I'm a Tolstoy

I'm doing a lot of travelling this month, and rather than try to take several books with me, I decided to take just one: War and Peace. This isn't just to save luggage space; it's also a rare opportunity to try to read such a large book in a relatively short span of time.

I'm 650 pages (of about 1220) into it so far, and loving it. For all the normal reasons one might find a big fat novel engrossing: it's fun to get caught up in the soap opera and to know that there's still lots more to read about all these characters and what happens to them. But I'm also struck by how much I'm finding myself identifying with Tolstoy as author. Let me try to explain and qualify that.

A nice anecdote I've heard at third hand: an Oxford philosopher remarking that he's had a good career and is well aware of his abilities as a philosopher. And while he's never written a book as good as Hume's Treatise or Enquiries, he believes he's written a few paragraphs over the course of his career that are as good as almost anything in Hume. By contrast, he claims, were he to live a thousand years and write non-stop, he'd never come up with a single sentence that matches anything in Wittgenstein.

I don't think this anecdote is meant to illustrate Wittgenstein's superior genius to Hume's. The point is rather to distinguish between two different kinds of genius. Hume was great because he accepted the problems and framework of his day, and had thoughts about them that were more original, penetrating, and revolutionary than most of his contemporaries. Hume's intelligence impresses me, but it's also recognizable. He had ideas that I myself might have had in those circumstances, if only I were more brilliant than I am. By contrast, Wittgenstein is like an alien: what makes his work revolutionary isn't simply the keenness of its insight, but the fact that he thinks in a manner that's entirely different from anyone else. That's one reason why it's impossible to imitate his style without seeming obtusely sycophantic, far more so than if you were to try imitating the style of someone less distinctive.

It's a very rough distinction, but I think you can draw it more broadly: there's the kind of genius who sees more sharply than others, and there's the kind of genius who sees in a way that's totally different from others. In the latter group you have not just Wittgenstein but also Nietzsche, Kafka, Gogol, Van Gogh, and Blake. In the former you have not just Hume but also Dickens, Wordsworth, Aristotle, and, of course, Tolstoy. My enthusiasm has always been more for the ones who think totally differently. But I have to acknowledge that my own talents, such as they are, lie more in the camp of the sharp thinkers than the original thinkers.

This acknowledgment has been forced on me with particular clarity reading Tolstoy because I feel I'm reading someone who is more like me than almost any great writer I've read. I'm obviously very different from Tolstoy in very many ways (not least of which being writing talent), but in reading War and Peace I've been struck on numerous occasions by the feeling that someone I don't know is managing to express much of my own perspective about the world far better than I could hope to.

Part of it, I think, is that Tolstoy writes from a somewhat religious point of view without himself being deeply religious at this stage of his career (what does this presage for myself?). There isn't the deep religious yearning you find in Dostoevsky, but rather a sense hovering in the background that, of all the ways one might look on the world and other people, viewing it all sub specie aeternitatus is the most truthful, but that this perspective is one we catch only by glimpses and intimations. I should have bookmarked particular instances--if I don't have them at the tips of my fingers now, I never will. But it leads, first of all, to a rather bemused narrative voice whenever we're considering affairs that seem so crucial in the here and now, whether it's advancement in society or military matters, and this bemusement is occasionally accompanied by a brief allusion to someone's soul and the eternity that soul is struggling to see.

This bemusement leads Tolstoy to show gentle humour in dealing with his characters, but also great affection. (The one major exception so far is Natasha's near-fling with Anatole Kuragin, which struck me as out of character and imposed on her simply to complicate the plot, and it outraged me that he'd resort to such expedience with a character he's built up so lovingly.) It also leads him to write protagonists who are largely autobiographical, and I'm struck by what of myself I recognize in them too. I'm thinking here above all of Pierre Bezukhov, but also Andrei Bolkonsky. And I could say the same of Levin in Anna Karenina, and maybe even Vronsky. What strikes me about these characters most of all is their restlessness. Pierre and Andrei are both eager to lead meaningful lives, and sufficiently sincere in this eagerness that neither of them are particularly interested in the normal routes of advancement that their circumstances make very open for them. But neither of them seems able to settle on a course. Every six months, it seems, they'll throw themselves into some new endeavour--be it Freemasonry, modernizing Russia's bureaucracy, or tending a country estate--with a profound belief that now they've found themselves and are on the right path and that all that occupied them before was mere distraction. And then they'll change course six months later and consider this occupation also a distraction.

I find this a much more believable portrait of existential angst. I don't spend my life at a loss, wondering what to do, and just moping the whole time like some character out of Sartre. My problem is I'm not sure what path to follow. Sometimes I think I should be a philosopher. Sometimes I think I should be a playwright. Sometimes I think these are both distractions from the ascetic religious life I ought to be leading. Or ways of hiding from the life of political engagement that is the only decent way to live. And so on. One reason I think I've made so little progress in any of these directions is that I keep changing my mind and am unable to commit fully to any of them. I lack the clarity (or maybe the narrowness) to have a consistent vision of the good life. (On the other hand, it's only thanks to this restlessness that I've managed to do good work in more than one area.)

I don't feel like Tolstoy is writing primarily about Pierre or Andrei, let alone me. I feel he's writing about himself. I think this also comes through in the narrative voice that has this detached sense that there are deeper things that lie just beyond the fanfare that's distracting us. I don't think Tolstoy (at the time of War and Peace, at least) was writing as someone who could see beyond this fanfare and was writing from the perspective of an ironic knower. Rather, I think he was himself very much distracted by this fanfare and struggling with his sense that everything he did--including writing one of the world's greatest novels--was just further distraction. He was a man torn between a profound love of life and an ascetic conscience. I feel the same way, stuck somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Wittgenstein, deeply admiring of both, but unable to follow either wholeheartedly.

And in that respect, I'm unsure whether to call Tolstoy's religious conversion later in life a fulfillment or a betrayal of the restless man who wrote War and Peace. On one hand, he seems to have achieved what his characters aspired to. On the other, it all feels a little phony from what I know of it, more a decision to deny a part of himself that was still very much alive rather than an acceptance of who he truly was. But I really don't know much about Tolstoy. Maybe I should read a biography. As long as I can find one that's shorter than the novels he wrote...

thought, language, and Austin

One of the downsides to my not writing more frequently is that when I actually do sit down to write I feel terribly out of date with everything. I mean, I feel like tell you that I've really enjoyed your thoughts on John Locke, but I worry you'll reply "John who?" while digging back through hazy memories of how you spent your summer.

But I will have three things to say. The first is to continue our conversation about poo and thoughts, which fortunately isn't linked to any particular readings we've been doing lately (though I'm curious whether your reading of Limited Inc has made my position clearer to you), so doesn't maybe feel the lag in time as much. The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date). And the third is to say a few words about Derrida based on a second draft of the chapter I've been working on.

So, thought and language. I'm not quite sure what to say here. At least, I'm not sure what to say that isn't just a variant on things I've already said, so I worry that what I will have to say here won't move the conversation forward any. But here are some thoughts anyway.

It seems like your resistance to what I'm saying is at least in part motivated by the sense that I'm denying something important, that is, that I'm trying to deny that there's anything going on inside of us beyond the stuff that we can put into words. Would my position be any more palatable if I reaffirmed that I don't mean to be denying this, or anything for that matter? Rather, what I'm trying to do is to shift from looking at the mysterious things-inside-of-us to looking at the ways we talk, or struggle to talk, about them. And the reason I'm trying to do that is that I think talking about our inner life as consisting of things-inside-of-us on analogy to the way that we can talk about the world around us as consisting of things-outside-of-us is a bad analogy. On one hand, it gets my access to other people's minds wrong: it sets up a framework for other minds scepticism, where each person is a shell covering over an inner world about which we have only the indirect and unreliable testimony of their words and behaviour. One problem with this position is that it implies that there's some more direct and reliable testimony that we could access if only circumstances were otherwise. On the other hand, it gets my access to my own mind wrong: my mind doesn't consist of thoughts and moods and sensations floating about that I can point to in the way that I can point to bits of my body or bits of the world. You might say that my access to my own mind is too close to work on the sort of object-and-designation model that we use for talking about things in the outside world. When I talk about what's going on inside of me, I'm not describing inner facts, I'm expressing them. And that's why my descriptions of other people's inner states aren't some sort of second-best unreliable description: their own testimony isn't description at all.

I'm not denying that we have moods, or that they're sometimes difficult to express, but I am saying that when we do express moods, what we're doing is precisely expressing them, not describing them. It's not as if they're these cloudy regions of inner space that are difficult to find an accurate description for. It's rather that our vocabulary in many respects falls short of our desire to express how it is with us sometimes.

I should also add that moods are distinct from the sorts of thoughts we began by talking about in that they don't have propositional content. That is, I can have the thought-that such-and-such, but I don't have a mood-that anything; I simply have a mood. And one of my initial concerns was the notion that propositional thoughts are somehow able to sit in the head in non-verbal form before being given the clothing of language and sent out into the world. And part of my point there is simply that whatever ineffable something is going on inside of you, it can't be the thought-that such-and-such because if it had propositional content it would necessarily be linguistic.

I don't know if any of that helps or adds anything. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent. But hopefully it will at least keep the ball rolling. And maybe something I said will click in a way that's helpful. I think it would help if I could sit you down with the Philosophical Investigations and maybe The Claim of Reason. At least that would make you see the position I'm arguing from, even if it doesn't make you agree.

Incidentally, this all connects with Austin, so I might as well talk about him in the same post. Because one of the signal contributions of How To Do Things With Words, I would have said, is precisely that it undermines the model of communication on which language is simply a means of transmitting mental contents from one mind to another. If that were the case, "I promise" would be the description of an inward act, and you could break promises using Hippolytus' line (which Austin actually distorts by quoting out of context) about how "my tongue swore but my heart did not." Performative utterances, if nothing else, are a fine example of the fact that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting thoughts.

And then Derrida's criticism of Austin precisely takes the form of saying that Austin is still married to a conception of language that ties it closely to consciousness. I sort of half-buy Derrida's criticism. But at any rate, you can see how both Austin and Derrida share this sense that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting pre-existing thoughts. I don't know if they help you see why I want to resist that view.

As for the value of Austin more generally, well, I don't know if further study or discussion has changed your opinion of him or reaffirmed it. I think in part it helps to see Austin within his philosophical context, and in particular working at a time when logical positivism is in the ascendant and when A. J. Ayer is the big cheese at Oxford. This is a school of thought according to which utterances can be divided into scientific propositions that make assertions about the world and "non-cognitive" utterances expressing emotion or metaphysics or religious sentiment or whatever else, and that lack any real propositional content. So one of the things Austin's doing is complicating and undermining that picture. And that part of his project might be less evident and feel less pressing in a time when logical positivism isn't so prominent.

Though there's still a tendency often to assume that statements are descriptive. It's a very tempting assumption. And here I have to confess to some impatience with your remark that Austin's not saying anything you don't already know. Austin himself remarks in the very first paragraph that nothing he's going to say is particularly difficult or contentious, and the tone throughout is marked with the bemusement of someone who's not entirely sure why he's bothering to tell us all of this. This notion of saying nothing that isn't already obvious is characteristic not just of Wittgenstein as well, but also phenomenology. It's one of the similarities I remark on between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for instance: in Being and Time, Heidegger claims to simply be describing what's before us, and that if we haven't noticed something like the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit before, that's because it's so obvious that we often pass over it. Like Poe's Purloined Letter. So simply saying that Austin's saying things that are obvious isn't in itself a criticism. It's only a criticism if you want to say that he's saying things that are both obvious and unlikely to cause problems when we pass them over unnoticed. And I think he has some claim to make on that score.

And for my own part, I'm writing a thesis about this notion of appealing to ordinary language and I find Austin very interesting for methodological reasons. I think that aspect of his work, while on full display in How To Do Things With Words, has a more obvious critical edge in Sense and Sensibilia or "A Plea for Excuses." For whatever that's worth.

As for insults, I'm not sure I have much to add there. Except to suggest that the point of insulting people is, to borrow a phrase, to give them a tongue-lashing, that is to give them the verbal equivalent of a blow. And just as there are no conventional forms of beating people up (as there are with other physical actions, like handshakes or hailing taxis), there are no conventional forms for insulting them. "I insult you" simply wouldn't have the desired perlocutionary force. Part of Austin's interest in performative utterances is precisely that he thinks they're too often assimilated to locutionary or perlocutionary acts.

Wittgenstein and deconstruction

I'm working right now at a thesis chapter that deals with Derrida and ordinary language philosophy. "Signature Event Context" offers a reading of J. L. Austin that's very flattering in its attention, but also quite critical. It spawned a nasty spat between Derrida and John Searle, which is unfortunately one of the rare moments in which continental and analytic philosophy talked to one another. My chapter discusses Derrida's criticisms of Austin and asks whether these criticisms can apply to the appeal to ordinary language more generally, and to Wittgenstein in particular. Some people (Stanley Cavell and Martin Stone) take Derridean deconstruction to be sharply at odds with what Wittgenstein is trying to do, while others (Simon Glendinning and Henry Staten) find deep parallels between Wittgenstein and Derrida. I'm not yet sure which side I'm on, and I'm not sure to what extent I need to pick sides: there can be deep affinities as well as important differences. To a large extent, my uncertainty comes from my uncertainty about Derrida. That is, I don't feel at all confident in my understanding of Derrida, so I'm not sure where I stand with him. I just read a paper by Martin Stone that I think gives a strong reading of Wittgenstein, but offers a Derrida I'm not sure I recognize. I thought you'd be a worthwhile person to run all of this by since you know Derrida far better than I do. And because you'll certainly be approaching what I say from a more Derridean angle: people like Cavell and Stone, and even Glendinning, are more steeped in the analytic tradition and Wittgenstein than they are in Derrida and continental philosophy, so I worry that they might be giving me a skewed perspective.

If I want to talk about Stone on Wittgenstein and Derrida, the place to start is probably with Wittgenstein's famous discussion of rules. Wittgenstein is one of the first philosophers to give sustained attention to the question of what rule following consists in. This is particularly striking given that rule following seems to be implicit in so much philosophy: a great deal of our thinking about ethics and rationality, for instance, seems to rely on the notion of following rules. For Wittgenstein, rules also feature prominently not only in our thinking about mathematics, but in our thinking about thinking more generally: what is it to understand a concept if not the understanding of the rules according to which that concept can be applied in future instances? (As you'll see, this isn't meant to be simply a rhetorical question.)

Wittgenstein closely associates rules with interpretation. One example of a rule that Wittgenstein discusses is a signpost. Supposing you see a sign that says "Vancouver" with an arrow like this "->". The standard way of reading that signpost would be to take it to tell us that Vancouver is on the road to the right. But why do we take the arrow "->" to signify "right"? Couldn't we just as well read it as pointing to the left? (At one point he asks why we couldn't just as well take a pointing arm to signify the direction indicated by following the outstretched finger up to the shoulder.) One answer that Wittgenstein's imagined interlocutor proposes is that when we see the arrow, we interpret it as pointing to the right. But Wittgenstein finds a regress in this kind of answer: couldn't the interpretation itself be open to interpretation? That is, whatever this interpretation consists in--whether it's a mental picture, a written instruction, a spoken or thought word--is just as open to alternative interpretations as the original arrow.

(I should pause here to note that this is one of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Derrida that strikes me as really interesting. Both are very interested in what Derrida might call "the materiality of the sign." That is, both of them are highly sensitive to our philosophical tendency to avoid difficulties by imagining certain abstract processes like interpretation or meaning to take place in some inexplicably spiritual and exact medium that's free of all the ambiguities of normal sign use. And both of them combat this tendency by insisting that we treat these abstract processes in just the way that we might treat written or spoken signs.)

If rules in general are subject to interpretation, and interpretation itself is subject to further interpretation, it would seem that any course of action could count as following a particular rule on some interpretation of that rule, and that there's no absolute authority that can determine which is the correct interpretation. One climax in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules comes at §201 of the Philosophical Investigations: "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here." This passage, and the stuff around it, has been subjected to volumes upon volumes of scrutiny, and there's still wide disagreement about exactly what's going on here.

One very influential reading, most famously advanced by Saul Kripke, takes Wittgenstein to be offering us a "skeptical paradox" and also a "skeptical solution" to his skeptical paradox. The paradox is that rules would seem to require interpretations to fix their meanings, but since interpretations are equally open to this requirement, there's no absolutely correct interpretation of a rule. The "skeptical solution" is that rules (and rule-based practices, such as meaning, understanding, interpretation, and so on) don't have absolutely correct interpretations, but nor do they need them. What makes an interpretation correct is the agreement of a community on how to follow that rule. And this answer isn't a cop-out since communities are constitutive of rules. That is, there's no such thing as a rule if there isn't a community that agrees on how to follow that rule: "It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)" (PI §199).

I think this reading is wrong, and wrong in a way that's important to my thesis, because I think it arises precisely from a failure to take Wittgenstein's appeal to ordinary language into account. The point, I think, is precisely that we don't make an interpretation every time we follow a rule. For instance, I don't actually interpret a signpost with an arrow as pointing to the right and not to the left. If we look at how we ordinarily use a word like "interpret," we don't apply it to any and every case of rule following. Rather, we apply it in cases where there's ambiguity or room for doubt. If the sign is badly scratched up so that I have trouble discerning which way the arrow's pointing, I might find myself interpreting the sign as signalling that I should go left or right. But in ordinary circumstances I don't do any interpreting.

This isn't meant to offer a solution of any kind to the "skeptical paradox," but rather to suggest that this paradox only arises if we misuse and metastasize the ordinary meaning of "interpret."

Stone offers something like this reading of Wittgenstein on rule following, but he also uses it as a way of contrasting Wittgenstein with Derrida. Derrida, he thinks, takes much the same position as Kripke, arguing that every application of a rule (use of a sign, meaningful expression) requires interpretation, noting that there is no endpoint to the chain of interpretations of interpretations, and arguing for an essentially skeptical position on the possibility of definite meaning.

Before I'd read Stone, I was inclined to suggest that Derrida and Wittgenstein actually converge on their understanding of rules and signs, but if Stone's reading of Derrida is correct, then I'll have to change my inclination. Stone has a fair amount of textual evidence to back up his reading, but it doesn't sound like the Derrida I think I've read. Let me lay out what I think is the right line to take on rules and signs, and it's the line I think Wittgenstein takes and I less confidently think Derrida takes. You can tell me (a) if you think it's the right way to read Derrida, and (b) if you think it's right.

I said before that I don't read Wittgenstein as embracing a skeptical position about meaning because he wouldn't grant that every act of rule following involves interpretation. One danger of saying that is that it can risk making Wittgenstein out to be some sort of conservative (both admirers and detractors have read him this way). On one hand, we all follow signposts in the same way because the question of how to interpret them simply cannot arise, and on the other hand, we might follow all sorts of more politically charged social institutions in the same way for similar reasons. But I don't think Wittgenstein is trying to draw some sort of line and say that we cannot interpret the sign differently, or that it's impossible to doubt certain rules. His point is rather that, for the most part, we do not, and I think part of what's important about his philosophy is precisely that he draws our attention to the fact that there's no foundational reason for us not to doubt rules, interpret them differently, and so on. At one point, he gives the famous example of the child who's taught the rule "add 2," and starts writing out "2, 4, 6, 8..." as his teacher expects, but then gets to 1000 and continues "1004, 1008, 1012..." No matter how much cajoling and prompting his teacher gives him, he simply cannot be brought to follow the rule as the teacher expects. Part of the point to this allegory, I take it, is that there's no absolutely compelling reason that the teacher can give that will make the student see what he means: as Kripke says, every rule is always open to alternative interpretations.

However, I don't take Kripke's moral from this allegory. I think what we're supposed to learn is that we're able to do things like follow rules because we share a certain sense of what rule following consists of with others (and what teaching is, what speaking and meaning are, and so on), and that the bedrock for these shared practices isn't some rational justification--and also isn't the shared practices of a community--but what Wittgenstein calls Übereinstimmung: we just happen to be attuned with others in particular ways. He draws out the fact of this attunement by pointing out the impossibility of reaching agreement with someone who happens not to be attuned with us. It's not that a community grounds agreement, but that attunement is a necessary condition for the possibility of there being a community in the first place.

So on this reading of Wittgenstein, it's not that every rule or meaningful utterance stands in need of interpretation, and the interpretation stands in need of further interpretation, and so on. It's rather that there's nothing that could definitively halt this regress of interpretation if it were to start. That's all I'd taken Derrida to be saying as well. I'd taken his deconstructive readings to be playful exercises that undermine the aspiration to ground the meaningfulness of signs in their reaching out unambiguously to intended objects. By showing the ways in which signs can be alternatively interpreted, he wants to interrupt a certain Platonistic or idealistic conception of the relation of signs to the world. But that doesn't mean he wants to replace that conception with one in which everything is always open to (and demanding) interpretation.

That was maybe not the most elegantly presented discussion. I hope it wasn't too long-winded or unclear. And I hope it was thorough enough that you have some sense of the debate I'm trying to position Derrida in.

Language and thought

Wow, lots of interesting stuff from you recently. There's actually something in my own reading that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on, but first I should respond to some of what you said. Most pressingly, I suppose, I should answer for what I said about thoughts and poo.

First of all, you say you don't recognize yourself in my characterization of thoughts sitting in the head like poo in the bowels, there yet unformed, and then given shape as they leave the body. Maybe it was the provocative way I put it? What I meant is that you seem to have a model of the relationship between thought and language such that thought is something that exists in the head independently, and language is a tool for putting those thoughts across to others, and that this tool can shape or distort the original thought. At one point in the post I was responding to you describe language as a "vehicle for thought." If language is a vehicle for thought, that suggests that thought is a kind of substance, something that can be transmitted but that requires a medium in which to be transmitted. Later on, your write: "Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as." Here the metaphor isn't a vehicle but a code. A code is something that can be transmitted between two people, but what the code encodes is a message that exists independently of the code. Unpacking the metaphor, you seem to think of thought as a something that isn't quite language but enough like language that it can be "encoded" in language. It's these sorts of things that made me associate you with my poo analogy.

Actually, I think the code metaphor is quite telling: a literal code is a language that is translated from another language. If we follow the metaphor out, thought itself must be a kind of language in order to be encoded. And if so, do we have any better model for the kind of language that thought is than language itself?

It occurs to me that I don't have to reach as far as Wittgenstein to object to this model of the relationship between language and thought. Isn't this really one of the main targets of Derrida's work in the 60's and 70's? In "Signature Event Context," Derrida tries to deconstruct the notion that communication consists essentially of transmitting encoded thoughts from one mind to another, and in particular that writing is simply an extension of this transmission that allows us to communicate with people who aren't present. You know Derrida better than I do, so I'll let you judge whether you think he'd find your characterization of language as "something that couldn't possibly cause any objection."

In your defense, you insist that we can't simply say that thought = language and condemn children and others who don't think to thoughtlessness. I don't think I want to say anything as crude as that. But I do want to say that our concept of thought is closely tied to our concept of language, so that we're only able to ascribe thoughts to infants and animals by virtue of giving words to those thoughts. I think it's unproblematic to say that the infant wants its mommy even if it can't yet cry "mama." The mistake, I think, comes in then reifying this "thought," and thinking that there's a something in the infant's head which is the thought-that-I-want-mommy, and which we're identifying when we say the infant wants its mommy. That leap--from saying the child wants its mommy to saying that there's a definite thought in the child's head to the effect that it wants its mommy--then leads us to suppose that when the child learns to speak and says "I want mommy," it then too has a thought in its head, only now it's able to put that thought into words.

What I'm saying when I question your characterization of language is that I question this leap from how we talk about thoughts to the ontology of thoughts. Ascribing thoughts to infants, animals, and even other talkative people, is simply a way of talking, a way of describing behaviour that we find useful and illuminating. But if you think about how we use this language of thought ascription--and especially how we first come to learn to use phrases like "he's thinking..."--you'll see that this language doesn't really consist of descriptions of inner states, but descriptions of behaviour. Which isn't to say I'm a behaviourist--I'm not saying that thought is behaviour--but just that we learn how to talk about people's mental lives by seeing how they behave, not by seeing into their souls.

This might also explain what I said about thoughts on the tips of tongues. I (and Wittgenstein) wasn't denying that we can often have that experience, and that often we then find the words we were looking for. The point, rather, is that that expression ("it's on the tip of my tongue") isn't a description of my consciousness, where I can as it were see the thought sitting there, but through a thick enough haze that I can't accurately find words for it. Rather, it's a way of expressing the fact that I don't quite have the words I want, but I hope to come up with them soon. As Wittgenstein suggests, if no one ever then came up with the words, we wouldn't have use for this expression.

So yes, I agree with you that thought and language aren't the same thing, and that it's perfectly legitimate to talk about thoughts I can't find words for or what have you. But I want to resist the further inference that these thoughts are things of a sort, mental things, or even mental processes as you suggest.

From Vancouver, many months late

§§§§

As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.

logic and language

I don't want to talk much about language... I think the questions you brought up will be discussed at length over the summer when I'm talking about Locke, Condillac and co. Still, I feel like I can't not give a cursory response. When I spoke of Language as an imperfect vehicle for thought, I actually thought I was saying something that couldn't possibly cause any objection... I'm sure you think, as I do, that language enriches thought, gives us the ability to think more things and more complicated things. I'm sure you and I can agree that in articulating a thought we often change that thought for the better, making it clearer and more refined. I do not mean to suggest that there is or should be a better vehicle for thought, and I don't regret the absence of some ideal thought vessel. I suspect that you and me both have an unusually strong faith in what language can be made to express and joy in making it express things. What i meant is simply that language cannot communicate thought directly - the fact that you can have trouble putting a thought into words, the fact that there is no adequate vocabulary to express certain sensations or experiences, even the fact that things thought simultaneously and interconnected cannot be expressed simultaneously, all of this is what makes it possible for romantic thinkers like Rousseau to long for a pre-lapsarian language, a language before babel which would be perfectly transparent and instantly communicate thought as thought. The point is more or less what was written about the dictionary of received ideas - thoughts have to be made to conform to given vocabulary and syntactic structures, and this alters them (sometimes for the better). This gives pathways, patterns of thinking that can be a limitation or a barrier as well as an indispensable aid. Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as (though, obviously, since communication is possible, they don't always end up recognizable, and the most ordinary, everyday thoughts are often perfectly communicable). 'Imperfect' can actually be a desirable trait, since what is 'perfect' is often what is complete, finished, closed. I always refer back to the Cartesian distinction between animal and man (not that I buy the animal end of it), where man is defined by his instinct being 'imperfect', in other words not dictating how man should act or react in given situations, thus necessitating evolving behavior. It is because man is 'imperfect' that he is capable of invention. In this sort of scheme, 'imperfection' is equivalent to having free will, and being 'perfect' means being determined once and for all... of course, part of the 'imperfection', which is opacity, derives from the ambiguity that even the most lucid stylist can't help but creating at points. By lucid stylist, I mean the ideal philosopher who wants language to be transparent. I suppose 'imperfection' is also 'literary' - the fact that the qualities of language that a literary writer delights in (the materiality of language, its capacity to mean multiple things at one and the same time) are present, if often unacknowledged, even when the philosopher writes. This is a fact that the continental philosophers embrace, and sometimes sort of obsess over.
As to language being illogical, I feel somewhat less able to back up that claim. I was partly talking about the arbitrary nature of signs and the fact that convention trumps logic in all languages... in the seventeenth century, the grammar of port-royal attempted to show that language was modeled on logic, and that we speak and think using the same structures. Chomsky thought of this grammar as being a forerunner of his own generative grammar. The argument largely breaks down - I'll give some reasons in another post. Esperanto as a language without history may be created to be perfectly rational, and may have no exceptions to its rules, but it will still be required to make arbitrary choices about what its rules are, what words will have to have multiple meanings or functions (no language can have such a broad vocabulary that it can avoid this), what meanings and functions will be grouped together, etc... Everything I say from this point on relating to this is said with huge reservations (and I can't exactly remember what Lecercle said or how he said it - I'm sure I was careless in expressing it in the original post you were questioning). Remember I gave Bergson's definition of humor as the mechanical grafted onto the living? Well, language has to adapt to a living world, and if it is treated as a rigid, inflexible structure that is not capable of adapting to a situation, absurdity will result. I understand that it isn't illogical to adapt to circumstances, but logic, like language, can be treated as an abstract set of formulas - real logic can be replaced by textbook logic, just as real language can be replaced by textbook language... Ionesco's play 'the bald soprano' is a good send up of books for foreigners learning English. So I suppose that in part the word 'illogical' would here not genuinely mean 'illogical' but rather 'irreducible to a set of formulae and necessarily relying on certain arbitrary decisions determined by convention'. The nonsense relying on the 'illogical' nature of language would be 1) delighting in the frustration of rigid formulas 2) pretending arbitrary decisions were not arbitrary and providing spurious justifications for them 3) playing with groupings in the form of homonyms and homophones and words with multiple functions. I could expand on this, but why would I bother? This isn't really my topic. It's just part of what I think was in the Lecrcle book (though god knows in trying to explain what I wrote when talking about Lecercle, I've almost certainly strayed very far from what he actually wrote.
What else? I haven't read Wittgenstein, and I won't have a chance to any time this year, though I hope to read a bit of him next year. Your interest in him makes him appealing, and he pops up very frequently in books and conferences. Raluca has been reading some stuff on Wittgenstein, because she is working on a poet who was influenced by him. I can't imagine how happy it would make me to get to teach a class on Dostoyevsky, but that will never happen. I'm going to try to get a class on 'savages' for next year, but that isn't likely, and even that isn't what I would most want to teach. There's no possibility for teaching the stuff I'd most like to. As far as what you were saying about what Wittgenstein does, all I can say is that it sounds appealing. Though, to return to the very beginning of this post... I don't know quite how to put this, and it has nothing to do with Wittgenstein and more to do with the idea of seeing things through a different lense, casting a different light on the world or whatever... and what you said about 'clearly this has to be nuanced, because if that were what he was trying to say why wouldn't he have just said it exactly like I just did' (or words to that effect). I actually get incredibly frustrated with things I can't put into words, and tend to love anything that gives straightforward lucid explanations that ring true. I love things that add to my own ability to put things into words. On the other hand, I do think art can be used to help explain and understand he world just like philosophy can, and I have trouble separating the two. Music is probably the most direct and sensual of the arts, the one I have the least intellectual reaction to and enjoy the most for its own sake - but even music is something I enjoy talking about and trying to explain, and when I try explaining it, I'm always talking about something more general than just music.

I heart Wittgenstein

So I've been teaching the Philosophical Investigations this term, which gives me an excuse to re-read the book from cover to cover for the first time in a few years, as well as a chance to read for the first time the new translation that came out last year (which is really just an update and improvement on the original Anscombe translation). It's been great fun, and naturally I keep discovering new things, either things I hadn't noticed before, or connections I notice for the first time in passages that were already familiar.

One of the things I’ve found striking--and the thing I wanted to comment on--is how much I can see Wittgenstein's influence on the plays and other forms of make-believe that I create. There's a wonderful sense of absurdity in Wittgenstein that I think you'd love (have you ever read him?). Not so much outright jokes (though there are a few, depending on your sense of humour) as a pervasive sense of the world looked at askew, so that everything seems bizarre, out of place, ridiculous. And that's married with a very patient attitude toward the absurdities: Wittgenstein wants to nurse them gently rather than push any of them too hard.

There's a fair amount of debate about how to read Wittgenstein, ranging from people who think the best we can do with him is treat him like he was an analytic philosopher with a penchant for obscurity and try to tease tidy philosophical theses out of him to people who think his unique literary form serves a unique philosophical method that we ignore at our peril. As you can imagine, I fall more toward the latter end of that spectrum. My reading tries to take seriously his claim that if we were to advance theses in philosophy it would be impossible to debate them because everyone would agree to them, and so tries to find ways of reading Wittgenstein as not advancing theses.

To a large extent, I think the way to read Wittgenstein is as offering what he calls "objects of comparison." At §144 of the Philosophical Investigations he writes: "I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things." For instance, Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine a pupil who constantly gets things wrong in following out mathematical rules and can't be induced to do it "right." Wittgenstein doesn't tell us "the rules we normally take to be grounded in necessity are grounded in nothing stronger than our tendency to teach and learn in similar ways, so that, for the most part, we can teach people by getting them to see what we mean, but there's no way we can compel understanding." Rather, he finds the right absurdities to help us toward this view. (This claim obviously needs to be complicated: if all he's trying to do is get us to see the thing I wrote explicitly above, why didn't he just say so?). He sets the world we know against a world that's thrown weirdly askew, and the comparison leads us to see the world we know in a different light, in a way that dispels our philosophical confusions (or tries to do so).

It struck me that, though I don't do philosophy this way, it does reflect the way I approach my plays to a large extent. The well-chosen scenario is one that presents a fictional world that casts a jarring light on the real world. I'm not looking for the scenario that tells us what the real world is like so much as the one that gives us a point of comparison, or a perspective, on the real world such that we see it differently. And, in fact, this seems a not-bad sketch of what literature aims to do generally. Or one thing that literature does.

In this respect, it occurs to me that Wittgenstein interestingly blurs the old distinction between philosophy and literature. If philosophy is supposed to state claims directly and literature is supposed to cast light on matters obliquely by way of comparison, what Wittgenstein writes is more like literature than philosophy. This might explain why he's often greeted with such confusion and irritation within the halls of professional philosophy. What would Plato think?

nonsensical responses

First I'll try to say a bunch of things in response to your posts. Then, time permitting, I'll try to write a separate post about Wittgenstein. I mean god, I've been contributing to this blog for nearly half a year and I haven't talked about Wittgenstein yet. What's wrong with me?

First of all, I have to wonder to myself how you read books so fast. You're constantly complaining about how lazy you are and how little work you've done, and yet every week you're commenting on a new book you've read. It's a good month for me when I read a single book, and I don't really think I'm lazy, much as I castigate myself from time to time. In my case, I think there are two main reasons: first, I'm a slow reader, and especially with academic books, I read at a pace of something like five to ten pages an hour, so reading a full book in a week would be a full week's work, and I rarely manage a full week's work. And that's for the second reason, that I have a talent for taking on all sorts of extraneous commitments. I wouldn't really have it any other way, but it does add to the stress levels. Writes the guy on the bus back from London having spent the day sitting in on rehearsals for Tom's a-cold, which opens in a week and a half.

Now, to work roughly from oldest to youngest. Reading your last three posts I was reminded on a number of occasions of something I think you've remarked upon more than once, that we seem to be interested in many similar things even though we look at them through the lenses of rather different intellectual backgrounds. The language and nonsense stuff is a prime example, since it features significantly in my thesis too. Actually, it's maybe more of an anomalous case, since it's not just our interests that overlap here, but even our reading somewhat. I'm supposed to manage to get my head around Derrida at some point. Not sure I will, but I'm sure talking to you about this stuff can't be a bad start. So maybe I could begin by posing some clarificatory questions.

You talk about the rules of language being clearly not logical. I'm not entirely sure what this means, influenced as I am by Wittgenstein's claim that ordinary language is in perfect logical order. Do you simply mean that grammatical rules seem often to have exceptions, or do you mean something stronger than that? If you mean the weaker claim, I suspect that's a bit of a red herring (I'll get on to what I think is not the red herring shortly) because a language without grammatical exceptions isn't free of the sorts of ambiguities you seem to take as paradigmatic of illogicality. Esperanto, for instance, is a language without grammatical exceptions (I believe--I don't actually have more than a passing familiarity with constructed languages), and it seems like there are people who can communicate with it quite fluently, but it also seems (again, speaking out of ignorance) that speaking Esperanto doesn't radically alter the features of language that tempt us to call it an imperfect vehicle.

If you indeed mean a stronger claim that language of any kind--grammatical exceptions or not--is somehow an imperfect vehicle (you talk about language as a "flawed vehicle for thought"), I'm curious how you might spell that out. Flawed in comparison to what, for example? If the struggles we have with language aren't accidents of our language, but structural features of all possible languages, then can this count as an imperfection? Can we articulate what it is we're unable to do that our imperfect language somehow hinders us from doing?

I don't mean to deny that language often trips us up in various ways. I'm just questioning whether we can coherently talk about these snares as "illogicality."

I said I thought that grammatical exceptions were a red herring. What I don't think is a red herring--and something I believe is familiar to readers of Derrida as much as to readers of Wittgenstein or Cavell--is the fact that words can always be projected and used in new contexts, and no rules can lay out in advance how that projection can work, and if we operate with a sense that the boundaries of the concepts defined by our words are rigidly fixed in advance, we are likely to stumble on all sorts of confusions that make for a playground of nonsense. Lewis Carroll is one of the great masters of this genre. I'm thinking of the bit about "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today" as taking the word "today" to refer to the present day, whatever that day might be, fixed by the present moment rather than the moment of utterance. That's maybe not the best example, since there's more at work than just the notion that concepts need rigid boundaries, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

A few other things on other topics:

Regarding trans-humanism, you seem to share my sense that on one hand, this is obviously perverse, but on the other hand, there's something quite compelling about its logic. Again, more so for someone like me, a vegetarian and aspiring Buddhist, than you, with your punk sensibilities, but I'm glad you seem to share my sense of it. Again, I think of Nietzsche, this time in terms of his emphasis on instincts and his sense that unhealthy creatures come to distrust their instincts. Abolitionism seems to represent this notion perfectly: people who so distrust their own instincts that they can talk themselves into rejecting everything they are naturally. Though I was struck by your remark that you find enhanced intelligence less tempting than enhanced happiness. What thinking person hasn't wished for a little more sharpness of mind? Sure, godlike intelligence and happiness might render us other than human, but that's where the "trans" in "trans-humanism" comes from: from their point of view, if human nature as given to us doesn't sit well with our trans-human future, so much the worse for human nature.

I enjoyed the stuff on Flaubert and received ideas. When I was reading Bovary last summer there was frequent reference in the footnotes to the book, though I never quite knew what it was (having skipped the introduction to get right into the novel). It sounds like a delightful idea. It also reminded me of some stuff I've been reading about Heidegger and das Man. There's some debate about the extent to which das Man in Heidegger is meant to represent the bland conformity of adopting shared norms like driving on the same side of the road, etc., and to what extent it's meant to represent the pernicious conformism of thinking what everyone else thinks, etc. One suggestion is that the two easily bleed into one another, and I find a bit of that in your discussion of Flaubert. I've been working on a paper on Wittgenstein and Heidegger and precisely the question you raise with Flaubert about how we can break out of the habits of thought we've inherited without breaking out of the constitutive grounds for expressing thoughts coherently at all. You won't be surprised to hear that I think Wittgenstein is more successful in this respect than Heidegger. My next post might touch on this.

And lastly, I identify powerfully with what you say about complaints that there's nothing new to say being the complaints of people who can't think of anything new to say. I'd never have put it the way you put it, or even really thought it without your help, and I think it's inspired. Though it also reinforces my sense that I'm not really destined for the life of the scholar. I'm really not sure what there is to say that's new. Not because I don't believe it's possible, but because I feel like I'm able to think with people who inspire me but lousy at striking out on my own. I think my slavish devotion to Wittgenstein comes from the sense that I have nothing to say that could take me beyond what he's already said so well.

a genealogical myth of philosophy

I read something by my supervisor that struck me as problematic, but I can't quite put my finger on what I find wrong with it, so it might not be a bad idea to air some of the grievances.

He begins the paper with a Heidegger-inspired "genealogical myth of philosophy." Heidegger-inspired in the sense that it draws on Heidegger's distinction between ontic sciences, regional ontologies, and fundamental ontology. The idea is that there are various ontic sciences that go about interrogating particular kinds of beings: living beings in the case of biology, rocks in the case of geology, and so on. We're driven to interrogate entities because we want to understand their nature better: we want to know what kinds of entities there are. These ontic sciences all operate within a particular framework, a set of assumptions about what questions there are, how we should go about asking them, what basis of knowledge we all agree on, and so on. In Kuhnian terms, normal science operates within a paradigm. Call this paradigm a regional ontology. Occasionally, problems will arise that will make people start questioning the regional ontology. That's largely what philosophers do: philosophers of science aren't doing science but are doing regional ontology, where they question the framework within which the ontic science takes place. The Heideggerian step is then to ask what we're presupposing in doing our regional ontologies. This question then leads us back to fundamental ontology and Heidegger's beloved Question of Being.

Now, there are a few things that trouble me about this. Perhaps the central concern is that he calls this a "genealogical myth" because obviously it's not meant to be a rigorous description of how knowledge or science or philosophy or inquiry actually work, but rather a framework for thinking about it. A regional ontology for philosophy, if you will. But I can't help but think it's a bit sloppy and lazy to introduce something while granting it's far from rigorous, but then move on to other things without returning to question its assumptions. And my suspicion isn't just that it's drawing neat lines where things are far messier, but that it actually is a bad myth, it distorts matters in a number of important ways. Though I'm not sure I'm quite succeeding in putting my finger on how.

One simple objection is just that lines are far fuzzier than this myth suggests, though I suspect the use of "myth" was meant to grant that point. It can only have bite if I can show that these fuzzy lines are too fuzzy to make the distinctions worth drawing. But, for instance, it's not like scientists never question their paradigms. "What is life?" is as much a biological question as a philosophical one. And indeed, many of the people working in the "regional ontologies" of philosophy of biology or philosophy of physics are scientists first and foremost rather than philosophers. My uncle, a chemistry professor, once remarked to me that philosophers tend to come up with very simplistic notions of what it means to do science because they've never really done it themselves, and it takes many years of working in the sciences to really have a clear notion of what goes on in the sciences.

Not just do I think the hierarchical distinctions are problematic, I also think that a three-tiered hierarchy groups together things that don't really belong together. Mulhall talks about different regional ontologies, giving the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science as two examples. But are they really the same sorts of things, and more important, are science and religion really two commensurable "ontic sciences"? The myth I gave above--recapitulating his own--gives a scientific example, where it's easier to operate within the simple assumption that scientists are in the business of accumulating knowledge and that this accumulation can then be interrupted by questioning the overall framework. I'm not sure the same accumulation of knowledge occurs in any non-scientific field. What's the "ontic science" of religion in the business of doing? Science isn't one way of answering our curiosity about the world; it's the way of doing so. My interest in art or religion isn't provoked by a question of "what sorts of entities are there in the world?" but by entirely different kinds of question altogether.

This problem become more acute when we consider various ontic sciences deal with different kinds of entities, so that regional ontologies are asking the question of what it means for something to be an entity of that nature. He writes that philosophy of science asks what it is for something to be material, philosophy of mind asks what it is for something to be mental, philosophy of religion for something to be divine, and so on. That strikes me as bizarre on a number of levels. Firstly, I haven't done much philosophy of science, but I've done enough to know that "what is it for something to be material?" isn't a question they ask. That's a question for the metaphysicians. And also, it further reinforces this suggestion that the material, the mental, and the divine are just three different kinds of entities, which sounds all right if you're Descartes, but sounds very odd to a more contemporary ear. It takes some unnecessary reification and grouping together of apples and oranges to insist that there are divine or aesthetic entities just like there are material entities.

I also think this genealogical myth would be inimical to Wittgenstein, who's one of Mulhall's other great heroes. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects the notion of a "second-order philosophy," which is what fundamental ontology sounds like on this picture. And he was also very clear that he wasn't doing anything connected to science. Nor did he take himself to be interrogating entities. This might be Heidegger's genealogical myth of philosophy, but I don't know how much we can extend it beyond Heidegger.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this sounds like sound criticism to you. I don't feel I've quite put my finger on what troubles me about this genealogical myth, but I do find it problematic.