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Richard's Commonplace BookCompiled 9/89-3/93. HTML version, 12/94. Version updates 7/96, 14/99These are references I found useful while developing my own ideas about language and art, and are offered here along with a few notes on them. Home page: Stony
Run. Comments, additions, etc. to: rbear@oregon.uoregon.edu.
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Bachelard, Gaston. The Philosophy of No. Trans. G.C. Waterston. New York: The Orion Press, 1968. [Q175.B153]. . . mathematical metaphor and measured phenomena are indistinguishable from one another; the metaphor has the same general properties as reality; reality is not thought or understood otherwise than by metaphor (64).Here there is still some assumption that reality must in fact somehow lie beyond metaphor; at the same time it is recognized that the metaphor already lies at the limit of access. A metaphor seems like a gateway into the beyond; but as we go through it we find ourselves merely arriving elsewhere in this realm of which we already know. See Popper.there are no simple phenomena; every phenomenon is a fabric of relations" (quoted in Culler 97 from Bachelard's doctoral thesis).Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton 1979. [BD 161.B32]. . . sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i.e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain for more than a few seconds become perceptible only by scanning.In other words, mind is whatever runs on change. Mind is the history engine. See also Kimble.Difference is all the mind's input devices can detect, and difference is in a sense all the mind is there to consider and respond to.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. [GN6.B3]
When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "what interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system -- and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.Loops can be misleading images. When I visualize a "feedback loop" what I seem to see is a circular structure. The actual shape of feedback is spiral, for nothing in nature can arrive in exactly the same place it occupied before. Time is left out of the loop picture. But Bateson's point is sound. Mind can be shown to be simply whatever responds to, or accomodates, change -- so that there is no intrinsic obstacle to speaking of Lake Erie (as system, not as object) as mind. See also Gatlin and Campbell.Bateson, Mary Catherine. Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
Any kind of representation within a person of something outside depends on there being sufficient diversity within him to reflect the relationships in what he perceives....if human beings were totally non- comparable in the degree of their internal complexity to what's outside, then there would be no chance of any kind of valid internal representation of what lies outside them....If we're going to talk about relationships instead of about things, then all our talk about what exists, what's prior to what, and so on, just has to be rethought completely....We err through a mismatch between ourselves and the other, and all our falsehoods are falsehoods about ourselves as well....we have incomplete access to the complexity that we are....it eludes us, it's too fine-grained, we're just not organized to be aware of it. One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry....when we see [an ecosystem] as beautiful, that may be the only way that we can talk about the fact that we've perceived a set of relationships in it (287-289).see the entire book. UO doesn't have a copy, Eugene Library does. She's Gregory Bateson's and Margaret Mead's daughter and Our own Metaphor is her record of a landmark conference organized by her father on how to help dishabituate civilization from its addiction to destructive strategies.Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. [P49.B3513 1986]
Recommends that we "...conceive...a science of the Inexhaustible, of infinite Displacement..." (43). Compare Derrida. Describes a sentence as a "braid" of several codes (93). This is reminiscent of the structure of DNA, perhaps deliberately so. Compare Gatlin. Infinite displacement is possible because that which gives meaning to the part of the system under consideration is precisely whatever part of the system is not the part under consideration (James). Context shifts endlessly, always forming a new horizon (Jauss) for the new objective.
Today we recognize in the living organism the same structures as in the speaking subject: life itself is constructed as a language. (100)This is because reality itself is not found in the horizon of the objective; here there is only our extrapolation from specific experiences: compare W. V. Quine and also Buckminster Fuller.The reversal of appearances -- let us no longer say of appearances into reality . . . (273)
Calow, Peter. Biological Machines: A Cybernetic Approach to Life.London: Edward Arnold, 1976. [QH507.C34]
Says that (according to C.H. Waddington, 1962) there are three kinds of teleology: 1. the end is the cause; 2. a spirit directs the process; 3. the end proceeds from conditions present at the beginning. Darwin's theory destroys the first two but not the third. This third kind of teleology is consistent with mechanism, that is, living organisms appear to be complexes of feedback mechanisms. The mathematics of general systems theory applies to organisms and to communities of organisms, which are also organisms on a different order of scale. Refers to Whitehead for idea that the concept "organism" should be extended to systems presently called "inorganic."
Campbell, Jeremy. Grammatical Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. [Q360.C33]
[Information theory] was presented to the world in the form of two papers by Claude Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, published in the Bell System Technical Journal in July and October 1948 (17).Gregory Bateson, Lila Gatlin, and many others use Shannon's ideas directly....a system is described statistically, rather than in terms of direct cause and effect. . . (50).Shannon's assumption is that information theory involves mathematical laws like that which predicts pressure levels in containers of gas. From one molecule of gas, one can learn nothing of the pressure. Enough molecules must be taken into consideration to give a statistical description of pressure; when measured, the level proves to be as predicted. Information is a transform of preceding conditions that is meaningless on a special- case basis (Fuller), but more and more meaningful as more and more factors are taken into consideration -- context, or horizon (Jauss) in other words.The cable had been sent from Paris . . . PLEASE SEND ME FIFTY DOLLARS AMERICAN EXPRESS NICE LETTER OF EXPLANATION FOLLOWS LOVE LOU. The message presented no problem to Mrs. Tribus, although the word "nice" was a little strange . . . to Tribus himself however, it looked wrong. He knew that there were three American Express offices in Paris and the cable should have specified which one. . . Then he realized that "nice" was not an adjective . . . but the name of a town on the French Riviera. . . because of his prior information, Nice was more probable than nice in the context of the whole message (65).The context must include geographical knowledge of France greater than that Paris is in France, otherwise some of the information in the cable is simply not there; see Fish.Entropy is missing information (86).Total lack of geographic knowledge would reduce the cable to mere noise -- which is what remains of a system once its components have been reduced (by the second law of thermodynamics) into whatever is not the system.Once the genes are seen as information first and chemistry second, once their all-important role as symbols is recognized, then the barriers dividing one science from another come down (91).Entropy is information without a context, no longer within reach of the sampling techniques of the system. Once it is missing it is no longer persuasive, i.e., all information is rhetorical (Fish).There will always be true statements which can neither be shown to be true nor proved to be false within the confines of the system, using the axioms and rules of the system (Godel) (109).
Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign. Norman: UOP, 1988. [PN94.C85 1988]
To deconstruct the hierarchical oppositions of Western metaphysics is to reveal them as constructions -- by showing through a close reading of philosophical texts how they are undermined by the discourses that affirm or rely on them (20).This follows Derrida closely -- but the texts need not be philosophical, at least not in the sense that they are texts produced by people who believe they are producing philosophical texts rather than, say, cookbooks or automotive technical manuals. All that is required for deconstruction is a text that assumes that there is or can be objectivity -- and this is a condition no known text escapes in some measure (Fish).Repeated positive results do not verify a hypothesis, while a negative result forces one to investigate failure and leads to a more proximate knowledge (98).This follows Popper. The danger is in the word "proximate," which skirts a reification of knowledge; but Culler is aware of this. He limits "knowledge" by insisting that "proximate" accompany it; left to itself it might appear in the reader's mind in its ancient guise of "knowledge of essences." This is precisely the knowledge Popper and Culler deny is possible, by insisting on negative verification.De Man was known above all for his uncompromising critique of pieties in the study of literature and for his insistence on both the demystifying potential of close reading and the dubiousness of thinking one achieves demystified knowledge (107).Piety is a form of self-deception in which one deliberately fails to examine the multiplicity of relations passing through a system in hopes of retaining the sanctity of the system. That is, one selectively blinds oneself to all but one of the many "purposes" of the system. It is a piety on the part of Exxon executives to believe Exxon exists in order to provide fuel, and profit for shareholders; it also exists in order to provide money for cleanup crews and to provide opportunities for some species by the destruction of environmental niches of other species. De Man, as Culler notes, not only noticed pieties but noticed the emptiness that follows upon exposing them. Going out the door of demystification, one finds oneself (again) coming in through that same door into the place of mystery.De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: UMP, 1986. [Pn85.D374]
The attempt to treat literature theoretically may as well resign itself to the fact that it has to start out from empirical considerations (5).De Man notices the social nature of communication. Nothing can be agreed upon until something has already been agreed upon, so that in the end all we have are agreements founded upon agreements. Convention was first a gathering, then a gathering for purposes of coming to an agreement, then the agreement itself. What will be found, then, where "thing" and word seem to come together, is rhetoric (Fish).The phenomenality of the signifier, as sound, is unquestionably involved in the correspondence between the name and the thing named, but the link, the relationship between word and thing, is not phenomenal but conventional (10).
Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: NCB; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanitas Press, 1975. [Q175.F42]
The consistency condition which demands that new hypotheses agree with accepted theories is unreasonable because it preserves the older theory, and not the better theory. Hypotheses contradicting well- confirmed theories give evidence that cannot be obtained in any other way. Proliferation of theories is beneficial for science, while uniformity impairs its critical power.Facts are conventional (De Man), and only when events occur that are so inexplicable by the going convention that they are denied by the going ideology to have occurred at all do we have the preconditions for what is called scientific progress. Compare, on this, Kuhn and also Popper.Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be a part of progress.
Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: DUP, 1989. [PN441.F44 1989]
A formalist believes that words have clear meanings, and in order to believe that (or because he believes that) he must also believe (1) that minds see these clear meanings clearly, (2) that clarity is a condition that persists through changes in context....[fourteen other propositions follow, each building in absurdity on the one before] (6).There is a convergence taking place among some of those who work in the apparently diverse fields of information science, mathematics, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, physics, philosophy of science, history, critical theory, and others. This convergence, as it seems to me, follows upon the work of Charles Darwin, whose deconstruction of traditional teleology (see Calow) opened the way for a science of statistically (see Campbell) determined significances -- in which things are not objects but events, events not as caused by specific preceding events, but as vectors for relations among many synchronic (Fuller) events."Rhetorical" is, of course, a master-word in the essays that make up this book, and indeed the conclusion of the book (hardly a novel one) is that we live in a rhetorical world (25).
. . . the anti-foundationalist claim [is] not that there are no foundations, but that whatever foundations there are (and there are always some) have been established by persuasion, that is, in the course of argument and counterargument on the basis of examples and evidence that are themselves cultural and contextual (29).
We cannot check our interpretive accounts against the facts of the text because it is within our accounts -- that is, within an already assumed set of stipulative definitions and evidentiary criteria -- that the text and its facts, or, rather, a text and its facts, emerge and become available for inspection (143-4).
The anti-foundationalist argument . . . has been made in a variety of ways and in a variety of disciplines: in philosophy by Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, W. V. Quine; in anthropology by Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner; in history by Hayden White; in sociology by the entire tradition of the sociology of knowledge and more recently by the ethnomethodologists; in hermeneutics by Heidegger, and Derrida; in the general sciences of man by Foucault; in the history of science by Thomas Kuhn; in the history of art by Michael Fried; in legal theory by Philip Bobbit and Sanford Levincon; in literary theory by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Walter Michaels, Steven Knapp, John Fekete, Jonathan Culler Terry Eagleton, Frank Lentricchia, Jane Tompkins, Stanley Fish, and on and on (345).Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, HUP 1980. [PN81.F56]The reader was now given joint responsibility for the production of a meaning that was in itself redefined as an event rather than an entity (3).Fish's contribution is that despite the individuality of his voice, he never fails to remind us that his power of interpretation is a social power -- that interpretive communities precede and even constitute individual interpretation.Categories like "the natural" and "the everyday" are not essential but conventional. They refer not to properties of the world but to properties of the world as it is given to us by our interpretive assumptions (271).
Foucault, Michel. "The Discourse on Language." Trans. Rupert Sawyer. Social Science Information (10).
And yet, a century later, the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was, nor in what it did: it lay in what was said. The day dawned when truth moved over from the ritualized act -- potent and just -- of enunciation to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form, its object and what it referred to. A division emerged between Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false; it was a new division for, henceforth, true discourse was no longer precious and desirable, since it had ceased to be discourse linked to the exercise of power. And so the Sophists were routed.See Pirsig. Once language became the gateway to the beyond (an impossible task for it to fulfill, see Fish ), a piety entered philosophical discourse, in which the great philosophers visualized themselves going out through the gate into reality, and not, as they actually were, re-entering through the same gate at the same moment, somewhere else in the realm of mere discourse. This piety always, wherever it is found, displaces the power of myth, hence the universal antipathy to it of the priests. And yet there was a something in the myth-language that had given rise to the priests (even though theirs is so often an even greater mystification/pietistic discourse than that of the philosophers). This was and is the simple power of rhetoric to model (Fuller). A myth is a model, powerful when acted out; its internal logic is compelling to the acting community, and that power, the power of metaphor, is not only closer to the bone than "knowledge of essences" but essential to life itself. Foucault puts an articulate finger on the pulse of this community word-power, and this skill is the ground of his appeal to the political Left.Fuller, Buckminster. Critical Path. New York: Macmillan, 1981
I am not a thing -- a noun. I am not flesh. At 85, I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food, and water, which temporarily became my flesh and which progressively disassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs -- evolutionary processes.Fuller, Buckminster. Synergetics 2. New York: Macmillan, 1979. [Q295.F84]Things = events = patterns (5).Thus recapitulating Bachelard (in Culler), Bateson, and Whorf. But Fuller operated independently of the academic community, and arrived at this conclusion independently.. . . there is no "space," there is only the tuned-in and the at- present-un-tuned-in (55).Thus recapitulating Shannon (in Campbell). But Fuller had been thinking along these lines for a long time; he anticipated Shannon.Model is generalization; form is special case (198).This confirms Blake's insight and destroys Reynolds, at the same time depriving Blake's insight of its power to negate generalization. Every being generalizes, just as Blake did when he criticized Reynolds; the apparent contradiction in Blake is resolved by the discovery that generalization is mere extrapolation ( Quine) and need not presume the existence of an ideal form.Physics has found no surfaces and no solids: only localized regions of high-frequency, self-interfering, deflecting, and consequently self- knotting energy events (219).Once we are free of the tyranny of surfaces and solids we are ready to interpret the universe in terms of relation rather than object ( Bachelard).One by itself is nonexistent. Existence begins with awareness. Awareness begins with observable otherness (240).Compare Saussure. See also the work of Martin Buber, and the Psalms.Gatlin, Lila L. Information Theory and the Living System. New York: CUP, 1972. [QH507.G37]
Very technical, but highly rewarding. She says that life may be defined operationally as an information processing system (no more, no less, and regardless of scale). Discusses DNA as a language-based information system. There are presently over 4 to the tenth, to the ninth power base sequences possible for organisms on the DNA model alone. This is greater than the estimated number of particles in the universe.
Goodman, Nelson. Of Mind and Other Matters. Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1984. [B29.G619 1984]
I sit in a cluttered waiting room, unaware of any stereo system. Gradually I make out two speakers built into the bookcase, a receiver and turntable in a corner cabinet, and a remote control switch on the mantel . . . . Another visitor, fresh from a lifetime in the deepest jungle, will not find, because he has not the means of making, any stereo system in that room. Nor will he find books there; but in the books and plants I find he may find fuel and food that I do not. Not only does he not know that the stereo set is one; he does not recognize as a thing at all that which I know to be a stereo system -- that is, he does not make out or make any such object (35).Popularizing, imprecise language, but accessible. Shows that objects are constituted by us from the ways in which we assemble relations. See also Sapir and Whorf.Henson, Keith. "Memetics: The Science of Information Viruses." Whole Earth Review #57 (Winter 1987), pp. 50-55.
Memetics . . . is a word coined in purposeful analogy to "gene" by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. . . memes were defined as replicating information patterns that use minds to get themselves copied much as a virus uses cells to get itself copied. Like genes, memes are pure information, whether the sequence is coded in DNA, printed on paper, or written on magnetic tape (51).Henson is popularizing, and his language here is relatively imprecise. The concept of "meme" as he here borrows it from Dawkins, is, however, suggestive. Memes may turn out, in the end, to be only a classification. If life itself, as Gatlin and others (see Barthes) suggest, is information, memes would be only one of the many ways in which models "travel" in transformation.Social movements can be modeled as side effects of infectious ideas that spread among people (50).
Examples of memes are times, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain . . . . If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, . . . he mentions it in his articles and lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself . . . (51).
Jakobson, Roman. "What is Poetry?" Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Ed. Ladislaw Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: MITP, 1976. pp. 164-175. [P99.S39]
Why is it necessary to make a special point of the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because besides the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object (A is A1), there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequacy of that identity (A is not A1). The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out (175).Compare Popper. Until there is change (Bateson), which to the neuron in question is, in a sense, contradiction (as with computers: a 1 is not a 0), there can be no activity, no response, because there is nothing to respond to (also found in Kimble in the study of sea slugs).James, William. The Principles of Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1901. [BF121.J2]
Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it . . . (255).It is amazing how much of what one reads in Kimble (1988) on psychobiology is already found in James (1901). But this passage, although implicit in Kimble, is explicit in James: context makes the image. It might not be too much to say, exceeding James: image is the information (text) that we find when we examine the field (con-text). That is, the text does not merely depend on the context, but is a consequence of our examination of context, which is actually all that is there. See also Peirce.Jauss, Hans Robert. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." Trans. Timothy Bahti. In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: UMP, 1982. [PN98.R38J38 1982]
A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence.Actually the text was never in the material. Analogy is a kind of dance, and in the presence of the ink it is the reader that dances.. . . the aesthetics of mimesis has lost its obligatory character, along with the substantialist metaphysics ("knowledge of essences") that founded it."Knowledge of essences" l philosophy after Plato. For a thorough popular treatment, see Pirsig. See also Culler and Foucault.Kimble, Daniel P. Biological Psychology. New York: Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1988. [QP360.K49 1988]
Most modern biological psychologists would probably classify themselves not as dualists, such as Descartes, but as monists -- subscribing to the general notion that only one sort of substance is found in the universe and that the brain and everything else are constructed from it. Opinions vary about such mental events as thinking, dreaming, and remembering. For example, mind can be considered as (1) simply a concept that we use to explain the workings of the brain; (2) a process that has as one of its characteristics self-awareness; (3) an emergent property of the organization of the network of billions of cells in a complex brain; (4) an unimportant byproduct of the workings of the brain. Page 5.Sensation is based on difference in the environment that has a statistical relationship to the sensors (Campbell). Information processing by an organism is indistinguishable, mathematically and empirically, from information processing by any complex system -- which is to say that there is nothing to distinguish biological systems from other systems ( Bateson). "Life" as a term has suddenly become an undemonstrable explanatory principle."The brains of all cases of childhood dyslexia so far studied contain cortical regions whose structure is anomalous as a result of disturbances in utero" (98).That is to say, you are only who you are because of where you are in space and time; context is everything.One of the important "decisions" the differentiating neuron must make is its choice of transmitter. Each cell has genetic instructions for producing any or all of the neurotransmitters; but each neuron secretes only a small number, perhaps only one, after it has differentiated. Experiments with neurons of autonomic nervous systems indicate that the local environment of the differentiating plays a critical role in determining which particular transmitter the cell actually secretes (101).
Rats were housed in either standard conditions, impoverished conditions with few stimuli, or enriched environments with several cage and with objects to explore. Although other parts of the brain did not differ in weight among the three groups, the cortex of animals in the enriched condition was found to be about five percent heavier than the cortex of environmentally impoverished rats and about two percent heavier than the cortex of rats reared under standard conditions. . . .This additional weight is largely due to increased growth of basal dendrites on the cortical neurons. There is some evidence that these cortical gains are due to informal learning about the environment by the animals, not to some general sensory stimulation (108).Environment -- context -- again. Cells are persuaded to become what they are by the circumstances in which they find themselves.Derrida, Jacques, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: JHUP, 1970. [B841.4.L33]
Contains the papers and proceedings of the symposium: "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," held at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, October 18-21, 1966. Included is Derrida's famous paper on "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," 247-264. Also participating were Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan, among others. From the discussion following Derrida's presentation (which see):
Here or there I have used the word de-construction, which has nothing to do with destruction. That is to say, it is simply a question of . . . being alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentation of the language we use -- and that is not destruction (271).McCulloch, Warren S. Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1965, 1970. A collection of essays and lectures concerning mind and brain, with emphasis on empirical interpretation of neurophysiological evidence for modeling (metaphor) as a material phenomenon. We act out our myths precisely because the acting out is required for imposing upon long-term memory our experience of the world. The maps in long-term memory are shaped. We discuss tables based on our experience of specific tables (as in Aristotle) yet our general knowledge is an extrapolation not from the things them- selves but from comparison of models (embedded in cerebral cortex) of them.So, corresponding to the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy must always increase, we can write for any computing machine the corresponding law--information can never increase. This ensures that no machine can operate on the future but must derive its information from the past. It can never do anything with this information except corrupt it. The transmission of signals over ordinary networks of communication always follows the law that deduction obeys, that there can be no more information in the output than there is in the input. The noise, and only the noise, can increase. Therefore, if we are to deal with knowers that are computing machines, we can state this much about them. Each is a device, however complicated, which can only corrupt revelation (146).By throwing away all information that fails to agree with other information, we achieve an immense certainty that what we do observe is due to something in the world (147).This confirms Reidl on the probabilistic logic used by life forms generally, and establishes the digital procedure by which mind in responding to difference creates similarity (metaphorical relation).Peirce, Charles Sanders. Semiotic and Significs: the Correspondence Between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Ed. Charles S. Hardwick. Bloomington: IUP, 1977. [P99.P4 1977]
It appears to me that the essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient . . . according to the physical doctrine, nothing ever happens but the continued rectilinear velocities with the accelerations that accompany different relative positions of the particles. All other relations, of which we know so many, are inefficient. Knowledge in some way renders them efficient; and a sign is something by knowing which we know something more. With the exception of knowledge, in the present instant, of the contents of consciousness in that instant (the existence of which knowledge is open to doubt) all our thought & knowledge is by signs. (31-32). -- Peirce to Welby October 12, 1904For "inefficient relations" read "information masked by noise." For "efficient relations" read "information separated from noise." A model of the "rectilinear velocities," although not the velocities themselves, has value if it proves to be predictive of those velocities. The efficiency is the efficiency of analogy. Compare Fuller, Saussure.Peirce, Charles Sanders. "Views of Chemistry: Sketched for Young Ladies [1861]." Writings of C. S. Peirce. Bloomington: IUP, 1982. [B945.P4]
"She walks in beauty like the queen of night." This line contains a poetical image. Is it in the ink? Yet no Englishman can look at this ink without the form and the thrill coming to him can he? Not if he can read. What is this reading? It is an interpretation according to a system agreed upon beforehand (55).I had no idea there was anyone saying this in 1861! Compare Fish.Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1974.
Still in print and still selling after nearly twenty years, this popular account contains, among other things, the story of a young rhetorician who went up against the bastion of "knowledge of essences" in America, the University of Chicago Philosophy Department, and, for a moment, won.
"What? . . . Socrates has sworn to the Gods that it is the truth!" Phaedrus replies, "Socrates himself says it is an analogy." Fantastic, Phaedrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position . . . . Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that. . . . He doesn't understand where the shot has come from. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones (383-384).Compare Foucault. See also Jauss.Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric in turn is the child of the myths and poetry . . . (385).
Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books, 1959. [Q175.P863]
All science is cosmology . . . many people believe that the truth of these universal statements is "known by experience," yet it is clear that an account of an experience -- of an observation or the result of an experiment -- can in the first place be only a singular statement and not a universal one. Accordingly people who say of a universal statement that we know its truth from experience usually mean that the truth of this universal statement can somehow be reduced to the truth of singular ones, and that these singular ones are known by experience to be true; which amounts to saying that the universal statement is based on inductive inference. Thus to ask whether there are natural laws known to be true appears to be only another way of asking whether inductive inferences are logically justified (28).Thus he leaves meaning (see footnote, p. 28) and metaphysics (see page 37) entirely out of his method (compare W.V. Quine). This is because, as he says,Statements can be logically justified only by statements (43).It seems at first a trite truism to insist that science is only science if there can be scientific progress, but on a second look we may find this passage remarkably insightful. Only when there is an unanticipated difference do we notice anything at all. Every creature, faced with monotony, becomes habituated. Habituation ( Kimble) is energy efficient, but slows response time dangerously (= complacency). A new stimulus is required, a dishabituation, if the creature is to make whatever adjustments are necessary for survival under conditions of change. Science is merely an extension of the methods already in place in living things for responding to change. So is art. This is why every artist of note is doing, or trying to do, something different, new, not seen before. The successful work of art is that which dishabituates society. In this sense, what is there about Darwin's Origin of Species that is different from art?A system [is] empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience (40-41).
Popper, Karl. Realism and the Aim of Science. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield 1983. [Q175.P8643]
...my subject does not exist because subject matters in general do not exist. There are no subject matters; only branches of learning....There are only problems and the urge to solve them. A science such as botany or chemistry...is, I contend, merely an administrative unit. University administrators have a difficult job anyway, and it is a great convenience to them to work on the assumption that there are some named subjects, with the chairs attached to them to be filled by the experts....It has been said that the subjects are also a convenience to the student. I do not agree: even serious students are misled by the myth of the subject. (5)He says (8) that all critically unexamined beliefs are prejudices (and refers in this connection to Bacon's "idols").I am a rationalist. By a rationalist I mean a man who wishes to understand the world, and to learn by arguing with others....By "arguing with others" I mean, more especially, criticizing them; inviting their criticism; and trying to learn from it. The art of argument is a peculiar form of fighting--with words instead of swords, and inspired by the interest of getting nearer to the truth about the world. (5-6)
I believe that the so-called method of science consists in this kind of criticism. Scientific theories are distinguishable from myths merely in being criticizable, and in being open to modifications in the light of criticism. (7)
Never aim at more precision than is required by the job in hand. (7)
...I do not believe in definitions, and I do not believe that definitions add to exactness; and I especially dislike pretentious terminology and the psuedo-exactness concerned with it. What can be said can and should always be said more and more simply and clearly. (8)
Describes the common-sense notion of "learning by experience" that this is "learning by repetition" merely. Even Hume, he says, was fooled on this point, though Hume was the one who showed that it is illogical to rely on such learning.
As against all this, I happen to believe that in fact we never draw inductive inferences, or make use of what are now called "inductive procedures." Rather, we always discover regularities by the essentially different method of trial and error, of conjecture and refutation, or of learning from our mistakes....The method of learning by trial and error has, wrongly, been taken for a method of learning by repetition. "Experience" is gained by learning from our mistakes rather than by accumulation or association of observations. It is gained by an actively critical approach: by the critical use of experiments and observations designed to help us find where we have gone astray. (35)That is, you will go on collecting round things to make fire until, and only until, you encounter a round thing that does not burn. Then you will need to construct a theory that distinguishes between logs and iron pipes. I got this example from an introductory philosophy text 20 years ago. If you know the text, let me know, so I can cite it properly.Quine, Willard Van Ormond. Methods of Logic. New York: Holt, 1950.
Logic, like any science, has as its business the pursuit of truth. What are true are certain statements; and the pursuit of truth is the endeavor to sort out the true statements from the others, which are false. Truths are as plentiful as falsehoods, since each falsehood admits of a negation that is true. But scientific activity is not the indiscriminate amassing of truths; science is selective and seeks the truths that count for most, either in point of intrinsic interest or as instruments for coping with the world. (xi)Quine, Willard Van Ormond. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MITP, 1960. [B844.Q5]But utterances about physical objects are not verifiable or refutable by direct comparison with experience. They purport to describe, not experience, but the external world. They can be compared with the world only through the medium of our experience of that world, but the connection between our experience and the world already involves a step of hypothesis or inference which precludes any direct and conclusive confrontation of the utterance with its subject matter. There is many a slip betwixt objective cup and subjective lip. (xii).
What makes insensible things intelligibly describable is analogy, notably the special form of analogy known as extrapolation (14).The conclusion is that extrapolation is the operative principle even in what is called direct observation.Actually the truths that can be said even in common-sense terms about ordinary things are, themselves, in turn, far in excess of any available data (22).
To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it . . . we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time (22).
Quine, Willard Van Ormond. The Roots of Reference. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1973. [B105.R25 Q56]
Bodies are not given in our sensations, but are only inferred from them (1).And the inference is, in an important sense, in error. The temptation is always to lose sight of the relations and go for objectification.. . . a notion of cause is out of place in modern physics (6).Events are understood as probable, given certain preconditions. Cause is an explanatory principle.Don't venture farther from sensory evidence than you need to . . . . We recognize that between the globally learned observation sentences and the recognizably articulate talk of bodies there are irreducible leaps, but we can still be glad to minimize them...(138).This is given here as advice, whereas Fish would say that it is what we do, regardless of our intention. Both are right. We can hardly, even if we try, give up or stray far from our sensations in practice . . . at the same time, theory is capable of fooling itself into thinking it can compensate for the limitations of sensation, whether direct or technically aided. But Godel's theorem intervenes. No system can be devised that can explain adequately whatever is not a feature of the system.Reidl, Rupert, and Robert Kaspar. Biology of Knowledge: The Evolutionary Basis of Reason. Trans. from the third German edition by Paul Foulkes. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1984. [QP398.R5313]
Life is a hypothetical realist . . . there are many indications that support the reality of the world . . . but none of them is logically convincing. However, the solution that living creatures have found for the reality problem avoids deductive conclusions and depends on probabilities (19).The idea is that all living things are pragmatists, relying on statistics to pull them (or if not them, their species) through. Compare Richards. See also Kimble throughout.Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: OUP, 1936. [PN175.R45 1965]
A chief cause of misunderstanding . . . is the Proper Meaning Superstition. That is, the common belief . . . that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered. This superstition is a recognition of a certain kind of stability in the meanings of certain words. It is only a superstition when it forgets (as it commonly does) that the stability of the meaning of a word comes from the constancy of the context that gives it its meaning (11).I find this passage containing in embryo the ideas of Empson's that Culler so much admires. It also seems to sum up the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate (from the anti-essentialist viewpoint: Fishagayne!)The theory of interpretation is obviously a branch of biology . . . (12).Richards picked up this idea from William James. Compare Bateson....the lowliest organism . . . a polyp or an amoeba -- if it learns at all from its past, if it exclaims in its act, "Hallo! Thingem bob again!" thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker. It is behaving or thinking with a concept . . . (31).
Rorty, Richard. The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: UMP, 1982. [B29.R625 1982]
There is no way to think about either the world or our purposes except by using our language (xix).Kimble explains that there are regions of the brain explicitly anticipated and provided for in the DNA that controls the growth and connecting of neurons for the handling of vocabulary and grammar. These regions are active when we think. Rorty underscores this observation in plain language: there is no gate to the beyond; our very mental reflection on what the beyond might be must be conducted in language. Compare Paul de Man on language as prior to the human.Rumelhart, David. "Some Problems with the Notion of Literal Meanings." in Ortony, Andrew: Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: CUP, 1979.
All of Ortony's book should be read. Includes essays by Max Black and John R. Searle, for example. Rumelhart is the most useful, though.
We say that a statement is literally true when we find an existing schema that accounts fully for the data in question. We say that a statement is metaphorically true when we find that although certain primary aspects of the schema hold, others equally primary do not hold. When no schema can be found which allows for a good fit between any important aspects of the schema and the object for which it is said to account, we are simply unable to interpret the input at all (90).Says that alternative literal meanings are available for even the most straightforward "literal" accounts, and that metaphorical meanings are not really different from literal ones in the way reading or hearing of language is actually done. He's a psychologist, by the way, not a critic.Sapir, Edward. Totality. Language Monograph: Linguistic Society of America No. vi, September 1930. Baltimore: Waverly Press, Inc. [P123.53]
A little-known but highly cogent argument that we tend to treat aggregates of characteristics as objects. This resembles C.S. Peirce's explanation that an element is both perceived and defined as that which lacks the characteristics of any other element. That is, we don't know whether the element is there, only that when its characteristics appear, we conclude that probably the element is there. Sapir shows that we totalize the characteristics as a perception of an object, an operation that transfers itself into language as the confusion between sign and referent.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course on General Linguistics. New York: the Philosophical Library, 1959.
The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value.Compare with Buckminster Fuller (Also with Martin Buber, I and Thou).Weinberg, Gerald M. An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. Somerset, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 1975.
With "man-made" systems, we talk about "purpose," whereas such language is forbidden for "natural" systems. Yet much of the dissatisfaction with our man-made systems stems precisely from disagreement about what the "purpose" of the system is: that is, what the system "really" is. . . . To the junk dealers, General Motors does exist to put out scrap metal . . .We begin to see that Fish's sense of the embedded nature of literary interpretation is related to the problem of interpretation of any system by anyone (child, fish, or flower). These considerations appear across the board, so to speak, and there is no one not affected. Do you not feel the walls between the disciplines tumbling down?Whorf, Benjamin Lee. "The Relation of Habitual Thought and behavior to Language." Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MITP, 1956. Originally published in Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir, 1941.
. . . we always seem to assume that the linguistic analysis made by our group reflects reality better than it does.Perhaps the best-known (and most frequently cited) essay of Sapir's best-known student. The ideas it presents form the basis of what is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is simply the assertion that what you think is not prior to the language/culture in which you were raised. Possibly an even more important aspect of the essay is its attempt to describe the lack of spatial metaphors in Hopi speech. Whorf seems to squirm inside his "prison-house" of English looking for a way to show us that the Hopi see not objects but events, or "eventing." The implication is that they may have a better model of reality than ours, an eventually optimistic implication that I find very attractive.The SAE [Standard Average European] microcosm has analyzed reality largely in terms of what it calls "things" (bodies and quasi-bodies plus modes of existential but formless existence that it calls "substances" or "matter." It tends to see existence through a binomial formula that expresses any existent as a spatial form plus a spatial formless continuum related to the form, as contents is related to the outlines of its container. Nonspatial existents are imaginatively spatialized and charged with similar implications of form and continuum.
Very many of the gestures made by English-speaking people . . . serve to illustrate, by a movement in space, not a real spatial reference but one of the nonspatial references that our language handles by metaphors of imaginary space.
RSB