Yep, you don't get it. Don't think you will. Good chat.

If you like, SX, another way of thinking about Berkeley's arguments is to say that he does assume that these two are distinct to begin with, shows how this leads to a contradiction, and so discharges the assumption that led to said contradiction. — The Great Whatever

But it only leads to a contraction if it is assumed that the two are not distinct. That's why it's a contradiction. Which means the claim that Berkeley assumes that there is a distinction is wrong. Once you establish a distinction between concept and object, the 'contradiction' disappears.

I don't understand what this means. What do you mean by, a priori? Is the realist committed to the position that he cannot possibly be wrong about the distinction, and so any argument that purports to show that the distinction is invalid is wrong because he has ruled out that possibility to begin with? If that is not what you are saying, what are you saying? If it is what you are saying, what interest is there in an argument that simply assumes its conclusions a priori? You can assume anything you want a priori. — The Great Whatever

Nope. See: §§30: "Contrary to what correlationists proclaim, the presupposition of this difference is not a dogmatic prejudice in need of critical legitimation. Quite the reverse: it is the assumption that the difference between concept and object is always internal to the concept—that every difference is ultimately conceptual—that needs to be defended. For to assume that the difference between concept and object can only be internal to the concept is to assume that concepts furnish self-evident indexes of their own reality and internal structure—that we know what concepts are and can reliably track their internal differentiation—an assumption that then seems to license the claim that every difference in reality is a conceptual difference. The latter of course provides the premise for conceptual idealism, understood as the claim that reality is composed of concepts—precisely the sort of metaphysical claim which correlationism is supposed to abjure. Yet short of resorting to the phenomenological myth of an originary, self-constituting consciousness (one of the many variants of the myth of the given, denounced by Sellars), the same critical considerations that undermine dogmatism about the essence and existence of objects also vitiate dogmatism about the essence and existence of concepts (whether indexed by signifiers, discursive practices, conscious experiences, etc). Thus it is not clear why our access to the structure of concepts should be considered any less in need of critical legitimation than our access to the structure of objects. To assume privileged access to the structure of conception is to assume intellectual intuition. But this is to make a metaphysical claim about the essential nature of conception; an assumption every bit as dogmatic as any allegedly metaphysical assertion about the essential nature of objects."

The distinction does not secure realism or antirealism. The point is to stave off pre-critical dogmatism until an argument is advanced one way or another.

That's what Berkeley attributes to the realist. But it's wrong - because he doesn't establish a priori distinction between concepts and objects. Man, there are only so many ways I can say the same thing.

Put it this way: both you and Brassier agree that the argument doesn't serve to establish idealism, only disqualify realism. It's a negative, not a positive argument. Which is to say, in order to be 'correct', it needs to get the realist position right. And for Brassier, this is exactly what it doesn't do. Why? Because it doesn't distinguish between concepts and objects. Where does Berekley not do so? In exactly the place where there's nothing to quote. I can only point out an absence, not quote one.

(Is this part of your idealist proclivities? If there's nothing to quote, Berkeley did not not-say something?)

"To make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived" - exactly, literally, precisely, unequivocally.

Yep, can't see a prior distinction between concept and object in any of that - just a flat equivocation between 'things' - so I'd say the argument has exactly the form Brassier attributes to it

No, he does not begin by distinguishing a concept from an object, and go on to argue that they are the same. As far as the argument goes, there are simply objects, or 'things': things that are either mind-independent, or not. And then, from this starting point - which is already skewed - he says that the realist is committed to arguing that he can think of things without thinking of them ('a manifest repugnance'). But this is just the conclusion one would reach if one did not make the prior distinction between a concept and an object, which is something Berkeley manifestly does not do.

To the degree that he does not distinguish between a concept and an object, the conclusion is built into the argument from the beginning. It's not that hard dude. I can't quote what Berkeley does not say: it's not there, that's the problem.

How does it beg the question? Where does Berkeley assume that concepts and objects are identical? — The Great Whatever

The assumption is implicit in the equivocation between 'things' qua ideata and things simpliciter. And of course Berkeley doesn't make the distinction - but that's precisely the problem. What you think is the feature is exactly the bug.

But this is precisely what the realist calls for, and so precisely why Brassier feels he must 'refute' Berkeley. — The Great Whatever

No it isn't. "It is undoubtedly true that we cannot conceive of concept-independent things without conceiving of them; but it by no means follows from this that we cannot conceive of things existing independently of concepts, since there is no logical transitivity from the mind-dependence of concepts to that of conceivable objects." Again, concepts and objects mate.

...that's built into the very form of any argument that does not distinguish between concepts and objects (i.e. that begs the question).

I dunno TGW, you just seem not to 'get it': Brassier's point is that when you frame the realist's point in the way you do - "It is possible to conceive of something that no one conceives of", you've already fixed the game ahead of itself. Yet the entire thrust of Brassier's paper is that in order not to fall into the trap of metaphysical dogmatism, one must distinguish clearly between, well - concepts and objects. The relevant subsections are §§33 and 34:

"The difficulty facing the proponent of the Gem is the following: since the assumption that things are only ideata is every bit as metaphysical (‘dogmatic’) as the assumption that ideata are not the only things (that physical things are not ideas), the only way for the idealist to trump the realist is by invoking the self-authenticating nature of her experience as a thinking thing (or mind) and repository of ideas. But this she cannot do without invoking some idealist version of the myth of the given (which I take Sellars to have convincingly refuted). So in this regard, the alleged ‘givenness’ of the difference between concept and object would be no worse off than that of the identity of the concept (qua self-authenticating mental episode). Obviously, this does not suffice to vindicate metaphysical realism; what it does reveal however is that the Gem fails to disqualify it. It is undoubtedly true that we cannot conceive of concept-independent things without conceiving of them; but it by no means follows from this that we cannot conceive of things existing independently of concepts, since there is no logical transitivity from the mind-dependence of concepts to that of conceivable objects. Only someone who is confusing mind-independence with concept-independence would invoke the conceivability of the difference between concept and object in order to assert the mind-dependence of objects

...The claim that something exists mind-independently does not commit one to the claim that it is conceptually inaccessible. By implying that mind-independence requires conceptual inaccessibility, the Gem saddles transcendental realism with an exorbitant burden. But it is a burden which there is no good reason to accept." (bolding mine).

To the degree that you've not addressed Brassier's argument for the necessity for such a distinction, I don't think you've really understood the argument. You still think, in other words, that the realist ought to accept the very burden that Brassier points out is unnecessary.

By the principles premised, we are not deprived of any one thing in Nature. Whatever we see, feel, hear, or any wise conceive or understand, remains as secure as ever, and is as real as ever. There is a rerum natura, and the distinction between realities and chimeras retains its full force...[W]e have shewn what is meant by real things in opposition to chimeras, or ideas of our own framing. — Berkeley

Does this matter though? Surely, this is a conclusion inferred by Berkeley from what he takes be a successful argument against a mind-independent world already presented previously? If he began with this he would be begging the question. But Brassier's point is that so too does the argument. So I guess it's true you wouldn't know the above from reading Brassier or Stove, but would you need to?

It's fairly clear, though, that the movement of the leg is determined by the stimulus it receives from the brain. If we severed the spinal cord so that the brain couldn't cause the leg to move a certain way, the leg would remain lifeless. — Hanover

And if there were no environment for a leg to move - to exert pressure against, to be oriented amongst - there would be no such stimulus from the brain. Of course it's hard to think this way because in 'the environment' is a hard variable to isolate - unlike the spinal cord. But experiments with phantom hands, for example, show that the experiences of movement can well 'trick' the brain into 'feeling' limbs where there are none (other experiments involving zero-gravity and the loss of bodily orientation show attest to the same thing). The point goes beyond establishing a 'two-way street' (brain <-> environment) over the traditional 'one way street' (brain -> environment). It's rather that movement itself presides over the demarcation between body and world, and that there is a co-constitutive body-worlding (or worlding-body) which has it's genesis in movement, which in turn is generative of thought. Thought in this case is not something that occurs 'in' anything. It rather occurs-with: one thinks by moving, not 'in' a discrete parcel of space and time (known traditionally as 'the body'), but according to an event which spatializes and temporalizes: 'in' movement.

Metaphysically, it's the difference between considering thought in terms of a substance or mereological ontology, or a processual one. The body's significance for me has less to do with it's flesh and blood than it's kinesthetics capacities; there's a reason thought is not associated with inanimate objects. It's animation, motility and the ability to engage in encounters that form the basis of thought. This ins't to say that brains are 'irrelavent': only that they are as relavent as the encounters which force them to do their work as brains - no more no less. They occupy equal footing, rather than being a locus out of which thought somehow radiates - not unlike a little homunculus which simply displaces or defers the question of thought ('what thinks? The brain. How? By doing brain things').

(I sometimes wonder - if by evolutionary chance our mouths were in our feet, would we not 'hear' our 'internal voice' in our feet? That we attribute 'thinking' to the brain and not the body might just be a unlucky quirk of developmental history where our mouths and vocal tracts so happen to be close to our brains - a quirk which has resulted in some very unfortunate philosophy. That said, this is probably more than just an accident - the closer a mouth is to a brain, a faster it can vocalize the presence of danger, or indeed, interact with the environment. This goes for all the other 'senses' as well, which is why they all seem clustered in and around the head. These are probably all evolutionary advantages - if not disadvantages when it comes to doing philosophy!).

The point is that psychology is 'murky' precisely in accordance to the degree in which it's subject matter is murky. If were any more precise, it would do injustice to what it studies. One doesn't measure the genetic robustness of a fish by it's ability to climb a tree, and neither should psychology be deemed somehow inadequate for being unable to codify it's findings in a law-like fashion. That said, what this has to do with philosophy is beyond me. You seem to want to say that because psychology is 'murky' (false), that this somehow places a burden on philosophy. But this already presupposes that philosophy ought to be undergridded by some sort of verificationist methodology which is nowhere spelled out, elaborated, or argued for in your OP - just assumed. And without that argument, I simply have no dog in the fight you seem to want to pick.

My snarkiness is simply a function of my disinterest in the OP, Schop. I'm not sure I can put "I don't care" in a delicate manner.

Psychological experiments are less 'law-like' than physics or biology to the degree that the variables involved are harder, if not in principle impossible, to control. Inversely, physical or chemical 'laws' are only true if very specific ceteris paribus conditions ("all else being equal") hold. The former is not a mark of 'failure' or 'impotency' on the ledger of psychology so much as it is an acknowledgement of the specificity of the subject matter under investigation. A law-like psychology would not be a psychology at all - or simply bad psychology.

So there's nothing very special about 'laws'- in fact they are rather peculiar, holding only in very controlled, very un-natural situations. Laws are in fact about as close to idealizations as you can get (following the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, the more interesting question, frankly, is whether or not the law of physics are themselves true. Cartwight's position, which is more or less mine, runs: "rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their fundamental, explanatory force"). That an account of meaning ought to be codified according to some law-like structure is, as such, plainly ridiculous. Frankly, I'd deem it beneath refutation had you not tagged me here.

Alright, so - working through C&O. Essentially, I read C&O as something like a ground-clearing operation. Brassier's goal is to establish the importance of epistemology, setting it up as a genuine problem, one which demands a response. Although he doesn't actaully provide that response in the paper itself, the whole point of the paper is simply to set up the problem of epistemology as a problem. This in contrast to a few trends that Brassier sees as having taken hold in certain circles, where epistemology is more or less dissolved into ontology and thus obviated as a problem to address. Latour, obviously, is the primary target here, although Deleuze gets a pot shot taken at him as well.

Anyway, as stated by Brassier himself, the epistemological problem follows from the 'Critical injuntion' (cf. Kant) that: "Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable. There is no cognitive ingress to the real save through the concept. Yet the real itself is not to be confused with the concepts through which we know it. The fundamental problem of philosophy is to understand how to reconcile these two claims." This injunction is 'critical' not in the sense of 'being important', but in the Kantian sense of requiring that we furnish an account of the relation between thought and being, rather than take any such relation for granted, which would be a fall into pre-critical dogmatism, in the Kantian sense. In this regard, Brassier holds to the tradition of Critical Philosophy inaugurated by Kant.

From this starting point, Brassier goes on to look at various ways in which this injunction has more or less been papered over in various ways, beginning with Latour, before going on to his wonderful discussion of Stove's Gem, which he uses not so much to establish realism, but - in keeping with the ground-clearing mode of the rest of the paper - to disqualify approaches which aim to diffuse realism as an issue from the get-go. Here, both Berkeley and Fitche are taken as targets, with Meillassoux also critiqued for buying too easily into the Gem. Again, it's not a 'positive' argument that Brassier is advancing here, but a negative one - or more precisely, an attempt to negate a negative (against the idea that thought cannot track the real).

Hence the conclusion of the piece which goes: "[R]ecognizing this does not resolve or answer any of the profound epistemological and metaphysical difficulties which confront us in the wake of science’s remarkable cognitive achievements. But it may help us realize that these difficulties cannot be circumvented, as both correlationists and dogmatic metaphysicians seek to do." Again, the idea is to 'keep open' a problem, rather than address it directly. There's more to be said about the specifics here, but that's the general thrust and structure of the paper.

I still think there's a pretty huge discrepancy between Nihil Unbound and what we're seeing now, though, mainly owing to Brassier's rejection of nearly all of the commitments he took back then from Laruelle. — Glahn

I'm not sure about this - if anything, Brassier's ultimate charge in "L and the Reality of Abstraction" is that Laruelle basically loses his nerve at the last minute, rather than follow the consequences of his affirmation of the autonomy of the Real all the way to the end. This is why, among other reasons, C&O is so concerned about epistemology. Although his explicit targets are Latour and to a lesser extent Deleuze, in the background is also the Laruelleian gnosis which basically skimps out on furnishing the justificatory grounds of it's own position. Brassier's disillusionment with Laurelle is more or less that Laruelle doesn't follow through on his own insights - insights which Brassier holds to be singularly valuable. The whole post-NU 'turn' towards truth, negativity and representation is in some sense a way to remedy this lacuna and forge a Laruelleian inflected philosophy that throws out the bathwater without the baby of Laruelleian thought.

This is especially true in "Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism", where he rehashes Sellars's account of representation as that which correlates with the Real without corresponding to it, thereby satisfying the Laruellian injunction to respect the autonomy of the Real. In this particular paper (C&O), the Laruelleian influence is cashed out in the discussion in §§28 regarding the 'gap' between object and concept wherein "the difference between the conceptual and the extra-conceptual... can be presupposed as already-given in the act of knowing or conception. But it is presupposed without being posited." The idea again is to respect the autonomy of the object, without which we end up subscribing to a pre-critical dogmatism that simply assumes a sort of direct cognitive access to the concept which he takes Sellars to have decisively refuted. Anyway, I'll try and talk about C&O properly now...

Brassier is decidedly not a purveyor of mainstream secularism. To this end, StreetlightX, I think you're off the mark reading Brassier's extinction stuff as suggesting that we focus on enriching the here and now. That would be a pretty mainstream secular idea. The whole Nihil Unbound period in Brassier's career was an outgrowth of his dissertation work. At that time he was mainly concerned to criticize ideas prominent in mainstream French philosophy, which was at the time (and to some extent still is) dominated by theologically motivated phenomenology. He did make some initial gestures toward his current project back then, but he's distanced himself from the book since it was published -- so it's really not all that relevant to the "Concepts and Objects" paper. — Glahn

Mm, I quoted Bryant because he gives a nice reader's digest version of NU to the uninitiated. Brassier's take on his own work is in fact more interesting, but without the relevant background - one I suspect Schopenhauer does not share - it can be hard to parse. Here's something I wrote elsewhere on it in a slightly more technical vein:

The entire point [of NU] is that the thought of extinction renders thought immanent to being, insofar as "the transcendental scope of extinction... levels the difference between life and death, time and space, revoking the ontological potency attributed to temporalizing thought in its alleged invulnerability to physical death." The reality of extinction erases any sort of transcendence, and the 'leveling' that Brassier speaks of corresponds to the collapse of time that I mentioned earlier. To that extent, "extinction is not to be understood here as the termination of a biological species, but rather as that which levels the transcendence ascribed to the human, whether it be that of consciousness or Dasein, stripping the latter of its privilege as the locus of correlation."

This is why, unlike the phenomenological understanding of death as that which orients our actions and provides an index of value, the 'death' in question - that of extinction - is thus an entirely impersonal death, a death always-already at work that in no way serves to individuate us: "the thought of extinction tokens an annihilation which is neither a possibility towards which actual existence could orient itself, nor a given datum from which future existence could proceed. It retroactively disables projection, just as it pre-emptively abolishes retention... extinction unfolds in an ‘anterior posteriority’ which usurps the ‘future anteriority’ of human existence." The point is resolutely anti-phenomenological, and aims precisely to do away with the (existential) obsession with personal death. Extinction isn't really the sort of thing that can be obsessed over, insofar as, at the level of thought, it has already happened: "terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal."

The very thought of extinction then, has massive ramifications for the status of thought itself. Uncoupled from life, thought has an autonomy that is not bound to the vagrancies of life; thought itself marks a latent inhumanity in those who take themselves to be "merely human" and bound by finitude; through the thought of extinction, thought can "think a world without thought": "Extinction turns thinking inside out, objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world like any other (and no longer the imperishable condition of perishing). This is an externalization that cannot be appropriated by thought – not because it harbours some sort of transcendence that defies rational comprehension, but, on the contrary, because it indexes the autonomy of the object in its capacity to transform thought itself into a thing... extinction indexes the thought of the absence of thought. This is why it represents an objectification of thought, but one wherein the thought of the object is reversed by the object itself, rather than by the thought of the object. For the difference between the thought of the object and the object itself is no longer a function of thought, which is to say, of transcendence, but of the object understood as immanent identity." It's the thought of extinction that underpins Brassier's commitment to realism" — Me, elsewhere

B's. current work - as I read it - is precisely the 'filling in of the gaps' of the status of thought as it is presented in NU. If NU used extinction to level mind and world, C&O and related pieces trace out what thought ought to 'look like' if this is the case. Anyway, I'll try and stop talking about NU now. My post about it was in response to a thread by Schop in which he seemed curious about the 'nihilistic' aspect of B's thought, and it was that I was responding to.

Yes, this is quite un-Schopenhauerian. He is trying to say that either a) there is no metaphysical ground (like a monism of some sort) or b) even if there is a ground, this ground is individuated particles and energy ergo no purpose can be imputed other than the necessary laws found in science and the contingent play of these objects in their seemingly infinite variations of cause and effect.

He is also saying that the mind does not impute meaning, but simply interprets it or categorizes it. It will never have the "full" truth of the object, nor are all interpretations the same. The one true interpretation can come close to the truth of the object by scientific explanation.

How in the world did you draw these staggeringly off base conclusions? And why ought anybody answer your questions when you can't be bothered to do some of the required work to have this discussion in the first place? You're approaching the whole exercise with an awful attitude, and it shows in your lack of any close attention to the text itself.

This discussion was merged into Reading for December: Concepts and Objects (Ray Brassier)

@schopenhauer1 *Grumble*. Seems like you're after cliff notes because you can't be arsed reading yourself. Anyway, regarding Nihil Unbound - rather than Brassier's more recent work - the idea is that the truth of extinction can function as a tool for enlightenment: it teaches us something about the universe and our place in it. In Brassier's words, "Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity." That is, Brassier doesn't really care about the usual existential ennui or anguish of finitude that extinction usually elicits - his concern is wholly with thought, and the 'speculative opportunity' that the thought of extinction offers. Here is Levi Bryant's nice encapsulation of it:

"Brassier argues that the thought of radical extinction carries with it an enlightenment. What might this enlightenment be? Why might this horrific thought of erasure, extinction, be enlightening and ethically invigorating? [Because] [t]he truth of extinction is not the gloomy thought that all is pointless because everything is going to be destroyed anyway. Rather, the thought experiment of radical extinction hopefully accomplishes three aims. Insofar as the truth of every person’s life is death (i.e., there’s no afterlife), we should not direct ourselves to an afterlife, but rather should devote ourselves to this life. How can we live in relation to ourselves, to others, and to the earth in order to best live this brief spark that we possess? How should society be transformed and organized to maximize this existence?

Second, the truth of extinction with respect to the existence of the human species has the effect of decentering us. We can imagine a world where we are absent. As a consequence, we are not at the center of existence. We are one being– certainly important to ourselves –among others, and we are a being like the others destined to pass away. This discovery encourages us to both respect other beings, but also to recognize the fragility of ourselves and the world we rely on and therefore attend to the preservation of that world. Finally, the extinction of the universe cures us of messianism. There is no apocalypse, no final revelation of the truth, no final salvation, just this world. As such, we should squarely direct ourselves at this world and the work required to maintain this world, not at a world to come or an afterlife." (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/entropy-and-me/)

Brassier's recent work is an attempt to flesh out how thought does in fact function if the above claims are in fact the case. As he himself puts it, "[Nihil Unbound] contends that nature is not the repository of purpose and that consciousness is not the fulcrum of thought. [Yet] [t]he cogency of these claims presupposes an account of thought and meaning that is neither Aristotelian—everything has meaning because everything exists for a reason—nor phenomenological—consciousness is the basis of thought and the ultimate source of meaning. The absence of any such account is the book’s principal weakness (it has many others, but this is perhaps the most serious)." (http://afterxnature.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/ray-brassier-interviews-with-after_26.html). "Concepts and Objects" is one of Brassier's attempts to remedy this short-coming (a remedy inspired by Sellars), and come up with an account of thought that is adequate to the image of it presented in NU (along with his other more recent papers like "That Which is Not", "Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism", and "Against Flat Ontologies").

The full significance of nihilism and extinction for Brassier is found in the last chapter of NU, "The Truth of Extinction", which is worth reading if you actually care about this topic rather than getting others to do your work for you. Anyway, that's roughly the context in which C&O is written. I've merged this thread with the reading thread, as there's no reason why there should be two separate threads on an almost identical topic (Edit: it looks like the OP didn't carry over, and I'm not sure how to make that happen...)

The book the essay is published in - The Speculative Turn - has been published under an Open Access creative commons license, which means that there's no issue with linking to it. So here we go:

http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf [PDF]

As usual, we're at an impasse, and I've lost my appetite to go on. I will say that I literally meant cars blinking, as in what eyelids do - which is what I specified. I meant it as pure nonsense - like foreclosing a door. Otherwise, I've little desire to continue.

@Michael Sorry for the late reply, TPF has been down for me for a couple of days. Anyway...

But there's nothing to be anti-realist about. What is different are the reasons for such a rejection. Dummett rejects them because he thinks that natural language is full of sentences whose truth conditions we would not be able to recognize as obtaining - meaning that one must reject a truth-conditional theory of meaning. I reject them because the very idea of truth conditions that can or cannot be recognized makes no sense. I don't reject the realist's claim that truth conditions transcend verification because it is false. I reject it because the very idea of truth as correspondence is literally senseless. It's like asking 'what does 'dichotomy' taste like?'. The question is malformed, and one cannot take a stance on it either way.

Dummett still thinks that truth is a matter of correspondence (here's Dummett: "the correspondence theory expresses one important feature of the concept of truth... that a statement is true only if there is something in the world in virtue of which it is true." He literally elevates this to a 'principle' he christens 'principle C'). Dummett's semantic-anti realism actually consists in the 'next step' he takes, when he goes on to argue that because meaning cannot be wholly parsed according to this theory of truth, then one must reject truth-conditional theories of meaning. But Dummett, like the realists he argues against, both have truth all wrong to begin with. Correspondence is not even at issue, it never was, it never will be. Truth simply doesn't work like that.

A way to think about it is like if two people had differing opinions on whether cars can blink. One is a blinkist, and another is an anti-blinkist. A third bloke comes along and says, hold on, the whole idea of cars blinking is ridiclious. He notes that sometimes people speak of cars as having 'blinkers' which indicate left and right, but they don't blink, at least not in the way of having eyelids and so on. After which the other two immidiately tell him that he's actually an anti-blinkist. There is a sense in which they are right, but only in a way that is completely trivial and inane. The anti/blinkists are not simply wrong - they are not even wrong.

Sorry, made some substantial edits to my previous post in the process of your replying.

Then, however, Dummett goes on to identify the practical ability to make use of a statement with the recognitional capacity to verify or falsify that statement. — Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, Dirk Greimann and Geo Siegwart

Doesn't sound right to me. What is the recognitional capacity to verify or falsify "hello!". Or "I christen this ship 'Jane'"? This is the problem of course - even Dummett, the supposed arch-anti-realist about truth still assesses truth according to realist criteria (does truth have recognition-transcendent conditions or not?). The whole point of course, is to show the irrelevance of those criteria, to change the very terms of the debate. Sara Ellenbogen for example, in her excellent reconstruction of Wittgenstein's account of truth, writes of how Dummett's arguments "presuppose a commitment to a realist conception of truth. [His] belief... rests upon an assumption that the only thing that could make a given statement true is its correspondence with some segment of reality in virtue of which it is true.... it is only because Dummett assumes that the claim “p is true” amounts to the claim that there is something in virtue of which it is true that he is led to his antirealist conclusion, namely, that we treat certain statements as being true or false for which we can give no content to what our grasp of their truth conditions consists in."

Ellenbogen's solution - which is in fact a reading of Wittgenstein's own conception of truth - instead notes that we simply have the option of giving up on the realist's conception of truth altogether - something Dummett, for all his supposed 'anti-realism', is quite incapable of doing. And it precisely to this degree that "both sides of the realist/antirealist debate [are] part of the same metaphysical tradition. Antirealists follow Wittgenstein in rejecting the idea of transcendent truth, yet they remain very much implicitly committed to the realist view of truth that lies behind it. Therefore, in rejecting realism, they merely replace it with another view based on the same metaphysical assumption."

What is required is instead a different account of truth, one that rejects both sides of the anti/realist ledger in order to affirm that "to grasp a concept [like truth] is to have a practical mastery of the inferences it is involved in. It is to be aware of its role in justifying some further attitudes and in ruling out others.... For example, to learn the use of the word “red” is to learn to treat “This is red” as incompatible with “This is green,” as following from “This is scarlet,” and as entailing “This is colored.”" So too with truth - "the truth conditions of our statements are determined by... our conventional rules for predicating “is true” of them... once we conceive of learning the uses of “is true” as a matter of learning a certain practical mastery, the meaning we take our sentences to have is necessarily consistent with the use to which we put them. For we learn what it means to say [for example] that a past-tense statement p is true when we learn the [practical] criterion for judging its truth, that is, when we learn how to use the statement “p is true.” (Sara Ellenbogen, Wittgenstein's Account of Truth).

In other words, we learn to predicate truth of propositions in the same way learn to predicate color of things. By learning in what circumstances it is normally considered appropriate to make such predications. We learn to use language in a certain way, according to the circumstances which would allow ourselves to achieve what we set out to do with it (e.g. to testify in a trial ["It's true, he did it!"], hurt someone ["it's true that you're an asshole"], express affection ["I love you, it's true"] and so on). Truth is just a certain manner of using language. Like any other word. Anti/realism no more applies to it than the use of the word "apples", "pathbreaking" or "green". Truth is a word like any other.

It would have to be assessed on the basis of how language would be able to play that role. What specifically about language, in other words, would allow it to play the role you're theorising here?

For my part, I'm not all that convinced, unfortunately. I have no doubt that language allows for an unprecedented acceleration of the formation of associations - thanks to the relatively low energy costs involved in the use of language, as opposed to habit acquisition through say, bodily contraction -, but I don't think that there's anything particularly special, better, or exclusive about language that would make it serve the bridging function you want to make it play.

Not asking, Pneu, Butler's clearly a lost cause for you. But I don't think it was a mere accident that you went straight for a comment about her appearance. Make of it what you will, it's not something I really want to discuss.

Butler's recent works are actually incredibly accessable. But one would have to, y'know, read Butler to know that.

You're missing the parameter which would make significant such a distinction (between language and what is not language): sense. It's no use, or rather, philosophically meaningless to try and demarcate between what is and is not language with relating a third term by which such a distinction would at all be significant. Otherwise the distinction is simply nominal. And insofar as sense freely skips across such pseudo-distinctions with ease, philosophical questions which arbitrarily and artificially institute such a distinction to argue for some fake problem like realism and anti-realism are philosophically meaningless.

Cavacava raised a similar point which I addressed in my reply to him on the first page.

But what the OP tries to show - among other things - is precisely how such a distinction can be misleading. Insofar as language is just one manner of expressing sense, which itself is a production of ecological differentials which can include gesture, movement, intonation, atmosphere and so on - there are no a priori limits than can be drawn with respect to what implicates the sensible. To express sense is to draw on all these differentials, to work with or through this assemblage of elements. Sense is an achievement, a product of action wherein what does and does not contribute to it's making ('making sense', in the most literal terms) cannot be specified in advance.

The mereological language you use - parts and wholes - simply betrays the fact that your attempt to acknowledge that language is part of the world is merely lip service. You still treat language as if it were a realm unto it's own, ignoring the trans-linguistic implications of sense and the way in which sense is the outcome of a process whose elements cannot be neatly partitioned into 'language' and 'everything else'. To isolate language and ask of it the sorts of questions you want to ask is to fracture sense and deal instead with a dead fragment rather than a living process of sense. It's posing malformed questions motivated by artificial problems.

A hundred times yes! D&R functions for me as a sourcebook, something to continually go back to and discover new things. It's a guide to thinking, hand-manual of intellectual exploration. It teaches you how to think, rather than what to think, and going back to it - or Deleuze in general - always functions as a refresher to dislodge congealed manners of approaching things.

But if language is just another thing in the world, the question is more or less senseless. The very question 'what else' seems to want to parse language and world neatly apart from each other, language in one box, world in another. Then, beginning from the box called language, you want to ask: what else is there needed for truth? How do I get out of the language box and into the world box? Supposedly the anti-realist says you can't get out, and the realist says you can. But if such a division is nothing but an arbitrary convenience, the question is philosophically meaningless. There's simply nothing at stake in it ("You're both idiots, you've both been outside the whole time and the 'problem' of getting from one box to the other is a false one"). Which is why time and time again I've said the anti/realist debate is more or less a triviality, a badly posed banality not worth getting hung up on.

You seem to be mistaking form for content. Truths are predicated of propositions. Which is to say that by definition, one needs language in order to have truths. That's about all I'm saying. I'm not talking about this or that truth but the very structure of truth as such. That you are unable to see this - and that you think anti/realism turns upon the rejection or not of a tautology is incredibly strange. Its as if I were to say: in order for words to make sense one must have words. To which you'd reply: Ha! You're an antirealist about sense. It's incredibly bizzare.

In any case, if you have nohing to add other than bicker over labels as insubstantial as these, I might have to end our conversation here I think.

The other option of course is that both positions are devoid of sense and that one reject the terms of the debate altogether. But one would have to address an actual argument in order to do so I suppose.

Oh look, another entirely substanceless post. How very unexpected.

Yes but Dummett et. al. are wrong. What 'some' say is irrelavent here so long as the argument goes unaddressed. Which it has. The point is to show that rejecting the 'realist' POV does not entail a retreat into anti-realism, and that indeed, the whole anti/realism debate is a badly posed one to begin with. Falling back into doxa does not an argument make.

But why in the world would realism require verfication-transcendent conditions? It's as if you were to say: the fact that I can't walk through walls depends on me being there to walk around in the first place... therefore, so too does the wall. But such a conclusion is self-evidently absurd. The first statement is a rather obvious - indeed tautological - statement regarding a relation (wall-me), the second, regarding only a term (wall). The move from the one to other is illegitimate. Similarly, that truth, which is an operation of language-use, depends on the use of that language is to state nothing more than a tautology. Notice that this allows for neither a realist or an anti-realist reading: you can't draw conclusions from tautologies, as you seem to want to do. It's just another instance of Stove's Worst Argument in the World.

JW's reader's guide is pretty good, it's a very nice companion to have on you while making your way through the book. Otherwise, I dunno - I've been dipping into D&R for years now and every time I think I 'get it', something else reveals itself to me. If you can make it past the discussion on the 'blockage' of concepts in the introduction (warning: requires a basic grasp of Leibniz and Aristotle), you'll be doing OK.