[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[118]

Hi All,

Language all the way down is a concept.  Where language begins or ends
is a definition.  Language is an extension of what happens before, and
I am not sure if we have a good understanding of what reveals itself
as language.  If we treat language as an object (as in SOM), the we
can clearly provide definitions that language must have words made out
of letters as we understand them, for example.  However, if we take a
Quality approach, language is the expression of some value and it is
hard to contain it from being all the way down.

What finally comes out as language has its roots in the inorganic
level.  In terms of Quality, we can consider it an expression from
that primary level, going through the biological, working with the
intellectual, for the social.  In this way, the concept of "language
all the way down" works for me.

Mark

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey Dan,
>
> Matt said:
> Think about this way John: if you told someone that it was language
> all
> the way down, and they looked down at their feet and said they
> didn't
> see any language anywhere, they'd just articulated to you the
>
> sensitivity to context Steve and Rorty desire, and how the notion of
>
> "not language" still plays a role.
>
> John said:
> I'd say they'd also articulated a certain stubbornly obtuse evasion of
> sincere philosophical discussion, Matt.
>
> Dan said:
> I think Matt is pointing to context,., and attempting to show you, John,
> in a simple fashion, that not all reality can be reduced to language.
> So, "it" is not language all the way down.
>
> Matt:
> I want to make my position clear with respect to any slogan that
> uses "all the way down," including Pirsig's variation of "analogues
> upon analogues upon analogues."
>
> The reason, as I see it, why you are right, Dan, that "'it' is not
> language all the way down" is because "all reality" cannot be
> reduced to _anything_ in that way.  The fact that the point is being
> made about language is irrelevant in this case.  Because the sensitivity
> to context I'm pointing to needs to be extended to John and other "all
> the way down" sloganeers, too: when they are paying attention, their
> context is a narrowly defined context of philosophical debate (and, for
> their purposes, ignoring certain parts of common sense).  And in that
> context, their polemic against a non-linguistic reality that is a given
> compared to the clothing we dress it up in with language, is, I think,
> true.  This follows, for example, Wilfrid Sellars' attack on the Myth of
> the Given, which I sum up in "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the
> Linguistic Turn" as "the idea that there is a bald experience given to
> our minds that we simply add the hairplugs of language to."
>
> Samuel Johnson's stubbornness to Berkeley's idealism only becomes
> out of control if Johnson had remained stubborn in the face of
> Berkeley's more nuanced claim that "only an idea can represent
> another idea."  However, if Berkeley had remained stubborn with an
> "it's idea all the way down" slogan in front of the kicked rock, then
> we'd have good cause to think Johnson's stubbornness as winning
> the day.  It's all about sensitivity to context and knowing _when_ to
> be stubborn, for stubbornness is just another another word for
> "conviction," or "I believe this is true."  And why give up on true
> beliefs?  The trick is knowing how far the stubbornly held truth
> extends.
>
> Matt
>
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