There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
The private language argument argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent.
Language instead only provides sense in contexts of pragmatic social use.
I want to argue that each of us maintains and uses our own language that exceeds the reach of interpersonal contexts, but my argument is not this use of language is ‘private’ in the sense that Wittgenstein critiques. The concept of language that is the target of the private language critique is one where words refer to meanings that reside in the head independent of their expression.
In my notion language is ‘private’ only in the sense that it does not require the direct or indirect participation of a contextual community of other persons. But it is ‘public’ in the sense that the individual is already a community unto itself, sequentially transforming itself. Thinking and perceiving is already expressive, before and beyond the participation of other persons. Fundamentally, we show, express and check our language in relation to our own anticipations, in a kind of internal conversation. From this vantage , interpersonal communication is secondary and derived.
Language instead only provides sense in contexts of pragmatic social use.
I want to argue that each of us maintains and uses our own language that exceeds the reach of interpersonal contexts, but my argument is not this use of language is ‘private’ in the sense that Wittgenstein critiques. The concept of language that is the target of the private language critique is one where words refer to meanings that reside in the head independent of their expression.
In my notion language is ‘private’ only in the sense that it does not require the direct or indirect participation of a contextual community of other persons. But it is ‘public’ in the sense that the individual is already a community unto itself, sequentially transforming itself. Thinking and perceiving is already expressive, before and beyond the participation of other persons. Fundamentally, we show, express and check our language in relation to our own anticipations, in a kind of internal conversation. From this vantage , interpersonal communication is secondary and derived.
Comments (104)
Is it a language? If so, in what sense is it private and not a public language (such as English)?
How does someone learn to have this internal conversation?
Likely, you are not aware of the domain of social psychology, founded by Lev Vygotsky. In his book “Thinking and speech,” he convincingly showed that inner speech has an exact social origin. Children obtain inner speech abilities just after a certain period of exposure to playing and communicating in groups of other kids. I could bring other evidence that one acquires language via various processes of socialization. Nevertheless, let me assume that I embrace your notion that our common language is the derivative of the inner language, originated within the ‘constitutive community of oneself.’ When you claim that ‘the individual is already a community unto itself,’ how do you conceive the social constituency of this ‘community within the individual’? Please correct me if I misunderstood you: for you, all humans share the fundamental structures of what you call ‘radical temporality.’ These structures of one’s most essential inner temporary and affective processes found common ground for the social-collective nature of one’s private-inner language that later develops into our common ordinary language. If this is right, you may incorrectly represent the social character of ‘our inner communities.’
Consider for a thought experiment a writer along the lines of Tolkien, who invents a language for fictional characters to speak. Before he tells anyone else about this invented language, can it really be called a public language? It exists only within the writer's mind, even though in that mind it's imagined to be used in discourse between different characters.
Now remove the explicitly fictional context of that thought experiment, so instead the "different characters" are the interlocutors of one's normal inner dialogue. Can not one use language in that inner dialogue in a novel way that has not yet been made public, a way that exists only within one's own mind, even though within that mind it is being imagined to be used in a discourse between "characters", so to speak.
When you speak of unspoken thought, which you say is not private language, I would say that unspoken thought could occur in two different ways. First, it could be about aspects which are hard to formulate in words, since in some cases people may not be articulate their emotions fully.
The other kind of unspoken might be that which it seems better to withhold from conversations. Here, I am not talking about lying but what seems relevant and in the best interests. For example, it might seem better to avoid voicing a criticism of a person to that person if it could be hurtful and is not essential. So, we can hold back this aspect of potential dialogue as private monologues, which are a private language because they are not formulated into the way of dialogue with the other.
If the use of a ‘public’ language like English is idiosyncratic to the individual users of it , that is, if the precise sense of each word used either in private reflection or interpersonal communication is unique to each user, then English is ‘private’ in my sense.
“ just as a man’s body and “soul” are but two aspects of his way of being in the world, so the word and the thought it indicates should not be considered two externally related terms: the word bears its meaning in the same way that the body incarnates a manner of behaviour.” Merleau-Ponty
“If our interactions are attributed to ‘culture’, we may seem culturally programmed since we are born into a world of language, art, and human relationships. Culture may seem imposed on human bodies. But we can ask: How can a body have cultural patterns such as speech and art, and how can it act in situations? If we can explain this, we can explain how culture was generated and how it is now being regenerated further and
further.
“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always diferent and much more intricate than the cultural generalites. A situation is a bodily hapening, not just generalites. Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's
implying of behaviour posibilties. Our own situation always consists of more intricate implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that he individual can do no more than chose among the cultural scenarios, or ad mere nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturaly apropriate has only a
general meaning, it is the so-caled ‘nuances’ that el us what we realy want o know. They indicate what he standard saying realy means here, this time, from this person.
Spech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social. The curent heory of a one-way determination by society is to
simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require chanels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic suport, and asociations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public atitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In al these ways the individual is highly controled. Nevertheles, individual thinking
constantly exceds society.” Eugene Gendlin
What if I write it down and refer back to it. What if I am a philosopher who has gone as far as he can go in studying the works of other writers because he find that in some way his ideas have moved beyond the limits of those thinkers. So he writes down his thoughts using words in ways that appear incoherent to others but express exactly what he wants to say. His primary purpose in writing them down is isn’t to share them with others but to share them with himself. Referring back to what he wrote yesterday or last week or last month is like studying someone else‘ s ideas to some
extent, because the very act of writing his thoughts down changes his perspective in some small
fashion. And in the interim between his previous writing his perspective continues to be enriched simply by living. So web he returns to his previous thoughts
he finds that he has already transformed
them a bit. Over time he creates an evolving language , and perhaps never meets another person who understands it. Oh yes, if it is written in ‘English’ that will mean that a fellow English speaker will at first translate the words into ‘conventional definitions’ , but these will
likely bear no relation to what the author intended. But surely this is not true of every word the author uses.
What of simple verbs, nouns , adjectives? If language
functions as a gestalt whole , then , yes, in some respect even the simplest elements of the language belong to the author’s ideocyncratic world. (Essentially, Heidegger’s Being and Time was about the his changed understanding of the meaning of the word ‘is’.)
I have to admit that I haven't read much Wittgenstein. Reading his writings is on my 'To do' list along with Sartre's "Being and Nothingness', but it hasn't happened yet. These works seem a bit obscure and abstract to entice me toward them but this may be my failing and loss. Perhaps I will gravitate and appreciate them in time.
I can see what you mean about words having meaning which is private, but surely this divide is fuzzy because our thinking is also connected to the web of ideas. In particular, when we are communicating with others in these philosophy discussions the specific words which we use do have private, personal meaning but as we use the words in exchange with others surely we are moving more into others' meanings and partaking in the shared meanings, which lead us to expand our personal ones.
I'll follow you down the phenomenology rabbit hole insofar as humans have a capacity to recognise and engender meaningful patterns. In Heideggerese, that's a recognition that discourse's articulation renders the world always-already meaningful.
However, that capacity is collectively exercised and its content is determined by that collective exercise and environmental effects.
Quoting Joshs
It comes down to a question of whether the individual's "community unto itself" - the reflexive articulation of the given of discourse - has a strong historical dependence. Given that discourse's content is historically dependent, I would suggest that is the case.
If discourse, which is always-already interpersonal, is bracketed from the account, what remains of an agent's
Quoting Joshs
"stretching along in time" is bereft of any of the modifications of discourse. Which renders the idea that such streching is a "dialogue" only a metaphor. It cannot be construed as a dialogue due to the bracket placed on discursive content.
No doubt our interchange with others leads us to expand our personal meanings.It is true that each party’s participation in interaction changes the other’s way of being, but the question is whether there is not an underlying thematic consistency that is maintained in each person throughout all their interactions , a self-consistency that resists being usurped by a larger
self-other ‘system’. A mutuality, fusion, jointness cannot be assumed simply because each party is in responsive communication with the other. One party can be affected by the interaction by succeeding in subsuming the other’s perspective and as a result feeling an intimate and empathetic bond with the other. At the same time, in the same ‘joint’ encounter, the other
party may become more and more alienated from the first , having failed to subsume the first party’s system and finding the first party to be angering, upsetting and threatening.
In both situations of superficial mutual understanding and those where core role meanings are involved, those that pertain to issues deeply important to a person, a ‘meeting of minds’ is not a matter of shared understanding in the sense of a same or similar meaning becoming disseminated among the members of the group. Instead, effective social understanding requires the successful subsuming of each other’s construct systems by each participant in the group.
When I subsume another’s outlook within my system, for instance as a therapist understanding a client , or a
parent dealing with a young child, I am not converging on the same or similar way of looking at the world as the other. My system may remain very different from theirs as I understand them from within my own vantage point.
Actually I do agree with you that in many respects we only meet other minds on a certain level. I do have some experience of giving and having personal therapy and that is an example where there is an interchange of meaning but it is partial. The client shares experience and interacts with the therapist, but the two persons still retain the personal experiences and may be coming from such different meanings that there is barely any communion of minds. For example, for one person discussion about family may be based on a whole set of positive meanings and the other from negative ones.
I suppose that in any dialogue the art is to be able to find the connections which enable the common ground, so as to give the possible ways in which the two minds may meet to achieve the best possible collaboration. In everyday conversation this is about mutual negotiation but, in the example of therapy, the art of therapy is to enable the client to access the therapist's consciousness and attention to enable an expanded view to bring some possible new level of awareness for the client. This is to work on the 'stuck' nature of a problem which may have led the person to need therapy.
Quoting fdrake
In my reading of Heidegger the content of word meanings is only determined collectively in the mode of idle talk , which Heidegger says is not genuine understanding but a closing off of understanding. This is the inauthentic mode of discourse, which flattens and makes generic what originates as an individually distinct process of disclosure.
It seems to me that Heidegger’s notion of idle talk corresponds to the your notion of word meanings being determined by collective exercise.
In idle talk, “Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is spoken about as such. Communication does not "impart" the primary relation of being to the being spoken about, but being-with one-another takes place in talking with one another and in heeding what is spoken about. What is important to it is that one speaks. The being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement provide a guarantee for the genuineness and appropriateness of the discourse and the understanding belonging to it. And since this discoursing has lost the primary relation of being to the being talked about, or else never achieved it, it does not communicate in the mode of a primordial appropriation of this being, but communicates by gossiping and passing the word along. What is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on a authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.”
“ The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its being public, but encourages it. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk already guards against the danger of getting stranded in such an appropriation. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “
“ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”
In its entangled absorption in the "world" average everydayness has the character of stiflingness, of ambiguity as curiosity, idle talk, publicness, the they. A novelty that is flat, alienating, tranquilized, uproted distraction, unreflective, ambiguous, outward apearance, noncommital just-guesing-at, indifferent, approximate, superficial, generic. “What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.”
"Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness.
Tranquilized, familar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Da-sein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentialy and ontologicaly as the more primordial phenomenon."
"The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamilar" "Even as covered over, the familar is a mode of the unfamiliar ." To meaningfuly understand is not to
interrupt and uproot but to stay with, dwell with, reflect on, to contemplatively wonder rather than superficialy know and move on, to carry out what was guessed at in the ambiguity of idle talk and curiosity. This is authentic Dasein. Publicness is not the same as conditoned inter-
subjectivity because it originates in foreclosing projecting. It’s Dasein’s own ambiguous meaning. Not a shared definite meaning. Publicness “does not first originate through certain conditions which influence Da-sein "from the outside”.” Communication is an illusion born of the ambiguity of the supposedly shared meaning between people.
If English is a private language, then what would a public language look like? Is a public language possible in your sense?
sense isn’t ‘possible’ , what I mean is that it is an imprecise abstraction.
You appear to collapse the distinction between a public and a private language such that all language is private. Against what “field, ensemble or gestalt” do you determine that your language is private? Again, what would a public language look like to you?
Quoting Joshs
Doesn’t this mean that you exclude the possibility of a public language?
I have a great deal to say about the OP, against which I profoundly disagree, but I'll settle for now for making just this one remark: this 'deconstructive' move of finding the public in the individual is all very good, but what is puzzling is that this attempt at breaching the categorical distinctions is employed to all the more enforce the 'enclosure' of the individual from society: no need the public, because the private is always-already public: so much the worse for the actual public. The cost of 'publicizing the private' is at the expense of a radical and splendid isolationism of the individual that, far from abolishing the borders between the public and the private, institutes it at the most egregious possible way at another level. A reworked Cartesian solipsism wearing phenomenological dress. This alone is unacceptable, to say nothing of the OP being mired in the myth of the given, which itself is a concequence of erasing entirely any consideration of the specificity of language.
In Wittgenstein's use of the term, the answer is an emphatic yes: this is absolutely a public language. What makes a public language public is it's availability, in principle of being understood and mastered by another. In a mantra: a public language is public-izable. Whether or not the language is, in fact, in use among more than one person is irrelevant.
If you could describe in detail an example of public language in its actual functioning, I could attempt to show what it is an ‘imprecise abstraction’ of.
Writing provides a very good example of the dual purpose of language. There is a rich history of people making markings to serve as memory aids. This is very distinct from using language for communication. Sometimes the markings are very personal and may be made with the intention of preventing others from interpreting, codified. Other times, the memory which is being assisted with the markings is a 'collective memory', and the intent is to allow public interpretation. In the latter cases, the one function of language, as a memory aid, mixes with the other function, as a communicative aid.
To consider a "private language" in the most strict sense, we'd have to determine whether a system of markings could be constructed which could not possibly be interpreted by any other person. Of course we'd have to consider the role of instinctual tendencies, and even the principle of plenitude, so that would be a rather pointless and uninteresting debate. However, I find it interesting that there are these two very distinct uses for language. And, the intent involved in the making of markings as a personal memory aid cannot be reduced to an intent to communicate. Therefore we have a difference in meaning structures. So those who model language solely as a communicative tool are clearly missing out on something.
Just curious, but do things like talking to yourself or using memory aides not count as communication? Especially in the case of memory aides, it seems that one subject does in fact obtains information, albeit perhaps simply information that has been forgotten, but information is being transferred nonetheless.
Yes, but Tolkien and the reader only know what the words in that invented language mean or refer to by means of translating them into some public language. In that sense there is no private language. Of course there are private conversations; the conversations one has with oneself being the most private.
If indeed the social begins at a more intimate site than what you’re calling the public , then there is no society in your sense to enclose the individual away from, and your ‘actual’ public is a derived abstraction. But there are better ways of going about this discussion. than my hurling accusations of derived abstraction at your notion of public and you hurling back at me accusations of Cartesian solipsism, rationalism and idealism.
There are consequences to a solipsistic model. In addition to isolationism, there is resistance to change and arbitrariness when change does take place . Take for example, Beck’s cognitive therapy and Ellis’ rational emotive therapy. Exemplifying the oppositional relationship between a rationalist interpretive
template and an assumed independently existing reality that commandeers that schematics, these approaches embody isolationism, solipsism and arbitrariness.Heidegger, Derrida, Gendlin and Kelly offer nothing of the sort.
Quoting StreetlightX
The myth of the given asserts that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science. My touchstones for my claims concerning so-called private language are Derrida, Heidegger , n and Kelly. In my reading, Kelly was a radical constructivist. His philosophy of constructive alternativism makes meaning (perceptual, conceptual) amenable to an infinity of alternative constructions. This is about as far removed from the myth of the given as anything I can imagine.
Sure you can change the nuanced meanings of words, create novel nuances, associations and so on. But all of those nuances are themselves intelligible, even to their creator, only insofar as they are given in a public language.
Quoting Joshs
You cannot consistently make these two claims. Either there is no public ("derived abstraction"), or 'interpersonal communication is secondary and derived'. Pick one.
But it will never be understood in exactly the same way by each user of the language, so it is in fact not the ‘same’ language, only similar.
I’m reminded of Zahavi’s quote from Schultz:
“ The postulate, therefore, that I can observe the subjective experience of another person precisely as he does is absurd. For it presupposes that I myself have lived through all the conscious states and intentional Acts wherein this experience has been constituted. But this could only happen within my own experience and in my own Acts of attention to my experience. And this experience of mine would then have to duplicate his experience down to the smallest details, including impressions, their surrounding areas of protention and retention, reflective Acts, phantasies, etc. But there is more to come: I should have to be able to remember all his experiences and therefore should have had to live through these experiences in the same order that he did; and finally I should have had to give them exactly the same degree of attention that he did. In short, my stream of consciousness would have to coincide with the other person's, which is the same as saying that I should have to be the other person (Schutz 1967, p. 99; cf. Husserl 1976, § 83).
That is untrue: the language is the same, the difference lies in each individual use of the one language. No two individuals use their language in exactly the same way just as no two individuals eat, walk, run, or drive and so on in exactly the same way, or have exactly the same handwriting or interests etc., etc.
The why not say it is a similar language. There are thousands of languages in the world. They all began somewhere, and it obviously wasn’t instantaneous. Instead , it was incremental. Every user of a language is already contributing in their own unique way to the shifting of the basis of that language. Every time you use English you are helping to transform it into a new language.
This doesn't matter at all, and moreover, it is not clear what it even means to speak of people 'understanding in exactly the same way' or not - as if there was some transcendent index of 'understanding'. The publicity of a language is not measured by the degree to which people 'understand it in the exact same way'; rather, it has to do with the way in which it helps coordinate the actions and words of users among concrete circumstances engaged in concrete tasks. We don't 'understand language' so much as understand what a language does. Language does not exist in serene isolation from which we dip our toes in and out of willy nilly. It is always-already public otherwise it is not a language at all. To put it in overblown Heidggerese: all language with language-with.
It is the same language inasmuch as it has the same total lexicon.
So to simplify things, I will choose ‘interpersonal communication is secondary and derived'.
By the way, I’m not a fan of bullies, and your treatment of commenters on this site often comes close to that.
In which case you fall back into the initial objection of imagining an 'intimacy' so intimate that it is indistinguishable from a solipsism. As for problems of 'observing the subjective state of another' - we can't even observe the subjective state of ourselves, let alone others. We are as inaccessible to ourselves as others are to us and vice versa. In this sense I take the primacy of relationality more seriously than you can possibly imagine (in terms you might be familiar with: this is what it means to reject the "metaphysics of "presence"). That's what it means to recognize the public in the private - not to shut-up the private so tightly as though a black box that can only be peered into through a glass darkly.
species.
Quoting Joshs
@Joshs - your OP seems to be more about one's "subjective understanding" of a public language, rather than about a private language, as per Wittgenstein's distinction here.
One's understanding of a public language does not itself constitute a language. That is, you don't interpret a public language via the "language" of one's subjective understanding (because one's subjective understanding is not a language).
‘We’ are our ways of construing the world. Those dimensions of sense are implicitly available to us at some level of awareness, because they ARE us. They are the constantly adjusted relations of similarity and difference through which we organize our anticipations of events, and the most complex events are other people.
We may understand ourselves very well at an explicit level. But this ‘we’ that is being understood may be a mess, that is, what we understand ourselves to be is a functionally integral process of interaction with a world, and the process that is ‘ self’ may be doing a piss poor job of making sense of events.
The self is nothing other than this interactive sense making. It couldnt shut itself off from the world even if it wanted to, except in the extreme case of suicide , where one attempts to construct one’s world down to nothing so as to avoid the chaos of an incomprehensible reality.
But isn’t this merely a truism? We begin by pre-supposing that there is such a thing as a single language that we each subjectively interpret. So the premise is :single language, multiple subjective interpretations of it.
But what if we don’t begin by assuming there is a single language, since the only way to verify its existence is through the multitude of subjective interpretations of it. There is no standard or template to transcend the interpretations. If there are three of us in a room, one is speaking English, one French and the other German, we obviously don’t say that the three speakers are
are offering three interpretations of one language , because in this case the language is synonymous with the speaker.
Hence: "There is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it' in actual cases" (PI§201). Or again in Heideggerese: language is ready-to-hand long before it is present-to-hand.
And someone has to interpret that lexicon. Each of us. Differently. What secures and justifies the use of the word ‘same’ rather than ‘similar’ here? Objectivity is an idealization resulting from interpersonal correlations. It’s a shared faith that turns ‘similar’ into ‘same’. But the same is the same differently from person to person.
There are English teachers.
Quoting Joshs
Your position must be that there is no such thing as an English, French or German language/speaker because each individual in the world speaks their own unique language.
You could always try the same argument about a game with equally established rules, such as chess - that everyone interprets/understands it differently, that everyone plays it by their own rules, that there is no standard or template to transcend the interpretations, that there is no singular game that we call "chess". It would be equally false.
I do agree. The issue for me is that I reject the whole
concept of introspection when it comes
to what takes place when a person experiences the world (whether in what is conventionally called dreaming, imagination, sensation, social interaction, etc) moment to moment.
There is no psychic interior , no ‘intro’ to ‘spect’.
If you begin with that assumption, then you need other bodies , a public world, to get you out of your navel.
But the notion of an inner , self-affecting , self-reflexive self is one that I reject. There no such thing as a self that subsists in itself.
The self is a movement of transition, a tie between past and the world which changes it. This tie doesn’t survive past the moment of its instantiation in a moment of time.
The tie become a new tie , the self becomes a new self, every new moment. Reflection on one’s past is a new construction. The past is always a new past.
The ‘continuity’ of self that I refer to comes about because each change in self ( every moment) borrows from the past that it changes. So the ‘self’ continues to be the same differently. I look at others and empathize with them , which only means that I recognize that they too are a process of being the same differently.
But my going along with their behavior recognizes that they are other to me , that they are a variant of my changing movement of intention and motive
that isn’t ‘hidden’ from me, just other.
I have to admit that this is utterly bewildering to me coming from someone who claims Derrida to be an inspiration. Can you not see that you're trying to turn this idealization precisely into a 'supplement' that Derrida argued was everywhere originary? That the exclusion of this 'idealization' is precisely nothing other than the metaphysics of presence? Idealization is inherent to meaning as such, it is what makes meaning 'iterable'.The structure of the sign is what enables meaning at all - is what enables us to speak of 'the same' - or the different - at all:
"To the extent that the unity of the word— what makes it recognizable as a word, as the same word, the unity of a phonic complex and a sense— cannot be merged with the multiplicity of the sensible events of its employment nor does it depend on them, the sameness o f the word is ideal. It is the ideal possibility of repetition and it loses nothing with the reduction of any, and therefore of every empirical event marked by its appearance." (Voice and Phenomenon).
As for the post above this - what doe any of this have to do with language?
Or that two physicists in a room play it by their own rules, that there is no singular game called ‘physics’.
As John Shotter wrote:
“ So, although two scientists might not differ at all in doing calculations, making predictions, and in providing explanations when working with scientific formulae, differences could still occur between them in the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But these would only show up, notes Hanson (1958) in the different directions their new inquiries would take, “in ‘frontier' thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118).”
We don’t have to duplicate each other’s understanding to play chess or do science, we only have to approximate it, and much of our day to day communication together is at such a general level that the interpersonal
differences in interpretation will be completely irrelevant. They come into play when a deeper understanding of the other is required, such as takes place with religious, political or moral topics.
Then our belief in ‘established rules’ of language makes it impossible for us to believe that the other who voted
for that evil politician or supported that dangerous conspiracy theory or rejected basic public health advice interpreted the ‘same’ language in their own way. Instead we are forced to accuse the other of bad faith, lying, succumbing to brainwashing , coercion , ‘fake news’, immoral intent , greed.
Such accusations dominate media on both sides of the aisle mainly for this reason.
I interpret Derrida as saying here that the same (word) is the same differently WITHIN one person from moment to moment. This doesn’t take place accidentally
or specifically as the result of the interventions of
other persons.
In my article ‘What is a Number’ , I wrote :
Specifically, Derrida's groundbreaking reading of `Origin of Geometry' pursues the implications of Husserl's transformation of the Kantian thesis that an ideal object of any kind is an ideality in the extent to which it is identically repeatable again and again. As Derrida puts it,
“Absolute ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition."(Speech and Phenomena,p.52).
Derrida takes up Husserl's interest in this process of idealization, borrowing from Husserl a distinction between bound and free idealities (footnote 2). Derrida deconstructs the Husserlian usage of these terms, transforming them into species of iterability. Spoken and written language, and all other sorts of gestures and markings which intend meaning, exemplify bound idealities.
Even as it is designed to be immortal, repeatable as the same apart from any actual occurrences made at some point, the SENSE of a spoken or inscribed utterance, what it means or desires to say, is always tied to the contingencies of empirical circumstance. Derrida explains:
“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in orderto interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.(p53).
Then you've misread him to a significant degree. Nothing in Derrida's texts - and certainly nothing in the quote you've provided - 'limits' iterability as function 'within' a person - whatever that could even mean.
Again, it's telling that you continually try to put up borders between 'inside' and 'outside' even as you claim to try and explode them.
These do not become sets of similar entities on account of the countless different perceptions, interpretations and understandings of, or different dispositions or attunements to, them. The perceptions, interpretations and understandings are of, and the dispositions and attunements are to, them; to those particular entities.To advocate such a prodigiously multitudinous way of metaphysical thinking would be to advocate an egregiously unparsimonious ontology that would render all intersubjective transaction meaningless.
And you've stepped right over this without noticing, or at least addressing, it:
Quoting Janus
To quote Wittgenstein:
Quoting Joshs
Who is this ‘one’ who puts the shopping list in ‘one’s’ pocket? Who is this ‘oneself’ who is interrupting ‘oneself’ by changing the very sense of the meaning that ‘one’ intends, even before other persons are involved?
Welcome to the worlds of Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl.
Derrida writes:
“And so, must we not think, and think otherwise (without objecting to it frontally and integrally) , that the said "same world" (if there is some such world, and if it is indeed necessary to account for it, and account for its "effect," as "sense of the world") is not and will never be the "same world"?(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.193)”
Sure, iterabiltiy is a general schema that bears upon a 'one' no less than literally anything else. Nothing in Derrida warrants some kind of 'exclusivity' to an individual. It's an utterly wrongheaded reading.
Wittgenstein is making a distinction between thinking as classical reflective cognition and his notion of practice, which is comparable to recent notions of primary intersubjectivity, which conceives the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.”
So a rule , as a practice, forms the meaning of the word.
By contrast , according to the traditional notion of reflective cognition , one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private.
But Wittgenstein did not have available to him other ways of conceiving ‘thinking’.
For Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin, thinking is not consulting an inner template. It is an act of transformation akin to what Wittgenstein is describing , but one which takes place not as following a rule forged between two or more people, but between ‘me’ and the world , which includes what used to be considered ‘introspection’ not as consulting an inner realm inside one, but as interaction with a world.
Of course I am not denying that the world is subtly different for each percipient, whether animal or human, but it is the one shared world which appears differently in each case, and to each at different times, not a multitude of different worlds.
So this is also not to deny that the world is not the same from one moment to the next, because it is an ever-changing world; but is to say that it is the one world that is changing, and not a case of a teeming succession of countless different worlds. I suppose the reality "in itself" is neither one nor the other and the question is really concerning which is the better, more parsimonious and coherent way to think of it. To think of it, not of them, in other words, lest we become mired in a pointless, and indeed conceptually fatal, disunity.
Again, you’re beginning from a presupposition of self and social as distinguishable entities . By unraveling self, Derrida also unraveled the interpersonal social structure that depended on it.
No, this is exactly what I am not doing. Precisely because the self cannot be isolated in some pristine self-enclosed splendour, the idea that iteration only bears upon an 'individual' cannot hold. Your operation simply shunts the social 'into' the self and then shuts out and excludes the social on account of this. Your OP rigidifies a line between the self and the social in a stronger way than any possible metaphysical schema could ever do.
Unity doesn’t have to depend on holding onto the idea of a single categorical fixity. Isn’t the unity that science looks for a unity within change ? That is , a way of understanding a continuously evolving flow of events such that this multiplicity appears orderable as referentially consistent?
So tell me how you would describe the self, this entity which cannot be isolated but which you still have a name for.
But before you do, I’m curious about one thing. You read copiously in philosophy. Are you familiar with Zahavi’s notion of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness? It seems to have become a focal point of
research for an increasing group of writers. Among those who have been won over by the idea that consciousness implies self-consciousness are Ratcliffe, Slaby, Gallagher, Thompson and Fuchs.
Do you bribe this idea is an example of
quote="StreetlightX;485196"]A reworked Cartesian solipsism wearing phenomenological dress.[/quote]?
Am I right?
Quoting StreetlightX
But Heidegger’s long exegesis on idle talk and das man seems to make your notion of public language into idle talk. His notion of “primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself” sounds a lot more like Gendlin ‘s implicit bodily intricacy ( which is why Gendlin embraced Heidegger) than public language.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Perhaps you might be more sympathetic to Gallagher’s critique of Heidegger than to Heidegger’s view of language.
“In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”
So you're saying that an authentic self chooses the meaning of the words they use?
But this is simply not true. Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; it's value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, cheat and so on. You understand what is said only to the extent that you understand what language does: it's role in action. The idea of language as a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states' is a narrow, ivory-tower view of language usually promulgated by people who, having never consulted a single work of linguistics in their life, model language on old dead white men transmitting thoughts via books to them.
Language is indeed used to sometimes 'understand', but this function of language is a tiny subset of its uses that are capricious beyond the wildest imaginations of armchair philosophing about it. I won't comment on either Heideggerian idle talk - which is too far off topic - nor the technicalities of pre-reflective self-awareness (which I am farmiliar with) other than to note that Derrida made an entire philosophical career attacking such notions, and I think he was exactly right to do so. "Pre-reflective self-awareness" is literally the ur-candidate of the metaphysics of presence which Derrida spent his whole life dismantling.
Nonetheless, language can also function as "a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states'" in so-called inner speech, an inner monologue, etc. This function is not just cognitive, here language is in charge of the constitution and affirmation of self. And I agree that 'Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; its value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented.' Don’t we have the two incompatible functions of language?
No, because even such an expressive use of language is still a technique, it responds and is constituted by imperatives of communication - grammar key among them - that are social through and through. To quote Reza Negarestani (form Intelligence and Spirit):
"The capacity to know, believe, or mean something rests upon certain practical know-how (i.e., pragmatism), the practical mastery of inferential roles. ... the noises or behaviours of interlocutors can only count as saying or claiming something if said interlocutors know what to do—in accordance with rules and following some standards or norms—such that they can draw inferences from each other’s claims, using such inferences as the premises of their own claims and reasoning. Here, syntactic expressions as items of language assume semantic value or meaning when they are incorporated into the interaction of practitioners of discursive practices that give inferential roles to such utterances. These are practices that adopt or attribute normative statuses, commitments, and entitlements that stand in consequential relations to one another" - which is fancy way of saying that to know what is to know how: the first is a subset of the other. They are not two different functions of language.
Or as Daniel Dor puts it, the whole point of language is to bridge what he called the 'experiential gap' between people: "
"Our experiential communicative intents very rarely, if ever, emerge in our minds as digitally demarcated intents to either say or ask something, to order, or promise, or predict, or deny, and so on. They are multi-layered, variable, vague, dynamic, analogue. We wish to express something, and what we wish to express is as complex as the experience within which the communicative intent emerged. Coupled with the foundational fact of the experiential gap, this analogue complexity constitutes a major obstacle to communication: we very often find it difficult to understand what the person speaking to us is trying to do (“is this a promise or a threat”), and our experiential histories often lead us to the wrong conclusion.
Speech-acts, then, are socially negotiated, stereotypical communicative behaviors, highlighted and isolated from the experiential continuum of communication, which, when practiced according to a set of mutually identified conventions, allow for the successful mediation of the speaker’s intention across the experiential gap. When conventionalizing a speech-act, what the members of the community agree on is this: “from now on, when we behave this way—when, in these particular contexts, we use this intonation, this word order, this gesture—we mean to ask a question (or make a promise, or tell a story).” (The Instruction of the Imagination).
What is the most private, most personal experience that we have? I'm referring to an experience that's impossible to point to and say, "Here, this is it. This is what I'm talking about." The first thing that crosses my mind is consciousness. It's not something that we can point to directly and all that we know of consciousness is gleaned from indirect evidence. I suppose what I want to say is that when it comes to consciousness all that's linguistically possible, demanding the utmost rigor, is a private language. Consciousness fits the bill of an object that can't be, let's just say, put in the public domain a necessary step in the creation of languages according to Wittgenstein.
Is the difficulty we face in defining consciousness in a way that's precise and universally acceptable evidence that Wittgenstein's correct on that score? Consciousness and us have an uncanny resemblance to Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box analogy.
Next we enter the domain of emotions. Granted there are words for the emotions we experience but, at the same time, they possess an ineffable quality. The subjective nature of emotions, just like the subjective nature of consciousness, belies the existence of words to refer to them. How on earth did something so private find itself into a community of language users? The easiest answer is behavior - there are certain plainly visible physical manifestations of emotion and also consciousness and they're, for the most part, consistent enough to enable drawing the appropriate conditions that prevail inside our very private minds which, I suppose, permits the coining of the appropriate words and phrases for them.
In line with Wittgenstein's intuitions, emotions and consciousness still are linguistically troublesome - it's hard to put them in words. :chin:
Nevertheless, I would say that there is a fundamental difference of intention between communicating with oneself and communicating with others, implying a difference in meaning.
Quoting Joshs
I think that aural language (for communicating with others), and written language (for communicating with oneself) each developed distinctly, and then merged. The merging was conducive to an explosion in knowledge because writing allowed for a much more accurate temporal transmission of knowledge through a multitude of generations, compared to the verses of tribal chants, and things like that.
If you are asking which came first, there is much evidence in a wide range of species, that most if not all animals practise some form of communication through sound. I think I read somewhere that it's been hypothesized that some dinosaurs had a very advanced form of communication, allowing communication over long distances. On the other hand, we do not see much evidence of markings being used for memory aids in species other than human. However, the nature of such markings, as private, would make identification of them, very difficult. Perhaps some creatures would mark the way to their nests, or mark the way to food sources, and for obvious reasons these markings would be intended to be private. As much as the marking would be a memory aid for the individual making it, it would need to serve to confuse or deceive others at the same time. And, incidentally, this is why it is futile to argue for the reality of private language, evidence for it is self-refuting. The private language, if there is such a thing, must exist without evidence of its existence.
The point I wanted to make though, is that since the two types of language are developed from completely different intentions, perhaps modelled as almost parallel, the question of one being adapted to the other is not an appropriate question. What we see in human history is a merging of the two, coinciding with a great increase in intellectual capacity. Most likely there was a lot of adaptation on both sides, and reciprocation. So bringing what is private into the public realm, conforming it, and also adapting what is already public, to the principles of the private, breaks the boundary between the two, allowing for the existence of "knowledge" in the epistemological sense.
Now here's some speculation concerning "signs" and "symbols". These are the essential aspects of the written, private side of language. Aural communication in its raw form does not consist of signs and symbols, there is simply fluctuations, differences in sound waves. Differences have meaning. This is proven by all sorts of animal communication, birds especially, who communicate by song. But written markings seem to always be in the form of a recognizable sign or symbol.
Proceeding from this, as a premise, we see that all those philosophies of language, which model the symbol as the essence of communication are misguided. Essentially, communicative language consists of meaningful acts displaying differences, not symbols which represent something. The symbol is intrinsic to the private language. Furthermore, what this means, is that rules, or principles for interpreting symbols are also proper to the private language. So when we find rules existing within the public realm of communication, they have really been derived from the private, and adapted through the reciprocation process described above, to have a more universal application.
I believe that the crucial point in the evolution of meaning is the emergence of the spoken word, as a unit, or entity of meaning, to be interpreted according to rules. But it is most likely that the entity of meaning, to be interpreted according to principles, was recognized long before this in the private language, through the use of markings as symbols. So the spoken word emerged from the private language, despite the fact that aural communication already existed.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is where a recognition of the difference in intention is significant. The technique for the private language is completely different from the technique for public communication because of the difference in intention. The difference in intention necessitates a difference in the medium employed. The difference in the medium necessitates a difference in technique. As analogy, the different arts which utilize different media necessarily use different techniques depending on the medium.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think the op is questioning where the need for conventions is derived from? There is no need for conventions in common day to day language use, we could get along fine with just the "multi-layered, variable, vague, dynamic, analogue". However, there is for some reason an intent toward a higher level of understanding, and it is this intent which drives the need for conventions.
What is the difference? The purpose of both is to pass on information, correct?
Actually, what I would question here are the assumptions embedded in the claims concerning the effect social negotiation produces on the participants. I want to specifically focus on terms like mutually identified conventions , normative agreement , stereotypy.
How effectively do they lock-in shared meanings? If we use as a criterion a relaxed definition of shared use, then we can just ignore the variations from
person to person in their construal of their sense of the conventions involved , and more specifically, in their behavior, as long as the aims of the communicative
context are vague and general enough to make these differences unimportant, to make it seem for all intents and purposes as though there is one unified game being performed, a system that is prior to its participants.
But the most important communicative
contexts also happen to be the ones we encounter every day, involving conflicts of intention that cause us to experience stress, anger, depression and guilt.
As I write this, protesters are storming the U.S. Capital. This political conflict cannot be understood outside of a psychological and psychotherapeutic understanding of the terms of ‘shared’ conventions.
Is a a mutually identified convention a centered structure? Or does it subsist as the same differently from one person to the next?
Science would be impossible without conceiving of particular individual entities and specific categories; in other words without thinking sameness and identity, and difference. Sameness and identity don't conceptually depend on fixity or lack of change as I understand them, but on certain kinds and degrees of continuity.
This isn't a question that can be answered in the abstract. How effectively for what purpose? In the capacity of what role in action? Language works - not always sucessfully - to constrain uncertainty. It works to the extent that it is 'good enough' - not unlike evolution where what survives is 'good enough'. Communication is communication of the 'good enough', not for perfect matchings of 'internal states' or what have you. The latter is a metaphysical picture of language peddled by philosophers who have never studied human behaviour outside of imagining it in their books.
fixed categories. Those tidy boxes had to be unraveled
in favor of a much messier order of evolutionary change. But the larger effect of abandoning the categories in favor of continuous process was to reveal a more profound order of relation where there had been only arbitrary separation. Wittgenstein accomplished that with language, showing that they not just arbitrarily created entities, solipsistic categories unto themselves, but are formed through , and never depart from, relational contexts of pragmatic use. The Op’s quibble with Wittgenstein concerns his depiction of such contexts
as centered group structures.
I don't see that the categories; the families, genera and species and so on have been abandoned, but rather their interconnections have been better understood, and the boundaries between them more clearly defined, even as they have become understood to be less rigid.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not that clear on what you're saying here. It's unarguable that languages evolve pragmatically in group contexts, although not without more or less arbitrary individual innovations. Creative innovations have to be adopted by groups in order to survive and become conventional usages, though.
The OP is a response to the rising popularity of ways of thinking about how the individual relates to the environment, both bodily , physical and social. They reject the idea of language as a mere tool for representing already existing meanings in the head. They reject the idea that we know and empathize with other persons by consulting our own interior cognitive mechanics. I agree with them as far as they go. I agree that experiencing , perception , cognition and language is not a matter of consulting internal schemes and templates, but is instead a being-with, already exposed
to the world. Language is already present as
perception , and perception is interactive behavior with an outside that perceives by changing itself. This disclosive construing is already languaging, expression and sociality . It participates in social conventions but is not dissolved into them.
Hero’s an example of the type of position I’m critiquing.
“When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”
In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person’s thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them.
And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no
idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413)
I believe that my being affected by Paul, and he by me, emotively, linguistically and perceptually , does nothing
form a single system but is two systems revealing two
perspectives. There is my point of view and my understanding of his point of view from my vantage.
Then there is his point of view from his vantage and his understanding of my point of view from his vantage.
You can see how this would be applied to the sharing of linguistic conventions.
First of all, in principle, I agree with you that 'They are not two different functions of language,' and I share your view that 'Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination.' Yet, I think that you are too fast and there is still a problem of bridging the gap. When you say:
Quoting StreetlightX
you can depreciate the philosophical tradition based on self-reflection (from Descartes and Fichte to Husserl and Sartre) and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Likely, the first function of language is not just to provide an expressive medium of 'inner states.' "It is precisely the thinking activity of the cartesian self-reflection – the experiences of the thinking ego -that gives rise to doubt of the world reality and of my own. Thinking can seize upon and got hold of everything real – event, object, its own thoughts. The world itself got transformed into the flow of consciousness, and further become the object of reflection" (Hannah Arendt, ‘Human condition’). Activities of the mind, mediated by language, cannot be reduced to simple utilitarian performative functions. When we are writing these posts, we are not merely 'facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, cheat and so on'. We are doing much more.
Quoting StreetlightX
This account of the performativity of language is excellent, but it is still insufficient. Though Arendt’s conceptual framework can become irrelevant for us, she provided an expanded vision of 'the cartesian performativity’. Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants. Often, they are disguised by ordinary social conventions and norms. Also, reciprocally, we intervene and may impact the constitutive factors of our agency. Austin's theory of performativity represents just a superficial layer of what we do with words.
How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent?
No, memory is to retain information, that's completely different from passing on information. The former involves the attitude I have toward the relationship between the information I have, and myself. The latter involves the attitude I have toward the relationship between the information I have, and others. You ought to see that there is a big difference here. There is always good reason to retain information, but in a competitive world there is often good reason not to share it.
Quoting StreetlightX
Without a standard as to what is 'good enough' this is really meaningless. We can get along fine without conventions. Sure we might get frustrated and kill each other now and then, but conventions don't guarantee that we won't any way.
An amoeba survives 'good enough' without evolving. We really need to address the true motive behind the instigation of conventions, and that is not to be 'good enough'. More likely it is the striving to be better. When striving to be better is apprehended as the motive, then we see that there really is no such thing as 'good enough', until we reach the ideal; not unlike evolution, where survival is simply not good enough.
The best way to answer is to turn to Derrida’s critique of Austin’s speech acts theory.
“Without a general iterability (a general citationality) there would not even be a "successful" performative. The intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. This essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context. In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least have to be totally present… and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context.” (Derrida, Signature. Event. Contest)”
Derrida’s main point here that there is no speech act without intention, but there is the gap between one’s conscious intention and the unfelt determinants of the enormously complexed
indiscernible context. Derrida uses the concept of ‘contest’ instead of the set of analytical conditions that Austin underlined as necessary for a successful speech act. The unavoidable presence of various unconscious factors makes any context of iterative performative utterance analytically undeterminable, so that “any saturation of the context is prohibited.” Consequently, it would mean the failure of Austin’s attempt to take account of ‘total context’ (the total speech situation), able to produce an illocutive force. Also, it would prove the effectiveness of Derrida’s differance. Can one of Austin’s most celebrated examples refute these assertions?
"One of our examples was, for instance, the utterance 'I do' (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something - namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying… Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether 'physical' or 'mental' actions or even acts of uttering further words." (Austin, How To Do Things With Words). When one says 'I do,' one joins an infinite variation
of different ceremonies without which the wedding would have no meaning. Therefore, in principle unlimited, there is a series of ways other bodies can be joined in matrimony in different places by different authorities for various reasons to achieve different effects. It looks like Derrida is right that general iterability is the central factor of a successful speech act, and its context is in principle undefined. Nevertheless, Derrida could not sufficiently make explicit his notion of a general citationality.
Quoting Joshs
I feel that I did not answer it, may be I will do it better after discussion of Derrida vs. Austin
Quoting Number2018
Quoting Number2018
So the way that I want to interpret the way Derrida uses terms like context and unconscious is that they are sequential changes in intention, rather than a ‘co-existing’ unconscious context. The unconsciousness, then, would not be within but beyond, the unavoidable exposure of intention to the alterity of new context with each iteration of the ‘same’ intention. Put differently, context would not be a spatially present surround but a temporally spacing ( and transforming) interation.
And I guess this then connects up with my original question about how a social determinant, as a contextual influence, shapes and changes my intent?
Because if we say , with Wittgenstein, that the contextual game performs a unitary meaning for the participants in it , the what of the other piece
of Derrida’ s formulation of iterability, which is that each newly shaped intention borrows from what it displaces?
If each participant in a language game is experiencing a ‘shared’ language context but is borrowing from their own individual history as they share in the ‘same’ context, it seems to me that the norms, rules, practices, grammars and conventions that belong to language use must be understood as abstractions from a multiplicity of differing individual experiences of it.
I agree that there is affectivity and empathy prior to language. We can see it in social animals. Language is a tool for representing meanings and associations, which underpin its social functionality; poetry being the prime "pure" example. But language is also a medium which allows a great creative proliferation of meanings and associations, and novel elaborations of function too, all of which would otherwise be impossible, and this attribute is also exemplified by poetry. So language is representation, but it is also "poesis" (making). Why must these dual, or better multifarious and interdependent, roles of language be reduced to a narrow polemic, a black and white case of 'one or the other'?
I think the Wittgensteinian as well as phenomenological argument would be that if we believe that a role of language can be to represent extant meanings, then the basis of the creativity of language becomes a mere synthetic function, a putting together and reshuffling of pre-existing meanings, and nothing is ever really new
If on the other hand, to engage in language is never to refer to a pre-existing thought or feeling, but to instead enact a new sense of meaning, then creativity goes from a re-combining to a genuine birthing.
Maybe, but I’ve heard it said that we don’t write things down to remember them, we do so to forget them. If information is forgotten, then rediscovering it is basically the same thing as learning new information. Or, what if I tell someone else to remind me to do X? Is that communication?
We could say this about memorizing as well. We memorize something to get it out of mind, so we don't need to think about it anymore, therefore forget it. But this type of forgetting is conditional, on the confidence of being able to retrieve it later.
Quoting Pinprick
If you take some time to think about this statement, you'll see that it's based in an equivocation of "forgotten". If taking something out of your active mind, and placing it somewhere that it can be retrieved later, is a case of forgetting it, then retrieving it is obviously not the same thing as learning something new.
But that’s an information processing view of memory associated with first generation. cognitive psychology , which modeled human cognition after the computer.
Newer approaches have discarded the computer analogy in favor of organismic metaphors. Cognition belongs to an embodied self-organizing system. Processes like cognition and perception are not the processing of raw stimuli but forms of interaction and self-transformation. Memory, then, is never veridical because it is not the retrieval of data from a filing cabinet. Rather it is a reconstructive activity that changes rather than retrieves.
I do not know if Derrida himself developed an expanded theory based on his insights:
"Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place, it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [l'enonciation]. The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through the present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential." (Derrida, 'Signature. Event. Contest') Without realizing Derrida's program, it is still uncertain why language norms and rules expose the apparent iterative, repetitive patterns. Your interpretation of Derrida's central concepts of context and structuring iterative unconscious underlines just the context's alterity. When you claim that: "If each participant in a language game is experiencing a 'shared' language context but is borrowing from their own individual history as they share in the 'same' context, it seems to me that the norms, rules, practices, grammars and conventions that belong to language use must be understood as abstractions from a multiplicity of differing individual experiences of it," we still need to deal with a few gaps here. What do you mean by a 'shared' language context? Is that what you understand as Derrida's 'context'? If yes, there is a gap between this context and the general regularities of language. If not, you would contradict yourself. I think that Foucault and Deleuze, using different concepts, could further develop Derrida's program of the founding of the iterative unconscious structuring. That is why I disagree with your claim that "radically temporal approaches are more effective at understanding others, as individuals and as groups, than Deleuze's approach. What he would see as arbitrary, they would perceive a finer order hiding within. As a 'psychotherapeutic' approach, Deleuze would look for how individuals are defined and created by their positioning within a social arrangement. Radical temporal approaches see the social rearrangement as secondary and derived in relation to the social movement that already defines the individual.” Are you familiar with 'Anti-Oedipus'? You can call this work arbitrary, but it is effective. All in all, our disagreement is primarily about choosing a more effective conceptual framework. So far, I still do not see that 'radical temporal approaches' are more effective.
Quoting Number2018
Let’s get specific. I’m going to take Kenneth Gergen’s
approach to psychotherapy as reasonable proxy for Foucault-Deleuze.
For? Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition [end p.43] seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture" (MSp.9). For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up.
As Gergen sees it, instead of failures of understanding being crucial (and provoking adaptive reconstructions), "what we count as knowledge are temporary locations in dialogic space - samples of discourse that are accorded status as 'knowledgeable tellings on given occasions’.”
Radically temporalapproaches , by contrast , sees each person as only being able to relate to, assimilate , construe that in the social sphere which can be construed on some basis of similarity with respect to one’s history of understanding. So we find in Kelly, Gendlin, and Heidegger a description of the ongoing history of an individual’s experiencing in terms of an overall pragmatic self- continuity: Here’s Heidegger:
“In its familiar being-in-relevance, understanding holds itself before that disclosure as that within which its reference moves. Understanding can itself be referred in and by these relations. We shall call the relational character of these referential relations signifying. In its familiarity with these relations, Da-sein "signifies" to itself. It primordially gives itself to understand its being
and potentiality-of-being with regard to its being-in-the-world. The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.“
Can you imagine Deleuze assenting to this way of describing moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation?
Now let’s look at George Kelly’s view of sociality.
In order to understand the crucial distinction between using the social sphere as validational
evidence and having one’s behavior normatively shaped in joint action, we have to keep in mind
that the meaning of validation is closely tied to the replicative anticipatory aim of my construct
system. However directly I attempt to connect with a world of fellow persons, each with their own subjective systems, all I can ever experience of that otherness is what I anticipatively, replicatively construe as consonant with my own system. As participant in an intersubjective
community my construals frame and orient my reciprocal interactions with others in such a way that my own subjective thread of continuity runs through and organizes it. That is to say, hidden within the naive exteriority of my social encounters is a peculiar sort of coherence or implicate self-consistency.
In Kelly’s approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one’s own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is
that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and
between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds
of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”
One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways’ that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same’ cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.
Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory.”
It looks interesting. Could you write the name of the book?
You've got a lot of work to do to demonstrate that Wittgenstein was committed to this (narrow) view of thinking or understanding. I'm not sure where you get this from - perhaps by completely missing the point of his 'five red apples' example and almost all of his later philosophy? Consider this reading:
Quoting Phil Hutchinson
You might have an interesting point to make, but your conspicuous misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy isn't helping.
Quoting Luke
You need to make your point yourself, instead of throwing a long quote at me and then concluding that I completely misunderstand Wittgenstein, without telling me how specifically you are interpreting my claims, and how the quote refutes them. I may indeed completely misunderstand Wittgenstein , but please make the argument yourself so I know what the hell you are talking about.
In the meantime , you might want to glance at this paper I wrote ( published in Theory and Paychology ) that discusses social constructionist positions influenced by Wittgenstein. That may clarify my argument.
https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social
As far as I see, Derrida could not successfully manage the transition from his deconstruction project to the conceptual framework that is able to take account of a stable and apparent socially created subjectivity. On the contrary, after working on deconstruction of misrepresented ontological and epistemological foundations of our society (‘History of Madness,’ ‘Order of Things,’ and ‘Archeology of Knowledge), Foucault moved to the research of the creation of the social.
Quoting Joshs
There is the apparent controversy: from one side, one can make choices in an ever-expanding range of situations; one becomes responsible for the creation and construction of a 'life of one’s own.’ Human identity is being transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ with the responsibility for performing that task and for the possible consequences and the ‘side-effects’. Therefore, the role of intentionality, self-reflexivity and personal accountability has dramatically increased over the recent time. From the other side, we evidence that our ways of life, social engagements and personal experiences are shaped, reproduced and incorporated into the dominating social order. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. Foucault’s conceptualization of contemporary subjectivity could help to understand the reciprocity of the growing individuation and the overwhelming socialization. He characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of socialization and power as ‘environmental’: “governmentality acts on the social environment and systematically modify its variables…Biopower’s formula is to ’make live or die’. It seeks to optimize a state of life by maximizing and extracting forces…Neoliberalism finds its rational principle in an artificially arranged freedom: the creation and management of the competitive behavior of economically rational individuals in the regulated environment ” (Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’).
In our lives, we deal with various forms of conditioning that modulate behavior and stimulate intentionality by implanting directive presuppositions and activating certain tendencies. The psychological mechanisms behind these ways of behavior management are called priming. Lars Hall and others studied them:
https://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hall-et-al.-2010-Magic-at-the-Marketplace-Choice-Blindness-for-the-Taste-of-Jam-and-the-Smell-of-Tea.pdf
Priming operates less through stimulus-response than through cues whose force is situational. Priming includes the presuppositions that orient a social actor’s entry into the situation and direct her self – management after the encounter. We are continually immersed in highly organized artificial domains. During any encounter, one can experience her individual situation as profoundly personal and intimate. Nevertheless, one’s inner self and explicitly construed intents are primarily formed by a complex of pre-given organizing principles.
Quoting Joshs
Coming back to our discussion of the concepts of context and unconsciousness, priming-like notions would be more appropriate to consider our situation than the philosophy of radical temporality. Derrida’s differance or mark cannot explain the structuring iterative unconscious forces that impact us. People have similar experiences primarily due to the fact of being immersed in the common highly organized, but shocking and affectivily charged environment.
Quoting Joshs
I need to think about this. May be it is correct, but it is against my personal experience and observations.
You stated - or, at least, strongly implied - that, for Wittgenstein, 'thinking' is a "classical reflective cognition" according to which "one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private."
This is exactly the type of view that Wittgenstein was attempting to undermine in his Philosophical Investigations, particularly with his remarks on family resemblances, the private language argument and rule-following, but also more generally throughout.
To say or imply that Wittgenstein considered there to be one essential defining commonality to all instances and uses of the word "thinking", e.g. "consulting an inner template", would be to ignore his family resemblance concept, according to which the various meanings/uses of a word such as "thinking" do not all have one essential defining feature, but instead those various meanings/uses share "a complicated network of similarities" which lack any essential defining feature.
Likewise, to say or imply that Wittgenstein considered rule-following to consist in consulting an inner template would be to ignore or misconstrue virtually all of his remarks on rule-following and the private language argument, which seek to evince that the (public) grammar of the word "rule" (and the following of such rules) precludes a strictly private or isolated usage.
However, your misguided claim was about Wittgenstein's position on "thinking", which Wittgenstein refutes himself:
This contradicts your assertion that thinking is something "inner and private". If thinking were something "inner and private", then we could only ever know what "thinking" meant by observing ourselves think. But Wittgenstein explicitly states that this is not the meaning/use of the concept.
OK, let's assume that memory is a type of talking to oneself then. I still believe that the intent involved in talking to oneself, in general, is much different from the intent involved in talking to another. That was the point.
There is a matter of competition which makes it beneficial not to disclose to others what you want to talk to yourself about (remember). Further, there is a big issue of deception which we all practice to some extent pretty much on a daily basis. You might say that we ought not be secretive and deceptive, but we're talking about the reality of language, not some ideal.
Quoting Joshs
This is how Deleuze and Guattari describe our 'moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation' :smile: :razz: :
"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces
something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors." (Deleuze and Guattari, 'Anti-Oedipus')
Likely, our shared context also profoundly impacts our verbal performances. The context and medium determine language. I mean that after being placed into the ultimately different context, philosophical, literary, and poetic texts and citations can inevitably lose their original meaning. In our situation, even the most significant philosophical texts could become the means of the endless
re-citation, re-interpretation, and re-activation of one’s pre-given and pre-shaped subjectivity. Often, these texts cannot provide an access to Authenticity, Truth and Being. That is why Deleuze and Guattari moved to anti-text, anti-poetics, and anti-philosophy.Equally important, they insist that our context and unconscious are maintained and shaped by
machinic, iterative, and exterior processes.
You misunderstood me. I agree with you. The view that thinking is reflective cognition is the view Wittgenstein is opposing. My point was that there are alternatives to reflective cognition, such as certain phenomenological philosophical perspectives like that Heidegger’s. took of thinking or Metleau-Ponty’s embodied intercorpoeality, that do not posit a hidden inner repository of meaning, and yet offer an origin of language that is more primordial than Wittgenstein’s interaubjective grounding of language.
Then why attribute this view to Wittgenstein and say that he “did not have available to him other ways of conceiving ‘thinking’”?
Quoting Joshs
AFAIK, Wittgenstein never attempted to “offer an origin of language”.
No, he didn’t.
“ After such a synthesis of Wittgensteinian philosophy and Merleau-Ponty' s phenomenology of perception, where Wittgenstein grows silent, when we reach beyond the 'language-games' and 'forms of life,' once again the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty presents itself to point toward the Beyond. The precedence and succession of Merleau-Ponty to Wittgenstein is not a temporal or honorary one, but rather, a logical or phenomenological one. For Merleau-Ponty dares to tread where language fears to go; cannot go. While Wittgenstein has restricted himself to ordinary language, Merleau-Ponty has advocated the primacy of perception.”
Dennnis Heinzig, MERLEAU-PONTY AND LUDWIG
WITTGENSTEIN: A SYNTHESIS
Eugene Gendlin:
“After Wittgenstein philosophers have assumed that only language gives meaning to sensing the body “from inside.” The common experiencing we have all day is philosophically ignored because they think of it as merely internal and indeterminate, made interactional only by language. There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies.”
I've always liked DG's style.Utterly original. Let's say that we think long and hard about what is the simplest, most irreducible and primordial thing we can say about any sense of meaning, and what we come up with is this: The most basic origin of being is something like a machinic algorithm, a conceptual pattern which is designed to do something, something very simple and basic. But it never does this thing alone, it does it as a differential relation to some other machinic process. So all there are are machinic processes and their constantly changing differential relations. Now lets ask the question of HOW this simple machinic functioning changes. If we say that some sub-component of a machinic process is altered, this doesn't really amount to a transcendence of the whole process. Instead it is only a variation WITHIN the already structured function of the machine. A real transcendence requires a move beyond the meaning of the machine in its design and intent as a whole. This implies disconnection, interruption, gap, contrast, becasue the machine does what it does, and to cahnge from one machinic functioning to another is to move on to a new functioning.
Let me contrast this to Eugene Gendlin's notion of the most basic, irreducible grounding of a sense of meaning. Gendlin begins from the lived body, but his notion of body is not a conventional one. It bears some things in common with Merleau_ponty's notion of body as background-figure gestalt structuration, but for Gendlin , body is what he calls an implicit intricacy, an unseparated multiplicity is not a whole composed of separate parts but an original interaffecting. It exists by implying into occurring. That is, an event which occurs, which is experienced,crosses with the intricacy. An event is this crossing which carries forward the intricacy rather than interrupting it or disconnecting from it. Occurring into implying is not a new event which takes the place of an old event. It is neither the same nor just different, but rather an explicating.
"If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly...“Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they
Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and
with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.
Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behavior.
We can see the body's primacy and priority when we feel how the body now functions, always in a much wider way than language. The body functions in crucial ways, and in ways that are trans-historical. It is not the five senses but the sentient bodily interaction that takes on language and history - and then always still exceeds them.
Suppose, for example, that you are walking home at night, and you sense a group of men following you. You don't merely perceive them. You don't merely hear them there, in the space behind you. Your body-sense instantly includes also your hope that perhaps they aren't following you. It includes your alarm and many past experiences - too many to separate out -and surely also the need to do something, be it walk faster, change your course, escape into a house, get ready to fight, run, shout (.....).
My (.....) expresses the fact that your body-sense includes more than we can list, more than you can think by thinking one thing at a time. And it includes not only what is there. It also implies a next move to cope with the situation. But this implying of your next move is still a (.....) since your actual move has not yet come. Since it includes all this, the (.....) is not just a perception, although it certainly includes many perceptions. Is it then a feeling? It is certainly felt, but "feeling" usually means emotion. The (.....) includes emotions, but also so much else. Is it then something mysterious and unfamiliar'? No, we always have such a bodily sense of our situations. You have it now, or you would be disoriented as to where you are and what you are doing.
Is it not odd that no word or phrase in our language as yet says this? "Kinesthetic" refers only to movement, "proprioceptive" refers to muscles. "Sense" has many uses. So there is no common word for this utterly familiar bodily sense of the intricacy of our situations, along with the rapid weighing of more alternatives than we can think separately. We now call it a "felt sense." Notice that a (.....) is implicitly intricate. It is more than what is already formed or distinguished. In my example it includes many alternative moves, but more: the (.....) implies a next move - the body is the implying of - a next move, but after-and-with all that it includes, that move is as yet unformed.
The (.....) is interaction. It is the body's way of living its situation. Your situation and you are not two things, as if the external things were a situation without you. Nor is your bodily sense only internal. It is certainly not just an emotional reaction to the danger. It is that, but it also
includes more of the intricacy of your situation than you can see or think. Your bodily (.....) is your situation. It is not a perceived object before you or even behind you. The situation isn't the things that are there, nor something internal inside you. Your intricate involvement with others is not inside you, and it is not outside you, so it is also not those two things together.
The body-sense is the situation. It is inherently an interaction, not a mix of two things. The living body is an ongoing interaction with its environment. Therefore, of course, it contains environmental information. The bodily (.....) also implies a further step which may not yet be capable of being done or said. We need to conceive of the living body in a new way, so as to be able to understand how it can contain (or be) information, and also be the implying of the next bit of living. It is not the usual use of the word "body." As we have seen, the body is not just an orienting center of perceiving, nor only a center of motions, but also of acting and speaking in situations.
The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "being-in-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating
analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach."
Now DG might want to argue that Gendlin's implicit intricacy is a kind of machine, and that authentic change in experiencing would require an interruption of its mode of functioning. Perhaps Massumi would use affect as the body's way of disrupting the flow of the implicity intricacy.
On the other hand , Gendlin argues that DG's machines are like the way we think of word concepts, as discrete patterns that interact. But he would go on to claim that, just like word concepts and other logical patterns, there is a generating process which they derive from. A machinic pattern is something that drops out from the implicit intricacy.
"We can phenomenologically study how we use logic – for example in philosophical analysis, or in computing our bank account. We do it by holding the implicit intricacy aside, it is always there. We "know" why we are pursuing this logical chain just now, and what it means for our philosophy or our finances. We keep all this aside so as to follow "only" the logic. Without this implicit holding-aside, the logical thinking would not be possible. Logic does not control where it begins and ends. It also does not control the creation of the defined units it requires. One slight shift in the implicit meaning of any one unit can utterly undo a logical conclusion. By entering the implicit directly, we can generate a whole territory of distinctions and new entities, and then position the logical analysis where it is informed by the implicit intricacy. We can much better use the great human power of logic when we can enter the implicit and consider where to position and re-position the logic, and how to create its units. We do not need the assumption that reality consists of defined units.”
“ Recent thinking still assumes that all order and all interaction is externally programmed. For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) [13] argue that in order to overcome social control, a body would have to be "without organs", since it is through organs that it interacts with others. The assumption is that interaction is externally programmed; the body could be free only if it could give up all points of contact with other people. (The book has a laudatory preface by Foucault.) “
There is little in this thread that is relevant to the private language argument. It's about something else. A bastardised version, seen through alien eyes.
I feel that I need to come back to answer your post and to discuss time again.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9913/introducing-the-philosophy-of-radical-temporality
There are a few interrelated concepts:
the context, event, present time, and unconscious. If this attempt is productive, it can become possible to return here to clarify how these concepts are related to D&G ‘s perspectives on machinic functioning of body, body without organs, transcendence, and language.