Digressions&Impressions

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

On Being On To Something

Professor Kenneth Arrow died on February 21, 2017, at the age of 95. He was widely regarded (along with Paul Samuelson, John Hicks and possibly --- depending on tastes --- John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker) as one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. He also happened to be my favorite economist of all time.    

Professor Dipak Banerjee, my teacher, introduced me to Kenneth Arrow in 1974, who appeared (much in the manner of Hindu god[esses]s for whom my mother had special reverence) in the form of a small yellow paperback. I acquired Social Choice and Individual Values from Dasgupta and Co. of College Street, and still have it. I was a first year undergraduate. That little book was a repository of the most profound logical thought. I had never seen anyone distill what appeared to be an abstract question in political economy into a theoretical device that cut sharply, and cut deep.

What was the question? Briefly, it was well known from the so-called Condorcet paradox that majority voting could produce nasty cycles in choices, even when the individual preferences involved in that voting process were perfectly reasonable.  That led to the question: was there any political system that could “reasonably” aggregate individual preferences? Now think about the question for a second: we know what majority voting is, but there is in principle an infinity of other systems. How could one ever formulate such a problem, let alone attempt to answer it? The very formulation — as axioms placed on an abstract mapping that connected individual preferences to their social counterpart — was sheer genius. But the apparatus was not only beautiful: it could also speak. It argued that under the minimal desiderata placed on the aggregator, there was no way of putting together individual preferences into a satisfactory social ordering; one that was cycle-free.

Arrow had received the Nobel Prize just two years before this encounter with him. He was just 51 years old, by far the youngest Laureate then (or since) in Economics. I ran off to the National Library in Calcutta to dig out the Nobel citation, excitedly anticipating a homage to my beloved Impossibility Theorem. Yet oddly, the The Nobel citation mentions Arrow’s monumental theorem only at the very end, and almost in passing. It focused instead on Arrow’s (and Hicks’s) contributions to general equilibrium theory:

“[Arrow] provided the basis for a radical reformulation of the traditional equilibrium theory. Through this reformulation, which was based on the mathematical theory of convex sets, the general equilibrium theory gained both in generality and in simplicity… The model presented in this paper became the starting point for the major part of further research in this field. Among Arrow's many important contributions should also be mentioned his development of the theory of uncertainty and its incorporation within the frame of general equilibrium theory and, furthermore, his analysis of the possibilities for decentralized decisions in a society where the price system is fixed by the central authority… As perhaps the most important of Arrow's many contributions to welfare theory appears his ‘possibility theorem,’ according to which it is impossible to construct a social welfare function out of individual preference functions.”

This was disappointing as far as my current passion was concerned. But it was also exhilarating: because there was more! (Later, I realized just how much more.) Back I went to Professor Banerjee. I wanted to know why general equilibrium was not just a question of several equations in the same number of unknowns, and what all this was about “the mathematical theory of convex sets.” In response, Dipak-babu helpfully produced another small tome by Gerard Debreu. This was based on the work with Arrow. Though certainly more mainstream this time in its questions, the techniques went way over my 17-year old head....

As a graduate student, reading all this in late 70s and early 80s, I viewed Arrow as a thinker who could both ask the deepest questions in economic and political philosophy, and at the same  time use mathematical arguments with ease and utility to answer them to a substantive degree. This was someone who could put past accomplishments into perspective, leave them behind, and seek to look beyond to newer and more difficult concerns. Such were the nature of his forays into questions of incomplete information, pervasive externalities, increasing returns and interpersonal equity. There was just one word for it: inspirational. The inevitable reaction was not long in coming: I wanted to be like Ken Arrow. Surprise surprise, that was not destined to happen. But something else did: I had the immense good fortune to become his colleague at Stanford.

I was at Stanford on a job flyout, at the very beginning of 1982. I had been warned about the meeting with Arrow. Apparently, all I had to do was tell him the assumptions of my model and then, before I could get any further, he would proceed to tell me all the results that could conceivably be proved from those assumptions. This was unnerving news. But nothing of the sort happened.

I walked into his office. It was small and cluttered, full of books that went up high. It had a vertical rather than horizontal feel. Arrow himself gave the opposite impression. He was shorter than I had expected, strong, rooted to the ground. The man seemed to be in constant motion. He was both brisk and welcoming. He was wearing brightly colored suspenders, and there was an immense bicycle helmet on his desk. (I did not then realize that these, along with the perennially flipped pencil at seminars, would be an intrinsic part of my later memory of him.) I began talking about my work. It was a bit of an out-of-body experience; I could see myself talking to him. Arrow listened very closely. There was an intensity of gaze that never wavered, except when he would start speculating, during which he would look up at the ceiling and back to me. He asked questions non-stop. He talked very fast, the words tripping over one another, the tone uneven, the sentences clearly struggling to keep up with the flow of thoughts. He didn’t exactly anticipate my results. But after 15 minutes, I had a second eerie sensation: that I was talking to someone who  had thought about my problem for a very long time. This was a weird feeling that I came to associate with Arrow over the next few years.

....

Less enthusiasm was shown [by Arrow] towards the neo-Ricardians. Once I had mustered up enough courage, I would talk with Arrow with complete freedom, and before long I had told him that I had once spent an entire day with Piero Sraffa at Cambridge, and that he had given  me a signed copy of his book ...I told [Arrow] that I admired the book for its apparent demonstration that the distribution of income across labor income and profit could not be fully pinned down by economics — that some reference to the political system was needed. Arrow looked at me with a mix of irritation and pity: “I’ll get you out of that soon enough.” And of course he did convince me that Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities had an extra degree of freedom in it that generated a fake indeterminacy, though I still harbor a sneaking suspicion that Sraffa was on to something.--Debraj Ray "Kenneth Arrow, 1921-2017"

Of the quick, first round of obituaries of Arrow, the one by Ray, himself a leading economist (recall that I have remarked on his criticism of Piketty), stands out for its excellence mixing intellectual, psychological, and sociological observations on the significance and nature of Arrow's scholarly life as seen by professional economists today. It's worth reading in full (including the stuff on the scale and content of some of Arrow's many contributions to economics as well as Arrow's relationship to socialism) not the least for acquiring a flavor of the anecdotes that circulate around Arrow's life. One other reason why I quote so much of it -- despite some names and issues being obscure to philosophers -- is that Ray's manner of evaluation is so familiar to us professional philosophers (genius; deepest questions; out-of-body experience; intensity of gaze; talking to someone who  had thought about my problem for a very long time, etc.) They reminded me of the tenor of the recent remarks about Derek Parfit (who, to be sure, published much less than Arrow and was probably slightly less central to the disciplinary formation in philosophy than Arrow was in economics).

In the final sentence of the quoted paragraph (which is not the end of the obituary), Ray allows himself one very modest reservation: "I still harbor a sneaking suspicion that Sraffa was on to something." Now, in context, Ray is remarking on the fact that Arrow (then already very famous) "was teaching History of Economic Thought" and that among the history covered Arrow favored Cournot.* Ray is reporting on a series of exchanges with Arrow some time in the early 1980s (so more than thirty years ago). Even then Sraffa's work was not setting the agenda and conceptual framework for professional economics (in the way that Samuelson and Arrow did and to some extent still do). Even if we allow historical distortion, Arrow's irritation at the interest of his younger, talented colleague in a by then discarded project is notable.+

As an aside, as it happens in 1991,** Arrow published (inter alia) about Sraffa's role in the (Marxist leaning) reception of Ricardo, which influenced the way Keynes was assimilated, especially at Cambridge (and especially by Joan Robinson). In the paper, "Ricardo's Work as Viewed by Later Economists," Arrow self-describes himself as "a practicing theorist, not a scholar in the history of economic thought." Yet, Arrow shows great command over the historical material and the history of Ricardo reception.** One criticism of Sraffa by Arrow is that Sraffa is "indifferent to [Ricardo's] the full employment hypothesis, though one would have thought a position on this question to be basic to the formulation of a coherent model." Another (more implicit) criticism of Sraffa is that "the possibility of diminishing returns was dropped by Marx and equally by Sraffa and Joan Robinson."

To return to my main point. Ray reports his own "sneaking suspicion that Sraffa was on to something" despite being exposed to (presumably conclusive) proof that Sraffa's attempted formal "demonstration that the distribution of income across labor income and profit could not be fully pinned down by economics" was incoherent or unsupported. Lurking in the background is not just the question of the role of politics in determining economic outcomes, but also the question of disciplinary autonomy and closure. One would have liked to hear more about Ray's suspicions here -- Ray is the editor of the American Economic Review so he plays a non-trivial role (among many others) as gate-keeper and standard setter in the profession.++ 

But leaving aside the question of Arrow's criticism of Sraffa, I think the phenomena that Ray puts his finger on is more widespread (and also prevalent in philosophy): often the technically superior person will refute a theory Y -- and let's stipulate these are not straw-man versions of Y --, and [this matters] will do so in ways such that new recruits will not drift toward Y or variants of Y, and yet the insight (u) that gave rise to Y may not have been adequately handled.*** This is due to the fact that the relationship between (u) and Y is not a tight mapping. Much formalization in economics (recall my piece on the criticism of Harberger by MA. Khan) and all explication (recall my post on Leitgeb, Carnap, and Tarski) have some degrees of freedom and judgment about the way in which a would be Y captures (u), especially if (u) is interesting. After the refutation of Y, the partisan of (u) is often told to keep quiet until she can offer a successor to Y  that is not prone to the fatal flaws exposed of Y (by technically superior person). [This is even so in circumstances where Y could handle stuff in ways that no other present theory does, as in cases of Kuhn loss (recall).]

If (u) is something non-trivial, even important, it can be problematic that a discipline avoids working on developing successors or replacements of Y. And so, ideally, one would wish that the refutation of Y would be accompanied by some theoretical articulation that does justice to the significance of (u). [Notice that this is true of formal and non-formal theories of Y.] But currently the incentives and norms of many disciplines work against this and we are not encouraged to reflect on how this might be improved.

 

The Classic Put-Down (and being Out of Date); Williamson on Recent History (III)

The compositionality constraint exerted a powerful force in the direction of systematicity. In practice, the only semantic theories to exhibit (rather than merely claim) such a compositional structure were those for formally specified languages. Without such a formal semantics, a philosophy of language looked badly undeveloped to new wavers. It was partly for this reason that Austin was barely mentioned in Oxford philosophy of language by 1973, since he had no formal semantics to offer. The same went for his protégé and in some respects intellectual heir John Searle, whose major work Speech Acts looked out of date from an Oxford perspective almost as soon as it was published in 1969. Timothty Williamson  “How Did We Get Here From There?” (20)

“How Did We Get Here From There?”

Williamson's core intellectual vice is not his parochialism (recall), but that he confuses technical sophistication with philosophical significance; this leads to a certain amount of disfiguring small-mindedness (as exemplified in his remark on Searle). He writes as if there is a research-frontier in professional philosophy and if you are not on it, then you're not in the game.+ (This may be true from the perspective of modern grant agencies, but I ignore them here.) I write the previous sentences without much fondness for Searle's philosophical projects and with considerable admiration for Williamson's achievements. But even if we grant Williamson his authoritative judgment, it is striking that in his put-down, he cannot pause to note the accomplishments of Searle's Speech Acts, which has been astonishingly influential (with close to 20,000 citations according to Scholar.Google),++ including on many worthy non-philosophical and normative projects (something not quite on Williamson's radar-screen).

While one should always defend the intrinsic worth of un-applied philosophy, there is no need to be contemptuous of the many ways in which somewhat-non-cutting-edge-philosophical-tools can have up-take within and outside philosophy. It's not as if Williamson has any philosophical resources to argue otherwise--his justification of formal philosophy is -- not unlike Carnap's -- ultimately consequentialist.* From that vantage point a dated tool that can be used is better than an advanced bit of machinery without use.

If being on the technical cutting edge were decisive in philosophy, then we would have been Platonists (yea!) with Gödel a long time ago. More seriously, if being on the cutting edge of the technical research-frontier is the key mark of philosophical success then Alonzo Church (with his students) was the seminal philosopher of the (middle of the) twentieth century; sadly, Church goes unmentioned in Williamson's story. (So does Gödel.) More important, some works are nowhere near the cutting edge, yet they can generate enduring and insightful philosophical projects. From the vantage point of Eudoxus, Plato looks like a bungler; Leibniz is obviously technically superior to and the better philosopher than Locke (and just about anybody else to have ever lived). Yet, it's not just in political philosophy that Leibniz does not hold a candle to Locke (nor Hobbes). On the same theme: if Euler had read Hume, he would have thought him an amateur, but -- as much as I love Euler -- Hume did grasp philosophical problems in a way that eluded Euler. (It's not impossible Euler did think of Kant as a bungler.) Stebbing will remain a role-model long after Dummett is forgotten. Nietzsche is not a very impressive philosopher of physics, but there are enduring reasons for why Carnap embraces him in the midst of his polemics with Heidegger (see Stone here and Sachs here for discussion).

The previous paragraph is not an argument to stay ignorant of technical developments. (Just because my systematicity is informal, it does not mean I don't recognize a better route for others.) But one important reason for the recurring pattern, that the non-technical-whizz-kids-can-contribute-to-philosophy's progress, is that as long as there are no Philosopher-Kings, the call to philosophy is not exhausted by technical problems with given constraints; we are, as of yet, far removed from being an engineering science. Another reason is that good philosophical judgment is not a consequence of technical skill.** (This is why Bradley's judgment is still quotable by Williamson despite Russell's many purported technical knock-out blows and Ayer's cheap shots.) There is also a third reason that is related to the nature of twentieth century analytical philosophy: it was, with one non-trivial exception, not systematic enough. Without full systematicity, even the most formally sophisticated philosophical project is unprotected from its own arbitrary commitments. I'll try to explain this last, undoubtedly cryptic remark in my final post on Williamson's essay, which -- despite being 'informal and unsystematic' (8) -- has quite a bit to say about systematicity, soon.

Deleuze as (proto-Carnapian) Philosophical Historian of Philosophy

Our only teachers are those who tell us “do with me,” and are able to emit signs to be develop in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (hereafter DR), 26).

Difference and Repitition, 26DR 26)

Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche are three moments in the “history of the philosophical elaboration of the univocity of being.” (DR 48) This history is progressive: Spinoza “marks  a considerable progress.” And Nietzsche becomes world-historical (he offers “a Copernican revolution” (DR 50)) by opening the “possibility of difference having its own concept,” that is “eternal return” not of the “Identical,” but rather “returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes,”  (DR 50; it matters to Deleuze that what returns are the ‘extreme’ or ‘excessive’ forms). The history of progressive conceptual development is not just a “theoretical” exercise, but delivers a “practical” criterion in Nietzsche.

As the epigraph to the post suggests, for Deleuze the history of philosophy is an occasion to encounter exemplary thinkers that both invite their readers to think with their thoughts as well as demand from their very best readers a development that does not mindlessly repeat the original, but in the development introduce variance. This creative act of the historian of philosophy, this repetition and difference, which Deleuze calls the method of dramatization is, thus, a way to conceptualize the doing of the history of philosophy as a means toward progress in philosophy. Deleuze attributes the origin of the method to “Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” who “invent an incredible theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy.” (DR 9) So, Nietzsche plays a double role of the founder of a method and a contributor to a key development in which it is deployed. (That double role is -- witness Kierkegaard -- apparently not necessary.)

On reconceptualizing philosophical inquiry

What is perhaps needed is a deeper and more fundamental change, a reconceptualization of the nature of philosophical inquiry and practice.--Samir Chopra

[T]his pursuit [i.e., philosophy], not only in the eyes of good men, but also in the eyes of those who are even moderately bad, is a sort of protecting emblem...philosophy is peaceful and minds her own business.  [One] cannot scorn her; she is honoured by every profession, even the vilest among them.  Evil can never grow so strong, and nobility of character can never be so plotted against, that the name of philosophy shall cease to be worshipful and sacred.--Seneca (Letter 14).

Yesterday, I skipped these lines out of a kind of embarrassed discomfort. But Chopra's post has made me reconsider. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Seneca's ideal is not mere wishful thinking, but a live possibility. 

Much has changed since Seneca's Letters. Here are four notable features:

• (i) A religion infused with (speculative) philosophy became state religion in lots of places for nearly two millenia.
• (ii) Philosophy and its scientific-offspring allied itself with warmaking tacitly and explicitly.
• (iii) Philosophy became the hand-maiden to several ideologies that serve the modern state -- perhaps itself a philosophical bastard -- faithfully.
• (iv) Philosophy can be a (moderately) lucrative career in a whole variety of modern institutional settings.

Obviously, (i-iv) are not disconnected phenomena. Leaving aside their historical and philosophical connections, they all create a context in which philosophy stops being peaceful and mind her own business. Now, Seneca is aware that Socrates, Plato, and Cato (etc.) all thought that philosophy has some public role to play (in, say, promoting justice, better laws, expertise, promote freedom, less superstition, etc.). But absent (i-iv), the harms that could follow from philosophy are fairly mild. By contrast, in the presence of any one among (i-iv), the harms can be considerable. That is to say, once the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of power are allies then corruption away from Seneca's ideal is -- given human nature -- inevitable. Obviously, I have given no argument for this latter claim, which begs the question against a potential institutional design that can marshall power in the service of truth without serious harms. I am unfamiliar with such a design.

On Explication (Tarski, Spinoza, Leitgeb...)

...[T]he explication of philosophical concepts. That is: the construction of a new concept C′ that replaces a given, often pre-theoretic concept C of philosophical interest, so that the extension of C′ coincides with that of C in the clear-cut and uncontroversial cases but C′ is permitted to, and indeed ought to, improve upon C in terms of exactness, fruitfulness, and simplicity in all the unclear or fuzzy cases. (Leitgeb, 271)**

A true idea must agree with its object--Spinoza Ethics 1A6 (translated by Curley)

"Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends are speaking nonsense."--Tarski (1944, 345). [Thanks to Doug Patterson for sending me back to Tarski.]

One of the shared peculiarities of the now canonical philosophers writing between, say, Descartes and Hume is their mistrust of language. They warn of the "danger of being decived by" words, and recommend focus on -- in the memorable words of Berkeley, -- "naked, undisguised ideas." In their terminology, ideas are the objects of the mind. In the hands of Spinoza the distrust means that language -- the play of signs -- is not the vehicle by which to convey truth (E2p41).* This mistrust of language raises many complicated questions about how we  should understand the status of early modern texts (and the rhetorics of writing and reading), and, say, the early moderns' attitude(s) toward revealed writings, but here I focus on a more technical issue: the status of truth.