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The wonderful thing about this particular blog is that I can justify making no more than semi-informed remarks about anything whatsoever. (Most blogs do this, but they don't construct justifications for the habit.)
I have long been amused by the realization that people go into cultural studies because it gives them an excuse to spend time with things that already fascinate them; the results often being books that would horrify the neo-Marxists who first elevated the analysis of popular culture from a suspect, marginal area of academia to a mainstream endeavor.
But even though I would like to discuss topics like how a professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania comes to write a delectably flip and popularizing book like The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication and Glamour, maybe that one should wait till after Joan DeJean lectures at the High Museum on Sunday.
Right now I should wrap up the misuse of metaphor when it comes to chemistry.
Thomas Pynchon, of course, uses chemistry as a guiding metaphor in Gravity's Rainbow as he uses the higher reaches of mathematics as a guiding metaphor in Against the Day. Covalent bonds and corporate bonds cohabit quite comfortably in that first-named book.
And it is most intriguing to find the habits of humor and the assumptions about reality that prevail among chemists as among physicists (or among solicitors, as I believe lawyers are still called on the far side of the Atlantic pond, or among psychoanalysts). As I remarked somewhere in the last couple of posts, anyone who kept coming up with cusps in mathematical trajectories knows his limits and his scientific illiteracies (regarding which latter, I liked the offhand Reichian joke in one comment...one rarely gets send-ups of old Wilhelm these days, especially when creating pseudo-explications of experimental problems).
But having been sent off to the philosophers, or more accurately to nja's blog about them, I am struck again by my sense that Engels (I think it was Engels who said it, not Marx) was wrong again; the point may be to change the world, but the philosophers thus far have not even understood it.
Witness the tangle regarding valid arguments in (o, I shall let someone else, perhaps nja, remind me of whose book it is)...the author sets out to demonstate why it is that people get their visions of reality so muddled up. As George Lakoff would say, it is all a matter of framing; beginning with propositions in which we are emotionally invested, we make elementary mistakes in logic when we try to parse a situation that rouses our enthusiasm or our anger. But as if to illustrate his own point, the writer creates a syllogism that he himself can't get right.
It was a particularly confusing one, because it was based on a peculiarity of the English language when it comes to distinguishing groups and sets. But it seemed to me that anyone who understood the dynamics of history in English words and the method of distinguishing symbolic logic taught in freshman courses on the subject (some of us had to take it in lieu of a mathematics requirement) could have figured out what had gone wrong. Reverse a couple of terms and play with the intrinsic ambiguities involved in the word "some," and you can confuse even yourself.
But it is rarely the syllogisms that count in rhetoric; it is the framing of the premises. The hypotheticals of "must be" and "ought to be" elide smoothly into the rarely unambiguous "is." (By the way, how do Spanish-speaking logicians handle "es" versus "esta"? I don't know.) There is a great deal of emotion invested in the syllogism "A university gives graduate degrees to smart people. A certain politician has a graduate degree from such-and-such university. Therefore, that politician is intelligent." The premise elevates the provisional "Universities claim to give graduate degrees only to those intelligent enough to deserve them" to "A university awards graduate degrees if and only if the recipient has met the highest standards of intelligence," and ignores the problem that the premise is not a matter of validly argued logic in the first place, but of how a concrete issue is interpreted. It is a problem that lies in the assumptions of how graduate departments operate and how degrees are awarded.
That is a matter of sociology and history, and examining the syllogism will do no good except insofar as one can and should say that there is no such thing as a universally valid statement that is not a tautology, and that punsters and historians of language will find a way to show that a tautology is less than universally valid.
I am joking (what else would you expect?) but to a serious end. Interdisciplinarity is necessary because no single discipline can perceive the limitations in its own premises and terms of argument. Actually, no human being can perceive the ultimate limitations, but that is a tautology if one assumes that human beings are not omniscient and omnipotent, which we did the last time I checked in on the topic.
(All human beings have limitations. Some limitations are perceivable. Therefore, human beings perceive their limitations. Right? If you say "yes," proceed to the beginning of this post and start over. If you say "no," likewise.
If you say "Do you mean 'Some human beings sometimes perceive some of their limitations', or do you mean 'all human beings always perceive all of their limitations', or..." you will sound like a famous saying by Abraham Lincoln, or else like Ludwig Wittgenstein. But you will have noticed that the final term is systematically ambiguous, allowing the emotionally committed reader to smuggle in "all" and "always" or the deeply ambiguous "some" as much or as little as they prefer. The shift from active to passive voice is itself a cute rhetorical trick, but symbolic logic won't rescue us from the morasses. It may require a good story or two to make us see the point.)
I have long been amused by the realization that people go into cultural studies because it gives them an excuse to spend time with things that already fascinate them; the results often being books that would horrify the neo-Marxists who first elevated the analysis of popular culture from a suspect, marginal area of academia to a mainstream endeavor.
But even though I would like to discuss topics like how a professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania comes to write a delectably flip and popularizing book like The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication and Glamour, maybe that one should wait till after Joan DeJean lectures at the High Museum on Sunday.
Right now I should wrap up the misuse of metaphor when it comes to chemistry.
Thomas Pynchon, of course, uses chemistry as a guiding metaphor in Gravity's Rainbow as he uses the higher reaches of mathematics as a guiding metaphor in Against the Day. Covalent bonds and corporate bonds cohabit quite comfortably in that first-named book.
And it is most intriguing to find the habits of humor and the assumptions about reality that prevail among chemists as among physicists (or among solicitors, as I believe lawyers are still called on the far side of the Atlantic pond, or among psychoanalysts). As I remarked somewhere in the last couple of posts, anyone who kept coming up with cusps in mathematical trajectories knows his limits and his scientific illiteracies (regarding which latter, I liked the offhand Reichian joke in one comment...one rarely gets send-ups of old Wilhelm these days, especially when creating pseudo-explications of experimental problems).
But having been sent off to the philosophers, or more accurately to nja's blog about them, I am struck again by my sense that Engels (I think it was Engels who said it, not Marx) was wrong again; the point may be to change the world, but the philosophers thus far have not even understood it.
Witness the tangle regarding valid arguments in (o, I shall let someone else, perhaps nja, remind me of whose book it is)...the author sets out to demonstate why it is that people get their visions of reality so muddled up. As George Lakoff would say, it is all a matter of framing; beginning with propositions in which we are emotionally invested, we make elementary mistakes in logic when we try to parse a situation that rouses our enthusiasm or our anger. But as if to illustrate his own point, the writer creates a syllogism that he himself can't get right.
It was a particularly confusing one, because it was based on a peculiarity of the English language when it comes to distinguishing groups and sets. But it seemed to me that anyone who understood the dynamics of history in English words and the method of distinguishing symbolic logic taught in freshman courses on the subject (some of us had to take it in lieu of a mathematics requirement) could have figured out what had gone wrong. Reverse a couple of terms and play with the intrinsic ambiguities involved in the word "some," and you can confuse even yourself.
But it is rarely the syllogisms that count in rhetoric; it is the framing of the premises. The hypotheticals of "must be" and "ought to be" elide smoothly into the rarely unambiguous "is." (By the way, how do Spanish-speaking logicians handle "es" versus "esta"? I don't know.) There is a great deal of emotion invested in the syllogism "A university gives graduate degrees to smart people. A certain politician has a graduate degree from such-and-such university. Therefore, that politician is intelligent." The premise elevates the provisional "Universities claim to give graduate degrees only to those intelligent enough to deserve them" to "A university awards graduate degrees if and only if the recipient has met the highest standards of intelligence," and ignores the problem that the premise is not a matter of validly argued logic in the first place, but of how a concrete issue is interpreted. It is a problem that lies in the assumptions of how graduate departments operate and how degrees are awarded.
That is a matter of sociology and history, and examining the syllogism will do no good except insofar as one can and should say that there is no such thing as a universally valid statement that is not a tautology, and that punsters and historians of language will find a way to show that a tautology is less than universally valid.
I am joking (what else would you expect?) but to a serious end. Interdisciplinarity is necessary because no single discipline can perceive the limitations in its own premises and terms of argument. Actually, no human being can perceive the ultimate limitations, but that is a tautology if one assumes that human beings are not omniscient and omnipotent, which we did the last time I checked in on the topic.
(All human beings have limitations. Some limitations are perceivable. Therefore, human beings perceive their limitations. Right? If you say "yes," proceed to the beginning of this post and start over. If you say "no," likewise.
If you say "Do you mean 'Some human beings sometimes perceive some of their limitations', or do you mean 'all human beings always perceive all of their limitations', or..." you will sound like a famous saying by Abraham Lincoln, or else like Ludwig Wittgenstein. But you will have noticed that the final term is systematically ambiguous, allowing the emotionally committed reader to smuggle in "all" and "always" or the deeply ambiguous "some" as much or as little as they prefer. The shift from active to passive voice is itself a cute rhetorical trick, but symbolic logic won't rescue us from the morasses. It may require a good story or two to make us see the point.)
