Recent experiences: the philosophical investigations - dispositional reading frustrated by the interventions of Kripke; the accumulation of books - violent, seductive, debasing mounds; the compulsive elaboration of certain common metaphors (mirrors, cancer - no sports yet, thank god); the reduction of philosophy to oedipal neurosis; a developing obsession with the real physical hollowness of the human organism (biological fact as signifier for Lacan’s empty signifiers); the opacity of language; the reprieve of a bed filled with fiancee and new cat (contentment as traumatic event - the obvious biblical, linguistic metaphor: a return to babble); continued insecurity over mathematical incompetence, incapacity to speak french, inability to finish school.
posted by Iris wall-mouse at 12:05 AM
11 Comments:
Who's Kripke?
I would also like to posit that your use of the word "translucent" in your url is the best illustration of irony I've seen in a long damn while.
Fucking smart people...
The cat and I demand an explanation. Which I'm sure you'll enjoy. Contentment as a traumatic event? Ahem? We'll SHOW you traumatic... *threatens sweetly*
*mrow*
Saul Kripke is an american philosopher noted for what he termed an atidescriptionist conception of naming. He formulated a number of counterfactuals that, supposedly demonstrate that names don’t have definitions for their referents, but that, rather, objects are attached to their signifiers by an act of primal baptism. One such goes roughly as follows. The word, gold, has long been used to refer to a certain kind of substance. Originally it was perhaps defined by its yellow luster, its resistance to tarnish, its great weight, its malleability....Over time the characteristics that are thought to define it have gradually changed, so that perhaps now the definitive features of gold (the number of protons it has in its nucleus, for instance) have not one thing in common with the original definition. What is more, if it were suddenly discovered that gold somehow does not really–but only appears to–have the attributes generally ascribed to it, we would go on calling it gold just the same. We would simply change our definition.
We can supplement this with another example, this time taken from history. The name, Shakespeare is understood by most English speakers, to refer to the man who wrote the Shakespeare plays. It is sometimes proposed however, that the man who wrote Lear, Hamlet, and the like was a writer with whom William Shakespeare was at least acquainted, Christopher Marlow. Now when this claim is made it does not take the form, ‘it turns out that the man we thought was Shakespear was just an actor, the real William Shakespear is the man we used to call Christopher Marlow’. Rather, something to the effect of, ‘William Shakespeare is not the man who wrote the plays that are attributed to him after all, Christopher Marlow is’. We could take this example still further and suppose that the whole biographies of Shakespeare and Marlow had somehow been switched, so that in actual fact everything that we thought we knew about Shakespeare pertained instead to Marlow and vise versa. Once more, we would be inclined to say that some trick of history had led us to confuse the properties of the two men, not that we had given them the wrong signifiers.
Kripke is also well known for his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ argument.
I had thought of ‘translucent’ in the sense in which light is diffracted and so forth, rather than as pellucid(to the extent that I actually thought about it at all).
wait...were their actually people who claimed that names *weren't* just arbitrary? cause those people are some dumb fuckers, lemme tell you.
speaking of dumb fuckers, i need to go look up the word "pellucid".
later, w.
--andrew
How very sesquipedalian! Reading your blog takes far too much thought, William. (Whence the Iris Wall-Mouse?) Don't you know that audiences want easy-to-process? I know you've selected yourself a particularly select audience, but nevertheless... I think you may be overestimating us. Or, I'll speak for myself anyway.
Now let me say that I don't get that "contentment as traumatic event" thing either. It doesn't sound very flattering to Emily or the cat. I hope this excessive darkness is for poetic purposes only.
The question isn’t really over whether signifiers are arbitrary or not, but whether they have descriptions or ‘objects in the world’ for their referents. Incidentally, I’m inclined to think that signifiers must have descriptions as their signifieds. I don’t see how there can be any criteria for identity otherwise (I’m sure Kripke must try to resolve this difficulty somewhere). Anyway, other stories can be told in which things themselves change and yet the definitions of the words do not. I think that the lessons to be drawn from Kripke’s counterfactuals are actually rather different.
All that said, his Wittgenstein book is quite excellent.
oh. i get it, now. i think.
--andrew
Add to your current list of concerns "inability to update my blog at regular intervals". Put up a new post, already, you lame-wad.
--Andrew
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Feel free to update at any time now.
I'm at work. And I'm bored. And you could help ameloriate this boredom, if you updated. By witholding an update, you're kind of being selfish, you know?
Put the fucking guitar down for ten seconds. Update.
C'mon. Do it. You know you want to. So little effort for you, so much joy for me.
--Your Friend, the Copy Whore
Andrew, you are an awesome copy-whore.
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