Trouble is, I can’t now direct you to the threads on Austin in the previous incarnation of the forums.
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I’ve read some good stuff in Austin, tho it’s been awhile.
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And did he pronounce his own name Peircey? Fair’s fair and all that.
Hence consciousness aka use-mention confusion.
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The OP references the monkey’s usage, so we have a form of life problem in terms of meaning ascribed by the monkey.
But if a person cried out a particular way to mean “eagle,” then I guess that sound would as much mean eagle as if that were just a different language.
I see the car, I see the moon. Fine. Where do we go from here?
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I connect this to an “aspect theory” of objects. Husserl’s “adumbrations” can be generalized beyond the visual.
The car “in the rearview mirror” is an aspect of the car behind you car, while you “live” the mirror as an ontological extension of this car behind you.
We tend to adopt a theoretical presence of hovering over an “environment” rather than a “world.” While we live in our own scientific signs (so they are transparent ontological extensions of the discussed objects ), we look at the signs of other organisms as mere “signals.” So the monkey cry is “just a sound” that “causes” the monkey-machine to crane its neck.
But we don’t subject our own marks and noises to this regime, and indeed we can’t. For one would need the sign in its receding life to do so.
Could you say more here ?
Okay. I’ve actually read Husserl a little, which is more than I can say for most philosophers. (But I read him in German, so the English terms are unfamiliar. Turns out “adumbrations” are “Abschattungen”, so it wouldn’t have mattered, as I haven’t come across the term anyway, but it’s easy enogh to understand if you’re at least a little familiar with Husserl.)
Yes, that’s fine. (I tend to think of this as conceptual background vs. foreground, because I think you “live” the car, too. And there’s no “wall” between the background and the foreground: it’s fluid. The mirror can become relevant at any time.)
My misgivings here are actually rooted in the monkey life (where I include us humans in the wider category of monkey). That the sound causes the monkey to crane its neck is precisely what shows that the sound is not the eagle. You wouldn’t need to look for it, if it was.
Compare to the rear-view mirror. We just look at the rear-view mirror; we don’t turn back to see if there’s really a car. Or to check where exactly it is.
If that difference isn’t significant to you, I need to scale back how I think about this and see if I can come up with something coherent. For me that’s a vital difference. A “signal” for a potential spread of flying predators is something vitally different for me than a “signal” for something definite and easily located. There’s a built-in uncertainty, down to the possibility that there is no flying predator at all. (See my mention of a fake warning cry.)
The “sign in its receding life”? This is something I’ll have to come back to.
I envy you your German ! I’d love to read Husserl, Heidegger, Mach, Kafka,…
Agreed. You like Heidegger ? Sartre ? I understand consciousness to be the dynamic presence of the world.
I understand your reluctance here, but the point of the cry is to enlarge the eagle well beyond its talons, so that there is time enough to look up and take evasive action. It’s like sonar on a submarine. Torpedos aren’t aimed at the blip and yet they are.
Yes, but we already have all the visual information we need. Did you see that invention for blind people that they wear like shirt ? It pokes them on their back and they come to experience that sensation on their back as the world in front of them.
I hear you on this too, but surely someone could rig up a fake rearview mirror that functioned normally ( via hidden camera ) until it earned the trust of its user. Or perhaps the car’s windshield is a 2-million-dollar monitor-gadget that passes for a windshield. But later the spy uses it deceptively to convince the driver to sail off a cliff. Related : I tend to think in terms of transformation of lived belief, with “truth” abandoned altogether as no longer having a use beyond indicating belief.
Basically the rearview mirror “recedes” or “vanishes” to become whatever is behind the car. The sounds of the spoken words “gets out of the way” of their import. The sign “recedes” precisely to be its most effective as sign. Basically Heidegger’s hammer. But ( in case you missed it above) he also wrote about signs.
for primitive man, the sign coincides with that which is indicated. Not only can the sign represent this in the sense of serving as a substitute for what it indicates, but it can do so in such a way that the sign itself always is what it indicates. This remarkable coinciding does not mean, however, that the sign-Thing has already undergone a certain ‘Objectification’ — that it has been experienced as a mere Thing and misplaced into the same realm of Being of the present-at-hand as what it indicates. This ‘coinciding’ is not an identification of things which have hitherto been isolated from each other : it consists rather in the fact that the sign has not as yet become free from that of which it is a sign.
…
Such a use of signs is still absorbed completely in Being-towards what is indicated, so that a sign as such cannot detach itself at all. This coinciding is based not on a prior Objectification but on the fact that such Objectification is completely lacking. This means, however, that signs are not discovered as equipment at all — that ultimately what is ‘ready-to-hand’ within-the-world just does not have the kind of Being that belongs to equipment.
We the belated ones have the luxury of switching the signs on and off.
(have to turn in finally but I look forward to your response )
I basically agree, and hypothesise that a linguistic machine won’t get a conscious semantics without evolving the kind of systematic word/object confusion which you seem to argue is part and parcel of the monkeys’ communications and ours too?
And which you are perhaps entitled to deny is confusion after all? (There being no perfectly complete and consistent alternative meta-analysis of the linguistic activity.)
In a way, you are addressing what some computer scientists have acknowledged as the grounding problem? Symbol grounding problem - Wikipedia
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I’ve never read Heidegger or Mach, but Kafka loses a lot in translation. It’s a very different experience.
Unsure about Heidegger; I’ve never read him. Tried but found him hard (whereas Husserl is very intuitive for me).
I can take or leave Sartre, but I’m fine with the philosophy as far as I can understand it.
But there’s no eagle to enlarge. There’s just a cry, and the potential of an eagle. I don’t think we should mix up the psychological state and real-world triggers in that way. The monkey who issues the warning call sees a bottom-up (world-first?) eagle; the monkey who hears the warning call imagines a top-down (thought-first?) threat. That has to make a difference of some sort.
No “but” necessary. That’s part of what I was saying. In comparison the only information the monkey has is that someone may or may not have seen an eagle. That’s why the look up rather than run away from the source of the sound. I’m making assumptions from what monkeys (including the homo-sub-species) do, here. (They’re still just assumptions, though – I don’t think there’s any escaping assumptions.)
I very nearly addressed this, but didn’t want to blow up my post. In the case of warning-cry-fakes we have negated potential; in the case of rear-mirror-fakes, there’s a very specific car that doesn’t exist. It’s the difference between a potential sibling I never had, and a fictional character.
The aspect that complicates things here is that both the potential eagle and the real eagle collapse into its most salient feature: “danger”. There’s overlap. But there’s a different vector, here, I think. I imagine fraud over potentials to be far less distrubing than fraud over specifics. The friend who stands you up, vs. the mimic who looks like your friend.
I won’t pretend I understood Heidegger on that brief reading of an excerpt, but I’m suspicious about there being an aspect of the usual hubris: overestimating ourselves and simplifying others and using the difference to make ourselves more comfortable with ourselves.
I’m reading this with a very skeptical, anti-humanist bias. (Which is partly why I said “I’ll have to get back to this,” I suppose.)
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Yes. The word-object “confusion” is the effectiveness and genuineness of the sign. When people use my proper name, they intend me the person. But “intending” is not mental stuff but directed comportment in the world. Heidegger is great on this in History of the Concept of Time.
I’m “against” (as a foolosopher ) the subject as container. We might speak instead of the “eject.” There is nothing inside the subject. Consciousness is just the presence of the world for an organism. The “internal monologue” is a weird kind of object in that world, more like an itch than an alligator. Of course the body’s interior is in the world and not in the subject as mindstuff container. The eject is empty, though confusingly associated with a performance of the institution of selfhood.
Thank you for the link !
Check out this part:
There would be no connection at all between written symbols and any intended referents if there were no minds mediating those intentions, via their own internal means of picking out those intended referents. So the meaning of a word on a page is “ungrounded.” Nor would looking it up in a dictionary help: If one tried to look up the meaning of a word one did not understand in a dictionary of a language one did not already understand, one would just cycle endlessly from one meaningless definition to another. One’s search for meaning would be ungrounded. In contrast, the meaning of the words in one’s head — those words one does understand—are “grounded”. That mental grounding of the meanings of words mediates between the words on any external page one reads (and understands) and the external objects to which those words refer.
This assumes something like “signifieds” in a jar of “mindstuff.” A dualism is taken for granted. Signs as perceptual objects can take on a certain role among other perceptual objects. The perception of a sign can involve an intense “significance” that “radiates” from the sign itself, but as a function of that organism’s history. This to me is a great theme in early Heidegger, basically the historicity of signs and of the lifeworld in general, because objects are “generalized signs.” In Herodotus, we find kings sending birds rather than words to other kings. Messengers carried bags of non-sign objects that functioned as signs.
I’m also quite interested in philosophy of math. Even in Hilbert’s formalism we have the | as the ideally repeatable unit. This is of course (a version of ) Goodman’s character and analogous to Saussure’s sound-image.
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I can understand your reluctance, so I only continue making the case for the fun of philosophical conversation. The difference of the cry-as-eagle and the talon-as-eagle is a life or death difference that gives the sign itself “life” in the monkey world.
As I see it, the entire point of the cry is just this conflation. The conflation is the extension. But signs can fail. Monkeys might fake cries to steal food from one another.
For us of course the cry is conspicously distinguishable from the eagle. But then we leap right back into an “automatic faith” in our own human signs and forget all of that, reacting to trusted assertions as if to the asserted situations themselves.
You might say that I’m pushing this strong ontological reading just to point at how “meaning is use.” Or at least at a component thereof.
Always a risk ! But I think his point might be a sacred icon “is” the god, is an “aspect” of the god. In context, I think he trying to point out that we too are just like that, most of the time. But we can and do thematize the sign itself as distinct from what it typically signifies.
There’s one thing you still haven’t addressed: the monkey looking up. I say this demonstrates that for the monkey the cry is also distinguishable from the eagle. Actually, not only distinquishable but also distinguished. Cry over there; eagle up there.
I’m not sure I understand that. A sign being the things only makes sense in terms of objects for use. Thus when I see a table, the thing serves a sign for the use I have for it, and I treat it as a table. The sing-aspect of the thing is what makes the thing an object of use. And here the sing really is the thing.
But for a thing to function as a sign, we can’t just skip the additional step of reference. A word may be just squiggles on a page, but we see a word. We might take for granted that word is a word, in the way that we take for granted that a table is a table. But it has to be a word to be a sign for something that isn’t a word. But that’s an extra step, and I keep feeling you want to skip this, and also that skipping this unwarranted.
We can send mixed signals with items: I’m thinking of pieces of art like Dali’s flowing clocks, or Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en fourrure (I had to google the artist and name here). These things are and aren’t what they are.
I mean, I’ve read other posts of yours, and I so I’m pretty sure you’re partly riffing off Saussure, where the meaning of the word is part of the word and together they’re making the sign. But that doesn’t extend to the thing; it’s language as an isolated and contained system. That’s why both the post-structuralists and the speech actors are reaching beyond the sign - in rather different ways.
There’s a tree and there’s the word “tree”, and there’s a human who understands both (presumably because of an internal concept “tree”). There’s a warning cry and there’s danger from above, and there’s a monkey who understands both (presumbably because some internal concept, harder to label because a monkey’s form of life is somewhat more distant from us, but not quite as distant as some might believe…). I can grant that the meanings run together, but the various things (the sound and the tree; the cry and the eagle) remain separate - not only as things “out there”, but also as a difference of usage potential.
That is the cry is the cry and the eagle is the eagle, and while the concept “eagle” might attach to both, the monkey uses them as an aspect of either entity, but in different ways. That difference is obvious in behavour: the monkey’s not running away from the cry, it’s trying to locate “eagle”.
Or differently put: any monkey who would mistake the cry for the talons runs risk of running away from the cry straight into the talons. The smart monkey looks up.
The siren of an ambulance is likewise distinguishable from its front tires. When I hear the siren, I look for the rest of the ambulance.
I’m glad to acknowledge that the word can be thematized as a word. Comedians sometimes play with the strangeness that results when we keep repeating a word till it becomes absurdly just sound.
As humans, we constantly switch modes. I look right through my glasses — forget that I’m wearing them — until they fog up. I speak into a little rectangle, but really I’m talking to some agent of my insurance company, who is “there with me” as voice. This voice is not all of their being, but it’s the insurance agent I am speaking to, not the rectangle ( my phone ).
Sure. But this is like the mistaking the ends of a shotgun. The cry has a “proper use” in terms of monkey survival. So does the shotgun for self-defense.
Less morbid, surely some comedian has played on the old rotary phones, putting ear-piece to mouth and mouth-piece to ear.
FWIW, I think we mostly agree.
Yes.
Would you be comfortable with the following argument? There isn’t just the cry and the eagle, the word and the thing it is attached to. There are a rich multiplicity of senses or uses of meaning involved. Imagine we are involved in a context of action and something grabs our attention. In that context, it looks like a pattern of random squiggles. Then, on closer inspection, as we see that it belongs to a billboard, that shift or enlargement in context makes us intend it as letters, but not yet a word.
Later still we recognize these letters as forming a word, but we are not yet recognizing the word as familiar. When we finally do so, we have now arrived at a meaning of a ‘thing’ which we say the word ‘symbolizes’. I would make two points about this process. First, the squiggle means itself, the letter means itself, the word means itself and the meaning of the thing means itself.
That is, at each stage in this process, we are recognizing an experience which ‘looks like’ a particular sense. It may also point ahead of itself to other possibilities, but it doesn’t refer to those possibilities. Second, after a squiggle becomes a letter, a letter becomes a word, and a word becomes the meaning of a thing, what came before is now embedded within the meaning of what came after. We see the eagle which is the eagle we access through then word, which has been accessed through its letters, which has been accessed via a pattern of squiggles. These are now all implied in the final meaning of eagle.
If we want, we can deliberately read-see the squiggle within the eagle. If instead of reading eagle as a word, we directly look up at the sky and see it flying, we still have to go through a similar process. Initially we may mistake it for a speck in our eye. Then we may recognize it as a fly a few feet away. Then we may begin to form a sense of it as some kind of bird, and finally as an eagle, but not just an eagle. An eagle that is over there, an eagle which has looked like dust in the eye, then a fly, then a generic bird.
All these senses enter into the meaning of that eagle which we experience in this particular way in this context. Given that the ‘eagle’ itself is nothing outside of a conglomeration of perspectival aspects and features, and when we see the ‘actual’ eagle in the sky we are already filling in most of the image from memory and expectation, recognizing the eagle though a call is just an enrichment of what is already a product of a rich series of adumbrations. This ‘eagle which is being called to me’ is a single thing, not eagle and call as separate meanings.
(I’m selectively answering your post now, because I also want to address @Joshs, and time is limited.)
But I’m not talking about thematising words as words. What I’m saying is far more basic: If we use a word, we don’t foreground the word. It’s part of the unproblematic conceptual background of the current stream of consciousness. It’s available for thematisation should problems occur, but that’s secondary.
It’s more like pointing your finger at someone, saying “pew, pew, pew”, and being surprised they don’t fall over. What I’m talking about is that basic.
Yes, I’m talking about an old hang-up of mine here. It might be that I have a looser connection to words than others to begin with? Who knows.
But I thought I was saying that ? Likewise the cry is the eagle, but it can be thematized should problems occur.
I’ll take it bit by bit. I’ve read the entire post before posting, and will re-read the paragraph before replying, to make sure I get the right context.
And that’s also not what I meant to say. Instead, I’m saying we already have a concept “eagle”, a certain “knowledge” about the word, that gets triggered by both the eagle and the word. I think this is important.
Yes. When I say we already have concept “eagle” I’m simplifying. We have a stream of consciousness and thought habits, and somewhere in there is something we might analytically call “eagle” - but it’s not the same thing from moment to moment. I’m thinking it’s connected more by continuity than consistency. Thought habits are often routine and relegated to conceptual background. And it’s tempting to ignore the background. If you do, you can say something like “cry is the eagle”. But I’m losing track if I do this. I can’t follow. (I’ll get to why later.)
Yes. A streamlined approach, but I can work with this.
This is where my difficulties start to creep in. This is where the approach feels too streamlined. The above process isn’t linear. We prematurely see stuff and then re-see. We get ahead of ourselves until we reconsider. And so on. And crucially, a lot of this might not be committed to memory or even the conceptual foreground.
I’m thinking of the meaning of the word we arrive at above more as a flitter of potential waiting for necessity committ, while also assuming a me-independent thing in the sense “this thing has a definite meaning”. There’s a desire to be consistent rather than flighty involved. But the “meaning” we arrive at is never quite all there, and part of feels that this is wrong, which is why we wait to commit. We might committ prematurely, depending on our tolerance for indeterminacy. And then we might re-committ but not acknowledge that we do so. It’s guided chaos in there (more for some, less for others, probably a little for everyone).
So given all that, I’m not sure what we’re addressing with reference vs. pointing ahead of itself, here. Denotation vs. connotation? Uncertainty about how the concept ties into the context? I’m mostly still fine, here, though.
This is where we acknowledge that perception is non-linear, right? I’m fine with that.
This is where I’m starting to lose the plot. And I think it might be that my own… “configuration” gets in the way.
First, I have aphantasia, so “see” isn’t the right word, unless light reflects from an actual eagle onto my retina. I think “eagle”. It’s pure, unembellished concept - the entire chaotic swirl waiting for more detail.
Second, when I think words and concepts are noticibly distinct and quite line up. That is I never quite convince myself I have arrived. So once I recognise the word eagle, I’m primed for the word to become relevant in some way, but I don’t auto-complete the way others seem to do.
Two practical examples:
There’s this writing exercise, to get you going. The guy who asks us to imagine a boat. Fine. I imagine a boat. So he then asks questions. What kind of boat have you imagined? Where is the boat? And I thought, wait what? I was just imagining a boat. You didn’t ask for details? I can make them up on the fly if needed and then box in the concept little by little. But it’s work. I don’t arrive at anything useful. I arrive at being primed for more and… just stop.
Similarly, there’s this meditation technique they had us try at school. They darkened the class room, had us lie on our backs, and someone was saying stuff like: “You are at a beach…” and I thought, “I though we were supposed to relax. Why are you making me work?”
Conversly, when I’m faced with the real thing, I have to actively cancel out details. This is a far weaker effect than the above, and it can be over-written by routine. I can sort of relegate that reduction-work to a macro. But that also means changes to routine are stressful.
So for me, there’s a clear bottom-up and top-down difference between word and thing: I reduce the thing to fit the concept, I embellish the concept to fit the thing. And the result may or may not be an unacknowledged change in the concept.
I can’t literally see an eagle I just access through words, and I’m not sure what to do with the metaphor. I don’t “close the file”: the squiggles are the word, which is there, and the eagle is a wait-for-more-details preparedness quite different from the word. It quite literally doesn’t seem to work for me like that, but I can’t tell whether it’s really different for me than for others, or if I just don’t get the language here.
And now I can’t even guess whether I can do this or not. Sure, I can write “eagle” if I want to. I can attempt to draw an eagle, too. I’m not sure how that ingrates to fit above sentence? I mean, I can see an eagle and write down “eagle”, but the squiggles are on the notepad, not the eagle. And if I wanted to literally see the squiggles, I’d have to close my eyes and not see the eagle, which would be a distraction. All this to say, I don’t get this.
Yes. In the end, I may never be sure what I’ve seen and still think eagle - as a stop-gap primer. Or a that-too-is-an-eagle experience impacts noticably on the concept. Or… or… or. Some people my go with something like “big bird of pray and not vulture = eagle” - “small bird of pray = hawk” and then see something of inditerminate size and lable it eagle, simply because seeing an eagle is the rarer experience. There’s a lot going on.
I don’t think so. I mean, this may go on on the ultimate level: there’s one stream of consciousness that contains it all from memory traces to practices routine to conceptual background to sensory input to… whatever else we might seek to isolate in a thread like this.
In the end it boils down to behaviour, though: if the monkey hears an eagle cry and guesses the sound comes from there, there is where he will look. If same monkey hears a warning cry, the source of the cry is not where he look for the eagle. This is more important, I think, than any running-together of concepts in the mind that might be happening also.
It’s perhaps that I, if I want to get a look at something, I’ll want to get a hold of many concepts so I can permutations and think things through. Approaches like “the cry is the eagle” foreground the chaoticness of it all and stop me thinking. Works for poetry, not so much for philosophy. It’s benightning not englightening - for me.
Yes, to some degree. But here:
The first part of this just doesn’t track. At no point is the cry the eagle. It’s an unthematised cry, or differently put: in the background necessarily a cry to thematise the eagle, which is not there in the form of an eagle. This may just be about word-usage, but it’s important to me, because I can’t go on thinking if I word it like that. I mean, if the cry is the eagle, and you thematise the cry, you’d be thematising the eagle, which you’ve been doing all the time anyway… Oh, I’ll just stop. This might just sound like nitpicking to you - but I literally need to translate if I am to think about this, and sometimes… I just can’t.