McDowell Papers Online

A nice fellow named Tadayasu Murai, who is a philosophy PnD candidate studying McDowell, Sellars, and Kant in Japan, has alerted me to the fact that Charles Travis's website has a pair of McDowell papers uploaded on it, including "What Myth?". The "Berlin" link is actually McDowell's "Conceptual Capacities in Perception". He also points out that there is a McDowell video lecture available; sadly, it's in RealVideo format, but it might be worth reinstalling RealPlayer for this one.

"What Myth?" is McDowell's response to Dreyfus's APA address, which is available here.

Tadayasu-san has also offered me several McDowell articles which are hard to find nowadays; it'll be nice to finally have "Hegel's Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant" as something more than a footnote entry. I'll pass them on to anyone who's interested once I receive them, since I'm sure Duck will want these, too.

Since I am linking to unlimited McDowell works online, it occurs to me that this kolloquuim is probably new to most McDowell fans; McDowell's opening lecture is all I've read of it, but the opening lecture is pretty great. McDowell is particularly interested in defending his Sellarsian credentials in it; I think McDowell is simply right that he's "a better Sellarsian than some people give [him] credit for."

On a side-note, is "McDowell and His Critics" any good? The Rorty volume was fantastic, and I liked what I read of "Dennett and His Critics" (I thought Dennett's concluding essay was very revealing, especially), but I only recognize Bilgrami and Blackburn among the contributors to this volume.

Update!: I have received the papers, in addition to an interview in German titled "Kant ist der Größte." It would really be nice if I could read German.

e-mail me if you want the papers: dmlindquist at gmail

additional update: Tadayasu would probably prefer it if I didn't spell his name wrong! Error corrected.

Another update: I have also acquired "The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of 'Lordship and Bondage' in Hegel's Phenomenology", following a hat tip by Tadayasu.

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Education

Please note that I have posted some more thoughts on lecture #2 in the comments on the previous post. Also, shawn has had several nice posts recently on "Making It Explicit." Not that I suspect anyone will read this blog who doesn't already read "Words and Other Things" also.

Well, just got done listening to Brandom's third Locke Lecture. I don't know all that much about AI, and I know practically nothing about early childhood education, so I feel like I learned a lot from this. I had no idea that there was a serious problem with teaching fractions as compared to addition; this makes many old "Peanuts" comics even better than they already were. ¦3

I quite liked pretty much everything Brandom had to say about AI, the Turing test, education, and what they have to do with his concern for pragmatics. I'm not sure how much of what he was saying was supposed to be a summary of what everyone "already knew" about the state of the field, and what he was contributing as a novelty, but he acted like he was drawing attention to some neglected topics in computer science; I wouldn't have thought that pragmatics had been so broadly ignored, given the role it plays in the Turing test (we just need an automaton to act indistinguishably from a person to pass the test), but perhaps things are more badly in need of a shake-up than I'd thought.

That one practice was PP-sufficient for another by algorithmic elaboration meant that any creature which could do the first thing could, by following a prescribed algorithm calling for the performance of sub-tasks of the practice already mastered, do the other. It was noted that this is a bit of an idealization if you're trying to apply the model to humans, since there are psychological barriers to responding to certain inputs with certain outputs (even if one is bidden to by an algorithm). Brandom notes that there's a further problem with trying to find a practice which is PP-sufficient by algorithmic elaboration for discursive activity which didn't already presuppose discursive activity, one akin to the "framing problem." When one revises one's beliefs upon a shift somewhere in one's inferential matrix, every element is potentially in need of revision. There needs to be a way of determining what is and what isn't relevant for analysis, but the only way to do this that anyone is aware of requires using language. But, Brandom points out that there is another sort of PP-sufficiency relation we can work with, that of training. Apparently there are actually empirically well-supported algorithms such that anyone who can count can be taught to add -- but not to subtract; still working on that one. I'd be rather interested in reading more about this. This is an addition I didn't see coming; I was not aware that the study of pedagogy had come so far.

I don't have much to say about this lecture; it is simply very solid, enjoyable work. So, to make up for a lack of content: LOLRussell.

Addendum: I have now listened to P. Stekeler-Weithofer's reply, and Brandom's reply-reply, and the following Q&A, and I have to say: I don't have the foggiest idea what P. Stekeler-Weithofer is on about. He seemed to just be going off on tangents for pretty much the entire half-hour (what Hegel's notion of allgemeinheit as opposed to einigkeit, or Heidegger's critique of "humanism" has to do with AI, or with anything Brandom has mentioned, I could not even begin to guess, but P. Stekeler-Weithofer felt compelled to mention both). His criticisms of the Turing test seem entirely to miss the point of the test; it's a way to point out that manufacturing a passable simulacrum is the goal of AI. The claim that you can't know for sure if you're talking to a Turing machine unless you go and find out from the people who made it, and so the Turing test is structurally flawed, strikes me as the stupidest objection to the test that I have ever heard. I will note that Brandom's reply does mention a criticism of the Turing test, but it is not any of the ones P. Stekeler-Weithofer mentioned; I will also note that Brandom's reply was less than ten minutes long, so I am pretty sure I am not alone in thinking that P. Stekeler-Weithofer was a lousy commentator.

On the other hand, I am curious what N.N. will have to say about P. Stekeler-Weithofer's monologue. I know N.N. has some heterodox views on cognitive science, so he might be a more charitable listener than I've been.

A short note on Brandom's second lecture

John McFarlane's dissertation may not be published, but it is available here*. I'm half-inclined to see if I can rush through it this weekend, then listen to Brandom's second lecture again. I know I was not catching some of what Brandom was trying to say about logic there. It does come out (more explicitly) that the reason behind the PV/VP/PP sufficiency notions is to allow Brandom a way to show that anyone possessing a vocabulary sufficient for assertions possesses the necessary skills for employing logical vocabulary (and, I suspect, modal and normative vocabulary, though these topics are going to be handled in detail in a later lecture).

In lecture-form, it's not clear to me how this proof is supposed to go. Brandom notes that he's privileging assertions, and in general the capacity to give and ask for reasons for what one says (does?), but I'm not sure what his justification for this is. I know that Davidson holds that any language-user must have a concept of truth, since radical interpretation requires us to agree with the speaker about most of what is true (hence they must have thoughts that they hold true). I suspect that Brandom has some argument similar in form to this, but I've just missed it. I don't think Brandom is just privileging assertion because that makes for interesting philosophical work, since he speaks of philosophers being "proud of their logocentrism", of having an answer to Derrida, and of Wittgenstein being wrong that "language has no downtown." He seems to secure this point, though, by ruling some things which seem like language-games (such as the "Slab!" bit from PI 2) as "merely verbal." It is hardly revolutionary to find that, if only certain language-games are real language use, then real language has a "downtown" and that it is not arbitrary to privilege it. This does not seem like a satisfactory answer to Wittgenstein; I'll just set Derrida aside.

One reason I can think of for Brandom to be privileging assertion is that this lets him make bolder claims about the universality of logic: Rather than just being another case (for Brandom thinks there are many) where one vocabulary is PP sufficient for another, logic (and some other vocabularies, I think Brandom calls them "LX") is PP sufficient for any vocabulary. But this is just to say that logic is PP sufficient for any vocabulary which includes assertions as a subset. The universality is just the universality of assertion-vocabulary. Given that the universality of logic seems to be one of the things Brandom wants to explain, this can't be the reason for his privileging of assertions.

N.N. should be glad to hear that Brandom spends quite a bit of time in the Q&A clarifying what he means by "vocabulary"... after offering a "clarification" in the main lecture which he's forced to rather heavily amend. But at least the topic is broached.

I am going to give this lecture (and McFarlane's response) another listen before I move on. I am sure I am missing something important at the moment.

*I should mention that Paul Raymont's "An Idle Threat: Epiphenomenalism Exposed" is great, while I'm linking to that site anyway.

So it turns out I have JSTOR access now

I now have a dozen more reviews of "Mind and World" than I had previously. Sadly, some of them are mislabeled; Noam Chomsky did not actually review "Mind and World." I am pretty sure McDowell didn't translate the Thaetetus, either, though I suppose he might have.

I also have McDowell's response to Dreyfus's APA address, along with Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response, McDowell's response to Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response to Dreyfus, and Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response to Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response to Dreyfus. I have no idea why, but for some reason all of these articles were free yesterday. I wasn't signed in, since the "sign in here" field was still visible, and I don't think UT subscribes to "Informaworld"; I know they don't list this "Inquiry" journal as one they have access to. I was actually looking at the Informaworld site yesterday so I could get an ISSN number for placing an interlibrary loan, but for some reason it had little green icons next to all of the articles.

But today the articles are all behind a paywall again. I am confused. I suspect I may actually have gained temporary access while signed on to the UT library site, but said site is currently 404ing on me, so I can't test this. But, if anyone wants access to the articles, feel free to e-mail me: dmlindquist at gmail. It looks like the issue in question might be viewable as a "free sample" if you register an account, but I know I never like having to futz around with journal sites any more than I have to.

So far I've only read McDowell's response, "What Myth?". McDowell answers Dreyfus's charges exactly like I'd thought he would: Dreyfus has an untenable view of language, of rationality, and of the conceptual (in all three cases, the flaw is that they are viewed as essentially situation-independent). These views are also attrubuted to Merleau-Ponty, but McDowell shies away from saying the same of Heidegger. (I wouldn't hesitate to lump Heidegger in with the other two, myself. But McDowell may be a more careful reader of the logos stuff than I am.) All of this is spelled out with reference to Aristotle's notion of phronesis, which is at least a start at elaborating on what McDowell gestured towards in lectures 4 & 6 of "Mind and World"; I know I've wanted to see him be more specific about what he was getting at with the "second nature" talk. I remember someone called him on this in the "Reading McDowell" volume and he demurred, claiming that his invocation of Aristotle was "merely suggestive" and meant to remind us that the notion of "nature" can be broader than "the realm of law". But if nobody can spell out how rationality is supposed to be a "second nature" for a human being, then it remains doubtful that the concept is up to the task demanded of it: in which case it wouldn't help us to see that "'nature' can be second nature" after all. McDowell's project needs a thicker conception of "second nature" than McDowell himself has thus far supplied.

Dreyfus had also made one of the most common charges leveled at McDowell's position, that it has to deny that non-rational animals can (for example) see that there is food in front of them. McDowell had already answered this in lecture 6 of "Mind and World", but I can understand why the complaint has stuck around: Lecture 6 is a mess, with far too much argumentative weight being put on a gesture to a distinction made by Gadamer (following Heidegger), that between "inhabiting an environment" and "being open to the world." McDowell really should have slowed down in that lecture; I know I couldn't figure out how his argument was supposed to work until I'd read a fair amount of McDowell's post-"Mind and World" work. It doesn't help that in "Mind and World" McDowell spells out the Gadamerian insight via reference to the early Marx -- one usually hopes for the explanans to be more readily understood than the explanandum!

In "What Myth?" McDowell revisits the issue again, and I think he does a much more satisfactory job of it. In response to the charge that because we share some of our perceptual capacities with some non-rational animals, our perceptual capacities cannot be "permeated with rationality", McDowell notes that "this sharing comes to no more than that there are descriptions that apply both to our competence and to the competence of other animals. I can acknowledge that, and still claim that there are further descriptions that fit our case only. There is more to our embodied coping than there is to the embodied coping of nonrational animals." Short & sweet.

(Hilary Putnam treats a very similar topic in chapter two of "Renewing Philosophy", part of an extended critique of Fodor. He brings it up again in "Mind, Body & World: The Threefold Cord". His treatment of non-rational animals' perceptual capacities is the best thing of Putnam's I've yet read.)

McDowell closes the essay with a section beginning thusly: "I am all for the project of giving an insightful phenomenology of our embodied coping. But a phenomenology of embodiment should be conceived not as a corrective to the thought that our orientation towards the world is permeated with conceptual rationality, but as a supplementation, filling out the details of something that needs to be presupposed by any acceptable version of that thought." Yes, exactly. Filling out the details in McDowell's story is precisely what I have been looking for in the phenomenologists. It is nice to see that McDowell is also interested in seeing this done; he's done a rather poor job of filling out the details himself, mainly due to sins of omission.

Will Dreyfus come to his senses? I have no idea! The title of his response essay doesn't exactly fill me with hope, but I haven't the slightest idea what Dreyfus would say against McDowell, here. Hopefully the whole thing doesn't devolve into exegesis of Aristotle, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

hat tip on the articles: spontaneity & receptivity

Brandom's John Locke Lectures Online

Words and Other Things links to Brandom's John Locke Lectures from 2006. So far I've listened to Brandom's first lecture, and McDowell's response. A few scattered thoughts:

Brandom is much easier to listen to than to read. I'd actually seen the John Locke lectures were online before (in text), and got bogged down in the first lecture. Audio's pretty clear, too; I had to crank Winamp to max volume for it to be loud enough, but at least it was intelligible when it was audible. This is often not true of lecture recordings.

I kept wanting Brandom to provide some more examples of his "PV" relations between vocabularies. If he had any examples other than the indexical one (or the merely-alluded-to project of Huw Price, or the Laughing Santa bit), I've missed them. While listening to the lecture I was skeptical of just what McDowell later said he was skeptical of: both the desirability and the possibility of saying "what needs to be done" to count as making use of some particular vocabulary without making use of that very vocabulary (at least in many cases, including all of the interesting ones Brandom mentions). As I recall, this was just what was at issue in McDowell's "In Defense of Modesty" and its sequel, "Another Plea for Modesty", where McDowell was arguing with Dummett about what we should want from a "theory of meaning"; McDowell came out in defense of the adequacy of basically Davidsonian mock-ups (true-in-L and all that) as being perfectly satisfactory for doing what we should want a theory of meaning to do. I am pretty sure these were also some of the essays where McDowell argued with Crispin Wright about the Investigations; Wright seems to be footnoted in every other essay I've read from McDowell's two books. Good stuff.

Another point related to the "Modesty" essays and McDowell's response to Brandom: I can't say I have any idea what Brandom finds attractive in resuscitating "analysis", at least in the handling-one-vocabulary-with-another sense in which he wants to breath new life into the beast. Various attempts at this have certainly produced interesting creatures in analytic philosophy (and in philosophy in general, reduction being not a recent invention), but I can't say I can think of any cases where the undertaking has proved successful. Nor am I sure why we should lust after such a success when the empiricist and naturalist projects are dead (which Brandom takes them to be).

Brandom mentions the AI functionalism program (which he, rightly, thinks is a hugely important part of the trajectory analytic philosophy's taken in the past century). I suspect that one of the big "pay-offs" for Brandom's project is supposed to be that it shows how we can get an automaton to use intentional vocabulary (or at least get an automaton to use some interesting sort of vocabulary). If so, I suspect that seeing why Brandom's attempt fails might be illuminating for seeing why functionalism should join empiricism and naturalism on the scrapheap of the twentieth century. (If Brandom's attempt does not fail, then hey, get some engineers clued in and start cranking out R2 units and positronic brains.)

I am inclined to think that the success of something like Brandom's program is not needed for AI (or whatever the current descendants of AI are calling themselves). If robots aren't "really" capable of using some vocabulary or other (in that they don't do what we do when we use that vocabulary), but can do a fair enough job of passing for doing so, then I don't know what is supposed to go wanting. If a vocabulary which an automaton can understand is not PV sufficient for some vocabulary V, this doesn't mean we can't construct an automaton such that we comport ourselves naturally with it as if it had mastered vocabulary V. Which is good enough for government work. Conversely, I don't think AI work is going to lead to any amazing revelations about human psychology; if we get a robot that can mimic some aspect of human behavior, there's no reason to think it's doing the "same thing" we do when we behave in the relevant manner in the sense that we can use our deeper understanding of the robot we made to understand how humans work. It may very well be "doing the same thing" in the sense that we comport ourselves with the robot as if it were, say, asserting that the weather's turning grim, but there "analysing" what the robot is doing when asserting won't be any easier (or more productive) than analysing what a human does.

Brandom does seem to have some sort of argument to the effect that any discourse which supports assertion (and some other things I'm forgetting) will have to support modal terms, and normative terms, as well. That might be interesting. I still feel the hairs on my neck raise when modal talk comes up; it still looks suspicious to me. Don't trust the stuff more than I have to. I'm fine with "necessarily", "possibly", "maybe" et al as ways to modify the strength of one's doxastic commitments on a particular point; I suspect that something more sinister than this is often afoot. But perhaps I just haven't had cause to need to speak of necessity, and if I do then I'll warm up to those strange little boxes and diamonds.

I've noticed that McDowell quotes Wittgenstein (chapter & verse) rather often when writing (or speaking) about him. I notice that Brandom's longest actual quote from Wittgenstein is "look to the use" or "language is a motley", and I do not believe he gave the citations; generally, the only direct liftings from Wittgenstein are two- or three-word slogans. Brandom also notes that what he gets from Wittgenstein is something Wittgenstein wouldn't have found interesting or worthwhile, and which he would not want to encourage in others. On the plus side, at least Brandom is self-conscious about the fact that his reading has to be seriously, seriously wrong about what Wittgenstein is getting at -- not that he seems to care. I suspect N.N. got annoyed at these bits of the lecture.

I should probably listen to Brandom's reply to McDowell's reply while it is still fresh in my mind, but I should also have started the reading for Property about two hours ago. Hopefully writing a little something helps me to recall what the devil I just spent two hours listening to.

It would certainly be nice for the John Locke lectures to get more attention in general.

I need to get a copy of the current issue of Inquiry. McDowell responding to Dreyfus's APA address sounds awesome and is exactly the sort of thing I want to see happen over and over again.

Huh, I have somehow spent almost an hour and a half tooling around with this post. Hopefully the Property reading's short! ;_;

Blogroll Updated

Spontaneity and Receptivity is a blog about "Mind and World." The only way that can really go badly is if he never posts. I've found that even a bad article about "Mind and World" is pretty good; the only one I can recall not liking at all was Cripsin Wright's screed in "Reading Mind and World." I couldn't even finish that mess. Even that was worthwhile for McDowell's response, in the same volume.

Laelaps: Dinosaurs are awesome. So is intellectual history. Long posts about the history of paleontology are thus double-awesome.

My life as a 1-L begins tomorrow, and I've spent the past five days getting moved into my new apartment, but I have several things I want to blog about: Wittgenstein and Deconstruction was one of those articles which is nice for saying just the sorts of things you wanted someone to say, so you didn't have to make up a strawman to beat up on. The recent NDPR review of Macintyre's collected essays was much the same. But, I have to be out the door at 7:30 in the morning, and I still have to vacuum up all the dirt we kicked up putting together modular furniture. After that's done, I'm thinking: Sonic the Hedgehog Collection on the Gamecube, or maybe watch some more of the 10th season of The Simpsons. I'm up to the "Max Powers" episode, which I recall as being less egregiously unfunny than most of the later episodes.

This posts basically exists for two reasons: Remind myself that I wanted to blog about those two articles, and see if that guy at Spontaneity & Receptivity just links to anyone who links to him.

A Narcissism of Small differences

This interview with Derrida annoyed me more than it probably should, which I find to be a common experience with Derrida and Derrideans. So, might as well post about what I don't like. (as it so happens, I ended up merely making disjointed remarks; this seems to me to be quite fitting.)

What does it matter when philosophy started, or what is or is not philosophy, or if philosophy nowadays is or is not the same sort of thing (or a similar sort of thing) as Plato did, or as Heraclitus did? I'd write this off as one of the stupid questions interviewers ask when they don't know the subject, but Heidegger really did seem to think that ancient Greek history was Very Important for philosophy nowadays (indeed, for life & thought themselves nowadays), and Derrida seems to join in with the "We Must Seriously Engage The Platonic Dialogues If We Are To Think Today" silliness. As if history of philosophy just is philosophy, as if "participating in the tradition" meant writing commentaries rather than just doing things which are more or less like what previous folks have done. Heidegger seems to have some weird volkische ideas backing his intuitions about how important the history of thought is, what relation serious thought has to have to its history etc., but I'm not sure why Derrida hangs on to anything of the sort. Greek puns aren't going to help you make progress in understanding anything except what Greek words sound like other Greek words. Do they really blather about "love of wisdom" every year in French philosophy departments? I can see doing it once at the start of an undergrad course (like how many dull speeches begin with "Webster's Dictionary defines this as..."), but every year? What's the point in developing cleverer and cleverer answers to a question like that? What benefit could come from asking the question repeatedly, except the development of cleverness in answering it?

"This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other - to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other" -- here I detect a move that I encountered a fair bit as an undergrad, the shift from "respect for another" to "respect for the Other". I suspect that those who want to develop a "Christian ethics" are particularly vulnerable to this sort of sliding. The problem is that in everyday respect, love, attention there is not anything particularly radical: I comport myself with you in a way that we both find agreeable, I try to look out for your best interests (even, sometimes, when they diverge from my own), I listen to what you have to say and try to not fool myself into thinking you're happy when you aren't etc. In the first place, there's not a need for a "theory of friendship" or a "definition of love"; that sort of understanding is quite useless if what one cares about is love, friendship etc. Nor is anything in this made clearer by talking of "the otherness of the Other" or "the absolute Other" or "irreducible Otherness" or "violence towards the Other". The fact that an everyday practice is going on does not mean that there is some sort of metaphysical whotsits backing it, influencing it, controlling it, guiding it, and so there is not necessarily a demand for a counter-theory in a similar register as that imagined theory (even a counter-theory which is supposed to be "antitheoretical" or "subversive" or "antimetaphysical").
Theologians often want to go from talk about love between people, friendship, respect to love of God, worship, religion as if they were merely continuing the conversation, but this sort of move is a change of topic -- metabasis eis allos genos is the Greek, I believe.

There's a problem from the other direction too, I think: denying that "the absolutely Other" is intelligible is taken to be akin to hating friendship and love and peace and happiness, when really all that is meant is that "otherness" isn't something that makes sense when you push it very far. Red is one color, green is another; sand is different from glass; red and green are both colors; sand and glass have roughly the same chemical makeup; but it makes no sense to ask whether red is the same as or different from glass, or whether "the true is more or less identical to the good." Roughly put: "the other X" or "another X" is intelligible for most values of X, but not for an X with no value. And in all of this "unintelligible" is meant in the only sense it ever has: It makes as much sense as "fserra2trfer342 r4j34jq4neu2 4jh43ujhu4hi34". It is not that the "absolutely Other" merely escapes understanding, or that understanding fails to comprehend it, but that there is mere babble in all talk of this sort. There is no there there.

(I take this to be a broadly Hegelian point, and I think Heidegger and Derrida are both explicitly setting their faces against Hegel in defending some such bogeyman as "the Other." The only hint I've been able to find for why they might do this is because Hegel is associated with totalitarianism, or some octopus-like behemoth named Liberal Capitalism, or The System Which Must Assimilate All Comers, or some such silliness; or else he's just not holding out the promise of the poetic Rhineland soil which is supposed to save us all, nor is he a messianic figure. So then attacking Hegel's muted spinozism is supposed to be of a piece with opposing various bad political movements. As if it was the Logic, and not Hegel's knowledge of economics and liberal political thought, that was motivating the Rechtsphilosophie.)

(if there is anything to the Heideggerian/Derridean defense of the capital-O "Other" that isn't just politics in disguise, then I suspect that it's just the Myth of the Given and/or the Scheme/Content dualism again. Which would, again, be places where the right move is Hegelian -- in this case, Hegel in the guise of Sellars and Davidson, both of whom say nice things about Kant while espousing positions that are more Hegel than Kant.)

"When you address the Other, even if it is to oppose the Other, you make a sort of promise - that is, to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other. That's an irreducible affirmation, its the original ethics if you want." It seems that to "address the Other as something other than Other" is simply to not address the Other at all. In which case "as Other" is only pleonasm, and does not actually rule out anything. The same with "not to reduce the otherness of the Other" -- if one could reduce the "otherness of the Other" then it would of course be intelligible that one might not do this, or even shouldn't do this, or in fact never do do this. But here the idea seems to be that inevitably the "otherness of the Other" is not reduced. In which case it's no accomplishment when there isn't a reduction; nothing happens thereby. If something was supposed to be, or claimed to be, "reducing the otherness of the Other" then this simply shows that words are being used oddly -- there is not a claim to be "reducing the otherness of the Other" or an accusation that this has in fact happened, but merely a homonymous phrase.

From the interviewer, a description which Derrida does not reject: "To many of your readers, one of the important consequences of reading your works is the realization that criticism from an "outside" position is no longer possible, that one is always working with inherited language, and because one inherits language, one inevitably works within a shared framework." Here there is a very salutary point combined with a very confused one: The "outside" position is not no longer possible, but was never a position at all. Nor is it something that might become possible, or one that (so to speak) God might take up. To have something in view means to have a point from which to view things; the point of view does not occlude, but is that which makes vision possible. (One cannot see everything from every point, but this merely means that one must move around to see more things; one must experiment to deepen one's understanding. But the goal is not a viewpoint which encompasses everything, but merely a multitude of viewpoints which allow one to carry out the tasks which one takes to be desirable at various points. There is no limit to what one might be seeking after, but "Everything!" is not an intelligible answer to such a question.) Thus there is no sense to worrying about the fact that one is always working with a "shared framework"; an idiomatic framework would not intelligibly do the work of a framework, since what is in view is our only world and not some private objects, nor does a framework distort or shape anything, but puts a viewer in direct contact with the objects & events, the things & happenings, which fill our lives. Derrida seems to half-see this: He wants to put the point as being that the framework doesn't always have these nefarious effects, because it's constitutionally defective (as are all frameworks). "When you inherit a language, it does not mean you are totally in it or you are passively programmed by it. To inherit means to be able to, of course, appropriate this language, to transform it, to select something. Heritage is not something you are given as a whole. It is something that calls for interpretations, selections, reactions, response and responsibility. When you take your responsibility as an heir, you are not simply subjected to the heritage, you are not called to simply conserve or keep this heritage as it is, intact. You have to make it live and survive, and that is a process - a selective and interpretive process.... I would even say that in order to make something new happen, you have to inherit, you have to be inside the language, inside the tradition. You would not be able to transform or displace anything without in some way being inside the tradition, without understanding the language." I can't make up my mind if this is a very good & correct thing to say, or if it is deeply confused. "Heritage is not something you are given as a whole" seems to me to be a very bad way to put things, since it suggests that there is a whole, but it is simply not given, when I would much prefer to say that what one gains in learning a language, in working in a tradition, just is this ability to do what needs doing, to understand things, to have one's eyes opened to the world, to become able to make one's own mark on things. I suspect that Derrida's desire to say bad things about "conservatism" and "reactionaries" motivates some of this; there must be a way to describe those who do cling to "dead tradition" as doing something bad. I suspect, though, that the difference between "reactionaries" and "progressives" (or "revolutionaries") is not a difference in kind, but a difference in taste: One doesn't like the reactionaries, but one feels a regard for the other group. Both, it seems to me, are taking up elements from the tradition and bringing it forward; trying to maintain an oppressive old code is still to do something in the present, and is not literally dwelling in the past. This is not to say that "reactionaries" are really a sort of progressive, or that they betray their own reactionary nature, but that the demarcation was never a fit one to start with; it didn't carve reality up at the joints, but just hacked at things gracelessly.

Jaroslav Pelikan distinguished between "tradition" and "traditionalism" thusly: Tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. This is a nice picture for playing up the important of tradition (which is more noticeable in theology, Pelikan's home discipline, but the point has broader application). I like the line a good bit. But it is, again, striking out against reactionary forces at the expense of being entirely truthful: the "dead faith" of the reactionaries is of course a faith still, though it be an infernal sort of faith, and so "dead" here means not "not alive" but rather "bad." To call something a "dead faith" is to denigrate it. This is of course not to end up with a futile relativism, since insofar as we agree that something should be denigrated (perhaps while we actually denigrate it), then there is no room for us to have skeptical doubts about whether or not our denigration is in the right or not. So "N is denigrating X" can only seem like a skeptical rendering of "X is bad" (in N's mouth) so long as I really am undecided about my own views on X; "N and I are denigrating X" does not leave open the question, neither for N nor for me, whether or not X is up to snuff. The question may of course be broached and earnestly engaged with, but only against a background of notions which are not currently being held open to question.

"So I think there are inventive forms of respecting the tradition, and there are reactive or non-inventive forms. But I would not say that in order to invent something new, or to make something new happen, you have to betray the tradition or to forget the tradition." The only way I can make sense of this is if "inventive" means "good inventive." I don't know how a reactionary response is supposed to be non-inventive, given that it is a response.

To end on a happy note, I very much liked this bit: "If you expect an answer in the form of a "yes or no", I would say no. But if you give me more time, I would be more hesitant." If only he could hesitate before he said "no" as well!