Tag: Analytic Philosophy

Cultivating the Complementarity

Mark DavisLeave a comment

 

I am trying to imagine the difficulties that translator J.B. Sykes encountered when working on Erhard Scheibe’s The Logical Analysis of Quantum Mechanics from 1973. The translation process extended through to the Danish of Bohr himself, the primary subject of Scheibe’s book (likely in German). The complexities of describing the evolving theory and the strange logic that envelops quantum physics were clearly apparent in Scheibe’s project. About Bohr’s writing, he reports:

Bohr’s mode of expression and manner of argument are individualistic sometimes to the point of being repellent…”

and:

Thus, although Bohr himself testifies to his wish to present his view at least partly as a complex of causes or a hierarchy of concepts and statements having various degrees of priority, there is still good reason to question whether he succeeded in doing so intelligibly.”

But I am not here to further pile on Bohr. New concepts like complementarity were extremely strange. Instead, I want to emphasize the important role that philosophy can have in the analysis of arguments and conceptual structures. Quantum mechanics remains a unique example of something that is both the basis for the reality we observe and yet completely alien to the everyday reality we encounter at human scale. It needs contextualization in order to make progress. From “spooky” action-at-a-distance to Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, quantum logic is a thus-far intractably weird thing. As a philosophical topic for analysis, it escapes the complaint of being a purely mental or a priori construct of pure thought, the kinds of omphaloskepsis that extend back to Classical Greece.

I was considering all this in the context of much discussion of value hierarchies in fields like philosophy that have been circulating on Substack.… Read the rest

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