Thanks. It's a clever reworking of the song and lacks the breezy piety of the original. I prefer this, if we must have an anthem:

f

I have always hated Imagine - its been used as a secular hymn for decades here in Australia and its mawkish tone suits this era where sentimentality dominates. Religion hasn't had much of a role in public life here since the 1960's, but it had a small revival of sorts a few years ago with a stunted, evangelical, Trump-lite Prime Minister (2018-22). He turned out to be one of this country's most ethically compromised and unpopular leaders. I think many people today more correctly associate religion with coercion, poor moral choices and shifty politics. — Tom Storm

Better, though, than that ode to aggression, The Star Spangled Banner: the music was lifted from a once a popular drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydAIdVKv84g


But on the matter of religion, not to forget that religion, beneath the robes of pomp and pretense, is metaphysics, and metaphysics is not nothing.

Everything is metaphysics - so it's quite safe to ignore the subject and just go about your business - work, shopping, taking the kids to school, paying one's mortgage, mowing the lawn. :wink:

One has to actually climb Wittgenstein's ladder out, and this takes a working through the Tractatus, and implicitly attending there are Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer....and not to forget, a suicidal drive to understand the world. To see things with genuine clarity, one simply has to be a bit insane, for the world is NOT, as the world, something that conforms the ready-mades of our understanding.

↪fdrake
Banno may or may not be emotionally attached to naive realism and uses his intellect to find ways to ignore challenges to it and deny others the right to entertain those challenges. His strategy is to somehow use language as a foundation while simultaneously denying that foundationalism of any kind is appropriate. Thus he can't really allow any ineffable components because that screws with his foundation.

Josh's foundation is some sort of ever evolving change. Where Banno abhors privacy in a sort of neurotic way, Josh abhors stasis. And this is the central conflict. Josh needs part of the world to always be slightly out of reach, unknown, unexplained, etc. He needs an open window for his foundation of Becoming, so he's fond of the ineffable. — frank

I think I like this characterization of my position. But as regards Banno, I would ask you if you think that his thinking is significantly removed from the vicinity of Davidson and Anscombe, who he admires, and who are certainly not naive realists.

I have a few more things to say about the ineffable.
I entered into this conversation with a critique of formal logic that focuses on its inability to indicate in its terms what you call the becoming of sense. I’d like to expand on that a bit. In the early 1960’s Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In it he characterized the participants in competing scientific paradigmatic communities as living in different , incommensurable worlds. He believed that this incommensurability was bridgeable, though, due to the fact that there was enough commonality in the larger experience of various empirical communities to allow for a basis of translation of empirical concepts. Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, arguing that it isn’t just scientific paradigms narrowly construed that separates members of empirical communities , but larger cultural worldviews.
Furthermore, the shifting foundation of the meaning of scientific ( and cultural) concepts doesn’t only take place during scientific revolutions , but also during periods of what Kuhn called normal science. We can find even more powerful ways of thinking about the role of transformation of sense in everyday discourse in writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Rorty.
It is no coincidence that central to the work of all these thinkers is a critique of propositional logic.

The assumption they all share is that the transformation
in the meaning of language concepts that Kuhn associated with scientific revolutions is already at work in the most basic uses of everyday language.
Thus, even predicational logic must in some way be expressing more than what it is commonly assumed to be expressing (the novel arrangement of extant concepts).

Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, only concepts that, in their incorporation into a syllogism as subject, predicate or related element, arrive as already changed in their sense by the situational context of the structure of the syllogism. As Wittgenstein said, a word only exists in its actual use. That does not mean that a situational use of a word links up to an extant category stored in individual or social memory. It means that the category doesn’t have an existence outside of the situational use of the word, that there are in fact no extant categories.

In sum, word use is creation, pure and simple, and no component of a logical proposition involves the recycling of an extant meaning. My understanding of ineffability has to do with this impossibility of recycling, the fact that we can’t return to a prior sense of a meaning, there is no repetition of an identity. So what is slightly out of reach isnt the future of language but its past. Language is itself ineffable in the sense that to repeat, represent and recognize is to transform. Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding.







I

To see things with genuine clarity, one simply has to be a bit insane, for the world is NOT, as the world, something that conforms the ready-mades of our understanding. — Constance

This may well be accurate. But there's an assumption that seeing the world with clarity matters. What's the goal? You've already hinted that madness could await.

This may well be accurate. But there's an assumption that seeing the world with clarity matters. What's the goal? You've already hinted that madness awaits. — Tom Storm

Well, isn't that why they call the whole affair ineffable? Ineffability is entirely in the abstract until it is realized that it literally saturates our knowledge claims and therefore living itself.

his thinking is significantly removed from the vicinity of Davidson and Anscombe — Joshs

Oh, I hope so.

Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, — Joshs

Without checking, I have a recollection of his backing away a little bit from incommensurability, in Science in a free society, in response to folk pointing out that we do still understand Aristotle and Newton. After Davidson in On the very idea..., any completely incommensurable worldview could not be recognised as a world view.

I also mentioned earlier, also after Davidson, the recursive aspect of language, that it builds an unlimited number of sentences from a finite vocabulary. That this is what makes it learnable and useable.

If every new use of a word is an original creation, language would be neither usable nor learnable. It would be mere babble, a different word each time.

Rather, as Davidson suggests in derangement of epitaphs, novel use is built on convention.

Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, and we would do well to drop the notion of concept - a hangover from considerations of private language - and instead look to use.

Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, and we would do well to drop the notion of concept - a hangover from considerations of private language - and instead look to use. — Banno

Is it also a hangover from Platonism?

Indeed, it may be - something for another PhD, this time in the archaeology of ideas.

Noted with interest your chat with , who seems to not have noticed that Wittgenstein wrote stuff after 1920.

~~

Elsewhere he says different things. I'm not interested in these when the OP is "The ineffable".

Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding. — Joshs

Am I right in thinking that you're drawing really heavily from Derrida for this account?

But as regards Banno, I would ask you if you think that his thinking is significantly removed from the vicinity of Davidson and Anscombe, who he admires, and who are certainly not naive realists. — Joshs

I don't know. Probably doesn't matter.

So my question isn't so lazy @Joshs-

I entered into this conversation with a critique of formal logic that focuses on its inability to indicate in its terms what you call the becoming of sense. I’d like to expand on that a bit. In the early 1960’s Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In it he characterized the participants in competing scientific paradigmatic communities as living in different , incommensurable worlds. He believed that this incommensurability was bridgeable, though, due to the fact that there was enough commonality in the larger experience of various empirical communities to allow for a basis of translation of empirical concepts. Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, arguing that it isn’t just scientific paradigms narrowly construed that separates members of empirical communities , but larger cultural worldviews.
Furthermore, the shifting foundation of the meaning of scientific ( and cultural) concepts doesn’t only take place during scientific revolutions , but also during periods of what Kuhn called normal science. We can find even more powerful ways of thinking about the role of transformation of sense in everyday discourse in writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Rorty.
It is no coincidence that central to the work of all these thinkers is a critique of propositional logic. — Joshs

If I read right you're using scientific paradigms and their broader cultural conditions as examples of relatively demarcated systems of interpreting the world. They had fundamentally different ways of doing things in them, of making sense of the world.

That's analogised to those thinkers, who all had a criticism about the given-ness of the world in propositional form.

( 1 ) later Wittgenstein in rejecting "the picture of the world" contained in the logical form of propositions
( 2 ) Heidegger's criticism of propositional logic as derivative of more fundamental capacity of interpreting the world which already operates within the use of propositional logic and extensional understandings of meaning
( 3 ) Deleuze highlighting propositions can only be expressed in other propositions and thus can't explain the genesis of sense
( 4 ) Rorty's criticisms of representation - showing that we shouldn't think of expression as a representational mirror of the world.

And I don't know anything about the Foucault one!

The theme those accounts seem to have in common is that in order to give a good account of sense, you need to give an account of the genesis of sense. Requiring that sense be articulated in terms of propositional forms stop that question being asked despite needing the question to be answered in one way. This is circular, we can't speak about that which cannot be rendered in propositional form, because propositional form is all that can be stated.

Employing the concept of the pre-predicative; meanings, interpretations and concepts which arise in tandem with but not coextensively with that which can be put in propositional form is used to break out of the circle. The pre-predicative also forms (at least) part of the conditions of possibility of propositional form using expressions.

The use of propositional form as the vehicle of sense makes use of the given-ness of the interpretations which parse the world into propositional form; which is the interpretive structure of the predicative. That which we do to interpret the world into familiar objects and relations to parse it into statements of the form "x is P" are the interpretive activities which generate the predicative; the pre-predicative. All of that work is treated as completed and presently available, a given, when fleshing out sense in terms of articulated propositions. You thus need to look at the prepredicative to get at the genesis of sense, and away from givenness.

An account of the genesis of sense fills the hole created by successfully breaking the circle with a criticism of the given (insofar as it's propositional).

Then the account of ineffability you've given locates the ineffable precisely in the genesis of sense. Why?

In sum, word use is creation, pure and simple, and no component of a logical proposition involves the recycling of an extant meaning. My understanding of ineffability has to do with this impossibility of recycling, the fact that we can’t return to a prior sense of a meaning, there is no repetition of an identity. So what is slightly out of reach isnt the future of language but its past. Language is itself ineffable in the sense that to repeat, represent and recognize is to transform. Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding. — Joshs

In order for an expression to work, what is expressed must be sufficiently stable. But that stability has to come from the coordination of interpretive acts - which may later coalesce into articulable propositions. Thus there is necessary instability in what is expressed, otherwise nothing could be stably expressed at all. Coordination of speech acts over time aligns itself with repetition - iterability and the necessary publicisability of sense. For something to be senseful it has to be repeatable in a communal fashion (beetle in a box comes in here too).

Per the emphasis on the prepredicative genesis of sense, what is unstable isn't just the idiosyncrasies in the expression of propositions, like "I like eggs the most foodwise" vs "eggs are my favourite food", they're rooted in the interpretive practices which generate sense to begin with. Furthermore, instead of imagining language as a flat field in which statements linger, focussing on the generation of sense and its relationship to repetition means you have to think of statements dynamically - expression is unstable in time. Today's "Good morning" is not yesterday's "good morning". What's stable in them is a coordination of speech acts, but that leaves unsaid the contextual factors of each speech act that render it utterly singular - expressions always in a unique context.

The Derrida I saw in this was taking the singular and showing that it was required in establishing the iterable. That a wish of good morning is the same as no other, always, provides the contextualised acts (history) which is used in solidifying sense through repetition, and it could be no other way. It looked like the Derrida trick of taking a dyad where one term was suppressed, then showing it was actually at the centre of the dominant one as ground/condition of possibility. In this case expression/ineffability as dominant/suppressed. It reads as a gesture toward a deconstructive argument.

Fuck, thanks, that's magnificent; I haven't heard it before. Like the Perfect Circle 'Imagine' it's melancholy (and anthems should be melancholy) but musically there is no comparison.

An account of the genesis of sense fills the hole created by successfully breaking the circle with a criticism of the given (insofar as it's propositional).

Then the account of ineffability you've given locates the ineffable precisely in the genesis of sense. Why? — fdrake

An account of the genesis of sense cannot be given, precisely because it assumes what it purports to explain. In other words no account can get outside of sense in order to explain it, and gaining a perspective form outside in order to gain a comprehensive view is just what is expected of giving an account of the genesis of sense.

Sense is dualistic, and experience is non-dualistic. Sense finds its genesis in experience, but any account of that can only be in dualistic terms; trying to give an account of that is like chasing a mirage.

Hence we are faced with ineffability.

:up:

An account of the genesis of sense cannot be given, precisely because it assumes what it purports to explain. In other words no account can get outside of sense in order to explain it, and gaining a perspective form outside in order to gain a comprehensive view is just what is expected of giving an account of the genesis of sense. — Janus

I don't buy that argument.

( 1 ) In order to give an account of X, we need to obtain a perspective outside of X.
( 2 ) Gaining a perspective outside of X presumes presupposing a perspective within X.

If it's taken literally, it applies to any concept which behaves like articulation or one of its conditions of possibility.

In order to give an account of language, we need to get outside of language.
In order to give an account of space, we need to get outside of space.
In order to give an account of time, we need to get outside of time.
Same with history, culture... All those things.

Yet it seems there are accounts of those things which are successful, and even methodological discussions in each type of study. So there's a salient distinction somewhere which renders those discussions meaningful. I believe it goes as follows.

Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...

It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments!

Yet it seems there are accounts of those things which are successful, and even methodological discussions in each type of study. So there's a salient distinction somewhere which renders those discussions meaningful. — fdrake

Yes, but I didn't say no account of things can be given. Remember you were asking about an account, not just of sense, but of the genesis of sense.

Employing the concept of the pre-predicative; meanings, interpretations and concepts which arise in tandem with but not coextensively with that which can be put in propositional form is used to break out of the circle. The pre-predicative also forms (at least) part of the conditions of possibility of propositional form using expressions. — fdrake

There's the constant tendency to talk about the mooted pre-predicative, and as soon as one does one has left it and moved to the predicative.

If what is meant by "pre-predicative" is showing and doing, then what you say might work. But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts.

(, this is the continuation after the Tractatus)

Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...

It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments! — fdrake

Yes, you can articulate the involvement, but only within the involvement. Outside the involvement, there is no X. This is why familiar models fail to grasp the issue.

If what is meant by "pre-predicative" is showing and doing, then what you say might work. But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts. — Banno

What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.

And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".

Sans the "mysterious and impossible", how does any of this contrast with what I said?

There's the constant tendency to talk about the mooted pre-predicative, and as soon as one does one has left it and moved to the predicative. — Banno

Point needs arguing rather than asserting!

But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts. — Banno

It is the ineffability in question. You say showing and doing are not ineffable, but is what is shown and done exhaustively effable? This was the point: no.

Point needs arguing — fdrake

...we can't speak about that which cannot be rendered in propositional form, because propositional form is all that can be stated. — fdrake

So what is it you can't say, show or do?

Was a summary of your point, rather than an argument for it. The premise and the conclusion are actually the same thing!

The premise and the conclusion are actually the same thing! — fdrake

...the very definition of a valid argument! :wink: