[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me

Quoting John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>:

Just a short remark on John's par. immediately below:

snip
> I  surmise that Wittgenstein was being true to his tribe; as a philosopher,
> he would not pursue what would then become empirical research. My
> contribution is to note that this is the point at which philosophy becomes
> anthropology; the search for exactly what language game is being played is
> the heart of a form of research called the ethnography of speaking.

WO: I believe that John's surmise is indeed correct, despite W's frequently
voiced misgivings about the discipline of philosophy and his and his students'
involvement in it. But John goes like, astronomically beyond the pale in
suggesting that philosophy can ever itself be anthropolog-y/-ical. 

Anthropology is a an empirical form of inquiry - not too sure about what's
happening with Levi Strauss, though - while philosophy, univocally understood,
is a T form of inquiry. (Btw, I can't help but mention that Strauss wrote a
preface to a book written by a fellow I met while on sabbatical in Oxford a few
years back. He was a very fine fellow and an even better table-tennis player
and we played daily. Of course I've forgotten his full name now - we all simply
called him "Chi" (meaning "King"?). I recall we spent a morning in his college
residence trying to decide on the title of his book - an ethnography on an
isolated tribe in S China somewhere. I think we decided on *The [name of
chinese
tribe]: a society without husbands or fathers. Or was it "... a society without
fathers or husbands"? I remembee thinking that one title made more sense than
the other one and Chi ended up going along with it. But I'm old now and memory
fades so easily ...) I suggested he go to MIT Press and he said he'd think
about it. Haven't heard from him since, alas. Really fine fellow.

Returning to the main point above:
Clearly, if we find that we are surrounded by people whose antics are
unintelligible to us, we must go empirical. Interestingly, in trying to make
sense of their utterances and actions, we'll have to assume that most of what
they say is true and we have to assume that they are rational agents. Here's my
daring hypothesis for the week: both of the above are T'lly necessary
conditions
for the possibility of coming to understand their antics. 

Hearing the pitter-patter of Davidson's, Gadamer's and Quine's footsteps, but
returning to the baking of his salmon with dill, lemon and ??? (secret Russian
recipe)

Walter O






> 
> I once wrote a paper "Negotiating with Demons: The Uses of Magical Language"
> (American Ethnologist, No. 1, 1995) that illustrates what I'm talking about.
> Anthropologists had picked up from Austin's How to Do Things with Words the
> notion of performative utterance, that if a speaker were properly qualified,
> other conditions were satisfied, and the words spoken in proper form, a new
> social fact would be created. This philosophical model was consistent with
> another widely asserted definition, that ritual is, in essence, the
> repetition of fixed forms. My empirical case was an exorcism performed by a
> Daoist healer, on behalf of patients believed to be afflicted by ghosts.
> What I was able to demonstrate is that the exorcism is not simply a matter
> of rote. It is largely taken up with trying to persuade the demons, who
> start out utterly amoral, to accept the social contract under which the
> healer will have the power to banish them. The pivotal moment is when the
> healer, having established his bona fides, is tossing the divining blocks to
> see if the demons have accepted the deal and adding more spirit money to the
> fire until this goal is achieved. Thus, most of the language is persuasive,
> rather than performative. It varies widely in register, from informal street
> vernacular to rigidly structured poetry, depending on whether the healer is
> adopting a humble, pleading pose or asserting authority.
> 
> I note, in conclusion, how your final statement, that,
> 
> the 'meaning' in a game is not to be found by examining the rules nor even,
> > generally, in examining how the rules constrain the choices before the
> > players.  It is, instead, to be found in how the players interact with one
> > another through the actions offered by the rules -- the meaning is in what
> > they're doing, not in syntactic analysis the rules might offer.
> 
> 
> applies to this case.
> 
> John
> -- 
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
> 



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