[lit-ideas] Re: A thought for the coming year
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 19:19:08 -0330
Fascinating. In Canada (minimally)we do not attribute such powers of physical
materialization or teleportation to a philosophical position.
Interesting here as well - well, interesting if you're on holidays and the term
doesn't begin until jan 6th - is the thought "a box of pizza." No native
speaker of English in Canada (minimally) would have thunk it, or uttered it. I
stand to be corrected, of course. But Englisch is one of 4 languages I've been
speaking for quite some time now, and I'm not sure what it would mean to say
that I'm "mistaken" here. "If I'm wrong on that, what does 'wrong' then mean?"
- surely someone must have said something like that before me.
I do the following kind of stuff with my students - but with concepts like
justice, authority, indoctrination, truth, virtue , etc. Even "belief-that. Oh
no, not again.)
(No Virginia, there is no procedural sense of "belief." One can't "believe how"
anything. No Vanessa, it doesn't really matter "who says so?!" And no it's not
quite a stipulative definition - as if you could stipulate other ones equally
as
cogent. It's more like a transcendental fact about meaning. Vanessa, why are
you shaking your watch?)
But, hey, as one of our more august members maintains, when it comes to
language-games, it's political all the way down.)
Alright, let's roll up our sleeves and do some hard philosophical work before
guests show up for new years.
Some of the expressions/actions/events allowed for by the pizza language-game:
one can have a pizza in front of oneself (as in physically present);
one can ask if the pizza is here yet;
one can order a pizza;
one can lose a pizza, win a pizza, oggle a pizza, cut a pizza into slices or
mash up a pizza;
one can eat pizza with with a coke or with gusto; (getting hungrig yet?)
one can even think of a pizza, have the thought of a
pizza (even though the exact location of thoughts - i.e., "in the head" - is
robustly debated).
As Witters remarked about the expression "Here is one hand" (displaying
one's own unsevered hands as it holds a slice of pizza), only in highly
specific
and unusual circumstances would one intelligibly refer to a "box of pizza"
rather than a "pizza" in making a k-that claim. (A box in which a pizza has
been delivered can of course be referred to in a variety of ways, but one would
still not say "box of pizza.")
The "box of" language-game does allow the following locutions. (Dare I say
"implicatures? Would that be kosher? Oh dear god ....)
One can hold a box of marbles; drop a box of matches; one can box one's lover's
ears - oops, sorry, wrong language-game - buy a box of tacks; shake a wrapped
Christmas gift box; buy a box of doughnuts (btw, for our American friends, that
really is how "doughnut" is spelled in English. But yes I know it's turtles all
the way down); ask for a box of tissues.
Note that in all these examples, the contents of the box counts as a
count-noun.
"Pizza" is thus more like "dough" or "water" than like "thoughts" or "insults."
(Yeah, yeah, I know, it's all political.)
I wonder whether these conceptual truths, if so they be, are more than
culturally-specific semantic or linguistic conventions. Is there some
underlying transcendental truth explaining why not just anything can be
properly referred to as being "in" a box. ...... Vanessa, I think your watch
needs a new battery.
(Now, of coure, there are at least 3 different modes of being in which
something
can be said to be "in." Heidegger, HIM again!)
Still waiting for Christmas,
Walter O
Quoting Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>:
> It would be really nice if idealism was true, I'd have a box of pizza in
> front of me instead of just the thought of pizza in my head. Â Â Â O.K.
>
>
>
> On Sunday, December 29, 2013 11:24 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Walter wrote
>
> Well, when I asked RP to articulate for us his conception of a thought, I was
> not thinking he would simply compile a number of examples of "thought" or
> "thinking. From these examples proffered, we see that the terms, as
> understood
> by RP can refer to:
>
> 1. an argument
> 2. a belief
> 3. a thought dreamt (this one sort of begs the question, I would think)
> 4. a decision made or report on a decision made
> 5. a phenomenon or word to which "weird" could be attributed
> 6. an activity
> â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦
>
> But RP must still be firmly ensconced in the lap of family and friends since
> he
> resists the labour of the concept called for by  the philosophical question
> I
> posed.
>
> *Itâs not so much that I resist it; itâs that I donât understand it. I
> really donât know what âthe labour of the conceptâ means. Â
>
> Walter spells out what I would have to do in order order to adequately answer
> that question.
> [I would have to provide us ] not with a laundry-list, a bag, of examples of
> "thought"/"thinking" but rather with the criteria [I use] in identifying all
> these examples as examples *of* "thought"/"thinking." [For I] surely must be
> in possession of such criteria, else [I] would not be able to differentiate
> "thought"/"thinking" from anything else in the world (i.e., pizza,
> doggy-bags, birdfeeders, a 40 yr old Highland Park) and thus would be unable
> to identify some things and events as "examples."
>
> *Something has gone slightly wrong. Apparently Walter is providing a list of
> things that arenât and could not be thoughts, yet how he knows they
> arenât thoughts isnât entirely clear. The items in this motley are
> apparently related to each other only insofar as they are not thoughts. How
> this is known a priori is not obvious.
>
> I donât think that how a thought differs from a birdfeeder e.g. is an
> empirical problem.
>
> And yetâ¦
>
> How did I identify the things on the list in my last post as thoughts or
> thinking? What criteria did
> I use? That is a question for another post. Â The stuff above is just
> skirmishing. Â Iâll get right on it.
>
> Robert Paul
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