Expression II

(Note - There is another side to expression which still remains to be talked about ... the personal level of the artist doing the work and what that artist is feeling and expressing. That is a furutre topic.)

Style, as i am using it, is the expression of an artistic group or culture ... a time, place and peoples.

When we talk about baroque or romantic or neo-classical style the elements we are picking out that define the style in question are unique (as least as a grouping) to that style. When we talk about moving from one style to another we are talking about throwing out such a set of elements and moving on to another set of elements. In terms of style we are always starting over, there is no progress and it is not the kind of thing that lends itself to talk even of "flow", more or less of progress.

But much of what underlies a style, the assumptions shared by all or most styles, that is what we are tracking. We are choosing topics in line with that effort to track. We want to talk about what thing or things flow throughout the current of our narrative. "Image" is one of those things that lasts from antiquity up until the turn of the last century. That makes it a natural anchor, and even when it has left the stage as a dominent element it still holds philosophical value as a framework for discussing the non-image pieces in the canon.

I think of tracing the narrative of expression across Western art to be a task of art historians, not of philosophers. Expression as a topic will still raise its had, of course, just not as a unifying dimension of the narrative.

Expression theory

Expressionism is another leading candidate for being the answer to the question "what is art?".

One can look at art, all of art, and there are hundreds of interesting narratives which one could pick as a starting point for an investigation of art. Why pick "the history of art as an image" as a starting point over any other?

As a philosopher there is a strong disposition toward beginning with the question "is art mimises" because Aristotle started philosophy of art off with just that claim, that art is mimises. We (philosophers) work from there. Additionally, my particular task in philosophy deals with those areas which (at least seem to) make progress. We can look back over the history of art as mimises and see the technical improvements that lead up to the now.

That said we recognize two related problems. What counts as "very realistic" looking changes over time. Also, what looks natural within a time can look very "period piece" later. The former problem is pointed out by reading accounts of classic images written at the time those images were made where critics would say things like "I thought I could eat the grapes right off the canvas". The latter is pointed to in cases where earlier period artists have faked masterworks and gotten away with it in their time, but later generations can easily pick them out do to the (at the time of the painting) unoticed stylistic devices. (Both of these problems can be noted when one watches a decade or two old special effects dominated movie.)

Still, even accounting for such problems there still seems to be technical development, especially in terms of adding depth and shadows on two-dimensional canvas.

Now, we can see another historical flow occuring from the medieval to the modern that is a succession of modes of expression rather than changes in technical devices. They may often have occured simultaneous, these stylistic and technical changes, but not necessarily though.

One can certainly discuss this narrative as well as any other ... the change of styles from medieval art up thru the moderns. But would would one say about it that is not merely descriptive? Where-as the current that flows through mimises seems to have a "natural" element that allows for progress across paradigms, there seems to be no such "natural kind" in style. One can compare and contrast styles across paradigms (perhaps, the artistic eye may see too differently across time and place to really even allow this), and one can even write a descriptive history of the flow, but there can be no real analytic investigation of that flow, because that flow is very unlikely to be one thing across time and place.

The technical skill progress under mimises may be the kind of thing, though, that is thus analyzable. I am certainly not willing at this point to say it IS useful, thus, but at least it is a candidate. It is a starting point.
I think such a starting point is necessary for a "bildung" narrative to exist, and not just a descriptive narrative.

One nice point in starting also with Danto's thesis that this narrative is over and done is that we don't have to think about the narrative proscriptively, except as it might have been thus in the path. But today we can do the analysis and be "free from" the results of that analysis at the same time.

Magic Mountain(s)

The notion that most strongly affected me in Mann's "The Magic Mountain" is the notion of a worldview in which one is a terminal case.

Sanitariums like that in Monn's novel did exist, and there are those today (we all know a couple) that are firmly in the hands of the doctors today. But the metaphor pushed by Mann is more pervasive than that.

Two models affected me back when i read the novel (must have been a decade ago) ... depth psychology and born-again Christianity. In both cases many seemly healthy and happy individuals fall into the clutches of a world view that only asks "in what ways am i ill?" They push the conception that everyone is ill, rather anyone knows it or not, and that no one is able to help themselves out of the illness. Also, the more time one spends within this worldview the more sick one discovers oneself to have actually been, and the more sick one sees the others around themselves. Even first hand reports of the health and happiness of others are denied, it becomes so "by definition" (and the few cases that are accepted are "converted to the cause by definition").
In way case you need the clinical professional to heal you, and in the other case God's grace ... but in neither case is anyone ever healed, they are only always healing.

There are many other such worldviews. I ought not pick on just those two above listed. Any mode of thought that focusses on the lack of something, and on the lack of being able to do anything about it by oneself, be it material or ideal, is capable of becoming a Magic Mountain upon which one sits by and frets. ... upon which one sits and lets the world go by down below.

"The far future" is no less a symptom than is the health professional or the divine. Combined with the focus on any "lack of" ... it is a dangerous thought to oneself, to one's happiness and to one's well-being.

Thus Spaketh Master K'ung

"Is goodness indeed so far away? If we really wanted Goodness, we should find that it was at our very side." - Confuscius

stages in art history

I am not an art historian.

Very early in human history the tie between art and aesthetics was very tight. Music, and things like color stone formations, were almost modern in their aesthetic simplicity.

Not long after, though, the affect of art was noticed, and tied to the "other worldly", much like the power of math was also thus noticed and attributed to deep secrets.

The tie-in with cultural and/or political art soon followed ... using the dance productions to convey to youth the mysteries of the tribe. This was both myth and politics.

All these elements are very strong by the time we reach the Greeks. Already the distinctions of high and low art (as we would name them) and ratioanal and irrational art (also as we would name there) are there. But, at least in earlier Greek culture they are not "schools of art" in any sense as we would take them, they work side by side ... though certainly not always.

The rise of the later Greek philosphers, Plato and especially Aristotle, also gave rise to the critics. Plato certainly saw a distinction between high and low art and thought the latter should not be aloowed in the perfect Rebuplic. Aristotles concerns seem more descriptive ... and he gave us the earliest "art is" statement of which i am aware, "a mirror held up to the world". The hard arts (such as sculpture) especially, but also even the theatre and its use of acting and music had become highly structures and in some sense realistic (compared to the early dithyramb, very realistic).

[There is so much left out up until here, but time, time, time. Most of the counter examples that Spring to my mind would make wonderful clarifications for the above, but this is meant to be a very rough outline.]

Medieval art, and to a high degree, Roman art before it, conforms well to the Aristotelean norms. Art, as a whole, is somewhat self-aware after the Greek philosophers, but as of yet there is no real artistic narrative going on. Medieval art is a repitition of and improvement on the Aristoteleon notion of mimesis. (I acknowledge that my knowledge of Medieval art is near bare and that any Medieval art historian would (should) probably crucify this notion ... it is for me "future operations" to do so myself.)

But i want to get onto the Renaissance. Danto dates this as the begging of the narrative he sees as ending in 1964 with Brillo Box. What stands out to me in the art from this time until about the impressionists is the role of movements and schools and the lack of stable accepted form over time. The artists and artistic groups are seeking but not finding. Also, the artist is really starting to become aware of the medium of his work, and striving to improve that as well. All of this stands, however, within a positive doctrine at this point. That is, it is about art and how the specific medium of art can obtain an end (which is still primarily "a mirror held up to the world").
The art world jumping from movement to movement is a world waiting for a crisis in a Kuhnian paradigm theory sense. The artists and critics are waiting for and willing to take the chance on a new way of doing things. What they have not up to this point considered giving up is the faming concept of art as mimesis.

The crisis arises via technology. The camera is the paradigm case, but material advancements in architecture (the ability to create objects like the tower of Paris and taller and taller buildings), and the succession of stills that would become the movie.
Suddenly each genre of art was finding in the world competitors in the project of mimesis. With a camera even the entirely unskilled could capture a still of life in light. In architecture, and perhaps also sculpture, the conception of dominating the landscape, the reality of the place, arises. Those ats with no direct technological competition picked up the ideas second hand, the death of mimesis as the (only legitimate) aim of art. The rise of the question, then, of what is this specific medium of art in which i am working capable?

I claim this is a negative question. It is reacting to something (technology) and it is dicussing what a specific medium can and cannot do (defining). Surely the medievals learned a lot in this regard too, but they merely threw out the results rather than making further art based on those findings.

So while i can see a single narrative from the Reinnasance to today in a Danto-esque sense ... a narrative about what specific mediums of art can do ... i think there is a major shift after the technology caused paradigm crisis.

I'm really not committed yet to the idea the Renaissance art is more similar to Modern Art than it (Renaissance Art) is similar to Medieval Art. It has long been an assumption of mine, but it has recently been called into question in my research ... and at this stage i do not know enough about Medieval Art to answer the question satisfactorially.

I shall next study more why Danto believes the main narrative split is Medieval into Reinnasance. It seems a good of place as any to start the project. (If others have suggestions in this arena, please feel free to post them along to me.)

art as dialogue ... inevitability and irrelevence

I am interested in the notion of art as a dialogue, though i leave open right now the question of "between whom(s)?".
If it is a dialogue, or as A. Danto would say, a narrative, i am immediately led to think about teleology ... is there a necessary outcome (at least viewed from hindsight)?

Danto is speaking in the Hegelian language, and so the question arises because Marx, as Hegelian, forces it to so do. In the specific Marxian dialogue the bourgeos class is historically irrelevent and the proletariat class will inevitably rise to power. I don't know too many people who believe that is the case, but what i am interested here is the structure of the Marxist master-slave dialogue, the notion of inevitability and of historic irrelevence.

From the time the artist began asking the question "what is art?" and/or "what are the limits to art?" was the answer already inevitably "anything and everything can fall within that arena" ?
Logically, of course, there are uncountably many answers to that question, so i guess i'm being intentionaly materialistic here ... given the time and culture in which the question formed (a later topic), was the answer "anything" inevitable.
Did the (and do the) background assumptions (something like the Foucault grille) drive the the question to this conclusion? If we lift those assumptions can we re-ask the question and arrive at a different answer, or is "anything" the final answer if we pull away all the assumptions anyway. (Is the contemporary artist, able to make any art of any thing for any one) in any way living in a Foucault-lian world of freedom ... at least in regards to that one capacity? If so, does that make them better off? ... or worse? ... or is the question beside the point?

Two questions:
Is art since the enlightenment in any way a dialogue?
If yes, does it have any inherent inevitabilities and irrelevencies?

I think, at least, starting from the time of the invasion of art by technology (e.g. the photograph) that the dialogues "what is art?" and, within a specific medium, "what can this medium do artistically" is a very real narrative.

At this point i am skeptical about the inevitability of the "anything" answer, but i consider it to be an open question.

modern art and less-ness

What is the opposite of a flaw in a work of art? ... breathtakingness?

Does contemporary art have less of both?

I think this may be the case in novels ... what of painting? ... of the symphony?

Note on art ...

I don't know that the narrative about "what is art?" is over, per se, but it may well have finally moved beyond the arena of the artists. The artist now understands that anything can be art, and can now return to the actual production of art within whichever paradigm and needs they choose.

Now the philosopher takes over. The question moves slightly from "what can be art?" in general (or "can I make this into art?" in specific) to the actual analytic analysis of what is doing the work in any individual case ... what makes the Campbell's Soup Can art in this or that case, but not the Montgomery Ward building for Duchamp.
Now the critic takes over ... identifying what is doing the work in this or that case before them, the critic can then turn to judging the merits of the work vis-a-vis the means by which it has become art.

Example ... a piece of artwork may be very popular simply because it derides or lauds the President. The value of the piece of art stands or falls. however, not on the success of its political intent, but on the success of its artistic component. The latter can be many things, but whatever it is, the value of the art falls out from it ... not from the success or failure of the object as a political statement.


When the critic? ... and when the philosopher? ... and when, still, the artist as either? That is going to mostly depend on the work itself. Each of these parties has their own stills. I bring the philosopher in because the analytic tool-kit is (very often) lacking in the artist and the crtique (which is fine, because that is not their jobs).

A short reflection

How vast the capability of the human mind to change from generation to generation, and how vast, from some perspectives, the changes that have actually actualized ...
yet ...
reading something like The Decameron it is shocking the extent to which the tales remain the same.

freedom for ...

One thing that always stands out to me when reading debates such as the Chomsky - Foucault debate discussed below ... some know what they want freedom for and others do not. It seems to me OK for youth (those under the age of, say, 49?) to desire freedom for freedom's sake, but at some point i would like to think most people figure out what it is they want to do with their lives.
Chomsky certainly has this in spades, social justice. The "for" of freedom is social justice to Chomsky.
Reading Foucault, even at that stage in his life, either he has not found a task in life and therefor wants to keep all options open, or the task is freedom itself. I'm sure his devotees will say it is the latter, and i guess i have no reason to disbelieve in his case. In his case that may well be true, albeit i find the notion very strange.
Why would a human care about freedom itself, not freedom as a tool?

For me it is going to turn back upon the evolutionary stance. Humans have needs and desires and the well-balanced human has a plethora of such entities they wish to fulfill. Not so well formed entities are over delighted by one or a few of the natural desires and seek them at the expense of all others (the Picasso-esque artist i have here in mind). All of these people will yea-say for freedom, the freedom for themselves to do what they need to do and the freedom for others like themselves, and others they can understand, to pursue the same.
All these goals and desires, though, are human and, as all human desires are, also cultural. To deny them is to deny the humanity in oneself.
There is no greater humanity than that which is now, that which is before us, that which i am a part. There is no absolute standard against which we are any better or worse than those before us and those after us ... but it is simply a denial, a saying no to life to not want to partake of this life.
If you cannot describe your goal in the human tongue (of your time and temper), then you do not have a goal ... you are merely a back-worlds-man.
The pursuit of freedom, or any other tools to human needs and desires, is a saying of the same thing. "My goal is something else".

The truth, that can be something else, sure. What is the absolute, "neti neti neti". Fine. But truth is another of the tools, not the ends. Like freedom, it is a noble well yea-sayed tool, but in the end, still a tool.


All that said ... and still ... i do not have a goal, and i do not forsee one rising in my lifetime for me.
Nihilism, at its purest.

"Run, save yourself, i failed Time's happiness quiz in their latest issue!"
... worse, i know why ... and i would rather not fix it.

Foucault - Chomsky #5 (y finito)

Assuming that we keep the Marxist notion of the aristocratic few lording over the proletarian many, then Chomsky seems right in his assertion that the class "proletariate" needs be expanded to include the skilled mechanical and the intellectual laborers ... to include the middle and upper-middle class and perhaps the lower upper-class as well.

This segment of society is not, as Chomsky might say, aware of their place in the scehma ... they associate themselves with those above and demarcate below themselves ... demarcate the people below them ans different and less than themselves, via education, arts, and mundane material things. If you serve others ... and yet you have an image of the southern redneck, or that those from across the river in Council Bluffs are somehow less interesting and vital than you, then you, in contemporary Marxist terms, have been co-opted by the aristocratic class.
This segment of society allows provides the weight and power for the aristocratic power structure to rule ... the same structure that keeps this segment of society from being what it would really like to be, true owner-operators of society, so to speak.

And that's the rub ... everyone's demand and desire to be equal to those just above themselves (but never below themselves) is the propping up of the values "above" and the aristocrats' defeat of the proletarian desires by the means of divide and conquer.
In terms of capital, they give some up, or, rather, they give up some of the growth of the capital, to obtain this end. Those on the receiving end of this capital transfer keep their stash together to try to multiply it and vault up into the higher ranks.

Don't get me wrong here. Capital is beautiful. Capital is one of those most amazing object/forces in the world. If society does not understand what capital is, and how it works, then there can be no free society of the future. The freedoms that we identify (Foucault would here note that they are not "true" freedoms but only the freedoms defined by this culture, defined by the will to be an aristocrat) are obtainable only when the capital pool is allowed to multiply itself.
But that is another area altogether.

I leave the debate on this note ... this comparison. If one has to choose between making the middle third of the western democratic societies more free, or bringing the other 75% of the world up to that level ... what would you choose to do?
How about if we add uncertainty? If the freeing of that third of society would make it easier to pull the rest of the world up? ... then would you choose that? Or, conversely, knowing that we can't know what the free peoples of that future society would do, and given our current moral imperitives, culturally derived as they may be, do we take the safe lesser bet and work for the rest of the world? ... or do we work for the higher idea, hoping that will work for the rest of the world?

At heart i remain Nietzschean. Whatever the morals and desires of that future society, no matter how good they may be versus more desireable standards ... they are still unknown to me. I am a man in culture (Dasein, perhaps the good word) with my moral ways and i must pursue those moral ways, by the best means. The accumulated freedom and capital of the western democracies is not something i feel i can risk in the name of anyone. I must side with the slower safer option, the general grab of "the rest of us" of the capital pool (and freedom pool, as it is). This talk of better future freedoms ... that is spirit talk and back-worlds talk and just cannot, at the end of the day, work as justification for me.

At the time when Newton was writing The Principia, my ancestors had for generation after generation after generation been farming for others in the mud of southern Ireland, Clan McNamara in County Cork.
Me. Today. There are a thousand fulfilling and self-actualizing tasks with which i could task myself, and accomplish. Things my ancestors never dreamed of having the freedom to do. How could i not, as a moral agent, wish to export that in my community and in my world forst and formost. It would take a very specific vision of a better society and a very high probability of obtaining it to get me to give up my moral wishes here and now.

Foucault would tell me, "they've gotten you hook, line and sinker."
Then again, Chomsky would tell me that too, he would just mean something a little different thereby.

Foucault - Chomsky #4

The debate then turns directly into the question of the justification of the proletariate revolution in terms of either justice or anti-power. (Sorry, didn't mean to load the issue, "justification" was the only applicable term that came to mind.)

In the purest sense of what i take to be the claim of the Marxist revolution i would have to say that Foucault makes a very good point. The rationalizations that we use in support of the class struggle are themselves products of the power structure which is meant to be destroyed. A too devout adherence to such ideas, then, is an indication that the revolution at hand is not the Marxist revolution.
Conversely, the attempt toward a value-less revolution seems to me paramont to a claim of faith ... a "teleological suspension of the ethical" to use a Kierkegaardian term, except that Kierkegaard at least believed that a direct personal access to the godhead was possible. The structure announced by Foucault seems more akin to the irrational Knight of Faith that does not have even a personal reason for turning against the world, much less an explicable reason.

Chomsky notes that we need not have an idea of perfect justice to move forward, which is good because we cannot have such an idea. I'm not sure the same does not hold for the idea of the end of class power, or of power in general (i think Foucault would consider them one in the same).
Do we move forward as-if the process will gain for us the knowledge? ... or do we move forward on the limited knowledge we have (knowing it make take many revolutions to come nearer perfection of the ideas)? I am uncertain how Foucault would actually state the former case, or even if he would accept the task of so doing. He stands out, though, in my mind in seeming to believe something of this kind. One encounters such reasoning, but usually in religious terms, be it like SK above, or in Eastern mysticism or American shamanism ... there is something inexplicable but personally knowable that drives the devotee.

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An aside from the world of developmental psychology and neuroscience ...

It appears the the notion of justice that we do have, from the best evidence currently available, is hard-wired in the manner that linguistic capability probably is. The timing under which the human child develops the notion of of right and wrong, along with the notions of punishment and digust, comes together so completely in so little time under degraded conditions of input ... it is hard to imagine a scientific explanation other than a hard-coding of the capacity to learn social right and wrong.
I think of "justice" in relation to this learned right and wrong ... a higher order (new brain) re-calculation of the earliest learned value system.

Anyway ... for our discussion ...i say hard-wired, but not our particulary value system is hard-wired, only the notion of having one. If we could tear down all the power structures during a revolution and then raise a new generation of children, it is hard to say what their value system would be like (from this vantage it is hard to say) ... but it is unlikely that it would be value-less. The concern that a value-less revolution (to avoid class ideas) would lead to a value-less society and world (which we think of as probably violent and laking good) is likely a misguided notions. The post revolutionary child would still pick up a value system, just one unknown to us at this time.
Sadly, though, disgust, judgement and punishment also are tightly tied into this stage of human development. I don't know that we an say that these things can be thrown off, or just appended to a different, hopefully better, class of ideas.

Foucault - Chomsky #3b

For today ... just a slight clarification ...

I don't want to overstate my concern that political change can lead to Phol Pot kinds of disaster, that is more of a sideline.
My real concern is wasted effort. Giving potential freedom to political entities that have no idea they need it, or are ready to use the freedom, and whatnot ... the new order will different winners and losers but no real change in the aggregate. That is the concern. Where-as pushing on the right lever at the right time (i know this badly begs the question) will have more pay-off in the long run. I am in definite disagreement with Marx (and the Bakunin's of the world) in this respect ... i believe that small incremental changes are the best road to freedom.

I believe the greatest missed opportunity of the 20th century (for the average American) was when the labor unions in the 50s and 60s went for more pay and benefits rather than for company ownership at the time when they had political power.


Lastly i want to emphasize again that whatever your scorecard, be it happiness or fulfillment or etc, there is enough freedom in nearly every country in the world for an entity to lead a meaningful life in that measure. The exceptions would be those regions where the day to day struggle is with survival, the places on this earth that Malthus would still recognize. Hence, my morality vis-a-vis global issues focuses first on developing economies in those developing countries on the verge of breaking out of the poverty trap (again, begs the question, i know.)


Beg questions perhaps entertained later.

Foucault - Chomsky #3

So now we enter the political half of the discussion. I hope to keep my posts much shorter in this section, if for no other reason than that i feel that i have much less expertise in this area.

I have two conflicting instincts here ... the first is that our political science and economic theories are so not mature sciences that there is a great risk in changing much, at least quickly. At the same time, however, they are the best tools we have and one feels the great weight of resposibility in doing something. Chomsky says something along these lines pretty early in this part of the discussion ("we face the very same problem that we face in immediate political action, namely, that of being impelled to do something, because the problems are so great, and yet knowing that whatever we do is on the basis of very partial understanding ..."). And the latter problem is no small problem. This debate took place before Phol Pot's regime took over in Cambodia and where the results of trying to fix a social order that is not yet ready for that fix can be more damaging than inaction itself.

It is certainly not a democracy in which we live when we are speaking of relations of power. Foucault says that pretty explicitely and Chomsky likely agrees whole-heartedly. At the same time, however, there is something i express as a Nietzschean notion that there is more than enough freedom to move out there in the world to make any life fulfilling that searches such paths out. That is, i see problems, many and great problems, but i feel no sense of panic. Even here and now the paths are available, we just need to increase the availability.
Ah ... but conversely to that statement ... it is not as if the knowledge necessary to do it "right" is just around the corner or even down the path. It is not even like nuclear fusion which i have heard is 40 years away from being a fact for my entire life, and still they are saying 40 years out. In fact, the time frame from the Enlightenment until now is probably a small segment in time compared to the time frame in which we are ready for some scheme that resembles Chomsky's initial description.

My advice is ... push only on the rocks that are ready to tumble, on the points that are ready to fall. Do not waste energy pushing already fallen rocks, but watch them, and push them again if they come to rest ... that is ... do not give up gains which have already been made.

... but more on that to come.

Foucault - Chomsky #2b

(having not yet moved further along in the article)
... but hopefully making more sense today


Creativity ... so, we have an example with this very word. Chamsky is not just using the word differently, he is also examplifying exactly what Foucault is saying. The word "creativity" no longer means what it used to mean once the psychological (and later, the neuroscientific) community have started to make a technical term out of it. And later, when this en-vogue theory gives way to another ... when we have found other more important questions ... the term "creativity" will get taken and used in another sense. And, importantly, this is not progress ... they are failed attampts and reductionism (reducing the term "creativity" to this or that set of elements) and we start over.

In Saul Kripke's (Omaha Central !) ... "Naming and Necessity" Kripke paints the picture of the earliest names of an object merely picking out a thing for later work. We say "gold" ... and later humans are able to compare the maluability and ductibility and etc of the element against other elements even when the gold is white or green or when other gold-colored rocks are found to be something other than gold. The set of properties that "stick" to the description are allowed to change, to become more refined. In the 20th century we learn that gold has 79 protons and an atomic weight of ... ummm .... 197 is it? Now ... if we see a new case of something out there in the world we are going to judge whether or not that new thing, maybe it came on a meteor, is gold based on its atomic properties ... though ... and this is important ... if its not enough like the phenomenal properties of gold (soft, maluable, etc) then it will probably be given some hyphenated taxonomy .... like white gold.

Foucault could reply to the Kripke framework soemthing like ... look ... that's fine ... but what if in the next 50 years we find some quantum energy level description of gold (and other elements) and we start teaching classification in terms of that? We are going to try to reduce all the same terms to some other new thing ... and it will always be the case that there is some other new thing on the horizon.

The thing about something like gold, and chenical elements, though, is that the old description does not get discarded completely. The pre-atomic standards of determining if a thing is gold are still valid today, and even if chemistry were reduced to (quantum) physics, and then again later to something else ... the atomic taxonomy still holds true.
Psychology and other not mature sciences (economics, sociology, etc) are not like this. Some may take a long time to die ... but i doubt there are any psychologists working at the cutting edge of psychology today that are, more than metaphorically or drastic change in word usage, be3haviorists or Freudians or even really Piaget-ian or gestaltest. [Some launchpad ideas, sure, but the structure and language of the study ... the core ontology, has drastically changed] ... and the old terms are no longer valid. At most they are very special cases of a truth.

And again with Newton ... his truths do hold very proximately here on earth, except for the finest levels of measuring. Most science and engineering work could be done just fine even today without knowing any quantum theory or even general relativity. Medicine, a field as old if not older, can not say the same. As noted by Foucault ... it is hard to even recognize past medical writing if you are familiar with today's writing.
But still ... we have to take seriously the problems imposed on us by, say, Newton's 2nd Law ... f=ma. In the Newtonian world 'm' is a constant ... not so post Einstein. f=ma really only does work as a special case in the Newtonian sense.

To me it comes down to this ... are there cases where the old accumulated knowledge remains valuable? If even just one or two areas have now, or are capable of gaining in the future, such a kind of knowledge (that may be reduced to other terms, but is never considered false per se ... such like gold where every case of something having the old phenomenological properties has the atomic properties of AU, and everything with the atomic properties of AU will feel and act like gold) ... ... ...
I think, utlimately, it comes down to this two part questions. Are there Natural Kinds? ... and if yes, can humans uniquely identify them?

[Note that Nelson Goodman's new problem of induction (as well as the older Humean induction problem) does not go away. Logically, the NEXT discovery could force us to change our entire way of thinking ... "grue emeralds". The above is targeting a different complaint ... how to determine if the 'grille' problem is not merely common, but actually indefeatable.]


The Natural Kind question, unfortunately, is not an armchair question. One must say either yes or no. 40,000 years from now, maybe someone can make an informed guess. More likely ... the question will merely have been cast aside, just as Foucault might suggest.

(New scientific theories rarely answer the 'problem questions' brought at them, they make the asking irrelevent. The old-school scientists are rarely convinced of the new truths, but they retire from the field, and the new-school inherits that field.)

Foucault - Chomsky #2

This post runs from the "initial question posed" in the last post up to the point where Elder is pushing Foucault on answering the personal questions that Foucault sees as irrelevent. (More on that subject in a future post, most likely anyway.)

In this section they start off talking about creativity, and proceed into the question of whether there are limitations on human theories. I think one's answer is going to depend a lot on where one falls in the Marxist critique of Hegel on how differently human minds are capable of seeing the world from one time and culture to another.

At one level i believe this is an open neuroscientific question ... about plasticity of brains in the human species. It seems likely that the level of possible plasticity in the human brain has been constant for about the last 40,000 years, though the manifestation of that plasticity is probably greater in cultures with greater stress. That is ... necessity breeds invention in the new upcoming generation. This is likley true for survival as well as in scientific and social paradigms.

But this was not available knowledge in the early 70s, and even 30 years later is is mostly conjecture ... so ...

I think the point Chomsky is trying to get across is merely that we humans use a lot of shortcuts in analyzing situations. Take the chess example, even the most novice adult, provided he understands the game at all, is unlikely to move his rook back and forth one space, over and over, during a large portion of the game. A high-powered computer, on the other hand, has to run through such possible moves. It has no "rational" limitations when it considers moves.

The George Smith (Tufts University) question in terms of physical theory is related to this ... it is about how potential hypotheses are constrained (in practice) and what are the affects of this constraint on science. Smith believes understanding this notion is key to understanding why Descartes induction (mentioned by Chomsky) is merely 'occult force' while Newton's Universal Gravity is not. A lot of what Foucault is saying goes into this distinction too ... about the history of knowledge which allows us Smitheans to say that Newton was making a deduction about UG and not an induction ... "standing on the shoulders of giants". Contradicting Chomsky's statement ... it wasn't that Newton was able to eventually mathematically prove UG while Descartes was somehow unlucky in being unable to prove his induction ... Newton did the math first, initially resisted and continued to resist the notion of UG, up until the point he had no choice but to accept it. (How this all worked out is a long history ... i suggest B. Cohen's translation and guide to 'The Principia' as well as Smith's own notes about Newton in the 'Cambridge Companion to Newton" which he edited.)

Now, that said ... UG was to a large extent possible only because of some lucky coincidenses in the way our solar system is formed. A lot of small differences could have made Newton's approach impossible ... as predicting the moon's orbit mathematically was such problem (until well into the 19th century) ... due to the 3-body problem in UG when things are close together.


How this all gets long so quickly ...

... but i also want to talk a bit again about "data underdetermines reality". Foucault brings up the notion of 'grille' for the first time in the debate in this section. It is certainly not deniable that his notion cetainly occurs, and often. The question at hand is ... is it always so? ... and are there good reasons for sometimes doing so?

Take the once seperate field theories of eletricity and magnetism. Each worked for for the people that used them, but they eventually were brought together under one common theory ... Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory.
Now ... each by themselves might have (in logic) been made the core theory of physical theory and everything else reduced to one in one world and the second in another world. That is underdermination in a nutshell. Both, however, in this world were brought under (reduced to) further unified theory by Maxwell ... because ... well ... we humans seem to like unified theories. I think this fits in well with the 'grille' as well as underdetermination.


... sigh ... i lost the thread i had when i started this ... i shall try again soon.

Foucault - Chomsky #1

A transcript of the debate is available here:
http://criminyjicket.tripod.com/chomfouc.html

Elders starts right off asking about "human nature" ... is there such a thing? He asks Chomsky to start off and explain what kind of thing it might be if, in fact, there is a "human nature".

In my parlence we are talking about natural kinds. Is "human nature" a natural kind, or will it pick out one thing for one peoples at one time and another thing for another peoples at another time and on and on?

Chomsky starts off suggesting that something like linguistic schematics would be a part of human nature, and he seems to indicate a belief that many (presumably "social" abilities) might be combined to make up something we might call human nature.

Foucault begins by looking at it from another perspective. He suggests that "human nature" as a kind is something akin to "life" in biology, an "epistemological indicator" that fixes the domain of diologue and research/questions within fields of study.


As i mentioned above ... the question restated in my language of philosophical speech is ... "Is 'human naute' a natrual kind?" It could also, however, be a question about the provability, one way or the other, about such a question.

The direction i take on this question is to pretty much conceed the point to Foucault, but to not give up Chomsky-esque projects (where i mean the linguistics project, not the definition of human nature project). Daniel Dennet out at Tufts U. would categorize this as a "stance". A stance is essentially a noted assumption that one does not even attempt to prove, but just assumes it to be true in order to see what results experiments based on the assumption provide. Something like the use of the theory of "evolutionary theory" in neuroscience theory and research is a paradigm case of 'the stance'. It doesn't so much matter whether it is true or not, so long as it yields results. In the case of neuroscience ... the assumption that we are evolutionary creatures led to looking at speech and speech recognition capabilities not just as higher order functions, but as a few higher-order tricks in the newer parts of the brain used in conjunction with many mechanisms already in use in the older parts of our brains. The results of this approach have yielded large dividends (see something like Lieberman's "Human Language and our Reptilian Brains if interested). Emotion studies have also been working under this stance with some positive results.
Now, positive results do not mean the theory is true. The Romans built mighty fine bridges and buildings with a physical theory about such structures that we would consider to be very wrong (Aristoteleon science).
Dennet likes to explain 'the stance' as a human cognition tool in terms of playing a computer chess game. There are many stances you can take in reguards to the computer and the chess program, the most effective of which is that it is an opponent trying to beat you at chess. That is very much a wrong assumption ... it is a program of on and off switches and a hardware base of on and off electrical pulses with no real motivation at all and no knowledge that what it is doing is playing chess, more or less hoping to win, it is a program. Now, you could take the 'true' stance and try to beat the computer at the level of electronic pulses, figuring out the pattern and constructing another pattern to defeat it that way, but just pretending it is a chess player is much easier.
(Of course, the computer is designed to make that case true ... so we must be careful about how we use this system.)
Another example might be something like Newton's 2nd law of motion (f=ma) ... that velocity only changes if a force is applied ... that is ... as opposed to Aristotle who thought there had to be a force to create velocity and if the force stops, the object will move to a state of rest. Now, this law was relatively new even at his time (though he was not the first to state it). Just a couple generations before in Descartes' time pretty much everyone still assumed the opposite to be true, following Aristotle, that things tried to move to a state of rest, unless something kept them going as they were. Now, neither assumption is provable, though the latter seems to be more likely re-inforced by observations here on the planet earth, but the switch to the 2nd law of motion paid huge dividends for the physical theories that assumed it and we still call it a law today, though there has never been an experiment, per se, conducted on its truth or falsity. (It's not clear how the 1st law of motion, inertia, could be tested wither.)

Anyway ... In terms of how Chomsky is doing linguistics there does seem to be a notion a 'human nature' in roughly the terms he describes. Without that assumption it is hard to imagine how the field of linguistics could proceed ... and it does seem to be proceeding. With the newest results from neuroscience it will likley proceed further. It is still a very young science, though, and will probably need to practically start over several (more) times before it looks anything like a hard physical science. I want Chomsky and the linguists to keep the assumption ... it seems the most likely to bear fruit.


The discussion reminds me of the movement from Kant through Hegel on to Marx about how much or how little our basic perceptions of the world might change ... very little for Kant, Hegel's view of history has some semblence to paradigm theory which allows for some changes, and Marx seems to suggest that even the most fundamental ways that human's interact with the world can change. The Chomsky - Foucault discussion appears to fall within the Marxist end of this question. The question at hand will be how 'open' are the alternate views ... Chomsky claiming that there are hardwired limitations, and Foucault saying maybe not ... but that is for later on in the discussion.


I'll end it at this for today ... i doubt that there is any 'principled' natural kind we might call "human nature", but it is likley a very useful fiction.