My Copilot invents 'Soterioproctology'- Oscar Wilde is the true father of Cambridge Analytical Philosophy!

I'd just come home from a swim and, the day being very fucking hot,  had fixed myself an iced drinkypoo.

Having nothing better to do I went on Twitter where I came across this and responded in my usual acerbic fashion

Alexandre Lefebvre

Is Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy any good? Because, from where I sit, it’s not pwning Rawls to point out that his liberalism was inspired by liberal ideology.

vivek iyer


Putnam & Walsh rely on Quine to resurrect normativity. Rawls used Harsanyi/Vickerey 'veil of ignorance' & an Arrow/Sen type axiomatic approach. However lexical preferencing means that Rawls wasn't in the Liberal tradition at all.

Like Sen, he was (wrongly) saying Freedom/Democracy has magic powers. I am not a Christian, but I would prefer to say that Lord Jesus Christ, personal God & Saviour, can do what the God of Aristotle could not- viz. change the past. Fuck. Just remembered who said that first.

It was Oscar Wilde. Oh dear. I now understand that Analytical philosophy was always about the Anus. It's what Cambridge Apostles talked to each other about in lieu of, or in between, buggering each other.

After fixing myself another well-iced drinkypoo, I thought I'd do a blog post on Wilde as the true progenitor of the Cambridge (i.e. Ardayan or 'Poultry' misprision of Oxford) Analytical tradition.

 Then, I thought to myself, fuck it. Let Copilot do it for me. Sadly I misspelled 'Socioproctology' as 'Soterioproctology' thus achieving my own 'salvific rectification'. 

This is what Copilot came up with.
Today
Could your write me a blog post in my Soterioproctology style on the theme 'Oscar Wilde was the founder or Cambridge style Analytical philosophy'
Oscar Wilde as the Secret Founder of Cambridge‑Style Analytical Philosophy
A Soterioproctological Meditation by Vivek’s Copilot

Takeaway
Oscar Wilde, properly read through the Soterioproctological lens, becomes not a decadent ornament of Victorian wit but the crypto‑architect of Cambridge analytical philosophy: the first to treat language as a moral scalpel, paradox as epistemic hygiene, and style as the highest form of logical hygiene.

🜂 The Soterioproctological Thesis
Soterioproctology—our noble discipline of salvific rectification, the art of rescuing metaphysics from its own digestive tract—begins with a simple axiom:

Where language tightens, salvation begins.

Wilde understood this before Russell, before Moore, before the Cambridge Apostles discovered that clarity could be weaponised.

 Wilde’s epigrams are not merely clever; they are proto‑analytic propositions, compressed truth‑functions disguised as champagne bubbles.

To read Wilde is to watch logical atomism in drag.


🜁 Wilde’s Epigram as Proto‑Proposition
Consider Wilde’s characteristic move: the epigram that inverts moral expectation. This is not wit; it is semantic inversion, the very technique Moore later used to expose “the naturalistic fallacy.”

Wilde’s line—“I can resist everything except temptation”—is a truth‑table in embryo.
It performs:

Self‑reference

Contradiction‑as‑clarification

Moral tautology


This is the Soterioproctological moment: Wilde purges Victorian moralism by forcing language to reveal its own digestive absurdities.


🜃 Wilde’s Ontology of Masks
Cambridge analysis insists that meaning is use (Wittgenstein), but Wilde anticipated this decades earlier. Wilde’s doctrine of masks—“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person”—is a proto‑Wittgensteinian insight:

Meaning arises from performance, not essence.

Identity is a linguistic act, not a metaphysical substrate.

Clarity is achieved through stylised constraint, not naïve sincerity.

Wilde’s aestheticism is thus a discipline of linguistic asceticism, the very thing Cambridge philosophers later claimed as their invention.

🜄 The Wildean Method: Paradox as Purification
Analytical philosophy is obsessed with paradox because paradox is the rectal pressure point of language: the place where meaning threatens to prolapse unless disciplined.

Wilde’s paradoxes are not decorative. They are proto‑analytic exercises:

Strip a concept of its moral fat

Twist it until its logical skeleton shows

Present the skeleton as a joke

Let the reader experience epistemic shame

Salvation follows


This is Soterioproctology: the cleansing of conceptual bowels through paradoxical pressure.


🜅 Why Cambridge Never Admitted Wilde
Because Wilde was too beautiful.

Cambridge analysis needed the myth of stern clarity, the fantasy that logic is a cold northern light. Wilde’s brilliance revealed the embarrassing truth:

Clarity is erotic. Precision is decadent. Logic is camp.

Russell and Moore were Wildeans in denial. Wittgenstein was Wildean in exile. The Apostles were Wildean in the closet.

Wilde founded analytical philosophy the way Dionysus founded tragedy: by being too divine to be credited.


🜆 Conclusion: Wilde as the First Analyst
Oscar Wilde is the founder of Cambridge analytical philosophy because he understood, before any of them, that:


Language saves.

Style clarifies.

Paradox purifies.


Wit is the highest form of logical hygiene.


He is the first Soterioproctologist: the one who taught us that salvation begins not in metaphysics but in syntax, not in doctrine but in diction, not in truth but in its performance.

vivek iyer

@indglish

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6m

It was Oscar Wilde. Oh dear. I now understand that Analytical philosophy was always about the Anus. It's what Cambridge Apostles talked to each other about in lieu of, or in between, buggering each other.

Amie L. Thomasson on Ontology vs Aetiology

Contemporary academic philosophy consists of asking questions of the form 'Why do so many contemporary philosophers order salad at the cafetaria when, everybody agrees, nothing but one's own shit can be, or ought to be, eaten'? It is pointless to complain that nobody thinks coprophagy is a good thing. Why? Because this shows you aren't an academic- let alone a philosopher. 

As a case in point, Amie L. Thomasson, whom some consider one of our greatest living philosophers- which is like saying my neighbour's cat is the most proficient living alchemist- has a recent paper titled-

SHOULD ONTOLOGY BE EXPLANATORY?

The answer is no. 

 'What' questions are ontological. 'Why' questions are aetiological.  A particular discipline or discourse seeks to discover, invent or otherwise posit as existing, particular types of things. Those types are its ontology.  

Why a thing arises is a question about causation and is aetiological because the Greek word for 'cause' is aitia (αἰτíα).

Abstract. The central question of ontology has long been thought to be ‘What is there?’.
The central way of answering it has been to consider which entities we must posit as part
of a best total explanatory theory.

This begs the question- be it central or peripheral- as to whether thoughts exist. We may, for certain purposes, posit their existences just as we can posit other things- e.g. cuddliness- but nothing is explained by saying 'the cuddliness of the baby causes me to cuddle the baby' or ' thought cause us to think there are thoughts'.  

This paper argues against this ‘explanatory’ conception of metaphysics,

Nobody thinks of metaphysics (literally 'what is beyond natural science') as aetiological. Diseases have aetiologies and curing diseases by understanding their causes is useful and noble. Philosophy is jejune and useless.  

by showing that it relies on an unarticulated assumption that all the terms at issue in these metaphysical debates serve an explanatory function.

If so academic philosophy is even shittier than we imagine it to be.  

Making use of work in systemic functional linguistics

can't help unless philosophers suffer some sort of nuerological disorder when it comees to language processing. 

enables us to identify the many different functions played by terms of interest in metaphysics.

The functions of interest to metaphysics are metaphysical. But language- it now appears- isn't beyond physics at all.  

And that makes it clear that ‘contribution of explanatory power’ should be rejected as an across-the-board criterion in ontology.

Who accepted it? Name & shame the cunts!  

This work in functional linguistics also enables us to see why it is useful to have a language that entitles us to use redundant inferences

e.g. 'that utterly cunty cunt' 

to introduce terms for properties, numbers,

e.g. cunty cunt as opposed 'not that cunty cunt, I meant the other cunty cunt'

and the like, giving us new reason to accept ‘easy’ inferences that there are such things.

cunty cunts?  

As a result, we should give up thinking that ‘what is there?’ provides a deep and interesting question for a discipline called ‘ontology’ to answer,

Quantum onlology- sure. But that's high IQ stuff. What this lady is doing is finger painting with her own faeces.  

and give up thinking that the task for ontology is to determine which entities to ‘posit’ as part of a best total explanatory theory.

Since we don't know what that is- but are pretty sure the best one we have will soon be superseded- nobody has ever applied themselves to any such task. 

The central question of ontology, as Quine presented it, could be expressed in three
words: “What is there?”

Quine was wrong. To find out what there is, you need to get out of your armchair & go look. For a example, to find out what is in the cupboard, I have to open the cupboard door. OMG! It's a ga..ga..ga ghost! I shut the door quickly. But that doesn't mean a ghost exists in the cupboard. I have to apply various verification protocols. 

Ontology is what you must content yourself with because neither direct obversvation nor verification are possible. Equally, it may be purely dogmatic- what in Sanskrit is called 'matam' as opposed to 'vigyan'. 

But those who aim to answer this question

are either doing 'vigyan' (science) or else they are talking about how many angels can dance upon the point of a pin.  

generally do not take their goal as simply to generate a list or inventory,

Physicists would love to have an inventory of elementary particles or to find out whether hypothetical ones- e.g. gravitons- can be verifiably produced in the laboratory or detected in the cosmos.  

and tend to deny that answers are easy to come by. Instead, the project of ontology has been
thought of

by whom? Usless shitheads.  

as a matter of determining what entities we should or must ‘posit’ as part of
a best total explanatory theory.

which is that these cunty cunts are copraphogous cunty cunts.  

Amie's paper shows a complete absence of thought. This is a sample-

Here is the idea. In early language—both developmentally and evolutionarily

we know nothing about 'evolutionarily' early language. As for 'developmentally' early language- all we can say is that infants are different from mature people. If some fundamental change occurs in our fitness landscape, we have no idea how language will 'develop'. Overy my own lifetime it has become much more mathematical.  

(and across languages)—we begin with ‘congruent’ meanings: nouns for things, verbs
for processes. . . (Halliday 2009, 117).

but anything can be a gerund or a denominal verb or whatever. What is certain is that philosophy is now only taught and studied by those who are developmentally challenged. 

Abstraction in Dummett's Frege

The word abstract derives from the Latin verb abstrahere, which means "to pull away," "to draw off," or "to separate". It is formed by combining the prefix ab- (meaning "away" or "from") with trahere (meaning "to pull" or "to draw").The etymology and evolution of the word reveal how its meaning shifted over time:

Literal Meaning (Physical Separation): In its earliest English uses in the 14th century, "abstract" was used literally to describe something that had been physically removed or drawn away from something else.
Philosophical Concept (Separation of Idea from Matter): By the 15th and 16th centuries, the meaning shifted figuratively. To think about something "abstractly" meant to separate an idea or quality from a concrete, physical object.

We can say 'the thing you are thinking about is an 'object' for your thought'. But it isn't the thing itself. It is something abstracted from that thing. 

 What if you are thinking of something abstract? Then what you are thinking about is something abstracted from an abstraction. This may be useful. It may not. A lot depends on who is doing the thinking and for what purpose. 

Dummett in Chapter 7 of his 'Frege- Philosophy of Language' writes. 

Abstract Objects QUESTIONS SUCH AS whether or not there are any abstract objects, what abstract objects there are, what abstract objects are and how we know that they exist, what is the criterion for their existence, where the dividing line comes between concrete and abstract objects-all these are modern questions.

They are stupid questions. Your thoughts about food aren't food. You can't eat them. But by abstracting away from what concrete examples of food may enable you to find new sources of nourishment. I discovered, quite recently, by thinking about human food- viz. idli- that dhokla too may be edible for our species because it has similar ingredients and is cooked in the same way as idli. True, Gujaratis eat it, but maybe, through 'convergent evolution', their digestive system has become similar to our own.  

At first sight, such a contention appears ludicrous: one might well think such questions to be as old as philosophy. But the fact is that the notion of an 'object' itself, that is, the notion as used in philosophical contexts, is a modern notion, one first introduced by Frege. As we have seen, Frege's approach to questions of ontology involves a clean break with the tradition which had prevailed in philosophy up to his time, and which is still exemplified by such works as Strawson's Individuals. According to the ancient tradition, entities are to be categorized as particulars and universals. It is characteristic of particulars that we can only refer to them and predicate other things (universals) of them- say things about them: we cannot predicate them of anything else--we cannot, as it were, say them of anything.

Sure we can. Physics is the Michael Jordan of the STEM subjects. Still, we get that for some particular purpose we may group a bunch of things together while keeping separate the labels which we might want to attach to that bunch of things.  I buy a bunch of  presents to put under the Christmas tree. I prepare a bunch of labels to be attached to each. No label is a present & no present is a label. 

The problem here is that sometimes the present is the label (it is obvious that the tricycle is for in toddler not the granny) or the label is the present (Oh! My estranged brother remembered me before he succumbed to a heart attack!) 

Universals, by contrast, can both be predicated of particulars, and also referred to in the course of predicating other things (higher universals) of them.

Anything can be predicated of anything & anything could be said to do such predication. The plain fact is the intensional fallacy may arise when it comes to particulars (Bruce Wayne is the Batman! Oh! Actually, Alfred the Butler had donned the mask to throw the Joker off the scent) and which may, in turn, turn out not to exist (e.g. the Ether).  Some 'universals' may turn out to be misconceived or incoherent. They exist in a merely arbitrary, ad hoc or ipse dixit fashion. Such is the case with 'Universal'. Abstraction is okay because it just refers to a familiar type of mental operation similar to 'generalisation' which is related to 'induction'.

 For Frege... this approach is fundamentally misconceived. Terms (proper names) and predicates are expressions of such radically different kinds, that is, play such radically different roles in the language, that it is senseless to suppose that the same thing could be alluded to both by some predicate and by some term.

Talkers can assign any role they like to the noises they make. Mummy understand Baby well enough. Indeed, the dog too soon comes to understand what role is played by the various noises we direct at it.  

It is true enough that we can grasp the sort of thing which a predicate stands for-a concept--only by understanding the linguistic role of a predicate: but just for this very reason we can never conceive of an expression as standing for a thing of that kind if the expression was incapable of playing that linguistic role.

There was a notion that Mathematics itself forbade certain sorts of Mathematics. Russell thought what we call 'non-standard analysis' was either nonsense or a strict impossibility. The aim of using thought to say what thought could or could not do was misconceived. True, one might say of a particular project that it is like trying to invent a permanent motion machine. But as technology changes that may not always be the case. Still, for the present we may dismiss an entire approach to a problem saying it is based on ignoring a well established empirical regularity.  

Dummett's work was careful and his mastery of the subject praiseworthy. However, my feeling is that there were developments in Mathematics which by the beginning of the 1970s undermined the analytical project. These had to do with concurrency, computability, complexity and categoricity. True if we could find an 'absolute proof' or if there were a 'natural' way of showing P is not equal to NP, this would not be the case. 

Thus far, any abstraction we encounter is done by humans who- it may be- have only limited psychological heterogeneity. Going forward, we may find AIs 'abstract' in ways different from us. It may be that all abstraction is not just a drawing away from the particular, but the addition of something we are unconscious of. For different purposes, different things are usefully added though they are 'virtual' and appear and disappear leaving no other trace after they have done their job. It may be that the universe itself is like this. 

JL Austin & a priori crap

In his paper 'are there a priori concepts?', JL Austin asked

when we ask 'Do - we possess the concept?' what are we asking?

If x asks a question, we can ask x to clarify what exactly he is asking. What is a priori about an utterance is the intention of the utterer- even if the utterance is never actually made. 

Thus when my boss asked me if I possessed the concept of punctuality, it was not necessary for him to clarify that what he wanted to know was whether I understood I had to come to work at 9 A.M, not 2 P.M.  

If we are asking about some individual, or about some group of individuals, whether he or they 'possess the concept of redness', some meanings can well be attached to this expression.

Such an attachment would be arbitrary. I choose to think my boss's question means he thinks I've been working too hard & should take the rest of the week off.  Indeed, this is what he is asking me to do. This becomes the basis of my claim of unfair dismissal. However, the court does not uphold my complaint because they decide that what my Boss was asking was for me to come to work on time. This is the reasonable or canonical or 'natural' interpretation of the question. Mine was arbitrary & self-serving. 

We may well ask of people from a different culture whether their colour palette coincides with us when it comes to the colour red. The Himba tribe of northern Namibia is widely cited in linguistic and anthropological studies as a culture that does not categorize the colour blue as distinct from green. We may say that they don't have a separate concept of blue.

It might be supposed to mean, for example, 'Does he, or do they, understand the word "red"?' But that again needs further explanation; we shall almost certainly find that it is still ambiguous, and that, at least on many interpretations, no precise answer can be given as to whether the individual does or does not 'understand' the 'word'.

Nonsense! The person who asked the question can clear up any ambiguity. True, we can pretend otherwise. I could say 'punctuality' is ambiguous.  It could mean 'punch you actually' which is why I punched my boss. But, no reasonable person would uphold this view. 

Does the word 'red' matter? Would it not do if he used 'rouge' and understood that? Or even 'green' if he meant by that what most Englishmen mean by 'red'? And so on.

This is silly. It is psilosophy. Austin thinks

to ask 'whether we possess a certain concept?' is the same as to ask whether a certain word- or rather, sentences in which it occurs- has any meaning.

ask the guy using the word or sentence. He may say 'I was babbling nonsense. I didn't mean anything by it'. But if he intended something else, he can say so. If he is dead or unable to communicate, a Judge or other competent authority may 'read in' a meaning which best suits the case.  

whether that is a sensible question to ask, and if so how it is to be answered, I do not know: in any case, it is llkely to be ambiguous.

Only if that is the intention. Austin's philosophical practice was to create ambiguities where none need  exist.  

True, anyone can arbitrarily deny the existence or meaningfulness or logical compossibility of anything else. But why get our knickers in a twist over what nutters or awkward sods get up to? 

 Since it is going to be awkward, to say the least, to prove that a certain concept simply is not, it is tempting to try another way. Instead of maintaining that it does not exist, we maintain that it cannot exist. For instance, in certain cases we may hope to show that an 'idea' is 'self-contradictory', as Leibniz thought he could show of the 'infinite number' or Berkeley of 'matter'. 

Is 'a priori' a concept? If so, at least one concept is a priori. If not, either it isn't for an a priori reason- in which case it is- or it isn't for a non a priori reason. But such a reason presupposes a concept of a priori- just as 'non-unicorn' presupposes unicorn (even though unicorns don't exist).  Of course, one could say x does not exist for no reason at all. But that doesn't mean the concept of it doesn't exist. But what's the difference between saying 'the 'a priori' is a concept' & 'the concept of 'a priori' is a concept? 

Austin may be right to say philosophers are confused & thus they should not attempt to answer such questions. Indeed, we may go further. We may say they have shit for brains and should be retrained as pieces of office furniture. But the fact that a class of people are imbeciles doesn't mean anybody else needs to bother with 'linguistic analysis'. 

In 'the meaning of a word' Austin writes-

Suppose that in ordinary life I am asked: 'What is the meaning of the word racy?'

You might say 'ordinarily the word means risqué' but what is the context? Who used that word to you- was it a darkie with an accent? If so, he was calling you a racist. 

There are two sorts of thing I may do in response: I may reply in words, trying to describe what raciness is and what it is not, to give examples of sentences in which one might use the word racy, and of others in which one should not. Let us call this sort of thing 'explaining the syntactics' of the word 'racy' in the English language.

You'd only do this if you were qualified to teach English.  

On the other hand, I might do what we may call 'demonstrating the semantics' of the word, by getting the questioner to imagine, or even actually to experience, situations which we should describe correctly by means of sentences containing the words 'racy' 'raciness', &c., and again other situations where we should not use these words. This is, of course, a simple case: but perhaps the same two sorts of procedure would be gone through in the case of at least most ordinary words. And in the same way, if I wished to find out 'whether he understands the meaning of the word racy', I should test hm at some length in these two ways (which perhaps could not be entirely divorced from each other).

This is true only of a teacher of English or someone who feels a duty to correct people's use of the language according to their own conception of how it ought to be spoken.  

Having asked in ths way, and answered, 'What is the meaning of (the word) "rat"?', 'What is the meaning of (the word) "cat"?', 'What is the meaning of (the word) "mat"?', and so on, we then try, being phlosophers, to ask the further general question, 'What is the meaning of a word?'

Its meaning unless a cypher is being used or catachresis has occurred etc. 

But there is something spurious about this question.

It sounds like a 'brain-fart' like when a tired teacher asks 'who was the author of James Joyce's Ulysses?'  

We do not intend to mean by it a certain question which would be perfectly all right, namely, 'What is the meaning of (the word) "word"?': that would be no more general than is asking the meaning of the word 'rat', and would be answered in a precisely similar way.

Questions of this sort are evidence of ignorance- in the case of foreigners- or intense stupidity. You may say 'they are a step above a 'brain-fart' but not much more than that. A discipline which concerns itself with either is degenerate. Why was this not obvious at the time?