#maybe it's partially a disagreement on characterization & how the situation was handled

[orcelito]

Man. It's not even a good fic.

Probably wasting my time trying to read this.

[glassmenagerieofmusesarc]

Let’s talk about two important aspects of Charlie’s character and how they develop in Season 2; Co-dependency and guilt.

Both of these aspects of Charlie’s character are well established in his first season storyline episodes and flashbacks. 

Codependency

Charlie is shown as being very co-dependent on Liam. He gives up a dream of his because his brother asks and he jumps down the rabbit hole because he feels the drugs are coming between him and his brother. Even though he knows that the drugs have changed his brother’s personality in ways he doesn’t like, he’s more afraid of losing that relationship than losing himself. This tendency to latch on also explains why he is so susceptible to the addiction in the first place. When his brother decides to leave the band, the vacuum of that relationship sends him into an even deeper spiral. He tries to again emulate his brother by dating the girl with the Winston Churchill memorabilia. He wants to take a job and settle down to repair that new gap but his relationship to heroin is now even stronger than his dependence on his brother.

Enter the island; Charlie is forced to break his dependency on drugs and immediately bonds with Claire in their place. This is partially because she draws out his more positive side, a side he’s lost in the years of his drug addition. More importantly, he believes that she needs him, just as he needs her to distract from his recovery. Not a great reason to fall for someone but while he is clean, it works out fairly well. Claire depends on him and he helps to relieve some of the stress of having the baby initially. Still, Charlie overinvests very quickly as shown by the way he proposes a whole new life with her when they leave the island. He’s way more serious about it than she even knows. 

Guilt

When we meet Charlie, he wants to go into seminary and is very dedicated to his religion, specifically Catholicism which is 1. a very pointed choice for a Brit and 2. a very clear indication that guilt is a motivating factor in his life. After he turns away from this path, the only way he can avoid his guilt is through his drug use. No one thinks he’s more pathetic and terrible than he does. The shame he feels after failing at sobriety in the real world and giving in to the temptation of stealing the Winston Churchill plate sends him spiraling.

His entire recovery on the island carries over these religious overtones. Locke tests him three times to get his drugs back but he refuses to do the drugs once he gets them back. His recovery is also greatly helped by Rose helping him reconnect with his faith. Finally, we get to the not at all subtle, borderline cruel use of the Virgin Mary statues as symbolism for his relapse into heroin addiction in season 2. 

(Also, lol btw Claire positing that maybe Charlie is some really religious dude after finding the statue is the most amazing and layered way to pull these two themes together *chef’s kiss*)

Season 2 So Far (About 6 episodes in):

So how do these two themes contribute to Charlie’s development in season 2 so far? Charlie hasn’t been on screen too often so far. But there are a few scenes that imply he is using again and not doing well in his relationship with Claire as a result. Aside from the fact it’s highly questionable for a drug addict to be a primary caretaker for an infant, we see Charlie becoming more inconsistent. In Locke’s episode after they have a disagreement about waking the baby up, Charlie has mysteriously wandered off. When he comes back, he snaps at Claire and Locke, a clear indication he snuck off to get high. 

We can also tell a lot from what Claire reveals about her feelings on the disagreement, which she does not characterize as a fight even though Charlie later does. Claire’s concerns revolve around how involved Charlie is despite the fact they have barely known each other more than a month. She mentions feeling like they’re married and doesn’t know how she feels about this level of codependency. These anxieties are only heightened when he returns and becomes jealous of Locke. Clearly, his more possessive and insecure side, the side that needs Claire in his life to be okay is starting to wear him down. He sees Locke being helpful, and rather than thinking he is a threat to any romantic relationship between him and Claire, he thinks that anyone else getting involved could make Claire realize that she doesn’t need him as much as he needs her. He knows the drugs might make him lose her and he selfishly thinks he can have both dependencies like he did during his time touring with his brother. Yet he knows from experience, people will only tolerate that behavior for so long. The drugs are playing on his paranoia, certainly not helped by the pressure of the situation.

What I think is even more interesting though, is his conversation with Locke afterwards. In this conversation, he tells his side of the disagreement. He calls the disagreement a fight unlike Claire and begins to say negative things about Claire and her ability to raise Aaron. Aside from the obvious explanation that drug use makes people say all sorts of awful things they never would when sober, this conversation also returns to the theme of guilt. The fact that he calls it a fight shows how bad he feels and how nervous he is about his connection to Claire. The statements he makes about Claire not being a good caretaker, saying she is irresponsible and can’t handle the pressure, are projections of his own guilt for taking care of the baby while using. Drug addicts will do anything to justify their use and so by putting himself above Claire, he can tell himself the drug use isn’t really interfering with caring for Aaron. Dismissing Claire allows him to believe that he’s still the more stable force in the relationship. Totally fucked up and toxic mindset, but it’s heroin. I also love that Locke totally calls him out for his hypocrisy. Charlie can’t even meet his eyes after Locke implies he knows that Charlie is using again because of that guilt.

Where will this go? I don’t know but I desperately wish that Claire had found out what was in the statue the first night she saw it. She could’ve stopped him from relapsing by reassuring him that she needs him before things got tense between them. She could’ve laid out her expectations for him to be sober if he’s going to be around the baby. He knew this would be the conversation they had which is part of why he lied--can’t break a promise if you never made it!

[spilledreality]

Philosophers Are Unwitting Lexicographers: Introduction

“Linguistic Conquests” described a “narrow and conquer” method of concept factoring, where a narrow, specific sub-sense of a concept is taken to for its “true meaning” or essential {concept}-ness. Thinkers deploying this method make a claim to have “discovered” the true nature of a human concept like rationality or courage, when in “truth” there is no such nature—only a descriptive fact about the historical & hypothetical extensions of a handle onto referents. Instead, these thinkers have merely advanced a formal definition, which itself is only a crystallized pattern which covers “most” or many cases. In other words, the knowledge work being performed is more or less lexicographic. We can call this the “many threads” problem in theoretical discourse, since it arises when the Wittgensteinian motto Something runs through the whole thread—namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres is not properly taken to heart.

In “Reading ‘Ignorance: A Skilled Practice’,” I walked through Sarah Perry’s factoring of the “global knowledge game” in the social sciences, noting an erisological pattern akin to the old “three blind men & an elephant” parable:

Social science seeks to explain a broad phenomenon, like “learned helplessness.” A researcher chooses an activity which he believes encapsulates a larger phenomenon, such as: immobilizing dogs, administering electric shocks, freeing the dogs, and seeing if they attempt to escape when shocked once again. The resulting finding—that many dogs did, no longer, attempt to escape, ostensibly believing that they were incapable of it—is used, under the auspices of science, as a metonymic metaphor, more parable than global truth. The specific, contextual behavior—of dogs, no less—is taken as an indicator of some global truth about how learned helplessness operates in humans, indeed, as an indicator that we ourselves are inclined toward learned helplessness.

This dynamic is not identical to how “narrow and conquer” methods play out in philosophy and theory, but is related.

Unfortunately, much of philosophical discourse in the humanities, from literary theory to art theory to metaphysics, continues unproductively playing out this erisological pattern. Even self-purported realists, who would distance themselves from claims that the map is the territory literal, still treat human concepts like truth as if there were a fact of the matter—some essential, discoverable nature. Consider that the “correspondence theory” of the concept “truth” holds that the term describes a relationship between linguistic utterances and the state of the world, in other words, between a map and a territory. Another popular rival theory holds that truth is concerned with the inter-propositional coherence of a belief or utterance within a network of beliefs and utterances. In other words, the problem of “truth” seems always to arise only once the map exists, in other words, it is a feature of the map, and does not “exist” in “reality” anywhere.  

Philosophers of the narrow-and-conquer strategy factor out formal criteria and rules, believing they have compressed the concept’s entire structure (or at least its “meaningful” parts) into two or three or fives rules—only to be contradicted by another philosopher’s presentation of an edge-case, a twin-world hypothetical or an impossible thought experiment in which we, the arbitrating readers, are asked to intuit whether we would apply the concept to a situation that would never, and has never, occurred. Then our intuition about whether it belongs in the category is treated as evidence. Recall Unger 1979:

...were we given a novel object & a corresponding nonsense word as its “handle” (e.g. “This is a nacknick”), we could quickly begin discerning between nearby (not identical, but merely similar) objects “of its type,” and those dissimilar enough to not be of its type. This boundary would be highly fuzzy but feel real. Note that such behavior should not be described as “recognizing” a category but as inventing it, from scratch. Though our language acquisition process may benefit from examples of native speaker usage, or reference to semi-formal definitions as in a classroom setting, we seem to do just fine extrapolating categories on our own. This portion of Unger’s paper serves as an elegant thought experiment for illustrating the inherent vagueness—or “radial cloud” of decreasing relation, birthed by even a single acquired example—which characterizes our concepts.

Now on the defensive, our original formalizer doubles back, like Ayer responding to challenges posed* against to positivism’s “Every meaningful statement is either analytic or verifiable”—“I’m just defining ‘meaningful’, man.” Often, the original position is seen as weakened after such admissions, but this repeated style of retreat cues us to the real state of all such claims: attempts at crystallizing a pattern behind the lingusitic extension of a term; turf-wars over different sub-meanings & carvings; attempts to lower the entropy of what are inherently high-entropy entities. Here I’ll discuss, informally, the discourses in art and literary theory that led me to hold this belief. 

* The usual challenge being that the statement “Every meaningful statement...” is not, itself, analytic or verifiable, and is therefore meaningless.

i. Visual arts: But what is art, really?

Sam Rosen, in “But what are birds really?” argues that in the visual arts, a hundred years of controversy & subversion have held court over the question “What is art?” I think this portrait is somewhat simplistic; Sontag’s “Aesthetics of Silence” (and a hundred other tractates) offer very different factorings of the problem; but it is nonetheless clear in the historical record that questions about the boundaries and inclusivities of our concept “art” has undergirded modernist and post-modernist aesthetic discourse. 

Such a question is not too far off from what I believe the discourse ought to be asking—more productive questions might include, What ought art to be? and Which legitimating bodies effectively shape our extension of the concept “art”? Indeed, many arguments to these effects, advancing answers to these questions, have been snuck in under the cover of explaining what art “is.” (We understand now, for instance, that the signature, the gallery, the art critic, the museum, and to a lesser extent, the public, all contribute to the legitimation process—though some idealogues claim that only one of these bodies is “legitimate” or “authoritative”—note the lingering essentialism.) 

This, I think, is an important aspect of the “many threads” problem. Problematic discourses miss the most accurate, productive frame for the project they purport to engage in, and thus the quality and clarity of their answers are lowered. But along the way, many bright & efficacious individuals manage to nonetheless advance knowledge which does obtain to questions like How ought we factor concept X? or What are the differences that matter in our factorings of X? Many analytic philosophers, for instance, have worked—unwittingly!—in the lexicographic domain, searching for close-fitting formal criteria, or “crystallizing” patterns, which compressively describe the set described by (i.e. the “extension” of) a concept handle. (A handle which itself is often a superset of many subconcepts’ extensions).

But the fundamental confusion in frame remains to the net detriment of discourse; the varying modes of response only muddy the waters. As Dave Chalmers says about verbal disputes, the recognition of verbal disagreement—and by extension, we will add, model disagreement—may not “dissolve” the question, as some of LessWrong’s more ambitious pragmatists believe, but it at least “advances” it, & often by several steps.

ii. Literary theory: What is textual meaning, really? Who is the “authority” on the meaning of a text—author, reader, or scholar?

I spent a collegiate summer pouring over the 20th C Meaning Wars in literary theory, mostly texts between 1920 and 1980, and rarely saw the relevant, warring theorists acknowledge maybe there was an intended meaning of the author that mattered, and also an emergent meaning which came—structured but unique—to each reader upon engagement with the text produced through author intentionality—and also that, as must follow, there was some overlapping or common “meaning” for the “average” reader of a community, and that all these types of meaning could co-exist happily if we were to carve up the concept “textual meaning” into specific subterms (the “divide and conquer” method), instead of its ambiguous umbrella, its family of relations, its thread of spun fibers. 

We could say that “intended meaning” was certainly partially conscious, having to do with some modeled hypothetical reader in the author’s mind (and where does this model come from?), and also partly subconscious, in that hidden agendas were likely acted out. (After all, in contemporary cultural production, the creations of an individual are taken as metonymic representations of him as creator. This is in opposition to many indigenous traditions, which believed a piece of bone, say, had an internal “essence” which the artist “discovered.” Very interesting, this reverberation of magical thinking.) We could say that the author who, writing a sentence, believes it to mean one thing, and then, upon reading it, decides (or “realizes”) it means something different, perhaps from erroneous construction, is operating here with a concept of “hypothetical reader meaning,” an “others in mind” mental model, and that the very fact he can recognize he meant to convey one thing, but that his words actually convey another—would be interpreted as other—is a testimony to this gap: an intended meaning, which gives birth to the utterance, and a conveyed meaning, what is received by the reader. We could say that intentionality structures response, and that readers’ search for intentionality further structures response, even if these responses are “consummated” by the reader (the genetic metaphor of mutual contribution & interaction seems apt). 

And indeed, to give them their full due, all these observations and more have been made by literary theorists engaged in the so-called Meaning Wars, who have, between them, more or less factored out the literary process in full, from inception in the author’s mind, to interpretation by the reader, to the use of formal instruments like dictionaries as interpretive guides. But instead of attempting to understand when one type of textual meaning is more productive or ascertainable, instead of factoring out the relationships between these meanings, thought and energies were wasted in what amount, ultimately, to attempted linguistic conquests, fueled by the status awarded to victors of the global knowledge game. Nowadays, few theorists seem to care much about the meaning wars’ dispute—the subject’s been dropped, ostensibly for being self-frustrating. (Because they got it flipped around: they forgot they were factoring human concepts and thought they were discovering conceptual realities). And the lowercase-p pragmatic resolution is that people just refer to intended meanings and author meanings and don’t feel like they have to pledge allegiance to some totalizing camp where X is the only, narrow “meaning” that counts.

In other words, the mutual exclusivity of narrow-and-conquer strategies, with representatives arguing for their pet formalizations, was replaced by a divide-and-conquer strategy, with qualifiers appended to the umbrella concept.

It’s been some years since I investigated the Meaning Wars, & I intend to go back to my notebooks and re-read the canonical battles. Hopefully I’ll have a longer piece soon which explores, in depth—and with greater understanding than was possible at age 21—its dynamics as intellectual history.

In the post which follows, I’ll more formally work through a handful of philosophical and metaphysical dialogues from the past-half century, such as the conversation surrounding “collective intentionality,” which exhibit a “lexicographic” tendency.