Friday, June 15, 2007

Thinking about it a bit more, there's a simple way to describe this.
In the terms of abstract logic one of us is the equivalent of another; but yet I am not you.
We communicate. But how well? And in how much detail?
Abstract logic is a vulgarization of human interaction, beginning with our lowest common denominator. In presupposing unity, it breeds atomization: so we get Posnerite economics politics and law.
If one presuppose the opposite, considering how much effort and energy we expend just to communicate then communication itself, the mechanism becomes much more interesting.
I always go back to Posner in this context, the US and law, but why not: Posner has no interest in language and philosophers have little respect for it.

The contempt for democracy [the culture of language in use] in Posner, and in Leiter and others who claim to be to his left, is striking.
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"Languages (Russian, English, the language of first-order logic, etc.) don't demarcate irreconcilable conceptual or logical domains, and if they did, there would be no (meta-)language available in which to argue for the claim."

Do yourself a favor: ask a translator.

Lived experience is full of "irreconcilable conceptual and logical domains."
That's why we invent formal -third party- systems as mediators, means of approximating one to the another. But what results is transliteration, not translation.
Philosophers these days seem more interested in categories than in the gaps between them. The gaps are both more interesting and more important.
A courtroom is a place of naming according to agreed-upon (and formal) rules. We use formalism and adversarialism only because reason is impossible. Courts are only used in times of crisis: when specific individual acts need for practical reasons to be defined by the state "beyond a reasonable doubt."
that's a lot of wiggle room.

I guess Davidson goes with Hart on these things.
Wishful thinking and mindblowing idiocy.
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"We're identical only as tokens."
We're type identical.
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Dualism is an argument for the existence of a substance without "substance." With that the damage is done: whether there is a God or not is secondary.

As to questions of philosophy as such, it seems to be interested only in the nature of types and not of tokens. In the context of academic philosophy I'm sure Davidson succeeded in 'proving' his point. The fact that it can be shown to be wrong seems to be irrelevant.
The only question worth working on is that of the relation of tokens to types. Any and all questions of language, culture, and politics revolve around this one.

[I think that's a good point. And again: the arts are the description by and of tokens, the description and provisional naming of things and events]

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