Houses are Turning Into Flowers
There's a wonderful and kind of cute discussion by Stanley Cavell about what it might mean to reject or affirm the idea that 'houses turn into flowers'. Now, on the face of it, it's pretty clear that it's simply false: houses do not turn into flowers. But Cavell goes on to ask: even if such a claim is simply rejected outright, what even could such a rejection mean?:
"But is it merely in fact the case that houses do not turn into flowers? What do we learn - what fact is conveyed - when we are told that they do not? What would it be like if the flowers and houses did turn into one another? What would "houses" or "flowers" mean in the language of such a world? What would be the difference between (what we call) stones and seeds? Where would we live in that world, and what would we grow in our gardens? And what would "grow" mean?" (The Claim of Reason).
Cavell's claim is something like: if you're affirming or denying that houses can turn into flowers, then you're not 'merely' adding a new fact to the store of known facts; meaning must also be revised. Because insofar what we call houses and flowers are concerned, one cannot possibly be talking about houses and flowers as we know them, even if to reject the idea that houses cannot turn into flowers. To even deny that houses can turn into flowers, one would have to change what we understand houses and flowers to be altogether. To bring the point out a bit, he compares the following statements (following a similar procedure that Wittgenstein carries out at one point in the Investigations*):
(1) Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers.
(2) Acorns do not turn into flowers.
(3) Houses do not turn into flowers.
Now, there's something peculiar about (3). Unwatered seeds are the kind of thing that could, if watered, turn into flowers. Acorns, well, not the kind of thing that could turn into flowers, but one can imagine oneself correcting a child who thinks flowers come from acorns. But what about (3)? Could one even make the mistake? Is it a fact that must be corrected if it turned out that houses can, in some circumstances, turn into flowers? Or is it also the very meaning of 'houses' and 'flowers' - and the whole constellation of related terms like 'grow' and 'live' - that needs now to come under wholesale revision?
One last way to put the point: insofar as we have an understanding of what houses and flowers are, if houses could turn into flowers, we would no longer know (for a time, anyway) what either houses or flowers were. We would have to revise not only our facts (what we say), but also how we say. Which is another way of saying: to say 'houses do/do not turn into flowers' - in 'this' world in which we live and breathe - is, in some sense, unintelligible. Confronted with that statement, one simply might not know how to respond, having meaning sapped from what used to be familiar words.
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Quick moral because I've written too much: facts are given against a background of meaning and significance by which they count as facts of a certain sort - in our example, 'houses turn into flowers', if true, could not be true of 'our' houses and flowers. And importantly, neither could it be false of our houses and flowers.
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* Witty's list, for comparison, is (PI,II, §314):
(1) A new-born child has no teeth.
(2) A goose has no teeth.
(3) A rose has no teeth.
"But is it merely in fact the case that houses do not turn into flowers? What do we learn - what fact is conveyed - when we are told that they do not? What would it be like if the flowers and houses did turn into one another? What would "houses" or "flowers" mean in the language of such a world? What would be the difference between (what we call) stones and seeds? Where would we live in that world, and what would we grow in our gardens? And what would "grow" mean?" (The Claim of Reason).
Cavell's claim is something like: if you're affirming or denying that houses can turn into flowers, then you're not 'merely' adding a new fact to the store of known facts; meaning must also be revised. Because insofar what we call houses and flowers are concerned, one cannot possibly be talking about houses and flowers as we know them, even if to reject the idea that houses cannot turn into flowers. To even deny that houses can turn into flowers, one would have to change what we understand houses and flowers to be altogether. To bring the point out a bit, he compares the following statements (following a similar procedure that Wittgenstein carries out at one point in the Investigations*):
(1) Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers.
(2) Acorns do not turn into flowers.
(3) Houses do not turn into flowers.
Now, there's something peculiar about (3). Unwatered seeds are the kind of thing that could, if watered, turn into flowers. Acorns, well, not the kind of thing that could turn into flowers, but one can imagine oneself correcting a child who thinks flowers come from acorns. But what about (3)? Could one even make the mistake? Is it a fact that must be corrected if it turned out that houses can, in some circumstances, turn into flowers? Or is it also the very meaning of 'houses' and 'flowers' - and the whole constellation of related terms like 'grow' and 'live' - that needs now to come under wholesale revision?
One last way to put the point: insofar as we have an understanding of what houses and flowers are, if houses could turn into flowers, we would no longer know (for a time, anyway) what either houses or flowers were. We would have to revise not only our facts (what we say), but also how we say. Which is another way of saying: to say 'houses do/do not turn into flowers' - in 'this' world in which we live and breathe - is, in some sense, unintelligible. Confronted with that statement, one simply might not know how to respond, having meaning sapped from what used to be familiar words.
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Quick moral because I've written too much: facts are given against a background of meaning and significance by which they count as facts of a certain sort - in our example, 'houses turn into flowers', if true, could not be true of 'our' houses and flowers. And importantly, neither could it be false of our houses and flowers.
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* Witty's list, for comparison, is (PI,II, §314):
(1) A new-born child has no teeth.
(2) A goose has no teeth.
(3) A rose has no teeth.
Comments (187)
I don't really buy this. Framing devices and their rhetorical background/discursive-conceptual structure/philosophical grammar could possibly have 'houses turn into flowers' as a metaphor or allegory - perhaps a poem that charted a human extinction event and ended on a hopeful note of the beauty of nature without humans. But such an expression's sense comes from a non-literal meaning of the phrase.
When we say that a meaning is non-literal, we are able to (implicitly anyway) quantify over philosophical grammars, discursive contexts and so on, and the reasons why the phrase could only be given a sense allegorically are precisely the same reasons why 'houses turn into flowers' is literally false.
It isn't as if one simply summons a single discursive context along with an expression which vouchsafes the uniqueness, or otherwise singularly determines, the sense of the phrase, and moreover we can allow our inquiry to range over such contexts to the extent a phrase has multiple interpretations with fuzzy boundaries between them.
I agree, but importantly, it would not be houses and flowers (red bricks and peonies) that we're talking about. 'Houses do not turn into flowers!' might be used as - say - a warning to a boxer who wants to take up MMA or something. That's the point: it's not facts that are stake here. Yours is a good point I wanted to address but for lack of space left out. But a Cavell quote, now you've given me an excuse:
"It has been suggested to me that "Houses are turning into flowers" does mean something clear, for example in an animated cartoon or a dream. This is undeniable. In such contexts we say, for example, see a cathedral with a rose window turn into a rose. But I did not wish to suggest that such a statement meant nothing, only that we had to give it a clear meaning. And in having to imagine such a context in order to invite its projection we are imagining a world for which the statement "We have absolutely conclusive evidence that houses don't turn into flowers" is false, or rather, means nothing, because in such a world the (our) concept of evidence has no application: anything can be followed by anything. Cartoons make us laugh because they are enough like our world to be terribly sad and frightening."
Well, it could be, if the interpretive context is examining the literal truth of the phrase. Just as in the other grammars we'd fit the world to it, we can fit it to the world.
Let me be a cynic here. What's the distinction you're trying to highlight? And how does it differ from these banalities:
(1) The literal truth of a phrase isn't always interesting.
(2) Imaginary circumstances don't have to follow the usual rules.
(3) Interpretation comes prior to truth value assignment.
I see no reason why the turning into rubble could not be seen as an accidental property of houses. It would change very little in the way we interact with and talk about houses. I can easily imagine a world in which Professor McGonagall could utter the incantation fleurismus! and wave her wand in just the right way to transfigure a bungalow into a peony. I could imagine a somewhat less magical world in which some sort of emotional or spiritual force field made a house spontaneously collapse in a cloud of dust when the last person that had lived in it died, and when the dust cleared, there was a bed of blooming roses.
It seems to me that the statement 'houses don't turn into flowers' is a simple observation of an accidental property of objects in the particular world we inhabit.
Caveat: My worldview is very non-essentialist, so I am not intimately familiar with the rules and conventions of essentialism. Perhaps a signed-up Aristotelean would object to the way I am using terms such as 'accidental property'.
Quoting fdrake
...comes closest to what's going on, but the sense of 'interpretation' here is very particular. True, we must 'interpret' a claim before deciding if it is true or not, but quite specifically, we must also 'decide' if this is what the truth claim applies to; we must decide if this is what counts as what the truth claim is about. So: out of the blue, you say "houses turn into flowers"; I imagine my first thought is: you're not talking about roses and such - that's not what 'counts as' as flower in your locution; no, you're being metaphorical, you're being a bit annoyingly enigmatic about what you're talking about, but I'm sure it'll be cleared up if I inquire further (I suspect you're saying something like: an MMA fighter can't become a professional boxer). And that's alright.
But no, you really mean that houses turn into flowers. After a moment of shock, assuming you're not joshing me, I realize I no longer know what counts as a house; nor a flower. The world in which these terms took on their significance has been totally upended for me. Note that something has shifted massively between the first and second 'receptions' of the claim 'houses turn into flowers'. The 'metaphorical reception' 'fits' into the world I know: I still know, despite the metaphorical use, what here counts as a flower and house. The literal reception throws that all out of what: what counts any more as a house or a flower? I'm no longer sure, the grammar of my concepts needs to be revised; what kind of thing(s) I say about houses and flowers needs to be revised.
(I wrote, in a draft: The kinds of things I say about houses and flowers must change entirely. Not facts, but the 'relations between facts' (and these are not to be found 'in' the facts; they are found in our grammar, in how concepts relate to other concepts) must change. The change occurs 'in the space of reasons', qua Sellars).
Anyway, what this brings out is that there must then be currently a set of kinds of things that I or 'we' say about houses and flowers - there must be, if this is what must undergo revision upon the revelation that houses turn into flowers. One of the points, I guess, is that this is really hard to see. It's only at point of 'grammatical crisis', we might say, that our sedimented grammar shows itself up as sedimented. A bit like Heidegger's broken hammer.
But there are other points to be made too: about how the intelligibility of language (of what we say) is derivative or premised upon the world, the life in which it is used; in 'this' world, houses are not the kind of thing that (can) turn into flowers. And the very intelligibility of our speaking of (what we call) houses and flowers is derived from this (more or less) stable fact. And while we can, as you said, simply stipulate (as with metaphor) what we mean by such a phrase that does not turn upon this fact, we would not be speaking about the same thing as someone who is speaking about red bricks and peonies.
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Another way to make the same point: one might make a distinction (which Cavell kinda does) between words which are 'only' their meanings (stipulations, metaphor), and words which take their significance from the world in which they are embedded - 'lived' meanings, as it were. Cavell speaks of words which 'have nothing but their meanings' (which are 'merely'/only conventional), and contrasts this with words that have a relation to the world, which take their intelligibility from how things are in the world (like the fact that houses are not the kind of thing which turn into flowers!). Both 'kinds' of words are of course meaningful - one cannot deny that metaphor and so on are meaningful; but the danger is in confusing the two, in treating the one like the other.
If one wants to call this essentialism (I'm not a fan), it's a very strange kind of essentialism: a grammatical essentialism and not a 'metaphysical' one. An essentialism in Wittgenstein's mold (PI §371/373: "Essence is expressed in grammar ... Grammar tells what kind of object anything is"). An essentialism moreover, that is open to revision: were it to be the case that houses could turn into flowers, than that is what we would obviously have to say.
So it's that not our kind of houses do not turn into our kind of flowers because they have 'essential properties', but because what we call houses (the kinds of things we count as being houses) are not the kinds of things that turn into what we (happen to) call flowers (what we count as being flowers). So at stake here is a question of intelligibility, not properties and (substantial) essences. Or, if essences, then essences pertaining to what we count, call, or recognize as houses and flowers: a question of how we relate to the world around us, and not questions about the world 'in itself'.
So with respect to the magical or spiritual examples you invoked, the point is that if such things came to pass (and nothing in particular guarantees that they cannot), such things would not just count as one new fact among other facts which we add to the stock of facts we know about (what we call) houses. That houses could turn into flowers would not (only) be a fact like, 'houses can sometimes have attics and basements'. It would be a fact that would force us to revise what it is that we count as a house (or as a flower) to begin with.
Such phrases are useful only to the whimsical mystic within ;)
It seems to me that Heidegger and Derrida would argue that metaphoricity and world-embeddedness are inseparably implied in all meanings, In your example:
(1) Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers.
(2) Acorns do not turn into flowers.
(3) Houses do not turn into flowers
The first 2 require a metaphoric displacement just as much as the 3rd, even when they appear to be non-problematically intelligible. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It understands, interprets, and articulates, and thereby "takes apart" and transnforms what it affirms.
I don't disagree, and the distinction is more a matter of degree than kind; after all, even stipulation is a kind of way of life, albeit a very 'thin' one: not much rides on using a particular metaphor if a boxer is taking up MMA. But still, for the purposes of the point being made, the deconstruction of the distinction - while perfectly valid - is simply not relevant.
Yes, and by the same token, just as Heidegger's broken hammer makes visible but does not violate the overaching pragmatic sense of the situation it interrupts, an anomalous phrase within a specific logical context can be comfortably construed as nonsense within the frame of relevance of that context.
If , on the other hand, 'houses do not turn into flowers' is successfully transformed from nonsense to meaningfulness, it i s because an ongoing superordinate intelligibility guides the search for new interpretive contexts. As you say, the character of anomaly is a matter of degree.
Some of them turned into owls.
Some of us live in flowers already.
Quoting StreetlightX
That 'we' fascinates me, as though there are also or might be 'others' - poets, saints and madmen, who do not recognise these circumscriptions of our language. 'Of course, we are star dust, and flowers and houses are star dust, and everything turns into everything. To every thing, turn turn turn...'
"To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff — on some occasion, perhaps once for all —
of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff —on some occasion, perhaps once for all —those who claimed to be speaking for you. There are directions other than the political in which you will have to find your own voice — in religion, in friendship, in parenthood, in love, in art — and to find your own work; and the political is likely to be heartbreaking or dangerous. So are the others. ... Once you recognize a community as yours, then it does speak for you until you say it doesn't, i.e., until you show that you do. A fortunate community is one in which the issue is least costly to raise; and only necessary to raise on brief, widely spaced, and agreed upon occasions; and, when raised, offers a state of affairs you can speak for, i.e., allows you to reaffirm the polis". (The Claim of Reason)
To say "I speak" is always to make a claim for being part of a "we speak", by virtue of meaning anything at all. A claim that may be rebuffed, open to revision, itself a rebuff and so on. We speak not just as 'part' of a community, but for one; and it, for us. Right up until it, or we, do not. Thence enters the ethical, and the political.
Who is 'us', who is not? Who counts as 'us'? This is no less a question than what counts as a house or a flower. Who gets to count this as a flower, and that not.
But I think if fdrake really did say that to you, in real life, and you had established he wasn't joking, what would actually happen is (1) you would worry for his mental health or (2) you would expect some kind of explanation of what he means. You would expect him to expect that you'd be shocked, you'd expect that he would be aware of the effect that sentence would have on you, and so be prepared to help you make sense of it. It would be meaningful that he said it 'out of the blue'.If he kept it at that level, maintained it's out-of-the-blueness without aiding you - then you would probably ascribe to him either some sort of hostility or a zen-like approach to koan you into a higher understanding.*
But say fdrake told you that with every intent to guide you through the meaning. He DM'ed you, but then his internet went down, leaving you to puzzle over what he meant. I think there are a lot of steps you would take before jettisoning your conceptual grammar. (There are a lot of levels here, but I think what this example is essentially playing with is our understanding of the physical and biological world. It's less about houses and flowers, and more about what physical transformations we think are possible. Like, if some architect created a house with biological materials, such that it really did, at some point, become a flower, I don't think that would mess with our heads too much. I mean, I'd almost be surprised if there isn't some architect who really has already done something like this. This might be one of the things you take fdrake to mean, before moving to deep conceptual revision. )
I know this could seem like I'm missing the point by focusing too specifically on the particular example, rather than what it's meant to show. But - if we're talking about statements the acceptance of which would entail major revisions of 'conceptual grammar', I think the pragmatic dimension would play as important a role as the semantic/syntactic dimenions (etc. I don't know enough about linguistics to know if I'm saying this right.)
Considering this idea from the lens of D&G's' conceptual personae'. Absent any pragmatic specifications (besides establishing that the ohter person isn't joking), the conceptual persona in this example, the one sent reeling by learning that 'houses turn into flowers,' would be a sort of tortured, childlike, prophet (God will destroy the city, god will build it back up) whose cognitive defenses against categorial chaos are tragically underdeveloped,
A: Giving birth is how you log onto the internet.
B: Ha, good one!
A: No, I'm serious
B: WHAT IS REAL?
_____________
* [edit: Or maybe a narcissistic indifference, even unawareness of its effects. But here, and I think this important, this wouldn't fit your relationship with fdrake. It would better characterize the attitude of adult to whom it wouldn't even occur that a child wouldn't make sense of what he said. Or an an expert talking to a layman. I think these traumatic irruptions probably happen a lot, but in different settings, and this relativity of effect to setting seems key]
Was thinking about this a bit more: I think I'm avoiding magical examples because if McGonagall could just wave her wand and transfigure a bungalow into a peony, I've got bigger conceptual worries: now there is magic! (where does that fit into things?) More than just the constellation of grammar associated with houses and plants ('growing', 'living', 'stones', 'seeds', etc), but also, physics, matter, possibility, and all the rest. The mesh or network of interrelated concepts that now need to be rearranged in relation to each other is massively larger. Keeping the example to something 'locally' bizzare allows us to keep focused on the philosophical stakes a bit easier.
@Csalisbury: about to sleep, will reply tomorrow.
This might not be as obvious as it seems.
Sometimes we must assume that what has been said is true in order to work out what it meant - the Principle of Charity.
Where?
Don't worry - found it.
Your post brings to mind alot of the debate that occasionally crops up, in Lacanian circles, between those who bank on the 'Real' as provding some kind of Big Heroic Eruption/Event in the Normal Order of Things, and those who see the 'Symbolic' as a site of potential (revolutionary?) change, able to be worked on over time. I think there's a parallel and related debate to be had here, and I think you're right that the 'relativity of effect to setting' is what adjudicates, to a large degree, how the change plays out.
It's a matter - or at least, this is how I read what you're bringing up - of bringing history and 'materiality' back into the fold: what are the singularities of the situation that we need to pay attention to; the inflexion points, the points of instablity or opportunity or pain (in this time and in this space) which can be exploited or brought into play such that something new (= new meaning, new significance) can be introduced (in the most pragmatic(?) way). And this stuff ins't something that can be 'theoried' beforehand.
So yes, obviously I'm sharpening the issue to bring out the salient points in the starkest relief possible, skipping over the hard and patient work that someone (fdrake, in my example) might need to put in to 'acclimatize' me to learning that houses can in fact turn into flowers. And I think the reason this needs to be done - the reason why Cavell (who actually takes the example from Norman Malcolm) has to resort to this fancification - is that only by doing this can the (relative) difference in kind between adding new facts ("Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers") and changing understanding ("Houses do not turn into flowers") be brought out, as a properly conceptual difference.
Also, as a last point, one of the things Cavell also focuses on is that this is how, for the most part, learning - pedagogy - takes place as well. Your comments on being childlike remind me of this: the 'wonder' or surprise of children might be said to be reflective of the fact that novel facts ("we can send people to the moon!") are more likely to (re)arrange the child's 'looser' - more plastic - conceptual network than it is an adult's (whose conceptual network might be more rigid). Facts for children can hew closer to 'houses can turn into flowers' than to 'watered seeds turn into flowers'.
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Cavell: "If an utterance is meant to tell someone something, then what you say to him must be something he is in a position to understand, and something which is, or which you have reason to believe will be, informative, something which is news to him. The first of these conditions is obvious enough, but it has all the hidden difficulties we discussed in investigating the idea of teaching a word. (Consider, for example, what it would mean for a physicist to "tell" me, a child in the subject, what a pi-meson is, or that that (streak in the photograph) is the track of a pi-meson. He can tell me this only in the sense in which I can tell my three-year-old daughter who Beethoven is, or that that (picture in the book) is Beethoven. She and I, in the respective worlds in which we are children, will both be able to repeat the words we are given, and in the future point to the pictures and say the right word; but we will not exhibit the criteria which go with knowing what these things are; my world cannot compass pi-mesons.)"
Just to be clear, the context of Cavell's discussion - which I see you've found - is in relation to the problem of scepticism: do we need philosophy to come up with a guarantee that 'houses will not turn into flowers'? Do we know this? Cavell's question is something like: what would it mean to 'know' this? As I quoted in the OP: "What do we learn - what fact is conveyed - when we are told that they do not?"; It's not quite as simple as it might be on first brush.
Also note that this seemingly bizzare scenario has a long pedigree: Hume and the uniformity of nature, and Kant with his changing cinnabar: "If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one... then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red." CPR). Cavell's intervention - after Wittgenstein - is to introduce a new line of approach: that of language (something absent in Hume and Kant).
Provisional belief that P is different from belief that P, P iff ("P" is true) has no bearing on that. Edit: moreover, we're not just talking about propositions, under what conditions are 'Get me a glass of water please' or 'Go away' or "in heaven I am a wild ox, on Earth I am a lion" true?
Isn't that the basis for understanding?
I would guess, in all ignorance, that understanding is necessary for good philosophical discourse.
In any case, there are perspectives which are irreconcilable in each others terms.
Without sidetracking too much re ontology of meaning, the only sense I can make out of someone thinking that we can't "mean" the normal usage of "houses" and "flowers" with "Houses can/can't turn into flowers" is that the person coming to that conclusion (the conclusion that we must be using the terms in some novel way) believes, for some reason, that people can't be too imaginative, or too deluded, etc. Why they'd believe that is a mystery. People can be very imaginative. They can be very deluded. And so on.
Now, that doesn't imply that someone necessarily has conventional meanings in mind when they say "Houses can/can't turn into flowers." They might, or they might not. But by the same token, someone might not have conventional meanings in mind when they say "Seeds can turn into flowers," either. Again, they might or they might not. The only way we can learn whether someone has something like the conventional meanings in mind or not is by interacting with them and/or via observing how they're using words in a broader context/via additional occurrences of the words in question.
The only universal condition is that of the subject, which is about as particular as it gets.
Those questions were rhetorical, assuming the truth of an expression in order to ascertain its meaning only makes sense for those expressions which are truth apt; to connect sense to truth (of a proposition) requires a truth value, not just the possibility of a truth value under an interpretation.
Could you please rephrase your explanation, I didn't understand ?
Ok.
If you can assume the truth or falsity of X, then X must be able to be true or false. This means X is 'truth apt', where there are conditions under which it is true, and conditions under which it is false. If 'X' is 'It is raining here now' (for here, now being my location), X is true just when it is raining and false just when it is not raining. 'It is raining here now' is the kind of expression that can be true or false.
Consider 'Get me some water please', it is a request, it is not a statement of fact even if it is an expression of desire. 'Get me some water please' is never true or false, since it is a request. Therefore, since it can't be true or false, assuming it is true cannot help you interpret it.
Consider 'In Heaven I am a wild ox, in Earth I am a lion', on the face of it it could be true or false; it's true just when the person saying/writing it really is a wild ox in Heaven but also really is a lion on Earth. and false when one or both of these these conditions does not occur. But, assuming the truth or falsity of it does not help you interpret it one bit. The use of language is figurative, allegorical, metaphorical and so on, the literal truth doesn't matter a drop. What does matter is how it functions in its own context as a metaphor.
There's no way someone would ever come up with the context of a song about a spirit that fled from heaven because it felt powerless there. In Heaven, the spirit was just an angel among angels, on Earth, it was a mighty predator of unfathomable intelligence and significance. It chose to sacrifice the vulnerable ecstasy of heaven for the power it would have in the mortal realm. The principle of charity isn't going to give you that, because the truth conditions of the statement 'In Heaven I am a wild ox, on Earth I am a lion' provide little to no information about its sense outside of the context of the song.
Edit: even within the song, it's uttered as a metaphor which summarises the reasons why the spirit fled from heaven and its opinion of Heaven and humans. You can 'assume it is true for the spirit' in a sense, but notice that it doesn't actually matter whether the spirit really was a wild ox in Heaven and transformed into a lion on Earth, what matters is the two symbolic dyads of wild ox/lion prey/predator interacting with the other dyad of Heaven/Earth.
Of course, when my friend told me he prefers to hang around with people dumber than him because 'on Earth I am a lion', I understood, because we both knew the song.
All this seems to be straying from what it is to exist. What does it matter to my existence what mode of expression best expresses the truth? When I am sharing an experience with a friend, the last thing on my mind is the mode through which we are directly able to relate, I am too busy relating
I don't think the conversation between @Banno, @StreetlightX, @csalisbury, @unenlightened and myself was ever about questions of existence, they're all questions of meaning/significance/sense. Specifically I believe we're talking about schemes or habits of interpretation adapting themselves to expressions, and the relationship between this adaptation and the context or 'background' of the interpreted expression.
No need to apologise. I still think your Wittgenstein quote was appropriate. We have to take a lot of stuff for granted in order to express anything.
I always thought that quote to alluded to the notion that induction is impossible to determine with any certainty. That there is no reason a man couldn't transform into a tree. And if that happened, what implications would that have concerning identity?
In the context of the discussion in 508->516 in On Certainty, knowing is situated in a context alongside other things rather than standing apart/alone from linguistic contexts as a judgement which can be made of an isolated proposition. This is a recalibration of knowing as something other than deliberate judgement in the court of reason, exercising norms of language use comes equipped with knowledge of how they work, and this 'knowing' is much different from, say, judging whether a scientific hypothesis is true or well supported.
If suddenly a house turned into steam, the know-how of house identification (what counts as a house) changes, along with all the things that would lead to that identification - including the web of linguistic norms and concepts which allow us to identify a house as a house or to say 'I know that's a house.'. Wittgenstein looks at this as a perturbation of context which allows us to doubt things which before made no sense to doubt. He gives another similar example in 515:
515. If my name is not L.W., how can I rely on what is meant by "true" and "false"?
This kind of hard-hitting perturbation of interpretive habits is exactly the kind of thing mapped out in Street's original post.
Maybe not philosophy but I'd say we need science to determine that the molecules that make up a house can't feasibly rearrange into the molecules that make up a flower.
It's impossibility is a fact about physics/chemistry/biology, not a fact about grammar.
I don't think science can provide such a guaranteed. Science can give us a near infallible degree of certainty regarding the occurence of particular phenomena under fixed conditions, but it is incapable of determining the necessity of any fixed condition in nature, unless predicated on another fixed condition. But this just leads into an infinite regress, and never a guarantee.
Is it possible to put it another way?
What if nothing changed physically, but everyone on earth began calling houses flowers, and flowers houses? How would that affect the landscape of meaning?
Quoting fdrake
Provisional belief?
Certainty is a specific form of belief, yes. Beyond that...
Wittgenstein's example sits between discussions of Moore's two hands and of knowing. And he draws a link to knowing someone else is in pain.
What is peculiar about (3) in the OP is that we don't as yet know what to do with it.
Yeah. There are times when you entertain a position without assenting to it.
But how to do so without knowing what it means? How to you believe sentence (3) without knowing what it means?
I think need something else here.
Davidson would say that we take it to be true, then look around for a translation in English that makes sense...
But it is already in English.
Note that Davidson would treat this search for a suitable translation as an anthropological quest. That is, he would have us look holistically for the meaning within the culture in which it is used.
Wittgenstein might disregard such complexity and simply ask what the speaker is doing.
Huh? Why?
People once thought the moon was divine and that it could help them if they prayed to it. Once we discovered that it's just a big rock, were we talking about a different object? If so, then there's no way to express that ancients were wrong about the moon.
So it's the laws of the universe as we know them that's in play regarding whether houses can turn into flowers. We would say it's physically impossible, but it remains metaphysically possible as long as we can imagine a world where the laws of the universe are different such that houses can change into flowers.
Suppose we're actually wrong about the mutability of objects. Suppose everything around us is more holographic than we realize. Maybe it's actually possible for me to turn into a flower, it's just than I haven't realized how to do it yet. This is one of the values of metaphysical possibility. It allows us to ponder the possibility that we're wrong in fundamental ways. If reference is bound to description, then my imagination is hobbled.
Hey, I'm on of those people, and I don't think I'm being theological! (though if I am, I guess there are worse things to be)
I mentioned physics because I think that's the only level on which the example comes close to doing what you're saying it's supposed to do. So, again, we can imagine an architect working with biological materials, creating a house that, literally, becomes a flower. This would be a novelty, and a lot people would 'gram themselves in front of it, but more or less everything we understand 'house' and 'flower' to mean would remain intact. It's not difficult at all to integrate the phrase 'houses turn into flowers' into our current understanding. What would be difficult, for us, our language-community, is to imagine a house not designed to become a flower, spontaneously coming a flower. But why is that hard, for us?
[quote=Sx]It's a matter - or at least, this is how I read what you're bringing up - of bringing history and 'materiality' back into the fold: what are the singularities of the situation that we need to pay attention to; the inflexion points, the points of instablity or opportunity or pain (in this time and in this space) which can be exploited or brought into play such that something new (= new meaning, new significance) can be introduced (in the most pragmatic(?) way). [/quote]
Our understanding of physics is part of our situation, part of our singularity. So, double-ironically, you seem to be treating physics, theologically, as some pre-given reservoir from which 'our' language ought to be separated. But of course, our understanding of physics is, itself, part of our language, our situation. And it's that part of our language, our common understanding, which could be shaken by the example. Otherwise, all you have is the grammable flower-house, which is cool, but doesn't really change much.
I'd forgotten you'd mentioned physics. In any case you weren't who I had in mind.
Quoting csalisbury
All I'll say is that I what I'm arguing for can accommodate this (as I've already acknowledged!), and, that this is not an example of reading meaning off physics.
Oh, Iagree, I didn't mean that as an example of reading meaning off physics.
What I mean is that our understanding of what makes something something is very bound up with physics. By that, I'm not making any metaphysical claim, where physics would be the ultimate, or most literal, description of what is. I just mean the process by whichwe determine the disruptiveness of a certain claim often relies very heavily on physical possibility/impossibility. Even if our concepts of houses and flowers weren't read off the physical, we've since read the physical back into them. Since most people today are working with a background idea of a kind of physical univocity, most people have no problem with houses becoming flowers, provided everything checks out on a physical level. I think I understand the point of the OP, but I also think the example literally doesn't do what it's supposed to (by relying on an outdated man-made vs organic dichotomy)
What I mean is that our singular situation is one in which many categories (especially ones involving physical objects)are treated much more fluidly than in older societies, because there is an underlying sense of ultimate physical equivalence. Anything can be something else, or both, with a little help
Which is why i think the people discussing physical reality both are and aren't missing the point. I think it does matter that the example has to force itself to work, it needs a lot of intepretive scaffolding.
My only point was that where "houses" works as a rigid designator, you don't have to be talking about different ones (from regular ones) to talk about them turning into flowers.
Why ironic? We replaced The Good Book with The Book of Nature; we didn't stop reading, (or writing). Of course the authority of physics replaced the authority of God, and of course it pretends otherwise. But we love Big Brother and we love the Bomb because serotonin is nature, as god is love, or something.
I kinda think the otherness of science wrt religion is no more absolute than the otherness of flowers wrt houses. But maybe that's my brain turning to mush?
Was thinking about this. What was your original point? "Facts are given against a background of meaning and significance by which they count as facts of a certain sort." Confronted with a certain challenge to this background, "we would have to revise not only our facts (what we say), but also how we say. "
So the point is to point out the normative conventionality of facts. What would make a deconstruction of the distinction relevant? It could be relevant if a specifically Heideggerian destruction or Derridean deconstruction questioned the justification of the distinction, in the dialectically oppositional way it is presented by Cavell, in the first place. There are certainly regions, modalities, groupings to be pointed to, with associated normative features, but when it comes to the 'between regions' , I don't Heidegger or Derrida as wanting to accord any special relevance to this in-between such as to imply a centeredness to normative conventions. This is what fascinates me most about their work. Perhaps it isn't specifically relevant to your point in that it doesn't contradict what has been uncovered about normativity and factuality, it just turns Cavell and Lacan against themselves to extend the economy of the between' to the 'within'. .
It would have to be "The houses are..." We could change the metaphysical background of the statement and still be picking out the same objects by "the houses."
Are there cases where we can extend the concept of a rigid designator to talk about a general term?
I don't think the OP is saying the concept of a house changes if its metaphysical backdrop changes. Was it?
But in talking about the triplet of examples (in cavell, or wittgenstein) there's clearly a felt, intuitive, difference between the first two and the third. Maybe there's no ultimate metaphysical difference, but then you have to explain how the indifferent background creates the felt, intutive, difference between the first two and the third. So, ultimately, the long derridean detour brings you right back to where you already were.
Do you mean a felt, intuitive difference between inhabiting and making one's way through a normative sphere vs making the transition from one normative sphere to another? What I find radical in Heidegger and Derrida is their deconstruction of the idea of structure, state, pattern, norm. Whereas for authors from Hegel and Sartre to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, structures are defined in terms of a center that determines them in opposition to other structures, Heidegger and Derrida find movement and transformation WITHIN the idea of structure itself. Heidegger discuses what is 'felt' in terms of Befindlichkeit, attunement, affect, emotoin, mood. He understands these as the way in which I find myself affected by what I am involved with. Affectivity for Heidegger is inseparable from his notion of understanding and temporality. They point to the 'in betweenness' of experiencing the world at every moment, the fact that I am myself by being absent to myself, being beyond and ahead of myself, existing by exiting from myself. This is a radically mobile notion of being, which begins prior to any thinking of normative structures. One could argue that for Heidegger and Derrida there is more or less accelerated thinking, for instance the difference between a text that clings to metaphysical assumptions which Derrida deconstructs, vs a text that overtly recognizes itself as deconstructive.. But here there is not a difference in kind between one form of thinking and another.
I know that in regard to this:
you were gesturing toward the possibility of deconstructing the difference, so that there was no real difference in kind.
But - there is a factual difference in kind. Namely, the understanding of them as different, by english speakers. That has to be accounted for. As does any distinction between center and margins. We couldn't deconstruct the opposition between center and margin if we didn't already understand the distinction. Maybe the distinction is grounded in this or that; still the difference is there, as a fact of distinction.. So deconstruct away, but you'll need to reconstruct in order to explain the fact of the distinction itself.
Your point is well taken, but I think what's missed is the context of the example, which, to be entirely fair, I did not provide. Actually, I mentioned it to Banno in a post previously, but just to rehearse, the example is meant to function in the context of a (limited) response to scepticism, and the ability to doubt. It's a response to the question like ('why can't houses turn into flowers at any point? Can we guarantee that they won't?'). And as I also mentioned to Banno, this kind of question finds its lineage in Hume on induction (maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow), and in Kant on knowledge more generally (the cinnabar that turns red and black and light by turns); More recently in Meillassoux on radical contingency (physical law might and can change at any point, for no reason whatsoever).
So yeah, that's the context in which the example is meant to find purchase: it's meant to approach these questions from a different angle: that of meaning (it's 'post-metaphysical' in that sense, unlike Kant, Hume, Meillassoux, etc). And in some ways your response furthers this even - by attributing a 'background idea of a kind of physical univocity' to a kind of cultural-historical specificity (our singular situation!), you're 'skipping' the metaphysics and going straight into cultural critique, as it were, which I suppose might be exactly one of the upshots of treating scepticism in this way. Perhaps there's something to be said about how the experience of scepticism is changed under the conditions in which 'anything can be something else, or both, with a little help': that would make for an interesting study.
Is it presented in a dialectically oppositional way? Or are you simply engaging in the standard Derridian one-upping that leads, over and over again, to the same, tirelessly repeated point about 'being within' or whatever is it Derridians monomaniacally roll out when the whiff of distinction graces the air? It's so tiring and has nothing to do with what's being posted. You want to talk about the 'within'? Fine. But that's a different topic. Or, if it's related, it does so by qualifying what's been said, but nobody asked, and what motivates it other than a 'I'm going to turn on the Derridian interpretive machine now and see what comes out the other end?'.
Look, sorry if I sound salty, but I used do very much the same thing, and I spent literally years learning to wean myself off that incredibly annoying temptation to deconstruct just in order to repeat the same conclusion(s) that Derridians have been reproducing ad nauseam as though novel for the last 50 years. OK, things are within and not between (or, they are between only insofar as they are within! Or whatever cute turn of phrase Derridans like!) - got it! Let's talk about something else now. Derrida - thank u, next.
Derrida :vomit: !
Then it is law
I don't really understand this. There's nothing theological about saying that things in the world are made up of matter and that matter of one type can or can't turn into matter of another type. We can turn mercury into gold. We can't turn bricks into proteins. This has nothing to do with mysticism and nothing to do with "read[ing] our language 'off' the physical characteristics of the world" (although to be honest I don't really know what you mean by this). It's just a truth-apt account of how we understand things to behave.
ohhh,ok, yeah. I'd missed your post to Banno. Now I'm in the embarrassing position of more or less agreeing entirely.
That bit about physical 'univocity' and weaker categories and all that was kinda cool, though, right? I felt pretty clever as I was thinking about it and posting, like I was doing DIY marxist epistemology or something. I smoked a triumphant cigarette on my lunch break after posting, lol.
But the point being made is not about things: it is about concepts (or language). It's not about physical possibility. It's about conceptual possibility. And importantly, it is about how the one does not mirror or track the other (at least, not in any pre-established way - hence the bit about 'pre-established' harmony - an old theological notion). One way to put all this is that language is normative: we call things what we do not because (or not only because) of their 'physical properties' but also because of what we imagine things 'should' be: a 'house' is roughly what we call something to be lived in; the kind of thing made out of weather-proof material; usually has a roof; has connotations of homeliness; may be small; may be big: these things are what a house is because 'we' put them into the concept of a house: it was (communally?) created, not discovered (subject, usually, to lots of constraints).
Or, to put it a bit roughly from the other side of things, there is nothing in 'nature' that just is a house. You can measure particle interactions till kingdom come, and none of them will tell you that 'this is the kind of thing you ought to call a house'. Or, at least, one must have an idea of what wants to call a house before deciding: this is the kind of thing of qualifies as a house (made of the right material, is spacious enough, etc). This is what I meant when I said you can't read language off of the physical. The world is silent about what it wants to be called: only 'we' decide - pragmatically, in concert with others, sometime antagonistically, based off a million and one inscrutable reasons (maybe for no particular reasons at all) - why 'this' thing ought to be called, in our language, this.
I agree with this, but I don't see how this precludes the conceptual possibility of houses turning into flowers. It's no different in kind to mercury turning into gold – it just differs in scale and complexity.
And if we look to use rather than material, we turn trees into houses all the time. Is the reverse really "not even false"?
The idea is that there would be a concept of a house that one could imagine turning into a flower, but not our concept of a house. But tbh I'm not really that hung up about sticking this this one particular example. The philosophical point is that concepts can be stretched to a point at which they no longer are the same concept, but a different one entirely. At some point, it is not facts we get wrong, but the very identification of what the fact pertains to that we get wrong.
In any case, I still think it's just speculative posturing to imagine that houses can turn into flowers - at least in the context of scepticism I mentioned to Banno and Csal. Were people to really think this - and thoughts like it - outside of the contrived space of a philosophical discussion, communication between humans would be rather impossible. When the child says: "my house turned into a flower!" - we know she is not talking about our kind of houses - unless we were in some sense mentally underdeveloped; perhaps ourselves children. I want to say something like: arguments otherwise are a kind of argument from mental regression.
Because we know that it's impossible for houses to turn into flowers. Whereas if she were to say that the tree in her garden became a shed we wouldn't question it because we know that carpenters are able to do this.
So I think it's entirely appropriate to say that houses can't turn into flowers because the laws of physics as we know them preclude this kind of transmutation. It really has nothing to do with language or our concepts at all.
What I should have said was that difference in kind and difference in degree are complicit and inseparable both within supposed normative structures and between them.Quoting csalisbury
In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure
implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in
fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such
singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that
it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of
sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the
central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)
“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..(Limited Inc p53)."
Even with all this said, for Derrida there are more or less stable contexts within which it is possible to come to normative agreement. So he does not eliminate the possibility of locating cultural groupings, schematisms and the like. Rather, he finds a way to think such topologies without recourse to a structural, thematic center.
The laws of physics eh? The one pertaining to flowers? Or the one about houses? Remind me. Flower =/= House? F =/= H?
I agree with this. I don't think that there was ever any real problem here to begin with. Do you? Apparently my earlier criticism along these lines, criticism which is unsympathetic to the thoughts and feelings behind the creation of this discussion, was deemed to be worthy of deletion. I'm guessing the excuse would be "low quality".
Wasn't me :confused:
The ones pertaining to nuclear fusion and fission primarily.
Trees can turn into sheds and mercury can turn into gold, but houses can't turn into flowers. It's quite straightforward and doesn't require any revision of meaning.
I'm not saying that we don't have the concept of flowers and houses. I'm saying that these concepts don't preclude us from talking about houses turning into flowers.Our concept of a tree is different to our concept of a shed, yet we can talk about trees being able to turn into sheds. Our concept of mercury is different to our concept of gold, yet we can talk about mercury being able to turn into gold. Our concept of cows is different to our concept of clothing, yet I have a very nice and expensive leather jacket hanging up in my hallway.
That our concept of houses is different to our concept of flowers doesn't mean that we can't talk about houses turning into flowers. We can – and are. And given what I know of physics I think we can say that it can't happen naturally and probably can't happen artificially (although whether or not it is possible is besides the point here).
Right, which is why I didn't say we can't. I said if we did, we'd be talking about something else. Or if you like - we can't if we want to talk about the same thing as the houses and flowers that we're familiar with.
."Quoting StreetlightX
I suspect this is at the heart of your boredom with Derrida. If you were pressed to perform a deconstructive reading of Cavell , there likely wouldn't be much of substance you would be able to offer, because your leanings are toward a constellation of thinkers outside the orbit of the Derrida and Heideger that I understand. The vital contribution I impute to Derrida and Heidegger has to do with revealing a profound intimacy in the moment to moment unfolding of temporaity that I see as being missed by Cavell, Wittgenstein and others. In my view, to understand being via this intimacy is to make this starting point vastly more interesting than to begin with normative structures and then celebrate their transformation. My writing and thinking was in this direction well before I ever read Derrida or Heidegger, so I can take or leave them. I find your contributions to be among the most thoughtful of the commenters on this site, and since there are few others here who are willing or able to engage at any level with Derrida , I occasionally see if I can draw you into incorporating him into discussion, even if just in the form of a critique.
These days I'm more interested in Heidegger anyway. Poring through Being and Time, I'm struck by the absence of discussion concerning inter-normative discursive regions. I see this a a deliberate outcome of an approach that subordinates apparent breaks and discontinuities to a radical intimacy of movement.
Ah yes, the world's most problematic metaphysical distinction, the distinction between houses and flowers. The house is privileged over the flower through the ideal structure of instrumental rationality, whereas really houses are derivative of flowers as the sense of revealing in a flower is transcendentally prior to the mechanistic ideology of houses. Given that houses are just a subordination of the flower concept their metaphysical structure cannot be distinguished from that of a flower. One picks a house when one is looking for a place to live, and one also picks flowers, or is that too much identity between the two? If one instead views the flower and the house through the non-metaphysics of difference, one will see that the notions are parasitic of one another and thus the distinction is merely another philosophical pretension of binary between the irreconcilable that has always already been reconciled.
I don't intend what I wrote to be a criticism of Derrida, I was actually trying to satirise your posts in the thread. The on topic posts were about how 'houses are turning into flowers' and like phrases engender a change from the usual understanding of houses and flowers to understand - perhaps it's a cartoon, or a child's fantasy, or a poem -, and usually we don't notice these contextual changes despite them occurring seamlessly in the usual way we interpret stuff.
If you like, as I believe you did, you can present this as a suspension (or bracketing) of the regime of understanding which categorises things into houses or flowers, and the possibility of a suspension reveals a structure of decision to categorise in that way.
You could fork the inquiry in two here, you could either tread the now well trodden ground of articulating the suspension and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning, or you could focus on the singularity of the utterance as a call for context sensitive methods of reasoning and similarly constrained creativity. The first one changes the topic - rather it suspends all discussion except the results of deconstructive impulse; here a methodology without a method and a method without a problem - the second one stays on topic; treating the differences/perturbations brought about by things like the OP as calls for theorising. Prosaically, differences are opportunities for distinctions.
For all the emphasis on attending to singularity and the perturbation of categories, in my experience epigones of Derrida (or Heidegger, really) end up having the same conversation almost every time.
Sure, but then :
This argument, this structured argument relies on a central concept. This center is the desire for presence, or a center. In order to maintain it's structure it has to has to characterize all metaphysical projects as having, at their core, some desire for a self-present center.
But this is a mischaracterization and such attempts to impose such a center at the heart of all metaphysical inquiry can only be a violence of thought. So it is necessary to begin to think that there is no such center
and then you can perform the same operation on that structured argument, to make a new one, and so on forever, just spinning your wheels, not being able to say anything. And then you want to say - this not being able to say anything is itself what I'm trying to say. So maybe you write being but cross it out, or come up with a term like differance.
Hey, but wait this seems a lot like a center around which a discourse is structured!
No, no, we thought that too, that's why we crossed it out. It's being crossed out signifies that all attempts to talk about it just replicate endlessly into a void and its ultimately futile, but we keep doing it anway, because...
It is sort of like when the alcoholic - it was a good metaphor you used - no longer thinks he'll find satisfaction in drink, but keeps drinking. Before, he was looking for a good time. Now, he's [s]looking for a good time[/s].
But he can't stop. Why?
My hunch: Derrida isn't really talking about 'metaphysics', whatever that is. He's talking about a particular kind of anxiety, and then projecting that anxiety onto everything. And anxious people, or a certain sort of anxious person, can't stop talking.
Quoting fdrake.
Let's talk about these epigones. I find the vast majority of readings of Derrida and Heidegger to be utterly conventional, or worse, semi-coherent insubstantialitites. Over and over , Heidegger gets turned into Kierkegaard, Levinas, Sartre or Gadamer, while Derrida becomes an unserious mischief-maker. Simon Critchely in a recent article deemed Derrida all but irrelevant( That happens to be my view concerning Critchely's work, but that's another story).
You could either tread the now well trodden ground of articulating the suspension and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning, or you could focus on the singularity of the utterance as a call for context sensitive methods of reasoning and similarly constrained creativity.[/quote] Yes, treading the well-trodden ground of articulating the suspension is what most Derrideans do. No wonder Streetlight is so bored with them!
Let me see if I can articulate what I am trying to do, and you can tell me, regardless of whether you agree with it, if it is off-topic.
So the singularity of the utterance calls for context sensitive methods of reasoning. Yes, indeed.
Let me take the position of someone having the realization for the first time that what was for so long understood as invariant, the factuality of statements, is subordinant to normative practices of meaning assignment. Such would be a profound epiphany, having implications in so many realms of endeavor, from the ethical and epistemological to the political.
This is where my Derrida-Heidegger come in. rather than focusing on "articulating the suspension(bracketing) and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning", in my reading, they move within the very heart of context itself and notice an almost imperceptible mobility within what has been rendered as structure, presence, state, form, scheme, element, being, the 'is', as the most supposedly irreducible origin of epxeience. What's most remarkable about this 'split' within the 'I" moment to moment is not that it leads to opposition , incommensurability, negation, suspension. On the contrary, it lends to the ongoing temporization of experiencing, in and through all contexts, a radical consistency, integrity and intricacy that is missing from other approaches. Whether you buy this or not, the implication is that what happens BETWEEN supposed normative regime of understanding to another becomes utterly uninteresting, becasue it is now understood to be only an abstracted and derivative way of thinking the basis of transformation in meaning. The real action has not been made visible yet to those who begin from centered contexts and their transformation.
.
The problem here is such 'centres' aren't always metaphysical presuppositions sustained through being inattentive to aporetic shifts in context, they're often non-conceptual in nature. If you want to chart the perturbation away from this centre induced by the singularity of some event, you don't subordinate its terms of expression it to a pre-established logic of perturbation and singularity, you use its singularity to tailor concepts to it. There's a historical element here, you always end up using some tradition of concepts to articulate the singular, but to thematise (and then give an account of) something singular requires you to cash it out in terms inspired by the thing rather than the generalised logic of singularity perturbing conceptual schemes/interpretive habits. You use the thing to tailor the history of concepts you apply to it, it 'organises' the cognitive elements of your historicity if you want to put it in phenomenological terms. Or more prosaically, you let it shape how you think and what you bring to the problems it poses.
It's certainly of philosophical interest to talk about that generalised logic of singular perturbation - what it does to metaphysical accounts - but you can't articulate any singularity through blind iteration of the way singularity as an idea perturbs concepts.
The real's both far more banal and far more rich than any conceptual distinction, all we can do is allow it to permeate our thought from the ground up.
Edit: notice how we're talking about a generalised logic of singularity rather than any specific instance of it? This is a shift from the realm of language convention the thread's problem was posed in.
Is that how you’re understanding deconstruction? It certainly is the way many acolytes understand and ‘apply’ it, but it is a profound misreading of Derrida, who has insistently argued that the general and the singular are indissociably linked in any context of understanding.
Alll thinking is already deconstructive thinking. When Derrida interprets Kant or Plato, he is contributing to a text that is already in process of deconstructing itself.
That is why his ‘theory’ is always embedded within the most sensitive and local contexts of those who he interprets , and that is the meaning of his famous phrase ‘nothing outside of the text’, which refers to the immediacy and precision of local context. Even when we claim to be transcending local context in generalizing and abstracting, we are never leaving the locality of our own specific context in forming such abstractions. This is what a deconstructive reading brings out. It was also Heidegger’s understanding of existence as temporality and history.
Just as you don’t “subordinate its terms of expression ito a pre-established logic of perturbation and singularity,” you don’t simply use its singularity to tailor concepts to it. Because what makes a singular singular also ties it s a historical context such that what gives it its meaning as unique also joins it thematically to a history. Any meaning is both utterly unique and utterly conventional and there is no thinking, no discourse which operates beyond this historicizing locality.
So I could engage specificallly with the example of the op, or speak more generally as I have, but my argument always had in mind and was organized around the specific example. To move back and forth between the more ‘ general’ and op-specified context with regard to the sentences provided would not result in much of a change in the argument. Not because the general approach ignored the ‘singularity’ of the context, but because that singularity carried forward, even in its particular instanstiation of it , a certain thematics
of thinking. House and flowers were the specific instnatiation I had in mind and tailored my argument to.
This is brcause there is always a specific singularity, regardless of whether meaning to make the general argument or the particular, or whether one is supposedly remaining within a normative region or traversing it for another.
The whole alleged problematic about needing to protect the singularity of a context from abstract logic, it seems to me, implies the assumption that singuality and generality can be thought coherently in separate terms.
But as at least one other poster has brought up with the magic example, we can conceptually understand houses being turned into flowers by some special means. And this sort of imaginative leap happens quite a bit in fiction, and not so infrequently in theology. Think of the Catholic Eucharist.
But let's say the language is meant to be everyday real-world and not magic or metaphysics. Is there anything physically preventing a house from being turned into flowers atom by atom, given some really unlikely scenario or with advanced technology?
Let's say time travelers or aliens leave a device behind that can rearrange matter however we like. Someone uses it to turn an abandoned decrepit building into flowers. Does this require us to alter our conceptual understanding of houses or flowers? Or does it just broaden our knowledge of what's physically possible?
We don't know this, and it probably isn't impossible. We just aren't anywhere near that technologically advanced. But I doubt it's physically impossible.
Do you mean there is no non-technological way for houses to turn into flowers? My guess is it's merely highly improbably, but QM would allow for a non-zero possibility of such an arrangement coming about in an infinite universe or given enough time.
However, to Street's point, if we ever do get that technologically advanced, houses might become more like living things that can morph themselves into whatever suits the moment. In which case our conceptual understanding of houses and most of the world around us will have shifted into some highly technological symbiosis between the environment and ourselves.
Or we go extinct before then.
This is exactly the Derridean response I was expecting.
Wait, we're supposed to be talking about "concepts turning into other concepts"?
There would be a concept of [a house that one could imagine turning into a flower]; Not:
There would be [a concept of a house] that one could imagine turning into [(a concept) of a flower].
I thought the OP meant that the meanings of general terms are bound to background language games, those ancient scaffolds behind the world we take to be real. In dreams those structures may bend and twist so that people can fly and monkeys can talk.
Cats are gigantic and, so on. It is a bit of a mystery how we know the difference between real and unreal. There isn't really any criteria for it.
All we know is that we'll end up like that guy in Beautiful Mind if we dont keep our shit together.
I would call that something we could imagine, rather than a concept. I reserve "concepts" for type/universal abstractions.
In any event, so what we're imagining is a physical thing transforming into another physical thing. If you're imaginative enough, you can imagine that so that the terms are being used in the normal way re "house" and "flower."
We imagine things like that often in artworks--paintings, novels, films, etc. a la fantasy, surrealism, etc.
I've been thinking about this a bit more. Building on what's been said. It seems like there's two conversations going on, and most of the confusion comes from that.
One is a kind of Wittgensteinan conversation about local conditions of sense. This was what I think I was going on about.
The other -cinnabar, sunrises - is far more general. It's also transcendental, but a deeper -or logically prior - transcendentality, which is about the necessity of regularity to talk about anything at all.
If you were to write a cosmogenic poem, you'd have chaos first, then a baseline regularity, then the emergence of specific concepts - houses, flowers etc. The deeper, or prior, condition would be the condition for later conditions.
One conversation brings us back to Kant. The other is an invitation to create some kind of 'cogntive map' of the present in order to pinpoint areas with some potential to disrupt/create new senses. (Though that makes it sound like disruption or novelty are intrinsically valuable. It would probably be better to say something like : if you know where you're at, then you'll know where to go.)
This latter approach characterizes thinkers like Sloterdijk or Lyotard (I'm of course evangelizing for my faves).
Like Michael, you're simply mapping your concept of a house (and a flower) to the physical: you're just begging the question (yes, I'm ignoring what terms you've 'resevered'). But it is clear that the concept of a house (or a flower) is not exhausted - if it refers to it at all - by the physical. And importantly, this is a point not about houses or flowers, but about language and our use of it.
But I think what I want to say that local conditions of sense are already this 'deeper' sense of transcendentality; or that the deep manifests itself in the local, and only as the local. So in this sense one can speak of something like a 'transcendental empiricism' in the vein of Deleuze: in which the transcendental is manifest at the level of the empirical, without collapsing into it. Or: the two senses of the transcendental can't be - should not be - treated as separate.
(I wrote to fdrake in a PM once: "This is an attempt to 'empiricise the transcedental', without, for all that, giving up on the status of the transcendental as transcendental. These terms might serve more to confuse than to clarify, because at stake is a kind of paradoxical effort to ‘collapse’ the transcendental into the empirical while still insisting on a distance between the two. To put it with a bit of poetic flourish, one might say that all thought is the effort to articulate the distance and the nearness between the two, without collapsing the one into the other.")
Or: every singular situation produces its own articulation between the transcendental (the 'background') and the empirical (the 'foreground'?), and the task of thought is to measure that distance, each time anew: this how thought becomes equal to whatever it is that thought is 'about'. And it's once you do this that you can, as you put it, "know where to go". Or in your terms: the cognitive map produced by local conditions already answers to the deeper sense of transcendentality dealt with by Kant, Hume, etc.
Wittgenstein once wrote something like: "philosophical problems happen when you don't know your way about"; one wants to reply: to find or invent a way about just is the task of philosophy.
Quoting StreetlightX
Would you make the same argument about Heidegger? What is the actual for Heidegger? What would he do with your 'Houses are turning into flowers' example? Would he consider it a dislocation of a normative region of phrases? How does the realm of the ready to hand and the Mitdasein treat the distinction between the intelligible and the unintelligible? Seems to me he preceded Derrida in depriving the actual of the power to produce wholesale revisions of sense, but I may be misreading him. Looking at just Being and TIme, with all of the modalities of the inauthentic(the ready to hand, present to hand, mitdasein) and the authentic he introduces in the book, nowhere does he seem to give factical particulars the capacity to reorient sense in the way you depict it in your Houses-Flowers example.
I’m not saying that the physical part exhausts the concept. I’m saying that even if there’s more to the concept than the physical part we can still ask if houses can become flowers - and still be talking about houses and flowers as we understand them. I’ve already offered the real examples of mercury into gold, of trees into sheds, and of cows into leather jackets. How is the case of houses into flowers in principle different?
The only difference I see is the practical difference that houses turning into flowers is (as far as I know) physically impossible. Stating this (presumed) fact doesn’t require a revision of meaning. It’s a perfectly ordinary and appropriate rejection (and even if it were possible my point stands).
This is not a Heidegger thread; why would you think these questions are relevant?
One way to talk about the transcendental empirical , as Deleuze puts it(I guess its alright to mention him), is to make the kinds of normative vs gestalt shift distinctions that your example wants to point to. Another way is to begin by closely examining what takes place within the normative regime, determining how the moment to moment unfolding of meaning making is structured. A certain kind of understanding of the basis of state, structure, pattern, form and presencing can be seen to justify a range of explanations(Cavell, Deleuze) that talk about such things as whole sale revisions. Another way of determining the basis of the actual in its moment to moment unfolding reaches a rather odd conclusion concerning the glue that holds past , present and future together in the constitution of meanings.
From the vantage of this kind of thinking, an ongoing belonging of what is actual to what it arises out of
results in a different formulation of what would otherwise be understood in terms of notions like whole sale revision of sense. There would indeed arise distinct differentiations, groupings, thematics , epoches, but the differences would among them would become little more interesting than the differentiations within these groupings.
The proponents of this odd approach would argue (or at least this proponent ) that one is not effectively thinking through the actual if one is relying on an understanding that fails to adequately perceive the glue that binds what arises as actual from the having been that frames it and is in turn framed by its future. For their part , the adherents of the norm-wholesale revision approach will be tempted to misread all this as an attempt to subordinate and flatten actuality for the sake of high theory. And that's where things stand now. Perhaps the oddball theorists have it all wrong. But that's different than being off topic.Unless I've misunderstood the topic. What is it, by the way?Is it :'Let's discuss the mechanics of wholesale revision with respect to the language example given'
or : 'Let's discuss both the mechanics of and the justification for the overarching presuppositions framing linguistic norms and their wholesale revision'. If it's the former then I apologize for being off-topic.
What failure? Was there something I wrote that implied that such temporal 'glue' ought to have no place in any analysis of language and normativity? Or is this just a projection made so that you can engage - blindly, without motive - the Derridian/Heideggarian interpretive machine? This is exactly what I despise about this kind of reading: for all the rhetoric and banging-on about how Presence is always contaminated by Death and how all immunity is always-already auto-immunity or whatever, the reading only proceeds by Totalizing, absolutely, it's subject. It's takes distinctions, absolutizes them, then, lauding itself for its own genius at finding how they can't, in fact, be totalized, says: look! You haven't considered the 'differenciations within groupings'!
It puts the rabbit in the hat and then acts surprised - and more theoretically sophisticated - when it finds it there. Did I deny that there might be (can be? must be?) 'differenciations within groupings'? Or do you see a word like 'whole', and, ignoring any sense of nuance whatsoever, find a nice and convenient spot to jam in the deconstructive lever? It's thoughtless, mechanistic reading, pre-fab theory for factory-floor application.
I might have even been more willing to work through with you, what I was trying to bring out with the OP. But why bother? You know what you want to conclude, and your only effort of thought is how you want to arrive at it. I cannot be bothered laying down tracks to your ready-made destination.
Then you're hopelessly muddled regarding what the heck you're even talking about. You're not talking about concepts per se, you're not talking about imagining a house turning into a flower, you're somehow talking about language and our use of it without talking about either of the two things above. How the heck would that work? And there's some sort of mysterious "exhausting" versus "not exhausting" a concept.
You'd need to be more explicit/straightforward/detailed about what you are talking about if you're going to respond to everything with "I'm not talking about that"
If I say that I'm surprised that you're not bothering to try to explain it better, and that I'm surprised that you not bothering would come with an "ad hominem" attached, would you believe me?
I asked roughly the same questions on the first page.
I've been trying - and failing - to articulate to myself why this approach doesn't sit right with me, but I think I've hit upon why. I think for the example of 'houses do not turn into flowers' to bring out what it's meant to bring out, it needs to hold ceratus paribus - all else equal. To say that what we call houses and flowers are not the kinds of things that turn into one another, is to say (to mean, to imply) that (among other things) the world in which these terms take on their significance is not one in which that kind of transmutation is possible. That is, not different from this one. Of course, this world can change: there may be super-advanced tech, or magic that we discover down the line. In which case that world and its possibilities are themselves not what we are now familiar with.
And insofar as the OP is trying - among other things - to bring out a distinction that can exist between the addition of new facts on the one hand, and the reassessment of concepts on the other, the example needs to be made in a context in which what I've called (following Cavell) 'the world' is held steady, as it were, while only the possibility of houses turning into flowers - without magic, without tech - is made different. It's like: you need to hold the background steady in order to properly see the change in the foreground. Otherwise the point is lost, and the transformation of a house into a flower (given new tech, given the discovery of magic, or whathaveyou) becomes just another fact. The conceptual point is lost.
Incidentally, this might be a point that @Joshs might appreciate, although a typical Derridian might still insist on how the distinction is 'always-already' reversible and then we're stuck into the black mud of deconstructive formalism again.
"is possible" is important there, though, because it's not possible per what?
How is that any different to simply stating that it's false that houses turn into flowers?
And what about other kinds of falsehoods? To borrow your wording, to say that what we we call a car isn't the kind of thing that can travel faster than light is to say that the world in which these terms take on their significance is not one in which that kind of movement is possible. But there's no controversy in claiming it to be false that cars travel faster than light? What is the difference between these two cases?
If you want a mathematical gloss on it, I'm thinking of it as something like:
We have a sortal concept of 'house', some things count as a house, some don't. Embedded in this sortal are all the things we'd call houses. Imagine this as a set (which is already a simplification). If you consider associating with this sortal a set of expressions which make sense to say of houses. Like "houses are where people live', 'that house is crumbling' and so on. Further imagine that we've collected all things that make sense to say of houses, and associated this with each house in the house sortal - call this the 'philosophical grammar' of the house sortal.
So, say, if I were to describe a mud hut as 'made of concrete', that would be false, but it would still be something I could produce from my understanding of houses (the house sortal) and the kind of things I could say about houses. Analogise this to the distinction between a not-well formed formula of a logic and a falsehood of a logic; like "P & &" is not a well formed formula of classical propositional logic, but "P & not-P" is a well formed formula but is always false. So this set of 'well formed formulae' is the set of things we can express of houses (as a sortal) because it works for every house.
Do the same thing for flowers, make a flower sortal, and all the things that could sensibly be said (even if false) of flowers.
With this set up 'houses are turning into flowers' isn't true or false in either logic, it's not a well-formed formula of either system of objects and sensible statements about them. So to say 'houses are turning into flowers' is simply false is to stipulate a different sortal concept of house/logic of house expressions or a different sortal concept of flowers/logic of flower expressions. One in which 'houses are turning into flowers' is a well formed formula.
We absolutely can do this; we could set up an interpretation of 'turning into' that makes sense of the phrase, be it through raw degredation as @Banno suggested, a physical transfer of atoms as @Marchesk or @Michael suggested, or allegory as I suggested. Edit: note, these tellingly all contain an act of imagination!
But the fact that you can set up such an interpretation introduces a context in which 'houses are turning into flowers' is a well formed formula of the logic, which is required before assigning truth or falsity to it. A mathematical gloss on this is that we tweak the relationship between the house-sortal and the flower-sortal to range over various meanings of 'turn into', which can be truth-apt given some alternative interpretation of the house sortal, the flower sortal, and the relationships between them.
You could say that we may interpret this 'completely literally', perhaps against the usual norms of the words (here identified as sortals) 'houses' and 'flowers', and since physical houses don't actually turn into physical flowers through some act of magic, it would be false. But in a cartoon, it could be true.
If this were the case then surely it wouldn't have made sense to say that the morning star and the evening star are the same thing, as "appearing in the evening" wasn't part of the morning star sortal, but as a matter of fact they are the same thing – Venus.
It's not as if after discovering this fact we are no longer talking about the same morning star and evening star as we were before. We are talking about the exact same morning star and the exact same evening star; it's just that we've learned a new fact about them/it. And conversely if they were in fact different things to state that they are the same thing would be a perfectly ordinary falsehood, not some subversion of meaning or whatever.
The issue is alleviated here by both being stars, the new information about their identity doesn't violate any rules of sense, it rather allows us to reconcile one sense with another through the discovery of 'morning star' and 'evening star' co-referring.
Edit: an analogous situation to the co-reference would be a house that is a flower, which is quite different from a house turning into a flower, even if you could interpret someone saying 'houses are turning into flowers' after watching a cartoon in which a person lived in a flower. It still requires an act of imagination to construct the example, in contrast to recalling norms of use.
As someone said, it's about where we are. Our location in the sea of possible worlds.
Then we could reconcile one sense with another through the hypothetical discovery of "my old house" and "my new flower" co-referring (were it physically possible for houses to turn into flowers).
It really is just a matter of ordinary facts that can be determined by scientific analysis. Either the physical stuff that makes up my house can or can't turn into the physical stuff that makes up a flower. As far as I know, it can't, so houses can't turn into flowers.
That's exactly the kind of stipulation of context I was trying to highlight in my post. I take one of the major points the OP is trying to illustrate is that such stipulation is a response to weird shit going on. If some weird shit wasn't going on, we wouldn't need to stipulate a context, or possible world, in which it made sense! This act of stipulation being a pre-requisite for an interpretation of the phrase signals a shift from the usual way we interpret the words. What was the meaning of 'houses are turning into flowers' before any of these stipulations?
The brick enclosure which keeps me dry and warm losing/gaining protons and/or neutrons in such a manner that they transmute into complex proteins of the sort that I would gift my mother on her birthday when I remember.
Either it can happen (like mercury into gold) or it can't. It's a truth-apt concern that science is best tasked at answering.
I'm not stipulating a possible world in which is makes sense. I'm stipulating a possible world in which it is possible. It already makes sense. It just can't happen because our world doesn't behave that way.
There's a difference between incoherence (four-sided triangles) and impossibility (faster-than-light travel). Houses into flowers is of the latter kind.
Saucy.
Yet people understand houses and flowers before understanding proteins, protons, neutrons, 'enclosures', changing atomic numbers, complexes, the relationship of atoms with solid objects... At least personally, I have to do some perverse exercise of imagination to identify a house as a complex of atoms transforming in some non-specified-way-I-gloss-over-the-details-of into a flower.
Perhaps you really do understand houses in terms of atomic physics. I personally doubt that though. I think it's more likely that you're stipulating a context of understanding for 'houses are turning into flowers' precisely because it generates lots of interpretive difficulties. I doubt that your understanding of 'houses' differs too much from 'houses' in 'houses are turning into flowers' when reading:
'Houses are turning into a poor investment nowadays'
you certainly wouldn't need to specify physical transformation in that scenario.
I don't see the relevance of that. People understood the Sun long before they knew anything about plasma or nuclear fusion (and that's true of lots of people today) but it either is or isn't a fact that the Sun is hot plasma and undergoes nuclear fusion at its core. So we can understand houses without understanding the physics of atoms but it either is or isn't a fact that the type of atoms which make up our houses can turn into the type of atoms which make up flowers.
Let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Personally, I understand houses and flowers largely through the medium of cartoons. What you're saying doesn't make any sense, because the laws of physics don't apply in cartoons. So 'houses are turning into flowers' is true.
Why is your interpretive context the only appropriate one?
He goes on to ask and say:
In the ordinary sense I know that houses do not turn into flowers, but this in not what the philosopher demands of claims of knowledge. Given the contingency of existence we simply do not have knowledge in an absolute, apodictic, infallible sense.
Quoting Michael
Because it is not even false that houses can turn into flowers at this point in time. A word about truth and falsity: both of these are subject to, conditioned by sense. Consider that when something is false, we know how to react to this, as it were - we know the significance of a false statement. "It is false that the cat is on the mat" -> "then I shan't go looking for the cat on the mat" [verbal response]; Or, *I don't look for the cat on the mat* [action]; (statement -> significance). To understand the 'game' of truth and falsity - and, a fortiori for something to be true or false - is to 'know one's way about' (in Wittgenstein's words) a true or false statement.
But what kind of significance does saying 'it is false that houses turn into flowers' have? How, even in principle, does one go about rendering any sense of significance to this? Think again of the child who affirms the truth of this statement ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!): one's immediate (adult?) response is something like: 'this child doesn't know what truth is'; or, 'this child doesn't quite understand how houses, or flowers, or change works', or "how adorable". This child doesn't understand concepts and how they relate to other concepts - at least, not like we do. Her language is in error (according to our standards). That's the immediate adult response, not: 'No darling, houses do not turn into flowers' (at least, it's not the response parent who isn't tired and just wants to get through lunchtime with bub; or, the adult could say this, but she's being somewhat pedagogically irresponsible).
To 'flatten' possibility in the way you're doing - to say that anything is possible, anything can turn into anything - is to loosen all communicative constraint to the point of non-sense. It's fine if we're talking about a localized case of houses turning into flowers - but take that logic all the way: anything can turn into anything else: language would lose its grip on the world, no one would 'know their way about'; this though, is just the condition of the child, who has yet to master language, who has yet to grasp the grammatical (not physical, not imaginative) constraints that allow sense to be made. One last, more abstract way to put this: distinctions with significance require asymmetry of response: if anything is possible, then anything follows, and one cannot say anything significant about anything at all.
Constraints need to be placed on our grammar such that one responds this way to a truth and this way to a falsehood: this asymmetry is the condition for language to function at all. But no such asymmetry exists in the case of 'it is false that houses turn into flowers'. One can only blink in bemusement: "he hasn't mastered a language yet";
Also, I was going to quote the exact passage of Cavell's that Fool just posted, but with a bit more: "In denying that we have conclusive verification for this last statement ['houses do not turn into flowers'], I am not to be understood as asserting that we do not have (conclusive) verification for it. I am asserting, rather, that we do not yet know what verification for or against it would he. Nor am I saying that such a statements can have no use: only, we have got to be told what its use is. (And when we are told, it is not likely to be a use which requires anything like verification at all- it might, e.g.. be an accusation or an insinuation)" (Cavell, The Claim of Reason).
Packed alot into this, but like I said, last post for about a day or so. Hopefully there's alot to chew on.
Regardless, the issue here isn't whether or not it's true that houses can turn into flowers; the issue is whether or not it makes sense to say that houses can or can't turn into flowers. And I'm saying it does. I know what it means for something to be a house, I know what it means for something to be a flower, and I know what it means for something to change into something else (mercury into gold, caterpillars into butterflies, trees into sheds), and so I know what it would mean for a house to turn into flowers (even if I don't understand how it would happen). If scientists were to determine that it is possible (via some complicated physical process that I'm too ignorant to understand) I wouldn't have to revise my concept of houses or flowers; I'd just have to revise my understanding of what's possible in the world.
I wasn't. My intuition was to turn the phrase into a truth by supplying the context of a poem. In that regard I understood the phrase 'houses are turning into flowers' as part of a post-apocalyptic story where the houses were all decaying and nature was colonising the architecture, making it a metaphorical description of fictional events.
Atoms had far less to do with my understanding of the phrase when true than the poetic connotations of the phrase.
I was still talking about an imagined real poem. Your invocation of the laws of physics, in this regard, is just as much an interpretive fantasy as mine. Only yours has the benefit of your interpretive habit of equating what is real (edit: or possible) and what is consistent with the laws of physics. Mine, of course, has the much better benefit of being a realistic scenario in which the truth of the phrase would be encountered; houses turn into flowers in fantasies. Note that my story too was consistent with the laws of physics, but did not require the reduction of houses and flowers into atomic configurations.
Whether science could determine if houses could really turn into flowers is irrelevant to my interpretation.
I’m not sure what you mean by “significance” here. Do you mean it in the sense of importance/relevance? I don’t know if it is important if it’s false, but it would be important if it were true, and it seems strange to say that it’s only truth-apt if it were true. And there are plenty of falsehoods that have no significance; e.g. Napoleon’s last meal was Weetabix.
Difference that makes a/any difference.
The problem with this is what determines "what it makes sense to say" about x?
That can't be limited to the way that x normally behaves. If we're saying that, we're ruling out imagination period, because . . . well, I don't know why we'd be doing that. At any rate, Streetlight said that the issue isn't about the physical stuff that's being referred to.
Is it limited to what's possible re x? Possible in what sense? Logical? Metaphysical? If we're talking about conceivability, that amounts to either imagination or possible in one of these senses. If we're talking about what's physically possible, Streetlight said he wasn't talking about that again.
Is it about the concept qua a concept? If so, we're back to how people think/what they can imagine. Also, Streetlight said that he wasn't talking about concepts turning into other concepts.
So just what is "what it makes sense to say" about here?
That's the key question really. You can see the different interpretations of 'houses are turning into flowers' as ways of ascribing a notion of possibility to the transformation. For Michael, mine apparently makes little to no sense, you seem to want to allow imagination to rule like I did.
Take that we brought different interpretations to it as data, the important thing to notice is how we did it, how we ascribed the notion of possibility, not the mechanics of that notion of possibility (in terms of accessibility relations if you must). I assumed that it was really natural to interpret it as poetic, Michael assumed it was really natural to interpret it as a physics problem.
What matters is that we supplanted a context to the phrase based upon some interpretive process, and we did so as a matter of interpretive habits. Nothing about the phrase tells us precisely how to make sense of it - the existence of various interpretations going against the grain of the usual understanding of houses and flowers attests to that.
If you're demanding that I precisely define 'what makes sense to say of houses' in order for you to understand the phrase, I counter demand you precisely define every single word and phrase in your post before I claim I understand what you're trying to say. I won't play that game.
If things like 'houses can be made of mud, concrete, bricks, wood...', 'people live in them' don't help you understand what I mean by 'things that make sense to say of houses', I don't know how to teach you what things are sensible to say of houses. Or flowers, for that matter. Consistent with the usual conventions of use of those words.
Quoting StreetlightX
You are a thoughful and well-read philosopher. I'm absolutely certain that some sort of temporal 'glue' has a place in your analysis of language and normativity. I am just as certain that you recognize differentiations within groupings. It's a question of what sort of glue and differentiations you have in mind , and how those differ from what I have in mind.
Quoting StreetlightX
I wrote a ridiculously superficial summary of what I was after. My point wasn't to present a completed argument to you. It was to see if I could get past your hostility and already formed presuppositions about what I had in mind, in order to open up a space to examine certain parts of your op. I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills and less of your invective. Just try and pretend for a moment that there is a tiny chance I am not the realization of all your worst assumptions concerning Derrida.
I would actually be interested in you applying these ideas to the OP to see what happens. I'm sorry for my earlier hostilities too. It's not really your fault I've had many incredibly frustrating experiences with Derrida fans.
Likewise there is a similar geometric sense, albeit involving cutting and gluing, in which a "house" could morph into "flowers" or even be regarded as equivalent.
The author is possibly conflating natural language semantics with formal semantics. Any formal definition of transforming type A into type B requires a notion of similarity, which in turn requires that A and B can be projected into a common conceptual space.
Yeah, that makes sense. My cosmogenic framing doesn't really work, since regularity can't arise without some singular situation which exhibits regularity. You can't treat one as temporally prior.
Still, there is a sense in which regularity is separable in principle from local conditions*, in the way any platonic idea is separate from its instantiations. [deleuzian caveat that ideas are themselves emergent, rather than imposed from without.]
The reason I mention this is that you'd responded to my focusing on the specificity of the example, by bringing it back to cinnabar, sunrises etc. The only way I can understand that response is to see 'houses become flowers' as really meaning 'things can't just turn into something else willy-nilly (tangential historical curiosity : Didn't Husserl, in Ideas, use this idea to try to show how consciousness can survive the destruction of the world?)
Or to put this another way - if the example is meant to show how local conditions are enough, without drawing on 'deeper' transcendality, then something has gone wrong when the example is shored up by explaining how its not houses and flowers per se, but the cinnabar thing.
The only reason I'm being so nitpicky here, is that I'm really, really interested in what the current situation is. If the example doesn't work except as an illustration of a more general principle, I think that does leave it very open to a Derridean take. Houses can turn into flowers, easily enough. What transformations can't we think (which transformations really make us strain)? I think that that by definition is a more challenging question, but its exactly what thinking otherwise is all about. (one more plug for Sloterdijk. Love his views or hate them, this is what I belive he tries to do.)
For all the (justified) spleen against Derrida (which I share), the OP seems to be right in his wheelhouse, so maybe @Joshs is justified in his approach to the OP
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*maybe 'distinction of thought' is more approprite here.
I am also comfortable in just using my own terms.
What interests me is the question of what the real and the actual teach us from a philosophical perspective in the guise of the singularity. Houses are turning into Flowers is presumably one such example of an opportunity for revision of a way of thinking. We see in myriad authors, from Kuhn and Foucault to Cavell ,Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, attention to the sort of event which prompts conceptual revolution, gestalt shift, wholesale reorientation of sense, differend, etc.
What's striking to me about Being and Time, by contrast, is the apparent absence of interest in such breaks and transformations, apart from the way that experience already unfolds moment to moment. Many modes of relating to a world are introduced, but Heidegger's intent always seems to be getting back to the primordial condition of possibility of having a world and of relating to beings. There are , of course, many clashing reading of Heidegger, and many camps(right vs left Heideggerians, existentialist vs postmodern ). My own take is that Heideger developed an odd and fascinating approach to grounding meaning , via his equiprimordial concepts of temporality, care and attunement.
My interest is in examining how these linked concepts determine factical experience in and through the sorts of contexts that would include the op's example, such as to reveal why Heidegger may have viewed the notion of singularity in a distinctly different way that the authors I mentioned.
Even where Heidegger seems to treat science in Kuhnian terms, he subordinates its achievements and methods to a more primordial 'ontological understanding of being'.
]
"Whether or not the importance of the research always lies in such establishment of concepts, its true progress comes about not so much in collecting results and storing them in "handbooks" as in being forced to ask questions about the basic constitution of each area, these questions being chiefly a reaction to increasing knowledge in each area. The real "movement" of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In these immanent crises of the sciences the relation of positive questioning to the matter
in question becomes unstable."(BT,p.9)
Questioning, revision and crisis are grounded for Heidegger in the odd equi-primordial structure of temporality-care-attunement. What is most strange to me about what he does with these concepts is that he doesn't begin from structure, state, form, value and then have these entities interaffect each other to form an inter-subjective world. He doesn't even seem to begin from Deleuze's starting point in structures which are already in differential relation to other structures within always plural contexts.
I would have to go into much detail to make any real sense of what i've said so far but we're already deep into the rabbit hole. It may be better to see how or if you want to refocus this discussion on the specifics of the op.
I don't see much relation to the terms in the thread, I can see how you've substituted the general concepts in, into which house, flower, and turns into transform. The phenomenology of that 'turns into' would be pretty interesting, as you'd actually be giving a description of a phenomenal event of context constraint which occurs during the interpretation of the phrase. Related to the 'folding the transcendental into the empirical' sub-theme in the thread.
For Heidegger World is always a specific pragmatic totality of relevance within which our interactions with others have significance. His famous hammer example shows how we only notice the hammer as hammer when something malfunctions and our engagement with the meaningful task of using the tool is interrupted. Notice that unlike the foreground -background model , within the totality of pragmatic relevance, the broken tool still has sense, since that relational totality takes account of the idea of tools not only functioning properly but also breaking. Such possibility of failure, absence and malfunction is implied in the pre-understanding of the situational context. Can the example of the borken tool be applied to that of a 'broken' phrase like Houses turning into Flowers? If so, then the phenomenal analysis of 'turning into' would reveal that while at one level the phrase breaks from the context of use, at a more general level it is taken into account in some way, either as nonsense or as an exception exposing the larger totality of relevance framing the discursive situation. As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. In other words, the possibility of the breakage of the overall sense is taken into account in the situation where we don't simply label the phrase as nonsensical. Thus, the totality of relevance can make intelligible both a narrower and a more general context.
This is what give us the tools, if we conclude that a revision in our understanding is required , to accomplish such revision. What do you think?
Honestly? That we've done just fine supplying relevant contexts to the phrase to interpret it without all the theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular. It hasn't really told us about what senses of possibility or transformation are immanent with respect to the phrase and which aren't, just made us suspect that they exist.
Edit: though, I probably wouldn't've understood what you wrote if I hadn't travelled similar theoretical ground before.
Edit2: the major disagreement I have is quite pedantic, but I think it's important.
Quoting Joshs
Putting it very densely; looking at it, I don't think it's quite right to say that the interpretive contexts adjoined to the statement are necessarily presupposed, as if fitting together with a system of inferential rules and reasonable conduct. The act which adjoins the context to the phrase is creative and spontaneous as much as it is following cues from our previous conventions. And thus in this regard it's not so much a philosophical presupposition of a pre-existing interpretive framework or an undecidable schism between interpretive frameworks (which marks why our interpretive decisions are creative as well as inferential), but an act of concept creation tailored to the phrase to give it a philosophical grammar which makes sense of it. If a presupposition is something which can be refuted through sufficient analysis, the act of interpretation here contrasts to presupposition. This is because the application of a philosophical grammar to interpret the phrase generates a novel conceptual space (as @sime puts it) which is equivalent (sortally, if anyone else is tracking when they crop up) to our understanding of the phrase when interpreted as an interpretive act; in that regard we can't so much refute the interpretation as reject or fail to understand the framework which comes along with it.
Edit 3: but perhaps I have been smoking too much Laruelle recently.
He is referring to "philosophers" or those on either side of the verification argument who see themselves as outside the world as a whole, as if the world is an object that one observes. Cavell, following Wittgenstein, points to forms of life -
My concern with it is primarily the claim that someone can have the normal meanings in mind by the terms. I don't think that really follows from anything.
You know, it's funny, a lot of the discussion here is precisely disagreeing on what the 'normal meaning' of the phrase is. Your suspicion's right, I think, that anyone fluent in English would immediately understand the phrase through some imaginative exercise. But the interesting thing here is why it is necessary to understand the phrase in this way, and where do the imaginative contexts come from?
I think there's a really interesting epistemological issue here. How can we ensure that we're being true to the thing we're interpreting when it provokes a suspension of the usual order of things?
Doesn't awareness of forms of life also imply a transcendental vantage point?
Hmm. What would tell us this? I suppose only the actual phrase in the actual context given. But there's a difference between how we actually make our way through such situations of interpretation and how we talk about the way we make our way through them. Aquinas, Descartes and Hegel would all have different takes on what such situations of interpretation entail. And isn't it the implications of their explanations that determine the political, ethical , literary structures of their era?
The issue comes down to how I am inclined to judge someone who fails to come up with the same interpretation that I or my peers do. Or how I judge myself when I fail to make the transition from one gestalt to another. Cultures kill over realities that they believe are absolute and universal, founded upon just the sort of thinking that doesnt recognize the very concept of gestalt shift.
It seems to me that everything that is supposed to make philosophy relevant is at stake in not leaving things to the singular, if the singular fails to also teach us anything about form and pattern.
How do we enable ourselves to slip within the perspective of others whose moral compass appears very different from our own? Our current cultural climate is dominated by blameful moralism on both the right and the left that manifests a failure at some level to achieve a 'houses turn into flowers' shift. Is it closer attention to the singular that is needed? Or a way to understand the singular within the context of commonality and relationality?
With respect to concepts giving us access to the thinking of another from their own perspective, do we really do just fine supplying relevant contexts to those concepts to interpret them, when we find ourselves rejecting an other's way of life? Is it simply the fault of 'theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular' here? Or is it the fault of a machinery that ends up concluding that the other is utterly singular and unassimilable with respect to our own concepts? Isnt what we strive for an approach to singularity that allows us to look for continuities and connections between the alien other and ourselves that avoids the alienation and incoherence of pure singularity?
It is not enough that senses of possibility or transformation are immanent in the actual. They lead to violence without a way to intimately relate the singular with the general without one dominating the other.
Do you actually attribute this belief to me, based on what I've written, or are you speaking hypothetically?
I would only add that when looking at the two temporal ends of the actual act, I follow Heidegger. At the end where history partakes of the present, the context that is joined to the phrase is already, as having been , changed by the current phrase. thus, 'having been arises from the future'. The 'now' is ahead of itself as itself, as the 'not yet', it projects, anticipates, as fore-having, fore-structuring. But this fore-having is not pre-supposition. The current phrase, then, is an in-between. It is neither just what was pre-supposed nor is it an absolute novelty. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It understands, interprets, and articulates, and thereby takes apart and changes what it affirms. .
So what you wrote sounds quite compatible with this.
I think what I was really trying to argue before was that in a way the machinery of generalization is its own kind of singularity. What gives hegemonic discourses their violence is that they only glimpse a particular, limited reality. The are called general , but what limits them is what they oppose, exclude or repress.
It occurs to me that what distinguishes philosophers of different eras isn't precisely that some privilege the general over the singular, but the nature of the relationship between what is unique and the covnentional. Deleuze, for instance, doesn't abandon theory. The world is such for him that there is something that is true everywhere, always, for everyone. For him it isdifferential and plural structural relations and assorted other details, that are primordially true. Ut they are only true in this general sense by being true always in particularity actual instantiations. Note that this account lends itself to a critique not unlike that you and Streelightx level against the Derrideans. Whereas you see Deleuze doing justice to the particular, opponents perceptive the way in whicih all particulars interrelate within a world as smelling of a preimposed theoretical machinery. Their world of sharp opposition and dichotomies, of proper and improper formations, is seemingly flattened after the post-structuraslists get done with it.
It is clearly not Deleuze's celebrating of the singular that leads to this impression but his discovery of a world of a radical interconnectedness that opponents simply don't see, and thus misread as abstract theorization,as stampeding over the particulars as they understand them..
At some point, I want to attempt to show how Derrida, or at least Heideger, may be read such that the impression of a machinery of generalization is removed.
By forms of life he means our ways of life, what we say and do. An anthropologist might study the forms of life of a people, but here Cavell is pointing to our engagement in the world.
If we agree that mountains don't turn into flowers, this is agreement in forms of life.
Wouldn't being aware of that imply a transcendental vantage point?
Apparently anthropology is part of our form of life, So suggesting that forms of life are identified by anthropologists could only be a metaphor. I think that what Witt was trying to say can't be said outright. It could perhaps be hinted at in the way the Flatlander points to the signs that a three dimensional spoon is passing through the two dimensional world.
(Responding a bit late, so I'll understand if you've moved on from this.)
The beginning of you post reminds me a lot of Hegel's analysis of sense-certainty in Phenomenology of Spirit. I assume that's what you're drawing from. If so, I understand that section to be a sort of ur-contradiction which contains the rest of the book in embryo. There's what I mean, and then there's what I say. If I try to refer back to some singular this (what I meant), I only say "this" which is a universal.
I can't say what I mean [ ...] Absolute spirit. (Except Derrida would see an ever-widening spiral, rather than a self-completing circle?)
But what does the 'center' have to do with any of this?
Let's say that this analysis is about the center and do a quick deconstruction of Hegel.
The 'center' he was drawing on, in Sense-Certainty, is closely connected to the revelation in the Eluesinian mysteries (Hegel explicitly draws this connection.) Already this 'origin' is itself derived. Doubly derived in fact, because looking back over his ouevre, we can see, from his early essays on Christianity that his understanding of the dialectic probably derived in large part from his reading of the bible. The 'center' here is something like the holy of holies within the tabernacle, as a sort of semitic mystery cult.
Now we have a triple derivation, because the holy of holies was itself a late stage in the biblical dialectic. (Eden, the flood, the patriarchs, the exodus, the tabernacle.) Moreover, the tabernacle has to constantly be moved (taken apart, stored, set back up.) We know that the god who speaks from the holy of holies, is ever-changing, even fickle. Plus the presence of god himself is overwhelming, impossible even, and can only be broached through mediators. When god doespresent himself, he emphasizes the contingency of his desire, and how his mission is sustained through equally contingent covenants.
And we know, in addition, that this center was constantly violated (and so is violable) causing changes in the religious and social economy. And that the Israelites were aware of this (otherwise the entire genre of prophecy wouldn't make sense.)
At this point, it's hard to say what we really mean by 'center' here, except something that changes in an on-going manner, but with enough consistency to allow relative continuity. Ancient people seemed quite aware of the fragility and fickleness of a 'center'.
The expression of this more sophisticated theoretical idea of a center seems analogous to a person who didn't understand social cues, but slowly observed people interacting and put together a theory and then announced to a group his theory of human behavior - 'yes, we know' most of them over the age of 30 would say, 'We were waiting for you to get it. Only we're not sure you do, because you still think we don't.'
And so the question arises, who is really defending 'center' qua what derrida is saying a center has to be? Hegel isn't really. It seems like the person who needs this center is....Derrida, through the projected desires of others.
[and then, of course, you can deconstruct the need for him to need a center, and so it goes.]
The point is - the whole enterprise brings you right back to where you started. I think it's necessary for thought, but I think that's also just thought catching up to reality. And that's why, in the end, the same philosophical questions survive the deconstructive storm. Integrate the storm, but there's no point in bringing everything back to it.
Here's a snippet of it, explained in my own terms:
Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental
from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between
instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures,
outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints.
When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a
certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each
other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The
particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the
internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless
reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm.
In their essence, Beings don’t HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING
as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation,
(transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not
form but difference. Each of the elements in the array that define a structure are differences
.They do not belong to a structure . They are their own differentiation. There is no
gathering, cobbling , synthesis, relating together, only a repetition of differentiation such
that what would have been called a form or structure is a being the same differently from
one to the next. Not a simultaneity but a sequence. So one could not say that form of nature
is the way in which nature transitions through and places itself into the forms and states
that, from a schematic perspective, constitute the path of its movement, and nature turns
into natural things, and vice versa. Nature would not transition through forms and states,
Nature, as difference itself, transitions though differential transitions. Differences are not
forms. Forms are enclosures of elements organized according to a rule. Forms give
direction. Difference does not give direction, it only changes direction. What are
commonly called forms are a temporally unfolding system of differences with no
organizing rule, no temporary ‘it’. The transformation is from one differential to the next
before one ever gets to a form.
Schemes, conceptual, forms, intentions, willings have no actual status other than as empty
ontic abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these
terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the senses operating within (and defining)
such abstractions in subtle but global ways concealed by but overrunning what ontically
understood symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to be.
The thinking of structure as a singularity implies a multiplicity of supposed ‘parts’ captured
in an instant of time. But the assumption that we think this parallel existence of differences
at the ‘same time’, as the ‘same space’, organized and centered as a ‘THIS’, must unravel
with the knowledge that each differential singular is born of and belongs irreducibly to,
even as it is a transformation of, an immediately prior element . Two different elements
cannot be presumed to exist at the same time because each single element is its own
time(the hinged time of the pairing of a passed event with the presencing of a new event) as
a change of place. Thus, whenever we think that we are theorizing two events at the same
time, we are unknowingly engaging in a process of temporal enchainment and spatial
recontextualization.
The assumption of a spatial frame depends on the ability to return to a previous element without the contaminating effect of time. How can we know that elements of meaning are of the same spatial frame unless each is assumed to refer back to the same ‘pre-existing’ structure?
The same goes for the fixing of a point of presence as a singular object. This pointing to,
and fixing of, an itself as itself is a thematic centering that brings with it all the metaphysical implications of the thinking of a structural center.
In the article I link to below I relate my argument to what Hedegger and Derrida say about structures.
https://www.academia.edu/38392519/Heidegger_and_Derrida_on_Structure_Form_and_State
I haven't read the whole essay through, though I will try to soon.
What I did really like was that phrase, 'a fleeting identity, a gathered field.'
I wasn't sure about forms and differentiation. I think if you can transport back in memory and remember childhood games- king of the hill, capture the flag etc - you can see how forms and transitions can occur very naturally, with people spontaneously understanding them. It's only later, when you try to fix things, that the confusion arises.
I'm uneasy about this because it would seem that it is our kind of houses and our kind of flowers which are always at stake.
It seems to me there is no situation in which we would not be talking about our kind of house or flower. In any case, we are referencing an object beyond its form(s) (the difference itself), no matter where it might be located. In this respect, there is no distinction between a real or fictional house of flower. Both are our kind of houses and flowers, they are just happening in different places/we are experiencing them in different places.
Faced with the object (difference itself), it's not just what we call an object which no longer matters, our very concepts of the object become disrupted because they are no longer constitutive of it. No object is so on account of its concept, not merely in what we name it. Only the object itself, difference itself, can be the presence of a thing. Form is as epiphenomenal as a name.
To be concerned with "kinds of things which do not turn into other kinds of things," even in the sense of intelligibility you are talking about, would still seem to be caught in questions of how we relate to there world. When we move to the world itself, I don't think it intelligible to speak about "kinds of things," even in a conceptual sense, as that is really our relation.
With difference itself, it would seem we could only ever speak of difference in relation to a distinction of kind. That's to say, we can take a difference itself and say that it might be any kind of thing.
It's not surprising that this process is circular, because "centre" is derived from circle. When you assume a centre you've already assumed equidistance from that point, and the circle is necessarily implied. There's no escape from the circle without denying the reality of the centre, which we do by emphasizing the fact that pi is irrational. If, after denying the reality of the circle we assume a spiral, we have to accept completely different principles, such as Fibonacci, and lack of centre.
I'm coming from a Deleuzian postion, but I don't think it's really a counter. The moves made by SX suggest to me he's been trying to talk about a certain kind of relation to us all along. I don't think they're after existence itself (difference itself), but a specific kind of relation formed by these differences.
SX is talking about the concepts we have beyond pure difference, certain conceptual relations of form and how they are defined. The point, I think, is these conceptual distinctions mean something. They aren't just an arbitrary whim of an interprating actor. Scepticism wins no battles here.
We can use pure difference to understand this consequence. Difference itself is the present of an object. If something is so, difference has defined it, amounts to the presence of a thing (and its absence; it will be unless another difference comes along).
At this point must bring formal relations back in. The object I'm considering may be pure difference and present only in difference itself, but that's not all it is.
These objects, these differences are actors and performers upon our plane of forms and phenomena. They aren't just differences, but differences which do something in relation to each other, in relation to us.
The screen I'm looking at, for example, is a pure difference. It's not existent by its form. At any moment it might disappear or even turn into a flower. I cannot use the forms I expect of it to judge whether it exists.
This, however, doesn't mean my screen is without form and its impacts upon me. My screen may possibly do anything, but that does not mean it does nothing. On the contrary, the difference of my screen does a lot of very specific things to me. It's my visual interface for communicating messages on this forum, for example. If it turns into a flower, it will do other very specific things to me.
In any case, the screen, the pure difference, the screen is acting upon me in certain ways. The difference (the existence of the screen) has consequences for my experience and my relations. The difference and its effects, are neither a whim of language (Derrida) nor ultimately mysterious and inaccessible (Heidegger).
In short, I agree with what SX is saying. I just think they've misdiagnosed the object of their critique. SX isn't attempting to talk about existence itself, to get beyond any talk of relations. They are trying to talk about the impacts of a difference itself (a thing that exists) upon the world of relations, the forms and relations a given difference performs in its presence.
There's such a thing as "inertia". Due to the brute fact of inertia, described by Newton's first law, your screen will not disappear at any moment, nor will it turn into a flower at any moment. Force, (cause), is required for this. In reality you can, and we do use the forms that we expect of a thing, to judge whether the thing exists or not. That's inductive reasoning. To deny that things will continue to be as they were, without a cause of change, is just to deny the law of inertia, but what's the point to that?
i believe what you're saying is that what SX refers to as a normative region would be the forms and relations a given difference performs in its presence.
I had earlier put forth the argument that Derrida and Heidegger would take issue with the distinction between the 'normative effects' of a difference and the difference itself as existence. Essentially they would argue that there is no such distinction to made. Not that there aren't nonoperative groupings, structurations, and modalities, but that there are not the effecgt of a difference, they are the temporal unflagging of multiple differences.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Not a whim of language for Derrida at all , but rather a function of intricately structured contextual differential relations, What Derrida does that Deleuze doesn't is that Derrida recognizes that even the moment of the gathered field that is the screen is not a single , centered THIS but a series of differential transformations. Deleuze begins with structures and forms in differential relation. Derrida beings with differences in differential relations. Deride gives us a more intricate and intimate view into the basis of meaning than Deleuze's more polarizing and semi-arbitrary starting point in differnce as temporary structure. Heidegger, far from seeing difference as mysterious and inaccessible, makes Derrida's approach possible by determining difference primordially in terms of temporality, a complexly structured unity.
Quoting Joshs
Don't you find this kind of approach just absolutely suffocating? I mean, Hegel gets alot of shit for being 'belly turned mind' (in Adorno's wonderful phrasing) in which the dialectic just gobbles up everything in its path, but this is in some respect even worse. Everything here is pre-digested and already accounted-for, everything has a place in an (oxymoronic, monstrous) economy of contingency, where every non-sense is already the other side of sense. Nothing escapes, and the engulfment into Theory is total and asphyxiating (the response to which is to self-flagellate by dwelling in paradox, writing 'under erasure', sous rature, and bringing to bear a whole Christian (?) theology of guilt and sin on philosophy, self-conscious to the point of immobility, like so many miserable Benedictine monks).
By contrast to this absolutisation of philosophy and its suffocation, a phrase like 'houses are turning into flowers' (or at least, situations analogous to it) ought to mark a point genuine - that is to say, creative - crisis, a point where sense needs to be reoriented by our grasping our way about, by our readjusting - however much we need to, and on whatever basis our lives are lived and contested - how we understand and relate to the world about us. There needs to be a way for change, transformation, novelty (and not just the forever oscillating pin-ball between differing and deferring) to occur in the order of things, the conceptual and lived matrix by which we relate to the world and ourselves. Breath.
And the only way to do this is to begin in the middle of things, to begin by ‘cognitively mapping’ (as Csal said) how things stand right now, in order to assess the possibilities of transformation, to measure the transcendental from within, rather than continually reaching the abstract, tired and useless shibboleth that everything is always-already other from the very beginning (which in any case is the reply of the reactionary: “everything is always-already other, what more could you possibly want?”). Philosophy needs to be innocent, aerial, unabashed - unlike anything the monastic stodginess of the Heideggarian legacy leaves us.
If houses are turning into flowers, then flowers are turning into houses.
Flowers, as one might guess, house many things from the abstract to the exact. Practically, they function as houses.
But when one thinks of one's house, there is a disparity between it and the ocean.
Though the ocean houses many things and functions as a house, its frame is different from the house of a human; likewise from the flower, which houses pollen.
By meaning, these are all houses - by frame, they are the ocean, a man's house and a flower.
Consider what I've said - by graphite and diamond. The difference is the structure; the frame, no?
And even though one may know that they are chemically the same, one can easily distinguish one from the other.
Perhaps one response to this is to transform the question from 'what transformations can't we think?' to: 'what transformations can't we live?'. This, perhaps, is what gets to the heart of what Cavell takes from Wittgenstein: at the end of the day, of course we can say - and think - if we want, with all abandon, that houses can turn into flowers. We can think this. We do think this, insfoar as we do (a tautology). We say it: houses can turn into flowers. But can we 'live' this? To say this, and perhaps more importantly, sustain it's 'saying', is to have to transform how we relate to houses and flowers, insofar as we live those relations. This is why, I think, when Cavell asks the question, he immediately turns to questions not 'immediately' related to houses and flowers, but to questions about 'growing' and 'gardens' and 'seeds' and 'stones':
"What would "houses" or "flowers" mean in the language of such a world? What would be the difference between (what we call) stones and seeds? Where would we live in that world, and what would we grow in our gardens? And what would "grow" mean?"
I think the 'style' of questions here are significant, and they remind of Deleuze's dictum to not ask 'what is?', but "who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?": Cavell's questions are in this vein, it seems to me. Even when they ask 'what', they are not 'what is?' but 'what would we grow?' and 'what's the difference?', questions that bear on relations and their significance, on how we relate, how we live with our ways of speaking, and how ours ways of speaking (and thinking) and embedded in ours ways of living.
Another way to put this is that the question 'do houses turn into flowers?' cannot just be about houses and flowers: it's also a question about growing, about gardens, about stones and seeds, all of which it carries in tow like an umbra which is easily missed if one doesn't make sure to pay attention to it. So to bring this all back to transcendentality: would it answer your concern to say that the 'missing bridge' between 'deep transcendentally' and 'local transcendentality' is just us?
(I think he lived in a shoe with an old woman...)
[quote=Robin Williamson] Experience will teach you what you may
And what you may not do
I'll teach you to forget the truths
You always knew.
See what might be,
See what might have been.
Though you yourself created me,
Your own mistake has set me free
I was your slave, now you are mine
I am Time, I am Time.[/quote]
It's always all about identification. Philosophers identify with thought, and thought is the bottle from which no flying thought can escape, with or without a ladder. Thought circles or spirals (who cares?) around a centre that is not thought, though thought names it 'actual'. This infinite centre is the only place to live, because thought is always already dead.
Therefore, houses are infinite flowers, and I and my house are the central attraction for every honeybee.
Just thought I'd mention... carry on.
Edit:
[quote=J. Krishnamurti]Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.[/quote]
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
Indeed, Cavell’s claim can be interpreted as an assertion of a fundamental asymmetry, grounding the condition for language to function at all. When Cavell writes that “I am asserting, rather, that we do not yet know what verification for or against it would be … both [the denial and assertion] rest on the same concept of what knowledge is, or must be … Both, in a word, use absolutely conclusive verification out of its ordinary context,” he means that he refutes all possible empirical processes of the verification of the given proposition “houses turn/do not turn into flowers.” Houses, flowers, the turn may have meaning from our ordinary context. Further, instead of real houses and flowers, we can consider our notions of these objects, but it is still possible to organize a process of verification. The utterance “houses turn into flowers” can have
different functions – it could be a proposition about real, imaginary, or symbolic objects. Or, it could be a grammatically correct/incorrect phrase - which is still an object for a kind of verification or an automatic rejection/acceptance within
the ordinary context. Another possibility is to assume that the utterance is merely a statement that just later can bear an assigned meaning and become a meaningful sentence or a true/false
proposition. Therefore, it has not yet confronted by a correlate or the absence of a correlate, as a proposition has (or has not) a referent. When the child says ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!), maybe she affirms the truth of this statement, but most likely she just exercises a fundamental ability of enouncing significant sentences; if it were just a random or mechanical combination of sounds, there would not be any significant adult response. A faculty to produce and differentiate significant and non-significant expressions can operate as “absolutely conclusive verification out of its ordinary context.”
Any point which you assume as the middle, or centre, will always end up having something further within, even if it's just a matter of "information" within that point. So the assumption of a middle point actually provides a false start. No starting point can be the middle because there is always something further inside, by the nature of infinity. The assumption of a middle is a lost cause. The seed, which forms the actual existence of "possibilities of transformation", itself must have an actual existence, and therefore a "within". This seed, as possibilities of transformation, has no centre or middle itself, and the information within cannot be described as having the spatial form which lends itself to the concept "middle". In other words, being within cannot be described as being in the middle.
Your argument starts with your conclusion, that Derrida and Heidegger don't begin in the middle of things. Well. I agree with half of that. They don't begin in the middle of things. They begin in the middle of something more mobile and intricate than things. If one doesn't see how it is possible to reduce 'things', in the guise of primordial form, structure, pattern, to a more primordial starting point, then what Derrida and Heidegger are doing will have to appear as though they are performing an "absolutisation of philosophy", an "engulfment into Theory", because they are not able to get right down into the middle of things.
It's nice to escape the highfalutin language of Heidegger-Derrida every once in awhile and remind ourselves of why this all matters. You and I want to be able to understand ourselves and each other most intimately.
Moving past Hegel via discourses that begin from the middle of things(Cavell, Deleuze, etc) takes us a good way in that direction. But what they don't do is provide us with the sort of exquisitely intricate creative potentiality of moment to moment felt meaning that H-D offer, a more intimate, intricate starting point for meaning than that of the in between of Deleuzian temporary structurations.
You and I know there are many readings of Heidegger-Derrida, and yours is a perfectly respectable one. What I am offering is a minority interpretation of them. Before you can reject it , you first have to understand it, and I readily admit that I may be unable to make this interpretation coherent enough for you to summarize it the way that I am more than confident I can summarize Deleuze or Cavell or Wittgenstein (approvingly, I might add, for I don't reject anything of what they argue , as far as they go. They just don't go far enough for me).
Quoting StreetlightX
You and I have discussed before how Massumi and Protevi treat the relationship between affectivity and language. They come close, but are simply unable to fully integrate the two notions. The reason they fall short is that structure and transformation remain distinct moments for them . Just as for you, the way they articulate matters, 'there needs to be a way for change, transformation, novelty to occur in the order of things'. But is there a dynamic more intricate than the order of 'things' as starting point, such that change, transformation, novelty don't have be seen as a problem to be explained? Is it possible to think change, transformation and novelty not as possible outcomes but as the most primordial ground of experience?
Of course it's 'possible'; Derrida and co. have never left the plane of the 'possible' - that's the only thing they are acquainted with. The question is what analytic pay-off you get by doing it. And frankly I don't see much use in trying to 'think change' by swamping everything with it; when everything is 'change as primordial ground' or whathaveyou, what you lose is precisely the ability to think change. If you make it your point of departure, any attempt at distinction is lost in the white noise of 'change': Derridians or whatever see this as a feature; I think this is a monstrous bug.
This is why Derridian responses to the OP have only ever been totally irrelevant. The price you pay for seeing change everywhere is an inability to see change anywhere. It's self-imposed analytic impotence.
I like the transition to living versus thinking. On this, we're on the same page.
Still - I'm not going to let this go - we can live [the example] just as well as we think it. I mean, maybe not us, in our apartments. But whoever has the fancy house-flower thing. And we all recognize what that kind of access is - as people living the realm where that's possible, or aspiring to it, or shut off from it. Here, we're close to something sort of close to the world we live in, almost. The house-flower thing is a little awkward, class-architecturally speaking, but at least it gets closer to some sort of shared situation we care about.
I'm still not clear on whether Cavell is doing the cinnabar thing, or means, precisely, houses and flowers. It's confusing. Cavell can ask - 'what would we grow' but he either means this as a pure example (which is my impression) or: he does have some experience with gardens, as such people sometimes do, but in a way that has nothing to do with sustenance, or anything more life-impacting that any hobby, and so, again, the significance of the example is not really significant.
I mean, if it is about hobbies, no harm no foul. Plant peas away from beets, or however gardens work. But this seems to be some bigger point?
[frankly, I think Cavell, in these quotes, is saying nothing more profound then: there's a difference between statements pertaining to frames and statements pertaining to framed content. Which, true, but most people would agree, and, hey, get in here Derrideans. The equivocation between that and the cinnabar stuff is just muddying and I'm struggling to figure out what I would take away from Cavell that most of us wouldn't have already known going in.]
When Deleuze introduced to the world his 'philosophy of difference' which puts difference before identity, this exposed him to the same sorts of criticisms that you level against Derrida, as if there was nothing there but a white noise of relativism, chaos, indeterminacy. But of course, what Deleuze means by this move is in fact a complex dynamic in which imminence and transcendence operate. Leaving Derrida out of this for the moment, one can make the same defense for Heidegger's equiprimordial concepts of temporality, care, attunement, understanding and discourse. And what is the analytic payoff? Speaking personally, it allows me to move alongside others in their ways of being more insightfully and empathetically than I would be able to via a 'Deleuzian psychotherapeutics', which i find still too polarizing, arbitrary and violent.
But then I am becoming convinced that enactivist approaches such as those of Gallagher and Thompson also do a better job of this than Deleuxe, for similar reasons , but that's a subject for another thread.
Deleuze doesn't put difference before identity (at least in the sense you seem to be using it here), he puts "prior" to form. For Delueze, the identity of a thing by this difference itself. The distinction between things, between you and me, between one rock and another, between one plastic spoon and another, is not found in any of those forms or linguistic which might present. Each has an identity on account of difference itself. No matter how similar or not in form, the logical distinction of a particular thing is given by this difference. Were there no difference, there would nothing with identity to possess a form.
In this respect, Deleuze is refuting these kind suggestions of relativism, chaos, indeterminacy. Unlike in Derrida's analysis, which puts us in a swirl of language, or Heidegger who puts us in the whims of Dasein, Deleuze is specifically pointing a thing and its identity are beyond us. They are true by difference itself, not by our particular interpretation or experience.
For all the chaos and indeterminacy of the world, Deleuze is pointing out difference/identity of things is never subject to change. All things are a difference itself, never subject to alteration, no matter how someone might complain we are now speaking different. (change, is of course, also around, but that's given in new differences, in repetitions).
In terms of this thread, Deleuze more or less agrees with SX's position. The major point of difference itself is to recognise distinctions between things aren't made by our interpretations or experience.
What texts of Deleuze are you basing this analysis on?
Difference and Repetition majorly.
Obviously, I'm putting into specific analytical terms with respect to the point of contention. I don't think, you'll find him saying things like "All things are a difference itself, never subject to alteration" because it's horribly misleading in any wider context (which he usually works in). Things are always changing, new differences coming into being, other ones passing out. The world is never still like moments of our logical analysis.
Joshs' approach is a strange inversion in this respect. They appear to be trying to do an analytical analysis of logical distinctions, of difference between things, yet they speak like they were just talking about what was here one moment and gone the next. I do wonder what the distinctions are meant to be if they are nothing more than our language or experience. Are we the distinctions being spoken about? Am I the keyboard I'm using write this message?
I'm pretty salty here because it is this kind of idea, supposing forms define the distinction between things, which Difference and Repetition is critiquing/rejecting/refuting.
What does Derridean regurgitation have to do with enaction? None of the enactivist writers I mentioned are even interested in Derrida. I know you have an interest in Deleuze(you referenced him earlier in this thread in response to another poster), which is why i mentioned him. I also mentioned him because I think he is among the most rigorous representatives of the kind of position you are supporting and which I am critiquing.
If you are prepared to accept these writers' analyses on these themes as generally consistent with Deleuze, then I can proceed to compare and contrast them with the work in this area of Eugene Gendlin, who I consider to be an effective interpreter of Heidegger.
Doing this sort of comparison gets us into the trenches, where we need to be, in order to reveal what is at stake in how we understand the functioning of affectivity, as a source of creativity and otherness, in relation to conceptualization, language and perception. And , believe it or not, this will bring us back to the original theme of the OP.
I am not the keyboard, I am the pragmatic relation with the keyboard. No 'i' apart from this relation , and no keyboard apart from it. Both the 'I' and things have no existence apart from this being-in-the -midst-of.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
IS it possible to think of a thing which doesn't matter to us, which has no significance for us? Is it possible for a thing to have a meaning independent of a way in which it is relevant to us in a particular context? I say no. Things emerge always in the midst of our concernful , relevant dealings within a particular context of involvement in the world. A thing is a 'matter' FOR us.
No, you mentioned him because you saw another generic opportunity to wheel out your pet concerns which are tangental and irrelavent to the thrust of the thread. Derridians are like the fucking Borg, assimilating indiscriminately while bleeting on about differance. No one is here to talk about bloody affect. Buzz off.
But I have the capacity to remove myself from the keyboard, thereby annihilating that relationship. And if I go on to establish relationships with other things, then just like the relationship with the keyboard, not one of these is a necessary relation. Therefore the "I" really is apart from the relations.
If you want to position the "I" as necessarily "in-the-midst-of", then you must start with the relations which are necessary to the "I". If you do find these necessary relations, I think you will also find that the "I" is not in the midst of them. Was the "I" in the midst of the sexual relation which brought you into existence?
Perhaps it's not necessarily a 'deep' point, but it is, I think, one worth making, especially considering the chorus of voices that have replied that 'houses don't turn into flowers' just is another (physical?) fact. But even saying that, that's not the 'only' point to be made. Leaving aside the context regarding this all arising as a response to skepticism (which I think I've elaborated upon enough), the other side of this is something like: okay, if it's important that not everything attests to just another fact, if it's important that one takes the transcednental into account, what kind of thing is the transcendental?
And this, in turn, is where 'living' our transformations comes into play: I'm trying to insist (using another term I've not yet employed) on the immanence of the transcendental, on the way in which it is mutable and occupies the underside of the empirical (of 'facts'), rather than being 'transcedent' and fixed beyond the world. The cinnabar-sunrises connection is just a way of trying to specify how this all fits in the broader philosophical tradition, trying to show how all this can be seen as a response those concerns, rather than just being some kind of idiosyncratic, weird example drawn from outta nowhere for no particular reason.
" I find your contributions to be among the most thoughtful of the commenters on this site, and since there are few others here who are willing or able to engage at any level with Derrida , I occasionally see if I can draw you into incorporating him into discussion, even if just in the form of a critique."
"You are a thoughtful and well-read philosopher."
"I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills "
These are some of your responses to my perhaps less-than-focused arguments:
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
I think all of us should remind ourselves from time to time how our responses on this site might affect others. We don't know what kinds of personal difficulties they may be having in their lives. There can be a fine line between healthy debate and hurtful comments.
I've posted plenty about what I do take this thread to be about, and perhaps you can take cues for further discussion from those posts, or at least ask me where things seems unclear or problematic. Hell, if you want to have a different discussion than the one here, PM me and we can hash something out.
I agree, no particular relationship with a thing is a necessary relationship. All relations are contingent and temporary. What is necessary is relation in general. The 'I' and the 'thing' only ever emerge via relevant relation between the two.It will always be a new and particular 'I' and 'thing' that co-appear from moment to moment, since 'things' are not self-identical persisting essences.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I know it sounds paradoxical, even absurd, but the 'I' is in the midst of the thinking and talking about any fact, whether that fact consists of things that I do or things that happened without me or before I was born . What I talk about, as well as what I point to as an object , is always what is relevant for me, matters to me, is of concern and significance to me right now. It's not that first there is a something and then it takes on relevant meaning for me. The relevance comes before the object in itself and defines its particular meaning for me in terms of its immediate 'use'. But the same goes for the me' that stands in relation to an object or matter. This is a kind of radical pragmatism, allowing for no reality outside of relevant relating, no existence outside current context. We can begin from this stance and derive science and the possibility of 'independent' facts from it.