The Human Question

Augustine's words, echoed by Anselm, that we must believe in order to understand, apply to more than just religious doctrine. Every speech act is an act of sharing in the beliefs of a linguistic community, and a kind of trust in the community's "word."

How is it that scientists see something happening the same way all of the time and understand it as necessarily happening that way? Light must travel at the speed at which it travels (then again, who "sees" light travelling?). Could it be that necessity in nature, is a common sense notion, one that is derived, like the notion of identity through time, reliability of the senses, etc. from our life-world? But where in our everday, not-necessarily-scientific experience do we encounter necessity? In the relation between moments (the term "moments" here used as Husserl used it).

There are two senses of abstraction ins Q. 85 of the prima pars of the Summa theologiae: to see something under a certain formality and to separate something from what is around it. Language, by the very fact that it uses word-units, tempts us to take as abstracted in the second sense what is given abstractly in the first sense. Language tempts us to regard moments as pieces. That is how language bewitches philosophers.

The primordially human life act is not using a hammer: it's communication. Dasein, says the Heideggerian, can be one person or a society. But Dasein cannot be a society, for the latter is constituted by cooperative, communicative activity, freely engaged in by many agents. Society is not just a quasi-personified whole. This objection should be dispositive, unless one is a fascist.

If afffirming human freedom seems like mystery-mongering, then compare this with the human ability to know necessity in the world: what causes the latter? To those who think freedom impossible, I would ask do you know that necessary truths? And if so, do you affirm that they are true because of antecedent natural events that forced you to see them as necessarily so? If so, then you don't really know that they are necessarily true. Perhaps it's possible, on this hypothesis, that you could be forced to see 4+3=2 as necessarily true as well...etc. with modem tollens. The necessity read into nature by determinists is transposed from math or from something analogous.

Logical positivists wanted to locate necessity in language so as to avoid metaphysics. But isn't this just a new version of Hume's ideas of mathematics, which are wholly in the mind? Yes, language is not an idea or a set of ideas located "in" mind. But it's hardly different from Hume's proposal. The detachment we have from mathematical objects, our inability to interact with them, is a paradigm of the atelic way in which a modern sees nature as given to experience. Pure object opposed to pure subject has its beginning here. Realizing that language is part of the world is to realize that there is no world of primordially detached, observable facts. Striving is everywhere.

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here.&qu

These days I've been listening to lectures from the Teaching Company on Wittgenstein, Quine, Habermas, etc. I have gathered the following: that our starting point for understanding the nature of language should be the starting point for how to "do" language: which is commands, requests, rather than pointing and naming. Language is most primitively about how to act...together. It presupposes a common activity toward a common goal. But what about the command of the superior to the inferior (as in parent/child and master/slave)? Well, I don't know about the latter, but the former requires empathy and a common goal. That common goal is not the private having of a thing by each of the communicators: it is a living and acting together. It might itself be communicative in nature. So in that case, there would be a kind of circularity in what I am saying. Language is a giving directions about how to act together (somewhat instrumentally or quasi-instrumentally) in or