Of course, here, she’s the one who insist that her own language in regard to determinism had better be your language because her language really does reflect the only rational manner in which to understand the manner in which lifeless matter “somehow” configured into autonomous living matter in the human brain.
She doesn’t quite have the science pinned down yet but, as with most other things of this nature with her, she just knows it.
Anyway, assuming the real deal free will, it does sound like she is hinting at staying here beyond our festive holiday season.
After all, this year, ILP really has turned into a No Moderation All The time slugfest for the pinheads, the Kids, and the fulminating fanatic objectivists.
And ILP has an enormously larger impact on world events than Know Thyself, right?
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Not really. It’s merely to suggest that while, from the perspective of ethics, language does not seem able to encompass human interactions either logically or epistemologically, it is “logically” and “epistemologically” sound to suggest we have no choice but to pretend that it can. Much along the lines here of “if God did not exist, we would have to invent Him.”
We can’t differentiate right from wrong behaviors objectively without God, but with language we can create arguments that, in a world of words rooted to one or another objectivist font, assert that we can.
And here he is not alone. Any number of philosophers down through the ages recognized the need for the “transcendent” – God – in order to have that crucial foundation mere mortals can turn to. And precisely because neither science nor philosophy has yet to come up with the secular equivalent of God. Only countless [and hopelessly conflicting] political ideologies and Humanisms and those who cling to biological imperatives – Nature – that revolve entirely around the assumptions that they make about Good and Evil.
Right, and tell me how he demonstrates this other than by merely asserting it to be so. If free will didn’t exist Nature would be obligated to compel us to insist that it does. Down the rabbit-hole of sheer speculation…the human brain attempting to understand the human brain itself.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
In other words, whatever that means. Really, in regards to your day to day life, what do you make of it? Or is it just something that a philosopher might think up…something that somehow allows us, perhaps, to go beyond our day to day interactions and grapple with something truly “profound” in regard to the “human condition”?
Instead, from my own frame of mind, there is what philosophers are able to elucidate in regard to the “rules of language”. There are things that make sense logically and things that do not. There are things we can know epistemologically and things that we can’t.
Given that we “elucidate” when we “make (something) clear; explain”, where does language meet its match “for all practical purposes” when we interact?
And yet many here become all but apoplectic when I keep insisting that we need a context. A set of circumstances in which we do explore “for all practical purposes” what the “limitations of language” might possibly be.
Manifest truths? Of course: that is precisely what the moral and political and spiritual objectivists among us insist that others ought to embrace in regard to their own value judgments.
Exactly! I merely root my own rendition of this in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. My own unique take on the limitations of language…when exploring the existential parameters of moral and political value judgments.
Here however…
…this is no less ultimately just an assumption. It’s not like it can be proven by either philosophers or scientists that beyond all doubt there is no collection of words, no language, no argument able to establish an objective morality. That’s what the objectivists can always fall back on. They merely have to believe what they do to make it true.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Of course, as I often come back to, given “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”, even science itself is left sputtering in the dark when it goes far enough out on the limb encompassed by “The Really Big Questions”.
What for example is either metaphysical or not metaphysical when either scientists or philosophers set for themselves the task of determining why there is something instead of nothing? Or why there is this something and not something else? Or the God Question. Or fierce discussions and debates that revolves around everything from determinism to morality.
What is the limitations of human language when we don’t even know how to encompass the “human condition” itself in the staggering vastness of “all there is”.
Same thing basically. Where does science end and philosophy begin? Okay, so let’s narrow the discussion down to a context we are all familiar with and explore that. Clearly it would seem the laws of nature overlap with the rules of language. The laws of nature tell us about the interactions of matter and energy such that some things are true objectively for all of us. Same with language. Something is either logically true or it is not. Thus in discussions that do revolve around the either/or world both philosophers and scientists can concur regarding any number of things. And whether Wittgenstein is understood correctly by those in the Vienna Circle in regard to “metaphysics” doesn’t change that.
Instead, the “problems of life” are almost always in regard to how we ought to react to the world around us when the way things are are thought to be either a good thing or a bad thing.
So, to the extent that science helps to create a world that brings into existence such things as computers, the internet, nuclear bombs and mind-boggling communications technology, those philosophers we call “political scientists” or “ethicists”, along with sociologists and psychologists and others are always going to be around to weigh in on things.
So, sure, if there are secret messages in the Torah, then why not in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Only for me, of course, my interests is always the same: connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality there and then. And here the Torah is likely to be more applicable, right?
Wittgenstein’s “message” would seem more applicable to logic and epistemology. Where in regard to the either/or or the is/ought world what are the limitations of language when it all comes down to communicating in the most rational manner.
In regard to the things that “really matter”.
Numbers and words. Apples and oranges to some of us. Again, depending on the context. With numbers, as most use them, the is/ought world doesn’t go away. The numbers may correspond to actual objective facts, but the conflicting goods remain the same.
On the other hand, since none of this “philosophical analysis” here is brought down to earth by the author, I may well be missing the point altogether about words and numbers.
Anyone willing to correct or clarify my own thinking about them? This part for example:
What sign? What index? What in particular do our eyes see? Pertaining both to the either/or and the is/ought world.
Wittgenstein’s Significance
Mark Cain on the 50th anniversary of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s death.
Language, mind and mathematics for some, perhaps, but language, mind and morality for me. After all, with mathematics, one rarely comes across this: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
Only when mathematics is employed regarding the very, very big and the very, very small are “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule” likely to come into play.
Instead, language becomes increasingly more muddled when we get around to the “rules of behavior” that entangle us in “perspectivism”.
This part…
“…to describe our concepts and the relationships between them and so make explicit something that we all know…”
The part where I come in and ask others to take those conceptual descriptions intertwined in other conceptual descriptions and note the extent to which there are differences between human relationships in the either/or world and in the is/ought world. And thus the difference between the effectiveness of language in communicating to others what we think/believe/claim to know is true.
How [clearly] science is able to intertwine its own “world of words” with the world as it actually is for all of us. Whereas philosophers, ethicists, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists etc., often seem to come into conflict over which description most rationally encompasses the “human condition”.
Then I take it a step further and insist that “theoretical descriptions” that come into conflict are nothing compared to the conflicts generated “out in the world of human interactions” when “for all practical purposes” they smash into each other socially, politically and economically.
For example, theoretical/conceptual descriptions of capitalism vs. theoretical/conceptual descriptions of socialism given the actual history of both seeking to stomp each other out “down here”.
Wittgenstein’s Significance
Mark Cain on the 50th anniversary of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s death.
The “problem of other minds” is hardly spurious when it comes to creating “rules of behaviors” in any given community. And the problem here revolves around minds that are only able to communicate intelligibly up to a point in regard to reconciling conflicting moral and political value judgments.
In particular the problem can mount when you encounter those who insist that there would be no problem at all if only everyone thought and felt as they do about [for some] everything under the sun.
Once again, however, in using as the example “five red apples” we are dealing with words that relate to the either/or world. Something either consist of 5 things or it does not. Something either is red or it is not. Something either is an apple or it is not. But suppose the note had read “five large eggs”. Same thing. Only there are those who insist that consuming eggs is wrong. Those in Peta for example, “cannot condone using animals for any reason”.
So, how do we determine when someone “falls into error and confusion” in their choice of language here?
And yet given my own argument regarding dasein, there are any number of contexts in which each of us interacting with others who do not share our moral and political values do, “for all practical purposes” acquire our own existential understanding of what particular words mean. A private language in the sense that if others don’t share our own meaning of the words in, say, the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution, truly contentious interactions can result.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Here of course what everyone will expect me to note is this: “given what particular context?”
Yes, that’s my main “thing” when it comes to philosophy. And why wouldn’t it be since, above all else, I come back to connecting the dots existentially in regard to this question: “how ought one to live in a world awash both in conflicting moral and political value judgments and in contingency, chance and change?”
Truth and clarity there.
Here, of course, it depends on how far you go with this. After all, think about your day to day interactions with others. Think about all of the countless times you don’t stop to insist, “that’s just interpretation – subjective – there’s never really any one meaning.”
Nothing much “postmodern” about the laws of nature, mathematics, the empirical world around is, human biology, the rules of logic.
On the other hand, the language that postmodernists use to deconstruct meaning and purpose in our lives necessarily includes their own arguments. For me, it still comes down to connecting the dots existentially between this or that “core idea” and this or that set of circumstances. Power, oppression and freedom out in what particular world understood in what particular way? That laborious, often futile task of separating what through language we claim to believe is true and what we are in fact able to demonstrate is true for all rational human beings. Postmodernism changed none of that.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
That’s always been the thrust of my own argument…that in many crucial respects language seems to be profoundly embedded in our subjective experiences. Resulting in countless “failures to communicate”. And what if these failures revolve around the fact that in regard to “conflicting goods” – moral and political value judgments at odds – human language is, perhaps, simply not capable of resolving these historical and cultural conflagrations?
There are some things languages can be very, very precise regarding in connecting the dots between words and worlds. But with other things, well, as they say, “the rest is history”.
Right from the start then…
Using language, to what extent are we able to “explain the Postmodern understanding of language” the author or anyone else refers to? After all, why do you suppose that once we leave discussions that pertain largely to “generalizations” imparted about postmodernism, and bring them “out into the world” of actual human interactions, we come to the at times heated debates regarding what postmodernism is? What if human language itself [even here] is not capable of bridging those subjective interpretive gaps and coming up with a more objective, “unified” consensus?
Especially given that, in regard to moral and political dissension, all language going back to the pre-Socratics, have utterly failed to bring about that vital unification that would make the “failures to communicate” go away. Here, in many crucial respects, postmodernism is just the next “school of thought” in line.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Come on, we all know that in the course of living our lives and interacting with others from day to day, language is there to provide us with the sort of communication that is, over and over and over again, extremely stable. The concepts overlap with the world with the sort of precision that allows us to sustain social interactions we scarcely have to think about at all. Language and the either/or world are truly made for each other.
Where does postmodernism fit in there? Theoretically or otherwise.
Yes, but identifying what object in what set of circumstances? Are you or are you not able to communicate the object effectively to others through language such that all of us “of sound mind” are able to discuss it at length with no real conflicts?
But, as is almost always the case when it comes to “illustrating the text” here, the example is invariably something like this…
Yes, and how is any of this different for the postmodernists? Instead, as with most truly controversial discussions and debates, “attitudes of skepticism toward what it considers as the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, as well as opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning” revolve far more around value judgments in the is/ought world?
But there, in my view, postmodernists are no less the embodiment of “I” at the existential juncture of “identity, conflicting goods and political economy”.
Just note a “situation” that generates moral and political conflagrations, and we can discuss our own use of language – limitations in particular – in conveying “the objective truth”.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Tell that to physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, mathematicians and those in other disciplines who would never think of the language they use to communicate back and forth as anything but entirely linear. Even among anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and others in the “soft disciplines”, they are able to agree on any number facts embedded in human interactions.
Ever and always [to me] the bottom line: that all we can do here is to note the extent to which anyone using language to communicate something that they believe is true are able, if pressed, to demonstrate to the best of their ability that in fact it is true. Or is true in one set of circumstances but not necessarily in another.
Postmodernists are no less included here.
Sure, I may be misunderstanding the point being made by particular postmodernists, but the fact is that in any number of contexts there exist a reality that is clearly separate from the “interpretations” of the “subject”.
This computer technology for example. What, it can’t be encompassed and communicated in language without the discussion breaking down into heated disagreements about what the actual components of it are or how they work together to make it possible to function as they do.
It’s like those who yank nihilism out of the is/ought world and attempt to make it applicable to, say, the laws of nature, mathematics, the rules of logic?
Yes, if you go far enough out on the metaphysical limb and start factoring in solipsism and sim worlds and dream worlds and determinism and Matrix realities – “the gap”, “Rummy’s Rule” – who the hell really knows what Reality itself is.
I’m always willing to concede that in regard to human language.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Right, like if different cultures set about creating a space program, there won’t be any number of instances in which the language used to build the rocket ships won’t be entirely interchangeable around the globe. On the other hand, the language used to convey differences of opinion regarding whether funding a space program is or is not more reasonable than spending the money on healthcare or infrastructure down here on planet Earth?
Exactly. So, I’ve never really been entirely clear as to what the fuss is all about in regard to postmodernism, deconstruction, semiotics, etc.
To me, they all eventually became just another way of noting that in regard to “I” in the is/ought world, communication often breaks down precisely because language in regard to value judgments doesn’t work the way it does in regard to material interactions in the either/or world.
Postmodernism then becomes just another way of encompassing the points I raise in with respect to dasein.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
The strong Postmodernist? Right, like they don’t live in and interact with others in the real world just like all the rest of us. There are clearly experiences and reasons and narratives that do in fact entirely overlap with that which very few of us would suggest is not objective reality.
Plato and his ilk on the other hand tried to make this “philosophical distinction” between reality in the cave and a super-reality in a world of words that – through God? – transcended the at times grubby, grimy, problematic reality of the “human-all-too-human Condition” down here.
It’s not that through language we attempt to rationalize the world around us so much as the extent to which one is able to demonstrate how his or her own words are or are not in sync with the world as it really is. Something that scientists generally do better than most others. And why, by and large, science generally steers clear of the is/ought world or the realm of God and religion and spirituality.
As for meta-narratives, Science is stymied here more in regard to the “big questions” – why something and not nothing? why this something and not something else? The age old debates about the very, very big and the very, very small…about determinism, about time. About the nature of such things as dark matter and dark energy
This of course gets closer to my own set of assumptions. Historical, cultural and personal realities that shift and change over time and across the globe. Endless squabbles over the way things are and the way they ought to be instead.
Then, from my own perspective, back always to how close we can come to demonstrating through language what we think and feel is “the best of all possible worlds”. Or, for the moral and political objectivists, the only truly rational world that there is. Their own.
But that has always been the case. With the postmodernists the arguments have just shifted to the role of language itself.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
On the other hand, to the extent that actual facts can be ascertained and then demonstrated to in fact be the fact of the matter – historically or otherwise – postmodernists become like all the rest of us. One can argue over the meaning and the rationale and the morality of slavery in America, but who is going to argue that the actual existence of slavery itself is just a matter of the language you use. Just a matter of one’s “personal opinion”.
Yes, given the manner in which I have come existentially to understand human identity in the is/ought world – “I” as the embodiment of dasein – I would then consider myself to be a postmodernist as well.
But what can this be conveyed to mean other than in and through a discussion of a situation involving human interaction in which some things are attempted to be encompassed as true objectively for all of us while other things seem clearly to be just matters of personal opinion.
Let’s discuss Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As either a postmodernist or as someone who rejects postmodernism.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Of course the beauty of language, ideas and knowledge encompassed in a “world of words” is this: that all that’s being constructed is the “world of words” itself. And here the “subjects” do battle only with what the words are said to mean given one or another definition.
Postmodernists merely have their own rendition of it.
What still ultimately matters is your capacity to take this “world of words” reality constructed out of language, ideas and knowledge down out of the intellectual clouds and, in the battles between conflicting moral and political value judgments, demonstrate why your own conclusions are more applicable.
For example, with respect to the war in Ukraine.
In our postmodern world, however, with the internet and a zillion news outlets and social media, there exists many, many, many more “discourses” available. As opposed to back in the day when none of that was around. Going all the way back to our premodern ancestors when, in regard to having a “discourse”, everyone had a place and everyone was expected to be in their place. What makes the postmodern world different is that the sheer complexity of human interactions now unfold in what for many is a No God world. It’s less a philosophy of life that guides us and more a way of viewing things given a particular “lifestyle”.
And given this “brave new world” reality what on earth are we to make of intellectual contraptions like this:
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Exactly my point! In the either/or world language communicates what everyone can agree that words mean. Words are invented to indicate things that are the same for all of us. Here the problem [for postmodernists and nihilists and all the rest of us] revolves around translation. If you don’t speak French and you hear the word “arbre” the speaker has to point to an actual tree [or a picture of one] to communicate intelligibly.
Up to a point, it’s the same thing in the is/ought world. If you are among English speaking people and say “my daughter had an abortion this morning”, are postmodernists not going to understand what your daughter chose to do? Only if they never heard of an abortion. If postmodernism revolves around the rejection of the “grand narratives and ideologies of modernism” that’s only really applicable to discussions relating to the morality of abortion, not abortion as a medical procedure.
And, from my frame of mind, moral relativism here has nothing to do with premodern, modern and postmodern human interactions. It’s a manifestation of dasein.
Yes, of politics. But not when the discussions revolve around, say, Putin invading Ukraine. Here the facts are the facts are the facts for all of us. At least to the extent that the facts can be demonstrated. But when discussions of politics here revolve around right and wrong, good and bad behaviors…
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Power because whenever moral and political values come into conflict whoever has the power to enforce his or her own understanding of the really important words will often prevail. Just think of all the back and forth now going on regarding the language used by the powers that be to shape and mold public thinking about the war in Ukraine. In Russia it is reported that Putin’s public approval rating is approaching George Bush’s after 9/11. Whereas here in America he is the Devil himself. Their words or our words.
Yes, it always depends on the context. After all, all of us are indoctrinated as children to describe the world around us as others describe it themselves. Starting with a particular family in a particular community in a particular nation at a particular time in history. Power – might makes right, right makes might – can become of fundamental importance in shaping and molding our understanding of the world around us. Think of the media industrial complex. It revolves around the corporations that own them in sync with the corporations that advertise in them. Think about that the next you read their own accounts of, well, almost everything. And postmodernists have barely put a dent in that dynamic.
Thus, even though…
…has the media industrial complex really been exposed by them? And then back to what specific “metanarrative” pertaining to what specific set of circumstances. What can in fact be differentiated as true for all of us as opposed to just sheer propaganda. And then back again to, well, I have my word for it.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
Power because whenever moral and political values come into conflict whoever has the power to enforce his or her own understanding of the really important words will often prevail. Just think of all the back and forth now going on regarding the language used by the powers that be to shape and mold public thinking about the war in Ukraine. In Russia it is reported that Putin’s public approval rating is approaching George Bush’s after 9/11. Whereas here in America he is the Devil himself. Their words or our words.
Yes, it always depends on the context. After all, all of us are indoctrinated as children to describe the world around us as others describe it themselves. Starting with a particular family in a particular community in a particular nation at a particular time in history. Power – might makes right, right makes might – can become of fundamental importance in shaping and molding our understanding of the world around us. Think of the media industrial complex. It revolves around the corporations that own them in sync with the corporations that advertise in them. Think about that the next you read their own accounts of, well, almost everything. And postmodernists have barely put a dent in that dynamic.
Thus, even though…
…has the media industrial complex really been exposed by them? And then back to what specific “metanarrative” pertaining to what specific set of circumstances. What can in fact be differentiated as true for all of us as opposed to just sheer propaganda. And then back again to, well, I have my word for it.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
All that can be expressed? Yet isn’t language superb when it comes to describing actual physical objects and the relationships between them out in the world all around us? And with the increasing sophistication of science more and more “things” and their interactions can be described in extraordinary detail and sophistication. Last night the Science Channel took us on a voyage to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Through the mindboggling technological devices attached to the Voyager spacecrafts. Where’s the “poverty of language” there? Nope, we don’t reach that point until astrophysicists begin to explore things like dark matter and dark energy and “before the Big Bang”. Where is the mathematical language needed to encompass existence itself?
Then all of this gets connected [for some] to the language those like Marx and Engles chose to describe the capitalist political economy creating the class struggle that eventually leads to socialism and then Communism. Only [so far] that has not actually become the language of choice for most these days. Why? Because the language used to encompass the “human condition” in Manifestos meets the far more complex and convoluted language derived from the far more problematic reality of the “real world” itself.
And then the language I choose to muddy the waters all the more.
Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
On the other hand, to the extent you emphasize that words like freedom become entangled in language itself…language out in particular worlds historically and culturally understood by individuals experientially/existentially in particular [often conflicting] ways…what does it then mean to speak of any “goal” at all, let alone a prime goal.
Here as well I insist that these world-of-words “language contraptions” be taken down out of the clouds such that in discussing how to “achieve” freedom [or justice] we make the whole point revolve around a context we are all likely to be familiar with. A controversial situation “ripped from the headlines” in which what some insist we ought to freely pursue others insist we ought to freely eschew.
Here, however, my own frame of mind is most controversial given the assumption “I” make that in attempting to “achieve” freedom and to find a “relative truth” myself all I succeeded in doing was fracturing and fragmenting my “self” given the arguments I make on these threads:
Then the reactions of many here to that. Hostile to say the least. Why? Because I suggest that to the extent they are not fractured and fragmented themselves in regard to their value judgments they are likely to be objectivists. And in terms of my own existential rendition of “authenticity”, that’s a sham. That’s a frame of mind they cling to in order to sustain the comfort and the consolation it brings them. What they believe is nowhere near as important here, in my view, as that they believe it. Left or right, liberal or conservative.
At least in regard to the most hotly debated issues.
Only I have no way in which to determine if I might myself be failing to grasp that my own conclusions here are just another example of someone [me] allowing himself to be dominated through his own language such that his own discourse is no less oppressive.
