistaken for nature: people seem to call it as they see it, in my humble opinion. If a known cultural pattern is apposite, I see no harm in using it to make sense of nature. Also, I feel there isn't that much of a difference between culture and nature - each seems to inform the other until they blend to the point of being an inseparable whole/unity - where does culture begin and where does nature end?

Wittgenstein, does he use a lot of metaphors in his work? I haven't been able to get my hands on his later book (Philosophical Analysis or something).

Some have claimed that our technical/abstract terms are just dead metaphors, their blood having been drained till they are imageless. — jas0n

:up: Did we extract the essence therein or was all of it just a waste of our time?