Things are objects because of the mind;
The mind is such because of things.
Understand the relativity of these two
and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.
In this emptiness the two are indistinguishable
and each contains in itself the whole world.
Sengcan, “Hsin-hsin ming”
Dewey on freedom and the task of the educator (via Hilary Putnam)
This talk given by Robert Brandom at Berkeley is among my favorites since here Brandom could be seen as the bridge between Chomsky and Foucault. Brandom seems to provide an answer to the common critique aimed at the genealogical position, i.e., Doesn’t genealogical antifoundationalism require some foundation to make its claims? Link above, highlights below:
“The overall point is that epistemological claims, including skeptical ones, have semantic presuppositions. I am going to argue that the soft underbelly of genealogical skepticism about reason is its implicit commitment to a naïve semantics.”
“Replacing theological necessity with rational necessity as the fundamental explanatory category is disenchantment of the world. Replacing rational necessity with natural necessity is disillusionment.”
“Kant’s system masks that underlying
symmetry by an artificial, asymmetric division of semantic and epistemic
labor.”
“According to Hegel’s
symmetric normative construal of the relations of authority and responsibility
between universals and particulars, the application of one concept (universal)
obliges one to apply others to that particular (according to relations of
rational consequence that articulate
(partially determine) the content of the concept=universal) and precludes one
from being entitled to apply others to that particular (according to relations
of rational incompatibility that
articulate (partially determine) the content of the concept=universal).”
“The clean division of semantic and epistemic
labor is an artifact of semantically naïve two-stage accounts. Our judgments shape our concepts no less than
our concepts shape our judgments. Understanding genealogical analyses as undercutting
the claims of reason (the rational bindingness of conceptual norms) depends on
assessing the rationality of discursive practice solely on the basis of the
extent to which applications of concepts, whose contents are construed as
always already fully determinate, are responsive exclusively to evidential
concerns.”
“But the idea that
assessments of rationality are appropriately addressed only to the application
of already fully determinate concepts is the product of a blinkered semantic naiveté. It ignores the fact that the very same
discursive practice that is from one point of view the application of conceptual norms is from another point of view the institution of those norms and the determination of their contents. Only when discursive practice is viewed whole
does its rationality emerge.”
“Hegel’s idea is that a distinctive kind of retrospective rational reconstruction of
prior applications of a concept is necessary and sufficient to exhibit those
applications as conferring a determinate content on the concept.”
“T.S. Eliot describes this
aspect of Hegelian Vernunft at work
in a different corner of the culture:
What
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing
order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward
the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.[1]
[1]
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [ref.]”
[Note to selves: Could Eliot’s retrocausation in aesthetics be the hidden variable in the EPR paradox in regard to entanglement? I believe Huw Price suggests such retrocausal “spooky action” in QM.]
“Reason Genealogy and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity with Robert Brandom”
As in a classic Renaissance house, we now inhabit the piano nobile, the upper, noble floor, not even knowing what happens in the ground floor below us, where technologies are humming in the service rooms. Unless there is some malfunctioning, we may not even know that such technologies are in place. But, if something goes wrong, it is the specialist who will now have to take care of both sides of the interface, with the result that specialists are the new priests in Janus’ temple. They will become increasingly powerful and influential the more we rely on higher order technologies.
Note to selves: Our hyperhistory will require hyperhistoricisms.
“Living in a Quantum World” by Vlatko Vedral
“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).
STEVEN WEXLER 