Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

In many ways this covers well-trodden territory, but it also clearly addresses the distinctions between different kinds of facts that arise in various disciplines. In short, the word "fact" itself doesn't designate a clear-cut and homogeneous category, but epistemological units that differ in form when you shift between systems of knowledge.

Also, I always enjoy articles that address the divide between the sciences and humanities, and this one does so rather fairly, I think. So I figured I'd share:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-should-science-have-the-last-word-on-culture

 

[Dak]

Good read. I'm surprised you didn't comment on the quick dismissal of Derrida et all.

 

[Einherjar86]

If the dismissal had been something more along the lines of a complete rejection of deconstruction, then I may have made a comment. As it stands, I'm fine admitting that many poststructuralists probably didn't know much about what actual scientists were doing. Although I'm not sure about Deleuze; I find it difficult to believe that he was out of touch with scientific practice, but then I don't really count him among poststructuralists. And Foucault definitely read up on science, but that doesn't mean he was well-acquainted with it. Baudrillard, Butler, Derrida... I don't think their writings exhibit an extensive knowledge of actual scientific practice. Of course, it's also totally possible that their obliviousness stems from their bloated writing style.

I do think that lots of conceptual models found within poststructuralism (and other postwar critical methodologies) are isomorphic with models we find in post-Einsteinian science, especially the work of Kurt Gödel. To a degree, I see Gödel's takedown of Russell and Whitehead as analogous to Derrida's takedown of Husserl and Heidegger. But this doesn't amount to saying that Derrida was well-versed in scientific literature.

Since the 1990s there's been a new generation of literary critics who have developed a reading of the complementarity between postwar critical theory and early-20thC science. N. Katherine Hayles (possibly my favorite literary critic) published a book back in the early '90s called Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. She wasn't claiming that poststructuralists really knew their science, or what scientists were doing, but that complementary patterns emerge between science and critical theory in the decades before and following World War Two (work she also pursues in her first book, The Cosmic Web, and her 1999 book, How We Became Posthuman).

Long story short, I think Pigliucci is mostly correct to say that most poststructuralists didn't know what they were talking about when it came to science; but I don't think that necessarily means they weren't saying things that were conceptually compatible with certain scientific models. Part of this possibly comes down to Pigliucci's discussion of the distinctions between facts - facts for critical theorists are definitely not the same thing as facts for physicists.

 

[Einherjar86]

Two ideas (i.e. I think too much); the first is long, the second is very short:

1. (I preface this with a disclaimer that I'm not a Marxist, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)

I don't buy the labor theory of value, meaning that I don't think value can be reduced to some metaphysical amount of labor-force instilled somehow within an object. But I have often found this to be a fascinating aspect of Marxian theory because of how strange it seems; after all, Marx criticized Hegel for being an idealist, saying that Hegel scored right on the dialectic but that he had it turned upside-down. Marx's project aimed to "turn Hegel on his head," so to speak, giving a materialist flair to Hegelian philosophy. Given this ardent materialism, how could it be that Marx proposed a "labor theory of value," i.e. a theory of value that posited value as some kind of congealed substance of labor inherent in a produced object - that is, a commodity? Could it be that Marx just threw in the towel and accepted a massive cognitive dissonance in order to devise a theoretical model that catered to the laboring subjects whose time and efforts went to manufacture these commodities? This has been a subject of some conflict for me, and something that I've reluctantly admitted after moving away from Marx and into more postwar theoretical territory.

But this doesn't mean I've abandoned Marx's critical commentary on industrial capitalism (i.e. the basic and very general organization of market economics following the Industrial Revolution). I recently read something by Michael Taussig (a Marxist anthropologist, I admit - let's get all our cards on the table) that gave me pause, and brought me back to this question. I'll give the quote in full below - it's from a book titled Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses:

"The relation of producers to the sum total of their own labor," wrote Marx, "is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor." This is the state of affairs that makes the commodity a mysterious thing "simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor." Decisive here is the displacement of the "social character of men's labor" into the commodity, where it is obliterated from awareness by appearing as an objective character of the commodity itself. The swallowing-up of contact we might say, by its copy, is what ensures the animation of the latter, its power to straddle us.

Now, here's the really interesting part, Taussig's explication:

Marx's optical analogy went like this: When we see something, we see that thing as its own self-suspended self out there, and not as the passage of its diaphonous membranes or impulsions as light waves, or however you want to conceptualize "contact" through the air and into the eye where the copy now burns physiognomically, physioelectrically, onto the retina where, as physical impulse, it darts along neuroptical fibers to be further registered as copy. All this contact of perceiver with perceived is obliterated into the shimmering copy of the thing perceived, aloof unto itself. So with the commodity, mused Marx, a spectral entity out there, lording it over mere mortals who in fact, singly and collectively in intricate divisions of market-orchestrated interpersonal labor-contact and sensuous interaction with the object-world, bring aforesaid commodity into being.

Now, what the fuck does all that bullshit mean?

Long story short, I don't think that Marx's labor theory of value can be construed as a means of calculating actual value in a market setting, and I think that Marx knew this. I think that Marx's labor theory of value only makes sense in an idealistic vision of socialist utopia, the success of which is beside the point I'm currently trying to make (although it wasn't beside the point for Marx). In Taussig's articulation, Marx's LToV operates less as a metaphysical treatise on value and more as a critical analysis of what complex market relations do to the perceptions of human subjects. And according to Taussig, perception is immensely important in shaping the dynamics of intersubjectivity and social relations (a claim with which I happen to agree). Basically, he's suggesting that perception doesn't constitute a clean line of communication and distinction between subject and object, but proceeds to entangle them, to confuse the perceiver with the perceived, and to displace the distinction through which we identify ourselves as subjects and our commodities as objects - we get sucked into the object world.

So Marx's LToV isn't that value inheres in a commodity as a metaphysically congealed substance derived from workers' labor, but that the post-industrial commodity elides the distinction between producer and produced, that it's a medium of social relations - this is how the actual relations between human subjects reappears in the commodity as a relation between things. To put this in more concrete terms, when you enter a convenience store you see shelves of bad snack food, refrigerated shelves stacked with sugar drinks, etc. etc. Labor value does not inhere in these products, but these products act as a medium between human subjects. The occupants of the store will never meet (in all likelihood) the laborers whose work went into making these products, meaning that the products themselves become the only means by which most people are able to have any identification with those laborers. We thereby fetishize the commodity, elevating it as a social form (or hieroglyphic, in Marx's own words) that represents the relation between human subjects. The commodity begins to dance, as Marx writes. In this way, these commodities appear to reflect the labor of those individuals whom most of us will never come in actual contact with. This is the "labor theory of value" - not an argument that value inheres in commodities as a substance of labor, but that commodities function in a market society as a representational form of the relations between laboring parties.

In short - when you look at a bag of Doritos, you don't see/touch/eat the people that went into producing it. You relate to those people via your own experience of that commodity as a product of labor.

Now, I'm going to stop short of saying this in any way justifies a move to full-blown communism. None of the above is intended as a justification of political revolution toward socialist organization. I'm interested in how the labor theory of value can be reimagined as a materialist philosophy, and I think this is how. When we replace the notion of a sense of value inherent within objects with a notion of value as a representation of relations between laboring parties, then we arrive at a materialist theory of value. Value derives from how subjects perceive their relations with others through the lens of commodities.


and 2. The left has an ideology problem.

That is, critique emerges in the form of ideological constructs. We need to take a lesson from Deleuze and Guattari and realize that ideology only makes sense within the parameters of ideological thought - in other words, the left can be said to suffer from "the ideology of ideology."

I don't exempt myself from this diagnosis.

 

[Dak]

Two ideas (i.e. I think too much); the first is long, the second is very short:

1. (I preface this with a disclaimer that I'm not a Marxist, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)

I don't buy the labor theory of value, meaning that I don't think value can be reduced to some metaphysical amount of labor-force instilled somehow within an object. But I have often found this to be a fascinating aspect of Marxian theory because of how strange it seems; after all, Marx criticized Hegel for being an idealist, saying that Hegel scored right on the dialectic but that he had it turned upside-down. Marx's project aimed to "turn Hegel on his head," so to speak, giving a materialist flair to Hegelian philosophy. Given this ardent materialism, how could it be that Marx proposed a "labor theory of value," i.e. a theory of value that posited value as some kind of congealed substance of labor inherent in a produced object - that is, a commodity? Could it be that Marx just threw in the towel and accepted a massive cognitive dissonance in order to devise a theoretical model that catered to the laboring subjects whose time and efforts went to manufacture these commodities? This has been a subject of some conflict for me, and something that I've reluctantly admitted after moving away from Marx and into more postwar theoretical territory.

But this doesn't mean I've abandoned Marx's critical commentary on industrial capitalism (i.e. the basic and very general organization of market economics following the Industrial Revolution). I recently read something by Michael Taussig (a Marxist anthropologist, I admit - let's get all our cards on the table) that gave me pause, and brought me back to this question. I'll give the quote in full below - it's from a book titled Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses:

This is more or less an aside to the general point of your post, but I don't think that Mr Taussig et al can purport to speak for Marx. I think Marx took the LToV qua LToV and accurately traced out the implications. It's just that it (the LToV) was replaced, and Marx never did formulate - at least publicly - a way to get from S(subjective)ToV to class warfare ideology. I have no problem respecting Mr Taussig's attempt to square the apparent circle as it were. But I find some irony in his conclusion, at least in the way you explained it.

Long story short, I don't think that Marx's labor theory of value can be construed as a means of calculating actual value in a market setting, and I think that Marx knew this. I think that Marx's labor theory of value only makes sense in an idealistic vision of socialist utopia, the success of which is beside the point I'm currently trying to make (although it wasn't beside the point for Marx). In Taussig's articulation, Marx's LToV operates less as a metaphysical treatise on value and more as a critical analysis of what complex market relations do to the perceptions of human subjects. And according to Taussig, perception is immensely important in shaping the dynamics of intersubjectivity and social relations (a claim with which I happen to agree). Basically, he's suggesting that perception doesn't constitute a clean line of communication and distinction between subject and object, but proceeds to entangle them, to confuse the perceiver with the perceived, and to displace the distinction through which we identify ourselves as subjects and our commodities as objects - we get sucked into the object world.

I never did get around to finishing Das Kapital, I stopped about halfway through because I felt that the chapters were getting redundant. But I saw nothing to suggest that Marx had his own brand of the LToV. It was *the* LToV, which had been the officially accepted value theory of economists since at least Adam Smith. What is being suggested here though (and what I find kind of ironic) is that Marxian analysis of the LToV is essentially an inexhaustive form of the subjective theory of value! I say inexhaustive because there are others ways in which we assign value (via perceptions, of course) besides social relations.

Labor value does not inhere in these products, but these products act as a medium between human subjects. The occupants of the store will never meet (in all likelihood) the laborers whose work went into making these products, meaning that the products themselves become the only means by which most people are able to have any identification with those laborers. We thereby fetishize the commodity, elevating it as a social form (or hieroglyphic, in Marx's own words) that represents the relation between human subjects. The commodity begins to dance, as Marx writes. In this way, these commodities appear to reflect the labor of those individuals whom most of us will never come in actual contact with. This is the "labor theory of value" - not an argument that value inheres in commodities as a substance of labor, but that commodities function in a market society as a representational form of the relations between laboring parties.

In short - when you look at a bag of Doritos, you don't see/touch/eat the people that went into producing it. You relate to those people via your own experience of that commodity as a product of labor.

I'm not familiar enough with the works of Smith or Ricardo to say definitively that they didn't see value as "inhering" in the commodity, but I don't believe any economists made such claims. Classical and modern economists use(d) value theories to try to explain price phenomena and any apparent paradoxes (like water vs diamonds). Products, or commodities, are certainly a medium between subjects, and money functions as a sort of "supermedium", or "medium of mediums".

Now, I'm going to stop short of saying this in any way justifies a move to full-blown communism. None of the above is intended as a justification of political revolution toward socialist organization. I'm interested in how the labor theory of value can be reimagined as a materialist philosophy, and I think this is how. When we replace the notion of a sense of value inherent within objects with a notion of value as a representation of relations between laboring parties, then we arrive at a materialist theory of value. Value derives from how subjects perceive their relations with others through the lens of commodities.

Well gladly granting the point that value at least partially, or contingently, derives from social relations, doesn't in my mind in anyway lead a jump to or justification of communism. In fact I believe it hamstrings it significantly. But (again) value cannot only derive through perceived social relations. How you or anyone else perceives me or vice versa has little to no impact on my demand for water or the supply thereof at various locales (conjuring the water vs diamond paradox of the LToV). Like I said, it is an incomplete subjective theory of value.

and 2. The left has an ideology problem.

That is, critique emerges in the form of ideological constructs. We need to take a lesson from Deleuze and Guattari and realize that ideology only makes sense within the parameters of ideological thought - in other words, the left can be said to suffer from "the ideology of ideology."

I don't exempt myself from this diagnosis.

If I understand you correctly, this would explain what I see as a disconnect between these actual theories in economics, and how they are played with in political philosophy (whether marxism or otherwise).

 

[Einherjar86]

This is more or less an aside to the general point of your post, but I don't think that Mr Taussig et al can purport to speak for Marx. I think Marx took the LToV qua LToV and accurately traced out the implications. It's just that it (the LToV) was replaced, and Marx never did formulate - at least publicly - a way to get from S(subjective)ToV to class warfare ideology. I have no problem respecting Mr Taussig's attempt to square the apparent circle as it were. But I find some irony in his conclusion, at least in the way you explained it.

Well, I have to disagree with the claim that modern critics can't speak propose readings of Capital. The problem is that there is no universally accepted reading of his work, and Capital proves one of the most cumbersome texts to read in the past century and a half. All we really have are re-readings, not any originally intended purpose or meaning; and any original meaning would be mostly irrelevant in today's economic climate. So modern critics adopt some of the models and/or figures that Marx proposed and see how they fit in today's culture. This is perfectly acceptable practice in my book.

I realize that there's a brand of philosophical practice that understands philosophies as ceasing at the borders of the work in which they're contained. By that measure, we can effectively judge a philosophy as technically right or wrong. Alternatively, we can continue to interpret philosophical texts, meaning that they're never truly right or wrong, but rather shed light on modern culture in continually shifting ways. I prefer the latter method, as it refuses to consign philosophical work to the historical dustbin but to reconsider how meaning is a constantly shifting enterprise.

I'm pretty sure you prefer the former, but I don't want to presume.

I never did get around to finishing Das Kapital, I stopped about halfway through because I felt that the chapters were getting redundant. But I saw nothing to suggest that Marx had his own brand of the LToV. It was *the* LToV, which had been the officially accepted value theory of economists since at least Adam Smith. What is being suggested here though (and what I find kind of ironic) is that Marxian analysis of the LToV is essentially an inexhaustive form of the subjective theory of value! I say inexhaustive because there are others ways in which we assign value (via perceptions, of course) besides social relations.

You've put in the effort, and as I suggested above I don't think there's only one way to read the text. Personally, I find Marx's theory of commodity fetishism to be a determining factor of his entire philosophy, and I think it has significant consequences on how we can read the labor theory of value. I think you're right that he's adopting it from prior economists, but I think Marx had a more critical eye toward how it functions. It contributes to his theory of false consciousness, i.e. people assume it works one way, but it actually works in another.

I'm not familiar enough with the works of Smith or Ricardo to say definitively that they didn't see value as "inhering" in the commodity, but I don't believe any economists made such claims. Classical and modern economists use(d) value theories to try to explain price phenomena and any apparent paradoxes (like water vs diamonds). Products, or commodities, are certainly a medium between subjects, and money functions as a sort of "supermedium", or "medium of mediums".

Could be a poor choice of words on my part. If value derives from the labor put into producing it, then in a sense it inheres in the object, since the object wouldn't exist without said labor. In a retroactive swoop, value gets reified into a substance that the commodity carries along with it. That's what I meant by "inhere."

And yes to your comment on money being the "supermedium."

Well gladly granting the point that value at least partially, or contingently, derives from social relations, doesn't in my mind in anyway lead a jump to or justification of communism. In fact I believe it hamstrings it significantly. But (again) value cannot only derive through perceived social relations. How you or anyone else perceives me or vice versa has little to no impact on my demand for water or the supply thereof at various locales (conjuring the water vs diamond paradox of the LToV). Like I said, it is an incomplete subjective theory of value.

I think it does have an impact, but only in an indirect and highly complex way. If commodities function as a kind of fabric mediating the relations between subjects, then we unconsciously attribute value to, or associate value with, the subjects "behind" those commodities (for lack of a better word). Obviously, this is a different kind of value than economic value; i.e. it isn't the same thing as the price that gets attached to diamonds or water. But it has an impact at some point during the circulation of values that feeds back into commodity exchange.

For example, my primary relation to you is through media devices. There's a value associated with this kind of interaction, and it feeds back into the value I place on my computer. This value also relates to (dictates?) how I perceive the producers whose labor went into making my computer. Marx was interested in paradox too, but his paradox lies in how exchange value feeds back into labor value. So instead of value deriving from how much labor went into making an object, the commodity dictates how much value we ascribe to labor. The commodity is a medium-image of congealed labor, but only in a perceptual (i.e. subjective) sense.

If I understand you correctly, this would explain what I see as a disconnect between these actual theories in economics, and how they are played with in political philosophy (whether marxism or otherwise).

Probably. This was a kind of off-the-cuff remark that I came up with yesterday while watching the news, and found myself thinking "it's an ideology of..." And then going on to think "why do I always do that?" I haven't really thought about it much beyond that.

 

[Dak]

Another person potentially in a position to cause trouble for Hillary is dead. More lucky coincidence for the Clintons.

 

[Dak]

https://www.propublica.org/article/white-trash-the-original-underclass

This article hits on a lot of some of that stuff I touched on earlier regarding, 50s "mythologizing", ACC skepticism, etc.

 

[Einherjar86]

I've been reading about Isenberg's book for weeks now, and I really want to get a copy - although I have no time to devote to such a weighty study right now.

I'm unfamiliar with exactly what her evidence is (obviously, considering I haven't read the book), but the general argument is spot on, in my opinion:

One of America’s founding myths, of course, is that the simple act of leaving England and boldly starting new lives in the colonies had an equalizing effect on the colonists, swiftly narrowing the distance between indentured servant and merchant, landowner and clerk — all except the African slave. Nonsense, Isenberg says: “Independence did not magically erase the British class system.” A “ruthless class order” was enforced at Jamestown, where one woman returned from 10 months of Indian captivity to be told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her dead husband’s former master and would have to work off the debt. The Puritans were likewise “obsessed with class rank” — membership in the Church and its core elect were elite privileges — not least because the early Massachusetts settlers included far more nonreligious riffraff than is generally realized. A version of the North Carolina constitution probably co-authored by John Locke was designed to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy.” It envisioned a nobility of landgraves and caciques (German for “princes” and Spanish for “chieftains”), along with a “court of heraldry” to oversee marriages and make sure they preserved pedigree.

Class distinctions were maintained above all in the apportionment of land. In Virginia in 1700, indentured servants had virtually no chance to own any, and by 1770, less than 10 percent of white Virginians had claim to more than half the land. In 1729 in North Carolina, a colony with 36,000 people, there were only 3,281 listed grants, and 309 grantees owned nearly half the land. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude,” Isenberg writes. “It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.” This was not just a Southern dynamic. The American usage of squatter traces to New England, where many of the nonelect — later called “swamp Yankees” — carved out homes on others’ land only to be chased off and have their houses burned.

The origins of the American Dream, set aflame. Seems like a fascinating read.

 

[Dak]

A little bit further down it touches on where I grew up and currently live:

By the time the nation gained independence, the white underclass — its future dependents — was fully entrenched. This underclass could be found just about every-where in the new country, but it was perhaps most conspicuous in North Carolina, where many whites who had been denied land in Virginia trickled into the area south of the Great Dismal Swamp, establishing what Isenberg calls “the first white trash colony.” William Byrd II, the Virginia planter, described these swamp denizens as suffering from “dis-tempers of laziness” and “slothful in everything but getting children.” North Carolina’s governor described his people as “the meanest, most rustic and squalid part of the species.”

Of course, it just so happens this area also has a huge population of "poor black trash" as well.

 

[rms]

I don't think people grasp how shit it was if you weren't the oldest male in a family at the very least, which is why 'ol Franklin had such an impact imo

 

[Dak]

http://backreaction.blogspot.hk/2016/08/the-lhc-nightmare-scenario-has-come-true.html?m=1

For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” – a technical term invented to describe the degree of numerical coincidence of a theory. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness because it’s a philosophical criterion, not a scientific one. But on that matter I got the last laugh: Nature, it turns out, doesn’t like to be told what’s presumably natural.

The idea of naturalness that has been preached for so long is plainly not compatible with the LHC data, regardless of what else will be found in the data yet to come. And now that naturalness is in the way of moving predictions for so-far undiscovered particles – yet again! – to higher energies, particle physicists, opportunistic as always, are suddenly more than willing to discard of naturalness to justify the next larger collider.

Now that the diphoton bump is gone, we’ve entered what has become known as the “nightmare scenario” for the LHC: The Higgs and nothing else. Many particle physicists thought of this as the worst possible outcome. It has left them without guidance, lost in a thicket of rapidly multiplying models. Without some new physics, they have nothing to work with that they haven’t already had for 50 years, no new input that can tell them in which direction to look for the ultimate goal of unification and/or quantum gravity.

http://www.bldgblog.com/2011/01/project-iceworm/

 

[Einherjar86]

Bow down to the cosmic chaos.

 

[Dak]

Mind fuck for Land: What if The Great Filter is intelligence?

 

[Einherjar86]

Ha, absolutely. I mean, there's no reason that intelligence has to be "alive," right? Although, in this context, I suppose it would be neither living nor non-living. Which is a mindfuck in its own right.

 

[Einherjar86]

Hadn't realized the nice segue here, but anyway - new blog post on intelligence is up.

Most recent issue of PMLA is interesting. Its 'Theories and Methodologies' section is on the discursive relationship between literature and philosophy. Haven't really gotten into it yet, but the introduction provides an impressively detailed account of the way philosophy bleeds into literature - or rather, how philosophy cannot makes its arguments without appealing to literary language, figure, metaphor, metonymy, etc. An excerpt (the quotations can get annoying, but she's emphasizing the words that operate in a more literary fashion):

Plato's dramatic characters, disagreeing speakers, mundane scenes, openly mythologizing allegories of ideas, and entirely imaginary polis; Descartes's "engineer" tracing "regular" forms on a "vacant plane," the irregular "paths" through the "book of the world" his Discourse takes (Discourse 1-7), the local "customs" and other temporary "housings" in which his "I" necessarily "resides" "in time" (8-13), much like the "infinitely flexible" "piece of wax" whose simplest conception as "extension" remains unchanged (Meditations 60-69); Locke's "empty cabinet" of a "mind" "furnished" with "ideas" (65) first "framed" by the "names" "lodged" within it (361-98); Hobbes's "Leviathan" or "Artificial Man" of a "State" whose "Soul" is the "Seat" of absolute "Sovereignty" (223-74), no less than Rousseau's opposing conception of a literally artificial "social contract" capable of replacing the "spectacular" bases of "inequality" with the "convention" of equal "citizenship" (Discourses; Social Contract), all demonstrate not only their authors' arguments but also those arguments' reliance on language properly categorized as literary.

 

[Dak]

Seems kind of a stretch. Obviously philosophy has to use words, and literature uses words.

Edit: Good blog post, a lot to chew on there. I do want to object to the move you make early on in trying to define and frame intelligence. It is true, at least broadly and up to the current era, that intelligence is discoverable/assessable via behavioral expression only. But it does not logically follow then that intelligence is merely behavior. There's a longstanding tension in psychology between cognitivists and behaviorists, but even behaviorists don't jump that far in justifying their orientation (at least not to my knowledge).

 

[Einherjar86]

Yes, but philosophy has had a somewhat checkered history with regard to language, culminating of course in positivism's misguided efforts at creating a perfectly transparent language of logic. This is what Wittgenstein set out to do with the Tractatus, and by the end of it realized he'd basically argued the opposite. Philosophy usually tends to appropriate and utilize language in a manner different than literature per se, yet it often appeals to literary language in order to make its point. If we permit philosophy this resource - which, as you suggest, is necessary - then we have to be cautious where philosophy appears to treat its claims (or theorems, axioms, whatever) as though they're obvious, or entirely transparent - for its usually in moments like these that language plays tricks on us.

The humanities are all about the practice of reading, reading as a critical activity. It isn't purely about interpretation, but about how interpretation contributes to a discourse. Philosophy, simply by the nature of the discourse, has to assume a somewhat untroubled relationship to the words it uses. Literary studies can have some insight here.

EDIT:

Edit: Good blog post, a lot to chew on there. I do want to object to the move you make early on in trying to define and frame intelligence. It is true, at least broadly and up to the current era, that intelligence is discoverable/assessable via behavioral expression only. But it does not logically follow then that intelligence is merely behavior. There's a longstanding tension in psychology between cognitivists and behaviorists, but even behaviorists don't jump that far in justifying their orientation (at least not to my knowledge).

Thanks. I take your point about behaviorism vs. cognitivism, and intelligence not being reducible to behavior. I may emphasize the point too strongly in the post, because I don't think I want to say that it "logically follows" that behavior is intelligence (can't recall if I used these words or not). Rather, because behavior is all that we can verify, it makes sense to associate this with intelligence, and resist reifying intelligence into some internal substance.

It is illogical to assume that behavior equals intelligence, but it's also illogical to assume that performance on an IQ exam reflects some interior core of intelligence. And until we can prove the connection between behavior and internal substance, then I think it makes sense to pursue AI studies (and other fields involving intelligence) in terms of where intelligence does manifest - i.e. in behavior.

 

[Dak]

Thanks. I take your point about behaviorism vs. cognitivism, and intelligence not being reducible to behavior. I may emphasize the point too strongly in the post, because I don't think I want to say that it logically follows that behavior is intelligence. Rather, because behavior is all that we can verify, it makes sense to associate this with intelligence, and resist reifying intelligence into some internal substance.

This is, more or less, the orientation of behaviorism. That since we have limited if any access to actual cognitive functions/processes, it makes more sense to focus on behavior.

It is illogical to assume that behavior equals intelligence, but it's also illogical to assume that performance on an IQ exam reflects some interior core of intelligence. And until we can prove the connection between behavior and internal substance, then I think it makes sense to pursue AI studies (and other fields involving intelligence) in terms of where intelligence does manifest - i.e. in behavior.

If intelligence is framed as "number crunching ability", then we can speak of both hardware and software "interior cores", directly in terms of "artificial intelligence", and via analogy for animal and human "wetware".

 

[Einherjar86]

This is, more or less, the orientation of behaviorism. That since we have limited if any access to actual cognitive functions/processes, it makes more sense to focus on behavior.

Yeah, this seems to be what I align with, based on what I've read. I don't like proclaiming myself for any one particular brand of philosophy of mind, but I seem to fall closest to eliminative materialism, which shares some affinities with behaviorism.

If intelligence is framed as "number crunching ability", then we can speak of both hardware and software "interior cores", directly in terms of "artificial intelligence", and via analogy for animal and human "wetware".

Can you explain this a bit more?