[MD] Truth and the Linguistic Turn

[Ron Kulp]

Hey Ron,

Thank you very much for the selections. I was actually only thinking a list of names and their books/articles, but certainly the slices are even better ;-)

The two names that stand out to me are Heidegger and Barry Allen. What Heidegger called "onto-theology" he also called just "Platonism," a naming practice I picked up from Richard Rorty--who picked it up largely from Heidegger. Barry Allen was a student of, and wrote his PhD dissertation under, Richard Rorty.

You see where I'm going? I had a feeling, but now I'm pretty certain, that _we_ are pretty much going in the same direction (even more in the details maybe than some of the general commonality we might hold with the average Pirsigian). We might have a few disputes about the scholarly material, but the general story, I think, is the same. I think perhaps the only major difference is that, when I look at Heidegger and especially Allen, I see them as saying (and even if they don't, they should) that grammatical/linguistic evolution produced certain specifically Western philosophical problems, but philosophy has a dialectic of its own that, shall we say, lifts off from the launch pad of language-patterns.

Ron:
I think you summed it pretty well with that statement. I think by giving
deductive reasoning an inductive foundation. This set the stage for
Renaissance thinkers who until the 19th century, took Aristotle's
work as given.

Matt:
Now, one of my hang-ups in the conversation that I wasn't totally cognizant of is your use of "grammar." I've always thought of it as a basically post hoc set of convention-differentiators. As an activity, it didn't begin to arise (in the West) until in and around the 5th century BCE, as you've been saying. I think my trouble has been that you occasionally seem to use the term "grammar" to mean, not just "the categorization of conventional word usage," but also "word usage." This would be a mistake, I think, and it is one that I think Heidegger occasional commits. For instance, it might lead one to say that, before Plato and Aristotle, there _was no differentiation between nouns and verbs_. That would be a mistake and false. There was differentiation, it was simply that nobody was explicitly and articulately _aware_ of what the difference was--speaking a language is a kind of know-how, not a grammatical knowing-that. This isn't to exactly downplay what you are pointing out (following Heidegger and Allen), but just to try and become more aware of what we are exactly talking about. Because it is certainly the case that _after_ we became explicitly aware of the difference between a noun and a verb, that self-conscious awareness (particularly in Aristotle) effected language-patterns.  And very specifically and germane to Pirsig and philosophy, it did effect the history and evolution of philosophical discussion.

Ron:
Most certainly it did, what the whole enterprise seems to revolve around is
that of deductive inference.
Stanford encyclopedia states this:
Deductions are one of two species of argument recognized by Aristotle. The other species is induction (epagôgê). He has far less to say about this than deduction, doing little more than characterize it as "argument from the particular to the universal". However, induction (or something very much like it) plays a crucial role in the theory of scientific knowledge in the Posterior Analytics: it is induction, or at any rate a cognitive process that moves from particulars to their generalizations, that is the basis of knowledge of the indemonstrable first principles of sciences."

Ron:
I think that the ancient grammatical "knowing that" became the "knowing how"
of modern thinking by virtue of public education. I think this is why Pirsig
places emphasis on the common sense pragmatic approach to philosophy,
it's not that intellect is bad, it that it is mired in Syllogisms and
axiomatic assumption which confine intellect within certain parameters.

Stanford Encyclopedia illustrates my assertion rather well about abstract/
concrete distinction, with this I propose that Pirsigs dynamic/static
takes up the root of this linguistic distinction. 
This was the point I was trying to make about Bo's SOL and why it didn't 
work, simply because SOL is part of the problem. By citing and building
on this linguistic distinction that Aristotle founded his logic on,
we may give MoQ a solid functional foundation within the western
cultural paradigm. 

Stanford:
The word universal (katholou) appears to be an Aristotelian coinage. Literally, it means "of a whole"; its opposite is therefore "of a particular" (kath' hekaston). Universal terms are those which can properly serve as predicates, while particular terms are those which cannot.

This distinction is not simply a matter of grammatical function. We can readily enough construct a sentence with "Socrates" as its grammatical predicate: "The person sitting down is Socrates". Aristotle, however, does not consider this a genuine predication. He calls it instead a merely accidental or incidental (kata sumbebêkos) predication. Such sentences are, for him, dependent for their truth values on other genuine predications (in this case, "Socrates is sitting down").

Consequently, predication for Aristotle is as much a matter of metaphysics as a matter of grammar. The reason that the term Socrates is an individual term and not a universal is that the entity which it designates is an individual, not a universal. What makes white and human universal terms is that they designate universals.

Ron:
Aristotle's Organon lost in the sack of Alexandria, reintroduced
and interpreted by thinkers of the middle ages produced an attitude of assumption. Kant thought that Aristotle had discovered everything there was to know about logic, and the historian of logic Prantl drew the corollary that any logician after Aristotle who said anything new was confused, stupid, or perverse.

" Aristotle's logic, especially his theory of the syllogism, has had an unparalleled influence on the history of Western thought. It did not always hold this position: in the Hellenistic period, Stoic logic, and in particular the work of Chrysippus, took pride of place. However, in later antiquity, following the work of Aristotelian Commentators, Aristotle's logic became dominant, and Aristotelian logic was what was transmitted to the Arabic and the Latin medieval traditions, while the works of Chrysippus have not survived."


source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#DiaArgArtDia