- Waste

We're All Pilots Here: Andrea Long Chu's Authority

2026-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Pans garner more attention than praises, and it's the pans in Authority that readers of the volume are most likely already to have encountered. At any rate it was primarily the pans (along with "On Liking Women") that I had encountered before, and who can blame me for knowing them better, or them for being better known? They've got zip. They're devastating. One detects a bit of relish. But one comes away from Chu's appreciation of Lexi Freidman's Inappropriation with perhaps a chuckle at its remark that "it's always nice to read a book with the right number of Holocaust jokes" and the sense that both the book, and the review, are probably fine. The destruction of Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise, almost twice as long, has distinctly more verve; Chu seems to enjoy anatomizing the flaws of the books and its author, and in general she is a more engaging writer when holding something up as at best not very good, or an object lesson (as in her piece on Yellowstone, which is more the occasion for cultural criticism than a straightforward review), than when recommending its virtues. Sometimes the pans are a bit too successful: that of Yanigihara in particular is so sweepingly effective that I at least had to wonder why she'd bothered writing about it at all. What in it merits such an expenditure of critical intelligence? The fun of it? No doubt it is fun.^{1</a> At least she ends her review of Ottessa Moshfegh and Lapvona, another book and author that emerge from Chu's treatment with little, seemingly, to recommend them, by saying that Moshfegh may yet become a great novelist, and credits her with technical mastery, though admittedly in neither case does she go so far as to explain why. (I say "book and author" because each seems to be under review. Chu does not omit to inform us, for instance, that Moshfegh said some awfully stupid stuff on, of all things, Bret Easton Ellis's podcast.) One comes away from several of the pieces (on Yanagihara, on Andrew Lloyd Webber, on Ellis) with the question: why not pick on someone your own size? Which is not to say that her net catches small fry exclusively; Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith do not escape it.}

In truth, the negative reviews are not so interesting to revisit, not in themselves at least, largely because of their thoroughness. And since I have not read the works she praises, I can't say whether her reviews continue to offer interesting perspectives on them, though they aren't really, in the first instance, interpretive essays. It's the pieces that are not reviews collected here that, I think, have more to offer both the reader and the re-reader; they are more expansive, more interesting, and, whereas the reviews sometimes seem to fall into pyrotechnics, more cohesive and assured.2</a> Some of these pieces I had read before, some I had not; nearly all of what follows will be concerned with the two brand-new essays written for the collection. Their topic is criticism itself: the introductory "Criticism in a Crisis" and the title essay, the collections' centerpiece. The brief attention to the reviews paid in the remainder is more to look at her critical practice in the light of her theoretical statements than to discuss the content of the reviews in relation to the works under review.

In these new essays she defends, among other things, her vision of criticism as ineluctably political (she practices an overtly political criticism, but anyone's criticism will evince their politics, no matter how wishy-washy). She defends her critical practice against the charge that she "reduc[es] the work of art to a ship's manifest of ideas"; or rather, she admits the charge and defends the practice. She discusses what we want from critics, what critics like her can provide their readers, and who "critics" even are in the first place: the "crisis" of the first essay is the ancient and eternal fear that "the mythological figure of the Bad Critic" will ruin it for everyone. The Bad Critic, like as not, is in fact no critic at all, but a mere reviewer—perish the thought!—a scribbling hack, simply Not Our Kind, Dear, and nothing like true critic. Chu will rightly have none of this critical WASPishness; a critic is a critic is a critic is a reviewer, for her, to the point, in fact, that later on in the same essay we read that what "the critic" knows of her reader is that the reader is reading "her review".

The critic's task is even narrower than that of producing a review, if we are to trust the opening of "Authority". In this essay the connection between criticism and the political imagination, sounded briefly in "Criticism in a Crisis", is developed more fully, as the concept of "authority" is traced through the millennia, beginning with the Roman Republic (though it takes us only two pages to reach Hobbes). She begins the essay by asking the question "why do we ask the critic to have authority?", though she is really more concerned at first with sketching what she takes to be the peculiarity of the authority we supposedly demand of the critic is. It is fine and dandy to ask the critic to know what he's talking about ("we hope she will not attempt Sondheim without knowing an arpeggio from an appoggiatura"), something we also ask of scholars, general essayists, and writers of all sorts. The critic, though, is in a tight spot, because while on the one hand we are rightly suspicious of claims of authority that boil down to "because I said so", on the other we both expect the critic to make claims that are binding on others (that is, the critic doesn't just say "I liked it", she says "this is good"), and deny that she can "prove the excellence of a novel or painting": therefore, she thinks, the critic is left to "declar[e] that a given work of art is beautiful while being unable to provide a definitive reason why … we are meant to take him at his word, and nothing more". (Then why does it matter if she knows what an arpeggio is? Robert Christgau, the modern critic who more than others I can recall generally did simply declare what was good and expect to be taken at his word, didn't truck unduly with technical musical vocabulary, and he reviewed music. But then I have to single him out because mostly critics don't just make a declaration and expect to be taken at their word.)

One very reasonable reaction to all this is to ask, well, do we ask the critic to have authority? In this sense? Chu mentions in the preface to the book that its title originates in a remark Frank Rich made to her after reading "The Opera Ghost", that "he admired the authority [she] had brought to a genre as arcane as musical theater". (Arcane?) Did Rich mean that she exhibited a pure authority which neither needs nor admits of justification? Or did he mean that she exhibited the kind of authority we expect, in Chu's view, of historians and sociologists—knowledge, expertise, a command of their subject, that she knows what an arpeggio is? (Don't we ask for accuracy, that "crucial" additional demand we place on scholars, from Chu as well, when she says that Andrew Lloyd Webber lifted this or that melody from this or that composer? And isn't that the sort of claim that could serve as evidence in making a judgment about his work?) Chu is curiously uninterested in convincing us that we do demand that the critic have this sort of authority. Surely, some people do; for a time, it was a favored complaint of the right wing that literary critics spent too much time doing interpretive work—and worse, political interpretive work!—rather than simply informing us which works were Great, but I doubt that Chu includes herself in a "we" with them.

The remainder of is almost a politico-critical tour of the times important figures in the history of English criticism have used the word "authority", and she is likewise not terribly interested in establishing that when Samuel Johnson, or whoever, uses the word, he means anything like what she means. (It is not absolutely certain to me that she means something consistent by it.) The not terribly satisfying conclusion is that "we ask the critic to have authority" because "we are inheritors of a history" of understanding the critic politically, e.g. "in the eighteenth century, [as] an enlightened king", or "in the twentieth, [as] a state bureaucrat". One reason this is not satisfying is that it is not clear why we would demand of the critic an authority "like that of a king" in the bureaucratic twentieth century, or even in the eighteenth, since on her telling the link between the critic and the monarch in that time was that the potential for rational criticism was a model for the possibility of a liberal, ie constrained, monarchy, so that the monarch's authority would be brought within reason, on the one hand, and on the other, the monarch would be understood by analogy to the critic, not vice versa; the authority she thinks we demand of the critic is that of an absolute, not a constitutional, monarch. ("When Locke that men freely entered into the social contract out of their need for a 'known and indifferent judge' with the authority to sort out their differences, he sounded as if he was describing a critic", writes Chu. He also sounds as if he is describing a bureaucrat.) The larger reason it's not satisfying is that it's circular: she begins the essay by speculating that the peculiar demand for authority we place on critics is "probably why" critics have understood themselves politically all along. Why do we demand critics have authority? Because critics have historically understood themselves on various political models, which they have done because we have demanded that they have authority. The supposedly historicizing investigation in fact turns on a conception of critical authority which does not seem to have emerged in time.

This makes sense, because her description of the critic's plight seems to emerge from the nature of the sort of judgment the critic is supposed to deliver, about the sort of object the critic is supposed to deal with. Why is Chu asking about the literary critic's authority and not, say, the textual critic's? We do not ask for the textual critic's mere opinion about how to read the manuscript, but a judgment; while there is a truth about what was written originally, we may not believe we can ever finally know it, so here too we might say "what she will never be is decidedly right". (After all, many critics and philosophers have thought that the critic really is right, when she's right; both Hume and Kant can agree on that much. It's not being correct that's at issue but being able to compel assent, or to demonstrate correctness.) The textual critic, though, can avail herself of arguments and evidence to support her reading, in a way that Chu seems to believe the literary critic cannot … at least not "definitively". It is in the putative demand for a definitive deliverance that the entire problem lives. (Can the textual critic make a definitive case? Perhaps sometimes, but likely mostly not. But we don't demand definitive cases from the textual critic.)

Now, I don't think that there's much in the preceding that is made much more perspicuous by the claim "in the twentieth century, the critic was thought of as a sort of state bureaucrat", especially since that analogy is more about studied facial impartiality than inscrutable deliverances. (The bureaucrat's deliverances may or may not be unappealable but they should at least be scrutable.) On the other hand, the formulation is not without its historical roots. In particular, the contrast between the giving one's opinion and making a judgment, and the implicit thought that when I make a judgment, something that seems to be making an objective claim, that's the kind of thing that ought to be provable definitively, in principle at least, are redolent of Kant's presentation in the third Critique, and it's no accident that Kant gets the most sustained treatment of any one figure in the essay. It's not only the beginning of the essay that has that Kantian flavor.

After following post-Kant English-languages discourses of authority and criticism to the present, Chu concludes by proposing that we abandon authority as a "governing concept" for criticism. She is very reassuring that doing so would not mean abandoning "the word authority", or "the authoritative style", or "scholarship, tradition, history, wit, or charisma". We will only "have to reckon with our longing for authority". This concluding thought, that overcoming the idea of "authority" in criticism means giving up exactly no actual critical practices, merely (merely!) the desire for someone to tell us what to think, to relieve us of the burden of exercising taste and discernment and thought, risking error, whatever error would mean when we have given up the idea that there is a fact of the matter about beauty, or about whatever aesthetic qualities of a work interest us, echoes the concluding thought of the first essay: "for who is to say if the critic is right? The rest of us, of course. The only measure of judgment is more judgment". Now to be clear, I think this is completely correct, just not quite as novel a call as one might have gathered from her presentation. One might even summarize it thus: the embrace of criticism à la Chu is "our emergence from our self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Sapere aude!"

It's not just that Chu ends up in a place that fits neatly with the beginning of "What is Enlightenment?"; it's also a place that fits neatly with the Kant of the third Critique. The treatment of Kant in the essay is really quite peculiar; one would never have guessed that Chu's position will end up being so close to Kant's. Or rather, to a Kant-inspired one; something else one would never have guessed is that any application of Kant to literary criticism, or really criticism in general, will end up being more a matter of inspiration than strict textual fidelity, since for Kant the judgment of taste that forms the topic of the first part of the third Critique really is just "this [singular object before me] is beautiful" (at least, if we ignore the discussion of the sublime, which isn't relevant here). He has much less to say about the fine arts in general than he does about the beauties of nature, and it has never been clear to me how one would directly apply his account to something like a novel. (He himself discusses poetry, and even that has always struck me as a bad fit with his system. It is interesting to note that while something like Friedrich Schlegel's essay "On Goethe's Meister" has a definite third-critical flavor, it savors less of the first than of the second part, dealing with teleological judgment, with its emphasis on organic form and the reciprocal influence of part and whole.) Part of the problem is that her presentation is riddled with errors, some of which are unfortunate but not really important (the account of what Kant means by the "free play" of the faculties is not quite right), but many of them seem distinctly motivated, efforts to make it seem that Kant is talking about what she's talking about, or to get him to fit nicely in the narrative she wants to tell.

Kant does not "picture[] the art critic as exercising free lawfulness in the face of an unknowable law", partly because Kant has remarkably little to say about such a figure as "the art critic" at all, partly because he does not describe the person making a judgment of taste as "exercising free lawfulness". She says quite a bit more about the "law" in the context of aesthetic judgments than Kant himself did; the most charitable interpretation, to me, is that she is thinking of the lawful character of concepts, but even then, the presentation is deceptive. Her "maxim for the critic", "always assume that beauty has a rational explanation, but never pretend to know what it is", is puzzling: first because Kant was, again, not in the business of giving critics advice (except in §34, discussing "what critics can and should reason about": "the investigation of the faculties of cognition and their functions"), second because Kant in the third Critique does explain how the feeling of beauty arises in us, and what kind of judgment we make when we say that something is beautiful. Kant certainly did not think that disagreements about the beautiful were "inevitable, insofar as beauty consisted of nothing but the free lawfulness of the imagination"; the entire argument that even though judgments of taste are subjective, they have universal validity, comes from their basis in nothing but the free play of our shared faculties, so this statement is pretty much exactly backwards. She writes, as if this is Kant's belief, that the critic cannot attempt to make a "definitive answer" about what is beautiful "without abusing his authority": not only is Kant not generally interested in "the critic", he does not speak at all of the "authority" of the person making a judgment of taste; similarly, Kant does not solve any paradoxes by arguing that "the critic's authority originated in human reason"; the judgment of taste owes its possibility and validity to human reason and faculties, yes, but this has little do to with "authority".

Some of these are perhaps venial gaffes; others strike me as more serious. The most serious, from the standpoint of basic scholarly practice, is an actual tendentious misquotation. Chu correctly observes that the German word "Kritik" may be rendered in English both as "criticism" and as "critique", but it may not be rendered, certainly at least when talking about, much less translating, Kant, as either, willy-nilly, just as one likes. "Critique" in this context is jargon; it refers to Kant's philosophical strategy of (this will be ridiculously compressed) investigating what in our experience derives merely from our faculties. When Kant himself uses the word "Kritik", it is of course possible that he means "criticism", and arguably he means it in this sense in §34, when he mentions "Kritik als Kunst" (translators differ in how they treat this). When in §44 he writes that "es gibt weder eine Wissenschaft des Schönen, sondern nur Kritik …" ("there is neither a science of the beautiful, but only critique …") he is summarizing, as he turns to the subject of fine art, the findings of the earlier sections, and "Kritik" can only responsibly be translated "critique". Chu however writes "there is neither a science of the beautiful, only criticism". None of the four translations I consulted makes this choice (three use "critique"; the fourth punts and leaves "Kritik" untranslated); since this is not a scholarly book, there is neither bibliography and nor notes, so it's can't be known if Chu is amending an existing translation, using her own translation, or quoting someone else's mistake, a possibility that is partly exculpatory (she didn't make this mistake) but partly inculpatory: who would think to attempt to write with such an "authoritative style" without consulting the primary sources? (That said, it seems likely that she is either using Pluhar's translation or quoting someone using it.) As with the suggestion that Kant opines about the critic's authority, the effect here is to suggest falsely that she and Kant are both talking about, well, authority and criticism and the critic's authority, while suppressing the actual ways that his philosophy really does intersect with her topic, not to mention her sympathy with him. She would rather finger Kant as the point at which the critic began to be charged with purging his criticism of moral concerns (in the process misrepresenting what he meant by beauty's being the symbol of morality, though in fairness this has puzzled many commentators).

What is that intersection? Consider the state of play, as we might understand it from her presentation, prior to Kant. The critic's task is to let it be known which works are beautiful, but it is proving quite difficult to figure out how to tell which those are, in any sort of systematic way, or to find, as Chu quotes Samuel Johnson, "the stability of a science". (Chu acknowledges that these 18th-century English critics looked to science as a model, but the idea that criticism might have looked to science for a model of its authority in judgment appears only in the watered-down form of references to "rationalism".) At least some of them thought that, at least in principle, some such stable footing could be found; Hume, in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste", makes much of what he calls "a noted story in Don Quixote", in which Sancho's kinsmen, derided for their assessment of a barrel of wine, which each find good with one reservation, one detecting the taste of leather, the other of iron, are proved right when a "an old key with a leathern thong" is found when the barrel is finally emptied: the "general rules or avowed patterns of composition" which he seems to believe in are like this key with its thong, capable of being used to demonstrate decisively who has taste and who hasn't. (Of course Hume doesn't tell us what those rules are. He's no fool. Chu gives the essay unfortunately short shrift—she doesn't even name it.) Now, insofar as one does think that such principles can be found, the critic actually is not figured as an absolute monarch whose decrees must be heeded without justification, nor must the critic be metaphorized as a liberal monarch (who, anyway, Chu has already said was somehow analogized to the critic) rather than as a claimant to the title of scientist. Comes now Kant arguing that there is no science of the beautiful, and that their goal was misguided from the jump: if someone else's judgments of taste were authoritative for me, that would be "heteronomy", but "taste makes claim merely to autonomy" (§32); I will judge for myself, thankyouverymuch. In §57: "To provide a determinate objective principle of taste, by means of which its judgments could be guided, examined, and proved, is absolutely impossible; for then it would not be a judgment of taste". If Kant provided a solution to the problem of the critic's authority, it was this: there is no such thing. Authority, in the sense that Chu has been tracing, is a chimera.

Since he was never interested in this problem explicitly to begin with, he does not, as Chu does, recommend giving up the desire for authority, but he can certainly agree with her that no critic, or anyone else, should seek it. (In this light Chu's statement that for him the critic cannot seek a definitive demonstration of beauty without exceeding authority is one of the more venial errors; indeed, no one can seek such definitiveness, just not with that proviso.) Chu is not terribly forthcoming about what her vision of a post-authority criticism entail, though we may, as I already have done, reasonably connect it to her thesis from "Criticism in a Crisis" that the only answer to one judgment is another, which, as she elaborates, "is what it means to try to live together with other human beings". Just so; we post-Kantians no longer have Hume's faith that aesthetics will produce the key and thong to criticism, and are thrown back on ourselves in the event of disagreement, either lamely rebutting "de gustibus non est disputandum" (relegating either our, or their, judgment to the realm of the Kantian "pleasant"), or trying to produce an argument, a reading, a re-presentation of the work that will not prove to the other party that we have it right, but will enable them to see it for themselves as we do. That's a vision of life with each other, one without domination or absolute authority. While Chu asserts that for Kant the critic becomes sort of a model citizen, Kant in fact goes beyond her, since she remains fixedly wed to the idea that the critic is somehow set apart from the rest of us, whereas he is describing a critical citizenry comprising all who encounter a work of art.

Of course it is only natural for Chu, a working critic, to be concerned with the activities of the working critic, and to think about criticism in the context of reviews, which are produced for others to read, and with a certain evaluative purpose, even. But this focus, in addition to leading her to be, at best, misleading about Kant, fits awkwardly with her conclusions in both essays. Who, after all, is the critic? Whose judgment is the only measure of judgment? And in what circumstances do they make these judgments? As I said, for Kant, it would seem that the answer is anyone who has encountered the work (or natural item) in question. Consider the imagined dialogue Cavell gives in "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" ("B" gets two possible replies in Cavell's text; one may take either):

A: He plays beautifully, doesn't he? </blockquote>

B1: Yes, too beautifully. Beethoven is not Chopin. </blockquote>

B2: How can you say that? There was no line, no structure, no idea what the music was about. He's simply an impressive colorist. </blockquote>
Cavell continues:

Now, how will A reply? Can he now say: "Well, I liked it"? Of course he can, but don't we feel that here that would be a feeble rejoinder, a retreat to personal taste? Because B's reasons are obviously relevant to the evaluation of the performance, and because they are arguable, in ways that anyone who knows about such things will know how to pursue. </blockquote>
On the one hand, this is a concise illustration of what Kant was getting at with the difference between judgments of agreeability ("I like it"), which are personal and inarguable, and judgments of beauty, which purport to make a claim on the agreement of others. It is simultaneously a concise challenge to the problematic Chu sets up on which "the critic" is to be taken "at his word, and nothing more", since B is manifestly offering considerations that A can take up, disputatiously or in agreement, or not. This is not to say that B has proven that the player exhibited an aesthetic fault, or that A could prove that the player did not; as Chu says, they can only make more judgments. But in this post-concert confab neither party says, simply, "it was beautiful—obey!".
On the other, though—who are A and B? Neither of them need be the sort of critic that writes and is published, and they are talking about something they have both just experienced. (Because they have both already experienced it, there is much less room for the exercise of arbitrary, kingly authority: who am I going to believe, B or my own ears? But B might instruct my ears to hear better.) I submit that they are engaging in criticism, though, insofar as they are thinking through the work they have just experienced. All of us can do that, and many of us do. Chu does not seem to think as highly of her readers as that:

There is no reason to insist on a false mutuality of reader and writer: it is odd, and probably not very ethical, to insist to the passenger that she is the one flying the plane. What the critic always knows for sure about her readers is that they are not, at this very moment, reading the book under consideration; they are reading her review of it. These are the only readers worth writing for: one’s own. I do not write to persuade the reader; I write to give her a chance to experience herself as the subject of thought, as if I am reading aloud what is already written on the inside of her own skull. </blockquote>
This is the view of her readers that a critic who wishes to give up the dream of authority has? Yes, the review-reading scene is one in which the reader cannot be assumed already to have experienced the work being reviewed, and the reader who hasn't does more or less have to take the critic at their word as far as the adequacy of their descriptions goes. That is as much as to say, to adapt Chu's metaphor, that the critic is the one presently at the controls. But we're all pilots here, ma'am. We are all, I dare say, capable of experiencing ourselves as the subject of thought!3</a> How can we reconcile idea that the reader of "Hanya's Boys" needs Chu to "give her a chance" so to experience herself with the idea that it's up to "the rest of us" to say if the critic is right, as she says mere pages later? The rest of us don't even know what it's like to think for ourselves, the poor dears. Belay that sapere aude!
Let us consider the bizarre identification of "one's own readers" with anyone who happens to be reading one's writing at any moment and the nonsensical assertion that it's even possible to write for readers thus identified, even though they are completely without specificity. (It is also not true that the critic knows for sure about her reader that they are reading her review of a book, because critical activity is not confined to the production of reviews. No one reads Mimesis to find out if To the Lighthouse is good or worth reading; someone who did might be confused by the fact that Auerbach spends all his time with only a small portion of the text.) It is not a bad example of the glibness to which she is prone. Chu is often quite breezy, and I certainly don't mind breeziness; I find the breezy prose style of Kenneth Rexroth's essays and reviews quite pleasing, and the lack of laboredness they share contributes something to the authoritative air Rexroth exhibits and Chu says she aims for. But, although she asserts defiantly that she attends primarily to the ideas that novels body forth, treating them as advancing arguments, she is a bit careless of the ideas in her own work. How else can she move from stating that the thesis that "the critic is an artist in her own right" is "a transparent bid to increase the prestige of criticism with the public" to, in the very next paragraph, stating that it is thanks to the critic's work that "art will mean something for us"? If we are all critics, then this is true but inevitable; if only Chu and her comrades in reviewing are, it's surely as grandiose a claim as any to be found in "The Critic as Artist", the text she takes (in both new essays) as the sole exponent of the critic-as-artist thesis. (Or—well—grandiose, anyway. Wilde's text makes some fairly large claims.) It is also peculiar that she believes that the thesis "locates the critic’s worth in the formal qualities of her prose rather than her judgments", when, on the one hand, she herself has just explained that her evaluations of novels have at least as much to do with the ideas they advance, and, on the other, that conclusion is not unequivocally to be found Wilde's text: she has just quoted Gilbert4</a> saying that the critic is to the work as the creator of the work is to "the visible world of form and color". She is not formalist enough to think that all the creator does is stylize what was there anyway, and neither is Gilbert, who sensibly insists both on the critical dimension of all creative work, and, pace Chu's conclusion that he must lack faith in "criticism as a genre of assertive prose", that the critic "will be an interpreter" who gives "an analysis or exposition of the work itself".5</a>
In fact, when we look at the claim of Chu's I called grandiose more closely, she and Gilbert don't seem too unalike, not only as regards the size of their assertions but also as regards their content. Gilbert admittedly has a wide sense of who critics are or might be in the first place:

It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. He shows the poet's work under new conditions, and by a method special to himself. He takes the written word, and action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation. The singer or the player on lute and viol is the critic of music. The etcher of a picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material is a critical as well as a creative element. … When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely--Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. </blockquote>
One recalls Schlegel's discussion of poetic criticism occasioned by the appearances of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister:

What else but a poem can come into being when a poet in full possession of his powers contemplates a work of art and represents it in his own? This is not because his view makes suppositions and assertions which go beyond the visible work. All criticism has to do that, because every great work, of whatever kind, knows more than it says, and aspires to more than it knows. It is because the aims and approach of poetic criticism are something completely different. Poetic criticism does not act as a mere inscription, and merely say what the thing is, and where it stands and should stand in the world. For that, all that is required is a whole and undivided human being … if he takes pleasure in communication, by word of mouth or in writing, he will enjoy developing and elaborating an insight which is fundamentally single and indivisible. That is how a critical characterization of a work actually comes into being. The poet and artist on the other hand will want to represent the representation anew, and form once more what has already been formed … </blockquote>
Schlegel is not saying that all criticism is poetic criticism, but he is saying that there is such a thing as poetic criticism, at least. Or, careening now to an apparently quite different corner of philosophy, one might think of Donald Davidson's closing remark in "What Metaphors Mean", that "the critic is, so to speak, in benign competition with the metaphor-maker". The stakes here are lower and the scale, an individual metaphor, smaller, but it is still apt to speak of a "critic" here, who is interposed between the artist (the metaphor-maker) and the reader, and who attempts to redo the metaphor in such a way as to render the artist comprehensible to the reader. Can anyone deny that doing so requires taste and creativity, in addition to insight into what it does or could mean, even beyond the fact that, in general, paraphrase of a metaphor remains firmly metaphorical? It is not simply a matter of finding the one correct prosaic way of understanding the poetic figure of which the author, for generic reasons, could not avail themselves, the critic as positivistic detective.
Victorian critics were fond of digestive metaphors, figuring reading as ingestion and incorporation into one's artistic self, the literary inputs being bodied forth, when well digested, in new (or not-so-new—defenses of plagiarism abound) works.6</a> Rubinstein gives us, when he plays, a particular view, or hearing, of Beethoven; when B, in the dialogue from Cavell above, says "Beethoven is not Chopin", he may be taken as criticizing the "criticism" the piano player offered—stating the the player has misunderstood Beethoven and thus given us a poor recapitulation.
Surely, however, one might say now, Rubinstein and Goethe are doing criticism only in an extended sense. Literary critics are not really engaged in "representing the representation anew" like that; your everyday non-poetic critic is more in the "mere inscription" line, and there's nothing wrong with that. But some degree of representing anew is inevitable, since otherwise we would just read the work itself, and we don't look to the critic simply for a declaration "it is, or isn't, beautiful", but to tell us about the work and to justify their assessments. Just look at what Chu herself says about too much of what passes for political art: "the artist is trying too hard to be her own critic, premasticating the work so that all we have to do is swallow." If the bad political artist's contra naturam act of self-criticism is pre-mastication for the reader's benefit, doesn't that suggest that in the natural order of things the author prepares, the critic ruminates, and the reader gets regurgitated pap, though at least in the second she could read the original text, too, if she has a strong stomach? In either case, the reader of critical output is getting something already gnawed upon. Isn't it, after all, part of the critic's job to enable the text to go down more easily for the reader? Certainly Chu, the thinker of her readers' thoughts, must agree with that, to some extent.
It is because, I think, of the critic's post-Kantian plight that the "critic as artist" thesis pulls on us, not because in this way the critic can poach some esteem from the artists. One way to read Gilbert's denial that the critic is to see the work "as in itself it really is" is as on a par with Chu's that the only "measure" of judgment is more judgment: no one is going to produce the skeleton key-and-thong that shows once and for all that one reading is correct and there's an end on it. There's no outside to reach; no guarantor of correctness; nothing transcendent; it's just us: no wonder we have to shore up fragments. Ironically, given that Chu in these pages denies that "criticism could participate in modernism itself", this loss of a shared external standard that would vouchsafe the validity of an artistic (!) activity is precisely how I read Cavell and Gabriel Josipovici on what modernism is in the first place—making criticism not only a participant in modernist attitude, but among the first. As for Gilbert's statement that criticism is "impressive only" (sc. only a matter of the work's impression on the critic), well, doesn't Chu herself say of "the higher critical act" that the critic undertakes it "because it will crack open a view onto unconscious processes within herself" (her emphasis), which she can then show to us, the readers of her review of Maggie Nelson's On Freedom? Perhaps it's just because Chu is writing an essay in response to a book of essays, but she seems here to be giving us not only her judgment of Nelson's accomplishment, but to intend to show us what the better version of Nelson's own work would have been.
But I was talking about Chu's habit of permitting herself glib little tidbits, which give one the impression, just a bit, that she really does think that a piece of criticism is judged by the verve of its prose and not the cogency of the arguments it advances. Here she is at the close of her review of Zadie Smith's The Fraud:

Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness. It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine. Not for nothing do we call it the third person. </blockquote>
(Emphasis in the original.) Now this is a pretty familiar sort of line about the moral (excuse me, political) upbuildingness of novels, albeit idiosyncratically stated (is that the distinction between ethics and politics?). Finely aware, richly responsible, yadda yadda. But wait, people who might as well not exist? Novels are peopled, mostly, with characters who don't exist, but on the other hand one does tend to imagine them as ensouled. It is, however, the culmination of the paragraph that is sure either to give one the impression that deep insight has here been expressed, though one may not be able to articulate it oneself. Not for nothing do we call it the third person! Truly. But—what? For what significant something, I wonder, would Chu say we do employ that bit of originally grammatical terminology (in which context, as you may recall, "the third person" is used with non-persons and even non-entities ("it's raining") as well as persons who are not speaker or addressee) latterly adopted into the typology of narration, and does our using it thus indicate that other sorts of narrative are politically impaired?7</a> Take that, Lorrie Moore!
The granting of permission to say something because it sounds nice, even though one perhaps doesn't mean it—even though it's not clear what it would mean, if someone meant it—is explicitly thematized at the end of the Nelson review. Chu has just lamented Nelson's limits: it is "disappointing … when a writer of stature and skill who genuinely wants us to think more carefully, as I believe Nelson does, manages not to extend that care beyond the limits of what she finds interesting, right, or true." One way Nelson has failed to extend due care is in not realizing that Hannah Black's open letter, as an exercise in public rhetoric, may not have meant literally everything it called for. Chu is aware that she is thereby "plac[ing] on her arguments a demand for logical consistency that I implore her … to spare other people", since one could just as well argue that Nelson's essay is an exercise in public rhetoric and shouldn't be assumed to mean its claims entirely literally. Is it not disappointing that Chu doesn't extend the care to Nelson that Nelson doesn't, according to Chu, extend to her targets? Evidently not, because Chu, on noticing that she isn't being entirely consistent, shrugs and moves on:

I exercise judgment … I gather the indeterminacy of a thing into the inconsistency of having an opinion about it. Indeed, opinions can be formed no other way. When I make a judgment about a work of art, or a political act, or a book like this one, I change not knowing what to think about it into not knowing why I think it. </blockquote>
Opinions can actually be formed in other ways, but whatever. Chu doesn't even extend the gift of thinking carefully to herself.8</a> It is one thing, and an inevitable and thus plausibly blameless one, to harbor inconsistent beliefs. It is another, less worthy, to note inconsistency in one's own beliefs, and shrug and move on; still another to do so in a critical essay; quite another to do so when the inconsistency lies precisely in accusing another of careless thought while being careless oneself. It isn't hard to speculate on why Chu is forgiving of Black and stern toward Nelson: she basically more sympathetic to the one than to the other, and thinks little of catholicity in criticism. Hasn't Chu earlier in the collection remarked that "we find it only natural today to rate a critic on the basis of her mental attitude … rather than the ideological content of her judgments"? Perhaps that is because we want not only ideologically correct but also well-reasoned and, well, intellectually generous criticism, the same which Chu dings Nelson for exhibiting too little, and (more or less explicitly) others for exhibiting too much. It is surely fair, at a minimum, to expect criticism to produce some sort of persuasive case for the judgments it makes, and to judge it on the basis of that case. (Recall: we aren't giving that up, when we give up the yen for authority.) When Chu wrote that "the critic always had to assume the possibility of meaning, even as the modernist realized he didn't. (This is what made him a modernist!)", I think she's wrong about modernism, and wrong about the division between critics and modernism. But I'm willing to say something related, which is that the critic should mean it when she makes and justifies her judgments (and she should justify them). Wasn't criticism supposed to be a genre of assertive prose? The irony of the closing of the Nelson review is that in the preceding pages Chu has any number of self-consistent criticisms, and appreciations, of Nelson's essay to record, making the final self-undermining tack she takes quite unnecessary—and it wouldn't even be self-undermining if she were prepared to argue that Black's text must be read non-literally while Nelson's must be read literally. But that would get in the way of neatly ending her piece with a callback to Nelson's invocation of "practices of freedom", a structural nicety with more artistic than critical merit: is not knowing why you think what you think really a practice of freedom? Is that an attractive vision of criticism, even a non-authoritative criticism?

^{1
"Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told", G.C. Lichtenberg wrote of an unknown but evidently libidinous writer, "he gets an enormous erection." No one has told me that zinging her targets gratifies Chu erotically, but one can see where Lichtenberg's author was coming from. Well—one could see that in one's own person, to be honest.
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^{2
Chu adorns some of the pieces with brief afterwords, and the one for "On Liking Women" laments "bloggy 'voiceyness'" which was "dated even then". Perhaps it was, it's Chu's prerogative to look back, at the advanced age of 32 or however old she was when she composed the note, at the work of her 24-year-old self, and cringe at her youthful style. But it's my prerogative, being un homme d'un certain âge, to find the brassiness charming. (Did I find it so when it first appeared?) It fits the essay, I think, a bit better than it does the reviews with a similar voice.
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^{3
Given Chu's repeated denial that criticism is continuous with literature itself, it is ironic that one reading of what she's saying in this passage is similar to what poetry is said to do in Eileen John's "Poetry and Directions for Thought". (Johns is discussing work of Kendall Walton's, but I haven't read that.)
</div>
^{4
Wilde's text is a dialogue between Gilbert and Ernest; Gilbert speaks far more and may not unreasonably be taken to represent Wilde, though, first, the dialogue form itself creates some distance between author and main speaker, the text having been published as one fourth of a quartet, comprising two dialogues and two essays, making the choice of form obviously salient, and, second, that form and its ironizing potential is itself directly and indirectly thematized in the text itself. Indirectly insofar as some of the exchanges ineluctably bring Plato to mind (when Ernest says to Gilbert "while you talk it seems to me to be so", what reader will not think of Socrates's similar remark to Protagoras?); directly when Gilbert says that dialogue enables the thinker to "both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood." If we believe Gilbert about this, then how much else that Gilbert says will we attribute to Wilde as a firm conviction rather as than fancy and passing mood?
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^{5
And just look at what Gilbert goes on to say about Milton and Shakespeare!

But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate scholarship. And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe's greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare's disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word,he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world. The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name.
</blockquote>
Are these things not to be effected through, and put down in, assertive prose?
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^{6
I am going here by (my memory of) Paul Saint-Amour's The Copywrights, in whose discussion of this rhetoric occurs the excellent phrase "pleasurable deglutition".
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^{7
Sanskrit grammarians, I am told, call what we call the third person the first person. "Our" third-person dates at least from the composition of the treatise Τέχνη γραμματική, which, though it is attributed to Dionysus Thrax (died 90 BC), contains parts apparently believed to be written a few hundred years later, among them the part discussing grammatical persons. The division into persons is familiar: "πρώσοπα τρία, πρῶτον, δεύτερον, τρίτον· πρῶτον μὲν ἀφ᾽ οὗ ὁ λόγος, δεύτερον δὲ πρὸς ὃν ὁ λόγος, τρίτον δὲ περὶ οὗ ὁ λόγος" (there are three persons, the first, the second, and the third; the first is that from whom the speech is, the second that to whom the speech is; the third that about which the speech is).
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^{8
The literal and the metaphorical come in for some odd claims in these paragraphs:

The rhetoric of harm is just that—a rhetoric. It does not really divide the world into victims and perpetrators of harm, either literally or metaphorically. Where is its army, its police? No, a rhetoric only tries to impose its categories on the world …
</blockquote>
However we are to understand "it does not really divide the world … metaphorically", the adverbs seemingly fighting each other, I would at least have expected that a rhetoric's attempt "to impose its categories on the world" amounted precisely to a metaphorical division, in this case into victims and perpetrators of harm.
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On Purity in Heists

2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Fred Astaire and Jackie Chan agree: if you know what you're doing, in a filmed dance or fight, you don't want the camera to move, and they expressed this agreement in pretty similar ways, Astaire saying "either the camera dances or I do", and Chan "when the camera angle moves, that means the actors, they don't know how to fight … I never move my camera. Always steady". You don't have to show all the action with a relatively static, wide shot just because you can, just because the action you'd be showing will be well executed, but if you're making a dance movie, or a martial arts movie, not doing so would be kind of perverse. On the other hand, if your actors are not good at dancing or movie fighting, you certainly still have the option of shooting them in the wide without a lot of cuts, but the result will be more obviously bad than if you make it flashier.
There's an analogy to this in heist films, escape films, the kind of film, in general, in which the overcoming of obstacles in service of a goal is a large part of the scaffolding of the plot. Consider the difference between Rififi and (the prompt for this post, though plenty of other examples can be furnished) the first episode of the Lupin TV series. Rififi shows the heist straight through. I admit I can't remember how they gain access in the first place via the adjacent storefront; I believe this too is explained if not depicted in detail, but certainly from that point on—the actual break-in, the disabling of security, the theft, the escape—we see it happen, over the course of half an hour (a quarter of the movie's runtime). Not only are there no surprises in the execution of the robbery revealed to the viewer after the fact, there aren't even any surprises as it happens. The viewer already knows how it's going to go, because we've seen the robbers forming the plan, figuring out how they're going to do it. A key moment comes when they discover how to deal with the new alarm the store has recently installed. These men are essentially engineers and we watch them overcome a difficult technical problem in a believable way. (Not only was the process of figuring it out depicted believably, the solution is not just believable but actually functional, leading to copycat robberies in the real world. This, perhaps, is superogatory.) The actual execution of the plan is still remarkably tense—the fact that we know the plan doesn't mean that carrying it out will automatically succeed, after all—but it's notable that we see them do pretty much exactly what they told us they'd do.
How different is the syuzhet of Lupin! The plot concerns the theft of a necklace, and neither the theft itself nor the planning thereof is depicted straightforwardly. (Assane, the thief, is planning everything himself, so there's no real reason for it to be articulated aloud, but he does have help, and obviously they could have arranged for it to be joint work if they'd wanted to.) Everything comes out of order, each mysterious tidbit explained later in the order of depiction by a flashback that situates and, theoretically, explains it.
Why would you do it like this? It's not quite parallel to the fight scene case, where we can imagine that a director is working with a fully-formed script and firm set of casting choices, and must now figure out how to depict a fight with these performers. This structure—I assume—is as written, not a subsequent reworking of a plot initially written linearly. But this structure has a very clear advantage, which is that it enables you to obscure the fact that Assane's plan doesn't make any fucking sense. If there had been a scene in which Assane explained to his jeweler friend what his scheme was, in detail similar to that which we see in Rififi, the audience would rightly scoff. It is dependent on coincidence, luck, and the unwitting participation of third parties to an absurd degree. The flashback structure allows us to see something happen which we don't understand, or which we see only partially, and then to see it more fully, with the same event getting more layers in subsequent flashbacks. Each little bit moving forward in time poses a question: why is he doing this? How is this going to work? How's Assane going to wriggle out of this one? Each flashback gives us a bit of insight: Ah! That's how it happened! That's how he did it! The ensuing back-and-forth of puzzle and answer impresses us with how neatly the complex scheme came together, because it did happen thus and so, and keeps us feeling satisfied, because each immediate question is resolved, and then we're on to another one, and the resolution, being retrospective, makes matters feel settled.
A plan, however, is not retrospective but prospective. The primary service the mixed-up temporality of the syuzhet serves is that it replaces a plan, which must take into account future possibilities and contingencies, with a record of events, which only did happen one way. But it's the intelligence embodied in the prospective plan that, to me at least, you want in a heist movie. You want the mastermind to actually have masterminded something, not to be playing hope chess. Rififi's explicit depiction of the planning itself is somewhat rare (Le Cercle Rouge shares this feature, but it is clearly a Rififi homage) but it's useful twice over, both reality effect and discipline: it is not impossible to simply depict the heist and then explain how the plan worked retrospectively (I wouldn't call Inside Man an unqualified success, but the hostage/robber intermingling seemed effectively done in this regard to me), but having someone say "we will do this, and then that will happen" invites the audience, and hopefully the writer, to say: "will it, though? What if it doesn't?". (Obviously, this is no panacea. Several of the elements of the plan in Ocean's 8 that are discussed in advance are completely ridiculous, but it just barrels ahead anyway. But then, it and the similarly afflicted Ocean's 11 belong firmly to the "beautiful face, huge" school of filmmaking.)
There may be other modes of presentation which would also serve Lupin, but the linear style of Rififi could never work. When the temporal structure of the heist moves, that means that the plan is nonsense.

What's so testimonial about testimonial injustice? A reply to Richard Pettigrew

2025-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

I am interested in the paper "What is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice?</a>" by Richard Pettigrew. I have quibbles both about its first-order discussion and its methodological maneuvers. At the first order, Pettigrew objects to one account of the "characteristic wrong" on grounds that I don't think come off and makes a positive proposal that I deem peculiar. (In fact, he makes two positive proposals, of which the second, which he seems to favor, strikes me as both unmotivated and unworkable.) This first order and his methodology intersect when he argues that while his positive proposal doesn't cover one example in the literature, that's fine, because the provision of an analysis and the determination of what the analysand even is are part of a hermeneutic circle in which both affect the other, and we learn, through his analysis, that that example actually is not an example of testimonial injustice, though it is an injustice.
Three examples are treated as the canonical motivations for the notion of testimonial injustice:

Cal, a visitor to Glasgow, receives advice from Elspeth, about how to get to Glasgow Central Station, but doesn't believe her as much as he should (or rather he grants her testimony insufficient credence, to use the parlance of the times). In a variation he does grant her sufficient credence, but only because his prejudice about the abilities of women to give directions is offset by his observation that she's a mountaineer and hence presumably reliable—even for a woman—about orientation. </li>

Marge Sherwood is disbelieved by Dickie Greenleaf's father about Tom Ripley, in The Talented Mr Ripley. </li>

Tom Robinson is disbelieved by the jury in claiming that he was Mayella Ewell's friend, in To Kill a Mockingbird. </li> </ol>
The third is the example that Pettigrew will claim is shown not to be testimonial injustice on the grounds that his analysis does not apply to it. The first and its variants are his starting point. The second he more or less leaves aside.
Pettigrew's methodological interlude</h1>
Observing that the concept was introduced by Miranda Fricker apparently quite thoroughly, and yet "others have argued that she circumscribes its extension too narrowly" (1431), Pettigrew finds that "something strange" is afoot: "Fricker introduces a technical term of art partly by ostension and then by definition, and yet there is debate over whether it's the correct definition. How can this be?" (ibid.) His answer is that "her interlocutors are trying to pick out the most natural or unified or useful concept in the vicinity of the one that she specifies with her definition (ibid.; emphasis added). We want to include in the concept "all genuinely similar instances" (1432), where "genuinely similar" means that "the same wrong is done by hearer to testifier … and so the question of the distinctive wrong of testimonial injustice is entangled with the question of the concept's extension: we settle both together" (ibid.).
Now, I do not think that anything strange is afoot. Imagine that Fricker had, under the name "testimonial injustice", ostended the exact same examples and given the exact same definition, except she had also specified "the testimony is given and received in New Jersey". No one, I think, would be tempted by the thought that that was just what testimonial injustice was henceforth to be, as if Fricker had a proprietary interest in the term or must, by having given a definition, have penetrated into the nature of what she was discussing, even if all her examples really did take place in New Jersey. Any other observer is entitled to say: "you're clearly on to something—you have rendered a service by pointing this phenomenon out under this rubric—but your analysis is too restrictive". Or if we insist on calling it a definition, we can say: "you can introduce a term with a definition (but no one is required to think it refers to anything interesting), and you can introduce a term by ostension, but if you ostend and define we are all allowed to look at what is ostended and deny that the definition fits it, or to define the same good term differently".
Partly this is just because Fricker names the phenomenon with a descriptive name</a>. If we know that the phenomenon in question is "testimonial injustice", then what possible relevance could its taking place in New Jersey have? If Fricker had ostended the same examples, given the same definition, and said "I dub this phenomenon 'qwxzlp'", then a reasonable reaction might be to simply let her have it. How would I know what qwxzlp is supposed to be in the first place? On the other hand, I could still look at the examples and think that something else is going on, which is more interesting.
Really, the issue is that (on Pettigrew's presentation!) Fricker is not giving a definition at all. She is pointing to a phenomenon, hitherto neglected, and offering an analysis of it. The name still guides us toward finding something specifically testimonial in the offing, and her analysis is oriented to explaining what, testimonially, is unjust, but we can all look at the (fictional) cases and judge for ourselves if that's really what's going on. We might conjecture that the order of priority is noticing that there's something interesting about such-and-such a case, surmising that it's a self-standing phenomenon in its own right and has something to do with testimony and justice, giving it the name "testimonial injustice", and then offering an analysis, guided by the surmise the name embodies.
And, given the name, we others can cast about for what other things might also merit the name. If notation is productive, how much more productive is a name? This need not be in service of the idea that some one wrong is involved in all cases; it could simply be widening the field of investigation. This is why I used "merit the name" rather than "be testimonial injustice". What other cases does that phrase aptly describe? There need be no suggestion that we are looking for "genuine similarity" at all, rather than investigating how best to use this evocative phrase.
Fricker, after all, is not guaranteed to have found the most illustrative, or all the illustrative, cases that seem to merit the name "testimonial injustice" merely by dint of having been first. Indeed, given the above sketch of how testimonial injustice may have come to be a topic at all, it seems that "testimonial injustice" ought to be regarded as a label pro tem for a set of phenomena of which we ought not assume that the "best" concept under which to array them makes essential reference to testimony at all (indeed we may also wish to hold open the possibility that the wrong involved is not a form of injustice but another kind of wrong). Lichtenberg thought that "parabola" and "hyperbola" were names of rare quality, "for they express qualities of these lines from which all the others can be derived"; we oughtn't assume that "testimonial injustice" expresses any quality of the cases under consideration, even the involvement of testimony, as far as getting at what's really interesting in them goes. Guidance by the name may be very productive in scaring up other testimony-involving examples, but it may also prevent one from noticing other examples which bid fair to be, at root, the same kind of thing. In fact I think it's not too hard to work up such an example. Consider again Cal and Elspeth. In the example as given, Elspeth approaches a a visibly confused Cal, offers her aid, and is insufficiently believed for her troubles. But what if a confused Cal, realizing he could consult a local, looks about him for someone whose aid he will affirmatively seek? Elspeth is in his field of vision and he considers asking her before plumping instead for a man ten feet further off, solely because she's a woman and he a man. It seems to me as if, whatever is going on in the case of Cal's disvaluing of Elspeth's actual act of giving information, the same thing is going on in Cal's act of ignoring Elspeth as a potential source of information; that the two should be given the same analysis; that no difference of kind is in question at all. And yet since there is no real presence of testimony it would not count, for Pettigrew, as testimonial injustice.
The admission is now likely long overdue that I am in fact quite unfamiliar with the literature on testimonial injustice; I'm sure that the question of the unity and the testimoniality of testimonial injustice has been raised before. It is unreasonable in the extreme to expect each paper to include, just in case n00bs to the topic should chance upon them, a justification of the legitimacy of the topic at all before getting underway; one ought to be able to address a community that basically agrees on such things. But in Pettigrew's case in particular I think it is a fault that he doesn't say more about the presupposition that the "genuine similarity" depends on the same wrong occurring, or that the proliferation of examples of putative testimonial injustice is concerned with getting at what the most useful concept in the neighborhood is, since he brings the points of methodology up himself and attempts to use these presuppositions to argue that the Tom Robinson example isn't one of testimonial injustice. This he can only maintain if "testimonial injustice" does name one single unified phenomenon, rather than being a façade (in something like Mark Wilson's sense),1</a> or being otherwise multifarious. Moreover, given the way testimony actually gets into his account, the question of testimoniality does seem worth addressing explicitly. The jurors, in Pettigrew's analysis of the Tom Robinson example, meet every single criterion of committing testimonial injustice against Robinson, except that they aren't responding wrongly specifically to his testimony. (Actually, I think that even on Pettigrew's own description of the case, they are, but he doesn't think so; I'll return to this below.) Pettigrew concludes from this that it isn't a case of testimonial injustice, and that this is a positive step, because we've learned something new. It is reasonable, I think, to ask why we don't learn from this that "doesn't happen to involve testimony" is more like "doesn't happen to take place in New Jersey" than previously suspected—that the category is less distinctive than we thought.
Pettigrew is aware that on his account "the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice … doesn't seem distinctive to testimonial injustices", but deflects this with the remark that his "aim has been to identify the wrong that is present in all cases of testimonial injustice", not "a wrong that is present only in those cases", and after all "the alternative accounts [he's] considered [also] don't identify a wrong that occurs only in those cases" (1444). Fair enough. But if the ambition is to find "the most natural or unified or useful concept" where the unification comes in virtue of "the same wrong [being] done by hearer to testifier" (1432), then either one must give up on the idea that testimony has much essential to do with testimonial injustice—because one will be unifying with "too much"—or one must find a wrong that does essentially involve testimony. (But wait: didn't I just say that Pettigrew excludes the Tom Robinson case on testimonial grounds? Yes, because his story is basically bipartite: testimonial injustice is an injustice of such-and-such a type, that occurs in the right sort of testimonial setting. The suspicious newjerseyness of this structure is apparent, I take it.) At a minimum, I think, a paper titled "what is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice?" should have more to say on its own behalf when it turns out that the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice is not characteristic of testimonial injustice, the way most readers would construe that phrase, than "the goal was never to describe the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice that way".
Pettigrew's first-order account</h1>
In what follows I wish to address the first-order story Pettigrew tells, starting with the objection he raises to the view that the wrong involved in testimonial injustice is that of failing to treat one's interlocutor with due respect, and then moving on to his actual proposed account what the wrong is, and his treatment of the Tom Robinson example.
Respect</h2>
"The hearer wrongs the testifier by not treating her with the epistemic respect his evidence tells him she is owed" (1437) sure seems like a plausible start. Pettigrew asserts that it falls to the following example. First, he says that "often our evidence … comes from many different sources and there are many permissible ways to weight these against each other; it pulls in different directions, and there are many permissible ways to resolve these tensions. And so, in such cases, there is a range of credences that rationality permits as a response to that evidence, rather than a single credence it demands" (ibid.).
Before even finishing Pettigrew's narrative, we can see where one objection to his objection will surface. "There is a range of credences that rationality permits" is true if it means "one can rationally arrive at any credence in this range by some particular route in each case"; it is not true if it means "rationality permits any credence in this range, no matter how arrived at". Given the many permissible weighings and resolvings of evidentiary sources and tensions, it may be the case that one can permissibly end up with credences in the 80—90% range, but only by a permissible weighing and resolving. This drops out from Pettigrew's presentation, in which he simply says that "Cal's background evidence is such that … his credence … should lie between 80 and 90 percent" (ibid.); as it happens, whenever a woman helps him, he believes her to the tune of 81%, whereas a man he believes to the tune of 89%. Therefore, per Pettigrew, Cal accords Elspeth due epistemic respect.
How might we think of such a range of permissible credences in this case? Perhaps Cal has reason to believe that those who approach one to offer help are generally knowledgeable (why else would they be offering help?) but sometimes, as he also has reason to believe, they're instead ignorant but overconfident (that's why else!), and sometimes too they have the competence but botch the performance; perhaps also he's heard that the Scottish are a friendly people (so that they may be more inclined to try to help even though they don't know), but Elspeth seemed more neutral than friendly (so maybe that's not what's going on) and as nothing in the scenario compels a specific weight or resolution to the different directions these point, there's some wiggle room for where he ends up. When Pettigrew says that (epistemic) disrespect in this case involves A treating B "as less reliable than A's evidence says B is" (1437; slightly modified), we must be cautious: it's not that A's evidence says B's reliability is "anywhere between 80 and 90%, take your pick in that range", it's that A's evidence doesn't assign any reliability to B, until A resolves it, and all permissible resolutions lie between 80 and 90%.
Suppose that Cal, having awoken in an optimistic mood, full of faith in human kindness, minimizes considerations that would lead him to a lower credence, and would accord Elspeth 87% credence, but for the post-resolution operation of a blanket "prejudice against women" tax of six percentage points, leading to a final assignment of 81%. Here surely he has accorded her less credence than his evidence-as-finally-resolved demanded, since it demanded 87%. Does Pettigrew wish to add that his prejudice against women is another source of evidence to be weighed, which it is permissible for him to take into account? Presumably not, because the construction of the original case was such that Cal assigns a credence too low given his evidence, which he would not be doing if his prejudice were part of his evidence. Does he wish to say that resolving the conflicts by appeal to a prejudice is legitimate? Well, yes, actually (1438f)! Since "everything that is relevant to reliability is already included in the evidence", and thus arriving at some specific credence will always involve an "appeal to something that is arbitrary in some way", there is no basis for complaint. Strictly this is not true: Cal's buoyant mood, which silences certain considerations, is not a consideration he appeals to, and frankly I find the idea that in this situation, in general, we make any kind of appeal to a consideration to "pick our credence" suspicious. Cal's prejudice need not be a consideration he appeals to, either; it could simply be operative in his prejudicially weighing certain parts of his evidence too much or too little (that is, Cal does not resolve his evidence by appeal to a prejudice, he resolves his evidence in a prejudiced way), and it certainly seems plausible that even if he ends up with a "respectable" level of credence, prejudicially playing sources of evidence off each other is disrespectful to Elspeth. Respect is not an output of this process, but a mode in which it is conducted. But even if it were, what of it? The idea that we'd have to go beyond our evidence to something not evidential doesn't mean that we can permissibly go beyond it to anything.
All that to the side: even if we ignore the idea of permissibly arriving at a given credence, so that the mere fact of 81% credence would be fine no matter how arrived at, I still wish to say: of course Cal disrespects Elspeth (epistemically, even). There's a sort of fallacy of composition at play here: what may be properly respectful in any one case is not necessarily respectful when it takes place systematically. If you do the minimum required of you as a friend vis-à-vis one person on one occasion, that may be compatible with your respecting them; perhaps you have a more than sufficient reason for not having done more, and after all you did do the required. If you always do the minimum with respect to that friend, while showing that you're perfectly capable of doing more because you do do more with respect to another friend, then you are indeed being disrespectful, even though on each occasion you exceed the threshold. Systematically differentially doing the bare minimum is disrespectful.2</a> (Perhaps this is not "epistemic disrespect".) Even aside from this compositional argument, the slide from "rationality permits me to grant you 81% credence" to "in granting you 81% credence I am not being disrespectful" is far too quick. Perhaps the reason Cal grants Elspeth merely 81% credence is not his specific prejudice about women's ability to give directions but precisely his disrespect for women. The fact that he doesn't disrespect women enough to dip below the 80% threshold in this case does not mean he is being adequately respectful; at best, it means that his disrespect hasn't led him to make an additional epistemic error.
The positive story</h2>
Here is Pettigrew's "account of the wrong that is present in cases of testimonial injustices"; it is subject to a few adjustments and then a fairly radical modification, which will be discussed below:

B gives testimony to A; A's response is guided by [prejudices about relevant competences]; so A treats B's testimony as less reliable than A's evidence tells them it is. This is then expressive of a social hierarchy with respect to which A is advantaged relative to B, and so A thereby treats B as his [sic] social inferior; and in virtue of that, A commits a relational injustice against B—A's treatment of B prevents them from meeting as equals. According to the account built on Fraser's suggestion, this is the distinctive wrong of testimonial injustice. (1442) </blockquote>
As we've seen, "distinctive" does not mean that it is a wrong distinct to testimonial injustices—you cannot distinguish a testimonial injustice from another by its presence. You can (according to Pettigrew) only distinguish a non–testimonial injustice by its absence. An adjustment (1443): one might be met not as equal because one isn't an equal, in some relevant social hierarchy (eg one person may simply be a scoundrel and unworthy of esteem). Thus we append "without warrant" as appropriate. It will be seen that the role testimony plays in this account is that it occasions the injustice; A could express the same hierarchy and commit the same injustice with other promptings.
Undue deference</h3>
Discussing the case of a white person granting too much credence to a Black man on the topic of illegal drugs (1445), Pettigrew says that his account gets it right, even though A treats B as more reliable than their evidence tells them B is. The reason is that by treating the Black man as more reliable about drugs, the white person still casts him as their social inferior, even if he is cast as an epistemic superior with regard to this unsavory topic. So "less reliable" in the account really should be read as "either less or more reliable", so long as, with respect to the topic in question, lesser or greater reliability is associated with an inferior position in a social hierarchy.
Bear with me as I reiterate this point: on this account, testimonial injustice occurs because the hearer's incorrect degree of belief in the testifier's testimony expresses a hierarchy on which the testifier is inferior. Epistemic inferiority or superiority is material only insofar as it positions the testifier in a socially inferior role.
If we allow ourselves to be guided by the label "testimonial injustice" and the thought that this injustice has to do with not meeting another as an equal, we might think as follows: one can be granted undue deference about anything, not merely a socially disfavored topic. If A treats B as more reliable than is warranted by A's evidence on the topic of, say, the ballet, does A meet B as an equal? B may not be harmed by this deference, but Pettigrew doesn't wish to insist that a harm to B is necessary for testimonial injustice to be in the offing. Insofar as the ballet is a culturally elevated sort of topic, A may be assimilating B to an unequal, but higher, position on a social hierarchy; is this also unjust? It does seem to mean, as can also be said in the hitherto considered cases, that A doesn't really meet B directly. The operation of a prejudice prevents A from encountering the person actually before them.
The examples Pettigrew considers are one-off exchanges (even Tom Robinson's testimony is treated as a single disbelieved utterance). Imagine, though, that this deference plays out not just with respect to a single statement but over the course of a conversation. One might say: in this case the problem is not so much that A doesn't meet B as an equal but that A prevents B from meeting A as an equal, or that the mode of A's not meeting B as an equal is that A withdraws their equality from the meeting. "The yes-man harms/is unjust to his interlocutor" may not be the most sympathetic position, but I think there's something there. Here we are not mediating the one-on-one injustice by a broader social hierarchy; it is something A does directly to B, perhaps because B is a member of some class, but not to B qua member-of-some-class.
Pettigrew doesn't think views that class credibility as a good to be distributed have much promise, and in that I think he's correct; this insight also smooths the way, though, to thinking these cases of too much credibility (even on socially neutral or favored topics) at least can constitute an injustice. There may be nothing wrong with giving someone more than they're owed when it comes to doing them a favor, but granting someone excessive credence isn't doing them a favor at all. I wish to say: denying them your disagreement is disrespectful. It prevents each of you from a genuine encounter with the other—it is a one-on-one injustice.
Idiosyncratic prejudice</h3> As mentioned, Pettigrew actually gives two positive accounts (the second is considered below</a>). Pettigrew thinks that the second one solves the following problem: the original account requires a hierarchy in which A is advantaged relative to B, but what if Cal and Elspeth are both women? Surely a woman can harbor prejudices about women's ability to give directions, and the female Cal should be able to be testimonially unjust to Elspeth too.
Let us stick however with the thought from the preceding section that injustices are often done one-to-one: I do something to you. Why must my harming you by disbelieving you, or believing you insufficiently, be referred to a social hierarchy? I might have quite niche or idiosyncratic prejudices, corresponding to no real social hierarchy. Pettigrew for his part says that "surely we want to identify a wrong that is present only when the person who receives the credibility deficit belongs to a group that is stereotyped as being less credible" (1440),3</a> where presumably he means "stereotyped by people at large as being less credible"; all I can say is that I'm not at all sure of that. Perhaps I believe that it's men who are bad at understanding and giving directions, and women who are good at it, and discount Alistair's advice about navigating Glasgow central station, simply because he is a man. Surely we want to say that I thereby work an injustice upon him. I mean: how not? I prejudicially disbelieve him, even if not in accord with a socially cognized hierarchy.
Perhaps the problem here is that I don't treat Alistair as my social inferior by dint of prejudicially insufficiently believing him. The wrong on Pettigrew's account is not-meeting-as-equal-because-treating-as-social-inferior. It could be possible to make my treatment of Alistair conform to this story; it could be the case that my behavior is expressive of a "social hierarchy" on which men are inferior (this is connected to their supposed navigational deficiencies), just a social hierarchy that doesn't have any social reality. (It would not be a "social hierarchy" in the sense of being a hierarchy actually expressed in social standings but in that of being a hierarchy that pertains to social standings.) I treat him as my inferior, even though, socially, he isn't. This might enable the account to handle this case, if we wish to handle it. But perhaps my prejudices run like this:

Men on the whole are superior to women, in countless domains—all the ones that matter, really. But you just can't rely on a man to give you good directions! There's nothing wrong with that. They're just not mindful of the details; they're more big-picture types, which is great normally but not if you need to figure out where you're going. Women are the opposite—that's what makes them so good at domestic organization, keeping spaces tidy, stuff like that. </blockquote>
That is, I endorse the conventional social hierarchy, I just flip who in it is good at giving directions. (It's not as if there is a natural or necessary connection between the social hierarchy and the specific prejudices associated with it.) Now my believing him insufficiently is expressive of a hierarchy on which men are superior, because the valence of navigation is flipped. Even here it seems to me that I'm behaving unjustly toward him.
We also have prejudices which are not obviously connected to a relevant social hierarchy. I happen to be a Pisces, and Pisces apparently are thought, by the people who think this kind of thing, to be overly emotional; some such person might therefore discount my testimony on the grounds that I must be making too big a deal of whatever it is I'm talking about—typical Pisces! I do not believe that, in general, there is a social hierarchy on which Pisces rank low, or high, or at all; I don't even think that the believer in astrology need have a ranking of signs: each sign will have some good, some bad, and some neutral traits to be mindful of in some situations. Unlike being bad at giving directions, which it is not bad to be in itself, being overly emotional is arguably not neutral (being overly anything is bad), but it is, to the astrology-believer, hierarchically neutral; at least, being conceptualized as overly emotional qua Pisces doesn't lead to a hierarchy of astrological signs. And yet it seems to me that being disbelieved on the grounds of my astrological sign is also unjust; I am granted too little credibility because of a prejudice, and this means my hearer doesn't meet me as an equal (this seems a congenial formula, albeit one yet to be filled in): isn't that enough for injustice to be on the scene?
Others' meeting as equals</h3>
Pettigrew is much exercised by the thought that A might unjustly believe B insufficiently on a topic on which they acknowledge B to be both skilled in general and more skilled than they are themselves. This leads him to the radical revision foretold above. I do not believe, though, that his motivation really makes sense, or that his revision does.
Here's how he sets up the motivating case, the mountaineer variation on Cal and Elspeth:

As Elspeth approaches Cal, he notices that she's wearing a badge of the Scottish Mountaineering Society. This, together with his background evidence and Elspeth's testimony, requires him to give credence 99 per cent … but he gives only 90 per cent, because, while he recognizes that women mountaineers are more competent at giving directions than the average person, he is still guided sufficiently by his prejudice that they aren't as good as his evidence tells him they are. What's more, Cal thinks of himself as having a pretty average sense of direction … so, at least in a standard colloquial sense, Cal treats Elspeth as his superior, not as his inferior … it doesn't seem that Cal's behavior impairs the abilities of him and Elspeth to meet as equals, which is supposed to be the source of the injustice (1446) </blockquote>
Before going further, I want to address this locution that "Cal's behavior" does or doesn't "impair his ability" to meet Elspeth as an equal. It is new on the scene; previously, we were concerned with whether Cal did or did not meet Elspeth as an equal, and why. This new formula strikes me as confused: that which impairs an ability impairs its exercise; my ankle injury impairs my ability to hop on one foot, but my faulty hopping does not impair that ability: it is the better or worse exercise of that ability. (Of course, my hopping could impair my ability if it exacerbates my injury, and Cal's behavior could impair his ability if it strengthens his prejudice. But such consequentialist construals have been explicitly excluded (1443).) Cal's behavior is the exercise of his ability to meet with Elspeth as an equal or otherwise. His behavior is his meeting her as an equal, or not; it is not aptly described as impairing, or not impairing, the ability to do so. It's not as if he first believes her insufficiently (and this is his "behavior"), then as a second step taken on that basis does some other thing to treat her as his inferior, and finally finishes it all off by not meeting her as an equal, as a third action. If we wish to find something that might or might not impair his ability to meet Elspeth as an equal, his prejudice is a good candidate; in that case, though, it seems clear (insofar as we understand what meeting as equals is at all) that his prejudice does do so. The fact that his prejudice about women is offset by a countervailing belief about mountaineers doesn't mean that his prejudice is not affecting his ability to meet Elspeth as an equal, any more than my wearing a life vest would not mean that my ability to float is not impaired by having a weight strapped to my waist. You can tell that she is still treated as inferior because men don't need to be mountaineers to have their directions believed. Here as in the discussion of respect I suspect that Pettigrew is misled by his use of specific credences expressed as percentages. The important point has become "is the final number correct?", with the question of how that number was arrived at entirely suppressed.
Since, as we saw in the case of supposed expertise on drugs</a>, it is not the mere fact of judging someone to be superior in some epistemic domain, but what that means for their social status, that makes for the wrong on Pettigrew's account, the fact that "in a standard colloquial sense" Cal meets Elspeth here as his (epistemic) superior is irrelevant. We have a clue to this irrelevance in the fact that in the original description of the case no mention was made of Cal's assessment of his own skill at giving directions. There's nothing wrong, after all, about regarding someone as your inferior with regard to giving directions, and that wasn't what Cal was doing (in the original case) anyway: with regard to skill at giving directions, he was regarding Elspeth as inferior to herself (or, at least, inferior to how his evidence told him she was). The harm was that in so doing he expressed an unjust hierarchy on which women in general are inferior socially to men in general.
With regard to the mountaineer case, since Cal still believes Elspeth exemplifies womanly inferiority in her being worse at giving directions than a similarly situated man, ie than a male mountaineer, and expresses this prejudice in discounting her testimony, there seems to be no obstacle to saying that he treats her as a social inferior, while acknowledging her direction-giving superiority to him. It is still the case that he regards her as worse than she is. It would be another matter if her being a mountaineer simply overpowered his prejudice about women, so that it played no role in his uptake of her testimony—but then presumably he would also not commit an injustice.
There is however another way, not explored by Pettigrew, to construe a similar example so that it's at least questionable whether A treats B to occupy an inferior social role. Social hierarchies are multiple and cross-cutting, so there's not necessarily going to be a way, in an arbitrary interaction, to place the participants unambiguously on a single scale with one above the other. In discussing the mountaineer example, Pettigrew considers "two scientists present[ing] their findings, one a man, one a woman", to an "audience [that] knows no more about their competence than that both are scientists". When the audience members "set their credences … they appeal to a sexist distribution in which scientists who are women are, on average, less competent to than scientists are men", so that "they will give less credence to the woman's testimony and more to the man's" (1448). Now we can say everything we said about Cal and Elspeth-the-mountaineer here too: that the audience members treat the woman scientist as a social inferior in that they make use of a prejudice that partly constitutes a hierarchy on which women are lesser than men, and that this is visible in their treating her as less credible than her peer (rather than as less credible than they themselves are). But perhaps "scientist" is a particularly august role, so that while they disvalue her qua woman they value her qua scientist—this is separate from believing her qua scientist. Now their degree of belief is expressive of a social hierarchy on which women are inferior than men, but their acknowledgement that she is after all a scientist is expressive of a different hierarchy on which scientists are superior to the lay community, so that whether they treat her as their "social inferior" overall, thus not meeting her as an equal, may be up in the air. But perhaps all the story needs is her being treated without warrant as an inferior along some axis; perhaps, too, "treats as a social inferior" is just as much a misleading output as "has credence x%" and we should focus more simply on the operation of the prejudice, locating the wrong directly there.
Here's how Pettigrew approaches this mountaineer conundrum. First, he asserts that (1) "to avoid a relational egalitarian injustice, it is not sufficient that A and B regard each other as equals; it is also necessary that the wider society in which they live regard them in that way" (1448); as an example, (2) "partners in a mixed race relationship cannot meet as equals, however fully they treat one another as equals, while society treats one as the superior of the other" (ibid.). In the example of the scientists, while the audience members treat both scientists as their superiors, (3) "it is the two scientists who are less able to meet as equals". Something similar is said to be happening with Cal and the mountaineer: (4) "Cal's behavior does not impair his ability to meet with Elspeth as equals … but it does impair the ability of others to meet as equals, since it expresses a hierarchy that ensures that … [a woman] will be treated as less competent" (ibid.).
(This is the solution that's supposed to solve the problem of a woman being testimonially unjust to a woman (1449).) Now here we really want to know much more explicitly what "meeting as equals" actually does mean in Pettigrew's eyes. If the partners in (2) who always treat each other as equals don't meet as equals, then how is it that in the original statement of the wrong "A's treatment of B prevents them from meeting as equals" (1442)? They never stood a chance of meeting as equals. Perhaps this is why we get the unheralded appearance of the locution "Cal's behavior does/does not impair his ability to meet Elspeth as an equal" rather than simply "Cal does/does not meet Elspeth as an equal": sure, he was never going to meet her as an equal anyway, because of (1), but he could make things worse for himself. As I've said, I don't think this locution makes much sense in itself, and I don't think it helps Pettigrew out here, because if, in (4), Cal's behavior doesn't impair his ability to meet Elspeth, that is presumably because Cal does in fact believe her sufficiently much (because he takes her to be his navigational superior), but if that's what it takes not to derail meeting another as equals—merely getting the credences right, despite the continued operation of personal prejudice—then what about wider society (1) impairs the ability of the partners in (2), since in treating each other equally they presumably get the credences right, too? Then too (reiterating here): Cal is said to treat mountaineer Elspeth as his superior because of his treatment of her navigational capacities in (4), but it isn't navigational but social equality (presumably!) that's in question in (1).
At any rate, we are certainly entitled to ask how, in (4), Cal's behavior does impair the ability of others to meet as equals. Pettigrew doesn't really elaborate on this, beyond saying again that Cal's behavior is expressive of a hierarchy on which women are inferior, but this doesn't really answer the question: how does Cal's expression of a hierarchy in the privacy of his own assignment of credences do any such thing? Yes, the hierarchy impedes the meeting as equals of others,4</a> but it was going to do that anyway, and we aren't considering a consequentialist interpretation on which Cal's behavior furthers or maintains the hierarchy, or even his own acceptance of it (which, in any given case, it also might not do). Why Cal's behavior on any one occasion, which may be consequentially inert, is relevant is unclear; it strikes me that Pettigrew would be on firmer ground stating simply that Cal's state of being prejudiced impaired the ability of others to meet as equals, but he exists in that state regardless of whether he is currently listening to a woman's testimony or not, and here too the ground is only really firm if we go with the consequentialist interpretation. To the best of my ability to tell, there wasn't a real problem for Pettigrew's original account here, and his solution to this non-problem doesn't make sense.5</a> Cal still seems to be treating Elspeth, even mountaineer Elspeth, as a social inferior, in virtue of his judgment of her navigational abilities being guided by a prejudice which expresses a hierarchy, even though he accords her more skill than he accords himself. That was the whole account to begin with. If we accepted it before, these variations don't seem to be an obstacle to accepting it still.
Respect redux</h2>
What's wrong with treating someone as a social inferior, or what conditions must be met for such treatment to be wrong? Pettigrew does observe (with respect to hierarchies of esteem) that there's nothing wrong with treating a dishonorable scoundrel as one's social inferior, because they are one (1443); it is only when such treatment is unwarranted, as it is in the case of Cal and Elspeth, that an injustice is committed. But hang on: just as the wretch who sells out his friend is inferior on some hierarchies to virtuous folks such as you, dear reader, and such as me, isn't Elspeth actually the social inferior of Cal? Recall that Pettigrew even wants to restrict the domain of testimonial injustice so that it can only be done to people who are "stereotyped as being less credible" (1440), which is a way of being a social inferior. Women aren't actually less skilled at giving directions, but they are actually socially disadvantaged. It's not even necessarily bad to treat them as such. Men are sometimes reminded that we can use our privileged positions on women's behalf, for instance by making a point of loudly crediting a woman with having originated an idea in a meeting. Doing something like that is treating a woman as a social inferior—that's why the man does it—albeit not in a way that accepts that she should be an inferior. (Perhaps we might try to distinguish Cal from this present case by saying that Cal treats Elspeth as an inferior whereas here the man treats the woman as treated as an inferior (but doesn't himself treat her as an inferior), baking acceptance of the hierarchy into "treats as an inferior". I'm not really sure about this.)
If that's the case, then perhaps Pettigrew's account shouldn't turn on not treating as an equal but on expressing an unjust hierarchy, since in the second case above the not-treating-as-an-equal comes in response to, not expression of, the hierarchy. (I'm assuming that "expressing" a hierarchy means at least acting in acceptance of it.)
If we simply say that, then the wrong will seem to be a personal failing, not a wrong done to anyone at all; this is actually ok by Pettigrew (1449), though it does to my mind call into question the justice of the label "injustice". If the wrong is the expression of the hierarchy, the agreement with an injustice, that may be a form of vice, but it is not obviously injustice itself. In keeping with the idea that "testimonial injustice" is serving primarily as a label, this is fine with me too; it does, however, seem worth pointing out explicitly.
If we simply say that, then we also won't be able to make sense of my behavior toward Alistair, or the astrologist's behavior toward me, or the over-eager yes-man's behavior, as instances of the same kind of phenomenon. That too might be fine—not because they aren't testimonial injustice, but because "testimonial injustice" is a multifarious thing, which admits of different analyses in different cases. But perhaps we can say something else, something telegraphed by the section heading. When you allow yourself to be guided by a prejudice, whether it's rooted in sexism or astrology, rather than your evidence concerning the person before you, aren't you failing to respect the person before you? To treat them as (as far as your evidence tells you, anyway) they are, not as your prejudice, whether it redounds to their credit or detriment, tells you they must be. This is a less, because not at all, specified form of respect than the one Pettigrew considers, which seems to bottom out in "you respect someone epistemically when you grant them the appropriate credence". But it seems to me to capture something, at least, of what's objectionable about discounting (or overvaluing) a statement on the basis of a prejudice about the speaker—something about its being an affront to the other, even if they never learn of it. It is an affront to mountaineer Elspeth that her credibility is dinged on the basis of her being a woman, even if she is still trusted overall.
The exclusion of Tom Robinson, & methodology redux</h1>
Here is the crux of Pettigrew's discussion of this case (1445; emphasis in original):

It is not unreasonable for the jury to believe that, if Robinson is innocent, he'll be telling the truth, and if he's guilty he'll be lying. And that requires no prejudice about the trustworthiness of Black men … the jury's credence in Robinson's guilt ends up determined almost entirely by their prior credence that the version of of events he tells would be true and their prior credence that the version that Ewell tells would be true. … It is here … that their prejudice enters: they give higher credence to the sort of event that Ewell describes than to the sort of event that Robinson describes … So, while they do end up treating Robinson as less trustworthy than he is, this is because of their prior beliefs about the sort of situation he describes, and not because he describes them, and they antecedently think him an untrustworthy person. Testimonially, they treat him like any other defendant: likely to lie if guilty and likely to tell the truth if innocent. Their prejudice toward him is not a prejudice that he's less trustworthy, but a prejudice that he's more likely to rape than he is. … The prejudice is not a testimonial one: it is not a prejudice concerning the standing of the testimony of Black men, but the prejudice that Black men are more likely to rape than they are … a relational injustice occurs in this case, and of course it is grave, but it is not a testimonial relational injustice. </blockquote>
There is something strange about this. In the example of Cal and Elspeth, nothing turned on the idea that Cal thought Elspeth an untrustworthy person, merely that he thought her untrustworthy on this topic, or as one might say about the situation she describes (the situation is that Cal's destination lies to his left, or whatever). The jurors' "prejudice is not a testimonial one": the prejudice that says women are navigationally impaired is also not a testimonial one. Or to make things more obviously about the description of a situation, suppose that Elspeth was telling Cal about the time she and a male friend got lost somewhere, and she says either (a) that she through her navigational acumen quickly realized where they were and had gone wrong and saw them right or (b) that she was totally befuddled and minorly panicked but fortunately her male companion saw them right. If she says (a) Cal will be skeptical that it really happened that way; if she says (b) Cal will accept it without quibble. Can't we say that in this case Cal doesn't antecedently believe she's untrustworthy, but because of his prior beliefs about the situation she describes (women be getting lost!) he believes her insufficiently well? "His prejudice toward her is not a prejudice that she's less trustworthy, but a prejudice that she's more likely to get, and stay, lost than she is." Because of this prejudice, he doesn't trust her. So it really isn't obvious to me why Pettigrew isn't describing by his own lights an example of testimonial injustice.
Perhaps the fault lies with me, though, and indeed his account doesn't cover this case. Nevertheless it seems that he himself is describing a situation in which a Black man's testimony will be disbelieved unless the content of the testimony corresponds to the prejudices of the hearer. Even outside a courtroom setting, if Tom were to say "I'm off to visit my friend, a white woman", he would be disbelieved. "You may testify to whatever you wish to, as long as it's p": perhaps this isn't an example of testimonial injustice sensu Pettigrew. But if this isn't worthy of the name "testimonial injustice", I'm not sure what is. If we had a compelling reason to believe that whatever the extension of "testimonial injustice" is, it must admit of one account, being a single, unified phenomenon, we would be forced to conclude that either Pettigrew's account fails or Tom Robinson's case really isn't worthy of the name. But do we have such a reason? This is a term that was made up recently. It could be a genus name rather than species name; it could be a useful shorthand for a collection of different phenomena united only in that injustice involving testimony is done. There need be nothing wrong with that, insofar as there is some useful purpose being served in any given case, or insofar as, perhaps, no one had hitherto thought that testimony even could be a scene of injustice. (Whereas "New Jersey injustice" would not be useful, insofar as we already knew that New Jersey is home to many and varied injustices.)
Similarly, if we had a compelling account of testimoniality in one case but not the other, that might tell on the one's behalf. Pettigrew as we've seen believes that the wrong done to Tom Robinson is "not a testimonial relational injustice" (1445); he reiterates in his conclusion that "the wrong done [is] ethical, or at least more broadly epistemic, rather than testimonial" (1449). But on his account "the wrong done" is that of meeting not as a social equal, or of impairing the ability others to meet as equals, which is also not "testimonial", as he has acknowledged (1444). Or at least, it is not clear what it means for a wrong to be testimonial, such that Cal's treatment of Elspeth gets in and the jurors' treatment of Robinson does not. In the latter case, it seems that the wrong is not testimonial insofar as Robinson's testimony is merely the occasion for an injustice which according to its kind could also have occurred in other circumstances. But the same seems to be true of the wrong Cal commits with respect to Elspeth's testimony. Indeed, for all that Pettigrew says, allowing that each is a relational injustice involving a status hierarchy, it seems plausible enough to say that the same wrong is committed in each case, so that one wrong's being testimonial and the other not begins to seem rather inessential and the nature of the philosophical benefit we are supposed to receive by learning that one is and the other isn't testimonial begins to seem rather unclear.
In the abstract, we have two cases, A and B, each of which is prima facie plausibly described as "testimonial injustice". Pettigrew presents an analysis of A that (he claims) doesn't include B; if we accept that analysis we accept at the same time that B is not testimonial injustice. (Actually it is not extremely clear to me how much of his argument about Tom Robinson is a working-out of the consequences of his analysis of Cal and Elspeth and how much is just a direct analysis of the case itself and the interplay therein of testimony and prejudice, in which case it wouldn't really be a case of settling the extension and the analysis together but rather a constraint on any analysis that it exclude the case. But he presents it as a consequence of his analysis.) Pettigrew doesn't mind that his account excludes B because of the hermeneutic circle in which anyone analyzing the concept finds themselves: the analysis constructs the cases and the cases influence the analysis. But one must at least acknowledge the influence of starting conditions. Pettigrew takes A as an utterly secure starting place, and relies throughout on his sense of what obviously is or isn't included in the extension; confident in these assessments, he formulates an account which excludes B. But what if he had started with B? Insofar as B is excluded not on internal grounds but on the basis of the account of A, this is presumably legitimate. Perhaps he would have arrived at an account capacious enough to include A as well; perhaps he would have found one that excludes it. In the latter case, what stops us from saying that they are both testimonial injustice, A in its way and B in its? What—given the wan role for testimony actually included in Pettigrew's actual account—stops us from saying that the most informative thing to say about them, as far as injustice is concerned, is simply that they are both injustices, each in its own way?

^{1
I'm not sure if Wilson still favors the "façade" terminology; he doesn't use it in Imitation of Rigor that I can recall. With respect to his physical examples it and its successors may not fit very well, since those turn on the same term's being given different constructions at different scales or with different explanatory purposes but with principles of translation at the areas of overlap. I have more in mind (my memory of) his mathematical examples, where the "same" operations are carried out differently in different numerical domains.
</div>
^{2
Here's a fanciful analogy I made earlier on bsky which may not be as clever as I thought. If you make cash transactions (deposits and withdrawals) at a bank totaling more than $10,000 in a day, this is perfectly legal but the bank must file something called a "currency transaction report" (CTR). This is intended to help catch money laundering and whatnot. If you make cash transactions totally $9,999, not only is this also perfectly legal it also isn't even suspicious at all and the bank will not have to file a CTR. But if you engage in a pattern of these perfectly legal, non-suspicious sub-$10K transactions, such that it appears that you're skirting the reporting requirement, then in the aggregate that's not merely suspicious, it's a crime, called "structuring".
</div>
^{3
He says this, and he reiterates it implicitly when discussing Tom Robinson, but it isn't clear to me that he can actually mean it. None of the examples he discusses hinges on a group being stereotyped as "less credible" simpliciter, rather than less (or more!) credible on particular topics.
</div>
^{4
Or something. As with the question of behavior impeding an ability, it does seem a better to say that the hierarchy subsists in the impeded-meeting-as-equals of others, at least some of whom have internalized the hierarchy.
</div>
^{5
"Not only does the author not understand his own account, none of the reviewers for The Philosophical Quarterly, which is no slouch as journals go, caught that" sure seems like a thought that ought to indicate to me that actually I'm the one who's mistaken. I dunno!
</div>}}}}}

On "An Essay On Wank"

2025-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

On "Wank"</h1>
Everyone on bsky, and elsewhere even, seems to have loved Iris Meredith's essay on "wank"</a>, but I—you'll never have guessed—did not! It is, I think, at best just kind of all over the place; it's not that it fails to make good points, it's that the good points are scattershot and not necessarily related to its announced topic. It's telling, I think, that there are very few specific examples and none that are worked through. (It opens with an anecdote which is immediately described as an "early type example", despite being, as best I can tell, not even remotely an example of the phenomenon the essay is putatively concerned with.) The nominal topic of the essay is a certain kind of speech act in which someone says something that seems to be intended to descriptive and answerable to the world, but whose actual importance for the speaker has little to do with truth; the official definition of this kind of speech act is:
</a>

Wank is a speech act directed first and foremost at helping the speaker feel better about themselves, stated as an objective claim about the state of the world, that we are expected in discussion to treat with the epistemic authority of a claim about identity, but [to ignore] the content of the actual claim. </blockquote>
All sorts of ills are laid at the doorstep of "wank" thus defined, including ineffectual left-wing organizing in favor of short-term actions that enable one to feel good (eg poasting rather than the grind of organizing), and just being ineffectual in general: one of the remedies she suggests is prioritizing, in an organization, people who are effective at getting concrete things done rather than, I guess, saying the right thing, which, well, yes. King Lear would have been well advised to follow similar advice. The connection between being ineffective at whatever thing the organization might need done, and indulging (sometimes? often? always?) in this particular kind of speech act is allowed to remain pretty opaque. That's not surprising, though, because despite its official topic being a particular kind of speech act, discussed on the model of, and in opposition to, Frankfurt's famous discussion of "bullshit" in contradistinction to lying, it seems clear that its actual topic is just a certain kind of intellectual dishonesty or bad hygiene in which one allows oneself to believe certain things for reasons not having to do with their truth or likelihood and to retain those beliefs without regard to, or in willful disregard of, countervailing reasons, specifically because doing so allows one to retain a comforting image of oneself (the comforts can be fairly varied). If, however, we follow this line—taking it to be about structures of belief—we lose what seem to be the more novel elements of the definition, the idea that we're supposed to actually ignore the manifest content of the statement and that we treat it with "the epistemic authority of a claim about identity" (which I'm not actually sure how to understand in this context, to be honest).
This confusion I think helps explain why even some of the examples that are straightforwardly about specific concrete instances of speech don't seem to have much to do with her definition, even when the example is supposed to motivate the definition; thus one example concerns an "overtly … political position, and one that passes for objective", as she says: I certainly have no desire to uphold a stringent fact/value dichotomy but I'm not sure that something acknowledged to be an expression of one's political values is a paradigm case of "an objective claim about the state of the world", and one can understand, perhaps, why someone would feel personally affronted by a sharp dismissive challenge to such an expression even without their being guilty of an intellectual sin.
At any rate, it does seem to be the intellectual sins she's really on about, which is why she resorts to such otherwise confusing locutions as "wank-statement" (sometimes "strongly held wank-statement") and "wank-purveyor". A "wank-statement", as near as I can tell, is a belief held for rationally disreputable reasons; a wank-purveyor, meanwhile, is as far as I can tell not necessarily someone who goes about uttering the statements but simply someone who holds comforting beliefs because they're comforting rather than because they're true. The dangers listed in the section "the epistemic dangers of wank", too, are more concerned with this flawed process of belief formation and retention than they are with occasions of speech, which is too bad, because the dialogic scene in which such statements would be made are worth attending to.
I have a cranky idea for why the topic drifts so much and "wank" becomes so expansive almost immediately, and it is that "wank" is simply a bad name for what the official definition is supposed to encompass. "Wank", and "wanker", alas, already have a pretty strong set of associations as terms of abuse for someone we dislike engaging in something we dislike, and so it's easy to proceed, once the name is in place, as if we pretty much know what's going on. Yes, masturbation is an act aimed at providing pleasure to oneself, so it's not exactly off the wall as a name, but "wanker" is just too general. We all know what a wanker is, right? We've all met wankers. ("Bullshit" of course predated Frankfurt's essay as a term of abuse, but what he names with the term is, happily, much more plausible as a precisification of already-existing usage than Meredith's "wank" is.) Devoted readers will know that I stand with Lichtenberg</a> (in aphorism K19):1</a>

It seems to me that the immeasurable advantage that language brings to thinking consists in the fact that words are signs for things rather than definitions. … If all of the names in chemistry were Hebrew or Arabic, such as alkali etc., then the less one understood of the names, the better one would fare. </blockquote>
If instead of "wank" Meredith had called this speech act "flargle", I hypothesize crankily, it would not have been so easily so labile, since it would be impossible to think one knew what it was on the basis of the name. On the other hand, even given the definition, by its nature it is easy to apply to an opponent one doesn't think all too highly of, especially if one allows the latter two elements to drop out; Meredith, aware that "what [she's] discussed is almost all about internal state", gives some pointers for diagnosing it, which are supposed to help avoid over-eager accusations. Let us look at these tips, and also at a few examples.
Examples & tools for the diagnosis</h1> The first real example is of an adherent of an apparently rather simplistic form of anarcho-primitivism,2</a> who (because, recall, we're officially talking about speech acts!) "says all of this [sc. a concise statement of the anarcho-primitivist program], feels good about themselves for taking a morally superior position, and doesn't think about it further." Faced with a challenge ("what about the disabled, then? what will they do in the coming utopia?") the primitivist gets defensive, shuts down, and generally does not cover themselves in glory. This is actually, I think, already a somewhat odd scenario, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, while of course it is better to speak thoughtfully than thoughtlessly, sometimes one does simply express long-held opinions and does not "think about it further", because one has thought about it before. Thinking about one's political speech after speaking politically is getting it the wrong way around! Chalk this up to the unclarity already indicated in what the topic really is. The scenario is really simply that someone is revealed to be an anarcho-primitivist: nothing really requires that the anarcho-primitivist has said anything; it could just as well have been that person A points out person B as a committed anarcho-primitivist.
Diagnosticians of the features of speech acts do well to attend, as Austin advised, to "the total speech act in the total speech situation". If, as Meredith says, "the effect [of the speaking] is almost entirely on the feelings of the person", that is if speaking this way reassures them (and a challenge to it unsettles them), why might that be the case? One possibility is this: this person is just insecure in whatever social context this speech is taking place, and thinks that this is the sort of thing one says among these people—this will lead to greater acceptance by demonstrating that one can talk with the in-crowd—and so producing the speech more or less fluently brings a sense of satisfaction—I've got it, I even understand it (even though probably I do not understand it). The challenge elicits a feeling of being attacked both because it shows that one did not understand it and because it shows that one is not actually a member of the group and didn't understand one's place in it. Is this wank? I'm not sure: it doesn't have the expectation of deference on the basis of identity, and I'm not sure that we're expected to ignore the content (aren't we expected to commend it?), but it is a speech act one engages in because of some comforting effect. It doesn't, however, seem enlightening to call it "wank" rather than attributing it to insecurity more specifically. This is not presumably the speech situation Meredith has in mind, but what is?
I think we ought, also, attend to the reason for the challenge. Meredith speaks of the

uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or at all, because challenging the factuality or other face-value elements of the statement is a personal attack on the person saying it and their identity. </blockquote>
and says "I'm sure we've all been in such situations", but what is this situation in which we are supposed to think about a statement as if it says what it literally says and also not do so? What is the situation in which one challenges it? When I think about the situations I've been in in which I've felt as if someone is saying something somewhat absurd or at least questionable, which I feel some hesitation about challenging because I suspect it's not really comme il faut to make such challenges, well, often those have been situations in which I am among strangers, and on the one hand I wonder if they might be speaking in a sort of hermetic shorthand, and on the other they might have reason to look askance at a newcomer with what may well seem to be uncharitable skepticism. (It's a hazard of having been trained in a reasonably combative largely analytic philosophy department. You'd never guess it but really I'm a sweetheart.) If I'd stuck around, perhaps I would be able to get my questions in subsequently. Perhaps not: it's not as if this kind of thoughtless defensiveness based on the psychic importance of a mantra doesn't exist at all. But the reason I dwell on this at all is, well, let's think about this poor anarcho-primitivist, a bit of a shallow thinker perhaps, who reacts so badly to the question about the handicapped:

challenges to the statement are then treated, unconsciously, as an attack on the self. … Even the most simple request for clarification or the most reasonable question … is treated as an attack on the whole value system and the person carrying it … </blockquote>
Let us be real. Nine times out of ten if an anarcho-primitivist encounters someone just asking questions about the fate of the handicapped, that is an attack on their value system and on the person (themselves) carrying it. They have expressed their political values and goals and get for their troubles a question which is not literally, but generally is in fact, asking little other than "but aren't those the political values and goals of a complete idiot?". People can often tell when you're genuinely interested and when you're trying to score points.
One might go so far as to say: the person asking this question, while facially inquiring about the real world (the details of someone else's proposal), in fact has no interest in the answer and is engaging in a speech act which enables them to feel good about themselves—canny and sharp and sitting loftily above others. That is: we are expected to ignore its actual content. Indeed, "the effect is almost entirely on the feelings of the person", giving them the frisson of demonstrating for all to see how lofty they are and how lowly the anarcho-primitivist. Don't you dare suggest that that's what they're doing, though! How offensive—they're merely a rational inquirer—if the anarcho-primitivist can't handle the heat of free-spirited debate, perhaps they should get out of the kitchen which they don't believe should exist anyway. (This is my attempt to shoehorn the clause about identity into the asking of a question.) This putative "most reasonable question"? Why, it's textbook wank. Even here, I'm not sure that this generic identification is of much interest, in part because it seems more abusive than analytical and offers little which "bad faith" doesn't already give you.
Here are two more potential cases. One of my beliefs, which I will express in speech given half a chance, is that academic hiring is a capricious affair, in which on the one hand the race is certainly not to the swift, and on the other hand most people are plenty swift enough to finish with a respectable time. If you have a tenure-track or tenured job, then while it is not incorrect to say that you deserve it in the sense that you do not fail to have the merits required of such a job—almost certainly you are capable of doing the work of teaching, research, and service the job calls for—it is incorrect to say that you deserve it if that is taken to mean that you specifically, rather than anyone else (or rather than all but a few) who applied for it deserve it—that you were simply the best candidate. If you removed all the candidates who just wouldn't be able to do the job, there would still be a boatload left over, and if you tried to sort them into equivalence classes of candidate quality the classes would be few and populous.
As it happens, I applied for tenure-track jobs and got nowhere. One might well suspect that I accept what's described above not primarily as a result of a sober-minded investigation into academic hiring practices but as a salve to my wounded ego; that Mandy Rice-Davies applies; that I might get a little more wound up during a spirited discussion of its validity than I would in one of other topics (true!); that I expect to be greeted primarily with sympathetic noises when I evince this belief; that, in other words, it's classic wank. (I'm not sure how to work the identity clause into this one, but I'm not sure how Meredith thinks that one works in many of her briefly given examples either.) Maybe so! On the other hand, if it is, it seems relatively harmless; it lets me prop myself up a bit and maybe it's not exactly hygienic and not something I should get accustomed to in general but I don't think it spills over into the rest of my life, or the world of action, all that much. It's not as if the domain the belief concerns, academic hiring, lies within my power to affect.
I've also heard the following belief expressed by folks who fared better in what I naturally regard as something of a lottery: actually, you do see people even at the campus visit stage reveal themselves as unsuitable (at least for this campus, whichever the instant campus may be), and hiring committees in their striving to do right by the department and the candidates actually do have an experience as of a range of candidate quality that admits of fine distinctions, and that when they offer a position to their top choice candidate and that candidate accepts the post actually has gone, in general and for the most part, to someone reasonably among the best.
At least sometimes, these people, those expressing that belief, also don't love to hear it vigorously challenged, and one can easily imagine why! If they distribute their offers justly then it's so much easier to believe that the offer distributed to them was done so justly in (previous) turn, dissolving the difficulty of having to accept that your privileged position is unmerited (again, not in the sense that you can't acquit yourself in it perfectly well, but in the sense that you do not merit it specially, and that you lucked out in having it). Quelle surprise, basically, that someone who has such a gig thinks that those who have such gigs deserve their gigs. W a n k. Here one can more easily make out a story about why it's harmful to have such beliefs. (On the other hand, one can also make out a story about why it's beneficial to have such beliefs—something about how having an earnest if irrational and self-protective belief in the justice of the process will tend to make one make an earnest effort to carry it out justly, while someone with my belief might be tempted to act unjustly if it's all such a toss-up anyway.)
"Signs of wank"</h2>
I do think that in each of these cases it's at least possible that it's justifiable to conclude that a speaker speaks and believes as they do for the self-preservative reasons identified in the definition of wank-speech and that if they recoil from collaborative discussion of the topic over-defensively that they do so because they wanted to be deferred to and confirmed in their comforting, identity-ratifying belief. Concluding that that is what's going on in any given case, assuming one isn't simply given indiscriminately to the hermeneutics of suspicion, seems like a delicate matter. The diagnostic criteria Meredith offers seem by contrast to be somewhat crude, if not simply irrelevant:

The first major indicator is excessive, black-and-white moral language. [Wank] is the language of the moral panic. "Protect the children", in particular, is a feature of an awful lot of wank: an excellent example of this is the current push for age verification and IDs on the internet to access social media and such. This is, simply put, a terrible idea … </li>

Relatedly, excessive saccharine sentimentality is a strong indicator of wank. Sentimentality is a seeking of safety, security and the dissolution of the self into something uncomplicatedly easy and unchallenging … </li>

The idea that certain things are easy, obvious or common-sense is another strong tell. … wank-purveyors actively believe … and act on the idea that their statements are actually common sense. … Listening for people asking why you're questioning something immediately obvious, then, is a good way of catching wank-speech. </li>

Finally, look for inconsistencies between stated aims and values and behaviour. </li> </ol>
One hates to be a bore, or to demand boring writing, but one would have appreciated in each of these "signs of wank" an explicit reminder of the working definition of wank</a> and an explanation of how the sign is related to the phenomenon, since they seem to me to be neither sufficient nor necessary, individually or in any combination, for wank as defined to be on the scene, nor even to be reliable indicators. Here, for instance, is how she fleshes out the fourth sign:

Wank-speech, as we've already established, is primarily emotional, and far more than both lies (where the appearance of consistency is required) and bullshit (where while you can be inconsistent between statements, but each individual statement still needs to hold together), it can be aggressively inconsistent internally. Obviously, liars and bullshitters are quite capable of lying about their values and aims, but that's usually weakly held and a pretty thin facade. If you have someone strongly expressing values around equity and kindness while equally strongly acting in ways and supporting positions that... don't do that, and pointing that out triggers distress and hostility, however, that is a very strong indicator that wank is afoot. </blockquote>
Is the idea that since lies are "weakly held", no one would lie about holding a belief strongly? That since lies are usually a "thin facade", lies are usually easily seen through? A not-so-smooth talking liar might become hostile when their inequitable behavior is pointed out: confrontation is unpleasant and upping the ante could well work to evade exposure. I simply do not see how this diagnostic tool connects at all with what it's supposed to indicate. Sometimes people sincerely believe that the solution to a problem is just "common sense" because they aren't very thoughtful or knowledgeable about what they're talking about. Is that bad? Yes! But it's something else. Is it bad if someone simply refuses even to contemplate reliable testimony to the effect that what they think is just common sense is actually all wrong? Also yes. Is that refusal a sign that they only said whatever it is they said in order to soothe themselves? That's quite a leap. Attributing the specific, specifically blameworthy, irrationality that "wank" is supposed to describe to someone on the basis of their being sentimental and shallow, or pigheaded and suspicious, or deceptive, is simply dishonest.
A tangent about practicality</h2>
"This is, simply put, a terrible idea", writes Meredith of internet age-verification nonsense. Certainly correct. She also, again correctly, points out that actually implementing her anarcho-primitivist's ideas is somewhere between impossible and monstrous on an unimaginable scale. These facts seem to her to be signs that the speaker is wanking, though, which is quite unaccountable to me. ("This pattern consistently comes up when looking at wank." She hasn't really shown us why the person hell-bent on "protecting the children" is wanking, though.) The suppressed argument might be something like the following, though I'm really not sure:

You propose some plan or goal</li>
this plan won't work or this goal is unachievable</li>
This fact is pretty obvious if you think about it at all</li>
Therefore, you haven't thought about it at all</li>
Therefore, you can only be proposing it for some ulterior reason</li>
That reason is that proposing it lets you feel better about yourself, and you expect us in discussion to treat your expression of the plan/goal with the epistemic authority, and to ignore the content of the claim</li> </ol>
This line of thought does not strike me as all that cogent; it basically inflates being wrong or thoughtless into engaging in this particular kind of bad-faith speech,3</a> and flattens out all the other potential reasons for someone's irrationally holding on to an impracticable idea.
Dangers & responses</h1>
I'm skipping over part of the essay, the "case study" to proceed directly to the final two sections, on the purported "epistemic dangers of wank" and what to do about wank in one's midst, which might seem like an odd thing to do given that I've complained about the lack of worked examples. My justification for doing this is that I find the section somewhat scattershot, mixing what seem to be genuine examples of the phenomenon (soi-disant whiz kids who are desperate to have known about the next big thing before the great unwashed and who spout a lot of nonsense that makes them feel oh so smart) with descriptions whose connection to the topic I genuinely can't make out, and which seem to be descriptions of specific things with the details scrubbed off, more than illustrative examples of the phenomenon under discussion.4</a> And much of the discussion in that section pertains to its dangers, even if not its epistemic dangers; for instance, it is bad if a hiring manager cannot accept disagreement from an interviewee or employee, though one must admit, I think, that the badness of that state of affairs is somewhat independent of the precise reason the manager requires assent. It's not great in general to close one's eyes to countervailing evidence for one's beliefs (or "deeply held statements"), whether that's because one is paid to ignore it or because paying attention would require revising one's sense of oneself as among the morally upright or whatever.
The epistemic dangers, narrowly construed, of "wank" would seem to be twofold: first, insofar as it describes a structure of difficult-to-dislodge irrationally held beliefs, the believers blind themselves to the true states of affairs (with all the potential for downstream practical dangers that implies); second, insofar as it describes a kind of statement, it is corrosive to trust and dialogue in a group (certain topics are verboten, you can't tell how to take certain statements), with further consequences for the self-understanding of the participants, and how they're understood by others. It is not clear to me that in either case the practical consequences lead to bullheadedness ("the iteration and the action drop out") or to prioritizing short-term thought or comforting actions ("actions that feel right, easy or emotionally cathartic (large rallies, online posting and so forth) get prioritised heavily over the harder, less gratifying work of organising, building effective structures of power, more in-depth analytical work and advocacy").
Sometimes, as in the case of my beliefs about tenure-track hiring, there's little question of action anyway, and the danger really is that I will simply refuse to accept that there's a range of candidate quality and that committees can pick up on it even when presented with compelling testimony to that effect. Sometimes the "wank-statement" is a goal and not a belief about the present constitution of the world anyway; we could imagine that the anarcho-primitivist is aware that he's got a tough row to hoe and of the obstacles in the path of achieving his utopia while still working toward it, more or less effectively; the problem isn't that he has no sensitivity to the conditions on the ground but that he has no sensitivity to his goal's being a bad one. The political commentator best exemplifies the dangers; when Ezra Klein is so committed to his emotional support bipartisanship that he both cannot accept that those days are long gone and bases his advice on the illusion that they're here to stay, that advice is going to be pretty bad, and woe to him who heeds it. This wouldn't stop Klein from "iterating" when each new bit of advice fails, if he can accept that it was heeded; it's just each new iteration is still built on a bad foundation. That is: it's not true that "you can't see when things aren't working"; you can see that, you just have a bonkers theory of why they aren't working. All of this will also be true if the reason Klein can't quite understand the way the world is is that his salary, rather than his self-esteem, depends on his not understanding it.
My use of Klein as an example follows Meredith's, but others have also claimed that Klein's pathologies as a thinker stem from his intense and sincere ideological commitment to bipartisanship. Meredith's diagnosis (which doesn't dispute his sincerity!), that Klein has an "emotional attachment [to] being above the political struggle and effortlessly able to synthesise the ideas of the left and right", contains an element of psychic gratification that mere ideological commitment to bipartisanship doesn't (it also contains an element of rebuke, beyond that implicit in "wank", since being above-it-all is bad). The commitment to bipartisanship without the element of psychic gratification, it seems to me, can generate the same epistemic pathologies as the more obviously gratifying superciliousness of Meredith's Klein. Certainly if Klein is merely sincere, but wrong, about this matter, he would find it upsetting to contemplate his potential error, would try to find ways to salvage it, etc, without his ever falling into the state of expressing, or holding, his beliefs in order to feel better about himself. I am not well placed to judge what is actually going on with Klein; I think that's a call that only someone who knows him could make. At a minimum, I do not think Klein expects us to ignore the content of his claims: I believe it is very important to him that we heed his claims. (If I were to pick a centrist avatar of wank, it would be Thomas Chatterton Williams.)
The fact that the observable effects of this kind of self-deception are similar to those of many other kinds of internally or externally motivated irrationality, or even to what we might expect in the case of important but not irrationally persisted in sincere belief, is part of the reason Meredith wanted to offer "signs of wank". I suspect that the judgment that someone is indulging in it can't really be referred to such signs (certainly not the signs that she identifies) and will always remain a site of case-by-case situated understanding. The same should go for the remedies. Meredith identifies a few, both to be applied to oneself (try meditation!) and more general. The idea that the study of literature will lead to fewer irrationally held beliefs, held because they shore up one's sense of self, is, I'm afraid, tosh, albeit tosh which is much beloved both of humanists (some of whom have thought a lot about it, admittedly) and non-humanists who, like the anarcho-primitivist, identify this one weird trick and just don't think about it further. So too with looking for those who do things rather than who want to be things. Someone who (cf. 4</a>) loves React because they were an early adopter and won't hear a word in favor of other frameworks because they might then have to admit that there's more to learn can, in fact, still be productive (in React); the hypersensitive anarcho-primitivist might not be the best choice to get others on board at events but could be perfectly capable behind the scenes; the person who believes that in the main people get their jobs based on merit and therefore they got their job based on merit might well be able to do their job just fine.
What is missing from the section entitled "countering wank effectively", and really much of the section on dangers, is anything to do with the scenario of wank as defined</a>: a conversation, or at least an utterance. Is it dangerous if someone goes on LinkedIn and posts some nonsense about career success, thereby assuaging their fears? Perhaps: this is not a healthy way to cope with career-related fears; someone might take it seriously, which would be bad because it's nonsense; on the other hand, people might take it unseriously and post along similar lines, gradually coming loose from reality (LinkedIn does seem to be a parallel world). The lattermost exemplifies the epistemic dangers not so much of wank, because only some, or one, of the participants might have that emotional need, but just of delusions, or of mock beliefs that gradually come to be real. If someone posts like that on LinkedIn, what should you do? How might you address this? You can't counter this by looking for people who do things, because this is (let's stipulate) your friend or former co-worker, not your employee, and even so, you wouldn't be countering this instance of wank so much as sidelining it if your reaction were to discount the poster for a potential promotion. As with the diagnosis in the first place, what to do here seems to require a great deal of local sensitivity.
If you're talking to someone and you come to realize that they're saying things seemingly about the world, or about their ends, not with an eye to getting the world right, or what those ends might actually mean if accomplished, but with an eye to propping themselves up, what then? The situation here might actually not be as hopeless as the one in which a person's opinion on a subject depends on who's paying their salary; people do manage to change their self-conceptions (sometimes they do so with the aid of a new false belief that they actually haven't changed). But what should you do? How can you convince them that you aren't being hostile or attacking them, but are interested in the content of what they said? Odds are good this will require slow-walking your criticisms—taking baby steps and whatnot. It helps if you actually are not attacking them, of course. I don't really have much specific to say about this and do not think I'm all that good at it, even, not being an especially sensitive, skilled interpersonal interlocutor. But I do think that if "wank" as defined by Meredith is a real and analytically useful phenomenon, then it's worth taking it seriously, both in furnishing detailed examples, and in discussing its dangers and remedies.

^{1
Watch this space for when I use the same argument to account for the variety of things called "testimonial injustice", prompted by a paper that in one part marvels at it.
</div>
^{2
I don't really know much about anarcho-primitivisms; perhaps they're all simplistic, perhaps not.
</div>
^{3
Allowing for the fact that the essay is not really concerned with speech doesn't make it more cogent, as far as I can tell.
</div>
^{4 I really want to know what in the world is going on in the background of this paragraph:
</div>

Functioning on the logic of wank also allows you to, to a degree,
avoid being judged on the basis of objective achievement. This is
particularly likely when the bulk of an organisation works on
wank-based principles: if the person assessing your work holds to a
wank-statement that's similar to yours, then so long as you
reinforce each other's statements (say, by stressing just how
important React is or something similarly inane), it doesn't matter
whether the objective face-value elements of the statement are
actually met: if the face-value of the wank-statement has to do with
particular business outcomes, for example, it doesn't actually
matter whether or not you actually achieve the outcomes. Rather, so
long as the emotional truth behind the wank-statement is
appropriately coddled, anything goes in the realm of things actually
happening.
</blockquote>
I don't know what she has in mind specifically at all (but I suspect
she has something very specific in mind), and I certainly don't
understand why "functioning on the logic of wank" means you can avoid
being assessed based on what you've done. If I and my manager both say
"React is the best tool for this task", even though neither of us is
able to defend it at all and we both just get warm fuzzies from React,
will my manager not mind that I didn't do anything for six months?</div>}}}}

On the materiality of Rebecca Ward's works

2025-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

(Images may be viewed in concert with this post!)</a>
With one exception, all of Rebecca Ward's work that I've seen is all in the same sort of mode: a canvas is divided into very flatly colored regions, which may be strictly polygonal or curvilinear; in most cases the coloration of these regions is solid but every now and then a gradient makes itself known. Almost always one edge of the canvas has been unwoven, so that threads run straight off to the side, or the bottom (in none that I've personally seen is this unwoven edge on the top, and she seems to favor the right over the left). Or, better said, these threads run parallel to one edge of the frame, which can be conventionally rectangular or, in some instances, triangular. Sometimes this unwoven section is a single color field (it is rarely precisely solid), but it may itself consist of multiple polygonal or curved colored regions, just as does the remainder of the canvas—that part of the "canvas", the metonym for "painting", which is literally still canvas. (Works exist in which there are multiple unwoven sections, and in which there is an unwoven section in the middle of sections of canvas rather than running off the edge, which retains its woven integrity on either side, but I haven't actually seen them in person myself. One of them, "nonplussed" from 2014</a>, seems especially interesting, in that there is an unwoven channel running through the middle, which changes angle very slightly. It isn't really possible to see what happens at the juncture between the angled sections in the image on her site, but one is very curious.) Or rather not "just as does the remainder of the canvas", because each distinct colored region of "the canvas" is actually multiple physically distinct pieces of fabric which have been sewn together to create the whole. When the unwoven sections comprise multiple colored sections, it is of course not possible for them likewise to comprise multiple pieces of fabric sewn together. They could have been different strings knotted together, but they aren't: they are just … different colors, just as one might have expected the still-woven sections to be.
One might think that from a distance the works would look just as if they did indeed comprise exactly one continuous if partially unwoven piece of canvas, with the edges of the different regions resulting simply from careful masking, or however it is that geometrically inclined painters have always made their edges neat and tidy, or however, for that matter, Ward herself makes the multiply-colored unwoven regions neat and tidy. (Sometimes these are not extremely neat or tidy</a>.) It's not really clear to me that that's true, though; or at least, the distance required is, I think, greater than one is likely to have at one's disposal. One doesn't have to be all that close to discern that there are seams joining the sections, and even when far enough off that one can't tell that, precisely, the reality of the seam contributes to a noticeable physicality between the panels. The "ditch" in which sewists are occasionally instructed to stitch makes one aware of the separateness of the sections, even if the precise cause is not clear; at Peter Blum gallery, for vector specter, I stood as far as possible from "soft landing" and it still did not seem that the edges met each other directly. Of course, I was cursed by the knowledge that they didn't, so one may wonder how trustworthy any seeming-to-me really is. But they really are, even at a distance, distinct individuals whose boundaries match each other but are separated by a miniscule dark shadow. The edges are not sharp, without being blurry or fuzzy in the sense of bleeding into each other; rather, you can tell that they do not quite meet, that they are kept from each other ever so slightly. You can see this even in the photos on her site. (It is not at all apparent on the little printouts you can get at a gallery giving titles and details.)
Up close, of course, the manner of construction of the works at the, so to speak, physical level is quite apparent. One can see from up close not only the seams but also the stitches—perhaps inevitable given that the seams are pulled apart by the canvas's being stretched over the frame—and the bulk of her seam allowances, which is fairly generous, and which is always finished such that both seam allowances are folded in the same direction, resulting in somewhat wonky edges where multiple seams end close to each other, especially when one of them is curved. (Curved seams are notoriously tricky to coax to lie flat, because there is just more fabric either at the seam or at the edge of the seam allowance, depending on which side of the curve one is on.) There's an interesting irony about the visibility of the labor that these traces of the manner of assembly makes possible: different methods of joining woven fabric panels are possible which would have made the edges literally seamless, eg so-called French or invisible reweaving, but invisible reweaving is far more intensely laborious than sewing with a machine. (Of course such reweaving would also remove the seam's visible gap which both joins and separates.)
I have been referring to the tint of her yarns and canvas pieces as their being "colored" rather than "painted" because they do not appear to be painted at all. Her media are given as "acrylic and dye", so presumably some of it actually is painted, but I confess that my impression is overwhelmingly of dyed fabric and yarns. This certainly contributes to the flatness of the coloration, which is more than simply its being matte: the color appears to be in the canvas, not on it, because, well, that's how dye works. The coloration of the yarns in the unwoven sections are even more interesting: in some of them individual adjacent yarns are distinct colors in the same family. I don't know if she dyes these separately and then carefully lines them up again, or what, but it's striking when right up close and contributes to an appealing mottled haze when not.
I have also been referring to her works as "works" rather than "paintings" because it seems fairly common to question their status as painting, or at least to insist that they are at a minimum not the most straightforward instances of painting. Frankly, one can see it: multiple pieces of sewn-together dyed fabric, some of which is unwoven? It isn't exactly squarely in the conceptual center of painting, even if some of those pieces of canvas do have paint on them. An interesting question for the reader: if you were to select some other concept under which to range these objects, what would it be? I've been going on about their physical construction so much because I think there's an extremely obvious candidate, but it is, strange to say, not the one that's popular these days.
Is there an art or craft characterized in large part by joining together into one large simple shape (a rectangle, a circle, why not a triangle) curved or polygonal pieces of colored fabric? Why yes, there is. Is there an art or craft characterized in large part the opposite of what Ward is doing when she removes yarns—always yarns running in the same direction, in any given case—from her canvas? Here too the answer is yes, and the name of the craft is even more obvious than in the first case. When someone puts together patches of fabric to make, say, a rectangle, that is known as "piecing", and it is a component of making a quilt. (The final component of making a quilt, in which multiple layers are sewn together with batting, is somewhat confusingly simply called "quilting", but one can quilt in that sense without being engaged in the making of a quilt. A winter jacket, that is, might have a quilted lining, meaning it is a lining, likely with a thin layer of insulation, with a diamond pattern sewn in it, for volume and to secure the insulation, without the lining's being a quilt in any recognized sense, because a quilt in the commonly accepted sense involves a pieced-together patchwork.) The thing which Ward is undoing when she unweaves her canvas is weaving. (In truth, I'm just guessing that Ward is unweaving a canvas that she has acquired in woven form, largely because I assume that if she were weaving the canvases herself and just leaving lengths of warp yarns unwoven her galleries would say so, since such unnecessary labors by an artist are always worth mentioning. But I don't know that.) That is, if one wishes to set these works alongside painting as an artistic pursuit and some other form of artistic pursuit, the obvious candidate, to me, is textile or fiber arts generally, and quilting (more than weaving) specifically. A 2015 interview actually does so (and mentions work of Ward's with batting, even, which I haven't seen). That sort of comparison is not as common these days, though. Nowadays, if one wishes to suggest that something's not quite painterly about these objects, the other pole of the comparison is sculpture.
This is quite baffling to my mind, and I truthfully cannot quite comprehend why it's the case. Or rather, I can think of one reason for it, but it's not one I've seen given and it's certainly more cute than convincing: in removing yarns from a tangle of yarns, mightn't we see Ward as engaged in a sort of construction by removal that we might analogize to a sculptor's removal of stone from stone? Like I said, cute. I can also think of a frankly cynical explanation, which by its nature one wouldn't see stated explicitly: that as Ward's star has risen it has been necessary to shed associations with the fiber arts, which are suspiciously lady-coded and not quite as artistically respectable as they might be, and replace them with associations with a finer art, something with more distinguished pedigree and less sullied by associations with the merely useful. If one restricts oneself to the classical artistic genres sculpture might seem to be the only other one left. It sure ain't dance, and sculpture is at least the art form of those classically countenanced that involves the physical construction of an object whether additively or subtractively (other, obviously, than architecture, but that one is even more of a stretch). If quilting is simply not on one's radar, or if one has decided that quilting is infra dig, but notes that these objects involve removal and putting-together, then sure, sculpture, why not.
There is also the fact that since painting and sculpture are members of the canon of classical art forms, and quilting and weaving are not, there is simply more grist for one's intellectual mill to be found in comparison to sculpture than to the others. I wonder if something like this is in the background of Ekin Erkan's review of vector specter</a>: the mind that inclines to theory and philosophy in these realms will naturally use those tools that are at its disposal in thinking through what's going on. But one should not seek enlightenment only where the light is good</a>. Thus although Erkan reasonably denies that Ward's works are sculpture, he nevertheless finds a sculptural element in them, quoting Herbert Read saying that sculpture is "an art of palpitations—an art that gives satisfaction in the touching and handling of objects", and applies this to Ward's work:

Specifically, Ward’s “palpitations” tremble in the fabric squares and rectangles that constitute the right-most or bottom strips in her constructions. There is one such element in each work and, unless intimately viewed, it almost remains hidden. Bereft of vertical warp threads, these bands allot the passage of light, slightly revealing the wall below. </blockquote>
Well, on the one hand, a wall or bit of frame that you can see but not touch without disturbing the taut threads hardly seems to give or promise satisfaction in the touching or handling (and prima facie, any painting with thick impasto, objects affixed collagewise to the canvas, or textural interest at all would seem to do so, notwithstanding that one learns early on that one does Not Touch the Art). On the other, you know what also reveals the wall below or behind? Very many weavings! But on the third hand, why talk about sculpture at all? The moves in the review are, basically, "it might seem odd to call these paintings sans phrase, but they also aren't sculpture". Nu, who said they had to be sculpture if they weren't paintings? (Ward herself has spoken of sculpture in the context of her works, in an interview that I haven't been able to find in full (NB I also haven't tried extremely hard); I'm the last person to think that we should take anything on her say-so but I admit to curiousity about how the topic of sculpture came up in the first place, especially given the 2015 interview that referred directly to textile arts.) The partial translucency of parts of the works, partly revealing the frame and wall—is that truly all it takes to give something a sculptural element? The grounds for aligning these works with textile arts seem significantly stronger. (Erkan has something to say about that, actually, and I've gone back and forth with him a bit about the puzzling part of his piece where he says "there are no seams to be found between the fabric elements", but I don't really want to recapitulate all that here.)
If I were to pick a set of works that has that property—that the yarns out of which it partly consists allow you to see the wall and frame—it would be the works of Brian Wills shown here</a> (tangentially, dig Edward Shalala's partly unwoven canvases at that link), and that's because of their method of construction (which you can discern in looking at them): they are made of threads individually pulled across the frame, individually placed. That is, whereas you can see through Ward's yarns because she has unwoven a canvas (and you can tell that that's what she's done, too), you can see through Wills's because he has placed them together like that; while "Ward is taking material away, sort of like a sculptor does" struck me as merely kind of cute, "Wills is adding material, sort of like a sculptor does" strikes me as … not necessarily conclusively cogent but somewhat more plausible.
Now, I personally have little problem simply saying that Ward's productions are paintings—not paradigm cases of paintings but still paintings—and that what's interesting about her is that she's found a way to make paintings out of fabric directly. We might compare her works in this vein to Jayson Musson's found a way to make paintings out of Coogi sweaters</a>. But in each case this is at least partly a pragmatic matter; they're hung on a wall like a painting, stretched on a frame like a painting, they have a sort of painting-like feel, sometimes they even have paint!—why not? But if you want to make hay out of Ward's stuff not being paradigmatic paintings, and being not merely not paradigmatic paintings but a sort of painting-like object that participates in another recognizable form, that form, it seems to me, has simply got to be the quilt. They're the top layers of quilts, basically, doing duty as paintings. This even still allows you to talk about medium specificity and all that, a set of discourses I mostly find somewhat sterile, though obviously I'm willing to maunder on. But you ought to get the media in question right.

Things Organized Neatly

2024-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

[I wrote this several months back, after reading Alphabetical Diaries, but since I had gotten to that book after it had been out for a while, no venue of which I was aware (important proviso) that seemed as if it might be interested in something about it had not already published something about it, so I just let it sit around. But on the occasion of the return of The Clock to MoMA, I thought I might take it back out and put it here.]
What sort of thing is Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries (henceforth AD)? What does it do? It is hardly tempting to say that it is, with its lack of any temporal or narrative structure, a diary, though its matter is diaristic. Let us ask, to start, what it is like; what may it usefully be set alongside?
We may say: it is a work of accumulation, in which the pileup of detail, the first not necessarily connected to the next, both carries one along and limns a subject to whom all these details occur, and resembles in this respect texts like Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport or David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (which also ought to be set alongside each other), or his later so-called Notecard Quartet, in whose first book, This Is Not a Novel, "Writer" announces:

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive. ...
Plotless. Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless. </blockquote>
In all of them the line "Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage" occurs. Quite so.
The "collage" of AD was not quite so freely assembled as Ellman's or Markson's, because of the fairly severe constraint under which Heti composed it, both as regards what was permitted to occur in it and how those things can be ordered. We may also say: AD is an appropriative work composed of bits and pieces of another work, like the centos that rearranged individual lines of Homer or Virgil to narrate the life of Jesus. (To say nothing of the many, many examples that do not restrict themselves to a single source.) And, as the title tells us, these bits occur in alphabetical order. (A computerized alphabetical order, so that we get, for instance, the sequence "Alone in a room. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.", because the period (ASCII 46) comes after the space (ASCII 32). Were I, with my human prejudices, to have alphabetized these same five sentences, the first would have been last, the punctuation disregarded. Nevertheless it must be admitted that that order in the text is better, or at any rate less bathetic.) Here one may be tempted to think of the Oulipo and the extreme constraint-based work it and its affiliates have produced: Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, Georges Perec's Les Revenentes, or Christian Bök's Eunoia. But very few Oulipian constraints, even the mind-bendingly restrictive ones employed by someone like Doug Nufer (consider Never Again), determine the material nearly so thoroughly as Heti's does, and those that do, such as N+7, tend toward the trivial. (They are so to speak organizational procedures rather than compositional constraints.) The combination of the restricted source text with the rule of alphabetization, with Heti's contribution to the final form of the text being one of selection after the mechanical procedure has been carried out, rather than creation of material according to a constraint, is less like Oulipo than it is like, say, total serialism. (Merely requiring alphabetically-ordered sentences would be another affair and one could imagine Nufer writing an alphabetical novel from scratch.) This is, it's true, a pretty rough-and-ready sort of distinction, which may not admit of a decent precisification; the basic thought, though, is that Oulipian practices attempt to spur on the creation of fresh material, even if the range of permissible material is quite restricted. But Heti does not create any new matter in Alphabetical Diaries.
What remains to Heti is selection, or, if you like, erasure of what is not to be included, and in a textual mode, emphasizing the latter, we might put it alongside something like Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes or Tom Phillips's A Humument, though for Heti the unit of preservation is not words in whatever spatial arrangement they may have on a page but entire sentences: having alphabetized her roughly 500,000 words of sentences, Heti then cut away roughly 440,000, or 88%, of them. Her creativity is curatorial: after the choice of source text and rule has been made, this operation of selection/deletion represents the sole intervention remaining to her.
We need not, however, limit ourselves to literary works, and may place AD productively alongside Christian Marclay's collage film The Clock (henceforth TC), also an appropriative work of accumulation subject to a strict constraint. Marclay of course did not limit himself to one film as his source, but while he and his assistants had the entirety of available film as possible sources his selections were, in the event, fairly classical (that is to say, TC consists largely of well known American and European films, along with a few TV shows: Columbo and The X-Files both make appearances). He also had greater freedom in placing the scenes relative to each other: all the 12:05 scenes must precede every 12:06 scene, but they can be freely ordered within the minute.
TC is ordered chronologically, not alphabetically—something that would not be totally absurd in film; Arst Arsw</a> does not really reward viewing in full, but it does exist, and one could imagine it being done better. Like AD it has its characteristic beats: in Heti we get clusters around possessive adjectives and pronouns; around question words; around names; around now and then, if and should. I will forms a thicket of injunction and prediction within the long I section. In Marclay all the hallmarks of the generic day are observed: breakfasting in the morning; shootouts a little past noon (Charles Bronson's Harmonica, in Once Upon a Time in the West, even observing to Henry Fonda's Frank that they're a little past the canonical time); filing out of school at three and the office at five. All things in due course, and even Hell itself awaits its appointed hour to breathe out its contagion to this world. Since in each case one knows where one is in the work's progression these landmarks can be anticipated and serve to generate tension and release. It is not that the works are not so absorbing that one pays attention to where one is, marking time until the next thing happens, the next unit begins, so much as that being absorbed in these works is, in part, being aware of the progression of time and letter.
David Velasco, writing in Artforum</a>, called TC a "remarkably bad" piece of cinema that is nevertheless compelling as a "paracinematic—and, indeed, aesthetic—experience". I am not sure that AD is remarkably bad as literature, but it is compellingly paraliterary in the way it directs attention not even to "language" but to letters and the alphabet. To be aware that the Ps cannot last all that much longer and that Q must be coming up soon, and then to be amused that the Q chapter is all of one sentence long, is not the sign of distraction that "surely this chapter must be ending soon" would be in another sort of book: awareness of its literally literal qualities is awareness of its substance.
In both works plot and reference are lost in the magical principles of adjacency and resemblance; one experiences narrativity without narrative, in which the formal devices that create the feel of coherence are laid bare. Even without Marclay's sensitive sound editing purely visual features knit disparate scenes together: a character looks to one direction, and is met in the "reverse" shot by the answering gaze of a character in an entirely different film, and it all flows together. Someone opens a door and enters a building—cut—someone else steps forth, exiting a different one, and the logic of crossing a threshold prevails. One person looks down at another's wristwatch. What AD lacks in the aural it gains in anaphora: it is astonishingly difficult, as one reads, to remember that the pronoun "he" in one sentence does not necessarily refer to the previous sentence's male name, or corefer with its "he":

Then he said, what is your name? and his eyes flickered across the alley, paved in stones. Then he spat on me. Then he went to get a cigarette and I could smell him smoking. </blockquote>
Who knows if the questioner, the spitter, and the smoker are the same person? "I" and "me" in two or three successive sentences presumably do all refer to the forensically identical person, but they could be years and miles apart.

I watched through the window as Vig left the garden and went into the street and started writing on his BlackBerry. I welled up with tears. I went back to my room where my clothes were. </blockquote>
In TC, it is generally pretty obvious when two sequences come from the same film; here, one may wonder whether even seemingly perfectly matched pairs of sentences had, originally, anything to do with each other:

Does he die, drowning, trying to kiss himself? Does he stare forever at his image? </blockquote>
Perhaps these were written just like this, one after the other, only to be separated by scads of "does he really"s, finally to be placed back in order when those intervening sentences were deleted. Perhaps they had, as composed, nothing to do with each other, written years apart—surely a person is allowed to think about Narcissus twice. Yet these terse little narratives go down easily, and stand out, as they wouldn't in a conventionally composed text, for their being comprehensible together. While they could have come together by the mere operation of alphabetization, their seemingly purposive adjacency is one of several reminders that while AD, like TC and like Markson's quartet, may be an "assemblage" in the mere sense of being made out of preexisting material, it is also assembled in the sense of being put together with purpose, not just thrown into an alphabetical heap. Not for nothing does it begin with six sentences starting "a book that…" ("a book that is a game" is the last); not for nothing does "I once" so niftily follow "I never" without a gap; not for nothing is the section of the "I" chapter beginning with the bare first-person pronoun set off from the rest of the text by some decorous vertical space. Heti's elimination of 88% of the text did not, one must presume, proceed haphazardly, and, just as does Markson's, her text seems to drop hints about itself:

All the elements of the world, everything I encounter and that other people encounter, can be put in a book.
Don't forget that although you aren't telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.
It will not be fiction, and it will not tell a story, and there will be no characters, and you will not worry about the voice or the way it is written, just about what you are saying. </blockquote>
To quote Markson quoting Dizzy Dean: it ain't bragging if you can do it.
What are we to make of AD's selection, its constructedness? Catherine Lacey, writing in Bookforum</a>, may well be right that Heti did not redact as she did "to remove the embarrassing bits", since after all "vulnerability has long been Heti's compass as a writer", but we need not think that she was engaged in Calvinistic deceptions</a> to think that the fact of her selections is significant. (Anyway, do you know what Heti considers embarrassing, what wounding? Maggie Nelson once told a seminar that she considered it more revealingly personal to discuss her writing process face to face with them than to describe, for the benefit of strangers, anal sex in the opening of The Argonauts. The possibility that Heti is actually increasing the proportion of embarrassing or wounding bits—if that's her thing, why not go all out?—is not broached.) Here at last it seems to matter somewhat that text which serves as AD's source is Heti's own diary: there would seem to be a real life to be glimpsed, at a fair few removes, in these pages.
Velasco again on TC and its (rather more obvious) constructedness writes that "Every movie has its own temporal grammar, and Marclay typically gives us just enough of a film to reveal its particular speed or pacing … he makes salient the idiosyncrasies of movie time", the time of its individual component movies and the time of movies in general. This way of putting what Marclay is up to suggests that he's accurately conveying to us something about, say, Otto Preminger's Laura, or about time in movies—something that was anyway true—and one of the things that a rearrangement of existing material, as in TC, promises to do is make clear salient sympathies and connections that would otherwise remain hidden. There are facts about movie time that could also be understood independently of TC, but which it brings out in a compact way. But the same technique can be employed, as in Markson, to create an impression of sympathies and connections, the entries in their sequence adumbrating a consciousness which is a pure intentionality. There's no substantial Novelist of whom we might say, as we can of movie time, that we might have learned the same things about him some other way. There's just the panoply of notes, with the occasional wry comment, out of which we create a character. "And so the chorus points to a secret law", as Goethe put it, but in this case the chorus legislates by its pointing.
Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, called the kind of presentation that puts one thing alongside another to transmit an understanding of "just the connections" übersichtlich, generally translated "perspicuous" but used by him somewhat eccentrically to denote a display that enables multiple perspectives, showing us multipolar relationships and the overall shape of a thing. "It is equally possible", he writes shortly before invoking Goethe's chorus himself, "to see the data in their relation to one another and to gather them into a general picture without doing so in form of a hypothesis concerning temporal development", the way, for instance, a diary might show a person's evolution in narrative time. The decidedly atemporal organization of AD seems to achieve just such a perspicuous representation: each of the individual male figures in the book receives, naturally, his own section for his first name: Lars, Hanif, Pavel, Lemons, a sort of composite, cubist portrait; the "he" section displays from all angles The Heti Man. "I will" gives a compact representation of her resolutions and suspicions. Overall, the radical organization of the text seems to present us with Heti's sensibility in an uncommonly direct fashion.
Sort of. David Markson really existed, of course—but it's not called This Is Not a Memoir and the figures of the quartet, Novelist, Writer, Reader, Author, whose subjectivities are the hidden principles of the collage, aren't David Markson. Sheila Heti really exists, and it is called Alphabetical Diaries. But we aren't, for all that, confronted with Heti's first-order sensibility.
Diaries are already a scene of construction, memorialization, and sense-making; potentially of self-deception and self-justification. They are not naïve records of the events of a person's life, written with, as it were, an innocent pen, not because their authors are necessarily trying to distort things but because there is no innocent pen. Still, Heti's was a diary of events many of which not only Heti experienced, about which intersubjective agreement is possible, and the full text, recording ten years of her life, would, moreover, presumably enable its reader to put together more than its temporally various authors realized they were revealing. One would learn, if not about Heti and her life, at least about Heti the diarist and her perspective. This might be even more the case with an unredacted alphabetized diary: who knows what might be revealed about Heti the diarist in (one imagines) hundreds of pages beginning "I "?
We have, however, a much reduced text, Heti the redacter's version of Heti the diarist's version of Heti the person's life. (It's possible that if we had the full text to compare with the redacted version we would find it to be just more of the same, that Heti's editing is really just stripping out redundancy. But why assume that's the case?) If we try to look Heti face to face in this text we will see her through two glasses, darkly. Why so much as think that that's what's happening? AD is built out of Heti's diary, and the material is, unsurprisingly, convincingly diaristic in precisely the way that diaristic and epistolary novels aren't—full of the grain and strangeness that someone cutting a diary from whole cloth wouldn't think to invent. But it isn't a diary, nor is it even an excerpt of a diary; she leads us through an experience as if of revealing hidden connections through an objective, semantically indifferent rule of arrangement, but she has constructed the impressions that we will thereby get by selecting what is there to be connected to what. Not, indeed, to deceive us, since we could only be deceived if we thought we were learning about Heti as she lives and breathes, but to construct characters: Lars, Hanif, Claire. And the chief one, who isn't named. Call her Diarist.
Comments</h1> on 2024-11-12 18:47:26.0, Guy Lionel Slingsby commented:</h3>
This is pretty wonderful, a really good way of delineating what’s different about Heti, and of describing the the kinds of agencies this alphabetisation gives us.
I wonder where (or if) Murnane fits in.
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I could have sworn I posted this in 2019

2024-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

The fact that no one seems to be relating Ducks, Newburyport to Wittgenstein's Mistress, despite the fact that each seems to consist of linked statements or allusions to facts that gradually detail the main character's state of mind and even a narrative of sorts, the fact that speakers of English seem to have a relationship to the grammar of their language marked primarily by ignorance and awe, the fact that one sees this in for instance the fetishization of the German compound word over the English space-separated compound noun, the fact that in the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street, the fact that the structure of long sentences in three modern novels would in fact be an interesting thing to pursue, the fact that the long sentences of Krasznahorkai are unlike the long sentences of Bernhard are unlike the long sentences of Ellmann (are unlike the long sentences of, say, James, Sebald, or Murnane), the fact that the sentences themselves but also their reception is worthy of examination, the fact that the mere length of a sentence is rarely the most interesting thing about it, presuming it's interesting at all, the fact that Markson's myriad of short sentences effects a similar pileup of fragment and detail, the fact that nevertheless the small dot, the line break, and the capital letter do seem to make a difference for the reader, the fact that repetition and length can vary independently, the fact that a long sentence (or a short one) can ease the reader along, hinder and obstruct the reader, or be something of a neutral medium through which the reader passes neither eased nor obstructed, the fact that, to risk repetition myself not merely in headwords, and to risk moreover a bit of over-cuteness, one oughtn't be so dazzled by the factivity of punctuation that one overlooks its activity, that is to say, a sentence's word count is of less interest to the critic than what the sentence does with its dimensions, the fact that Frank Sinatra was reported to have had quite a long sentence but, according to someone, I can't remember who, who read it herself, he wasn't a good writer, the fact that the name that comes to mind regarding that anecdote is Jayne Mansfield's, the fact that I have no particular interest in pursuing the question of that critic's identity further at this time, the fact that when I began to compose the list entry three before this one, I had had an idea about how to continue this sentence, the fact that now, having composed both that entry, and the one one before this one, that is, the one in which I took up the topic of the topic I had had in mind, I no longer recall what it was, so that I can't be confident that it was, as occurred to me when I began writing in this present vein, to concern the letter Gerald Murnane once wrote to a reviewer about that reviewer's misidentification, in Murnane's opinion, of a run-on sentence, or other grammatical chimera, as a single properly formed sentence, the fact that the sentence under dispute in that letter had been praised by the reviewer on the grounds of its length, which as I have already stated if perhaps not quite argued is a silly reason to praise a sentence, the fact that, despite this just-voiced opinion of mine, Murnane describes and reproduces the letter in an essay entitled "In Praise of the Long Sentence", the fact that you may read the essay, and the letter, yourself</a>, the fact that by Murnane's lights, and to be sure my own as well, this present series of clauses, is not a sentence but rather simply one clause laid after another with no particular grammatical relationship between them that would serve to unify them into a single sentences, the fact that, as Facebook reminded me, On This Day a year or two ago I offered a false etymology of "congeries" purporting to derive it from "congee", explaining that congee is a porridge in which the grains of rice remain discrete, as indeed do any inclusions in the porridge, so that one may say that it is a collection of grains but not a whole, the fact that "congeries" is a delightful word, in my opinion, the fact that I feel very much as if I could go on practically forever like this, such is the fertility and capacity of ever-productive all-encompassing immodest brainpan, the fact that at the same time I do not feel as if I could go on practically forever like this, because I've gone on for a bit already and am uncertain whether this will actually amuse anyone, the fact that a nontrivial amount of my blog activity is oriented toward the prospective amusement of myself or others rather than anything more, I don't know, laudable, not to say that the amusement of oneself or others is not laudable, but also not neglecting the fact that it is not, perhaps, using the medium to its fullest capacity, the fact that it is also, of course, not using it in a detrimental way, the fact that not using something poorly is not really the same as using it well or grounds for praise, the fact that, ideally, this sentence would come to a graceful end rather than simply stopping, the fact that a main verb is as yet wanting—all these things seem to be worthy of consideration.
Comments</h1> on 2024-04-26 0:24:36.0, C Voss commented:</h3>
See also Ammons’s “Glare.”
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On Agnes Callard's Aspiration

2024-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

I started writing something about Aspiration, a book I believe to be wholly without merit, a while back, and while normally I would just post such a thing here, it is far too long to do so (I know many things here have been quite long, but this is a new low for me). So you may find it here</a>.

On Lydia Tár's EGOT

2023-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

If "is Lydia Tár a real person" was the question about Todd Field's movie that sparked the most mirth at the end of 2022 (alongside, naturally, handwringing about The Youth's putative inability to recognize a fiction film, absent superheroics), "is the ending of Tár a dream sequence" was the question that sparked the most scorn. The idea that it is, or at least might be, was given its most thorough airing in an article by Dan Kois</a>, who, collating evidence of strange doings, sights, and sounds throughout the film, claims that the film is "a kind of ghost story, in which we're so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár's psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate", and never more so than in its final third.
Plenty of folks on social media (by which I mean Twitter, by which I mean Twitter as I experience it) were on hand deride Kois and others pushing that line for taking a shallow, puzzle-box approach to a work of art, in which the point of engagement with art is finding out the objectively correct answer to a question, the question being, usually, not terribly interesting.
How curious, then, the reactions that came in in January, when a few interviews with Field appeared in which he was called on to answer questions about Tár, which he mostly, to his credit, phrased as speculation, but sometimes answered definitively, like Rowling making her little pronouncements about what her characters get up to in their off hours: to Michael Schulman for The New Yorker</a>, whose questions were bafflingly irrelevant to the film, he said that Tár won her Tony for work with Ivo van Hove; to Kate Aurthur for Variety</a>, which ought to know better, he said that Tár actually never met, much less studied under, Leonard Bernstein. To these revelations there was no such derisive response; on the contrary, at least a few people were delighted to have their suspicions about Bernstein "confirmed". But—what attitude toward the film as a work of art lies in the impulse to ask such questions, or treat Field as in a position to confirm any such thing? For that matter, what attitude is it, really, that takes a work of art as a puzzle?
Certainly, there are works of art which contain puzzling elements, and getting straight about them is an unobjectionable, if perhaps not always necessary, part of appreciating them. It is not for nothing that Perec's preface to Life a User's Manual discusses the skillful creation of jigsaw puzzles, the imaginary dialogue between puzzle-maker and puzzle-solver involved in deciding what gets cut, or fit, where. We can regard Primer, for instance, as in part an exercise in constructing an extremely minimal syuzhet from which a much more involved and ramified fabula can be extrapolated; that those who attempt to do so arrive at substantially the same series of undepicted events is a testament to the skill with which it's put together. We confront something like a puzzle whenever we begin to suspect that a narrator is not reliable; the suspicion is an invitation to figure out how far and in what respect the narrator ought to be mistrusted: what's being concealed, what misrepresented? At times the text's own invitation to treat itself as offering up a mystery to be solved may become quite overt; think of some of Gene Wolfe's stories, perhaps "Seven American Nights". Such an invitation may always be declined. But taking it up needn't be "treating an artwork like a puzzle" in a derogatory sense; it could be the prelude to a deeper appreciation. If it seems too cold-bloodedly rational—if you prefer, perhaps, to let the feel of the work wash over you—recall that it was the arch-Romantic Schlegel who not only reminded us that a text teaches its readers how it is to be read, but also mocked his contemporaries thus: "If some mystical art lovers who regard every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logically, then 'wow' would be the best criticism of the worthiest work of art".
Regarding an artwork as a puzzle in the derogatory sense can't simply mean, for instance, noticing, and trying to interpret, the apparitions in some shots in Tár. It means something more like treating the work not merely as being, in some respects, puzzling, and trying to make coherent sense of those aspects in light of the whole, but as being exhausted by those aspects that present a puzzle, and approaching it solely in those terms: it has a solution and the point is to find it; once you've found it, you're done and can move on. Once the jigsaw puzzle has been finished, who pauses to appreciate, in any sense, the image they've assembled? That's not the point. The point was to figure it out. It becomes mysterious, with this attitude, why anyone should hold art or particular works of art in any particularly high esteem, why the encounter with art is so important in anyone's life, how it could offer intellectual and emotional satisfactions beyond those (which are real!) of finding the solution.
Kois actually made sure to say explicitly that a work of art is not a puzzle box, but since he doesn't really do anything with the result of his analysis, one can forgive his accusers somewhat for ignoring that declaration. (A much superior piece in Collider</a> by Martin Millman was concerned with many of the same aspects of the film as Kois, but used its observations to make thematic points.) Having put the clues together that, he thinks, show the unreality of the concluding sections of the film, he ends the piece. What are we to make of this newly assembled picture of Tár? Who knows—that doesn't seem to have been the point. But what Kois is up to, the relation that the puzzle-solving attitude bears to the artwork-as-puzzle, is still preferable to what Schulman was up to in The New Yorker.
A well made puzzle might be extraordinarily difficult, or fairly straightforward. It might require obscure or specialized knowledge; it might require very little beyond what the audience of potential solvers to which it addresses itself can be presumed to have. If well made, though, it should be self-sufficient, first, in the sense that it should contain within itself what is necessary to solve it. This will naturally be relative its audience; the more difficult linguistics olympiad puzzles are apt to stump those with no linguistics training, and if you've never heard of an épée some lazy crossword clues may simply be beyond you. These are, if you like, hermetic (as Ted Cohen called certain jokes hermetic), but nothing in them is secret; nothing is hidden. You may not know the thing that solves it, but you could have known it. You may need to appeal to the creator for hints, but if the puzzle is really well constructed it shouldn't be necessary for everyone to do so, in order to make progress; it should be tractable by at least some solvers. It should be self-sufficient in the further sense that if you have solved it, you should be able to recognize it as solved, to defend and explain your solution to the satisfaction of another. Obviously, sometimes this task is fairly trivial: these previously entangled rings are now separate; what more do you want? But that's not always the case. There really is a puzzle about what's going on in "Seven American Nights" and one can't simply present one's answer and expect it to be accepted without showing how it works—how it is a solution that fits satisfactorily with the whole. One may think that there has to be a single answer to a puzzle, but there's no reason to insist on that. Crossword constructors occasionally make puzzles whose single right answer will be determined by an event that hadn't yet taken place when the puzzle was published; the outcome of an election or sports game, say. Such a puzzle could easily be made to enjoy multiple solutions by changing the schematic clue "victor in such-and-such a contest" to "contender in such-and-such a contest". This would be a neat if perhaps not very interesting trick. But it is useful to cancel the idea that interest in puzzles implies an aversion to multiplicity. The puzzling events of "Seven American Nights", or for that matter of Tár, may admit of multiple interpretations without that meaning one can't regard them as well made puzzles. One wouldn't be able to tell that someone else was wrong just because they had a different answer, but one would expect that other person, as well as oneself, to show how each answer is an answer, how it fits together with the information given and how it answers whatever one takes the question to be. The essential point is that in taking something to be or pose a puzzle, one takes the process of finding and justifying a solution as something it is in one's power, at least in principle, to do. If the solver must appeal to the author to find out if they've answered it correctly, or must appeal for a hint because the puzzle is simply missing information, it's at best flawed. Gollum was right to object to "what have I got in my pocket": that's no riddle.
Interest in a puzzle, or something treated as a puzzle, is interest in something public. Some people may be better positioned to make a go of it, but in principle anyone else could be in the same position; no one has a special kind of relationship to the puzzle that makes them more authoritative than anyone else. Even creators of puzzles are well positioned only by knowing the same kind of thing that successful solvers will know; they're familiar with these things because they made the puzzle what it is. But their knowledge is of the puzzle, and they can even learn things about it they didn't already know; there may be other routes to a solution than they had envisaged. (Think of the Gordian Knot.) Moreover, whatever hints they give or announcements about the solution they may make are answerable to the puzzle; if the creator announces later "the solution is such-and-such", that had better actually fit with the starting points and declared goal of the puzzle. If they say "here's a hint: …", that hint had better be such as to help someone make progress. If, that is, the puzzle is "what actually happens at the end of Tár, and in particular, is it all a dream of Lydia Tár's?", and Todd Field himself announces that it is, then a fair rejoinder is "on what basis might anyone be able to tell that?"; if he says "you can tell from careful attention to a, b, and c", then a, b, and c had better actually support his contention, in the first place, and it's open, in the second, for anyone else to say "when you consider x, y, and z as well, this other interpretation of a, b, and c becomes compelling, which points away from 'it was a dream' solution toward this other one". There may be another solution, for all Field's goals when (as we are pretending) he constructed the puzzle. Whatever else may come with regarding a work of art as a puzzle to be solved, it at least takes the work, or some aspect of it, as the object of interest, and it takes the audience as able to do the solving.
What sort of attitude does someone have who asks whether Lydia Tár really knew Bernstein, or how she won her Tony? Michael Schulman, who wrote the New Yorker piece about her EGOT, referred to his confirmed-by-Field conjecture as "CANON", in all caps, on Twitter, suggesting that the basic orientation emerges from fandom, and it does seem to have a certain fannish deference and passivity. (Of course fandom has its own forms of activity, but with respect to what really happened, what's canonical, it shows a great deal of deference to whoever seems to be running the show.) But how does Field come to be in a position to confirm that Lydia Tár worked with Ivo van Hove? Nothing of the sort is suggested in the movie. If Tár were a real person, we could imagine that Field is just better acquainted with her than we are, but, alas, she isn't a real person, and there would seem to be no more to know about her than one can learn from the film, where she has the only existence she does have. If Field has an authority here any attentive viewer does not, then what the artwork is cannot simply be the film anyone can view attentively; Lydia Tár's existence must extend beyond the film. How else could Field know more about her than we do?
As with puzzles, Field could simply be more reliable as a guide to what's depicted in the film, both in the sense of what can be gleaned from it and in the sense of what's on screen to notice in the first place, than the average viewer, in virtue of his more intimate acquaintance with it. Even professional reviewers, who might be supposed to be good at watching movies and getting their gist, get basic facts of plot wrong surprisingly often; maybe it's better to put our trust in someone who's got a firmer grasp on the whole affair. But that isn't why someone asks Field whether Tár really knew Bernstein, or worked with van Hove. Those questions presuppose that Field has some special, esoteric knowledge, knowledge that we just can't get except by asking. After all, didn't he invent Lydia Tár, and everything we do see? (Ignoring for the moment the fact that movies are not created by just one person.) Why not suppose that he also invented a few more things, things that just didn't make it on screen, for one reason or another? It hardly strains the imagination. Perhaps he charted her career in great detail. Tár exists onscreen, yes, but also in Field's imagination, pages of notes, a private archive, whatever. We all see what's on the screen, which is public, but that only gives part of the story—whatever Field imagined in service of, or along the way to, creating the film also counts. And only he knows those things.
If you think that Field is uniquely authoritative and can confirm speculation about things that are only suggested, or not even suggested, in the course of the film, then the film, the only thing the public has full access to, is incomplete, eked out by something inaccessible to the rest of us. The epistemological deference we grant Field has, alas, metaphysical import; sitting in the theater, we audience members are even more like the wretches in Plato's cave than the projectionist's art suggests. It's not that understanding the film requires it to be supplemented by further things that are in principle also accessible to the public, even if not actually known, as in the case of the hermetic puzzle; that which completes it, that Field uniquely has knowledge of, are Field's own private thoughts and fancies, of which the thing we see is but the imperfect, incomplete manifestation. An artist who thinks of their work along these lines has in a sense never published it—they wish to retain a proprietary interest in it, keep it on a leash, rather than sending it on its way to become what it will be in the eyes of its public. Such an artist asserts the primacy of what they wanted to do over what they actually did. If the audience of a work thinks of it along these lines, it abdicates its role as appreciator and interpreter, wishing not only that there should be an answer, but someone who can give it the answer, and in fact setting things up so that someone has to give it the answer. For critical appreciation and assessment as an independent activity is all but impossible.
That conclusion may seem melodramatic when faced with trivial examples—guessing games about awards of no moment at all in the film. (Whether Tár was a fabulist all along about Bernstein is of greater interest.) There we have something firmly in "what have I got in my pockets" territory, but which is, at least, beside the point; potentially playful in the same way "who would win in a fight, Batman or the Predator?" is. (Which—this is admittedly petty—makes it all the more unseemly that Schulman chose to use his time with Field to pursue those questions.)
But the deference shown to the creators of works goes beyond the trivial and extraneous. It is easy, for instance, to find defenses against the obvious antisemitic reading of They Live claiming not that the reading is the crude, unilluminating application of a template whereby any tale of a sufficiently large conspiracy deceiving and exploiting the masses is congruent to any other, but that it's incorrect because John Carpenter says it's not what he meant—an act of bald ipsedixitry unproductive of critical insight, in addition to being somewhat flimsy if one thinks the availability of an antisemitic reading is important: "he may not have thought of it before", as Stanley Cavell wrote in a similar context, "but he had better think of it now." (I should add that I don't know in what spirit Carpenter himself has said these things.) Our knowledge of the film that we can watch contains the same potential for interpretation; what's changed is our knowledge of the film-cum–Carpenter's mind, and we are asked to disregard our lying eyes in favor of Carpenter's assurances.
Granted, we will not accept just anything from the creator of a work—"actually, this was funny" will not fly. (Or so one hopes. There do exist statements by artists about their work that amount to an announcement that their joke made you laugh, actually.) And perhaps claims that such and such a reading is, or is not, definitively correct, would also not fly, if they seemed to go against too much of what anyone can see in the public face of the work. But even regarding the creator as having the power to settle open controversies, or add, post-publication, to the store of facts, has a deep impact on how we can relate to an artwork.
My point is not that we've known since Barthes, or Foucault, or Cavell, or Nehamas, or or the New Critics, or the Romantics, or whatever style of critical autonomy you like, that this sort of attitude is wrong. (Perhaps, to pick up on its apparent fannish sympathies, it has reasonable application in the case of long-running serialized works with a master plan.) My point is that it's stultifying, and stultifying in a way that looking at a work of art as a puzzle is not. It makes our interest in a work of art into a sort of pretend appreciation. No matter how searching or sophisticated a reading, how compelling, productive, or interesting it is to others, it is always in principle hostage to someone else, the author or whoever it may be, coming along and saying, "no, that's not right"—and there's an end on it, because they know. It's disappointing if someone regards a work of art as a puzzle to be solved, because such an interest in art seems trivializing. It seems incompatible with the significance many find in their engagement with art in reducing such engagement to the finding of clever solutions, after which the work can be set aside. But at least such a person thinks that they can find the solutions. They have not mystified the nature of the artwork, or made it someone's private property. Someone who thinks Todd Field, uniquely, can say whether Lydia Tár really studied with Leonard Bernstein still thinks there's a single answer to be had to that question, but they don't even think they can find it out.
POST SCRIPT</h1> As it happens, while I was sitting around deciding what to do with this here piece of writing you've nearly finished, Aaron Bady, on Twitter, posted</a> a link to a paper (in some kind of draft state) on Teju Cole's Open City</a>. It's good and I recommend it. I mention it here because, in it, Bady makes use of Cole's personal statements, about the novel, about its reception (praising Alyssa Rosenberg's review), and about rape culture in general (ie not in connection with his novel), and I couldn't help but feel, as I read the pertinent sections, as if the apparently most important uses were in fact the most extraneous. (Partly this is done in service of arguing for against the identification of Cole and Julius, the novel's narrator, in which some critics, eg James Woods, indulged, and I have no objection to that, but that aim can be (and is!) prosecuted by producing a reading of Julius's character in the novel, and contrasting it with the real-life Cole, and setting them aside each other, not by taking Cole as privileged insight into the novel. Another citation of Cole has him suggesting a "plausible" (NB!) way of thinking about the novel as "a series of visits to [Julius's] psychiatrist", a suggestion redeemed by its fruitfulness, not its source.) This apparent extraneousness is especially interesting since Bady not only quotes Cole but also casts in a negative light the "New Critical impulse to avoid the 'intentional fallacy' [and] reluctance to give Teju Cole's opinion of his novel any interpretive weight", and connects that impulse to the impulse that led critics to essentially (and astoundingly) ignore even the possibility that Julius is a rapist.
The specific opinion most important statement of Cole's is that Julius did, in fact, rape Moji, as Moji asserts, an assertion that Julius more or less (as I remember it, anyway) ignores. One reason to be a little cautious here—to embrace the most anodyne possible version of an "intentional fallacy", the reminder that what one intends to do is not always what one does in the end—is apparent in the part of the interview Bady quotes: the book would end with "three vicious thwacks of the hammer, and then a soft exit to strings. I'm attracted, in art, to things that trouble the complacency of the viewer or reader", Cole says. But—manifestly, since otherwise there would be no need for Bady's paper—the complacency of many reviewers, at least, was not troubled. Bady remarks that Rosenberg hits a false note when she says that the ending of the novel "forces" us to reevaluate Julius. Cole, too, seems to have hit a false note; he may have intended to trouble our complacency, but this intention seems not to have been brought off. The hammer thwacks weren't vicious enough; maybe the hammer wasn't even really there. But this is after all an intention about the effect the ending should have, not an intention about what takes place within the world of the narrative, however implicit it may be; perhaps that makes the difference.
Suppose that Cole had said, of Moji's accusation, not "it's absolutely true" but "no, it's false" or "It's inconclusive on purpose" or nothing, declining to address the issue. And then suppose that we read Bady's paper, starting from the part beginning "in the remainder of this essay", wherein he develops the reading that "Julius works to forget [his rape of Moji], through his narrative, in ways which can be (and must be) read back into the novel". Would that reading be less convincing? It doesn't depend on taking Cole at his word regarding Moji's assertion. Indeed, although Bady says that "the novel's frustratingly limited first-person narration does not allow us to answer with any confidence" the question whether Julius raped Moji, in my eyes his reading allows us to conclude that the narration does allow us to answer the question with confidence in the affirmative: it is an argument that the affirmative answer, read back into the novel from the beginning, is present in the novel from the beginning, that while Julius does not narrate his consciousness of his rape as such, it nevertheless pervades and shapes his actions and his narration: "the reading is present in the novel, a pattern of references and associations which organize the stream of Julius's consciousness." (What, one has to wonder, do the critics who think it up in the air whether Julius raped Moji or not, or those, if there any, who think that he simply did not, think the episode is doing in the novel? Is it a prank? A warning—look, these accusations can come even for the learnèd flaneur?) Such a reading also reveals the book as better—more artfully and cunningly constructed—than it would otherwise seem; this is a dimension of its attraction.
It is ironic that Bady, in (aptly) describing his reading as "felicitous", ie, as one which "simply works or does not", contrasts that view of readings with a view of fiction as "a constative utterance", "a set of propositions about an objective reality which can either be confirmed or denied", after having previously cast suspicion on the "New Critical … reluctance to give Teju Cole's opinion of his novel any interpretive weight". Absent a compelling, felicitous reading, Teju Cole's opinion of his novel could only play the role of confirming or denying a supposition about what has happened within it, precisely as if it were an objective reality of which he has knowledge. But in the presence of such a reading, what need have we for his opinion in particular? It's not that there's a reason not to give Cole's opinion any weight: it deserves all the weight it can support. But he supports it the way we all do.
Comments</h1> on 2023-04-10 15:31:45.0, josh k-sky commented:</h3>
It's especially something—inartful?—to cede interpretive authority to Field when breathing life into the figure of Lydia Tár has become a game with so many players. There are a whole lot of new neighborhoods outside the text!
[permalink]</a>

Gefahr im Ziel

2022-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Like, I suppose, most of The Drift's readers, I stand ever at the ready to believe that whatever Obama's been up to recently</a> is an expression of Pure Ideology. When you've got an easy target, though, your work has to be correspondingly more rigorous; if you're criticizing as wrong someone your audience is already apt to think is wrong, you risk appearing self-satisfied or ungenerous. If you yield to the temptation of being breezy, pointing out this or that (and merely pointing it out) as if as a reminder to a reader who's already in the swim, you risk appearing supercilious where you should be incisive.
[Kristine McDvitt Tompkins and Douglas Tompkins]'s donation vastly expanded Chile’s national parklands, according to The New York Times, “enlarging the area of protection for pumas, condors, flamingos, and endangered deer species.” But nearby farmers have organized a resistance to the rewilding project. They complain that the rise in puma populations is threatening their herds, which they depend upon for their livelihood. Our Great National Parks has a short attention span, however: there’s no time to provide this context before moving on to glamor shots of an Andean condor chick.
Alas, "The Audacity of Nature Docs" has an even shorter attention span, not even pausing the explain how this is context. I am in no position to dispute that it's a fact, and even a fact that has something to do with the park in Chile. But a fact is not an analysis; an accumulation of facts is not context. The fact is presented as if its significance is obvious on its face (it's bad, I guess; a strike against the park), so that we, the knowing ones, have only to be told that the documentary doesn't include it to tell that we've got one up on it, but what is its significance? Who are the nearby farmers? What should we make of their claims? And why weren't there enough pumas around to trouble them before?
When Yellowstone was created, when, as Adams reminds us, it was inhabited by "several indigenous tribes that served as … effective caretakers of the land", wolves lived there too. Then for a while they didn't, or at least did only in negligible numbers: settlers—farmers who complained that the wolves were threatening their herds—were among those whose influence led to a pretty successful program of extermination. They're back now, though, and get this: farmers ("ranchers" might be more apt, but I'm following Adams's usage) complain about them. What should we make of their complaints?* (To what extent does their existence in their present form depend on the absence of wolves in the intervening years?) I personally do not think that it's a mark against the wolf programs; I am rather inclined to see them as an obstacle. Should I think the same of the Chilean farmers/ranchers? (It's also not clear that wolves were reintroduced with the aim of restoring Yellowstone to a "mythical wilderness [from] a time when humans did not exist", an image that may well be the documentary's ideal of a national park but is not exactly current in conservation, rather than restoring an endangered predator to an ecosystem from which it had been removed, which is not quite the same thing.)
I have no idea how far an analogy between the complainants about wolves and the complainants about pumas can be carried; I haven't got the context. But the outlines seem suggestive. We might ask what the wolf population in the American West would have been like if the indigenous peoples living in Yellowstone hadn't had their treaties violated. (It's quite possible that that wouldn't have been enough, but who knows.) We do know that Native Americans participated in the reintroduction of wolves</a> and have the authority to manage wolf populations on the lands they currently occupy. Adams closes by asking, "what would happen if, rather than kicking people off their land to convert it into more tourist destinations and reserves for future land exploitation, the conservation industry followed the lead of people who are already practicing preservation?" Well might one ask! Would there be pumas?
*What, for that matter, should we make of their occupation? These are cattlemen, after all.

I doff my assless chaps one leg at a time just like the next intermillennial yobbo

2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Picking up Saint Sebastian's Abyss, I knew that it contained passages in a style highly imitative of Thomas Bernhard's, a distinctive style which I had recognized immediately on seeing an excerpt from the book, but I did not know that the book was written exclusively in that style, though perhaps to a lesser degree in its closing chapters, unless as I read, I thought, I had simply gotten used to it by then, and as I read, I thought increasingly that this stylistic fidelity came with a certain detriment to the book, which, had it appeared in a world in which Bernhard had never existed or written, or in which he had written only theater pieces, and vitriolic and yet simultaneously friendly letters to his editor, and excoriations of Austria, and Vienna, and Viennese society, but had not written his novels, his immediately recognizable ranting monologues of eccentrics returning over and over to themes and phrases and obsessions, would be something absolutely first-rate, but which could in this world, as I read, I thought, in which Bernhard had existed, and had not contented himself with theater pieces, and testy exchanges with his editor, and condemnations of Austria, and Vienna, and Viennese society, but had also written the novels on which his fame rests, at least in the English-speaking world, only be seen as a kind of Bernhard lite, as something which continually invites comparison to Bernhard but which cannot bear up under those comparisons which it brings upon itself, specifically it invites comparison to The Loser, a novel about two friends one of whom is traveling in the days surrounding the other's death, the other an Austrian who has a lung condition, friends who have left practice for theory whose encounter with a fictional or at least fictionalized artist of surpassing ability derails their lives and fractures their friendship, and this comparison is something unbearable for the novel, as I read, I thought, for the personages in the novel are flimsy, which is not to say that Bernhard trafficked in the fully fleshed out character of literary psychological realism, he didn't, his obsessive, culture-mad personages were caricatures, but this does not save Saint Sebastian's Abyss, for its personages are then caricatures of caricatures, especially the narrator, and especially Schmidt, whose comical European-æsthete snobbery is too familiar to bite, whereas Bernhard's personages are weird, and Bernhard's personages, too, dwell in a familiar world, or rather, since Bernhard's personages for the most part do not interact with any world familiar to me, they dwell in their world in a way which seems compatible with the world familiar to me, even their obsessions are reconcilable with the world familiar to me, for instance Glenn Gould, the most important piano virtuoso of the century, as the narrator of The Loser said, I thought, even though he is not accurately represented in The Loser, we can understand his being the s u b j e c t of an obsession, and the c o n t e n t of their obsession are such as we can comprehend, whereas Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the greatest painting of all time, as the narrator and Schmidt both said, I thought, is so sketchily described that their obsession is not so comprehensible, but that at least must be forgiven, because only failure could attend the author who attempted to describe plausibly a painting that the reader could understand a personage being obsessed with as the greatest of all time, but also the c o n t e n t of their obsession, the books they write, seem to be the work of cranks, and but the novel presents them as not cranks, which is another way that Bernhard's personages are and these personages are not compatible with the world familiar to me, because Bernhard's personages most likely are cranks but they are supported by family wealth which exempts them from having to be anything other than cranks, being cranks is permissible to them, and perhaps even to Schmidt, whereas the personages of Saint Sebastian's Abyss are both scholarly and popular successes, the books of the narrator have made him wealthy, and presumably the books of Schmidt have made him wealthy, and they both possess acolytes and followers, and indulgent editors at presses, and the ability to place articles with ease, they are discussed on television, are celebrities, in other words, on the strength of their scholarly writings on Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the painting, and the two other paintings by Count Hugo Beckenbauer, and no other paintings, and one result of this is that the world of the novel seems strange to me, ich kann mich in diesem Buch nicht finden, and the satirical suggestion that their obsession is, well, kind of silly and crankish lands less well, because they are making a go of it, after all, and perhaps history will strip them naked as it did Saint-Saëns, as indeed Schmidt does to the narrator, but that episode cannot prove that they were silly or crankish, because it still occurs on their own terms, whereas the books of Bernhard's cranks do not make them famous, bring them no riches and no scholarly esteem, in fact the chief attribute that attach to the works of the personages in Bernhard's novels is that they are not finished, whereas in Saint Sebastian's Abyss they are almost all finished and are plentiful, and this too makes their being obsessive cranks less consistent with the world as it is familiar to me, which is not to say that I do not think that there are no successful cranks or for that matter frauds in this world, because I do think that, but we have nothing really to judge the personages of Saint Sebastian's Abyss by, because their works are necessarily merely sketched, except perhaps their utter sincerity about art, but I see no reason to call that anything worse than unworldly, and the general suspicion that so many books on just one topic must be cranky, and certainly the narrator's book speculating about what Beckenbauer's lost paintings may have been like seems unscholarly in topic, but what of it, shall just that one book condemn him, and so the idea as expressed in a blurb that the book "flays art of its pieties of and pretensions" does not land, because the book takes place in a pretense world, unless the blurber simply means that the personage of Beckenbauer is dissolute, but what of it, Caravaggio was a murderer and not even fictional, so why would a sex-addled painter who is fictional be any worse?
(And what, for the love of god, did that other blurber see in it, or in Krasznahorkai, to connect them?)

Two or three confusions about five or six pages of Bernard Williams

2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

This is just an attempt to work through some questions I had on reading Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp 143–148 and thereabouts, about "ethical knowledge" and its possibility in a fictive hypertraditional society (its salient tradition being its lack of reflection), in particular concerning the way that the "possibility[] of the insightful but not totally identified observer[] bears on an important question, whether those who properly apply ethical concepts of this kind [ie, thick ones] can be said to have ethical knowledge" (142)—how the observer is implicated in there being ethical knowledge in such a society, and how reflection is involved, and how reflection is said to destroy ethical knowledge. (When I say "work through some questions" I mean something like "express the questions somewhat combatively".) The last, in particular, now seems much stranger than I recall having found it on my first reading of the book, long ago; one might easily have thought both beforehand and, taking Williams at his word, afterward, that "reflection might destroy knowledge[] because thick ethical concepts that were used in a less reflective state might be driven from use by reflection, while the more abstract and general ethical thoughts that would probably take their place would not satisfy the conditions of propositional knowledge" (167). I say "taking Williams at his word" because he introduces that sentence with the phrase "earlier I said". But earlier he did not say that; what he said earlier was much weirder. (Or more carefully: earlier he said that, but disconnected from the context in which he says it, which requires him to have said something much weirder.)
But more on that anon; first, the argument that there's ethical knowledge in the first place in such a society (the one topic leads directly into the other, anyway). Broadly, it seems to be like this: First, those who have knowledge exhibit certain features: they believe the judgments they make, and the judgments are true, and the truth isn't happenstance but rather their practices track the truth. This is presumably meant to be a sufficient set of conditions on being knowledge(able). Second, practitioners of thick-ethical-concept discourses believe the judgments they make in using those concepts, and their use of the concepts varies as the circumstances vary. Lemma: If the judgments they make using those concepts are true, then they have, and the judgments constitute, knowledge. Third, one reason to think that the judgments are not true fails, and another reason fails if the people being talked about are sufficiently unreflective about what they're doing. Conclusion: truth and knowledge, at least in certain scenarios.
First, this is not exactly a constructive argument. That is: if you were concerned about how these practices might involve knowledge, or in what sense the practitioners can be said to know that so and so is such and such, you wouldn't really be enlightened here. (How could you be? We're talking about people whose practices you're on the outside of, and Williams talks only about "the boy is F", so he couldn't really try to get you inside.) When an argument by elimination succeeds, the result is seen to be unavoidable, but not necessarily in an illuminating way: it couldn't be these other things, so it must be this remaining thing. (That isn't necessarily a knock on it, though I personally did find it to be, as can sometimes be the case with arguments by elimination, a trifle trickily unsatisfying. Nor is it necessarily to say that a different kind of argument in this kind of case might even be possible; I'm willing to believe that in more philosophical cases than one would like to acknowledge you just sort of have to limn the thing from the outside.)
Second, if you're making an argument by elimination, you really have to make a case that you're eliminating all possibilities but those you wish to establish. Williams doesn't make such a case, and I don't think he is eliminating what's necessary. (I'm also not convinced he should get to claim the "tracks the truth" requirement; the brief argument there is simply that if any of their talk with their thick concept is true, then the fact that they vary their talk with varying circumstances, and correct each other, etc., shows that they track the truth. I suppose there's some consideration like: we only know what the content of these terms even is from the various ways they employ them, so what they do must come out to be tracking the truth, if there's truth. But it seems so easily won!.)
Williams confronts directly two possibilities for why the claims may not be truthful. One of them is this: if the observer is able to say "so and so's statement 'X is F' is true", then the observer ought to be able to just say "X is F" directly, but, Williams says, "he is not prepared to do that, since F is not one of his concepts" (143). What he seems to mean by this is that "F" is not one of his words: he explicates the disquotational principle involved with reference to slang terms for entities of a school, and the square teacher who understands but does not use the slang surely has concepts involved. To be somewhat more concrete: I, not being of the youth, or part of Twitch culture, etc., would not say that something is "based" rather than "cringe", or "poggers". But I might judge (more readily in the former than the latter case) that someone else was speaking correctly or incorrectly in using them. This discrepancy doesn't seem harmful to the possibility that things might truly be based (bzw. cringe), because what holds me back isn't their not being "my concepts" in the sense of my not knowing my way about them (though I might judge that I know my way about them to the extent of judging them correctly when used but not using them correctly myself in novel situations, as when a person has enough of a language to assess a translation but not enough to speak it fluently), but simply their not being my words to use; they belong to another population and I would feel or look silly speaking them myself. (Williams actually gives the disquotation principle as "A cannot correctly say that B speaks truly in uttering S unless A could also say something tantamount to S" (143; bold added), and that "tantamount" seems as if it actually gives one an out completely.) 
It's an reasonable question, I think, why Williams is confident that the observer would be willing to quote the term in question. Most actually existing people do not observe the analytic philosopher's niceties regarding use and mention of terms quite as rigorously as the philosophers do, especially around fraught terms. If F is not the observer's concept in a strong way, then his ability to judge about its use in another's statement is called into question; if it's not his term in a strong sense, then he might reasonably be skittish in uttering it even within a quotation. But this is more to the point with regard to the possibility I think Williams is leaving unaddressed. Another interesting question is why Williams subsequently characterizes the issue here as one in which "their notions [are] so different from the observer's that he could not assert what they asserted" (145), which really does seem to put this in territory different from the slang example and raise the question of how the observer is judging the truth of the quoted statements afresh.
The second argument that claims involving the terms in question are not true that Williams considers is false, "not because they can be mistaken in ways that the locals themselves could recognize, but because an entire segment of the local discourse may be seen from outside as involving a mistake" (145). One thinks, perhaps, witch discourse, or of "magic" more generally, of which Williams says:
"magic, at least, is a causal conception, with implications that overlap with scientific conceptions of causality. To the extent this is so, magical conceptions can be seen from the outside as false, and then no one will have known to be true any statement claiming magical influence … the problem is that their statements [] imply notions similar enough to some of [the observer's] for him to deny what they assert. (145) </blockquote>
That is, the system of scientific concepts the observer can find in magic-talk overlap sufficiently with the scientific concepts with which the observer is familiar that the observer can relate the two and condemn the former as at root mistaken.
In the ethical as opposed to theoretical context, Williams puts it thus:
the locals' statements imply something that can be put in the observer's terms and is rejected by him: that it is right, or all right, to do things he thinks it is not right, or all right, to do. Prescriptivism sees things in this way. The local statements entail, together with their descriptive content, an all-purpose ought. We have rejected the descriptive half of that analysis—is there any reason to accept the other half? (145–6)</blockquote>
It is in answering that question that the issue of zermalmende Reflexion arises, but before we get there—isn't there something odd about this? If the observer finds the claim to be false, must it be because of such a prescriptivist split? Compare this example from the next chapter: 
[M]embers of a culture that does not admit human sacrifice encounter members of another that does. They conceptualize differently the ritual killings, but this does not mean that the first group, if horrified, are laboring under an anthropological misunderstanding. It is, as they might put it, a deliberate killing of a captive, which is enough for their ethically hostile sentiments to extend to it. (158)</blockquote>
Indeed, they might be laboring under a crystalline anthropological understanding (mightn't they?) in which they very well understand what the other folks are getting at when they talk about the sacrifices but think it's all just erroneous. Or—and one really must wonder whence comes the temptation to set all these encounters in imagined ethnographic encounters with or between "primitive" peoples—consider something like the following. (And here I confess that it's not with the greatest comfort that I'll use (or even mention) the term that follows, but am doing so because I think it's more useful to have a concrete example than to talk of a "headman" saying "F", and because I don't think that endless circumlocutions would really have helped.) I believe that I am, and that most people I know are, capable of judging the aptness, in use, by the standards of those who use it full-throatedly, of terms such as "slut". I wouldn't use it myself, and I wouldn't even be thrilled to quote its use and assess the quotation, but I think I know what people are about when they do use it, and I would and do reject its application in general, as involving a whole complex of patriarchal nonsense which I also wish to reject. It certainly seems as if this rejection involves my deeming any particular application of it wrong, not because it's misapplied but because I think it can't be correctly applied. I don't believe that in adopting such an attitude I must adopt the prescriptivist analysis; certainly, since the basis of the rejection is another set of "thick" values set against patriarchy, it doesn't seem that it boils down to a description plus a thin "universal moral notion" (146). (One can also ask how it is that I come to be able to judge regarding uses of the term without inhabiting the system of values of which it is a native. But since I do do so—or allege that I do—if the only account thereof is the prescriptivist one, well, so much the worse for Williams.) But Williams only considers that one might call the application of the rejected thick terms systematically wrong from a thin, rather than a competing thick, position. So it isn't clear to me that the argument by elimination covers the needed ground.
My first thought about the observer unwilling to say in his own person "X is F" was that it would be this kind of case—unwilling to say it because to use of F is to take part in an odious-to-the-observer scheme. But it can't be that—the rest of the discussion wouldn't add up, and anyway, the observer would be unlikely to mention it in such a blasé fashion or to judge the sentence using it true. But I don't see how this kind of rejection of the thick concept maps on to the division into a pure description plus a thin "right" or "wrong". 
It's about this that Williams does bring in the role of reflection: 

The basic question is how we are to understand the relations between practice and reflection … in relation to this society, the question now is: Does the practice of the society, in particular the judgments that members of the society make, imply answers to reflective questions about that practice, questions they have never raised? …
There are two different ways in which we can see the activities of the hypertraditional society. … One of them may be called an "objectivist" model. According ot this, we shall see [them] as trying … to find out the truth about values … We shall then see their judgments as having these general implications [as we see claims about magic as having implications about cause more generally]. On the other model we shall see their judgments as part of their way of living, a cultural artifact they have come to inhabit … we shall take a different view of the relations between that practice and critical reflection. We shall not be disposed to see the level of reflection as implicitly already there. (147) </blockquote>
Note that the judgmental observer of just a minute ago doesn't need to care about this; that observer can seemingly say "well yes they aren't trying to get at abstract truths about patriarchy (or whatever) but their practices evince patriarchy and they are incorrect in their ground-floor statements because of that".
Why is this relevant? Well, consider the practitioners of magic; they seem, or have seemed to many ethnologists, to be engaging in causal reasoning, but with faulty premises, but because they share a topic with what we know, we are in a position to deny what they assert (as Williams had said, p 145). (Must the practitioners of magic be reflective about it, or is it enough that we read off causal implications? It seems as if it must be the former, given the distinction between the objectivist and non-objectivist readings of practices, but, in this domain at least, why?) They're up to something similar enough to what the observer knows for the observer to get his conceptual-schematic hooks in, is, it seems, a very crude way to take it. In the ethical case: "if we take the nonobjectivist view … various members of the society will have knowledge … But on the objectivist view they do not have knowledge, or at least it is most unlikely that they do, since their judgments have extensive implications" (148) which, one expects Williams to continue, impinge on a domain of the observer's knowledge, which enable the observer to deny what they assert (or, as one could more simply put it, which are false). This would parallel the discussion at the introduction of this possibility for denying knowledge: "magical conceptions can be seen from the outside as false … the local criteria do not reach to everything that is involved in such claims" (145), and so on. But that isn't how Williams goes on; he goes on to say "… which they have never considered, at a reflective level, and we have every reason to believe that, when those implications are considered, the traditional use of ethical concepts will be seriously affected" (148). Why do we have every reason to believe this? What are the implications (Williams of course can't tell us, because the only term he's given is the schematic "F")? We don't say that the practitioners of magic have got it wrong because, if they continue their investigations into causality, the practice of magic will be unsustainable (if we did say that their practice would collapse with continued investigation, we'd say that it would happen because they've got it wrong), nor, of course, did Williams suggest that we do. It is an open question in any given case whether mere reflection on the use of a thick ethical concept will, because of whatever further implications it has, tend to undermine it, or anyway, shouldn't that be what someone skeptical of ethical convergence ought to think? (There seems, too, to be something odd about the claim "you don't have knowledge now because, in the future, you (or your descendants!) will find this practice foreign". By the end of this section Williams is saying what he will later say he said: if "reflection characteristically disturbs, unseats, or replaces those traditional concepts [then] reflection can destroy knowledge" (148), but right here he is saying that reflection proleptically already has destroyed knowledge even before any disturbance, unseating, or replacement has happened.) In actual courses of reflective thought sometimes the wildest nonsense ends up being confirmed and the distressing implications just remain unconsidered or are explained away, and often, also, the reflection that destroys must be carried out at a rather high level of sophistication (we don't all have Williams's skill). At the same time, it seems that Williams can't quite say here, as he does in the case of magic, that the observer, because he can see the that the observees are engaged in a practice of trying to get it right that connects with his like practice, can bring his greater knowledge to bear and say that they're wrong on that account, because the observer, who one presumes is also reflective, shouldn't on Williams's account have that greater knowledge. But it's only something like that, as far as I can tell, that justifies his denying them knowledge now, merely because of the kind of life they have, before the corrosion typical of reflection has set in.

Their words, for you

2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Several months ago, it's been so many, now, that I know not how many, wondering about the remarkable metaphor with which Davidson begins "What Metaphors Mean" ("metaphor is the dreamwork of language"), and how far he actually goes to expound upon it, and additionally remembering that I found the ending suggestive (but of what?—I couldn't remember!), I re-read just the beginning and ending of that essay. The ending is suggestive, of a kind of Romantic coextension of critical and artistic creative activity, as, in fact, is the beginning (at least, I associate it with German Romanticism). It also seems to beg to be read alongside Cavell's "Excursus on Wittgenstein's Vision of Language". (I recall being very pleased with myself for inserting WMM between two bouts of Cavell when, ages ago, I taught Philosophy & Literature; I believe I found following it all with some Danto pleasing as well—though I can no longer trace that angle.)
I had some further inchoate thoughts that I thought I might give form and existence by writing them, about—not the initiating metaphor, but rather—the putative contrast between Davidson's "brute force" theory, as as David Hills terms it</a>, and Hills' own preference for a pretense theory. For it seemed to me—to be clear, this is before actually reading the entirety of the Davidson, or reacquainting myself with any of the actual details of the latter style of account—that the main thrust of the essay, that "metaphorical meanings" and "metaphorical truths" are the upshots, not the inputs, to understanding a metaphor, which operates by getting us (somehow—there's a reason Hills calls it "brute force") to notice certain, well, things is the normal nonspecific term to use here, but is unfortunately countable (Davidson when explaining himself adverts to pictures and cautions us from counting), so let's say that a metaphor gets us, perhaps helped along by a critic who is engaged in basically the same kind of activity, to notice the components of the metaphor in a certain way, is one that is compatible with, and perhaps even necessary for, a make-believe account—which would be relegated to filling out the "how". For how do we know what, or how, the speaker is making-believe in their metaphorizing? (How do we collaborate, in interactive, joint metaphor-making, without throwing each other off the rails, or stepping fully out of the game, and at best making observations about how one might play it—something that can also be fun, but is a different fun from that of playing the game?) If understanding a metaphor is conceived of as taking or being able to take up a game inaugurated but not wholly delimited by the metaphor-maker, cottoning on to the rules of a game already underway as it's played, or recollecting the play in tranquility, it seems all the more natural to conceive of the "metaphorical meaning" and the metaphorical truths thus recovered, if any, as the outputs of the successful, simpatico playing of the game, and successfully picking up on the game proposed or in progress would seem to be already similar to the successful noticing of what the metaphor-maker wishes to draw our attention to; it already requires sensitivity, discretion, taste, etc. Οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει, and likewise for this sort of game-player; the player doesn't tell you the nature of the game, and the game, and what the players take from it, is apt to outstrip whatever the inaugurating player thought, occurrently or not. (As Hills as much as says outright, in "Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor", p 145.) 
But then of course I actually did re-read the Davidson, and some of Hills' papers, and am here recording some impressions, rather than attempting to make a single argument, though perhaps the chorus will point to a secret law regardless. Let's agree, you and I, to understand by these abbreviations the names that follow them: "WMM" for "What Metaphors Mean", by Davidson; "AT" for "Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor", "PP" for "Problems of Paraphrase: Bottom's Dream", "M" for the "metaphor" article on SEP, and "WH" for "Τhe What and the How of Metaphorical Imagining, Part I", all by David Hills; and "MFM" and "MPOMB" for "Metaphor, Fictionalism, Make-Believe" and "Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe", respectively, by Kendall Walton. Many of the thoughts about Davidson will also advert to Hills, which is, you know, it's fine. It's not organized, but it's fine.
1. Davidson's visual emphasis. It's striking the extent to which Davidson adverts to the visual. When "he was burned up" was a live metaphor, he avers, "we would have pictured fire in the eyes or smoke coming out of the ears" (253). He denies that "associated with a metaphor is a definite cognitive content that its author wishes to convey" (262), but allows that there is something which can be called "what the author of a metaphor wanted us to see" which (definite?) thing "a more sensitive or educated reader grasps" (264). Here he's talking about the critic, hence the contrast; the critic produces a paraphrase ("in benign competition with the metaphor maker"; recall that most metaphorical paraphrasis is also metaphorical) to "make the lazy or ignorant reader have a vision like that of the skilled critic" (264; this is also very Cavellian). And of course there's this famous bit:
How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture. (263) </blockquote>
I'm not really sure what to make of this, to be honest—is it predominantly in covert support of his contention that what a metaphor induces the audience to come to awareness of is non-propositional? I certainly would be hard put to assign any visual content to "metaphor is the dreamwork of language". (When I read Robinson Jeffers' "And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens", the image that comes to mind is, no word of a lie and perhaps shamefully, oatmeal as it cooks. Despite the rather blatant availability of magma!) Is it just a stand-in for the fact that he doesn't have anything to say about how the noticing of similarities or the non-propositional whatsits occurs, and falls back to a visual analogy? All he really does with it is contend that the interpretation of metaphors, like the making of metaphors, is not guided by rules. (Actually, what he says is that the interpretation of metaphors is as little guided by rules as is the making of metaphors (245). Naturally one suspects that what he means by this is what anyone would mean by it, that neither is guided by rules at all. But it's a happy fact that he put it as he did, for while the interpretation of dreams is surely not guided completely by rules that can be laid down once and for all in advance, it's also not a hermeneutic free-for-all, and it's because of the putative similarity between the interpretation of dreams, and that of metaphor, that Davidson makes this remark about rules. A point worth making, because Davidson's contention is also a point of contention between him and Hills, in PP. But the "rules of a special and difficult-to-elicit kind, offering a special and difficult-to-elicit kind of guidance" of which Hills speaks (PP, 5) don't seem obviously incompatible with mild hermeneutic heuristics that Davidson needn't fear. But we now verge on Bentham-like</a> impenetrability.) Others were not so cautious: think of Max Black and his "system of commonplaces", which is admittedly not exactly effectively computable, but manages to say something. 
2. (Davdison on) the inexhaustibility of metaphors. That a metaphor is inexhaustible in some sense is a commonplace, at least since Cavell's famous observation of the "and so on" that ends most attempts at paraphase. (Hills points out that Cavell referred to Empson on the "pregnancy" of metaphor, but I don't know if Empson also suggests that one could just go on forever.) This is, I think, oversold. Davidson in particular seems to oversell it here, though note the final sentence: 
[I]n fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention … When we try to say what a metaphor 'means', we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention. If someone draws his finger along a coastline on a map, or mentions the beauty and deftness of a line in a Picasso etching, how many things are drawn to your attention? You might list a great many, but you could not finish since the idea of finishing would have no clear application. (263) </blockquote>
Between the beginning and the end of this short excerpt are two quite different senses in which even a successful paraphrase ought to end with "and so on"! The first part expresses the commonplace in an uncommonly strong form: not only is the metaphor endlessly productive, but we soon realize this; we have the sense quickly that we could go on endlessly. If one can't finish this task, that's only because (if we aren't simply mistaken) one's life will end first.
This one simply seems false to me. I just don't think—based on personal experience!—that we do realize this at all, in many cases, let alone "soon", and I think (cynically) that many people who say that they do realize this, even soon, would take it back if asked to actually sit down and do it for a period of, say, several hours straight. Doing this kind of thing is work, for one thing, and while Davidson suggests that one is simply spinning out things one noticed on the spot, one will quickly find, if one tries this, that in order to get the similarities out, one must first put effort in. A coastline, actually, is not a bad example, if seemingly inadvertently: there's always more detail, but only if you get closer. (Though Davidson actually refers to "running [a] finger along a coastline on a map"; I'm not really sure what one is supposed to notice in this.)
How many things can you really adduce about the sun, and about Juliet, especially keeping in mind that these things you bring in should be relevant to the scene at hand? (How does Romeo think the sun an illuminating thing with which to think about Juliet?) Only some of those things were "called to your attention"; the rest you sought out, and your seeking is apt to falter eventually.
Cavell to his credit notes that there is such a thing as "the over-reading of metaphors" ("Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy", 79), and one might well think, on the one hand, that some metaphors are in fact best read not very much at all. "A great many effective similes are pretty well exhausted by the compact explanation their author promptly and explicitly supplies", says Hills (PP, 19), offering the Baconian "virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set" as an example; if we really think that this simile (rather than Bacon's purpose in making it) is exhausted by the gloss, what would we make of the alternative "virtue is a rich stone, best plain set"? What's gloss for the gloose, one wishes to say, is gloss for the glander; however much the reader's mind is set in motion—by either!—if one is interested in what the author is doing, the answer would seem to be, not much. A Bookforum review of a book by Pankaj Mishra</a> yields such metaphors as "Burrowed in the mythic depths of society's unwritten constitution, no printed ray of rational reproof can strike them down" and "the Scot exemplifies the plaque accumulating in the brain trust of the transatlantic set"; one no doubt could follow the (geometric) "ray of rational reproof" out to infinity, but one does it, surely, to amuse oneself, not to understand Guan's point better.
On the other hand, some metaphors seem to call out for more reading than we can, in fact, provide, and Davidson's own opening metaphor is a good candidate, at least for me. Even Davidson himself doesn't quite gloss it:
Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work of the imagination. So too understanding a metaphor … (245) </blockquote>
Observe how Davidson immediately moves from "metaphor is the dreamwork of language" to the interpretation of metaphors and the interpretation of dreams. But neither the dream nor its interpretation is the dreamwork, and metaphors aren't metaphor. ("I'm going to have to stop you there. This is World of Golf. What you're describing is World of Golf Equipment. 'Golf' is an abstract noun.</a>") Hills also: "I agree that a metaphor is like a dream" (5). That isn't the metaphor Davidson actually makes! In fact, what I was wondering, when as noted at the top I was wondering about precisely this metaphor, was whether anyone had attempted to expound on it in a way that really took its psychoanalytic element, and its abstractness, seriously, and directly, not by pivoting to the waking work of interpretation, and not even by assimilating it to "metaphors are the dreams of language". My own impression of this metaphor is that it feels evocative; it feels as if it's full of significance and meaning, but I absolutely could not get started with a paraphrase. My poor grasp of psychoanalytic theory may be part of that—and perhaps in that respect I'm one of the ignorant who need the aid of a critic. To some extent this is what Ted Cohen would call a hermetic metaphor; this is no "system of commonplaces" because "dreamwork" just isn't a commonplace concept. But, ignorant though I be, I simply don't feel as if the metaphor causes me to notice more than I could ever express; very far from it. But then, I also think that most of what people say about Romeo, Juliet, and the sun is overdoing it, relative to the scene. Even "his day begins with her"—this just doesn't seem to be of a piece with what Romeo goes on to say in his soliloquy. It is, certainly, something that could be meant by "Juliet is the sun", and it is also, certainly, a matter of dispute, perhaps not capable of being finally settled. 
Which brings us to the other suggestion Davidson makes, and different it is, as an account of the seeming endlessness of paraphrase! "You could not finish since the idea of finishing would have no clear application." This is not at all saying that the noticing, the juxtaposition, the image, whatever, is infinitely rich, but rather that the activity of paraphrase (like other forms of criticism!—surely it's significant that he mentions "beauty and deftness" here) is itself open-ended and provisional. One ends with "and so on" not because one has other things in mind but doesn't want to bore the reader, and not even because one thinks one could extend the list but doesn't want to spend the time, but to signal the non-finality of the list already set down; more could be added later by a more insightful critic, and indeed some things could be removed. There isn't a once-and-for-all interpretation following which we'll be done forever; that just isn't the sort of project we're engaged in. 
This is what I think Davidson ought to mean, and what I think people, in general, who emphasize the productivity of metaphor ought to mean. This is both because, as noted, I don't think the "and so on" ending a paraphrase does signal the inexhaustibility of most actual metaphors, but also because whatever I notice is whatever I notice, and whatever you notice may be something different, but we can surely disagree with each other about a metaphor, about our interpretations, which are not simply how things struck us after we took the metaphor in. And there's the matter of "what the author … wanted us to see", which the critic helps us grasp, which presumably acts as some kind of standard. (Though if we're critics after my own heart, regarding these metaphors as small-scale artworks, we won't be too fussed about the living, breathing author's opinion.) What ought I to notice? What is the best, the most satisfactory way of taking the metaphor, the one that is richest, lets us appreciate it the most deeply, illuminates its subject the most? (And—why not?—illuminates that in terms of which the subject is presented the most. Reflecting on what Churchill might have meant in calling Mussolini "the merest utensil of his master's will" is apt to make one think not only about how Mussolini is thus presented, but also and thereby about what kind of tool a "utensil" is. Someone unfamiliar with tall boots might find "Italy is a boot" instructive twice over.) 
Here is a consideration that is perhaps more compelling than just "this is what I think he ought to mean". Davidson mostly speaks of metaphor, reasonably enough, as a "device", as simile is a device, and paronomasia, litotes, and syllepsis are devices. But he also, at the beginning and end, speaks of it as an artwork, a creative production somewhat more august than those other things. And so it is fitting if his position about metaphor and its interpretation at least could be applied to artworks and their interpretation more generally. (It is likely a fault of an account of metaphor if it makes metaphor too hard to connect to art in general.) And that's what I think taking him this way enables us to do; I think it's not for nothing that one gets a distinct whiff of Cavell in the final paragraph. 
3. Davidson on metaphor's propriety I think the real point of WMM is this:
… what we attempt in 'paraphrasing' a metaphor [is] to evoke what the metaphor brings to our attention. I can imagine someone granting this and shrugging it off as no more than an insistence on restraint in using the word 'meaning'. This would be wrong. The central error about metaphor is most easily attacked when it takes the form of a theory of metaphorical meaning, but behind that theory, and statable independently, is the thesis that associated with a metaphor is a definite cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message. This theory is false as a full [???] account of metaphor, whether or not we call the purported cognitive content a meaning. (262)</blockquote>
That is, not the stuff about "bringing to our attention" or even "nonpropositional contents" or limitless object of attention or the visual metaphor, but a more purely negative point: a metaphor does not involve a definite content that the maker has in mind and the appreciator must grasp or err, as if the point is to smuggle some thought out in disguise. No definite content, such that it is to be recovered by an audience. This is, I think, a somewhat modest claim, and one that's rather plausible in the case of grander, more gravid metaphors, especially if we think that one of the things implicit in the idea that the author "wishes to convey" a "definite" content is the further idea that the content is in some sense had in advance of the uttering by the author. In which case, it is also, I think, pretty plausible in instances of plain, non-metaphorical speech, too. There's a reason we often "work out" an idea by talking, or by writing; drafting isn't just a process of hitting on the aptest formulation of something that was formulated correctly all along in the language of thought but one of thinking in its own right. Hills's "oracular utterances"—which, I confess, I don't know if he's actually discussed in print, though he does use the phrase in AT—would be a good example, too.
But of course metaphors are present not only in on-the-fly utterances but in the final, worked-over product as well, in the sorts of works that are so worked that the author can account for the being of most of the bits. It remains plausible that the biographical author doesn't intend the fullness of what an audience defensibly finds in the metaphor (as in other cases of artistic interpretation!), but that author presumably has some idea why the thing's there and what it's supposed to be doing in the work and to/for the audience. (Nevertheless, that understanding could come after it's written down, in a fit of inspiration!) One can press the point by noting that Davidson himself is at pains to deny that "metaphor is confusing, merely emotive, unsuited to serious, scientific, or philosophic discourse"; rather, "metaphor is a legitimate device not only in literature but in science, philosophy, and the law" (246), domains in which, at least in their public accounts of themselves, vague suggestiveness is not favored.
One must hope, too, that Davidson wouldn't agree that whatever I happen to notice is equally correct, though since his gloss on paraphrase is just as a restatement of what one in fact does notice one may be hard put to pin that on him. One wishes to say that Lawrence, emerging from the desert and not yet having had his lemonade, overhearing Romeo and concluding that Juliet is merciless, something to flee from, not to be faced but feared, and whatnot, would be getting not only Romeo but Romeo's utterance all wrong, notwithstanding that a different person differently situated could use those same words to that different effect. We can account Lawrence's interpretation incorrect without recourse to a definite thing Romeo meant in the same way that we can account incorrect wildly off interpretations of any artistic production: the correct one is so much more satisfactory, coheres so much better with Romeo's tone when he speaks, what he does and says before and after, fits better with other things we'd like to say about or to him. But this is a rather third-personal way of carrying on (and it occurs to me to wonder, now, if radical interpretation in general isn't a rather third-personal way of carrying on, in addition to whether metaphor, aside from the occult noticing stuff, really even has to be that special for Davidson); at any rate, if we meant to understand how metaphor can legitimately be used in serious, scientific, or philosophic discourse despite the lack of a definite cognitive content its author wishes to convey, we may not be much helped. Maybe we are: does that legitimacy require that kind of standard of correctness? Perhaps it's enough that, in fact, the author can correctly predict, often enough, that such and such a metaphor will be taken in such and such a way. Perhaps the life of a metaphor is that their makers are their first audience, who trust that their audiences, in turn, will notice in them what they noticed; all whirling in the same being, not transmitting specific messages one to the other.
4. (Hills on) Davidson on paraphrasability as such. Hills calls Davidson an "opponent of paraphrase"; Davidson explicitly denies the possibility of what he chooses to term "paraphrase" as applied to metaphor:
I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is … because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, is appropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning … This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. (246) </blockquote>
But, on the other hand, while Davidson objected to shrugging off his denial that metaphors mean something as "an insistence in restraint in using the word 'meaning'" (262), I can't see any reason not to think of this as an insistence on restraint in using the word "paraphrase", since Davidson is quite clear that "so-called paraphrase" has a "legitimate function" (264). It just isn't properly so called, because Davidson has quite definite ideas about what "paraphrase" can mean. But it's hard for me, anyway, to see how even on Davidson's construal of the whole affair such an effort doesn't fall under "a bringing out with further words of the point of some initial words", and what's wrong with that as a capacious understanding of "paraphrase"? It's not as if it's a particularly load-bearing bit of jargon, or as if the meaning Davidson brings in is so clearly the sole legitimate reason.
For this reason, I think Hills's argument against Davidson in PP misfires: "If we had a valid objection to paraphrasis along these Davidsonian lines", he writes about the coastline passage, "we'd have a parallel and equally valid objection to ecphrasis … [but as] in the case of ecphrasis, the fact that the idea of finishing lacks clear application in no way entails that the idea of starting is in the same boat" (30). But Davidson doesn't object to the enterprises of ecphrasis or (so-called, for him) paraphrasis as such. The objection is that this doesn't give you anything which he's willing to countenance as "the meaning", that "definite cognitive content that its author wishes to convey". Hills does think that paraphrasis is an attempt to recover or discover the (metaphorical) truth-conditions and in that sense the metaphorical meaning (but not "the definite cognitive content the author [wished] to convey"!), but that's a further thesis about paraphrasis, not the entry fee for those who want to tolerate the activity. You really have to lean in to the "exchange" in "Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture": no matter how many words you hand over, you never get the whole picture in return (despite what's said about Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings), just so many partial views. If you think that you have to lean in to "wrong currency" and wish to argue that there's a conceptual mistake here somewhere, you do still have to confront the fact that Davidson doesn't argue against the practice of paraphrasis (and presumably wouldn't against ecphrasis), but against the name, and a mistake one might make in thinking about what one gets out of it. 
5. Hills on metaphorical meaning: a preliminary. Hills thinks, for various reasons, that we ought to recognize a distinctive metaphorical meaning, and category of metaphorical truth; he thinks doing so, moreover, could lead to wide-ranging revisions in the way we think about language and truth in general. I'm not so sure about that, despite agreeing with him about many of the more particular claims he makes along the way, such as these:
[(a)] An ambitious paraphrase of an ambitious metaphor can quickly outrun both what the speaker could plausibly have had in mind at the outset and what listeners could reasonably be expected to gather from his words on the spot. Even the least ambitious metaphors have a knack for lending themselves to manifestly unintended construals … [(b)] what's at stake in getting an ordinary intertexual allusion is often merely (some part of) what we should gather from someone else's words, [but] what's at stake in getting a metaphor is what we should understand by the words … what truth-conditional content we should assign the words themselves.
This suggestion conflicts with … [(c)] the thought that language use is invariably a matter of getting something across or getting something down—of communicating or recording an already formed thought. (AT, 145–6; similar thoughts crop up in the concluding section of PP, and PP §17.)</blockquote>
Well, of those, at the ones I've labeled (a) and (c), anyway. (b) strikes me as more questionable, and it strikes me that it should strike Hills as less than fully established, too, because he also, elsewhere, speaks specifically of metaphorical truth, and once you've made that allowance, haven't you allowed that we can keep assigning the non-metaphorical truth conditions the way we used to? And it would seem that (b) is vulnerable to a Davidson-like objection: Hills's isn't, by his own telling, what he calls a "semantic twist" account; "infant" in "Tolstoy was a great moralizing infant" isn't imbued with a special nonce literal meaning. For us to appreciate what Mann's metaphor is about, we have to take "infant" as referring to infants, and "Tolstoy" to Tolstoy, and all the other words as having all their usual denotations. Hills suggests further that "if we think of metaphorical truth values as determined by metaphorical sentence contents" (AT 146–7), then we can further break down the latter into metaphorical expressions and start doing compositional semantics on metaphors. It is not obvious to me that even for Hills we should satisfy the premise: is that how a pretense theory operates? It seems a much more holistic affair than that. (Perhaps this is the gist of (d) in PP, 28.) He states that "to take words metaphorically is to assign content to them twice over" (147), but that leaves it open whether we're actually assigning meanings wordwise rather than to "the words" as a whole. (How does one assign content twice to the individual words in "the work is the death mask of its conception"? Doesn't it rather invite one to think about the creative and intellectual process generally, its completion or culmination generally, satisfactions and finality? Paraphrasis rarely amounts to saying "take these two words with these new significances".)
It likely will not be necessary to point out how like Davidson on metaphor (c) on language-use in general is. Davidson thought that a metaphor's not communicating a thought formed in advance was grounds for saying the metaphor didn't mean anything beyond what it literally means; Hills doesn't, but again, insofar as Hills speaks of a metaphorical meaning for metaphors, with their own truth conditions, it isn't clear to me how much these positions actually conflict. If we assign contents twice over—and we have to do that; we shouldn't abandon our initial interpretation of the "twice-apt metaphor" (PP, 40) Scottie makes in Vertigo (which is also his initial interpretation): you shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing; it's bad hygiene—we can keep our account of the first content and the question of how the second content should affect our theorizing in general is still open. (One reason we shouldn't simply dismiss the literal meaning of Scottie's utterance is that the aesthetic value of the metaphor he expresses with it is enhanced by the fact that he conveyed, if that's the right word, that idea by a double meaning. And we can expect the initial single meaning to be important wherever there's a question of oracularity or "brainstorming", I suspect.) 
6. Hills on metaphorical meaning: disagreement. One reason—I think—that Hills wishes to recognize a distinctive metaphorical meaning is related to the Frege-Geach problem, though I can't remember if he's put it this way in print, and hence am relying on my memory, which is over a decade old (I have discovered, to my surprise and distress, that I can no longer find, and probably not longer have, the notes Hills distributed to the members of his seminar on metaphor that I took in … 2005). But, basically, if someone says to you, "if music be the food of love, play on", how are you to take that, and what are you to do? Play on, or no? But since I can't remember to what end he introduced this thought—it may also have been to caution against a too-narrow view of the forms metaphor takes—and since I am also not sure how to integrate it with what I (with all my limitations!) understand to be his understanding of metaphorical truth anyway, perhaps we should let it lie. Somewhat more explicitly, though, in AT, he brings up the pattern of disagreement with metaphors. One thing you can do with a set of words is convey an idea which is not literally entailed by those words, as in, famously, conveying the idea that so-and-so is no good at philosophy by putting in your letter of recommendation nothing more than "so-and-so is punctual and has very neat handwriting". But what if you think so-and-so is just great at philosophy?
We need to consider the specific verbal forms that agreement, disagreement, and questioning can plausibly take in different cases. In general, when I get one thing across by saying something else, my listener can't agree with, disagree with, or question, the thing I get across by using the standard devices for assenting to, dissenting from, or challenging the something else—what my words actually (literally) say. (AT, 127) </blockquote>
You can't say, "yes he is!" or "that's just not so" to "so-and-so is very punctual" and thereby disagree with the conveyed thought that so-and-so is bad at philosophy (by asserting the contrary, in the first case, or simply by denial, in the second). But those who think that Juliet's not really all that and reply "bosh!" to Romeo's utterance "Juliet is the sun" aren't denying that she's literally the sun, are they? They're denying whatever they understand Romeo's metaphor to mean:
So it would appear that Romeo's meaning gets lodged in Romeo's words in a way that Grice's meaning … never gets lodged in Grice's words. The words of Romeo's utterance … get taken so as to express a thought they wouldn't express if they were taken literally—one which may be true or false or indeterminate in its truth value, one to which we are free to respond in ways that are appropriate only to thoughts that speakers have actually put into words. (AT, 127, emphasis added.)</blockquote>
When the Juliet-skeptics say "bosh", are they literally denying? Or metaphorically? If they said outright "Juliet is not the sun", that would be their continuation of the metaphor by means of denial, just as surely as another speaker's having said "arise, fair sun", instead of Romeo's having said it, would be their continuation of the metaphor by means of extension. The truth value Hills speaks of is presumably a real one, real truth or real falsity or real indeterminacy, not a pretend one, but if it appears that a meaning with such a value "gets lodged in Romeo's words" because one can issue a denial, then hadn't that better be a real denial, not a pretend one? (If it's a pretend denial, and a truth value that lives only as long as the pretense does, what do we do with "if music be the food of love, play on"?) It seems that Hills is thinking of the denial as the denial not, as I'm tempted to put it, of the metaphor, but of what the metaphor means—Romeo's meaning, that gets into his words, which mean something else. (How distant we are from the concluding sections of AT! Just a page later Hills supposes that by "semantic success" we might "mean something like conveying a determinate, determinately true proposition" (AT 128): an ambitious metaphor doesn't seem to have much hope for semantic success. And what's this about Romeo's thought?) 
7. A distinction between two kinds of paraphrase of metaphor. The sort of paraphrase we tend to see, when the example is Romeo's speech, is what you might call one that illuminates the metaphor by extending it: it shows one, so to speak, how the instant metaphor works, but showing one how one might operate with the system the metaphor implies or suggests. This is what Davidson is on about when he says that "the critic is, so to speak, in benign competition wit the metaphor maker. The critic tries to make his own art easier or more transparent in some respects than the original, but at the same time he tries to reproduce in others some of the effects the original had on him" (WMM, 264); this takes taste, sensitivity, and creativity, just as does formulating a good metaphor—one that might require the aid of a critic—in the first place. This also seems to fit with the sort of prop-orientation, and game-likeness, that Walton and Hills discuss. Light, perhaps, will dawn gradually over the whole; you'll pick up the knack of how to talk about A in terms of B, and in so doing you'll get what the point of the original metaphor was all along. A notable feature of this kind of paraphrase is that the sentences it produces tend also to be metaphors. My suspicion is that this is what folks mostly are thinking of when they think of "paraphrase" in this specific philosophical-metaphorical context.
Here's an example, from William James, of another kind of paraphrase, adduced by Hills in PP, in the section on "authorized paraphrase" (which contains many examples of, mostly, this kind of paraphrase). As in his text, the italics are added indicate which part is the metaphor (of interest):
Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.</blockquote>
Aside, perhaps, from the bit after the comma in the first sentence, the rest, while it may contain other metaphors, doesn't really contain more metaphors that show us how to think about society with reference to flywheels, as might have been the case (with some damage to accuracy) had James written that habit absorbs and renders smooth smooth the boisterous activity of the unruly poor. Or compare this other example of a metaphor "fully prepared to paraphrase itself" (PP, 24): "You're the cream in my coffee / You're the salt in my stew / You will always be / My necessity / I'd be lost without you". Imagine that you've been asked to paraphrase the metaphor—just the one in the second line will do—with Cavell's paraphrase of Romeo's as your example. You would never come up with the remaining three lines, just as Cavell would never have accepted those lines as an adequate paraphrase of Romeo's metaphor. It's not hard to continue in the extension line: you, the salt in my stew, are that thing that brings out the flavor of life, makes everything else better, even makes everything else more itself. Things are dull, lackluster without you; you are that unnoticed in itself thing that makes everything else worth noticing at all (is this taking it too far? Perhaps, but perhaps not; salt is a background player). 
This second sort of paraphrase—the sort that finds "you're my necessity" a paraphrase of "you're the salt in my stew"—is a telling sort of paraphrase, similar to the way we explain an idiom by just telling someone "'kicked the bucket' means 'died'" (Cf PP 7; 25). The first is not. I mention this because of Hills' contention (in AT) that "metaphor is at once fully aesthetic and fully semantic" (157) and that "paraphrase undertakes to display (approximately and in part) what would make Romeo's metaphor, taken precisely as metaphor, come out true—in other words, what would make it come out metaphorically true" (125). The distinction is of interest in that the second sort of paraphrase provides an exit, as it were, from the metaphor: one could say that "you're the salt in my stew" is metaphorically true if "you will always be my necessity" is true according to the way it should be taken (hyperbolically, not literally, but also not metaphorically). But the first doesn't: "you're the salt in my stew" isn't metaphorically true if "you make things more vivid" is literally true (much less if "you bring out the flavor of other things" is literally true). Not only is that still a metaphor, it's a metaphor that really ought to be understood in the context of its being an explication or extension of saline culinary metaphor; the vividness here is that of an enhanced quiddity, not a greater intensity. And this is clearer in the case of the even more obviously solar paraphrases of "Juliet is the sun". "You're the salt in my stew" is metaphorically true if those other things exhibit the sort of truth apt for them, but that's just metaphorical truth again. 
8. Further fictional truths; "Juliet just plain is the sun" Hills and Walton both chide Elisabeth Camp and Catherine Wearing for imputing to the them too robust a, or the wrong kind of, conception of what sort of imagining of Juliet as the sun/pretending Juliet to be the sun Romeo putatively does and we putatively are called on to join him in. Hills: "Once Romeo's words are uttered (they reason), once it is at least defeasibly fictional that Juliet is the sun, it is likewise at least defeasibly fictional that certain of the sun's actual properties belong to her 'by implication'" (WH, 27); they impute to the fictionalist several theses which neither he nor Walton hold, among them that "once a metaphor is sprung on us, we are invariably called on to imagine true what the metaphor literally says—that the primary subject is the secondary subject" and that "we'll find ourselves compelled to imaginatively ascribe to the primary subject whatever real properties of the secondary subject this signal of ours calls to mind" (28). Walton emphasizes repeatedly throughout MFM that the pretense theory is prop-oriented, and concerned with "conditional principles of generation, which determine what is or would be fictional should the prop possess certain properties" (4), stating that "insofar as make-believe is prop oriented, we are usually not concerned with implied fictional truths … there is no point in even raising the question of whether, if it is fictional that Bill is a bulldozer, this fictional truth implies that fictionally Bill is enormous, clanking, and diesel guzzling" (5–6).
It is not too difficult to see why someone might think that we are called on to imagine that the primary subject is the secondary subject: "In what spirit do Romeo and his listeners entertain the thought … that Juliet just plain is the sun? … In saying 'Juliet is the sun', Romeo pretends that she just plain is exactly that" (AT, 147). "We come to suspect that Romeo is imagining his new love to just plain be exactly that … His words serve to signal an understanding on his part … under the rules of the game that he and any suitably attuned listeners are playing together, he and they are to imagine Juliet to be the sun—imagine her to just plain be exactly that" (M; this phrase also occurs in WH, 24). Whether we do or not is another matter, but isn't that (just plain) what we are called on to imagine?—Whatever that actually means. I find it pretty hard to make out. One might be forgiven for thinking that imagining that she "just plain is" the sun means imagining that the temperature on her surface (her skin?) is many thousands of degrees: for isn't the sun just plain quite hot? ("A paraphrase of Romeo’s metaphor would specify features of Juliet in virtue of which the proposition that she is just plain is exactly that, the sun, comes out fictional" (WH, 25): if it's only properties x, y, and z in virtue of which Juliet counts as the sun, that doesn't mean that once she is the sun in the game, she lacks further solar properties. If she does lack those further properties, then she isn't "just plain" the sun—nicht wahr? She's sunlike in suchlike respects.) Or in general, for thinking that such imagining does mean imputing to Juliet properties derived first from the sun, even if we're constraining those properties to what we think Romeo had in mind. 
Hills and Walton occasionally use the example of "Italy is a boot" to illustrate prop-oriented make-believe; this is, I take it, no more a metaphor than is "France is hexagonal" (that is, not a metaphor), but that's ok; it's meant to illustrate a certain kind of make-believe, not metaphor, though metaphor is also supposed to be prop-oriented make believe. Imagine someone saying that, cued by "think of Italy as a boot", you were to imagine that Italy "just plain is exactly that"! The suggestion strikes me, frankly, as absurd; I don't even know where to begin with it. But let's think about this. One way to proceed with "Italy is a boot" is to, say, look at Italy, and imagine that the north of Italy is a pant leg, tucked in to the top of the boot and bloused, and that Sicily and Sardinia are pebbles or clods of dirt casually kicked by the wearer. This, I take it, is truly prop-oriented; one considers the prop—Italy and goes from the initial prompt and further facts about it, facts which fulfill unstated conditional principles, to further pretend facts. This can be amusing, if somewhat empty. That's not the sort of thing Hills brings up, though: "turn Italy for the time being into an improvised representation of a boot, and you have a readymade scheme for locating particular Italian cities in relation to each other, deriving from established ways of thinking and talking about boots and their component parts. Games of this second sort are prop oriented" (WH, 22). 
Now imagine that I, someone who knows something about the geography of Italy, am telling you, someone who knows its general shape and location in the Mediterranean but nothing about its internal articulation, but who is familiar with the parts of footwear, about the regions of Italy. "Think of Italy as a boot", I say. "Calabria comprises, more or less, the toe and vamp". (Or, definitely following Walton, "Crotone is on the vamp": MPOMB, 40) When I say this, I am relating the parts of Italy to the parts of a boot. But you can't do that; you don't know what the parts of Italy are. I'm instructing you. You understand it by relating the parts of a boot to the parts, which you are thereby learning about, of Italy. Surely it is an "implied fictional truth" that Calabria is near the heel of Italy? 
Hills chastises Camp and Wearing for "a lack of curiosity about how clear cases of make believe actually work" (WH, 27). Hills himself is perceptive and interesting whenever he elucidates a metaphor, which makes it all the stranger that he excludes facts about the sun as having a role to play in understanding the metaphor, or playing the game (in opposing the second thesis I mentioned above, or in the enumeration on WH, 24). The prop-oriented order of things is that facts about the prop generate truths in the game in accordance with some principles of generation; facts about Juliet—her importance to Romeo, for instance—generate fictional truths about Juliet-the-sun does—nourishes him, for instance. There is no metaphorical truth that Juliet-the-sun dazzles or blinds or burns or becancers Romeo because there is no corresponding literal truth that Juliet the person damages him through exposure. (Er, at least, that isn't what Romeo believes!) The logical order is that the properties of the prop come first. But this is not the interpretive order! Especially when the prop is a cipher limned mostly by metaphor, you have to start from the facts about whatever it's said to be, and use those to guide your insight into the prop. (We don't know much else about "you" than that you're the top.) And even when we do have a pretty good idea about the prop, starting from the other end can produce insights one wouldn't otherwise have had. Yes, the facts about the prop must jibe with whatever you come up with in this way—it wouldn't be an insight, otherwise—but that's hermeneutic holism for you; we have to make sense of this Juliet being dazzling or dangerous, if we think the dangers of being too long in, or staring too long at, the sun are relevant to the metaphor.
It's less surprising that Walton excludes "facts about the sun"-type facts, and Walton's example is helpfully blunt:

Our [Walton's and Hill's] view is that in interpreting (2) [the sentence "Bill is a bulldozer"] the hearer recognizes a game with conditional principles of generation, but does not necessarily take it to be fictional that Bill is a bulldozer, let alone work out what would follow—either what fictional truths this one implies, or what would actually be the case if Bill were a bulldozer, or what else one would imagine about Bill if one imagined (pretended) him to be a bulldozer. What the speaker asserts, truly or falsely, is just that Bill has properties such as to make it fictional that he is a bulldozer.
The hearer will take it to be fictional that Bill is a bulldozer if she thinks the speaker's claim is true. (7) </blockquote>
The thing about this is that although Walton refers to what might happen "as the game proceeds" (7), it's unclear whether, or why, the game would proceed at all; it seems singularly uninteresting. In fact, the real game here would seem to be this: the speaker has in mind certain conditional rules of generation, and makes a claim that follows from those rules and an unstated premise, and hearers starts from what they believe about the speaker's beliefs about the Bill in the utterance and attempt to discover both the rules and the premise: in virtue of what might Bill be bulldozer? In other words, it's a riddle.

What distinguishes "Italy is a boot [sc. roughly, in respect of shape]" from "Bill is a bulldozer"? It seems as if we could eke out the latter with "in respect of insensitivity to obstacles" and be done with it, and if Bill and bulldozers actually are or are believed to be insensitive to the would-be obstacles each encounters, then are we not finished? Walton says that "the hearer will take it to be fictional that Bill is a bulldozer if she thinks the speaker's claim [that Bill is implacable] is true", but why would she do that? "Pointing out what fictional truths the props generate directly should the speaker’s claim be true suffices to call attention to the features of the prop we are interested in" (7). But the hearer's going on, once she has cottoned on to the principles of generation and had her attention brought to the interesting features of the prop, to take the generated truths to be fictional, or to participate in an established, ongoing game, seems entirely optional, on this presentation. (It also seems somewhat optimistic, or perhaps pessimistic, depending on your view of what's going on: it seems, that is, to presume that the features of the prop the speaker is interested in are not really all that obscure, wanting only the making of the metaphor to bring them into the light. It seems unambitious.) What would be the point? Even when Walton does entertain the extension of the metaphor, he imagines the initial speaker having initially said something more involved:
She might, extending the metaphor, describe Bill as an “enormous, clanking, diesel guzzling bulldozer,” thereby calling attention not only to Bill’s determination and stubborness, but also, let’s say, to his manner in meetings—his huffing and puffing, pounding the table, rising threateningly from his seat and clinking loudly on glasses to get attention, often after having had too much to drink. (8)</blockquote>
Walton's description of his own position is curiously one-directional, and this, I think, accounts for the curiously clue-like character of metaphors as he describes them. And the overall riddle-like character makes it hard to see how paraphrase could be open-ended, or even called for: there would seem to be one principle of generation. But if you allow facts about bulldozers to suggest new ways of conceiving of Bill, then you can begin to see how there might be something new afoot, and for that matter how the metaphor might actually be illuminating. Rather than just "what is it about Bill that makes so-and-so say he's a bulldozer?" you get "what does thinking about Bill and bulldozers together suggest?". And—this is why I mentioned Hills's skill earlier—this is what suggestive, successful paraphrasis actually does do. The proof of this is that one is able to say so much about Juliet, or the "you" who's the salt in "my" stew, or the creative process, at all: one thinks about the sun and sees the propriety of suggesting that Romeo's day begins with Juliet, salt and the propriety of saying that when you're in love, the world itself seems heightened, death masks and the propriety of saying—as explication if not endorsement—that the completed thing is a still reminder, a concretized something, of something that was once dynamic, and seemed as if it could be anything.
It may be objected that it's not the case that Romeo's day fictionally begins with Juliet because it actually begins with the sun, but rather because of some presumably literally stated fact about Juliet that suits her, in the putative game, to be the sun in this respect also. Thus we still do not really care about a derived truth; it's still all principles of generation. That may be. But if the idea of a "game" isn't itself simply a prop that is meant to aid our thinking about metaphor—then we must take seriously how it's actually played. We already know that, since a good, ambitious paraphrase (I take it that paraphrase is simply another form of participation) can outstrip anything that the maker could plausibly have thought at the time or that anyone listening could plausibly have understood at the time, that not all the principles of generation could have been objects of the players' thoughts. I find the suggestion that they're discovered distasteful. They are rather put in place, newly installed in an evolving game, by the player saying "Romeo's day begins with Juliet"; this is after all, as most ambitious paraphrases are, another metaphor. (Discovery would also suggest that one could get it wrong in paraphrasis, not because the paraphrase is unsatisfying, inconsistent, or even merely inferior to another, but because it depends on a principle that wasn't there to be discovered in the sense in which those which are discovered all. But this seems wrongheaded to me; the test for the interpretation is our satisfaction with its deliverances, given its success in hanging together with whatever else we've said, and that's enough.) And if that player has gotten there by asking "what, in the sun, is there in a beloved?", then the game is concerned with derived truths, and in a sense the fictional truths are fictionally true because of their being derived. 
9. Hills on metaphorical meaning: intertextual allusion; oracular utterance. The more, or so it seems to me, one emphasizes that "metaphor … often strikes us as inspired or oracular" (AT, 145) or the possibility of a metaphor's proper or fruitful interpretation far outstripping anything that was or could have been meant, or understood, on the spot, the less plausible, and more significant, is the claim that the upshot of paraphrase is "what we should understand by the words … what truth-conditional content we should assign the words themselves", as distinct from "what we should gather from" them (ibid., italics in original), which is striking, because Hills makes these claims more or less back to back. The latter is Hills's assessment of the stakes in intertextual allusion (as you can see, I'm circling material somewhat): 
The actual or merely suspected presence in one text of an allusion to earlier ones invites us to scour our cultural memories for appropriate earlier texts, our search being guided in part by how salient various earlier texts are for the community being addressed, in part by how satisfying in promises to be to read the new text in the light of this or that earlier one—with the upshot that an author may sometimes inadvertently allude to a book he's never heard of. But what's at stake in getting an ordinary intertextual allusion is often merely (some part of) what we should gather from someone else's words. While if I'm right about the status of paraphrase, what's at stake in getting a metaphor is what we should understand by the words, what we should take the words themselves to mean in this particular context, what truth-conditional content we should assign the words themselves. (ibid.) </blockquote>
(This may be too indirect to really constitute an allusion to Cavell's discussion, in "A Matter of Meaning It", of discussion of Fellini's possibly intended allusion to Philomel in La Strada, but that discussion is certainly not irrelevant.) Why would we say that someone can have alluded inadvertently? The fact that Hills refers to a "text" here is suggestive: it positions the case not as one in which, in the flow of conversation, someone says something which could have been construed as an allusion if one of the participants were to focus on it, but as one in which the words (spoken or written) are already the object of scrutiny as such. What's important is that one stands apart from the words and considers them as artistic interpretanda, things that can mean in multiple ways, things constructed from which we are called on to gather something. This isn't the normal transparency with which we interact with written or spoken words! Here are these things, the words, and this thing, the text; it's an object for contemplation in its own right, in which we can find significance. It's a bit of verbal art, basically, or something we're prepared to count as such; the reason the "normative influence of actual or inferable speaker intentions" is lessened is that we construe the thing as something for which the historical intending of a person is not considered relevant. The "status of paraphrase" Hills mentions is, I believe, that "we try to enjoy [metaphors] in order to understand them"; paraphrase is the vehicle of the enjoyment and delivers the understanding. (I think. I could easily have missed a more explicit bit earlier on.) 
Consider an example of this phenomenon, which also happens to be an allusion (not a textual allusion) that sparks a bout of metaphoric thought: Scottie, in Vertigo, says to Judy, "There was where you made your mistake, Judy. You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing." Hills says of this utterance (as I mentioned before) that it's a "twice-apt metaphor", but it isn't, straightforwardly, a metaphor at all, not the way "Juliet is the sun" is. Nothing is said to be anything it isn't; there isn't even a Pound-like laying-alongside. If it's construed as a metaphor metaphorical (Hills refers to its metaphorical understanding, to taking it metaphorically) it's because Scottie, and presumably Judy, as it were hearing the echo of Scottie's statement, realize that "souvenir" could also have been used as a way of alluding to Scottie himself, and appreciating the justice of alluding in that way. But Scottie doesn't say he's a souvenir. (To point back to the talk of denial above: if Judy said "but I didn't keep you", or "but you aren't a souvenir", both of those remarks would be completely in-bounds given what they've both taken up from their sudden revision of their understanding of the import of Scottie's words. But isn't it clear that her saying either of these things would represent a taking up of what the identification Scottie makes, a participation in it, and a denial of its propriety?) That his words could have been used the way that he comes to accept them—that is, that "souvenir" could have referred to him—comes as a surprise to him—that's why it's "oracular"—and it's also something that he can only realize once he's said it—that's why it's an oracular utterance. Utterance, thinking out loud, is a defamiliarizing move; it objectifies the uncertain by putting it into some single specific form, which can then be thought about. I don't think "thinking out loud" is metaphorical; I think it's a mode of thinking itself, not merely the verbalization of an already formed thought, and one of its uses is that it forces the forming, because you have to actually say something. It's tempting to think that the alternative is a mentally indistinctly represented distinct, fully formed thought, but I think the truth is more often that it's just an inchoate mess in there until it's put into shape. And once it's put into shape you can take up an attitude to it, even be surprised by it. (It's a neat trick, but not of course dispositive, that an utterance is—and I only really realized this because of the defamiliarizing move of encountering its cognate, Äußerung, in German—a making-outer, an outering.) The utterance can be "oracular", can say more than you knew and say something back to you, because once objectified it can be inspected, have questions put to it. (This is also why bits and pieces of phrases can be repurposed; one can see in them and their parts new potentials. "Moneybags must be so lucky" is the title of a book, and the "must" is the must of "it must be nice to …". But it's extracted from a sentence of Marx in which the "must" conveys a necessity under which Moneybags stands: he is required to be so lucky as to find someone who …. "Now is the winter of our discontent" is ungrammatical if we try to read it as Shakespeare meant it.) But this is getting a bit far afield.
Let us consider what Hills says about Scottie's utterance, taken literally and taken metaphorically:
Taken literally, the utterance is an explanation of how Judy was found out … it's reckless to keep an object that connects you so directly to a crime in which you are implicated, and it's unhealthy to even want to renew one's memories of such a crime and one's role in it … Taken metaphorically … you shouldn't renew your connection to another person (me) in a way that turns him (me) into a cooped-up, immobilized bit of private property, simply for the sake of his capacity to help you recall a stretch of the past that you would both of you be better off trying to forget. (PP, 40) </blockquote>
What's interesting, to me, about these paraphrases is that the first concerns souvenirs of a killing and the second concerns a person being a souvenir; only the "better off trying to forget" part of the second connects up with the souvenir being of a killing, but really, you shouldn't keep people around like that for anything. Given that Scottie speaks of "souvenirs" generally, we can actually get by with taking everything he utters literally!
Why is it that recognizing a textual allusion helps us with what we should gather from some words, rather than what they mean? One simplistic thought is that an intertextual allusion is metatextual (whereas a metaphor is a first-order affair): it doesn't show up in, as it were, the words themselves, but when we recognize it it helps us frame the context of the words, by relating one text to another. The recognition realigns our approach. But it doesn't change what the words mean (one could imagine actually cases in which the presence of an allusion helps one settle an ambiguity, but whatever). Scottie's realization that he too can be called a souvenir doesn't change what "you shouldn't keep souvenirs from a killing" means, and doesn't render it a metaphor, any more than "thou art the man</a>" renders Nathan's story a metaphor; I don't even think it has a metaphorical construal, given the generality. But Scottie and Judy's shared realization of the aptness of Scottie-as-souvenir does add an edge to the statement, and make it more of a reproach. (It's puzzling that earlier (18–19), discussing Tracy Lord's explanation of "yare" in The Philadelphia Story, Hills actually says that it's simply not a metaphor—even though Tracy is clearly thinking of both ships and herself by the time she finishes. We can even imagine that this possibility only occurs to her partway through, at which point it's too compelling to give up.) We can't even say for sure that there's a metaphorical presupposition, "Scottie is a souvenir"; since it's unarticulated, couldn't it be a simile?
10. Their words, for you.. In AT Hills speaks of the truth-conditional content of the words; in PP (28), our words (in expressing the worry that "what our words mean [being] a matter of what we inferably intend to accomplish by means of them seems to be under threat"). When Scottie's caught up short by the words he's uttered, what they suggest to him isn't anything he meant; when I suggest that Juliet is Romeo's sun also in that he should consider limiting his exposure to her, I don't take myself to be expanding on something he meant. Do I particularly care, in paraphrasing on Benjamin's death mask aphorism, what Benjamin thought he was about it making it? I do not. Neither do I particularly care, in "now is the winter of our discontent", that Shakespeare's "is" is an auxiliary verb (the main verb is "made"); the words are there, free to suggest what they will, as I am free to make of them what I will. One might nevertheless believe that even if a paraphrase of a particular metaphor doesn't get at what the maker meant, i.e., what the maker had in mind already, it still gets at what the metaphor means, and what the metaphor means already: as if we were trying to recover the living face from the mask in death. (Paraphrase captures "the meaning and content already accruing to a metaphorical utterance" (PP, 26; emphasis added. Only we can't quite state that meaning—except tautologously—we have to limn it paraphrastically.) Whence accrues this meaning? It can't be from the game to which the metaphor-maker invites one, because the invitation can't be to a game which is already onto the meaning (since it exceeds their grasp), but it also can't be from the game's free progression, because that's meaning that's made as the game goes—it isn't what already accrued. And the "already" suggests that the games, though we may play them in any number of moods, actually have a point: they ought to be uncovering this meaning. So it's odd that Hills refers to "the multiplicity of acceptable nonsynonymous paraphrases of the same metaphor" as something that "suggests that if paraphrases really gave metaphorical meanings or contents, metaphors would be much more ambiguous than we ordinarily suppose them to be" (PP, 27), because if there' a content that already accrues, that multiplicity ought to suggest that many of them are more or less wrong, n'est-ce pas? They're acceptable because the already-accrued content isn't available. If, on the other hand, the fact that we accept them is supposed to suffice by itself—if we can do without a single secret meaning they hopefully approximate and are judged against—then why talk about a meaning—akin to the literal meaning (close enough kin that the weird properties of metaphorical meaning form a first assault on popularly accepted features of literal meaning)—that already accrues to the metaphor? We talk about the meaning of a poem, but we don't think that the necessity of tact and critical intelligence for sussing it out forms a challenge to compositionality. Why think this for the meaning of a metaphor, especially when the processes by which we arrive at each seem to be, basically, the same? (Couldn't Davidson point to the actual descriptions of how metaphorical understanding proceeds and say, "yes, it's like that", while keeping the rest of his largely negative project intact?) 
Comments</h1> on 2021-01-01 1:50:18.0, Daniel Lindquist commented:</h3>
I haven't read this in full yet (it's good so far), but on the "full (???)" part, I think there is a simple explanation of what DD meant: it will be (perhaps a small) part of any account of metaphors that they can be used for various purposes, and many of these will involve recognizing that the person using them is intending to use them in that way. So there are "cognitive contents" of various sorts in play, for Gricean sorts of reasons; DD is just noting that appealing to such things to make sense of metaphors generally won't work out. But they are there, and sometimes matter for what the metaphor is up to; trivially, Romeo has to intend to be speaking about that Juliet by uttering "Juliet", etc. for "Juliet is the sun" to have the literal meaning DD says it does. Thus, without the caveat "full" in his sentence, the thesis DD objects to would not be false, but might be trivially true. If you don't try to make it the center of your account of metaphors, there's no problem (by DD's lights) with the idea that there are definite "cognitive contents" of some sorts that need to be picked up on to get at what a metaphor is saying -- that much is secured by DD's belief that metaphors do have their ordinary literal meanings, and what he thinks is involved in words having meanings at all.
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My pettiest post ever

2020-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

For someone whose professional career was based on her persnickety checking and correction of putatively minor details of punctuation and whatnot, Mary Norris demonstrates a surprising willingness to be fast and loose with her descriptions in Greek To Me. Here, for instance, is something she says about the letter chi, χ, as it appears, transliterated, in English words:
Speakers of English often have trouble pronouncing words with ch in them—melancholy, chalcedony, chiropodist, chimera—because ch also represents the sound in such common English words as church, chicken, and cheese. (You could say our alphabet is imperfect.)</blockquote>
Speakers of English have trouble pronouncing such words as those in "rødgrød med fløde</a>", in at least a double sense: first, when confronted with the written words, speakers of English are unlikely to even know how to begin; they will find it difficult to go from a written representation to an audible performance. Second, even after hearing a Dane speak out the phrase or one of its components, a speaker of English will find it difficult to repeat the performance back, producing the same sounds again.
Speakers of English certainly do not have trouble pronouncing the sounds /k/ or /tʃ/, which is completely unsurprising, since both of those are common sounds in English. Speakers of English may occasionally be wrong in how they pronounce a word containing "ch", as I was, for a long time, with "chalcedony", but that, surely, does not mean that such speakers have trouble pronouncing them. They pronounce them with ease and confidence, just wrong. I would never have characterized myself, in the period in which I was incorrect about "chalcedony", as having trouble with its pronunciation, and I doubt that anyone else would have, either, even someone who knew its correct pronunciation. Perhaps speakers of English are often mistaken about "chiropodist" (though Norris gives us no real reason to believe that, either), but do they often have trouble?
Comments</h1> on 2020-10-18 14:42:47.0, Mr. F commented:</h3>
Beyond the pale,
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and, further, on 2024-02-04 15:07:53.0, Francesca Berger commented:</h3>
I got here by pure internet rabbit-holing, and just want to say that I think you're entirely in the right on this petty point. Hear hear.
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Are we Aristotle's enemies?

2020-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Are we Aristotle's Enemies?</q> is the title of a paper Agnes Callard gave at the 2011 Pacific APA, with commentary by Michael Thompson, which I would dearly love to have heard, both because I suspect he had interesting things to say about it in general and because of a particular part of the paper where he's mentioned only to be set aside, in what I think was an intellectual lapse—not because he deserves to be treated more thoroughly in himself, but because putting aside a view simply because only one person holds it, when it might offer a way out of the difficulty you're proposing, strikes me as irresponsible.* At any rate, I didn't hear either her delivery of the paper or his delivery of his response, because I was speaking elsewhere at the same time. But she did kindly send me a copy of the paper.
Probably unsurprisingly, the paper does not explicitly answer its titular question, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the intended answer is yes</q>. I do not think that, in general, enemyship is a symmetrical relation, but it does seem as if in this case it is: if we are Aristotle's enemies, then Aristotle is reciprocally ours. (Aristotle being dead, it makes more sense for us to think of him as our enemy, since we still interact with him in the form of his writings and influence, than for us to think of ourselves as his enemy, since he is, as mentioned, dead, if there is to be an enemy on the scene at all.) At the very least, if we are not his enemies, or he ours, we may not be able to be friends: The cost of understanding Aristotle might be that we can no longer read him in the amiable spirit to which we are accustomed.</q> The crux is the concept of natural slavery, which goes deep in his philosophy, or rather, comes from deep in his philosophy: his views about slavery … follow directly from his views about the nature of action and how it is bound up with choice.</q> These views, or rather, the underlying basis for these views, makes for a deep difference between Aristotelian ethics and anything we could, today, call ethics</q>.
I don't much like the first-order discussion of the paper, for reasons that I will relegate to the paragraphs following the last occurrence of a doubled asterisk in this post.** I'm more interested in the way she talks about Aristotle. She does not downplay his commitment to slavery as an acceptable or even good and just phenomenon; instead, she invokes it at several times, and even concludes with it, saying that the difference between Aristotelian ethics and modern rights</q> ethics explains why we’re against slavery, and why Aristotle wasn’t.</q> The discussion of slavery is not actually necessary to establish the putative difference (it's present in the elaboration of what she takes to be Aristotle's position, but more as a description of Aristotle on slavery than as anything that furthers the discussion of the theoretical basis of his ethics). It is, as she advertises in her introduction, a consequence of the deeper view on action, choice, and "moral sources" that she lays out. (Or at least, it's advertised as a consequence. It doesn't actually follow from anything she presents as his views on choice, etc.!—we get his thesis that slavery is actually good for those who are lesser, but that doesn't follow from his views on choice, etc.; it's something additional.) Its function in the paper is to drive us to answer its titular question in the affirmative.
She does not attempt to minimize but amplify the moral significance of Aristotle's commitments; she does not, for instance, suggest that he ended up with a view on action, choice, etc., that underwrites the idea that some of us are less than fully accomplished persons because of the stratification of and presence of slavery in ancient society, as if he lacked the wit to envision alternate social arrangements (something that would be a truly spectacular suggestion, both because his predecessors were able to do so, as Bryan W. Van Norden points out in this generally good piece</a>, and even Euthyphro was able to frame the thought that one can do wrong to a manual laborer—and because a world of slavery and of the subjugation of women and manual laborers</q> was not exactly unknown to modern thinkers). Perhaps for the same reason, she isn't really interested in why Aristotle thinks the things he does at the empirical level, either—she mentions his assessment of Dacians, but it isn't really all that interesting to her.
What, if we believe all the arguments in the paper, would we do with Aristotle? Would his ethics be salvageable—might there be something to the vision of megalopsuchia, "great deeds" (her translation of eupraxia), and being tall? Well, maybe, but the list of specific things Aristotle thinks virtue to consist in is not very interesting, except insofar as it still lives alongside other visions of the good and noble in our lives; the interesting thing would be the account of the acquisition of virtue, the nature of deliberation, etc., and on our present supposition, those are all vitiated by their leading directly to approving slavery. (It would be even worse for Aristotle, here, if we did think that he had arrived at his account simply because he looked around and saw a world of injustice and subordination and couldn't but echo it. If we knew in advance that that was why he thought what he did, we might be interested in the details as a kind of curiosity—what explanation for what he saw did this famous empiricist come up with?—but given that we'd see the explanatory project as misguided from the jump, how could it rise above being a curiosity?) Would it be instructive as a contrast class? Perhaps, but Callard has no reference to Aristotle in the development of her account of what she takes our current (oddly univocal) beliefs to be. We don't, evidently, need him to learn for ourselves about our own commitments. And we might well wonder if idly debating about such things, in the abstracted manner characteristic of many contemporary philosophers, in which the nature of the phenomena being discussed is generally covered over, doesn't tend to damage our souls, to put it in terms that an ancient philosopher would recognize: for there is a far greater risk in buying teachings than in buying food [because] you cannot carry teachings away in a separate container. You put down your money and take the teaching away in your soul by having learned it, and off you go, either helped or injured.</q> Ironically, it's those who get hotheaded about such things that keep themselves best.

What are we to make of Callard's much later declaration that Aristotle is not our enemy</q>? I don't think the piece in which the claim appears is very good—in fact, I think it's quite bad. To pick up the thread most recently laid down above, at one point she says that dangerousness [of speech], I have been arguing, is less a matter of literal content than messaging content</q>. In fact, she has not argued that at all; to argue that, one would have to argue not only that messaging content</q> is dangerous—which she doesn't do—but also that literal content</q> is not—which she also doesn't do. (She points out that what she calls messaging content</q>, which is not actually about the content but the use of an utterance, has an aim other than the conveying of a truth via the content of the utterance. She calls this, absurdly, extra-communicative</q>, as if communication were primarily a matter of conveying truths via utterances whose contents are those truths. I'm so happy for you!</q> would be, by her lights, at least on dangerous ground vis-a-vis messaging content</q>, since the point of saying such a thing is not, in the first instance, to inform its hearer of its speaker's emotional state. Oh, yay!</q> is even worse in that regard, and I now pronounce you man and wife</q> might give her much to ponder. None of these things is plausibly "dangerous", think what you will about the institution of marriage.) Her concern with messaging content is in any case ironic, since there is no serious way to take her piece except as a bit of messaging content</q>, given the context of its publication and, especially, that there is no remote threat of Aristotle's being cancelled</q>, however one might understand that term. Are we really to imagine that Callard chose to write this piece simply to unburden herself of some things she holds to be true and to inform us that she holds them to be true, and that's it? It hardly seems worth the effort! It is an attempted intervention in something it doesn't mention, one in which being able to pose as being a reasonable, civil person who just wants to hear the other person out is itself a position of power. It is too bad that sometimes on particular occasions simple utterances of things that even are truths will convey further things, as when someone who truly has been living in a cave says all lives matter</q>, not realizing the further significance doing such a thing has. The solution to this is not to insist on an impossible nightmare of strictly literal utterances, but sensitivity and discretion. But these things aren't to be extended time and time again to the same subjects.
*Much turns on the idea that A wrongs B</q> and B is wronged by A</q> are different albeit reciprocally entailing facts; that there are active facts</q> and passive facts</q>, rather than one fact differently expressed. (Active</q> and passive</q> are particularly unfortunate. Consider this bats description of rights (also a rather bats scenario in general):
… a right makes someone a threat. If B was going to prevent someone from φ-ing, and he had to choose between A, who has a right to φ, and C, who doesn’t, A’s right to φ would be an intelligible ground of his choosing to act on C. B cannot act on A with impunity—that is, he cannot act on A without thereby doing something wrong. A’s right might, then, exert a certain pressure on B’s treatment of A. Notice that B’s experience of this pressure, insofar as he does experience it, will be independent of A’s exercising his right. This pressure is the pressure of a threat: should B act on A (rather than C) he knows that A holds the trump card that will make him into a wrongdoer.</blockquote>
On this description, the same pair of sentences about A and B having wronged/been wronged bye each other could be replaced by these, to describe the same reality: A is made vulnerable to B</q> and B gains the upper hand over A</q>.)
**For one thing, it seems to be internally inconsistent; I don't see how you can simultaneously say that enslaving those who are natural slaves is good for them in the way she says it can be (bringing them into some connection with the human good</q>) and also say that only the naturally free can be moral patients, capable of being wronged or done well by</q>. And she identifies without argument, and without even seeming to realize that these are different sorts of things, the idea that someone has "passive virtue", that is, someone who responds virtuously without the involvement of choice or deliberation (because the source of the action is outside the agent), and the idea that someone can be a "moral patient", that is, that someone can be wronged or done well by</q>. (By "without argument" I mean to include the fact that she doesn't cite anything from Aristotle that would support his holding this position, whether he argues for it or not. Of course the "moral source" language is not his.) There is certainly nothing prima facie in the idea of someone's being capable of reacting rightly to the sight of someone needing urgent help to connect it with their being capable of being wronged by being denied an agreed-upon share of some goods, for instance. I take it that someone is wronged in cases of pleonexia! (An uncharitable person would consider this motivated by little more than a pun.) Later she will say that, for Aristotle, what’s wrong is what the unjust persons does, by choice, to his fellow citizen.</q> But she hasn't equipped us to understand why it has to be done to a fellow citizen. And this is actually the heart of the claim that the defense of slavery falls out of Aristotle's understanding of action and choice, as far as I can tell—that, for instance, it would be inconceivably un-Aristotelian to object to slavery on the grounds that a just person wouldn't do that to another human, even if you accept the idea that person</q> is a status only some humans have. After all, there are lots of things that the virtuous person doesn't do even though the patients of the action aren't "moral sources" (for instance, torturing cats); the virtuous person doesn't do them because to do them is base or vicious.
Comments</h1> on 2020-07-22 20:09:04.0, Daniel commented:</h3>
I decided to stop reading Callard's stuff a while ago; feeling good about that decision.
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Wingtip Dot Club

2019-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

When I was taking these photos</a>, and was thinking ahead to the post I was already planning to write about them—which, in truth, I had already been thinking about previously, and which occasioned the taking of the photos—I thought that when I wrote the post, I would start it off in a fairly abstruse and complicated vein. I would start it off, I thought when I took the photos, by mentioning Richard Taruskin's Text and Act, the first and only collection of his essays and reviews that I've read.
When I was taking these photos and thinking ahead to the post I am now writing, I thought I would mention Taruskin's claim that so-called "historically informed performance", or period performance, or "authentic" performance, conceived in opposition to the ideal of "Werktreue" in the earlier part of the previous century, was not, despite its name and its advertisements for itself, a recovery of the past, or an opportunity for the audience to hear the pieces as audiences of the past would have heard them. Such performances and ideals, as I intended to recollect his argument, were thoroughly up-to-the-minute and modern. Whatever one of thinks of the resemblance of the playing or of the techniques employed to the playing or techniques employed by ensembles of the various composers' times, the contemporary employment of them answers a distinctively modern craving precisely for the "authentic", despite its irrecoverability.
When I thought about how I would employ this point to further the end with which I was taking the photos, namely deriding and ridiculing the establishment shown in the photos, I thought that I would endeavor to draw attention to something that my varied and dear readers would likely see plainly for themselves. I thought that my acute blog friendship would not need much prompting to see the decidedly old-fashioned design of the window decorations, the out-of-date prices for barbering services, and the specifics of the advertised goods and services, which function nicely as a list of contemporary imaginings of rugged yet tasteful masculinities of the past. Although I suspected at the time I was thinking about how I would write this post and how I would relate Taruskin's position to the details of the photos of the shop windows that I would not need to point out to those reading the post the text in the first picture reading "solutions for the modern gentleman", I still intended to do so.
After having pointed out this text, my thought, as I imagined the progression of the argument of the post, when I was taking the pictures I am now posting, is probably now obvious to my readers, who are uniformly a sharp bunch: my thought was to deny any incongruity. I would have asked: what in fact is more characteristic of the "modern gentleman" than to clutch desperately at the tokens of an imagined past gentlemanliness? The craving for what Taruskin referred to as "the tainted A-word", authenticity, is as in evidence here as in an improvised cadenza by Christopher Hogwood. (At the time I was thinking these thoughts, I did not know that in addition to a keyboardist bearing the name Christopher Hogwood, there also lived in the present century a pig bearing that same name, so I could not have thought, at the time, to insert a mock-clarificatory note. Now that I am actually writing the post that I had previously only been thinking of composing, however, and because I have learned that both Hogwood the keyboardist and Hogwood the pig lived in the present century, I am able to have that thought.)
After I had taken the photos and was walking back to my office, still dwelling on the post I was planning on writing at some remove regarding the photos, I thought about what accounts for the dissimilarity between this store, which is stupid and tacky, and Hogwood's music, which is not, when they both originate, in some sense, in the same impulse. I was thinking of this both as a question to myself, and as a question I might pose in the post whose writing I was then dwelling on. I would put the question in the post, I thought, as if I were still musing on it. I intended, when I was walking back to the office, to ask in the post whether it was because Hogwood's performances came after long study and practice so that he could more fully play his parts as, for example, Mozart would have expected them to be played, whereas the proprietors of this shop seemed to believe that the sale of cufflinks as such is worthy of advertisement, and the sale of sabers intended to be used for opening bottles of sparkling wine is worthy of anything but shame. If Hogwood had started performing immediately after learning that improvisation was common in Mozart's time without knowing much about the specifics, would he not also have seemed foolish? I had no intention, walking back to my office, of providing a definitive answer to such questions as these, intending rather to leave them open. Another possibility that I intended to moot was that there was an important difference in the subject matter. I thought, as I was returning to my office with Taruskin's argument commingling in my mind with the very idea of a "belt bar", that I might ask my readers if the exploration of different performance styles, even an exploration conceptualized as a recovery of past performance styles, was simply a less ridiculous and more admirable thing to do than the exploration of styles of masculinity, especially an archaizing exploration conceptualized as a recovery of a style of masculinity that places an emphasis on scotch, cigars, and clubs. (Prior to taking the photos that led me to think these thoughts, I had been reminded of the existence of this store when I walked past it at a time that was not kairotic for photography. This walking past of the store by me did lead me to google the shop for information about it, and I discovered in so doing that it has an attached club, or perhaps the club has an attached shop. As I was walking back to my office after having taken the photos, I had not forgotten about this history of how I learned about the club occurred to me, but neither was I thinking about it.) Perhaps—I imagined that I might pose this question in the post—it's just the obvious concern with outmoded masculinity or masculinity at all that's so bad.
I had all these thoughts several days prior to the time at which I actually began to write the post. For one or two days after I had taken the photos, and after having had the thoughts about what I would write in the post that I recounted in the first five paragraphs of this post, I continued to think that the post I would write would proceed along more or less the lines I had earlier conceived for it. During all of these days I knew that I would not actually begin writing the post until the weekend.
At some point after the one or two days during which I continued to believe that I would write a post along the lines that had occurred to me while I was taking the photos and walking back to my office, but before I began to write the post which you are now reading, I realized that I did not need to do anything so complicated to convey my point or, hopefully, amuse my blog friends. I realized, at some point before the weekend but one or two days after I had taken the photos, that a much simpler avenue was open to me.
My realization was this: I had only to point out that one of the brands stocked by the store is named "Rodd & Gunn".
(Several days after having written the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post, I realized that I had been confused while writing them. I had thought that Taruskin praised Hogwood's playing for its contemporary-antique freshness. In fact, I should have named Robert Levin. I learned this only after having obtained a copy of Text and Act, which I did not have at the time I wrote the above-mentioned paragraphs, and having read an essay in it, "A Mozart Wholly Ours". After learning that Levin's was the correct name, I contemplated editing the text of the post to replace Hogwood's name with Levin's. I began to do so, but realized that I would no longer be able, with any real cause, to mention the pig named Christopher Hogwood. I opted for this addendum for that reason.)
Comments</h1> on 2019-08-04 16:56:46.0, k-sky commented:</h3>
Count this blog friend amused
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Ford contra O'Shaugnessy

2018-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

I recently read Anton Ford's paper The Province of Human Agency, which recently appeared in Νοῦς (the third number of its fifty-second volume), and it was a bit of an odd experience in that I am extremely sympathetic to (what I take to be) the basic perspective from which he writes, and the basic position he's trying to advocate for (and I really liked his dissertation), but also (and I have this experience a lot with let's call them Pittsburgh Anscombians) I found the paper itself to be frustratingly hard to get a handle on. (I also had the somewhat melancholy thought that my papers dammit would have been relevant to its composition and its successors, should there be any: here is someone, Ford, who would probably be interested in my stuff! And might even have had cause to read some had I remained in the academy, and conferred, and whatnot, but who now will, basically, not.) But it was also somewhat annoying because I thought the use made of Brian O'Shaughnessy was very shabby. I thought I would write a short post substantiating that thought. I may or may not have succeeded in substantiating it; I definitely failed in writing a short post, or one that confines itself to that task.
Here's the context. A picture of action theory is given in which two views do combat: volitionalism, in which all we ever do, sensu stricto, is will, or intend, or try (in some purely mental sense of "try"!), and what Ford calls, identifying it with the mainstream, "corporealism", in which all we ever do is move our bodies, in some sense which is unfortunately not laid out particularly clearly. Davidson, for instance, explicitly endorses this view … or something like it. (The view Davidson explicitly endorses is also not particularly clear, so that fits, at least!) The immediate unclarity is perhaps harmless, since Ford will later extend it to encompass one which explicitly has it that we do do more than merely move our bodies (Feinberg's, on p 712): the essential point for corporealism isn't that the limit of our as we might put it contributions as agents to what happens stops at the body, but that it stops somewhere short of what happens. (As is also true of volitionalism.) After some point, what we do is over, and the rest is just the workings-out of cause and effect ("up to nature", in Davidson's phrase), and (therefore) not what we do. Of course philosophers who speak in such a way are willing to countenance what is apparently an inexact habit of speech in which those effects do count as what we do, by, I suppose, courtesy. Ford: they "uniformly go on to say that, given the right setting and a certain amount of luck, moving one's body might amount to something as sophisticated as turning on the lights" (697), owing to the possibility of redescribing a cause in terms of its effects (the famous "accordion effect"). But this is, apparently, if we are to be rigorously philosophical, loose talk. (Mark that luck, though!) Or such is, roughly, how Ford sets it out.
Given, then, that the issue is not really just about moving one's body and what it might mean to say that all we ever do (in some privileged sense) is that, the failure to get clear on what "all we ever do is move our body" is perhaps excusable. Really, we are interested in the idea that all we ever do (in some privileged sense) is less than everything that happens when we do what we do (in that privileged sense). But that doesn't remove the fundamental issue, which is that we don't, yet, know what that privileged sense is! As a result of which we don't know, for instance, how much of a courtesy the extension of the title of deeds to those things which a person's privileged deeds cause is. Maybe not much!
More of that later, though.
In order, then, to produce conviction in the reader that corporealism is rampant, and found among partisans of numerous philosophical orientations (not merely among those with scientistic or physicalist sympathies), we get a brief list, with one or two supporting quotations, of folks said to endorse it—Davidson and Michael Smith, but also Helen Steward, Adrian Haddock, John McDowell, and Brian O'Shaughnessy. The point of such a list is, in a way, rhetorical: it says, look, this isn't just Davidson and Davidsonians (*ahem*, no matter what one might gather from the actually following text …): it's pervasive in modern action theory. It's a deep tendency. One wants to swell the ranks. (In this light including O'Shaughnessy is kind of strange, actually, at least if my suspicion that he isn't much read is correct.) That this is accomplished by corralling lots of short quotations from the above-named persons, which evince what are superficially similar positions, is somewhat astounding, since Ford doesn't actually establish that they are the same position, which would require expounding on each in context. The fact that two philosophers summing up their positions in a few sentences might use similar formulations no more establishes that their positions are consonant than the fact that O'Shaughnessy and a probate proceeding are both concerned with "the will" establishes that they have the same topic. If the philosophers in question all came from broadly the same school or lineage it might be fine, but Ford's whole point is that they don't; we ought to be wary of casual syncretism.
Let us roughly group what follows thus: (a), why the inclusion of O'Shaughnessy is prima facie puzzling (there are actually lots of reasons for this, and I've only included the one that first came to me, as I was reading Ford's paper); (b), why, on the other hand, one might be tempted to include him, and what Ford quotes by way of supporting this inclusion; (c), the connection of this to other parts of the paper; (d), a look at the overall argumentative structure of the paper; it's even less specific to O'Shaughnessy than (c) is but there's something notably weird about it. Finally, there are scads of notes, including two long ones that almost constitute a rare thing from me, a defense of Davidson. We will begin, conventionally, with (a).
(a) It's been a while since I read The Will, but I remember bits of it well enough to be able to say that even before getting to the quotation brought in to justify the identification of O'Shaughnessy as a corporealist, one ought to find the mere fact of his inclusion strange. For he does not merely fail to join the chorus of those apologizing for their strange views with reference to the accordion effect, he explicitly mentions it to say that it's bosh—he considers at length the case of someone adjusting a radio's volume by adjusting its volume knob (by moving his fingers), and whether one ought to say, when speaking properly, that really he's only moving his fingers, and the rest is simply an effect, and concludes that … one should not say that. (Nor does he identify any point at which one would be correct to say: here is the point at which the agent's contribution stops.) So he not only does not do what we are told that corporealists uniformly do, he seems to be rejecting corporealism in one part of his (admittedly, long and complex) text, something that ought to make us demand more than simply a single quotation with no further explication to justify his inclusion in the corporealist body. O'Shaughnessy even expresses himself, in the course of this discussion, with prose that any Thompson epigone ought to admire:

Now the peculiar thing about the utterance, "He is really only moving his fingers", is the word "only". What is it that is being ruled out? What is it that he does not do? A strange and primitive sort of linguistic reaction wells up within one at this stage. What is it that he does not do? "Why, he doesn't do that", we say, pointing at the movement of the knob that he is moving, "He isn't doing that", pointing to the moving and glowing insides of the wireless, "He isn't doing the causal connections!" This is a bizarre and wild outbreak of the philosophical unconscious. (The Will, 2nd ed, 109) </blockquote>
On p 108 he says outright that (supposing the radio is actually working, the knob not jammed, etc.) "he is really only moving his fingers" is "false". The discussion is quite lengthy and proceeds somewhat eccentrically (his immediate concern is not Ford's, or Davidson's), but I find nothing in it to undermine my initial seeming recollection that O'Shaughnessy does not believe that action, strictly aspeaking, extends only to bodily movements, or indeed to less than what happens, much less only to willings in some bad merely internal sense (O'Shaughnessy's own sense of "willing" is of course more complicated than that), and plenty to support it, such as, say, "In section (e) … I shall indicate what a valid motive for such a restriction on the extension of 'action' might be, and show that no such justification here exists" (117). Seems pretty unambiguous, if merely promised (but I'm reading it through again in order, and don't have all day, you know [1]).
(b) I'm not going to attempt to summarize the third chapter of the first volume of The Will (since it really is about that much, if not that and the second chapter for context, that's relevant to O'Shaughnessy's consideration of the whether sensu stricto one only ever moves one's body), but I do think this ought to suffice to show that prima facie he's an odd choice to name as a corporealist, underspecified as that position is, and Ford does very little to support his inclusion. Nevertheless one must admit that statements such as "once that outbreak [of the philosophical unconscious] is fully analysed, we shall then find ourselves in a position to use the once metaphysical 'I cannot move the knob of the wireless' non-metaphysically. Analysing such a metaphysical utterance is the very complicated process of giving it a use." (121–2) as, well, they might make one think that in the end we will end up restricting actions, in some sense, to bodily movements (always excepting, as O'Shaughnessy does explicitly mention, actions that essentially involve no gross movement) after all. And indeed the entire second part of the first volume is concerned with "The Immediate Object of the Will", namely, as it turns out, the body. (The modifier, obviously, is important.)
It's not that, however, which Ford adduces, but this sentence (-fragment, in context), which is, I think, somewhat less than dispositive, even taken by itself, and much less than dispositive in its larger context:

the event of willing physically develops, in a naturally appointed causal manner, to the point at which it incorporates the event of limb movement, and completes itself in so doing. (512) </blockquote>
I think it is reasonable to say that this does not precisely imply that all we ever do, sensu stricto, is move our bodies, or that all that happens after the movement (or some other thing) is technically not our doing. For one thing, when I turn the volume knob, the (event of the) turning takes place simultaneously with (the event of) my fingers' moving! The event in which the willing completes itself, the event of the bodily movement, and the event of the moving of the thing moved by the body's moving can all be the same event. (And "willing" is a technical term for O'Shaughnessy; one oughtn't just drop it into one's piece as if its meaning is clear to all and move on.) And yet this may be thought a rather special case; when the sharp pockets the eight ball, or when Rube Goldberg operates his light switches, the body's movement ends before the goal is attained. (On the other hand, it might be thought that Ford's examples of transaction, too, are much more like turning the radio knob than like what Rube characteristically does, in that one is continually interacting with the material on which one is acting.) So something is, if not fishy precisely, in need of explanation; is all our willing really exhausted in bodily movements?
It is somewhat tempting to observe that O'Shaughnessy's official remit in the section in which that quotation occurs is "bodily action", and so he may simply be concerned with actions that are no more than, i.e. not more extended than, bodily movements (though he does also refer to turnings on of lights). And I think he really is concerned, here, mostly with basic actions (a concept he countenances, as do I), because I think he is, here, concerned with wondering about, well, the curious yet oh so classic duality seemingly exhibited by action (psychic phenomena, yet also physical phenomena!), and the marriage of mind and body exhibited in intentional bodily movements would seem to be the place in which that problematic is exhibited in exemplary fashion (this is a person, after all, who wrote a paper called "Trying (As the Mental 'Pineal Gland')" and repeats the pineal gland line again in The Will). There is something to be investigated about the will and the body—about willings and movings—which is different from the investigation of whether it is proper to identify action with bodily movement.
Now it is from the late discussions explicitly about action (the first part, that I was quoting from in (a), is not about action as such) clear that O'Shaughnessy also countenances non-basic, instrumental or constitutive actions, though unfortunately giving examples of his doing so is made more difficult by the fact that he also countenances the concept of the unintentional action, so when he speaks of starting an avalanche by firing a rifle (as on 458; N.B., though, not "by contracting a finger" on a trigger that happens to be hard by!), he means this to be an unintentional doing. It ought to be borne in mind that accepting the idea of a basic action, and holding the position that ultimately everything one does one does by or in doing basic actions (singly or in series), does not force one to hold the further position that those basic actions qua intentional actions are bodily movements in the way Davidson seems to intend; that is, such a person can (and should!) fully adopt Ford's points on pp 707f. (But then, as far as I can tell, so also can and should Davidson.) (Such a person should also adopt my points in "Second Nature and Basic Action"!) That is, one might analyze the structure of actions into the instrumental/constitutive and the basic, such that all of the former are accomplished (in some way) by or in the latter, without committing oneself to identifying action with bodily movement, or believing that the effects of the basic actions are not properly our doings.
For all that, though, O'Shaughnessy especially in the second volume of The Will, and especially its latter portions, does seem awfully preoccupied, when talking about both action and the will, with bodily movements, in a way that might lead one to think that that really is all he thinks action amounts to. And it's not clear to me in this paper but it seems at times as if for Ford recognizing basic actions makes you a corporealist.
(c) As alluded to at the beginning of the post, there's a rather wide range of positions that get put together as "corporealism" or that count as "identifying action with bodily movement", and it's not always super clear what it's intended to be captured. It doesn't help, of course, that his leading target, Davidson, is monumentally unclear about how to construe his position, in two ways. I suspect it's at least correct that Davidson thinks that all our primitive or basic actions are bodily movements, and that he thinks all our basic actions are bodily movements under bodily-movement descriptions (though the argument he advances, if that really his supposed to be the position, is notably bad). The second thing there is in my opinion incorrect and as far as I can tell comes in with no clear motivation other than Davidson's apparent belief that it's theoretically neat; at any rate, even saying that much doesn't amount to the claim, which of course Davidson also makes, that all we do is move our bodies (regardless of the description qua which these movements are intentional actions), and when he adds that, he seems to be contradicting himself [2]! (It still seems unfair of Ford to saddle him with the charges that he doesn't believe in instrumental action or that for him the body has no need of the extra-bodily [3].) But then he's got Feinberg as a target, too, and Feinberg explicitly does not believe that "all the actions there are" are bodily movements.
Ford characterizes both corporealism and voluntarism as species of "practical dualism", and says that such a doctrine in general

divides what is presumed to be an unproblematic case of intentional action, like turning on the lights, into two causally-related [sic] parts, one of which is the agent's contribution to what happens, and the other of which is "up to nature". Although I have said that materialism marks no such division, the suspicion may linger that it must do so, on pain of embracing an absurd triumphalism, according to which there are no limits to what one can do intentionally. (712) </blockquote>
It's almost like Frankfurt's concern in "The Problem of Action", but his solution is (in my memory of it, anyway), a cybernetic more-of-the-same. (And one ought to allow, in some circumstances, that the agent is doing whatever she's doing even if she isn't following the unfolding progress, ready to intervene, pace Frankfurt.)
I've quoted his remark about materialism and triumphalism as well because I find the characterization of why someone actually would want to speak of leaving something "up to nature" rather confusing—what the temptation actually is, or, otherwise put, what leaving something up to nature is supposed to mean. (That is, I'm not sure what limits Ford thinks might be lifted in triumph. We would be able to … turn on lights? Glow like filaments?) Why would someone think that? What sort of not-doing might be in question in the "part" that's up to nature? Surely there's an innocuous sense in which, once I have poured the poison into the king's ear, I allow its its fatal action of, I don't know, its binding to red blood cells and preventing them from carrying oxygen, a natural potential which we exploit, to run its course? Must saying that mean saying that I didn't kill the king, I merely tilted my wrist just so? Whence the temptation to make a special place for the body? What even is a body, anyway?
There is a strange missed opportunity early on in the introduction of "materialism" as a term:

It did not escape [Aristotle's] notice that a person needs to move herself in order to move something else. Nor did he fail to appreciate that when one moves a stone by pushing it with a stick, there are real and important differences between the "moving" one does of the stone, the "moving" one does of the stick, and the "moving" one does of oneself. But none of this led him to fixate on the movement of the body. (700) </blockquote>
Unfortunately for me, Ford does not record where Aristotle notices this [4]. Unfortunately for all of us, he doesn't record what those important differences are, or again in the paper take cognizance of fact that one must move oneself in order to move one's body, or what the significance for the philosophy of action that fact might have. We can take this, however, at least implicitly allowing that one can be a materialist in good standing while affirming that bodily movements are special, being both necessary for and different (in some important way!) from the movements of the non-bodily.
In a footnote, he does tell us that the materialist tradition includes Marx and many phenomenologists, adding that

one striking difference between phenomenologists, on the one hand, and analytic action theorists, on the other, is that the former are apt to devote while chapters of their main works to thinking about the human body. There is nothing remotely similar in the Davidsonian corpus. And that is the great irony of what I am calling "corporealism": though analytic action theorists constantly mention "bodily movement", the nature of the human body is rarely thematized as a topic of philosophical reflection. (718n28) </blockquote>
Reader, I found this infuriating: O'Shaughnessy not only devotes a whole hell of a lot of The Will precisely to the human body, much of what he says resounds harmoniously with Merleau-Ponty. (Ford says next to nothing about it.) It's especially irksome given that Ford spends more time with this remark of Anscombe's, not obviously consonant with Aristotle's noticing:

People sometimes say that one can get one's arm to move by an act of will but not a matchbox; but if they mean 'Will a matchbox to move and it won't' the answer is 'If I will my arm to move in that way, it won't', and if they mean, 'I can move my arm but not my matchbox' the answer is that I can move the matchbox—nothing easier. (quoted on 706) </blockquote>
This seems to lose track of the idea that there is a real, much less an important, difference between the two movings. Something seems to have escaped Anscombe's notice, at least in the use Ford makes of this remark. What, after all, is the way in which I move my arm, when I move it to move the matchbox? And if I try—do I even know how to try?—to move the matchbox that way, do I? It's in the context of O'Shaughnessy's lengthy considerations of, basically, just this question that he first disputes that we only ever do the finger-moving, and not also the volume adjusting, but this doesn't lead him to gloss over the differences between the two. (It is bizarre of Ford to commend Aristotle for not "fixating" on the body and, in a footnote attached to just that commendation, commend phenomenologists for (and abuse analytic philosophers for not) occupying themselves deeply with the body. As we know, a "fixation" is a theory, or an object of study eventuating in a theory, one doesn't like.) If we retain notice of the necessity of moving oneself in order to move something else, then there must surely be a sense in which one can move oneself but not the matchbox: one doesn't move the matchbox in the way one moves oneself, or one wouldn't need to move oneself in order to move the matchbox. (Or the matchbox would be oneself, which is not a priori impossible.) Thus while I don't know what parts of Aristotle Ford had in his mind, what came first to mine was this:

It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things. (DA 432a) </blockquote>
Much could be made about the perception/action parallel being drawn in these few lines with respect to the instant problematic [5], but it flashed on me because, well, isn't it odd that we should even have a tool of tools? Like, we've got all these tools, right, both artifacts made (often using other tools!) for our purposes, and natural objects appropriated as-is to be used for this or that. Why don't we just use them? Why don't we use the tools, that is, directly, rather than using a tool of tools to use them? (And if for some reason we must use a tool of tools to use the tools, why mustn't we use a tool of tools of tools to use the tool of tools?) Haven't we, after all, just been assured that we can do precisely that, namely just use the (say) knife to peel the apple—nothing easier?
Well, the answer is, you can indeed peel an apple, but try to peel an apple that way, and you won't. For that matter, you can indeed move your spleen, but try to move it that way, and you won't. For O'Shaughnessy, as indeed for Merleau-Ponty, the "body" with which we are concerned does not include the spleen, but does, or at least can, include such incorporeal addenda as prosthetics (O'S) or canes (M-P) [6]. (This is another thing that, all by itself, ought to give one pause before including O'Shaughnessy among the corporealists!) Such things are, for those who have learned how to use them, among the "immediate object[s] of the will", in O'Shaughnessy's phrase. I don't think "object" is the happiest term, or necessary for him, since it implies that the will acts on the body and the body, then, on something else; the point is the immediacy, which we do not enjoy (except if we have, as he puts it, "rare powers") with respect to knives.
One is tempted to say something like this: we need a tool of tools because the active powers of the soul do not extend directly to all the world, as infants are said to believe they do; we are finite beings whose practical efficacy requires physical intercession, and physical intercession in the world happens via the soul's physical expression, which is the body. (Ronald Polansky, in his commentary on De anima, puts it by saying "the hand reaches out to touch and grasp many things, while the soul through its cognitive faculties embraces the whole world of things" (496), which nicely sets up the hand not merely as like the soul or the soul as like the hand but the hand as the active counterpart to the soul's receptive nature.) And this is also why we do not need a tool of tools of tools: the body is the actualization of our active nature, not a tool which the soul makes use of (though it's not always easy to find the right way to express this thought). This poses no particular restriction on what counts as "the body" (it could include canes; it could exclude spleens; it is apt to be different for you and for me) or the range of activities in which our practical natures are immediately (or mediately) expressed. Whether this amounts to identifying actions with bodily movements is unclear; the "body" in question is not the biological body, and we have no reason not to say that the laces, when I tie them, are temporarily incorporated, to a limited purpose. (If we do this, we do so because the laces figure in the sole or most basic practical thought involved in lace-tying; we have lost grasp of "the body" independent from that in which the will expresses itself practically. Actually I think what to say about things not connected to the body that nevertheless figure in the most basic practical thought, like the cup one goes to grasp and to whose outline one's hand is conformed in anticipation, is a super interesting question, but I don't really have a settled opinion about it.) This is if not a distinct "part" at least relevantly different from what we accomplish in and/or by thus expressing ourselves, in that those further things we do are, well, again, being finite, we are dependent on, uh, nature and natural regularities to effect our desires. "Up to nature" gives the whole thing a rather helpless air, which Ford, with his previous rather unaccountable invocation of "luck", makes much of:

The dualist's conviction that an agent must leave something up to nature, even when all she is doing is turning on the lights, betrays an unrealistic conception of the ordinary objects that we use on a daily basis … the only "nature" in question is an incandescent light bulb … they are made by human beings to be used by human beings … it is no accident that they tend to turn on when people flip the switches that are made to turn them on. (713) </blockquote>
Ford doesn't say what the unrealistic conception actually is! (Does he think that it means, like, the woods? I honestly found this baffling.) Presumably, though, on it, it is an accident that light bulbs mostly do turn on when their switches are flipped. This only makes sense if "the rest is up to nature" means "sure, I flipped the switch, and it's anybody's guess what happens next", or something like that; but—whence might he have gotten that idea? [7] It is precisely because leaving things up to nature is not a matter of accident that we can make light bulbs at all; I can leave it up to the filament to glow when the current goes through it. Indeed, I don't need to know anything about the construction of light bulbs or the wiring of my home to operate a light switch. I just flip the switch! The rest—lovely nature—takes care of itself, and need not be represented in my practical or indeed theoretical thought at all [8]. The temptation to speak of leaving stuff up to nature is not, I think, that otherwise we seem to be omnipotent, but the simple observation that I just loose the string and the arrow goes, flip the switch and the light turns on, pour the poison and the king dies, rub the sticks and the kindling lights, whatever, there's the thing I'm immediately doing, and the things that I do by so doing. (Ford wants to say that "when I intentionally turn on the lights, what I change intentionally is not merely the switch that I manipulate, but [also] the lights" (713). So does O'Shaughnessy, and, for that matter, so does Davidson. Ford's own formulation acknowledges that one manipulates the switch, but not the lights. How do the lights come to be light, rather than dark, then? Is it because the manipulation closes a circuit, which sends electricity through the filament, which causes the filament to get really hot and emit light? If so, is it merely by courtesy that we say that I changed the lights intentionally?) And although I need to rub my hands on the stick up here so that the other end down there turns in the wood, it is in the nature of the wood down there to be heated and ignite from the friction. I am turning, heating, igniting; but I am relying on nature to get me from deed to deed.
One is tempted to believe that in so saying one is not sinning against materialism, or at least falling into corporealism, and that O'Shaughnessy can safely be said to have evaded the charge. It seems, where it skirts territory Ford anathematizes, to be doing so innocuously, in unmetaphysical ways, and it seems to be drawing out the primacy and difference of bodily movement which he seems to tolerate in Aristotle. But I'm not certain, because Ford has McDowell in the beginning saying precisely that

"actualizations of our active nature" extend into the "goings-on in which natural things, like limbs, do natural things, like moving." For McDowell, it is things like hands, not things like handles, whose movements are realizations of our "active nature". The mind enters the world, he thinks, but only a little way[.] (698) </blockquote>
So, who knows! I mean, hands and not handles seems right up there with tools of tools and not tools. But I still think that O'Shaughnessy is being miscategorized. I certainly think that the diversity of positions putatively under consideration, relative to the attention given to any actual position, is unfortunate: it really does seem unclear to me whether assenting to "there are basic actions" is supposed to make one a corporealist. I don't think it does?
(d) Here's the overall structure of the paper: volitionalism asserts its primacy on the grounds of three considerations (which I will call "the first three"): fallibility (of bodily movement as against willing), separability (of willing from movement), and etiology (of bodily movement from willing). Against these corporealism asserts it has the advantage with another three considerations ("the second three"): pre-theoretical practical thought, embodiment, and animality. Things can't just stand there, though; corporealism has to address the first three. Ford gives it two options: deny the phenomena (an option he says is "rarely, if ever, exercised", possibly because of "its lack of promise" (705)) or to "grant the phenomena, but deny that they disqualify bodily movement as the prime expression of agency" (705).
However, materialism now comes along and says: just as the second three give corporealism the edge over volitionalism, so too they give materialism the edge over corporealism: if you find those considerations moving, you should be moved to materialism. Against that, corporealism advances counter-considerations against materialism: fallibility (of transaction as against bodily movement), separability (of bodily movement from transaction), and etiology (of transaction from movement). But wait—didn't the corporealist just say that those considerations have no force?
Ford says yes—the corporealist did just say that, and is therefore "in the impossible position of needing to deny out of one side of their mouths … exactly what they affirm out of the other that fallibility, separability and etiological priority establish the primacy of one expression of agency as against another" (711).
What's weird about this is: Ford is a person who likes to reject highest-common-factor type considerations. You know the sort of thing: formally, or from one limited perspective, these two things are the same, and so, we're stuck. He seems to envision the only possible route the corporealist could take against the volitionalist as being: "no consideration of separability ever favors any one conception of agency over any other". It's just not, formally, the sort of consideration that could do that. And yet, isn't there another possibility? Couldn't there be a substantive argument against the specific consideration, in which the corporealist simply says "this consideration of separability, for substantive reasons pertaining to (say) the nature of willing, or of tryings, or bodily movings, or whatever, doesn't favor volitionalism over corporealism"? (George Wilson—and I, in the second chapter of my dissertation!—have made arguments against "pure intending", for instance. As has, in a different vein, Thompson, I believe.)
It's possible that doing this would amount, in Ford's view, to denying the phenomena, because it disputes their characterization. (But it might only dispute their significance, but specifically with respect to their natures: accept the phenomena, deny the "thus …", but not because the genre of consideration is wrong.) If so, though, I don't know why he just says without expanding on it that the strategy lacks promise or is hardly ever undertaken: it seems promising to me, and he literally quotes O'Shaughnessy in the process of, if not undertaking specifically that project, at least developing a position from which to undertake it (717n14). Of course I've been denying that O'Shaughnessy is a corporealist, but Ford seems to be saying that it's not done by and not promising for anyone.
Similarly, corporealism could deny that the considerations it supposedly adduces against volitionalism do in fact move one all the way to materialism. For instance, consider pre-theoretical practical thought, and Rube Goldberg machines for turning lights on. I set one off by putting a teakettle to boil, and five minutes later a domino, pushed over by its rear neighbor, is pushing its fore neighbor over. I think that if you zoom in, as it were, just on that, pre-theoretical practical thought would be willing to say, well, you aren't doing that. (Pre-theoretical practical thought is not unrelated to O'Shaughnessy's philosophical unconscious! At the same time it probably would say I'm turning the light on, but the whole thing about the pre-theoretical is that one has to allow it to be not obviously systematic or self-consistent.) You just started it off, P-TPT might, quite plausibly, say. Feinberg looks pretty good on this score, if you ask me! (Ford's own discussion of how P-TPT approaches the corporealism-materialism divide is extremely theoretical.)

ETA on the following day: of course basic actions probably do suffice to make one a corporealist on this view, given the (only now clear to me) strong family resemblance between Ford's characterization here, and Lavin's, in "Must There Be Basic Action?", of the basic agent as one who as it were supervises the unfolding but does not participate in it as agent. But this is only a resemblance of characterization; it isn't support for the inclusion, and as we know (don't we, loyal audience of readers?) I think Lavin has things badly wrong about basic action.

[1] This is a joke, of course; this was written in far more than a day, and has involved reading far more of The Will (and of other things) than I initially predicted it might. But I'm leaving these first two parts sketchy.
[2] Specifically, he writes:

It is correctly assumed that unless the agent himself is aware of what he is doing with his body alone, unless he can conceive his movements as an event physically separate from whatever else takes place, his bodily movements cannot be his action. But it is wrongly supposed that such awareness and conception are impossible in the case of speaking or of tying one's shoelaces … if I tie my shoelaces, here is a description of my movements: I move my body in just the way required to tie my shoelaces. ("Agency", 51) </blockquote>
Ok, fine. But there's a big difference between "the agent is aware" and "it's not impossible for the agent to be aware"! Sure, the agent could aware of his movements under the anodyne description, but mostly, the agent is not, or if the agent is, it's in a derived, theoretical way. And when it is, it's in a derived practical way: I want to demonstrate how I move when I tie my shoelaces, and I know that I will move in that way if I tie my shoelaces, so I tie them. But here the syllogism is "I want to move however I move when I tie my laces; if I tie my laces I will do that; so: let me tie my laces". It's not the other way around! (It's interesting that Thompson and Lavin make this exact error when they argue against basic actions. The deep Davidsonian core of Pittsburgh Anscombianism!) But perhaps Davidson merely means: something like this has to be the case for my bodily movements not to be foreign to me; not: when I tie my shoelaces I move my hands under this description. One might say, for instance, that it's correctly supposed that unless beliefs can be adduced which display one's movements in a rational light and which the one would accept they cannot be one's actions, and point out that when one steps through a door without first checking what's on the far side obviously one believed that there was a floor there. That doesn't mean that one explicitly thought "there's a floor there, so I can step". One's bodily movements aren't foreign to one when tying one's laces because one can recognize them as one's own under a laces-inclusive description, might be the thought. Of course this doesn't lead to the conclusion that only bodily movements are actions, but neither does it exclude it. I think there just isn't a good reason to be found in "Agency" for restricting basic action to bodily movement! (AFAICT, and again this isn't coming from a careful re-reading, the structure is basically "here's an idea" followed by "here are responses to some objections". Ok, but how about a positive argument?)
The apparent contradiction lies in the juxtaposition of "once he has done one thing … each consequence presents us with a deed" (53), some of which are intentional (that is, as I would say, the one thing presents us with further actions) with bodily movements being "all the actions there are" (59), unless there's some extremely subtle distinction between "action" and "intentional deed". It's especially bad if the movements are intentional only under movement descriptions, because then one can't appeal as easily to the movements having been done for the sake of the further consequences, and because on 53 Davidson seems to be saying that the intention with which the body is moved is relevant to which of the further consequences are intentional, which is hard to make out unless the description is not cast solely in bodily terms. But I don't think we need to think that they are, even on Davidson's own terms. (It's really unclear to me why Davidson says that, about "all the actions there are". What would be lost to him if he just said "all primitive actions are bodily movements" and left it at that? For that matter, what would be lost to him if he just said "there is some set of primitive actions"? Not much, I suspect, especially in the first case.)
[3] Thus:

[T]hey do not need [the extra-corporeal] to state their position on the only other kind of action, non-primitive action, since there position is, in fact, purely hypothetical: … if the agent's bodily movement causes a further event, then the latter is also the agent's doing … the kind of "body" that corporealism attributes to us is one whose activity does not essentially involve any interaction with the extra-corporeal world … But the movement proper to a human body, and therefore to a human being, essentially involves extra-corporeal objects. (709) </blockquote>
(It's interesting to note, perhaps, that O'Shaughnessy also observes that someone who thinks that we only ever move our bodies is in danger of denying the existence of instrumental acts (109).) This impression is made more vivid by Ford's rather tendentious characterization of how the downstream effects get in the picture: they do so "given the right setting and a certain amount of luck" (697), as if people were in the habit of flicking their fingers and hoping that a light switch that might just be connected to a light in this very room might be nearby. Davidson of course says instead that "the rest is up to nature" (Agency, 59), a rather more defensible and much different claim (nature is the realm of laws, not of luck!), if one that does smack of the outbreak of the philosophical unconscious O'Shaughnessy notes: he isn't (pointing at the wire leading to the light bulb) doing the conductivity of copper! He isn't (pointing at the filament) doing the emission of photons!
The diagnosis about instrumentality would have surprised Davidson, who supplies a clear case of instrumental action two sentences after making the claim Ford disputes:

First, it will be said that some actions require that we do others in order to bring them off, and so cannot be primitive: for example, before I can hit the bull's eye, I must load and raise my gun, then aim and pull the trigger. Of course I do not deny that we must prepare the way for some actions by performing others. (Agency, 59) </blockquote>
I load the gun in order to later hit the bull's eye. It won't do to insist, against this, that really all I do is perform a variety of bodily movements among whose effects is the loading of the gun, unless we are also forestalled from saying that those bodily movements are done in order to later make it the case that my contracting of my finger causes a bullet, rather than nothing at all, to fly out of the barrel. As for the idea that the bodily movements presupposed by corporealism make no reference to the extra-corporeal, that too would have surprised Davidson, was worse off than being unable to describe or think how he moves his fingers when he ties his laces: "nor am I capable of moving my fingers in the appropriate way when no laces are present (this is a trick I might learn)" (Agency, 51—this comes immediately after a bit Ford quotes). It sure seems as if Davidson thinks that in order for him to be able perform this bodily movement, something extra-bodily has to be to hand. (So to speak.) It also has to be present to thought, because the practical thought Davidson gins up to solve the problem he thinks confronts him, if in fact it is supposed to be a practical thought, is to move his body however it moves to tie his shoelaces. (And why would I do that if not to tie my shoelaces?)
To be sure: "it would have surprised Davidson" doesn't mean the accusation is unjust. But I think it does mean that one ought to support the accusation, either directly or with a reference. What's worse is that Ford isn't really accusing Davidson alone of these things; it's supposed to be a common failing of all corporealists. But this is even harder to substantiate, for even if we believe that philosophers with a great diversity of backgrounds have all converged on something that can be thus characterized, that doesn't mean they've all converged on the same something, and making the charges stick in each case might require considering the details of the particular somethings in question. Or it might not: but Ford doesn't do much to convince us that the common position, if there is a single position, can in virtue solely of what is common be convicted of the charges.
[4] Perhaps this is just super obvious to those in the swim, on a level with not providing a citation for something about the virtues being a mean.
[5] Ford draws the obvious (given the author) general parallel, that rejecting practical dualism is like rejecting the thesis that all one perceives is sense data. O'Shaughnessy also brings perception into the mix (456–8) (he retains the sense datum, but holds that perceiving it is identical with perceiving the thing; that is, there's no inferential leap—odd position but not the concern here).
[6] If I remember correctly, Merleau-Ponty is willing to expand this to automobiles!
[7] I suspect that regarding causalists one actually can make something like this argument go, at least a little, but that requires making the argument specifically about causalists, which, again, is not Ford's ambition.
[8] Here's an ultra-pedantic quibble, but then, claims of necessity ought to be subject to pedantry:

If, as Anscombe claims, "the failure to execute intentions is necessarily the rare exception," then, since we normally use instruments to execute our intentions, our instruments must normally serve the purposes that we put them to. </blockquote>
#Actually, we can be more reliable in executing our intentions than our instruments are in serving our purposes. For a silly example, consider the esoteric programming language Java2k</a>:

Because (almost) all builtin functions in Java2K have only a 90% chance of returning the correct result, actual results often deviate more-or-less from expected results. So, the real challenge is to develop techniques of getting a higher probability of correct results !
It is relatively easy to write a function that will return a one 90% of the time, but it is more difficult to write a function that has a 99.9999% chance of doing so, and even more difficult of doing this to a function that returns something as simple as the number two. </blockquote>
More difficult but not impossible. Or consider this task: given a biased coin that shows heads 2/3 of the time, flip it and get tails. The technique is simple: just keep doing it until you get tails.
But, if our instruments do normally serve our purposes, it's because nature … is … reliable?

The fire in me now

2017-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

The deadline for submissions to the Pacific APA either having passed recently, or being about to pass soon, or as I finally publish this actually having passed some time ago, and I realizing that I would therefore be completely unable to both write and submit the paper I was too-idly contemplating, I thought it might at least be a nice idea to write, here, a description of the general plan, and that then became the more general related thought that it would be nice, in fact, to write up a description of My Philosophical Interests, Such As They Remain To Me, tied or not to any particular (actual or, let's be honest, theoretical) writing project. This thought was given added something, I don't know, not urgency; perhaps piquancy or … mental heft, or something, when toward the end of September an ad</a> was posted announcing an Ass't Profship at Stanford one of whose AOSes was that rare bird, the philosophy of action. (Reader: the question of whether I should apply did, absurdly, cross my mind.) But this is meant to be more a stock-taking, and a pretty loose one at that. (So loose, in fact, that I dribbled it out intermittently over the course of over a month, and finally just decided to stop, rather than bringing it to a tidy, much less complete, end. Apologies, faithful readers, for the no doubt great incoherence.) And some of these are far more ambitious than others, as will be clear.
The commonest thread through the most—not necessarily articulated in them—is the defense and articulation of a stridently [sic] non-"naturalist" conception of agency carrying with it more first-person authority than is likely to strike many as strictly plausible.

Well, first of all, the paper whose salient nonexistence prompted this project. (This is likely to be the most detailed entry on this list, since it was most recently and most detailédly on my mind.) Having reread a bunch of early Davidson a couple of months ago, I was reminded, or so I thought, of an argument about the incompatibility of anomalous monism with Davidson's rejection of scheme/content dualism. I thought the argument was made in "Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between Dogmas"</a>, but on reviewing that paper I couldn't really make it out again. (I can find the point at which the argument I thought I remembered would come. But the argument that does come isn't what I thought I remembered, and is pretty sketchy.) But in attempting to reconstruct the argument I thought I remembered I came up with one that seemed worth pursuing, assuming I haven't just failed to remember the actual place I read it.
The crux in both cases (i.e., both the Synthese paper's actual argument, and my reconstruction) is that there's at a minimum something fishy about Davidson's assurance that to a given mental event, such as an action or a course of deliberation, there corresponds precisely a physical event. (Or, and I don't think this helps but it is more Davidsonianly correct, that the selfsame event that has a description also has a purely physical description.) It sure seems as if this is edging us toward recognizing an event independent of but susceptible to multiple descriptions—a bit of content schematizable physically or mentally, is the charge. The question is making it stick; the Synthese paper seems to conclude at the point where it should be applying the glue. Having mentioned the Synthese paper on Facebook, Daniel</a> asked why Davidson couldn't simply do what Anscombe does, in "Under a Description", when faced with the question "what is the action that answers to all these different descriptions?" and repeat one of the descriptions. I'm not sure he can, though, and it's also not obvious to me what Anscombe means to be doing when she thus answers. "Under a Description" is stranger than I remembered it; for instance, and connected with the preceding puzzlement, I would have guessed that in answer to the question "how many actions does N.N. perform when he moves his arm, startles a fly, threatens X.'s queen, etc.?" not to be "one", but in the paper she evidently thinks that the answer is one (under the inferred circumstances of the question, namely the case in which there is one bodily movement). So, you know, I wanted to inquire into what kind of answer the one suggested for Davidson is for Anscombe, and what it would have to be for Davidson. The bit of "Under a Description" where Anscombe scoffs at the sensibility of a question such as "how many things are here?" absent further specification of how one is meant to group, well, things into things was, I thought, going to be important here, not least because it was the justification for the title I thought I would use, namely "Which Events are Events?", in honor of Hornsby's "Which Physical Events are Mental Events?".
I am cleverly omitting most of the details here because I want to be sure that I continually forget them and have to remember them afresh, rather than ever developing them. </li>
I mean, what is</a> called awkwardness? Already over two years old; I still think I should do something more with this. Lee Konstantinou's observation that the entire first half can be dropped is sound, but I couldn't figure out (not that I tried very hard) how to get an entry into the subject without it. More generally on Cavell and sociality; both Diamond's "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy" and Gustafsson's "Austinian Examples and Perfect Pitch" being Leitfaden for me, though I persist in thinking that the second errs</a> in its understanding of "the whirl of organism" and why, precisely, that's supposed to be terrifying.—All this stuff is freshly on my mind as a result of reading The Religion of Existence</a>, in the course of doing which Cavell came occasionally to mind as someone with similar, albeit modulated in expression, concerns, related both to the possible grounding of one's projects and existence and how one might react to the relevant revelations. (Possibly a superficial or fantastic similarity.)
The most successful part of the philosophy and literature course I taught at UCSB, all these years ago, was, I think, the sequence of Cavell ("Aesthetic Problems", "Music Discomposed"), Davidson and more Cavell ("What Metaphors Mean" and "Excursus on Wittgenstein's Vision of Language", respectively), and Danto (the two "Works of And Mere …" chapters from Transfiguration of the Commonplace), Danto also having been accompanied by a bit of Ern Malley. (Though I think the most successful single meeting was the one concerned with "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy", several meetings later, though that obviously has its Cavellian bits. Actually there was a lot of good stuff on that syllabus. I recall thinking, in teaching "Fearing Fictions", that I had finally figured out exactly where it went completely off the rails.) I would like to delve more into Cavell's aesthetics, especially since having learned at the 2016 PacAPA how non-mainstream it seems to be.
I am similarly interested in Cavell (and the more recent Stroud!) on skepticism, and what (in different ways) they refer to as "the truth in skepticism", and, what I think is connected to that, how to conceive of progress in philosophy. Connected because it seems to me that for Cavell one truth of skepticism is: technical problems you may not always have with you, but skepticism you will always have with you. This seems right to me, because there is something there, just not what it's theorized as being, but it also isn't clear that argument (anyway, as analytic philosophers like to conceive of it, in the main) is the way out of the mistheorization, and a phenomenon that attaches to a lot of philosophical problems. (Cavell on skepticism is, in a lot of ways, like Cavell on art, and I think that's one of the reasons that his general take is so submerged, in favor of approaches that at least purport to give nice neat answers. (Ontological approaches, for instance, or institutional ones that offload work.) Whereas Cavell insists that it's just inherently problematic and contested, and there's no easy resting place to be had. "But is it art?" you will always have with you, too. Ethics, too. "Oh, great, now we know how to live and don't need to worry about that anymore"—no matter how advanced our practical ethics, that isn't going to happen, at least not because of the study of ethics. So, like, what are we doing? A further metaphysical question pertains to what we're doing day to day: the ideology seems to be that we're trying to convince each other of things. But I doubt that people really are convinced of much except what precise position to take within the larger affiliations that remain unchanged.) </li>

Behavior and intentional action. This somewhat flows into the below, and is perhaps really just an aspect of it, but let's consider it separately, shall we? I claim that there is a strong tendency to act (and to philosophize, as a kind of acting!) as if, as much as possible, episodes wherein (the circumlocution you are about to read is part of the point; I don't want to commit to any particular characterization of the episode) a person originates, in some sense, or in the same sense refrains from originating, a change, which are also episodes that are broadly interesting or significant, are intentional, or are to be called be some other term that is, let's say, maximally agency-involving. For instance, a twitch, or even a bit of finger-drumming, likely count as changes initiated by a person (I'm saying "person" rather than "agent" here deliberately!), but are probably not apt to be described even by the most zealous philosopher as intentional. But the maintenance of conversational distance with a partner who has different standards about how far apart to stand (so that one keeps approaching or backing off during the conversation) has been put to me as intentional, and it's barely more interesting. Correspondingly, if one says of some such thing that one does not consider it intentional, one is often taken as dismissing it in some sense, as if, having classed some performance as not intentional, one were saying that it held no philosophical interest. This strikes me as quite strange (surely the not exactly recent resurgence of interest in virtue in ethics should have gotten us used to the idea that there's much more than their intentional actions that matters in a person's history?), but I've seen it with my own eyes on several occasions. I had, in my dissertation, to say a little about this kind of thing—both conversational distance and a decidedly more interesting in terms of personal history but not I think different in kind case (the breakup of a romantic relationship)—in my dissertation, but not enough; it would be nice to have a more robust story about sub-intentional and habitual actions, and the category of "behavior" that doesn't rise to the level of intentional action. (Of course, there already are examples of such things. The one that comes most readily to my mind is O'Shaughnessy on sub-intentional action but I doubt that's indicative of the state of the art.)
I suspect there's pressure to over-ascribe intentionality from two sorts of opposed philosophical inclinations. When my advisor, a somewhat classical causal theorist of action, pressed the example of conversational distance on me, part of his reason for doing so was that retreating in response to encroachment or encroaching in response to retreat is a complex, controlled undertaking, apparently performed "for reasons" (I am discomfited and wish not to be; backing up will remove my discomfiture; let me back up). On causal theories in general there's no reason to think that agents will often or normally be aware of their reasons and it looks as if everything's all lined up for the application of the theory. On the other side, if you have a McDowell-esque sort of position, you're probably used to making the observation that the fact that rational and non-rational animals both engage in superficially similar behaviors (here using the term neutrally) doesn't mean that the accounts for those behaviors are the same in each case, and that reason can be involved in the rational-animal case and not in the other. For such a person, saying "ok but here reason doesn't enter into it (in an intentionalness-adding way)" might look like special pleading, absent some really good story.
Concomitant with which, I remain interested in basic, skillful, and habitual actions—I have written a little on these, albeit largely destructively, targeting Michael Thompson and Doug Lavin; it would be nice to write something more positive. </li>
Since, as I was working on my dissertation, Anscombe happened to be having a renaissance, and her take on practical knowledge more and more explored and taken seriously by more and more people (including, somewhat to my annoyance, by John McDowell, pushing an account that I thought was really a lot like mine, not at all unsurprisingly), I clearly needed to come up with another, even more heterodox position to espouse, and I think I've found it in the denial of most unconscious phenomena as those tend to be conceptualized; I have tended to express this as simply denying that there are unconscious desires, but I'm willing to extend it pretty broadly (and definitely no unconscious phenomena intimately related to rationalagency, e.g. deciding or deliberating). All that I've actually produced in this direction is around ten thousand (!) mildly directionless words, half-ish concerning David Finkelstein (written between 2012, and, I'm somewhat surprised to discover, early 2015, though it looks as if that was just shuffling stuff around and the last real work was in late 2014) and my belief that there was some reason, which I don't think I was ever able to successfully specify, that his willingness to acknowledge unconscious intentional attitudes played poorly with the rest of his story in Expression and the Inner, and half-ish concerning some putative examples of learning of an unconsciously held mental state (especially the bafflingly popular case of learning of one's love for another); and several</a> blog</a> posts</a> about Krista Lawlor's paper on "Knowing What One Wants". (Also this post</a>, though it's less directly on point.)
This is obviously super ambitious as a project, and I'm not sure I know how I would actually undertake it were I to attempt it (I'm quite confident it could not be carried out competently given my present employment); it's almost the case that the most positive thing I can say on its behalf is that I don't believe I've yet encountered a putative example of unconscious desire that can't be otherwise accounted for, which would be fine, sort of, if "no unconscious desires" were the generally accepted default position that had to be defended against other comers. But indeed the situation is precisely the opposite and the onus is on me. One needs, to carry out this project, a positive picture of the nature of desire and what we're up to in talking about desire, appealing to or attributing desire, etc. (Akeel Bilgrami has a paper—or had, I think I read it in draft on his website and it's possible nothing came of it—about speaker meaning and whether a speaker might be ignorant of it, he denying this possibility, part of which involved asking, well, why is "speaker meaning" even a thing we care about? why do we talk about it at all, and could the concept serve if speakers might be ignorant of their speaker meaning? Of course any attempt to directly port such a line of thought over to desire will founder on the shoals, since everyone will claim that there are lots of things we do with desire-talk and plenty of them can be carried out with respect to unconscious desires. Nevertheless I found Bilgrami's paper refreshing. The question is whether the selfsame concept is invoked in all these cases, anyway.)
Since, however, I recognize the reasonableness of the question "but why would you believe such a strange thing?", here are a couple of considerations, the first of which is explanatory but not, you know, cogent, and the second of which is really only supposed gesture toward opening the question: if you are going to cite beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. as parts of action-explanation and as parts of what gives actions their natures (as being φings, etc.), and you quite reasonably are not going to insist on anything like conscious (= occurrent, in this context) rehearsals of reasons or reasonings, then it sure looks as if, if all these things can be unconscious, it will be possible for an intentional-qua-φing action to be undertaken and the agent not know it under the description φing, which, if you think that when an agent performs an intentional action, she knows nonobservationally that she's performing it, is a problem, and you need to have something to say about that possibility. And I think that! Perhaps one can build one's account of practical reasoning such that the attitudes can be unconscious in the sense that's more robust than merely not being present objects of awareness but the reasoning can't be like that; maybe not. (Frankly I think if you're going to make that stick you've probably gone most of the way to making the more general claim anyway.) But that's a sort of explanation for why I might find myself in this boat in the first place. (This is the same sort of reason why I had to address the very idea of a causal theory of action in my dissertation—not that I wasn't already set against them, but they were specifically relevant because, if you've got an account whereby an action is just the upshot of certain sorts of causes, there's really no reason to think that the causation will ever be accompanied by knowledge, without a lot of extra machinery.) Here, then, is the second: suppose you take a person acting in a way that generally leads others to ascribe an unknown desire to them, and you take a person who has a sort of canonically consciously known and avowable desire. By what right do we say that each of these people has one of the same kind of thing, different only in whether and how it's known? Perhaps you're some kind of functionalist and you claim to observe the ascribed/avowed items playing the same role in the agents' mental lives. I'm not some kind of functionalist—it really does depend on how you conceive of natures of mental things!—but even if you are, it's striking that people to whom unconscious desires and people with ascribable desires with the same content do not generally act similarly. So, in general, it's my strong suspicion that when we flesh out the answer to the question "why do we call both of these phenomena a person's desiring something?", we'll end up with an overall picture of mental life that I want to reject. (This is now nearing the specific issue that I thought was lurking somewhere for Finkelstein, having to do with what we were supposed to make of an unconscious desire of which someone becomes conscious, meaning not merely aware of it as a third person can be, but able to avow it—what, for him, is the nature of a desire such that it can be unavowable and unconscious, and then become avowable? Shouldn't there be an expressivist story about that? How's that happen?)
There is a peculiar phenomenon I have observed when expressing some of these beliefs, which is that they are ruled out of order, because, if you hold them, you will think you know the answer to certain questions which are held to be puzzling. (This is a somewhat tendentious characterization.) E.g., recently in response to the question whether it's possible for a person to make a decision unconsciously, or in ignorance of his or her having decided, I replied that I believed the answer to be "no", because—this is admittedly a trivial answer!—well, because I don't believe a decision is the sort of thing that can be made, or as one might rather say in such a situation take place, and the decider be ignorant. Admittedly: someone saying this had better have something to say about what they take decisions to be, and why other phenomena which bring a divided mind to unanimity don't count as decisions. The replies I received, however, were not concerned with whether I could provide that something more; they were concerned with the fact that my response rendered the question uninteresting. This is strange twice over: first because no question has the right to be considered interesting, just because it can be posed; second because in advance of an understanding of what a decision is the question can't be adjudicated, and once you have one who's to say whether the question will be nontrivial? One might think a "decision" is whatever it is that brings one from multiplicity to singularity of mind, and include within it such phenomena as falling asleep torn between two options and waking up to find that one of them has simply lost all its appeal—in that case the answer is "yes", directly, and the question is again uninteresting. </li>
Oh almost forgot (did forget, in fact), also Nietzschean moral psychology, but not, I think, as that's commonly meant, more like "Romantic irony and". (But it connects to as that's more commonly meant, or so I suspect; basically, I'd like to firm up the things I gestured at in the piece that, as I still can't quite believe, was published in the JNS.) Also on the moral-psychological tip it would be interesting to see if I could articulate coherently why I came to find Frankfurt's writing on autonomy and and that of those following in his wake distasteful. "Distasteful" is not obviously a philosophical objection!</li> </ul>
Comments</h1>
on 2017-11-09 3:34:15.0, Daniel Lindquist commented:</h3>
"but even if you are, it's striking that people to whom unconscious desires and people with ascribable desires with the same content do not generally act similarly." -- This seems wrong. Not the same in all respects, but surely they do behave similarly in some relevant ways: both can be described as acting in some way to manage that desire. Say, a homophobe unconsciously dealing with his homosexual desires by condemning them in others (and so indirectly in himself -- and a self-condemned desire is then right to not act on), and a normal person dealing with his homosexual desires by satisfying them. Certainly the homophobe and the normal person act quite differently, but there is a sort of story to be told that unites them as sharing a type of root desire. The fact that their very different actions both admit of this sort of story-telling is then the relevant sort of similarity in their behavior to look to, I think, in trying to cash out what the point of desire-talk amounts to. The one person is acting in such and such a way and the other is acting to suppress such actions in their own person.
I enjoyed reading this set of rambles.
[permalink]</a>

The credulity of the recappers, or, what does Rick & Morty have in common with "Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist?"

2017-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, that's right; my first post in over six months is going to be about Rick and Morty, and not even directly about Rick and Morty—more about Rick and Morty fans. DON'T WORRY; I might have a post about Davidson (actually about my attempt to remember the argument of a paper that might not exist) up in the next two months. Maybe just be happy it isn't a terrible joke.
So (by the way there are R&M spoilers here; to my mind it isn't a show to which the concept is remotely applicable but who knows who lurks in my wide and varied readership; I sure don't), here's the situation: at the end of the second season, Rick, overhearing his family, including Morty, talking about his unreliability and tendency to let people down or abandon them because he only really cares about himself, turns himself in. Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" plays, because of course it does. No one in his family knows that he's overheard them or that he's turning himself in; he does it by himself, and with an extremely morose, disaffected-to-despairing affect. (He even credits Jerry with turning him in—that is, he doesn't tell the authorities "here I am, come and get me"; he tells them, pretending to be Jerry, "You can find Rick at such-and-such a place".) Persons writing about this at the time seemed to take it pretty straight—Rick really is doing something on their behalf, he actually is distraught, the emotional state we're free to read in him, as he does all this stuff with no one looking on (and therefore for no one's benefit) is really his.
Then, in the season 3 premiere, he says a lot of stuff about how it was his plan all along to go to the prison so he could break out of it and destroy the empire and also conveniently get rid of Jerry, and he's never cared for anyone but himself (and a long-gone McDonald's condiment), and a whole bunch of stuff that is not easily reconciled with the end of the second season (it's also asserted by one of the characters who has no evident reason to know that he did in fact turn himself in, but whatever). Oddly, people writing about this at the time it came out behaved exactly as credulously with respect to it as they had, previously, with respect to the end of the second season: if that's what Rick says now, it must be true, and must have been true, all along, meaning he must have been faking it back at the end of the second season.
And yet … why should anyone think that? Isn't there not one possibility, but at least three?

Rick was putting on some kind of sob story show for no one in particular, for some reason, in season two, but is being straight with Morty in season three.</li>
Rick's emotional state as we discerned it in season two was genuine, and he's unwilling or unable to admit to any actual feelings for his family in season three. (Not implausible! Though it does have its own interpretive difficulties with respect to the premiere!)</li>
The show actually has no interest in giving coherence to Rick's character, and will play on the self-loathing-but-does-care string when that serves its purposes (as it's done several times), and the unapologetic-nihilist string when that does (as it's done several times), without particularly caring to make them fit together, much less into any sort of arc.</li> </ol>
I think that the third is overwhelmingly the most likely option, but I can understand why someone who has to write about it on the regular might refrain from embracing it, and I can also understand why you might think that as a matter of interpretive principle something like that ought to be the option of last resort. But why not at least give air time to the second option? 

Bad faith, briefly expounded

2016-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Recently on facebook (yes, I, too, am on facebook, fond readers; my output is not limited to this, my blog) I "defined" bad faith (as in mauvaise foi, not as in just anything for which the phrase is used in English) concisely if gnomically as "identification with an identity", and followed it up with a link to the Onion classic Asshole Admits to Being Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move</A>, which also, I claimed, exemplified bad faith. Unsurprisingly not all found either of these transparent or informative; hence this post, which attempts to explain why I thought "identification with an identity" was a decent way of getting at (part of) what's intended by "bad faith". This is not actually a good post, I think, but I said I would make one, so here we all are.
I say "part of" because I tend to be guided by Dick Moran's presentation of bad faith in Authority and Estrangement, where he's mostly concerned with what one might call the bad faith of identity (he calls it something, but I can't remember what), as against what Sartre in Being and Nothingness seems more concerned with, what one might (and I think Moran does) call the bad faith of transcendence. (Incidentally, and somewhat irrelevantly, I find Sartre's presentation extremely confusing, because many of the examples of bad faith he gives seem to me to be merely self-deception, and while he does characterize bad faith as self-deception it doesn't seem as if he thinks it's found in every case of self-deception. (For instance, the (not very sympathetic) discussion of the homosexual, pp 107f.) And others, the ones that do seem more significant, don't seem to have anything to do with self-deception, necessarily.) But anyway: the key, I think, lies in Sartre's characterization of a person as "at once a facticity and a transcendence" (p 98 of my edition), and the basic move of bad faith is taking oneself to be entirely a facticity or a transcendence. (Something that needn't involve self-deception!) So the bad faith of transcendence is exhibited by "the man who in the face of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation" (100), or, in Moran's example, a habitual gambler who, realizing that his habit is unfortunate, just decides that he'll stop. Indeed, a person is not exhausted by his or her present characteristics, and is changeable, and can give direction to those changes; one enjoys freedom in that respect. But one can't just up and decide to be different—the present facts do matter. (This is the kind of bad faith that Velleman accuses Frankfurt's agents of indulging in, and I think he's right: the writing-off of disfavored actions as not really mine could come straight out of one of the examples in Being and Nothingness.)
The bad faith of identity is what the asshole exemplifies. Why is admitting to being an asshole the supreme asshole move? In this case, at least, because the recognition of assholery brings with it no desire to change into a non-asshole, or acknowledgement that there's anything one might reasonably say against being an asshole. Instead, an asshole is just who he is—it's a fact—so you'd better get used to it. This is bad faith: it just isn't true that a person is an asshole the way (say) a person is dependent on oxygen to live. It's treating a fact about one's person (or personality) as if it characterized one's essence—swinging entirely to the side of facticity. That, more or less, is what I meant by "identification with an identity": one has various identities or roles one plays, self-conferred or conferred by others, which have or are thought to have various characteristic properties. And one can identify with them in the sense of taking the identity not to be something one has, or has adopted, or has had foisted upon one, or whatever, but of being what one is, really and deeply, such that further things about oneself follow from it. One sees it in statements like "I'm an English major, so …"; "I'm an artist, so [something about an unconventional personal life is apt to follow]"; "I'm a geek, so …". One can recognize that one has some, many, or all of the trappings of, and will be assigned, some label or identity; it's a further step to embrace it, and yet a further step to see oneself as defined by it, with further consequences for who one is, what one does, etc. (The flip of the switch would seem to come in a move from "because I do such-and-such, I am a so-and-so" to "because I am a so-and-so, I do such-and-such", but even there, there's a difference in inflection; it needn't be bad faith to affirm "because I am a doctor, I often work long hours".) That's what "identification with an identity" was meant to capture.

Verse roundup!!!!

2016-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Limericks/double dactyls/etc composed but not previously made public (outside of facebook):

If there's one thing that's good, and sans phrase,
It's a will that submits to the laws:
Not desire and friends,
But the Kingdom of Ends!
(See part 3 for some stuff about "cause".)

</li>
I admit first of all that I'm sick.
And I'm spiteful as well---a real prick.
I'd run into a wall
To show once and for all
You can't reckon me as clocks tick.

(you are requested to take the metrical hash of the last line as thematic.)</li>
Once as I slowly the
Streets of Laredo was
Ambling in outfit of
Cowboy along,

Cerements spotted I
Wrapping a cowboy who
Testamentarily
Sang me this song.</a>

(Spot me "cerements".) </li>
Connolly and Pearse
Are wearing green
A terrible birth
Of beauty's seen
Easter Shave

</li>
I'd put it from a candle</a>
About a foot away,
And nosh on Brot und Mandel
And watch the face decay.

The plea "Oh help me sir!"
From Cumber then would come,
"Before my eyes I see a blur;
I fear my race is run!"

But I would sit back in my chair
And watch his features melt;
"This fate will come to foul and fair:
Now play the hand you're dealt."</li>
(The first quatrain here was supplied by the artistic director of Golosa</a> after I pronounced myself incapable of finding a beginning for the second quatrain)

Wordily, wordily,
Wolfson outdoes himself,
though for a subject he
doesn't stray far:

People who order a
Triple genever make
Juniperemptory
Claims on the bar.< </li>
(My contribution to a series of limericks composed, at my request, on the rhymes of "unshriven" and "unswiven"):

The bereaved thus by guilt so beriven
Prayed daily that he'd be forgiven:
Ivan clove to his wife
For all of her life
But she died with her cleft yet uncliven.

</li>
There was once a roaming antelope
Who returned to his wife, hight Penelope,
And their home in a comb
Where she wove at her loom
The plot to the opera Partenope.

</li>
Abbreviated verse (the topic suggested by the unfolding of a conversation):

Elizabeth Taylor was really hoopy, i.e.,
Like Ford Prefect and his towel she'd always know where her hat is,
And would certainly have underplayed some parts, e.g.
Phyllis Dietrichson or Dorothy of "Oz" make a good sample,
She'd've played them psychologically incorrectly, viz.,
Altogether meek and mild; in a word, tamely.

</li>
That stylish young poet, John Keats,
Was shocked when he first met Bill Yeats,
For the latter was clad
Like a suburban dad
In tennies and t-shirt and sweats.

</li>
Jiggery-pokery
Hapax legomena,
Terms that appear only
Once in a text,

Often because of their
Semelfactivity
Mean lexicographers
Must remain vexed. </li>
Squiggily wiggily
Ink-shooting creatures, if
Wounded or sick or if
Caught in a snare,

Give themselves up to the
Eightfold attentions of
Octopodiatrist
Medical care.
</li>
Ookily spookily
summoning rituals
ought to be over be-
fore the first light:

If there's no suitable
antecrepuscular
shadow surrounding, the
demons don't bite.
</li>
Jiggery Pokery
Friedrich von Schlegel schrieb
Bücher ironisch, ro-
mantisch, und dreist:

Ein gar willkürlicher,
dazu gebildeter,
symphilosophischer,
bildender Geist. </li> </ol>
Comments</h1>
on 2016-05-24 16:42:39.0, Darthhellokitty commented:</h3>
I bow to your prowess - in particular, parts 3 and 10, and 11 - part 10 needs to be illustrated by Kate Beaton.
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Sculptural realism, or, Michelangelo on knowing one's mind

2016-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

As is well known, or at least, as is much said, Michelangelo described himself, in sculpting, as merely removing the marble obscuring the sculpture latent within it. (Or perhaps as removing the parts he didn't want. But let's go with the formula previously given.) We can give this a strong reading: the sculpture is already there in the marble and has only to be revealed by the sculptor. In that case, the sculptor can do well or poorly according to how well the thing, when declared done, actually does align with the latent sculpture. That is, the sculpture already in the marble gives the standard of correctness for the sculptor's activities, and it is a valid question, both for the sculptor and for appreciators of the result, whether the sculptor got it right. And that question stands regardless of how satisfied with the sculpture, considered as it were in its own right, anyone might be. Michelangelo's David: a masterpiece, without question, a virtuoso work with which anyone ought be satisfied. But perhaps in that block of marble there lurked—a statue of Perseus. Michelangelo, and we, might be perfectly satisfied with the sculpture. But it's wrong; irretrievably so, in fact.
No one really cares whether or not the sculpture in fact produced corresponds to what lay within the marble, which is as good a sign as any, I suppose, that no one actually believes that there is such a latent sculpture. The example occurred to me, though, during a talk at the APA on the subject of articulating one's thoughts, in which it was presumed that there is a real thought, had but not known, prior to its being put into words. The leading example was: after a seminar, or a colloquium, one is nagged by an inarticulate objection one can't quite put one's finger on, to which one wants to give words, and the leading presumption was a realist one: in such a case, there is a fully formed, determinate, articulated-in-itself (the way a skeleton is articulated; it has joints, verbal parts) thought that one really does have. The only problem is that one doesn't know its articulation. The task of "articulating one's thought" is the task of finding out what words correspond to the thought.
There are several consequences of this presumption. One is that when you think back about the subject matter of the seminar/colloquium, the point of doing so isn't (or isn't just) to figure out what you think about it, to formulate a thought about it. You think about the subject matter because you think it will help you accomplish the task you are actually set, which is to uncover the content of a thought you already had. If you work through the subject matter and come to an understanding with which you are wholly content, which you have articulated (you have given words to it), there's still the question: but is this the thought that I previously had?
I think that no one, when they've come to an understanding, a formulation, with which they're satisfied as regards the subject matter, actually goes on to ask that question. No one cares about it, any more than they care about whether Michelangelo got it right. Good thing, too, because how could you tell? People take having arrived at a response that presently satisfies them as a reason to stop deliberating; it resolves the mental itch that got them started. People speak as if they're trying to get at a thought already had, but they act as if they're trying to give shape to something as yet indeterminate, based on the hunch: there might be a thought to think here. And I think this is a pretty good reason to think that, really, people don't think that they have fully determinate, but unknown, thoughts, in this sort of case, anyway.
(Long-time readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I, of course, think that there is no determinate thought prior to the conclusion of the process of deliberation, and that the same goes for desires, as my several posts about Krista Lawlor's paper on desire probably suggested or possibly even said outright—it's been a while. Many years ago I actually used the same line of thought in talking about desires with her, for dissertation-related reasons: you might wonder "what flavor of ice cream do I want?", decide to get vanilla, be perfectly happy with it—and yet, on the view that holds that there was already a fully determinate but unarticulated desire, be wrong! You actually wanted chocolate.)
Comments</h1>
on 2016-04-17 6:44:15.0, Daniel Lindquist commented:</h3>
This reminds me of a passage from Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief": "Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false. And it is clear that nothing out of the sphere of our knowledge can be our object, for nothing which does not affect the mind can be the motive for mental effort."
Peirce's line here has always struck me as getting more right than the people he's arguing against, but not without erring in its own fashion. Peirce is right that truth is not the aim of inquiry, as inquiry is always motivated by a need to settle opinion in some particular practical area -- and settling on an opinion is settling on its truth, so any added question we might ask about the truth of an opinion we're settling on would be idle. But there's no reason to deny that in inquiry we seek true opinions: those are what we think we have when we settle on opinions, and we can't become open to the thought that we've settled on an untrue opinion without ipso facto unsettling that opinion. Inquiry, when it goes well, settles opinions by our coming to hold true opinions: this is the line I think Peirce should've gone with. That we can't split inquiry into two steps, settling on an opinion and looking into the truth of that opinion, doesn't mean that inquiry is really just one step, where opinions are settled on without caring about their truth.
Analogously, I don't see that the line you're taking actually shows that there aren't determinate thoughts (or desires) prior to deliberation. I might not ask "But is this the thought I previously had?" or "But is this the desire I really have?" after ending a process of deliberation. But this might just be because I think I have settled those questions in my ordinary process of deliberation -- and I might, later on, come to think I didn't actually settle those questions, and so come to think something went a bit off with my earlier deliberating.
For example, in the seminar case: I have become satisfied with an objection I constructed after class as being what I had in mind earlier, and then came to think instead that what I was trying to say in class was worse than what I came to say after class -- because I become alerted to a confusion in the expressions I tried to make use of in class, which confusion would be simply unintelligible if I had been trying to give voice to my later, better, objection. This normally doesn't happen when I try to find my words after class, but it doesn't never happen.
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and, further, on 2016-04-18 15:45:50.0, ben w commented:</h3>
Oh, it doesn't show that there aren't determinate thoughts prior to deliberation. But I think it does show that people are less committed to there being determinate thoughts prior to deliberation than it seems at first blush.
I don't see how the process of deliberation about the general subject matter I take my earlier thought to have been concerned with could adequately settle the question regarding what that thought was. These seem to be just totally different questions, to me, once you grant that there was a determinate thought prior to deliberation.
What, for instance, is "off" with your previous deliberation if you later come to think you didn't settle the question "is this the thought I previously had?"? Is it that you now think you have a better thought? Or that you now think that your deliberation was still in the grips of a confusion? Those might indicate that your deliberation about the seminar topic was still imperfect. But they seem to have nothing to do with the question whether or not you had settled the question about your earlier thought, and your opinion that you hadn't actually settled that question doesn't indicate that your deliberation was faulty in any of those ways.
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and, further, on 2016-04-19 8:01:49.0, Daniel Lindquist commented:</h3>
"Oh, it doesn't show that there aren't determinate thoughts prior to deliberation. But I think it does show that people are less committed to there being determinate thoughts prior to deliberation than it seems at first blush."
Okay, that's fair enough; I think it can do that much work. I wouldn't want to defend the claim that there always are determinate thoughts prior to deliberation, anyway. But they seem to me to be real some of the time.
"I don't see how the process of deliberation about the general subject matter I take my earlier thought to have been concerned with could adequately settle the question regarding what that thought was. These seem to be just totally different questions, to me, once you grant that there was a determinate thought prior to deliberation."
Well, it's me thinking the thoughts in both cases, and I don't change so much between the middle of a seminar and its end. So if I think about what I was thinking about when I had the thought I've since forgotten, I can use that as a guide to figure out what I might have thought earlier. I also don't generally need to figure out what my earlier thought was while having no clue what it might have been; I have a hazy notion of what it was, and just need to clear up the haze in my memory. But that can happen indirectly, even if I'm not trying to answer the question of what it was I earlier thought at all.
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Prepare the receptacle

2015-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Here is an innocuous thought: in order for me to be able to make use of, or understand in any but the most etiolated sense, a bit of information, I must already be able to situate myself with respect to it. If I ask who put the bop in the bop-sheb-bop and am told "Kevin", this is helpful insofar as I can tell that it's the name of a person, but if that's all I know, it would be very curious to say that I know who did it. It's slightly better than a shorthand for "person who …" because the name "Kevin" might be intelligible to others as well, but as yet it functions, for me, as such a shorthand. If, emerging from the train station in a foreign city, I can see that I am at the intersection of Rue Georges Perec and Odos Ermou, and know that my hotel is 11 Hegelallee (cosmopolitan city), but am otherwise disoriented, then while I'm better off than if I knew only that I am "here" and my hotel is "there" (especially if I know that "11 Hegelallee" decomposes into a street number and a street name, but even if I don't, I might suspect that other people will recognize the unit as the stable name of a place, which they wouldn't for "there"), but it would be a stretch to say that I know where the hotel is in any robust sense (rather than that I know the name of where the hotel is, say).
So, comes now Ted Poston, in "Know How to Transmit Knowledge?", arguing that knowledge-that and knowledge-wh can be transmitted by testimony but knowledge-how cannot, in a series of examples that one wished confronted that innocuous thought a bit more full-on. He does give it a few sidelong glances, admittedly. In the first glance, he wishes to set aside examples of know-how apparently being transmitted via testimony such as the following: Sam knows how to tie the Bimini Twist</a>, and tells John (an experienced fisherman) how to do so; John now knows how to tie it, too. The reason he gives is that "it is a general skill being applied to a specific novel case" (6) rather than a new skill cut from whole cloth. It is a case "in which a subject has preexisting practical knowledge that is then applied to a new case" (6). One might rather characterize it this way: it is a case in which the subject is prepared to make use of the testimony given. A good instance of knowledge-that being imparted by testimony, on Poston's view, is "(4) Bill knows how Obama will govern. (5) Bill tells Hannah how Obama will govern. So, (6) Hannah knows how Obama will govern" (5), yet anyone would think that Hannah had better be bringing an awful lot of background knowledge about the United States and its politics to bear in order to get anywhere with Bill's speech; that, in other words, she has some general knowledge about the subject matter being brought to bear on this one particular president.
Another possibility, perhaps, is simply that Bill is very patient, and takes a great deal of time to explain things to Hannah, essentially giving her the preparation as well as the information about Obama. Poston's glance in this direction is concerned not with preparation per se but with the complexity of the subject matter; he gives two (similar) examples. In the first, Terence Tao, who knows (all about) topology, tells Smith "all about" it (the "all about" is there because it doesn't count for Smith just to know "that topology concerns the mathematical study of spaces" (7)); then "if Tao tells smith all about topology then Smith will come to know topology, but Smith will not know as well as Tao. Once we control for this fact, the inference is good." (8; remember that control!). Or suppose "Sam knows that all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2. Sam tells Jones this. Assuming that Jones understands what is said (he understands the concepts expressed) Jones comes to know this. So the difference in learning is not a result of complexity" (8). If Jones the mathematician is in a position to just hear the words "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2" and get it, he seems to me to be in the same position as John the fisherman (it also seems to make the example remarkably bad if it's supposed to be about the complexity of the knowledge imparted—recall the mathematical joke that "trivial" is whatever you know the answer to. If Jones is that prepared, it can't be that complex for him). Suppose he isn't, though; suppose he's like Smith with respect to topology, or suppose he's, I don't know, an average fifth-grader; he doesn't even know about trigonometric functions. It would seem to be Poston's belief, which I hope is not his actual pedagogical practice, that fifth-grade Jones, if Sam just talks to him long enough (I suppose Sam can also make use of a blackboard, etc.), will come to understand about the zeta function. That is, Poston would seem to believe that the preparation necessary to understand "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2" can be imparted via testimony, with the testified-to party not needing to do anything.
How liberating!: if someone just talked to us skillfully enough, we would have no need of problem sets, homework, asking questions, any of that. Advanced mathematics can be learned entirely passively! Poston doesn't say that explicitly, of course, because it sounds absolutely bats, but I don't see how he can avoid it. If he acknowledges that in learning something, the learner too must act, then his argument would seem to fall apart: it would divide into cases where the learner is either already adequately prepared to simply hear something described or discussed, in which case testimony (without audience participation) suffices, and cases where the learner must take part in her learning. In those cases, sometimes the participation will amount to asking for clarification, asking about connections, mental reconstructions, and practicing; in others, it will amount to, er, asking for clarification, asking about connections, mental reconstructions, and practicing. The practice might be completing the square (and learning how to tell when to complete the square, which is something that someone learning all about high school algebra would seem to be learning, but which would also seem to be difficult to impart solely by testimony—lots of know-how (however theorized) goes into acquiring knowledge-that, or is implicitly present in what's characterized as knowledge-that) or it might be mounting the bicycle, whatever.
Recall Smith's inferior knowledge of topology, after being told all about it by Terence Tao. Two things come to mind here. First, if he can count as knowing topology even though he doesn't know it as well as his instructor, why should we be so quick to deny the validity of the inference "(7) Bill knows how to ride a bike. (8) Bill tells Hannah how to ride a bike. So, (9) Hannah knows how to ride a bike" (5)? She probably doesn't know how to ride a bike as well as Bill, but she might be better at it than someone who hadn't benefited from Bill's instruction. If Bill knows what he's talking about and is a good instructor (let's not lose sight of the fact that knowing something, whether it's -that or -how, is not the same as knowing how to impart that knowledge) who knows what pitfalls a beginner might encounter and can talk through them in advance, etc., she might fare a lot better than her uninstructed counterpart. She might not win any races, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on Smith passing topology exams, either. (You might think that with performing a triple Axel, someone with no experience ice skating will derive approximately no benefit from testimony. Seems plausible to me. But I also am very skeptical that someone with no experience of high school math will be able to be brought to an understanding of the zeta function solely from testimony.) Second, Poston says, plausibly, that Tao "knows because he has accumulated knowledge of many truths about topology but also has keen insight and skill" (8). Where did that skill come from? Possibly some of it is down to Tao's being super smart (but on the topic of raw mathematical genius, bear in mind the words of Tao himself</a>), but probably a lot of it comes from hard work, deep immersion, and practice practice practice. Smith can work hard and practice, too; he might get better! But, again, the notion of practice here, and for that matter skill, in the realm of the transmission (or mastery) of knowledge-that, seems dangerous to Poston. Tao doesn't know better because he received better testimony.
One reason I buy that one doesn't count as knowing about topology for just knowing that it's the mathematical study of spaces is that one can be able to say that, even knowing what "spaces" means in this context, without having the first idea what a practicing topologist actually does. Of course, something similar is true of the sentence "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2"; someone could say that and be like Aristotle's drunkard reciting scientific proofs or Empedocles, or, more aptly, like Aristotle's students "who have just begun to learn a science can string together its phrases, but do not yet know it; for it has to become part of themselves" (in EN 7.3; sadly the Internet Classics Archive allows for no more exact citation). (Or like the Brazilian physics student Feynman encountered who could rattle off equations but not apply them to simple word problems.) So there's a lot of unacknowledged work going into the parenthetical about Jones "understand[ing] the concepts expressed", by my lights; it can't just be that Jones knows about the zeta function the way I know where my hotel at 11 Hegelallee is. But the beefier sort of understanding Jones must have strikes me as being intimately intertwined with Jones' knowing how to do things. And even without that, Poston already refers to Tao's knowledge of topology in ways that implicate skill. Poston quotes Noë on the fact that skills aren't acquired all at once but come gradually with practice; the same is true of knowledge-that, because … it implicates skills. Which suggests that if you can't transmit novel knowledge-how by testimony, then you also can't transmit novel knowledge-that by testimony, either. Which again suggests the breakdown of the argument into the two cases mentioned above: the subject is adequately prepared to receive the testimony, in which case testimony works, or isn't, in which case activity on the subject's part is required. So I'm unmoved: Poston seems unduly glib about the powers of testimony to impart knowledge in the knowledge-that case, in the very kinds of examples that concern him in the knowledge-how case.

Cavell, not Carell

2015-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

What is called awkwardness?</a>. Attention conservation notice: 11,000 words, many pettifogging, and many others digressing, about a five-year-old book.

Transformative Experience: Nonidentity Problem

2015-07-12T00:00:00+00:00
Yonder</a> we are having a book discussion thingy on Transformative Experience, with the chapters introduced/summarized/responded-to by individual commenters with an accompanying comment thread. I am not one of the volunteers for any of the weeks but, as the poster, had thought I might abuse my privileges to say something anyway. Since the things I have said expanded to great length, I have instead posted them here, below. They are something of a mess, having been said in haste.
I found a number of things puzzling or unsatisfactory or underspecified in the first two chapters, and have listed some of them below, not, however, in any particular order (certainly not, for instance, with the more important things coming first, or last), and also not with the visible marks of any effort I may or may not have taken to make them form some kind of coherent whole when considered together still apparent. (Though that is probably not the appropriate form for this kind of thing anyway.) They all broadly pertain to not understanding what the relevant conceptions of "experience" or "transformative experience" are, or finding puzzling Paul's assertions and arguments regarding the method of choosing that she seems to think is simultaneously the one that comes naturally to us, the one demanded by the norms of rationality, and the one that general social norms (whereas it strikes me now, as it did reading the earlier paper, as quite odd). Some of them, inevitably given that I wrote them, drift into somewhat stream-of-consciousness territory; sorry for that.
What's up with those vampires anyway? I just do not understand why this case is supposed to be so hard, in a way that basically affects the entire remainder of what we read for this week (so you see, at least I put this one so close to the top)—it seems as if there are plenty of ways one might quite rationally decide to become, or not to become, a vampire, and when we get to "if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future" (2), my first reaction was, and remains, "what an odd way to want to make that choice". I do not believe that I "naturally and intuitively want to make [my] life choices by thinking about … what [my] future experience will be like if [I] decide to undergo the experience" (4). The elision is significant; also it seems as if "experience" is being used in two different senses there; "my future experience" being similar to, say, "my life" (or "my future experiences") and "the experience" being some one thing I do or undergo; this equivocation seems pervasive though I don't know if it actually matters. I really didn't understand the difficulty after the initial presentation, but my lack of understanding, alas! persisted after reading the more detailed exposition forty pages on. (I understand that it will be difficult if we think the decision has to be made in precisely the way that Paul thinks we're inevitably lead to attempt to make it, I just don't see why it does.) 
Why not, on the one hand, just take the advice of your friends? They're unanimous in praising the life of the vampire, and they would know (and you wouldn't). If you're really interested in basing your decision on knowing what it's like to be a vampire, it would seem that you can do that. You'll know "what it's like" only by description, but you have no reason to doubt the accuracy of your friends' reports, as far as I can tell. Paul says initially that relying on this testimony is "awfully suspect … because, after all, they aren't human any more, so their preference are the ones vampires have" (2), and later recurs to this theme, stating that there's a "dilemma" about whether to weight the testimony of so-and-so before becoming a vampire (when so-and-so had human preferences, etc.) or after (46). But what's the problem here? First, if you become a vampire, you too will have vampiric preferences (and vampiric abilities and disabilities), not human, so the fact that your friends are speaking from the perspective you'll have if you join them would seem to me to make using their testimony less suspect, not more. If you want to know what it's like to watch TV on a high-definition set, wouldn't it make sense to ask someone who has one? Wouldn't that person be able to tell you what it's like (even though, indeed, that act of telling won't let you in on the character of the experience as you'd have it watching on one yourself)? As for the supposed dilemma, it seems chimerical to me: the humans can't offer testimony about the subjective experience of being a vampire. They can offer arguments and considerations for or against making the change, but they can't attest to the experience.
Paul mentions other imagined circumstances that are supposed to make relying on testimony more vexed: "even people who seemed quite anti-vampire beforehand can change their minds about being bitten", for instance; their "pre-vampire selves" were against the life of the vampire. Or, perhaps vampires are subject to some kind of Stockholm Syndrome that prevents them from evaluating their state in any way other than a positive one (46). Again, though, as long as we're just attempting to decide based on what it's like to be a vampire—post transition, that is—these possibilities seem like nonissues. Maybe you wouldn't have wanted to there from here. But once you're there you'll like it. And we're concerned—aren't we?—with how things will be once you're there.
So I fail to see why the inability to "include considerations about what the lived experience involved in the choice would be like for you" in the way Paul means (18) is a big deal, even in the face of pp 24–30, on this topic. (In a different way, you are including considerations about what it would be like: that's what the testimony of your friends pertains to.) I also don't see how this involves a removal of "your experience or your individual, personal perspective" (tbh at a higher level I'm not sure such a removal is even compatible with decision-making; when, later, Paul says that she's concerned with deliberation "that is conducted from one's first personal, phenomenally conscious perspective" (25), I don't know what distinction she means to draw: isn't all deliberation conducted from that perspective? Isn't that inevitable?); one isn't, for instance, taking the impersonal view that it would be better all told if such-and-such were to happen and doing it for that reason. The fact that I do not know exactly what it will be like to be a vampire doesn't mean I'm abdicating responsibility for the choice, or letting my friends decide for me, or deciding irrationally, as far as I can tell, anyway. 
Here is another instance! The significant elision above was "what [I] care about", and that's something that pertains to me now, right? Of course I'll also care about things post-transformation, too; possibly different things. (Paul speaks in terms of preference; I'd prefer to speak in terms of cares or values, and these don't seem similar to me, but whatever, I suppose, though one should note in what follows, I suppose, that she explicitly decides to ignore moral considerations on p 19 and again on p 25.) So we get the question "Which set of preferences should you be most concerned with? Your preferences now, or your preferences after the experience?" (48, and rather late; can I just say that from my perspective the first two chapters are really weirdly organized? thanks!). Of course in principle you might not even have the faintest idea what your preferences after the experience would be, so there's one problem in talking about the two sets as if they're fully determinate; Paul says this: 
More simply: before you have the transformative experience, you can't know what it will be like to be you after the experience. So you can't compare what it's like to be you before the transformative change and what it's like to be you after the change in order to decide which experiential perspective and accompanying set of preferences you'd prefer. (49) </blockquote>
(Side note: the previous paragraph lays out the claim that "the problem doesn't arise in ordinary cases of preference change". Perhaps because I don't know what sort of cases she's thinking of as ordinary, or when, in general, one might have the opportunity to change one's preferences by a voluntary act, I did not remotely follow the argument there. Are the "ordinary" because you do know what it would be like to have either preference in play? But how would you know that? And don't say "perhaps at various periods in your life you've had both sets of relevant preferences". Perhaps at various periods in your life you've stepped into the same river.) 
However, and this may just be a reiteration of my failure to understand what's so important about knowing what it would be like to be you after the change in the relevant kind of detail, I persist in thinking that the answer is obviously "you should be concerned with your preferences now". Suppose you're a vegan, or the vegetarian Buddhist mentioned on p 46. (Suppose you're a vegan but not for moral reasons, as some kind of personal purification or something, just to get around the bracketing of moral concerns). 
Both of the following would seem to be perfectly reasonable and rational courses of deliberation: (a) "While, if I made the decision to become a vampire, I would then see nothing wrong with, and take pleasure in, living off the blood of animals, that would show only that I had become corrupt. No matter how enjoyable it would seem to me then, it would still be a repugnant way to live, as I can see now, so of course I won't do it."; (b) "Of course not, that would be repugnant", where in (b) we don't even consider the subjective experience post-transformation. (McDowell would be surprised to hear that "The subjective value of outcomes matters to us even if … we care most about the outcome's moral status, for the subjective value we assign to that outcome will be reflected in what it is like for us to experience that outcome as morally important" (25), or I assume he would be if I could understand what the second half of the sentence is driving out (I couldn't, since I don't know whether she means experiencing the outcome as morally important in the course of deliberation or in the course of action), since the virtuous agent wouldn't get as far as thinking about what it would be like to perform a vicious act.) I hope that (b) would be more or less what most of us would do if the act in question involved, say, procuring the extrajudicial killing of an innocent</a>, however that might reorient our preferences and values (maybe, though always having conceived of ourselves as peaceful and humane, we are in fact highly susceptible to bloodlust!), or the sublime pleasures of kicking puppies, or whatever. Admittedly this does not involve being able to compare the having of the one set of preferences to the having of the other, but I don't see why one cannot say, well, if I preferred to X, or valued Xing, or needed to X in order to survive, I probably would in fact X, and even worse I might even like Xing, and that's unacceptable. I simply don't see how the actual experiential character of doing vampiric things as a vampire, or of being a vampire, is at all important. 
Maybe a less frivolous-seeming, because vaguely possible, example is in order. Imagine an unusually reflective person, of an older generation, who used to believe, along with many of his generation, that nothing of quality existed on television, but who now believes that it's a medium as capable of rewarding a critical intelligence as any. We can call him "Alexander" and imagine that he might reflect, one day, thus (it's long, because that's how unusually reflective he is):
Although none of this is to say that watching television is bound to be morally benign, it should undermine our confidence in quick – and wholly negative – judgments about the effects of genres or media as a whole, especially while we are still unfamiliar with them. Even the narrowest judgment of beauty has far-reaching consequences and makes a difference to one’s mode of life. What such a life will bring is impossible to predict and, once it has brought it, difficult to evaluate. You can’t know in advance the sort of person it will make you and you can’t ever be sure of the worth of the person you have become. You can’t even be certain that you will eventually consider what you find through the pursuit of beauty to have been worth your while. Perhaps you will feel about it as Swann came to feel about Odette after all the years he devoted to her: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” Perhaps – that might be worse – you may find yourself satisfied, not realizing that what you loved has led you into a degraded life that you can’t recognize for what it is. Before I was attracted to television, for instance, I thought it despicable and felt a mixture of pity and scorn for those who seemed to enjoy it. These days I feel, instead, that I can see why it is worth enjoying – but can I? It seems to me that, other things being equal, I am better off now than I was then. But how can I tell, since, along with a taste for television I have also developed standards of judgment that, from the point of view of my earlier self, are depraved and corrupt? By my earlier standards, I am now debased and miserable although I don’t know that I am. By the standards that are currently mine, my earlier standards were silly, prejudiced and deprived me of great beauty. Which standards are right? (151–2 of Only a Promise of Happiness) </blockquote> As I recall Nehamas was brought to his current appreciation of teevee by exposure to one or two particular (I believe Hill Street Blues was one). I, like basically everyone these days, happen to agree with present-day Nehamas, but I also think that presented with the opportunity to become a tv-liker he would have been completely correct to say "thanks but no thanks" on the grounds that he would thereby, in his estimation, have become a stultified goon. It is an interesting question how he wound up actually becoming a tv-liker. Perhaps someone dragged him to the couch in a headlock</a> (linking this comment constitutes my wondering aloud how much of this book is related to the external reasons literature; also, it seems that much of Millgram's output for the past however many years is directly on point, to the degree that his absence from the bibliography is almost as puzzling as Kolnai's), or he was humoring a friend and consented to watch alongside and found it better than he expected (which would not be a choice to change his preferences but a choice to put himself in television's way). Perhaps he was convinced by the arguments of friends or critics he respected that there was something to the stuff, akin to listening to those already become vampires. This is also not the best example because there are really very few cases where one can expect a more or less sudden reconfiguration of one's preferences in a way that actually matters. (I experienced a more or less sudden reconfiguration of my preferences regarding almonds after eating an apricot kernel, but I wouldn't call that personally transformative.) But if Nehamas had announced something like his intention to keep watching tv until he started to like it, thereby (by his present lights) rendering himself depraved and corrupt, then, if he couldn't also cite some further end this served ("I just want to be like all you yahoos!") that made it at least instrumentally rational, I'm pretty sure I would find that bats. I think he should continue choosing based on his present lights, which are the only lights he has. 
Similarly, regarding the chip-implantation stuff (pp 39–41), if you value tasting things so highly and aren't very intrigued by this new sensory modality, it escapes me why you would not stick with the modalities you've got. I mean: perhaps you are intrigued by the new modality, or the opportunity to advance knowledge, or curiosity about potentially greater pleasures than can be tasted with the tongue that will be revealed to you. But that would seem to be a tension within your present preferences, not one between your present preference and your hypothetical future preference. (I wonder how thinking about this example would change if it were like this: would you like to have a tremendously sharp sense of hearing, to the point of being able to navigate with a form of echolocation? If you say yes, I'll put out your eyes. (Though someone blinded as an adult would be unlikely to actually gain such a heightened sense of hearing, I suppose.)) 
About the claim that the book is weirdly organized Nevermind what came right before this: 
It just means that the decision is the kind of personal decision that has no obvious or appealing way of approaching it if you don't take into account your personal preferences and point of view, for it essentially involves your subjective values and your subjective future.
It's also the sort of decision that in some sense should be made from your personal point of view. That is, in your deliberations, you should include considerations about what the lived experience involved in the choice would be like for you, because there is no better way to take your personal perspective and preferences into account, including your personal preferences about your future lived experience …
… [T]he problem is that … you cannot rationally choose to have the experience, nor can you rationally choose to avoid it, to the extent that your choice is based on your assessments of what the experience would be like and what this would imply about the subjective value of your future lived experience. (18–19; bolding added)</blockquote>
This does not actually say that Paul will argue that you should base your choice on assessments having to do with the subjective value of your future lived experience—only that you should take into account what the experience would be like, possibly ignoring the question of subjective value. But this is, I think, not terribly clearly stated. Anyway, later:
Now, in fact, I think it does make sense to ask how rational agents should make transformative decisions, because I think agents can meet the relevant normative standard. So, in the end, I will argue that normative decision theory does apply. But there is a catch: in order for standard decision theory to apply, we will have to reject or significantly modify a deeply ingrained, very natural approach to making such decisions, the approach that takes subjective values of one's future lived experience into account. (33) </blockquote>
Let us set aside, for my now, my impression that the said approach is neither deeply ingrained nor very natural. Here is my question. Why not say this straight out? Why coyly say, way back at p 14 (emphasis is added), "Subjective values play an important role … if, when we evaluate our alternatives, we choose between them based on the expected subjective value of an act", for instance? When I got there, I wrote "big if!" in the margin of the book, thinking that perhaps it was being implicitly endorsed. It is, apparently, to be rejected. I understand attempting to establish that there is a problem before delivering the solution. Sometimes the way out is through! But this felt as if the author was in possession of a secret all along, or something. (Partly, also, since I never thought the supposedly ingrained tendency was attractive, I felt somewhat as if it had just been revealed that there had actually been no reason for me to read the preceding 32 pages, or at least no reason to have gotten so het up in the process.) 
Do we value gains in cognitive abilities? And if we do is that why what it's like to have experiences matters to us? (One might have thought it was because we were the ones undergoing the experiences.) (Also, does "what it's like to have experiences" on p 11 refer to a very formal what-it's-like, namely the what-it's-likeness of being an experiencer? Or to what it's like, in each case of experiencing, to have that experience?) Do we "especially care about having experiences of different sorts" (11)? I dunno, I mean, we surely value gains in some cognitive abilities for some reasons, because say it will make us better bridge players or because we wish to uncover timeless mathematical verities or something. And there are certainly people who seem to be experience-sort-mongers. But this feels like a much more abstract claim, like Kant's in the I want to say second introduction to the third critique that we take pleasure merely in perceiving. But I feel (quite possibly mistakenly!) as if I understand why Kant is led to say what he says much better than I do why Paul is led to say what she says. 
Which experiences are (epistemically) transformative? If a transformative experience is one having had which enables the experiencer to imagine or "simulate" (ugh) having like experiences, then, as Paul acknowledges (36, regarding pineapples), one might think that all experiences are transformative, since each experience lets you imagine what it would be like to have precisely that experience, which you couldn't have done before. That may not matter for decisionmaking, since the differences between the experience of the pineapple before you now and the pineapples that were before you in the past (or between the second and third bites of the same pineapple) may not be of interest to you, given that you can tell that this pineapple, too, is ripe, but in principle it would seem that it's still, technically, transformative. Paul disagrees:
Epistemically transformative experiences arise from having new kinds of experiences, not from new token experiences that are instances of the kinds of experiences you already know about. If you've had an experience of a particular kind already, you know enough about its dominant, that is, its kind-defining, properties to know what having an experience of that kind is like. (36)</blockquote>
I am unmoved by this for two reasons, the first of which is the fact that, even if we grant the kind-talk, the second quoted sentence seems obviously false. There is, after all, a difference between doing φ, and doing φ again, or twice; just ask Constantin Constantius</a> or Lichtenberg</a>. Many people, for instance, find that their second oyster, or thirtieth glass of wine or whiskey, is not like their first.
The second is that the kind-talk strikes me as extremely fishy. First, Paul actually is willing to admit "highly refined kind[s]" such as "the experience of tasting precisely this pineapple" and allows that they are epistemically transformative (37), which seems to be precisely what she denied on the previous page. We can acknowledge that, as she said, dicing things so fine requires conceiving of the experiences in ways that "are not of much interest in most [but not all?] decision-making situations" (37), but I don't (presently) care about that, I just want to know which are the transformative experiences. And why, after all, isn't this something that stops me from rationally deciding what to do? I may not in fact care, but shouldn't I? After all, this is the pineapple I'm going to eat.
Paul also remarks that the finely-diced kind "ripe-pineapple-with-just-this-amount-of-cloying-sweetness-and-acidity" is "not a natural or ordinary kind" (37; the idea of the naturality of a kind of experience comes up also on 11). I am not sure what makes a kind of experience a natural one or why she is sure that the one just described isn't one. I wouldn't have thought that, for instance, winning an Olympic gold medal, cited on p 16, was a particularly sterling example of a natural kind. But anyway there seems to be some freedom of choice for what kind of experience one is having, at least for purposes of deliberation; one can freely reconceive the choice between pineapple and durian to be one about having the experience of tasting a new kind of fruit or knowing what it's like to eat durian (I'm guessing this would have to be, in fact, the experience of knowing, or the experience of the increase in knowledge). I'm more or less fine with saying that the kind of experience you're having depends on how you conceive of it (even retroactively, though this feels like a use of "kind of experience" that may not connect with the "kind" of "natural kind"), but no matter how you conceive of the choice or the actual eating of the durian, you will, having eaten it, have experienced the taste of durian and have gained the ability to imagine further durian taste experience, in which case it would seem to be transformative regardless of the kind of experience for the purposes of deliberation it is. 
Why so certain?It certainly seems, thus far, that there isn't a lot of question about which experiences will be transformative, personally or epistemically or both. The focus (thus far, anyway) on choice might explain that, since if you have no reason to believe that an experience even potentially would be transformative then there wouldn't be a problem, for you, about deliberating, since you would just do whatever you did as regards ordinary choices, since that's what you'd think you confronted. But you might be confronted with choices where you don't know if they'll be transformative (personally or non-trivially epistemically), mightn't you? Maybe you opt to become a vampire and afterwards deliver the following monologue, sincerely and correctly: "Sure, I now know what it's like to live exclusively on blood, and that took some getting used to, and sure, several of my preferences have changed: I used to like my steak well done and now I insist on its being positively ultraviolet, and a day at the beach will never sound appealing again. But I'm still the same. My values (or whatever) haven't changed. I still feel the same to myself." Maybe you win the lottery and continue on much the same as ever. Maybe this is addressed later, or my impression is incorrect? It just seems strange to me.
What do you mean "experience"? why so punctual? + a personal reminiscenceIn addition to the uses as a mass and count noun, I'm uncertain what is meant by "experience" as a verb in the description of personally transformative experiences as ones that change "how you experience being who you are" (17). I could imagine taking some momentous decision to, say, take credit for someone else's work, advancing myself and sidelining the other, and then thinking myself a fraud, a usurper, and simply a bad person, whereas before I did not, but I don't know if that's how I experience being who I am. Or, I could imagine myself having given up some ambitious but unlikely pursuit for something more achievable but less rewarding according to my standards at the time of the change, and considering myself, say, a disappointment or a failure, and being correspondingly depressed, but that seems to be a judgment about what I am—who I am at a stretch—"how I experience being who I am" is too many layers of indirection for me to quite know what it means. Just "how I think of myself"?
As alluded to above, everything seems rather punctual; continuing on p 17, after skipping a bit:
Having a transformative experience teaches you something new … Such experiences are very important from a personal perspective, for transformative experiences can play a significant role in your life, involving options that, speaking metaphorically, function as a crossroads in your path towards self-realization. </blockquote>
Just about nothing that I think of as having functioned metaphorically as a crossroads in my life (surely one cannot help becoming what one is, one way or another) seems aptly described to me as an experience. At least, just about nothing I decided to do does. (Even something like seeing one's baby for the first time, which (I believe) occasionally does involve sudden and striking reorientations of one's values and priorities, is not something one can just decide to do, mostly.) The decision to leave academia, for instance, certainly changed the direction of my life, and no doubt I have preferences now that I wouldn't have had I decided otherwise (whether I have values now that I wouldn't have had otherwise I'm not sure), but I don't think of that as an experience, and I don't think Paul should either, since on both pp 4 and 18 "experiences" are described as things one undergoes, which is not the relation one stands in to decidings. Thus on 18 she speaks of a "a decision about whether to undergo an experience", and I don't think there is any such experience I underwent. Even having a chip implanted seems a poor candidate for "an experience" that changes you so significantly: you're likely to be anaesthetized. (Just to be clear, I would also be uncomfortable with the claim that it was a series of experiences following my decision that changed my life.)
And, while I can't deny that I was concerned, in thinking through what to do, about my future well-being, my concerns were expressed more on the level of "If I leave, will I regret doing so? Will I become bitter? Will it be a relief? If I stay, will I regret doing that? Will I get a job and if so will I be happy there?" In a way, that's a concern with the quality of my (let's say) lived experience, or, well, life. But: (a) it's not at the experience-by-experience level; (b) it's not clear that this involves "simulating" making the different choices and seeing what the outcome is, or simulating the same choice multiple times (this time I decide to leave and it's wonderful, this time I decide to leave and it's a disaster; I decide to stay and am ground down; I decide to stay and get a job and it's wonderful, or I get a job and it's strangely unsatisfying and I keep wondering what would have happened had I left, whatever)—not because one doesn't know what it would be like to occupy any one of those roles, but because one doesn't know which would actually happen. (I'm halfway to convincing myself that this is not a transformative experience, actually, and am somewhat left wondering what actually possible, actually important thing could be.) After all, just as I don't need to know what it's like, in the relevant way, to be eaten by a shark to know that it will be bad, I don't need to know what it's like, in the relevant way, to be bitter and regretful to know that it's bad. I had no way to know what would end up being the case (and there's still time, you know, for things to change) but we're then in standard decision-making under ignorance mode, no? (Well, perhaps not, since I don't know what kind of ordering of values Paul's preferred decision theory requires. Does a lexicographical ordering suffice? Do we need to be able to consider differences in values? Given the weighting of value by probability it seems like these are awfully number-like, which is a shame, I think, because while a normative standard isn't a description, it ought to be such that it could describe someone's actual deliberation (ought ought to imply can, y'know), and the more require of the values assigned in terms of number-like manipulability, the less likely it is that the standard is something any actual deliberator could meet. If we need to be able to multiply values by probabilities, for instance, I'm pretty sure I never have and never will deliberate rationally.) If I can get away with just saying "it's bad, whatever its precise phenomenal character" when it comes to being eaten by a shark, why can't I say the same when considering possible general outcomes of a decision? And it's the general, large-scale outcomes I was concerned with in this case, anyway.
Experience machines Here is a thing that I think supports the idea that one ought to go by one's present preferences/values/etceteras rather than those of one's future counterpart who made whatever choice is at issue. Early on Paul states that "the values of what it is like to have [] experiences" is had "only when it correctly represents what's in the world" and the experiences are "real" (11–12), but adds in a note that she does not personally think that being veridical is necessary (12n14). She later reaffirms that "subjective value attaches to lived experience" and that we aren't dealing with an "experience-generating machine" (25n32). I think this stipulation is interesting. Suppose</a> you were given the option of being fitted into a machine that would cause to have experiences subjectively indistinguishable from whatever you wanted, while in fact you chilled out in a pod. It's not necessarily the case that if you opted to do so you would, in your illusory world, form new and different preferences. But you might well decide not to do so on the grounds that, as you now know, were you to do so, you would not in fact be doing any of the things you thought you were, or be the way you thought you were; it would all be illusory, and you might prefer to take your chances with reality rather than enjoy an illusion that you wouldn't know to be one. This seems a reasonably close parallel to choosing not to make a choice that you would be happy with having made it, but unhappy with in prospect. 
A question of genre How are personally and epistemically transformative experiences related? Are they just both kinds of experiences that happen, in one way or another, to change the person having them? Are they both specific kinds or uh species of a genus of "transformative experience"?

Robert Louis Stevenson modernism shocker

2015-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

I am fond</a> of quoting a bit from Harry Mathews' interview in The Paris Review: 
INTERVIEWER
Do you not care whether your stories make sense?
MATHEWS
I don't say there is no sense or no meaning. There is, but it's not one that exists outside of the work. Robert Louis Stevenson--and he's not exactly considered a modernist writer--once wrote: "The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work." For me, that's it. He's really my favorite prose writer of all. His pithiness and efficiency--he says an awful lot in that one sentence. </blockquote>
And so I quoted it elsewhere</a>, where the following</a> was quoted in response: 
How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting particularity of fiction. "Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step." To hell with Roland and the scraper! Yours ever, R.L.S. (to Henry James, 1893)</blockquote>
This seems to me to mirror exactly what Josipovici, at least, took Valéry's concern with sentences like "the Marquis went out at five" to be, in What Ever Happened to Modernism; it's too bad that (at least there) no notice is taken of this peculiar similarity—it would for one thing help Josipovici in his claim that modernism isn't a matter of stylistic habits.
Comments</h1> on 2016-05-30 8:05:17.0, Guy Lionel Slingsby commented:</h3>
I remember John Bayley quoting or quasi-quoting Karl Krauss on the murderous rage that filled him whenever he opened a book that began something like this: "Humphrey glanced at the clock as he crossed the room. It was 3:00 pm."
But I can't find it. Might have been in TLS?
[permalink]</a>

Art and Desire

2015-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Here's an interesting bit from Amy Bauer's "Philosophy Recomposed: Stanley Cavell and the Critique of New Music", from the Journal of Music Theory's special issue on the fortieth anniversary of ♥ "Music Discomposed" ♥, which by chance I turned to after finally publishing the previous post:
For Cavell, there are no empirical, much less philosophical, guarantors for the value of art, the assessment of which relies on experience and a kind of knowledge “in feeling,” borne by conviction but resistant to prescription or prediction. (77)</blockquote>
Not interesting in itself in isolation, perhaps, but it seemed to resonate with the importance of "sticking" etc. for Lawlor.

More on "Knowing What One Wants"

2015-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, I’m still concerned with “Knowing What One Wants”; what can I say? I write slow, especially when I write one or two days a week at most (and not for very long on those days, even). So! Recall, or learn hereby: Lawlor starts by describing three views all of which hold that “in normal cases, if one knows one’s own desire, that is the result of a constitutive, not a cognitive, relation between the attitude known—the desire—and the reflective attitude involved in knowing about it” (55). “Normal” cases means, roughly, cases where (as I’d like to put it) the knowledge can be self-ascribed first-personally; it excludes, e.g., taking one’s therapist’s word that one wants something. But, per Lawlor, in fact “[k]nowing what one wants can be a cognitive accomplishment, in the sense that one finds out about an independently constitute object of knowledge (one’s desire), through means that are routinely epistemic (namely, through inference)” (56).
This post is pretty long (and not very well organized!), so...

It’s important to note that the desires Lawlor thinks we find out about through inference are not supposed to be unconscious desires. The theorists she uses as foils would be willing to admit that we learn of our unconscious desires that way, though at least some of them would distinguish between the type of knowledge inference yields (expressed via an attribution) and the type of knowledge had in the normal case (expressed via an avowal). I personally am unfriendly to the idea of unconscious desires period (and I think that e.g. Moran and Finkelstein should be as well), but that’s a pretty minority position; that there are unconscious desires and that we learn about them via inference or hearsay or any of the other ways we learn external facts about ourselves or internal facts about others is pretty noncontroversial, even among those who think we have a special, constitutive way of knowing about our conscious desires. So Lawlor is making a pretty strong claim.
The route to establishing the claim, somewhat surprisingly, through “attention to the experience of getting (and trying to get) self-knowledge of one’s desires”, specifically by working through several ways a hypothetical Katherine, contemplating having a second child, might work out how she feels about the idea.
It actually wasn’t obvious to me how much the argument rests on this example, but the section in which it’s given ends with “[i]n sum, it seems that causal self-interpretation is a routine means by which we know what we want” (60), strongly suggesting that that claim is supposed to have just been established. The fact, however, that Lawlor doesn’t, as far as I can tell, say what she takes the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious desire to be leaves me somewhat at a loss: I would have thought that anything that required the process Lawlor details, something inaccessible to thought in that way, was ipso facto unconscious, even if it occasionally protrudes into conscious thought (as when Lawlor imagines Katherine, leaning over her child’s crib, suddenly subjected to the thought “have another”).
Here, in brief, are my quibbles: (i) it seems as if the constitutivist can acknowledge most of Lawlor’s description of Katherine’s coming to a conclusion about the state of her desires, merely by stating that she’s learning about an unconscious desire, and it’s unclear what Lawlor has to say against this; (ii) this is possible because the process she describes does not, in fact, seem to culminate in learning anything by inference; (iii) Lawlor moves too quickly from her descriptions of Katherine’s thoughts and behavior to the conclusion that an already existing desire underlies them. In particular, I think that even after everything Lawlor says on her own behalf, it is still, as she says prior to laying out her argument, “open to the defender of self-intimation to insist that one does not have the relevant desire until one has the relevant self-knowledge” (57). One need not even insist; one can offer some reasons—and even with reference to Lawlor’s own descriptions.
She goes on:

But this seems an inaccurate description of our experience of searching for self-knowledge. And, for the moment, it is our experience I am interested in. Often one feels that one does in fact want or not want some particular thing Katherine, for instance, may feel that there is a fact of the matter about her desire for another child. (57, emphasis added) </blockquote>
Well, perhaps—I’m actually not convinced that this is how our experience often is. But even were it the case, our experience having a certain character wouldn’t mean that the character was accurate; this is one of the points my previous post attempted to make. So as we follow Lawlor following the paths of reflection Katherine may tread, the question is not “would it seem to a person so reflecting as if there were an independent fact of the matter regarding her desires?”. The question is whether the description, presuming it to be accurate, compels the conclusion that there is indeed an independently constituted desire. A different way of taking the descriptions comes from a footnote of Lawlor’s own:

we often don’t face questions about what we want until we wonder about what to want, or what end to aim at. This fact marks what might seem a surprising reversal of the expected order of self-discovery. Often the question of what one’s ends are to be is not settled by prior knowledge of what one wants, but by one’s opportunities. As Aurel Kolnai notes:

Of course we do not form purposes out of nothing However, for all the constants in our mental and affective outlook which make us receptive to some kinds of stimuli and unresponsible [sic] to others, our actual purpose-formation is largely contingent on occasions and suggestive influence which happen to cross our path. </blockquote>
(71; Lawlor’s “sic”) </blockquote>
Lawlor means to be drawing a distinction between two kinds of self-knowledge, where she takes Moran to be identifying them: wondering what to want, we may well discover what we do, or rather, did all along, want, and these are different. There is, to be sure, a plain enough sense in which my sense of what to want can diverge from what I take myself in fact to want, though not necessarily in a way that impinges on Moran,1</a> But I wish to focus on the “did all along”.
Brought to wonder, for whatever reason, what to want, we pose to ourselves the question “what do I want?” (and we should take care—I’ll return to this below—not to invest this form of words with too much significance) and begin a course of reflection. A course: it could take several, and will be influenced, more or less, by its initial conditions. Occasions and suggestive influence happeneth to all, including the path reflection takes.
Of the views Lawlor surveys initially, Taylor’s seems most compatible with this alternative, since emotions and desires are bound up with our own interpretive efforts: “our understanding of them or the interpretations we accept are constitutive of the emotion” (in “The concept of a person”, quoted by Lawlor on 51; my emphasis). (The emphasized “accept” finds echoes in Lawlor’s talk, not explicitly motivated, of a self-attribution “sticking”.) And it seems best able to handle the phenomena Katherine captures in her deliberative journey, as she’s confronted by inarticulate urges, somewhat more articulate fantasizing, scrutinizing and testing out of various options in part by articulating them, and measuring possibilities against each other. For that simply is a description of hermeneusis.
Suppose one attends a play, and, afterwards, says something like: “I’m not sure what I think of that”. Perhaps there’s some specific sticking point: an important part of the action seemed out of character or out of keeping with the rest, or the manneredness of the style was obtrusive, or something like that. We speak of unconscious beliefs as well as unconscious desires, but in this case, but while we might be inclined to think, about matters of major significance, that we do have real desires already, and must discover them, here I take it that there is less of a presumption that the one already has an opinion, and merely doesn’t know what that opinion is. “I’m not sure what I think of that”: I have a confused mass of competing reactions, and I’m not sure what to make of them—it is simply an inner-directed version of “I’m not sure what to think of that”, which might be glossed as: it is a confusing mass of competing elements, and I’m not sure what to make of them. Not: among my confused reactions is one that isn’t confused, which I mean now to recover.
In thinking these things through, attempting to arrive at an assessment with which one is satisfied (an assessment that sticks!), one will formulate tentative opinions and see how they hang with other, more secure judgments, will “try on” different takes on the matter (not so different from imaginatively inhabiting the consequences of one decision or another, imaginatively made in light of desires one might be trying on). Perhaps the acting is mannered for this reason—does that satisfy? What would that mean for other things that seem to be going on in the play? For one’s judgment of the play? Is it a tendentious reading? (Is one inclined to it anyway?) This process is certainly richly cognitive, and will involve “means that are routinely epistemic”, including inference (if this thing’s role is x, doesn’t that conflict with what just supposed that thing might be doing?). But that does not mean that at its conclusion, when one says, say, “you know, I think it just doesn’t work, on its own terms”, or “now that I see it like this, I like it much better”, one has inferred to that conclusion. A hermeneutic view has the added advantage that interpretation is not unconstrained: even if one does not believe that meanings inhere in the interpretanda and are discovered by the interpreters, the interpretations ought to make satisfying sense of the interpreted material, are captive to it to some extent. (This is true even when the question one attempts to answer isn’t “what does this mean?” but the more superficially subjective “what do I make of this, how do I feel about it?”. One may throw up one’s hands and say “well, I just do/don’t like it, full stop”, but that is less satisfying than a reaction that articulates why.)
Many of the specific things that Lawlor describes Katherine doing or undergoing fit this interpretive mold: “Now that the question has been called he catches herself imagining, remembering, and feeling a range of things” (57): but these things don’t have to piont to an already existing desire, fully fledged; Katherine can coherently ask herself not “what, in the light of all this, do I (already) want?”, but “what am I to make of this?” She does not yet make anything of it, but notices, now, these internal promptings; supposing she does not put them from her mind, she will likely attempt to come to some conclusion about them. Or she may not! Lawlor introduces one point with the condition that “if Katherine’s provisional self-ascription doesn’t settle the question, but she still feels there is an answer to the question that has been called” (58, my emphasis); she may not feel there is an answer, or may not feel the question needs answering, may not feel the range of things she felt as strongly or frequently, or may dismiss them when they come up as idle daydreams. But as long as the question is live for her, then we can accommodate Lawlor’s suggestion that there’s some pressure for her to come to some kind of conclusion, without giving in to the idea that what she’s doing is discovering something already there.
We can perhaps illustrate this by looking at a less vexatious, less freighty case, which will also allow us to examine the significance of this wide range of possible behaviors. Supposing Katherine finds herself simply uninterested in pursuing the question further, or feels there’s no answer: is the worm still at work? If the desire pre-existed the question’s being called, it can post-exist it too.
So consider not the question “do I want another child?”, but the question “do I want to buy these shoes?”, which Lawlor also mentions. This question is interesting to me because—unlike the question regarding a second child—it takes some work before I can see how the question could sincerely be intended as reflecting ignorance regarding the questioner’s desires. (Lawlor calls the child question “a difficult case”, but as far as motivating her thesis, I think it’s actually an easy case. It’s not insignificant that people concerned to establish the existence of unknown or unconscious desires occupy themselves with the portentous.) Does it mean something like “I’m unsure how much I like these shoes (their style isn’t quite mine; or, they’re appealing now but would I really wear them; or, I like the look but not the fit; or, I like the look but not the construction; or etc.)”? In such a case one asking the question seems apt to be saying: “I like the look, but they seem not to be made well (to take a specific example), but I still want them, so I’m not sure if I should buy them”. Or it could simply be: “I want to have them, but they’re expensive and I haven’t the money, so I don’t want to buy them precisely, but that doesn’t rid me of my possessive desire, so ”. One wishes to say: you know what you want, you just can’t have what you want, so you don’t know what to do. Or: you don’t know what, of the things you can have, you might (come to) want, or be happy or satisfied with, and any of them would involve settling for something other than what you (actually) want right now, hence would involve at least imagined disappointment. But simply to be ignorant of whether you possess the desire to buy (or perhaps more straightforwardly to own, since the desire to buy is somewhat rarefied) a pair of shoes—perhaps we need a scenario like this: the shoes in question are really rather remarkable, out of line from what one ordinarily wears, such that it’s hard to imagine oneself actually wearing them, but one catches oneself imagining them or thinking about them often. The whole scenario is becomes more coherent, to me anyway, if one associates the new-style footgear with a broader style of living, a self-conception, that one has hitherto rejected or at least considered foreign. But then the question has become about something more than whether one desires certain furnishings for one’s feet; the shoes are proxy for wonderment about the kind of person one takes oneself to be. That might seem fodder for the position that the desire pre-exists its recognition as such (we supposedly have here an unacknowledged or suppressed desire that can’t be recognized until a broader shift in worldview is carried out), but the persistency of one’s thoughts about this particular stimulus-to-revaluation could also be explained by, for instance, new susceptibility to revaluation in general. But now we really are getting away from what was supposed to be a relatively simple question.
Suppose one doesn’t buy the shoes. Something else catches one’s attention instead, or one just stops thinking about them. One might well have chosen wrongly, in not making the purchase, in that one actually did have a desire to have them—then the desire will not have been satisfied, with apparently no effect on the satisfaction of the agent. Imagine that the question is actually between shoes A and B, and you buy A, but wanted B (without knowing it), but are perfectly happy with A. Then you are both content with what you want, and want a different pair. Of course one could construe the situation as one in which you settle for A, and your desire for B evaporates accordingly. But that sort of settling seems better suited to a situation in which you know of the desire and consciously decide to go for something else, for some reason, in the first place; in the second, there’s no reason to think that must be what’s happened. Why should the unknown desire for B go away, just because you’re content with what you got?—I’m saying “content” here because I want to suggest that as far as you know you no longer have any relevant desires. You’re both satisfied (as far as you know) and unsatisfied. It’s an odd case.
I want to look at some of the specific steps of Katherine’s reasoning, along with the frequent recurrence to the idea of a self-attribution “sticking”. So: Katherine has been startled by the thought of having another child, and “Starts noticing her experiences and thoughts imaginaing, remembering, and feeling a range of things. Putting away her son’s now-too-small clothes, she finds herself lingering over the memory of how a newborn feels in one’s arms.” (57). She begins entertaining these things deliberately, sounding herself:

Some of Katherine’s active self-questioning and prompting permits her to discover further imaginings. For instance, she may notice that her imaginings are all about having a child just like the one she’s already got. On noticing this, she might find herself with the fantasy of freezing him in time, and hanging on to his childhood. These images will suggest a different desire—it’s not really a second child she wants, but this one all over again. So she’ll say, “what I really want is to have him all over again”. (58) </blockquote>
Why is she saying this? (She might also have said: what I really want is to freeze him in time.) She’s trying the thought on, maybe, doing that whole does-it-stick thing. But this seems to me like a creative interpretation. Her initial prompting was just the sudden thought of a second child impinging on her while observing her first and only—she’s bringing a lot of richness to this process beyond what was, as we might say, given in the initial interpretandum. It sounds more as if she’s pointing herself in a particular direction here, trying to conceptualize what’s happening in a particular way. She has a lot of freedom in this conceptualizing process, and she’s using it.
The use of imagination here strikes me as creative and, if informative, counterfactually so, but Lawlor as informative of the current state of affairs:

Katherine’s imaginings may be rehearsed, both actively and possively: she may passively experience repetitions of imagined scenes, but she may also actively rehearse them, noting details and seeking to direct their content. she may, even when not directly experiencing them, recall their flavor and content. For instance, she imagines a newboarn, imagines its cries, and waking in the night for feeding. These imaginings she finds pleasing to linger over. she recalls the experience of imagining these things, and notes how she felt in rehearsing them. (58) </blockquote>
Katherine is in a somewhat advantageous position because her imaginings here can recruit rememberings. But it’s surely worth pointing out, regardless, that the fact that one finds an imagined scene pleasing to linger over is not only no reason to think that one would find the reality pleasing to experience, it’s perfectly compatible with believing that the reality would be displeasing. This could just mean that one wants something that, for various reasons, is associated with things one doesn’t want (as one might imagine the view from atop some peak with pleasure, but not particularly want to undertake the hike that would permit one to take it in) but could also simply witness the fact that not everything one likes to think about is something one would like to do. So there’s something a little odd about taking pleasant imaginings of φing as a sign of a presently existing desire to φ. Still, we need not insist on infallibility here; imaginings can be imperfect and still provide guidance and clues.
But we should wonder whether the question we’re getting guidance on is “do I actually want this right now, unbeknownst to me?” or “how would I feel if I were doing this?”. The answer to the latter question will likely feed back into our present desires: if I imagine the mountaintop breeze and the landscape arrayed before me with rapture, I might decide it’s worth the trudge. Unsurprisingly, I think the relevant question is the latter, that asking “what do I really want here?” isn’t concerned with what’s on the list of my present desires, but is more like the open-ended question “what would make me happy?”. I imagine myself thus, or thus: is that a pleasant way to be?
The work of imagination has another dimension as well, one that I think corresponds to Lawlor’s references to “sticking”. E.g., “She’ll say to herself, ‘I think I want another’, and see if it sticks—does she resist the self-attribution or not?” (57); “In the best case, after making a self-ascription, Katherine will experience a sense of ease” (59); and the related “living with a provisional self-ascription for a time is another means we have of finding out what we want” (59); and the issue of reconciliation embodied in the contrast between those for whom “the first self-ascription they make is the one they try to live in accord with” (58–9) and those who “never feel certain, in light of possible alternative self-ascriptions, in calling an impulse a desire of theirs” (59); later we have reference to “certain characteristic changes in one’s imagings [which] count as one’s having ‘settled the question’ (62). Imagination is a proxy for the attempt to live with a course of action, and that’s something we do not simply to answer the question “what are my present desires” but to reconcile ourselves to one of several possibilities.
“After one makes a provisional self-ascription, one may try the attitude on, both in imagination and in action” (59); why? It tells one, or is intended to tell one, that one can live with that course of action, and is in part a work of reconciliation, where what one is reconciling oneself to is not pursuing the other options. The result of this process (if it’s purely imaginative) is, I take it, not knowledge of the desire one already had to φ, but a newly had desire to φ: I can see myself doing this, it is pleasant, I do not mind not doing not-φ: I’ll φ.
(Here’s a parallel case. David Hills once, in a handout that I probably still have in hard copy but not, alas, in electronic, and thus not available to me as I now write, suggested that we class some utterances—which one might think of as bullshit-adjacent, it now seems to me—not as performative or informative or passionate (per Cavell) but oracular, and gave as an example the utterances about home from Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man”:

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ </blockquote>
“Oracular” because it comes as it were from the god through the speaker, as he speaks, then perhaps to be assessed: is this what I think “home” is? Try it on, see how it fits, even though it came from you. One way of taking this kind of articulation is to think that one already has, inwardly, an articulate but obscured belief about home, and the utterance externalizes it somewhat and allows one to test various formulations against oneself, probing around what one cannot discern in oneself, discerning its outlines. Another is that Bigfoot is blurry, one has only an obscure, inarticulate understanding, but saying something lets one think about it more and more clearly—because one ends up saying something relatively clear, not blurry—and orient oneself in thought, as when one has a dim idea about how to proceed with a math problem and starts writing things down to see if doing so spurs one on. It’s an occasion for thinking, not the result of hidden thoughts.)
I think this is far truer to Lawlor’s own descriptions of Katherine’s reasoning, and the caveats about different psychological types she makes, than Lawlor’s conclusion, which is that having found ourselves at home in a particular imaginative route, we draw the inference that the reason we were at home is that we already wanted to take that route. For one thing, the official goal of all this rigmarole, the inference, results in knowledge in a very wan way. It’s a falling-back from a richer state one already occupied, one that is important for talking of full-bodied knowledge of desire.
Causal inference would result in knowledge no better or richer than that had by trusting a friend or professional who gave one to believe that one’s desire was to φ. That would put one in the position to self-attribute that knowledge, but not, to use the going jargon, to avow it. The mere inference, like the report, doesn’t do any reconciling work, for instance; need bring with it no sense of ease; need not “stick”. But for all that one can call it knowledge—can’t one? If knowledge of desire can be had in either of these ways, why not in the other? One may not trust one’s own causal inference without this richer structure built up around it, but perhaps one finds one’s analyst trustworthy from the get-go. And isn’t what one does in the talking cure a lot like what Katherine’s doing by herself? The analyst infers similarly to her. Admittedly the analyst, in attributing a desire to Katherine, doesn’t do something similar to what we do in self-attributing desires in the paradigm cases, but it seems very much as if Katherine, in attributing a desire to herself on the basis of an inference, also isn’t doing that.
I think the “sticking”, the “characteristic changes”, all that, is supposed to make it seem as if there’s something more to the account than an ascription only adventitiously to oneself, one of the same kind that another could have made. (It’s a oneself-as-another–ascription, to recycle a “joke” from facebook.) And there is something more happening, it’s just mischaracterized.
Why should “characteristic changes” in one’s mental life “count as one’s having ‘settled the question’’? It’s telling that the changes don’t count as a sign that one is on the right track; telling too that the contrast with those who try to live in accord with their first guess are those who “never feel certain in calling an impulse a desire of theirs”. One reason would be: those characteristic changes mark the onset of the desire, and one experiences a “sense of ease” not because one has identified a desire but because one feels a desire, whereas before one had been casting about. If a tentative conclusion fails to “stick”, that, I take it, is because one actually does not feel the desire one has attributed to oneself. (What else would “sticking” be? Why else would “sticking” matter? That isn’t a normal feature of inferences.)
I see no reason to think the desire one then feels is one that one had had all along, now properly surfaced—though even if it were, it still wouldn’t be the case that one had found out about it through inference, rather than imaginatively working through the effects of its promptings. After one has come to feel the desire, the inference is otiose.

If for instance in thinking about what to eat I find that I desire something grossly unhealthy, and think that I should not want such things. The latter thought, though, is a complicated one, and could mean that I want (more or less earnestly) to be the sort of person who not want such things.↩</a> </li> </ol></div>

A few more double dactyls

2015-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

The stream of versification has dried up somewhat, partly because of less, you know, inspiration, and partly because the plum-related stuff is now elsewhere</a>. But:
Higgledy piggledy
Terence the austringer
Got himself tied into
All sorts of knots,

Wand'ring the heather with
Nothing about but an
Ataviscistical
Hawk and his thoughts.
And: Higgledy Piggledy
Villainous henchmen must
Give up their lives in the
Service of crime;

Battling sidekicks, these
Deuterantagonists
Go on without any
Personal time. 

Innocence & experience

2015-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

A small thought about the paper that was also the subject of my previous post (and, don't you worry, is intended to be the subject of my subsequent post, at impractical length). Lawlor places a great deal of weight in §3 on what it feels like to a person attempting to figure out (as that person would put it) what they want; in particular, on the fact that it feels like they're figuring out what they want, i.e., what they in fact presently do desire though they don't know it. It seems to me that this use of how-it-feels presumes on its being both remarkably innocent and remarkably sophisticated.
Innocent the way Gombrich denied that there was an "innocent eye": that "the way it feels" is simply given, not colored by how, for instance, the general vocabulary for talking about desire might lead us to conceptualize our experience. "I don't know which one I want" when said of two dishes at a restaurant, for instance, doesn't suggest to me that there is one I want and I don't know which one that is (just as "I want a wife" doesn't suggest that there is a specific wife whom I want), but that's the form of phrase we have for talking about our desires or lack thereof. If one has a set of recurrent imaginings, feelings, etc. regarding a second child and is brought to reflect on them, "I don't know whether I want a second child" is how one is apt to put it; isn't that apt to influence whether or not one conceives of the recurrent whatevers as signs of an unknown desire, rather than something else?
Sophistication is the flip-side of innocence: if the way it feels isn't simply given, then we're sufficiently discerning to tell that this is the way having an unknown desire feels, and it's also not the way anything else feels. Recall the (apocryphal? from my perspective, anyway) anecdote about Wittgenstein, which I have from either Ted Cohen or David Hills, who, hearing someone explain that we shouldn't fault people for having thought the sun goes around the earth because "that is how it looks, after all", asked how it would look if the earth went around the sun (perhaps adding "while revolving", I don't know). Well, it would look the way it does look, one hopes, since, one believes, that's what it does do. How would you feel if you didn't have a desire unknown to you, but rather [competing explanation]? Maybe the same!

Evolutionary explanation, mimics, and the doctrine of double effect

2015-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Quite a title for what will actually be a slim post! Here's the sitch—we're trying to answer the question why certain "imagings" of images or sentences hold our attention and are experienced as contentful, telling us things, when "this is an illusion", because "images are not missives sent from oneself to oneself".
Here is a possible answer. Suppose that one's mind includes many system,s attentional, computational (comprised of many task specific computational modules), memorial, affective, visual, auditory, speech-producing and consuming, and so on. One also has self-monitoring systems, built to register bodily states and needs … The information stored and processed continually by all these systems is quite enormous; but attention is limited, as are resources … In this competition for agential, person-level, resources, it gives an attitude, a need, or an emotion a decided edge if it can cause representations that have a powerful pull on the attention. The attention is commanded by representations with auditory and visual aspects, and held by information that tells a coherent story. So if a desire can cause an image or images that catch and hold the attention, relevant systems of intention-formation may more readily engage in ways favorable from the perspective of the desire. … No agency needs to design the image so that it speaks just so about the desire. It is enough that having such effects in creature [sic] like us is a way for desires to get their way with us.</blockquote>
All this is from p 64 of Krista Lawlor's "Knowing What One Wants" and it is, seh allows, "entirely speculative". But if this is the account she's going to go with, it seems to open up some territory that ought to be acknowledged and addressed. (Does one address territory?) The account is evolutionary in spirit, I take it, in that desires need not to be conceived of as having designs or being capable of fashioning actual messages to us, it's just that the desires that happen to cause representations that are as-if-of the things the desires themselves are concerned with fare better in actually being acted on than other desires do, so … something something evolutionary pressure, I suppose; there seems to be a missing element to the story, given that there isn't a notion of reproduction at play that would explain why desires would come more often to tend to cause imagings that catch and hold the attention and that correspond in some systematic way to what the desires are of. Given a soup of desires, one that tended to catch and hold the attention might meet with greater success than the others, in that intentions and actions would be formed and performed that led to the desire's being fulfilled. But that doesn't mean that it will transmit that same tendency to its successor desires, whatever that notion might mean. Whatever, though; let us wave our hands over that question in the manner prescribed by ritual and custom. Here's a more interesting issue.</p
We know from the evolution of creatures that some of them are both poisonous and brightly colored, the coloration serving to warn predators of the poison. (Handy at the individual level, one must admit.) And one knows also that some other creatures have (as it were, not by design, etc.) cottoned on to the utility of bright coloration and taken the shortcut of just being brightly colored, and omitted to actually be poisonous—so much work! The coloration gives you most of the benefit of being both brightly colored and poisonous at a fraction of the cost. Couldn't something similar happen with desires, on this sort of account? The benefit that accrues to a desire that p of catching and holding the attention and intention is the benefit of my actually bringing it about that p, fulfilling the desire; this, however, will be a benefit to any desire that would be fulfilled by my doing whatever it is I'll do to bring it about that p, i.e., not only by desires actually about p. Suppose I harbor the perverse desire to degrade the soles of my shoes; couldn't it catch and hold my attention by causing representations as if of the pleasantness of going for long walks? Going on the walks will also affect my shoes, and such a representation might actually be more reliable, from the perspective of this desire, than a representation of the pleasures of down-at-the-heels shoes, which would be apt primarily to puzzle me. The desire that q, which I find distasteful, might clothe itself in representations of p, which I find more reasonable. Of course this as-it-were strategy is not without its risks, since I might hit on a way of bringing it about that p that doesn't bring q about too, but it might on the whole be as it were worth it to the desire that q, depending. So there seems to be a question, on this account, that faces any would-be agent inferring from representations to the desires that supposedly caused them: were these representations of doing this caused by a desire with the selfsame content (is that what I desire)? Or were they caused by a more vulpine desire, which comes to me with ovine representations? How could one tell? One might think that Lawlor is actually acknowledging this possibility, albeit not drawing attention to it, when she writes that "typically causing the right kind of images gets the desire a better chance of being fulfilled." One will likely assume, on first reading, that "the right kind of images" means the kind of images that will be interpreted to have the same content the desire has. But if the point of these images is to catch and hold the attention and thereby make more likely the undertaking of actions that will get the desire fulfilled, the right kind could well be quite other.
And for Lawlor, I think, the question is, suppose that the representations as if of doing p were actually caused by a desire that q, but the agent doesn't know this, and self-ascribes a desire that p. The agent might even then (mightn't she? if not, why not?) experience the "characteristic changes" (p 62) in her imagings that show the question to be settled; she experiences a "sense of ease" (p 59), the attribution "sticks" (p 57). What should we conclude about her? That despite the actual cause of the representations, her inference that she desires that p is correct? I'd be inclined in that direction, but I'm unmoved by Lawlor's position and paper overall anyway. If we do say that, then how do we justify it? If, on the other hand, we prefer to say that she's just mistaken, and really doesn't desire that p, only that q, then what are we to make of her ease, the attribution's stickiness, etc.? (Maybe we're to deny that in this case it could really happen that way.) The (limited, piecemeal) discussion of the attribution's sticking, once made, and the "characteristic changes" and whatnot after the reflection and inferring, seems to me to be a weak point in the account, one that serves as a bactrio-nasal inlet. This question doesn't actually, I suppose, require the possibility of the kind of mimicry described above (though I do think that's worth addressing)—the agent could just misinterpret the representations the desire that q caused along p-lines and find herself at ease with that interpretation. (Right? Or, again, if not, why not?) Maybe "misinterpretation" isn't really the right term, since by hypothesis these representations (and even "representations" isn't the right term, for the same reason) aren't messages or any kind of interpretandum in the first place—but the imaging characteristically caused by a q-desire can't guarantee its being taken qishly.
A bit later Lawlor writes that "whether or not one's desire actually causes one's imagings and other internal promptings is a separate question. The point I note here is that our inference is structured in such a way as to suppose that desires cause imagings and other internal promptings" (p 65). But how could this be a separate question? It seems rather central to me; if we're engaging in some kind of causal inference from an internal prompting to the existence of a desire that caused it, then the soundness of the inference seems to depend quite a bit on the desire's actually having caused the prompting. If the inferential pattern merely supposes that there are such causal relations, then, on the one hand, something that I take it is necessary to separate Lawlor's position from one like Taylor's, namely that the desire in question definitely already exists and is therefore decidedly not constituted by the interpretive activity of the agent is free to go by the wayside. (Lawlor wants to distinguish the inferential account from a constitutive account, and also describes the cognitive element of the inferential account. But someone who says, as Lawlor summarizes Taylor, that "knowing what one wants owes to the fact that self-interpretation … puts in place the very facts known" (p 51), will of course allow that there's cognitive activity associated with knowing what one wants. Hermeneusis doesn't come for free. The claim to deny is that the thing known preëxists the knowledge thereof.) One is free, in particular, to claim that the causal supposition is a dispensable manner of speaking, that what one essentially has is, say, a sandy mental irritant around which reflection and interpretation build up a pearly desire, which was not the cause of the irritation but the product of the interpretation. ("What's this grain of sand then" is of course a good question. But I think on the whole there are lots of advantages to thinking this way, among them that it can capture the path-dependence of reflection and satisfaction with its results in a way that taking the desire as independently constituted can't obviously do.) And even if we don't go that far, then, on the other hand, this pattern of inference does not seem like a very reliable way to go about getting self-knowledge—if our desires don't cause the internal promptings, then the inference is just structured wrong.
Comments</h1> on 2015-02-25 1:15:20.0, Guy Lionel Slingsby commented:</h3>
I really like this -- especially the parts about path-dependency and (also) the pearl metaphor. I assume that at some point she talks about Freud? Because that is what she's talking about, isn't it? Does she mention Fingarette?
From your quotation it sounds like the evolutionary idea is meme plus pheno-type. At some point her way of thinking, or your account of animal mimicry, would have to hit the rdf of costly signaling. That is: if all frogs are blue, blue no longer works to protect them. So being blue has to be something that most frogs can't afford to be: there is a pretty low limit on how many non-poisonous frogs the blues can save. The camel may get through the -- nose? -- of the needle, but without much headroom for a free rider. (That tends to mean that blue us a hard color to produce without poison, so that if you're blue you're likely to be poisonous. Certainly true of... pink flamingoes.)
Same I imagine with her view of the meme's relation to its purpose: the purpose has to be pretty helpful and the meme pretty consonant with it for the purposer's way of purposing to survive down the generations. And then there's the question of the interpretation that others put on her expressions of desire, etc.
Just maundering out-loud here. I always hate feeling Taylor is right about something. But that's just me.
The doctrine of double effect as put to mention here wouldn't be hers, right? But more yours or Taylor's?
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and, further, on 2015-02-25 19:25:12.0, ben w commented:</h3>
Oh hey I was pleased by the pearl metaphor as well; thanks.
No Freud in the paper—she actually specifically disavows unconscious desires as part of her topic, which doesn't really make much sense to me—nor Fingarette, though the self-deception book sounds interesting.
I'm not sure that there needs to be any sort of costliness here; I mean, not all desires can cause pleasant representations of going for a walk, but why would they all? And if the perverse shoe-abrading desire does, and maybe a few other perverse desires do, why must that be costly? Because otherwise I'll go on too many walks? (I guess because: otherwise I'll become inured to the desire. But I dunno, the whole mechanism here seems underspecified. NB I'm the one to talk about evolutionary dynamics here; they're absent from the paper. I just want to understand why desires would (only) cause images/thoughts that align with their content.)
No double-effect in the paper (or Taylor, or that part of Taylor, anyway); just being gestured at here as possibly of interest.
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Judo flip!

2015-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Having learned of its existence I'm not sure how long ago, I am now at last reading The Golden Gate (whose author's name, as I have recently learned, rhymes with its title, and not with the name of the third biblical son); finding myself not quite sure what to make of it, I have done as I normally do in such situations, and tried to read the opinions of the more penetrating and informed: for instance, it boasts a blurb by the much-admired-by-me John Hollander, creator of the lines "O Bug bug bug bug bug that did require / The quietest devotions of our doubt"</a> and the creator of the quite literally magisterial Rhyme's Reason, and no doubt many more serious verses as well. The review from which the blurb came is not available online, it seems, but many records of Hollander's and Marjorie Perloff's strong disagreement regarding the novel are; for instance, in this interesting paper</a> about the receptions of The Golden Gate and Lyn Hejinian's Oxota (of which I had never heard before).
I was particularly interested in reading Hollander's take because he, I reasoned, clearly knows his formal verse, and apparently thought Seth's to be "expertly controlled", while I have been finding several cases of (to my mind) prosodic gracelessness; spondees choking up a line, say, or weird rhythms or weird enjambment being forced on a sentence, all in ways that call attention to the lines and their strictures—no Frost-like facility here. (Of course, it took me three chapters to finally notice that Seth's sonnets are in Onegin-like tetrameters, not classical pentameters, and didn't actually notice, but had to be informed, that they also hew to a strict scheme of masculine and feminine rhymes.* So my judgments regarding meter and such may not be worth much.) It seems likely, judging from the above-linked article, that both Hollander's and Perloff's review were made in a context of poetic strife of which I am largely ignorant, so perhaps both the former's enthusiasm and the latter's disdain are overstated. I've found more of Perloff's review online than Hollander's and at least one of her assertions—that nothing John says or does suggests that he's even heard of the Venerable Bede—is hard to reconcile with what else he's described as reading not much later in the book. And this bit of criticism seems perhaps overstated:
In its preference for signification over representation, Hejinian’s poetics [in her vaguely Onegin-inspired long poem Oxota] is antithetical to Seth’s in that, like John Ashbery, with whom Perloff contrasts Seth (“Homeward Ho” 44–45), Hejinian refuses the illusion of representation of reality, while accepting and exploiting the multiple possibilities for signification and reference in language. For Perloff, Seth’s work fails because the formal sound and visual devices of the Pushkin stanza are divorced from the representation, or indeed stifle it, so that the signifying possibilities of “language charged with meaning,” as Ezra Pound put it, are not exploited (28).</blockquote>
Is that the reason Seth's work fails, if it fails? Perloff pays it the backhanded compliment of saying that at least it sends us back to Byron and Pushkin, implying that their work does not fail. But it seems unlikely that the static and extremely restrictive Onegin stanza is married to the various situations described in Eugene Onegin (though I admit I haven't read it), suggesting that the reason Perloff cites can't really be right, as it would prove too much. So that's puzzling. The charge, though, that Seth not only is doing something he shouldn't be attempting but isn't even doing it well, does leave her open to this clever rejoinder, to the effect that he isn't doing that at all and he is doing what he's actually doing just fine:
Perloff singles out the unrealistic elements of Seth’s work apparently caused by the need to keep to Pushkin’s stanzaic form (“Homeward Ho” 39–42). It is also possible, however, to read the interference created by rhyme and rhythm as pointing toward the false claims to easy mimesis made not only by the apparently straightforward narrative of Seth’s novel but also by the nostalgic certainties that Perloff identifies in 1980s U.S. literary criticism and the culture at large (“Homeward Ho” 43–44). Indeed, a reading of the novel through its infelicities and failures might underscore the aporia at the novel’s heart. For all the shifts in love and bridging gestures of the novel, the nuclear threat remains, and the rule of law and strictures of verse triumph over “morality” and “direct” expression.</blockquote>
Zing! Perloff gulled by exoteric reading! On this take the apparent metrical solecisms, etc., are proper and necessary, drawing attention to the fact that something rules the text that's unconcerned with the niceties of narrative and the fates of Liz and John and Jan and Phil; they take us out of the simple pleasures of reading about the characters (and the simple characters of verse, for that matter) to remind us of the inhuman structuring rules, and thereby that we aren't getting a representation of reality. It would be nice if more were done to connect the formal aspect of this reading to the thematic claim about law (apter, one suspects, to speak of realpolitik or something like that) and morality, and for that matter it would be nice if the claim weren't tossed off in the final paragraph of the paper, since it's important for the paper's success that the reading be made to stick, or at least to appear plausible (and one might as well acknowledge that looking to the real-life Seth may not provide a lot of support for it). For instance: more could be made of the fact that the "I" of the narrative is ok with metafictional games (nowadays we have to call it something like that, even if in former days the author might more innocently or more serious have addressed his or her readers), interrupting the narrative in the middle of chapter four with an entirely unconvincing and unnecessary explanation for his failure to depict Ed and Phil having sex (had he just skipped straight to the following scene, the missing depiction would have been missed less), and beginning chapter five with five stanzas describing and defending the novel's genesis and form, in a way that more or less asserts the primacy of the form over the incidents it's used to relate. (Bonus: scan the line "Why, asks a friend, attempt tetrameter?". The extra two syllables are surely intentional, given the easy availability of the line "A friend asks, why tetrameter?".)
Instead of further substantiating that take on The Golden Gate, Edmonds makes a similar claim (in the opposite direction) about Oxota:
At the same time, while “representation” is rejected at one level in Oxota, at another level the novel aims to represent the experience of Hejinian in Leningrad, an experience ironically intertwined with the rejection of direct representation through the poetics of estrangement.</blockquote>
This is perhaps actually a rather obvious point (and one that could be bolstered by noting that Hejinian's poem is closer to being self-expressive, as well, and to represent something real, being autobiographical) and one might well think that a claim Hejinian makes about her poetics in a passage Edmonds quotes is more or less cheating: "I am free to signify place though not to represent it" strikes me as saying something like "I am free to represent place though not in the way you'd expect (unless you know my work in which case you might well expect precisely this)". Perloff's response to a further statement of poetic method Hejinian makes, too, seems rather overblown: "Once writing is no longer regarded as the vehicle that conveys an already present speech, every word, indeed every morpheme can be seen to carry meaning, to enter relationships with its neighbors". We surely didn't need langpo or its kin to be able to say this, did we? It seems to be the condition of poetry generally, not to mention of the lowest form of pun, the Tom Swifty. (For all the antiromantic rhetoric of the langpo crowd, and of some manifestos of which Hejinian is a signatory, that claim would be reasonably at home in the Athenaeum or slipped into Novalis's Monologue</a>.) It's not even clear why writing has to be divorced from speech for this to be the case, as if one could never craft an utterance. (One couldn't play tricks with lineation or enjambment in speech, but speech has its own modes that writing doesn't.) I am confessedly unsure what to make of Perloff's various claims anyway (not having access to all the relevant texts is doing me no favors, I'm sure); I know she likes Ron Silliman's work, for instance, and that fondness seems undamaged by her acknowledgement that "Albany" exhibits "a razor-sharp realism of description</a>". Nor, as far as I know, has she turned her back on Hejinian, one of whose who claimed that "The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing", after her discovery (it took her until 1998, apparently—she shoulda asked me</a>) "that we can easily tell</a> a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O'Sullivan 'verbovisivocal' text from one by Susan Howe" (and presumably all of these from one by Lyn Hejinian). Not that someone who denied that poetry was the Authentic Immediate Expression of a Self would have to believe that his or her verse would be indistinguishable from someone else who issued a like denial—obviously—but she is putting this forward as something to be noted. (This line of inquiry, which seems to be preoccupied with the lyrical, is of course at right angles to anything involving the Seth, for which, as a third-person narrative verse, the appearance of an "I" at all is an intrusion. But perhaps it serves as a reminder to be careful about the programs of the programmatic, and not to oversell them.)
*I seem to be unable to retain the preferred terms.
Comments</h1>
on 2015-06-12 15:46:12.0, octopus commented:</h3>
You've slightly misread the line "Why, asks a friend, attempt tetrameter?" The stanza demands a feminine (polysyllabic) rhyme, and Seth (perhaps unadvisably) consistently treats three-syllable dactylic rhymes as feminine, which adds an extra unstressed syllable at the end. If he limited himself to two-syllable rhymes, the line would naturally be nine syllables ("Why, asks a friend, attempt the samba?"). Still, you might be right that Seth is pushing the meter closer to pentameter than it needs to be, just for irony's sake -- I hadn't thought of that.
Good blog, by the way.
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Phonological tricks

2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

In My Life in CIA, a pale sexton, who's avoided the sun to heighten his whiteness since the accidental death of his black ("like Siberian anthracite") lover, says of his new habit of remaining indoors and seeing after the church that employs him that he occupies himself "minding [his] keys and pews". We readers know that he says so as a witticism and not ingenuously because as he does he "smile[s] faintly". Nicely done, church-bleached sexton, and Mathews as well, we readers think, until, perhaps merely pretending not to understand the conventions of fiction, we recall that this book takes place mostly in Paris and the characters are, presumably, speaking French to each other. (The fact that some actual French words are occasionally interjected—on the order of "merde" and "adieu"—doesn't matter; those are just bits of color, clumsily left un-Englished to remind the reader of the setting.) So: what did the sexton really say, to bring the faint smile forth? Did it have the same subject matter? Was it also a pun? How impressed with Mathews' rendition should we be? I say "perhaps merely pretending" because it seems to me that there should be something French that the sexton could have said, more or less equally clever and meaning something more or less similar, if we're to attend not merely to the meaning of his words but to the words qua words, and their sounds etc., themselves, and that Mathews is getting off easy, doing something cheap, if he hasn't got an answer to the question. And partly, too, because Mathews seems like the kind of author who would have an answer to that question.
At this point you, varied reader, are no doubt thinking that while spooneristic puns do have something to do with sounds, it is not really a "phonological trick", and so the title of this post is a bit inept. That is a good thought. This post is not about My Life in CIA, though it is about a novel by Harry Mathews, and admittedly begins in a way that does not make its actual matter obvious. Consequently I will now reveal that it concerns a bit of the "Lewis and Morris" chapter of his earlier novel Cigarettes, and will even, in the next paragraph, reveal the bit itself. (Scandalous.) In the remainder of this paragraph I'll just give a bit of background—will do so, in fact, starting with the next sentence. Lewis, having read Morris's art criticism, is eager to enter his good graces, and Lewis's sister introduces them; they meet a few times thereafter but their relationship doesn't begin in earnest until Morris sees Lewis's photo in the paper: Lewis, and many others, were arrested when the police raided Lewis's crucifixion. (This is an objective genitive.) They then embark on a sadomasochistic affair in which Morris subjects Lewis to basically monthly humiliations and tortures, with plentiful verbal abuse, while, in between, getting him set up with an apartment and job and coaching him in his writing. (Late in the chapter Morris reveals that he gave several of Lewis's efforts to an editor of Locus Solus, the little magazine that, in real life, Mathews co-edited.)
At their last meeting, Morris has Lewis mix up a bunch of quick-setting cement, covers him in oil, and then makes a living statue out of him (with holes obligingly provided for his eyes, ears, and nose). He then, per usual, chews Lewis out, saying how (oratio obliqua) worthless and repulsive Lewis is, and, from the bottom of page 151 to the top of 152, such things as (oratio recta):
"Even if I don't like reading you the stations, I won't spread jam. So please, Louisa, get it and go. You're a mess, a reject, a patient—I could go on for days. And don't tell me—I have your nose wide open. I'm sorry. Spare me the wet lashes, it's all summer stock. Because the only one you've ever really been strung out on is your own smart self, and you always will be. And for what—to keep catching my rakes in your zits? Forget it, Dorothy. This is goodbye. Remember one thing, though. No matter what I've said to you, no matter how I've turned you out, the truth is"—Morris's eyes become wet; he turns a surprising shade of red—"the truth is, and I'm singing it out: I lo—</blockquote>
Morris's eyes become wet and he turns read not, or at least not necessarily, or not solely, because of the emotion involved in what he does not in the end say, but rather because, or at least in part because, of his weak heart, which has finally just now given out; he dies, leaving Lewis encased in the cement. Lewis manages to break free (by causing himself to totter back and forth) and call for help, bringing further infamy on himself: "Morris", we read on page 254, "might well in these consequences be completing his last aborted sentence, which Lewis had unhesitatingly grasped in its entirety: 'The truth is, I loathe you'."
The first time I read Cigarettes, I took it that Morris had been cut off in saying, finally, "I love you"; Lewis's revelation two pages later came as a shock. Note, though, that each interpretation makes semantic sense. "No matter what I've said to you" could refer to Morris's speeches to Lewis in their assignations, or in his encouragements afterwards. "No matter how I've turned you out" seems apter to involve unsavory slang</a> than a metaphor for grooming, but, eh. At any rate, I was prepared to accept that Lewis's reconstruction was, after all, correct (and it does seem more in keeping with Morris's general M.O.). (So it was a bit surprising to read in this generally good paper</a> the claim "Lewis (mis)interprets Morris’s dying words as “I loathe you,” thus confirming the pain, inadequacy, and self-hatred he so needed Morris to act out on him" (528), since it's far from clear that it's a misinterpretation—even allowing for the fact that Lewis himself is the narrator and not presenting everything with a totally even hand.) But really, isn't this a dirty trick Mathews has pulled? (Or perhaps it's Lewis who's pulled it. Still a dirty trick!) "Love" and "loathe" begin with the same two letters, but if Morris had reached a point in his utterance that it would be natural to transcribe as "lo—" (rather than "l—"), he would have reached the disambiguating vowel—wouldn't he have? The reader is lulled into thinking "love", or perhaps suspects, given the scene, that it's "loathe"—but it wouldn't be so unclear for Lewis, whose ears, recall, are unstopped. The reveal on p 254 doesn't just prompt a reassessment and reconsideration of what one had read before (meaning the matter that had been related before), it prompts a revisitation of the actual text, the letters themselves, that one had read, in a different sense, before: it was "lo", right? But then—
Anyway, it's dissatisfying.

A question about Frankfurt-style cases regarding so-called free will

2014-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Intended, as I understand it, to demonstrate the putative fact that moral responsibility does not require having been able to do otherwise, aren't the cases rather similar to one in which I pose you a dilemma like the following, and claim that you will do the same thing in either case (yet be blameworthy in one and not the other, of course)? "Either you pick up this gun in your hand, point it at so-and-so, and pull the trigger, or I will temporarily incapacitate you, put the gun in your hand, move your arm so that it's pointing at so-and-so, and curl your finger on the trigger so that the gun goes off."

Literary expose of the century!

2014-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

John Barton Wolgamot gave his name to a Society in Michigan, founded, more or less, by Keith Waldrop; he also wrote and published (via vanity presses) the poem that was to provide the text and title of Robert Ashley's composition In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women. The same text was also published earlier under the title In Sara Haardt Were Men and Women, and he had been working, when he died, on a third work, also with the same text, but with a third title, Beacons of Ancestorship, that later became the title of a Tortoise album (who also named a track after the previous work, with "Men" and "Women" transposed). Waldrop reports</a> that Wolgamot sent copies of the first two to Mencken, and that those copies were given to the Enoch Pratt Free Library (a catalog search on their website for "Wolgamot" does not currently give any results). For unknown reasons, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry</a> identifies Wolgamot as a literary historian. Aside from that curiosity, basically everything one can find online about Wolgamot concurs with the information given in the poetry foundation link, a recollection by Waldrop (information substantially reproduced in this interview</a> with Waldrop, though he can't quite keep his story straight). Very little actually goes beyond what's contained there; no Ashley or Tortoise fans, for instance, report having actually gotten their mitts on a copy in some library somewhere, or even having confirmed Waldrop's claim that the book is referred to in any account of Mencken's library. The story, or parts of it, is passed around; it comes up, for instance, in Kyle Gann's book on Ashley.
It seems quite probable to me that there never was a Wolgamot; that the name was made up (the family name, perhaps, derived from Rosmarie Waldrop's mother's maiden name, Wohlgemuth</a>?). Looking just at the poetry foundation link, the story is really just too pat. No further copies are extant—no one remembers Wolgamot's name at the first publisher's, and Waldrop buys the last remaining copy the second publisher has. No one is likely to look through all of Mencken's jottings to find the one that Waldrop refers to (without giving any bibliographical information). Waldrop describes the way Ashley's piece was made (reading one page/sentence in one breath, then the next, editing out the spaces between the readings), and later in the story, when he finally meets Wolgamot and tells him that the poem was set to music, the only things Wolgamot is recorded as having said in response are that "it was hard to imagine reading his book out loud", but that "'it would have to be a sort of'—he hesitated, considered—'well, a breathless reading'"—what a nice confirmation for Ashley! Immediately prior to that we get a hypothesis and confirmation much closer together:
Ashley had done a formal analysis of the book, in an elaborate chart, showing that the book is in four movements-there was no sign of this, no markings-four movements of equal length. I was not entirely convinced. But the first thing Wolgamot said was, “You realize, this is in four movements.” And Ashley immediately brought out his chart, which Wolgamot wouldn’t look at. Just as he had no interest at all in hearing the composition.</blockquote>
Note that in the interview, Wolgamot is reported as having found the reading of his piece so imaginable that he at one point actually contemplated it himself:
Which reminds me: when Wolgamot heard that in Bob's composition the text was actually spoken, he said that at one time he had thought of reading it out loud. "But then I decided against it," he said. "I suppose that—if you did read it—it would have to be a kind of, well, breathless reading."</blockquote>
How odd!
Early on, Waldrop writes that he "claimed that the work was a funeral piece for Sara Powell Haardt, intimating, however, that while Sara was Mencken’s on earth, she was Wolgamot’s in eternity"; in the paragraph before, Waldrop mentions a phone call between Mencken and Waldrop. Then, during the meeting between Waldrop and Wolgamot:
I asked him if he had ever met Mencken. He said he hadn’t but, “I talked to him on the phone once.” I said I supposed, then, he had never met Sara Powell Haardt, and I could see Ashley was remembering my silly theory. And Wolgamot said, “No, I never met Sara Powell Haardt. I used her name, because her last name’s Haardt and my middle name’s Bart.” But he went on, “Of course, in the book, I represent myself as having an illicit relation with her. In a book like this, there has to be some love interest.”</blockquote>
The encounter with Wolgamot reveals no information not already stated or speculated about earlier (sometimes immediately earlier); speculations, moreover, are always confirmed, never disconfirmed, so that Ashley and Waldrop's powers of analysis and perception are emphasized. And since their theories about the structure of the bizarre text are confirmed by the text's eccentric author to be correct, we are encouraged to believe that the structure really is there—as we might not so easily or successfully be encouraged if Waldrop's liner notes just asserted of a text attribute to Ashley or himself that it was in four parts and perfectly suited for a "breathless" reading (not just Ashley's eccentric choice but the result of recognition of just what the text requires). But I suspect that the text really is by Waldrop or Ashley and that the whole Wolgamot story is false, false, false! And obviously false, in fact, in a way that makes its repetition somewhat baffling.
Comments</h1> on 2014-11-05 20:56:56.0, lk commented:</h3>
Line 3: Robert Ashley, not John. Thirteen years ago I had to proofread a university press press release and went to find its author in his office:
Me: "Hey, who's the Attorney General of the United States?" He: "Richard Ashcroft." Me: "JOHN Ashcroft. Please fix."
The third round of this will presumably involve Jon Haidt and John Ashbery.
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and, further, on 2014-11-07 10:04:33.0, ben w commented:</h3>
Yes of course you're right; maybe contamination from Wolgamot's Christian name.
I emailed Rosmarie Waldrop and she denied everything, but I still think I'm right.
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and, further, on 2015-06-03 2:45:54.0, Simon Lucas commented:</h3>
I do question why no one seems to have seen a copy of the books. However, your evidence seems a little bit flimsy to begin to publicly write off the possibility that JBW existed or wrote those books, dramatically announcing 'hoax!'. I hope you are wrong. It seems unlikely that so many people could keep this a secret for so long. You could ask Mimi Johnson, you could ask Waldrop, you could even visit Mencken's archive. Personally, I'd like to see more evidence and less conjecture.
Here's one piece of evidence that does support his existence. The second entry states 'John Barton Wolgamot, died 1989, NYC'
http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?gl=34&rank=1&new=1&MSAV=0&msT=1&gss=angs-g&gsfn=John+Barton&gsln=Wolgamot&msrpn__ftp=Illinois%2c+USA&msrpn=16&msrpn_PInfo=5-%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c2%7c0%7c16%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c&uidh=000&so=2
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and, further, on 2015-06-03 2:54:51.0, Simon Lucas commented:</h3>
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6451
see entry from nyer13:
'I worked at the Little Carnegie from ‘71 to '77 (usher/doorman). '
'John Wolgamot was the long-term mgr when I was at the theater.'
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and, further, on 2015-06-03 6:39:15.0, ben w commented:</h3>
I did ask Waldrop (Rosmarie), as indicated above, and she denied it (as indicated above), but she would, wouldn't she? I also don't think that very many people would have to keep it a secret at all, maybe, what, seven?
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and, further, on 2015-06-04 2:00:45.0, Simon Lucac commented:</h3>
Do we know how many people were in the Wolgamot Society? I reckon something would slip out eventually. People find it hard to keep secrets.
If he existed, there must be people outside that small circle who knew Wolgamot in NY who went to that cinema.
His nephew may still be alive.
I have found two John B Wolgamots in the birth register for Illinois. One, I think is 1903 and the other 1930.
It seems like a huge task to really uncover the facts or the fiction - a student research project, perhaps?
It would be quite a revelation to find out it was a fiction. Waldrop and Ashley strike me as quite capable of doing that.
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and, further, on 2015-06-10 16:11:49.0, Simon Lucas commented:</h3>
Ben, I re-read Ashley's notes and analysis of the book, and became more convinced that the books were real, but still unsure after reading your post. So, I also wrote to Keith Waldrop asking for any photographs of the book that might exist and whether one day they might be re-published. Rosmarie wrote back, told me that Keith was ill and that the book was available as the CD booklet, and avoiding the question of the photographs.
So, I did some more research. My first lead came back tonight, and I can now say that I am in possession of real evidence that these two books existed. Relieved and more than a little thrilled.
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and, further, on 2015-06-10 16:25:11.0, ben w commented:</h3>
I am very curious about this evidence!
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and, further, on 2016-07-21 11:56:51.0, Frances Kirby commented:</h3>
John Barton Wolgamot is my grandfather. He grew up in Danville, IL. I have read my mother's copy of his book which he self-published.
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and, further, on 2016-07-21 0:02:19.0, ben w commented:</h3>
I want to believe you, I really do.
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and, further, on 2016-10-09 14:26:30.0, Elbie Bow commented:</h3>
to ben w.: Just do some reseach. John Wolgamot was the manager of Little Carnegie Theater in New York.
You can verify it with his nephew Bart Wolgamot -He lives in Albuquerque, NM .
The books were self-published, so he did not have a large number of copies, nor he was a well known author, because he was an eccentric man - just like his son! (I personally met his ~~illegitimate</del> son, back in 2003, and he had a copy of his dad's book).~~
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and, further, on 2016-10-09 15:02:11.0, Elbie Bow commented:</h3>
...come to think of it, his son, Charlie was much like the father... eccentric, even a bit wierd, but had a cool sense of rhythm,(used to be a drummer) and he used his words most carefully. Otherwise he was an artist -I saw some of his collages -quite unusual with historical facts and news headlines, and war memorabilia and sexy women. But Charlie would never wantto talk about his father- he hated him.
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and, further, on 2016-10-09 15:15:42.0, ben w commented:</h3>
Well, apparently the sleuths at LanguageHat have discovered the legitimacy of everything already, which I find disappointing in one respect and fascinating in another. It does still seem as if, purely from the materials put forth by the Waldrops, Ashley, et al., one could hardly conclude any otherwise than I'd done, though.
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and, further, on 2019-06-07 21:59:42.0, Frances Kirby commented:</h3>
I am John Wolgamot’s granddaughter and Charlie’s daughter. He exists. We have the book.
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On a popular misconception concerning "literally"

2014-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Here is a thing which you may have observed. There are people about who don't like it when the word "literally" figures in a sentence whose overall thrust is figurative. It is contended that something has gone wrong, or at any rate it's not an ideal state of affairs. As far as I have been able to determine by arguing with people, the reasons are something like the following: (a) such sentences are (literally) false, or (b) they involve a misuse of the word "literally", or (c) at the very least it's desirable to have a word that functions the way the complainants think "literally" ought to function and no otherwise. So you may have heard it said, but I say to you that (a) such sentences are just as false without the word "literally" in them and no one objects to those, and (b) figurative uses are not misuses, and finally (c) this is not only not desirable, it is not possible.
Consider the following two sentences:

I was beside myself.</li>
I could eat a horse.</li> </ol>
On no occasion has anyone uttering the first been saying something which is, sensu stricto, true; some particular someone uttering the second on some particular occasion might have been, but it seems unlikely. We know what speakers of these sentences are getting at, of course, and they might therefore be conveying something true to us listeners: that they were very angry; are very hungry. What they are saying is, nevertheless, literally false.
Most people, being for the most part sensible, do not get in a tizzy about that. They don't respond, unless failing in attempts to be humorous, "no you weren't" or "no you couldn't". Nor does even the most persnickety person reply to (1) by saying that the speaker surely misunderstands the meaning of "beside" (or "myself" or any of the other words in the sentence).
How drastically does the situation change when we revise the sentences, add to the hyperbole a little bit!

I was literally beside myself.</li>
I could literally eat a horse.</li> </ol>
This is guaranteed to raise the hackles of a number of persons, though the precise reason for this horripilation is a little hard for me to make out. One consideration offered is that neither (3) nor (4) is (literally) true. But then, neither were (1) or (2), and, as already mentioned, no one really minds about them. One might account for the difference thus:

Everyone knows that "beside myself" in (1) and "eat a horse" in (2) are meant fancifully, figuratively; in a word (but not literally a word, hahaha) not literally. It isn't literally true, granted, but we know that we aren't meant to take the statement literally. But the speakers of (3) or (4) specifically direct us to take their words literally! They disclaim figurative intent about as clearly as they can! </blockquote>
This isn't really satisfying, though. For one thing, we don't get the same vociferous objections—or as far as I know any objections at all—to sentences such as the following:

I was honestly/really/actually beside myself.</li>
I'm not joking/not kidding, I was beside myself.</li>
I mean it; this is not hyperbole, it's the plain unvarnished truth: I was beside myself.</li>
I'm not being figurative here: I was beside myself.</li> </ol>
And they seem to be of basically the same kidney as (3). Granted, "honestly" vel sim. don't function identically to "literally"; they don't disclaim the figurative in the exact same way. (Obviously this caveat does not apply to (7) or (8).) But why does no one fulminate thus?

You aren't being honest, you're being hyperbolic! You weren't really or actually beside yourself, and you just said you were being honest, were really and actually beside yourself! You may not be joking precisely, but you're not being totally straight either, are you? It clearly is hyperbole and has many coats of varnish, and you just said the opposite! You are definitely being figurative, and you just said you weren't! Goddammit, I believed you! </blockquote>
(At last, one wishes to say, a practical use for the Oulipo! Evade misguided pedants through definitional literature</a>!)
It's not really the falsity of (3) and (4), and in general other sentences in which "literally" is deployed to figurative effect, that annoys people, I take it. My impression is that the real complaint is that "literally" is being used incorrectly, that "literally" is unique in that it, unlike every other word, can only be used, well, literally. There is something offensive about using a word which means "not figuratively" with figurative intent.
It seems, too, as if it really does depend on the fact that, while "literally" means literally, it's being used non-literally that grates. After all, it would be odd to object that "infant" is being used incorrectly in the following sentence:
Tolstoy was a great moralizing infant.</li> </ol>
It's true that "infant" doesn't mean "unrealistic, petty, egocentric, yet powerless despot" (or whatever we might think Mann meant to suggest regarding Tolstoy). But it's not misused. It is, in fact, perfectly aptly used. It's because "infant" means what it does—because it refers to, you know, infants—that its application to the adult Tolstoy does what it does.
It sure seems as if the same thing is happening with "literally"---that is, that it's because "literally" means "not figuratively" that it can be used to strengthen the use of a tired figurative trope. Let us quote from a scholarly article</a>, whose bibliographic information I'll just give inline right here: "Literally speaking", Michael Israel, Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 423–32. Ok? Here we go:

As I will argue, the word’s notorious misuse actually marks a natural development from its orthodox usage: people use the word in this way precisely because they do understand the notion of literal meaning, and they associate it, naturally enough, with plain speaking and honest expression. (424) </blockquote>
And later:

the folk model of literal meaning seems to be unchanged. In both cases, literal meaning is associated with directness, plain speaking, and, fundamentally, with truth. The shift itself seems to reflect little more than an equivocation between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. This sort of shift is, in fact, quite common with modal expressions whose basic function is to emphasize the fit between reality and the way it is described, and the examples in (10) show uses of really and truly which closely parallel the use of literally in (8): </blockquote>

(10) a. Her guacamole is truly out of this world.
b. She really pulled the wool over our eyes. </blockquote> </blockquote>

As Brugman notes, the adverbs here effectively signal ‘‘that the conventionalized nonliteral meaning [of a figurative expression] ... is being used in a strict sense’’ (1984: 34). (429) </blockquote>
The whole paper is worth a look.
The OED has a good expression of the use of "literally" here discussed; it signifies that "some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense". It is easy enough to construct a notional origin for this use of the word: some set phrase is getting overused, worn out, bleached, and a speaker, reaching for it, wants to indicate to her listeners that she's not just saying mouthing something, no, she really means it. You could easily say "I could eat a horse" while not being very hungry, especially if it's becoming a conventional expression of hunger, so you say you could literally eat a horse. And, again, it's because "literally" functions as it does in its approved contexts that it works here too.
When, after all, would you use "literally" in the approved sense? When you are aware that your utterance might be taken otherwise than you intend, because some figurative sense is most plausible---or plausible enough, or if you just want to be careful to avoid misunderstanding available at all---and you wish to forestall it: I don't mean this thing that suggests itself, I mean what my words mean on their face.
The same thing is happening in (3) and (4), it's just that the location of the face, so to speak, has shifted. I want you to know that when I say "I was beside myself" I don't just mean "I was annoyed" or "I was ticked off"---I want you to know that I mean what my words mean on their face---where what they mean on their face is the figurative meaning, that I was enraged. (Rather, that is, than that I was merely ticked off.) Quoting Israel quoting Brugman: the conventionalized nonliteral meaning is being used in a strict sense. (What could be clearer?)
So, again, it's hard to make out the claim that "literally" is being misused. Firstly because there's no reason to think that a figurative use of a word is a misuse (I don't have a ``theory'' of the figurative so I may be skating on thin ice in characterizing the use under discussion as figurative but I think it's probably fine), and it's laughable to think that it would be wrong to use a word figuratively just because its literal meaning is "not figurative"---as laughable as thinking that it's wrong to apply a word figuratively to an adult because its literal meaning is "not an adult". And secondly because the non-literal use in question is exactly what you'd expect given the literal uses. It's the right use!
Some people with whom I've had this argument have, at this point, lamented the idea that we're "losing" the literal use of "literal". (They think to score points off me because I actually do think the loss of the "uninterested"/"disinterested" contrast would be a shame.) But we aren't losing the literal use of "literal", any more than sentences like (9) or the imprecation "don't be such a baby" have led us to lose our vocabulary for the very young.
And, of course, it's just not possible to keep a word from being used figuratively. Especially given that "literally" seems tailor-made for the use to which misguided pedants so object. Any proposed replacement, stipulated to mean "literally (literally!!!)", would be suborned to figurative purposes before long, by the exact same process that affected "literally" itself. It is, after all, useful. And I'm not aware of anyone attempting to use "literally" to indicate that her words were, in fact, to be taken literally and not figuratively at all who has been unable to do so.
Comments</h1> on 2014-07-21 6:53:01.0, Tammy commented:</h3>
I don't really have a horse in this race (literally) or any particular fervor about the issue, but I do think your argument misses a component.
The concept of "misusing" a word is probably not the most helpful one to focus on. As a copy editor, I tend to frame preferred language in terms of clarity, and I think "literally" has a clarity problem.* True, no one would be confused by "I was literally beside myself" or even "The shit literally hit the fan" (although I find the latter somewhat nonsensical**). But what about these?:
(11) I was literally up at the crack of dawn. (12) They were literally caught with their pants down. (13) The widgets are literally a dime a dozen.
There is a range of plausible meanings in these cases. Were you up at dawn, or just much earlier than usual? Was something salacious going on or not? Are the widgets twelve for 10 cents, or some other low price? Certainly, context is important, but if you have to do a lot of work to divert the confusion a word creates, it's probably bad writing and you shouldn't use the word in the first place. And I'm not sure there's another elegant way to precisely express "literally (literally!!!)" in these cases. I think this is what people are getting at when they bemoan the "loss" of this word or of its sense. How great a loss to the language this may be, I can't say, but then, some people work to save endangered species of mosquito.
*This problem is not caused by ensconcing the "figuratively" definition in the OED, of course; it exists anyway, so long as people use the word that way. I.e., there's not much we can do about it except bitch.
**Your sentence (8) strikes me as similarly meaningless, and I do find it and (7) objectionable in a way that (5) and (6) are not, for the reason you grant in the paragraph below them. Count me as a fulminator.
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and, further, on 2014-07-21 11:25:14.0, Mr. F commented:</h3>
Tammy gets it exactly right.
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and, further, on 2014-07-21 0:51:28.0, ben w commented:</h3>
Your thundering, Tammy, is noted.
And you're right that the issue of clarity is not as well addressed as it might be. On facebook someone pointed out
(14) I was standing in line for literally an hour
which is another good one. But really, I'm not sure that the situation with any of (11)–(14) is so dire.
The argument, as I understand it, is something like this:
The uses of "literally" in (3) and (4) are basically unproblematic in themselves, because no non-figurative interpretation could really be in the offing anyway. But it's objectionable nevertheless, because it contributes to [this phrase is lamentably not in wide use, can you believe that?] a semantic lenition which will make uses of "literally" in other contexts, formerly clear-cut, ambiguous between a recommendation of an actual literal construction of some idiom and a strengthening of the idiom's common figurative meaning—since there are some idioms which aren't as outlandish as horse-eating.</blockquote>
So something like: don't use "literally" this way here because it'll then be harder to tell how you're using it there.
Well, I dunno. Context is king, innit? If we're discussing the apprehension of that notorious gang of flashers that's been terrorizing Local Park, then someone using (12) not meaning to say that they were caught in a state of undress has made a serious miscalculation—as has someone using (12) meaning to say that whoever was caught was partly nude, if we're talking about some kind of price-fixing scandal. If we're talking about a gang of Clouseau-esque bank robbers, then sure, there may be some difficulty about getting across their attire at the moment of being caught, and the solution may well be just a rewrite: "they were caught when their comically oversized pants fell about their ankles, literally tripping them up."
I suppose I am simply not concerned if some idioms, in some contexts, are unusable without ambiguity or further explanation. I can't just say, in some contexts, "I was standing in line for literally an hour" (in some of course I can, for instance if we both know that I was there for twenty minutes—or for sixty-five). I will have to augment it with "I got there at 11:34 and it was 12:20 by the time I could even see the front", or something.
Figurative idioms and "literally" are not even the only things that confront us with this kind of problem. There are some nice examples in Matt Weiner's "Are all conversational implicatures cancellable?</a>" (tl;dr: no). Consider: you see someone on the subway doing just a really marvelous job of making room for cats</a>, and wonder at his feat of taking up space. You sincerely wish to know whether he could, in fact, take up more room. You could ask him a question to find out:
(15) Could you possibly take up more room?
You are unlikely, however, to be taken as genuinely interested in the matter of this question. This, however, is even worse!
(16) I'm asking sincerely: could you possibly take up more room?
Anyway, I think that both "sincerely" and "literally" are far too good at what they do in cases where they aren't used sincerely and literally to think there's much point in trying to get people not to use them that way. But it's not just an argument from futility; I also think that we'd be more expressively impoverished without those uses than we are with, despite the occasional ambiguities or difficulties thereby engendered. It's fundamentally not a big if instead of saying merely "the widgets are literally a dime a dozen", I have to say "the whosits cost thirty-five cents for ten, and as for the widgets, they're literally a dime a dozen". In which latter case I think the meaning is fairly clear, though I'd be understanding if an editor wanted to rewrite further.
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and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:31:42.0, Cecily commented:</h3>
I also think that we'd be more expressively impoverished
I'm with you on everything else, but not this. Words and phrases can change their meanings in all sorts of ways without hindering the overall expressivity of a language; if literally at some point in the future shifts back to being primarily a marker of literalness, other means of intensification will surely wax as it wanes. And I, a person in whose idiolect literally does not function as an intensifier, am nonetheless capable of exaggerating my idioms. (I think practically is my go-to as far as an equivalent lexical intensifier, but I'm probably more likely to just use absurd quantities instead: "I stood in line for eight hundred hours.")
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and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:41:41.0, JoshKsky commented:</h3>
To praise another word oft-disparaged, the word "like" does good work in "I stood in line for like eight hundred hours."
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and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:51:19.0, Cecily commented:</h3>
Or even "I stood in line for like an hour."
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and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:53:16.0, ben w commented:</h3>
Ok, fair point about impoverishment; speakers will find a way. (Of course, that cuts both ways!)
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and, further, on 2014-08-01 7:06:08.0, dsquared commented:</h3>
I literally pissed myself with joy at seeing this important point made.
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and, further, on 2014-08-01 16:42:14.0, Cecily commented:</h3>
Upon reflection, I retract my earlier claim that practically or implausible quantities (or like) are doing the same job as non-literal literally. They are doing something more like marking the presence of exaggeration than intensifying anything.
I do not retract the part about impoverishment though. That part stands (and is an equally good argument against bossy prescriptivists, as you note).
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and, further, on 2016-12-22 3:08:50.0, haste makes waste commented:</h3>
Love to read this post, thank you so much Ben. Ruth, UK
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That's right, it's more double dactyls

2014-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

1. Rapidly rapidly
Runner Pheidhippides
Set out from Marathon
Swift as his name;

Died ent'ring Athens but
Won for his hurrying
Hemerodromical
Long-living fame.
2. Hippity Hoppity
Thomas Stearns Eliot's
Verses careened twixt the
Deep and the odd;

One of the latter's got
Equiriparian
Creatures compared to the
True church of God.
3. Higgledy Piggledy
Dolce far niente is
Charming indeed, but is
Counter to pride;

Rouse yourself now from this
Oblomovitical
Pastoral torpor, with
Olga your bride!
4. Watterson Watterson
Calvinist doctrine's con-
Cerned to distinguish the
Goats from the sheep;

Praedestinatio
Mirrors mundanity:
Strive to attain to the
Top of the heap!

Cauliflower sans Merci

2014-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

In the Oulipo Compendium we read:

Transplant. This procedure was first used by Harry Mathews before his introduction to the Oulipo; it entered the Oulipian repertory during the preparation of the Atlas, in which it was described as a double lexical translation.Two texts are chosen, of similar length but differing in genre. Each text is rewritten with the vocabulary of the other. Complete short examples are a virtual impossibility. Here are the subtitles and opening paragraphs of the two sections of Cauliflower sans Merci, where the source texts are (a) Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci and (b) a recipe for the preparation of cauliflower with tomatoes: </code></pre> </blockquote> And there follows indeed a short excerpt. But why "complete short examples are a virtual impossibility"? La Belle Dame isn't a terribly long poem and the Compendium contains many examples of moderate length; why not just give all of "Cauliflower sans Merci" as the example? Well, for whatever reasons, the editors, of whom Mathews was one, decided against that, which is terribly annoying, since the excerpt they do reproduce is tantalizing and it's not easy to get one's hands on the full text (it having been published in a small Canadian literary journal, "Atropos", that lasted, as far as I can tell, three issues). Until now, that is, for the full text is reproduced below, with the apparent errors from the original printing intact, but the original formatting as regards spacing, line indentation, etc. not intact. One may be interested to know that the table of contents for the issue classifies "Cauliflower sans Merci" as "fiction".I.</h3> Death-pale Root-son with strange faery lily-manna made squirrel-beautiful by fever. This manna is full sweet with sides of steed and with woebegone sides of steed. The latest fresh rose-cheek manna is here full of fragrant relish—this is the beautiful day for meeting this strange making of root-sons. For four heads, for four heads and a head, and for four heads, a head and a head. A squirrel-long head of root-son, made in elfin lilies A long knight-at-arms head full of fever dew A squirrel-head of death-pale nothing-sweet A zone for root-leaning, set in the knight-at-arms head, is beautiful too. I can, too, set four roses-full of death-pale lily dew in the knight-at-arms head to make the root-sun death-pale. I set the dew-wept root-son in the wild fever dew; I can set the root-leaning zone too (have I this?) I make the dew wild full sore. Here, I make it wild loitering, nothing on, for four and four dream-kisses. Here I make the foot of the root-son gape—the root-son is all fragrant. I can take a lily of root son, the root-son is beautiful, and I sure. (Full sweet, the root-son is moist and shuts in a light dream of sedge.) Here no loitering—I take the root-son and make the dew fade. I can, too, take the root-leaning zone, with the root-son, from sojourning in the wild dew. I lull the root-sone [sic] in cold dew and make the dew fade. A head of full rose-cheek root-sons, with sides gaping, with no bird's eyes or dew (to make three roses-full of rose-cheek root-son relish). I make long garlands of the rose-cheek relish. A light squirrel-long zone for fever-thrall, moist with lily-manna A lily of death-pale nothing-sweet A bird's eye of anguish-relish A rose-full of moist lily-manna—honey-cheek manna of lily dew A faded rose-full of withered fever sojourned granary-manna met with a rose-full of woe-begone strange faery lily manna I set the death-pale root-son fast in the fever-zone. I set the rose-cheek relish sideways there. I set on the nothing-sweet, the anguish-relish and withered rose-full of lily manna. I set the strange faery lily manna and the withered granary manna on the root-sons, and there I set on all the moist lily manna. With the thirty latest dream-kisses of starving, I set the fever-zone in the brow of a fever-grot, ever full wild, and make the root-sons full of fever and the stange [sic] lily manna squirrel-beautiful. The latest dream here is no loitering and no starving. II.</h3> The Fine and Cold One of the Cooking-People "Uncover the knife that pierces you, you of the people of degree, now one, keeping to this edge, and white. The vegetables are dry by the Swiss water, and the skimmers are done. "Uncover the knife that pierces you, you of the people of degree, particularly drained and thoroughly used by cold time. The racks of the stem-mastering eight-inch people are full, and the bread-vegetables are brought in. "You have a white floweret on the upper third of your head, washed in grating suggestion and the water of boiling, and on each white half of your face a large red floweret is rapidly draining." "One of the cooking-people is in the large strips of vegetables and flowerets, thoroughly fine, one of the different people of piercing art, having a head as large as possible, the merest stems, and boiling head-contained useful pulps. "Strips are made of large flowerets cut and mixed, for the head, for the edge of the upper stems, and (refreshing ones) for the tender place of this one of the cooking-people: and this one makes a suggestion of tender people and nicely boils. "This one is placed on the quickly-getting four-stem one, and degrees of retaining melt for the white time: this one spreads to the edge and makes presentation with the kettle-boiling flavor of one of the different people of piercing art. "This one gets stems of food eathing [sic] and uncovers tender flavor for bread and gets different milk, and thoroughly adds the suggestion that this one is melting for one of the people of degree. "This one places the one one of degree in a cold oven, large and particularly different, and this one drains through the head-contained pulps and pierces to the core, and this one's boiling pulps are contained by four head-masterings. "And this one, by spreading minutes with tender suggestions, makes the one of the people of degree drop to be refreshed; and into the refreshing is mixed a presentation (this is the rack), the fresh, fresh presentation of the one of degree on the cold edge of the upper strip. "In the presentation are white people of full degree and people of large degree, and white knife-mastering people, and this people make the boiling suggestion that this one of the people of piercing art, fine and cold, is placed mastering over the one of the people of degree. "In the presentation at the chop-edges of this people when the white time is melting are drained and peeled back with piercing useful suggestion. The presentation melts, and the one of the people of degree is uncovered and now placed on the cold edge of the upper strip. "And if the vegetables are dry by the Swiss water and the skimmers are done, this retains the one of the people of degree, now one, keeping to this edge, and white." Comments</h1> on 2014-02-12 9:25:25.0, horus commented:</h3> Oulipo, like Dogma 95, serves to emphasize what is already the condition of art, namely constrained choice. What interests me most about examples like this: it's very unclear to me where the boundary between choice and constraint lies, and just what the role of choice is in the finished product. I'm reminded of the claim that all Dogma directors broke some of the rules at some point during production. This isn't so for all Oulipo - in A Void for instance, the constraint is specific and clear enough that its boundary is certain (and Perec follows it religiously is my recollection). That he chose as the theme the very absence forced by the constraint seems like a choice which elevates the novel to art. But "rewriting with the vocabulary of the other" is much more ambiguous - what constitutes legitimate technique here? What serves to elevate the exercise to art? What specific role does the writer play in creating emotive and intellectual effect? I demand commentary. [permalink]</a> and, further, on 2014-02-13 17:53:04.0, ben w commented:</h3> You demand commentary? Then you shall have, at least, a comment, in bullet point form. -> I don't see why it's less clear here than in A Void where the boundary between choice and constraint lies: in either case, we can immediately tell if the text offends (in A Void, if the text contains an "e"; here, if either part contains a word not appearing in its prescribed source). Perhaps it's looser here because it's unclear whether or not Mathews has succeeded in "rewriting" the recipe using the constrained vocabulary of the poem, or vice versa (though I think he's done a pretty admirable job)—we can tell that he's only used the requisite vocabulary, and come up with a text that can be read in parallel with the original, but rewritten? If anything, though, there's less choice here than in A Void, since there's a constraint on both content and form (no doubt part of why Mathews described the composition process as "agony"</a>), whereas Perec's novel could have been about anything. He follows the constrained religiously, but in very many ways it allows for a great deal of freedom. (The multiple constraints of Life a User's Manual are less obvious but perhaps more constraining ultimately.) -> I don't really understand why the reflection of the constraint of A Void in its plot elevates it to art. Is it the mere fact of involution in "On the Sonnet"</a> or A Fit of Something Against Something"</a> that elevate them to art? They're certainly pleasing feats, but there are any number of sonnets and sestine that aren't about their own constraints, and one could write a sonnet on the sonnet that was artless and sucky. Though maybe all you mean is that in this case, i.e. that of A Void, the alignment of plot and constraint is what turned the trick—but that seems strange to me, too, or at least I'm not sure why one would think so. -> I'm not really comfortable, in general, with questions like "what elevates the exercise to art?" (though lord knows I do employ the term art as an honorific, and in propria persona, even). I believe it is the standard Oulipo line that their constraints are to be thought of as techniques one might employ for various reasons, spurs to creativity or new formal strictures or whatever, and nothing more; they're experimental, and just because you've employed one, that doesn't mean you've created anything of worth. (And thus that the examples used to demonstrate them at Oulipo meetings or in things like the Compendium aren't what their real worth should be judged by, since they're just toy demonstrations: here's how the thing works, now go employ it in an actually ambitious work, if you wish to.) If anything elevates this particular piece to art, it would be, for me, the feel of the results; I find the texture and rhythms and odd reaching for meaning in the prose delightful. And those things probably would not have been produced but for the bizarre constraint Mathews labored under. But it isn't the constraint that makes the art, it's what Mathews did with it. (One also has to wonder how in the world it occurred to him to do this at all.) [permalink]</a> and, further, on 2014-02-14 1:33:26.0, horus commented:</h3> Hmmm, well I did mean commentary on the role of constrained choice in artistic practice, not on my comment, but I guess the third bullet point addresses that. I do think the question of how specific the constraints are should be relevant here, and on that score I do still think the "transplant" idea seems much more liberal than a constraint as specific as avoid a particular letter (or word, or whatever) - for instance, must one always replace the same word in one text with the same translation from the other? Must one replace every single word? May the "is" of text A be replaced by the "is" of text B? etc. Of course, we could perhaps recover how all these choices were made in this instance by examining the original text - but the crucial issue (the constraint is underdetermined) still stands. The idea does seem to me a natural extension of the cutup technique, and one way in which it's an interesting extension is the change in the ordering of constraint and choice. In cutup, there is choice in choosing the initial texts, then presumably one must strictly adhere to the result of juxtaposing them post cutup, or one sullies the exercise. Here, there is choice of texts, then translation is in some degree mechanical, but with choices interspersed (which word to use as translation etc.). I guess the elevating to art point may be off base - if constrained choice is an essential feature of art, then it seems to me these sorts of exercises, which are self-conscious about this aspect of art and push it to the extreme, have the power to reveal something about the essential nature of art. I would be hard pressed to state it myself, though, which is why I asked you. For what it's worth, I think the question is more interesting here if we take "art" in a deflated, rather than honorific, sense. The point about A Void was meant to be particular to it. There, I guess, the apparently arbitrary nature of the constraint receives justification from its marriage to theme. In the case of sonnets, although there are some aspects of the constraint which are arbitrary, much of it is justified, not the least of which justification being simple historical precedent (if writing novels without an "e" became a standard practice, a recognized genre, then thematizing them on absence would no longer be interesting). There's an amazing moment in Xenakis' dissertation defense, where Messiaen challenges him on this issue. Xenakis has put all his effort into defending algorithmic music, music where all the choice goes into choosing the algorithm and the rest is mechanical, and Messiaen relates a moment when he passed Xenakis in his office writing music, and Xenakis, reflecting on something his algorithm had generated, erases it saying, no that wouldn't sound good at all. For Messiaen, it was the standards by which the choices to break form are made which were interesting, and it was exactly those which Xenakis' emphasis on establishing the form ignored. [permalink]</a> and, further, on 2014-02-14 10:54:14.0, ben w commented:</h3> I've seen variations on the last point before, I think on Kyle Gann's blog, talking about how the profusion of options for varying tone rows and setting up initial conditions, etc., had the effect of rendering the strictness of serialism more apparent than real. (Also, interesting, in one of Andrew Hussie's periodic process reflections on the composition of MS Paint Adventures, which theoretically was initially driven by reader responses—it has the form of a text adventure, and there are attached forums, in which readers can respond to the "what do you do now?" prompts—just taking the first response led to a total mess, and as soon as he gave himself latitude to pick a response, he discovered that given the volume of responses, he could just pick whatever he wanted, so it didn't really work as a constraint anymore.) There's an officially sanctioned concept in Oulipian practice for this kind of thing—they've adopted the term "clinamen" for a chosen deviation from a constraint ("chosen" meaning to capture the idea that it's not a clinamen if you just don't know how to proceed within the constraint). Possibly related—a good exchange, or at least a good quotation, from the interview linked in my previous comment: INTERVIEWER Do you not care whether your stories make sense? MATHEWS I don’t say there is no sense or no meaning. There is, but it’s not one that exists outside of the work. Robert Louis Stevenson—and he’s not exactly considered a modernist writer—once wrote: “The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.”</blockquote> To be honest, I don't really understand why you think there's more choice in this constraint than with a lipogram; at best I'd think there's no grounds for comparison. Certainly to say "you must use these words and no others to rewrite (however construed) this text" leaves open whether you can, say, use "is" for "is" or whether you can vary the use of words in the new vocabulary to capture the words in the target text—but banning "e" doesn't tell you whether you can sometimes write "copulation" and sometimes "fucking" for "sex" (of course a lipogrammatical composition isn't to be thought of as a translation of a text with the full range of letters into a new text with a reduced range—unless, of course, that is sometimes what happens, as it does with several poems in A Void—which is just another reason for thinking that the constraints are too different for meaningful comparison). It's perfectly possible to tell in each case whether the constraint has been violated: use of a word not in the source text; use of the banned letter. Your complaint seems to be that there might be ways of further constraining transplant that aren't specifically addressed—but why must they be? I don't understand why it's underdetermined as is, just because there could be a more determinate form. (One wishes to say: Moses, do whatever you want!</a>. Yes, I know the cases aren't strictly analogous.) Actually, one thing that might be revealed by procedures like this just is that since they're self-conscious adoptions of a constraint they (maybe? could?) help explode the idea that less self-conscious cases aren't enabled by some (potentially feeble) free adoption of a constraint, even if it's (merely?) generic (and doesn't descend into e.g. specific word choices or orderings)—Mathews actually puts it well in the part of the interview where he calls the composition of "Cauliflower sans Merci" agony: "But I discovered something very important, which is that once you start on a project like that, no matter how insane it is, you rapidly become convinced that there’s a solution, which is, of course, nonsense. You have to make it happen."—I mean to call out the "You have to make it happen" part. It's not just going to happen naturally. [permalink]</a>
More than one frustration regarding "Honest Illusion" 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 The central thought in my solution to the interpretive puzzle is that valuing, in Nietzsche's recommended practice, involves the generation of "honest illusions". It can be thought of as a form of make-believe, pretending, or, the non-Nietzschean phrase adopted here, "regard … as": S values X by regarding X as valuable while knowing that in fact X is not valuable in itself. The motivation for this interpretive strategy arises, perhaps not surprisingly, from what I have called interpretive constraint (4), namely, the suggestion in Nietzsche's texts that there is some close connection between art, avoiding practical nihilism, and the creation of values.</blockquote> So Hussain, on p 166 of "Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche's Free Spirits". The mentioned interpretive puzzle arises out of four constraints; the fourth, as indicated, is that the creation of values and art are closely related. The first three are (1) "A central task of Nietzsche's free spirits is the creation and revaluation of values" (158); (2) "Nietzsche's free spirit 'conceives reality as it is'" (158); and (3) "Nietzsche claims that nothing has value in itself and therefore that all claims of the form 'X is valuable [sc. in itself]' are false" (159; I added the bracketed material). I find this position implausible both interpretatively and substantively: interpretatively because several passages proffered in support seem to me to be better interpreted otherwise; substantively because it seems impossible to prevent the position from collapsing into one Hussain explicitly rejects, in which the free spirits come to believe that there really is value in the world. In the pages following the blockquote with which this post begins, he attempts to flesh out the relationship of Nietzsche's writings on art to the pretense theory he attributes to Nietzsche. Here are (parts of) two he quotes, GS P4 and GS 299: Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance … Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. here we should learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists … Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other … all that we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life …</blockquote> After quoting GS 299, Hussain writes that "it is the example of art that (i) shows us the psychological possiblity of regarding things as valuable even when we know they are not, and (ii) provides a source of techniques that, suitably refined, could help us succeed in regarding things as valuable outside the domain of art proper" (172). Art enables us "to engage in a simulacrum of valuing by regarding things as valuable in themselves while knowing they are not" (175). But doesn't that actually run directly counter to the passages just quoted from Nietzsche? In the first place, GS 299 begins with a contrast between how things are in themselves and how we might wish them to be for us, without ever suggesting that their being thus and so for us consists in our taking them to be thus and so in themselves. When the physician sugars his medicine, rendering palatable for us something that by [sic] itself is not, we don't think that the medicine thereby becomes sweeter in itself, though the mixture is sweeter than the medicine is; in that sense he makes it—he makes what we confront, what we have to do with—attractive, and no one involved projects the attraction onto the unmixed drug, knowingly or not. Similarly, when we esteem as beautiful or attractive a tableau in which some thing is concealed by another, do we judge "this thing, of which I can see only a part, is itself beautiful"? Isn't it rather than the scene, in which many things that are themselves not beautiful are nicely arranged, is judged to be beautiful? After all—are we not to stop courageously at the surface? Even remarks to the effect that, e.g., "we do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem" (GS 107) do not directly support the reading. It is clear from context that this rounding-off is not the ever-present (hitherto ever-present?) coloration of the world with moral evaluation (in WP 260) with which Hussain immediately pairs it, since it is introduced by saying that "now there is a counterforce" (emphasis added). (Something similar could be said about, for example, the remark somewhere in BGE that we are more artistic than we know, because we perceive things as enduring. That illusion, if it is an illusion, can't be what's presently relevant, because we all already engage in it anyway.) Substantively, while there is a brief discussion of whether the kind of make-believe that Hussain describes is actually practicable, I don't think it really gets at the issues very deeply. Recall that the free spirit's pretense has a certain content and purpose, having respectively to do with the real existence of values and the avoidance of nihilism (thereby enabling a certain kind of life for the free spirit). This makes the going about of the pretending a rather delicate business; it can't obviously can't be at the front of the free spirit's mind. The pretense that something is valuable in itself can't be accompanied by the thought "… not really, though"; if it is, the "simulacrum of valuing" (p 175) in which she engages will be too overtly pretended to serve its purpose. (In this respect the pretense is decidedly not like any pretense we engage in regarding artworks, which is severely delimited. We do not actually try, or pretend to try, or try to pretend, to talk to the people in novels or paintings. We may talk about them as if they were people, and point out interesting facts about their pretend actions or pretend clothing, but we implicitly recognize a point beyond which we do not carry the game. This, I think, is a large part of the reason the pretense is compatible with the acknowledgement that it's a pretense. If the free spirits' pretense contained inner limits like that, it could not play anything like the role in our lives that actual valuing does. The point here isn't that (as Hussain suggests) the free spirits' valuing, being pretended, wouldn't be like the valuing that had come before, in that, say, "a particular kind of seriousness and gravity that is part of traditional morality could not be regenerated within" it (175n43); it is, rather, that this pretense would seem, unlike the pretenses with reference to which it is developed, to have no "outside". (Unless of course the free spirits hop from valuational system to valuational system, but that seems to me to make the whole thing even harder to maintain.)) If the pretense can't be like that, it must be one in which for long stretches there are no occurrent thoughts about the pretense itself. However, engaging in a really thorough-going pretense is one of the things one would do if one wanted to end up actually believing that things have value in themselves—faking it is a time-honored technique for making it—and it's a constraint for Hussain that the free spirits don't do that. So they must both lose themselves in their pretense, and not get so lost that they end up falling for it: a hard needle to thread. Part of the discussion in which feasibility is addressed runs thus: In imaginative play, successfully regarding a pile of wood as the Bismarck under fire requires, or at least when one is, as we say, 'into' the game, engaging in certain actions, or pretend actions—ducking from the incoming shells (just tennis balls, of course), yelling at your gunners to fire back, and so on. It also requires certain physical responses: the increased heart beat, the sweating of palms, and an intense exclusive concentration.</blockquote> However, as far as I can see, it doesn't require much further than that—and if we can say that doing that sort of thing (having that sort of involuntary physical response, engaging in certain voluntary physical actions in an appropriately engaged way) just is what "regarding a pile of wood as the besieged Bismarck" comes to, then we conspicuously don't need to say that the pretender pretends that the wood really is a ship. The players can just declare "that over there is the Bismarck and these are shells", thereby giving a bit of structure and narrative to what would otherwise be arbitrary; involvement in the game can then come from competitive spirit, or the fun of throwing tennis balls at your friends, or whatever, and no illusion, honest or dishonest, need enter into it. Further versification 2013-11-16T00:00:00+00:00 Three more double dactyls, a morale élémentaire on my constant theme, and a self-descriptive Beautiful In-Law: 1. Higgledy Piggledy Hydriotaphia Thomas Browne's essay on Bodies in jars Gives the opinion that Sempiternality's Simply not possible Under the stars 2. Jiggery Pokery William and Elwyn, the Usage dictators whose Book is confused: "Ceteris paribus, Sesquipedalian Latinate verbiage Shouldn't be used. 3. Higgledy Piggledy Nufer the author has Practiced negation in Each of his books; But that devotion to Nonrepetitiously Writing's just won him some Mighty odd looks. 4. Here.</a> 5. One lone noble son, foe of few, One selfless fool (feels offense slow), One swell fellow (woos belles well), One new Solon, one boon, We follow Ben Wolfson. Wow! An expression of a single frustration regarding one aspect of Pippin's treatment of action 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00 Nicely recapped by R. L. Anderson</a>: … let us return to the expressivist account of successful action, which is nicely captured in Pippin’s paradigm examples of artistic intention. Suppose my intention is to write a good poem. Unfortunately, I am no poet, so my results are execrable. The power and interest of the expressivist identification of intention with action arise just here. Precisely because the character of my intention can be defined by the actual outcome of my activity, I run afoul of the lightning-flash identity argument when I insist that this is not the poem I intended to write. My actual poem does express my intention (where that is defined in terms of the process of action), so it is bad faith to disown it. What my discontent seeks is not fairly described as the good poem I intended to write; at best, what it wants is to have had a different intention altogether, one that could have produced a different, better, poem. The availability of this analysis depends on the thought animating the first horn of the dilemma—that the content of my intention is ineluctably defined in terms of the proper interpretation of the resulting action.</blockquote> Right down to the tendentious "proper" in the last sentence. I think it's worth pointing out how weird the intention to write a good poem is, too, but that's probably inessential. (Obviously, I can only speak to the production of doggerel and parodies, but I don't think I've ever sat down to write anything with the goal of just writing a good X, and it seems like a bizarre way to take artistic intentions generally.) Nehamas also makes use of this kind of creative example, if I remember correctly, and also uses specifically artistic creation (I believe I've heard him use specifically poetry, for that matter). It's a nice example for polemical purposes but a bad one, I think, for philosophical. It's good for polemical purposes because the bad poet who insists that he didn't mean to write this poem can't, if challenged with the question what poem he did mean to write, produce a different, better one and say: "well I wanted to write this one, see." (Of course, he can say "I intended to write a good poem, not this ungainly mess", or "I wanted to write a poem that would …"—and it's never really been clear to me why that isn't enough. We could call it the Travis Bickle Theory of Intention: "I don't see any other poems around here.") If he could have done that, he would have written that one. It obviously isn't a question of his reproducing an already existing poem, after all, and the only poem on the scene is the bad one actually produced. That's not essential to the example, though; the example ought to work with any instance of incompetence. It ought to work equally well if I mess up the roasting of a chicken or the construction of a birdhouse, which are (or at least can be) exercises in copying models or following procedures. If the bird is burnt black, or the birdhouse a Escherian puzzle, and I say: "I didn't mean to do that", though, I can say what I intended: I point to the picture in my illustrated cookbook, or woodworking book, and say, "I wanted to make that". To deny that that is a sound expression of one's intention is bats; it would be like insisting that in order really to refer to something we have always to engage in the "singular stroke of eloquence" that Dr. Slothrop attempts in Tristram Shandy, whereby instead of giving the name of a thing one just produces the thing itself. "I wanted to build a [here I produce from my mantle a birdhouse]"—and even here, I could produce another birdhouse, not built by me, since I'm not trying to build an original birdhouse anyway. To say that the shambles of a birdhouse I actually build "expresses my intention (where that is defined in terms of the processes of action)" begs the question, since clearly the upshot of the processes of action I engaged in—assuming I haven't been interfered with—can't be other than the upshot of those very processes. What might be meant in this case by saying my discontent with it really means that I wish to have intended something else? Does that mean, to have intended to produce a different birdhouse than the one exampled in the pages of my book? Not that. Perhaps it means that I wish to have had different sub-intentions in carrying out the construction project—e.g. that I should have intended to drive the nail in straight rather than incompetently? But that obviously gets us nowhere (I did intend to drive the nail in straight, I'll insist). I am not sure what other reasonable interpretations there are, here, or why we shouldn't just say that while I intended to do one thing, I was incompetent, and thus ended up actually doing something else. On Pippin's account it seems as if I always only execute my actual intentions just fine, and incompetence is isolated to my initial identification of what I'm about in the first place. The actual birdhouse I end up building can still be plausibly claimed to "express my intention" in the following sense: I intended to build a birdhouse like the one in the book, acted on the intention, and produced this thing, which is very unlike it. And one could sensibly say that, therefore, it's bad faith for me to disown the birdhouse. It's not what I wanted but it is what I did (and if I want to get better at woodworking it would be advisable for me to try to understand what I did wrong). But that's consistent with denying that this thing is what I intended to produce, on any sane use of the concept of intention. The dactylic guide to poets & philosophers 2013-09-29T00:00:00+00:00 1. Hippity-hoppity Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, the Diligent scholar and Seeker of truth, Has an epiphany--- Nonhermeneutically--- When in the presence of Lithe-bodied youth.</div> 2. Jiggery-pokery</div> R. Lanier Anderson Reading his Nietzsche with Rose-colored lens, Makes out of Carter a Paradigmatical Instance of doctrines that No one else kens.</div> 3. Higgledy-piggledy Robinson Jeffers, who Lived in a tower that's Hewn all by hand, Quitted the polis, since Megalopsuchia Means being moderate In loving man.</div> 4. Imagist imagist William C. Williams has Gobbled the fruit you were Saving to eat: "Pardon my trespass and Pflaumengefräßigkeit, They were delicious, so Cold and so sweet."</div> 5. Higgledy piggledy Der Allzermalmende Made room for faith by de- Stroying the schools: Questions pertaining to Transcendentalities Can't be decided, by Wise men or fools.</div> Comments</h1> on 2013-09-30 20:44:00.0, implied other commented:</h3> like [permalink]</a> Is a colander solid? 2013-08-10T00:00:00+00:00 By way of analogy</a>, consider what is the practically rational response when we learn surprising things about the world, such as the fact that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. It seems to me perfectly practically rational to act as if such objects are as solid as they appear, and to feel trusting in their apparent solidity, even if, when I reflect, I don't believe that they are solid (at least, not in the way they appear to be).</blockquote> Imagine an old-school model of a salt crystal, a little cube, made out of little spheres of various sizes connected with little rods of various lengths. Is it solid? One way of taking the question is: are the components solid, as opposed to hollow: are the spheres more like ball bearings or table tennis balls; are the tubes dowels or pipes. But perhaps that's not what's meant; what's meant is: is the whole assembly solid. In that case, I find myself uncertain how to answer: what is meant by solid, in that question? Solid as opposed to what? But I might accept the following answer: construct the smallest (geometric!) solid that entirely encloses all the spheres and rods and whatnot, and observe that it's not the same stuff all the way through; it is, in fact, mostly air. Conclude, then, that it isn't solid, even though it's not quite right to say it's hollow or something like that either. Perhaps something like that would underlie the assertion that "apparently solid objects are mostly empty space"; sc. merely apparently solid but actually not (or there's no point in mentioning it). A (merely) apparently solid iron cube, 1cm on a side, actually is not solid, being mostly empty space. Now there are some applications in which we would indisputably be justified in treating the cube as being "as solid as it appears" (more on which soon); for instance, we might calculate from its volume of one cubic centimeter and iron's density of so and so many grams per cubic centimeter that it has a mass of so and so many grams. This is perfectly in order; we aren't imagining that the cube fails to be solid by failing to be solid iron, that is, by being an iron exterior with an interior of copper, or air, or whatever. Our concern is one that would attach to the iron exterior, too; it too would really be mostly empty space. And this means that the suggestion that the cube isn't really solid itself doesn't affect the propriety of our calculation in the way one might have expected. The calculation that the cube is so and so many grams might be understood to be approximate on the grounds that, for instance, it probably isn't 100% pure iron. Maybe there's even a pocket of air in the cube! That would mean that we wouldn't be getting the right answer from the calculation, because of the non-iron in the cube. But in the ideal case where none of that happens, we aren't in danger of getting the wrong answer on the grounds that the cube isn't really solid, because the figure for density is derived from iron which is similarly mostly empty space—that's what solid iron is. What is the solidity that the iron cube lacks? Is it that it's not the same thing all the way through? But isn't it?—assuming it's pure iron, isn't it iron all the way through? And the purity of iron isn't impugned by the fact that a chunk of the stuff has, in addition to atoms of Fe, space between the atoms of Fe. "Stuff" used advisedly in the previous sentence: the idea that a piece of iron isn't the same all the way through seems to come from an opposition to the idea of stuffs of things, as if iron, or anything else, could only be solid if the atoms were literally adjacent to one another. Though it's not clear what that would mean. After all, the atoms themselves are mostly empty space, too, right? The electrons aren't all touching the nucleus. (It's also not clear, actually, that one can't say that it's composed only of all the same thing, namely, Fe atoms. The empty space isn't an ethereal entity that also comes into the composition!) What, for that matter, is the solidity the iron cube appears to have? It looks impermeable by raisins; does it look impermeable by neutrinos? Or is it just that—in contrast to puffy gribenes—it looks as if it's not mostly empty space? (But then the puffs in the gribenes don't look as if they're empty space, they look like air bubbles. Air is also mostly empty space in the same way that iron is, but it doesn't look that way, does it?) It seems odd to say that it looks as if it has the solidity that would come from being nothing but Fe nuclei right next to each other. "I don't believe they are solid (at least, not in the way they appear to be)" undermines itself: there doesn't seem to be another coherent way for them to be solid. On initial reflection, one may be inclined to say that cubes of pure iron aren't really solid, since they're mostly empty space; further reflection ought to lead one to the conclusion that that's just part of what it is for iron, or anything else, to be solid. A further variation 2013-07-29T00:00:00+00:00 A while ago I thought I'd write a blog post about §21 of Intention. Indeed, I've been thinking about doing such a thing for about 18 months. I have, as you may have discerned, not yet done so. But I have expanded the list of poems rewritten to have, more or less, the content of "This Is Just To Say" (though this is not as good as the others): Whoso list to snack, I know where is a plum, But as for me, hélas, I may no more: When last I did my housemate got so sore I felt myself to be a no-good bum. Yet had I by no means been stricken dumb: "This is just to say I ate your fruit. For- give me; it was delicious", said I, nor was. Better in the end to just keep mum. Who will these plums, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may wind up in a jam. There in marker, for him who would it eat, Is written on a post-it round about: Noli me edere, for breakfast I am, And bitter for to taste, though I seem sweet. On going the bloody hard way in eating ice-cream cones 2013-05-16T00:00:00+00:00 Selected paragraphs from the introduction to How to Do Things Right by L. Rust Hills (wotta name!): Now it may seem to some of you as you first get into this that the answers are harder than the questions, that the solutions in fact turn out to be far worse than the problems ever even thought of being. But that's because you don't yet understand the problems-and-solutions relationship. Anyone interested in doing something right, really right, is necessarily going to be much more intrigued by a problem than he is by a solution. If you are only interested in a solution—just any old simple solution—then the best thing to do is not even think about the problem. Most problems just go away—poof!—if you stop thinking about them. Difference in degree of interest-in-the-problem creates the fundamental division of all mankind: between those who believe in getting things done, on the one hand, and those who believe in doing things right</a>, on the other. Most of the complex problems we've got in this country today are the result of slap-dash, "can-do" men attempting to solve once-simple problems in careless ways that left a mess, left vicious half-solved problems, like wounded lions, in all our streets. … Problems have their pride, you know, as well as a strong sense of self-preservation, and they quite naturally resist yielding up their existence to an inferior solution. But when a problem is confronted with a solution that demonstrates full appreciation and entire comprehension—matches it intricacy for intricacy, complexity for complexity, even absurdity for absurdity—then it gives way utterly to this flattery and understanding. Since the "perfect" solution to a problem, the exact match-up, is unlikely to occur to anyone, a certain amount of overkill in problem-solving is quite obviously necessary. Thus what I present in this book (proudly) is a sequence of apparently complicated solutions to apparently simple problems. The fact that they may not work either is completely irrelevant. It's a whole new approach! </blockquote> Having read his advice on "how to be kindly", in the first book of this three-book compilation, I am not quite sure what to expect in the third book, How to Be Good. And this is the pen I use to write the recipes for my most delicious meals. I like to call it my 2013-05-08T00:00:00+00:00 plume de nom. Also, "heterostatic hypotension" is when you get all lightheaded on seeing someone else's proud, upright bearing. I know neither of those is really up to the standards I used to pretend to maintain, but I'm rusty over here, sheesh. Variations on a theme by Kenneth Koch 2013-04-20T00:00:00+00:00 1. Then eat the cold plums, if that will move her; If you can give yourself to the one half sucked out in your hand, give yourself to her too, Till she cry "Lover, plum-eating, self-giving lover, I must have you beside the white chickens!" 2. Do not say, my sweet, I am unkind That I upset your day, And having on your breakfast dined I have just this to say. True, your icebox now I loot Of plums you'd set aside; As cold and sweet as any fruit That yet by me was tried. Yet this nocturnal snack is such As makes me none the worse: I could not love thee, dear, so much Had you ne'er inspired verse. 3. I ate the plums That you were saving Their sweetness was What I was craving Burma-Shave Comments</h1> on 2014-07-20 13:17:21.0, ben w commented:</h3> See also</a>. [permalink]</a> The SEP entry on "Philosophy of Computer Science" is strange and wonderful 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 See for yourself if you don't believe me.</a> It is traditional for carping blog posts to work their way through their subjects line by line or at least section by section, which is (now that I review the article) indeed highly tempting. In fact, let's yield to the temptation, though only for some sections: §2.1, §4.1, and §6.1, though I also think §6.2 is not so hot. I will also now observe that the whole thing is quite superficial and proceeds mostly by way of rhetorical questions. (After having written this post I realize that I didn't find a place to include this interesting post on undefined behavior</a>, so I'll just stick it here.) §2.1, "The Dual Nature of Programs" I'll just consider the first and fourth paragraphs of this section. The first: Many authors (Moor 1978; Rapaport 2005b; Colburn 2004) discuss the so-called dual nature of programs. On the face of it, a program appears to have both a textual and a mechanical or process-like guise. As text, a program can be edited. But its manifestation on a machine-readable disk seems to have quite different properties. In particular, it can be executed on a physical machine. So according to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (§3.3), the two guises cannot be the same entity. Of course, anyone persuaded by this duality is under an obligation to say something about the relationship between these two apparent forms of existence. </blockquote> What, one wonders, do the authors mean by this. Consider the following: Some source code lives always and forever in human-readable form; it is never compiled to anything else. I believe that PHP is (or was) like this. In that case, the source code can be executed on a physical machine (by an interpreter, but that's immaterial).</li> Some source code is never directly executed; it must be compiled. The executable can be executed on a physical machine; the source code cannot. (Or at least, not in the same way the executable can; there exist polyglot programs.) There doesn't seem to be any reason at all to balk at calling the source and the executable different entities, any more than there would be a reason to balk at calling the recipe and the cake different entities. (Or, perhaps less contentiously, calling Der Zauberberg and The Magic Mountain different entities, whatever one's ontology of fictional works is, or score and performance. (It occurs to me that this is perhaps not less contentious. But it should be!)) I take it the second paragraph is supposed to tell us why this is in fact problematic, and it does seem that, say, byte compilation is more like a series of transformations all of the same sort than performing a musical score is. But the evocation of the supposed peculiar difficulty is pretty unconvincing (also I don't think anyone refers to compilation as implementation).</li> Nevertheless, the means by which the authors seek to draw attention to the intuitive difference between source code and executable is faulty. True, one can write a program on a piece of paper, and edit it with a pencil and an eraser (or one could punch holes in cards oneself, I guess, with a steady hand) but more often one writes them using a computer, in which case it has, of course, "a manifestation on a machine-readable disk", which is, obviously, editable. And a compiled program is also editable</a>, though not as easily.</li> </ol> It's also worth noting that even an executable is only actually capable of being run given a certain context; even something that has no language runtime or links to no external libraries will only be runnable by an operating system that understands its format (or by an emulator that does). This is independent of its representation on disk. (And for that matter its representation on disk is still the wrong thing to draw our attention to, because what we would presumably like to call the same file will be represented on a disk differently depending on the filesystem used.) The fourth paragraph: A slightly different perspective on these issues starts from the question of program identity. When are two programs taken to be the same? Such issues arise for example in attempts to determine the legal identity of a piece of software. If we identify a program with its textual manifestation then the identity of a program is sensitive to changes in its appearance (e.g. changing the font). Evidently, it is not the text alone that provides us with any philosophically interesting notion of program identity. Rather, to reach an informed criterion of identity we need to take more account of semantics and implementation. We shall return to this subject in §3 and §6. </blockquote> This whole post actually really only exists because of the egregious badness of the fourth sentence in this paragraph: were it not for that I'd have found the article baffling but probably not been motivated to write about it. Here is the issue: the font in which source code is displayed is not a property of its text, any more than (e.g.) where the line wrapping occurs, or the color in which the text is displayed is. This is fairly close to exactly equivalent to arguing that if we individuate programs by their textual manifestations, then looking at your monitor through sunglasses creates a different program. A much better example of a trivial change which we might not want to claim leads to a difference in program identity is the insertion of grammatically irrelevant characters—in many languages this can be done by fiddling with indentation or lineation—or by changing representations of characters</a>. (Or even the insertion of comments, which are grammatically relevant.) But in the first case the reason for denying that they change the identity of the program seems close at hand—they're grammatically irrelevant, so they aren't really there at all. (Consider Lisp programmers, who traditionally incline to the view that the program is the AST, and that they're just writing a representation of the AST, and consequently occasionally claim that Lisp has no parentheses.) And really one can imagine a whole host of at least diverting questions here: Have you got the same program after something that doesn't affect the AST but does make things clearer to the reader (e.g. alpha conversion (in the absence of quotation or other tricky things), or even just comments)?</li> After local changes that do affect the AST but shouldn't affect the semantics (e.g. eta conversion, though I believe in some type systems this can lead to different inferred types)?</li> After global changes that radically affect the AST but shouldn't affect the semantics (e.g. conversion to CPS in a language in which that won't completely trash the stack)?</li> Does the same source code compiled with different compiler optimization options produce different programs?</li> Is a polyglot quine</a> the same program as itself?</li> </ol> §4.1, "Proofs in Computer Science" It is averred that proofs in computer science are shallow and uninteresting, and do not employ mathematical abstraction, and this distinguishes them (to their discredit) from mathematical proofs. The sole example of a proof in computer science is one of the correctness of a straightforward algorithm for computing a factorial. It is obvious</a> that all arguments in CS are about on that level</a>, especially as regards abstraction. Or, I guess, look here</a>. (I also wish to link to this post</a>, which includes the marginally hilarious function definition memoize :: Functor f => (forall a. (n -> a, [a]) -> f a) -> T f n memoize f = let x = prop7 (f . lemma) in T (yoneda (fst x)) (memoize (snd x)) </code></pre> .) The cited statement about proofs in CS also seems hard to reconcile with the authors' reference to sophisticated type systems later, since one of the things people interested in sophisticated type systems are often interested in establishing is that the type system is sound and the type checker will terminate, which—as I understand it—tends to involve equally sophisticated logical systems. §6.1, "Abstraction" First, note the sentence "A more logical approach to the analysis of abstraction, that does have some strong advocacy (Wright 1983; Hale 1987).". Of course. We continue in a vein that makes one wonder if the authors actually know how "abstraction" is typically used in a CS context: the conceptual investigation of abstraction in computer science is in its infancy. Colburn (2007) suggests that the distinction between abstraction in mathematics and abstraction in computer science lies in the fact that in mathematics abstraction is information neglect whereas in computer science it is information hiding. That is, abstractions in mathematics ignore what is judged to be irrelevant (e.g. the colour of similar triangles). In contrast, in computer science, any details that are ignored at one level of abstraction (e.g. Java programmers need not worry about the precise location in memory associated with a particular variable) must not be ignored by one of the lower levels (e.g. the virtual machine handles all memory allocations). </blockquote> This is a shockingly terrible example of abstraction (but it seems to be a matter of information neglect on the part of the programmer), being just about the least abstract one could be. It doesn't even qualify as a toy example. One might also observe that frequently one wants to combine two values of the same type in such a way that the combining operation has a "default" that acts as an identity, without caring about precisely what the combination comes to or what the default is, and abstract over that</a>. Naturally in order for this to be useful some specific operations will have to be defined—what would be the point, otherwise? But what would be the point of the exact same abstraction</a> in mathematics if there were no particular mathematical structures that fulfilled it? Post Scriptum 2013-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 HATRED of one's father at Victoria. Clapham, a nightmare of cream-painted plumbing and baths in the sky. Sorrow and Angst over the fish in the dining car. Then Dover, looking guiltily northward at the death of the spirit. </blockquote> Which is to say, another way of looking at the role of objects and in particular that pesky carpet in Remainder is as an expression of Resistentialism</a>. The extended stomach 2013-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 JEH Smith, writing for the Chronicle, observes that</a> "biologically speaking, all cooking is a form of extrasomatic predigestion, beginning a process of breaking down raw food through dicing, boiling, etc., that is subsequently continued by our digestive system". To make such an assertion is not, of course, to assert that, like the starfish, our stomachs are (even occasionally) outside our bodies. Comments</h1> on 2013-02-05 20:29:32.0, dz commented:</h3> Starfish are always outside our bodies, unless we've recently eaten a starfish. [permalink]</a> Remainder is a book about Beisichsein 2013-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 "[B]eing at one with oneself is an ideal with its roots in animal life", writes Terry Pinkard (Hegel's Naturalism, p 58), expressing an opinion which I too have long held [1]. (In fact, concern about some such idea has shown up in versions of research statements of mine, though such a concern has yet to manifest itself in much actual research, excepting an APA presentation on Schlegel and Nietzsche.) Why in animal agency? Because (again quoting Pinkard) "the animal acts in terms of the principles of its own nature", because (in a not uncommon trope that I always associate with Uexküll, since it was in him that I first encountered it) in the world of the animal there are only that-kind-of-animal-things, things whose significances are plain, and because for the animal there is no distinction between things as they are for it and things as they are in themselves. (Even the lark, says Heidegger, does not see the open.) The hungry animal seeks food, the endangered animal shelter, etc.; in their actions they do, as we would put it if talking of ourselves, what comes naturally. The only reason not to put it that way when talking of them is the suggestion that an animal might do something that does not come naturally, might do something not of its nature. (Uexküll, at least, was willing to recognize some plasticity in the natures of e.g. dogs; it's in their natures to acquire new objects, but even for him dogs are not able to see their objects as objects whose objecthood might thereby come into question.) This is not to say, of course, that an animal always attains its end, or that every animal exhibits surefooted mastery of its environment, an impossibility given both predators and prey. Only that, on the one hand, its end is neither a question for an animal nor set before it as end, and on the other, its not having achieved its end is not something that could elicit a response such as: "Curses, foiled again!". One is at one with oneself at least partially in many accounts of absorbed activity, the fluent action (often confused with basic action, both by proponents and opponents of basic action) said to be characteristic of craftsmen: one is so to speak led on smoothly from one end to the other, successive actions being elicited by the objects worked upon, tools worked with, etc., the agency so to speak dispersed in the environment in a manner analogous to that of an animal—so long as nothing breaks down. But, of course, breakdowns are possible, and if one occurs, one will be called back to oneself, what one was doing now present to oneself as the unattained end. One could conceive of another model here, supra- rather than infrahuman, in which no breakdown is possible, not because the material is flawless, but because the actor is prepared in advance for all contingencies. No breakdown is possible for an animal because, no matter how unfriendly or alien the environment, its ends cannot be made problematic for it; no breakdown is possible for a god because no environment can be unfriendly or alien enough to recall it from action to contemplation. (Having the end is the same as accomplishing it. I suppose this elides the question of determining the end in the first place.) Not only animals and gods have been thought to be at one with themselves in something like this fashion. The ancient Greek, for instance, "had not lost nature in his humanity" and was "at one with himself and happy in the sense of his humanity", says Schiller. Robert De Niro [2] "flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn't have to think about them, or understand them first. He doesn't have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real.", says the narrator of Remainder (p 24), having previously observed that De Niro "merge[s] with [the action] until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between" (p 23). And just a page prior to that the narrator remarks that most of us—he formerly included—are like that with our basic physical abilities: Walking, for example: now that's very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command. I had to learn them all, all seventy-five. And if you think That's not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you're wrong. Completely wrong. That's just it, see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French, or tennis. You just do it without thinking how you do it: you stumble into it, literally. </blockquote> The narrator gradually regains his ability to walk without thinking of walking, but after beholding De Niro's perfection on the screen recognizes that in his larger deeds he's still as he was before his accident (one of the things he recognizes is that he was thus before his accident and not merely after): Recovering from the accident, learning to move and walk, understanding before I could act—all this just made me become even more what I'd always been anyway, added another layer of distance between me and things I did. … I wasn't unusual: I was more usual than most. </blockquote> The ambition and attempt somehow to overcome the state that he and more or less everyone else is in occupies, in one way or another, the rest of the book. At first he just looks for people who aren't "artificial", as he puts it; then, seeming to remember a non-artificial (but also nontrivial: not just walking) act of his, he seeks to reproduce it—on its face an odd approach since one dimension of what he finds objectionable is precisely the doubling of action in thought of action (lighting the cigarette perfectly, and thinking: "I'm lighting the cigarette perfectly", or even "I'm lighting the cigarette perfectly—like De Niro!"). But in fact something like this is the only reasonable way forward. After all: that's how we learn to walk, isn't it?—constant trials, until it's second nature. Let us not concern ourselves with his many reenactments of scenes remembered or witnessed and concern ourselves henceforth with his original works—the bank heist and the back-and-forth plane flight. First, however, let us return to the imagined god-like Beisichseiende. What makes the being of that being unattainable for beings such as we are? It's not for nothing that leading examples of fluent action occur in constrained realms—generally either the movements we use just for getting around, or some set of movements around which some kind of specialized practice has grown up: crafts, or sports, or the arts. (Not just movements, of course; these things involve, for instance, recognitional capacities as well. The ability to hear spoken English with comprehension, or, I suppose, tell at a glance that the jam has just set, for instance. But these still occur within constraints.) Importantly, first, when you've got some kind of practice, some things fall outside the practice and can be discounted; second, because the practice is set off within all of life, episodes in the practice can be returned to and events or actions within it reprised and, well, practiced. You can practice your fingering, or your performance of a given piece, and get better at it. And if, in the middle of a given performance, the ceiling collapses and you're knocked over by falling masonry, that does not reflect poorly on your abilities as (e.g.) a violinist: dodging falling objects is simply not within the violinist's remit. If you face a difficult decision in a chess game, you can, after losing, revisit the game (if you weren't recording it, you can revisit that decision) and see what responses were available to you at that point (or earlier). When you play your next game, you're starting over from the beginning: the games are disjoint events. The second doesn't happen later than the first in some scale of time native to chess. Consequently the same thing can happen again, and you can be better prepared. You can't be practiced at life that way, something that people who recommend artistic self-fashioning would be advised to bear in mind: there are no trial runs, no repetitions of little bits that you can get better at, no seeing what went wrong after the fact and working out how to behave should the same thing occur again—it can't. The idiom which the genius of living would have to master includes every eventuality, falling ceilings included, and would have to get it right the first time, every time. Even if we discount a period of maturation, we could not possibly become able to encounter anything without breakdown, because there are just too many surprising things. (A theme that Millgram sounds vigorously.) Consequently we cannot expect that we, given that we are capable of the reflection and explicit bringing into view of ends as ends that characterizes breakdowns (i.e. given that we are not animals), will never actually be brought out of ourselves into such reflection (i.e. we are not divinely self-sufficient). This is also why I suspect the ideal of being at one with oneself of being a flight from the difficulties of the distinctively human [3]. (I once asked Rachel Barney about something not entirely unrelated to the preceding after a talk about the Stoics. She noted, in her reply, that the phronimos is rarer than the phoenix, and that there's only one of them at a time.) De Niro can merge with all his actions (onscreen) because, duh, it's not really happening and do-overs are allowed. Outside of more or less artificial circumstances we cannot, in general, achieve a like merger with our action. The environment is, at least potentially, too recalcitrant. This is neatly dramatized by the bank robbery. The thing is rehearsed until all the participants have their parts down pat; these rehearsals happen, like practice chess games or any other rehearsal, in their own time, embedded within the lives of the pre-enactors. When they go out to actually rob the actual bank, they will, it is hoped, be perfectly at one with their actions, which in the interim will have become second nature to them. And there are some things that could conceivably arise (John McClane happens to be in the bank; a freak natural disaster sweeps through) that would not impugn their status as excellent robbers. In that respect the narrator's ambitions are realistic: the people he's assembling aren't to gain mastery at everything, but only in a limited arena. This in fact comes up explicitly in the early planning stages: "I say 'ideally'," Samuels continued, "because this pattern is to both sides' great advantage. The robbers get their money and the bank staff don't get killed. What messes it all up is when a factor no one has anticipated and built into the pattern breaks in. … A have-a-go hero jumping one of the robbers, a hysterical woman who won't obey commands, someone who tries to run out fo the door …" (p 250; the second ellipsis is in the text.) </blockquote> An extremely limited arena, in fact; the potential recalcitrance of the environment to our plans is demonstrated by something quite minor. During an early rehearsal (perhaps the first), one of the pre-enactors trips over a kink in the carpet. This is incorporated into the act and the pre-enactor becomes practiced at stumbling and catching himself. When rehearsals end, though, and the act is taken on tour to the actual bank, the carpet is flat, and the whole thing goes agley. The pre-enactors are brought out of their practiced movements and must come to understand the situation they now find themselves in before they can act, choosing to abandoning the ends they were previously absorbed in (one of them calls out for the "re-enactment" to stop, not yet having figured out that it's not a re-enactment and the others in the bank are unwilling co-participants). [4] It is appropriate that the narrator ends up in the highly constrained environment of an airplane, flying back and forth without setting down: here, at least, is an environment not specially set apart from the rest of the world which he can fully take in. (Until, after the book ends, the issue of fuel becomes pressing.) [1] Obviously not only I; many have held it for much longer: "We love in [animals etc.] the tacitly created life, the serene spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves", quo' Schiller. [2] I thought, prior to checking, that the narrator has this thought about John Wayne. [3] Perhaps I should add "when this is individualistic", at least until I finish Pinkard's book—though societies also clash and I can't say I've ever been incredibly satisfied with e.g. McDowell's explanation of Aristotle's seeming lack of curiosity about, say, the customs of the Massagetae. [4] I don't believe I noted this before but the narrator, throughout all of this, is in just the state of mind that he disliked at the beginning of the book, standing apart from it all and assessing it. I suppose that he more wants to observe fluid action than to partake of it himself—or he's in the double bind of wanting to partake of it and to appreciate himself partaking of it. He also, in his assessment of his fallen employees ("I looked at Two and Five lying on the floor. They seemed now less like acrobats than sculptures. The bag that had slipped from Five's hand and the gun that now lay beside Two's looked to me like wedges of surpluis matter stripped away to reveal them."), reminds me more than a little of Rönne: "Trotzdem verrichtete er weiter, was an Fragen und Befehlen zu verrichten war; klopfte mit einem Finger der rechten Hand auf einen der linken, dann stand eine Lunge darunter; trat an Betten: guten Morgen, was macht Ihr Leib", in "Gehirne", "Auf allen Tischen standen Geräte, welche für den Hunger, welche für den Durst", in "Die Eroberung". Comments</h1> on 2013-01-23 8:15:21.0, Johanna commented:</h3> Very enjoyable piece! [permalink]</a> and, further, on 2013-01-23 15:07:56.0, Johanna commented:</h3> I wonder whether what we try to achieve when we 'start over' in life (new job, new partner, new country) is not just exactly that: render the previous failures a mere 'trial run', to be discounted, just like the violinist writes off an unsuccessful practice? The promise of 'starting over' is perhaps not just that our lives will in fact be better, but also that we can discount any previous mistakes as part of the test, not the real thing. [permalink]</a> Why tolerate Mark Johnston's religion? 2013-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 I have not read Why Tolerate Religion?, but I have read its NDPR review</a> and its bibliography, as a result of which I am unsurprised by the reviewer's assertion that the book "manifests little engagement with serious history of religious thought". I suspect, again based on the bibliography, that it does not manifest a great deal of engagement with the history of thought about religion; in particular, I wish the review had spent more time not simply critiquing the "four features that he says are, or may be, distinctive of religious belief and essential to religion as such" but going into how Leiter identifies them, and their broad adequacy. Is it true, in fact, that all the things we are apt now to call religions issue in categorical demands for action? Is that true of everything discussed in The Golden Bough, for instance (I don't know if Leiter observes a difference between myth and religion)? Is it true that Religion after Idolatry manifests culpable failures of epistemic warrant on Johnston's part? (Manifesting such a failure isn't itself one of Leiter's features, but it seems from the review that they jointly entail such a manifestation.) Neglect of thought about religion</a> is unfortunate in part because if one does want to come up with a catalogue of features characteristic of religion one has to start from some understanding of what religion is, to get one's topic into view, even if that understanding will be revised and sharpened as the investigation proceeds. But without study one is apt to simply recapitulate (in this time and place) a vulgar Christianity, as it latterly understands itself. (Latterly because, obviously, what was considered to be religion, or a religion, has not been constant; JZ Smith mentions in "Religion, Religions, Religious" that in the early 16th century, for instance, "religion" was just a category of customs and rites, not of beliefs, which (in the case of the beliefs of members of cultures encountered by Europeans abroad) "could simply be recorded as 'antiquities'"; that they yonder believe such-and-such about the world would not have made it into an account of their religion. That's reaching way back for a point that could also be made just in the 20th century with the increasing prominence of evangelicalism.) The idea that all religions essentially issue categorical demands for action and involve "explicitly or implicitly" a "metaphysics of ultimate reality" seem particularly likely to have such an origin. (I'm curious about that implicitness: it clearly has to be there because it would be absurd to claim that all religious beliefs involve a metaphysics of ultimate reality. But how implicit is the metaphysics allowed to be, and how determinate must it be? Implicit and indeterminate enough that just about any ordinary belief also implicitly involves such a metaphysics?) A different (and excellent) Smith essay, "God Save This Honorable Court", demonstrates the ways that "a notion of self-evidence derived from using lay understandings of varied forms of Christianities" leads people (in the case of the essay, Supreme Court judges) to try to press the unfamiliar into familiar molds, assimilating Santeria to Christianity, and to not examine the familiar, illustrated with a series of Durkheimian takes on Lynch v Donnelly. It is very long, but I'm going to quote a substantial section of it, because I only wrote this post because I wanted to quote it (in what follows, ellipses in square brackets were introduced by me, and other ellipses were introduced by Smith into material he's quoting): I quote, without intervening comment, two extracts from the majority opinion in Lynch v Donnelly … the first may be taken as an ethnographic description, the second as a statement by native informants. […] Each year, in cooperation with the downtown retail merchants association, the city of Pawtucket, R.I. … erects a Christmas display as part of its observance of the Christmas holiday season. The display is situated in a park owned by a non-profit organization and located in the heart of the shopping district. The display comprises many figures and decorations traditionally associated with Christmas, including, among other things, a Santa Claus house, reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh, candy striped poles, a Christmas tree, carolers, cut out figures representing such characters as a clown, an elephant, a teddy bear, a talking wishing well, hundreds of colored lights, a large banner that reads "Seasons Greetings," and a creche. The creche has been on display for forty or more years. It consists of the traditional figures including the Infant Jesus, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, kings and animals, all ranging in height from five inches to five feet. The crech is positioned in a central and highly visible location, an almost life sized tableau marked off by a white picket fence.</blockquote> […] The display engenders a friendly community spirit of goodwill in keeping with the season. The display brings into the central city shoppers and serves commercial interests and benefits merchants and their employees. It promotes pre-Christmas retail sales and helps engender goodwill and neighborliness commonly associated with the Christmas season. It invites people to participate in the Christmas spirit, brotherhood, peace, and to let loose with their money.</blockquote> […] Let us begin by granting for purposes of argument the finding of fact by the Court: that the display consists of the copresence of sacred and secular items. In the Court's reasoning, religion would be present only if the exhibit consisted entirely of sacred symbols; that is to say, for the Court, following some generalized Christian prototype, religion is the sacred. Durkheim might reject both the Court's premise and its conclusion, while accepting its finding of fact. For Durkheim, religion is the oppositional relationship of sacred to profane. The presence of both are required for there to be religion. […] In the case at hand, the native informant predictably stressed the economic and pragmatic consequences of the display. This understanding was, from Durkheim's view, erroneously accepted as true by the Court. The informant claimed that the exhibit "benefits merchants and their employees", it "serves commercial interest" […] Durkheim might remark that embedded in this economic discourse is a second language of sociality, specifically tied to a particular season. […] As translated by Durkheim, members of the Pawtucket society usually live dispersed in their separate homes, following individual biological and economic pursuits For Durkheim, this is the fundamental social translation of the profane. By contrast, in the shopping center, these same folk come together to "participate" in what Durkheim would define as a "moral community", his translation of the sacred. […] The coming together "into the central city" is a ritual that resignifies the sacred. In Durkheim's sense of the term, this coming together in the shopping center constitues Pawtucket's 'church'. From this perspective, Durkheim might go on to argue two reinterpretations of the native informants' account. Both would reject the Court's understanding that Pawtucket's beliefs are secular. On the one hand, Durkheim might argue that, in religion, the experience of the collectivity is objectified, often as an impersonal force, sometimes as a supernatural being. In the native's erroneous understanding, it is this force (or being) rather than the coming together that is thought to "engender" the powerfully experienced sentiments of collective life. In Pawtucket, this objectification is variously named the "Season", the "Christmas Season", or the "Christmas Spirit". This is a sacred power in that it can be profaned. Think of the canonical example of Scrooge. Alternatively, Durkheim might argue that as these sentiments are "engendered" by this periodic coming together, seasonal shopping in Pawtucket constitues that society's religious ritual.</blockquote> Later Smith has Durkheim observing that while all come together to shop at the mall, after doing so they "disperse to their individual homes and denominational houses of worship, a dispersal that likewise markes the profane". (For all that Smith refers to mistaken objectifications of the collectivity as impersonal forces or supernatural beings, I'm not sure there's an objectionable metaphysical view underlying the informant's claim that the display engenders goodwill, etc.) Failure to abstract 2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

- Waste

We're All Pilots Here: Andrea Long Chu's Authority

On Purity in Heists

What's so testimonial about testimonial injustice? A reply to Richard Pettigrew

On "An Essay On Wank"

On the materiality of Rebecca Ward's works

Things Organized Neatly

Comments</h1> on 2024-11-12 18:47:26.0, Guy Lionel Slingsby commented:</h3> This is pretty wonderful, a really good way of delineating what’s different about Heti, and of describing the the kinds of agencies this alphabetisation gives us.</p> I wonder where (or if) Murnane fits in.</p>

on 2024-11-12 18:47:26.0, Guy Lionel Slingsby commented:</h3> This is pretty wonderful, a really good way of delineating what’s different about Heti, and of describing the the kinds of agencies this alphabetisation gives us.</p> I wonder where (or if) Murnane fits in.</p>

I could have sworn I posted this in 2019

Comments</h1> on 2024-04-26 0:24:36.0, C Voss commented:</h3> See also Ammons’s “Glare.”</p>

on 2024-04-26 0:24:36.0, C Voss commented:</h3> See also Ammons’s “Glare.”</p>

On Agnes Callard's Aspiration

On Lydia Tár's EGOT

on 2023-04-10 15:31:45.0, josh k-sky commented:</h3> It's especially something—inartful?—to cede interpretive authority to Field when breathing life into the figure of Lydia Tár has become a game with so many players. There are a whole lot of new neighborhoods outside the text!</p>

Gefahr im Ziel

I doff my assless chaps one leg at a time just like the next intermillennial yobbo

Two or three confusions about five or six pages of Bernard Williams

Their words, for you

My pettiest post ever

Comments</h1> on 2020-10-18 14:42:47.0, Mr. F commented:</h3> Beyond the pale,</p>

on 2020-10-18 14:42:47.0, Mr. F commented:</h3> Beyond the pale,</p>

and, further, on 2024-02-04 15:07:53.0, Francesca Berger commented:</h3> I got here by pure internet rabbit-holing, and just want to say that I think you're entirely in the right on this petty point. Hear hear.</p>

Are we Aristotle's enemies?

Comments</h1> on 2020-07-22 20:09:04.0, Daniel commented:</h3> I decided to stop reading Callard's stuff a while ago; feeling good about that decision.</p>

on 2020-07-22 20:09:04.0, Daniel commented:</h3> I decided to stop reading Callard's stuff a while ago; feeling good about that decision.</p>

Wingtip Dot Club

Comments</h1> on 2019-08-04 16:56:46.0, k-sky commented:</h3> Count this blog friend amused</p>

on 2019-08-04 16:56:46.0, k-sky commented:</h3> Count this blog friend amused</p>

Ford contra O'Shaugnessy

The fire in me now

Comments</h1>

The credulity of the recappers, or, what does Rick & Morty have in common with "Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist?"

Bad faith, briefly expounded

Verse roundup!!!!

Comments</h1>

on 2016-05-24 16:42:39.0, Darthhellokitty commented:</h3> I bow to your prowess - in particular, parts 3 and 10, and 11 - part 10 needs to be illustrated by Kate Beaton.</p>

Sculptural realism, or, Michelangelo on knowing one's mind

Prepare the receptacle

Cavell, not Carell

Transformative Experience</em>: Nonidentity Problem

Robert Louis Stevenson modernism shocker

Art and Desire

More on "Knowing What One Wants"

A few more double dactyls

Innocence & experience

Evolutionary explanation, mimics, and the doctrine of double effect

Judo flip!

Phonological tricks

A question about Frankfurt-style cases regarding so-called free will

Literary expose of the century!

and, further, on 2014-11-07 10:04:33.0, ben w commented:</h3> Yes of course you're right; maybe contamination from Wolgamot's Christian name.</p> I emailed Rosmarie Waldrop and she denied everything, but I still think I'm right.</p>

and, further, on 2015-06-03 2:54:51.0, Simon Lucas commented:</h3> http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6451</p> see entry from nyer13:</p> 'I worked at the Little Carnegie from ‘71 to '77 (usher/doorman). '</p> 'John Wolgamot was the long-term mgr when I was at the theater.'</p>

and, further, on 2015-06-03 6:39:15.0, ben w commented:</h3> I did ask Waldrop (Rosmarie), as indicated above, and she denied it (as indicated above), but she would, wouldn't she? I also don't think that very many people would have to keep it a secret at all, maybe, what, seven?</p>

and, further, on 2015-06-10 16:25:11.0, ben w commented:</h3> I am very curious about this evidence!</p>

and, further, on 2016-07-21 11:56:51.0, Frances Kirby commented:</h3> John Barton Wolgamot is my grandfather. He grew up in Danville, IL. I have read my mother's copy of his book which he self-published.</p>

and, further, on 2016-07-21 0:02:19.0, ben w commented:</h3> I want to believe you, I really do.</p>

and, further, on 2019-06-07 21:59:42.0, Frances Kirby commented:</h3> I am John Wolgamot’s granddaughter and Charlie’s daughter. He exists. We have the book.</p>

On a popular misconception concerning "literally"

and, further, on 2014-07-21 11:25:14.0, Mr. F commented:</h3> Tammy gets it exactly right.</p>

and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:41:41.0, JoshKsky commented:</h3> To praise another word oft-disparaged, the word "like" does good work in "I stood in line for like eight hundred hours."</p>

and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:51:19.0, Cecily commented:</h3> Or even "I stood in line for like an hour."</p>

and, further, on 2014-07-21 13:53:16.0, ben w commented:</h3> Ok, fair point about impoverishment; speakers will find a way. (Of course, that cuts both ways!)</p>

and, further, on 2014-08-01 7:06:08.0, dsquared commented:</h3> I literally pissed myself with joy at seeing this important point made.</p>

and, further, on 2016-12-22 3:08:50.0, haste makes waste commented:</h3> Love to read this post, thank you so much Ben. Ruth, UK</p>

That's right, it's more double dactyls

Cauliflower sans Merci

and, further, on 2014-02-13 17:53:04.0, ben w commented:</h3> You demand commentary? Then you shall have, at least, a comment, in bullet point form.</p>

More than one frustration regarding "Honest Illusion"

Further versification

An expression of a single frustration regarding one aspect of Pippin's treatment of action

The dactylic guide to poets & philosophers

Comments</h1>

on 2013-09-30 20:44:00.0, implied other commented:</h3> like</p> [permalink]</a></small></p>

Is a colander solid?

A further variation

On going the bloody hard way in eating ice-cream cones

And this is the pen I use to write the recipes for my most delicious meals. I like to call it my

Variations on a theme by Kenneth Koch

Comments</h1>

Comments</h1> on 2024-04-26 0:24:36.0, C Voss commented:</h3>
See also Ammons’s “Glare.”</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

on 2024-04-26 0:24:36.0, C Voss commented:</h3>
See also Ammons’s “Glare.”</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

and, further, on 2024-02-04 15:07:53.0, Francesca Berger commented:</h3>
I got here by pure internet rabbit-holing, and just want to say that I think you're entirely in the right on this petty point. Hear hear.</p>
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Comments</h1> on 2020-07-22 20:09:04.0, Daniel commented:</h3>
I decided to stop reading Callard's stuff a while ago; feeling good about that decision.</p>
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on 2020-07-22 20:09:04.0, Daniel commented:</h3>
I decided to stop reading Callard's stuff a while ago; feeling good about that decision.</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

Comments</h1> on 2019-08-04 16:56:46.0, k-sky commented:</h3>
Count this blog friend amused</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

on 2019-08-04 16:56:46.0, k-sky commented:</h3>
Count this blog friend amused</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

on 2016-05-24 16:42:39.0, Darthhellokitty commented:</h3>
I bow to your prowess - in particular, parts 3 and 10, and 11 - part 10 needs to be illustrated by Kate Beaton.</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

and, further, on 2019-06-07 21:59:42.0, Frances Kirby commented:</h3>
I am John Wolgamot’s granddaughter and Charlie’s daughter. He exists. We have the book.</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

and, further, on 2016-12-22 3:08:50.0, haste makes waste commented:</h3>
Love to read this post, thank you so much Ben. Ruth, UK</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

on 2013-09-30 20:44:00.0, implied other commented:</h3>
like</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>

on 2014-07-20 13:17:21.0, ben w commented:</h3>
See also</a>.</p>
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Comments</h1>
on 2013-02-05 20:29:32.0, dz commented:</h3>
Starfish are always outside our bodies, unless we've recently eaten a starfish.</p>
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on 2013-02-05 20:29:32.0, dz commented:</h3>
Starfish are always outside our bodies, unless we've recently eaten a starfish.</p>
[permalink]</a></small></p>