• Banno
    23.1k
    Art begins as language because all perceptual experience is by necessity organized via grammar, due to the structural constraints imposed on experience as perception automatically parses, groups and differentiates the variatiing flow of sensory input into subject and predicate-like , sentence and paragraph-like chunks.Joshs

    Mmmm. Art begins as language? Showing begins as saying? I think that is the wrong way around.

    Perception is overrated and confusing.

    But yeah, language constrains what we talk about.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    It might be worth pointing out that predicates are names for groups of things.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    What we talk about constrains what we talk about, because prior context delimits the scope and ways of proceeding into fresh context. How does adding the term 'language' offer anything new to this? Do you mean to say that some arbitrary device keeps us from saying certain things we might otherwise be able to say? There is no way around cutting up experience in certain ways in order to proceed without losing oneself in a fog of incoherence. This is the lesson of perception, or, if you will, experiencing of all kinds, whether linguistic or pre-linguistic.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    What we talk about constrains what we talk about, because prior context delimits the scope and ways of proceeding into fresh context. How does adding the term 'language' offer anything new to this?Joshs

    So when you talk about "talking about...", you were not talking about language?

    It would be more interesting to tell us why you think language precedes art.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    I'm using talking about as a metaphor for thinking about. Thinking can be linguistic or non-linguistic.
    Wittgenstein was brilliant in teaching that discursive context determines linguistic meaning, but each of us is already our own discursive community well before and outside of our interchange with each other. Linguistic meaning is determined and redetermined in social context of use, but it is more fundamentally determined and transformed over and over in so-called 'private experience. I say so-called because the primary site of exposure to an other takes place before there is another person to commminicate with.
    What is called thinking to one self already functions in the way Wittgenstein imagines in a social language game, but within an internalized social environment that makes each participant in discourse not simply a pole of a shared set of meanings within a language game, but resistant to an extent to what is supposedly constituted via the game.
    (This comes from Heidegger and Derrida, among others).
  • Banno
    23.1k
    I say so-called because the primary site of exposure to an other takes place before there is another person to commminicate with.Joshs

    Not sure what to make of this. Is there some jargon going on with "an other" as opposed to "another"?
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    'Showing begins as saying?' No, the scene of showing is more intimate than Wittgenstein imagines. We assume otherness intervenes at a site we determine as being between people. There is self and others. Exposure to novelty and the empirical only begins where solipsism ends.
    But I don't know what a person is. I think such a notion is an abstraction. Before we know who experience belongs to there is already exposure to an outside. If I say 'my' experience is always already contaminated by this outside even before I encounter 'you' , I also have to rethink this 'i' as not already constituted as itself before it is altered by an outside.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    I will say, in defense of Wittgenstein, that despite the popular (conservative) mischaraterizations of his work, language-games require no determinate other person or society. The language of 'public' and 'private' in Witty is unfortunately misleading: public only means something like 'public-izable', as opposed to what cannot be made, in principle, public. tl;dr: Witty already agrees with you. He is much closer to Derrida than one might think.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    yes. The concept of person is an overdetermined abstraction. I can invent a new word for you. Or at least invent a new sense of a word. Just look at the word 'cat' here. It doesn't matter what image or sense comes into mind. Just keep on looking at it. Each time you repeat this exercise of attending to the word ' cat' you are in some small way reinventing its sense, in a way a way that is at the same time subtle and completely new. At the same time you are also in some small sense reconceiving your entire history. The simple repetition of the word brings in an other, an outside.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    . SX's claim is that this activity innovates, which means to make changes, and create new things, and this appears to be exactly what evolution does.Metaphysician Undercover

    SO much for the school boy understanding of evolution.
    Evolution is an EFFECT, not a cause.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    My point exactly
    An otherwise completely useless adaptation wholly given over to sex and reproduction.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    The girl kissed the boy who delivered what? The pizza? Her baby?

    It's not rocket-grammar is it? Just word order, mainly.

    Or: What did the boy whom the girl kissed deliver?

    'What did the girl kiss the boy who delivered?' is not nonsense, it is ungrammatical, but decipherable in context. It doesn't seem to involve those deep categorical structures that might or might not e partially assimilated genetically, but more an ad hoc means of disambiguation like the BODMAS rule in maths.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k
    SO much for the school boy understanding of evolution.
    Evolution is an EFFECT, not a cause.
    charleton

    Evolution is a process of development. It is an activity, Therefore theories of evolution refer to both causes and effects, as is necessary for understanding activity. Within such a theory one ought to adequately differentiate between causes and effects, or else the theory may present us with a misunderstanding.

    From the perspective of empirical science, evolution is demonstrated and known through various physical evidence, which is the effects of evolution. So evolution is known through the effects. Logic is applied to various different forms of evidence (effects), relating them, to produce theory concerning the activity which is called evolution. Further logic, and speculation is applied toward determining the causes of evolution.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    Interesting. You may enjoy reading this piece from Eugene Gendlin, who defends Wittgenstein against the possible objections of postmodernists against his position on the sociality of language.
    http://www.focusing.org/gendlin5.html
    I would also be interested to hear your take on this article I wrote critiquing social constructionist writers for their neglect of private experience. In your view, is Wittgenstein exempt from this critique?
    https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social_Theory_and_Psychology_October_2001_11_655-670_doi_10.1177_0959354301115004
  • charleton
    1.2k
    Therefore theories of evolution refer to both causes and effects, as is necessary for understanding activity.Metaphysician Undercover

    You almost making my argument, but are stuck in an important fallacy.

    A cause has to be driven you are saying that there is an ineffable force in the universe which is evolution. That's utterly absurd.
    Shit happens, things change, and the result is evolution. For some species this is the end, for others it means little, for others still it means more fitness to a changing environment, but the result of all this change is evolution.
    You can ask what was the change that led to evolution, but its just dumb to suggest we change BECAUSE of evolution.
    Darwin gave us one of the three major Copernican turns in intellectual history, don't be a dinosaur medievalist!
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k
    A cause has to be driven you are saying that there is an ineffable force in the universe which is evolution. That's utterly absurd.charleton

    Evolution is a description of what has happened, so to say that it is ineffable is what is absurd. It is no more ineffable than any other activity which we describe.

    Shit happens, things change, and the result is evolution. For some species this is the end, for others it means little, for others still it means more fitness to a changing environment, but the result of all this change is evolution.charleton

    I don't see what you're trying to say. You are describing changes, and saying that evolution is not this activity described as changes, but the result of the changes. The result of these changes is that you and I are existing today. Are you and I evolution? See it's your statements which are really absurd. Or do you agree with me that "evolution" more properly refers to the activity of these changes, which has brought us into existence, not the result of the changes?

    You can ask what was the change that led to evolution, but its just dumb to suggest we change BECAUSE of evolution.
    Darwin gave us one of the three major Copernican turns in intellectual history, don't be a dinosaur medievalist!
    charleton

    I don't know charleton, your points are really incomprehensible to me; "what was the change that led to evolution?". Since evolution has been going on since life began on earth, then I guess the appearance of life on earth is the change that led to evolution. Agree?
  • charleton
    1.2k
    I think you now agree that confusing evolution as a cause of change is not going to work, and you have started to back away from that idea.

    So instead of blaming time for the fact you are late, you agree with me that would be silly
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k

    All activities cause change. Evolution is an activity. Therefore evolution causes change.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    Evolution is not a cause, its an effect.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    Natural selection is a cause of evolution
    Artificial selection is a cause of evolution
    Domestic selection is a cause of evolution.
    Changing environments are part of this causality.
    Use your brain, I can tell you have one.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k

    As I told, evolution is an activity, therefore it consists of both causes and effects. Variation in species is the effect of evolution.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    There is no way around cutting up experience in certain ways in order to proceed without losing oneself in a fog of incoherence. This is the lesson of perception, or, if you will, experiencing of all kinds, whether linguistic or pre-linguistic.Joshs

    This travels way to fast to be clear.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Language is only for getting laid?
  • Banno
    23.1k

    The poems of ee cummings I made use of earlier are a more erudite variation of Jabberwocky. A joke about first-order predication that wasn't recognised. As Alice says about Jabberwocky,
    ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—’
    Grammar, unfixed.

    my mind is
    a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
    taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
    chipping with sharp fatal tools
    in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
    chrome and execute strides of cobalt
    nevertheless i
    feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
    becoming something a little different, in fact
    myself
    Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
    bellowings.

    The nonsense of the self comes forth from Heidegger and Husserl.

    the performance of acts such as knot tying are already well catered for by facial expression and gesture, and visual/performative means respectively, and so did not develop a role in the grammatical structure of the language.unenlightened

    I think perhaps knot-tying made its way into language through Thales and Socrates.
  • Janus
    15.4k
    Variation in species is the effect of evolution.Metaphysician Undercover

    Special variation is evolution.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k

    It's very clear that "evolution" referrers to a process of change. Check your dictionary if necessary. You can reread my posts if you have something meaningful to add, but I don't see any point in repeating everything I've already stated.
  • Janus
    15.4k


    A process is a series, or better, a nexus of causes and effects, though; it does not cause anything. Put it another way: change is the result of causal forces; change does not itself cause change.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    Said... "Language is only for getting laid?"

    If that is what you think, go with it.
    Otherwise you could follow the discussion in more detail.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    That which becomes 'selected' by nature is what is evolution.
    Variation is not evolution and neither is survival.
    Evolution occurs when species characteristics change; extinctions occur; in the face of changing environments, after selection.
  • charleton
    1.2k
    As I told, evolution is an activity, therefore it consists of both causes and effects. Variation in species is the effect of evolution.Metaphysician Undercover

    You simply do not have a clue about causality. It's a pity science teaching is so poor.
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