Month: September 2016

On Huw Price’s “Two Notions of Naturalism”

“So I oppose both naturalism and non-naturalism as popularly understood, and favour a different kind of naturalism–naturalism without representationalism” (2).

“[D]eflationism about truth and reference blocks an object naturalist’s access to the kind of semantic ladder needed to transform a theoretical question about terms into a question about their assumed objects” (9).

Per Paul Boghossian: “Irrealism presupposes semantic notions, and hence the denial in question is incoherent in the case of the semantic terms themselves” (9).

Language Games and Metavocabularies

“And I’ve been urging that Wittgenstein’s response to philosophical anxiety about meaningfulness uberhaupt contains nothing to encourage analytic aspirations for pragmatic metavocabularies.”
–John McDowell, “Brandom on Extending the Project of Analysis (with John McDowell)”

Yet one must ask if Wittgenstein’s language games and family resemblance constitute a “downtown” of sorts that would then give weight to Brandom’s notion of pragmatically mediated semantic relations.

https://youtu.be/NwoVZ4GKs40

There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern times. [ … ] It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics 1961, p. 159, 160.