Via a reader: John Searle on The Philosophy Of Language as part of Bryan Magee’s series:
It’s always a pleasure to observe someone with deep understanding explain a subject clearly.
There’s some interesting discussion on modernism and postmodernism too, or the tendency for the ‘moderns’ to focus on language itself as a problem to be re-examined and possibly solved, or the study of linguistics to be put upon a foundation similar to that of many sciences.
As we’ve seen in the arts, the poem, a novel, the very written words themselves can become subjects which poets, novelists, and writers examine, doubt, and in some cases ‘deconstruct.’
As to that tribe in South America, cited as evidence against Chomsky’s claims of necessary recursion and the existence of a universal grammar, Searle has some things to say in the interview below.
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
‘Many right-wingers dismiss Chomsky’s model because they reject his left-wing assumptions and the claims he makes about U.S. foreign policy in the name of the model. Many left-wingers, finding the model itself plausible and already sympathetic to some the political and economic assumptions Chomsky brings to bear when applying it, judge that the applications must be sound. ‘
What’s the problem with the streaming services model, and how can musicians and people trying to make a buck actually….make a buck?
If the Pareto principle holds, a few musicians will make a vast majority of the music people will want to hear (again and again and again). Even centuries after their deaths. It’s often tough to tell who’s making music (or who will make music in the future) which endures.
Add-in visual elements (streaming/video games), youth, beauty and technology, and you get the Pareto distribution reasserting itself across new platforms and amongst ‘pop culture’ anew.
We learn through stories, and may in fact visualize profound elements of reality through these stories. Music, along with the pleasure it gives, can encode vital information about ourselves and our origins, coming to dominate the all-important present.
Is Netflix already Betamax? What about owning something tangible? Listen in to two old fogeys with a lot of experience in music and the business of music.
Worth your time:
On that note, what about the best music, stories, visual arts and poem we have? What about the profound failures of stewardship these past generations?
Does rock/popular music corrupt the souls of youth in preventing them from evening-out the passions; from pursuing higher things that a quality humanities education can offer?
Might such a lack allow political ideology to offer young people something to do, something to be, and something of which to be a part?
A questioning of premises, with varied disagreement, including that from an Emersonian.
‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘
Totten interviewed Benjamin Kerstein, who wrote Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, which is bold in holding Chomsky to account for many of his ideas and public statements regarding his politics:
‘In the case of Chomsky, however, I think we have one of the most egregious cases. He didn’t just support an ideology, he essentially created it, or at least played a major—perhaps the decisive—role in doing so. And there isn’t just one case of lending his skills to justifying horrendous acts of political evil, there are many. And as I noted before, he has never owned up to any of them and as far as I can tell never will.’
It sounds quite incendiary. Kerstein labels Chomsky a monster for such sins as Cambodia.
There’s also this:
‘Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn’t make it true.’
When it comes to defending logic and the scientific method, I’m probably closer to Chomsky than Foucault, if I have to choose, regardless of political philosophy.
Related On This Site: Perhaps after Kant’s transcendental idealism, Chomsky really does believe that morality, like Chomsky’s innatist theory of language, is universal and furthermore hard-wired into the brain. This could possibly lead to a political philosophy of either universalism or nihilism (a central postmodern problem), or at least his retreat into anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism away from such idealism. There’s little to no room for the individual in such a vision. Perhaps Chomsky has never seen life, liberty and property and the individual except from such a vantage point: Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge…
What about value pluralism…positive and negative liberty?: The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
‘Still, actual life in Hong Kong seemed to be pretty free, especially compared to the available alternatives, which included the totalitarian state that was Mao’s China. Yet as the British lease on Hong Kong approached expiration, an even deeper problem with a non-democratic Hong Kong became evident: Because there was no legitimate alternative sovereign to protest, the British simply handed the territory over to China.’
‘The double grief is, first, the unreflective and ugly anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism of the Left now, its obsessive, laser-like denunciation of everything about Israel, including even its progressive policy on gay people, which is denounced as ‘pinkwashing’ the occupation. Israel is now written about in the way North Korea is written about: as a kind of prime evil.’
Towards a more sustainable skepticism:
Become a member of a protected identity group, whether you’ve chosen to or not, uniting against an injustice or perceived injustice———>have the protected identity group become a member of a broader political coalition of other protected identity groups, coordinated around the competition to defeat moral/political/ideological enemies and bring about justice/liberation———>join a broader coalition of secular humanists but also anti-humanists, scientists/pro-science rationalists but also anti-science irrationalists/Romantic primitives, neo-liberal idealists but also anti-capitalist utopian socialists, live-and-let-live-liberals but also violent authoritarian/totalitarian ideologues——–>Peace/Democracy/Human Rights/A Better World await.
I don’t think it’s an iron law, but it’s likely a truism: Evenutally the logic will be used against you. Within such a Manichean worldview (good and evil, oppressed vs oppressor) some injustices might get better, some worse, but not without the dangers so well documented.
A lot of the problems are baked in the cake, so to speak.
Totten interviews Benjamin Kerstein, who’d written Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, which is bold in holding Chomsky to account for many of his ideas and public statements regarding his politics:
‘In the case of Chomsky, however, I think we have one of the most egregious cases. He didn’t just support an ideology, he essentially created it, or at least played a major—perhaps the decisive—role in doing so. And there isn’t just one case of lending his skills to justifying horrendous acts of political evil, there are many. And as I noted before, he has never owned up to any of them and as far as I can tell never will.’
It sounds quite incendiary. Kerstein labels Chomsky a monster for such sins as Cambodia.
There’s also this:
‘Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn’t make it true.’
‘Most recently, the disagreements in the field have pulled the American author Tom Wolfe into the fray, with a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and a cover story in Harper’s Magazine on the topic. This has changed the debate a bit, engaging many more people than ever before, but now it’s centred around Wolfe, Noam Chomsky – and me.
As background to understanding what’s at stake in this controversy, we need a grasp of Chomsky’s important theoretical proposals regarding human language acquisition.’
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Via a reader: John Searle on The Philosophy Of Language as part of Bryan Magee’s series:
It’s always a pleasure to observe someone with deep understanding explain a subject clearly.
There’s some interesting discussion on modernism and postmodernism too, or the tendency for the ‘moderns’ to focus on language itself as a problem to be re-examined and possibly solved, or the study of linguistics to be put upon a foundation similar to that of many sciences.
As we’ve seen in the arts, the poem, a novel, the very written words themselves can become subjects which poets, novelists, and writers examine, doubt, and in some cases ‘deconstruct.’
As to that tribe in South America, cited as evidence against Chomsky’s claims of necessary recursion and the existence of a universal grammar, Searle has some things to say in the interview below.
Related On This Site: Perhaps after Kant’s transcendental idealism, Chomsky really does believe that morality, like Chomsky’s innatist theory of language, is universal and furthermore hard-wired into the brain. This could lead to a political philosophy of either universalism or nihilism, or at least his retreat into anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism away from such idealism. There’s little to no room for the individual in such a vision. Perhaps Chomsky has never seen life, liberty and property and the individual except from such a vantage point: Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge…
What about value pluralism…positive and negative liberty?: The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
‘Most recently, the disagreements in the field have pulled the American author Tom Wolfe into the fray, with a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and a cover story in Harper’s Magazine on the topic. This has changed the debate a bit, engaging many more people than ever before, but now it’s centred around Wolfe, Noam Chomsky – and me.
As background to understanding what’s at stake in this controversy, we need a grasp of Chomsky’s important theoretical proposals regarding human language acquisition.’
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Via a reader: John Searle on The Philosophy Of Language as part of Bryan Magee’s series:
It’s always a pleasure to observe someone with deep understanding explain a subject clearly.
There’s some interesting discussion on modernism and postmodernism too, or the tendency for the ‘moderns’ to focus on language itself as a problem to be re-examined and possibly solved, or the study of linguistics to be put upon a foundation similar to that of many sciences.
As we’ve seen in the arts, the poem, a novel, the very written words themselves can become subjects which poets, novelists, and writers examine, doubt, and in some cases ‘deconstruct.’
As to that tribe in South America, cited as evidence against Chomsky’s claims of necessary recursion and the existence of a universal grammar, Searle has some things to say in the interview below.
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Theodore Dalrymple takes a reactionary position to tattoos in ‘Exposing Shallowness.‘
‘What is striking about these “tattoo narratives” (as the author calls them) is their vacuous egoism. The interlocutors speak, and appear to think, in pure psychobabble, that debased and vague confessional language that allows people to imagine they are baring their souls when in fact they are exposing their shallowness’
My Curmudgeonly Tattoo Theory– It used to be like carving a lover’s name into a tree (go ahead you anti-photosynthesist), except on your arm. Or maybe you were in prison or hanging in a gang. Maybe you were in the armed services and went through some stuff together and made it out the other side.
Now, the ‘transgressive’ and forbidden aspect of tattoos has become quite predictable: Go ahead, Mom!
Of course, your face, your body, your eyes will all announce what you’ve been up to lately and where you’ve been…to some extent.
—
In a similar vein, Ross Douthat argued that even though organized religion is on the decline, people still need all the stuff it can provide, they just find it elsewhere.
People can come to believe in secular ideals as though they provided transcendent purpose (addition: or at least imbue those ideals with a faith people reserve for that which is presumed universally true):
‘…what is the idea of universal human rights if not a metaphysical principle? Can you find universal human rights under a microscope?‘
—————
An 11:00 video on what may remain of Obama’s legacy via The Future Of Capitalism, from a generally Right-Of-Center perspective.
The 1st and last paragraphs of Blackburn’s review:
‘When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly. And as Leavis once remarked, whenever this is so, we can suspect that the differences have little to do with thinking. Still, the question certainly obsesses thinkers, and crops up in various terminologies and under various rubrics: human essence versus historical accident, intrinsic nature versus social construction, nativism versus empiricism. In the ancient world the nativist Plato held that we come into the world equipped with knowledge obtained in a previous life, while the empiricist Aristotle denied it. In our own time Chomsky has revived the nativist doctrine that our capacity for language is innate, and some ultras have even held that our whole conceptual repertoire is innate. We did not ever have to learn anything. We had only to let loose what we already have.
and:
‘Once we get past the demonizing and the rhetoric, take proper notice of the space between overt psychology and evolutionary rationale for it, and lose any phobia of cultural phenomena, what is left? There are plenty of sensible and plausible observations about human beings in Pinker’s book. But it is not clear that any of them are particularly new: Hobbes and Adam Smith give us more than anybody else. And at least their insights have stood the test of time, unlike that of some more recent work. Consider again the example of media violence. Here it seems that psychologists cannot speak with one voice about its effects. But worse than that, much worse, they cannot even speak with one voice about what psychological studies find about its effects. That is, the meta-studies that Pinker cites flatly disagree with the meta-studies that I mentioned earlier. If this is the state of play, we do well to plead the privilege of skepticism. We also do well too not to jettison other cultural resources too quickly. The depressing thing about “The Blank Slate” is that behind the rhetoric and the salesmanship, I suspect that Pinker knows this as well as anyone else.’
It’s a complicated tale of economic growth, leftism, the government likely having violated the principle of treating people as ends and not means to achieve that economic growth…acting brutally.
And as Nussbaum frames it: it’s a tale of the anti-liberal communist/marxist left and the more liberal left. The latter in this case has demonstrated real moral courage.
“HERE WE ARRIVE at an issue that lies at the heart of all the leftist political movements of the twentieth century: is solidarity itself a major political value or is the basic value that of justice to each and every person, treating each and every one as an end?“
She takes Noam Chomsky to task for his continuing hubris:
“Not so admirable, by contrast, have been the statements of some leftists to the effect that one should not criticize one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness…
…A particularly fatuous document of this kind was a letter authored by Noam Chomsky”
Chomsky’s nothing if not fatuous when it comes to politics.
In assessing the specific situation of West Bengal, we must distinguish between the government’s industrial strategy, which I, like Amartya Sen, believe to be generally correct and the means the government chose to implement it, which are appalling…”
In Nussbaum’s assessment, the government’s brutality may come out of Marxism itself:
“What led to this breakdown in governance? The seeds of catastrophe lie, no doubt, in the never-sufficiently-de-Stalinized background of this Party, always suspicious of democracy, always used to treating people as agents of class struggle”
Nussbaum concludes:
If the government returns to its arrogant ways, however, it will continue to need and deserve the criticism of fellow egalitarians, who must not allow solidarity to trump justice.”
Anyone who will put the principle of treating people as ends and not means is welcome.
Totten interviews Benjamin Kerstein, who’s written Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, which is bold in holding Chomsky to account for many of his ideas and public statements regarding his politics:
‘In the case of Chomsky, however, I think we have one of the most egregious cases. He didn’t just support an ideology, he essentially created it, or at least played a major—perhaps the decisive—role in doing so. And there isn’t just one case of lending his skills to justifying horrendous acts of political evil, there are many. And as I noted before, he has never owned up to any of them and as far as I can tell never will.’
It sounds quite incendiary. Kerstein labels Chomsky a monster for such sins as Cambodia.
There’s also this:
‘Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn’t make it true.’
Related On This Site: Perhaps after Kant’s transcendental idealism, Chomsky really does believe that morality, like Chomsky’s innatist theory of language, is universal and furthermore hard-wired into the brain. This could lead to a political philosophy of either universalism or nihilism, or at least his retreat into anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism away from such idealism. There’s little to no room for the individual in such a vision. Perhaps Chomsky has never seen life, liberty and property and the individual except from such a vantage point: Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge…
What about value pluralism…positive and negative liberty?: The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”