[Xmca-l] Re: Brandom Extended

[Greg Thompson]

David,
Can your "mopeds" replace "zopeds"?

Larry, I'd love to get a copy of the Pippin paper you mentioned.

-greg


On Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 3:44 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Larry:
>
> It wasn't my metaphor, actually: it was Brandom's. Here's the context:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJXibuBSotc
>
> Brandom (not to be confused with Richard Bransom!) is pretty dense for me;
> I found it easier to print out Brandom's speech and read it:
>
>  http://lms.ff.uhk.cz/pool/download_14.pdf
>
> But that misses out on the Q & A which would also be worth reading. My
> complaint is that it's all a little bloodless: it doesn't give me the sense
> that cities are full of struggle, and that even the disagreements we have
> about what things are thus and so and why, the things which Brandom claims
> are "downtown", are often, when we look more closely, about how things WILL
> be or SHOULD be rather than how they actually are, and involve conflicts of
> material interests. It seems to me that if you want to get from the suburbs
> to downtown, that is the way to go. Brandom's "downtown" is really an ivory
> tower; a material walled city. Mine is more like the "downtown" of that
> moped song:
>
> She has her arms around your waist
> With a balance that could keep us safe
> Downtown, downtown
>
> It's all about getting from the suburbs (that is, the areas where language
> and non-language exists side by side, as in everyday conversation) into the
> downtown of language (where one is confronted by pure text, as in the case
> of this 'discussion' list) and back to the burbs, safely, and with the
> least possible expenditure of intellectual resources on the means of
> transportation so that you can expend at least some of that energy on your
> companions.
>
> And that brings me to your quote. As you can see, I'm really a painter and
> not an intellectual at all: I find it very hard to think in abstractions,
> and I can't even figure out the grammar of the first sentence: "Arguments
> for relativism and sometimes transcendental idealism often make the
> mistake, the mistake of thinking of thought or horizons of sense or modes
> of sense-making or conceptual schemes in this third person way *as if*
> something one can get trapped inside of unless something exogenous can
> *break* through it."
>
> This is the kind of thing that slows me down, Larry; when philosophers talk
> about language they really make no more sense than when linguists talk
> about philosophy. What does it mean to think of modes of sense making '"as
> if" (it is?) something one can get trapped inside of'? Isn't making sense
> precisely NOT being trapped inside of the mode of sense making? How can you
> make sense WITHOUT breaking  through to something or somebody "exogenous"
> (presumably this means exogenous to language, although it's pretty hard to
> tell)!
>
> Ruqaiya Hasan argues a lot for an "internal" view of language, where
> meaning is essentially within language itself and not a relation with
> material reality, including sapient minds and sentient meat. This
> internalist view too is a walled city to me; I can see no gate to its
> downtown that isn't triply portcullised. It is like saying that the meaning
> of a painting is in the paint (Jackson Pollack might have thought that was
> true, but he is dead and his paintings are now selling for millions of
> dollars to people who appear to completely disagree).
>
> I think I prefer to think of language as a moped, a means of communication
> that you can pedal (as when we use language in an ancillary way, to access
> goods and services which are not irreducibly language) or which pedals
> itself (as when we use language to exchange 'information' in the form of
> more language). Sure, most of us will use the motor most of the time;
> that's what modernity means these days, and besides that's the only way to
> access MY downtown, which is not how things are but rather how they would
> be and how they could be and how they should be. But it would
> nevertheless be a mistake to assume that the motor is all there is, because
> then there's no way to start the damn thing up.
>
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 1:54 AM, Lplarry <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > David,
> > Your metaphor of downtown city and architecture not being picture frames
> I
> > found intriguing but I will require more con/text to follow in more than
> > an impressionistic way.
> >
> > I happen to be reading an article by Robert Pippin that is exploring
> > similar themes. Pippin says that he is making a case for a Hegelian
> > shareable *I-We* relation extending beyond Bransom’s *I-Thou* relation of
> > idiodects. Is this the contrast between dwelling within architectural
> > places rather than within picture frames?
> >
> > Now for the con/text in which this claim is embedded is this quote:
> > “ Arguments for relativism and sometimes transcendental idealism often
> > make the mistake, the mistake of thinking of thought or horizons of sense
> > or modes of sense-making or conceptual schemes in this third person way
> *as
> > if* something one can get trapped inside of unless something exogenous
> can
> > *break* through it.  As it has been put in many contemporary contexts,
> one
> > source of the confusion is the temptation to think in terms of conceptual
> > schemes and a separable, otherwise neutral, non-conceptual content that
> is
> > conceptualized by such a scheme. The temptation is to think of an in
> > principal neutral or indeterminate content or world in itself the
> > accessibility of which is a matter of applying a scheme to such a content
> > and so ending up with something *less* than the world in itself, but
> rather
> > the world only as so finitely appropriated.  Hegel is among the parties
> > denying such a scheme-content distinction, although he is certainly not
> > denying that there can be different, sometimes quite different, aspectual
> > takes on the world. The point of this self-negating language is to
> > distinguish this possible partiality of a *shape of spirit* from the idea
> > of some putatively radical, alternative conceptual scheme, and this view
> > about the *inherently* possible self-negating aspect of such a *shape* is
> > meant to stress what Gadamer calls the *openness* of linguistic horizons
> to
> > each other.”
> >
> > Pippin at this point adds a footnote # 7
> > “Besides being right (in my view anyway) about the set of Friedman,
> > Gadamer, and Davidson issues, McDowell also broaches the question of what
> > we need to say is *shareable* by a linguistic community in order for this
> > mutual intelligibility and integration to succeed and suggests the
> > beginning of what I would regard as a Hegelian case for the
> > indispensability of an *I-We* relation beyond the *I-Thou* priority
> argued
> > for by Bransom and, in effect, by Davidson on the priority of idiolects.”
> >
> > If asked I can send the article.
> > Larry
> >
> >
> > Sent from my Windows 10 phone
> >
> >
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson