[Inquiry] Re: Semiotics Of Misrepresentation -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SOM.  Discussion Note 6

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BR = Bertrand Russell
JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: SOM-DIS 4.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-May/002620.html
In: SOM-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-May/thread.html#2620

In part, somewhat reorganized:

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.

JA: Let us 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.

JA: 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.

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

Tom,

Supposing that we can find a cluster of persistent experiences,
recurring phenomena, or reproducible situations whose adequate
descriptions bring their diverse contents under a unified form
of expression, we come to the question:  What are the adequate
descriptions of a given domain of such goings-on?

For my part I see something similar in the expressions:
"X loves Y" and "X frees Y", despite all their obvious
dissimilarities, and that is just the form of sentence
that describes a 2-adic relation.  The use of noticing
a common form, as far as it goes, is partly economical,
in that many of the regularities affecting one of them
can be transferred automatically and safely to another
one, without our having to learn the same lessons over
and over (and over)* again in each new particular case.

If you do not see any useful comparison, then I'm sure
that we can find other examples where the similarities
are not so problematic.

So let's suppose that there is a domain of goings-on
whose members are adequately described by a suitable
class of 2-adic relational expressions.

With all of that desk-organizing business out of our way,
at least provisionally and for the time being, the next
question that presents itself in this setting is this:
Is the type of phenomenon or situation that is under
consideration here, illustrated by the illustrious
story of Cassio, Desdemona, Othello, belief, love,
the characterizations, fictions, and imputations
thereof -- is that sort of goings-on adequately
described by the 2-adic relational forms that
are commonly used to describe believing and
loving, or any 2-adic combination thereof,
or does this type of case demand for its
adequate description some higher arity
of relational expression?

I'm guessing you can guess my answer.

Jon Awbrey

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