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Sunday, April 22, 2007
I’m trying to write, but it just won’t write
Perhaps you know the feeling. At any rate, I notice that our friend Josh Lukin has taken to blogging. Welcome, Josh! He is chatting with Ray Davis at the moment; always a good thing.
Also, Clark Goble, who participated gamely in my attempt to restage Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel as a Derrida thread, has carried over certain questions about Peirce and Derrida to his own blog. While I was there, I browsed into another thread which concluded thusly:
Put an other way if I talk about poplar trees unaware of some aspect of poplar trees that arises tomorrow, is that future social understanding and physical reality part of my meaning? For Heidegger, as I understand him, it most certainly is. For Davidson I think it might be but I simply am not sure.
I would have said the opposite. That is, this thing can definitely count as part of my meaning for Davidson. Heidegger, I’m not so sure. What do you say? I’m especially interested in the Heidegger case, actually. Defend your answer. (If you can find a way to disagree with me about Heidegger - a continental philosopher, be it noted - without heavily hinting that I am exhibiting some deplorable mental or spiritual infirmity, I will give you points for originality. I’m looking at some of you.)
Comments
I’m not seeing how bits of poplar trees I’m ignorant of count as part of what I mean when I talk about “poplar trees”, for Davidson. Wasn’t this part of what the issue was between him and Burge in “Knowing One’s Own Mind”—whether when Davidson says that “Carl has arthritis” but thinks that arthritis can only be caused by calcium deposits, something slightly different than “arthritis” was meant by Davidson, or whether Davidson meant “arthritis” but had some false beliefs about arthritis?
Maybe I’m putting the wrong emphasis on “can” in “this thing can definitely count as part of my meaning for Davidson.” It seems innocuous to say that for Davidson the poplar trees themselves are what I mean when I talk about “poplar trees”, even if I’m ignorant of some arborilogical facts. But it seems wrong to say that part of what I mean by “poplar trees” is an aspect I’m ignorant of—I thought Davidson had claimed that this sort of externalism posed too much of a threat to first-person authority, which is why he denies that by “arthritis” he meant inflammations of the joints which were not caused by calcium deposits.
I am not even going to try to get clear on what Heidegger thinks about meaning and time, but I can’t see why I’m wrong about Davidson on this point.
I’ll reread “Knowing One’s Own Mind” today, Daniel, if I can find the time. I was focusing more on the innocuous bit: the poplar tress are what I mean.
Heidegger can be read in many ways on this point. I take the Heidegger as realist reading which is common (roughly) to Dreyfus, Carman, Wrathall and others. Exactly how to take Heidegger’s externalism is debated by many of these same figures though. If you’re interesting in a fairly good book on this way of reading Heidegger check out Carman’s Heidegger’s Analytic. I have to be somewhat careful since Carman was (for the most part) arguing along lines of how I already read Heidegger. It is a worthwhile book. If nothing else it highlights several places where Heidegger is sufficiently vague and ambiguous that figuring out how to take him in his externalism isn’t clear. But as the thread you linked to on Davidson shows, I’m not convinced Davidson is much better. (i.e. the meaning of “typical” relative to his view of externalism)
I do think that Davidson plays up an interplace of object and community and self where the typical is the meaning. With significant time being the period when this learning was taking place. (i.e. the past) So Davidson isn’t a synchronic externalist. The past matters in determining meaning. But I’d be the first to admit I’m still learning about Davidson in this regard.
Contrast this to Heidegger whose analytic of time entails the future as counting.
Burge would take experts as counting. I don’t know how he relates to time - presumably the experts at the time of the utterance although I’m sure one could read him in terms of future experts as well.
I’m more a Peircean so I tend to take the pragmatic maxim as being what’s helpful for meaning. The way I read that (and I’d be the first to admit that Peirce’s discussion of it is sometimes problematic) is that meaning is entirely caught up in terms of counterfactual verification and thus the future. This is especially true given his ideal interpretive community always endlessly deferred to the future. (Which I tend to take in a fashion much like Derrida’s eschatology for a coming messiah that never arrives)
I guess it partly depends on what “means” means.
Clark, thanks. I’m actually a Dreyfus student (the only non-Heidegger focused one, so far as I know); and went to grad school with Wrathall.
I’m still working through the Davidson, but I see your point. I’ll try to follow-up.