Wittgenstein showed that meaning is largely social and structural. People born blind can know about color. Why ? Because knowledge is essentially inferential, founded on the norms governing justification in “logical space.” — plaque flag
“…normative conception of social practices does not identify a practice by any exhibited regularities among its constituent performances or by their accountability to an independently specifiable rule or norm… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”
Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule. — Joshs
n. We can't completely reject the publicity of concepts without absurdity. But we need not reduce meaning to this structure — plaque flag
I guess what I’m asking is whether something like a public concept has any existence at all outside of the way it is changed ( used) in discursive interchange. To be it must be performed , and in this praxis its sense is freshly, contextually determined. — Joshs
Relatively atemporal knowledge is what philosophers tend to seek, no ? [ And we prefer the totally eternal kind if we can get it. — plaque flag
Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure.Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time. — Joshs
Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.
— Joshs
Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure — plaque flag
It is a radically temporal (or omni-temporal) structure. ‘Only ever’ self-differentiating, like ‘ always already’ in motion, has self-reflexive transformation built into its sense. It is not a view above difference but its performance. — Joshs
That's undeniably slick, but you put the stability of the meaning of your own claim in such jeopardy that it's hard to take you 100% at your word.
If you are making a point about relentless semantic drift, I'm with you, but that drift can't be so rapid that the thesis of this drift is unintelligible. If you deny the ideal communication community completely, with involves relatively stable semantic and inferential norms, you are basically what I'd call a transrational mystic. A fine personal choice perhaps, but at the sacrifice of 'leverage.' — plaque flag
This reminds me of Rorty’s assertion that he never met a radical relativist, that the accusation leveled against postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction is a red herring. — Joshs
When you say semantic drift can’t be too rapid, what is it in the structure of semantics that allows such drift to take place at all? I — Joshs
those discourses which begin from difference within identity — Joshs
Here are some 'irrationalist' offerings from Rorty though. I didn't have a good pdf on hand, so they are chosen from some cheap quote site. But it's the bald pragmatist irrationalism I've been thinking about lately.
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
Truth [is] what is better for us to believe. — plaque flag
In my liberal utopia, this replacement would receive a kind of recognition which it still lacks. That recognition would be part of a general turn against theory and toward narrative. Such a turn would be emblematic of our having given up the attempt to hold all the sides of our life in a single vision, to describe them with a single vocabulary. It would amount to a recognition of what, in Chapter I, I call the "contingency of language" - the fact that there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.
I can add to those quotes sources like Deleuze, who argued that the rational is just a species of irrationality. — Joshs
there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.
He's doing the thing he says he can't do. He's speaking within a finite vocabulary about all possible vocabularies. — plaque flag
I'm taking inspiration from Deleuze in my flat ontology thread. Haven't studied him closely, but I like the immanence theme. — plaque flag
... his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim — Joshs
When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational. — Joshs
from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement. — Joshs
You are only agreeing with me. Transrational mysticism, educated irrationalism, ...
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's irrationalism...ironic-ambiguous at best — plaque flag
.Does he get around to critiquing other superstitions like immanence ? — plaque flag
:up:The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent. — Joshs
You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary — Joshs
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComActA theory of rationality thus attempts to reconstruct the practical knowledge necessary for being a knowledgeable social actor among other knowledgeable social actors.
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From a social-scientific point of view, language is a medium for coordinating action, although not the only such medium. The fundamental form of coordination through language, according to Habermas, requires speakers to adopt a practical stance oriented toward “reaching understanding,” which he regards as the “inherent telos” of speech.
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Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
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According to the core principle of his pragmatic theory of meaning, “we understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance—in short, when we know what makes it acceptable” (1998b, 232). With this principle, Habermas ties the meaning of speech acts to the practice of reason giving: speech acts inherently involve claims that are in need of reasons—claims that are open to both criticism and justification. In our everyday speech (and in much of our action), speakers tacitly commit themselves to explaining and justifying themselves, if necessary. To understand what one is doing in making a speech act, therefore, one must have some sense of the appropriate response that would justify one's speech act, were one challenged to do so.
A speech act succeeds in reaching understanding when the hearer takes up “an affirmative position” toward the claim made by the speaker (TCA 1: 95–97; 282; 297). In doing so, the hearer presumes that the claims in the speech act could be supported by good reasons (even if she has not asked for them). When the offer made by the speaker fails to receive uptake, speaker and hearer may shift reflexive levels, from ordinary speech to “discourse”—processes of argumentation and dialogue in which the claims implicit in the speech act are tested for their rational justifiability as true, correct or authentic.
He critiques the superstition in religion. — Joshs
To me the essential difference between religion and philosophy is the rationality I specified a moment ago. Both Popper and Kojeve talk of a second-order critical-synthetic metamyth, which is basically that infinite framework of the meta-authority of reason itself. Reason is god. I mean the 'rational' human community recognizes no higher authority beyond or above itself. — plaque flag
Would you agree that a difference between Kuhn on the one hand, and Popper and Habermas on the other, is that for Kuhn the transition between paradigms is not rational, whereas for the latter a meta-rational framework encompasses such transitions? — Joshs
Does Husserl’s categorial intuition help us ? Do we just see the plums in the icebox --and 'see' this seeing ?. The inferentialist (structuralist) insight is powerful, but is it not finally grounded in the individual subject’s immersion in the (our) sensual world which is categorically structured ? Does it not otherwise 'float' without its deepest [non-inferential ] 'meaning.' — plaque flag
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