Sensational Conceptuality

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Wittgenstein showed that meaning is largely social and structural. People born blind can know about color. Why ? Because knowledge is essentially inferential, founded on the norms governing justification in “logical space.”

But it is not the norms and rules. that found knowledge. Rather, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

As Joseph Rouse argues:

“…normative conception of social practices does not identify a practice by any exhibited regularities among its constituent performances or by their accountability to an independently specifiable rule or norm… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”

Reply to Joshs
Did you notice I was trying to show the limits of a structuralist (rulebased) approach ? Inferential role semantics gets something right, but I think it leaves something out.

Can I can personally refer to what I call red ? Within the 'Wittgensteinian' public constraints of the use of red ?

Do I mean by 'red' what a bornblind person means by 'red' ? This is also about the relation of meaning and knowledge, and the relation of individual subjects to public concepts ---or the undeniable public aspects of concepts.

Quoting Joshs

Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

I'll grant there are limits to what might be synchronic [s]fictions[/s] approximations. But I'm only accepting a social-structural conception of meaning as a constraint and not a foundation. We can't completely reject the publicity of concepts without absurdity. But we need not reduce meaning to this structure.

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n. We can't completely reject the publicity of concepts without absurdity. But we need not reduce meaning to this structure

I guess what I’m asking is whether something like a public concept has any existence at all outside of the way it is changed ( used) in discursive interchange. To be it must be performed , and in this praxis its sense is freshly, contextually determined.

Quoting Joshs

I guess what I’m asking is whether something like a public concept has any existence at all outside of the way it is changed ( used) in discursive interchange. To be it must be performed , and in this praxis its sense is freshly, contextually determined.

Can we step in the same river twice ? I think so.

Brandom tries to put meaning entirely in inferential practice. We perform concepts. But unless there's some relative stability in this performance, knowledge is impossible.

Relatively atemporal knowledge is what philosophers tend to seek, no ? [ And we prefer the totally eternal kind if we can get it. ]

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Relatively atemporal knowledge is what philosophers tend to seek, no ? [ And we prefer the totally eternal kind if we can get it.

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.

Quoting Joshs

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.

Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure.

To be sure, philosophy gets more self-referential in this way as the story progresses, but it doesn't lose its lust to transcend its own moment.

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Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.
— Joshs
Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure

It is a radically temporal (or omni-temporal) structure. ‘Only ever’ self-differentiating, like ‘ always already’ in motion, has self-reflexive transformation built into its sense. It is not a view above difference but its performance.

Quoting Joshs

It is a radically temporal (or omni-temporal) structure. ‘Only ever’ self-differentiating, like ‘ always already’ in motion, has self-reflexive transformation built into its sense. It is not a view above difference but its performance.

That's undeniably slick, but you put the stability of the meaning of your own claim in such jeopardy that it's hard to take you 100% at your word.

If you are making a point about relentless semantic drift, I'm with you, but that drift can't be so rapid that the thesis of this drift is unintelligible. If you deny the ideal communication community completely, with involves relatively stable semantic and inferential norms, you are basically what I'd call a transrational mystic. A fine personal choice perhaps, but at the sacrifice of 'leverage.'

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That's undeniably slick, but you put the stability of the meaning of your own claim in such jeopardy that it's hard to take you 100% at your word.

If you are making a point about relentless semantic drift, I'm with you, but that drift can't be so rapid that the thesis of this drift is unintelligible. If you deny the ideal communication community completely, with involves relatively stable semantic and inferential norms, you are basically what I'd call a transrational mystic. A fine personal choice perhaps, but at the sacrifice of 'leverage.'

Is there any writer you know of that this seems to be true of (transrational mysticism)? Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida?
This reminds me of Rorty’s assertion that he never met a radical relativist, that the accusation leveled against postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction is a red herring.

When you say semantic drift can’t be too rapid, what is it in the structure of semantics that allows such drift to take place at all? Isnt our determination of how violent, arbitrary and polarizing such drift is at its core a function of how substantially we ground the basis of semantics? I suggest that it is those discourses that begin from identity and the persistence of self-identity which are forced to characterize drift in oppositional and polarizing terms. By contrast, those discourses which begin from difference within identity( the most rapid onset of drift imaginable , from your vantage) that reveal intricate relational stabilities internal to discursive communities, and unseen by those philosophies for whom drift is only secondary to semantic meaning, an unfortunate accident that can happen to it and that we must recover from.
We don’t communicate by avoiding drift, drift is the condition of possibility of comminication. Stable normative understanding results from a dance of responsive interchange in which my utterance doesn’t mean what it means until your response determines it, and vice versa. This interchange is drifting semantically every moment in an intricate way, and this is what maintains its stability.

Quoting Joshs

This reminds me of Rorty’s assertion that he never met a radical relativist, that the accusation leveled against postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction is a red herring.

Rorty was one of my favorites for years. As much as I love the guy, I wouldn't take the old sophist at his word on that. I will grant that many people who gnash their teeth about this or that ism are thinking of cartoons.

Here are some 'irrationalist' offerings from Rorty though. I didn't have a good pdf on hand, so they are chosen from some cheap quote site. But it's the bald pragmatist irrationalism I've been thinking about lately.


Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/12612-Richard_Rorty

Quoting Joshs

When you say semantic drift can’t be too rapid, what is it in the structure of semantics that allows such drift to take place at all? I

I assume the correct answer is infinitely complicated, but I'm confident that it involves individual subjectivity (dramaturgical ontology), with various actors intending new ideas, creating new metaphorical entities that harden into familiar literality. Then of course there's technology and the relentless change in our lifestyles. And so much more. But that's a start.

Quoting Joshs

those discourses which begin from difference within identity

This sure sounds like that familiar river. The intentional object has a certain place in the justification of claims. The word 'same' has never been pronounced the same way twice, even by the same person. Form is a fundamental experience. Husserl's categorical intuition. That kind of thing.

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Here are some 'irrationalist' offerings from Rorty though. I didn't have a good pdf on hand, so they are chosen from some cheap quote site. But it's the bald pragmatist irrationalism I've been thinking about lately.


Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

I can add to those quotes sources like Deleuze, who argued that the rational is just a species of irrationality.

Reply to Joshs
OK, I got a pdf of CIS.

Here's a good one.

In my liberal utopia, this replacement would receive a kind of recognition which it still lacks. That recognition would be part of a general turn against theory and toward narrative. Such a turn would be emblematic of our having given up the attempt to hold all the sides of our life in a single vision, to describe them with a single vocabulary. It would amount to a recognition of what, in Chapter I, I call the "contingency of language" - the fact that there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.

He's doing the thing he says he can't do. He's speaking within a finite vocabulary about all possible vocabularies. Trapped within his wee contingent vocab, he somehow grasps the essence of every possible vocab and its limitations.

This is the classic Kantian false humility. 'True' knowledge is impossible, I'm truly fucking sure of it. And Rorty liked to stress that oldtimey philosophy, the stuff he was transcending, was Kantian in intention. But there he goes: Can't get big truth, except of course for my big truth that you can't get big truth.

Quoting Joshs

I can add to those quotes sources like Deleuze, who argued that the rational is just a species of irrationality.

I'm taking inspiration from Deleuze in my flat ontology thread. Haven't studied him closely, but I like the immanence theme.

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there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.

He's doing the thing he says he can't do. He's speaking within a finite vocabulary about all possible vocabularies.

What Rorty is saying must continually reaffirm itself differently in the very act of re-enacting the saying. Thus, his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim but rather as an invitation to a way of life, wherein we see ourselves , at each moment, as participating in a continual reinvention of the meaning of our vocabulary. When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational. Others have more carefully made the point that Rorty is trying to make here, which is that post-structuralism’s approach to language is not a truth claim or belief, but instead is performative. Rorty can only enact what happens for him in the conversation in which someone else makes a truth claim concerning something like a metavocabulary.

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I'm taking inspiration from Deleuze in my flat ontology thread. Haven't studied him closely, but I like the immanence theme.

Yes, well keep in mind that his plane of immanance is the immanence of difference to itself, from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement.

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Granted that we all call fire-engines red...

Quoting Joshs

... his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim

You are only agreeing with me. Transrational mysticism, educated irrationalism, ...
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's irrationalism...ironic-ambiguous at best

Quoting Joshs

When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational.

Again, you agree with me. A consistent skeptic/ironist avoids the temptation to play Kant.

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Now you know my intention was obvious --- but indeed even over here they are not all red.

Quoting Joshs

from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement.

Does he get around to critiquing other superstitions like immanence ?

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You are only agreeing with me. Transrational mysticism, educated irrationalism, ...
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's irrationalism...ironic-ambiguous at best

You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary. For writers like Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger and Deleuze all that’s left of the rational is a kind of relative intelligibility, a way of anticipating the new that finds aspects of similarity with what came before, a relative ongoing consistency ( kind of like the ‘rationality’ of Kuhnian normal science vs the irrationality of revolutionary scientific change) . But this anticipatory coherence is not completely absent in what would be called irrational experience, because there can be no experience utterly devoid of anticipatory familiarity. The confusing, the incoherent, the surprising are kinds of anticipation also, since any new experience will come pre-structured to an extent. Thus the rational and the irrational are species or modes of the same process. The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent. It should not be a matter of giving preference to the rational over the irrational through some idealized totalization, like a dialectical unity of differences which subordinates the negative and the irrational to a lessor status.
Rather, our understanding of metaphysics can be built on what is common to both the rational and the irrational as irreducible in experience (anticipatory structure of pragmatic relaronality). The rational can never ultimately ‘overcome’ the irrational, and has no priority over it, no superior power. Each are modes of becoming, necessitating each other in an endless intertwining dance. Each is affirmative and creative in its own way. Normal science needs revolutionary science , and vice versa. Encouraging and accelerating the flow of becoming in all its modalities is the thing, not trying to catch and freeze in place a moment of the rational so as to stave off the inevitable moment of revolutionary change and the irrational which follow upon and are inspired by the moment of the rational and the normal.

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Does he get around to critiquing other superstitions like immanence ?

.

He critiques the superstition in religion.

“Religious figures and philosophical concepts are not really on the same plane of immanence. The plane of immanence that is populated by figures “is not exactly philosophical, but prephilosophical…. In the case of figures, the prephilosophical shows that a creation of concepts or a philosophical formation was not the inevitable destination of the plane of immanence itself but that it could unfold in wisdoms and religions according to a bifurcation that wards off philosophy in advance from the point of view of its very possibility…”

When we attribute immanence to something transcendent to it, we move from philosophical concepts to religious figures.

Quoting Joshs

The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent.

:up:

Well put, and I agree.

Quoting Joshs

You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary

Rationality is something like trying to be a good citizen in an ideal communication community --- living toward or into that hope. I don't think there can be some final specification of this community, for it must itself be specified rationally. But Habermas seems to get the basics right.

A theory of rationality thus attempts to reconstruct the practical knowledge necessary for being a knowledgeable social actor among other knowledgeable social actors.
...
From a social-scientific point of view, language is a medium for coordinating action, although not the only such medium. The fundamental form of coordination through language, according to Habermas, requires speakers to adopt a practical stance oriented toward “reaching understanding,” which he regards as the “inherent telos” of speech.
...
Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
...
According to the core principle of his pragmatic theory of meaning, “we understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance—in short, when we know what makes it acceptable” (1998b, 232). With this principle, Habermas ties the meaning of speech acts to the practice of reason giving: speech acts inherently involve claims that are in need of reasons—claims that are open to both criticism and justification. In our everyday speech (and in much of our action), speakers tacitly commit themselves to explaining and justifying themselves, if necessary. To understand what one is doing in making a speech act, therefore, one must have some sense of the appropriate response that would justify one's speech act, were one challenged to do so.

A speech act succeeds in reaching understanding when the hearer takes up “an affirmative position” toward the claim made by the speaker (TCA 1: 95–97; 282; 297). In doing so, the hearer presumes that the claims in the speech act could be supported by good reasons (even if she has not asked for them). When the offer made by the speaker fails to receive uptake, speaker and hearer may shift reflexive levels, from ordinary speech to “discourse”—processes of argumentation and dialogue in which the claims implicit in the speech act are tested for their rational justifiability as true, correct or authentic.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComAct

[quote]

Quoting Joshs

He critiques the superstition in religion.

:up:

To me the essential difference between religion and philosophy is the rationality I specified a moment ago. Both Popper and Kojeve talk of a second-order critical-synthetic metamyth, which is basically that infinite framework of the meta-authority of reason itself. Reason is god. I mean the 'rational' human community recognizes no higher authority beyond or above itself.

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To me the essential difference between religion and philosophy is the rationality I specified a moment ago. Both Popper and Kojeve talk of a second-order critical-synthetic metamyth, which is basically that infinite framework of the meta-authority of reason itself. Reason is god. I mean the 'rational' human community recognizes no higher authority beyond or above itself.

Would you agree that a difference between Kuhn on the one hand, and Popper and Habermas on the other, is that for Kuhn the transition between paradigms is not rational, whereas for the latter a meta-rational framework encompasses such transitions?

Quoting Joshs

Would you agree that a difference between Kuhn on the one hand, and Popper and Habermas on the other, is that for Kuhn the transition between paradigms is not rational, whereas for the latter a meta-rational framework encompasses such transitions?

I'd say that scientific paradigm switching is rational in the larger ethical-dramaturgical sense, and I'd support that by noting that it happens within science. Neurath's boat seems appropriate here. Some modifications are more substantial than others (perhaps foundational physical theories are questioned), but the basic style of communication ( under the meta-authority of the critical-synthetic tradition as such, which transcends all of its theoretical products ) remains intact.

A 'truly' irrational paradigm switch would be (for instance) the violent takeover of an institution by religious fundamentalists who found their authority in a sacred text (or in the unquestionable words of a living prophet.)

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Does Husserl’s categorial intuition help us ? Do we just see the plums in the icebox --and 'see' this seeing ?. The inferentialist (structuralist) insight is powerful, but is it not finally grounded in the individual subject’s immersion in the (our) sensual world which is categorically structured ? Does it not otherwise 'float' without its deepest [non-inferential ] 'meaning.'

hypothesis

The structural account explains the genesis of the private aspect of the reference of a concept that cannot exist without a public aspect.

When I am up all night with a terrible toothache, and I call the dentist first thing in the morning and explain my situation, I am referring to the terrible pain in my mouth. I can feel this pain in the 'transconceptual surplus' of experience, in the 'matter' that is 'formed' by 'intentional conceptuality.' I can only refer to this pain in a social space in which I have learned to explain myself and justify my beliefs. But I refer to my actual pain and not the concept of pain.

detour

Husserl speaks of a series of visual appearances or adumbrations of (for instance) lamp that are organized and unified by my grasping that series of perspectival eye-taking as a lamp that endures in time. This lamp (and every spatial object) is 'transcendent' in that it goes beyond any of the particular momentary perspectival appearances it unifies or tracks. But that is all. The lamp is not more than this system of its appearances. It is not behind this system of appearences. It is this system of appearances.

return

I can tell my dentist about my toothache because the public aspect of the reference 'is' its inferential role in the space of giving and asking for reasons. 'Can you get me in right away ? because I'm in terrible pain ! ' I claim that we already understand differential aspect to pain. The dentist experiences my pain as an entity within the world, but not in the same way that I do. We tend to understand a kind of 'direct' access to mental entities.

But we need not do this within a dualist or indirect realist framework. I think we should also grasp the limitations of an admittedly illuminating structuralist semantics. The idea of language as a system of differences without positive elements is beautiful in its purity, but does it tell the whole truth ? Are we really doing all this without an extra-linguistic referent ? Can we understand the referent strictly in reference to our discursive practice ? Brandom's inferentialism hugely inspired me, but I think I'm seeing its limits.

This is part of a broader attempt to do subjectivity justice without mysticism.

Quoting Joshs

Normal science needs revolutionary science , and vice versa. Encouraging and accelerating the flow of becoming in all its modalities is the thing, not trying to catch and freeze in place a moment of the rational so as to stave off the inevitable moment of revolutionary change and the irrational which follow upon and are inspired by the moment of the rational and the normal.

:up:
I agree. So I've been trying to sketch (influenced by Habermas and Apel) the widest concept of rationality that still actually means something. I cannot embrace 'anything goes' or 'science is whatever scientists do.' Or rather I can embrace 'anything goes' in a larger context of personal freedom limited by the personal freedom of others. But that's just my ICC. That's just something like what Habermas offers.

I recall/interpret that Feyerabend was afraid of what I myself find most intellectually horrible, which is a fanatical irrationalism that identifies itself with the rational. This is why some 'progressives' dismay me more than rednecks who never pretend to rationality in the first place. I'm guessing Feyerbend felt this same revulsion at times towards those with paradoxically dogmatic conceptions of rationality itself. 'Anything goes' should be recognized as a framework whose only unquestionable belief (its founding intention ) is that no other belief is unquestionable.

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I'd say that scientific paradigm switching is rational in the larger ethical-dramaturgical sense, and I'd support that by noting that it happens within science. Neurath's boat seems appropriate here. Some modifications are more substantial than others (perhaps foundational physical theories are questioned), but the basic style of communication ( under the meta-authority of the critical-synthetic tradition as such, which transcends all of its theoretical products ) remains intact.

Does the basic style of communication transcend its theoretical products, or do its theoretical products redefine the very nature of the tradition? Does paradigm switching happen WITHIN science as it is understood under the terms of the old paradigm , or does the old guard, protecting its interpretation of the tradition. reject the heretical paradigm as non-science?

Quoting Joshs

Does the basic style of communication transcend its theoretical products, or do its theoretical products redefine the very nature of the tradition? Does paradigm switching happen WITHIN science as it is understood under the terms of the old paradigm , or does the old guard, protecting its interpretation of the tradition. reject the heretical paradigm as non-science?

To me it's a given (absolutely fundamental) that rationality (phenomenology, philosophy, ontology, science in the highest sense) determines its own essence. This is implicit in the firstness of First philosophy.

The 'most burning issue' for [s]phenomenology[/s] first philosophy is...itself, in a recurring return to its radical founding intention, which is never finally clarified or fixed. Heidegger's early lecture courses are great on the 'methodology' of 'pre-science.'

Be we as thrown projection don't start with nothing. Habermas and Apel fallibly articulate our heritage within that very heritage.

We inherit tradition as possibility rather than [ only ] substance, or 'substance' as possibility.

Quoting RussellA

agree that Mary can talk about the concept of colour, ie "colour is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though colour is not an inherent property of matter, colour perception is related to an object's light absorption, reflection, emission spectra and interference"

But can Mary talk about what it feels like to perceive colour ?

I think she can. To me the big insight from Brandom/Sellars is the space of reasons. Sapient use of concepts is normative. Mary can explain a belief or action in terms of perceiving a colored object.

But the traffic light was green !

Or maybe she doesn't buy a can of paint with her husband because she was 'thinking of something a little more vivid.'

This inferential role isn't everything, but to me it looks like a big part of the grip of concepts, and these concepts need some kind of grip on ' [obviously/vividly] interpersonal space.' The actual boundaries of personal space are not fixed, IMV, as technology gets better and can even lately begin to generate images of what we are thinking about. Your toothache exists in my world inasmuch as it lives in the space of reasons. You can explain your absence from a planned meeting in terms of it, etc. Physical/mental is not absolute, though the world's being given only to our through perspectives is what tempts us toward an unnecessary dualism.

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I think she can

If Mary can talk about not only the concept of colour but also what it feels like to perceive colour, then, in your own words, how would you describe your perception of the colour violet to a person who cannot see colours.

Quoting RussellA

If Mary can talk about not only the concept of colour but also what it feels like to perceive colour, then, in your own words, how would you describe your perception of the colour violet to a person who cannot see colours.

Note that I'm not saying we have to accept Mary's talk. I'm saying that 'what red is like for me' has a genuine role in the human discussion. Mary may even say: I can never 'really' tell you what red is like for me.. She may justify this claim philosophically.

It's the same with 'God.' A theist may make claims about God, perhaps to justify other claims. An atheist may challenge the theist's use of this God concept, but the atheist can only do so because 'God' already has a kind of system of familiar uses.