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>From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <1991Dec4.165329.5216@Princeton.EDU>
Date: 4 Dec 91 16:53:29 GMT
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In article <ZuwDcB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
>egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:
>
>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.

Derrida's "point", if I may use that way of speaking about it as a
shorthand for "what Derrida is saying", is that binary oppositions
obscure things that would otherwise be clear.  I won't call these
"things" that are obscured The Truth, and I won't even call them
Useful, for the former presupposes a kind of Platonism and the
latter presupposes a Deweyan approach to truth, and neither is
clearly acceptable (it is astonishing how Deweyan truth-as-utility
sneaks into the background of philosophical discourse; for example,
Ray Monk's otherwise excellent account of Wittgenstein, The Duty of
Genius, describes Wittgenstein as rejecting Russellian and Platonist
accounts of the philosophy of mathematics for a conception of
mathematical "utility" that completely begs the question, the Ur-
question, of whether "utility" is a clear concept in the light of
ambiguity, regret and doubt.  I can only describe this lack as a
byproduct of American military power.)

Thus, the binary opposition between Good Science and Bad Ideology,
if dissolved, allows us to read "good" science as in ways very
ideological.  Sheldon Glashow, for example, in a recent defense of
science as a (nonideological, nongendered) seeking after Truth,
sounds like the Nicene Creed: "we believe that the universe is
knowable...".

>
>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!

Well, perhaps the domination of the arrowsmiths is not such a good
thing after all; perhaps its day, like the day of the hunter, is
passed.  

Also, I don't think that Manicheanism, which is what Zarathrusta
was marketing (as well as heretical sects of the early Christian
Church), or yingyang are examples of the binary opposition that
Derrida was talking about.  The key to logocentrism is that it
refuses to speak its name, whereas Manicheanism and yinyang have
as their essence the naming of a binary opposition.  For example,
to the ideological scientist (the scientist who, more than simply
wanting to do a good job as a scientist, is a mouthpiece for the
scientific world-picture, often a bad scientist at the level of 
craft) does not say that "science is value neutral" or "science
is gender neutral" as some sort of ploy.  He (and I use the
pronoun advisedly) must needs do so, for to do other would give
the game away.  This is more on the level of the patient under
Freudian analysis refusing to recognize certain motives than on
the level of the Manichean clearly distinguishing God and the
devil, and yinyang concepts as used in traditional Chinese
healing (where the yin must interact with the yan) are actually
closer, to me, to what Derrida is saying than to the Western
tradition.  

It is true that at the origin of the Western tradition there is
an explicit rejection of the female, and Socrates on his
deathbed says some astonishingly cruel things about his wife
Xanthippe.  But it is important to this tradition that there be
no other term and eventually real women are subsumed under the
tradition such that IF they become quasi-males they can be
welcomed into the fold (whence liberal feminism: whence Betsey
Briefcase, a parody of the success-driven corporate male.)  It
is true (as you may say) that this is not an exclusively Western
notion: in New Jersey, the smallest Indian tribes had names that meant
"men among men", "the real people" and (for all I know) "the
way-cool folk."  But even here there is an implied recognition
that their are other men, perhaps not so way-cool but nonetheless
"real."  Derrida's point is that Western metaphysics witholds
even a name from the Other.

I have directed followup to alt.postmodern because this discussion
is no more "technical" philosophy (whatever THAT is) but centers
around Derrida.
>
>--
>Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
>Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
>Atlanta, Georgia       |
>(404) 881-6877         |


