[Inquiry] Re: Semiotics Of Misrepresentation -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SOM.  Discussion Note 4

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BR = Bertrand Russell
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: SOM-DIS 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/002562.html
In: SOM-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/thread.html#2556

Tom,

Let's say there are experiences, phenomena, or situations going on
in the world about us, and by that I don't mean, borrowing a prefix
from Peirce, "sinphenomena", or phenomena that occur only once, but
that at least some of these goings-on are comparable with regard to
their forms or patterns, no matter how diverse their contents may be.
In other words, we are able to find clusters of these goings-on for
which it makes sense to "factor" our best descriptions of them into
the parts that are the same and the parts that are different, as we
range over the goings-on in a given cluster.

If this never happens anywhere in our experience,
then I submit that we are in really big trouble,
survival-wise, since everything going-on would
be totally novel and a total surprise all the
time, and all attempts at learning would be
totally useless.

The moral of the story being:  We can always pick our
own examples of comparable form, and begin with those.

With that pre-ramble, I'll try to get back to the rest of this later on ...

Jon Awbrey

TG: If I ever come to believe in God, it will be because of the strange way
    appropriate readings seem to appear just when I need them.  In this case
    it was Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit".  It's not only appropriate in that
    it deals with misrepresentation and deception but also that it does so within
    Russell's framework.

TG: Given that framework:

BR: |                                   Othello
    |                                      |
    |                                      |
    |                                   believes
    |                                      |
    |                                      v
    |                       Desdemona -----------> Cassio
    |                                    loves
        
TG: I'll skip the subject/believes top of the map, or better
    leave it in Frankfurt's able hands.  What interests me is
    the objects/relation bottom of the map.  And why not take
    an example prominent today, say, "The US freed Iraq", as
    the kind of judgment someone might believe or not?

TG: Russell then says:

BR: | If I say "Desdemona loves Cassio" that is of
    | the same form as "A is to the right of B".
    |
    | Those are of the same form, and I say that nothing
    | that occurs in space is of the same form as belief.

TG: If we remove the smokescreen of worrying about the relation of the second verb
    to belief, I think we can presume that for Russell "Desdemona loves Cassio"
    and "the US freed Iraq" are "of the same form as 'A is to the right of B'".
    This is confirmed by the fact that when he does come to discussing this
    second verb directly he switches to the example of "A and B are similar".

TG: But to put the concepts of "love" or "freedom" on a
    par with "is to the right of" and "is similar to" is
    the "dumbing-down" I referred to in my initial response.
    If the judgments of logic are so construed, I don't think
    we ever have to worry about logic ever contesting any kind
    of "rationalization" in the quests for love or power.  In fact,
    if "believing" is infested with human subjectivity and intentions,
    surely "love" and "freedom" are as well, and should also be at the
    top of the map.  Anyway, using concepts such as "is to the right of"
    or even "is similar too" is nothing at all compared to using a concepts
    like "love" or "freedom", yet Russellian logic puts them on the same level
    before it begins.

TG: Russell does say he's not going to refer to "love" as an object
    although I think we were better off when he did (at least it was
    something that had to be known and it might even have been known
    truly or falsely), and he fogs the whole thing up by making the
    meaning of the second verbs a matter of the person believing them
    to some extent, but the damage is done.  In fact, it seems to me
    that it is precisely this formal interchangeability of concepts
    that makes bullshit, at least as Frankfurt defines it (i.e., as
    a total unconcern for the truth or falsity of what is being said),
    possible.  If "freed" can linguistically function within that
    expression, logically it need do or be no more.

TG: Frankfurt also speculates whether bullshit was possible in the
    past to the extent it is (as indicated by its prevalence) today.
    My initial reaction would be that (when it is distinguished from
    lying as Frankfurt does) it was much more difficult prior to the
    early 1900s, but I guess that might be difficult to prove.

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