The Metaphysics of Lobstergod

DR linked to a silly "New Apps" post, "In Praise of the Incredulous Stare", and I'm proud enough of my comments on his comments on the comments to that post that I'm making a post out of them.

Here is a defense of philosophers who boldly go against common sense. It's weird (not exactly unusual, but disorienting) to see things from that point of view. In comments there, dmf writes that "If memory serves Rorty reads Davidson, after Kuhn, on "living" metaphors as non-sensical creations (perhaps provoked by encounters with the unassimilated) that evoke paradigm shifts and then are slowly incorporated into everyday use and slowly “die”." I don't know whether Rorty would have liked calling such things nonsensical (maybe that's just the word that Davidson uses, I don't know), but otherwise this idea sounds fine to me. It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me.

Rorty wouldn't have been entirely happy with calling such things nonsense, and Davidson didn't. The problem with doing so is that the question of sense/nonsense is orthogonal to the issue of something's functioning as a live metaphor. A true sentence such as "Obama puts his pants on one leg at a time" or a false one such as "Love is a battlefield" can function as metaphors, and so can sentences like "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language" where I don't know what to say about its truth, falsity, or sensicality (does it presuppose that language can sleep? is "of language" an objective or subjective genitive?). And then some sentences of patent nonsense ("Books are rhomboid fluorine") and some sensical sentences ("There are black dogs") would be hard-pressed to do any work as metaphors. Sense/nonsense and good metaphor/bad metaphor are just independent axes of assessment.

Davidson says that metaphors function in the way that pictures do, and that "a picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture." A picture can lead its viewer to think of certain things alongside one another, or in connection to or contrast with one another, which he would not have otherwise done. But the way it does so cannot be reconstructed as by supplying things which can serve as premises in a valid inference to the conclusion which is the thoughts inspired in the viewer, or anything along those lines -- pictures are not the sort of thing that can have the sort of content a sentence has (that is "the wrong currency"). Not all of our thoughts are arrived at rationally (in a way codifiable in valid inferences), and this is a good thing: creativity is a lovely and useful part of our lives, for example, and it is not a rational process. To say of some connection between thoughts that it is merely causal, not rational, is not necessarily to denigrate it.

"It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me."

I'm actually not sure that this isn't a profitable way to think about those guys: they're providing new ways of talking, ways which are initially (at least somewhat) metaphorical (thus their air of paradox), but which can sediment into just being one more optional vocabulary we can take up at leisure. I don't think that this is how *they* think of what they're doing (though I'm less sure of David Lewis than of Sider or van Inwagen), but then the Idealists, Realists, and Solipsists of PI 402 don't think that they're working in the way Wittgenstein there says they are, either. But it seems to me that the shoe fits: Lewis wants to make it no longer seem pressing to answer questions like "What are modal claims about?" by talking in terms of "real non-actual worlds", and a lot of opposition to "modal realism" attacks this shift of vocabulary as if they were attacking something they already were talking about, but which (before David Lewis) everyone knew was false ("There is only one world!"). What looks like (can look like) disagreements in metaphysics are actually disagreements about metaphysical vocabularies: there's only a show of there being some theses which one side accepts and the other rejects, since there's no agreement in how any such thesis is to be understood (even where, among the supposed theses, are theses which look like "...and we understand by this claim that...." or "...which is meant in the sense of..."). The two "metaphysicians" disagree with one another not over the truth-value of a proposition, but over how metaphysicians should talk.

I think this is quite contrary to the spirit of the "New Apps" post, but I'm not sure it isn't closer to what Deleuze & Guatarri actually saw as the value of their work: as I see them, they were providing new vocabularies we could take up (or not), not trying to make us better "understand" "common sense" in the way that "conceptual analysis" or Hume's psychological speculations were meant to. Guatarri said that what he really wanted to do was "say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow", and it seems to me that any value in such a project would be very different from anything Hume could see as the value of *his* project, let alone Sider or van Inwagen. "Creating concepts" in the D-G sense is saying "God is a lobster" and then talking about the God-lobster in geological terms, not "God is an entity possessing maximal greatness" and then trying to derive as many conclusions from this as possible. The point is just to get us moving in different directions and see where that takes us. The bizarre style of Deleuze/Guattari's work is not an accidental feature of their philosophy.

(This is an extension of my short post on Andy Clark's extended mind thing from a while back.)

Ramsey's Testimony regarding the Tractatus

I find I have spent the past four or five hours reading "Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951". I blame the fact that the letters are almost all very short, so it always feels like I can read just one more. I am stopping after 100 of the 439 in the book.

Anyway, I found these two passages striking. They're from a letter of Ramsey's to his mother, p.139:

[Wittgenstein's] idea of his book is not that anyone by reading it will understand his ideas, but that some day someone will think them out again for himself, and will derive real pleasure from finding in this book their exact expressions.

This probably only looks remarkable if you've been spending the past few weeks grappling with Schopenhauer (which I have); it is puzzling what one is doing in writing an avowedly incomprehensible book. This quote doesn't really tell us anything that wasn't already stated in the preface to the book, but I found it noteworthy that he'd repeat it in conversation.

It’s terrible when he says “Is that clear” and I say “no” and he says “Damn it’s horrid to go through that again”. Sometimes he says, I can’t see that now [—] we must leave it. He often forgot the meaning of what he wrote within 5 minutes, and then remembered it later. Some of his sentences are intentionally ambiguous having an ordinary meaning and a more difficult meaning which he also believes.

I don't know quite what to make of that last bit. I can't tell from the context if Ramsey is talking about sentences of the Tractatus or sentences Wittgenstein was using in their conversations about the book. In any case, it's an interesting thing to see said.

A Link Post

I haven't been keeping my blogroll maintained, so here's some links to blogs the reader might not have known of:

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy is about reading the early moderns along an experimental-speculative dichotomy rather than an empiricist-rationalist one. This has the merit of being a distinction actually in use at the time, rather than being one which first comes into full flower with Karl Reinhold. I continue to be impressed with how much of what "everyone knows" about Kant and Kantianism comes from places where Reinhold varied from Kant.

OLP & Literary Studies Online regularly links to/mentions new work on Cavell and Wittgenstein.

The Renaissance Mathematicus is a history of science blog. I should probably read more of those. They're fun.

Child's Play is a psychology blog that regularly says nice things about both Wittgenstein and "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs". They also had a nice post on the "Knobe Effect" a while back that I can't recall if I ever got around to linking.

Extrablogically, I am currently going back and forth between Schopenhauer, Frege, and Wittgenstein, looking for term paper ideas. Lots of connections slip in and out of view. Still in search of something term-paper-sized to poke at.

Wittgenstein: Bacon and Potatoes

I record this quotation for Google, because I'm happy to finally run across it again. (It's something Anscombe told Bryan Magee in conversation, apparently. This is why I never could find it in "Culture & Value" when I looked for it there. The context is Magee's wondering why Wittgenstein doesn't mention Schopenhauer more.)

From Brian Magee's "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer":

[Wittgenstein] used to say that if a man had been physically nourished on bacon and potatoes we should all see the folly of trying to identify which bits of his person derived from bacon and which bits from potatoes, and yet we make exactly that mistake with regard to whatever intellectual nourishment he may have metabolized into himself.

"And then there’s Kuhn’s philosophical concept – the incommensurability of meaning - ...."

A claim in one of Eroll Morris's footnotes bugged me, specifically the bit I made my title.

Using Google Books, here are the things Kuhn calls "incommensurable" in "Structure" (with the page numbers in parentheses): ways of seeing the world (4), traditions (103), "the world of his research" (112), traditions (148), paradigms (150), solutions to problems (165), viewpoints (175), theories (not said in his own voice -- this is part of a view philosophers have attributed to him) (198). viewpoints (200). Here are things of whose "incommensurability" he speaks: traditions (148), standards (149), paradigms (150), paradigms (157).

Not in the book: "incommensurability of meaning".

In the collection "The Road Since Structure", we find the following called "incommensurable": theories (34) the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle (35), the circumference and radius of a circle (35), theories (36, twice), terms (36 -- he does mention "the meanings of incommensurable terms" here), "parts of an older scientific vocabulary" (53), portions of French and English vocabularies (56), points of view (124), theories (163), theories (164), theories (189), the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle (189), theories (204).

Not in the book: "incommensurable meanings".

"Incommensurability" shows up 50 times, says Google Books, and this doesn't count repeated hits on a single page. Often it's occurring without being clearly "of" anything in the immediately context, where it's something like a watchword for Kuhn's ideas about the history of science broadly. Where it does seem clear to me that the text allows for a citation of what "incommensurability" is of or between, I get these results, tabulated by page first now:

34: theories

36: theories, a local claim "about language, about meaning change" (this is introduced with "insofar as incommensurability was a claim about...").

49: natural languages

60: theories

97: theories

188: pairs of theories

189: theories

And here are some passages that seem especially relevant:

p. 34, footnote 2: "Both Feyerabend and I wrote of the impossibility of defining the terms of one theory on the basis of terms of the other. But he restricted incommensurability to language; I spoke also of differences in "methods, problem-field, and standards of solution" (Structure, 2nd end., p. 103), something I would no longer do except to the considerable extent that the latter differences are necessary consequences of the language-learning process." (He notes in footnote 1 on the previous page that Feyerabend and he had arrived at the metaphor independently at around the same time.)

p.36 : "'meaning' is not the rubric under which incommensurability is best discussed."

p. 93: "Incommensurability thus becomes a sort of untranslatability, localized to one or another area in which two lexical taxonomies differ."

p. 309 (the final interview): "...but it struck me very forcefully that all of them entirely dropped the problem of meaning when they made that [historicist] turn, and that they therefore dropped incommensurability...."

p. 237-8: "In Structure I spoke of meaning change as a characteristic feature of scientific revolutions; later, as I increasingly identified incommensurability with difference of meaning, I repeatedly referred to the difficulties of translation. But I was then torn, usually without quite realizing it, between my sense that translation between an old theory and a new one was possible and my competing sense that it was not.... I was wrong to speak of translation. What I described, I now realize, was language learning, a process that need not, and ordinarily does not, make full translation possible."

So, Kuhn usually speaks of the incommensurability of theories. He used the term more widely in "Structure", and never for anything narrowly linguistic. Post-"Structure" he does emphasize language more, but he realizes before too long that meaning is not the aspect of language that matters most for his purposes. That's not the way to frame the problem, if he's to make any progress.

But, Morris is no innovator, as Googling "incommensurability of meaning" easily shows. I did like that Reed & Sharrock put that phrase in the mouth of their "mainstream critic" of Kuhn. And it is still nice to see some real philosophy discussed in the NYT, and Morris is a fine writer. But what bugs me bugs me. And I'm not even touching the "relativism" rubbish. Or the straight-up depressing fourth part, where Morris misses that the thing about the two Kuhns is a joke. (Kuhn notes, immediately following the bit Morris quotes, that he "lacks the wit to further develop the fantasy" and so drops the gag. Morris's misreading is so striking that I suspect it's genuinely out of malice. I can't even bring myself to care about the absurd charge that Wittgenstein is a relativist, at the end of the piece, due to how sad that opening is.)

Also, the entire third part of Morris's series is ridiculous: Kuhn never says anything about getting his metaphor from the legend of Hippasus. He gets it from the boring mathematical fact: You can't say what the square root of two is if you're limited to expressing numbers as ratios of whole numbers. To talk about the square root of two, you need to learn a new way of thinking about numbers. And once you have, you still can't express the square root of two as a ratio of whole numbers. I don't see how he missed this. It's not a complex metaphor. But the imaginative fiction he weaves to suggest "that Kuhn’s entire theory of scientific change might be an imaginative fiction" does make for a more gripping yarn than something about irrational numbers.

Conference Announcement: "The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel's Subjective Logic"

Thought this might be of interest. It's certainly a topic that could use more discussion, especially with the use McDowell & Brandom have made of Hegel with regard to judgement.

SECOND ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

BONN UNIVERSITY, GERMANY

“The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel’s Subjective Logic”



I am pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the Second Annual International Summer School in German Philosophy, hosted by Bonn University, Germany, to be held July 4 - 15, 2011.



This year’s topic is “The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel’s Subjective Logic.” The course will be led by Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) with keynote addresses by Michael Forster (University of Chicago), Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt University, Berlin), and
 Axel Hutter (LMU, Munich). Course readings and discussions will be in English.



There are no registration or course fees for the summer school. A limited number of travel stipends are available for students coming from outside of Germany.



Application is open to graduate students and recent PhD recipients with backgrounds in philosophy. For a full course description, application instructions, and further information about the summer school, please visit our website:



http://www.idealism.uni-bonn.de/



The application deadline is MARCH 15, 2011. Application materials (CV and short letter of intent, plus a separate letter explaining financial needs if applying for a stipend) should be sent via email to idealism2011@gmail.com.

It turns out the new translation of "The Science of Logic" came out last year

I didn't notice when this happened, so I figure others probably missed it, too: di Giovanni's translation of "The Science of Logic" is out now. From what I've read of it so far, it's not radically different from Miller's translation, but the mere addition of some modern critical apparatuses is very welcome. Like, just having some more footnotes is a great addition. As is changing the font. The Miller is just an ugly book to look at. So even if this doesn't end up being a radical change, it's definitely welcome. (Now they just need to print it in paperback so I can own a copy of the thing legally.)

It looks like there are actually three volumes of the Cambridge Edition of Hegel's Works out now. I'd only heard about the Heidelberg Writings (which I haven't had time to think about looking at yet), and I just found out they were working on (and have already published) another translation of the Encyclopedia Logic earlier this evening. I'm not sure why they did this one, especially this early-on; the Hackett edition is from 1991, and strikes me as perfectly serviceable still. I would've thought that they were working mainly on unpublished or out-of-date materials, based on the fact that they started with the Heidelberg Writings volume. I suppose they might have been trying to get the major works out there (with Pinkard's translation of the Phenomenology presumably destined to come out in this series), but it still strikes me as odd. The other volumes of the Encyclopedia are badly in need of either new translations or a reprint of the Petry editions in a format that people other than major research libraries can get access to. (I've not seen them outside of reference collections, even there. Amusingly, Amazon offers the third volume of Petry for $2.30 as a Kindle edition, but this is actually just the version you can find online at places like Marxists.org, not even the Miller edition that has the Zusatze etc. So save your $2.30, nature-philosophers!)

Anyway, I'm reading di Giovanni's preface to "The Science of Logic" now. One bit that leaped out at me when I was reading:
"In this respect, since [The Phenomenology of Spirit] is governed throughout by the idea of spirit, it also constitutes the First Part of the System of Science, as Hegel surnamed it in 1807. This is a title which was dropped in the second edition of 1832, because it no longer corresponded to the subsequent publication history of the then planned System, and because Hegel later incorporated a much abbreviated version of the Phenomenology in the Encyclopedia as part of the Philosophy of Spirit."

I was very happy to see someone established say this; I've never actually seen it stated in print before (though I've said it on blogs). I have seen the opposed view (both in print and online), that the Phenomenology elevates its reader to the status of Absolute Knowledge and thus enables her to make sense of the System Of Science which begins with "The Science of Logic", which has always struck me as nuts.

Unrelated note: My handwritten McDowell notes gnaw at my soul like a beaver on soft wood. They demand to be typed up. I am not very good at blogging.