Here I’d like to contrast what I take to be two primary approaches to philosophy. The first and most familiar seeks a true picture. The second and less familiar seeks a sharing in possibility.
(1)
For some the point is to picture. Between each subject and the world there is a picture, which is “mind” or “consciousness.”
Assertions are marks and noises that “contain” or transmit this picturing stuff. Meaning is picturing stuff. A “true” assertion is an accurate picture of something that is not this picture.
Philosophers meet to discuss one another’s pictures, arguing for the accuracy of this rather than that picture. This game becomes especially complex as philosophers try to accurately picture accurate picturing itself.
(2)
For others the point is to point. There is no picture between subjects and the world they share.
Subjects as consciousness are instead this shared world itself from a point of view that includes this subject as a conscious organism.
Assertions ( if we still want to call them that ) are pointings rather than picturings, pointings at possibilities.
The “meaning” of these pointings is not in the “finger” as “content” but in the world as what is pointed at. The pointing is selected here and now for the partner in the dialogue.
The success of a pointing is uncertainly established by a counter-pointing. Dialogue is pointing and counter-pointing toward a sense of shared possibility. Pointing may fail.
Possibility is stressed here because the world is being extended and enriched rather than pictured.
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Which approach do you identify with, if either, and why ?
What is good or bad about this way of dividing up the space ?
Disciplines don’t picture; only those subjects in their partaking of it, do, insofar as it is only to subjects in general that representative images belong.
OK, but do they not generate, through signs, a consensus picture ?
How do signs work, in your view ? Is there a “completely internal” meaning-stuff that is separable from marks and noises ?
Of course I grant something like the “translation” ( risky metaphor !) of the “same” idea from one “medium” ( risk metaphor!) to another. But I prefer to explain this in terms of the generation of pragmatically equivalent signs.
So we don’t need mathematical platonism. Numbers are ways of treating numerals, etc. There is a “formal” element in experience — in the world itself — but it should be carefully explicated so that this “form” does not become substantial.
You, or someone you were in dialogue with, said it already: “signs” for the striving non-dualist, are merely a re-make of the standard dualist’s “conception”. Although, that isn’t quite right either; “sign” for dualists is technically representation.
To picture is to point a picture at an object (or at nothing), or to be a picture thus pointed. To assert or to name is to point words, or to be the words thus pointed?
Good first approximation, but the whole internal/external framing is being jettisoned here. And what’s within the fuzzy boundaries of the organism is important too.
Zooming out, the consciousness of a perceiver is just the presence or being of the world itself from the point of view of the perceiver as conscious sign-trading organism.
This’ll sound radically idealist, but it’s a pointing at the “pure realism” in the TLP. Consciousness does not exist. The thereness of what is there is not itself there. Of course the sign “thereness” is there as a pointer away from what is present to its presence. No ur-stuff. Result : a genial pluralism. A dialogical perspectival pluralism maybe.
So we mostly agree ? Picturing versus pointing ?
There are some points we haven’t clarified in our dialogue. As I see it, external-to-my-body perceptual objects are given in terms of “moments” or “aspects” with a quality or significance that depends on what is both within and without those boundaries. I don’t assume ( or find coherent ) a God’s-eye-POV that allows for the “truth” about this difference.
I also see pointing as fundamentally open, as an enactment of fuzzy possibility. So I can’t offer you an accurate picture of the difference. I can maybe point hopefully at what might be your experience of two imperfectly differentiated comportments toward dialogue. One comportment seeks truth as good picturing. The other seeks a necessarily indeterminate enrichment of the world. If I already see what the other might point me to, then I don’t need the other. I also want to see if the other can share with me in what I point at, with help perhaps from my pointing. Not to close down the game with “truth” but to continue and intensify it.
In the pointing comportment, it’s all already world, so it’s matter of movement in that world toward what hides in the darkness that constitutes subjectivity. Bakhtin uses the example of two people facing one another, each able to see what is behind the other’s back. To be a me is to have a blindness behind my vision.
This is worth investigating. Where do the metaphors collide ? And are these collisions there before you offer me those signs ? Before we generate more signs on the chase of this vague possibility ?
“Accurate picturing” vaguely suggest darts. One might try to reduce picturing, pragmatist-wise, to persuasion toward cooperation. How do words point ? What’s in a name ? Is the “truth” already out there ? Shall we aim a picture at it ?
Mr. Formal Indication might say point me toward what looks most promising to you, not expecting a resolution that’ll abolish the darkness that follows our torches wherever go.
I’d call that zooming in? Out, would be seeing what the signs are pointing at, as the language game plays on? Granted, the players are organisms, with psychological theories about the pointing. But externalism is a different kind of theory about it.
Yes. Some shots are better than others.
Yes. E.g. do you see how my shot is ‘closest’?
By being pieces in that kind of language game?
Or do you mean, what’s the game about? Then… sorting the world into things and kinds.
The thing or kind that its use acquaints us with?
Are some shots objectively ‘closer’ than others? Yes, tricky one. What are the rules? (After all.)
I like your OP. Simplicity and clarity are good starting places.
I identify more with the picture-painting view of philosophy, because I think phil is essentially discursive. Which is not to say that pointing is useless. But it’s often better done in literature or religion than phil.
Also, I think you may have gotten a little off-track when you say, "Between each subject and the world there is a picture, which is ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’.” On the picture-painting view, it is not mind that’s interposed between subject and world, but the picture. Consider: Wouldn’t you have to make the same statement about pointing? "Among each of the subjects and the world there is a pointing, which is ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’.” There’s no way to point, either figuratively or literally, that doesn’t interpose the mind that does the pointing. Otherwise, it would not be pointing, but merely putting a finger somewhere.
So the difference as I see it is between the guy who believes we can look at a word-picture together and decide if it’s a good one, and the guy who thinks we’ll do better by reciprocal pointings, until a presumed agreement is reached. I think those of us who prefer the picturing style believe that it’s more efficient, and will avoid more of the “uncertainty” you describe for pointing and counter-pointing. Of course the laugh may be on us, since the history of phil is not exactly blooming with certainty . . .
Also, @Mww 's issue is important, because talking about “what we point to” can rapidly leave philosophy behind and become a psychological or sociological examination of human behavior, since talk about what is pointed to is ruled out. But putting phil to rest (or out of its misery) is very much the “therapy” recommended by many in the pointing camp.
Thank you ! I see the simple style as coming with its own risks, but in this case it made sense.
I agree: discursive. So I intended discursive pointing, as something like Heidegger’s ‘formal indication.’
From over here, the point of pointing at pointing is to put that gap in question. I can also express this in terms of philosophy’s distrust of figurative language. The “dream” is perhaps a purified language untainted by rhetoric. “Let us just say what mean directly.”
But from over here, the meaning is not in the words themselves, and these words can always be used in surprising ways.
What you say makes sense to me. One can use “mind” for the “pure witness” of the picture. One can also use “mind” for a host of settled beliefs and tendencies that are not thematized. The picture becomes the thematized construction, the in-progress theory or seeing of the world beyond the picture.
In this case I use the sign “consciousness” to point at the being or presence of the world. Consciousness does not exist as a thing or a stuff in the world. Signs are perceptual objects in the world that offer their “significance” with their “sensory quality.”
An easy example is a stop sign. Each perception of a stop sign is a singular event. But these perceptions include a “significance” that can be pointed at with “stop-sign-ness.” Another example is an unrepeatable vocalization that gets “characterized” (Nelson Goodman’s term) as a saying of “hello.”
While all perceived objects have at least a dim significance, signs are objects with a historically-socially achieved significance. Because the perceived sign is part of the world from the perceiver’s point of view, the sign object has a “significance” that is finally personal, even if sharing a “form of life” with others constrains the idiosyncrasy of this significance.
I grant that “mind” points to something crucial. I’m inclined to “find mind” in the significance of signs in the world. For instance, using a finger to point depends on a tradition of following the ray from that finger. My tendency to follow the ray from the finger becomes automatic. The finger is perceived with this “significance.”
I suppose the issue here is how words picture. This is why I invoked meaning stuff, because spoken words as sound, for instance, might have trouble picturing non-sound situations, like the velocity of a meteor in vacuum.
How do we compare pictures with reality if reality is always mediated by pictures ? Is it the “meaning” of the pictures (as marks and noises) that we compare ? For this meaning to “mirror” the world beyond pictures seems to require that the world already be in the form of meaning, which puts the use of the picture mediation in question.
We might think instead of tuning the way the world shows itself to us through trading signs.
I think the “picture theory” gets something right about simple perceptual states of affairs. “There is a plum in the fridge.” It’s not even easy to tell picturing and pointing apart in this case.
The reciprocal pointings approach assumes the goal is an increased sharing of the world. We do not assume the finality or “absolute” validity of any pointing. The world is as much created as it is explored in this paradigm.
Perhaps you are reading me to much as a behaviorist ? We might say that any discipline becomes philosophical when it digs deep enough into its own method.
To me the call and response of pointing is precisely talk about what is pointed to, which is not separable from the dialogue partners getting a sense that the signs between them are “radiating” for both of them in the same-enough way. What we are both trying to point out “evolves” and hopefully becomes more specified and “possessed” as the dialogue proceeds.
I meant zooming-out in terms of presenting my understanding of consciousness. There is only world which is always from-a-point-of-view. If one works from this framing, how does it change one’s approach to the issue of signs and their “meanings” ?
As I see it, “we” wouldn’t have a god’s-pov. The “significance” of signs is there with the “aspect” or “moment” of the sign as perceptual object.
In case it helps, I don’t identify with “externalism,” though what I’m pointing at is along those lines perhaps. A strong influence on me here is early Heidegger’s discussion of “significance” as the basic character of the lifeworld.
Right. You might find the words for what I was “trying” to say or wanted to say. If so, I give you positive feedback. “Yes, it’s like that.” This use of “likeness” suggests how deeply the picture metaphor is woven into our language. And it’s a great metaphor. For me the point is to make it optional, a good metaphor among others.
Yes. This is a good pointing at possibility. Names are an effect of sociality. One might “explore further.” The issue is never put to bed unless those inquiring get sleepy.
A tricky one. And one doesn’t want to make the mistake of presenting the objective truth that there is no objective truth. Here too one can point out a comportment that often operates blindly and non-optionally — not to prohibit it however.
As you may know, Heidegger uses “truth” as another name for “being.” It’s not a property of propositions but the ongoing disclosure of the world itself. From this point of view, pointing is something like the attempt to share and solidify the pointer’s “truth” ( the situation as it is just there for them.) But the situation-for-them can be more vague than crystallized, more possible than actualized. Trading signs would always be “part” of a larger notion of “truth” as more-reality-on-the-way.
I’d say that any explication of our basic situation has to account for communication and what we call “meaning.” I would agree that a sign-focused approach is the analogue of the “internal conceptions” approach.
As I read them, Plato and Kant and really lots of thinkers offer some version of hylomorphism. There is something like “ideality” or “form” and something like “sensation” or “the qualitative continuum.” Of course it matters how one understands the sign “consciousness.” Is it internal stuff or the being of the from-a-point-of-view world itself ? Is there an absolute interiority ? Or no genuine interior at all, but only the world which is not inside or outside ?
At this depth, at least in my view, we are beyond the picturing metaphor, digging below it. It doesn’t make sense to check ontoperspectivism against a truth-maker.
By explication do you mean one of us talking to the other regarding our basic situation? If so, then sure, communication and meaning are given.
On the other hand, our basic situation is the being of thinking, feeling biological creatures, the explication of the system by which that occurs, has no need to account for communication, it being merely an addendum to, and possible from, the system’s functional procedure.
Perhaps the picturing metaphor, but it remains we are picturing at the basic situational level, insofar as we perceive in images called phenomena, and we think in schemata called conceptions, both of which are representations, which loose primary correlation by being called mere signs.
Yes, I understand. And that’s always a possible move: to redraw the boundaries of what counts as philosophy so as to include things like art and religion. As against Rorty and Witt, who are pretty clear that philosophy, or at least metaphysics, can’t be saved and should simply cease. And against that, you could reply, “Thank you for that piece of philosophy!” From your standpoint (but not from theirs), it would indeed be philosophy.
Yes, good. So the difference between picturing and pointing is not about mind vs. no-mind. Rather, perhaps, it’s about what the mind(s) in question are doing.
Well, traditional philosophy might reply that perceptions are not pictures in the way that discursive sentences are. If there’s any mediation of reality going on, we need to discover it and describe it. And if there are vicious-circle problems involved, we need to describe those.
Sorry, I didn’t express myself well. By speaking about “behavior” I meant to include all sorts of unobservable events. But my understanding of the pointing style is that is discourages abstract word-pictures and instead urges us to simply notice what we do, and how our culture and language warrants it. That’s what I meant by a possible move into “a psychological or sociological examination of human behavior.”
The “communication system” is indeed “given.” I use the metaphor “forum” for what is “presupposed” in all speaking to others and even to ourselves.
Hence the metaphor of ex-plication as unfolding. We don’t start with nothing but in a “collective consciousness” of vague meaning. Explication is like getting a better grip on the signs we are already trading.
This is one approach to explicating “the forum” — how we share the same world from different points of view. In this approach, signs are often understood as sensory carriers of a nonsensory content or passenger. This goes back to Aristotle at least.
If we understand initially consciousness as a mediating picture of an external world, other moves are “forced” on us. Perhaps the primary motive for postulating an interior is the “perspectivity” of perception that includes a “perspectivity” of the “significance” of the perceptual object. One is tempted to understand the external object as x and then perceptions of the object as f_1(x), f_2(x),..., where each f_i is the cognitive mediation of a particular subject i and each f_i(x) is the internal representation of the external x relative to or “for” that subject. In this case, consciousness is something like the presence of a world-mediating screen rather than of the world itself.
Or we can work from a different initial move, that does not assume a mediating screen. If we understand consciousness as the being of the world itself from the POV of the conscious organism, then perceptions are “pieces” of the object itself. ( From within the screen paradigm, this probably sounds insane. )
Some perceptual objects are signs. While all perceptual objects have at least a dim significance, these “signs” have a historically subject-relative “significance.” We “think in signs” that are “immediately rich” with lifeworld significance.
We might frame this in terms of getting leverage on the metaphor of meaning as the content of a signifier that functions as its vessel. The point is not to dogmatically reject this metaphor but to escape from its mostly transparent constraint on our inquiry.
The word “translation” suggests the movement of this “content,” which comes to have a ghostlike immateriality. I take Sellars to have offered us an alternative. To paraphrase is to create a sign that has the same-enough role in the world as the the original sign.
Right. So traditional philosophy might understand mind in terms of two kinds of pictures. Perceptions are “internal pictures” of “external” objects that “cause” them. “Pure meaning” is what “gives life or content” to the sensory-material vessel or body of the sign. In this case the sign is a vocalization that gets “characterized” in terms of its “transcript.”
Saussure’s “sound-image” touches on this “formal aspect” of the singular vocalization that makes it a vocalization of (this or that “sentence.”) Presumably Plato was talking about this “formal” or “ideal” aspect of experience. The word “idea” has come to signify in terms of something subject-internal, even though perceptual objects in the world as there as this or that enduring object ( which is also a kind of object, and so on.)
Do we need to work automatically from “within” the framework of perception and proposition as pictures in or as mindstuff ?
I agree, though I happen to approach philosophy as an atheist and a heretical positivist. The problem with some early positivists was what was still too platonistic and theological — and therefore anti-empirical — in their understanding of language. I speculate that all critical discourse, including my own, is constrained by unseen blindness. The limit on a perfect empiricism (and on the pursuit of an atemporal objectivity) is our historicity. As Nelson Goodman saw, we never meet the object or the situation “pure.”
No worries; consciousness doesn’t mediate anything.
From the POV, yes; perceptions as “pieces” of the object, not so much. If not neutral, perception can only be considered a “piece” of the subject to which the object appears.
Lifeworld significance. How conceptually superfluous. It always amazes me how much time folks waste…..what possesses them to feel such need…….coming up with these trite expressions, that say nothing more than those replaced by them. Nothing really wrong with ti, but…..why???
To me it’s a good thing to ask that question when it is asked earnestly. To respond to the unexpected by projecting foolishness on the other is perhaps its own kind of foolishness. But it’s a vice we can afford on topics like these.
I meant it rhetorically, which is neither good nor bad. Just making the point that there’s no readily discernible benefit in modifying expressions that already say enough, in the case at hand, that being good ol’ experience. To then say there’s nothing technically wrong with doing it, is a nod toward the justification brought from pure subjective inclination, which must be allowed any who philosophize honestly.