Researchgate
Google Scholar
Tuesday 4 December 2018
Thursday 1 November 2018
Presentation in November at APPC Conference in Melbourne
My first presentation as Dr Bruce Long will be at the Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference.
Abstract
Abstract
“I will present a development of a formal logical language
based upon an ontology of information sources. The formal language draws upon
situation theory (including Floridian infonic theory) algorithmic conceptions
of information, and the category/universals ontology recently developed by Leckey and
Bigelow to model universal properties and relations. I’ll defer to a reductive
and physicalistic conception of information with reference also to the
scientific metaphysical conception of OSR I presented in my PhD thesis, and
incorporate conceptions of natural encoding and virtual sources to provide a
way of characterising universals, properties, relations, and functions.”
Sunday 7 October 2018
Of post-Sokal hoaxes and the secular-ecumenical academy...
This post began as a reply to a fellow scholar's Facebook post. It got too long and it's well enough written that I didn't want to just throw it away...
Not liking an individual (or having 'besties' that do not like them) is not supposed to lead one to exclude or hamper them in their career, but this is unfortunately a deeply entrenched habit in the humanities. It's one which is broadly misconstrued and misidentified as something positive. It's variously relabeled, sold, and construed as cultural sophistication, intellectual and cultural guardianship, or some form of intellectual responsibility (this last one is hilarious). It's really just schoolyard-grade bullying, bastardisation, and blacklisting, and it's endemic and rife.
As I will discuss below, academia has its own snobbery and bullying, and thus the academy is not above any other walk of life in this respect. In academia, and especially philosophy, however, it carries with it an enhanced tone of hypocrisy and of the failure to uphold implied standards. It's an in-principle failure of at least some minimal standard of academic cultural and professional mandates: avoidance of inappropriate bias, adherence to appropriate fair-mindedness, and a commitment to anti-snobbery (this latter option is ironically almost anti-thetical to most of the working academy).
I think that it is fair to say that the hoaxing trio of Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay have all - in all likelihood - fallen afoul of the snobbery factor in the academy, and probably worse. Why? Because they're new-atheist-cum-intellectual-dark-web denizens of intelligentsia, and, as surprising as this may sound: that's not a good fit according to the (humanities) academy. It's a disposition not regarded as ecumenical or secular enough (where the definition of secular incorporates pro-religionism.)
Although I am no intellectual dark web enthusiast, the accusation that the hoax-trio and their ilk are extreme right-wing is probably particularly disingenuous and hypocritical, or at the very least paranoid and confused. They're either left-leaning moderates or liberal democrats as they claim, and although they snipe at the 'regressive left' (which is certainly part of the motivation for the hoax papers and their targets) - they're a long way from jack-booted right-wing anything. It's still more confusing to the novice than this, since it's the commercialist and pro-liberal and quasi-democratic (profits before voters) new capitalist-merchant patrons of the academy that are (profit-motivated) secular ecumenicalists extraordinaire. In other words - the humanities academy is sort of some kind of ecumenical left wing on the inside, but increasingly owned by commercial patrons and providers.
Merchants and business moguls cannot afford to be other than ecumenical and syncretic - until they are big enough to push their agendas. But you won't hear many serious commitments made to religious or irreligious ideology from most CEOs: it's considered bad business form and is bad for the portfolio and investors. They write the cheques and provide the grants in the academy, and so left-wing intellectuals who want to eat have to inherit the form somehow. Bashing new-atheists as Nazis is probably just one of many release valves for the awful tummy-turning pwessure - darlings. (That's when something close to psychopathy and self-interest aren't driving the career bus anyway.)
During the Middle Ages and up to the French Enlightenment (and beyond) lack of endorsement from the Church - or at minimum from moneyed elite that the Church wanted to keep in good faith - made it difficult or impossible to get any kind of posting (and certainly not tenure) in a British sandstone university. Famous 18th century empiricist philosopher David Hume was a well known victim of this long standing culture. Nowadays, increasingly, the new patrons, custodians, and overlords of the academy are corporate and (usually) liberal capitalists. Unless they're conservative capitalists like those who manage The Templeton Foundation. They're merchants and proponents of corporatisation first, and therefore generally otherwise ideologically unconcerned or uncommitted (except where they have a mandate and power like The Templeton Foundation does). Government subsidisation is still significant, but its perceived influence and authority is waning, and it is made subservient to corporate models.
Although I am probably more atheist than all three of the hoax-trio (granted, it's not really a competition) I am not particularly enamored of new-atheism or the 'Intellectual Dark Web'. However, I am just as little enamored of the 'sophisticated' and somewhat-sniping academy that denigrates them.
In my case, the wide interdisciplinarity in which I am somewhat automatically academically embedded is by no means a bad thing. Much the opposite. It stops me from getting bored, and some work in philosophy is better than no work in philosophy. It is the only thing I really like to do, and where my best abilities lie. Moreover, the vice chancellor of The University of Sydney, Dr Michael Spence (a trained Anglican Priest and lawyer) has been very big on interdisciplinarity for some time.
Perhaps most importantly in the context of the hoaxes, however: philosophers are famous for, and, according to certain tenets of the profession, supposed to be, intellectual and sub-disciplinary omnivores. Sure - philosophers have areas of specialisation, but a broad skill set across disciplines and subdisciplines is generally not only regarded as meritorious, but is expected.
I am a heterosexual male and an atheist. I am somewhat scientistic (scientism is either a term of derogation, endorsement, or simple description - depending upon who one asks) and an evolutionary Darwinist. I am not even agnostic enough - and I am too physicalistic for - my own atheist supervisor (which erudite and patient soul admittedly has an affection of sorts for Buddhism and secular ecumenicalism, expressed largely scientistically).
Of The Humanities and the Academy, Dark Webs, and Interdisciplinarity
Perhaps because of my age and academic status I end up teaching broadly outside of my primary disciplinary areas (I started my academic career quite late, which in the discipline of philosophy is - err - non-ideal according to many accounts). There are in fact other reasons for this 'channeling' of my talents, a few of which have to do with the unfortunate nature of the academy and the still more unfortunate (and unethical) acceptability of the practice of de-endorsement due to personal distaste within the humanities.Not liking an individual (or having 'besties' that do not like them) is not supposed to lead one to exclude or hamper them in their career, but this is unfortunately a deeply entrenched habit in the humanities. It's one which is broadly misconstrued and misidentified as something positive. It's variously relabeled, sold, and construed as cultural sophistication, intellectual and cultural guardianship, or some form of intellectual responsibility (this last one is hilarious). It's really just schoolyard-grade bullying, bastardisation, and blacklisting, and it's endemic and rife.
As I will discuss below, academia has its own snobbery and bullying, and thus the academy is not above any other walk of life in this respect. In academia, and especially philosophy, however, it carries with it an enhanced tone of hypocrisy and of the failure to uphold implied standards. It's an in-principle failure of at least some minimal standard of academic cultural and professional mandates: avoidance of inappropriate bias, adherence to appropriate fair-mindedness, and a commitment to anti-snobbery (this latter option is ironically almost anti-thetical to most of the working academy).
I think that it is fair to say that the hoaxing trio of Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay have all - in all likelihood - fallen afoul of the snobbery factor in the academy, and probably worse. Why? Because they're new-atheist-cum-intellectual-dark-web denizens of intelligentsia, and, as surprising as this may sound: that's not a good fit according to the (humanities) academy. It's a disposition not regarded as ecumenical or secular enough (where the definition of secular incorporates pro-religionism.)
Although I am no intellectual dark web enthusiast, the accusation that the hoax-trio and their ilk are extreme right-wing is probably particularly disingenuous and hypocritical, or at the very least paranoid and confused. They're either left-leaning moderates or liberal democrats as they claim, and although they snipe at the 'regressive left' (which is certainly part of the motivation for the hoax papers and their targets) - they're a long way from jack-booted right-wing anything. It's still more confusing to the novice than this, since it's the commercialist and pro-liberal and quasi-democratic (profits before voters) new capitalist-merchant patrons of the academy that are (profit-motivated) secular ecumenicalists extraordinaire. In other words - the humanities academy is sort of some kind of ecumenical left wing on the inside, but increasingly owned by commercial patrons and providers.
Merchants and business moguls cannot afford to be other than ecumenical and syncretic - until they are big enough to push their agendas. But you won't hear many serious commitments made to religious or irreligious ideology from most CEOs: it's considered bad business form and is bad for the portfolio and investors. They write the cheques and provide the grants in the academy, and so left-wing intellectuals who want to eat have to inherit the form somehow. Bashing new-atheists as Nazis is probably just one of many release valves for the awful tummy-turning pwessure - darlings. (That's when something close to psychopathy and self-interest aren't driving the career bus anyway.)
During the Middle Ages and up to the French Enlightenment (and beyond) lack of endorsement from the Church - or at minimum from moneyed elite that the Church wanted to keep in good faith - made it difficult or impossible to get any kind of posting (and certainly not tenure) in a British sandstone university. Famous 18th century empiricist philosopher David Hume was a well known victim of this long standing culture. Nowadays, increasingly, the new patrons, custodians, and overlords of the academy are corporate and (usually) liberal capitalists. Unless they're conservative capitalists like those who manage The Templeton Foundation. They're merchants and proponents of corporatisation first, and therefore generally otherwise ideologically unconcerned or uncommitted (except where they have a mandate and power like The Templeton Foundation does). Government subsidisation is still significant, but its perceived influence and authority is waning, and it is made subservient to corporate models.
Although I am probably more atheist than all three of the hoax-trio (granted, it's not really a competition) I am not particularly enamored of new-atheism or the 'Intellectual Dark Web'. However, I am just as little enamored of the 'sophisticated' and somewhat-sniping academy that denigrates them.
In my case, the wide interdisciplinarity in which I am somewhat automatically academically embedded is by no means a bad thing. Much the opposite. It stops me from getting bored, and some work in philosophy is better than no work in philosophy. It is the only thing I really like to do, and where my best abilities lie. Moreover, the vice chancellor of The University of Sydney, Dr Michael Spence (a trained Anglican Priest and lawyer) has been very big on interdisciplinarity for some time.
Perhaps most importantly in the context of the hoaxes, however: philosophers are famous for, and, according to certain tenets of the profession, supposed to be, intellectual and sub-disciplinary omnivores. Sure - philosophers have areas of specialisation, but a broad skill set across disciplines and subdisciplines is generally not only regarded as meritorious, but is expected.
I am a heterosexual male and an atheist. I am somewhat scientistic (scientism is either a term of derogation, endorsement, or simple description - depending upon who one asks) and an evolutionary Darwinist. I am not even agnostic enough - and I am too physicalistic for - my own atheist supervisor (which erudite and patient soul admittedly has an affection of sorts for Buddhism and secular ecumenicalism, expressed largely scientistically).
Since 2014 I have tutored numerous courses at five Australian universities. These have included a course in Identity, race, and gender studies headed by a Japanese speaking Australian lesbian, a second year course in ethical theory at The University of Melbourne run by a feminist gay woman, a course at the University of Sydney that covered Christian (Protestant) Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary debunking argument (an argument which had the entire philosophy of science and cognitive science community scratching its collective head for some time and which took the not insignificant talents of my own supervisor Paul Griffiths and a coauthor to counter), and most recently a course focusing on the narrative theories of human nature and the self presented by radical Christian philosophers Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the world-renowned and highly influential cross-disciplinary Rene Girard. I also taught a course called 'Logic and Reason' convened by a socialist academic at a regional university campus in country Victoria (the author of the course and the handbook was almost certainly highly sympathetic to the cultural dispositions of the hoaxer trio.)
The academy is a VERY broad church, and its central, and habitual, cultural commitments tend to be something like a horse designed by a secret committee, or perhaps a Frankenstein's monster designed by the same committee, or something.
Nonetheless, one doesn't have to be a philosopher to know the following:
1. Ideology - including religious belief - influences one's philosophical disposition. (Scientific Constructivist extraordinaire Bas Van Fraassen - a Catholic whose interpretation of scientific instrumentalism permanently keeps structural realist materialists on their toes - would probably agree.) This is okay, so long as, should one be doing philosophy, one is versed in, and willing to deploy, such principles as the principle of charity, and other tools for objective argumentation.
2. Academia - including the humanities - has a mandate for accuracy and high quality scholarship. Otherwise what are we here for? We're supposed to provide useful intellectual resources to people who are busy doing more applied tasks, and to help cultivate, develop, and preserve those resources on behalf of our entire society.
3. Of course the mandate of the humanities is also, ideally, and for practical purposes, one of forebearance, interdisciplinarity, debate, and - especially in philosophy (and Boghossian is a philosopher) argumentation. This ideal is all to frequently trammeled, but oddly enough - this is also partly mandated in the humanities. The recent hoaxes are possibly an expression of this latter meta-disciplinary exception.
Given that the entire debate about the epistemic and intellectual usefulness of postmodernism and its related disciplinary oeuvre is of significance in this hoax case, it's worth noting that like everything else in the humanities, these hoaxes have an intellectual heritage in much older debates and arguments. The debates and differences go back to the logical positivists of the early 20th century and beyond: to the intellectual debates between British Empiricist Hume and his intellectual quarry - Rationalist DesCartes, and to Immanuel Kant, who then went after Hume (and continuing probably all the way back to Aristotle Vs Plato regarding the forms).
One of my favourite on-line interviews is with the famous neo-Marxist post-structuralist Michel Foucault, conducted by contemporary analytic Anglo-American atheist-pragmatist philosopher John Searle (famous for the Chinese room linguistic-semantics thought experiment.) Searle asks Foucault - a French Continental left wing icon - what he thinks of the writings of Jacques Derrida (another neo-Marxist, but postmodernist, icon.) Foucault does not skip a beat when he deploys a neologism and accuses Derrida of obscurantisme terroriste (the terrorism of obfuscation/obscurantism.) Foucault complains that when challenged that his theory or hypothesis does not cohere, Derrida's writing and expression is so ambiguous and obscure, that the postmodernist simply replies 'You did not understand the argument to begin with.' In fairness to Derrida - this is somewhat in keeping with his principle of deconstruction of binaries.
I have nursed a personal affection for postmodernism myself due to a further affection for postmodern literature and science fiction. I have to keep this a secret from my scientistic philosophical pals and from the powerful old school neo-Marxists that still stalk the halls of the academy. Actually - they don't like me anyway - and so it's nothing from nothing. However, the theist department heads aren't too hot on it either! One thing that new-atheists and theistic traditionalists both have a hankering for is truth, or in the case of the former, facts, whatever they actually are (ask D.M. Armstrong - who will make an entrance shortly - if facts are straightforward things to understand and define. Hint: the answer is no).
Mostly I have to keep my love for postmodernism a secret from my atheist students! In the recent course on Identity I taught, I was nigh on lynched by a group of young twenty-something white male atheists who weren't having a bar of the idea that social construction might influence the development of a person's identity as significantly as biological determinism or genetics - by way of factors including, but not limited to, epigenetic psychological effects.
It's worth noting that - inside knowledge - Analytic Anglo-American and Continental left wing philosophy generally do not get along (there's the well-worn capitalist versus 'Reds under the bed' chestnut to account for: an anvil that seems set to wear out almost as many hammers as the Church). This binary opposition also tends to further the separation between Sokal-style-hoaxers and ecumenical academicians, but the interplay between left-right and religionist-atheist binary oppositions alone is immediately complex, and probably not understood well even by most participating intellectual combatants. If one adds the rift between Continental and Analytic Anglo-American thinkers, then Derrida's much loved binary deconstruction starts to look, perhaps, inherently meritorious. Then throw in some pragmatists (of which there are about a dozen kinds.) One has to be smart-ish just to track the alternatives, probably.
To provide some local (to my multiple alumni - The University of Sydney) colour and context: there was an internecine political and departmental war at The University of Sydney in the 1970s between the Anglo-American right wing headed by David Malet Armstrong, and the intellectual-left neo-Marxists. It happened at around the time that the Sydney Push of Clive James and Germaine Greer was in ascension. It was the neo-Marxists who succumbed. Former Australian PM (then a student activist) Tony Abbott was around - somewhere. Jobs and tenure were lost, great soaring egos were crushed, etc. (Politics and interpersonal sniping at USyd is famously bitter. It's a not-so-well kept secret that Popper drove a 'lesser' being there to suicide.)
Nevertheless, it is probably true that the cultural Frankenstein's monster is more like a vociferous many-headed hydra (Frankenstein's monster was far too friendly to deserve the metaphorical burden of connotation of academic warfare!) (I am allowed to mix metaphors here - because it's apropos to the cultural and political mess in the humanities anyway). The point is that both Anglo-American Academics - including analytic philosophers - and their moderate liberal left counterparts in the Humanities, still tend to be largely of a secular-ecumenical disposition that trucks no view that looks narrow (Yes - this is a narrow view too - but do NOT tell them that.) It's secular ecumenical pragmatism that holds sway in the academy, and it can get pretty fanatical.
Boghossian and his New-Atheist-cum-Intellectual-Dark-Web pals have got this against them: it's hard to be appropriately secular when you think - say - religion - is a complete anathema to the healthy development of both civilisation and human psychology. I am not saying they are wrong (or right). I am just saying that they are academically very unpopular with the academic-intellectual mainstream - which is itself an unruly and ideologically fluid beast with many heads, but one which, as already mentioned, is somewhat fixed in its grumpy old ad-hominem-ist (and fairly inappropriate) ways.
What does the above-mentioned interview between Searle and Foucault tell us? Many things. However, relative to the context of the current round of post-Sokal hoaxes - I think it reminds us that one humanities academic's truth is often another's joke-at-the-bar. This is, I suggest, largely healthy. At the very least it is, arguably, unavoidable in a healthy academy of humanities. The mandate of the humanities to truck very wide and varied intellectual opinions, arguments, and insights, all but guarantees such critical extreme-divergences will occur. I think that the 'will' is a 'should': it's meant to be a normative outcome according to the mandates of the humanities at both a meta-disciplinary and practical level.
Philosophers are supposed to argue. This hoax business is just more grist for the mill of cultural studies. Our Three Musketeers (or Three Stooges - depending perhaps upon which masters one serves) are in a very real way - doing their job. Sure, it's a raging, flaming salvo in the flame-war between postmodernist truth deniers and scientistic fact-fixers. However, it's also a fascinating element of, and contribution to, our contemporary intellectual culture. A sobering thought, perhaps, is that I don't think Diderot or Voltaire would be overmuch startled. Nor perhaps would Descartes with his deceiving demon - for that matter. (I did not know until informed by the inimitable Professor Eugenio Benitez that Descartes was regarded by many Catholic authorities as a rebel and heretic for his views and theology.)
I applaud these hoaxes as a positive contribution to humanities scholarship, and I will still regard the journal Hypatia as possessed of professional standing (as I think the hoaxers might also do).
The hoaxers are probably harbouring some resentment of the academic-egoist variety over being bruised repeatedly by the secular-ecumenical left-right beast of the proto-religionist secular academy (look what almost any tenured humanities academic has to say about their buddies Sam Harris and Jordan B Pedersen - for example). However, they're also making good on their commitment to generate debate and do daring intellectual envelope-pushing things. If nothing else - they have some cultural and intellectual spunk, and that has to be worthwhile for their students to learn.
The academy is a VERY broad church, and its central, and habitual, cultural commitments tend to be something like a horse designed by a secret committee, or perhaps a Frankenstein's monster designed by the same committee, or something.
Nonetheless, one doesn't have to be a philosopher to know the following:
1. Ideology - including religious belief - influences one's philosophical disposition. (Scientific Constructivist extraordinaire Bas Van Fraassen - a Catholic whose interpretation of scientific instrumentalism permanently keeps structural realist materialists on their toes - would probably agree.) This is okay, so long as, should one be doing philosophy, one is versed in, and willing to deploy, such principles as the principle of charity, and other tools for objective argumentation.
2. Academia - including the humanities - has a mandate for accuracy and high quality scholarship. Otherwise what are we here for? We're supposed to provide useful intellectual resources to people who are busy doing more applied tasks, and to help cultivate, develop, and preserve those resources on behalf of our entire society.
3. Of course the mandate of the humanities is also, ideally, and for practical purposes, one of forebearance, interdisciplinarity, debate, and - especially in philosophy (and Boghossian is a philosopher) argumentation. This ideal is all to frequently trammeled, but oddly enough - this is also partly mandated in the humanities. The recent hoaxes are possibly an expression of this latter meta-disciplinary exception.
The Naked Emperor We've Come to Know Well in The Humanities
Given that the entire debate about the epistemic and intellectual usefulness of postmodernism and its related disciplinary oeuvre is of significance in this hoax case, it's worth noting that like everything else in the humanities, these hoaxes have an intellectual heritage in much older debates and arguments. The debates and differences go back to the logical positivists of the early 20th century and beyond: to the intellectual debates between British Empiricist Hume and his intellectual quarry - Rationalist DesCartes, and to Immanuel Kant, who then went after Hume (and continuing probably all the way back to Aristotle Vs Plato regarding the forms).
One of my favourite on-line interviews is with the famous neo-Marxist post-structuralist Michel Foucault, conducted by contemporary analytic Anglo-American atheist-pragmatist philosopher John Searle (famous for the Chinese room linguistic-semantics thought experiment.) Searle asks Foucault - a French Continental left wing icon - what he thinks of the writings of Jacques Derrida (another neo-Marxist, but postmodernist, icon.) Foucault does not skip a beat when he deploys a neologism and accuses Derrida of obscurantisme terroriste (the terrorism of obfuscation/obscurantism.) Foucault complains that when challenged that his theory or hypothesis does not cohere, Derrida's writing and expression is so ambiguous and obscure, that the postmodernist simply replies 'You did not understand the argument to begin with.' In fairness to Derrida - this is somewhat in keeping with his principle of deconstruction of binaries.
John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy http://t.co/6bra21Bs9b pic.twitter.com/Siu2Ha8OJ4— Open Culture (@openculture) July 16, 2015
I have nursed a personal affection for postmodernism myself due to a further affection for postmodern literature and science fiction. I have to keep this a secret from my scientistic philosophical pals and from the powerful old school neo-Marxists that still stalk the halls of the academy. Actually - they don't like me anyway - and so it's nothing from nothing. However, the theist department heads aren't too hot on it either! One thing that new-atheists and theistic traditionalists both have a hankering for is truth, or in the case of the former, facts, whatever they actually are (ask D.M. Armstrong - who will make an entrance shortly - if facts are straightforward things to understand and define. Hint: the answer is no).
Mostly I have to keep my love for postmodernism a secret from my atheist students! In the recent course on Identity I taught, I was nigh on lynched by a group of young twenty-something white male atheists who weren't having a bar of the idea that social construction might influence the development of a person's identity as significantly as biological determinism or genetics - by way of factors including, but not limited to, epigenetic psychological effects.
It's worth noting that - inside knowledge - Analytic Anglo-American and Continental left wing philosophy generally do not get along (there's the well-worn capitalist versus 'Reds under the bed' chestnut to account for: an anvil that seems set to wear out almost as many hammers as the Church). This binary opposition also tends to further the separation between Sokal-style-hoaxers and ecumenical academicians, but the interplay between left-right and religionist-atheist binary oppositions alone is immediately complex, and probably not understood well even by most participating intellectual combatants. If one adds the rift between Continental and Analytic Anglo-American thinkers, then Derrida's much loved binary deconstruction starts to look, perhaps, inherently meritorious. Then throw in some pragmatists (of which there are about a dozen kinds.) One has to be smart-ish just to track the alternatives, probably.
To provide some local (to my multiple alumni - The University of Sydney) colour and context: there was an internecine political and departmental war at The University of Sydney in the 1970s between the Anglo-American right wing headed by David Malet Armstrong, and the intellectual-left neo-Marxists. It happened at around the time that the Sydney Push of Clive James and Germaine Greer was in ascension. It was the neo-Marxists who succumbed. Former Australian PM (then a student activist) Tony Abbott was around - somewhere. Jobs and tenure were lost, great soaring egos were crushed, etc. (Politics and interpersonal sniping at USyd is famously bitter. It's a not-so-well kept secret that Popper drove a 'lesser' being there to suicide.)
Nevertheless, it is probably true that the cultural Frankenstein's monster is more like a vociferous many-headed hydra (Frankenstein's monster was far too friendly to deserve the metaphorical burden of connotation of academic warfare!) (I am allowed to mix metaphors here - because it's apropos to the cultural and political mess in the humanities anyway). The point is that both Anglo-American Academics - including analytic philosophers - and their moderate liberal left counterparts in the Humanities, still tend to be largely of a secular-ecumenical disposition that trucks no view that looks narrow (Yes - this is a narrow view too - but do NOT tell them that.) It's secular ecumenical pragmatism that holds sway in the academy, and it can get pretty fanatical.
Boghossian and his New-Atheist-cum-Intellectual-Dark-Web pals have got this against them: it's hard to be appropriately secular when you think - say - religion - is a complete anathema to the healthy development of both civilisation and human psychology. I am not saying they are wrong (or right). I am just saying that they are academically very unpopular with the academic-intellectual mainstream - which is itself an unruly and ideologically fluid beast with many heads, but one which, as already mentioned, is somewhat fixed in its grumpy old ad-hominem-ist (and fairly inappropriate) ways.
What does the above-mentioned interview between Searle and Foucault tell us? Many things. However, relative to the context of the current round of post-Sokal hoaxes - I think it reminds us that one humanities academic's truth is often another's joke-at-the-bar. This is, I suggest, largely healthy. At the very least it is, arguably, unavoidable in a healthy academy of humanities. The mandate of the humanities to truck very wide and varied intellectual opinions, arguments, and insights, all but guarantees such critical extreme-divergences will occur. I think that the 'will' is a 'should': it's meant to be a normative outcome according to the mandates of the humanities at both a meta-disciplinary and practical level.
Philosophers are supposed to argue. This hoax business is just more grist for the mill of cultural studies. Our Three Musketeers (or Three Stooges - depending perhaps upon which masters one serves) are in a very real way - doing their job. Sure, it's a raging, flaming salvo in the flame-war between postmodernist truth deniers and scientistic fact-fixers. However, it's also a fascinating element of, and contribution to, our contemporary intellectual culture. A sobering thought, perhaps, is that I don't think Diderot or Voltaire would be overmuch startled. Nor perhaps would Descartes with his deceiving demon - for that matter. (I did not know until informed by the inimitable Professor Eugenio Benitez that Descartes was regarded by many Catholic authorities as a rebel and heretic for his views and theology.)
I applaud these hoaxes as a positive contribution to humanities scholarship, and I will still regard the journal Hypatia as possessed of professional standing (as I think the hoaxers might also do).
The hoaxers are probably harbouring some resentment of the academic-egoist variety over being bruised repeatedly by the secular-ecumenical left-right beast of the proto-religionist secular academy (look what almost any tenured humanities academic has to say about their buddies Sam Harris and Jordan B Pedersen - for example). However, they're also making good on their commitment to generate debate and do daring intellectual envelope-pushing things. If nothing else - they have some cultural and intellectual spunk, and that has to be worthwhile for their students to learn.
Is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/"Theory" journal? Helen Plucrose et al. submitted a dozen hoax papers to find out. https://t.co/TTDLuIQN9p via @areomagazine— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) October 3, 2018
This will put the cat among the pigeons. "Fake News Comes to Academia:— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) October 3, 2018
How three scholars gulled academic journals to publish hoax papers on ‘grievance studies.’" Wall Street Journal breaks story:https://t.co/dvnXLWjdxR
Video explanation by authors: https://t.co/31laR5Hb4r pic.twitter.com/aLTAgETrhi
Opinion: Three scholars have roiled the academy with hoax papers on "grievance studies," writes @JillianKayM https://t.co/2BGR2PVqDT— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 3, 2018
Academic journal hoax has exposed a world of nonsense - Herald Sun https://t.co/kelisrjcQT— Tribune Science (@TribuneSCi) October 7, 2018
Hoax papers are being used to expose the problems with academic publishing. "Gender, Place & Culture", an academic journal, published a hoax paper on canine rape culture https://t.co/P8v6U2oSYw pic.twitter.com/BTvVQYfv3z— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 6, 2018
The “grievance studies” hoax does not reveal the academic scandal that it claims: https://t.co/oDCdlDtgIG pic.twitter.com/vF6slmSc4t— Slate (@Slate) October 7, 2018
Tuesday 18 September 2018
Peirce's Symbolic Signs and the Symbol Grounding Problem (For my WSU Tutorial scholars)
In Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic system, the symbolic form of signs is distinguished from the iconic
and indexical forms. Indexical signs have meaning via causal pathways and due to their causes, which they indicate: smoke means fire, for example. Iconic signs have some representational element (often pictographic) that makes some part of their semantic content obvious, like emojis and some kinds of hieroglyphics, for example.
The signs used in latinate, Germanic, Francophone, Arabic, and Cyrillic languages are generally symbolic. These are atomic languages in which there are word-symbol signs comprised of letter symbols that are both based upon a formal system that is conventional: constructed using conventions and rules. There is no way of discerning the meaning of the word signs without a dictionary that maps meanings or semantic content to the sign.
“Usually, the symbols constituting a symbolic system neither resemble nor are causally linked to their corresponding meanings. They are merely part of a formal, notational convention agreed upon by its users. One may then wonder whether an AA (or indeed a population of them) may ever be able to develop an autonomous,semantic capacity to connect its symbols with the environment in which the AA is embedded interactively. This is the SGP.”
In the above quotation, an AA is an artificial agent. Think
of it as a very smart AI robot that has to figure out what the symbols in a
language mean without any dictionary. If the symbols were pictographic like
hieroglyphics (iconic) then if the robot knows about what people with buckets
and spears look like, it has a way of decoding the meaning of the symbols. In
the case of indexicals, the AA simply learns the causal rules and figures out
what cause is being indicated – probably using physics and basic deduction. In
the case of formal non-pictographic symbols like we use in English (words
comprised of letters), the AA robot has little chance of figuring out their
meaning without a dictionary. Put simply, there is no way to tell – if one
doesn’t know any English and has no dictionary and no one to translate – what
the meaning of any given English word is.
An indexical sign is one that indicates its cause. C.S.
Peirce’s famous example is a weathercock (this is a metal fin mounted on a bearing and placed on a roof. It often has the outline of a fowl or cock. It has the same purpose as a windsock on an
airfield.) The weathercock indicates which way the wind is blowing. Peirce called
it a dicent sinsign. Arguably the AA would not have too much trouble with determining the meaning of such signs if it had a way of understanding cause and effect.
An iconic sign depicts or represents what it signifies
directly. Icons and avatars in games and on the internet. Emoticons are another
example. If you have a rough idea what a smile is and what it means then you
won’t have much trouble with this sign: 😊. With an ability to associate visual patterns, the AA would have a good chance of determining the meaning of such signs.
A symbolic sign is exemplified by all of the words in all of
these sentences. If you did not know the language and had no dictionary, you’d
be hard pressed to know the meaning of the symbolic signs of English (or
German, or Italian, or French, or Cyrillic-derived Russian, and so on.) This
is what people mean when they say ‘It’s all Greek to me!’. The AA would have trouble with Peirce's symbolic signs for precisely this reason. There is no indication or hint embodied in the sign itself to tell the AA what the meaning of the sign might be. The semantic and semiotic system is hard (probably impossble) to adduce from 'scratch' even with lots of text.
Sunday 9 September 2018
The Categorial Ontology of John Bigelow and Martin Leckey. Part 1: A possible problem with Vagueness?
Being a relative novice about categorial ontologies, but with some interest in, and experience with, lambda calculus, I was very interested in a paper about a categorial ontology presented by John Bigelow and Martin Leckey at the 2018 NZAP conference (at which conference I also enjoyed presenting).
Categorial ontologies that accompany formal category languages are ontologically prolific. They are ontologically inflationary compared to the ontologies of particulars familiar from first order formal logic. Normally associated with categorial logical languages, categorial ontologies admit to the ontology as real universals, properties and relations, in addition to the extensional particulars or individuals admitted by first order formal logic. The categorial ontology proposed by John Bigelow and Martin Leckey both countenances, and admits to the furniture of the world, properties and relations. It also admits properties of properties, properties of relations, relations between relations, relations between properties, properties of properties of properties, and so on, recursively - in what John Bigelow recently called 'worlds without end'.
Thus an important element of adherence to a categorial ontology like that of Bigelow and Leckey is a commitment to realism about more than just particulars or individuals, and universals:
 |
| Bigelow, J and Leckey, M. Categorial Ontology, Presented at the 2018 NZAP Conference at Wellington University of Victoria. |
In their 2018 NZAP presentation, Bigelow and Leckey identified as a motivation the quandary faced by W.V.O Quine with respect to universals. Quine was determinedly anti-realist about universals, but, in accordance with the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, begrudgingly acceded to the inclusion of abstract mathematical particulars in the furniture of the world. This made Quine both nominalist about universals and - in a certain sense - realist: a very nearly contradictory position - if not a full-blown contradiction. According to The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, abstract mathematical particulars get referred to in our best and most effective scientific theories with apparent realist commitments, and so the positivist and/or scientistic philosopher should bow to scientific intuition and practice and admit abstract mathematical entities into the ontology, realist-wise.
Syntax and Semantics
Due to these ontological commitments, formal categorial languages like that of Bigelow and Leckey have certain syntactic requirements. Bigelow and Leckey's categorial ontology comes with a very clean notation inspired by the work of M.J. Cresswell (Monash University associate of Bigelow) who adapts the work of Polish logician Stanislaw Lesniewski.
The first semantic challenge for the formal categorial language designer is deciding what to assign the category labels to. In work on the deep structure of sentences in natural language, which discipline influences categorial ontology, the most basic chosen labels/categories are names and sentences. Cresswell's syntax involves the use of angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ and category labels 0, 1. Slightly confusingly, according to Cresswell's approach it's the name that is '1' and the sentence that is '0':
 |
| (Cresswell, M. J., 'Categorial Languages', Studia Logica 36 (1977), 257-269.) |
The term 'functor' can be confusing in this context, since it is a term of art and technical term in linguistics denoting function words: words with little or no semantic content that are used to bind and combine semantically richer words to build meaningful phrases, clauses, and sentences. In the context of a formal categorial language, however, the term 'functor' denotes - in accordance with the definition in logic and algebra - a morphism between mathematical and/or logical categories.
According to Cresswell's deployment of Lesniewski's system, John is a name (1), and runs is an intransitive verb. Thus runs would be in category ⟨ 0,1 ⟩ because it takes/maps a name to a sentence. The two place transitive verb loves is in ⟨ 0,1,1 ⟩ because it takes two names (e.g. Chris, category 1, and Naomi, category 1) to a sentence (category 0) 'Chris loves Naomi'.
The same approach applies to categories where what is labelled is logical truth functional connectives and operators. Thus logical negation ~ is category ⟨ 0,0 ⟩ because it will take a logical sentence to another sentence:
'All frogs are amphibians'
∀x(Fx → Ax)
becomes another sentence
'All frogs are not amphibians'
~∀x(Fx → Ax)
And, as stated above, sentences are category label 0.
 |
| (Cresswell, M. J., 'Categorial Languages', Studia Logica 36 (1977), 257-269.) |
The treatment in the above quotations from reference #3 is, perhaps, not as clear as it could be. Cresswell's presentation in another paper (reference #4) is superior. In the following excerpt, the lambda calculus abstraction of Alonzo Church is introduced. This presentation makes it clearer how the complex categories work. The first term in the brackets is the 'output' category term or the result category:
 |
| (Cresswell, M. J. (1980). Quotational Theories of Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 9(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00258075)
Note that there is an editorial/typographical error (missing angle bracket) at the category definition of the ∀. It should read:
F⟨ 0, ⟨ 0,1⟩⟩ = {∀}
|
Cresswell continues to develop the formal language, introducing the lambda λ-abstraction symbol which enables working with functions as arguments of functions, and which is also motivated by the need to exclude set theoretic ontological considerations from the formalism:
Church's lambda λ here serves to denote that the application of the function expression α to the variable x.
The purpose of the lambda calculus and notation is to provide an alternative way of defining functions for λ-categorial languages: non-extensionally as a parameter or argument expression instead of extensionally as a set of ordered pairs corresponding to a morphism. Its use is straightforward once the category language apparatus as described above is in place. Instead of defining a function in set-theoretic terms, one specifies an expression α in the logical language, and then treats both the expression and the variable for the values x as arguments. The λ simply denotes this application of expression argument to variable argument.
It's called λ-abstraction because the expression is treated as an argument that can take any specified value and with no function name - only an expression. In functional computer languages this is also referred to as an anonymous function. No function definition is used and so no morphism between sets or set of ordered pairs is picked out as an extension. In this way, the function expression can be used as an argument passed to a function or ⟨λ, x, a ⟩ expression in λ-categorial languages I'll not pursue further investigation of the lambda calculus here.
What's of further interest in this post is Bigelow and Leckey's adaptation of the Dσ notation for domains of properties and relations of individuals:
Bigelow and Leckey denote a domain of individuals/particulars as
Dι
D⟨ ι ⟩
and then for the domain of properties of those properties:
and so on, recursively ad infinitum, while relations between any of the individuals and properties in these categories are denoted by:
D⟨ h, k, ...⟩
‘the category for relations among things in
categories h, k, …'
'For instance, if we might set the variables h = ι and k = ⟨ι⟩. Then
D⟨ h, k ⟩ = D⟨ ι, ⟨ ι ⟩⟩.And, in that case, ‘D⟨ ι, ⟨ ι ⟩⟩’ is to read as the category for‘ relations between individuals and properties of individuals’. (From Bigelow, J, and Leckey, M., 2018 Categorial Ontology URL https://aap.org.au/ABSTRACTS-2018)
Bigelow and Leckey's adaptation of the Cresswell-Lesniewski syntax for property and relation categories is syntactically elegant. It does render the semantics into a manageable and compact form of syntactic expression that allows for tidy representation. However, I suspect that any deployment of comprehensive logical proofs will involve what I will call a 'LISP' effect for longer proofs, according to which outcome (see next paragraph) the proof would become difficult to follow and read due to nesting of parentheses. It's a style and readability issue, potentially.
λ-calculus was the inspiration for a number of functional computer programming languages in the 1970s and 1980s (with a recent resurgence in interest with programming languages like Microsoft's F#.) One of the known problems with some of these languages was human readability for complex programs. The acronym LISP literally stands for 'Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses'. It's not for nothing that there is a 'LISP showoff page' on Wiki:
 |
| LISP code excerpt from Wiki |
For those not familiar with procedural computer programming: much like logical proofs, any slip is death when it comes to syntax (and with computer code that can mean the aircraft traffic control systems!) Tracking the number of parentheses on the left and right is no longer a manual task in most programming IDEs (integrated [software] development environments), but when LISP was introduced to the world, things were less sophisticated and programmers had to count the parentheses and check their placement to ensure that the code would compile, and that if it did the logic was right. If a logician is not using a CA tool for proofs in logic, then the same situation prevails for readability and robustness in The point is that some formal logics have readability and clarity challenges, and Bigelow and Leckey's multiple nested ⟨ ⟩'s might become cumbersome. I should provide an experimental proof to test this speculation, but I will defer this until another day due to time and space constraints.
Potential Vagueness Problems
Leckey and Bigelow are aware of the challenges for their Platonic variety of realism about properties and relations. They bite the bullet on the Platonic commitments, and echo the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for the realist commitments their categorial ontology, recursively replete as it is with properties of, and relations between, any and all of the possible elements in all available categories.
As with all formal language development, category languages involve problems and challenges. These are historically well known.
Bigelow and Leckey address issues of definitional in-exactitude for names in both natural and formal languages, referring to the work of semanticists in their treatment of the deep structure of natural languages, and to the closely related work of logicians interested in applying categorial languages to capture deep-structure natural language semantics and to provide an ontological basis and semantics for a formal logic.
In first order logic, only individuals, predicates, and names (for specific token individuals) are admitted: one can have a predicate P and apply it to a variable x or else to a name a. Importantly, in natural language:
there are syntactic categories approximately shadowing the names, variables, and predicates of the predicate calculus; but there are complications. The syntactic category for nouns, for instance, behaves in some respects as if these were names; but often we translate nouns into predicates when we regiment our assertions in the predicate calculus
(From Bigelow, J, and Leckey, M., 2018 Categorial Ontology URL https://aap.org.au/ABSTRACTS-2018)
In linguistic (natural language) semantics (as opposed to the logical-philosophical variety for formal languages and the study of meaning itself), theorists attempt to identify the deep structure of the meaning of sentences and how it relates to the surface structure. The classifications of nouns and natural language terms in formal categorial language hierarchy is often not straightforward.
Leckey and Bigelow, like Cresswell, also identify ambiguous syncategorematic terms in natural language as being problematic for a formal categorial language treatment because they do not seem to belong to one category only:
"Deviations of human language from ontological stratification:
In framing a description of a stratified categorial ontology, some of the words we have been employing do not invite interpretation by assigning to them a single thing, as a ‘semantic value’ or ‘meaning’. They seem, instead, to scatter their reference across more than one, sometimes perhaps infinitely many, distinct ontological categories.
Thus, for instance, our use of the word ‘property’ resists the assignment to any one unique ‘semantic value’, which could be located within any one domain of properties within the ontological hierarchy. Instead, the word ‘property’ seems to cast a scattered reference all the way up the hierarchy.
...Wittgenstein...suggested that there may be ‘family resemblance’ concepts that spread their reference by a recursive pattern that might work roughly like this.We might apply the word ‘game’ to something with salient characteristics A, B and C. Something new comes along with salient characteristics B, C and D. So we apply the same word to this new thing. And so on. Eventually we apply the same word to something with salient characteristics P, Q and R, which has no salient properties in common with the things that we initially called games because they have properties A, B and C.
A similar pattern can be elicited concerning our theoretical applications of the word ‘property’. We apply the word ‘property’ to things in category D⟨ ι ⟩ because they stand in a relation that we call ‘being instantiated by’ to the individuals that are found in the domain Dι
Then, at categorial levels just a few steps higher – say, categories D⟨ h ⟩ and Dh – we will find a relationship that resembles the ‘instantiation’ relationship between D⟨ ι ⟩ and Dι . Consequently, we transfer the reference of the words ‘being instantiated by’ up to that level as well. This recursive mechanism will smear the reference of the linguistic expressions ‘property’ and ‘is instantiated by’ all the way up the hierarchy, by a process that closely echoes Wittgenstein’s conception of a ‘family resemblance’. "
(From Bigelow, J, and Leckey, M., 2018 Categorial Ontology URL https://aap.org.au/ABSTRACTS-2018)Cresswell notes that some category language theorists have introduced features that allow multi-category expressions:
Again here there is some difficult typography.
"...for any function a in D⟨0,1⟩ , ζ(a) is the function such that for any x in D1 , (ζ(a) = ω(a(x))
Syncategorematic natural language represents a problem for category language. However, I think that one other possible related challenge for this kind of categorial language and ontology arises due to logical vagueness (common examples include identifying at exactly what point on a colour spectrum dark red becomes purple, or at what number of hairs a person attains the property of baldness). They are related to this kind of syncategorematic language ambiguity, but are not the same.
One example hinted at by Bigelow and Leckey themselves is that of the property of being approximately spherical, with a matching category for all of the individuals that are approximately spherical. Now, the natural language label for this category is easily stated. However, it would seem to be a requirement of categorial language and ontology of the kind Bigelow and Leckey desire that the categories be unambiguous and distinct,even if the semantic content of certain terms is spread across them. Yet, I suspect that the obvious sorites paradox associated with the concept of approximate sphericity (at what point does some geometric object that is not spherical become approximately spherical, and how is this decided and why?) troubles the base category of individuals, and by recursion all of the categories containing instantiations of property and relations that are based upon the category of individuals.
It's not so much that the property of being approximately spherical is cross-category in terms of expression that refer to it (it may well be so). It's not that it involves a progressive family resemblance problem such that the surface meaning of the term has slipped or migrated across deep meaning categories. It's that the property itself is ineliminably vague. Thus the category - against the requirements for category language categories - is also vague or perhaps undefinable in the right way. Why do I surmise that this might be a problem for Leckey and Bigelow? Because their proposed category ontology is supposed to be superior to, and more coherent than, those ontologies associated with formal languages which do not admit such a wide range of Platonic entities onto the menu of existing things.
There are pathological cases and problematic cases for all formal logics. Bertrand Russell's own paradox of FOL is perhaps the locus classicus example.
The domain for the property instantiated by the property of being approximately spherical would seem to be dead on arrival. Moreover, it is not clear what happens to the 'is instantiated by' relation and its domain in this case. Perhaps this pathological case is not something that should be admitted into consideration.
Perhaps the members of the set of approximately spherical things will have to be a Zadehian fuzzy set, given that adducing exactly when something crosses the threshold between approximately spherical, and not approximately spherical, might be prohibitive.
References
- Bigelow, John, (1988), The Reality of Numbers: A Physicalist’s Philosophy of Mathematics, Oxford: Clarendon.
- From Bigelow, J, and Leckey, M., 2018 Categorial Ontology URL https://aap.org.au/ABSTRACTS-2018)
- Cresswell, M. J., (1977) 'Categorial Languages', Studia Logica 36 , 257-269.
- Cresswell, M. J. (1980). Quotational Theories of Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 9(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00258075
- Linnebo, Ø. (2018). Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/platonism-mathematics/
- Gallin, D. (1977). Review: M. J. Cresswell, Logics and Languages. J. Symbolic Logic, 42(iss. 3), 425–426.
- Rennie, M. K. (1974). CRESSWELL, M. J.: “Logics and Languages” (Book Review). Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 52(Generic), 277.
Sunday 26 August 2018
Is biology the only or correct source for answering the question 'What is the Human?' ? Ask these Dudes...
@drcfleming Dr Ronai on concepts of species... Looks relevant to 101010.3 What is the Human. Perhaps the answer is not in biology for what the human is? https://t.co/LTsQEEVyQW
— Bruce Long (梅龙） (@brucerlong) August 27, 2018
Wednesday 15 August 2018
Powerpoint slides for my WSU 101010.3 3rd Year 'What is the Human' Scholars...
Here are the Powerpoint slides for all of my Tuesday 101010.3 What is the Human tutorials so far online:
https://tinyurl.com/y94xe484
Wednesday 25 July 2018
Wolfgang Iser's 'Secret' Source for Repertoire and the Interdisciplinarity of The Philosophy of Information
Philosophers of information are used to the ready interdisciplinarity that the subdiscipline both avails, and demands, of the researcher. This is due to many factors including the polysemous content of the term 'information' itself, the general intuitive and practical importance of information (on a par with such things as knowledge and structure, and related intimately to both) and the general recognition of the validity and salience of pluralist conceptions of information.
I intend to make this short post one in a series of 'who knows' how many on interdisciplinarity in the philosophy of information.
When I first embarked upon my Master of Philosophy in English at The University of Sydney, I had only recently completed an Honours First Class in Philosophy and been admitted to a PhD in philosophy. A flight of literary fancy took me and I decided to try a lateral and interdisciplinary move to English. Dr Peter Marks suggested that I use the topic of my Honours thesis as a jumping-off point. I was surprised at this suggestion, since the Honours thesis was significantly orientated towards the philosophy of information and probability: more philosophy of science and analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American vein.
I should have realised that Professor Marks knew what was afoot. I had only just met him and was not aware that I was talking to an eminent Orwell scholar from Oxford with a famous thesis about Orwell.
It transpires that Shannon's appeal in his editorial address in the 1956 edition of IEEE Transactions was a response to a trend of literary theorists and social scientists to embrace - metaphorically, analogically, and otherwise - the ideas of Shannon's very much applied scientific and statistical Mathematical Theory of Communication:
In Shannon's 1948 applied statistical theory, there are causal information sources (Shannon's physical stochastic processes and in-model representations of the same) and then there are complex polysemantic combined information sources which include the properties of Shannon sources, but also include dynamical situations and data structures that have pre-encoded epistemic and cognitive, linguistic, then political and ideological semantic information/content. Sounds overly fixated upon information theory and somewhat over-analytical or 'scientistic' - right?
Perhaps not. Wolfgang Iser's reader reception theory was built upon the foundation of the idea of repertoire. Repertoires are the sets of texts (using literary theoretic parlance) that influence the reader's partial construction of parsed and interpreted texts and their associated narratives (where a narrative can be construed broadly as semantic and epistemic context and content). As is the case with most theories - especially those in the arts and humanities - the core idea came from elsewhere. It came from a little known French analytic philosopher and polymath by the name of Abram Moles. Moles' primary interest was in what is sometimes called computational aesthetics. He attempted to use Claude E. Shannon's conception of information sources and transmission in an analysis of texts and textual transmission (a not uncommon trend in the mid to late 20th century).
I intend to make this short post one in a series of 'who knows' how many on interdisciplinarity in the philosophy of information.
When I first embarked upon my Master of Philosophy in English at The University of Sydney, I had only recently completed an Honours First Class in Philosophy and been admitted to a PhD in philosophy. A flight of literary fancy took me and I decided to try a lateral and interdisciplinary move to English. Dr Peter Marks suggested that I use the topic of my Honours thesis as a jumping-off point. I was surprised at this suggestion, since the Honours thesis was significantly orientated towards the philosophy of information and probability: more philosophy of science and analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American vein.
I should have realised that Professor Marks knew what was afoot. I had only just met him and was not aware that I was talking to an eminent Orwell scholar from Oxford with a famous thesis about Orwell.
It transpires that Shannon's appeal in his editorial address in the 1956 edition of IEEE Transactions was a response to a trend of literary theorists and social scientists to embrace - metaphorically, analogically, and otherwise - the ideas of Shannon's very much applied scientific and statistical Mathematical Theory of Communication:
 |
| The Bandwagon Article can be found here and at this nice blogopedia Wiki based article from which I learned that the Sokal hoax article in fact draws parodically upon Shannon's article. |
Perhaps not. Wolfgang Iser's reader reception theory was built upon the foundation of the idea of repertoire. Repertoires are the sets of texts (using literary theoretic parlance) that influence the reader's partial construction of parsed and interpreted texts and their associated narratives (where a narrative can be construed broadly as semantic and epistemic context and content). As is the case with most theories - especially those in the arts and humanities - the core idea came from elsewhere. It came from a little known French analytic philosopher and polymath by the name of Abram Moles. Moles' primary interest was in what is sometimes called computational aesthetics. He attempted to use Claude E. Shannon's conception of information sources and transmission in an analysis of texts and textual transmission (a not uncommon trend in the mid to late 20th century).
 |
| Abraham Moles |
 |
| Moles |
This influence of Shannon upon the work of structuralist literary theorists, grammarians, and social scientists is also revealed in the work of structuralists John Lyons and Zellig S. Harris. Harris was a true informationist interdisciplinarian, producing works analysing the information content of specific scientific language, formulating one of the first semantic theories of information, and even producing an informational analysis of scientific structures in molecular bioscience/immunlogy (11 and 12 below.)
That information theory influences late structuralist and early poststructuralist and postmodern theory by way of Iser's work is borne out by those theorists investments in effort to apply information theory to grammar, linguistics, and literary theory:
That information theory influences late structuralist and early poststructuralist and postmodern theory by way of Iser's work is borne out by those theorists investments in effort to apply information theory to grammar, linguistics, and literary theory:
 |
| From an interview with Wolfgang Iser |
Notice that the references to instructions (and the execution thereof), codes, information, and feed-back all draw heavily upon the discourses of Wienerian cybernetics and Shannonian information theory as well as the emerging computer sciences of the time. Those readers familiar with the science of computer architecture will recognise that instruction processing and microcodes are the stuff of earlier microcode based CPU architectures.
More recently in history, new efforts have also arisen in the other scholarly direction - from critical theory to information theory with the former applied to the implications and effects of the latter. Fuchs work clearly reflects the style and discourse of lat 20th century neo-marxist continental philosophers.
Again the discursive admixture of very continental (and in this case neomarxist) and literary theoretic modes with that of the information sciences is striking, if not unexpected. The proposed meta-theoretic critical discipline is a natural, yet clever and inventive, evolution of the tool set of critical theory.
The philosophy of information lends itself to and requires a breathtaking interdisciplinary breadth that is also constrained by a science-humanities conceptual nexus rooted in applied science as significant as The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Professor Peter Marks had seen the influence of information theory on structuralism and poststructuralism first hand, and had a ready repertoire for a beginner to apply himself too.
Bibliography
- Allmer, T. (2012). Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism. Frankfurt: Lang, Peter, GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften.
- Baddeley, R., & Attewell, D. (2009). The Relationship Between Language and the Environment: Information Theory Shows Why We Have Only Three Lightness Terms. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1100–1107.
- Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964). Language and information: selected essays on their theory and application. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.
- Cooper, W. S. (1978). Foundations of logico-linguistics: a unified theory of information, language, and logic (Vol. 2). Dordrecht, Holland;Boston; D. Reidel Pub. Co.
- De Bruyn, B. (2012). Wolfgang Iser: A Companion (Vol. 1). Berlin ;Boston: De Gruyter.
- Fuchs, C. (2009). Towards a critical theory of information. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v7i2.91
- Harris, Z. S. (1951). Structural linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Harris, Z. S. (1962). String analysis of sentence structure (Vol. no. 1). The Hague: Mouton.
- Harris, Z. S. (1982). A grammar of English on mathematical principles. New York: Wiley.
- Harris, Z. S. (1988). Language and information (Vol. no. 28). New York: Columbia University Press.
- Harris, Z. S. (1989). The Form of information in science: analysis of an immunology sublanguage (Vol. 104). Dordrecht [Netherlands];Boston; Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- Harris, Z. S. (1991). A theory of language and information: a mathematical approach. Oxford [England];New York; Clarendon Press.
- Harris, Z. S. (2002). The structure of science information. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 35(4), 215–221.
- Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader: patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London [etc.]: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Jauss, H. R., & De Man, P. (1982). Toward an aesthetic of reception (Vol. 2). Brighton: Harvester.
- LEE, R. (2010). The use of information theory to determine the language character type of Pictish symbols. Scottish Archaeological Journal, 32(2), 137–176.
- Lodwick, W. A., & Thipwiwatpotjana, P. (2017). Generalized uncertainty theory: A language for information deficiency. Studies in Computational Intelligence, 696, 37–69.
- Lyons, J., Newman, S., Sapir, P., Swiggers, P., & Zellig, S. H. (2008). General Linguistics (Vol. I). Berlin ;Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Montemurro, M. A., & Zanette, D. (2009). Towards the quantification of the semantic information encoded in written language.
- Pereira, F. (2000). Formal grammar and information theory: together again? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 358(1769), 1239–1253.
- PLOTKIN, J. B., & NOWAK, M. A. (2000). Language Evolution and Information Theory. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 205(1), 147–159.
- Shannon, C. (1956). The bandwagon (Edtl.). IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 2(1), 3–3.
- Whitworth, A. (2006). Communicative competence in the information age: Towards a critical theory of information literacy education. Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5(1), 1–13.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)