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Article 1842 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <ZuwDcB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 3 Dec 91 15:00:10 GMT
References: <1991Dec2.012056.13228@Princeton.EDU>
Lines: 93

egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:
RC:
> >The above paragraph by Mr. Zeleny reassures me that there was no
> >oversight or carelessness.
EN:
> My take is quite different from yours.  As I understand it, Mr.
> Zeleny (and people of his ilk) are quite capable of flinging
> names, from Hegel through de Saussure to Derrida, without having
> much understanding of what the thinkers behind those names might
> be saying.

Well, at least the formal semanticists know _about_ Saussure.
Whether they know his formulations in sufficient detail to
understand the full force of the incommensurability of his
formulations with theirs isn't immediately obvious.  They say they
do.  Dialogue will clarify both positions.

I can forgive them for flinging about names since that's what we
all do when operating at a high level of abstraction. "Hegel"
becomes a shorthand way of referring to the "synthesis" of
"theses" and "antitheses" (in spite of the fact that Hegel avoided
that terminology, which Fichte had introduced in _his_ attempt to
"formalize" dialectical logic, apparently because he thought it
too simplistic). Sartre's "philosophy" becomes merely the phrase,
"Existence precedes Essence," and Karl Popper turns into the
single proposition, "Scientists should try to _falsify_ rather
than _verify_ their theories."  (Never mind that scientists had
always done that anyway -- I remember reading a passage in _The
Origin of Species_, which impressed me very much when I was 15,
where Darwin said he always looked for evidence to _disconfirm_
evolution.) Reducing a thinker to a sound bite or a slogan is
probably harmless when sketching out an idea.  It's redundant
structure, or context, that helps the reader understand what is
being proposed.  I think it's only harmful when you don't go
beyond those shorthand sound bite when developing a thought.

EN:
> Dividing language into a binary opposition between (good,
>correct, pure) mathematics and logic and (not so good, incorrect,
>impure) > not-mathematics and not-logic is only understandable as
>the continuing need of ethnocentric Western males to make binary
>oppositions.  The fact that this division is almost always coupled
>with ferocious denials that (of course) any value judgements are
>being made makes the entire discourse more reminiscent of a
>therapist's office than of what is "supposed" to be philosophy.
>This division has caused much mischief, including the
>overdomination of departments of philosophy by analytic schools,
>with the result that students are undertrained in informal logic,
>business ethics, and critical thinking...all examples of skills
>which analytic philosophers tend to feel are "beneath them."

There is no doubt in my mind that all of this is true.  Call it a
meta-historical idea which can serve as a tool for understanding
the movement of Western thought since the emergence of Ionian
"physics" in the person of Thales.  However, whether logocentric
thought is all bad is less clear.  Both empirical science and
mathematics seem to have arisen out of the primitive "logics" and
"propositions," with their reified and hypostatized constructs of
"Truth" and "Justice."  Today we see an opposition between
"scientific" thought and "ideological" or "dogmatic" thought, but
the one seems to have arisen out of the other, although I can't
quite see how.  At least they both arose in the West.

I think we could have a rousing discussion of this in a Newsgroup
like alt.postmodern.  I don't even think it would be a waste of
time or a kind of mental onanism because I think we need a
conceptual big picture, largely historical in nature, in which to
do our more precise and detailed thinking.  For example, Derrida
points out the Western bias toward binary thinking -- what my
professors in the 50's used to condemn as "two-valued" or
"either/or" thinking, but he misses the fact the non-Western
cultures -- the ones that didn't develop either philosophy or
science and mathematics -- are _more_ involved in binary thinking.
The Persians, like Zarathustra, saw a binary distinction between
good and evil much more sharply than the Greeks.  The Chinese with
their binary opposition of Yin and Yang (feminine and masculine)
were likewise more binary than the Greeks.  I think binary
thinking is either natural to the human mind or to human language,
which is what Saussure suggests.  As much as I admire Derrida's
meta-historical account, I think that "domination" by means of
logocentric logic is different and better than domination by means
of brute force.  Yes, it does seem to be a "masculine" thing --
with feeling and "intuition" being the feminine "other" of it --
but it was the "masculinity" of the arrowsmiths rather thant the
masculinity of the hunters that produced the logocentric thought
and its eventual dominance over brute force. As I said, this could
be discussed at the discursive level for weeks or months!

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


