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Tag: wittgenstein (page 6 of 8)

Brett Bourbon: Finding a Replacement for the Soul

13 March 2005 / / 0 Comments

This is a strange one. Subtitled Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy, this book comes as neither an inhabitant of a particular established field of study, nor as the cross-disciplinary generalizations of a well-known academic like Richard Rorty or Stanley Cavell. Its topic is how literature has something unique to contribute to metaphysical concerns, specifically something that cannot be obtained from philosophy. It’s very idiosyncratic, and while I’m not sure how anyone could agree with all or most of it, there should be more books like it.

The question considered, stated early on, is:

What does it mean to be a human person with our capacities and our fate? How could we answer such a question? Maybe with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the works of Aristotle, or Bach’s Mass in B Minor…Every answer to “What does it mean to be human?” is a restatement of another riddle. (20)

I take the question of meaning in human life to be metaphysical. There are extreme epistemological concerns that overlap with it, such as how such a meaning is communicated to others, how it is perceived, and our own sense of ourselves as humans to begin with. But where Wittgenstein (whose late work figures prominently in the book) would relegate these questions to a mystical status, Bourbon follows them in a comparatively concrete manner. When he says “meaning,” he constitutes it in a Heideggerian way: what does being human constitute that could not be constituted by a robot or a computer program? Here is how he describes this distinction:

To talk about seeing humans as machines, if by machine we mean as automata and thus as not human in the way that I am, or as machines in the same way that clocks and computers are, is not to see humans under some aspect or description. It is to understand human beings as not human. Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. (204)

The question of “seeing” is epistemological, but the metaphysics underpinning this passage are quite aggressive. There is some bootstrapping going on in the book, as though to assume that the question of human meaning is paramount to Da-sein, and that the path to an answer can be found through literature, and specifically, through “The various ways sentences and phrases lose sense.” I am sympathetic to this approach, but Bourbon goes after it with such single-mindedness that he will lose many along the way who do not agree with the centrality of his concerns.

One of his final conclusions–

The deformations of our variable relation to and participation in language are the only legitimate things that we can read through literature. (259)

–is less shocking in context simply because it flows so easily from
the strong opinions that have preceded it.

The significance of these topics are as a way of saving/replacing the authoritative voice, and how to preserve a method of meaning (as a human) in the absence of a definitive religion or other authority. This is presented as an ethical question as much as an ontological one. Where oracles once spoke with a particular type of intentionality that provided a foundational basis for truth, we now cannot fall back on such myths:

Our ethical judgments and their particular intentional content and concern lack a foundation that would include an intrinsic relation to their normative form. (46)

In other words, it is necessary to build a foundation for ethics that stands aside from the scientific, objective world–perhaps even the propositional world described by Russell and early Wittgenstein. There is an echo here of Levinas’s project to save morality, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre’s endorsement of Aristotle’s ethics. The difference is that it is far more deductive than even Levinas; from literature and “human meaning” will flow a river that picks up ethics downstream.

To be continued…

Correspondence vs. Metaphysics

5 March 2005 / / 0 Comments

I.

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber has a dissection of the latest latest battle between Rorty and the analytics. I’m neither schooled in nor particularly concerned with the vagueness part of things, but I do feel strongly about the Kripke-derived school of essentialism and metaphysics, and Rorty’s original review uses vagueness as more of a arbitrarily chosen example than as a special case. I’m not certain why Rorty chose it, since the study of what is and is not a “heap” isn’t as bewildering to common sense as certain other thought experiments, such as this one:

Consider the following version of the PMC taken from the writings of the Stoic Chrysippus. A man named Dion undergoes the amputation of his left-foot. Assuming that he is identical to his body, we may then ask: what is the relationship between Dion, the amputee, whom we shall call &#x93Leon,&#x94 and &#x93Theon,&#x94 the erstwhile aggregate of all of Dion&#x92s body parts minus his left foot? Shall we say that it is Dion who is (has become) the amputee Leon, Theon having perished? Or is it Theon to whom Leon is identical, Dion having perished? A third option is that both survive the operation as the amputee. I believe that the third answer is the correct one.

Regardless of the greater implications that such study has on realism and philosophy of language, Brian points out that many of his colleagues have no interest in the larger issue. It seems undeniable to me that the issue is one of territory.

Some of the correspondents mention that Kripkean essentialism is a way to recover ground lost when Wittgenstein and then Quine attacked language correspondence, empiricism, and the analytic/synthetic distinction. This also seems undeniable in effect if not in intent. David Armstrong once said that he thought that in comparing early Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell (he had no interest in later Wittgenstein), he thought that Wittgenstein had gone in the wrong direction in emphasizing correspondence; Russell was the one who had it right metaphysically. My own biases prevent me from understanding this position; I stand by Wittgenstein’s critique of Russell’s weak correspondence theory. But it’s clear that Armstrong, and most likely many others, are concerned enough with what happens past correspondence that the issue itself is not especially important to them. Or, as Soames says of vagueness (among other things) in his response:

This enterprise is one of several in which analytic philosophers are forging ahead by replacing Rorty&#x92s metaphorical question — Are the sentences we use to describe the world maps of an independent reality?
— with more specific, nonmetaphorical questions on which real
progress can be made.

II.

But what is the definition of “real progress”? There’s no question that metaphysics has once again blossomed since Kripke, but aside from outliers like Davidson and Cavell, modern analytic work has had very little disciplinary overlap with other fields. As far as I can tell it has no interaction with its continental bete noir, nor much with literature these days.

One large area of overlap, however, is in the philosophy of mind, as neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists in artificial intelligence, and philosophers engage in long turf wars that often appear as though they’re talking past each other. Baumgartner and Payr’s Speaking Minds incisively portrays the dialogue of the deaf by giving each person their own chapter and letting the differences emerge. I disagree with the review at the above link when Cooper says:

Is it really necessary, for example, to include each interviewee’s description of the Turing test? Surely a singly quote from the original source (which is in any case included in a very useful glossary) would be sufficient.

I would argue that indeed it is, since the definitions vary! Daniel Dennett, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Weizenbaum, George Lakoff, Hubert Dreyfus, and John Searle all proceed from such wildly varying starting points that they hear the questions about building/simulating minds differently and respond in kind. The computer scientists and the neurologists have lower-level problems to solve and don’t want to be bothered with the hard stuff. Putnam and Dreyfus have bigger epistemological problems to solve before this piddling stuff. Dennett wants to define most of these problems of mind out of existence. Even where there appears to be overlap, then, it is commonly incidental.

Yet there has been real overlap between philosophy and cognitive science in ontology. Metaphysical ontological work has been very significant in the development of knowledge representation structures used in, for example, the CYC project, which has been building a large, general purpose repository of object relations and the like for over a decade. Brilliant people like John F. Sowa have worked tirelessly on such projects of ontological knowledge representation, and still I admit I’m skeptical that such rigorous semantics will yield as good results even as search engines do today. See Peter Norvig’s speech on this topic.

III.

Yet clearly the ontologies have produced research with practical application; yet Sowa and others seem to owe more to Russell and Peirce than they do to the current batch of researchers. This is not to say that vagueness could not be used in knowledge representation ontologies; I’m saying that much of the progress being made no longer appears to link back clearly to “specific, nonmetaphorical applications”–rather, certain particular philosophical questions (free will, the mind-body problem, identity over time, “grue”-ness) appear to be spawning out further work at a rate that does not seem to allow for the cohesion that Soames believes there to be. That these questions seem to be based on a set of shared assumptions quite particular to their field gives me reason to pause.

There is always, however, room for epistemology; it undercuts other fields in a way that metaphysics can’t. This won’t make a case for people studying it, but the realms that were explored by Peirce and Russell seem to have been picked up as much by Godel (in the area of math and logic) as any modern analytic. But the epistemological questions have remained squarely untouched.

Personal, if I didn’t believe that language-reality correspondence was inherently paradoxical, and that it was the fundamental basis for so many other areas of study–sociology, psychology, literature, law, organizational structure–I don’t know what other problem would take the place of the huge void it would leave in my head.

Friction: Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Wittgenstein

26 February 2005 / / 0 Comments

I knew that I would write no books either in English or in Latin in the coming year, the years after that, or in all the years of this life of mine. There is only one reason for this, a strange and embarrassing one; I leave it to your infinite intellectual superiority to give it a place among what to your clear eyes is an orderly array of mental and physical phenomena. It is that the language in which I might have been granted the opportunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself someday when I am dead and standing before an unknown judge.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Lord Chandos Letter”

This language he describes is as universal (in the sense that it cannot be contained, and is infinite in that regard), and utterly private–what is a language that he hears but of which he does not know a single word? The language that seems to speak of a union of noumenal and phenomenal substance, unmediated by language?

I know who to turn to for this…

The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.–We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investications, S.107

There will be more about slipperiness shortly; it figures in a book I’ve been meaning to write about for months. But my sense of what Wittgenstein says here is that with the removal of the requirement of meaning, language loses its sense, and with it the troubles of its inadequacy for its requirements of meaning and logic. But it is precisely the inadequacy we face whenever we try to place these requirements on it, and so any examination of language’s use must proceed from constant attention to the inadequacy of language to fit the meanings that are contained in what “mute things speak” to Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos.

Likewise the friction in Kafka’s The Castle between K. and the authorities, of which Lars at Spurious writes:

The drama of the novel – the collision between K., who wants to know he has a place in the village, and the implacable authorities would then be determined: it can only be a matter of frustration, of the alternation between moments of grace and moments of setback.

The supposed ending that was never written–K. dies and is finally granted permission to stay in the town, though his mission is not formally recognized–speaks to the end of the conflict. K.’s death signals the collapse of his will, or words, or what-have-you, that has kept him alienated from the town and active.

The self that frees itself from the alienation (i.e., friction) it feels from Sein, as Heidegger posits as a positive, is for Kafka nothing more than a dead self, just as it is an impossibility for Wittgenstein. Likewise, the mute, perfect language of Hofmannsthal’s narrator, which will only going to be accessible to him after death.

Kripke for Beginners

24 December 2004 / / 0 Comments

I have asked many children, “Do you believe that your mind is the same thing as your brain?”…Among those who answered no, one said, “The mind cannot be the same thing as the brain because the brain is something tangible and the mind is not.”

Raymond Smullyan, 2000 BC

I’ve always felt, justifiably or not, a similarity here with Saul Kripke’s argument against mind-body identity, which roughly amounts to this: mental properties are essentially mental, and brain properties are essentially physical, and thus they aren’t the same. If you grant that “tangibility” is a constituent property of physicality, or identical to it, the child seems to be making the same argument Kripke’s notion of “essentiality” derives from modal logic and possible worlds. In essence, since it is logically possible (to Kripke, anyway) to have a single mental state with different physical instantiations, it is not necessary that a mental state be correlated to any particular physical instantiation, and therefore mental states cannot be reduced to physical brain states.

I never engaged with modal logic, which Kripke establishes and relies on for his anti-identity argument, because it seemed more about a question of imagination than logical possibility (pace early Wittgenstein, in my opinion, though Kripke would not agree). And in Kripke’s defense, he appeals to an intuition that is so strong that it has the appeal of being possibly epistemically primary, enough so that a child naturally bifurcates the world into mental and physical in such a fashion. She can imagine clearly that her mental states have no necessary physical instantiation.

Intuitions are constantly overturned, but what is the etiology of the strongly held belief of mind-body non-identity, especially if it is not shared by all? Is it cultural conditioning, as with Greeks who saw the mind in the chest, or is it a more innate disposition? (Or are those other kids zombies?)

Either way, the ability to locate such intuitions in children is what gives Kripke’s mind arguments such force (if not persuasiveness). There is room for extending his other necessary/contingent arguments, like the business about the Morning Star and the Evening Star, over to Piaget’s developmental stages of object relations. If a star appears in the morning and the night, Kripke proposes that it’s not necessary that “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star” be the same thing, even if in our world they actually are.

This distinctions are more meaningful to me psychologically and linguistically than they are metaphysically. At what point can a child know that the Evening Star and the Morning Star may (or may not) be one and the same thing? At what point is the distinction even meaningful?

Bruno Schulz and Wittgenstein

25 November 2004 / / 0 Comments

Mark Kaplan thinks about Hegel after reading a phrase of Bruno Schulz:

It is though what the mind grasps, in a cursory and impatient way, is simply the idea of these things – without colour, volume, height, or any tangible qualities at all.

This sent me scurrying back to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for a rejoinder. I didn’t find one, but here is a (rather Kantian) comment from Philosophical Remarks:

That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.

What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.

The word points to a series of cognitive structures that give form to the world, as though, in the absence of physical details about an object itself, the formal constraints on the word bound what it means in our mind.

Some of Schulz’s own comments on the matter (please read the whole thing at the link, it’s wonderful):

Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth.

When we employ commonplace words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that, like barbarians, we are building our homes out of fragments of sculptures and the statues of the gods.

Speech is the metaphysical organ of man. And yet over time the word grows rigid, becomes immobilized, ceases to be the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words through new short-circuits, which arise out of their fusions.

At present we consider the word to be merely a shadow of reality, its reflection. But the reverse would be more accurate: reality is but a shadow of the word. Philosophy is really philology, the creative exploration of the word.

Also check out some of Schulz’s drawings, some reminiscent of Tenniel.

Later thoughts: first, that attempting to mention Hegel, Schulz, Wittgenstein, and Kant in a single concept was a bit of a stretch. The Kant-Wittgenstein connection deserves more comment, though.

Wittgenstein in the quote above describes the boundaries of perception that are a given to us, both physically (in the form of our vision) and conceptually (in how our sense data, shaped by those boundaries, are reflected in mental and verbal concepts).

This is a variation on one of Kant’s core ideas, the transcendental deduction:

For the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is in itself diverse and without relation to the identity of the subject…The analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity.

(Since this is one of the most famous passages in Kant, I fear that I’m going to bore philosophy majors here and mystify everyone else, but I will try to take it in a different direction.)

Approximately, Kant makes a case for a priori synthetic knowledge by concluding that the mind cannot simply be a blank slate on which sense impressions are made, since there must be a set of preexisting organizing principles. He then proceeds to lay out at great length what those principles are.

Wittgenstein views these principles as a prison: they confine the ideas that proscribe our world. And thus they confine our use of language as well. In the absence of alternative principles, our words must reflect a blinkered perception that generates ideas about the world along strict, narrow lines.

Wittgenstein focuses on one of those principles at much greater length than all others, which is the placement of the self in relation to other objects. For Wittgenstein, it is the way that we pick ourselves out amongst all the objects in the world that is one of the key aspects of how our minds give shape to raw sense data.

Now, this is a jump, but can you see what Schulz is saying, the writer’s act upon words that — that it is not experiential sense data that can operate upon the mind to change it, but words in the absence of sensory referents that can stretch the boundaries of the organizing principles? And that, in the absence of sense data in which one can pick one’s self out of one’s surroundings, writing can offer a less blinkered view in which ideas may be more unfettered. This is all mysticism, of course, but at least it’s interesting mysticism.

Finally, a quote in summary from Gilbert Ryle, with regard to Mark Kaplan’s original thoughts:

Sometimes, when someone mentions a blacksmith’s forge, I find myself instantaneously back in my childhood, visiting a local smithy. I can vividly “see” the glowing red horseshoe on the anvil, fairly vividly “hear” the hammer ringing on the shoe and less vividly “smell” the singed hoof. How should we describe this “smelling in the mind’s nose?”

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