What Is It Like To Be a Word Cloud? - by Thomas Nagel
Steve, do you have a link to this piece by Nagel?
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
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Steve, do you have a link to this piece by Nagel?
Also, Steve or @Soupie, is there a text accompanying this word cloud, by Hoffman or perhaps by someone else? And is the Nagel piece you cite a response to that text?
I'm most curious to learn what's being claimed and possibly critiqued concerning this or any 'word cloud' since I'm pursuing MP's analysis of Saussure's major contributions to the field of 'linguistics' and the way in which to understand 'words' as 'signs' signifying meanings in human language. I'm working from sources cited in my post of a few days ago at this link:
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
I'm most curious to learn what's being claimed and possibly critiqued concerning this or any 'word cloud' since I'm pursuing MP's analysis of Saussure's major contributions to the field of 'linguistics' and the way in which to understand 'words' as 'signs' signifying meanings in human language. I'm working from sources cited in my post of a few days ago at this link:
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
No, I hadn't found those links. Unfortunately, the first provides access to that key essay by MP only behind a paywall that involves a complicated agreement to subscribe to Scribd [though one can accept the offer of a free month's subscription in order to read the essay if one then remembers to cancel the subscription within 30 days]. I know I have that essay in a collection of papers by MP, but I haven't yet located that volume since my household move last September.
I'm very glad to have the second link you provided, to the whole text of Prose of the World, which was published after MP's death from a partially completed manuscript, for this work too concerns MP's developing analysis of language and semiotics.
I don't think that Google Translate is likely to provide a reliable translation of any philosophical work available in another language. What I can do to capture a text of "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" for the thread is to find the book in which I have it in English translation and scan it and copy it here. I'll try to do that, but it will probably take a while since I also don't know which yet-unpacked box has my scanner in it. In the meantime, sections of Prose of the World can provide insight into MP's responses to 'closed systems' in linquistics and his development of what Saussure's linguistics revealed.
ps, re MP's Prose of the World, prefatory to beginning MP's text it will be helpful to read the first three pages of the first Editor's Preface and the whole of the Translator's Preface.
The link {thanks to Steve}:
https://monoskop.org/images/0/04/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Prose_of_the_World_1973.pdf
The link {thanks to Steve}:
https://monoskop.org/images/0/04/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Prose_of_the_World_1973.pdf
This extract from the Translator's Introduction to The Prose of the World should be clarifying re the ontological ground and scope of MP's phenomenological philosophy:
{pg. xxviii} "... Merleau-Ponty*s formulation of the return to phenomena is not intended to do away with language as such but to recover from its particular vocabularies the genesis of the world and its appearance, that is the inspiration of poetry or of any creative act. Indeed, so far from being destructive of philosophical language and its intentionality, Merleau-Ponty's appeal to the prelinguistic world is an effort to free philosophical thinking from the habits of method and to reconnect it with the teleology of reason.
Through this broadened notion of intentionality, phenomenological "comprehension" is distinguished from traditional "intellection," which is confined to "true and immutable natures," and so phenomenology can become a phenomenology of origins. Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to "understand" is to take in the total intention—not only what these things are for representation (the "properties" of the thing perceived, the mass of "historical facts," the "ideas" introduced by the doctrine)—but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each civilization, of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physicomathematical type, discoverable by objective thought, but that formula which sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and making his own. These are the dimensions of history.6
These remarks of Merleau-Ponty are clearly programatic, but there are many senses in which this may be understood. I wish to choose the direction of his concluding remarks upon phenomenological method as a way of moving further along the path which Merleau-Ponty himself opened into the tradition of reason in the human world.
Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people's in my own.7
The relation between speaking and the structure of language raises the question of the dependence of the word on its divine anchorage, on ourselves and the variety of human history and culture. The responsibility of speech marks the autonomy of philosophical reflection amidst sophistry and rhetoric. But our own care with language belongs to the responsibility we have to ourselves and to the nature of things. This, however, is not an invocation of a science of language in its present sense or, in particular, its subordination of common sense everyday language. It is an invocation of the common labor of turning common sense into good sense. That is, it is an idealization of the community of truth rather than the packaging of being into competing domains of knowledge ruled by definitions and operations.
There are, of course, as many philosophies as there are philosophies of language. It has thus seemed to many that language is the scandal of philosophy, that a rigorous philosophy can be achieved only through the adoption of a "mathematical" language. The republic of knowledge is in this way made the construct of a rule of method which would provide future natives with greater clarity of judgment than philosophers of the past. This Cartesian dream of a universal language is at the same time, therefore, a prescription for social order, since clarity of mind eliminates the vexatiousness of theological and political controversy—not to mention the vanity of poets. The standards of science and technology translate the ideals of philosophical enlightenment and community into the everyday practices of public knowledge, health, and security. Plain language becomes the order of the day. Metaphysics and feudal privilege are swept into the trash of history. The new society is uniform and its icon is a 'well-made language', the sublimation of civic order and technical optimism.
The pathos of philosophical speech is romantic and historicist. It rejects the universalism of scientific language in search of human expression and its power to say man through the structures of divinity, stone, and commerce. A philosophy of speech is properly a philosophy of initiative, of style and gratuity accomplished against the limits of received language. Speech is the invocation of our own being in concert with others. This is so even when our speech is disordered or mere chatter. The commonality of language and being is the prepredicative source of all predicative orders or domains of being and togetherness, as well as of alienation and falsehood. The efficacy of speech may present itself to us as the workings of an external order, of magic and institution, of divine fiat or plain sense. But these are equally the responses of speech in which nature, language, and society are addressed as the other of dialogue. We never escape the antinomy of expression and communication, because meaning is neither a collective representation nor a solitary accomplishment. The options of madness and officialese are the result of the suppression of the complementary orders of speech and communication. The expropriation of meaning is as pervasive in modern times as the alienation of labor. Its cause cannot without contradiction be attributed to language, art, and work. For each of these is the irremediable means of complaint and reform. What is expropriated is the standard by which we have anything in common.
When both of us see what you say is true, when we both see what I say is true—where do we see it, I ask you? Certainly, it is not in you that I see it, it is not in me that you see it. Both of us see it in immutable Truth, which is beyond our minds. [Augustine Confessions XII 35]
All agreements of fact are thus agreements in principle, that is, agreements of value which ground rules of logic and the common verbal and artistic currency. The crisis of communication is a crisis of transcendental values. Thus the modern concern with love, friendship, and communication is a concern about the fate of consciousness, of our being with being, that is, the hospitality of being.
The poet's experience with language and the artist's relation to tradition and style always appealed to Merleau-Ponty as the ground for the relation between expression and communication. Here we are tempted to speak of mastery and technique and to overlook the fact that these are only so many ways of being-in-the-world through our senses, through perception, language, and art. The science of language, as well as the history of philosophy and the history of art and science, begin with an autonomous object of study. But the life of philosophy, science, and the arts acquires its autonomy only through the subscription of living thinkers and artists whose encounter with tradition and its solicitation of their responses require that their own lives be the material and setting of the artifacts they create. The acquisition of speech, of thought, and of style is not a trick of skill, of technique, or of method.
The Prose of the World presupposes and illustrates Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of intersubjectivity and rationality and the fundamentals of his philosophy of perception and embodiment.8 The phenomenological approach to language is ultimately an introduction to the ontology of the world. It is a reflection upon our being-in-the world through embodiment, which is the mysterious action of a presence that can be elsewhere. The philosophical puzzles of how we are in the world (ontology) or of how the world can be in us (epistemology), which have dictated quite particular analyses of the logic of language and thought, are transcended in the phenomenological conception of embodiment as a corporeal intentionality, a mode of knowledge and expressive form. . . . ."
ETA: I should repeat that the whole of this introduction is extremely valuable as an introductory clarification of the coherent development of MP's phenomenological thought from his first books to the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible and the assembled Lecture Notes on 'Nature'.
{pg. xxviii} "... Merleau-Ponty*s formulation of the return to phenomena is not intended to do away with language as such but to recover from its particular vocabularies the genesis of the world and its appearance, that is the inspiration of poetry or of any creative act. Indeed, so far from being destructive of philosophical language and its intentionality, Merleau-Ponty's appeal to the prelinguistic world is an effort to free philosophical thinking from the habits of method and to reconnect it with the teleology of reason.
Through this broadened notion of intentionality, phenomenological "comprehension" is distinguished from traditional "intellection," which is confined to "true and immutable natures," and so phenomenology can become a phenomenology of origins. Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to "understand" is to take in the total intention—not only what these things are for representation (the "properties" of the thing perceived, the mass of "historical facts," the "ideas" introduced by the doctrine)—but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each civilization, of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physicomathematical type, discoverable by objective thought, but that formula which sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and making his own. These are the dimensions of history.6
These remarks of Merleau-Ponty are clearly programatic, but there are many senses in which this may be understood. I wish to choose the direction of his concluding remarks upon phenomenological method as a way of moving further along the path which Merleau-Ponty himself opened into the tradition of reason in the human world.
Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people's in my own.7
The relation between speaking and the structure of language raises the question of the dependence of the word on its divine anchorage, on ourselves and the variety of human history and culture. The responsibility of speech marks the autonomy of philosophical reflection amidst sophistry and rhetoric. But our own care with language belongs to the responsibility we have to ourselves and to the nature of things. This, however, is not an invocation of a science of language in its present sense or, in particular, its subordination of common sense everyday language. It is an invocation of the common labor of turning common sense into good sense. That is, it is an idealization of the community of truth rather than the packaging of being into competing domains of knowledge ruled by definitions and operations.
There are, of course, as many philosophies as there are philosophies of language. It has thus seemed to many that language is the scandal of philosophy, that a rigorous philosophy can be achieved only through the adoption of a "mathematical" language. The republic of knowledge is in this way made the construct of a rule of method which would provide future natives with greater clarity of judgment than philosophers of the past. This Cartesian dream of a universal language is at the same time, therefore, a prescription for social order, since clarity of mind eliminates the vexatiousness of theological and political controversy—not to mention the vanity of poets. The standards of science and technology translate the ideals of philosophical enlightenment and community into the everyday practices of public knowledge, health, and security. Plain language becomes the order of the day. Metaphysics and feudal privilege are swept into the trash of history. The new society is uniform and its icon is a 'well-made language', the sublimation of civic order and technical optimism.
The pathos of philosophical speech is romantic and historicist. It rejects the universalism of scientific language in search of human expression and its power to say man through the structures of divinity, stone, and commerce. A philosophy of speech is properly a philosophy of initiative, of style and gratuity accomplished against the limits of received language. Speech is the invocation of our own being in concert with others. This is so even when our speech is disordered or mere chatter. The commonality of language and being is the prepredicative source of all predicative orders or domains of being and togetherness, as well as of alienation and falsehood. The efficacy of speech may present itself to us as the workings of an external order, of magic and institution, of divine fiat or plain sense. But these are equally the responses of speech in which nature, language, and society are addressed as the other of dialogue. We never escape the antinomy of expression and communication, because meaning is neither a collective representation nor a solitary accomplishment. The options of madness and officialese are the result of the suppression of the complementary orders of speech and communication. The expropriation of meaning is as pervasive in modern times as the alienation of labor. Its cause cannot without contradiction be attributed to language, art, and work. For each of these is the irremediable means of complaint and reform. What is expropriated is the standard by which we have anything in common.
When both of us see what you say is true, when we both see what I say is true—where do we see it, I ask you? Certainly, it is not in you that I see it, it is not in me that you see it. Both of us see it in immutable Truth, which is beyond our minds. [Augustine Confessions XII 35]
All agreements of fact are thus agreements in principle, that is, agreements of value which ground rules of logic and the common verbal and artistic currency. The crisis of communication is a crisis of transcendental values. Thus the modern concern with love, friendship, and communication is a concern about the fate of consciousness, of our being with being, that is, the hospitality of being.
The poet's experience with language and the artist's relation to tradition and style always appealed to Merleau-Ponty as the ground for the relation between expression and communication. Here we are tempted to speak of mastery and technique and to overlook the fact that these are only so many ways of being-in-the-world through our senses, through perception, language, and art. The science of language, as well as the history of philosophy and the history of art and science, begin with an autonomous object of study. But the life of philosophy, science, and the arts acquires its autonomy only through the subscription of living thinkers and artists whose encounter with tradition and its solicitation of their responses require that their own lives be the material and setting of the artifacts they create. The acquisition of speech, of thought, and of style is not a trick of skill, of technique, or of method.
The Prose of the World presupposes and illustrates Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of intersubjectivity and rationality and the fundamentals of his philosophy of perception and embodiment.8 The phenomenological approach to language is ultimately an introduction to the ontology of the world. It is a reflection upon our being-in-the world through embodiment, which is the mysterious action of a presence that can be elsewhere. The philosophical puzzles of how we are in the world (ontology) or of how the world can be in us (epistemology), which have dictated quite particular analyses of the logic of language and thought, are transcended in the phenomenological conception of embodiment as a corporeal intentionality, a mode of knowledge and expressive form. . . . ."
ETA: I should repeat that the whole of this introduction is extremely valuable as an introductory clarification of the coherent development of MP's phenomenological thought from his first books to the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible and the assembled Lecture Notes on 'Nature'.
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For anyone approaching a reading of MP's Phenomenology of Perception, these course notes by Ron McClamrock at SUNY will be a helpful orientation to MP's introduction to that work:
Notes: The Introduction to The Phenomenology of Perception
Notes: The Introduction to The Phenomenology of Perception
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Hi Constance - it's "What Is It Like To Be a Bat" I just ran it through a "word cloud" generator to do a visual of the most common words in the paper.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Sorry, I didn't explain what I was doing this morning ... I went to this site:
Free online word cloud generator and tag cloud creator
and pasted "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Nagel and Hoffman's paper into the "wizard" on that site - what it does is sort the words by size according to frequency in the text ... it will also generate a list of the words and how often they are used. My boss used it when we were trying to come up with a mission statement - you can see at a glance what words are used most often ... it's simple, but can produce dramatic results ... for example in the text by @Soupie - "feeling" was much larger than any other word - meaning it was used more often, you would of course have to use context to see how the word was used. In Nagel's essay it was "like" used most often but not as much as "feeling" was in @Soupie's post ... in Heidegger's essay "technology" of course but also "revealing" "man" and essence are used - also this example shows the words appearing in the center of the cloud are also more frequently used which is helpful because shorter words may not otherwise stand out as much.
Just a simple tool to use after reading a text ... I want to apply it to my own texts, that may be the most useful for editing ...
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Very helpful to me on MP and science, particularly a critique Realism and Naturalism as hypotheses and arguing that science and phenomenology are fundamentally the same kinds of investigation.
https://komromrom.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/5mpscience1.pdf
https://komromrom.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/5mpscience1.pdf
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Very accessible introduction to Merleau-Ponty's though, by the man himself. The original radio broadcasts are available with English subtitles, if needed.
http://timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-wp.pdf
"This is that rare genre, the careful popularisation, done by the original author. In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principal themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger. These lectures are slight but not superficial: you can feel the deep consonance with Lacan and the unspoken debt to Heidegger. Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Ponge, Kafka, Proust, Cézanne, and Sartre float through the text, each one impeccably well cited. And it is all posed in a lovely calm tone, which I read as Merleau-Ponty’s deep and unacknowledged affinity with his foil, Descartes."
In just over a hundred pages, this elegant volume presents the reader with the text of seven talks. These were originally prepared in short lecture form by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) on the occasion of a series of broadcasts on French national radio, which were delivered by the author in 1948.
http://timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-wp.pdf
"This is that rare genre, the careful popularisation, done by the original author. In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principal themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger. These lectures are slight but not superficial: you can feel the deep consonance with Lacan and the unspoken debt to Heidegger. Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Ponge, Kafka, Proust, Cézanne, and Sartre float through the text, each one impeccably well cited. And it is all posed in a lovely calm tone, which I read as Merleau-Ponty’s deep and unacknowledged affinity with his foil, Descartes."
In just over a hundred pages, this elegant volume presents the reader with the text of seven talks. These were originally prepared in short lecture form by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) on the occasion of a series of broadcasts on French national radio, which were delivered by the author in 1948.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Notwithstanding the progress in neuroscience, the elements of lived life yield a “folk psychology” without which the brain would be of no greater interest than the spleen. We are as good (or bad) at explaining ourselves to each other now as were our remote ancestors, including those who had no knowledge of brains at all. By ordinary standards and expectations, this suggests a fundamental gap between the character of lived life and the neural processes grounding such a life — and thus, again, between the various types of explanation.
The Limits of Information
In May 2009, M.I.T.’s Technology Review published a brief online essay titled “The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?” After citing some leading-edge theorizing, the essay concludes that
"... it is not the laws of physics that determine how information behaves in our Universe, but the other way round. The implication is extraordinary: that somehow, information is the ghostly bedrock of our Universe and from it, all else is derived."
The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?
The Limits of Information
In May 2009, M.I.T.’s Technology Review published a brief online essay titled “The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?” After citing some leading-edge theorizing, the essay concludes that
"... it is not the laws of physics that determine how information behaves in our Universe, but the other way round. The implication is extraordinary: that somehow, information is the ghostly bedrock of our Universe and from it, all else is derived."
The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?
A brilliant, illuminating, essay. Thanks so much for linking it here, Steve.
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Why...its "das mann," of course.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Yes I have...just finished major asic development project just recently...fpga validation . How do (did) you know(guess) this?
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