I even understand what that mod was looking for (homophobia), i just think he was mistaken about finding it. — DingoJones

Homophobia is a pc word. Why? Because It was created after standards of correctness emerged on the cultural scene following upon an evolution of thinking about gender, an evolution in which some segments of culture have participated more than others. Like all such standards of correctness, whether it is recognized as appropriate or censorious depends on where on that spectrum of development one finds oneself.

I’m not complaining. I understand that lines have to be drawn for convenience sake. I’m just reminding of their arbitrary nature. Who’s in and who’s out depends on who’s got the power.

Personally, I’d prefer the mods banned such speech because it doesn’t lead to philosophically interesting conversation, rather than using a moralistic rationale.

Is being French a disability? — Baden

If it isnt I’m going to have to return my car placard.

I think this has been a rather robust discussion of the ethics surrounding the use of the word ‘defect’ with regard to gender (thanks to your efforts). Free speech somehow has a way of wriggling its way around pc.

I said above what I'm saying, no need to repeat it. — Raul

Let’s look at the quote again.

This existential "solip­sism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ — Joshs

Are you seeing the rhetorical move Heidegger is making? He does this often. When he wants us to realize that he is saying the complete opposite of what we might be inclined to think he is saying , he will warn us that what ever concept he is introducing to us ‘ is so far
from’ our assumption of it that it has the opposite effect of what we think. In this instance, lest we think that Dasein is an isolated subject-thing split off from the world , he tells us that, on the contrary, individuated Dasein is fundamentally as itself
only when it is outside of itself in the world.’ Itself before itself ‘ MEANS in the world , because self for Heidegger IS interaction.

once you have finished reading and studying him you are left with a great and enjoyable intellectual experience, but nothing else, very modest epistemological value. — Raul

No wonder, you seemed to have missed the central
idea of Being and Time.

"transposing an isolated subject-thing", then it says "itself before itself" — Raul

Are you saying that you interpret Heidegger as believing in a notion of self as an isolated subject-thing?

The anxiety is triggered when one finds oneself alone drowning within this sweet infinite ocean, with no worldly supports for one’s existence. Dasein encounters then itself as an individual, ultimately alone. In Heidegger’s words: “Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’” — Raul

Ah, but don’t forget the paradoxical nature of individuation for Heidegger. Look at the rest of the paragraph you quotes from:


“ For as attune­ment, anxiousness is a fundamental mode of being-in-the-world. The existential identity of disclosing and what is disclosed so that in what is disclosed the world is disclosed as world, as being-in, individualized, pure, thrown poten­tiality for being, makes it clear that with the phenomenon of Angst a distinctive kind of attunement has become the theme of our interpretation. Angst individ­ualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solip­sism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“

So in relation to the OP’s focus on aloneness as being cut off from others, this is the opposite
of what Heidegger is saying. The primary quality of
authentic anxiety is not isolation, but in the contrary, uncanniness, the feeling of not being at home with oneself because one is already out in the world.
Let me give an example:

Two people are talking together. One may be feeling alienated by the encounter, while the other may feel a strong sense of kinship and togetherness with the first person. Heidegger would say the first person’s alienation is a deprivation mode of being-with.
So each Dasein has individualized the encounter between them , but for both interaction and being-with is pre-supposed.

how can I know that though? I have no way to confirm any of what you are saying, that others feel what I feel or even feel to begin with. — Darkneos

We hypothesize such things and see if the resulting anticipations bear fruit. We know how we are likely to act when we ‘feel’ any particularity way , and on that basis we form expectations of others whose behavior from our vantage seems to be similar to ours when we are feeling a certain way. We often have to hypothesize about our own feelings too. (was I angry or confused?)

Point-of-view not having itself in view thus needing somehow something to bring it into view, lest it be essentially unconscious. And, I'm a fan of Stambough's translation, you? — tim wood

That sounds reasonable to me. I agree about Stambough vs. Macquarie. I don’t know how they got ‘state of mind’ from Befindlichkeit

Which being-with is in my reading a part of the analysis of in-authentic being. But I appreciate and accept as corrective being-alone as a deficient form of being-with - if one couldn't be-with, then how could one be-alone?

Where I get "aloneness" is from Heidegger's observation that we all die our own deaths - and no one else's, and no one else ours - this being for H a window into the possibility of authentic being. — tim wood

But there is also an authentic being-with.

“If the being of everyday being-with-one-another, which seems onto­ logically to approach pure objective presence, is really fundamentally different from that kind of presence, still less can the being of the authen­tic self be understood as objective presence. Authentic being oneself is not based on an exceptional state of the subject, a state detached from the they, but is an existentiell modification of the they as an essential existential.”

But then again, as you say, there is one’s ownmost possibilities, which he formulates as being toward death.
The way I read this is, the self for Heidegger is an in-between, not a present subject facing separate objects but fundamental interaction. As inauthentic interaction Dasein is flattened into the normativity of Das Man. As authentic interaction, Dasein is its ‘point of view’.

Heidegger argued we're essentially alone, spending our time trying to escape it. — tim wood

I wouldn’t quite interpret the following from Being and Time as arguing that we are essentially alone. Rather,being alone is a form of Being-with.

“Being-with existentially determines Da-sein even when an other is not factically present and perceived. The being-alone of Da-sein, too, is being-with in the world. The other can be lacking only in and for a being­
with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, its possibility is a proof for the latter. On the other hand, factical being alone is not changed by the fact that a second copy of a human being is "next to" me, or per­
haps ten human beings. Even when these and still more are objectively present, Da-sein can be alone. Thus, being-with and the facticity of being­ with-one-another are not based on the fact that several "subjects" are
physically there together. Being alone "among" many, however, does not mean with respect to the being of others that they are simply objectively present. Even in being "among them," they are there with. Their Mitda-sein
is encountered in the mode of indifference and being alien. Lacking and "being away" are modes of Mitda-sein and are possible only because Da-sein as being-with lets the Da-sein of others be encountered in its world.”

Cavell does account for the connection (I wouldn't call it logical more then inevitable, or sliding down a slippery slope) between the desire for certainty and removing the human.

Witt separately refers to a picture (like a framework) but it is not one people "believe" in. It is forced on them by their desire for certainty. — Antony Nickles

Are there other ways that frameworks get forced on people? If there is a desire for certainty, is this universal , or it it possible some people don’t have this desire for certainty? And if such people exist , and have existed in the past, is it possible that such persons scattered about history have not been forced into the framework Witt is referring to? In other words, due to their imperviousness to the drive for certainty, is it possible such persons in previous eras of history , say during Descartes era, were not motivated to think outside of language games?

“Not everything is done with my intention or reasons--the effect of what I say is not causally related; I may choose my words, but then they are in the world, subject to the criteria or our concepts, even though I remain answerable for them. “

That’s right, not everything is done with my intentions. Take perception for instance. I can choose to look at an object with the expectation of seeing a particular pattern, but what I end up seeing will be a function both of what answers to my expectations in the world, by validating or surprising them , and the background of my expectations. This background constrains what counts as validating or surprising, and even determines what appears at all.

The background that accompanies my perceptions places limits on what I can see and how I can see it., apart from my desires ( for certainty or anything else) In a similar way , my background of pre-conceptions places limits on what I can understand as scientifically or morally true and how I can understand it. What Witt calls a picture ( framework) is forced on me the way that the pattern I recognize in a perceptual image is forced on me. If I do not know Chinese and have never seen a Chinese character, nothing in the changes in clarity or focus of a Chinese visual character presented to me will be recognized by me as an item of language rather than a pattern of squiggly lines. Similarly , if I am a Cartesian philosopher, I can be immersed in intense conversation with a community of Wittgensteinians and still not recognize ‘language game’ or ‘picture theory ‘ any differently than Mmw and metaphysical undercover do after many exchanges with you. That is, such notions will be forced into what my Cartesian pre-conceptions impose on them.

“Witt is doing more than changing the subject; he is hoping you see what you desired of the picture, and then to turn around and see a better way.”

What you desired of the picture was comparable to what you desired of the Chinese character and what you desired of the scientific worldview. In all cases, the desire was as much determined by the pre-conditions for the seeing of the picture, character and worldview as it was determining of them. The desire was as much product as cause. One could say that the genesis of the picture framework gives birth to a particular notion of certainty that then becomes desired. Likewise , Your desire for speaking within language games has its genesis in your absorption of Witt’s idea of the language game. It gave rise to your particular understanding of desire and of your formulation of ‘desire for certainty’.

But what is also implied in the notion of desire that you are using is the tacit assumption of a meta-context(what Putnam would call realism with a human face) that you think will allow the possibility in certain circumstances of a common criterion to be applied to desire as it is experienced by a Cartesian and as Witt experiences it. But they belong to different worlds.

To say Witt is corrective is not to say he is convincing people to "now believe" in language games. He is doing more than changing the subject; he is hoping you see what you desired of the picture, and then to turn around and see a better way (method) to see our actual desires. — Antony Nickles

What does it mean to see a better way? If you’ve read Kuhn, you know that embracing a ‘better’ scientific theory always implies a change of subject.
A new theory can’t be understood as better within the terms of the prior theory because it has no existence within the terms of the prior theory and this includes its methods, its assumptions , its criteria of validity, etc.

What would it mean to do ‘more’ than change the subject? Changing the subject, that is, qualitatively , ‘ revilutionarily’ transforming the terms of a science , is the most profound way of achieving a better scientific theory.

I think you, Austin and Cavell are holding onto a version of realism along with Putnam, who has nothing but praise for Cavell, and this puts you at odds with Rorty and a thoroughgoing postmodernism.

“While Rorty claims that his view is "almost, but not quite, the same as....Putnam's] "internalist conception of philosophy" (1984b, p. T), Putnam is uncomfortable with this association. Putnam claims to be preserving the realist spirit but he takes Rorty to be "rejecting the in- tuitions that underlie every kind of realism (and not just metaphysical realism)" (1988a, p. 16). Putnam views Rorty's pragmatism as a self-refuting relativism driven by a deep irrationalism that casts doubt on the very possi- bility of thought.”(Paul Forster)

Every thought has a feeling which is either painful or pleasurable - this has to be accounted for in any understanding. — Pop

Does this make you feel better?


“...emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options. Damasio's (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus “mark” those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002)

I think there is a general consensus on the broad brush strokes shape of a scientific understanding of reality, on what scientific methods are, and on the utility of technology. — counterpunch

These are not questions within science, they are questions of philosophy of science, and there is absolutely no consensus on these issues.Not to mention the fact that whatever local consensus there has been within regions of scientific practice has undergone significant change over the past 500 years concerning the nature of reality, on what scientific methods are, and on the utility of technology.

What you’re on about isnt science, it’s scientism, the elevation of one view of science over all others as the ‘one true way’ science is, and the elevation of science above all other human endeavors as having a special access to truth.

"For Piaget, emotion is the motivating force of action emanating from outside the individual in the form of sensations emitted by objects. ... — Pop

This is an awful misreading of Piaget. I highly recommend Mischel’s Cognitive Conflict and the Motivation of Thought.

“...there are good reasons for holding that Piaget does not really regard affects, qua psychological phenomena, as "energizers of behavior in any literal, physiological sense For one thing, he insists that "consciousness seen as energy seems to us a fallacious metaphor" (Piaget, 1954b, p. 142). Since afiects , as psychological phenomena, fall under what Piaget calls the "point of view of conscious-ness," it would be "fallacious" to identify them with the energies that activate the organism. Further, Piaget repeatedly maintains that "compre- hension is no more the cause of emotion than emotion is the cause of comprehension (23), because it simply makes no sense to ask whether affective developments cause cognitive developments, or conversely (Piaget, 1954a, pp. 56, 150). Since affect and cognition are correlative aspects of one and the same psyehological phenomenon, the Relation between them is not an external causal relation between separately identifiable entities. Finally, when Piaget deals with needs, interest, and other affects, he explicitly rules out consideration of their physiologicul conditions (Piaget, 1954a, p. 30) and focuses instead on their "functional Significance. " And "from such a functional point of view, need is essentially an awareness of momentary disequilibrium, and the satisfaction of need, that is , awareness of re-equilibration.” (Theodore Mischel).

What would Piaget think of love? My guess is he would say that love is a form of interest.

speed is clearly not a problem for the neuromorphic processor in our heads, which uses pretty much exactly the same system. — Mick Wright

Neuromorphic processors don’t mirror human perceptual processes , according to the current psychological theories of perception , which model perception as ecologically embodied and action based. Neuromorphic processors mirror the way psychologists thought about perception 40 years ago, as ecologically neutral representations. This point isn’t relevant to the rest of your post , which deals with the ethical ramifications of machines that co-opt more and more of what used to constitute human livelihoods.

https://towardsdatascience.com/we-need-to-rethink-convolutional-neural-networks-ccad1ba5dc1c?gi=7a390fedc145

So let us imagine a political party that recognises science as truth - let's call it 'The Science Party'. Let us further imagine, there's such discontent with politics as usual that "Sci-Pol" immediately took half the seats in Parliament - and formed a government. The question is this:

Who sits opposite and why? — counterpunch

You wouldn't need an opposition. While there is general consensus among natural scientists concerning the facts of their field, there is no such agreement over the uses of science. One could argue that this is the domain of the social sciences , but then there as many opposing camps here as there are in the political domain. Good luck getting anthropologists, economists, political scientists and psychologists to agree on anything.

It was kind of a test of your pleasure-pain model. Piaget would answer that motivation and cognitive structures are indissociable. Pleasure-pain no more ‘drives’ cognition than cognition drives pleasure-pain.

“ The dichotomy usually envisioned between intelligence and affectivity is based on the idea that these two aspects of behavior are distinct but analogous mental faculties acting on each other. We reject this conception because, in our view, it creates false problems. It is convenient, but it does not correspond to reality. Behavior cannot be classifed under affective and cognitive rubrics. If a distinction must be made, and it appears one should, it would be more accurate to make it between behaviors related to objects and behaviors related to people.”

Interpersonal love is the feeling that results from the experience of being willingly bonded to someone as a result of the pleasure they give you — Pop

Could the motivational system be reengineered so that social bonding no longer produced pleasure but pain instead? under that circumstance, would there be no such thing as interpersonal love?

The fact that you’re forgetting what you read is your brain telling you that it isn’t relevant enough to for you to retain. A basic tenet of memory is that the more exciting and pertinent to what matters you in your life something is, the more effectively you will remember it. So start with your strongest interest in philosophy , find books or articles or summaries that speak to that interest, and work your way outward from there. Don’t worry about skipping portions of books. Do what whatever you have to do to sustain maximum interest and enjoyment. That will do wonders for your memory.

is capitalism about to f — Kenosha Kid

Here’s my take:
In the past , growing populations were
am indication of prosperity and scientific, technological and economic progress. I think it is the reverse now. The most educated and prosperous a society is, the more likely it is to be experiencing shrinking birth rates.
Among other things, robotization is a cause of this trend , which I think will only accelerate. I also think that, as a reflection of choices people make for their own benefit , it will benefit capitalist economies. The current panic-mongering among economist over
population decline is the result of relying on old and outdated models to understand the relationship between economic growth and population.

I also think shrinking population and what is driving it has much to do with the rise of populist movements around the world. Essentially a growing percentage of our populations are becoming obsolete and they are sensing this. Small towns across the U.S. are crumbling and simply vanishing, as everyone heads to megalopolises.

I think this is a tragedy without a political solution.

the idea is that the fear of doubt and the black hole of skepticism/relativism cause the philosopher to skip over our regular criteria to fix meaning and word together, to have certain knowledge, normative rules, universal criteria, predetermined, etc. h — Antony Nickles

After I wrote this post , I read Rorty’s critique of Cavell and realized that he was making a similar argument to mine.

https://www.pdcnet.org/revmetaph/content/revmetaph_1981_0034_0004_0759_0774

Rorty:“ My complaint about Cavell's treatment of skepticism may be summed up by saying that his book never makes this possibility clear for someone for whom it is not yet an actuality. It is fairly easy to connect (b) with (c): the realization that the world is available to us only under a description hooks up with the realization that it exists without a self-description, that it has no language of its own which we might one day learn. Its existence "makes no sense" because sense is relative to descriptions and existence is not. But, just as I do not know how to hook up (a) with (b), I do not know how to hook (a) up with (c) either. Thus (c) seems to me not to serve as a useful link between (a) and (b).”

Rortyand I are both claiming that Cavell is assuming a logical connection between such situations as believing in the picture theory of meaning and Wittgenstein’s corrective of that thinking. Instead, we argue that moving from a belief in the picture theory to language games amounts to a change of subject. I suppose Lyotard might refer to this incommensurability as a differend.

For most of the history of the West , in the sciences, philosophy, literature and the arts something like a picture theory dominated ( there are many kinds of picture theories ). That shouldn’t be surprising. We see the same phenomenon in child development. Merleau-Pony pointed out that young children do not recognize that others have their own perspective and point of view , that what is a fact for me is the same fact for everyone. So there is a developmental process in child
development and also in philosophical history of decentering of perspective.

In reacting to skepticism, philosophy sees the problem as the human, its fallibility, its inconsistency, its emotion, its partiality, its diversity, and decides that none of that is going to give us the certainty and universality and rationality that we want to solve skepticism, so we take philosophy out of any context and fashion it to meet the standards that will solve it. But this doesn't see that not only are ordinary criteria more adequate, but they also see that we still have a place in their application or their extension, or going past them, or against them. — Antony Nickles

Skepticism belongs to the type of thinking that is incommensurable with Wittgenstein. In order for a skeptic to “take meaning out of any context” they would fist have to understand ‘context’ and ‘ meaning’ in the way that Witt means it , and that is precisely what they cannot do.
This is like accusing the young child who only recognizes their own perspective(because the very notion of perspective doesn’t exist for them yet ) of taking meaning out of any context , because of the fear of doubt. What those of us who come after Witt should say about the young child or the Cartesian skeptic is that while they IMPLICTLY understand the world via language games , at an EXPLICIT level they only recognize an undifferentiated terrain.

Our lives have agreed in all the little ways (all the pieces are in place Wii says) that allow for us to recognize the terms of a misunderstanding, the concept of miscommunication. — Antony Nickles

Except that it seems to me in the case of Einstein’s
theory, or better yet, Wittgenstein’s writings, our lives will have had to agree in more than just the little ways in order for our criteria to align closely enough to attain agreement on the content of the ideas. It seems to me that body of work on the order of a Kant or Descartes represents a comprehensive form of life.

had thought you had said that context exists only in individual temporal instances and not between or across them. — Janus

Ah yes, I did say that. I didn’t mean to imply that there is no referential consistency from moment to moment. I was trying to convey Derrida’s argument that each moment what I experience , and what I am, is in some subtle but thoroughgoing way completely other than the previous.
The result of this is that from moment to moment I continue to be the same differently. So at a glance I continue to appear to myself as self-identical, even though this is only made possible by an underlying process of continual transformation.
This continuity through change means that the world around me that I relate to can , in various circumstances, be more or less comprehensible, more or less stable and normative. When I am involved with events that appear to me as familiar, recognizable, comfortably interpretable in a. ongoing way , that is what is usually referred to as a single stable context. But really it is what Derrida calls a stratified context, the appearance of a unitary context that is in fact the product of a continuously self-transforming series of ‘micro-contexts’.

The issue I see would be whether or not the person knows the voice to be coming from one's own head. The voice might be within one's own head, but one's own head is not necessarily the source of the voice. It might be the case that the voice is coming from God or some other source like that. So it wouldn't be correct to say that the person knows the voice to be "coming from their own head", if in fact they believe that the voice has a different source. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sometimes they believe the voice is being broadcast by a radio signal, or that some audio speaker has been implanted in their brain, These are just some of the many different ways voice hearers attempt to explain a phenomenon that is fundamentally puzzling to them, the hearing of a voice that they don’t recognize as their own, not just in its acoustic features, but in its personality, coming from inside their head in the same way that they hear their own thinking.

Shaun Gallagher has done some interesting work in tthis area.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283415573_Gallagher_S_2000_Self-reference_and_schizophrenia

How do you know "what they mean to say" if there is no context in common? — Janus

I don’t, any more that I would know what Einstein meant to say without a context in common. Context in common means I have already found myself thinking in terms that are close enough to that of the writer that I can relate to what they have to offer.

It is very much like the Deleuzian rhizome, which has no center and depends on other points of intersection in order to "constitute" itself. — Giorgi

Ahh, but it does have a center. Deleuze’s corpus is loaded with forms, concepts, algorithms, which relate to other forms and patterns. Just because their identity depends on this relation to other forms and patterns does not mean that they are not centered. Center just means that at any point in time a series of elements are related in a certain way, as a certain structure.


As regards temporality , I want to get back to my previous question. i am putting the letter ‘p’ here. Look at it and count to 3 while you are looking at it. Now I am going to tell you that in those 3 seconds that you looked at the letter ‘p’ you enters three different worlds. Let me out that a different way. Everything in your past background and history changed each of those 3 moments. You can back to yourself differently each time. It was as though there were three different selves. Now what about those institutionalized powers that are incorporated into the very essence of ‘self’? Well, they changed completely and totally each of those three seconds. Now this may seem ludicrous. I should add that this complete and total transformation of the meaning of ‘self’ and its history that took place , and continues to take place , every moment of time, is so subtle as to go unnoticed. This subtle it total shift in sense is what Derrida means by difference of force. The change from moment to moment (iterability) is a difference in force.

The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”

That is precisely what power as a partial object implies. It is decentered. — Giorgi

Could you elaborate on that a little more?
If I were to define a gestalt , wherein the parts have no existence outside of their relation to the whole , and the whole is nothing outside of the parts which constitute it , and furthermore, a gestalt is only a local, contingent production, constantly changing in changing contexts of social relation, is this somewhat like a ‘partial-object’?
Or perhaps like a Deleuzian object?

As regards temporality , I want to get back to my previous question. i am putting the letter ‘p’ here. Look at it and count to 3 while you are looking at it. Now I am going to tell you that in those 3 seconds that you looked at the letter ‘p’ you enters three different worlds. Let me out that a different way. Everything in your past background and history changed each of those 3 moments. You can back to yourself differently each time. It was as though there were three different selves. Now what about those institutionalized powers that are incorporated into the very essence of ‘self’? Well, they changed completely and totally each of those three seconds. Now this may seem ludicrous. I should add that this complete and total transformation of the meaning of ‘self’ and its history that took place , and continues to take place , every moment of time, is so subtle as to go unnoticed. This subtle it total shift in sense is what Derrida means by difference of force. The change from moment to moment (iterability) is a difference in force.

The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”

Resorting to time (or space) as originary pre-given forms or conditions of experience is just another Kantian move, and I think we've had enough of that in western philosophy — Giorgi

We certainly have had enough of that, and that is why Heidegger and Derrida’s notion of temporality does nothing of the sort. Have you read these authors? There is nothing ‘pre-given’ about temporality. It is not a formal pre-conditon, but relationally itself , the in-between. It is Foucault who maintains a link to Kantianism in the structuralist basis of his forms of power.

It has no ontology (following the Heideggerian project of the destruction of ontology and western metaphysics), — Giorgi

Heidegger deconstructed traditional Western Ontology, and put in its place his own Ontology of Dasein.

I do not see why we cannot reconcile Derrida with Foucault — Giorgi

In order to do that it is necessary to deconstruct the idea of a centered structure , that is , an ensemble of elements united by a central force or identity. Can you do that with the notion of power as a partial-object? Define partial-object a bit further for me.

it takes the concepts that philosophy wrings its hands over and reveals their mystery and seeming power as driven by our disappointment with misunderstandings and our desire to take ourselves out of the solution. — Antony Nickles

I know that Cavell uses this sort of explanation to account for the problematic features of philosophy before Wittgenstein. It makes it sound as though desire is at the heart of the split between olp and approaches antagonistic to it. Wittgenstein’s work is important, as important and innovative , and challenging , as any of the great philosophers in history. You had mentioned Kuhn in a previous post. Does Wittgenstein’s work not represent a paradigm shift? Would you say that a shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics , or from Lamarckism to Darwinian biology, or from Descartes to Hegel was a matter of shift of desire, or a gestalt shift requiring turning the world on its head ?

Is it possible to understand what you mean by ‘ taking ourselves out of the solution’ without already having undergone the paradigm shift necessary to relate to Wittgenstein’s world?

think it would be more apt to focus "change and stability" in our world and our concepts; people usually come into it afterwards to figure out a mess. — Antony Nickles

What do you mean by world? Can world have any useful
meaning outside of how the word is used by people relating via language?

Also, I had mentioned the following to Metaphysician Undercover :

“schizophrenics may experience thought insertion, the sense that another person’s voice is speaking to one inside one’s head. The schizophrenic knows the voice is coming from their own head, and yet they don’t recognize it as their ‘I’.” In the West , this voice is typically belligerent, accusatory, judgmental, whereas in other cultures it can be positive and supportive.

I was wondering if you think the kinds of conversations that that place with this sort of ‘other’ voice in one’s head
are amenable to an Austinian analysis. By that measure, what of the voices of characters a novelist creates? Often, writers say that the characters they create come to life and tell them what they want to do. They converse with the author.

Power does NOT require a foundation. It operates effectively without a ground or an essence. — Giorgi

The same can be said of a more originary basis of ‘power, in temporality. Or to put it in Derrida’s terms: not power but force, and not simply force
but differences of force. This deconstructs
Foucault’s power.

“ The words "force" and "power" which I have just joined you in using, also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micropowers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena "powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under three conditions, at least. A. That one takes account of the fact that there is never any thing called power or force, but only differences of power and of force, and that these differences are as qualitative as they are quantitative. In short, it seems to me that one must start, as Nietzsche doubtless did, from difference in order to accede to force and not vice versa. B. That, starting from this qualitatively differential thought, one opens oneself, in attempting to account for it, to this apparently perverse or paradoxical possibility: the ostensibly greater force can also be the "lesser" (or the "strongest" force is not "strongest" but "weakest, " which supposes the essential possibility of an inversion of meaning, that is to say, a mutation of meaning not limited to the semantics of discourse or the dictionary but which also "produces" itself as history). C. That one takes into account, consequently, all the paradoxes and ruses of force, of power, of mastery, as traps in which these ruses cannot avoid being caught up. I” (From Limited, Inc.)

We can only address the body in a perspectival manner through an institutional lens. — Giorgi

What institutes the institution, what establishes the establishment? What incorporates the corporation? What embodies the body? What is the irreducible basis of a relation of forces? If the body is created by the institutional and corporate conditions of its being, make damm sure you don’t essentialize whatever you think you mean by corporate or institutional lens. It may cause you to miss what is most important and relevant to behavior, the subtle and intricate creative
changes that are likely utterly invisible to a thinking that
begins from a glorified Skinnerian notion of conditioning.

Read this paragraph 10 times and notic how your sense of the meaning of it changes each time in subtle ways. Welcome to the origin of the social. Good luck trying to explain that by institutionalized forces. Only a much more nuanced understanding of affectivity, sense, feeling and significance will allow you to see a whole universe of change underlying the monolithic, generic and superficial
entities that you take to be the irreducible basis of meaning.

So despite the ever changing difference of 'I', which you aptly describe, there is an underlying attitude of sameness, identity, within the 'I' which gives the 'I' of yesterday a special relationship with the 'I' of today, in comparison with the relationship between the 'I' of today, and any other person. This attitude, which is grounded in the difference between the temporal separation between the 'I' and itself, and the spatial separation between the 'I' and others, substantiates the difference between talking to oneself and talking to another — Metaphysician Undercover

There has to be more to perceived self-relationality of the’I’ than just temporal and spatial continuity. For instance, schizophrenics may experience thought insertion, the sense that another person’s voice is speaking to one inside one’s head. The schizophrenic knows the voice is coming from their own head, and yet they don’t recognize it as their ‘I’. So in this case absolute temporal and spatial
proximity is not enough to have a sense being one’s own ‘I’.

Foucault's claim would be that the experience of the body can be (is, in fact) as much a product of institutional training as any other. I think overall, phenomenology cannot escape essentialisms and that's Foucault's main bone of contention. Would you disagree? And why this privileging of Merleau-Ponty over Sartre? T — Giorgi

Sartre misread many forms of philosophy, as Derrida noted. He essentialized the ego , whereas Merleau-Ponty made the self out in the world. As far as the origin of the experience of the body, for MP body is a gestalt field , as is intersubjectivity. But that means institutions and other forms of conditioning only have their existence against a background of the body. If the body is nothing but these conditionings, the it is no longer a body and we can’t even talk about the socially determining conditionings. Each implies the other and this means that what conditions us is experienced from a point of view.
Each of us are conditioned by shared practices. that is the social gestalt. But those shared practices are not indentical practices. Each of us are conditioned differently
by those same practices. That is what it means to be embodied.

Focualt’s model of social interaction is too blunt and monolithic. It fails to discern differences within institutional forces, and as a result is inclined to act too violently.

phenomenology posits a theory of the subject and that offers an epistemic framework for grounding morality later on. I even demonstrate how a phenomenological attitude can lead directly to liberalism. That was Foucault's problem, in France, phenomenology was institutionalized and become another (though quite profound) technique of discipline and governance. — Giorgi

There are many versions of phenomenology. The forms of phenomenology that were institutionalized in France were bastardized interpretations , owing much more to Sartre than to Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is not a ‘theory or the subject’.
Foucault is certainly an improvement over Sartre, but I think Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Foucault.

it is case by case for OLP (we are not looking for a general theory). — Antony Nickles

Ah, but there are general pre-suppositions informing the carrying though of the ‘case by case’ even if not explicitly articulated as such.

I believe you are using "sense" here as in "meaning", as if they were attached to the expression. Witt is trying to show that words (concepts more specifically) do not have an associated "meaning", in the sense of thought: — Antony Nickles

I am using sense in a Heideggerian or Derridean way.
For both of them words do not refer to
or represent meanings. A sense of a word is not an aspect of a concept that already exists, as in a variation on a theme. A sense is a variation, but it is a variation of a variation. There are only senses, with no originating ground. So really we can’t speak of a sense of a word, but word as only sense. You will not find me or Heidegger or Derrida advocating any notion of ‘associated meaning’.

an expression" has a lot of moving parts in each case, — Antony Nickles

I think it is safe to say that the collection of terms that are interlinked as part of Austin’s approach to doing things with words points to many moving parts. I consider this a particular kind of structuralism. There are of course many different sorts of structuralisms in philosophy. What they have in common is that they make use of a notion of an ensemble of parts unified by a central sense. We can also call this a gestalt. It is this unity in difference that drives the ordinariness of language for olp writers. One could say that the terms of ordinariness are whatever allows for an alignment of moving parts that creates agreement, shared practice , normativiity. You can qualify this unifying feature any way you like, provide cautions, limitations, reminders of all the different ways and circumstances in which it can be said to work or not work or maybe work, and what it means to work or not work or maybe work.

My point is that olp’s kind of structuralism ( and there are of course differences from Cavell to Austin to Witt to Ryle), like all structuralisms, is built on events that are invisible to it. How do I mean this? The picture view that Witt problematizes hides all differences from context to context in what it believes to be the same meaning, the same standard or origin that supposedly exists apart from
those changing contexts. The rabbit is there to be seen because it supposedly pre-exists my seeing it ‘as’ a rabbit. But it is not as if the person who relies on this picture view is not seeing what they believe is the ‘same’ meaning ( or just a different aspect of the ‘same’ meaning) via an endless series of language games. They just don’t notice this transformational process. It is invisible to them at an explicit level
even though they rely on it implicitly.

In a similar way, I see the particular discursive -based structuralism of olp as relying on a kind of box. Not a box in Witt’s sense of the beetle box. That is, not a box that supposedly remains what it is outside of contextual change, but a box that remains what it is only locally, contingently. So what makes it a box?

not that the concept is changed by the context--we could have the same sense of a concept expressed (same type of threat) and the contexts would only need to align in the ways necessary to allow for the criteria to work as they do in the same way--so that "every context" is different is not as meaningful as: they have differences, but they may or may not matter: to the expression (you deciding to say it, say, at an inappropriate time), or may only matter in the aftermath of you saying something we have to make sense of, or which changes the consequences of the expression (what happens after a threat to your brother may be different than after — Antony Nickles

For olp change and stability are functions of different kinds of relations between participants in language.
That means a relation between bodies is an irreducible structural condition for any notion of stability or change , accord or misunderstanding, usefulness or failure to work. By bodies I don’t mean bodies defined as humans or biological or any other substantive way other than as discursive participants.

What does this irreducibility structural condition hides?It hides its dependence on a more orginary relation, that between the self and itself.

Could there possibly be any way of thinking about a concept like a self’s relation to a self that does t depend on some form of cartesianism?

When would one use a word like self except in order to contrast it with a person who is not myself? What other use is there? I can have a use of ‘I’ and ‘self’ which only considers ipsiety as background to a figure that appears before ‘me’ . The ‘me’ is nothing but whatever this background part of the current context is. What occurs into the ‘me’ .’ I see, I do, I feel’ :these terms just are talking about how the background is changed. There is no ‘I’ without the background but there is also never an ‘I’ without what appears to it, changes it , interrogates it, expresses it. The ‘I’’s ‘ ‘voluntary’ actions also interrogate it, so that the ‘I’ finds itself deciding or acting. It doesn’t decide to decide or decide to desire. The matter confronting it interrogates it , decides for it.

A world of other persons appear to an’I’ , and their effect on the ‘I’ contributes to its sedimented background, but all other phenomena of sense also appear to and interrogate the ‘I’. That is , all events of perception speak to the ‘I’ in all forms and varieties of consonance and dissonance. The ‘I’ may recognize a phenomenon as familiar, disturbing , useful, illusory, promising , vague. But even the strangest and most alien phenomenon that speaks to the ‘I’ is still in some fashion recognized as akin to something previously experienced , so in the most general sense is normative. But every moment of experience of being spoken to , the ‘I’ is in some subtle but comprehensive way never the same ‘I’ as it was, it is an other. Is this a private or inner process? But what would that mean ? Private with respect to what ? It is a background continually changed by being continually exposed and interrogated by an outside. Is it inner because it is not a sharing with an other? But sharing is itself a being interrogated. The other, whether it is a voice or another sort of phenomenon , shares with the ‘I’ by changing the ‘I’.
If there is no ‘public’ , is there no ordinary? Yes, the ordinary is the various ways the background can be transformed such that it appears to itself as the same differently, as familiar to itself in various ways in an ongoing manner in various circumstances.


This being spoken to is language , although it may or may not involve words. The ‘I’ will have experiences not only of being interrogated by language from other persons , but is interrogated by language from the ‘I’. There is no definite distinction between my talking to myself and my talking to another person. Both experiences are forms
of talking to another who interrogates the ‘I’.
When the ‘I’ is with other persons and it is talking and listening, it is changing itself in myriad ways , as all phenomena that appear to it talk to it and change it. The process of the ‘I’’s being changed is so immediate and continual that it can make no sense to point to verbal language as in any way a difference in kind with respect to the always already ongoing contextual shifts in conceptualization that characterize the ‘I’’s comportment.

Olp’s ordinariness hides a richer, more immediate and more mobile ordinariness of the ‘I’s discourse with its world before , within and beyond verbal interchange.

I am currently "fighting off" phenomenological appropriations where they try to integrate Foucaultian findings with Husserlian phenomenology. — Giorgi

Why would you want to do that? Just don’t combine Foucault with insufferable moralism like so much of the discourse of the left does.

I can at this point, thus only address where you seem to go off track. Words do not have contexts, expressions do (actions do). — Antony Nickles

There are two ways that you’re going to perceive me as going off track. The first is the result of the fact that I have read only a little of Austin and Cavell( although I am making up for that now. I have read Wittgenstein closely in the past but it has been quite a number of years since I looked at his work).
So there will be misunderstandings on my part concerning how their terms are to be treated.

The other way you’re going to misunderstand me is the result of the fact that my interests lie in the areas I mentioned to you ( deconstruction, Heidegger, hermeneutics, constructivism, social
constructionism, phenomenology , autopoietic self-organizing systems theory, Rorty and pragmatism, enactive embodied cognition, Deleuziain bio-politics) and so my use of terms is influenced by that eclectic background rather than Cavell, Austin and Witt.

You don’t yet have any way of knowing this , but I may very well already be understanding the most important features of your reading of Witt, C and A, but am conveying my understanding using a vocabulary that I sense is unfamiliar to you. Would I be correct in assuming you have read little of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Jonas, Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi, Gallagher , Ratcliffe, Varela, Fuchs, Gergen, Shotter or Gadamer?This may put you at a disadvantage both in conveying the ideas you want to
present and , more importantly , recognizing when other authors, using other vocabularies, are being ‘problematic’, or ‘skeptical’.

As you know it has been at least 70 years since Austin and Witt introduced their work, and in that time, a healthy, vibrant and complex scholarly dialogue has been unfolding in a diverse variety of disciplines , embracing and utilizing Austin, Witt and C , expanding their thinking in many directions.

But when I attempt to introduce this scholarship
to you, I sense that , in contrast with most of the generous and open-mindednacademic engagements between your preferred authors and other strains of philosophy that I see in the literature , you are inclined to wall off Witt, C and A from what you might be almost reflexively inclined to interpret as ‘problematic’.

That means that I may be better off abandoning my attempts to widen the discussion to include
other disciplines , and try instead to fine-tune my use of terms so that they are recognizable to you , as you train me in how you understand them.

Now let me ask about your comment that words do not have contexts, expressions and acts do. If we change any word in an expression , doesn’t it change the
sense of the expression? Is there such a thing as two identical expressions with non-identical
words composing them? What is an act and what exactly is the difference between an act and a word?

philosophy's concerns are not about facts (not that they fly in the face of them)--philosophy does not look to facts. I also believe that positivism's mistakes have led to a sense that science can address the concerns of philosophy (though it has reduced the purview of philosophy over time to such things as morality, meaning, aesthetics, what is the best way to live, etc. — Antony Nickles

My point was that 1) no clear distinction can be made between what philosophy supposedly does and what science does
2) All empirical treatments of ‘facts’ are embedded within and are oriented by an overarching philosophical worldview , whether the researches in that field are aware is it or not, and normally they are not. (Descartes and Newton, Darwin and Hegel, Einstein and Kant, Freud and Nietzsche ). The philosophers of science make explicit thee philosophical underpinnings, but they are what drive and give meaning to any empirical field.
The social sciences are moving. more and more in the direction of abandoning the very notion of account-independent facts.

Custom and upbringing are objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use.
— Joshs

Our customs are literally the criteria we see when we look at the use of what we say when (in whatever context to draw out the criteria). They are not in a box (though they may be unexamined), and we do not "only know them" in looking at their use in context, that is exactly what OLP is doing — Antony Nickles

That was a typo on my part. I meant that custom and upbringing are NOT objects in a box. BTW, why do we not only know them in looking at their use in context? Are
you saying that we know them outside of local, contingent contexts, that they transcend contexts? No, you’re not saying that , are you? Are you trying to say that shared custom, upbringing , background assure that when move over from context to context a thread of normative continuity allows us to a avoid ‘starting from scratch’ with every new context?

I’ll close this with this from Brandom:

I’m guessing you disagree with it.

Rorty sees the distinction between public and private discourse as a special case of the distinction between thought and talk that takes place within a stable,
shared vocabulary, on the one hand, and thought and talk that transcends such a vocabulary by creating a new, individualized, idiosyncratic vocabulary, on the
other. Community-constitutive acts of forming ‘we’ intentions, and the giving and asking for reasons that such acts are embedded in, are made possible by the shared norms and commitments implicit in our use of a public vocabulary.
Poets and revolutionary scientists break out of their inherited vocabularies to create new ones, as yet undreamed of by their fellows. The creation of novel
vocabularies is an activity we can all partake in to one degree or another, but we should recognize the incommensurability of the vocabulary in which we
publicly enact our concern for the development of the ‘we’ and that in which we privately enact our concern for the ‘I’.

Rorty says:

There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.

"Even as [words] are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy." (One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; that our words are out there, for us to be read by, held to.) However, the next sentence (as you quote) shows the radical, world-entire, world-ending doubt where philosophy takes it to: "With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether [enduringly] lost." This ends our trust in our ordinary criteria of our concepts, and philosophy's recourse is to have its own criteria and standards, and take away the context of criteria — Antony Nickles

Your analysis of Ratcliffe’s treatment of some heady psychological topics ( ptsd, severe depression) implies an alternative ‘psychotherapy’. I wonder if you are aware
of any writers who have elaborated such a Wittgensteinian alternative to psychoanalytic, cognitive and other approaches. I mentioned Ken Gergen but you seemed a bit hostile toward him.

I read the l article from 1969 you linked to , and re-read PI.

Here are my notes:

There are certain fundamental, irreducible concepts that are implied in all experiences of sense for Witt, Austin,Cavell:

me and other,interaction , better and worse, (felicitous and infelicitous, failure and success, which implies the binary hedonic of affect) , sense, criterion,context, convention, behavior, circumstance, familiar-unfamiliar(another affective
term) , pre-suppose, background-history memory past, present, use, language, game.

Let’s start with me and other. Before being able to say anything else about what ‘me’ or ‘other’ means in any specific context of use, this binary is pre-supposed. As Witt says, a word ‘looks at me’, so there is something that does the looking and something being looked at, even if the specific sense or content of that something is always instantiated in a different game.


There would be no me and no other apart from this relation.
Also irreducible are context, circumstance, game, language, criterion. these point to the two poles of the relation. On the one hand there is the background, the past , the history that alway comes into play to form a context. That is why a context is familiar to me , has a normative dimension. But this past, this history of mine, is not invoked as memory or recollection as if it were being retrieved from storage. My history , my past , works freshly as past as part of the new context of use. In this sense my past is always in front of me. The other pole is that aspect of the context that provides the new criterion, and assures that my context never repeats itself, never repeats the sense of a word. Context is novel and familiar (background history ) at the same time.

The other irreducible feature of a language game is affect. Word contexts can be more or less familiar, more or less felicitous , more or less successfully understood. This is the ethical dimension of language. As you put it “

rds] One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; t — Antony Nickles

So what does this tell us about scientific approaches that are currently in use? It tells us that any approach that talks in terms of objects in a box ( let’s say that box is a universe, consciousness, mind or body ) is problematic. And it tell us that any treatment of a history as an already composed progression ( cosmological, biological, child developmental, cultural) is problematic.

Now, most of our sciences do think in terms of pictures. And yet they are undeniably useful to us. our planes stay up in the air, etc. Would they be even more useful to us , or useful in a richer way , if they understood
what Witt was getting at? Could there be such a thing as a post-Wittgensteinian physics or politics or psychology( I think there must be)!and what would that look like? As I’ve mentioned , there are today forms of political and psychological thinking, even biological, that claim to have assimilated Witt’s lessons. And there are the approaches to history that consider it not as an accomplished fact but as genealogy
(Nietzsche, Foucault, Lyotard).

(Here’s a feminist political theorist who integrates Austin,Cavell and Witt in her argument. )

https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/academic-fellows/images/zerilli_nlh_published.pdf

You find Ratcliffe’s account problematic. You seem to find problematic accounts of resistance to communicative understanding due to personally sedimented histories.
But Witt seems to acknowledge the role of background in causing difficulties in understanding.

Witt says “ There are, for example, styles of painting which do not convey anything to me in this immediate way, but do to other people. I think custom and upbringing have a hand in this.”

Custom and upbringing are not objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use. Nevertheless , there are consonances an dissonances, more and less felicitous relationalities, that can be spoken of usefully as ongoing patterns rather than as simply this momentary difficulty.

What would words like custom and upbringing do for Wittt if we needn’t say more than ‘this moment is this context of use, and now this new moment is a fresh context of use’?
Would this not prevent us from talking about different normative communities and flatten everything down to an utterly undifferentiated sense of contextual change?
Of course, it would also prevent us from talking about problematic uses of language since all contextual uses would simply be equally different.

So if the central ethical question concerns how to achieve optimal communication to avoid suffering, that implies another question: how effective and how intimate can communication be?

Does it indeed depend on two or more persons? Can I have a context of language use with my dog? If so, can I have one with my cat when we play with a string and he anticipates my movements , and I reciprocally anticipate his? Is that a language game? If so, what about my interaction with my gerbil? In other words, if I can be involved in language games with non-human mammals, where do we draw the line between an animal that I can have a language game with and one I can’t’? What would it even mean to draw a line like that? On the basis of what criteria? If you restrict language games to humans, what about pre-verbal infants? We now know that very young infants recognize our facial expressions.

If word use is a mater of a word looking at me, that is, confronting me with an outside that lets me know there is no inside to ‘me’ , why does this outside , this criterion of contextual sense , not extend to rocks and colors and all kinds of sensings that , like a person’s words and gestures, come at me, interrogate me , create new criteria? If con-text is with-person, why is not a non-person also a con-text?
Is there no language game, no felicity or non-felicity , in the changing pragmatic contexts of driving a car, walking to the store? Witt says no, because only in saying is there a context of sense. But then intimacy, felicity, understanding and happiness are at mercy of what happens when I talk with others, and can have no life outside of that talking. It wouldn’t make sense to suggest an understanding that was not a talking, an experiencing of joy that was not a talking