David Powelstock's List: Inward Turn

• Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects for the sublime, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction noted by other writers

• 'Further, language has such capacity that it is possible thereby to debase things lofty and invest things small with grandeur, and to express old things in a new way, and to discourse in ancient fashion about what has newly happened (Panegyricus 8, at Perseus).'
• Among the chief causes of the sublime in speech, as in the structure of the human body, is the collocation of members, a single one of which if severed from another possesses in itself nothing remarkable, but all united together make a full and perfect organism.

  • synergy, holism

• There are, it may be said, five principal sources of elevated language. Beneath these five varieties there lies, as though it were a common foundation, the gift of discourse, which is indispensable. First and most important is the power of forming great conceptions, as we have elsewhere explained in our remarks on Xenophon. Secondly, there is vehement and inspired passion. These two components of the sublime are for the most part innate. Those which remain are partly the product of art. The due formation of figures deals with two sorts of figures, first those of thought and secondly those of expression. Next there is noble diction, which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language. The fifth cause of elevation--one which is the fitting conclusion of all that have preceded it--is dignified and elevated composition.
• 'Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.'

• A separate angle on linguistic determinism maintains that language is the only thing that is ever known.
• Linguistic determinism is far from universally accepted. In August 2004, however, Peter Gordon, a psychologist at Columbia University, published a study

   

  that provides support to the hypothesis of linguistic determinism. The study investigated abilities held by native speakers of the language of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil, Pirahã, which is a "one, two, many" language (that is, a language which contains words only for the numbers one and two, all other numbers being simply represented by a single word meaning "many"). It was demonstrated that these native speakers had an impaired ability to compare quantities of objects higher than three, and that their ability to conceive of numbers was comparable to that of an infant. Opponents of linguistic determinism, though, have suggested that Gordon's findings might be explained by non-linguistic factors^[1], and that the issue remains far from settled.

• One of my favorite books is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, a psychologist at Princeton University. Nearly everyone seems to agree that this is either a work of profound genius, or of profound crackpottery, and also that they aren't sure which it is. Jaynes' theory, as nearly as I can summarize the book, is something like this:

    <!-- <li>Human consciousness comprises:<p>  <ul>  <li>Linguistic mediation of the universe through use of metaphor  <li>A spatial model of time  <li>  </ul> -->  

  Human consciousness (which Jaynes describes and defines in considerable detail) is a relatively recent development, dating back at most only about 3,000 years or so.

    That is the shocking part of the theory. Most people probably imagine consciousness arising much, much earlier, perhaps before language. Jaynes disagrees. In his theory, language, and in particular its mediation of thought through the use of metaphors, is an essential prerequisite for consciousness. And his date for the development of consciousness means that human consciousness would postdate several other important developments, such as metalworking, large-scale agriculture, complex hierarchical social structures, and even writing. Jaynes thinks that the development of consciousness is a historical event and is attested to by written history. He tries to examine the historical record to find evidence not only of preconscious culture, but of the tremendous upheavals that both caused and were the result of the arrival of consciousness.

• speech, is characterized as the “finest and best of all streams” (75e4–5). Why so? As the speaker Timaeus has explained earlier (47c4–7), both voice and hearing were created in us as principal means to philosophy, above all by the use of speech. He is undoubtedly referring to Plato's main philosophical method, dialectic, the systematic use of question and answer to eliminate falsehoods and arrive eventually at truths. Plato's worldview thus places an altogether pivotal importance on the gift of spoken language: as the basis of dialectic, it is a privileged means to philosophy, and thereby to the soul's salvation.
• Plato sometimes refers to internal, unvoiced question and answer conducted by a single individual
• in his later work he develops the idea that this process, which closely replicates the sequence of vocalized, interpersonal dialectic, is the structure of thought itself
• silent “statements” (logoi)
• how fundamental language is to Plato's philosophy
• Rather than being, for example, a convenient code in which to encapsulate and convey our thoughts to each other, it is the very stuff of those thoughts. This means, among other things, that the later philosophical problem of other minds’ inaccessibility to us does not arise for Plato. If other people's thoughts are their internal utterances, these are fully open to inspection by us through external question and answer, and indeed Plato's dialogues depict a series of interrogators conducting just such inspections of their interlocutors’ thoughts.
• But what about thought at the very highest level? Doesn't this at least transcend language in Plato's eyes?
• even this ultimate object is understood only by those who can define it discursively and go on to defend their definition against all refutations that are forthcoming
• On the other hand, Plato certainly never meant to suggest that when you think you are merely uttering internal sentences.
• internal scribe
• internal painter
• Whether words were first introduced by early members of the human race (the more favored view in the Cratylus), by a divine source (see, e.g., Ti. 73c6–d2), or by a mixture of the two, they were attempts to encapsulate the natures of the items they named. Their construction involved subtle compression of a whole message into just a few syllables, and the resultant difficulty of decoding them has been further complicated by misleading sound-shifts and other distortions during subsequent ages. Nevertheless, with sufficient expertise they can be decoded. With the help of such a technique, we can aspire to recover real insights by uncovering the hidden meanings of words.
• that the structure of our language, however imperfectly, already mirrors the structure of reality.

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• Substantiating this view of language by  attacking the correspondence theory of truth was a major purpose  of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Understandably  enough, Rorty does not attempt here to repeat his earlier case.  Nor, however, does he answer in any great detail the significant  objections raised by his earlier arguments (by for example Russman,  Schlagel, or Bontekoe). Rorty acknowledges that "it is essential  to my view that we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which  language needs to be adequate" (21), but that is as much  as he is prepared to concede to those who wish to explore more  patiently and thoroughly the large gap between total acceptance  and outright rejection of the given, the dichotomy central to  Rorty's position. Similarly, Rorty has little by way of a new  response to those who wish to confer privileged status upon the  language of the sciences, which, in his anti-foundational Kuhnian  view, is simply one more of our languages. Its persuasive power  comes, not from its relation to reality, but from its historically  contingent utility.
• Given the crucial importance of this view  of language in Rorty's scheme and his occasionally rather cavalier  treatment of objections to it, one can understand the reaction  of those for whom the issue is more complex.
• if truth  is merely a matter of effective agreement
• scientific culture
• Why has modern science, almost from the  moment of its appearance, exercised such a decisively persuasive  explanatory effect?
• Quine's  view that "The myth of physical objects is epistemologically  superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than  other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into  the flux of experience"
• The explanatory power of science is thus  just something we happened somehow to agree upon.
• the "liberal ironist," someone  who accepts the contingency of language
• Such self-creation is a private affair and takes place in a realm  hermetically sealed from one's public life.
• We should stop trying to combine self-creation  and politics

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• Final draft of published Appendix 1 in Charlton, B.
   Psychiatry and the human condition
    Radcliffe Medical Press: Oxford,  UK, 2000.
• consciousness is an ordinary fact of life - babies are born without it and develop it over the first few years of life
• People often find 'consciousness' mysterious, but the real mystery is awareness - and many other animals are aware, so this is not a specifically human mystery.

  • "awareness" -- should this be "self-awareness"? (See Pinker's alternative usages: "consciousness" can mean "awareness" or "sentience," with the former being the far easier problem
• The question of consciousness can therefore be approached by considering the general phenomenon of awareness, of which consciousness is one particular example.
• Why do we know that we know, instead of just knowing it?
• Displacement is necessary, but not sufficient, for the definition of language
• By this account, most of 'linguistics' is not about language, but about speech.
• The idea that displacement is a distinctive and defining quality of human language is certainly not currently accepted.
• a conscious social animal without language (such as a chimpanzee)

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• The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes.
• The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes.
• The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes.
• The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes.

• No definitive taxonomy of emotions exists, though numerous taxonomies have been proposed. Some categorizations include:

   
   
  • 'Cognitive' versus 'non-cognitive' emotions
   
  • Instinctual emotions (from the amygdala), versus cognitive emotions (from the prefrontal cortex).
   
  • Basic versus complex: where base emotions lead to more complex ones.
   
  • Categorization based on duration: Some emotions occur over a period of seconds (e.g. surprise) where others can last years (e.g. love).
• A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviours and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting or fleeing. Yet again, if one can have the emotion without the corresponding behaviour then we may consider the behaviour not to be essential to the emotion.
• The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The functionalist approach to emotions (e.g. Nico Frijda) holds that emotions have evolved for a particular function, such as to keep the subject safe.

• Somatic theories

   

  Somatic theories of emotion claim that bodily responses rather than judgements are essential to emotions. The first modern version of such theories comes from William James in the 1880s. The theory lost favour in the 20th Century, but has regained popularity more recently due largely to theorists such as John Cacioppo, António Damásio, Joseph E. LeDoux and Robert Zajonc who are able to appeal to neurological evidence.

• James-Lange theory

   

  Main article: James-Lange theory

   

  William James, in the article 'What is an Emotion?' (Mind, 9, 1884: 188-205), argued that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The Danish psychologist Carl Lange also proposed a similar theory at around the same time, so this position is known as the James-Lange theory. This theory and its derivatives state that a changed situation leads to a changed bodily state. As James says 'the perception of bodily changes as they occur IS the emotion.' James further claims that 'we feel sad because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and neither we cry, strike, nor tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.'

   

  This theory is supported by experiments in which by manipulating the bodily state, a desired emotion is induced.^[4] Such experiments also have therapeutic implications (e.g. in laughter therapy, dance therapy). The James-Lange theory is often misunderstood because it seems counter-intuitive. Most people believe that emotions give rise to emotion-specific actions: i.e. "I'm crying because I'm sad," or "I ran away because I was scared." The James-Lange theory, conversely, asserts that first we react to a situation (running away and crying happen before the emotion), and then we interpret our actions into an emotional response. In this way, emotions serve to explain and organize our own actions to us.
• Evidence of universality in the human case has been provided by Paul Ekman's seminal research on facial expression.

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• for Derrida, difference, or différance, comes before the Subject.
• Derrida goes on to criticise ‘opposition to racism, totalitarianism, to Nazism, to fascism’ that is undertaken ‘in the name of the spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axiomatic — for example, that of democracy or “human rights” — which directly or not comes back to this metaphysics of Subjectivity.’^[10]
• he Subject of absolute self-creation, even if it transcends all the determinations of the modern Subject in an immediately natural position (the particularity of race), brings together and concretises these same determinations and sets itself up as the Subject, absolutely speaking.
• the degradation of the Subject destroys the basis of a sustained investigation of the objective
• ‘Ideology interpellates individuals as Subjects’, Louis Althusser.^[12]
• Althusser argues that even the idea of oneself as a Subject, author of your own destiny, is an illusion fostered by ideology.
• It is the internalisation of the ‘discourse’ of power that creates the Subject.
• the ‘discursive production of the subject’
• the theory depends upon a play on words
• The reversal of meanings whereby Subject formation becomes enslavement rather than liberation begins with the critique not of subjectification, but of objectification. Specifically, it was feminist thinkers who first showed how ideological representations of women could serve to render them as ‘objects of the male gaze’.^[30]
• Maeve Cooke writes, for example, that ‘feminists have rejected the ideal of autonomy’ that defines the Subject.^[34
• ‘Do the exclusionary practices that ground feminist theory in a notion of “women” as subject paradoxically undercut feminist goals...?’, she asks.^[35]
• Feminism for Butler advances a critique of the Subject per se, not simply a reformist demand for the extension of the ‘normative requirements of the Subject’ to encompass women.
• it is not the male monopoly over the rights of the Subject that is at fault, but the very ‘ideal of autonomy’ itself.
• Women in adapting the mantle of Subject, conform to these unspoken, normative requirements. At this point one has to wonder whether Butler is carried away with her own dialectical skills. What began as a criticism of the monopoly over freedom exercised by men has turned, paradoxically, into a criticism of freedom as such.
• There is a kind of elan to the critique of Subjectivity. It moves tentatively first, like a child testing out some new profanity.
• There is of course, a price to pay, and a heavy one. The theoretical degradation of the Subject is closer to reality than a naive reassertion of natural rights could be. But it is also an accomplice to the present.
• What is the degradation of the Subject in fact, and ought theory to be an accomplice to it?
• Thinking ought to pay attention to the world, but it does not necessarily have to celebrate the defeats of the human spirit.

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• The unfortunate result is that second-order consciousness is surprisingly described as a device which regularly and correctly represents first-order maps which in turn cannot be mistaken. 

• To bring consciousness to the foreground inside the control model of attention, we turn to recent developments in phenomenology to guide us: there are two components of consciousness: “consciousness of” and the pre-reflective self. The pre-reflective self is experienced as the ownership of one’s conscious experience and as the basis of all awareness; without it there would be content but no owner of that content.

• Alvin Goldman has recently challenged this claim. In "Science, Publicity and Consciousness" (1997), he says that heterophenomenology is not, as I claim,  the standard method of consciousness research, since researchers "rely substantially on subjects' introspective beliefs about their conscious experience (or lack thereof)" (p532). In private correspondence (Feb 21, 2001) he has elaborated his claim thus:

    

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  The objection lodged in my paper to heterophenomenology is that what cognitive scientists actually do in this territory is not to practice  agnosticism.  Instead, they rely substantially on subjects' introspective beliefs (or reports). So my claim is that the heterophenomenological method is not an accurate description of what cognitive scientists (of consciousness) standardly do.  Of course, you can say (and perhaps intended to say, but if so it wasn't entirely clear) that this is what scientists should do, not what they do do.
• but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt
• Is there anything about your experience of this motion capture phenomenon that is not explorable by heterophenomenology?

  • Perhaps not this phenomenon, but it's not hard to explain "seeming" when it seems the same to everyone!

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• Consistent with this theory, Ramachandran found that when a patient with a phantom arm watched another person’s intact hand being rubbed, he actually felt his phantom being rubbed. Massaging the other persons hand appeared to relieve the pain in the phantom, an observation that might have clinical implications if confirmed.

  • B/c the phantom limb cannot send a null signal to "veto" the output of mirror neurons

• he can't shake the assumption that contents determine conditions of satisfaction
• In my view, they are not propositions at all, at least not complete propositions.
• indexical
• We can make sense of this idea once we give up the supposition that the content of a perceptual experience determines its condition of satisfaction.
• let me tentatively offer a different though related principle. I call it "Experience First." It says that only beings that enjoy phenomenal states are capable of being in Intentional states at all, as opposed to mere informational states. In other words, only beings with perception and sensation are capable of thought. If this is so, there can be no such thing as a pure thinking machine. Nothing qualifies as a thinking thing unless it qualifies as a sentient one. A robot, no matter how sophisticated its sensors and its processing of the information received from them, does not qualify as a thinking thing, a conscious being, unless it has experiences.

  • i.e., no such thing as brain in a vat
• no concepts without percepts
• To conclude, I have argued that Searle's account of the content of visual experience is, despite its element of causal self-referentiality, essentially a descriptivist theory. As such, it does not solve the problem of particularity.

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• 6. Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy and the Introduction of the Logical (Transformative) Conception
• logical analysis
• logical analysis
• What characterizes analytic philosophy—or at least that central strand that originates in the work of Frege and Russell—is the  recognition of what was called earlier the transformative or interpretive dimension of analysis
• interpreting what we are seeking to  analyze as part of the process of regression and decomposition. This  may involve transforming it in some way, in order for the  resources of a given theory or conceptual framework to be brought to  bear
• quantificational theory
• predicate logic
• divergence that was thereby opened up  between grammatical and logical form
• (AN) A truth is analytic if its proof depends only on general logical laws and definitions.
• logical analysis of number statements
• The possibilities that this strategy of ‘translating’  into a logical language opens up are enormous: we are no longer  forced to treat the surface grammatical form of a statement as a  guide to its ‘real’ form, and are provided with a means  of representing that form. This is the value of logical analysis: it  allows us to ‘analyze away’ problematic linguistic  expressions and explain what it is ‘really’ going on.  This strategy was employed, most famously, in Russell's theory  of descriptions, which was a major motivation behind the ideas of  Wittgenstein's Tractatus (see the supplementary  sections on   Russell  and   Wittgenstein).  Although subsequent philosophers were to question the assumption that there could ever be a definitive logical analysis of a given  statement, the idea that ordinary language may be systematically  misleading has remained.

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• "There is one great question," he writes in 1911. "Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all  questions."^[1]
• the centrality of scientific knowledge and the importance of an underlying scientific methodology that is common to both philosophy and science
• logical analysis
• in 1898, he abandoned the idealism that he had encountered as a student at Cambridge, together with his Kantian methodology, in favour of a pluralistic realism.
• The underlying themes of this "revolution," including his belief in pluralism, his emphasis upon anti-psychologism, and the importance of science, remained central to Russell's philosophy for the remainder of his  life.^[3]
• making and testing of hypotheses through the weighing of evidence
• the underlying "logical form" of natural language statements
• Russell's most famous example of his "analytic" method concerns denoting phrases such as descriptions and proper names. In his Principles of Mathematics, Russell had adopted the view that every denoting phrase (for example, "Scott," "blue," "the number two," "the golden mountain") denoted, or referred to, an existing entity. By the time his landmark article, "On Denoting," appeared two years later, in 1905, Russell had modified this extreme realism and had instead become convinced that denoting phrases need not possess a theoretical unity.
• "this" or "that" which refer to sensations of which an agent is immediately aware) do have referents associated with them

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• In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require a “first-person” ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains “secrete” consciousness.
• Searle's theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl's

  • Don't tell Searle that!
• Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists — including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty — seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.
• Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science

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• pre-reflective self-consciousness
• or in the construction of a self-narrative
• pre-reflective self-consciousness
• Much of what we have said about self-consciousness may still seem overly mentalistic. It is important to note that for phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, pre-reflective self-awareness is both embodied and embedded in the world. The first-person point of view on the world is never a view from nowhere; it is always defined by the situation of the perceiver's body, which concerns not simply location and posture, but action in pragmatic contexts and interaction with other people. The claim is not simply that the perceiver/actor is objectively embodied, but that the body is in some fashion self-given in the perception or action. It has become customary to distinguish the pre-reflective body-awareness that accompanies and shapes every spatial experience, from the reflective consciousness of the body. To capture this difference, Husserl introduced a terminological distinction between Leib and Körper, that is, between the pre-reflectively lived body, i.e., the body as an embodied first-person perspective, and the subsequent thematic experience of the body as an object (Husserl 1973a, 57).

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• The kind of identity that the Ricoeurian self has is not like the nonpersonal entities that perdure simply as in some significant sense “selfsame.” Rather, the self's identity is constituted by an inextricable tie between a selfsameness and a selfhood or ipseity. Following a distinction in Latin between idem and ipse, Ricoeur holds that the self's idem-identity is that which gives the self, among other things, its spatio-temporal sameness. Its ipse-identity gives it its unique ability to initiate something new and imputable to himself or herself (OAA, 35). Without both sorts of identity there is no self. Because a self has both an idem-identity and an ipse-identity, it inhabits two irreducible orders of causality, namely the physical and the intentional orders. A comprehensive account of any genuine action must express the way it is related to both of these orders.
• On Ricoeur's analysis, every action is both purposive and related to other actions. It takes place in a context of meaningfulness. That is, it is in some measure a response to past action and it anticipates that there will be future responses to it. Thus action takes place in what Ricoeur calls historical time.
• In The Course of Recognition, his last book, Ricoeur returns to the topic of personal identity. Here again he develops his position through an analysis of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that are constitutive of human existence. But here his focus is on these capabilities in their exercise and not simply in their potentiality. In their exercise these capabilities always more or less explicitly implicate at least one other person. I speak to someone. I affect someone by the doings and makings I either perform or leave undone. Every narrative I construct always involves the intersection of at least two human lives. And every imputation that I make implies at least two persons, one of whom bears some responsibility for someone else's well being.

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