:chin:

Sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. I'll try to retrace and see where I went wrong.

art continues to perform magic but liberated from the need to claim that there are supernatural entities or that it has the power to influence nature and events. — Jamal

My reaction is that poets and artists maybe pull the strings in the long run. Even anemic abstract ideologies are still just magical enough to motivate. Art and poetry speak to entire visceral human being.

There are no spirits and demons. — Jamal

I wonder how exactly less sophisticated minds understand them to exist. Taken as metaphors or sigils or as tribal or family avatars to lived toward, they seem real enough. We talk of team spirit, being inspired. I do understand that asking a god to make it rain is something on the literal side (farther from art in Adorno's sense).

I’m not opposed to your sagacious and fascinating thoughts, but I wasn’t really endorsing Teddy’s definition so much as interpreting it to demonstrate how the right kind of definition can work philosophically.

Ah, so I got caught up on a tangent. Sorry 'bout that !

No worries, feel free to follow it wherever it goes. It’s actually quite relevant to my previous discussion called “Magical powers”, so it’s not that I don’t find it interesting.

Thanks for the kind words !

Hegelian dialectics is the best philosophy for explicating the truth of concepts. — Jamal

it’s in the use of a term that we can understand the meaning of concepts, not primarily by definitions — Jamal

I picked up (probably from Kaufman's translation of the famous Hegel preface) that use/meaning shifts within the dialectic / conversation. One cannot sum up a conversation. One cannot summarize Hegel or Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Adorno. One has to live in the world of an essentially historical conversation to follow the shifts in use-meaning. So one can't walk away with a pocket of theorems in a universal neutral language. Instead one just has more skill, the ability to jump back into that world, maybe with a fellow traveler who's also been there, but not in exactly the same way.

now we bring in Hegel — plaque flag

Only if you follow the recent obsession with centenarian German existentialism. I had Davidson's more recent jokes in mind.

Another reason definitions have no place in philosophy is that choosing to adhere or flout a definition is a part of the very philosophical discussion...

Recursive how? — Jamal

Like that, for a start. Setting out a definition in order to ground an argument is already taking a stance, which may itself be brought into question.

Moreover, we might think in terms of Searle's status functions and institutional facts. Language builds on itself, so that saying it is so makes it so, or counts as its being so.

Like that, for a start. Setting out a definition in order to ground an argument is already taking a stance, which may itself be brought into question.

Moreover, we might think in terms of Searle's status functions and institutional facts. Language builds on itself, so that saying it is so makes it so, or counts as its being so. — Banno

I'm afraid I'm going to have to entirely agree. Sorry.

That sort of attitude is just not going to get your thread past eight pages.

I could say that meaning is pointing if that would help?

Pointing is just a particular kind of handwaving — unless it means something, of course. Then it is sign language.

apparently:

Moreover, we might think in terms of Searle's status functions and institutional facts. Language builds on itself, so that saying it is so makes it so, or counts as its being so. — Banno

Sounds like Brandom talking about Hegel. So it's back to those pesky Germans. [ Of course it doesn't really matter where the good ideas come from. ]

That sort of attitude is just not going to get your thread past eight pages. — Banno

I could say that meaning is pointing if that would help? — Jamal

Have you tried obviously polemic political diatribes? Works for me.

Language builds on itself, so that saying it is so makes it so, or counts as its being so. — Banno

I'll have a quibble that might yield an extra page...

Merely saying it is so is not enough, we have to agree (at least some sub-community do), so a definition can be read as an argument that we ought to agree. There are at least some reasons that can be brought to bear. If I say "we ought not use 'jabberwocky' to describe both vases and cups, it's confusing" I have at least made a rational argument using some reasonable principle.

Language is a behaviour like any other and so I think no less amenable to arguments about proper comportment.

I mean it literally. You cast the spell: “ I name this ship the SS Quagmire”; and the world is changed!

all the proper observances must be met for the incantation to work. Sure.

Good point, but it’s a bit like referring to communism or militant atheism as religions. Naming a ship and declaring a meeting adjourned can be distinguished from magic incantations and rituals, and not only by the fact that they’re separate instances of the same thing.

so I must be one of the untrue Scotsmen who do not understand art. Teach me; how else can naming a ship be distinguished from magic, other than by their being seperate instances of the same thing?

I suspect Adorno wants to grant a special status to art that I might deny.

Teach me; how else can naming a ship be distinguished from magic, other than by their being seperate instances of the same thing? — Banno

Very well, Socrates, I’ll play along. I’m not saying it has sharper boundaries than the notion of a game, so I’m not saying that Adorno’s definition of art requires a definition of magic, but I can say that magic, unlike naming a ship, involves the belief in supernatural entities such as spirits and demons that inhabit the things of nature, and that magic spells are often effected by means of symbolic objects made to resemble or represent these things or their spirits and demons.

But…

I suspect Adorno wants to grant a special status to art that I might deny. — Banno

I suspect this is true, even though his definition does not rule out the idea that naming a ship is a kind of magic.

doesn’t adjourning a meeting require spirits and Demons, or at least ghosts in the machine? It’s not like turning off a tap; nothing physical happens - not until folk get up to leave, but thats the consequence of the incantation, not the implementation.

But:

Adjourning a meeting is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

This doesn’t work. Adjourning a meeting was never involved in spiritual practices.

Adjourning a meeting was never involved in spiritual practices. — Jamal

That was hasty of me. Does this kill my point?

Not really. Adjourning a meeting was never the means by which the favour of benign spirits and the protection from malign ones was effected.

good point. So if we are to get to page five I’ll either have to say that art was never spiritual or that adjourning a meeting is a lie.

So I’ll go for the latter. But modify it slightly to say that performatives are not truth-functional, they are not either true nor false - much like art. Semi-pointless troublemaking, of course.

Beliefs are truth-functional though, and art in the service of false beliefs is thereby a lie.

Like that, for a start. Setting out a definition in order to ground an argument is already taking a stance, which may itself be brought into question. — Banno

Yes. We had this discussion once, at least once, when you tried to shanghai one of my threads. Sometimes, often, I want to examine the substance and details of a particular position. Getting into arguments about the meaning of words can make that impossible. Making every discussion a free-for-all makes it so you can't dig deeply into anything. That happens every day here on the forum. That's why, for most discussions, laying out definitions at the beginning is important.

Sometimes, often, I want to examine the substance and details of a particular position. Getting into arguments about the meaning of words can make that impossible — T Clark

Getting into arguments about the meaning of words is examining the substance and details of a particular position.

Beliefs are truth-functional though, and art in the service of false beliefs is thereby a lie. — Jamal

It's more like one of the the hoi polloi, not the chair, attempting to adjourn the meeting. They can say the words but the words are, so to speak, a lie.

I had an old American Heritage Dictionary. In the the front there were two essays giving opposing views of what a dictionary is.

The first was by William F. Buckle and he said dictionaries set out proper language use. He emphasized that they get credentialed experts to write dictionaries so that the poor stupid people will know how to comport themselves properly.

The other essay said a dictionary is where words go to die. They don't tell you how words are used now, but rather how they were used last year. It's the poor crazy street people making up new words out of their schizophrenic day dreams who give life to language.

Those are paraphrases, anyway. Thoughts?

Nice.

I don't see that these two are not incompatible.

Of course, the other way to write a dictionary is on historical principles; as an account of the development of the language over time.

But it's a big dictionary.