Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

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This is relevant to our discussions that have arisen recently. Stanley Cavell on art and intentionality:

We approach [art] objects not merely because they are interesting in themselves, but because they are felt as made by someone - and so we use such categories as intention, personal style, feeling, dishonesty, authority, inventiveness, profundity, meretriciousness, etc., in speaking of them. The category of intention is inescapable (or escapable with the same consequences) in speaking of objects of art as in speaking of what human beings say and do: without it, we would not understand what they are. They are, in a word, not works of nature but of art (i.e. of act, talent, skill). Only the concept of intention does not function, as elsewhere, as a term of excuse or justification. We follow the progress of a piece the way we follow what someone is saying or doing. Not, however, to see how it will come out, nor to learn something specific, but to see what it says, to see what someone has been able to make out of these materials. A work of art does not express some particular intention (as statements do), nor achieve particular goals (the way technological skill and moral action do), but, one may say, celebrates the fact that men can intend their lives at all (if you like, that they are free to choose), and that their actions are coherent and effective at all in the scene of indifferent nature and determined society. This is what I understand Kant to have seen when he said of works of art that they embody "purposiveness without purpose."
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So Ein, I summed up Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations to this - "Hey philosophers, meaning is determined after the use of a word, not before. Also, you don't know shit."

:p
 
Haha, I think it's a little more complicated than that!

Saussure had already argued that meaning doesn't subsist within a word; for Saussure, a word (or "signifier") only achieves meaning when coupled with its referent (or "signified"). Together they form a sign, and this sign is public and communal. Wittgenstein and many other philosophers (even some in the Continental tradition) were working out of Saussure's texts. He kind of set the stage for 20th-century linguistics. Even Chomsky and "deep grammar" linguistics acknowledge Saussure's work.

Wittgenstein is more interested in how language operates effectively; if words have no inherent meaning, how do people come to agree on common definitions? How can we use words non-literally and still achieve our desired meaning (e.g. "feed the baby" vs. "feed the meter")? He's also concerned with how people learn language, since any ability to teach language seems to presuppose that the student has some minimal knowledge of what is taking place (i.e. education), which in turn seems to suggest that it requires some initial understanding of language; but then, how can the subject know about language before it's been taught language? Wittgenstein encounters these paradoxes over and over again, and that's where a lot of his concern lies.

My skepticism comes from moments where Wittgenstein seems to naturalize basic human responses to external activity/movement. This is a move he has to make in order to try and get a foothold on how language emerges. These responses seem almost instinctual in his writing, but I also question whether or not Wittgenstein is making an assumption here. Essentially, it's a biological claim being made by a linguist/philosopher. I'd like a little more science in his argument; since, after all, he would be familiar with scientists such as Jakob von Uexküll. He should engage more with that kind of work, in my opinion.
 
I'll have to check that out more later. Thanks! :cool:

Going along with what was posted above, and continuing in the Wittgensteinian tradition, here's a quote from J.L. Austin. There are some aspects that might get left out since I'm quoting out of context, but the general idea is still there, plain and simple:

In the particular case of promising, as with many other performatives, it is appropriate that the person uttering the promise should have a certain intention, viz. here to keep his word: and perhaps of all the concomitants this looks the most suitable to be that which "I promise" does describe or record. Do we not actually, when such intention is absent, speak of a "false" promise? Yet so to speak is not to say that the utterance "I promise that..." is false, in the sense that though he states that he does, he doesn't, or that though he describes he misdescribes - misreports. For he does promise: the promise here is not even void, though it is given in bad faith. His utterance is perhaps misleading, probably deceitful and doubtless wrong, but it is not a lie or a misstatement.
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Not sure. I mean I wouldn't doubt every President at some point had a hand in increasing this countries involvement in terror, imperialism, war, murder.

Care to add/ explain?
 
Well the US hasn't ever fought any war it didn't start, and/or provoke, and its been at war with someone almost constantly since the founding.
 
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