From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 21 2005 - 05:31:10 GMT
Matt,
You said (paraphrasing Scott)
"all consciousness is semiotic, all reality is consciousness, all
reality is linguistic."
I say no, consciousness exists (ontologically) as part of reality as
well as being semiotic (part of epistemology).
As I think you are pointing out, whether we are talking epistemology
or ontology, language is a fundamental basis (for us to talk about it)
("Of which we cannot speak, thereof we ...etc.) It would still be an
ontological choice to deem linguistics to be in any sense really
fundamental, but it is therefore nevertheless a good foundation to
choiose (pragmatically) for building your world model.
The rest - Metaphysics vs Pragmatism ... you already know where I stand.
Ian
On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:08:23 -0600, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Scott,
>
> This is a good place to start as we move forward.
>
> Scott said:
> I'm afraid I am not sure that I see how that changes things. For example, a
> theologian is engaged in redescription, but behind that is a Reality (God)
> and within it is an acceptance that Reality really is in a certain way that,
> for instance, precludes Darwinism. And for a materialist, Reality really is
> in a certain way that, for instance, precludes life after death. So I do not
> see how either of these beliefs escape the "How do things_really_ hang
> together" formula, or the revised formula "metaphysics tries to get things
> hammered down by something else, i.e. Reality, whereas in speculative
> philosophy the only thing doing any hammering are people". Perhaps I need a
> better example of what counts as a case of Reality pinning down a
> metaphysician's moves. I can see cases where a presumed methodology does so,
> e.g., Descartes trying to be mathematical. This would count as someone being
> metaphysical as a consequence of being foundational. So I can see that
> Whitehead can escape being called metaphysical by this definition, in that
> he is saying: "let's think (in our philosophical moments) in terms of
> process rather than in terms of thingness".
>
> So, as I see it, a nominalist and Darwinist is a nominalist/Darwinist due to
> a belief about Reality, namely that *there is* a non-linguistic,
> non-conscious reality, for example, in the asteroid belt, or on earth before
> there was life.
>
> Matt:
> What I'm trying to get a distinction between is the view that "there is a
> way things are" and "there is a way things _really_ are." The way I see
> philosophy (and this comes from the Anglophone tradition beginning in Oxford
> and Vienna, roughly those who first took the "linguistic turn") is as taking
> common sense and finding something wrong with it. Common sense, as ways in
> which we make our way about the world, entails a way things are. That's
> what it is. A rock is a rock exactly because it is a rock and not a book of
> philosophy or Bach's Ninth Symphony. What the metaphysicians have taken to
> be philosophy (and by metaphysicians I mean right now
> representationalists/foundationalists; we'll get to the other permutations
> later) is the correction of common sense by getting at the way the things
> _really_ are. What fully pragmatized thought tries to do is change common
> sense by offering us better ways of thinking how things are.
>
> So, if I, as a (hopefully) fully pragmatized philosopher, am to be
> identified as a materialist (as in thinking that corpuscularianism is a good
> way of thinking about what science does), or a nominalist (as in thinking
> that, if there is distinction between universals and particulars, it can
> only be made _within_ a language and not between language (universals) and
> non-language (particulars)), or a Darwinian (as in thinking that humans are
> simply one more species of animal doing its best), it is not because I think
> that any of those ways entail a way things _really_ are (or rather, the way
> things _really_ are entails them), but that they entail a way things are, in
> that I act and behave and think as if those things are the way they
> are--because that's what common sense is: "the way I act and behave and
> think."
>
> What metaphysicians think is that our common sense can be corrected by the
> way things _really_ are, that the ways we act, behave, and think can be
> changed by ascertaining the way things _really_ are in the world.
> Pragmatists only think that the ways we act, behave, and think can be
> changed by alternative ways of acting, behaving, and thinking and that the
> "ascertainment of the _really_ real" is a wheel that plays no part in the
> system. Its not that the metaphysicians aren't motivated in their
> redescriptions by their belief that their redescription is closer to the way
> things _really_ are, but I'm suggesting that there's no difference between
> redescriptions offered by metaphysicians who think that they finally have it
> and by pragmatists who think that this is just one more potentially better
> alternative to try out. So by an act of Ockham's Razor, we'd like to cut
> out the wheel spinning all by itself.
>
> Scott said:
> The way I do it (or think of doing it -- this is all up in the air at this
> point), is to make representation the foundation, though "representation" no
> longer works since there is no assumed presence to be re-presented. There is
> plenty of correspondence, but it is not a case of language corresponding to
> non-language, rather it is metaphoric/analogical extension of one language
> to allow translation with another, only some of which are human.
>
> What makes this foundational is that I see certain words as having absolute
> application. Such words are, first of all, 'language', but also 'criteria',
> 'pattern', 'language-game', 'reason', 'value', 'abstract', 'context', and so
> forth (plus many synonyms). Now these words as a foundation are anything but
> "clear and distinct", and in fact, as I see it, to talk about them, rather
> than just use them, requires the logic of contradictory identity. But -- and
> here it gets metaphysical -- I assume that all that happens everywhere is
> the same sort of thing: creation happens by the creating of criteria,
> "things happen" is a consequence of contradictory identity, and so forth.
>
> Matt:
> Okay, if I'm getting this, you're saying that language is the foundation
> (representationalism sans the representationalism). This would make sense
> because I imagine a lot of people might have a tough time deciding whether
> you were a linguistic idealist or an old-school mind-idealist, but either
> way an idealist. So, all consciousness is semiotic, all reality is
> consciousness, so all reality is linguistic, meaning the "foundation"
> is...reality, right?
>
> I threw in the scare quotes because, at this stage, you sound just like a
> pragmatist, meaning that the "foundation" is no foundation at all, at least
> nothing you could put any philosophical weight on. BUT, you go on to say
> that there is non-human language available (I don't want to say "out there"
> and suck you into Kantian problems, which we can all assume you want to
> eschew) in addition to human language. So, you can agree with Berkeley that
> an idea can only represent another idea. But, you also say that some of
> this language is representing non-human language. The pivot point comes,
> though (and this is the only way I can see you getting any mileage out of
> foundationism), when you say that one of the things that this non-human
> language tells us is that "all consciousness is semiotic, all reality is
> consciousness, all reality is linguistic."
>
> You didn't say that, but if you don't make that move I don't see how you'd
> get foundationalism to stick. And because you didn't say that "non-human
> language" was the foundation (you said instead, after some transposing, that
> _language_ was the foundation), I'm not sure if that is an accurate
> portrayal of your views. If it isn't, I want to know how you get to a
> foundation without the move I made. Because I don't think its enough to say
> that "certain words" have "absolute application." I think that move, by
> itself, is simply a hypostatization of certain functions of current language
> games. We may not think we'd ever be able to get rid of them, but its
> possible that we simply aren't being creative enough in our changing of our
> current language games. Again, like before, the only way I think you'd get
> these "certain words" to stick as a foundation is if these certain words
> were written in the "non-human language."
>
> Which, of course, brings us to the issue of knowing when we've encountered a
> non-human language.
>
> The way I see the first part of this post hanging together with the second
> is that in the first segment I'm trying to get Darwinianism and nominalism
> to look more idealist, more having to do with our language, rather than
> so-called "Reality." In the second bit, I see you as sounding completely
> idealist, everything is language, but the chunk that makes you resistant to
> pragmatism is a human language/non-human language distinction, which
> substitutes (though, as far as I can see, functions the same as) for the
> language/reality distinction which representationalists use.
>
> Does that kind of sound right? Because the way I've been seeing it, much of
> our philosophy sounds just the same, until we reach the bit about the
> soteriological function of irony and the asymptotic approach to non-human
> language. And I still see those things as either 1) having no function or
> 2) having to be held up by an epistemology.
>
> I'm curious about one bit, though, that didn't come up from the above (and
> doesn't really play much role in the meat of the discussion, I'm just
> curious): does all of our human language correspond to a non-human language,
> or just some of it (meaning there are bits that we may never agree on
> because there's nothing pushing or pulling us asymptotically in one or
> another direction)?
>
> Matt
>
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