File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-06-08.010, message 135


From: PBurns-AT-lmumail.lmu.edu
Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 10:55:52 -0700
Subject: Re: Peter on pomo phil


  Jukka Laari asks:

  
>Do you mean that cartesian 'foundation' were 'clear and 
>distinct ideas' and not 'cartesian cogito' (usual reference 
>in several post-discourses)?

  Roughly speaking, the Cartesian cogito is a basic example  
  of what Descartes thought were clear and distinct ideas 
  'in action'--ideas of self, existence, thought, etc.  From
  there he went on to using the idea of God to guarantee 
  protection from corrupt ideas.  But the rationalist        
  tradition continued after Descartes to rely on allegedly
  self-evident basic truths, self-evident because the ideas  
  contained in them were alleged clear and distinct; so here 
  I'm referring to that 
  whole tradition which sought the foundations of knowledge
  in a priori "intellection" (Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and   
  and the other German idealists such as Fichte, Schelling,  
  etc, rather than in sense-data or sensory experience.  It  
  gets a bit confusing because the 
  empiricists like Locke, Hume and Berkeley also used the 
  terminology of 'ideas' to mean something less intellectual
  and more based on the physical senses.
  
>   2) the semantic doctrine of indeterminacy of meaning and 
>   reference.  (roughly, a cluster of views, to wit: that
>   there are no metaphysically robust and well-defined
>   entities like 'senses' (i.e. meanings), pace Frege; that 
>   reference is a socially constucted, not a metaphysically 
>   robust relation
  
What this would mean in context of Fregean example of 
Bedeutung vs. Sinn / Meaning vs. Sense? That planet Venus as 
sense could be socially constructed? How would it be 
possible? [In this example: sense is 'planet Venus', 
meanings are 'morning star' and 'evening star'.] (Or am I 
doing translation error - Bedeutung=sense, Sinn=meaning? I 
have to check this..)
  
  In the Fregean view, the name 'Venus' has both a sense 
  (Sinn) and a reference (Bedeutung).  The sense would be
  a definite description such as 'the third most distant 
  planet from the sun, which appears in a certain portion of 
  the sky in the morning and a certain other portion of the 
  sky in the evening'.  The reference would be the actual 
  planet itself--the physical object out there in the solar 
  system.  In fact for Frege's own purpose of distinguishing 
  sense from reference, he argued that the sense of 'morning 
  star' is different from the sense of 'evening star' but 
  their reference is the same, and it is this fact which 
  explains why 'The morning star is the evening star' is a 
  cognitively informative statement that might be discovered
  by astronomers, whereas 'The morning star is the morning
  star' or 'Venus is Venus' are truths which are not 
  cognitively informative and don't need any empirical work
  in astronomy to discover.  The view he was the attacking 
  was that meaning was simply a matter of reference, the 
  idea that what a terms means is the object in the world it 
  stands for or refers to or designates--this is sometimes 
  called the 'Fido'-Fido theory of meaning.  The later 
  Wittgenstein and Quine are rejecting the whole notion that
  individual terms have a definite, well-determined sense.
  For these anti-Fregeans, there are no such things as 
  senses in any metaphysically robust sense (pun intended).
  Fregean senses do not exist, there are only 
  social/linguistic behaviors of various sorts, e.g. 
  tendencies to utter certain noises when other noises get 
  uttered come to be meaningful in what Wittgenstein called
  a form of life (a bundle of social practices).  For Quine
  the key bundle of social practices for meaning and truth 
  are those involved in science, engineering and technology, 
  but he justifies this on pragmatic grounds.  He doesn't 
  really try to give a non-pragmatic, justification for the
  epistemological primacy of science.
  
>    At the time and for decades afterwards,
>   analytic philosophy was dismissed by other disciplines 
>   as totally useless mind-numbing lifeless shit.
  
     One remark: It isn't necessarily so simple. After WW2 there happened 
     drastic changes in social sciences in favour of (then) logical-analytical 
     philosophy (in Europe, I mean). Partly because of Niedergang of German 
     culture, partly because of other reasons (social scientists looked for 
     empirically more fruitful foundations, or somesuch). There was a trend 
     towards 'late-Wittgensteinian and Quinean foundations' althought not 
     necessarily under these banners. That trend was perhaps particularly strong 
     in Nothern Europe
     
     Perhaps, but I was referring not simply to Continental thinkers
     but to humanities departments within the English-speaking world,
     in which analytic philosophy was regularly and ignorantly trashed 
     for years.
     
     Peter


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