things, language and scientific calculations

There are things and they are moving and there are relations between things, between movements and between thangs and movements ... and there is no ultimate objective location from which to view it all. (That is, there are no slices of space-time, per se. I take this to be one of the main deductions from Einsteinian relativity.)

Each of us has a perception of the world from a particular vantage point.

The scientific vantage point is something more like the center of mass of these particular individual vantage points. In practice, though, vary few of the individual vantage points are (as we use the term in economics) "price setters", most are "price takers".
I speak here of modern science ... of mathematical and logical formulas. I disclude even the linguistic descriptions of what these formulas mean.

Primitive societies have no such vantage point. The still have price setters and price takers in describing the way things really are from some assumed greater (but need not be ultimate) vantage point ... similar to the above mentioned center of mass.
[In reality ... the shape is not precise and, like an ellipse, will have multiple foci (centers of mass). ]

Now ...

From an evolutionary stance the representation of the world from a particular vantage point makes sense.
The evolution of language as a means of sharing information between these very close particular vantage points also make sense. The utterances are close enough together in space and time, though, as to not necessarily make the notion of a greater vantage point an abvious intuition. (Perhaps writing and sharing information across greater ranges of space and time made that intuition move obvious.)
What is important here ... from the evolutionary point, natural language is tied to the usefullness (fitness, in evolutionary terms) of the particular vantage point.

The odds that language would be equally useful from some greater less particular vantage point is significantly small. Very very small.

Humans who had first posited such a notion (of a higher vantage point, a more objective vantage point) did so initially in natural language ... but in the course of moving through history were very likely to find something that maps better on to the non-particular vantage point than does natural language.

Math and logic is the discovery that best does this, so far.

So ... to a particular vantage point on phenomena, there is a natural language description that best suits mapping the things and movements of that phenomena and the relations between all said things and movements. Natural language is the (closest ... I don't know that i want to go so far as to make that claim) functionally equivalent mapping system for the particularist vantage point.

And ... that greater objective vantage point, the things it would see are not best mapped by natural language but by math and logic. (Since we, humans, have defined the type of vantage point that it is, a discovery of a better way to map the relations amongst things and events seen from that vantage point is a legitimate judgement.)

The question remains of wether that defined vantage point is better than the natural vantage point.

It seems unlikely that the natural vantage point would be "the best possible" ... it merely needs to be functional from the evolutionary standpoint.

[From the Creationist standpoint a parallel claim can be made ... that the gods wanted happiness for people, not true knowledge of the material world ... so the natural perceptions and language are naturally attuned not to map to such knowledge and only accidently does so. That humans found a better mapping may be the case, and it may also be the case that it has lead them off the path.]

{From the nihilist standpoint, it only needs to be said that things as they are are complete accident and that finding a better way to accomplish some sideline tasks is not surprising. None of it can be ultimately better or worse, though, as there is no ultimate goal.}

The evolutionary stance has its own goal, up to a point. Since we are still stuck on a rock by gravity within a perhaps delicate environment, it has not yet played out its usefullness. Ones humans are dispersed throughout the galaxies, then nihilism will strike the paradigm down.


Right, off with me then ...

Correction correction Correction - LoS4

Correction ...

The duality in the proposition is between denotation and expression.
Expression does not equal sense.
Expression and denotation are the two sides of the same mirror, sense is the frontier between them ... in the Deleuzian notion in Chapter 4.

The Logic of Sense - Four

There was a lot of summary in this section. Deleuze talked about how we have moved, in the text, from the basic duality of cause/effect now to the duality of body/language. The things themselves have depth where-as the language describing them have no depth, is a surface phenomenon.

He then looks at Carroll's use of this duality to create oddities ... talking about "speaking of food" (attaching words to depth) and "eating words" (attaching bodies [things] to the surface).

He then talks about "sense" again ... sense as in the notion of a sentence making sense (or not). Sense does not exist outside propositions, but it is an attribute of state-of-affairs (not an attribute of the proposition in which it exists).

Here the "state-of-affairs" are the qualites of things and the relations between those qualities, between things.

Deleuze makes of point of noting that the "things/proposition" (body/language) duality is not a true dualism in the classic sense, but is rather two sides of the same coin (or mirror, as we are speaking in Carroll's terms too). The intersection or frontier between the two [sides] is impenetrable.

He then starts discussing the duality within the propostion (a third duality, thus making a series ... and hence the chapter title "Fourth [chapter] Series of dualities".
This duality is between the denotation of things and the expression of sense. Following the Frege distinction we now have the proposition containing part denotation and part sense where the denotation is of things in stasis and the sense is about becommings.
Deleuze then discusses these as two sides of a mirror ... one side the relation between denotation and the other the relation between senses (of sentences). The manifestation/signification discussed in previous chapters is now the frontier between these two sides.

He then shows examples of Carroll developing the two dimensions ... denoted objects and expressable meanings. "Expressable meanings" are the combination of sense and events [verbs].

So ...
using the body/language duality discussed in earlier chapters as the example, Deleuze runs the same logic for denotation/sense within propositions themselves.


We wait to see what he plans to do with it.

Method

"... I have formed a Method that gives me the means, as I think, of gradually augmenting my knowledge, and of raising it little by little to the highest point which the mediocrity of my talents and the brief duration of my life will permit me to reach. For I have always reaped from it such fruits that, although I have been accustomed to think lowly enough of myslef, and altough when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the varied courses and pursuits of mankind at large, I find scarcely one which does not appear vain and useless, I nevertheless derive the highest satisfaction from the progress I conceive myself to have already made ..."
- Rene Descartes (Discourse on Method)

The Logic of Sense - Three

Pretty straight forward chapter. Deleuze starts with discussing the elements of a propositional statement which he takes to be denotation (reference and indexicals), manifestation (desires and beliefs) and signification (logical implications such as if/then).
He then discusses whether any of these elements can act as a ground for the others and determines that none can do that work. By ground i take it that he is implying that it is the type of thing about which on ecan say "true" or "false".

"Sense" (as in the "sense of the statment" or "the idea expressed by the statment") is then brought out as a 4th element to ground the proposition and the other 3 elements. It is the sense of the statment that is either true or false.

"Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs."
"But it does not merge with the proposition which expresses it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality of the proposition it denotes"


In agree with Deleuze on his end point, that the statement or proposition is the carrier of truth. I don't know that i like his conception of "sense" so much. It is a posited entity type that seems to do nothing more than fill the space that needs to be filled. That is, there is an apparent need to ground statments, okay. But the move is merely to then posit that something does this, and then afixing the label "sense" to that posit. I would prefer that he just say that some thing, we'll call it "Y", grounds the statement. Now let us look at what Y is. Instead, Deleuze has taken a term that already has meaning, sense, and affixed it into this usage. It makes me worry about a linguistic sleight-of-hand.

Still, as i mentioned (and Deleuze references it too in this chapter) that Meinong posits a similar notion of sense and our willingness to allow Meinong's "sense" to stand in as a black box until we learn more about it ... we will grant the same allowance to Deleuze. So far he has only determined a few of the things it is not.

Now, Russell attacked Meinong on similar grounds that i might go after him, that the notion of "sense" isn't really doing any work. Russell contends, however, that the proposition can be grounded by one of the proposition's internal elements ... the denotation. This is in some sense the Logical Positivist claim in a nutshell. The claim fails. It does not fail per the reason of regress that Deleuze mentions in chapter three, but it does fail.
It does not follow, though, that sense Russell was wrong that Meinong was right and that "sense" is a properly posited entity. What element of a statement is true or false? It's sense. What is sense? Sense is the meta-statement entity that grounds the statement as true or false vis-a-vis the real world. (I don't think Deleuze will use the sense of the real world as such, at all ... but we'll cache that out later.) It's a bit cicular, in the bad way.
Quine's neo-positivist notion of what is ("To be is to be the value of a bound variable") is going to allow a lot more possibilities than the Logical Positivist approach to the world. In the end, though, it may not be the case that "truth" is definable in the formal system (Tarski's theory) and, if that is the case ... nothing more than the posit of a ground for truth may be possible. There may be an unreducible place-holder where Deleuze is using the term "sense", but why not call it something like Statement-T and leave out the conflation necessayr is using a pre-existing term like "sense".
Ah ... but let us grant all for now and move forward.

Deleuze also equates it to events, as earlier described in Chapter 2.
I'll definitely have to work back through chapter 2 to see if i can find an explicit notion of what is the event. I would say "the probabilities [albeit forward and back in time] that subsist about real things [being]".
More work on this later, but the importance here is that there is a positive claim to look at, and we will do that in future chapters presumably.

The next chapter is about dualities.

The Logic of Sense - Title

It might help to take a moment to discuss what the book "The Logic of Sense" is about, or, at least, why i have considered returning to it post analytic philosophy graduate school ... why this book and not some other of the Continental authors on my shelf?

First ... i am not qualified to discuss what the book is about, really. I am only two chapters in. I did read about 1/2 or 2/3 of the book some years back [for those with some sense of the recent history of the Old Market i will note that the bookmark marking my last forray into this text was a free-drink card from Downtown Grounds ... that should date it approximately].

The notion of "sense" has a long history in analytic philosophy. It is core to the theory of one of the two pioneers in the field, G. Frege. At the time of Frege the name of an object was thought to be a short-hand for a description of an object, especially in the case of proper nouns. This theory had odd results ... two types in particular stood out to Frege.

1) Take the statement "the present king of France is bald." The object, "the present king of France" ... to what does this refer? Prior philosophers (Meinong often gets the wrap for this) created a world of existing but unactualized objects. This is an ontologically weird notion.

2) Thnk about two Babylonian objects ... Hesperous (the Evening Star) and phosphorous (the Morning Star). The babylonians had descriptions for both. Later in history we discovered that Hesperous and Phosphorous are one in the same thing (Venus), and that this discovery added some kind of knowledge to our world. In "names as description" theory to say that hesperous is Phosphorous should be as mundain as saying Venus is Venus. ... but it is not.

Anyway ... Frege talks differently about what a word for an object means. Frege says it has two componnets, a reference (extention) and a sense (intention). Hesperous and Phosphorous have the same extention/reference (they pick out the same class of things), but a defferent "sense" or cognitive component.

Forms of this idea are still accepted, but the caching out of what "sense" might be in this structure ... sense as one of two component elements of a word's meaning ... is still a much debatable topic.
Personally ... i do not believe that the "word" (or object phrase) is the element that conveys meaning in natural languages ... sentences/propositions do that, and even then only as one piece of a larger framwork. So, in that sense, i am not so concerned with Deleuzes' results for this topic ... but I am very interested in the approach and the structure of his thinking about the topic, as it is very off-the-path in analytic philosophy terms ... at least, i think it will be so.

So ...
... that is my entry point back into "The Logic of Sense". We'll see how far it takes me before it comes apart under the author's appraoch.

The Logic of Sense - Two

The second chapter in The Logic of Sense discusses the Stoic ontology (and also mentions briefly the Epicurian).

In the first chapter Platonic ontology had the concept of change completely held in the surface/material world, while the "real" world of being hung out behind it as Ideas (Perfect Forms).

The Stoic ontology moves change back into the "real" backworld behind everyday things. Things, as we perceive them, are on the surface. The "real" thing is behind the scenes, but not like changeless eternal Platonic Ideas. The Stoic behind the scenes entity includes all its possibilities. It is a thing and all its changes (transformations).
The world we experience is that "real" non-determinate thing becoming part of this surface world we deal with day in and day out.

The word the Stoics used for this other world, where Plato placed Ideas, is Logos. Logos is generally translated as Universal Reason or the Processes of Nature. Both are meant at different times.

The result of the Stoic notion is that the real thing, the thing we are talking about, does not go changing properties everytime we see it change in the world. That is, i pick up a knife and i slice into an apple, slicing it in two but placing both halves back together.
Platonic (and moreso, Aristoteleon) ontology has to create classifications of essential and accidental properties to talk about the identity of this apple as the same before and after the slicing.
Stoic ontology need do no such thing as the identity of the apple is in that backworld and includes the possiblity that it may be split. The identity "subsists" behind the world in which we live and only comes into existence when it becomes manifest in this world, that is, when we slice the apple.

Note - These arguments exist well into the world of the 20th century. Russell has a whole world of "unactualized possibles" he describes as "subsisting" (until actuallized), and Quine argues later, mostly unrelatedly, that Russell's system can't work in the world of modal logic without sneaking in some version of Aristoteleon Essentialism which then makes it circular as that form of essentialism assumes you already know what composes the identitiy of a thing ... but identity was exactly the question at hand in the debate so the move is visciously circular.
Aside - Saul Kripke (from Omaha Central) was a primary late 20th century thinker to get us out of these analytic traps, by the way. His theory of naming and reference gets around the need for Aristoteleon Essentialism.

Anyway ... back to Deleuze ...
The Paradox of the second chapter is the Paradox of Surface Effects. For those of us who live in this surface world, that is, all of us, the change and transmutations of things are of the highest importance. If the real world is Platonic changeless ideas, these most important aspects of our living world are merely accidents and unimportant in the real world. But if the knife is descending on my hand rather than on the apple, what could be more important to me. The Stoic ontology keeps the importance of change where we need it to be, in the world of the surface, not in the "now" moment, but across time. That is ... in the world of becomming as opposed to a world of static being (as described in the first chapter).

I find Deleuzes mentioning of the Epicureans to be odd. They too attacked Platonic ontology, but eventually they would become moreso an opposition school to the Stoics. Following on the Democratus' atomistic theory the Epicureans would create what we would today call a macro- / micro- split rather than a surface-world / back-world split. Everything is moved to the surface world in Epicureanism.

Aside - The Epicurean notion of free-will is logically very similar to the one proposed by Penrose in the 90s in "The Emperor's New Mind", or at least i find it so. And, in Dan Dennett's terminology, i find neither to be "the kind of free will worth wanting".

That the important elements are in the surface, even if one has to move side to side (i.e. through time, forward or backward) to learn these things. This is opposed to the notion that one can sit in the present and learn about the world by penetrating into things ... to see the real world behind this one.

I am uncertain, and am unable to state in a concluding sentence, what Deleuze believes is the paradox here. Perhaps it is along the lines of ... if you follow the Platonic ontology (which Deleuze equates in many ways to the Kantian and to our modern ontology) the most important aspects of our identity (our change and transformations) are but mere accidents and unimportant to the way things really are, and that is unsatisfying.

If any Deleuze experts have clarification here, please feel free to add-on.

No postings ...

No posts, no rading even, this week due to vineyard planting tasks. We (Lee Rice and Thomas Schminke) have 3 acres of grape vines in the ground. That is 1650 plants. Two acres are frontenoc grapes and the other acre is a white called frontenoc gris, sibling grape to the frontenoc (red).

These local grapes will not be ready as wine for probably 6 years, but the winery section of the business hopes to open in 2007 on grapes purchased elsewhere, some local, some national, some international.

There is still much post hole digging in my future the next few days, for the trellising system. Hard to say when i'll get caught back up on my reading.


I love to build things from the ground up.

The Logic of Sense - One

I am mostly, philosophically, working on Tarski and truth, and later attempts to disprove Tarski's theory on truth (eg. Etchemende (sp?) or Kripke). But i do not care to post on those issues right now.

So.

How about Gilles Deleuze's "The Logic of Sense", a book i read about 100 pages of about 10 years ago and have been interested on looking back upon, now, post analytic graduate school.

So. Here is an attempt to state what Deleuze seems to intend, with no particular claim that i find the thoughts tenable.

Chapter One: Paradoxes of Pure Becoming ...

1) Getting larger in the present, the now, going forward ... is the same as getting smaller in the present, the now, going backward. The paradox of becoming ... contra static identity of self.

2) Plato distinguishes being (static/discrete/quantum) from fluid becoming. (Deleuze thinks Plato is very wrong.) This is the Platonic Dualism on which Deleuze wants to focus rather than the classic Idea(or Form)/matter dualism, or real/copy(simulacra) dualism.

3) For Plato, the fluid becoming can never "complete" ... can never become a static end. (Matter, no matter how much perfection, can never become a perfect Platonic Form).

4) The Platonic Idea (Form) only applies to being. Becoming eludes Idea.

5) Language has two sets of names. One set points at beings. The other set points at becoming. In Plato, they shall never meet. They shall remain paradox.

6) Pure becoming eludes the present (just as it eludes pure Form).

7) The Paradox of Pure Becoming (the notion we are spelling out in this chapter) IS the Paradox of Infinite Identity. Infinite Identity is the set of properties one has from the standpoint of becoming (forward AND back in time) rather than from the standpoint of being (in the "now").

8) Infinite Identity is reversals. It is becoming larger and becoming smaller at the same time, in the now ... depending on whether we view forward or backward. Reversal is viewing it from both ways at once.

9) Reversals attack the concept of personal identity.

10) Platonic Ideas (and Christian God) support the idea of a persoanl identity by acting as a ground for static being.

11) Pure Becoming assails the idea of a personal identity by dissolving the ground for static being.

12) Nouns and adjectives in language are the stuff of static being. Verbs are the stuff of change, of becoming. The existince of verbs in language creates a paradox that destorys the ground of pure being (of Platonic Ideas/Forms).


My analysis ... (to follow later) ... but roughly ... we will look at the same issue through the ideas of mereology ... the study of identity through change in analytic philosophy.
A comparison to Zeno's Paradox and the mathematical dissolution of that paradox (by Newton and Leibniz via infintesimals) also might be relevent. We shall see.