[lit-ideas] The Multiplicity of World
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 13:55:08 EDT
Grice wrote on "The multiplicity of being", so there you go.
In a message dated 7/7/2011 6:18:21 P.M., donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes
in "Re: Philosophy of Music":
This touches of course on very large and important areas, so just some
small points for now..
We are discussing what makes
doh-dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah-dah dah-daah-daah-dah
the "Derry air" (the 'most beautiful melody I ever heard' -- Yeats)
McEvoy:
"It is not merely the "acoustic and auditory levels" but the metaphysics
of these levels, which themselves involve further different "levels", that
we are considering."
McEvoy uses 'metaphysically' rather otiosely.
The prefix, 'meta-', in Greek, makes no sense ("So, how shall I call them
books Aristotle left _by_ the physics books?" ""Meta-physical", of
course"", was the amanuensis's curt reply.
In Latin, things got worse when they thought 'meta-' had a _sense_, which
was Latin, "trans-". "Trans-naturalia" became the meta-physical realm. By
this realm, Aristotle meant just some ramblings on the pragmatics of the verb
"is" (alla Clinton).
----
McEvoy:
"for those "levels" have a physical or World 1 aspect that may be
distinguished from their World 2 and World 3 aspects. Even if we had the same
_physical_ acoustics and auditory "levels" of a dog, as a matter of 'sensory
apparatus', what is music to us might be very different if our cognitive
apparatus in relation to those acoustics were very different - that is, if our
World 2 of mental states [both conscious and unconscious] were very different
despite a similar sensory apparatus."
This trades on subjectivity, dangerously.
Twain said,
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
---- His point was that in New England, where Wagner was JUST beginning to
be performed, the _ears_ of the New Englanders were not corrupted, as they
were those of the Parisians who had to _endure_ Wagner's deafening sounds
in, precisely, Paris.
---
In other words,
By uttering x ("Parsifal", say), Wagner meant that p.
----- This will be relative to the 'intended' target. He may have meant
something _for him_ which differed from what he meant it to mean for his wife,
who happened, incidentally, to be an Italian (Cosima).
---
What he meant it as to be 'understood' by his dog (he had one) is still a
_different animal_ -- metaphorically.
----
In the case of the "Derry air", the pragmatics are slightly more complex in
that the melody was first _heard_ in 1764, from the 'closed mouth' of an
Irish "peasant collen", as Johnson described her.
Graves's father set the melody to music, unsuccessfully. Weatherly tried
his bit, and did not succeed either. There is something in the "Derry air"
melody that is NOT meant by words.
(vide Grice, "Studies in the way of words"). That is why Diana, for her
funeral, had it played "without words", as it originally went, and should
always originally or other go.
---
McEvoy:
"We might guess that a person whose sensory apparatus for sound was normal,
but who was cognitively impaired in some way, would have a different grasp
of music to a person who was not so impaired;"
Verdi complained that Wagner's deafening sound (world III, almost) had a
causal effect (or 'affect') on, indeed, his own sensory apparatus ("breaks my
inner ears", he would complain). A similar scenario was existent for
Beethoven, but inverse, in that he (as composer) was deaf himself.
---
McEvoy:
"in addition, response to music depends on learning and exposure -
engagement with World 3. Additionally, for Popper, World 3 is only accessed
by
humans"
-- or extraterrestrials? (cfr. "Martians, according to Grice" --
elsewhere).
"not by animals (though I doubt he would be dogmatic on this, as he leaves
it as a fundamental problem that remains very open "To what extent human
knowledge is continuous or discontinuous with animal knowledge?").
I wouldn't care about animals, but when those clever Americans were sending
important messages 'overseas', indeed, to the universe, their 'meaning'
point was that
there may be an addresee, somewhere, that may be able to understand
human language, and stuff.
They included, in that space ship, some important items of Popper's world
III: paintings ("the Mona Lisa" by Da Vinci), and "Ode to Sprig" by Vivaldi,
as performed by a celebrated quartette.
The point was that the extraterrestrial would decode (or infer) the
'spiritual' value of such stuff -- not its mere material base. This was one
reason why they refused to include _material_ jewelry (shining pieces of
emerald
and gold, say), since they may be said to have an intrinsic world-1 value,
as Elizabeth Taylor was well aware.
---
McEvoy:
"As indicated above, even the "perception of the performance" may involve
physical as well as mental events, and also World 3 'content' as the object
that is grasped by World 2. It is not all one 'level'".
I see. The paradox, for Popper, is that he cannot give ONE example of an
item of world III that is not 'realised' in world I.
---
McEvoy quotes my:
"I follow you there. I agree that if music is psychological, and has some
'substance' at the World II level, it should be reduced to a World I
level."
and comments:
"Am I right in thinking this should conclude, "it should _not_ be reduced
to a World I level"? Otherwise I'm at a loss to how you are agreeing."
---- I thought, and I may quote you, that you were saying that the
realisation in World I is a sine qua non. An item in world II must be realised
in
world I, and an item in world III must be realised in world II, and
consequently (transitively) in world I.
McEvoy:
"Somewhere afair (I think in his Emory Lectures) he is asked a similar
question - about whether ethics should given its own 'world'. He seems very
open that we might distinguish any number of 'worlds', and even worlds within
worlds, but is sticking to World123 as sufficient for his purposes as far
as they go in those lectures."
Thanks. This is of course related, but not identical, with Lewis's title of
his book,
"The plurality of words" (Blackwell) -- and Griceian parsimony, in
contrast.
---
For Lewis, the point is about the real existence (redundancy) of 'possible'
worlds. He uses 'w' to symbolise world, and he means just a Witters-sort
of state of affairs.
"it may rain"
is true if (Ew)(w) It rains.
----
i.e. if there is a world in which it rains
---
McEvoy:
"There is enough standing in the way of accepting a World123 analysis for
World123 to be enough to be going on with: but if we accepted at least that
tripartite division, we might then ask what further divisions or
sub-divisions might properly be made."
I see. Again, this was I think first seen by Aristotle, Lovejoy, and
Nikolai Hartman.
It's more like the 'emergence' theory -- hence the idea that the levels
are three and just three:
physical
psychological
"spiritual".
----- The third world being the 'objectification' of spirit alla Hegel.
Note that it's not 'social' level, alla Comte.
---
McEvoy:
"As indicated, far from offering any such modal argument, Popper is very
open to increasing the divisions beyond 12&3 as we develop the arguments: he
is a metaphysical pluralist and comments that Occam's Razor, even if
accepted, raises the question of what is _unnecessary_ multiplying of entities
and what is not. The World 123 division is a minimum necessary division in
his view."
Again, the label of 'world' being confusing more than not.
Physical
Psychological
and
Spiritual
being just fine.
The time-honoured polemic was the distinction between the psychological and
the spiritual. English does not distinguish this too well; or if it does,
it may trigger the wrong implicature. The use of "soul", for example. Does
it belong to World III? I don't think so.
Margot Asquith used to call herself "a soul" -- she meant something
different -- and perhaps more interesting -- from what Aquinas meant.
anima
animus
spiritus
is a similar distinction in the Romance languages.
The idea of the third world, in Popper, then, obscures some subtle fine
distinctions in traditional terminology. Plus, he is not too explicit about
the emergence of one world out of the previous one.
----
McEvoy:
re Popper's "materialism" and Eccles:
"I think the influence is much more the other way, and that Eccles (like
Medawar) is much less astute than Popper on what is at stake philosophically
(as might be expected). "The Self And Its Brain" is another of his great
books, worth reading just for Popper's historical survey of approaches to
the mind-body problem."
I wouldn't think he would pay much attention to the time-honoured debate in
the pages of "Mind", to which H. P. Grice (the early Grice) contributed,
"Personal identity" (Mind, 1941)
but I do. I don't believe in 'split personalities', in that schyzophrenia
presents a problem for the philosopher (or more than one). Grice identifies
'the self' (a pretentious word that, like Nowell-Smith, he avoids -- he
prefers to stick with the use of "someone" as in "Someone was hit by a cricket
bat yesterday", "Someone fell from the stairs", "Someone is listening to a
piece of music") with memory,
alla Locke and Bergson.
---
The self offers sufficient problems to the philosopher to want to go and
analyse 'brain' into the bargain. And why not say that 'arm' and 'tail'
comprises my self too? (Grice, "Can I have a pain in my tail?").
----
---
(For Aristotle, as for Grice, it's the _chest_ that is the see of the
soul).
---
McEvoy:
"And beautifully written. It is a defence of (v. unfashionable) mind-body
dualism (indeed of World123 interaction) but not of untenable Cartesian
dualism with its idea of a mental "substance" and causation by push (that
cannot be reconciled: for how can an immaterial substance 'push' a material
one?)."
I guess Grice would have been unimpressed in that, and Ryle is to blame
here, nobody in Oxford was taking Descartes seriously with his
ghost-in-the-machine category mistake.
---
McEvoy:
"That many philosophers tend to assume that a modern mind-body dualism must
be dualism in its Cartesian form is as egregious as if they were to assume
that a contemporary physical monism must take the form of asserting, a la
Descartes, that there are physical "substances" and that all causation
between these is by push, though modern science has
overthrown these Cartesian assumptions."
I thought you would say "monism" alla Plotinus or Leibniz with his monads.
I have always been surprised by the fact that American philosophers were
once so enamoured with "Monism" that, out of all the possible titles for a
philosophical journal, they chose, "The Monist".
---
McEvoy:
"Though it is a deep problem to explain how a mental event could interact
with a physical one, as Popper points out we do not have a very good
explanation for how different physical events interact - for example, how an
immaterial force like gravity can affect the behaviour of material objects.
But
no one argues that because we cannot quite explain how this physical
interaction is possible, it therefore does not happen - yet, in effect, it is
one
of the chief arguments used against mind-body dualism that we cannot
explain quite how such interaction is possible and so we should deny it
exists."
Good point. Indeed, as Grice notes, people (and philosophers) should have
taken Hume more seriously and avoid altogether talk of 'cause'.
For Grice, and for me, 'cause' means
"to will".
"The cause of the death of Charles I" was his 'decapitation'. It would
still be otiose to say that Charles I's decapitation willed his death. Yet,
this is what 'aitia' meant in Greek, and causa in Latin.
In Italian, 'causa' gets corrupted to 'cosa'. The Italians, non-Humeans by
heart, go on to overuse 'cosa' in every (other) question they make, "cosa"
sometimes even replacing the slightly more correct, 'che cosa' (where
'che' is more than enough -- 'what do you say?', 'what thing do you say?',
"thing do you say?") and so on.
In French, it's even worse with 'chose', which to aggravate things, made a
philosopher out of Michel Foucault ("les mots et les choses" -- mottoes and
causes).
Grice notes that in Greek,
'a cause'
was a motto for fight.
"a rebel without a cause" is still a rebel.
When the Romans translated the 'causative' case in Greek, they got all
confused.
There is nothing of an 'accusation' in
Peter killed Paul.
The killing of Paul is the _effect_ of Peter's killing Paul. The Greeks saw
this as involving 'aitia' -- but Cicero, for one, got confused, and
thought some Legalese was involved. And the rest is misunderstanding.
What is 'accusative' about _me_ that is not accusative about "I", to bring
the topic back to personal identity?
Cheers,
Speranza
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