Tag: Analytic Philosophy

The Multidimensional Ghosts of Translation (with Seinfeld References)

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

I love analytic philosophy. It’s like Seinfeld for ideas, a field with no particular content except the perplexing nature of ideas themselves. I’m reading Scott Soames’ attack on two-dimensional semantics right now, for instance. This has peculiar relevance in that insofar as meaning can be broken up into two dimensions there are ways of building modal logic justifications for things like “philosophical zombies” in the philosophy of mind. It’s a curious corner of this show about meaning and nothing more. I always fall back to Wittgenstein at some point: language is just games we play with one another. There are rules that we internalize and meaning has to do with the constraints those rules put on us. But, ahem, then we start asking what exactly are those rules and what kinds of internal logic helps to bind words and ideas together, so Wittgenstein is more of a deconstructive backstop that helps relieve us of the weight of expectation that there are mega-metatheories that can wrap all this meaning stuff up. Still, there remains the hard work to do that we see in linguistics and cognitive science where meaning representations and all the rules of these games are sketched out towards some kind of effective theory.

Another deconstructive reflection comes from the related concepts of Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation. If we can’t ever really know with certainty what words mean to someone else then we need strategies to empirically probe, through questions and observations, and gradually develop a working theory about what the hell those other people are talking about. Meaning becomes science experiments. We test, we hypothesize, we have U-shaped curves, and we build up a tentative understanding.… Read the rest

Politics is Religion

Mark Davis1 Comment

Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy has steadily distanced itself from Continental Philosophy for many reasons, but the defining difference must be with respect to the correlation of meaning with textual intent. Continental Philosophy deconstructs (at least in recent years) and as a phenomenon there is cultural significance to the motivation to tear down the assumptions that we have carefully nurtured from the Enlightenment through to Modernism. Meaning disconnects from words. It slurs. And reinvention is the only persistent motivation.

Arguably, though, it is only Continental Philosophy that cares about politics and culture, which makes it less abstract and irrelevant than the thumb twiddling of the analytic strain. Modern culture and our claims about significance are the lambs for the slaughterhouse. I thought of that voting in one of California’s ever-present elections today. Simon Critchley carried the water for me with his recent argument that politics is essentially religion (side-note: check out his discussion of Philip K. Dick in the New York Times recently; nothing really new to anyone who has read the VALIS books, but the facts concerning Dick’s later years and death are worth understanding). How is it religion? Because it is easy to redraw the semantic map in Continental Philosophy. Words mean what they are positioned to mean and the positioning is highly variable. The only solidity is in faith-based attachment to a theory of meaning, and politics exemplifies that in a way that is passingly second to religion itself.

We can see the effects of this religion in the defining political conflict of our era. The Pew Research Center’s new report, Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years, shows this political religion at work.  On a majority of issues, the study shows, among Americans who self-identify as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, there has been a steady increase in the disparity between opinions.… Read the rest