tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post4841796446028417922..comments2024-02-20T12:26:24.682-05:00Comments on language goes on holiday: Boys and frogsDuncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-79168206509088327372016-11-17T06:57:34.986-05:002016-11-17T06:57:34.986-05:00I think Buber's contribution rests on an insig...I think Buber's contribution rests on an insight about the dimension of subjectness within which we all exist but barely notice, the way we fail to notice the air we breathe until, perhaps, we are deprived of it or a fish fails to notice the water through which it swims. It's fundamental to its being and thus to every aspect of its experience and yet it's transparent to it precisely because it's so ubiquitous. Just as vision is transparent to to the viewer, awareness to the one who is aware, so being a subject (having the elements of subjectness, a mental life) goes unnoticed by subjects. Yet it is in that where we can find the impetus for valuing if we look and, more particularly and perhaps more interestingly, the source and basis for our moral claims. Buber never makes that point, or anything quite like it, but he noticed the significance of seeing subjectness in other things and what that means for our condition, our subjective way of being in the world. In some ways, it's easy to see why he is overlooked in mainstream, technical philosophy . . . and why he is admired in other quarters: foremost of these being the domain of thinking in which existentialists move. Stuart W. Mirskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12247784373895331173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-27959311247028041352016-11-16T12:24:35.206-05:002016-11-16T12:24:35.206-05:00Yes, be careful of what you wish for and all that....Yes, be careful of what you wish for and all that. Also, praying to Jupiter seems to be a bad idea.Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-22757780008786243902016-11-16T12:23:37.801-05:002016-11-16T12:23:37.801-05:00I don't know Buber's work at all, but I...I don't know Buber's work at all, but I'm sure it's worth studying.Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-17665708848529353162016-11-16T12:18:48.111-05:002016-11-16T12:18:48.111-05:00the content is of course contingent/man-made and c...<i>the content is of course contingent/man-made and can be manipulated but the styles (paranoid and such) not so much.</i><br /><br />Could well be. And I blame Trump tooDuncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-41374154165463588542016-11-16T09:43:43.642-05:002016-11-16T09:43:43.642-05:00https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLuglURnyIQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLuglURnyIQAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-85132880866498982962016-11-15T15:35:11.534-05:002016-11-15T15:35:11.534-05:00oops public, i blame trump...oops public, i blame trump...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-3877576303719157922016-11-15T15:33:17.763-05:002016-11-15T15:33:17.763-05:00http://homebrave.com/home-of-the-brave//the-greate...http://homebrave.com/home-of-the-brave//the-greater-yellowstone-grizzly-part-three<br />"nobody likes the pubic meetings"Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-27760030055495466222016-11-15T15:27:51.305-05:002016-11-15T15:27:51.305-05:00the content is of course contingent/man-made and c...the content is of course contingent/man-made and can be manipulated but the styles (paranoid and such) not so much. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-75694269529063688832016-11-15T15:15:41.993-05:002016-11-15T15:15:41.993-05:00Thanks. Will have a look. More and more it seems t...Thanks. Will have a look. More and more it seems to me that the things we think and believe <em>about</em> the world hinge on a mode of "thinking about" that is fundamentally agential (not impersonally agential, but agential as subjects are) and that this way of thinking (and thus of acting) is only comprehensible through exploration of the dimensions and the role of subjectness itself.<br /><br />We too often see the world in merely physical terms, an array of objects, including the people before us, and so we forget entirely that it is subjects that distinguish our kind of world (a world in which we are always engaged with other intentional forms of life) and we are engaged like this just because we can and do recognize subjectness when we meet it in many of the "things" around us.<br /><br />But what does recognizing subjectness mean? Understanding what it means to recognize a subject carries, I think, profound implications, especially of a moral type, and it is there that we need to look if we want to understand how valuing things shapes our form of life, including those things we do which seem to be beyond ordinary explication along strictly scientific lines, such as our odd inclination to formulate and argue about moral beliefs and the behaviors that express them. (I find myself, of late, drawn back to Buber who was not a very rigorous or sophisticated philosopher and yet seems to have homed right in on the role of subjectness in our world, a role that is always about I's and "thou's" -- to use Buber's own idiosyncratic form of reference). Stuart W. Mirskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12247784373895331173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-76461043961306102232016-11-15T14:18:07.755-05:002016-11-15T14:18:07.755-05:00He is treating them not as fellow subjects in one ...<i>He is treating them not as fellow subjects in one very important sense (and this makes this a moral question, I think) but as creatures on a different order than himself (Pavlovian creatures to be induced to certain actions by signaling rather than communicated with).</i><br /><br />I agree. I just read David Egan's paper <a href="https://www.academia.edu/29822297/Playing_Well_Wittgensteins_Language-Games_and_the_Ethics_of_Discourse" rel="nofollow"> "Playing Well: Wittgenstein's Language-Games and the Ethics of Discourse"</a>, which has some interesting things to say about taking conversation seriously (and not doing so), especially around pp. 12-13.<br /><br />As for the source of Trumpian narcissism, I just don't know. Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-32529126832146014682016-11-15T12:37:24.383-05:002016-11-15T12:37:24.383-05:00His rhetoric IS worrying, as are his lack of fidel...His rhetoric IS worrying, as are his lack of fidelity to truth and his behavior. Late night tweeting is infantile, as is constantly hitting back at every perceived slight but basking in the praise of others (not to mention the adulation of crowds).<br /><br />Watching Trump at work in this election year has reminded me that language and rationality don't always go together, even if language is probably a pre-requisite for being rational. If meaning is about connecting words to thoughts, then ultimately even expressing meaning is a pragmatic activity because the point is to use words that prompt certain behaviors in others because the prompted behaviors are directly linked to the mental lives of our interlocutors, to the thoughts they have on hearing the words.<br /><br />We don't need to have the same associations, the same mental images to understand each other, but we have to have enough similarity to prompt mutually comprehensible behaviors. If that's true then a guy like Trump isn't so much diverging from rationality per se as he is out of balance with how most of us use words.<br /><br />Most of us, I think, care about what thoughts our words prompt in others, which is why truth matters to us. If I say X and someone hears it as X then presumably he or she will have a certain amount of shared thoughts, thoughts which relate to the world I see and am speaking about. If he or she doesn't, then my statement X won't be X to him or her and we get misunderstandings. But Trump seems to mainly care about what his interlocutors (audiences generally) do rather than what they think. He wants his words to prompt certain kinds of responses but doesn't concern himself with how close the underlying response-provoking thoughts match his. <br /><br />Such matches seem to carry no weight with him, at least when he is speaking in a public way. His words are entirely response oriented, manipulative. He seems to have little concern for what his listeners are actually thinking as long as they are doing what he wants.<br /><br />In a sense he lacks what might best be described as the normal balance which most of us have between using our words as action prompts and as thought prompts. The interior dimension of language use doesn't really seem to concern him. Not that he is unaware of the mental lives of his interlocutors but that his interest in it is only directed at the extent to which whatever thoughts they are experiencing on hearing his words leads to the actions he desires of them. He is treating them not as fellow subjects in one very important sense (and this makes this a moral question, I think) but as creatures on a different order than himself (Pavlovian creatures to be induced to certain actions by signaling rather than communicated with). Is this the source of Trumpian narcissism then? Stuart W. Mirskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12247784373895331173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-36570572479444504132016-11-15T11:14:54.313-05:002016-11-15T11:14:54.313-05:00Maybe so, although I think those tribalistic ways ...Maybe so, although I think those tribalistic ways of thinking can be manipulated in various ways. They aren't simply given or inevitable.Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-20038295082026871112016-11-15T11:12:54.405-05:002016-11-15T11:12:54.405-05:00I don't know. His rhetoric is worrying, though...I don't know. His rhetoric is worrying, though, because it makes it so hard to know what you are going to get. (Well, and because it suggests we might get some very bad things.)Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-7065734288715764922016-11-15T11:02:44.329-05:002016-11-15T11:02:44.329-05:00I think Trump has just showed us what was always a...I think Trump has just showed us what was always at play in the electorate, to borrow a phrase we have never been modern, when the engineered systems/infrastructures of our daily doings begin to collapse than people can no longer unthinkingly depend on the institutionalized-thinking-of-experts (think of how little I have to understand in order to use my bank) and they fall back into their usual tribalistic folk-psychologies.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-1617054745126710162016-11-15T09:48:22.604-05:002016-11-15T09:48:22.604-05:00". . . what they seem to want is not to keep ...". . . what they seem to want is not to keep Mexicans out of the country or to build a wall so much as to be allowed to talk about wanting to build a wall."<br /><br />Yes, I think this goes a long way toward explaining why so many Trump supporters didn't seem to care about the substance or truth of what he said. His was an expressive campaign, consisting of saying things that excited people (more than most of us would have guessed, I suspect) but which his target audience never demanded be seen as serious proposals. In fact, he's already shifting about on the "build a wall" business, something he consistently claimed, whenever challenged, that he meant to do in reality ("we're gonna build a wall, a great wall and make it higher"), even though many people pointed out that walls weren't appropriate along much of the southern border, given the terrain, and that there were other means of securing the border. "Build a wall" was his (and his followers') code for "secure the border by whatever means necessary" so not building an actual wall would likely be no problem for him with supporters as long as he intensifies the nation's focus on, and introduces initiatives to, increase border security.<br /><br />Similarly, "make Mexico pay for it" had a more metaphorical than literal sense in his rhetoric and that's what his followers took it for (vs. those of us who found him appalling because we took him literally). It's simply inconceivable that Mexico would pay to build a wall strictly for U.S. interests but Trump noticed how that trope resonated and so he kept at it, yanking the appropriate strings on the campaign trail with such references. If he now proceeds to secure the border he can very likely get away with exacting only a kind of psychic payment from Mexico, however. So this was more Trumpian rhetoric.<br /><br />It's why he seems to lie with equanimity. Lying doesn't mean to him what it means many of us. For him rhetoric is about pulling the right levers in an audience, evoking the right sort of response -- in his case a kind of mass adulation, which he seems to crave and whose opposite prompts in him visceral anger, a lashing out at those who aren't "nice" to him. Those of us looking for meaning in his words were looking in the wrong place which, perhaps, explains our failure to be moved.<br /><br />For him semantics are always rooted in pragmatics. His words only "mean" what they do, what they can prompt in others' direct responses to him (cheers, shouts, votes) rather than in their mental lives (the thoughts and beliefs they have in response to his words).<br /><br />Trump seems to be a man focused not on reaching others' beliefs to change or influence them but on achieving particular kinds of externally observable responses, the sort which serve him either by leading to more revenue or, as in this case, more votes.<br /><br />Where belief is relatively unimportant, so too is truth, thus explaining the man's remarkable penchant for self-contradiction and statements at odds with known facts. To some of us we all have that tendency but in Trump it seems to be remarkably highly developed and the concern for conceptual validity seemingly atrophied. A neurological issue or merely an educational one? Stuart W. Mirskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12247784373895331173noreply@blogger.com