Michael -- My hardnosed position on so much of the strictly "philosophy"
stuff on the forum ain't your fault (which I suspect you know). It largely
springs from my reaction to what every major philosopher has been taking for
granted for generations. Two days ago in a posting for Geoff I megalomaniacally
implied you listers are actually being exposed to some original and fundamental
objections to "philosophy today".
I have no illusions that everything I say has been sufficiently
read-and-thought about by me, or is adequately expressed. For me, one of the
great virtues
of our often uncivil forum is that it's a place that forces one to think
further-through, and to articulate defenses for, still inchoate ideas.
However, it still pleasingly beguiles me to see listers, badgered by me so
long, taking on board ideas that, if you were ever to retail them to
professional philosophers you know, you'd probably be subjected to blinks and
protests
about your absurdity. And I know you'd now be able to defend some of the
notions
in ways that would make them sputter if you hung in there. (Just don't let
them bring you to a halt with specious terms of art like 'epistemic', or
dismissive remarks that you need to go read Gadamer or Rorty or Merleau-Ponty
or. .
.)
You say, " I concede that words have no animate power, they can't literally
do anything, whether it's provoking or prodding or pointing."
But in that posting two days ago to Geoff I wrote:
"Say I, "ordinary language philosophy" has somewhat stalled because it has
not shaken the thinking behind such phrases as "THE meanings of words" and "how
words mean", and the use of the form, "What is X?", as in "What is reality?"
"In particular am I astonished to find no philosopher addressing this basic
implication of their general position: They all believe that words ("signs"
etc) DO something. They believe "words" carry on the activity of "meaning",
"signifying", "denoting" etc. Saul Kripke, perhaps the current "leading" living
philosopher today, believes names "name", "pick out".
"As far as I can tell, no one has ever looked closely at the notion that
"words" carry out an "action". To me, that notion entails dizzying absurdities,
and they've never been examined. The outlandish idea that words DON'T act is
so contrary to ingrained assumption, that not only is it not taken seriously,
it's never considered at all.
"If one can ever so wrench his mind as to consider it, it still takes a long
time before its implications become apparent -- or, at any rate, it took MY
slow mind a long time to see its impact on the fundaments of philosophy of
language, mind, and metaphysics ("ontology")."
And here -- you've taken on board what even Saul Kripke didn't figure out.
If/when I have time, I'd like to show the forum some the thinking in the single
piece celebrated as the start of modern "philosophy of language". It's by
Gottlob Frege and it is totally muddled by his assumptions of "signifying"
action,
"reference", "referents", "sense", "meaning" and other terms I've hammered at
here. Believe it, philosophers today are still muddled in many similar ways.
Sure, in such talk I display megalomania, but that doesn't scare me. I'm
smart enough to realize how many things my brain is not equipped to do well.
When
I was young and getting relatively "astronomic" grades and aptitude-test
scores, I thought I could do anything, but my adult life has been an education
in
how wrong I was. It's not bullshit when I say I am awed by what people like you
and Kate and William and Boris and Mando and other listers can do --
effectively with your "head" (and hand). It's something I wanted to do as a boy
and
well into my teens -- and I just didn't have your innate equipment. I know
enough about what they do to be sure I couldn't be a great mathematician,
molecular
biologist, chemist, musician, architect -- the list is enormous.
But I've also learned that in certain other, narrow, ways I have "nothing to
be afraid of" from anyone. I was in an industry where every single executive
in the U.S., England, and Europe would have said my strategy was wrong. It
wasn't, theirs were.
For what it's worth, nothing I ever did in my industry struck me as anything
more than "common sense". It took none of the "inspiration", gifts, the
what-we-want-to-call "genius" needed for the greatest work in the "arts" and
sciences. Very little of the "scholarly work" in the rest of "humanities" or
"social
studies" or "business" has ever struck me as requiring those traits.
Nor, say I, does philosophy. I won't do "great philosophy" now -- I'm too
old. I don't have the time left. If I megalomaniacally think I can still have
some original ideas in narrow parts of philosophy, after twenty-five-hundred
years of smart people being at it, I do it feeling my ideas are just common
sense (supported by my conviction I can see outright errors in the now-numerous
philosophers I've read seriously).
If I express wonder at the fact that philosophers haven't thought of some of
these things, the focus of my wonder is on the zany fact there are so many
assumptions they've simply accepted without ever questioning. (For what
it's
worth I have, off the forum, had colloquies with professional philosophers. I
have encountered sputter, and a startling inability to take on board, to
question, some of the stuff you non-professionals have managed to wrap your
minds
around -- with sporadic tenacity. As a CEO, I was always wary about hiring
MBA's, because their Business School indoctrinations seemed to make it
impossible
for them to entertain novel notions.)
I shall now go back to being a narrow schoolmaster on some aspects of our
forum discussion. For some years now all you guys have been teaching me. I
claim
I have some things to teach you, but I'm fully aware they are very largely
irrelevant to the astonishing creative work you do.
(But wouldn't it be fun to think this tiny forum is involved in
rationcinations that may still be discussed generations from now?)
**************
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