[lit-ideas] Re: Patty Duke & The Apriori [part 2of 2]
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:49:34 -0230
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
> Wittgenstein says somewhere early in the Investigations, that naming a
> thing is like attaching a label to it. (This is the origin of the causal
> theory of reference.) It (may be) like this. No one can know that Harry
> loves Sally until they have a sound theory of love, or at least the eros
> part of it. One can?t come to know what love is simply by watching how
> Harry and Sally behave. ?Love is a special way of feeling.? Learning
> that these impressions on one?s palm are ?connected? to the sensation of
> water flowing over the palm of one?s other hand, that they refer to it
> and not to the square root of 9, cannot simply be a matter of having
> these two sensations at once. Often one has several sensations at the
> same time?an itching behind one?s shoulder blades, a flash of
> light?without inferring that either of them ?means? or refers to the
> other. Suppose though, that meaning and inferring were occult mental
> processes, ?occult? insofar as they cannot be identified by neurologists
> or by metaphysicians. Thus, being nowhere, they are not ?derived from
> experience.? Still, there must be _something_ identifiable as referring.
>
> ?Meaning x,? and ?referring to x,? are close enough for philosophical
> work. In ?A means x by y,? there is supposed to be some relation between
> x and y, namely, that of meaning: there must be a meaning relation
> between x and y in order for this schema to work. Call it ?M.? ?M? just
> means that x and y stand in a certain relation. ?But how do we know that
> ?M? itself means that?? asks Bradley, standing in for Achilles. We need
> a further relation, M-sub-1, make sure that ?M? means that?
>
> This is my response to Walter?s worries, or to his theory, or to his
> worry of a theory. A child learns what is being referred to when someone
> gestures or speaks through trial and error (just as adults do when,
> e.g., talking to someone who speaks poorly the language one speaks
> oneself, or when talking with the victim of a stroke). A child (or an
> adult) ?gets it,? when he or she can do certain kinds of things, can
> give certain responses, of which there is no a priori list. This is a
> small part of what we mean when we try to distinguish speaking from mere
> sound. All of this is done in the open: had Helen Keller later said, ?It
> was as if a choir of angels were singing to me,? we?d be reluctant to
> say that this was what grasping the meaning, the referent, of a word
> amounted to,
>
> I?m sure I?ve got Walter mostly wrong, but that never stopped a
> philosopher from forging ahead, regardless.
>
> Robert Paul
>
There is much here that deserves commentary. But I am able to respond only to a
small tangential point in Robert's above account - an account that needs to be
read in conjunction with "Patty Duke and The Apriori [part 1 of 2]"). Once the
movie version comes out, we should all view it to see if the "book" is better
than the movie. (Wouldn't you just hate to be the casting director?)
Anyway, before returning to my panicy distance students, let me say a word or
two about Robert's "One can't come to know what love is simply by watching how
Harry and Sally behave." (Isn't there a movie like that? Do they live happily
ever after?)
Our Summer Philosophy Reading Group is tackling Robert Brandom's *Making it
explicit*. Btw, don't try this at home; the Summer readers are university-based
professionals who are analyzing the text under rigorously controlled and
supervised conditions of hermeneutic deconstruction that are unavailable to
most readers. You have been duly warned.
Brandom maintains that if you want to know what "intentionality"
means, look at people who treat others as intentional systems - i.e., observe
people who attribute intentionality to others. He borrows this idea from
Daniel
Dennett, of course ("The intentional stance stance"). But more fundamentally,
the underlying metaphysics here is clearly reminiscent of the early Heidegger
(HIM again). Wie we all know, Martin's claim to fame, at the ripe old age of
37, rested in his recognition that the nature of human being does not exist
independently of human being's understanding of what it means to be a human
being. ............
You may wish to re-read that last sentence. (What? You have something better to
do?) There WILL be a test at the end.
That is to say, ca voulait dire, alles gutes, ona ochyen krasivoya, the being
of
any entity is what it is through the system of responses made to it. No entity
has its "essence" contained immanently within itself, as per the Cartesian
dualistic metaphysics. The being of an entity is constituted by the system of
dispositions addressing it. Even natural phenomena fall under this metaphysics:
guess what the "dispositions" of iron are?
So, if you want to know what "love" means, give up the Cartesian effort to
identify its underlying essence across differing appearances, and simply go
look at people who say they are in love and attribute "being in love" to others
and then find out what movies they are seeing, what kinds of foods they are
eating, what they're doing to and with each others' bodies, minds and souls,
etc.
Continuing steadfastly in his refusal to acknowledge who "Patty Duke" is or
was,
Walter O
MUN
P.S. Was she some sort of flying nun? Did she reside in Mayberry? Or New
Rochelle, NY?
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