General Philosophical discussion

[Theo Huxtable.]

zen and taoism all the way for me. i have many thoughts about how they parallel the western cannon.

 

 

 

and theo

 

 

cogito ergo sum, is the latin phrase that was written by Descarte. It literally translates as what we commonly understand as "I think, therefore I am." Cogito means I think, ergo=therefore, and sum means I am.

 

Philosophy usually as a sort of economy of writing will refer to a latin phrase when it holds a stronger concept then some sort of english explication.

 

 

one thing to consider about the dichotomy of eastern vs western philosophies is the structure and form of each. Easten seeks simplicity in its form to lead the reader into a state of right knowing, yet western thought employs complexity and dense writing to convey a certain semantics. It is all reaylly interesting to me.

 

 

you're right, now that i remember that was the phrase. vocally (in person), i've never heard anyone use "ergo" in english language, not even from english proffessors giving lectures. the word is just amusing to me. actually, i saw a magician perform and he used this word in his act, but comically -- his whole theme was to sound ultra-shakespearean and similar to the old dude from matrix revolutions.

[WORDISM45]

Remember that Buddhist philosophy is also a great deal empiricistic.

 

the entire backing of Buddhist thought isn't empirical in the slightest, i've only studied one semester of Buddhist philosophy so i don;t really know shit but i'd be interested in examples of how Buddhist philosophy is empirical.

[the.crooked]

I find that i prefer western philosophy because it seems to have more logical backing. Western philosophy is really really critical and i like it that all the ltitle flaws in an arugment are brought out and examined, i also really like the whole 'ockham's razor' deal and burdens of proof etc.

 

although i am really drawn to some ideas in buddhist philosophy I don't like it that a lot of it rests upon the fact that you can't know certain things and i don't like how much assumption is made and left uncriticized in most Buddhist teahings, its very illogical.

 

To the contrary, deep buddhist logic is much closer to formal modal logic than one might think. Rationality and logic are merely defined by a perspective. The buddhists even had what we now consider set theory. Or something very close to it.

 

 

e.g. a number is constructed by a succesor function from the null set [], to [[]], to [[],[[]]]. etc.

 

THe conception that eastern and western are so far off from eachother, to me, is a huge misperception of the intent and goals of boath aims. On the eastern side is it concerned with right knowing in action, where as wester is understanding the rational choice, etc. Each has a specific style in which it was written to lead the reader to a certain conclusive point. Eastern texts use lucid paradox in language to force the reader into accepting certain dichotomous roles of language and concepts, while the western uses complexity in form and structure to build entire concepts elucidating the complex relationships formed by such dichotomies in language. But either is ultimately concerned with showing the right choice. While within western philosophy the analytic tradition tends to shy away from ethics, it should be noted that if their arguments are extended out into a metaphysical ontology, there is a certain ethics that necessarily developes and it is not far from more generally metaphysical veins within the field or even its eastern counterparts.

[russell jones]

To the contrary, deep buddhist logic is much closer to formal modal logic than one might think. Rationality and logic are merely defined by a perspective. The buddhists even had what we now consider set theory. Or something very close to it.

 

 

e.g. a number is constructed by a succesor function from the null set [], to [[]], to [[],[[]]]. etc.

 

THe conception that eastern and western are so far off from eachother, to me, is a huge misperception of the intent and goals of boath aims. On the eastern side is it concerned with right knowing in action, where as wester is understanding the rational choice, etc. Each has a specific style in which it was written to lead the reader to a certain conclusive point. Eastern texts use lucid paradox in language to force the reader into accepting certain dichotomous roles of language and concepts, while the western uses complexity in form and structure to build entire concepts elucidating the complex relationships formed by such dichotomies in language. But either is ultimately concerned with showing the right choice. While within western philosophy the analytic tradition tends to shy away from ethics, it should be noted that if their arguments are extended out into a metaphysical ontology, there is a certain ethics that necessarily developes and it is not far from more generally metaphysical veins within the field or even its eastern counterparts.

 

I believe you are correct in saying that Eastern and Western thought are closer than most would think, but Eastern languages such as Chinese and Japanese have entirely different conceptions of the self in relation to others than Western languages. Its partly semantic, and partly traditions, perhaps grown out of semantics or vice a versa. By the way, I am no expert on Eastern languages, but my analysis is derived from a book by Steven Laycock called Mind and the Mirroring of the Mind: Buddhist Reflections on Western Phenomenology. I took classes from him on Existentialism and Zen. Perhaps you should check it out crook?

[WORDISM45]

To the contrary, deep buddhist logic is much closer to formal modal logic than one might think. Rationality and logic are merely defined by a perspective. The buddhists even had what we now consider set theory. Or something very close to it.

 

 

e.g. a number is constructed by a succesor function from the null set [], to [[]], to [[],[[]]]. etc.

 

THe conception that eastern and western are so far off from eachother, to me, is a huge misperception of the intent and goals of boath aims. On the eastern side is it concerned with right knowing in action, where as wester is understanding the rational choice, etc. Each has a specific style in which it was written to lead the reader to a certain conclusive point. Eastern texts use lucid paradox in language to force the reader into accepting certain dichotomous roles of language and concepts, while the western uses complexity in form and structure to build entire concepts elucidating the complex relationships formed by such dichotomies in language. But either is ultimately concerned with showing the right choice. While within western philosophy the analytic tradition tends to shy away from ethics, it should be noted that if their arguments are extended out into a metaphysical ontology, there is a certain ethics that necessarily developes and it is not far from more generally metaphysical veins within the field or even its eastern counterparts.

 

what do you mean "within western philosophy the analytic tradition tends to shy away from ethics" ? there's huge depth in both empirical and a priori ethics in western philosophy

[the.crooked]

analytic philosophy is geared towards looking at how we construct our world through language, the sciences and mathematics, and not so much how we should apply those conclusions in a social sense.

 

Not to say there are not ethical implications at all, to be sure they are necessarily there, but just that most of the people writing in the last golden era of analytic philosophy really didnt care. It is hard to pull out an ethical argument on concepts like "ontological relativity" or "the form of action sentences" or "naturalized epistemology." Basically, all I was trying to say was that those philosophies concerned with emperical research are usually not concerned in their specific aims (essay to essay that is, not as a whole of work) with reaching a moral position on things. While the texts that led to much of postmodern theory surely do have an ethical bent in their implications, few attribute that to the author's concerns themselves.

 

Quine and other loathed the metaphysical and ethical writings of the european tradition. all phil history.

 

 

 

I was also trying to show that a focus on rationality tends to be slightly more cold and holds less regard for the human element in most ethical conversations.

[WORDISM45]

rightyo i've never come across 'analytical philosophy' before, i thought you just meant analytical in the true sense of the word.

[the.crooked]

it is amazing how menial shit just seems so absolutely boring after working on this stuff for a couple years now.

 

 

i am at this office job right now and it blows more than any bit of academic work i could ever think of doing... academic for life (maybe).

[the.crooked]

so just some thoughts i need to put out. I am reading a book by danniel dennet right now on "philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness" and i need to rant a little bit.

 

 

 

Here goes:

 

 

Dennet makes the claim that recent forays in to the philosophy of mind by physicists and other cognitive scientist seem appealing at first but miss the forest for the trees, as he says. He also tends to percieve these "intrusions" as merely tolerable, etc, and goes so far as to dismiss the actuall theoretical connective tissue between these fields.

 

This to me is the issue with the last generation of scholarly research. He doubts the connections cognitive scientists have made between the "zombie" discussion in Philosophy of Mind and it supposed correlates in cognitive theory are actually viable. It is this skepticism that I myself am unfond of.

 

I do not understand this. If mathematics, Physics, cognitive theory, etc all proclaim to be the empirical standard, then should they not correspond to eachother? And conversely should not our introspections on the theories themselves be correlative to such research? To me Dennet is the one who misses the forrest for the trees. No doubt cognition as an emergent property of complex systems is something to be lauded and need not be seen as missing something in a qualitative sense (eg the qualia debate), but to discredit attempts within emperical science to make such ideas seem viable in a theoreticall pragmatic sense, seems rediculous and indicative of the arrogant insulation most philosophers seem to live in.

 

The problem, as I see it, is that while the last forty years of philosophical inquiry have been conducted on a lack of perspectival foundation (eg postmodernism) those that practice are still stuck in the belief of what came before. Namely that each field does not necessarily have correlates that should and will correspond to eachother. Not to say the accomplishments of postmodernism amount to much. Any look at feminist theory's dismissal of most histories in any field will show this.

 

But a new form of inquiry should be emerging from all of these things. As my friend in school put it "post modernism gave us the know how to take our toys apart and now we have been sitting on the floor for the last thirty years with our toy parts and not a clue as to what to do with them. Now we are putting them back together as we see fit." This is exactly the type of perspective people like Dennet need to adopt. "As we see fit" need not be seen as lacking a philosophical rigor or rational process, but rather that modes of rationality which intuitively lead to theoretical correlates in seperate fields should be appreciated. It is sort of like applying Taoism to academic inquiry. To appreciate what feels right when you read something. It is what we do at all anyways. It is just choosing not to be so restrictive when we apply such thoughts.

 

 

 

Iono, basically I am tired of the arrogance each of field thought ascribes to. Issues of the mind are issues of the mind. To assume that seemingly seperate fields that all study such can not have anything intelligable to say to eachother reflects a chosen ignorance that breeds only a contempt for epistemological flourishment, and lacks the synthetic drive necessary for us to proceed in new directions. We need a new epistemology that reflects these connections. They are alluded to by Quine and Davidson, eg "ontological relativity" and "anomolous monism." And even in more metaphysical texts, eg Deleuze's "univocity."

 

 

Quine percieves that all theory is subordinated to other theories through shared terms, although they may be incommensurable (this is a chosen belief of Kuhn in the history of science and Quine due to a belief in failure of translation between theories), but it alludes to a connection of all theoretical material by virtue of language at all. Davidson expands on Leibniz's monism by appealing to a universal human practice of finding rationality at all, to propose a modified view of conceptual schemes. Particularly, that while we all reflect different rationalities and different languages, we share the impulse to do so, and in so much as we may believe to believe eachother's meanings, we in fact do. Deleuze points to much the same thing in a very ambiguous language of dialectics throughout the history of philosophy.

 

The irony, is that all of them do not think eachother (aside from quine to davidson) had anything worthwhile to say to eachother. However they all make an associative contextual argument for semantics and thus creat an epistemology of such that emperical research can not ignore. Nor would it be valid in any sense for Philosophy, as the pre-cursor to all human inquiry, to ignore this impulse as well. Everything speaks to everything else, and until the old folks can take their heads out their asses, we are gonna be stuck in this idiom of insulation and minute progress. Once we step out of this role and into a more constructive ideology (putting the toys back together as we see fit) we will see more revolutionary changes in science and theory, as we did in the forties to sixties, and any other period of conceptual revolution (or paradigmatic shift, as Kuhn would term it).

 

 

 

 

blahhh.... fifteen minute rant on my work break.

[the.crooked]

I believe you are correct in saying that Eastern and Western thought are closer than most would think, but Eastern languages such as Chinese and Japanese have entirely different conceptions of the self in relation to others than Western languages. Its partly semantic, and partly traditions, perhaps grown out of semantics or vice a versa. By the way, I am no expert on Eastern languages, but my analysis is derived from a book by Steven Laycock called Mind and the Mirroring of the Mind: Buddhist Reflections on Western Phenomenology. I took classes from him on Existentialism and Zen. Perhaps you should check it out crook?

 

I think a large part of it has to do with the actual construction of the languages visually. An idiographic form does much more for implied concepts rather than an explicitly reductive language as the western form.

 

I think this is why I see their forms as attributing to the type of language they use to reach some of the same ends. Eg the simplicity of a koan vs the density of deleuzean dichotomies.

 

I think the thing to me is that both employ the language to force the reader into a state of mind such that if they grasp the text in its visual and syntactic structure then they are forced to understand the message behind it. Seems sort of obvious, but it is crazy when you think of reaching a different cognitive state just by reading something.

[russell jones]

Definitely crook, something that insubstantial (physically at least) having such an effect is pretty amazing.

 

I respond to some of the other things when I have a spare minute later in the week.

[the.crooked]

File dump, a slightly longer expanse on what we have been discussin. A more formal opening to the thoughts of my upcoming thesis paper.

 

 

 

What are the major issues in science religion and philosophy? The soul, the physical world, and the mental world and the time they persist in. That is if anyone of those things exist, if they exist seperately or necessarily connected. These topics have been dealt with throughout the hsitory of philosophy and science. They have been definitely answered by religions since their social inception.

 

But what of the totality of academic thought to this point? Ancient philosophies reflect the starting points to be sure, but what exists now as ontologies of any post-greek/ancient asian ideology are much more flourished explications of those starting points. And it is there that one may begin a small historical review of the texts developed on the aformentioned issues and the early philosophical/religious answers. Starting with Descarte and the cogito we were given a dualism backed by judeo-christian dogma that is still yet to be wholly dismissed. We were given another option in Leibniz's monism and Spinoza's deterministic infinite substance. Again both were couched in the language of the Judeo-Christian idiom, yet they, as did Descarte's, surpassed the dogmatic wisdom of the church and left a legacy still being explored in the realms of cognitive neuroscience, theoretical physics, and higher mathematics, to name a few. The questions and answers presented by these thinkers have laid the foundations for all of these fields and their specific foundations of inquiry. Even the social sciences appreciate their basics in the texts wondering about the natural truth of humanitie's existence.

 

After Spinoza, Descarte and Leibniz came the skeptics who brought forth a question of why we should trust our experiences of the outside world which was answered by Kant and his transcendental arguments. [fill in more here]. But the most contemporary theoretical breakthroughs came during the first three quarters of the last century. In seemingly disparate fields, answers to these questions were presnted in many forms. The analytic tradition began to culminate in the works of W.V. Quine and his conceptions of Ontological Relativity, Donald Davidson's Anomolous Monism, Paul Benacerraf' rejection of platonism within mathematics, Thomas Kuhn's assesment of paradigmatic progression in science and other varying texts. The European, or what may be considered the continental mode, was presented in the phenomenoly of Heiddeger, the transcendental empericism of Giles Deleuze, Henri Bergson's conceptions of an abstract progression, and many other distinct viewpoints. The answers were many, they gave way (in many respects)to postmodernism, and no one thought anyone else was right. There is a certain disdain by any mode for those that are not them. To borrow a term from Quine, there persisted a certain Ontological Insulation. Where ontology is the total message of any one theory about our existence and our experience of the world we exist in. Every answer was THE answer, but with the emergence of postmodernism we lost the foundational rational perspective with which to judge which may infact be the right answer, if there ever was to be one.

 

What we have been left with, which I suppose is as it always has been, is a mulitude of positions claiming superior authority to answer the hard questions of life yet another forty years of rational inquiry on top of it stating that there is no superior authority to be had. A friend once jokingly said the failure of postmodernism is that "when we were given postmodernism, we were left with the tools to take apart our toys, and we have spent the last thirty years sitting on the floor with toy pieces all about us in no discernable pattern." I asked if he thought we would move beyond this stage if infintile deconstruction. To which he responded "we already are. We are now putting back the toys as we see fit." THe we he spoke of was, he and I. Not that we are making complete revampings of thought (as we may hope to be) but that we recognize at this point that anyone's construction of the information we have been given to interpret (the past history of academic and cannonical thought) is just as good as any other. Sure there are questions of methodological rigor that may define the small differences among different fields, their specific aims, the ontologies each author in a field decides upon, but again, turning upon the point that those foundations were found to be necessarily fallacious who are we to concern ourselves with the negligible discrepencies of perspectival foundation?

 

When one loses this position of ontological insulation, or perspectival arrogance, a new pattern arises. It is not some great revision of the past history, or even an expansion on it. It is more a creation of a "meta-ontology" among existing theories. Certain late writers hit upon this notion in a some what overly abstract fashion (cough Deleuze cough). But what is this meta-ontology and what does it provide? Striking upon

 

 

to finish later.

 

 

Div III stuff.

[russell jones]

This article from the New Yorker may interest some of you.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto?printable=true

 

It is about a linguist, Dan Everett, who is criticizing Chomsky's universal grammar. According to the article, Chomsky's linchpin of universal grammar is the concept of recursion. Recursion is when we embed ideas within other ideas to make a sentence. For instance, "I am typing on my computer while drinking tea." Everett has been studying an Amazonian people who have defied the efforts of practically anyone to understand their language. Everett and his wife are the two who are closest. According to Everett, these people have no recursion. Instead, they merely state what is in front of them. So instead of the sentence above, they would say, "I type on the computer. I drink tea." Everything is a series of discreet statements. Everett argues that this language demolishes the idea of universal grammar. Perhaps even more importantly, his findings seem to contradict the idea that humans have a kind of universal cognition. According to Everett, our language fundamentally affects our cognition, to the point that Everett claims that one of the tribe may be in the same room physically with him, but he is in a completely different world experientially.

 

I have also sensed intuitively that language has a greater effect on cognition rather than the other way around. I also believe that these differences apply to languages that seem to conform to Chomskian paradigms, such as English and Japanese. I want to learn an Eastern language so that I can hopefully confirm some of these ideas. I suspect that language defines experience more than most of us suspect.

[the.crooked]

Ill read that tomorrow and then comment. I think this will be a perfect situation to bring up the ideas of "radical translation" that both Quine and Davidson find central to their notions of language and experience.

[Manute Bol]

I read half of this page and got a headache, very enlightening though, I like pronouncing the word "phenomenological"

[russell jones]

I like pronouncing the word "linguist." Sounds dirty doesn't it?

[the.crooked]

it sure does.

[Manute Bol]

I like the word polyglot better, sounds like some kind of bacterial infection in the vagina.

[the.crooked]

Here, yet again, is a beginning of something I am writing for school. This paper is supposed to be a reflection on multicultural perspectives within my field of inquiry. I am choosing to make a comparison of form (syntax) to meaning (semantics) in philosophical texts. Specifically, I will deal with ideas of linguistic economy (less is more, elocutionary brevity, etc), complexity vs. simplism, and a comparison of eastern to western texts. On the western side I will critique the argument that metaphysical writings lack intellectual validity due to their seemingly impenetrable texts. For eastern comparison I am going to look at the dialectic presentation in the Tao Te Ching and the experience of paradox in Buddhist Koans. Ultimately I will use my presentation of eastern texts as expressive of a specific connection between semantics in syntax in that each writing is tailored such that to understand the syntax of the writing is to appreciate its message. Seemingly obvious but it does a lot to refute the notion that writing need be lucid to be effective philosophy. Rather I want to use the notion of syntax leading the reader to a state of implicit right knowing as a justification of overtly complex writings in the western cannon. For when a person reads a Koan they are introduced to examine a hard question in which the answer may not particularly be expressable in words, but that upon reaching an answer the reader has been "shocked" or "jarred" into a state of experiential understanding. This compared to the dialective of the Tao Te Ching is similar in that the oppositionary form of this text accomplishes the same task by presenting the reader with paradox after paradox in an attempt to characterize "the way." All of this will be mediated through a discussion of Richard Dawkins and other contemporary analytic writers against European metaphysical writings such as Giles Deleuze and Charles Guattari.

 

Anywho, give me your thoughts, if you care.

 

 

What is the intent of philosophical texts? A broad question to be sure, but perhaps there is a simple answer: to convey a personally rational conclusion through the use of notations on a page. That is to say the message of any philosophical text is the presentation of a logical conclusion of its author through their use of specific and chosen terms of any written language.

 

This, to me, is broad enough that it does not negate any specific conclusion of an author (i.e. Descarte’s Dualism, Davidson’s Anomolous Monism, etc.), and recognizes the necessity of presenting such conclusions in a form itself (English, French, Japanese, diagrammatic vs. lettered written structures, etc).

 

Naturally, a second question arises from such a supposition: What is the relationship between the form of the text (syntax) and the meaningful conclusion of the author (semantics)? To some it they are separable and need not be considered together (as formal logic would dictate about syntactic truth devoid of semantic meaning). Understanding the relationship between these two concepts is the course of inquiry which western philosophy of language has followed since its inception. Frege’s questions of reference, sense and sign are nothing more than a simple answer to this question. Rather by designating specific objects in the empirical world as the referents of any given sign he relegated language to a direct relationship between ordering the world around us and creating a way to share such orderings. The sense, as he termed it, was the intuition by which we knew what thing a sign referred to. But alas, this ran afoul of certain problems in the course of its academic duration. Jumping slightly forward in the history of Western analytic philosophy, Quine released his seminal paper “Two Dogmas of Empericism” and shook the foundations of our thought about syntax and the semantics behind it. His ultimate conclusion is that the form of language can not be removed from our semantics. For to try and understand a word based on definition alone, only leads to circular notions of linguistic description. Through a reduction of analysticity (logical truths) to nothing more than a muddled wanton belief in linguistic slight of hand Quine showed that we must regard full sentences as having meaning, and that such statements are appreciated as checked against experience which feeds their meaning. To quote; “The total of our knowledge is like a field of force where the boundary conditions are that of experience.”

 

A conclusion one might draw from this, is that meaning and form are one in the same. As for written language, a reader is given the meaning of something by understanding the logical construction of the language itself. For English that means to understand the relationship of noun to verb, direct objects, adverbs, prepositions, articles, and the other terms of the language itself. When those terms are put into a specific order (a sentence), they are presented as a whole concept by which the reader is allowed to derive its semantic significance by appreciating the relationship between the terms in a syntactic sense.

 

How the interaction of form, meaning, authorship and readership is characterized is a deep problem indeed. But there are several questions which may lead to interesting perspectives on the issue. Particularly a comparison of form between different models of philosophical texts which all ascribe to do the same thing (convey truth or right knowing) can take such an issue to task.

 

One of the contemporary cannons for clear lucid writing is the belief in an economy of words per concept to be conveyed. Brevity, being concise and an appeal to the mantra of “less is more” seems to have dominated western writing all the way from journalism into analytic philosophy. But is such an appeal warranted as the best possible way to convey a concept? It is an assumption on the part of many that the best way for a reader to experience a semantic truth (or right knowing) is through the least amount of words possible. However, I question whether or not this elocutionary economy is falsely given precedence over a need for unique syntactic structure per a given concept.

 

The former sentiment of linguistic economy can be characterized by the lamentation of analytic writers against the seemingly impenetrable texts of more metaphysical writers. But are their aims not specifically different? Richard Dawkins critiques the likes of Giles Deleuze and Charles Guattari as pseudo-intellectuals who mask ineffectual inquiry in dense language devoid of any true semantic value.

 

To be continued.

[russell jones]

This is a great direction. I have found some writing in the humanities to be impenetrable, as Dawkins has, but conversely, I have found koans to be extremely helpful in elucidating mental states that would be extremely difficult to explain in a concise way. I find your idea that exclusive syntax may be necessary to fully convey a particular semantic concept very interesting.

 

I think you may want to use analogies with slang, or perhaps how music uses slang. You may think this is off topic, but have you ever heard the song "Dig Yourself Baby" on the DJ Vadim album U.S.S.R.: Life from the Other Side? If you haven't, I'll try to post an mp3 later.

 

However... allow me to perhaps become impenetrable for a moment, but one of the purposes of a koan is to possibly divorce a concept from the words that necessarily define it. I believe many koans attempt to free your mind from the specificity of language. Specificity could easily be a barrier to understanding. Shit, now I'm sounding like a koan.

[the.crooked]

Naw, your fine.

 

I think that is definitely one of the intents of Koans. To force the brain into a state of objective recognition of a system. Rather to gain an implicit understanding of something beyond the specific linguistic negation being presented in each Koan.

 

This is where I find it such an interesting operation. It is like using syntax to force epiphany. Which, I think is quite awesome. That is really how I try to do all my research, I just read, get stoned, and wait for something to seem right. When it does, thats when I start writing. More oft then not this has proved to be quite fruitful as even if what I come up with isn't quite right, there is at least typically some literature to the aim I am thinking of. And even if there isn't I tend to think of myself as on a pretty good track most the time.

[russell jones]

I think you're right. I have a friend who is extremely smart, but thinks that koans are just confusing for the sake of confusion. I tried to explain to her the concept of a zen moment. I told about times I was playing music and I was so totally in the moment that I felt that I was not doing anything at all, except that I obviously was. She said, "you're either doing it or you're not doing it." I said, "no, I was doing it without doing it."

 

She was also annoyed by her inability to understand the first De La Soul album. Connection? Yes sir there is.

[the.crooked]

haha. I think this is a funny example of chrystaline thought and plastic thought.

 

It is like the Tao Te Ching says. Rigidity and firmness are associated with death, suppleness and weakness are the way of life.

[the.crooked]

Rather, a true understanding of who we are requires movement between modes of thought. Not reliance on the pure beautiful structure of science and objectively rational deductive thought.

[russell jones]

Dig yourself baby!

[the.crooked]

nights like this make me think im on a good path with philosophy.

[russell jones]

I just remembered the connection with the De La Soul album. I said I thought it was cool how they created there own in language for the whole album. She said that they weren't communicating because they weren't using language everybody could understand. I said that if they used language that everybody could understand, then everybody would not understand what they were communicating, which was their world, their context, their point of reference. It is practically impossible to do this without creating new words.

[the.crooked]

Exactly.

 

Fuck, when I am not gettin tired, I need to go into radical translation.

 

 

Remind me of that soon.

[the.crooked]

Bump for a new page. Want to hear more thoughts on this:

 

Here, yet again, is a beginning of something I am writing for school. This paper is supposed to be a reflection on multicultural perspectives within my field of inquiry. I am choosing to make a comparison of form (syntax) to meaning (semantics) in philosophical texts. Specifically, I will deal with ideas of linguistic economy (less is more, elocutionary brevity, etc), complexity vs. simplism, and a comparison of eastern to western texts. On the western side I will critique the argument that metaphysical writings lack intellectual validity due to their seemingly impenetrable texts. For eastern comparison I am going to look at the dialectic presentation in the Tao Te Ching and the experience of paradox in Buddhist Koans. Ultimately I will use my presentation of eastern texts as expressive of a specific connection between semantics in syntax in that each writing is tailored such that to understand the syntax of the writing is to appreciate its message. Seemingly obvious but it does a lot to refute the notion that writing need be lucid to be effective philosophy. Rather I want to use the notion of syntax leading the reader to a state of implicit right knowing as a justification of overtly complex writings in the western cannon. For when a person reads a Koan they are introduced to examine a hard question in which the answer may not particularly be expressable in words, but that upon reaching an answer the reader has been "shocked" or "jarred" into a state of experiential understanding. This compared to the dialective of the Tao Te Ching is similar in that the oppositionary form of this text accomplishes the same task by presenting the reader with paradox after paradox in an attempt to characterize "the way." All of this will be mediated through a discussion of Richard Dawkins and other contemporary analytic writers against European metaphysical writings such as Giles Deleuze and Charles Guattari.

 

Anywho, give me your thoughts, if you care.

 

 

What is the intent of philosophical texts? A broad question to be sure, but perhaps there is a simple answer: to convey a personally rational conclusion through the use of notations on a page. That is to say the message of any philosophical text is the presentation of a logical conclusion of its author through their use of specific and chosen terms of any written language.

 

This, to me, is broad enough that it does not negate any specific conclusion of an author (i.e. Descarte’s Dualism, Davidson’s Anomolous Monism, etc.), and recognizes the necessity of presenting such conclusions in a form itself (English, French, Japanese, diagrammatic vs. lettered written structures, etc).

 

Naturally, a second question arises from such a supposition: What is the relationship between the form of the text (syntax) and the meaningful conclusion of the author (semantics)? To some it they are separable and need not be considered together (as formal logic would dictate about syntactic truth devoid of semantic meaning). Understanding the relationship between these two concepts is the course of inquiry which western philosophy of language has followed since its inception. Frege’s questions of reference, sense and sign are nothing more than a simple answer to this question. Rather by designating specific objects in the empirical world as the referents of any given sign he relegated language to a direct relationship between ordering the world around us and creating a way to share such orderings. The sense, as he termed it, was the intuition by which we knew what thing a sign referred to. But alas, this ran afoul of certain problems in the course of its academic duration. Jumping slightly forward in the history of Western analytic philosophy, Quine released his seminal paper “Two Dogmas of Empericism” and shook the foundations of our thought about syntax and the semantics behind it. His ultimate conclusion is that the form of language can not be removed from our semantics. For to try and understand a word based on definition alone, only leads to circular notions of linguistic description. Through a reduction of analysticity (logical truths) to nothing more than a muddled wanton belief in linguistic slight of hand Quine showed that we must regard full sentences as having meaning, and that such statements are appreciated as checked against experience which feeds their meaning. To quote; “The total of our knowledge is like a field of force where the boundary conditions are that of experience.”

 

A conclusion one might draw from this, is that meaning and form are one in the same. As for written language, a reader is given the meaning of something by understanding the logical construction of the language itself. For English that means to understand the relationship of noun to verb, direct objects, adverbs, prepositions, articles, and the other terms of the language itself. When those terms are put into a specific order (a sentence), they are presented as a whole concept by which the reader is allowed to derive its semantic significance by appreciating the relationship between the terms in a syntactic sense.

 

How the interaction of form, meaning, authorship and readership is characterized is a deep problem indeed. But there are several questions which may lead to interesting perspectives on the issue. Particularly a comparison of form between different models of philosophical texts which all ascribe to do the same thing (convey truth or right knowing) can take such an issue to task.

 

One of the contemporary cannons for clear lucid writing is the belief in an economy of words per concept to be conveyed. Brevity, being concise and an appeal to the mantra of “less is more” seems to have dominated western writing all the way from journalism into analytic philosophy. But is such an appeal warranted as the best possible way to convey a concept? It is an assumption on the part of many that the best way for a reader to experience a semantic truth (or right knowing) is through the least amount of words possible. However, I question whether or not this elocutionary economy is falsely given precedence over a need for unique syntactic structure per a given concept.

 

The former sentiment of linguistic economy can be characterized by the lamentation of analytic writers against the seemingly impenetrable texts of more metaphysical writers. But are their aims not specifically different? Richard Dawkins critiques the likes of Giles Deleuze and Charles Guattari as pseudo-intellectuals who mask ineffectual inquiry in dense language devoid of any true semantic value.

 

To be continued.

[amongst]

good thread, too much writing. interesting perspective on time. i didn't get to finish it yet but ill get around to it tomorrow or something. or maybe when i get around to taking a philosophy class. here's my thoughts:

 

when theo was addressing your question about the present and the range of passage, he was talking about how the big bang was just a mere singularity in which the present was created and before which time and space did not exist. i've always thought about time and the universe and such, and its always difficult for me to comprehend that there was nothing and now there is something. it's a paradox. thinking geometricly, what is time? how can it be graphed? plotted? is time possible without space? is space possible without time? i believe so. however, perhaps the rays or the lines that represent time and space where once skew to one another. maybe they both existed, just not in the same plain. and when they did intersect one another, the present was created.