Over on the Death of the Author thread, I suggested a way of looking at the debate that I hoped might be worth pursuing. Because it was a considerable departure from the discussion up to that point, I thought it would make sense to start a new thread.

The idea was to start with a set of fairly commonsense perceptions and assumptions about texts, meanings, language and interpretations that one might expect a theory of interpretation to respect and account for. I’ll mention some and I invite others to add to the list. No questions are being begged in setting these common sense perceptions out and asking for the theory to account for them, because the theory can, instead of explaining how the perception is true, may explain why we have the perception even though it is false. These common sense perceptions may conflict – in which case, the challenge is to decide which perception to reject or to find a way that both can be true.

Here are a few such perceptions grouped as much as possible into puzzles:
Puzzles and questions:
I
1. If I utter the sentence ‘John is fat’ today, and you utter the same sentence tomorrow. The conventional meaning of our utterances are the same. Yet it is possible for our individual utterances to mean different things. We may be talking about different Johns, or one of us may be using the sentence ironically.

2. We tend to believe that speaker’s or writer’s intentions are what go beyond the conventional meaning to determine the meaning of this individual utterance (the “speaker meaning” in Paul Grice’s terminology). There’s a conventional meaning and then there’s what the speaker means by it.

3. A full interpretation of a text or utterance will go beyond the conventional meaning to discover what the speaker intended to convey by that utterance.

4. Yet, this makes the hearer or reader appear to be a mind-reader – how can you know my intentions apart from what I actually say? And if you can, why do I need to talk at all?

5. And when it comes to reading “literary texts”, we often put aside the author’s own remarks about his intentions (as well as information about his biography, etc.) as irrelevant to our reading. If the meaning of the text were determined by author’s intention, then we would not put this information aside.

II

1. Novels, plays and poems, have an overt meaning, just as a treatise or a letter to a friend might. But interpreting this overt meaning is not all there is to interpreting such a work. Such works have “deep meanings” which they convey by means of the overt meaning. Interpretation of such texts is aimed at seeing this deep meaning through the overt meaning, and most argument between critics will focus here.

2. Yet if a literary interpreter is able to state this deep meaning declaratively, he either loses much of what is important about the “deep meaning” or he doesn’t

3. If he doesn’t, then why didn’t the author just write what the critic wrote rather than bothering with indirection?

4. So, either the critic’s attempt to understand the deep meaning kills the deep meaning, or the novelist’s work is unnecessarily roundabout. So there appears to be no place for literary criticism of a fairly traditional sort.

III Some plays, poems, novels, etc. are better than others. (How can this be? By what right can we declare this?)

IV Some interpretations are better than others. (How is this possible?)

V Some uses of speech to persuade or convince are more honest and rational than others, and honest, rational persuasion respects the autonomy of the person persuaded, while dishonest persuasion does not. (In this respect dishonest persuasion resembles coercion, though it is not the same thing.) Plato marks this distinction as the difference between "philosophy" and "rhetoric". (What is the difference between rational, honest persuasion and the other kind?)

And here are some constraints on theories of language and interpretation:

VI Speech and writing would never have developed just so we could write and discuss novels, poems and philosophical treatises. The primary uses of speech and writing are practical. A theory of interpretation or of language itself that makes it difficult to see how people ever understand each other seems to face a great deal of evidence that people DO understand each other (as evidenced by the success of their coordination of plans. Also a theory of interpretation of literary works ought to grow naturally out of interpretation of simpler, more practical sorts of interpretation.

VIII Babies learn language – if our theory makes this seem impossible, then we are in trouble.

IX Much of our knowledge (e.g., skill-knowledge, knowing how to do something) and much of our thought is non-linguistic, and much communication is non-linguistic (expressions, body language).

X Other minds are knowable. We do often know what other people think and feel. At the same time, our knowledge of our own minds is itself fallible (e.g., self-deception is possible).

XI Nearly all of our knowledge depends upon probabilistic inference (induction), not on deduction from a priori first principles. Induction is inference to the best explanation, and is necessarily dialectical (theories compete by raising problems for each other on their own terms).
[In line with XI, none of the "constraints" above are to be taken as first principles, but rather as things we have reason to believe based on background theories. All are up for debate themselves.]

As soon as I can get to it, I want to discuss structuralism and deconstruction.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]

An argument (inspired by constraint number XI above) that we should not let structuralists and post-structuralists stand in the way of developing a more commonsensical theory of interpretation:

Structuralism is a theory of language primarily, and by extension, of representation and meaning in general.
Derrida assumes structuralism as an account of meaning and derives from it conclusions which conflict rather radically with the rest of our beliefs about understanding and interpretation.
He takes this as a reason to reject these other beliefs, but it is equally a reason to reject structuralism. If I start from the assumption that the earth is flat, then we can't believe in our pictures from the moon or in a number of other things we accept, but why shouldn't we reject the view that the earth is flat instead?

Presumably there is some evidence for structuralism, but whatever this evidence is, it has to be balanced against the evidence against structuralism. And if Derrida is right about the radical consequences of structuralism, then there seems to be a lot of evidence against structuralism. If there are other theories of language and meaning which are otherwise as well supported as structuralism and which permit us a fairly unproblematic understanding of each other, we should prefer those theories.
And if there are no such theories yet, we should be trying to develop them rather than accepting the wild consequences of the first theory we ever tried.

It could turn out that structuralism is our only option (or that all other theories have even more implausible consequences), and that therefore we are stuck with Deconstructive skepticism. But until we've tried out some other options, we have no reason to accept structuralism or the consequences Derrida derives from it.

Derrida's argument should not, then, stand in the way of our trying to find a more commonsensical theory of interpretation. Derrida's views are supported only insofar as we try to work out such alternate theories and fail.

[I think I can offer a more specific argument against structuralism based on a problem about how babies learn language, but perhaps the above argument is enough for the moment.]

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 30, 2004).]

By the way, please feel free to continue any discussion from "Death of the Author" on this thread (if that's convenient), whether it connects with what I said at the beginning of this thread or not.
I regard this as a continuation of that thread.

On a first pass I found much to agree with. My eyebrows raised at
I.3. A full interpretation of a text or utterance will go beyond the conventional meaning to discover what the speaker intended to convey by that utterance. - in many circumstances we work this way (in order - as IX - to improve our odds of "probabilistic inference") but the arts in particular (and perhaps "Modern Art" moreso) host many challenges to this approach. Even a text's "conventional meaning" can be hard to pin down unless one's happy to accept that knowing the meanings of the words (which may be overlapping, in motion, in different fonts/colours, etc) suffices.
II.3 Novels, plays and poems, have an overt meaning, just as a treatise or a letter to a friend might. - do they? Depends what you mean by "overt meaning". Test cases include Theatre of the Absurd, or some things on http://www.blazevox.org/

Hi Tim,
Thanks for coming over and having a look and raising a few questions!
First, I want to say that I regard all of the claims above as commonsense views. I treat commonsense views, not as the final word, but as the starting points for theory (just as sense perception and common sense are the starting points for science). Where we end up, in trying to resolve the puzzles that arise out of those assertions may be quite different (in both science and in our theory of interpretation).
Second, I should probably have inserted a hedge into those statements -- something that put aside until later, the possibility that an author might, in full awareness of our usual critical practice, try to frustrate that practice. Works of art which are themselves based upon post-modern theories must especially be put aside at the beginning, but we can't put them aside forever.
Along with avant garde art and theater of the absurd, I would include zen koans. Looking ahead to what I expect my final theory to say about them, I would interpret koans as attempts to "say the unsayable" -- to communicate a meaning or a state of mind which cannot be put into words by means of words -- words which frustrate our attempts to make sense of them. (I suspect that avant garde art is often attempting something similar -- and that it must still be regarded as a form of communication, though one which works by only appearing to have an intermediate meaning). On such an account, the koan ends up being "parasitic" on our ordinary attempts to make sense of the "overt meaning." If people always spoke in koans and we got used to this, we would not try to make sense of them anymore, and then the frustration required to convey the unsayable meaning would disappear and we could no longer communicate this unsayable meaning. The same goes for avant garde art (I suspect) and this gives rise to a paradox: what do you do when the avant garde becomes the norm?

It occurs to me that Derrida should be viewed as himself in the tradition of the koan -- attempting to frustrate our attempts to make sense of texts and of the world (just another text), perhaps for the sake of some unstatable form of enlightenment (or is the enlightenment simply a recognition of how our attempts to make rational sense must fail?). (I've been trying to learn about Derrida and the other post-modern thinkers, but let me admit that so far I have not actually read any of his texts directly.)




[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]

Just a quick hit and run.

I am generally suspicious of theories that present themselves as being based in common sense. I spent an uncomfortable semester studying with Ronald Dworkin, who contends that his own interpretive and moral theories are based on fundamental propositions about which we all agree. If you point out to him that we don’t all agree with those propositions, he just looks annoyed.
In any case, your set of common-sense propositions sets up a number of difficulties that common sense is largely unable to resolve.

There is also, I think, an asymmetry in the way you introduce the subject-matter and the way you treat deconstruction. You begin with “common-sense” observations in the hopes, I take it, of building on interpretive strategy based on those observations. But when it comes to deconstruction, you start with the conclusions and dismiss it as not being based on common sense. To the extent that I find deconstruction compelling, it is because my “common sense” observations about how language works (or fails to work) coincide with those on which deconstructive theory is based. And I continue to find aspects of deconstructive theory compelling even if I do not embrace radical skepticism. In short, I do not think such radical skepticism is a necessary outcome if one starts from the following simple propositions about language and culture:

1. language communicates meaning through recognized pairs of binary oppositions;
2. the binary pairs depend on one another for their ability to communicate meaning;
3. we tend to order binary pairs hierarchically without recognizing their interdependence.

The profound linguistic philosopher, Arlo Guthrie, sets forth the same common-sense view in a live performance, encouraging his audience not to worry about the neutron bomb because “you can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in” and if we’ve got the neutron bomb (which is bad), it won’t be long before we have the un-neutron bomb (which will be good).

epigone

I had thought I might explain more specifically what is implausible about structuralism, but I've run across an account of Barthes' "Death of the Author" essay (not the essay itself, I'm afraid), which I thought might be worth talking about. It is in "Teach yourself Postmodernism" by Glenn Ward (one of the "Teach yourself" series). I'd be inclined to turn up my nose at anything with such a title, but I have found it quite helpful.

Ward starts with three "slogans" from Barthes, which he motivates and explains:
"The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author."
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture."
"It is language which speaks, not the author."

The motivation Ward supplies is that Barthes wants to critique the romantic conception of the author -- not so much ordinary authors, but the genius -- and to give the reader something to do besides passively receive the great man's wisdom. I'm certainly sympathetic to this motivation, but we can achieve it without so radically inverting our picture of how we interpret texts.

In explicating the first "slogan", Ward gives the following view of the picture Barthe is reacting against (I paraphrase for the sake of brevity):
An individual author has an inspiration -- this is a fully realized, non-verbal idea.
He then encodes this idea in a medium (language in the case of writers), so that others can understand him.
The reader receives this meaning more or less passively, simply inserting his understanding of definitions and grammar to decode the text.

If I had to choose between this picture and Barthes' view of reading, I'm not sure which I'd pick, but fortunately, I don't have to.
It IS ridiculous to think that Shakespeare's inspiration for Hamlet is a complete text of Hamlet in mentalese (the language of the mind), which he then simply translates into English. Presumably, he starts with an inchoate sense of Hamlet the character and of his situation. He starts planning out what might happen and at some point he starts to write. As he writes, he may find that some of the plans he made ahead of time don't fit the character as he has started to develop on the page. He has the sense that the character is refusing to do what he (Shakespeare) had planned, that the character wants to do something else. Shakespeare may not know what the character wants to do for a while -- he may flounder about trying different things. Eventually, he hits on something that seems right, and keeps on writing. But perhaps on looking again, he decides this was also not something Hamlet would do. He tears up those pages and goes back again. When he's finally finished a draft, he may go back and rewrite more -- eliminating contradictions etc. He may put it on stage and find that some parts aren't working and rewrite again. Finally, either because he's satisfied or because he has no more time, he lets it go and starts a new play.

It is possible of course that he may write in white heat and never have to change a word, but even in this case, he still feels that the play is revealing itself to him as he writes -- it isn't that he just knows ahead of time all that will happen, and then simply translates this knowledge into English.
Does this glorify the author too much -- make him too godlike? If we restrict ourselves to masterpieces, maybe. But Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives of Windsor as well as Hamlet, and it's not ridiculous to think that Kenneth Branagh improved Henry V by some judicious cutting. The author's brilliance and knowledge may need the supplement of something like good fortune to produce a masterpiece, and even most masterpieces are not perfect (I think Tolstoy's passages on history in War and Peace are too long and that his appetite for such reflections exceeds his philosophical prowess).

Authors are not so much in control, nor are readers so passive as the supposedly "standard" picture suggests. First of all, the reader, on my view is not merely inserting his knowledge of grammar and definitions into the text -- rather he is forming a theory about what the author intended a reader to understand and testing it against the text. Coming up with a theory involves a good deal of imagination and creativity. Second, a reader should not sit passively at an author's feet, absorbing the great man's wisdom -- she should argue back, testing the author's sense of what the character would do against her own sense of how people behave.
(These activities are actually interrelated -- arguing back against one's understanding of the author may help one see that the author actually meant something else.)

My account of the author's work (in the particular case of a piece of fiction) does give a role to non-linguistic thought. Shakespeare's understanding of human motivation on this picture is non-linguistic, or at least inarticulate(like most "skill-knowledge" or "how-to" knowledge). But this knowledge serves as a guide to his writing, not, implausibly as a pre-existing text of Hamlet in mentalese. And the process of revision I described, shows how author's intentions can gradually become clearer to the author himself during composition and rewriting. To read a text through the lens of its author's intentions is not to decide what the author had in mind before he ever put pen on paper. It is rather closer to what he had in mind when he decided "yes, this is what I wanted to write" or at least "this is as finished as I can make it" (though much more would need to be said about this).

OK enough for now. I'll say more about Barthes' other slogans later (unless y'all beg me not to).

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]

Very quick reply to epigone:

I don't intend to "base my views on common sense", if common sense is to be regarded as foundational. I treat common sense as a group of appearances, which a theory ought to try to explain and make coherent.
You are exactly right that these phenomena give rise to puzzles which common sense cannot itself resolve (as I tried myself to point out), and that starting with common sense, we can end up with some very radical theories. The natural sciences start with the phenomena of sense impressions and our natural commonsense reasoning about the world, but they end up with some quite radical conclusions (which nonetheless EXPLAIN these sense impressions and why our commonsense reasoning works most of the time in our actual circumstances.

And then, I had no intention of dismissing deconstruction. My conclusion is only that while we are forming our view of interpretation, we can ignore challenges from those who take structuralism as a foundational truth which undercuts these appearances. My theory must in the end compete against the deconstructionist's theory.

I see it this way: minimally, a scientific theory that tells us that there are 27 dimensions must be able to tell us why there only seem to be 3. A theory of meaning that tells us that we never understand each other must have a pretty good account of how we manage to get along without understanding each other. More than that, I'd suggest that a scientific theory ought to be able to persuade people who start with a commonsense view of the world why we need 27 dimensions or why we should believe in genes or natural selection. I also think a theory of meaning that rejects much of common sense ought to be able to show us commonsense thinkers why we must reject common sese about meaning. If there is another theory that is closer to commonsense, the more radical theory should be able to defeat that theory, not on its own radical assumptions, but on the assumptions that the theory itself would grant.

I would like at some point to explain what I think is wrong with structuralism. The part of structuralism that I have the best arguments against is its attempt to make sense of meaning in a world-independent, non-referential (and holistic) way.
Interestingly, you do not appeal directly to this feature in your account of what is plausible in deconstruction.

The assumption about binary opposites needing each other is a part of common sense (though not as hard to give up as the claim that we often understand one another). I accept it as such, though of course, I reserve the right to account for it in ways that do not give rise to deconstruction.
(Well not so quick after all...sorry)

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]

This time it really will be quick (I hope).

What if we usually understand each other about mundane things ("I'm going to the store") but really do not understand each other about complex literary and philosophical texts ("Was Rousseau a radical democrat or a proto-fascist")? While I think humans are capable of communicating simple thoughts, I think we need a theory to account for why we have such a hard time communicating complex thoughts and postmodernism helps me there.

And yes, although I did not include it in my sampling of common sense propositions, common sense may very well persuade us that in general, there is no relationship between the signified and the signifier. That is, the fact that we name an object a "chair" does not tell us anything about its qualities.

epigone

Chris,

You said "Does this glorify the author too much -- make him too godlike?"

On the contrary, it does the opposite. In the picture you paint of Shakespeare's mode d'ecrire, the characters have a life independent of his "plans" for them, such as they may be. And this is common to many, if not most, authors of fictiona nd drama (at least the good ones): they set out with some notion of where they're going, but the characters sieze control and take them somewhere else, as often as not. In this sense, the author is in no way a "god"; he is in some ways relegated to the position of "scribe", reporting on the activities and thoughts of his characters.

In an analogous way, it's my frequent experience, when writing a poem, that I think I know what I am saying (or what I intend to say or what I want to say) but the poem reveals otherwise to me. And it is therefore often the case that the act of writing the poem makes me aware, for the first time, of what I really feel/believe/think.

What this says about the validity of the author's "intentions" I am not quite sure...

(robt)

epigone,
Do you regard your second remark ('And yes...) as equivalent to what I called structuralism's non-referential world-independent, holistic account of meaning?
I don't. I accept that words do not name by some intrinsic fitness to the object they name (neither German nor English is "wrong" where they differ in their words).
And I do regard that as common sense.
What I don't accept is that the meaning of a word is given entirely by its relationship to other parts of the language. Saussure (I gather) treats language as like the game of chess:
"But just as a game of chess is entirely in the combination of the different chess pieces, language is characterized as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units."
Words have meaning only by their interrelationship with other words.
This is quite a different proposition from the conventionality of words, and it is actually quite implausible (if I am understanding it properly).

As for your first point, you're right that the difficulty of achieving agreement for complicated texts is one of the phenomena to be explained, but so is the intelligibility of the simple, mundane texts. I have some fairly boring explanations for the former. One is precisely that the texts ARE more complex, and a theory of its meaning will have more phenomena to account for. Another is that the narcissism of small differences often exaggerates the apparent degree of disagreement. Another is precisely that all justification is dialectical (the point about justification I've been harping on) and provisional -- no debate is beyond being reopened if a really new theory comes along. And there are other explanations.
It isn't clear to me whether the post-structuralist view has a very good explanation for my datum (the fact that we can understand simple texts). (I think the self-enclosed nature of language I described above gets in the way.)

Robt,
I think I agree with you. I guess that the author is demoted to god's prophet or oracle. And this might still seem a bit too romantic a position to Barthes -- my additional remarks were meant to make him even more human.

In bridge we use a highly-specific language for bidding called "conventions". In any given situation, a specific bid (say, 3 hearts) will have a different "meaning", and this meaning is "conventional"; that is to say, we have agreed beforehand upon the interpretation of this bid in this circumstance or situation.

Toa player who does not understand conventions at all, the bid has no "meaning". To a player who uses a different set of conventiuons, and is unaware of the nature of my conventions, the bid has "meaning" but the "meaning" is false.

In bridge tournaments we are required to "disclose" our conventions at the beginning of each round of play, and me be disqualified for using undisclosed conventions.


This analogy must be good for something...

(robt)

Hmmm. I do not think Saussure's "concrete units" are words. I think they are sound units -- phonemes, which do indeed have meaning (or at least that's what my common sense tells me) only through their interrelatioship with other phonemes.

epigone

Epi,

That's correct: Sauserre is referring to phonemes as the base-units of language. To him, apparently, words are ordered constructions of phonemes. About as anti-literary a perspective as one can imagine.

(robt)

epigone,

I'm a little puzzled by your saying that the phonemes have meaning, since I'd have thought the word was the smallest unit with a meaning. (I do admit to being pretty ignorant of Saussure et al., however).
I understand Saussure starts with the observation that phonemes have their identity only through contrast (some languages don't mark the distinction between /l/ and /r/)and interrelation with other phonemes (where one can or cannot substitute a /g/ for an /l/. And this does seem plausible to me.

But I gather (from a few sources -- the clearest statement being Devitt and Sterelny, _Language and Reality_, which is certainly quite critical of structuralism in linguistics) that Saussure implicitly and other structuralists more explicitly generalize this account to other dimensions of language, including semantics. (Certainly the bit about binary oppositions among concepts seems like a generalization to concepts from "binary feature analysis" of phonemes.
And in fact the quote I produced above (quoted from another book, so it's true I don't know the context) does appear to make the point about "language" in general, not just to phonology.

I'll put Course in General Linguistics on the reading list too, but in the mean time, is this view a complete misunderstanding?

PS Here's something I pulled off the web from a Google search by a Proffessor John Lye:

1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system. For instance, the meaning of the words "woman" and "lady" are established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field. They both refer to a human female, but what constitutes "human" and what constitutes "female" are themselves established through difference, not identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.
Here is the link to the whole thing:
http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.html



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]

Chris,

It's not that phonemes, of themselves, have "meaning"; it's that they don't. But "words" (which we believe do have "meanings", are composed of building-blocks of phonemes. Therefore, the statement's logically coherent — it's in fact true that phonemes have no meaning except in opposition to each other: e.g. when they are arrayed into the form of words.

Logically, if we don't accept that then we have to accept that human beings cannot "think". Not a position I'd want to defend :)

(robt)

Robt,
I see that you are probably right about what Epigone meant -- reading "interrelationship" as "combinations with". Your use of "in opposition to" is an odd way of describing "combination".

Here's a quote from Jonathan Culler in _On Deconstruction_:

"Saussure begins by defining language as a system of signs. Noises count as language only when they serve to express or communicate ideas, and thus the central question for him becomes the nature of the sign: what gives it its identity and enables it to function as a sign. He argues that signs are arbitrary and conventional and that each is defined not by essential properties but by the differences that distinguish it from other signs." [my emphasis]

and later in the next paragraph:
"Indeed, he concludes that "in the linguistic system there are only differences, without positive terms"" [Saussure's or Culler's emphasis]

and later in that paragraph:
"signs are the product of a system of differences; indeed, they are not positive entitities at all but effects of difference."
Culler explicitly makes the connection of "meaning through difference (not combination) to signs, not phonemes.

Also, isn't it the case that structuralists infer the rejection of essentialism from the structuralist view of language? Don't they, in other words, infer that when we talk about things, we cannot be referring to "real essences" out in the world?
If signs gain their meaning only through difference from each other, this would seem to follow. It doesn't even seem to follow from the fact that phonemes can only gain meaning by being combined into words.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 01, 2004).]

An Englishman, by name Sir Babbit,
went hunting for to shoot a rabbit.
At length, one burst from out a thicket
and, while still running very quick, it
fell, two arrows in its heart.
Instantly did Sir Babbit start
to fetch the rabbit he had shot,
a tasty morsel for the pot,
when sudeenly there did appear
a hunter, garbed for hunting deer.
A brilliant fellow, the hunter said:
"I do believe my rabbit's dead!"
"The rabbit's mine!" said Babbit, acidly.
"Let's split it." said the hunter, placidly.
"Forget it!" said Babbit (putting on airs),
"I don't believe in splitting hares!"

(from memory, author unknown or forgotten-by-me)

jejeje™

(robt)

Hello Robt,
I didn't mean to be hairsplitting or haresplitting either.

The issue is whether to interpret Saussure and the others as saying something very mundane (phonemes have meaning only when combined into words) or something very radical (words gain their meaning entirely through their relationships to one another).

I took your use of "opposition" there as an attempt to explain some of the texts I brought up besides epigone's remark, and I wanted to suggest why I didn't think it would work as a reading of the others.
I apologize if it appeared that I was making some cheap point about your not quoting epi exactly right -- that wasn't at all my intention.
I assume you don't regard the two interpretations of Saussure as a distinction without a difference?
Chris

Chris,

the fault is mine: I should have added a comment along with the doggerel that made clear I posted it as an amusing sidebar to the discussion. I did not mean to imply that YOU are "splitting hairs" in some offensive way.

The case could be made that the entire discussion is an extreme example of splitting hairs, but that's not to fault YOU: it's a fasinating discussion regardless, and I'm well aware that I can (and do) split hairs with the best of them.

I find it existentially amusing the great lengths the more rabid deconstructionists go to in their race to make the "commonsensical" so opaque that mortal minds can no longer believe anything they see or hear, but that's another story and I'm not sticking to it...

Peace,

(robt)

Oh good, Robt. I didn’t mean to be humorless, just wanted to be sure I hadn’t offended. Of course, to those uninterested in such issues, all intellectual debate, or all debate about difficult and abstract issues (including physics and astronomy) can look like hairsplitting. On the other hand, the narcissism of small differences is certainly a real hazard in intellectual debate. One may fall into drawing a distinction without a difference.
While I’m confident that the distinctions I’m drawing are important within the debate over structuralism, I do worry that perhaps I’m the only one who would be interested in pursuing that discussion. Well, the good thing about discussion boards is that the audience is self-selecting – I just hope I won’t chase people away permanently who might be interested in other issues I also would like to discuss. With that said, I’m going to forge ahead on structuralism when I get the chance.

I said above that that I had a problem with structuralism's attempt to make sense of meaning purely in terms of words' relations to each other, leaving out words' relations to the world.
epigone responded that it was common sense to think that names are arbitrary – that calling something a chair doesn't tell us anything about chairs. (Putting it the other way around, there’s nothing about that combination of phonemes or letters that is any more suited to chairs than to skunk cabbages, and nothing about ‘chair’ that makes it capture reality better than ‘Stuhl’.)
This response puzzled me – I couldn’t see the connection between what I had said and epigone's reply.
Looking at epigone's reply to Paul Lake on the Enchanted Loom thread, I think maybe I've got it:

“Structuralism is a theory of how communication is effectuated through a system of recognized differences. The differences are arbitrary and have no connection to their referents, but communication is possible based on the differences within the system. Derrida broke with the structuralists by stressing the “play” in the relationship between the binary opposites and, more politically, by contending that binary oppositions are always hierarchical in nature.” [My emphasis]

The emphasized passage seems to have two readings. I think that, at least pre-reflectively, we assume that the world is the way it is apart from how we talk about it: though the particular sounds we use to mark distinctions are indeed arbitrary, the distinctions themselves are not. Whatever distinctions we may draw in language, there really is a distinction out there in the world between mountains and molehills or between mammals and fish. The job of arbitrary signs is to mark real, non-arbitrary distinctions between things -- things whose nature is the way it is whatever language we may speak (or whether there are any language users at all). In Plato’s metaphor, language or concepts “should cut reality at the joints.” This view is sometimes called "essentialism" and sometimes "realism".

(1) On one reading of the bolded remark, it seems to deny these real distinctions out in the world. It seems to say that conceptual differences themselves are arbitrary: before language makes its arbitrary distinctions, reality has no “joints”. The linguistic system, in marking distinctions, does not refer outward to real distinctions in the world (this is what I called ‘world-independence’ and ‘non-referentiality’). Rather our arbitrary marking of differences in some way creates the distinctions the language is supposed to respect. The way language as a whole carves reality (partly) creates the "joints" which an individual utterance or text must carve at. On this reading, structuralism is a form of transcendental idealism.

(2) On another reading, the bolded remark simply says, uncontroversially, that the difference in sounds tells us nothing about the distinction being drawn. For example, the fact that ‘bank’ closely resembles ‘bunk’ doesn’t give us reason to think that banks will resemble bunks.

It strikes me that epigone’s response to me makes sense if one assumes either that she confuses these two senses of the bolded remark, or if one assumes that she has an argument that shows, quite surprisingly, that the one follows from the other. I find some support for this reading in the paragraph immediately preceding the one I quoted from the Loom thread:

“I take Derrida to mean (and I take this to be a fundamental principle of deconstruction) that our world must be conceived of as a text and that we must be cognizant of the fact that our giving names to things (through a system of recognized distinctions – binary oppositions) inevitably shapes that world or, what for Derrida is the same thing, our understanding of that world. The point is not that texts exist and things do not. Rather, the point is that things cannot be divorced from the way we speak and think of them. [My emphasis again]

And in fact, I can see a reason why a structuralist would be tempted to slide from (2) to (1), if we remember Saussure's point about phonemes. Is there a difference between /a/ when a woman says it and when a man says it? There certainly is a difference in sound, but the phonemes are the same. If I pronounce a ‘t’ in on my teeth or just behind my teeth, is there a difference in phoneme? Whether there is a difference between the phonemes depends entirely on whether the language itself contrasts these sounds (or "marks the difference").
If one generalizes the above point about phonemes to ALL distinctions – between mammals and fish as well as /l/ and /r/, then the language as a whole makes the difference between mammals and fish in the continuum of experience simply by marking that distinction and not another.
But what is plausible with regard to the sounds we ourselves make in language is extremely implausible when we face a real distinction out in the world. From a commonsense or scientific point of view, the claim that we make the world by conceiving it smacks of magical thought.
Sure, our own linguistic behavior is influenced by the distinctions we draw between different phonemes. But how do we infer from this fact that the distinctions we draw somehow influence the world beyond us?
The analogy with phonemes certainly won't be enough to persuade a realist to abandon his view.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 02, 2004).]

Sorry for that long post. Hope I haven't permanently killed the discussion.
What about returning to Barthes' second "slogan":
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture."

Yes authors are all part of an inherited tradition and could hardly write what they write without it. The crazy quilt picture might not be a bad one for what third rate writers (unconsciously)do.
But for original thinkers, isn't Newton's image a better one? "I could only see so far because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Yes, I know that the book _On the Shoulders of Giants_ shows that this was not one of Newton's original statements.)
If the structuralist account of signs forces us to treat Shakespeare, Plato and Darwin as merely stitching cliches together, like Danielle Steele, isn't this a reason to reject structuralism?

Or what about this question:
At the beginning, I mentioned as one of my commonsense assumptions, that there were non-manipulative (autonomy-preserving) means of persuading people.
If there are, then recognizing manipulation should be an important part of the work of literary criticism. (And we do in fact criticize movies and poems as "manipulative".)
Yet postmodernists seem to believe that all discourse is ideological.
Reason seemed to promise us a way out of being manipulated, but reason turns out to be just another ideology (logocentrism).
There is no liberation -- only irony and the embracing of contradiction.
Is there really no way to distinguish between manipulative and non-manipulative persuasion? Is it morally responsible for us to give up the hope of finding one?



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 04, 2004).]

I would venture to opine that in any practical sense "manipulation" and "persuasion" are synonyms, and that "persuasion" is simply a more polite way of manipulating. In a very real sense, all proactive communication is "manipulation"; that is to say, by the very act of communication I am expressing that I see such-and-so and wish that you see it as well.

"Please pass the salt, dear!" is overt manipulation. "Is there a salt cellar at the end of the table down there?" is covert manipulation. In each case, the "desired" result is to get salt on the food.

In the fundamental sense, absent the need to say "I want..." there is no need for speech.

(robt)

That's a good place to start Robt.
Speech, like all other action is motivated by desire.
Generally, I wouldn't speak to you unless I wanted to persuade you to do something or think something -- or at least consider something. (We speak to ourselves in order to give vent to feelings or to clarify our ideas, and I might speak to you for similar reasons without caring much whether you are listening, but that's certainly not the standard case.

But we generally recognize two sorts of "persuasion":

1. I persuade the store keeper to give me a carton of milk by giving him something he values more: $2.
or
I persuade my father to give me money for college by persuading him that this will best serve my long term interest (which he already cares about because he loves me). I take the money and use it for college.

2. I persuade the store keeper to give me the milk by persuading him (knowing all the time that I won't do it) that I will bring him the money tomorrow.
or
I persuade my father to give me money for college all the while intending to use the money for drugs.
or
I persuade others of my political view by stating true (but irrelevant) statistics, knowing that my hearers will misinterpret the statistics as supporting my view.

If you are the persuadee, you don't mind being persuaded in the first way, but you do object to being persuaded in the second way (as soon as you realize it). This is an intuitive or commonsense distinction that we might want to mark, however far we understand what's behind the distinction -- we might use "manipulation" to mark the latter form of persuasion. For the former, we might use the word "justification." But if you prefer to use 'manipulation' synonymously with 'persuasion', then we can find other words to mark the distinction.
A plausible view of the difference is that the latter form of persuasion gets you to produce an outcome purely for my reasons (because I don't give you a real reason, only an apparent one), while the former gets you to produce the outcome I desire for your own reasons. The former treats you as a tool; the latter respects you as a rational agent.

Whatever the explanation is, if we assume that all persuasion is really more or less like the cases in (2) we end up with a rather horrible view of human relations -- and of politics.
Legitimate government is a kind that can justify itself to the people governed -- tyranny may persuade the people to follow it on the basis of falsehoods (e.g., divine right of kings), but it cannot justify itself to its citizens. If we give up on separating the two kinds of persuasion, don't we give up on the distinction between tyranny and legitimate government?

A more valid distinction, in my mind, is between "overt" and "covert" manipulation/persuasion. Certainly, the dichotomy you are identifying is real, but the distinction you are making is, from a logical perspective, paralyzingly hair-splitting.

You're proposing (a Good Idea) that we distinguish, essentially, between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" manipulation. But of ocurse, this raises the issue of "who decides?" and has very little utile value from a logical perspective. Manipulation is manipulation, logically you can't argue that one form is "superior" to the other. It's about like arguing that whites are "better" than blacks...

So down here at the deconstrucionist level we're currently exploring, you've drawn a meaningless distinction.

You're either comfortable judging acts by their results (conditional approach) and so you are in the "end justifies the means" camp, or you judge an act without relation to its (potential or actual) consequences (moral absolutism).

As an immediately relevant or recognizable comparison, some spherian's feel that "established members" should be allowed more slack within the framework of the posting rules (I've posted an average of 100 crits a month since I joined, I should be able topost more than 4 poems a month); others feel that the precise, same rules should be applied to all, and that no 'spherian, regardless of his identity, should be cut any slack at all.

Anyone standing on the outside would say, rewrite the rules to specifically define levels of properly reward the community's most valued members.

Running out of steam, I'm tired... I know there's a point int here someplace. later, dude...

(robt)

I'm puzzled by the charge of hair-splitting:
I'd have thought a distinction between deceptive and non-deceptive persuasion was part of common sense. And if we can go beyond common sense to specify more exactly what the difference is, then I'd think that a very useful project.

As for who decides -- the deceiver is in a position to know whether he is being deceptive or not. If the person to be deceived understood how the deceiver intended to persuade him, he would not be persuaded, and the deceiver knows this. The deceiver also knows that he doesn't himself want to be persuaded in this fashion.

But just at the level of making the distinction between deceptive or manipulative vs. rational persuasion, I do not mean to be discussing the issue of the morality of deception. Maybe there's never anything morally wrong with deceiving others -- but the distinction between the two kinds of persuasion remains. (For this reason, I'd avoid labeling them "legitimate" and "illegitimate.") For my purposes it's enough to think about the kind of persuasion you don't mind being persuaded by and the kind that you try to guard against.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 06, 2004).]

Chris,

It wasn't a "charge"; more a statement that, from my perspective, the distinction itself is paralyzing.

Remember, I said in the last post that what you are saying is a Good Thing; of COURSE we need to make those distinctions, in life. My point was more abstract; So down here at the deconstrucionist level we're currently exploring, you've drawn a meaningless distinction.

I'm just feeling my way through these ideas; please don't think for a single instant that ANYTHING I say in this sort of a thread was meant to be taken as belittling, a put-down, derisory, whatever.

But I can't get away from the concept that, at an elemental level, the essence of language is manipulation, and down at that level there's no such thing as "good" or "bad". The uses to which we put our manipulative abilities, of course, are a whole other story.

Makes me think of the dude that was sitting at a bar in St. Louis, nursing a bourbon-and-branch, when an extremely attractive, apparently unaccompanied, woman sat down two stools south of him. After watching her toss back 3 scotches in quick succesion, our guy decided to take a shot at it...

He slid down beside her, looked her straight in the eye, and said: "If I give you a million dollars, will you sleep with me tonight?"

She looked him up and down, nodded in decision, and said "Sure!"

He said, "Great!", pulled out his wallet, removed a 50-dollar bill, passed it to her, and said "Let's go out in the alley for a quick blow job!"

She looked at him in stunned amazement, and said "What kind of a woman do you think I AM, anyway?" (She was pissed, dontcha know?)

His reply? "Honey, we've already established that; we're just haggling over price now..."

If you catch my drift?

(robt)

Sorry Robt -- I used the word "charge" without heat to mean "objection" -- it's one of several habits of speech that (Anglo-American) philosophers employ to make the comparison of theories seem more dramatic. I didn't even consider that I might sound insulted or anything. Feel free to ignore it if I sound like that again.

I've always liked that joke (the version I heard was with Churchill and a woman next to him at a dinner party).

I'd have said the essence of language was communication. Sometimes I may only want you to know how I feel -- and by telling you I've achieved my end already. There's no persuasion involved (and certainly no manipulation). Sometimes I signal my intentions, not so as to persuade, but simply so that you and I can coordinate our plans -- turning on my turn signal to indicate I'm turning left or telling you that I've already vacuumed so you don't waste the effort. Can these really be called "persuasion" -- let alone "manipulation"?

Just in order to draw the distinction, we don't need to talk about morality or "good" and 'bad', but rather a distinction between two kinds of persuasive strategy:
Open persuasion
The strategy can be fully understood by the hearer, without undercutting its persuasive force.
Deception
The strategy of persuasion cannot be fully understood by the hearer without undercutting its persuasive force.

Even someone who doesn't believe in morality or good and bad could make this distinction -- in fact he'd need to. When he's deceiving, he won't want to let his strategy out of the bag "and here's the place where I will get you to slide illicitly from one meaning of the word to a quite different meaning..."

But perhaps you are doubting the possibility of open persuasion (as I defined it). In other words, persuasion necessarily involves fallacies or distortions of the facts?

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 06, 2004).]

No, I'm speaking in the abstract:

Given: that the essential core of language is "manipulation" in the pure sense of the word; to have an effect is to manipulate...

it follows: that no meaningful theoretical distinction can be made, at the ur-level, between various degrees of manipulation...

because: any such distinction relies upon mutually agreed-upon frames of reference, and in order even to define those I must "speak with" (i.e. manipulate) you.

Something like that.

In the real world, we can, and must, make these distinctions. But deconstructionist theory is NOT the real world...

(robt)

OK, I think I get where you're coming from -- you are speaking for the postmodernist who already assumes that there is no basis to my commonsense distinction. I was starting from a different point.
I wanted to show the practical importance of the distinction, so that we don't just give it up as soon as some clever person comes along with a nifty abstract argument like the one you give above. Not that we should refuse to examine his argument, but we shouldn't be too easily bulldozed into throwing in the towel either.
In other words, I agree with you that deconstruction isn't in the real world -- and I think that's a problem for it.

Science runs into problems in its quest to understand the world -- from very simple things like an unexpected experimental result to the tension between relativity and quantum mechanics.
One might react to either kind of problem by just throwing up one's hands and giving up the project of understanding the world. But that would be ridiculously premature -- scientists will rerun the experiment to be sure that the unexpected result doesn't come about through error or fraud. Then, if the result is confirmed, they'll try to fit it within existing theory. If it can't be, they will continue using old theories until they can find a better one that takes account of the anomaly. Even with the quantum/relativity conflict, they try to develop a new theory (superstrings) that resolves the conflict -- they don't just throw in the towel and say "gosh, I guess we just can't understand the world after all." We could conceivably reach this point, but how can we assume that we've reached it already?
Our project was to understand the meaning of texts and to find a way to distinguish between manipulative persuasion and non-manipulative. The postmodernist tells us this can't be done -- the project is hopeless. But the postmodernist's reason for this is itself a certain (empirical) theory of meaning. The conclusion he should draw is, "either the project is hopeless, OR the (structuralist) theory of meaning is wrong".
By what right does the post-structuralist hold his structuralism beyond question? In fact there are other theories of meaning which do not have this extreme consequence (see _Language and Reality_ by Devitt and Sterelny). Even if there were not, wouldn't it be reasonable to go looking for one before just throwing up our hands?

The postmodernist is fond of "calling things into question," but for some reason, he never calls into question his own assumption that structuralism is true.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 07, 2004).]

I guess nobody reads Wittgenstein anymore. Or else you wouldn't be having this argument!

E. A. K.

I've read Wittgenstein. But to read W is not to always to agree with him.
Yes, once upon a time, philosophers were so far in his thrall that anything W (was thought to have) said was accepted as unquestioned truth.
Thank God, we are free of that particular idolatry, at least.
Now Wittgenstein is one extremely interesting philosopher among others.

If you want to mount a Wittgensteinian critique of all one of the issues under discussion, I'll discuss it with you. But no, it's no longer the case that just whispering his name can silence all debate.

Why Structuralism and Poststructuralism must be False
I'd be very interested to see what epigone, or some other post-structuralist sympahthizer (or however I should put it) would say about the following argument. (Sorry it looks so long -- it is about a page and a half in Word and I have tried to make it readily intelligible).

Summary Argument
1. If we accept Structuralism as our theory of language, we cannot account for how language could arise in the first place, nor how language is acquired by individual babies.
2. But language did have an origin in human pre-history and is learned by babies of every generation.
3. Therefore structuralism must be false.
4. And insofar as post-structuralism retains the structuralist assumptions that make this impossible, post-structuralism is false as well.

I assume that (2) is completely uncontroversial. But where does assumption (1) come from?
I start with two assumptions of structuralism:
A. Referents may be “bracketed” The operation of language can be understood entirely without mention of things out in the world beyond our own concepts that the word and or concept refers to or STANDS FOR. To understand how language works, we need to appeal to the CONCEPT of dogs, cats, people and butternut squash, but not to actual dogs or cats or butternut squash out in the world.
B. There are no pre-linguistic concepts. We cannot have the concept of a physical object (for example) prior to acquiring language. This is because individual concepts depend upon the entire system of concepts set out by a language

Intuitively, we can see a problem. Cats and cars are “public objects” things that are accessible to all of us by means of sense perception. If concepts were (as we commonly think) items in the mind, then how can I teach a baby to associate my concept of cat with the word “cat” – unless the baby can read my mind?
The structuralist might well deny that concepts are things in the mind, but this only makes it harder. On the structuralist view, to possess the concept of cat is already to possess an entire language in which the concept of cat figures. How can the baby who starts with no language possibly ever acquire a language?
The baby seems to be in the position of an English speaker who tries to learn Greek solely by means of a Greek dictionary intended for Greeks. Perhaps he can grasp the interrelationship of various uninterpreted signs, but he won’t ever grasp their meanings unless he goes out into the streets of Athens and starts pointing at things or acting things out. Babies, without even a first language, are even worse off. We cannot bracket referents in explaining how language is acquired.

In addition, language would be unlearnable if the baby did not possess some concepts pre-linguistically. To see this, imagine that you have been marooned on an island with a group of people who speak a language completely unrelated to any language you know and who speak no English. A rabbit runs by and one of the islanders points and says “gavagai”. You think, “aha! 'gavagai’ means ‘rabbit’ or maybe ‘there is a rabbit’.” You are very likely right, but the inference is far from certain. ‘Gavagai’ might mean ‘undetached rabbit part’ or ‘rabbit if it is before the year 2020, pastrami sandwich after 2020’ or ‘instantiation of rabbithood’ or ‘time-slice of a four dimensional rabbit-history’ or ‘I detect a rabbitty sensation in my visual field’ or any number of other things. You might hope that learning the rest of the language would eliminate this uncertainty, but it can never do so, because any amount of linguistic behavior you observe will necessarily be finite, while the interpretive theories consistent with any finite amount of linguistic behavior are infinite. (So when I learn what I think is ‘the rabbit hops’, it could mean “rabbithood and hopping are being manifested together.”) To get anywhere with my translation, I must assume for instance that these people have the concept of physical objects like rabbits and rocks, and that they find the same things salient in most situations that I do. (If they introduce me to colors, I assume that they’re more likely to point out ‘blue’ before they point out ‘aquamarine’ or ‘azure’, for instance). Babies are in the same boat except that they possess no language ahead of time. If they did not already possess some concept of a physical object prior to learning language, for example, or if they did not regard physical objects as particularly salient, they could not learn language at all.
(In fact there is experimental evidence that babies do possess this concept before they acquire language – which I’ll describe on request.)
The strange thing is that Derrida actually points out problems of something like this sort in connection with Saussure (see Derrida Positions, p 28, and Culler, p. 95) but he doesn’t reject structuralism – instead he treats the problem as simply ineliminable. But before we reach that conclusion, we ought to try a theory which grants that humans and animals possess some concepts prior to language, and which does not regard referents as irrelevant to an account of language. There are such theories as I said above (see Devitt and Sterelny _Language and Reality_) and they seem quite capable of explaining how language arises historically and in each human child.
I conclude that structuralism and post-structuralism, though interesting to consider as things we could imagine having reason to believe, are false in the real world.

[Acknowledgement: The 'gavagai' argument owes a debt to W.V.O. Quine's argument about the indeterminacy of translation, and to Steven Pinker's use of the argument in _The Language Instinct_ -- though neither of them aims the argument against structuralism, as I do here.)



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 10, 2004).]

It seems I'm something of a thread-killer, and certainly don't wish to work my magic here, Chris, but having seen this effort of yours go unanswered for three days, I thought I might take the chance and respond—-I'm afraid, not with a formal reply to the argument, but a more historical perspective on the entire aporia, as it has established itself as an articulable historical fact. (Just skip this post if you like.)
My school memories of the structuralist debate are too vague to do justice to your argument, as I said, but this much I think seems clear: a lot of very intelligent and highly-trained linguistic minds have argued for and against this position for half a century, and instead of it going away (like the positivism from which, in many ways, it stemmed) it has spawned all manners of yet more improbable progeny. This fact alone would suggest two things:
1) that no Spherical posting can do much to alter anyone's opinion, if that opinion is sufficiently informed as to understand the posting; and
2) that the "solution" to structuralism (and offspring) will ultimately consist, as Wittgenstein would say, in the vanishing of the problem.
That problem, I would suggest, is ultimately a moral or religious one, something like the Enlightenment obsession with knowledge (a sickness virtually unknown to the Greeks, who healthily took the world—-some world at least—-as a given).
It's as if there'd been another deluge on the earth, and this time Noah's boat wouldn't float, and the sons of Cain (who adore floods of every sort) were sea-dooing, here and there and everywhere, amongst all the flotsam and jetsam of the world.
At the risk of seeming 'clever' by deconstructing deconstruction (et al), then, I would suggest that it has clearly thrived on the historical combination, dominating the late twentieth-century, of simmering intellectual hysteria, creative exhaustion and moral quiescence, and is not—-ever—-to be corrected, only healed.



[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 13, 2004).]

Thanks for responding Brian.
I have a slightly different take, though I think related.

What you call the Enlightenment obsession with knowledge, I regard as a very particular view of knowledge -- the Cartesian or "foundationalist" view of knowledge, where knowledge must start from absolutely certain foundations and build upward more or less deductively.

The project of building up our knowledge in this way has failed (for very good reasons). The solution is not, in my view, to dissolve or heal the problem, so much as to find another conception of how knowledge can work.

As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle had such a model, regarding knowledge as holistic and dialectical. Sense experience and prereflective assumptions give rise to puzzles. Resolving these puzzles in the best way will lead us to knowledge. This is, I take it, the path of science now.

I feel even Wittgenstein was a prisoner of the foundationalist view in a way. Sometimes he seems to believe in foundations, but to regard these foundations as 'brute' foundations -- they are not certain foundations, but justification must come to an end somewhere and this is just WHERE WE STOP (in this particular language game). Or one might read him as giving us conceptual foundations -- we stop here and stopping here is just WHAT WE MEAN BY justification in this context. But on the dialectical/holist view, justification doesn't really come to an end -- our knowledge and justification are in some way provisional. It's always possible that someone could come along with a new set of puzzles that his radical new theory resolves better than ours.
On my view, Wittgenstein comes too close to positivism and behaviorism -- I think one can see this in his discussion of mental states in others and the quasi-definitional way he seems to use the word "criterion". In treating science as just another language game, he buys too much of the skeptical argument he's rejecting. I believe common sense is right: science really does tell us (though fallibly) about the reality that underlies our commonsense world.

Of course this view leads us to another even deeper motivation for anti-realism (or Kantianism) of the structuralist sort and of other sorts:
If science tells us the whole truth, then where does that leave our human world of desires, beliefs, emotions and moral judgments? Don't we need to put science in its place, restrict it to a particular domain to keep it from undermining this realm?
My short answer to this is that it identifies science with physics. Human beings and their beliefs and desires are irrelevant to physics, but human beings and their beliefs and desires are not irrelevant to psychology. And I suggest (controversially) along with Plato and Aristotle that morality is part of psychology and political science -- the justice of a social system may well be relevant to its stability, for instance. We should not be too ready to give up morality and our human world, but we shouldn't be too ready to assume that scientific knowledge automatically conflicts with all morality. We shouldn't be too ready to grasp at desperate expedients like transcendental idealism (of the structuralist sort or any other sort) as though they were the only way out.

Let's not reject the Enlightenment desire for knowledge of reality, let's just reject Descartes' radical and unrealistic picture of what such knowledge has to be like.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 14, 2004).]

imagine that you have been marooned on an island with a group of people who speak a language completely unrelated to any language you know and who speak no English
An aside, but it is claimed that

• indri, the name of a short-tailed lemur of Madagascar, means 'look' - which a French naturalist took to be its name when it was pointed out to him.
• Kangaroo is the reply to Captain James Cook's question about the name of the strange marsupial Cook had just seen. The native had answered, 'Kangaroo' which means 'I don't know'.
• Llama derived its name from 'Como se llama?', Spanish for what's its name?

I think the 2nd of these at least is untrue. See google for details.

I almost wish I were still licensed to practice philosophy, merely to engage with one so articulate as you. Sadly, I'm not; but shall keep one eye open henceforward for anything of yours, and wish you the best, should that be your path.

Brian

Tim,
Some interesting examples. If they're not true, it seems at least that they could be. Of course, the wrongness of these translations could certainly be discovered with a little time (as in fact it has been, if the examples are true). But if one doesn't make some assumptions about the kind of concepts the speakers are more likely to be using (it's hard to see how language learning could get off the ground).
Babies actually learn language with far less evidence than my imaginary linguist on a desert isle.
No one asked me for the evidence that babies start with a concept of a physical object (as well as some mathematical awareness), but maybe this is a good place to mention the experiment.
A baby is shown a Mickey Mouse doll being put behind a screen, which conceals the doll from view. Then another Mickey is placed next to the screen. The experimenter waits until the baby loses interest and then removes the screen. If there is still only one Mickey (the one beside the screen, not the one behind). The baby shows much more surprise and interest than if both are visible.
Since only one Mickey was visible at any time, it seems, first of all, that the baby has, in effect, ADDED 1 Mickey plus 1 Mickey = 2 Mickeys to form her expectation that there should be two Mickeys when the screen is removed.
It also seems to show that the baby expects physical objects to PERSIST UNOBSERVED -- thus it possesses at least one essential element of the concept of a physical object. (For a fuller account of the experiment, see Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ -- I'll find the page number if anyone asks me to -- don't have the book with me now.)

This isn't too surprising. Physical objects are terribly important to survival -- one would expect natural selection to "prewire" some awareness of their nature into us.

This brings me to another point, the structuralist seems to adopt an excessively Cartesian view of non-linguistic animals (including babies). A more naturalistic view of animals would have to admit that some prelinguistic animals think, even reason. If concepts are entirely a product of language, how could animals do this?

Brian,
Thank you for responding and for the kind remarks at the end of your message. If you should ever wish to talk philosophy, I won't ask to see your license.

Though you raise a number of interesting questions, I'll restrict myself to your attempt, following Rorty, to keep science within its limits -- restrict it to finding out about "the SCIENTIFIC reality that underlies our commonsense world." If you are going to draw boundaries, the question arises why you draw them so broadly -- why not say that chemistry deals with chemical reality and physics deals with physical reality and biology deals with biological reality --why not wall the sciences off from each other in the way that you seem to wall science off from other forms of understanding?
The reason is, of course, that some scientists have pursued the possibility that the world is knowable as a whole -- that one can build biology on chemistry and chemistry on physics. Others in history who denied this (vitalists in biology, for instance) have been defeated. Even if we deny this, following Thomas Kuhn, it certainly seems that project of unified scientific knowledge might have failed -- we could be butting our heads against walls around biology and chemistry. Even on Kuhn's view, wishing doesn't make it so.
One might maintain that there is an obvious wall separating the human world from the scientific -- but this seems very dubious. The study of other animals and of our own brains seems to shed light on the human world too -- science bleeds out beyond whatever boundaries you try to set up around it.
Historically speaking, it was very important to the scientific movement to set up boundaries around God and the soul -- promising the powerful Church that it would not interfere in those realms. But in a way the Church was more perceptive than Gallileo on this point: science has no natural boundaries. Natural selection undermines the argument from design -- as well as the Biblical story of creation. Historical inquiry may undermine the authority of certain holy texts or show us the historical impossibility of some of their claims.

Human reality seems no more walled off from scientific reality than "chemical reality" is walled off from physical or biological reality. Reality is reality is reality.

On the other hand, the physicist doesn't just take over the chemist's job -- both have a responsibility to recognize and incorporate the facts turned up by the other. And physicists aren't going to put psychologists, sociologists or novelists out of work by showing that there are no emotions, no people and no societies --only "atoms and the void". If we keep this in mind, we may not find it so necessary to erect walls in the first place.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 15, 2004).]