#wittgenstein theory of language

[richo1915]

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Natural Language

The philosophy of natural language is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature, origins, and use of language as it is naturally spoken and understood by human beings. It involves the study of how language functions in communication, the relationship between language and thought, the structure and meaning of linguistic expressions, and the role of context in understanding meaning. This field intersects with linguistics, cognitive science, logic, and semiotics, aiming to understand both the abstract properties of language and its practical use in everyday life.

Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Natural Language:

Meaning and Reference:

Semantics: One of the central concerns of the philosophy of natural language is the study of meaning, known as semantics. Philosophers explore how words and sentences convey meaning, how meaning is structured, and how language relates to the world.

Reference: Reference is the relationship between linguistic expressions and the objects or entities they refer to in the world. Philosophers like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam have contributed to understanding how names, descriptions, and other expressions refer to things in the world.

Pragmatics:

Context and Meaning: Pragmatics deals with how context influences the interpretation of language. It examines how speakers use language in different contexts and how listeners infer meaning based on context, intentions, and social norms.

Speech Acts: Philosophers such as J.L. Austin and John Searle have explored how utterances can do more than convey information—they can perform actions, such as making promises, giving orders, or asking questions.

Syntax and Grammar:

Structure of Language: Syntax is the study of the rules and principles that govern the structure of sentences in natural languages. Philosophers and linguists investigate how words are combined to form meaningful sentences and how these structures relate to meaning.

Universal Grammar: The concept of universal grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky, suggests that the ability to acquire language is innate to humans and that there are underlying grammatical principles common to all languages.

Language and Thought:

Linguistic Relativity: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggests that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and think about the world. Philosophers debate the extent to which language shapes thought and whether different languages lead to different cognitive processes.

Conceptual Frameworks: Language is often seen as providing the conceptual framework through which we interpret the world. Philosophers examine how language structures our understanding of reality and whether it limits or expands our cognitive abilities.

Philosophy of Meaning:

Theories of Meaning: Various theories of meaning have been proposed in the philosophy of language, including:

Descriptivist Theories: These suggest that the meaning of a word or phrase is equivalent to a description associated with it.

Causal Theories: These argue that meaning is determined by a causal relationship between words and the things they refer to.

Use Theories: Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, these theories claim that the meaning of a word is determined by its use in the language.

Language and Reality:

Metaphysical Implications: Philosophers explore how language relates to reality, including how linguistic structures might reflect or distort our understanding of the world. This involves questions about whether language mirrors reality or if it plays a role in constructing our experience of reality.

Ontology of Language: This concerns the nature of the entities that linguistic expressions refer to, such as whether abstract objects (like numbers or properties) exist independently of language.

Communication and Interpretation:

Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, particularly of texts. Philosophers in this tradition, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, explore how understanding is achieved in communication and how meaning is negotiated between speakers and listeners.

Ambiguity and Vagueness: Natural language often contains ambiguity and vagueness, where words or sentences can have multiple interpretations. Philosophers study how these features affect communication and understanding.

Language and Social Interaction:

Language as a Social Phenomenon: Language is inherently social, and its use is governed by social norms and conventions. Philosophers study how language functions in social contexts, how power dynamics influence language, and how language can both reflect and shape social structures.

Language Games: Wittgenstein introduced the concept of "language games" to describe how the meaning of words is tied to their use in specific forms of life or social practices. This concept emphasizes the diversity of language use and the idea that meaning is context-dependent.

Evolution of Language:

Origins of Language: Philosophers and cognitive scientists explore how language evolved in humans, the relationship between language and other forms of communication in animals, and the cognitive capacities required for language.

Language Change: Natural languages are dynamic and constantly evolving. Philosophers study how languages change over time and what this reveals about the nature of meaning and communication.

Critique of Language:

Deconstruction: Philosophers like Jacques Derrida have critiqued traditional notions of language and meaning, arguing that language is inherently unstable and that meaning is always deferred, never fully present or fixed.

Critical Theory: In the tradition of critical theory, philosophers analyze how language can perpetuate power structures, ideologies, and social inequalities, and how it can be used to resist and challenge these forces.

The philosophy of natural language offers a rich and complex exploration of how language functions, how it relates to thought and reality, and how it shapes human interaction and understanding. By examining the nature of meaning, reference, context, and the social dimensions of language, philosophers aim to uncover the fundamental principles that govern linguistic communication and the role of language in human life.

[fatehbaz]

[E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us […]. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug – a multitude of life we cannot sense. [...] So despite shared histories and the close proximity in which slugs and [humans] live, the slug retains a certain darkness as a creature apart; something is held in reserve […]. And so fleeting awareness of the irretrievability of the lives of others intensifies poignancy, such that despite a gulf separating the [human] from other creatures, some connection, however fleeting, is made to something – however strange. Refusing to dismiss the everyday and the banal is an ethical response. […] Slugs are there: sliming, chomping, and oozing around quietly and that should be enough to give them consideration.

[Text by: Franklin Ginn. “Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 39, Issue 4. 2013. Bold emphasis added by me.]

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So, can an insect speak? And if yes, do we understand it? Wittgenstein maintained that ‘if a lion could speak we would not understand him’, by which he implied that we do not share the ‘form of lion-life’ that would make lion language fully transparent to us […]. A similar insight was [...] expressed by [...] [a twentieth-century] honeybee researcher [...]: Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us of the depths of their real existence. But such ignorance is better than the other kind, which is unconscious and satisfied.

[Text by: Eileen Crist. “Can an Insect Speak?: The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language.” Social Studies of Science, Volume 34, Issue 1. 2004. Bold emphasis added.]

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Animal studies scholarship tends to emphasize animal-human relations, encounters, and similarities. […] Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures [...], however, float at the far reaches of our ability to construct sturdy interspecies connections [...]. Uexkull’s theory […] insists upon multiple worlds […], a capacious admission that a multitude of other creatures dwell as part of worlds that humans cannot readily or completely access or grasp. Three-quarters of a century later Terry Tempest Williams wonders what it would be like to be a jellyfish. […] [She] writes: “Perhaps this is what moves me most about jellies – their sensory intelligence […] the great hunger that is sent outward through the feathery reach of their tentacles. Imagine the information sought and returned.”

[Text by: Stacy Alaimo. “Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible”. In: Thinking with Water. 2013. Bold emphasis added.]

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Although we cannot ‘speak’ with nonhumans in any straightforward way, what we can and more importantly do do is become articulate with them in various ways. [...] If there is a way out of this historical impasse [alienation, climate crisis, global ecological degradation], [for some] it is not to be found in attributing some of ‘our’ qualities to ‘them’. It “would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals […]. Perhaps the task is not to seek to compare the dance language of bees […] with human language, the ‘intelligence’ […] of Monarch butterflies with human intelligence, […] but rather (or at least in addition) to find a way of thinking about these ‘remarkable things’ that grants them positive ontological difference in their own right. […] [It] is concerned with what is always a multitude of others rather than a singular other […]; and it is radically nonanthropocentric […].

[Text by: Nick Bingham. “Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Volume 38, Issue 3. 2006. Bold emphasis added.]

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Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention [...] shows them [slowly] moving, changing. [...] Then there are beings [like some insects] that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can't know what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. [...] [W]e should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled […]. It is not abstract, or empty.

[Text by: Bawaka Country et al. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum Volume 108. January 2020. Bold emphasis added.]

[max1461]

Yeah, I think the failure mode of a lot of mathbrained and also philosophybrained people in thinking about natural language is that they forget they have to check things empirically. Like, it's really easy to introspect on "how language works", and if you're of the systematizing type, come up with some nice ideas about it. And you can sort of handwave away places were the reality of natural language doesn't look like your nice system, because ultimately it's not the nitty-gritty of natural language you're interested in, it's something more abstract and more grandiose, like How Truth Works or what have you.

And this is fine if you're only ever interested in the philosophy or the math. Hence Russel, Frege, Wittgenstein, whatever. But if you ever try and turn things around, and reason about human-language-the-empirical-phenomenon by way of your nice theory, it won't work. It won't work because you can't philosophy it or math it, you have to science it! You have to check! You cannot determine how it is by thinking hard!

And when you check it's like, a bunch of weird shit. Right, all the shit that you thought was The Most Important Part is kind of, not. Like you might come up with some sort of compelling philosophical idea about the order that kids must learn words in, right, because the meaning of some words is dependent on others. Uh so they have to learn "horse" before "cart" or some shit like that. Feels like this is the kind of thing a 17th century guy would think. Well then you check and that just isn't true, the order kids learn words in is as much about how phonologically comfortable they find them as it is their semantics, etc. etc. There's a bunch of specific empirical shit you have to deal with.

Well I feel like a fair amount of non-linguist commentary on natural language is sort of a more advanced version of that. You gotta check! Always remember you gotta check.

...And don't just check English and French!

[loving-n0t-heyting]

over course of trip to seattle learned about damion searls new translation of the tractatus, which left me livid enough to overcome the local SAD. was going to write a long angry post about it until i learned aw moore had already written a much better scathing review in lrb complaining about the exact things i would have—in particular: the travesties made of 1 and 2.141. both, but the latter especially, reminded me of blooms comments on cornford in the preface to his republic translation:

There is no doubt that one can read the sentence as it appears in Comford without being drawn up short, without being puzzled. But this is only because it says nothing. It uses commonplace terms which have no precise significance; it is the kind of sentence one finds in newspaper editorials. From having been shocking or incomprehensible, Plato becomes boring.

this seems like the obvious outcome of a translation that emphasises leaving the final product natural and unjarring in the target language: genuinely jarring thoughts present in the original are penalised from the outset

there was one part of the introductory essay moore ignores i thought was worth commenting on:

partly its shocking that you would openly admit, in the course of translating a text, to simply ignoring anything it has to say about translating btwn languages. but moreso it is baffling you would choose to translate a source text whose explicit statements about the process you clearly regard with such contempt. (he tries to soften the blow by citing the notoriously obscure and evocative 6.43 as evidence of wittgensteins "glimmers of recog­nition" that searls own extreme anti-literalist stance on translation is superior; looking to correct the relatively lucid by the relatively opaque is a classic hallmark of the eisegete.) active malice is a poor foundation for textual fidelity. the fact this contempt leads him to fatuously bungle crucial passages like 2.141 is just icing on the cake

i did think this passage (it goes on much longer but this conveys the gist) from his recent book on the philosophy of translation (which i decided to hateskim) was particularly revealing. this isnt the etymology or meaning of that word in philosophical contexts at all. the root is the latin "intentus", which comes closer to "attentive" or "focused" than to anything like "intending" or "intention" as usually used by english speakers, and the meaning is about mental states that take or attend to an object or state, the way eg that vision is of some visible thing/fact. this more general use dates back to the middle ages; any association with orientation to action is incidental and/or idiosyncratic to certain authors (such as merleau-ponty, whos being invoked here—or maybe it is, ive never actually read him). looking up the term in any reputable reference book would have disabused him of this error

to some extent this is obviously nitpicking; he wants to make a point about the nature of perception and how it relates to his understanding of translation, the phenomenology jargon is just window dressing. but this is a book about translation! he is trying to convey his expertise in finding the right way to translate the right word! speaks extremely poorly to his fitness for this i would think if he makes a slogan for much of his book out of a phrase whose historical meaning he has clearly ignored outside the narrow context of one specific and atypical writer on the subject. even if you think the highly specific theory of intentionality is correct, omitting the historical context of the expression and its cognates cuts any readers off from any larger conversations to which this theory is contributing, the same way flitting freely between different words in the target language for the same word in the source will muddy lines of thought developed internally to the text

whenever i see ppl on here discussing translation it seems to be in a vein much closer to how searls writes about it. the translators task is to capture the feeling or vibe of the passages translated; literal translation, favouring preservation of sentence structure and uniformity of word choice over fidelity to sentiment and deep meaning, is mechanical, soulless, and amateurish. a major pitfall to this approach being that you can easily find plenty of cases where the translator thus interpreting their job is insensitive to the actual vibes at hand

[adarkrainbow]

A class on fairy tales (1)

As you might know (since I have been telling it for quite some times), I had a class at university which was about fairy tales, their history and evolution. But from a literary point of view - I am doing literary studies at university, it was a class of “Literature and Human sciences”, and this year’s topic was fairy tales, or rather “contes” as we call them in France. It was twelve seances, and I decided, why not share the things I learned and noted down here? (The titles of the different parts of this post are actually from me. The original notes are just a non-stop stream, so I broke them down for an easier read)

I) Book lists

The class relied on a main corpus which consisted of the various fairytales we studied - texts published up to the “first modernity” and through which the literary genre of the fairytale established itself. In chronological order they were: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile, Le Piacevoli Notti by Giovan Francesco Straparola, the various fairytales of Charles Perrault, the fairytales of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and finally the Kinder-und Hausmärchen of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. There is also a minor mention for the fables of Faerno, not because they played an important historical role like the others, but due to them being used in comparison to Perrault’s fairytales ; there is also a mention of the fairytales of Leprince de Beaumont if I remember well. 

After giving us this main corpus, we were given a second bibliography containing the most famous and the most noteworthy theorical tools when it came to fairytales - the key books that served to theorize the genre itself. The teacher who did this class deliberatly gave us a “mixed list”, with works that went in completely opposite directions when it came to fairytale, to better undersant the various differences among “fairytale critics” - said differences making all the vitality of the genre of the fairytale, and of the thoughts on fairytales. Fairytales are a very complex matter. 

For example, to list the English-written works we were given, you find, in chronological order: Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment ; Jack David Zipes’ Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion ; Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men ; Marie-Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales ; Lewis C. Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France (1670-1715) ; and Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. If you know the French language, there are two books here: Jacques Barchilon’s Le conte merveilleux français de 1690 à 1790 ; and Jean-Michel Adam and Ute Heidmann’s Textualité et intertextualité des contes. We were also given quite a few German works, such as Märchenforschung und Tiefenpsychologie by Wilhelm Laiblin, Nachwort zu Deutsche Volksmärchen von arm und reich, by Waltraud Woeller ; or Märchen, Träume, Schicksale by Otto Graf Wittgenstein. And of course, the bibliography did not forget the most famous theory-tools for fairytales: Vladimir Propp’s Morfologija skazki + Poetika, Vremennik Otdela Slovesnykh Iskusstv ; as well as the famous Classification of Aarne Anti, Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther (the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification, aka the ATU). 

By compiling these works together, one will be able to identify the two main “families” that are rivals, if not enemies, in the world of the fairytale criticism. Today it is considered that, roughly, if we simplify things, there are two families of scholars who work and study the fairy tales. One family take back the thesis and the theories of folklorists - they follow the path of those who, starting in the 19th century, put forward the hypothesis that a “folklore” existed, that is to say a “poetry of the people”, an oral and popular literature. On the other side, you have those that consider that fairytales are inscribed in the history of literature, and that like other objects of literature (be it oral or written), they have intertextual relationships with other texts and other forms of stories. So they hold that fairytales are not “pure, spontaneous emanations”. (And given this is a literary class, given by a literary teacher, to literary students, the teacher did admit their bias for the “literary family” and this was the main focus of the class).

Which notably led us to a third bibliography, this time collecting works that massively changed or influenced the fairytale critics - but this time books that exclusively focused on the works of Perrault and Grimm, and here again we find the same divide folklore VS textuality and intertextuality. It is Marc Soriano’s Les contes de Perrault: culture savante et traditions populaires, it is Ernest Tonnelat’s Les Contes des frères Grimm: étude sur la composition et le style du recueil des Kinder-und-Hausmärchen ; it is Jérémie Benoit’s Les Origines mythologiques des contes de Grimm ; it is Wilhelm Solms’ Die Moral von Grimms Märchen ; it is Dominqiue Leborgne-Peyrache’s Vies et métamorphoses des contes de Grimm ; it is Jens E. Sennewald’ Das Buch, das wir sind: zur Poetik der Kinder und-Hausmärchen ; it is Heinz Rölleke’s Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: eine Einführung. No English book this time, sorry.

II) The Germans were French, and the French Italians

The actual main topic of this class was to consider the “fairytale” in relationship to the notions of “intertextuality” and “rewrites”. Most notably there was an opening at the very end towards modern rewrites of fairytales, such as Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, “Le petit chaperon vert” (Little Green Riding Hood) or “La princesse qui n’aimait pas les princes” (The princess who didn’t like princes). But the main subject of the class was to see how the “main corpus” of classic fairytales, the Perrault, the Grimm, the Basile and Straparola fairytales, were actually entirely created out of rewrites. Each text was rewriting, or taking back, or answering previous texts - the history of fairytales is one of constant rewrite and intertextuality. 

For example, if we take the most major example, the fairytales of the brothers Grimm. What are the sources of the brothers? We could believe, like most people, that they merely collected their tale. This is what they called, especially in the last edition of their book: they claimed to have collected their tales in regions of Germany. It was the intention of the authors, it was their project, and since it was the will and desire of the author, it must be put first. When somebody does a critical edition of a text, one of the main concerns is to find the way the author intended their text to pass on to posterity. So yes, the brothers Grimm claimed that their tales came from the German countryside, and were manifestations of the German folklore. 

But... in truth, if we look at the first editions of their book, if we look at the preface of their first editions, we discover very different indications, indications which were checked and studied by several critics, such as Ernest Tomelas. In truth, one of their biggest sources was... Charles Perrault. While today the concept of the “tales of the little peasant house, told by the fireside” is the most prevalent one, in their first edition the brothers Grimm explained that their sources for these tales were not actually old peasant women, far from it: they were ladies, of a certain social standing, they were young women, born of exiled French families (because they were Protestants, and thus after the revocation of the édit de Nantes in France which allowed a peaceful coexistance of Catholics and Protestants, they had to flee to a country more welcoming of their religion, aka Germany). They were young women of the upper society, girls of the nobility, they were educated, they were quite scholarly - in fact, they worked as tutors/teachers and governess/nursemaids for German children. For children of the German nobility to be exact. And these young French women kept alive the memory of the French literature of the previous century - which included the fairytales of Perrault.

So, through these women born of the French emigration, one of the main sources of the Grimm turns out to be Perrault. And in a similar way, Perrault’s fairytales actually have roots and intertextuality with older tales, Italian fairytales. And from these Italian fairytales we can come back to roots into Antiquity itself - we are talking Apuleius, and Virgil before him, and Homer before him, this whole classical, Latin-Greek literature. This entire genealogy has been forgotten for a long time due to the enormous surge, the enormous hype, the enormous fascination for the study of folklore at the end of the 19th century and throughout all of the 20th. 

We talk of “types of fairytales”, if we talk of Vladimir Propp, if we talk of Aarne Thompson, we are speaking of the “morphology of fairytales”, a name which comes from the Russian theorician that is Propp. Most people place the beginning of the “structuralism” movement in the 70s, because it is in 1970 that the works of Propp became well-known in France, but again there is a big discrepancy between what people think and what actually is. It is true that starting with the 70s there was a massive wave, during which Germans, Italians and English scholars worked on Propp’s books, but Propp had written his studies much earlier than that, at the beginning of the 20th century. The first edition of his Morphology of fairytales was released in 1928. While it was reprinted and rewriten several times in Russia, it would have to wait for roughly fifty years before actually reaching Western Europe, where it would become the fundamental block of the “structuralist grammar”. This is quite interesting because... when France (and Western Europe as a whole) adopted structuralism, when they started to read fairytales under a morphological and structuralist angle, they had the feeling and belief, they were convinced that they were doing a “modern” criticism of fairytales, a “new” criticism. But in truth... they were just repeating old theories and conceptions, snatched away from the original socio-historical context in which Propp had created them - aka the Soviet Union and a communist regime. People often forget too quickly that contextualizing the texts isn’t only good for the studied works, we must also contextualize the works of critics and the analysis of scholars. Criticism has its own history, and so unlike the common belief, Propp’s Morphology of fairytales isn’t a text of structuralist theoricians from the 70s. It was a text of the Soviet Union, during the Interwar Period. 

So the two main questions of this class are. 1) We will do a double exploration to understand the intertextual relationships between fairytales. And 2) We will wonder about the definition of a “fairytale” (or rather of a “conte” as it is called in French) - if the fairytale is indeed a literary genre, then it must have a definition, key elements. And from this poetical point of view, other questions come forward: how does one analyze a fairytale? What does a fairytale mean?

III) Feuding families

Before going further, we will pause to return to a subject talked about above: the great debate among scholars and critics that lasted for decades now, forming the two branches of the fairytale study. One is the “folklorist” branch, the one that most people actually know without realizing it. When one works on fairytale, one does folklorism without knowing it, because we got used to the idea that fairytale are oral products, popular products, that are present everywhere on Earth, we are used to the concept of the universality of motives and structures of fairytales. In the “folklorist” school of thought, there is an universalism, and not only are fairytales present everywhere, but one can identify a common core for them. It can be a categorization of characters, it can be narrative functions, it can be roles in a story, but there is always a structure or a core. As a result, the work of critics who follow this branch is to collect the greatest number of “versions” of a same tale they can find, and compare them to find the smallest common denominator. From this, they will create or reconstruct the “core fairytale”, the “type” or the “source” from which the various variations come from.

Before jumping onto the other family, we will take a brief time to look at the history of the “folklorist branch” of the critic. (Though, to summarize the main differences, the other family of critics basically claims that we do not actually know the origin of these stories, but what we know are rather the texts of these stories, the written archives or the oral records). 

So the first family here (that is called “folklorist” for the sake of simplicity, but it is not an official or true appelation) had been extremely influenced by the works of a famous and talented scholar of the early 20th century: Aarne Antti, a scholar of Elsinki who collected a large number of fairytales and produced out of them a classification, a typology based on this theory that there is an “original fairytale type” that existed at the beginning, and from which variants appeared. His work was then continued by two other scholars: Stith Thompson, and Hans-Jörg Uther. This continuation gave birth to the “Aarne-Thompson” classification, a classification and bibliography of folkloric fairytales from around the world, which is very often used in journals and articles studying fairytales. Through them, the idea of “types” of fairytales and “variants” imposed itself in people’s minds, where each tale corresponds to a numbered category, depending on the subjects treated and the ways the story unfolds (for example an entire category of tale collects the “animal-husbands”. This classification imposed itself on the Western way of thinking at the end of the first third of the 20th century.

The next step in the history of this type of fairytale study was Vladimir Propp. With his Morphology of fairytales, we find the same theory, the same principle of classification: one must collect the fairytales from all around the world, and compare them to find the common denominator. Propp thought Aarne-Thompson’s work was interesting, but he did complain about the way their criteria mixed heterogenous elements, or how the duo doubled criterias that could be unified into one. Propp noted that, by the Aarne-Thompson system, a same tale could have two different numbers - he concluded that one shouldn’t classify tales by their subject or motif. He claimed that dividing the fairytales by “types” was actually impossible, that this whole theory was more of a fiction than an actual reality. So, he proposed an alternate way of doing things, by not relying on the motifs of fairytales: Propp rather relied on their structure. Propp doesn’t deny the existence of fairytales, he doesn’t put in question the categorization of fairytales, or the universality of fairytales, on all that he joins Aarne-Thompson. But what he does is change the typology, basing it on “functions”: for him, the constituve parts of fairytales are “functions”, which exist in limited numbers and follow each other per determined orders (even if they are not all “activated”). He identified 31 functions, that can be grouped into three groups forming the canonical schema of the fairytale according to Propp. These three groups are an initial situation with seven functions, followed by a first sequence going from the misdeed (a bad action, a misfortune, a lack) to its reparation, and finally there is a second sequence which goes from the return of the hero to its reward. From these seven “preparatory functions”, forming the initial situation, Propp identified seven character profiles, defined by their functions in the narrative and not by their unique characteristics. These seven profiles are the Aggressor (the villain), the Donor (or provider), the Auxiliary (or adjuvant), the Princess, the Princess’ Father, the Mandator, the Hero, and the False Hero. This system will be taken back and turned into a system by Greimas, with the notion of “actants”: Greimas will create three divisions, between the subject and the object, between the giver and the gifted, and between the adjuvant and the opposant.

With his work, Vladimir Propp had identified the “structure of the tale”, according to his own work, hence the name of the movement that Propp inspired: structuralism. A structure and a morphology - but Propp did mention in his texts that said morphology could only be applied to fairytales taken from the folklore (that is to say, fairytales collected through oral means), and did not work at all for literary fairytales (such as those of Perrault). And indeed, while this method of study is interesting for folkloric fairytales, it becomes disappointing with literary fairytales - and it works even less for novels. Because, trying to find the smallest denominator between works is actually the opposite of literary criticism, where what is interesting is the difference between various authors. It is interesting to note what is common, indeed, but it is even more interesting to note the singularities and differences. Anyway, the apparition of the structuralist study of fairytales caused a true schism among the field of literary critics, between those that believe all tales must be treated on a same way, with the same tools (such as those of Propp), and those that are not satisfied with this “universalisation” that places everything on the same level. 

This second branch is the second family we will be talking about: those that are more interested by the singularity of each tale, than by their common denominators and shared structures. This second branch of analysis is mostly illustrated today by the works of Ute Heidmann, a German/Swiss researcher who published alongside Jean Michel Adam (a specialist of linguistic, stylistic and speech-analysis) a fundamental work in French: Textualité et intertextualité des contes: Perrault, Apulée, La Fontaine, Lhéritier... (Textuality and intertextuality of fairytales). A lot of this class was inspired by Heidmann and Adam’s work, which was released in 2010. Now, this book is actually surrounded by various articles posted before and after, and Ute Heidmann also directed a collective about the intertextuality of the brothers Grimm fairytales. Heidmann did not invent on her own the theories of textuality and intertextuality - she relies on older researches, such as those of the Ernest Tonnelat, who in 1912 published a study of the brothers Grimm fairytales focusing on the first edition of their book and its preface. This was where the Grimm named the sources of their fairytales: girls of the upper class, not at all small peasants, descendants of the protestant (huguenots) noblemen of France who fled to Germany. Tonnelat managed to reconstruct, through these sources, the various element that the Grimm took from Perrault’s fairytales. This work actually weakened the folklorist school of thought, because for the “folklorist critics”, when a similarity is noted between two fairytales, it is a proof of “an universal fairytale type”, an original fairytale that must be reconstructed. But what Tonnelat and other “intertextuality critics” pushed forward was rather the idea that “If the story of the Grimm is similar but not identical to the one of Perrault, it is because they heard a modified version of Perrault’s tale, a version modified either by the Grimms or by the woman that told them the tale, who tried to make the story more or less horrible depending on the situation”. This all fragilized the idea of an “original, source-fairytale”, and encouraged other researchers to dig this way.

For example, the case was taken up by Heinz Rölleke, in 1985: he systematized the study of the sources of the Grimm, especially the sources that tied them to the fairytales of Perrault. Now, all the works of this branch of critics does not try to deny or reject the existence of fairytales all over the world. And it does not forget that all over the world, human people are similar and have the same preoccupations (life, love, death, war, peace). So, of course, there is an universality of the themes, of the motives, of the intentions of the texts. Because they are human texts, so there is an universality of human fiction. But there is here the rejection of a topic, a theory, a question that can actually become VERY dangerous. (For example, in post World War II Germany, all researches about fairytales were forbidden, because during their reign the Nazis had turned the fairytales the Grimm into an abject ideological tool). This other family, vein, branch of critics, rather focuses on the specificity of each writing style, of each rewrite of a fairytale, but also on the various receptions and interpretations of fairytales depending on the context of their writing and the context of their reading. So the idea behind this “intertextuality study” is to study the fairytales like the rest of literature, be it oral or written, and to analyze them with the same philological tools used by history studies, by sociology study, by speech analysis and narrative analysis - all of that to understand what were the conditions of creation, of publication, of reading and spreading of these tales, and how they impacted culture.

[toughknit]

oh my god can queer theory let go of phenomenology. especially feminists. im so dead inside. like there's this tension between standpoint theory and defending the validity of affect & personal experience as knowledge, but what's happening right now, as i'm reading to build my memoir on the relationship between chronic pain and attention to language, is a bunch of priviledged academics who are ashamed and frustrated of their position and are defending this specific affect. this frustration is born from opression definitely, but this strategy is allowing them to strip themselves of their agency just by the fact that it's commonly considered empowering to simply reorganize syntax to one's advantage --but they are either ashamed, guilty, or ignorant of their privilege. and they go on calling that defense, that reparation, ...revolutionary. are you just scared of wittgenstein??????... are we all just stuck into reappropriating heidegger because of his influence and accessibility? i get it, my first intro to philosophy was phenomenology; i had a professor who discouraged me to take that avenue, and now everything is just so obvious: most people are stuck looking for meaning in things that structurally, systemically, don't want them, in order not to change themselves! in order to keep looking away from introspection & instead continue to consume the same modes that entrap them. the concept of sense is out of the question for them as they refuse to move in other ways than intellectually, because doing so would require them to let go of their privilege.

[elbiotipo]

how'd the punks meet?

Oh, I actually made a long post about this, it's fun! let me translate it!

...

Marcos and Florencia have known each other since teens and they were always a constant in the bioclub (ORIGINAL MEMBERS). Marcos asked Florencia out shortly after meeting her. Florencia is a lesbian. To this day, Florencia NEVER loses an opportunity to laugh at that.

Marcos met Ariel when his biosuite broke down and he got the tip Ariel was good with that kind of machines. Marcos used his powers of Having Patience With The IT Guy. Ariel automatically declared him the First Non-Pelotudo Costumer he ever had: they've been friends ever since. Soon after Ariel joined the club, he found plenty to do fixing the club's old machines and/or cebando mates on the weekends.

Ariel and Melanie se conocieron, bailando en un bar... Any story they've had is deliberately ambiguous and you're not gonna get it from them. But Melanie sometimes spends more time at Ariel's workshop than at her house. And Ariel never misses Kawaii Anime Night at Melanie's. The funny thing is that Melanie supposedly "joined" the club with Ariel, although she had already participated a couple of times as a teen (Marcos and Florencia don't even remember her, because Melanie didn't have uwu neko ears then, but she INSISTS she appears in the background of the photos)

Pancho arrived at the club to rest after a long day of walking in Buenos Aires (bioclubs have pools for cetacean members, making them very popular with them). Melanie and the others approached him curiously. Pancho told them about Wittgenstein's theories of language and about Marxism in relation to the Moreau liberation movements. They got him into the club that same week, how could you not?

Marina is an exchange student from Brazil. When she was a teen she had participated in a bioclub in Fortaleza but only occasionally, so now that she lived in Argentina, she decided to try again. The first to greet her Marcos, and they spent a whole day talking about the space programs of Argentina and Brazil (forgetting about everyone else present). After a metric ton of cargadas from the others, Marcos invited her to the club and she didn't even hesitate, perhaps the coolest decision she made since she arrived in Argentina.

Paola met Florencia (her girlfriend) at an applied Neopaleontology convention. They had a heated argument about whether or not it's ethical to revive dinosaurs. Obviously, after that, they started dating, and they've been together for several years now. Paola is not part of the club and she thinks Florencia's friends are all weirdoes, but she plays D&D with everyone from time to time. Marcos wishes she would just pay her membership, she spends all day there anyways.

Everyone already knows Marcos' brother, Martín, because he always calls them when he's out on patrol to make sure they aren't making a bioweapon or somthing. Marcos loves him like a little brother loves his old bro, that is, a mixture of disdain and ride-or-die. Biopunks in general never get along with genedarmes, but Melanie admits that she unfortunately likes guys in uniform. Everyone loves Fito, the Genedarme Dog, because he is Fito, the Genedarme Dog.

Lucía is a student of Winogrodzki. Lucía now teaches at the UBA and Winogrodzki is the god of bioengineering and is basically everywhere, but the two are the club's administrators: Winogrodzki for his vocation for youth, Lucía for the resume experience. Many have come and gone: Winogrodzki was a member of the club in the heyday of biopunk before the Ecocide. Since then, the Marcos & Co. group has been the most constant he has ever had.

Maximiliano was also a student of Winogrodzki and Lucía's bioclub partner. But life took him down another path, and he is now the administrator of Recursos Cósmicos Fiscales, the Argentine space mining agency. He still has contact with his teacher and his old club mate sometimes.

There are more characters, and they each have friends (romances maybe?) from outside the club who show up occasionally (and their families, too, obviously), but they're still not fully fleshed out.

[unnatural-transformations]

Types of math joke that exist in the wild:

Puns (i.e. "why was 6 afraid of 7?") [1]

Thinly veiled excuses to demonstrate knowledge that positions the speaker as part of the in-group (i.e. "a comathematician is a comachine for turning cotheorems into ffee") [2]

Combinations of the previous two types (i.e. "what's purple and commutes?") [3]

Jokes about the supposed otherworldliness of mathematicians (i.e. the one about a mathematician, physicist and engineer dealing with a fire in a hotel room) [4]

Jokes about particular mathematicians (i.e. Grothendieck's favorite prime) [5]

Jokes about mathematical conventions (i.e. "Let ϵ < 0") [6]

Jokes about established mathematical facts (i.e. the joke about which of the axiom of choice, the well-ordering principle and Zorn's lemma are "obviously true" and which are "obviously false") [7]

Jokes that, on inspection, turn out to actually be about language or linguistics or something else other than math (i.e. Wittgenstein's "profound philosophical joke") [8]

(There is, in fact, a pretty good case to be made that most of the last few types listed are just special cases of the second type. [9])

Types of math joke that do not seem to exist, in the wild or anywhere else:

Ones that are funny

Footnotes below the cut.

"Because 7 8 9". The words "ate" and "eight" are homonyms. The implication is that 6 fears meeting a similar fate to her fallen comrade 9.

(a) The 20th mathematician Paul Erdős is reported to have said that "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." In Erdős's own case, 'coffee' is perhaps best understood as a euphemism. (b) Category theory is a branch of pure mathematics that studies mathematical structures called categories, defined as abstract collections of objects and directed arrows between those objects satisfying certain simple axioms which are intended to generalize a large number of other structures. Many concepts in category theory have corresponding 'dual' concepts, whose definition we obtain by taking the original definition or theorem and reverseing the direction of all the arrows involved. This new dual concept is often given a name starting with the 'co'- prefix. For example, reversing the arrows in the definition of a 'product' gives the definition of a 'coproduct' while reversing the arrows in the definition of an 'equalizer' gives the definition of a 'coequalizer'. Taking duals again always gets us back to where we started, so for example a 'cocoproduct' would just be an ordinary product. By treating Erdős's original statement as if it were the definition of a mathematician in some category including the objects 'machine', 'coffee' and 'theorems' and "reversing the arrows" (i.e. changing the order of subject and object in the sentence) we obtain the new statement "defining" a comathematician.

"An abelian grape." Named after the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, an abelian group is a particular type of commutative monoid, a mathematical structure comprising a set A containing a distinguished identity element e and an associative, commutative binary operation R on A such that aRe = a for any element a in A. The word "grape" sounds a bit like the word "group".

Briefly: the engineer immediately puts out the fire by dousing it with as much water as possible. The physicist first does some calculations, then puts out the fire with exactly the minimum amount of water required. The mathematician does the same calculations and then, happy to have proved that a solution exists, goes back to bed (after which she presumably perishes in the fire).

The story goes that Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, was once asked by a student to make an example he was giving in a lecture more concrete, rather than working with a generic prime p. Supposedly Grothendieck responded by saying (presumably in French): "very well, let p be equal to 57". Experts in arithmetic may note that 57 has some properties that make it rather unlike most primes: for example, it's a multiple of 19.

By common convention, it is normal for ϵ to denote a small positive quantity, especially in elementary real analysis or topology courses. Math students will therefore get very used to seeing proofs that begin "Let ϵ > 0". From this subversion of expectations emerges humour. (Or not.)

These three results date back to the early 20th century and work being done on the foundation of mathematics. The axiom of choice -- which says, approximately, that given any (potentially infinite) collection of (potentially infinite) sets it is always possible to construct a new set by arbitrarily choosing exactly one element from each of the given sets -- would turn out to be the most controversial of the so called ZFC axioms that were later adopted as the basis of set theory by most mathematicians. It turns out that this axiom is independent of the others: both it and its negation are consistent with remaining ZF axioms. Both the well-ordering principle and Zorn's lemma can be proved if you assume the axiom of choice, and moreover they are equivalent to it: if either one is true then the axiom of choice must also be true. It would therefore be an error to declare one of the three "obviously true" while another was "obviously false": either they are all true or they are all false. (But you can't decide which without choosing a new set of axioms beyond ZFC.)

To begin solving an elementary maths problem in a classroom, a teacher says "Suppose the answer to the question is x". A student raises their hand: "But, sir. What if the answer is not x?" To be fair, Wittgenstein never said it was funny, but he did allegedly think it was clever.

A cynic might make much the same claim about this post, and they'd be right.

[coruscatingdust]

i saw your recent post about philosophy in academia, and as an undergraduate philosophy student, i completely agree with you ! looking at your profile, you seem incredibly cool, and i hope all is going well with your research — virtue ethics is absolutely fascinating !!

thank you so much for your kind words! Academic philosophy can be disenchanting and disappointing at times but there are those rare moments when you come across really engaging writers and those who are invested in asking the bigger questions, even when these discussions center on topics like language and logic (like Wittgenstein or some philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein like Stanley Cavell or Cora Diamond). I just wish there was more room to think and write creatively and explore issues connected with how we live and see the world, what dispositions and attitudes we can cultivate a virtuous way of coming to know the world.

For me, studying philosophy means being able to ask clear and honest questions about the ways we see the world. In one sense, it provides us different lenses which enable us to make sense of our actions, our thoughts, our purposes, and the events that happen in the world. But it also provides us with the tools to critique and re-examine the very lenses we have adopted.

It helps us reconfigure the relationship between concepts, definitions, and theories that are so often be employed without a real consideration of just what the words and concepts we use really mean. It is a way of delineating the excess of arbitrary language, to acknowledge the limits of our perception, and to have epistemic conscientiousness regards to beliefs we form and hold. All this, I think, matters to the type of life we are trying to live and the person we try to become.

This is what motivated me to study platonic virtue epistemology. I’m very much interested in what Iris Murdoch calls the “pictures” we use to make sense of ourselves and the world and how we coming to see reality lovingly and without our egoistic biases is a lifelong process of ethical attention to the real outside of ourselves. I am driven by such an ideal which comes into practice by the virtue of humility and curiosity. I also think the idea of the Good and eros in Plato has epistemic significance for shaping our desires and motivation for truth, and that the transformation of our consciousness can enable us to live a life of eudaimonia and harmony.

[anaxerneas]

Some propositions from Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour

22. We do not want to establish a theory of colour (neither a physiological one nor a psychological one), but rather the logic of colour concepts. And this accomplishes what people have often unjustly expected of a theory.

32. Sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning changes back and forth and they count now as expressions of norms, now as expressions of experience. (For it is certainly not an accompanying mental phenomenon - this is how we imagine 'thoughts' - but the use, which distinguishes the logical proposition from the empirical one.)

131. A language-game: report on the greater lightness or darkness of bodies. - But now there is a related one: state the relationship between the lightness of certain colours. (Compare: the relationship between the lengths of two given sticks - the relationship between two given numbers.) The form of the propositions is the same in both cases ("X lighter than Y"). But in the first language-game they are temporal and in the second non-temporal.

135. A natural history of colours would have to report on their occurrence in nature, not on their essence [Wesen]. Its propositions would have to be temporal ones.

[frou-frou-deserved-better]

[image ID 1: comic image not from the real Calvin and Hobbes series. First panel shows Calvin saying What is your opinion on postmodern literature, Hobbes? Hobbes replies Hmm? Sorry, I didn't hear you. I was too busy Considering Wittgenstein's picture theory of language. The next panel shows the artist at age seven reading the Calvin and Hobbes comic with tears in his eyes. A thought bubble reads Why can't I understand what they're talking about in this comic? Am I STUPID or something?!? /End ID]

[image ID 2: a real Calvin and Hobbes comic. Panel 1 shows Calvin reading to Hobbes from a book IT SAYS HERE THAT "RELIGION IS THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES" WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE THAT MEANS?. The next panel shows a tv with a thought bubble reading IT MEANS KARL MARX HADN'T SEEN ANYTHING YET... / End ID]

[image ID 3: another Calvin and Hobbes comic. Panel 1 shows Calvin speaking to Hobbes as he draws something on paper. Calvin says PEOPLE ALWAYS MAKE THE MISTAKE OF THINKING ART IS CREATED FOR THEM. Panel 2 shows Calvin continuing BUT REALLY, ART IS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE FOR SOPHISTICATES TO CONGRATULATE THEMSELVES ON THEIR SUPERIORITY TO THE REST OF THE WORLD. Panel 3 shows Calvin giving the paper to Hobbes and saying AS MY ARTIST'S STATEMENT EXPLAINS, MY WORK IS UTTERLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE AND IS THEREFORE FULL OF DEEP SIGNIFICANCE. The final panel has Hobbes saying YOU MISSPELLED WELTANSCHWING and Calvin replies A GOOD ARTISTS STATEMENT SAYS MORE THAN HIS ART EVER DOES. /End ID]

calvin and hobbes

[aellie-me]

Danas sa Pilipinas: Sikolohiyang Pilipino

From culture to climate to humor, the Philippines is distinct from the rest of the world. This difference calls for different needs, different actions, and different avenues to work in; working on communities even calls for more specific distinction on understanding these units. Spotlighting these differences, going helps us employ cultural sensitivity and pakikipagkapwa as unique to us Filipinos.

I have been acquainted with Sikolohiyang Pilipino across different courses that I took this year. The new challenge that CWTS 1 exposed me to is to apply this knowledge to the real world and improve connecting with other people with the knowledge of the underlying machineries at work. However, the Filipino experience or even Sikolohiyang Pilipino is not just about an algorithm we can adapt to be culturally sensitive, it taught me to be human in social interactions and understand how relationships are important to us – hence the importance of pakikipagkapwa.

Erasga (2015) introduces the concept of pagdadalumat or deep reflection as part of understanding the concept of kapwa or shared identity.  The paper shared the four guiding principles that guide pakikiramdam which are lapit (proximity), galang (respect), hiya (shame), lusot (evasion or finding a way out). Although these are translated to their English word counterparts, not everything is encapsulated by these translations. This is the reason why language plays an important role in understanding these concepts because translations may only represent a part but may imply another concept or misrepresent the concept.

These principles are important for me to understand as a student of CWTS 1 because I know that I can use them to relate to the people around me and in reaching out to the people of my community which can eventually lead to its usefulness in doing community work in both the present and the future. However, more is to explore in this article by Erasga (2015) and their exploration of pagdadalumat where I get to learn about the lack of local frameworks that makes us understand our own culture and the relationships within it. We often use foreign or Western methodologies, frameworks, and theories to understand local concepts. This challenges us – and even I as a student who experienced the importance of research locally and explored the gap of local research on our Psychology 115 research experiment – to deepen our understanding and develop local frameworks that work for us Filipinos and abandon the potential rigidity of Western methods and frameworks in understanding ourselves.

Connected to the importance of language is the paper of Chua (2024) which explores the case of “Ano” in our language and how it connects to the formation of Kapwa.  However, although I have highlighted the importance of developing local methods and frameworks in my musings above, this paper takes on the philosophy of Wittgenstein on the use of language. Wittgenstein, as one of the philosophers first highlighted in our first Philosophy class in University of the Philippines, was remarkable as he evaluated that most problems in Philosophy stems from the mutual understanding of philosophers on their use of language. This exactly gives us a similar feature in our language: the use of “ano” in our everyday sentences.

Chua (2024) highlights that the word “ano” is used in three levels: with definition, with context clues, and without context. This article is extensive in its exploration of how these three levels connect with pakikipagkapwa and how language connects us with one another, but what I wish to highlight is the importance it gave to understanding language as part of culture more. Chua drew his conclusion writing, “language is not just a tool for communication but a reflection of shared experiences and a ‘form of life.’” What this teaches me is that we connect with one another through language. 

Although, there is currently a shift towards the use of English or even Taglish, our language is beautiful in itself and we should keep it alive. I chose this specific topic to highlight in this reflection because I had always been fascinated with the Kapampangan language; however, it is used less and less as years go by as someone who lived in Pampanga my entire life. One experience that I had was when I stayed in Cavite with my mother when we had classes in Diliman. Our neighbor was Kapampangan, and he was seemingly fascinated by how he talks to me in Kapampangan but I reply to him in Filipino. He said to me that I should value and never forget my language because it is something to be proud of and something that I should value.

Going out of our classrooms will teach us how social interactions could not just be taught by simply going over these concepts but actually interacting with them knowing the senses they share with us as Filipinos but also respecting differences across peoples. This is why pakikipagkapwa enables us to understand one another deeper despite the preexisting cultural similarities that we have. These two articles spotlight the importance of this connection and how we can prepare our minds to go out there – papunta sa lansangan at makibahagi.

References:

Chua, J. M. (2024). The Case of Ano: Language in the Formation of Kapwa. Humanities Diliman: A Philippine Journal of Humanities, 12(1), 108-136. https://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/humanitiesdiliman/article/view/9753/8604

Erasga, D. S. (2015). Pakiramdaman: Isang tatak Filipinong lapit sa pagdadalumat sa Sosyolohiya (Pakiramdaman: A Filipino brand of reflective inquiry in Sociology). Humanities Diliman: A Philippine Journal of Humanities, 12(1), 78-105. https://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/humanitiesdiliman/article/view/4646

[kkarmalade]

New Epistme

From, "yesterday/a few days a go."

I'm going to use this as a vehicle for expressing some of the points I'm bringing up in my dissertation that I really need to spend more, "serious" time actual authoring-- This will be somewhat disjointed. I'm a decent writer and a decent editor but never at the same time.

New developments in, "physics" (science) have created a new, "criterion of knowledge" this as suggested by Michael Sugrue causes changes in parts of culture namely, "what we consider actually or morally excellent." Occidental culture and the western expanse isn't precipitated on, "moral imperatives" "New Reason" or, "Science" but, "the careful and loving expansion of the human subjectivity. I would argue here that the father of western culture is uncontroversially Socrates- but the father of the technical sophistry which animates the concrete and plastic features of our society is actually the great Hippocrates. As we expand the tendency toward, "the preservation of life" systemically or holistically we see improvements in the quality of organized human where in contrast we've seen mixed results from the expansion of totalizing politics and technology- even technologies which improve our capacity to communicate or learn. It has been suggest recently by Alan Kay that technology needs a, "Hippocratic Oath." The author concurs.

Dynamical Systems Theory, the, "critical points" theories like those suggested by Mandelbrot and Sornette (Misbehavior of Markets, Slaying the Dragon King), self-similarity-- call into question whether or not, "exact experimental specificity" is actually a worthwhile criterion for, "facts or truth." Baconian science has, "real value" in, "Polanyic tacit knowledge systems" as a matter of critical irony. We might consider the pedagogies associated with architecture and musicianship. Both stem from forms of technical sophistication in engineering and instrument building but as a matter of practice are subjective, tacit enterprises guided by theoric insight. Scientific reproducability while having extreme value in a practical sense is no longer a gold standard of truth in contemporary discourses the way it seem to dominate in the 19th and first part of the 20th century. Ergodicity, attraction, tendency, sensitivity form an emergent vocabulary for an emergent, "post-Systems Systems Thinking" science which seeks, "not to understand what things are" but, "what things are doing and in what ways relative to our goals taking those goals and aspirations for granted." One example of this is in drug discovery which uses a need for therapies developed out of our of human need to be developed out of robust models and understandings of, "what nature is made of" which terminates in new drugs and therapies being developed.

Wittgenstein, Godel, Turing, Russell leading into the Pragmatic turn surrounding Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam calls into question whether or not questions like, "what is the ultimate foundational model for describing the qualitative features of the subjective experience of consciousness?" have answers beyond, "those found the poetry of Virgil, Dante, or Emerson." The epistemic horizon of, "what we actually experience" assumes the ground of discourse in such a way that, "totalizing" discourses about mind, consciousness, or language while at times being informative (consider the neurosurgeon) are motivated by a fundamentally misapprehension about, "the pursuit of knowledge" or, "knowledge about what we are" both by taking totalizing readings of Plato and Darwin to heart in their own respective pathologies of thought.

There's a harmony between, "later Chomsky" and the, "neopragmatists" (I dislike the term) in that the later Minimalist program allows for, "Enlightenment tells us we can know something" and, "contemporary discourses seem to inform us that certain aspects of attempting to have total understandings of almost any domain are fool-hardy. With that said we can come to know something of value that may be informed by what we stereotypically call, "hard science." We can come to know something about how brains produce language-- trying to use this as a vehicle to understand concepts like, "the ultimate nature of communication" or, "what meaning is" is to misapply a set of contexts' which are really-- if we dissect them attentively are ultimately what Rorty might typify as, "new priests attempting to revive the old religion in a new scientifically informed language."

Socio-Objective (a term I coining) stereotypes in culture on one hand related to, "rainbow flag waiving new Liberals" and on the other, "Adam Smith necktie wearing Conservative Liberal" (who are now Paleonormative Populists for some reason. Go figure) both misread not just Smith but the whole of the Enlightenment as being fundamentally fueled by an inner rediscovery of what Rorty might call, "Reason with a capital, "R."

The Neokantian takes, "Pure Reason's inability to give us real knowledge of the metaphysical nature of morals" and, "Darwin with a capital D" as creating a totalizing moral imperative where-in, "the new Reason" is the only means by which, "man the animal" can ever achieve, "status as something more than a collection of organs, atoms, organizational structures, and so on…" The New Reason of the Enlightenment, "takes away from ourselves and our ugly nature" as to give rise to, "actual praxis divorced from what we are as a natural, biological contrivance." It's in this way that ironically the Wilsonian idealist might assert the need for, "Leagues of Nations" or, "Universal Declarations of Rights" Knowing that, "the true universality" which comes from our , "actual" relationship with nature (Darwin) without the vital oar staff of, "the new Reason empowered by the new Newtonian-Baconian…" In this schema, "Man is not really Man until he has developed to the point of discovering that he is an animal and decided to tame himself…" On the other hand the right handed reading of, "what this thing called the Enlightenment actually was" which puts industrialization, Adam Smith's conception of, "Invisible hands" as being a realization of a moral order which can be understood through systemic science and organization. Both severely undermine that much of the expansion of human subjectivity following the change of the millennia relates not just to the development of new, "technical sciences" or, "improved understandings about nature…" but, "improvements in our ability to reflect on ourselves both critically and subjectively." It's worth noting that all together the Holocaust, Soviet Communism, and the neoliberal expanse have killed, injured, displaced, or made mentally ill more than a billion people over a period of decades-- a modern miracle of planning and organization we see the monsters these, "dated dichotomies" can actually create. The harm is far from conceptual and given the potential for what some critics have called, "Secondary Enclosure" there is ripe potential for abuse if these stereotypes can't be replaced with a, "superior kind of conversation."

Old Occitania and the Troubadours have fascinated western commentators for centuries not for the technical innovations demonstrated in their literatures but due to what they inspire in the popular imagination. The development of, "a superior human way of life" may be like this- this has been suggested by Rorty and others. This is also I think shared as a sentiment by artists and musicians-- there's a sense that we need, "a better conversation about ourselves" and not necessarily, "some heroic attempt to achieve a Platonic perspective but from the purview of, "atomic exceptionality." It is the greatest boon that Plato and the Greeks were revived in the west- it is our greatest honor and obligation to attempt to go beyond to where our immortal ancestor wanted us to go-- out of the cave. Out of the fly bottle into the free evening air to make sweet love with other flies.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Subjectivity

Subjectivity is a central concept in philosophy, capturing the essence of individual perspectives, experiences, and consciousness. Unlike objectivity, which seeks to remove personal biases, subjectivity embraces the unique, personal, and often emotional dimensions of human existence. This exploration will delve into the philosophical significance of subjectivity, examining its implications for understanding reality, knowledge, and personal identity.

Understanding Subjectivity

Subjectivity refers to the qualities, experiences, and perspectives that are unique to an individual. It encompasses personal thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that are inherently shaped by one's individual context, emotions, and consciousness. In philosophy, subjectivity is crucial for understanding phenomena that cannot be fully captured by objective measures alone.

Philosophical Perspectives on Subjectivity

Phenomenology:

Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, emphasizes the study of conscious experience from the first-person perspective. This philosophical approach seeks to describe how objects and events are experienced subjectively, focusing on the intentionality of consciousness—how we direct our awareness toward objects of perception. Key figures like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty expanded on this, exploring the existential and embodied aspects of subjectivity.

Existentialism:

Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir highlight the centrality of individual experience and personal freedom. Existentialism posits that existence precedes essence, meaning that individuals must create their own meaning and identity through subjective choices and actions. This philosophy underscores the importance of personal authenticity and the subjective nature of human existence.

Postmodernism:

Postmodernist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida challenge the notion of objective truths and emphasize the role of subjectivity in shaping knowledge and reality. They argue that all knowledge is constructed through language, power structures, and cultural contexts, making it inherently subjective. Postmodernism critiques the idea of a single, objective reality, instead advocating for multiple, diverse perspectives.

Psychoanalysis:

Psychoanalytic theories, particularly those developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, delve into the subjective dimensions of the human psyche. These theories explore how unconscious desires, fears, and experiences shape an individual's subjective reality. Psychoanalysis highlights the complexity of the human mind and the interplay between conscious and unconscious elements in forming subjective experiences.

Key Themes and Debates

Subjectivity vs. Objectivity:

A fundamental debate in philosophy revolves around the tension between subjective and objective perspectives. While objectivity aims to transcend personal biases, subjectivity acknowledges the inevitable influence of individual perspectives on understanding and interpreting the world. This tension is particularly evident in fields like ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology.

The Role of Language and Culture:

Language and culture play a crucial role in shaping subjectivity. Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans-Georg Gadamer argue that our understanding of the world is mediated through language, which is deeply embedded in cultural contexts. This view suggests that subjectivity is not just a personal phenomenon but is also shaped by social and cultural influences.

Personal Identity:

The concept of subjectivity is closely tied to questions of personal identity. Philosophers like Derek Parfit and Charles Taylor explore how subjective experiences and self-perception contribute to the formation of personal identity. These inquiries examine the continuity of the self over time and the factors that constitute individual identity.

Ethics and Subjectivity:

Subjectivity also has significant implications for ethics. Moral subjectivism, for instance, posits that moral judgments are based on individual feelings and perspectives rather than objective standards. This raises questions about the nature of moral truths and the possibility of ethical consensus.

The philosophy of subjectivity offers a rich exploration of the personal, experiential, and consciousness-driven aspects of human existence. It challenges us to consider the importance of individual perspectives in shaping our understanding of reality, knowledge, and identity. By embracing subjectivity, we gain deeper insights into the complexity of human experience and the diverse ways in which we perceive and interpret the world.

[the-philosophers-shirt]

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a philosophical work in which Wittgenstein presents a theory of language and how it can be used to represent the world. According to Wittgenstein, the world is made up of simple, indivisible objects and the purpose of...