Man

"In the so-called feudal times we held everything as a fief from God, in the liberal period the same feudal realtion exists from Man. God was the Lord, now Man is the Lord; God was Mediator, now Man is; God was Spirit, now Man is. In this three fold regard the feudal realtion has experienced a transformation."

- Max Stirner



"It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of - every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it."

- Max Stirner

go farther

Skeptical?
Not skeptical enough.

Do you belive some term intended to pick out some class of things is arbitrary?
You are very likely right.
Now pick out 3 more classes of things in your mind and apply the same logic.

Repeat.

What remains?
Natural kinds, perhaps.

outside discourse ...

You walk 3 steps, then you walk one more step.
This is the same as walking 4 steps from the start.

You grab 3 Oreos from the bag, then you grab one more Oreo.
You have the same number of Oreos as if you grabbed 4 Oreos from the get go.

3 + 1 = 4 ... in the strongest sense of "equals"

These are truths learned very very early in life, sometime between the onset of self mobility but well before actual talking.
And these truths are not learned independently ... the further step, the creation of the abstract notion 3+1=4 from the many different instances that we encounter that fact, this is also something learned very very early in life by people of all cultures, of all classes, of all intelligence levels (possibly there is a threshold on that last category).

It is not a matter of discourse.

The only question is whether it is a "necessary" truth or a "contingent" truth. How we come to know it is certainly a contigency ... many mathematical minds believe the abstract notion is necessarily so ... that there are really existing out there entities we call numbers that have necessary properties, their mathematical properties.
I won't go that far, but i certainly have no capability to explain the phenomenon that such a "realism" can support and that seems to be true of the world.

What is important here is the notion of a class of truths that are beyond discourse. They can be discussed, of course, and caught up in the web of language and the power structures there-of ... but they need not be.
And there-in lies the force of the notion that certain of the sciences are really different, because they tie into this type of truth ... physics being the best example. The fact that the formulas, the mathematical formulas come through paradigm changes intact, that is evidence of what we inply in the claim that the truths of physics "at its best" are outside discourse.
There are many other truths in physics which are not outside discourse. Pretty much, in fact, whenever we describe in mechanical or other terms what it is a certain mathemtical model "means", there we are back in the tabgled web of language. This is not such a problem for the oldest truths of science where the terms have been long walled-off with a technical meaning. Occasionally there is a change (eg. post-Einstein F=ma ... the "m" becomes a variable ... a classic example), ususally more slight than this example, but most of these terms stay in their formulas and do their work there-in.
Stepping forward to current science, there things become more problematic. Quantum theory, string theory, etc ... it is impossible to talk about these things with any accuracy in languge. We are best off just leaving the math to be the math.

I have used the "at its best" term. This usually means that the truths of the mature science (physics, chemistry, some biology) are best thought of as just the math formulas, not our description of the formulas. Take something like Universal Gravity. So long as we stick with the formulas we can really talk about knowing something about the phenomenon ... we can predict with stunning accuracy where a certain meteor will be at a certain time and hit it with Deep Impact. We know within a few 100 meters where Pluto will be in 10,000 years (barring other major force chages, like the sun exploding) relative to Earth. Stuning. But if you ask an ontological question about Universal Gravity, such as asking for a mechanical (or otherwise) explanation of what UG is (what UG really is) ... there the answers of science have not changed much since Newton's discovery of UG. [Essentially ... a shoulder shrug.]

The question at hand, though, is whether there is some knowledge outside discourse ... not whether all knowledge can be so. I think the answer is a definite "yes". The question then becomes, where is that line drawn, how much knowledge of this type is possible and what are the limits.
Not surprisingly, then, i work in epistemology (naturalized) and philosophy of science.


One last note ...
... science, at its best, is still very likely to say that certain kinds of questions are bad questions. It is very different from sociology or philosophy, though, in that it doesn't just tell you that you are asking the wrong kinds of questions and refusing to participate in that line of questioning ... it just states that its not very good with those kinds of questions (ontological) or that you are thinking of the phenomenon in a wrong manner (wave/partical duality) ... but it can take a crack at answering even those issues so long as you are happy with a partial answer. It can talk of gravity as a "rubber sheet" on which balls (planets) are rolling and get across, that way, some basic notions. It can talk about wave/partical duality in a way that is not arbitrary by noting the conditions under which, say, light, will always be measured as a wave and others under which it must be measuered as a partical. The duality is not ever arbitrary.
Again, such answers are not fully satisfying, but one does walk away with something.

(The problem of "Other Minds" has a related approach, even, too ... we can say something of what it is like to be a bat ... but we can't say "what it is like to be a bat" unqualified-ally. But if one is mostly a nihilist on what knowledge can actually do for us one will have some joy in the discoveries.)
[Maybe this is like the Augustinian-Calvinist notion of salvation ... we ALL deserve to burn. Because of God's grace some can be saved ... but none deserve it.]

I'll stop now.

more D.L.

" ... my [Communist] 'Party work' has consisted mostly of giving lectures on art to small groups. I say something like this: 'Art during the Middle Ages was communal, unindividual; it came out of a group consciousness. It was without the driving painful individuality of the art of the bourgeois era. And one day, we will leave behind the driving egotism of individual art. We will return to an art which will express not man's self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West... ' to use a useful catchphrase '---becomes more and more a shriek of torment from souls recording pain. Pain is becoming our deepest reality ...' I've been saying something like this. About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to stammer and couldn't finish. I have not given any more lectures. I know what that stammer means."

- Doris Lessing
"The Golden Nootbook"

words ...

You might have run into something like this in your intellectual travels/travails ...

A friend of mine and i were having a discussion with an intelligent Born Again Christian, the kind that understands argumentation and is well versed in the standard arguments on standard issues.
The subject of organ transplant comes up.
My friend just cannot believe that she, the BAC, could find organ transplants morally repugnant.
"Its cannibalism!" she says.


Okay, sure, yes ... it is cetainly one definition of cannibalism ... "to take a part out of one thing and put it into another".
But there is a reason she chose to say "Its cannibalism" rather than "Its taking the part out of one thing and putting it into another". Here they are setup as equivalent phrases, and she meant them that way as far as the logical form of the argument went. But the logical form of the argument did not explain properly her aversion ... she still needed a moral element in the argument. The word choice "cannibalism" provided that for her "for free" ... no further argument was necessary.
I find such argument forms tedious in that they are produced not to learn or to teach, but to create converts.

[There is actually a historical period in Europe where from which one can see the moral step and that is probably the origins of that particular BAC argument ... but our particular conversation did not run along that route. Essentially it says ... about the time Colombus encountered the Canibs there was in European medicine about that same time a like-produces-like theory in which human blood and human flesh were actually tried in small bits as cures, where the portion used was from someone who seemed imune to the particular disease or some such theory. There were those at the time who did not miss the hypocracy of making it legal (and moral, the Pope okayed this too) to enslave peoples because they were claimed to be cannibals while Europeans were actually openly practicing a very direct form of cannibalism. That fact that organ transplants do not pass through the lips might be considered a technicality. (The fact that the cure actually works and is not simply alchemy gone bad might be something to take under consideration, however.) Anyway ... there it is, in very short form. Background information only, really, not so much relevant to the story per se ... but it might come in handy if you ever find yourself in that same conversation with a BAC. Really ... its okay to heal someone on the Sabbath.]

another D. Lessing quote ...

"I have been thinking about the novels of the breakdown of language, like Finnegans Wake. And the preoccupation with semantics. The fact that Stalin bothers to write a pamphlet on this subject at all is just a sign of a general uneasiness about language. But what right have I to criticize anything when sentences from the most beautiful novel can seem idiotic to me?"

Imaginary Causes

Philosophy has et to take Nietzsche's theory of "imaginary causes" seriously enough. It is still only used as a critique of the philosophy of others.

"No more metaphysics!"

When philosophy finally comes to understand the full weight of the death of imaginary causes, philosophy itself will die ... leaving only a few questions within the realm of naturalized epistemology.

Nietzsche did not call himself a philosopher.


Trees do not "turn their leaves toward the sun to increase photosynthesis".
Computers do not "exploit weak pawns" in games of chess.

Sociology and the soft-sciences have not yet offered one hypothesis that escapes the grasp of the notion of imaginary causes. They speak truth only to the extent that they speak in tautologies, cleverly disguised as those tautologies may be in long circular chains.

A couple Doris Lessing quotes ...

from tonight's reading (The Golden Notebook) ...

"... my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself."

"I've never met anyone anywhere or any class, colour or creed, who hasn't at some time believed themselves to be writers, painters, dancers or something.
... a hundred years ago it would never have crossed most people's minds to be artists. They recognised the station in life it had pleased God to call them to."

LoS chapter by chapter end

... apparently i have run out of drive to do the chapter by chpater updates for The Logic of Sense. I have completed a couple more chapters but i don't seem to have much to say about them.

I guess i'll update that thread when i have more to say. (if)

The Logic of Sense - Five

Notes taken while reading the 5th chapter of "The Logic of Sense"

Fifth Series of ... sense

Sense = The frontier between denotation and expression.

When i designate an object in a proposition, i suppose the sense is understood (is already there).

1st Paradox: (of sense)
The paradox of regress (Frege's Paradox) ... I can never state the sense of what i am saying ... but that sense of what i have said can be the object (can be designated by) another proposition. The sense of that proposition, in turn, cannot state its own sense, yet another porposition is needed ... and on and on.

underlined ... "the infinite power of language to speak about words"

The sense of a proposition about a state of affairs can be denoted by another proposition ... a regression when trying to talk "about" ... Frege's Paradox (per names) ... infinite proliferation of entities (senses, as entities, subsist, not exist).

Frege's Paradox is also Carroll's Paradox as expressed by the meeting of Alice and the Knight (Through the Looking Glass) when they talk about the song 'Haddock's Eyes'.

Also used by Carol when Alice is talking to the Duchess in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ... the Duchesses use of the "and the moral of that is ..." regression.

Underlined ... Duchess quote ... "You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk."

{Aside - When speaking of poetry i like to tell students, by way of misquoting the Duchess, "take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself." The Duchess actually says the opposite, that taking care of the sense and let the sound take care of itself.}


2nd Paradox: (of sense)
The Paradox of sterile division (Stoic's Paradox)

If one tries to get around Frege's Paradox by division, the result will be sterile.

Example ... usage of "God is". ("to be" usage commonly entry here). The phrase may try (may succeed?) in having its own sense, but is sterile.

Underlined ... "All the way down [from the Stoics] to Husserl, there resounds the declaration of a splendid sterility of the expressed, soming to confirm the status of the noema ..."

The notion of sense forces either the path of regression or sterility.

Sense is indifferent to affirmation or negation ... so ...


3rd Paradox: (of sense)
The Paradox of Neutrality

... sense is not passive and not active

Example ... "God is" and "God is not" have the same sense.

This is parallel to examples from the early chapters about the likeness of the statments "becomming larger" and "becomming smaller". If time is neutral, these statements mean the same thing, its just a matter of which direction we point time's arrow.

Sense does not affirm or deny the truth of propostiions. Therefore propositions that differ only in truth claims have the same sense.

Deleuze parallels sense and essense ... in the same way that the universal and the particular might be the state of some essense (in Aristotelian thought) without expressing essense fully, so to sense might be a state of propositions and denotations without being expressed fully by either.

Sense is indifferent to ... universal and sigular, general and particular, and affirmation and negation.


4th Paradox: (of sense)
The Paradox of the Absurd.

Propositions which designate contradictory objects have no denotation ... they are absurd.

Examples ... the circular square of the white patch of black.

... but they have a sense. They are not nonsense.

This is Meinong's Paradox.

behind ...

Well behind on posting i am, yes.

I have more complated on "The Logic of Sense" but i have just not typed it in yet. Soon.
Between family vacation and field work on the vineyard/winery i am leaving myself too little time.

I have also wanted to talk about the London bombing and the War on Terror and Iraq. Such huge issues, though, and almost impossible to avoid political debates which i think do no good (in most cases, and in this case they probably do only harm).
I just cannot get my teeth into it though. I cannot get it started.

... and so nothing follows.

A link ...

A friend of mine has shown me an interesting web page ...

http://www.aldaily.com/

Deep Impact ...

The only hope ... they only kind of knowledge that keeps me from giving up on all human knowledge ...

Problematize scientific knowledge all you want. Deep Impact went off like clockwork.

We knew ...
1) Where the target comet was going to be at what time, with great precision.
2) We know, how to get the probe there at that exact same time (we understood all the forces that might throw it off course)
3) We also were aware of the forces that might have kept the photographic and detination (as well as others) portions from working properly at that remote target.

Philosophy, to me ... philosophy at its best ... is an epistemology of the natural. If we could know how we are able to know how to run a successful Deep Impact program (while knowing so little about our selves and our earth), we would know a lot about what we are as creatures.