Volterra is a name familiar to Economists. We know the 'predator-prey' Volterra model which two Leftist exiles meeting in Nehruvian India- viz. Goodwin & Haldane- turned into a story about how Workers- who are the Wolves- fuck over the Rabbits- the Capitalists, till they fucking starve and the Rabbits pop back up.
What semi-literate Rightists like me don't know is that Volterra, a Jew from a poor background- i.e. one 'Chosen' to liberate us from the Moloch of Poverty- had a student- Luigi Fantappie. In a sense, he is a proponent of 'negentropy' and ushered in, on the Right, what, the Leftist, Prigogine did by valorising 'disequilibrium' and its coevolved dynamics.
Analytical philosophy was playing catch-up with notions of Thermodynamic equilibrium when it formulated its notions of 'ideality' as one, which like 'Pareto efficiency' was one where no further exchange save the merely random would occur.
The trouble is, without an Identity which is Leibnizian in terms of 'indiscernible' elements of haecceity, no Logicism- or Analytical Philosophy- is possible.
But this must be the case if the universe of transactions isn't supervenient on- rather than having a mere 'Granger causality' link with- a Kevin Lancaster type 'characteristics' space. In other words, if what we do can't be directly linked to self-subsistent motivations- i.e. if we are not Pavolvian fucking robots- then neither 'ideality' nor 'equilibrium' nor stable 'identity' are accessible to us.
The problem here is that of 'multiple realisability'. Because we have no 'natural' proofs (because we can't distinguish random from pseudo-random) 'optimality' and therefore category theory is 'anything goes' just like Arrow Debreu general equilibrium.
Does this mean that 'ideality' is off the table? Not at all. But it is 'ipse dixit' Spiritual or Ontologically dysphoric- i.e. not at home in the world. The good news is that our hermeneutic of Revealed Scripture, but its own ordinance, is ever novel or 'apoorva'- i.e. having an epistemic or intensional meaning for all the ages.
It is tempting for atheists who deny the uncreated nature of Scripture- which is wholly imperative, epistemic and 'intensional'- to stipulate for an 'externalist' theory of value or meaning- as though some hypostases of what is Material were actually God, the Creator. In this case, you can have a Secular 'teleology' or even an 'eschatology'. 'Presentism' requires an Inquisition more rigorous, an auto da fe more thorough then any carried out in epistemic Ages of Darkness.
But, such a theory's 'general equilibrium' would, nevertheless only capture its internal transactions. It could say nothing about what was happening out in the world precisely because its 'decision space' wasn't supervenient in any sense on that of actual outcomes.
Jason Stanley and David Beaver- shitheads both- claim, in a paper with that name, that they are seeking to move 'towards a non-ideal Philosophy of language'. Yet, it is apparent that they think things should be otherwise than they are. There is a model how things should be- one could call it an ideal state- but there has been a great falling away from it. There are bad 'language practices'. They prevent the ideals of a democratic society from being realized. Speech is being polluted. The body politic is being poisoned. This was not inevitable. If people behaved in a better- i.e. more ideal- way, then outcomes would no longer be so bad. They would be good. But, what if there is no ideal way of speaking about things? If even language can't be ideal, how can we say, save arbitrarily, the world can have any such property. Who is to 'buck-stop' collective decisions as to what is bad and what is good?
For at least a decade, political philosophy and political science have been entangled in a debate about “ideal theory” versus “non-ideal theory.”
Is there an ideal distribution of wealth and income? Rawls appeared to say yes. Amartya Sen appeared to say no. Which of them is right?
The goal of ideal theory is to contrast different versions of an ideal state in an effort to discover the ideal principles of justice.
It failed immediately. Ideal theory neglected an aspect of the real world- Knightian Uncertainty- which militated for 'regret minimization' rather than 'expected utility maximization'. Thus it considered redistributive fiscal policy the appropriate tool to do what a risk-pooling insurance scheme is far better at doing. In other words, it was stupid shite. Sen's 'non-ideal' approach was even more useless because it featured things like 'capabilities' which are unknowable.
The philosophy of language is utterly useless because though it can have, following David Lewis, a notion of conventions as solving Coordination problems, it has no theory of 'discoordination games' as giving rise to 'hedging' and 'income effects'. This alters the 'general equilibrium' of the model and gives rise to arbitrage opportunities.
Such a project makes various idealizations—that citizens of the candidate ideal states are willing and able to abide by mutually agreed upon principles and policies, that, in short, citizens are willing to work together toward implementing a common vision of a just state.
That wasn't the problem with the theory. In an ideal state either there is Knightian Uncertainty or there isn't. If there isn't- there is no need for any coordination mechanism provided the Arrow-Debreu price vector is common knowledge. There won't be any economic exchange or, indeed, any need for language or education or research. If there is Knightian Uncertainty, there should be markets for insurance and other risk pooling devices. But this militates for both 'cheap talk' pooling equilibria and 'costly signal' separating equilibria. This is like coordination games giving rise to, or being complementary to, discoordination games.
What is true of economics is also true of linguistics. Chichilnisky and Heal have a Goldilocks condition re. preference and endowment diversity for markets to exist. But the same is true for language. If diversity is too great there is no market and no language for the thing.
What is excluded by the idealizations of ideal theory is not obviously relevant to its aim, which is to use intuitions to decide on the structure of the ideal state. Nonideal theory, by contrast, explores questions that arise when these idealizations do not obtain—such as our actual political condition.
Both are shit if they ignore Knightian Uncertainty, preference and endowment diversity, problems of concurrency, complexity and computability, and other relevant features of the real world.
The debates that have roiled political philosophy and political science concern, among other things, the relative priority of ideal and non-ideal theory. And since non-ideal theorizing has been to some extent marginalized, questions about the shape and form of non-ideal theory in political philosophy and political science are also relevant. The debates in political philosophy and political science about nonideal theory raise intriguing questions about theoretical assumptions structuring other domains.
No. We understand that the thing is shit because it is done by a citation cartel of shitheads. Their 'theoretical assumptions' represent laziness and stupidity. They don't structure shit.
In some areas of the study of language, particularly in philosophy of language (more specifically, semantics), there are assumptions analogous to the idealizations of political philosophy.
An ideal, intensional, 'inner', language may be assumed. But, in that case either it was created by an Occassionalist God or else, as Chomsky suggests, there was some magical mutation which spread instantaneously to all human beings. In Baldwinian evolutionary theory there are notions of 'channelization' vs 'capacitance diversity' which correspond to ideas about coordination and discoordination games and arbitrage between them. Essentially, a type of language which is potentially useful might originally be confined to a small clique. However, it can spread rapidly by mimesis if circumstances change and more and more people find it useful.
Corresponding to the assumption of a well-ordered society, there is the assumption of linguistic cooperativity—that speaker and audience are working together toward a common goal. In his now classic essay, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” which shaped contemporary discussion in political philosophy and political science, Charles Mills critiques the idealization of “an idealized cognitive sphere.”
Mills was from Jamaica. His 'the Racial Contract' was about how Contracts iz RACIST coz Whitey is actually enslaving us darkies. Wake up sheeple! Your white g.f is actually a succubus. She is milking you of your sperm thus causing you to become so weak and feeble that you spend all day watching footie on the telly while smoking skunk. You ought to be out in the world destroying Capitalism with your mighty dong.
Mills singles out for special disdain the idealization of a “general social transparency,” which will be presumed, with cognitive obstacles minimized as limited to biases of self-interest or the intrinsic difficulties of understanding the world, and little or no attention paid to the distinctive role of hegemonic ideologies and group-specific experience in distorting our perceptions and conceptions of the social order.
This was a vulgar type of Marxism which Stalin, bless his cotton socks, had purged from the Politburo. It may sound odd, but Stalin's philosophy of language was actually less shite than Stanley's paranoid nonsense.
Theorists of meaning also assume a “general social transparency.”
So does these nutters. There's no point being 'woke' if you can't point an accusatory finger at Whitey coz there is no transparent medium through which to see.
In the Gricean program, for example, it is a standard assumption that speaker intentions are transparent—no one has devious, hidden intentions.
Whereas, because of Newcombe problems or so as to outfox predators or parasites, even our own intentions are hidden from ourselves. There is no Momus window into our own hearts even for ourselves.
The fact that there are parallel ideals in Anglo-American liberal political philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy of language raises questions and challenges
the question is why are these guys so fucking ignorant of evolutionary game theory and category theory and other advances made five decades ago.
—it suggests the promise of analogous critiques and it raises the question of non-ideal philosophy of language. Anglo-American theory of meaning (understood broadly to include, for example, contributions of many continental European semanticists working in the same tradition) differs from Anglo-American political philosophy in having a longer tradition of singling out ideals for critique. It is easy to read Frege
a proto-Nazi
and Russell
who thought wars against technologically backward people to be justified
and think that truth-conditional content (or informational content) is the central notion in the theory of meaning.
Sadly, they didn't have the right notion of informativity. Shannon opened many doors.
J.L. Austin begins How to Do Things with Words by critiquing the assumption that description of the world, “fact-stating,” is the main business of statements. This is a theme to which Austin returns throughout the work.
Nice work if you can get it...but only if you are as thick as shit.
How to Do Things with Words is
useless.
a critique of the idealization that capturing the informational content of an utterance is the main aim of a theory of meaning.
because such a theory is useless. Why not have a theory of farting which is itself a fart?
Similarly, although it is easy to read many traditions in philosophy of language as ignoring the communicative importance of speech practices, as idealizing away from them, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasizes their centrality.
The stupid cunt didn't know game theory. Yet how else are language games to be analysed?
This is perhaps one reason why the specific contours of the debate in political philosophy have not simultaneously been reflected in the theory of meaning.
Smart people- Robert Mercer, Jim Simons- became billionaires by working on things like 'Brown clustering' (in natural language programming) or pattern recognition. Only morons took up philosophy.
Non-ideal critique is more familiar in philosophy of language, as traditions initiated by Austin and Wittgenstein are squarely within the mainstream today.
Because it is easy to do the intellectual equivalent of play with your own faeces.
This paper, adapted from the first chapter of our forthcoming book Hustle: The Politics of Language, is an attempt to systematize and build upon existing non-ideal critiques.
So as to prove everybody they don't like is a Nazi who is 'dog-whistling' incessantly against Jews, Blacks, Homosexuals and people who refuse to eat their own faeces so as to defeat the machinations of Big Food whose unholy alliance with the Toilet industry is causing us to flush away our tasty tasty turds.
We begin with concerns about the relative paucity of work on, and insights into, the functioning of anti-democratic political speech, which we attribute to an overly narrow set of examples.
It is overly narrow to focus on speech which is actually anti-democratic. We should include remarks people make about the weather to show they are all fucking NAZIS!
This narrow focus has led to idealizations that filter political speech out from the core data of semantic and pragmatic theorizing in linguistics and philosophy of language.
Coz they are all fucking NAZIS!
Idealizations with such consequences should be at minimum viewed with suspicion,
Coz they are all fucking NAZIS!
on the grounds that they threaten to exclude by accident important swaths of evidence.
Like the fact that they all have fucking Hitler 'taches. Wake up Sheeple! You think Sleepy Joe and Comatose Kamala don't have Hitler 'taches? How fucking naive are you?
This part of the project is critique. The other part concerns theory construction. In this paper, we sketch a conception of the theory of meaning that focuses on political speech as a core example, which has different goals than standard practice—such as capturing unintended communicative effects—and different key concepts, such as that of a speech practice. The book that this paper begins is devoted to adjusting, reinterpreting, and modifying tools, concepts, and understandings thereof to incorporate the resources we need to understand speech in a non-ideal world.
Filled with fucking NAZIS!
. Violent language Suppose you and your partner are making a meal together. Your partner tells you, “I need carrots.”
You take your dick out. It is clear that she wants to play horny Bugs Bunny. Also, fuck cooking. We'll just order a Pizza after she says 'That's all folks'.
You helpfully respond by giving them carrots. Without language, it would be considerably trickier to make a meal together, much less hold a constitutional convention.
Not really. The lazy bint can easily get the carrots for herself. Also, you'd prefer her to do Jessica Rabbit, not Bugs Bunny. As for constitutional conventions, they would be considerably more efficient if no talking was allowed.
Making a meal together and planning a society together are both cooperative activities.
They may be meant to be cooperative activities. But they are inefficient and as likely to cause divorce or Civil War as they are to lead to any desirable outcome.
Language is an invaluable tool in complex cooperative activities.
No. Money is. Fuck would I listen to you or try to figure out what you want unless you iz paying me mega-bucks?
Without it, we humans would not have leveraged our sociality into a position of such immense power over the Earth.
Nor would these cretins be playing with their own faeces.
Philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have devoted a great deal of attention to how language enables us to communicate what we know, which is presumably a central component in an account of how language makes cooperative activity so efficient. The obvious answer is something like this: words are labels for things and kinds of things. When we communicate to accomplish shared projects, we can communicate our knowledge about facts by describing those facts with language.
Or drawing pictures or pointing at stuff. But what motivates cooperation is money or 'transferable utility'.
When one of us expresses knowledge that is relevant to the other’s projects, the other acquires knowledge about which things are among which kinds of things, knowledge that aids them in accomplishing their task. There is thus a natural link between the idealization of cooperativity and the idealization that language is there to communicate information.
But those idealizations contain each other precisely because they are idealizations. What is common to them is Information theory- which is very useful and can make smart peeps very very fucking rich.
The descriptive function of language, however, is only one of its many uses.
Language is what causes Nazism. Did you know Hitler was able to talk?
Consider the example of genocide. Genocides are characteristically preceded by harsh rhetoric and conspiracy theories aimed at targets of violence.
Unless they aren't at all. It is safer, or more efficient, to keep mum so the thing will come as a nice surprise to your victims. On the other hand, 'harsh rhetoric' and conspiracy theories may proliferate without any fucking genocide coz your victims are better armed. Still, you can't say Hamas's leaders aren't doing very well for themselves and will continue to do so provided Uncle Sam maintains a military base protecting them in Qatar.
The function of conspiracy theories is not only—and not even primarily—descriptive but also, more importantly, to create in-group and out-group boundaries, dehumanizing their targets and trying to legitimate terrible actions against these targets.
Which is what these two shitheads are doing. If you study their stripe of shite, they want you to march around denouncing everybody else as totes Nazi.
In the build-up to genocide, language is used to coordinate among those who are considered legitimately “of the people.” But language is also characteristically used to demarcate and isolate a targeted population during the process leading up to their mass extermination, to reduce empathy for them, to exclude and silence them. Part of this use is to coordinate action. But one might be skeptical that an account of communication solely geared toward coordinating action will explain the various mechanisms at work in raising disgust and fear about out-groups. Rwandan Tutsis and Hutus share many features that suggest that they belong to the same ethnic group: they speak the same language and traditionally share a religion. Despite these commonalities, the remarkable human capacity to rapidly form out-groups for idiosyncratic ideological reasons was a central force in enabling the conditions for a genocide in which Rwandan Hutus killed Rwandan Tutsis en masse.
These stupid cunts don't know about the Ugandan connection and, more importantly, the struggle for control of the wealth of the Congo. It is that source of great wealth which keeps conflict in that region alive. Idi Amin had gotten rich from smuggling operations there before he ousted Obote. To hold onto power, he was then obliged to get rid of fellow Muslim Asians whom he got on very well with. Incidentally Mugabe turned his country into a shithole after he gambled and lost on an operation in Congo. Money matters. Rhetoric doesn't- unless there is money on the table.
Language was an essential part of the process by which Hutus dehumanized the Tutsis; in the lead-up to the genocide, Tutsis were referred to as “inyenzi” and “inzoka” (Kinyarwanda for “cockroach” and “snake,” respectively). 11 As Lynne Tirrell has vividly made clear, this was part of the process that enabled Hutus to treat their fellow Rwandans as cockroaches and snakes. 12 Such language enabled actions, she argues, via generating associations with practices of, for example, killing snakes. Tirrell’s analysis of the dehumanizing function of “inyenzi” and “inzoka” essentially appeals to practices connected to these terms. Her work suggests that we need to speak of practices associated with terms to understand the dehumanization that precedes genocide.
Nobody who has actually lived in the region thinks any such thing. Back in the day, it was fashionable to blame the Belgians and the French for resisting Anglophone Tutsis from Uganda (where there is a related tribe) for seeking to spread the language of perfidious Albion.
In their 2017 paper “Backlash: The Politics and Real-World Consequences of Minority Group Dehumanization,” Nour Kteily and Emile Bruneau
who wear MAGA baseball caps- right?
explore what they call “blatant dehumanization,” using the Trump campaign’s rhetoric toward Mexican immigrants and Muslims as a model.
These guys weren't trying to get peeps to hate the Donald. Perish the thought!
They “observed high levels of prejudice and dehumanization toward Mexican immigrants” (B 90).
they observed this amongst peeps who feel 'they took our jobs'.
They assessed prejudice using a feeling thermometer rating of Mexican immigrants on a 0 (very cold) to 100 (very warm) scale. Scores were reversed, such that higher scores indicate greater prejudice. Other groups assessed were Americans, Europeans, Arabs, Iranians, Muslims, Doctors, and Welfare recipients.
Not Serial Killers? That's discrimination.
(B 89) Blatant dehumanization was scored by asking participants a series of questions: Specifically, participants were asked to “Please rate how well the following terms describe Mexican immigrants” on a 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much so) scale: “savage, aggressive,” “backward, primitive,” “lacking morals,” “barbaric, cold-hearted,” “refined and cultured” (reverse coded), “rational and logical” (reverse coded), “scientifically/technologically advanced” (reverse coded), “capable of self-control” (reverse coded), and “mature, responsible” (reverse coded). Scores on these nine items were averaged . . . and standardized, and then combined with the standardized ratings of Mexican immigrants on the Ascent scale33 . . . to create a composite of blatant dehumanization. (Ibid.)
The aim was to dehumanize Trump supporters. It didn't work. But for COVID, the Donald would still be in the White House. There would have been no Ukraine or Gaza. Sad.
Kteily and Bruneau do not tell us whether Trump simply took advantage of pre-existing ideology or rather employed rhetoric that (in some sense) strengthened that ideology. But their study does suggest a connection between support for Trump and blatant dehumanization. What we lack is an account of the relation between rhetoric and dehumanizing ideologies.
Do we really need an account of how these two nutters are dehumanizing millions of their fellow Americans by their boring and paranoid rhetoric?
The topic of the relation between rhetoric and ideology is a question of great political import that lies squarely in the study of human communication, the effects of language; it is a topic that runs through non-ideal inquiry in the theory of meaning.
It is low IQ shite.
That Trump as a candidate was so easily able to exploit or reignite pre-existing oppressive ideologies is a testament to their lasting presence.
Paranoid ideologies, like that of these two authors, may have a 'lasting presence' only in University Departments which have become the last refuge of paranoid rage. -
Racist ideologies are persistent, even when wars are fought to overcome them.
No wars are fought to overcome racist ideologies. They are fought over territory or are wars of revenge.
However, in the presence of a public ethos that repudiates them, it becomes unacceptable to endorse these ideologies in public;
In that case, the public ethos is not ideological. However, people may have preferences between agendas for self-interested reasons.
they remain submerged but are kept alive by politicians in oblique ways that allow for plausible deniability.
In which case, the ideology doesn't matter save in so far as it signals a strong intention to implement a particular agenda. But, the same ideology may, for kairotic reasons, have a variety of action plans. If people don't care whether support for a particular measure is tactical, strategic, or principled, then, it is obvious, ideology doesn't matter at all. It is merely a bee in some pedant's bonnet.
A key mechanism to keep problematic ideologies alive, in the absence of a Trump-like figure who can gain political power by bringing them once more to the surface, is the use of manipulative speech, speech that appears on the surface to be essentially descriptive, but, when married to a hearer’s background frame and value system, communicates a problematic message.
The key mechanism which keeps stupidity of this sort alive is the citation cartel in a University department devoted to useless shite. But all it can do is say 'Trump is a Nazi!'
On the other hand, Collidge is supposed to be a place where certain 'ideals' are held up. A true 'gentleman and a scholar' does not bottle the Sommelier. A Vassar graduate does not suck off the waiter at the Indian restaurant on the assumption that the fellow is a Maharaja or Sheikh of some kind. Language can be a thing of beauty and of truth and luminous with grace. It mustn't be shite like this-
Language is a tool through which we communicate our knowledge in the service of mutual goals.
Jason is a tool alright.
Here, we need to think about information,
Informativity is good enough
although language is used in many other ways as well.
It is used to epistemically rape and rob darkies- right?
What then is the point of language? This is the question with which Luvell Anderson, Sally Haslanger, and Rae Langton begin their paper, “Language and Race.” They write, #If we begin with that abstract question, we may be tempted toward a high-minded answer: “People say things to get other people to come to know things that they didn’t know before.” The point is truth, knowledge, communication.
Why not hold that as the ideal to which to aspire?
If we begin with a concrete question, “What has language to do with race?” we find a different point: to attack, spread hatred, create racial hierarchy.
So, instead of helping actual members of the human race, you can pretend to combat Racism by bullying everyone you meet and accusing them of being Nazis. The trouble is, this creates a backlash. The nuisance you cause puts the cause you espouse in bad odour.
According to Austin, “stating, describing, etc., are just two names among a very great many others for illocutionary acts; they have no unique position”.
If you love Austin so much, why don't you marry him?
Focusing on description to the exclusion of other illocutionary acts obscures many of the elements that are central to communication.
Everybody else is always 'obscuring' things which are very clear to the paranoid nutcase.
Austin’s ordinary language perspective allows us to see what is lost by focusing simply on describing.
But only these shitheads focused on that.
For example, in Lecture XII of How to Do Things with Words, Austin outlines five classes of speech acts, including verdictives and exercitives .
Invent new words so as to appear smart. I often distinguish the infricative from the exfricative phonology of my farts.
Exercitives are “the exercising of powers, rights, or influences,” such as “appointing, voting, ordering, urging” (HDW 151).
Urging is the nigger in the wood pile. Any nutter can urge you to chop off your head and shove it up your poop-hole.
To judge whether a speaker is in the position to make an assertion, it is not in general necessary to have information about their social position relative to other participants in the discourse.
Yes it is. That's why you should not try to kiss the Judge even if your co-defendant asserts that this is a legal formality required by Magna Carta.
In contrast, to judge whether a speaker is in the position to give an order to another person, it is necessary to have information about their social position.
No. Their position is irrelevant. What matters is whether such orders are highly correlated with outcomes. If the British Prime Minister gives an order we don't need to know how posh a Skool he went to or how many billions he has in the Bank. All we need to know is whether anyone will actually carry out his orders. Currently, the answer to that question is- fuck, no.
One moral of Austin’s work is that if we seek our account of communication to explain not just assertions but also orders, we need to be sensitive to the social position of the participants in the discourse.
Nope. We need to estimate the likelihood that the thing is alethic or effectual. Social position is irrelevant.
The point that a central aim of language is to communicate a higher social rank is at the heart of classical anti-colonial theory.
Nonsense! There were guys called 'His Serene Highness, the Maharaja' who were against the Empire which kept loading them with titles and decorations.
It is not for nothing that chapter 1 of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is entitled “The Black Man and Language.”
But Fanon's Martinique chose to remain with France. Also Fanon was merely sucking up to Sartre to establish his own literary reputation.
In that chapter, he writes incisively about how the racial hierarchies that structure colonial domination are replicated in, and reinforced by, speech practices: “I know [B]lack people; you have to talk to them kindly, talk to them about their country; knowing how to talk to them, that’s the key. Now here’s what you have to do . . . .” This is no exaggeration. A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling.
Sartre may have done so. But Camus didn't. The pied noirs were quicker with their fists than with their coddling. Still, it is nice that Jason thinks the country his parent's emigrated to had plenty of Police Chiefs who coddled Black men accused of raping white girls.
It’s not just one person we have observed, but hundreds; and our observations were not limited to one category; insisting on a fundamentally objective attitude, we studied such behavior in physicians, police officers, and foremen on work sites.
You found what you wanted to find. Confirmation bias much?
Fanon, writing in 1952, outlines a research program that carries through to the present day in social psychology and socio-linguistics: to describe the ways in which language is used to reinforce hierarchy in the service of domination.
Why not describe the ways language is used to reinforce an utter fucking waste of time of this sort? The fact is money matters and who can kick whose ass matters. Language does not.
It is, at the very least, an open question whether a theory designed to explain a system’s use in the transmission of knowledge can also explain its uses in domination and subordination. In psychology, there is of course a robust literature on the social psychological mechanisms that serve to justify hierarchies.
If by 'robust' you mean 'stupid and useless'- sure. The fact is Psychology and Anthropology are considered even lower IQ than Philosophy. You might be merely mentally ill if you do Philosophy. On the other hand, Jordan Petersen has done well out of clinical psychology. But he was actually trying to help patients.
Social dominance theory stems largely from the pioneering work of Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, who provide an account of the group psychological mechanisms (and social structures) that are used to justify belief in social hierarchies (including gender hierarchies).
These are pseudo-beliefs or mere 'Bayesian priors'. The fact is, people are likely to test them as and when convenient.
There is more than two decades of work by John Jost, Mahzarin Banaji,
That should be Bananaji. Must be Jairus's retarded sister.
and many distinguished co-authors on system justification theory, which is another approach to explaining the mechanisms that undergird justifications of social hierarchies.
But justifications don't undergird anything. Every serial killer has got one.
Out of this work have emerged hypotheses about links between political ideologies and speech practices.
Hypotheses like 'peeps wot speak posh iz all bleeding heart benders who think the sun shines out of the arse of immigrant rapist scumbags'.
There is considerable work on linguistic intergroup bias that displays the different descriptions of the same act by in-group members and out-group members. For instance, we praise someone in our in-group who shares a valued item with someone who would appreciate it as having a generous character; whereas, if they are in our out-group, we praise their action as a “nice thing to do.”
No we don't. The problem with junk Social Science is that it can't be duplicated save by equally moronic fanatics.
Shanette Porter, Michelle RheinschmidtSame, and Jennifer Richeson have provided evidence that the practice of linguistic intergroup bias is a reliable method to communicate social identity.
Stuff like saying 'us guys' instead of 'you bastids'.
In a 2017 article, “Language from Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect,” Rob Voigt et al. used a data-set of 981 stops of Black motorists and 299 stops of white motorists in Oakland by 245 different officers of the Oakland Police Department to analyze differences in the speech practices officers employed with Black motorists and white motorists. Using this data set, they found that test participants were in broad agreement that the officers’ language in these interactions revealed lesser respect for Black motorists compared to white motorists.
Voigt was using trained algorithms. The problem with 'computational cartoons' is that you may only find what you put out there in the first place. The other problem here is that Oakland PD has been under Federal oversight since 2003. Stanford University was helping them tackle this problem by conducting workshops. Behaviour which persists is behaviour which is rewarded and reinforced. Interestingly, the black police-chief was fired by the Chinese mayor after the botched handling of an investigation into a Chinese origin sergeant. The police-chief says he was victimized for whistle-blowing against the federal monitor whom he accused of lining his own pockets. Thus, Oakland PD remains under Federal oversight.
Many of us working on linguistic communication have been caught flat-footed by the emergence of robustly authoritarian politics.
These guys mean the Donald. They were under the impression that Bernie Sanders would be a two term POTUS.
We find in feminist theory clear early warnings of the limitations of formal semantic frameworks in elucidating rhetoric that channels ideologies that reinforce unjust hierarchy and social position.
Like that of Professors versus illiterate schizophrenics with similar political views.
For example, Sally McConnell-Ginet writes: My background in analytic philosophy of language and formal semantics and pragmatics did not seem to equip me even to understand issues like “sexist” or “homophobic” language or some activists’ claims that women and sexual minorities were handicapped in expressing their thoughts, in giving voice to their own perspectives.
Worse still her background in analytic philosophy hadn't equipped her to tie her own shoe-laces which is why she couldn't wear Doc Martins so as to fit in with the other Lezzas.
In teaching my first course on language and gender, I spent a lot of time on standard sociolinguistic issues, safely outside my own realm of expertise and hence nonthreatening to my views about my particular domain of linguistic inquiry, formal semantics and pragmatics. Gender, sexuality, and other social matters seemed reassuringly distant from matters like quantificational scope or the semantics of comparative constructions. Together with my students, I explored the gendered dimensions of multilingualism and the pronunciation of vowels, the choreography of conversations (who interrupts, who takes responsibility for keeping the ball rolling, who sets the agenda), vocal effects and their role in indexing gendered and sexual identities, linguistic ideologies . . . . But I was careful to insist that only language use or users and not language itself could be sexist.
Then Language crept up behind me in the elevator and pinched my bum. I said 'How could you! Haven't you read the later Wittgenstein?' but Language laughed mockingly. 'You're gagging for it, bitch. Anyway, it's my word against yours same as that time I cornholed Wittgenstein in the Gents and he wept like a pussy.'
I was also confident that there was no principled reason to accept any version of linguistic relativism, the view that some languages might be better suited than others to express certain ideas, to explore certain conjectures and theories, or to adopt certain perspectives. After all, I continued to think, languages just paste formal labels on concepts and combine them systematically. . . . Yet from my students, as well as from theorists in other disciplines and from those engaged in liberation struggles outside the academy,
they were fighting Putin in Crimea- right?
I kept hearing other views of language and its incorporation of bias, continued to encounter folks who experienced language as limiting and sometimes even wounding.
Not to mention their experiencing the Philosophy of Language as cold and uncaring and refusing to do the washing up even after you took the trouble to cook a nice dinner for the two of you and then when you phoned your sister she said 'dude, get real. The Philosophy of Language just isn't in to you. I hear it has something going on with the Sociology of Science. I don't know the details, but its really kinky stuff. You are well out of it.'
I began to realize that perhaps content meaning was more complex and also more consequential than I (and many other linguists and philosophers of language) had thought.
Also, maybe you can get pregnant off a toilet seat. The world just isn't the way we were told it was supposed to be. Just the other day, Mum phoned to say that our ginger tabby had gone to live on a nice farm. Then I saw it sitting rigidly on Donald Trump's bald scalp! Fuck is going on?'
The theory of meaning should not simply stop at making sense of the attributions of truth values to utterances.
It shouldn't even start to do something utterly useless. Everybody already knows that 'attributions of truth values to utterances' have suffered horrendous epistemic self-abuse. We must show empathy to them. We mustn't try to 'make sense' of their word-salad. Essentially, our Western Enlightenment Phallocracy sodomizes the eye-sockets of those the male gaze has already scotomized by, as Foucault, said a dazzlement that is not less than the repeated insertion of its dick while the Pope, who is wearing a gimp suit, and the Sun King stand by laughing maniacally.
It must also make sense of why people apply predicates such as “wounding,” “silencing,” “objectifying,” and “harmful” to speech acts.
Some women may do that. We offer them rape counselling with our dicks. They remind us that we haven't been able to get it up since 2008. We cry and cry. Words can wound. But only if you gotta limp needle-dick.
In order to study political speech, it may turn out that, beyond what contemporary formal semantics and pragmatics have to offer, we need new tools; we certainly need a new focus.
These guys need a new brain and a Time Travel machine so they can make a better choice of major at Collidge.
When one moves away from a model of speech for people living in a democratic utopia to one more suitable for the real political situations in which we are more likely to find ourselves,
we discover we've left things too late. Either billionaires are running things or Sleepy Joe and Comatose Kamala have destroyed every last vestige of Western power and influence.
then there are different goals and different central concepts. In the rest of this paper, we offer suggestions for refocusing philosophy of language in this regard.
The old philosophy of language looked kind of mathsy but, unlike math, was useless and stupid. The new kind is just the mimesis of a mental illness of a shit-your-pants-while-screaming-incessantly kind.
Communicative Actions and Effects In discussing politics, we theorize not just about politicians’ intentions but also about what they do (lauding, inciting, criticizing, etc.), the effects of their discourse on members of their audience, and whether they were aware that their discourse had these effects or not.
For fuck's sake why? In a democracy, when discussing politics, we look at what a politician was expected to do and compare it to actual outcomes. We then look around and see if there is any candidate with a better track-record though we may take a punt on a rank outsider.
We don't give a shit about what the guy said or didn't say because that is wholly irrelevant. On the other hand, if he did a deal with some other politician and didn't keep his word, he may have made a dangerous enemy who will find a way, sooner or later, to take revenge.
No doubt, there may be nutters- e.g. the Grammar Police or the Political Correctness Gestapo- who will pore over transcripts of what a politician said so as to ridicule him or accuse him of being an illiterate Nazi cock-sucker. But those nutters matter less than other guys who sincerely believe the politician was actually born on another planet and has been installed in a position of power by the secretive cabal in the Vatican which is causing my dick to shrink.
The key object of study is therefore the notion of a communicative action and its associated effects. In studying political speech, it is vital to attend to what Austin calls the perlocutionary effects of communicative action.
That's the only thing worth attending to. A guy may make an aesthetically pleasing political speech but we aint voting for that fairy.
Perlocutionary effects are the non-linguistic effects of an utterance in a specific context It should be clear that an account of political speech must also attend carefully to perlocutionary effects. Austin was not thinking of political speech when writing How to Do Things with Words.
Because he wasn't a cretin. He understood that Winston Churchill wasn't made PM because he was a good orator. Indeed, he was only returned to power after he'd had a stroke. The King wanted him to resign in favour of Eden but Eden was even more ill. Indeed, Churchill took over the Foreign Office after another stroke. Finally he was presiding over the Cabinet while half paralysed. Nobody noticed. Churchill should never have made way for Eden who wasn't ill enough to stay out of Suez. My point is that Churchill was politically most successful precisely when he could scarcely speak or deal with files. King Log is better than King Stork. Austin understood this very well.
But the topic of political speech underscores the importance of perlocutionary effects.
Not to Austin. It was obvious that Atlee succeeded because he said as little as possible. He and his top people were as ill and as exhausted as Churchill and Eden. They needed to lose to keep the Labour Party together and lose they most valiantly did- by the grace of God & Cripps's stupid moralizing and Atlee's own utter incompetence. Who calls an election when you are behind in the polls? Apparently the guy thought he needed to hold an election before the King set off on an Imperial tour.
Still, I suppose, one might mention Aneurin's jibe at Tory 'vermin' which went down about as well as Churchill's 'Labour Gestapo' remark. But, even then, it wasn't words that sank Labour. It was the Korean War. Suddenly Churchill was the man people wanted to see at Number 10. It should be remembered he began and ended his career by retrenchment on the defence budget while raising welfare one way or another. He was Randolph's son, after all.
If one has political speech clearly in mind when constructing a theory of meaning, it is difficult to ignore the importance of the consequences of speech (including the unintended consequences).
The Brits don't mind a guy shooting off his mouth when of strong drink taken. But don't go on the Beeb and start ranting about Gestapos or vermin. You come across as a nutter. Still, all that really matters is the exchange rate and the mortgage rate and bringing in lots of lovely darkies to do the shitty jobs while pretending you are against them cunts and will pack them into banana boats and send them to fucking Rwanda any day now.
The centrality of communicative action can be masked in some traditions in the theory of meaning because of the way in which such theorists have abstracted from ordinary communication in their models. At the heart of Paul Grice’s influential the theory of meaning is the notion of speaker meaning.
Which was cool if you were a Brit of a certain class and period. Austerity and reconstruction took their toll. The Americans could afford to shoot their mouths off. They were rich and, it turned out, the military-industrial complex was their Messiah because they feared Fear itself unless contentedly making bombs which could blow up the world and thus give them something it was rational to dread.
Speaker meaning is assumed to be something that speakers intend to make fully manifest to their audiences.
No. We assume it is what the speaker would say about what they meant to say. They may or may not want to make it 'fully manifest'. Ask them and maybe you will find out.
In opposition to such an approach, Tirrell urges for a refocusing of the theory of meaning to include linguistic practices
why bother? That 'theory' was shit. Refocusing a turd won't make it less of a turd.
: Some theorists understand language primarily in terms of the communication of intentions.
But they are shitheads. Fuck them.
When Sally says, “Peter is tall,” for example, they think the best way to understand what is happening is to think of her utterance as a means to enable the hearer to figure out what Sally’s (communicative) intention is.
We can make an arbitrary guess but that's not really the 'figuring out' of anything.
It is because of her intention to get across a certain proposition (that Peter is tall) that she says what she says.
Nope. That's just a lazy guess.
The words help the hearer get at what is important, namely, Sally’s communicative intention.
A guess is just a guess. It doesn't help us get anything important.
On this view, language use is primarily a communicative tool between speaker and hearer.
I didn't hear Sally. Indeed, this is the first I'm hearing about this Peter being tall business. People are keeping things from me. Is it coz I iz bleck? What else is going on I should know about?
What matters most is the recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. This framework, which treats speaker’s intentions as primary for understanding what a particular speech act does, is too centered on individuals, as if we each could control the meanings of what we say.
We can do so easily enough more particularly if we have a reputation for violence.
Surely, we do try, but often the meanings and actions associated with what we say extend far beyond our own awareness and control.
Sally admitted she eats her own poo. People who say Peter is tall tend to be coprophagous swine. How come nobody says I am tall? Why is 'fattie' the mot juste in my case? Anyway, it's glandular. I eat like a bird. Well I eat a lot birds which have been deep fried. But those birds ate like birds.
In contrast, I focus on linguistic practices, which are non-individualistic and communal.
Such linguistic practices are to be found whenever your toaster, or other domestic appliance, starts talking to you.
The communicative effects of discourse can go well beyond what the speaker is willing to admit, and even well beyond what the speaker recognizes as the communicative effects of her discourse.
They can prove the Vatican is behind the disappearance of your TV remote. It simply isn't credible that it found its way up your arse by accident. Anyway, the guys at the ER were very sympathetic. I think some of 'em must be A-rabs or towel-heads of some description. They know all about what the Pope gets up to.
Yet, as noted, among the idealizations of semantic and pragmatic theorizing is the conviction that interlocutors aim for (and regularly achieve) mutual transparency of communicative intention.
But you don't need words for that. Hold up some money and point to what you want done. That's transparent communication. True, you might get arrested because it turned out the stripper in the police uniform was actually a police officer and not a stripper at all. Also, maybe the House of Lords aint a Gay Brothel- as the name suggests.
In the standard ideal model, the speaker has a specific communicative intention and either expresses it as the content of a sentence they utter or communicates it pragmatically. Yet in looking at political speech, it is important to drop this idealization.
Why? Should political speech not, at least ideally, be transparent and communicative? Indeed, it generally is. The President comes on TV and say 'we are now at war with such and such country'. That's pretty fucking transparent.
Intended effects of communication are not automatically more significant, politically or socially, than unintended effects of communication.
Yes they are if 'a reasonable person' considers the unintended effects to be a figment of Jason's paranoid imagination.
We are also concerned with explaining effects of communication that are intended but deliberately masked.
It's like when a student says 'Sir, I'm not gay. I don't want to suck your cock.' what is being deliberately masked is that he wants to suck your cock. Indeed, he will probably kill you if you don't unzip your fly and say 'if you want to pass my course, get down on your knees and start gobbling.'
What one is attempting to explain in describing political speech is its communicative significance. In order to do so, it is vital to think about covertly delivered effects that are nevertheless deliberate; Saul’s example of covert intentional dogwhistles is paradigmatic here. And it is vital to think about unintended effects (see, for example, Saul on unintentional dogwhistles). It is even important to think about communicative effects that would have occurred in normal circumstances but did not. But is it really possible to frame a theory that covers this range of issues? We now briefly delve into some respects in which this is problematic, casting the issue in terms that have a long history in philosophical discourse.
Paranoid discourse- sure.
Trying to give a theory about potential morally problematic effects of speech leads the theorist away from the category of mutually recognized, successfully communicated intentions and toward the more general notion of a communicative action. But is such a notion too general? There are at least two worries one could have here about the generality of the notion of a communicative action. The first is that it makes the notion into a jumble of elements rather than what philosophers often call a natural kind. The first worry leads naturally to the second. Philosophers take natural kinds, among which we can presumably include social natural kinds, to be the properties in the world (including the social world) that should guide our theoretical inquiry.
Category theory is the right way to look at 'naturality'. But this is associated with optimality. Evolution, however, 'satisfices' or 'regret minimizes' and, for robustness, goes in for redundancy and multiple realizability. Thus, looked for, 'naturality' like 'randomness', becomes harder and harder to distinguish. But this can still be very very useful. Philosophy however was contented to grow more and more stupid and useless so that it could help combat Fascism or Jim Crow or the Spanish Inquisition or other stuff which disappeared long ago.
An inquiry that takes non-natural kinds as the objects of study will be as disjunctive and as ad hoc as its objects of study.
Nope. It will be quantitative, empirical, inductive, and linked to Structural Causal Models of a useful type. It won't be paranoid masturbation.
There is surely no systematicity to be found here, one might think.
You guys can't think.
So, framing the questions about the possibility of studying political language in basic terminology of philosophy of science,
which these guys haven't done. Where is the Structural Causal Model? At least mention Bayesian priors if you don't want to sound like Aristotle's senile Uncle.
we have arrived at these questions: Are the objects of such a study—communicative actions, and their effects—a natural kind?
Not in natural language. There is no 'naturality square' because nothing is being optimized.
Is political speech amenable to systematic study,
Yes. A guy who is good at this type of study can make a lot of money helping to improve speeches made by politicians.
or will it just be a description of ever-changing cultural facts? What we have said, of course, breaks no new ground: here, we merely seek to frame the issue.
But for the fell purpose of shoving that frame up your own arse while the Pope, in a gimp suit, stands by laughing maniacally. What? I've read Foucault. All Philosophical approaches to the Language of Politics must eventually frame the question of Governmentality as BioPolitics after which, OBS, that frame must be shoved up the arse of the practitioner in question.
4. Is Rhetoric a Science? The question at the heart of Plato’s Gorgias is whether rhetoric is a craft (Ï„Îχνη).
The answer is yes. That's why peeps got paid good money to teach the thing.
There are disputes about what Plato means by a craft, but classic examples in ancient philosophy are medicine and navigation. Crafts, in the Gorgias, explicitly include both manual tasks, such as making shoes, and non-manual tasks, such as “arithmetic or computation or geometry, even checkers” (Gorg., 450D). It is clear that a craft is, at the very least, a discipline based on generalized principles that are known.
No. That is an unwarranted assumption. Deduction looks super cool and magical in geometry but geometry started off as empirical and, to be useful, had to remain so. Russell may be said to get anal-tickle philosophy off the ground in England when the silly fellow came up with an a priori reason why Space must have a constant curvature so as to allow Geometry to exist. This is like saying for dicks to exist peeing must involve RAPE!
Socrates’ point, and indeed the main point of the dialogue, is to establish that rhetoric is a mere “knack” and not a craft and thus that devotion to the study of rhetoric is misplaced (see Gorg., 462C–463B).
It was obvious that he was totally wrong. Had he bothered with rhetoric he'd have found out how the Ecclesia actually worked and got acquitted of the charge of impiety. Instead he made a hash of things. But that was cool coz he could be seen as a 'pharmakos' of sacrificial blood offering which brings about collective metanoia or atonement. In the Platonic world the guy was a Superman. In the real world- that of Aristophanes- he was an unlucky clown.
The question of whether a project such as ours is possible is one of western philosophy’s defining questions.
No. The point about Plato was that he tried to promote education in Math. Western philosophy would be in fine fettle if it hadn't decided to turn its back on Math five decades ago. This doesn't mean there isn't a Mathematical Philosophy. It just isn't done in Philosophy Departments. It is what goes on in the head of guys working on stuff like univalent foundations or quantum computing or potentially very useful stuff of that sort.
The first worry we articulated above was that the generality of the notion of a communicative action or its effects of speech makes either or both into a non-natural kind and hence an inappropriate object of analysis even for inquiries into social theory.
Just equate arbitrary symmetry breaking with uncorrelated asymmetries and you can go as far and as deep as you please. Language games are game theoretic. Logicism is of little use when the difficulty is determining the payoff matrix or fitness landscape.
One communicative action could be speaking in a high-pitched voice, for example. And such an action is only artificially separated from communicative actions that have to do with clearly non-linguistic aspects of the situation, such as the speaker’s choice of clothing.
We get it. These two nutters like dressing up in their wives' clothing while screeching at each other. There's a Monty Python sketch of two working class women discussing philosophy which a lot of us used to imitate- when we were 11 years old.
This problem becomes pointed when we think of the case of media such as film, where arbitrary properties of the representation
They are unlikely to be arbitrary. The Director probably has strong preferences in the matter.
and the individuals depicted may lead to significant effects on audiences.
Because film direction is an art or 'techne'.
In studying communication, and speech in particular, there is a danger of drawing artificial distinctions between communicative effects due to linguistic aspects of the speech situation and communicative effects that are equally present but non-linguistic.
Very true. It is one thing to strike a Churchillian tone in discussing our response to an Iranian attack. It is another to suck thoughtfully on, not a Cigar, but some hobo's dick, to punctuate your periods and enhance the dramatic effect of your peroration.
Here is another way to make the point. We find propaganda in both pictures and text. Why study just the communicative effects of the text?
Propaganda propagates a particular message. That is communicative. It may not be alethic, but that is a separate point.
We clearly have similar communicative effects with pictures and regular non-linguistic aspects of a speech situation. Moreover, we find pictures and text smoothly combined to deliver messages. Why not give a general theory for communicative effects?
The thing is useless. If you really understand 'communicative effects' you should be very very fucking rich or else sought after by the great and good for your exceptional skill-set.
Would that not obviate the need for a specific theory of the communicative effects of language? Why cut (social) reality this way? Our answer to this question also serves as a reply to the second worry about the possibility of systematic theory. We have very good tools to understand linguistic communication when it is conceived in ideal terms.
No we don't. That's why the 'i-language' approach to language recognition and computer generated text failed so completely. Back in the Sixties, many thought that we'd have a universal translator which the Air Force could build into the headsets of fighter pilots so they could hear an instant and accurate translation of Russian or Vietnamese or whatever.
There is not anywhere near this kind of systematic theory for pictorial representation. In order to evaluate the claim about systematicity, we propose to start with the concepts and tools we know and then motivate modifying, adding to them, perhaps replacing some of them with others more suitable to explain the broader class of phenomena that interest us, and possibly weakening or stretching idealizations so as to give our account sufficient breadth of coverage to incorporate the phenomena in which we are most interested.
If you could actually do anything useful, you'd be billionaire consultants to Microsoft or Google.
Some of the tools and concepts that we develop will have applicability to communicative effects that stem from non-linguistic aspects of the speech situation. But our best bet to develop systematic theory is to start from where we already have one. Of course, in modifying, adding to, or replacing the tools and concepts of the theory of meaning to account for communicative effects that are neither said nor meant, we may be sacrificing some of the explanatory value of those tools, but this can only be assessed after the project is complete.
If these guys could add value, they'd be rich. They can't add value because they are stupid and paranoid. Still, maybe they will get a pat on the back for fighting Adolph Hitler or the Spanish Inquisition or really sarcastic invisible dinosaurs who secretly run the Post Office.
Plato’s skepticism about rhetoric survives in modern-day theory of meaning (at least in the Anglo-American tradition).
No it doesn't. Even the Anglo-American Anal-tickle school understands that some folk talk reel gud.
Philosophers of language and (to a lesser extent) linguists often battle over whether something is semantic or pragmatic (as well as over different meanings of these terms).
This is because the smart kids won't sit with them in the cafeteria. They have to talk to each other and thus are doomed to remain as thick as shit.
Grice’s classic example involves a recommendation letter for a philosophy job in which one damns someone with faint praise, for example, by praising them for their handwriting. In writing “John has wonderful handwriting” in the context of a recommendation letter for a philosophy job, one semantically expresses a content about someone’s handwriting and implicates non-conventionally, i.e., pragmatically, that they are not suitable for the job.
Having good handwriting was considered a Jewish trait as was being the hallmark of the homosexual. Chesterton's first articles were rejected by an editor who thought he was a gay kike whose original name was Cjztinsky. His English was a little too good. Still, at least he wasn't one of those damned Irishmen.
It is because of particular facts about the world, what we know about the practice of writing recommendation letters for jobs, that we can derive the intended meaning from the semantic content.
No. A lot of the 'screening' of job applications is done by ill paid clerical workers. They have a check list. They don't score 'handwriting' because it isn't on the list. Sadly neither is 'farts melodiously' which is the reason I never got a coveted post with Trump University even though I FedExed the $999.99 application fee to an address in Lagos, Nigeria.
According to some theorists of meaning, showing that something is pragmatic is tantamount to rejecting its study as non-systematic, similar to the way that Plato described the study of rhetoric.
Plato was a gentleman. A gentleman knows useless things. If you are shelling out money to a wrestling coach and a riding instructor, why not spend a little extra so your son and heir acquires a bit of intellectual polish? Also, math can be quite useful. You don't want to entrust all the book-keeping to a Syrian slave.
In these corners of the theory of meaning, the goal is to show that a certain kind of phenomenon—be it metaphor, figurative speech, slurs, or propaganda— is “merely” pragmatic and hence not systematic.
It may be protocol bound and thus systematic enough. The problem is the protocols would be arbitrary and non unique. But so was any programmatic approach seeking 'atomic propositions' or a 'Universal Grammar'.
As in the above discussion of welfare, we take it as part of our task to argue that discourses as well as the linguistic properties of words are at issue here. Yet we are open to the possibility that the original terminology did not allow us to recognize important phenomena, so, we will not fuss greatly about what qualifies as semantics and what as pragmatics.
Semantics is part of pragmatics. There are some contexts in which you take the trouble to speak correctly, others where you try to sound folksy or cool. Don't try cool and folksy. You come across like a kiddy-fiddler.
It is not that we do not think distinctions matter. But we may have a heightened sense of why they matter to the phenomena we care about, in this case political speech, once we obtain a more expansive grasp of the empirical domain
I suppose that is code for wanking. We picture these two fuckwits grasping each other's empirical domain with one hand while touch-typing this shite with other.
Ernst Cassirer wrote in 1946: 'If we study our modern political myths
we aren't being paid enough.
and the use that has been made of them we find in them, to our great surprise, not only a transvaluation of all our ethical values but also
that our cousin, whose special talent was fitting his own fist into his mouth, has qualified as a plumber is now making enough to finance a three bedroom house in a good School District.
a transformation of human speech. The magic word takes precedence of the semantic word.
But the semantic word is seated closer to the Chancellor who finger-bangs her relentlessly
If nowadays I happen to read a German book, published in these last ten years, not a political but a theoretical book, a work dealing with philosophical, historical, or economic problems—I find to my amazement that I no longer understand the German language.
Nor do I. Still, it's easy enough to nod your head and say 'Ja natürlich' from time to time.
New words have been coined; and even the old ones are used in a new sense; they have undergone a deep change of meaning. This change of meaning depends upon the fact that those words which formerly were used in a descriptive, logical, or semantic sense, are now used as magic words that are destined to produce certain effects and to stir up certain emotions.
And yet there was a remarkable continuity in German war-aims. Anti-Semitism wasn't exactly new. Luther wasn't greatly enamoured with people of the older religion.
Our ordinary words are charged with meanings; but these new-fangled words are charged with feelings and violent passions. 74
But German had recovered by the time my parents got there and started a family.
Cassirer’s point is that to understand what Nazism did to the German language,
they did nothing special.
we need to recognize that language is not only used to describe.
This is something we recognized as small children.
Language is also used to create “feelings and violent passions” and to instill a social identity.
So are a lot of other things- e.g. cuddles, kisses, nice nice food, bed time stories- say what you like, my Krav Maga instructor is a real hard ass.
In order to see how language can do this, we need to look beyond the use of language as a device for communicating information. We need to think
of it as a vibrator
about how a discourse can fit into a speech practice that itself conveys information. A single word can be an essential element of a speech practice. Penelope Eckert and McConnell-Ginet give as an example the word “jock,” a focal concept in Eckert’s earlier work: The name jock points, then, to one important way in which school corporate culture constructs male dominance.
It may point in that way to those nutters. To me, 'jock' means a Scotsman. But the Scots can do dominance regardless of gender. This is because they eat nothing but deep-fried Mars Bars and drink only Whiskey on the rocks- big granite rocks which they grimly grind up with their rotting molars in the belief that this releases the taste of the peat.
The male varsity athlete is seen by the school institution as representing the school’s interests, and this gives him institutional status and privilege.
Jocks have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
The word “jock” is part of a speech practice that represents a school in a certain way. By engaging in the speech practice that uses “jock” in that way, one is endorsing, whether consciously or not, the value system represented by this speech practice.
No one isn't. Don't be silly.
How can one be complicit in endorsing a value system without being aware of it?
One can't.
There are some resources in philosophy of language that can be marshaled here.
Only because that subject is utter shit.
It is a traditional view in the philosophy of language that we can use words that have certain meanings despite a large amount of ignorance about these meanings.
This is obvious. A blind person can repeat the description of things.
A famous example that Hilary Putnam gave in his classic paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” is that someone who cannot distinguish elms from beeches still uses “elms” to refer to elms and not beeches.
Only if he is repeating a description. Otherwise if he is pointing at beeches and is saying 'what lovely elms!' We know he is referring to beeches.
Still, it is important to emphasize that you can find both elms and beeches in the woods. Guess what else can get wood? That's right- dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Hilary Putnam- who was actually a bloke despite being named after Chelsea's Mom- and all those who quote him are supporting structures of male dominance based on the RAPE of Women and LGTQYXZ goats and other ruminants.
Jason is endorsing, whether consciously or not, Hamas sexual atrocities against Jewish people. But then he probably commits plenty on himself.
Philosophers of language widely agree that social conventions link our words to their meanings in a way that allows us to use language to express meanings that, in some sense, can be opaque to us.
No. Our understanding may be inferior to that of somebody else in particular matters. We may be said to, relatively speaking, be in the dark. However, everybody is in that same darkness relative to a being with a better understanding of the subject.
We defer to conventions in this way even in judging the contents of our own mental states—that is, even as regards what we believe and intend.
No. We do what is in our interest.
Tyler Burge famously imagined a case in which a man who, believing that he has arthritis in his thigh, is told by a doctor that arthritis is a disease of the joints.
Doctors are useful. Don't punch them in the face. If he says 'this could be bursitis of the thigh', you reply 'You're the Doc. Cure me.'
Burge points out that the man is likely to take himself to have had a false belief, to proclaim, “I was mistaken to think I had arthritis in my thigh.”
Fuck off! Arthritis or Bursitis or Cystisis- who gives an actual fuck?! Cure me already!
We defer to medical experts even to characterize the contents of our beliefs; we take the doctor to be right about what arthritis is.
We don't give a shit about what it is. The thing hurts. Make it stop.
Even what we think is determined by sources of authority outside of us (in this case, epistemic authority). If we accept Burge’s conclusions regarding the wide content of mental states, then, in a sense, people might have beliefs that they do not fully understand but that may cogently be explicated by knowledgeable observers.
I may say 'I believe in String Theory'. Since I'm too stupid to know the first thing about it, what I mean is 'I believe the smart guys who work on String Theory are onto something.'
And indeed, maybe this view is standard folk psychology: the idea of wide content could explain why so many of us are so fond of telling other people what they meant and what they think.
Fuck knows what this means.
The philosophical insights of Putnam and Burge provide resources that help us to make sense of the idea that a speaker who falls into a certain kind of speech practice may unintentionally convey messages carried simply by the use of that speech practice.
Very true. It is easy to get confused and say 'We must kill Obama' when you mean Osama. Also, Hamas isn't actually a delicious chickpea based relish you can smear on your pitta bread.
A rhetoric that involves references to “globalists” or “cultural Marxists,” who seek—via either capitalist or communist means—to usurp traditional hierarchies—for example, by encouraging immigration—will increase (one form of) anti-Semitism, even if the person who employs such rhetoric is ignorant of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or even of any connection between Jewish persons and terms such as “globalist,” “cosmopolitan,” or “cultural Marxist.”
The leading British Jewish organization called Suella Braverman on these 'anti-semitic dog whistles'. But she could ignore them because she is of Indian origin and wants to bite the face off immigrants of all descriptions. So does Priti Patel. Rishi Sunak is the only one of that crew I wouldn't be afraid of encountering down an dark alley at night.
The fact that ways of speaking can affect audiences without the speaker being aware of them helps explain another puzzle that faces those who seek to explain the rhetorical effects of demagogues.
This theory has failed. References to David Icke's shape-shifting lizards or to Cultural-Marxists or rootless cosmopolitan billionaires simply aren't anti-Semitic. If the Jews can't even massacre the Palestinians, they are scarcely a threat to honest, hardworking, Hitler-loving, maniacs like myself.
Many successful demagogues are widely regarded as poorly educated fools.
Only if they are poorly educated and do stupid shit.
However, what we have said so far reveals a kind of fallacy in these discussions—what one might think of as the evil genius fallacy: only an evil genius can be a successful authoritarian.
No. The leader of a ruthless gang which captures the State and uses it to keep killing people can be authoritarian.
According to the reasoning in question, in order for someone to successfully pursue an authoritarian rhetorical strategy, they must be consciously aware of its authoritarian nature and purpose.
There is no 'authoritarian rhetorical strategy'. Authoritarianism requires the forceful suppression of any check on, or opposition, to the power of the leader. Deeds alone matter. Anyone can talk tough. The Beloved Leader may never give a speech and only be seen kissing babies but if he keeps having any potential challenger killed, he is authoritarian.
Some authoritarian leaders are almost certainly aware of the effects of their rhetoric. Take, for example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s claim in a campaign speech in Budapest in March 2018, that we are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.
Orban isn't yet able to kill election rivals. Some say he has authoritarian tendencies. Others think he is a lazy, corrupt, opportunist.
It is dubious that he was ignorant of the way in which his words evoked anti-Semitic tropes.
Soros had funded Orban's higher education. They guy genuinely was buying influence and using it to push a foolish agenda. Soros is of Jewish heritage. It was 'the Fink', a gay American Jew, who told Orban to train his guns on Soros. But Mahathir had played that card very successfully a dozen years previously.
Debates about whether a particular demagogue is aware of the problematic effects of their rhetoric tend to be a waste of time.
Soros's trained dobermans kept barking about how Modi was Hitler. That helped Modi. Soros is a senile shithead. Apparently, his son is worse.
Nevertheless, the effects of rhetoric independent of the intention with which they are delivered are core data for non-ideal theories of meaning.
No. They are core data for crazy shit. Rhetoric is a special type of speech where the intention of the speaker matters a great deal, more particularly if she says 'it is not my intention to disparage my rival'.
It is now easy to see the problem with the evil genius fallacy.
Its a fallacy. That makes it a problem.
If speech practices can convey value systems without the speaker being aware of them, then it is easy to envisage someone who naturally engages in such practices without being aware of their overall structure or significance. Someone may just be inculcated into authoritarian modes of speech, ones that structure the world into in-groups and out-groups, without being consciously aware of the links between the language they use and these value systems.
One may be a complete air-head. So what?
Successful authoritarians, from Viktor Orbán to Idi Amin to Jair Bolsonaro, need not be aware of why and how they are successful any more than someone who uses “elms” and “beeches” to refer to distinct kinds of trees needs to be able to tell them apart themselves.
Only in the sense that a great tennis player need not be aware she is playing tennis. She thinks she is prancing around waving her arms. The thing is possible. It isn't plausible.
On the other hand, feigned ignorance of the message of their ways of speaking is itself part of the repertoire of politics.
And of talking to people.
A speech practice frames the world in a distinctive way.
Nope. It's just a way of speaking is all it is. Some shithead may say it frames stuff and some other shithead might want to shove that frame up his arse but this really doesn't matter to anybody anywhere.
A classic text on frames is Erving Goffman’s 1974 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. The concept of a frame that Goffman employs is much larger than that of a linguistic frame: “Social frameworks . . . provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence”.
Back then there was this notion that working class kids didn't understand that, just because they were minors, they shouldn't try to dig coal out of teechur. Instead they should study an 'Ology' and themselves become teechurs.
Goffman applies his more general concept of a frame to strategic political speech; chapter 4 of Frame Analysis is called “Designs and Fabrications,” and it is, in part, about political deception (see FA 83–123). Goffman clearly meant his work to include linguistic framing, and linguists have contributed valuable work to characterize the notion at issue.
In other words, this slow witted attempt to smear people as anti-Semites or Racists is the product of decades of pseudo academic activity. We must defund non-STEM subjects immediately.
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