Purple Year's End

Thomas Kuhn's Revolution at 50

Writing in The New Atlantis, Matthew Rees reconsiders Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on it's 50th anniversary. Here are a few passages directed specifically at the social sciences, which were not much on Kuhn's mind when he wrote the book. I'm not sure I agree with Rees, but he makes interesting points.

While the physical sciences were the most prominent in the public mind when Kuhn was writing Structure in the early 1960s, today biology is in ascendance. It is striking, as Hacking notes in his introductory essay, that Kuhn does not explore whether Darwin’s revolution fits within his thesis. It is far from clear that Kuhn’s thesis can adequately account for not only Darwin’s revolution but also cell theory, Mendelian or molecular genetics, or many of the other major developments in the history of biology.... But in the half century since Kuhn wrote his book, biology has taken the place of physics as the dominant science — and so in the social sciences, the conception of society as a machine has gone out of vogue. Social scientists have increasingly turned to biology and ecology for possible analogies on which to build their social theories; organisms are supplanting machines as the guiding metaphor for social life. 

Here come our friends IS and OUGHT:

Yikes!

While I'm obviously not on hiatus at this point, I'm still working with a rental computer. It's taking time to get data transferred from my backup drive to the new machine. The problem seems to be in my email contacts. For some reason they weren't able to recover them from the back-up, so they're trying to recover them from the machine that died.

Ain't technology wonderful?

CSX

This brought a tear to my eyes

and I'm not at all a Zep fan. But you can't deny the power of this performance, which isn't by Led Zepplin, but was performed for them at the Kennedy Center.

Which reminds me: What about aging rockers? I heard that Mick Jagger tore it up at the Garden a couple of weeks ago. Maybe we need to rething old age.

"Put a grin on the groove and aim the beat at your feet"

So says drummer Duffy Jackson, son of bassist, Chubby Jackson. Sounds like a real sweet cat. Listen to the interview. It's a pleasure.

Some Conservatory Flowers

Correlationism?

This comment is undoubtedly naïve. A major sin in the contemporary philosophical environment. It is what it is.

The sin of correlationism is generally laid at the feet of Immanuel Kant and his Copernican revolution. Why not implicate Descartes?

He’s the one who divided the cosmos into two utterly different kinds of substance, res cogitansand res extensa. That’s where the problem lies, no? Given that these two substances are utterly different, and that our minds are constituted by one of them, the relationship between mind and the world becomes problematic. Descartes invoked God to handle that problem.

If you jettison God, then you’ve really got a problem. Correlationism is one solution. But it’s not the only one.

Why not jettison the division of the cosmos into two utterly different substances? What happens then? The relationship between humankind and the rest of the world becomes just another relationship. It may be a particularly complex one, but that’s OK. Complexity is not the same as Utterly Different.

In this regime correlationism simply disappears. Hence, you don’t even have to take the trouble to deny it or argue against it.

Ha!

Fan Dance

The Key to the Treasure IS the Treasure

Back in August of 2011 I published a relatively short document outlining my sense of where literary studies should go. I’ve now revised that document, retaining the four-part structure of my assessment, but somewhat revising my sense of what those four parts are. Then I talked of 1) description, 2) the newer psychologies, 3) object-oriented ontology, and 4) digital humanities. I’ve retained 1 and 4, but 2 and 3 have become naturalist criticism and ethical criticism, respectively. This change, of course, reflects the work I’ve recently done on a pluralist metaphysics.

This revision has the merit, I believe, of being a bit closer to what is actually happening in literary studies as naturalist criticism isn’t so restrictive a rubric as the newer psychologies and ethical criticism isn’t nearly so restrictive as object-oriented ontology. But the emphasis remains as it was then:

The primary texts constitute the treasure we study. Full and accurate descriptions of those texts are the key to that treasure. Everything else is built on those descriptions.

1) Description: We need to develop richer descriptions of the texts we study. I’ve blogged about this here and there, and I note that some folks at Arcade seem to be thinking about these lines. But mostly what I’ve been doing is working at honing my descriptive skills, with texts and with films. The postscript about a handbook for Heart of Darkness is as close as I’ve come to an explicit justification for description, though my recent post, Corpus Linguistics, Literary Studies, and Description, hints at what a fuller argument might entail.

The Pipe Organ at Longwood Gardens

is set up so that you can go behind the pipes. Here's a few shots:

The pipes are behind glass, hence the reflections you see in the photos.

Q. Are these the most elaborate musical instruments ever made?

Think about it...

Corpus Linguistics, Literary Studies, and Description

One of my main hobbyhorses these days is description. Literary studies has to get a lot more sophisticated about description, which is mostly taken for granted and so is not done very rigorously. There isn’t even a sense that there’s something there to be rigorous about. Perhaps corpus linguistics is a way to open up that conversation.

The crucial insight is this: What makes a statement descriptive IS NOT how one arrives at it, but the role it plays in the larger intellectual enterprise.

A Little Background Music

Back in the 1950s there was this notion that the process of aesthetic criticism took the form of a pipeline that started with description, moved on to analysis, then interpretation and finally evaluation. Academic literary practice simply dropped evaluation altogether and concentrated its efforts on interpretation. There were attempts to side-step the difficulties of interpretation by asserting that one is simply describing what’s there. To this Stanley Fish has replied (“What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?” in Is There a Text in This Class?, Harvard 1980, p. 353):

The basic gesture then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text: but it actually is a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all. 

And that takes care of that.

Except that it doesn’t. Fish is correct in asserting that there’s no such thing as a theory-free description. Literary texts are rich and complicated objects. When the critic picks this or that feature for discussion those choices are done with something in mind. They aren’t innocent.

But, as Michael Bérubé has pointed out in “There is Nothing Inside the Text, or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser” (in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds. Postmodern Sophistries, SUNY Press 2004, pp. 11-26) there is interpretation and there is interpretation and they’re not alike. The process by which the mind’s eye makes out letters and punctuation marks from ink smudges is interpretive, for example, but it’s rather different from throwing Marx and Freud at a text and coming up with meaning.

Thus I take it that the existence of some kind of interpretive component to any description need not imply that the necessity of interpretation implies that it is impossible to descriptively carve literary texts at their joints. And that’s one of the things that I want from description, to carve texts at their joints.

Of course, one has to know how to do that. And THAT, it would seem, is far from obvious.

Training Trees: Ontology in Cognition

This is a bonsai tree I photographed at Longwood Gardens outside Philadelphia:

The label for each such tree noted the date on which training began.

That’s what interests me, the use of the word “training.” One would not say that a black smith trains iron to become horseshoes, or a knife blade, or hardware fittings for doors and cabinets. Metal is not trainable in the sense that plants, animals, and humans are.

This usage seems most common for humans and animals, perhaps because training plants is not so common. Of myself I can say that I was trained by David Hays, but I would not say that I was trained by the other graduate faculty with whom I studied in graduate. It is true, that they trained me in a general way, but I worked more closely with Hays than with any of the others and acquired both a richer and a more specific set of skills from him. There are aspects of my work that are identifiably linked to David Hays, most obviously my work in cognitive networks.

 

Similarly, one can say of a boxer preparing for a fight that he is “in training” for the fight. A boxer in training will usually be working with a trainer. That trainer will be working with the boxer on both boxing skills and general physical conditioning. Things change in the world of football. There the coach is responsible for football skills while a trainer is responsible for physical conditioning.

Animals can be trained as well, though some animals are more easily trained than others. Dogs more so than cats, horses more so than cattle.

Humans, of course, can also train themselves, whether in athletic skills, intellectual skills, or any other kind of skill or conditioning. But plants and animals cannot. They must be trained by a human. And inanimate things, like chunks of metal, cannot be trained at all, though they can be worked, forged, shaped, carved, and so forth.

Informally we can say that living things have souls while inanimate things do not. It is the soul that accepts training. Further, we seem to have at least two kinds of souls. The soul of a plant can accept training but cannot itself direct training. It would seem that animals are like plants in this respect. The football example seems to imply that humans have two kinds of soul. One soul is the province of coaches while the other is for trainers to work on.

In thus talking of souls I do not mean to imply that such souls are consciously conceived. They may or may not be, but even where they are there’s no particular reason to believe that that conception plays a role in the semantic mechanisms underlying the usage of the verb “to train.” Those are the mechanisms that have interested me for some time. When I talk of ontological cognition, those mechanisms are what I have in mind. The explicit concept of the soul, or the notions of a vital, sensitive, and rational soul, those are most likely rationalizations of the underlying semantic mechanisms. 

Living lines, Longwood Gardens