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.
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.
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 11:30 AM
3 Comments:
I haven't yet read The Logic of Sense, but I was wondering....does Deleuze seem to problematize the idea that there is a "thing" to be sensed without the intellectualized idea first. Is there a way of sensing things without idealizing?
I do not recall from my previous reading, but it seems likely that he will. I'll look for it as I progress through the book.
Frege and Russell and folks at the turn of the last century were working within a "sense-datum" theory of perceiving which no one holds any longer (maybe it might be that way for insects or worms or the like). Human perception is highly pre-processed before it reaches consciousness. What you call "idealizing" may fall into one or more of those processes. Certainly, this being the point of mentioning it, i do not read this book for its critique of classical sense-datum theory. That theory is highly problematic from the analytic standpoint as well as the continental, and the physical science standpoint too.
The "sense" mentioned above is just a big "black box" to me at this point of the book ... containing all that is not the "reference" part of "meaning".
A lot of scare-quotes there i know. These are just picking out the words as i have allowed Frege to define them in the base post.
I have not yet read further chapters of the book, but hopefully this week i'll work in more.
Clarification - We should note that at this point the text is talking about "sense" as in "the sense of a proposition" ... what Husserl would describe as "what the proposition expresses" ... rather than "sense" as in sensation and sensing. Though there is an obvious etymological connection between these two notions.
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