Willard Van Orman Quine Guest Book Volume 2
October 1, 1999 - February 21, 2000

120. [WVQ-A] Oct 15, 1999 "RECAP" (found site through: Excite) --- Quine is amazing- i am studying his works and methods of theory in a class at Purchase College {Purchase, NY} and the information which has presented to me thus far is simply intriguing as well as mind expanding......thanx. from dave alger
121. [WVQ-A] Oct 17, 1999 "Hey Cats, Check Out This Site." (found site through: Zornsearch) --- Recent research comes to show that W.V.Quine was actually named Hugh Riddington. Keep our site bookmarked (control+D) for forthcoming information. from The Lovezone Collective --- Email: zorngrund (at) yahoo.com Web Page: https://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Suite/6012/interviewindex.html - obviously some messages are hoaxes ...
122. [WVQ-T] Oct 22, 1999 "Impressions" (found site through: Yahoo) --- An intrestingly personal web page. Is the section about countries Quine flew over but did not land in intended to humerous? If so, its damn funny. from David Johnston --- Email: tgericault (at) hotmail.com
123. [WVQ-A] Oct 30, 1999 "family tree." --- do you have or are you related to a christopher quine he is married to my mother. they live baja california. from suzanne martin --- Email: suzannemartin1964 (at) hotmail. com
124. [WVQ-A] Nov 1, 1999 "Word and Oject" (found site through: yahoo) --- I am having trouble with this piece. How is it that time is like space? from Kelsey Godfrey --- Email: kgodfrey (at) depauw.edu
125. [WVQ-A] Nov 1, 1999 "Diferent lenguajes" --- I could like to know what do you think about the work of Austin and last Wittgenstein. More precise, if you see a contradiction between first and second Wittgenstein. from Marcial Arredondo GUevara --- Email: maxiarre (at) netline.cl
126. [WVQ-A] Nov 3, 1999 "research on my family tree" (found site through: yahoo through familysearch.org---the mormon church in salt lake city, utah) --- my family name is quine on my great grandfather side. help me with the research if you can from James wright --- Email: jew1 (at) ev1.net
127. [WVQ-A] Nov 8, 1999 "Quine and God" (found site through: Britannica.com) --- In 1989 or '90 I attended a discussion led by Professor Quine, and asked him, after hearing many of his views, if he believed in God. His answer was somewhat longer, of course, but it all boiled down to "no". That put my mind at rest. After all, if a logician concludes that God exists, what other nonsense might have crept into his work? from Paul Antokolsky
128. [WVQ-A] Nov 9, 1999 (found site through: none. I was doing a report for a math teacher.) --- I am not too familiar with any work of Willards, but I would like to learn alot about everything there is to know about Willard. If any information can be givin to me, I would greatly appreceate it. My e.mail address is above so if you can contact me that way, it would be great. Thank you. from Elvira Hill --- Email: la_goofy4 (at) hotmail.com
129. [WVQ-A] Nov 18, 1999 --- I'm writing my Ph.d thesis on Goodman's new riddle of Induction, and I believe that your father done most of the work that had to be done in his "Natural Kinds" and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Do you think it is possible to post some questions and get some answers from your father? from Rami U. Israel --- Email: israel (at) fas.harvard.edu ; r-israel (at) excite.com
130. [WVQ-A] Nov 30, 1999 "Utt, Rawls, Sayre, Toles, Coon, WVSmith, Perry" --- Still looking for the Sayres-Toles connection on this website. from ariel utt rawls landrus --- Email: jdlael (at) yahoo.com
131. [WVQ-A] Dec 21, 1999 "Philosophy" (found site through: Boyd) --- The essay "New Foundations for Mathematical Logic" has been essential for the study of the nature of logical connectives in relation to understanding logic as abstract and theoretical philosophy. Some questions derivable from the essay, together with questions raised by Frege and Wittgenstein early in the 20th century, on sense and nominatum, may still be considered to contain vast fields of inquiry. from Alf Isak Keskitalo --- Email: alf-is (at) online.no Web Page: https://sites.netscape.net/akeskitalo/homepage
132. [WVQ-A] Dec 22, 1999 "Dr. Quine's health" --- I was sorry to hear on a visit to Cambridge this year of Dr. Quine's declining health. His set theory New Foundations continues to command the attention of a small but dedicated band of logicians... from M. Randall Holmes --- Email: holmes (at) math.boisestate.edu Web Page: https://math.boisestate.edu/~holmes
133. [WVQ-A] Dec 29, 1999 "Compliments" (found site through: Dr. W.V. Quine's bio at Harvard's Phil. Dept.) --- To Dr. Douglas Quine, The resource that you maintain on your father is very impressive, especially for someone like myself, who is still a novice to both philosophy and mathematics. We need more of our heroes to be philosophers. Please add my best wishes to what I am sure are many others regarding your father's health. Cheers, Eric Tam Toronto, Canada --- Email: tames (at) mcmaster.ca
134. [WVQ-A] Jan 7, 2000 --- with the greatest respect and admiration from robert hedden
135. [WVQ-A] Jan 17, 2000 "search for the reference for d=ƒ(m)" (found site through: Northern Light Search) --- Dear Prof. Quine, While a graduate student in simuliid cytotaxonomy (identification of black flies using giant chromosomes) in the early 1950's I became interested in the theoretical relationship between Psychology and Biology. So much so that I took two qualifying years in Psychology. One of the assigned readings in 1954-5 had a rather interesting topic on the words describing material objects:- there were "objects" and "functions-of-objects" to use the authors own phrases. A "function-of-object" was anything that helped describe or delimit an object, and there could be any number of functions-of-object. The word for an object (or class of objects) was effectively the summary of all functions-of-objects, known or yet to be described. Thus a word for an object incorporates the sum total of its plurality of functions-of-object, but the word for a function-of-object incorporates only a singularity. The author included a small formula to cover the situation. He let 'd' = function-of-object, and 'm' = object. The simple formula he developed from that was 'd=ƒ(m)'. - My problem is that I can remember neither the title nor the author of that little book. - My question is could you perhaps provide either or both, or anything that might prove useful in finding the book again. I have even recently pored over that section of the stacks reserved for psych books from that era at U of Toronto's new (to me) main library wondering if I just might recognise that very same book again, but to no avail. "Word and Object" first came out in 1960, and because of that title I was wondering if you knew the book I want. After those qualifying years, I came to the conclusion that most psychologists needed one, and returned to finish a doctorate on giant chromosomes. Now I've retired after a career that took me to live in three continents to work with black flies, and gone back in earnest to that question of a theoretical relationship. A subsidiary problem was the determination of just what was meant by the phrase "reified concept". For words for recognised objects and their functions-of-object I had reached the conclusion that there were two referents, the material and the symbolic. The symbolic referent turns out to be the "denotation", the material referent the "connotation" - the material referent effectively confers the natural meaning! Solving the reified concept riddle was aided by observing the common automobile. A car moves, it has "motion"; and so the question "What is x?" (x being motion). But perhaps the question should be "Of what is x evidence?". Depending upon which side of the tropical rain forest boundary one was born governs acceptance of "motion is evidence of the engine" or "evidence is [a long winded explanation; or a mythical force, creature etc.]". What are the rules governing the switch between employing "Of what is x evidence?" and "What is x?" to query observation of the singularity x? According to the observation of a the motion of a car, there is NO valid point, it's "Of what is x evidence?" to the bitter end. Substitute "attitude", a typical reified concept, for "motion", and stick to only "Of what is x evidence?". The requirement then is for something material of which "attitude" is evidence. Accept for now that a "belief" is the required object, then an attitude is evidence of a belief (Krech and Crutchfield 1948 so nearly got this). By not accepting that it is evidence, then the natural material referent has been rejected, and an optimistic but hopeless perpetual search for meaning is initiated. A corollary is that once the natural referent is rejected, then "anything goes" in that search for meaning. Thus Scher's 1962 "Theories of Mind" has now been superseded by Carruthers and Smith's 1996 "Theories of Theories of Mind", and I supposed by 2050 there could logically be a "Theories of Theories of Theories of Mind"!! Actually, there are both reified and dereified concepts (collectively, inverted concepts) which correspond respectively to function-of-object and object concepts. Reified concepts are possibly the most common type of word in the English language since a random check using Roget's Thesaurus showed several tens of thousands of them; but of dereified there may only be a couple of hundred of which mind and belief are the most prominent. Of course a material belief is required, and it is a substructure in the material hierarchy that is the mind. To understand a material mind it is first necessary to consider some items within a different frame, to abandon the rigid acceptance that an animal (well, mammal, for now) is the ascendant construct of a hierarchy of cells. With a slight shift in the conception of how the body is organised; a second, acellular biological hierarchy can be recognised that consists entirely of molecules, or evolved from such, that are capable of existing in one of two states depending upon energy levels:- sensor receptor, electrobiochemical transmission, temporary memory, memory storage and organ receptor molecules. Taken as a whole, these molecules exist in a connected system, and considering that myosin (the basis of muscle) is included, there is a goodly mass for the overall system. These two cellular and acellular hierarchies in animals exist in a synarchic relationship - and they are absolutely dependent upon each other as they rule jointly. Nerve cells are just packaging and a superservice provider for alternate state molecules. Without this acellular system, you have a fungus, add cyanobacteria to the fungus - green plants. Transitory and stored memories in this model are of arrays of appropriately fixed long and short term memory molecules, the molecules that make up the required structures. Long term memory molecules ARE the stored information. Once set, information is never abstracted to be whipped away to some imaginary gadget to make it "useful" (information can never be waltzed around as electricity in an appallingly electrically leaky system the way some guru's propose). The active material mind is defined by an associated matrix of low energy transmission molecules resulting from the transmission of information from both sensory input and internal reflux molecules, and storage molecules whose transmission matrix has been reduced to the same low energy state by brain waves. But the superservice neurons are forever returning the matrix molecules to a high energy state, up to 40 times a second, so this material mind is forever changing its parts. Some very good evidence for a material mind was published in 1966 by psychologist Clare Graves of Albany, N.Y., in the Harvard Business Review. He described seven distinct personality types which I construe as evidence of seven maturation categories for a developing material mind. The word "gestalt" was originally coined to describe the perpetually changing conditions noted for mental activity and that's what I use to describe the active state of the mind. For the high energy totality of the resting state I use "pandect", the all receiver. The 15 meter per second speed of electrobiochemical transmission is quite fast enough to operate this forever changing structure. Whereas the body as a whole changes almost all the matter in it annually, the time frame for the similar happening for the gestalt is a mere fraction of a second. These sparse paragraphs are a poor substitute for my accumulated notes and illustrations but I hope it serves to illuminate why I would like to find that book with the interesting little formula, d=ƒ(m) and give full credit to the author for this wonderful gem. Without it, I may never have worked out just what is a reified concept, and the consequent development of the model for a material mind. Sincerely yours, Robert W. Dunbar 209 Columbia Dr. Huron Park, Ont. Canada N0M 1Y0 (519) 228-6458 P.S. Another small question. Where or what is "Orman", and near what big (or bigger) community is it found? from Robert W. Dunbar --- Email: fmdunbar (at) execulink.com
136. [WVQ-A] Jan 31, 2000 "PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES" --- Philosophical research comprises also expressivity, seen as a phenomenon of sense. The tradition of expression, as it exists, complies to lexicon and grammar, but to what extent, is a question of empirical research as well as literary and linguistic opinion. The scale along which experience and imagination moves, refers to the authority of memory in relation to the means of expressivity and content. That is, the abstraction involved in philosophical research relates to what is genuine in the relation between thought and expression, since it cannot refer to anything else than what is interior to the research as an event of reason. There is a relation between existence and expressivity which also concerns premeditation. Reason cannot be limited merely to what is expressed, since thought takes place also as an interaction between memory and figurative content of the moment. There is no empirical authority which can decide on the relation between sense and expression as such, since such an authority would consist in a monopoly of method. What is conceived as practice, the practical decision, is a sort of revenge on reason, on its originality and genuineness. In the first book of Augustine's "Confessions", a work referred to more than once in the tradition, there is retold a strife between human reason and divine providence. The conclusion of Augustine seems to be that "those things shall be enlarged and perfected", that is, there is no cleavage in the conscious use of reason, and that which is fundamentally given from the source which the human mind cannot control. It is a form of consolation also for philosophical research, that keeping in mind the claim to the genuine, it does not have to mystify its sense, nor behave as if it was not done. Yet the very need to refer to Augustine and the tradition discloses some sort of insecurity in understanding, in perceiving sense and reason as legitime by themselves, as if some form of non-genuine authority had formed rules of expression and sense, an environmental bias in the formation of validity of research, a reference to a societal form. Societal mediation is a reasonable claim, but probably Descartes is right in forming criteria for the understanding of sense in research, and there is a strong paralelle between the "Meditations" of Descartes and the "Confessions" of Augustine. To Kant, thinking is a transcendental consciousness, not experience. To refer to an experience, is consciousness in time. Deductively, this gives time and thought as being transcendentally interrelated, that is, the relation is not part of experience. It can be seen as logic of the transcendent. Expressed in modernity, after elaboration in a long additional tradition, it can be stated that time is a dimension of reality which contains both consciousness and deductive thought, yet this remains elusive as an experience, since it relates to the dimension of time itself. However, there remains a residue of deductive reason, in the form of a sense of its architectonics, in the same sense as it is possible to perform a mathematical or logical calculus which is more comprehensive than can be taken in at one glance, in one moment, and yet being both effective and true. (20000116) The dispute between Kant and Wolff on ontology concerns science as represented by a miniature or a model at the museum. The museum, by its cathegory, purports to depict or describe some part of reality, ordered according to the ramification of research. Interiorally, the phenomenon of the museum can be experienced as access to a series of artefacts ordered according to some Aristotelian scheme. It is impossible to apprehend decades of serious museological research except as applied philosophical and scientific technique, but its result is a recourse to a deduction of a series of phenomena which are abstractly represented at any given moment. The question is thus how the museum as such can be said to cover a researched reality, since it intuitivley cannot represent a totally exhaustive picture of this reality. (One possible solution could be a reference to the societal a priori of the museum as an institution, but this societal a priori contains the same phenomenon of being a miniature explanation, that is, a deduction from a selection of a factual series. Johannes Kepler's attempt at constructing a cosmography of the planetary system, that is, at describing a regularity referring to a natural law of the planetary motions and orbits, was based on a transition from the antique views on harmonic motions to applications of new mathematical principles. In the same sense, a theory on the ordering of a museum of a partly archaic culture, can only exhibit aspects of some principles of classification and understanding nature, transferred to modern schemes of presence and reference. The museum will perhaps in any case pose the artefacts in a different sense between experience and perception, and thereby constitute an aspect of reality which contains an ordering existing only in the museum, but this will nevertheless be an aspect of science, as if seen retrospectively. The real problem of the internal phenomenology of the museum is its structure inside itself, that it represents a meaning or sense both of its artefacts, and a sort of stillstand of the scientific mind experiencing it. (20000119) At Delphi, in the museum in the hill overlooking the harbour, stands the griffe of Theva on the floor of the museum hall, some tens of yeards from the location of the fireplace of the oracle. Thus concrete facts of antique myths and plays relate anew superimposed by science and modern order. This ordering forms accumulated themes of inference and deductive tracks for authorized tourist guides, and shows how empirical research relates to a non-imagined but past reality of the culture which reveals itself in that way. By this the effectiveness of research can be understood as real, even if there are comprehensive difficulties in stating principles of all types of research as such. This experience of the focus of culture cannot be explained only as sense impressions, but points to the capacities of mind and consciousness. Thus the museum can be seen as an example of the focus of culture, that it exhibits a network of knowledge which, even if not complete to the presumably competent, is reliable as representing the "state of the art". Its contents are not popularizations in themselves, since museums harbour also research and research departments, but they can be said to represent a deductive derivate of one or several research disciplines being legitimated by the very process in which it has occurred or grown, paralell to some aim of visualizing or making intelligible what this or that type of research has aqcuired out of a tradition of inquiry having shown an interior coherence. To understand a scientific or cholarly museum is to understand some of the fundamental criteria of that branch of research. We can thus state that the museum itself does not represent ontology as a philosophical dicipline, but it represents some criteria which have been shown to hold for the acquisition of knowledge on what there is. (20000121) While the scientifically stated museum cannot be said to be a model for research as such, it perhaps constitutes an example of something stable in the scientific world, a residue of a facit of sorts, a curriculum for non-philosophical philosophy, in the sense of a question once posed by Stanley Cavell. And here is a transfer to an important point of innovative thought, like examplified by Rossvær, on the question of local meaning. As Cavell refers to the travelling mind of Santayana, Rossvær refers to the harbour of a small coast village, its symbols of weather and winds, of compressed time.(20000126) Thinking about language, and the residues of philosophy of language, the problem of private language in Investigations requires some form of psychological instantiation, in that the language we use in its actual concreteness has a publicly unconscious concensus derived from it not being chosen or elected. but is derived from an a priori stock as the actual one. Thus, depending on corcumstances, the situation being sufficciently isolated, the remaining languages hidden in as if a deck of cards, can occupy the place of what could be called a private language, and thus as a subjective local meaning which is totally inaccessible to other situational participants, that is, even in principle, if the language submerged is exotic but real. Thus the problem of idiom in philosophy concerns not only sociolects of expression, not even frequent interlinguistic usages (like between English and French or German), but also the profile of exotism of expression which can be found for instance in the paintings of Gauguin from the Pacific archipelagos, where the fleeting lines and coloristic values take on shapes that at first were private for Gauguin, his possession, when exposed to the metropolitan public, as if mediating privacy of a Pacific perception which slowly leaked out into the urban athmosphere as the quality of the exotic mind per se. Thus the choice of language, in relation to the problem of private language, can somehow be turned inside out, that if starting at the top of the deck, as if it had been shuffled by a gigantic and monumental statistical machine of linguistics, a real deed of the public is performed, notably that of performing an art of a foreign language which is nevertheless in common use, transferring an ontology of that which is actually foreign into a stage on which the residue languages can be understood as the expressive modes of something exotic, suggesting a sense which cannot be actually communicated unless drawn in equally exotic colours or emotions, as if passing a Gauguinistic wall in some urban museum of modern art. This phenomenon reminds of Cavell's reference to the phenomenology of Heidegger in relating to the ideas of Emerson as if something to be found "beside the road", perhaps actually seeing the procedure as a realization of the reconstructivism of early rationalism, which cannot be subdued as a "private language" of the phenomenological tradition. To see the problem of expressive language (and the "private" residue) as an analogy to the metropolitan museum requires some understanding of the more elusive forms of institutionalization, a question posed by Cavell in relation to some lectures at Santa Cruz, where the students had formed the question as to why we pose the questions of philosophy which we actually pose. Since private language was seen as philosophically impossible, perhaps the public language is also near impossible, that is, as an explicative form, - unless - perhaps again notifying the Pacific forms, the values of the expository coloured strokes were as if accounted for. (See Cavell 1989 This New Yet Unapproachable America)(20000127) Thus there might exist a second form of phenomenology of the language, notably what can be expressd in terms of of the language being in the privacy of oneself, in terms of being acquainted to it or with it. To whom does it belong, who uses it for what problems and which circumstances, to which one can add or subtract simply by using it for this or that purpose. The idioms it contains as sociolectal strata and learned forms, do not exactly paradigmize, but are conferred as stocks of styles or decks for more or less reasonable language games. They constitute the expressivity there is for particular puposes, and attain the tonality of what we want to express, precisely by these interconnected senses which they possess - or do not possess. The more one is familiar to some particular language, the sharper one's reserve or enthusiasm for its expressions converge into philosophical research, nevertheless without acquiring the sense of writing litterature or writing its history, but simply investigating its privacy, at the step it actually exists. Wittgenstein and Quine differ on this, on meaning and translation - what is private in language is its user's insight and interlinguistic reserve, so to say. (20000131) from Alf Isak Keskitalo --- Email: alf-is (at) online.no
137. [WVQ-A] Feb 4, 2000 "WVQ Story - Rutgers" --- Dear Doug, I'm devoting a significant portion of my graduate seminar this term to your father's work. I've always taken great pleasure in introducing a new generation of young students to his philosophy. About 13 or 14 years ago, I was teaching both a graduate and undergraduate seminar on his philosopher during the same term. I invited your father down to Rutgers. He said he didn't want to give a paper but he'd be glad to reply to queries about his philosophy from my students were I send them to him. So, I collected single-page inquiries from each student -- well, not from each - but from every single undergraduate. The graduate students knew too much and were terrified to show your father their written work -- they shouldn't have been -- well, I sent the whole stack of about thirty up to him. He came down with your mom a few weeks later -- we all went to the opera one night, and one night we hung out with your cousin Robert Quine - whom I recall telling your father how famous he must be since some kids asked him at arock concert whether he was related to the philospohy 'W. V. O. Quine'. I had let a few people know that your father would be visiting Rutgers that day and sure enough a few hundred people showed up. We had to move to an auditorium and your father sat on stage by himself in one of these desk/chair units. He was way too big for the unit but it was all we had since we weren't planning such a large event. Your father gets up there by himself -- with all the luminaries eagerly waiting his words - I recall several faculty from Columbia and Princeton showing up. He pulls out the stack of single page inquiries and proceeds each - all written by the various 18 and 19 year olds - he begins -- "Miss Kimberly asks me ....' He turns over the page and reads his response. It was wonderful. The students went wild -- at the end of the session they stormed the stage. Your father gave each student his or her page back with his written comments on the back. I think even at that age they knew they were begin given historical documents. I believe most of those students went on to graduate school. What a great memory. I'm thankful to you for provoking me to re-think it. He's a great man. I now am going surfing to check out the latest version of your home page. Warm regards, Ernie Lepore, Director Center for Cognitive Science & Lab of Vision Research Rutgers University - New Brunswick Psych Bldg Addition, Busch Campus 152 Frelinghuysen Road Piscataway, NJ 08854-8020 from Ernie Lepore --- Web Page: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/lepore.html
138. [WVQ-A] Feb 6, 2000 "Quine Subscription List UPDATE" --- Please correct the Quine Subscription List information above dated Sep 14, 1997. See https://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/dialognet.html or https://server.snni.com/~palmer/philosophy.html for the correct information. from Kent Palmer --- Email: palmer (at) think.net
139. [WVQ-A] Feb 6, 2000 "W V Quine E-Mail Group Information" (found site through: (I created this guestbook)) --- Group Description: A conversation about the life and works of Quine Group email addresses: Post Message quine-dialognet (at) eGroups.com Subscribe quine-dialognet-subscribe (at) eGroups.com Unsubscribe quine-dialognet-unsubscribe (at) eGroups.com List owner quine-dialognet-owner (at) eGroups.com from Doug - Web Page: https://www.wvquine.org/wv-quine.html
140. [WVQ-A] Feb 9, 2000 "Admiration" (found site through: Brittanica) --- I have long admired your work. from William H. Spinks --- Email: badkarma (at) microserve.net
141. [WVQ-A] Feb 11, 2000 "Philosophy of Science" (found site through: Copernic) --- What is the logical status of analyticity? from Claude C. Barnett --- Email: barncl (at) wwc.edu Web Page: https://homepages.wwc.edu/staff/barncl/
142. [WVQ-A] Feb 15, 2000 "PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES" --- Philosophical research comprises also expressivity, seen as a phenomenon of sense. The tradition of expression, as it exists, complies to lexicon and grammar, but to what extent, is a question of empirical research as well as literary and linguistic opinion. The scale along which experience and imagination moves, refers to the authority of memory in relation to the means of expressivity and content. That is, the abstraction involved in philosophical research relates to what is genuine in the relation between thought and expression, since it cannot refer to anything else than what is interior to the research as an event of reason. There is a relation between existence and expressivity which also concerns premeditation. Reason cannot be limited merely to what is expressed, since thought takes place also as an interaction between memory and figurative content of the moment. There is no empirical authority which can decide on the relation between sense and expression as such, since such an authority would consist in a monopoly of method. What is conceived as practice, the practical decision, is a sort of revenge on reason, on its originality and genuineness. In the first book of Augustine's "Confessions", a work referred to more than once in the tradition, there is retold a strife between human reason and divine providence. The conclusion of Augustine seems to be that "those things shall be enlarged and perfected", that is, there is no cleavage in the conscious use of reason, and that which is fundamentally given from the source which the human mind cannot control. It is a form of consolation also for philosophical research, that keeping in mind the claim to the genuine, it does not have to mystify its sense, nor behave as if it was not done. Yet the very need to refer to Augustine and the tradition discloses some sort of insecurity in understanding, in perceiving sense and reason as legitime by themselves, as if some form of non-genuine authority had formed rules of expression and sense, an environmental bias in the formation of validity of research, a reference to a societal form. Societal mediation is a reasonable claim, but probably Descartes is right in forming criteria for the understanding of sense in research, and there is a strong paralel between the "Meditations" of Descartes and the "Confessions" of Augustine. To Kant, thinking is a transcendental consciousness, not experience. To refer to an experience, is consciousness in time. Deductively, this gives time and thought as being transcendentally interrelated, that is, the relation is not part of experience. It can be seen as logic of the transcendent. Expressed in modernity, after elaboration in a long additional tradition, it can be stated that time is a dimension of reality which contains both consciousness and deductive thought, yet this remains elusive as an experience, since it relates to the dimension of time itself. However, there remains a residue of deductive reason, in the form of a sense of its architectonics, in the same sense as it is possible to perform a mathematical or logical calculus which is more comprehensive than can be taken in at one glance, in one moment, and yet being both effective and true. (20000116) The dispute between Kant and Wolff on ontology concerns science as represented by a miniature or a model at the museum. The museum, by its cathegory, purports to depict or describe some part of reality, ordered according to the ramification of research. Interiorally, the phenomenon of the museum can be experienced as access to a series of artefacts ordered according to some Aristotelian scheme. It is impossible to apprehend decades of serious museological research except as applied philosophical and scientific technique, but its result is a recourse to a deduction of a series of phenomena which are abstractly represented at any given moment. The question is thus how the museum as such can be said to cover a researched reality, since it intuitively cannot represent a totally exhaustive picture of this reality. (One possible solution could be a reference to the societal a priori of the museum as an institution, but this societal a priori contains the same phenomenon of being a miniature explanation, that is, a deduction from a selection of a factual series.) Johannes Kepler's attempt at constructing a cosmography of the planetary system, that is, at describing a regularity referring to a natural law of the planetary motions and orbits, was based on a transition from the antique views on harmonic motions to applications of new mathematical principles. In the same sense, a theory on the ordering of a museum of a partly archaic culture, can only exhibit aspects of some principles of classification and understanding nature, transferred to modern schemes of presence and reference. The museum will perhaps in any case pose the artefacts in a different sense between experience and perception, and thereby constitute an aspect of reality which contains an ordering existing only in the museum, but this will nevertheless be an aspect of science, as if seen retrospectively. The real problem of the internal phenomenology of the museum is its structure inside itself, that it represents a meaning or sense both of its artefacts, and a sort of stillstand of the scientific mind experiencing it. (20000119) At Delphi, in the museum in the hill overlooking the harbour, stands the griffe of Theva on the floor of the museum hall, some tens of yeards from the location of the fireplace of the oracle. Thus concrete facts of antique myths and plays relate anew superimposed by science and modern order. This ordering forms accumulated themes of inference and deductive tracks for authorized tourist guides, and shows how empirical research relates to a non-imagined but past reality of the culture which reveals itself in that way. By this the effectiveness of research can be understood as real, even if there are comprehensive difficulties in stating principles of all types of research as such. This experience of the focus of culture cannot be explained only as sense impressions, but points to the capacities of mind and consciousness. Thus the museum can be seen as an example of the focus of culture, that it exhibits a network of knowledge which, even if not complete to the presumably competent, is reliable as representing the "state of the art". Its contents are not popularizations in themselves, since museums harbour also research and research departments, but they can be said to represent a deductive derivate of one or several research disciplines being legitimated by the very process in which it has occurred or grown, paralell to some aim of visualizing or making intelligible what this or that type of research has acquired out of a tradition of inquiry having shown an interior coherence. To understand a scientific or scholarly museum is to understand some of the fundamental criteria of that branch of research. We can thus state that the museum itself does not represent ontology as a philosophical dicipline, but it represents some criteria which have been shown to hold for the acquisition of knowledge on what there is. (20000121) While the scientifically stated museum cannot be said to be a model for research as such, it perhaps constitutes an example of something stable in the scientific world, a residue of a facit of sorts, a curriculum for non-philosophical philosophy, in the sense of a question once posed by Stanley Cavell. And here is a transfer to an important point of innovative thought, like examplified by Rossvar, on the question of local meaning. As Cavell refers to the travelling mind of Santayana, Rossvar refers to the harbour of a small coast village, its symbols of weather and winds, of compressed time.(20000126) Thinking about language, and the residues of philosophy of language, the problem of private language in Investigations requires some form of psychological instantiation, in that the language we use in its actual concreteness has a publicly unconscious concensus derived from it not being chosen or elected. but is derived from an a priori stock as the actual one. Thus, depending on circumstances, the situation being sufficciently isolated, the remaining languages hidden in as if a deck of cards, can occupy the place of what could be called a private language, and thus as a subjective local meaning which is totally inaccessible to other situational participants, that is, even in principle, if the language submerged is exotic but real. Thus the problem of idiom in philosophy concerns not only sociolects of expression, not even frequent interlinguistic usages (like between English and French or German), but also the profile of exotism of expression which can be found for instance in the paintings of Gauguin from the Pacific archipelagos, where the fleeting lines and coloristic values take on shapes that at first were private for Gauguin, his possession, when exposed to the metropolitan public, as if mediating privacy of a Pacific perception which slowly leaked out into the urban athmosphere as the quality of the exotic mind per se. Thus the choice of language, in relation to the problem of private language, can somehow be turned inside out, that if starting at the top of the deck, as if it had been shuffled by a gigantic and monumental statistical machine of linguistics, a real deed of the public is performed, notably that of performing an art of a foreign language which is nevertheless in common use, transferring an ontology of that which is actually foreign into a stage on which the residue languages can be understood as the expressive modes of something exotic, suggesting a sense which cannot be actually communicated unless drawn in equally exotic colours or emotions, as if passing a Gauguinistic wall in some urban museum of modern art. This phenomenon reminds of Cavell's reference to the phenomenology of Heidegger in relating to the ideas of Emerson as if something to be found "beside the road", perhaps actually seeing the procedure as a realization of the reconstructivism of early rationalism, which cannot be subdued as a "private language" of the phenomenological tradition. To see the problem of expressive language (and the "private" residue) as an analogy to the metropolitan museum requires some understanding of the more elusive forms of institutionalization, a question posed by Cavell in relation to some lectures at Santa Cruz, where the students had formed the question as to why we pose the questions of philosophy which we actually pose. Since private language was seen as philosophically impossible, perhaps the public language is also near impossible, that is, as an explicative form, - unless - perhaps again notifying the Pacific forms, the values of the expository coloured strokes were as if accounted for. (See Cavell 1989 This New Yet Unapproachable America)(20000127) Thus there might exist a second form of phenomenology of the language, notably what can be expressd in terms of of the language being in the privacy of oneself, in terms of being acquainted to it or with it. To whom does it belong, who uses it for what problems and which circumstances, to which one can add or subtract simply by using it for this or that purpose. The idioms it contains as sociolectal strata and learned forms, do not exactly paradigmize, but are conferred as stocks of styles or decks for more or less reasonable language games. They constitute the expressivity there is for particular puposes, and attain the tonality of what we want to express, precisely by these interconnected senses which they possess - or do not possess. The more one is familiar to some particular language, the sharper one's reserve or enthusiasm for its expressions converge into philosophical research, nevertheless without acquiring the sense of writing litterature or writing its history, but simply investigating its privacy, at the step it actually exists. Wittgenstein and Quine differ on this, on meaning and translation - what is private in language is its user's insight and interlinguistic reserve, so to say. (20000131) Acknowledging the importance of "language game" as introduced by Wittgenstein in Investigations, two examples are deviced here: 1) Suppose in a seminary room, the students have a small poster with their name in front of the table. Now every participant can envisage some name brother or sister of the ones present, and then think or tell an alternative life history of the participants, for fun or seriousity. This is really intriguing, since the criterion is that the names have a real and present reference in the first place, in order that any game could be envisaged at all. This means that name relativism is a derivate of an ontic decision of real presence, and of real knowledge of other histories. 2) Suppose two somewhat advanced chess players design a sort of informative game of their own while playing real chess. Even chess moves can, given certain predefined rules, convey somthing besides the play at hand, even in a tournament. Elementarily, some systems are called respectively English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Preussian, Scottish, Sicilian, Yugoslav, Scandinavian etc., and this is only one form of informative chess, besides King's-, Queen's, Bogo-, Nimzo-, and Old- Indian. And there are countless of gambits and irregular systems, all of which are played for earnest, more or less modestly. There is for instance the Norwegian variation of Spanish or Ruy Lopez, and several main variations of Catalan. We sense a framework of information which really convey a first hand meaning also of chess lexicon, resembling the seminary table game. (20000201) The notions of private language and language game are perhaps also a sign of romanticism, and have local colours and valeurs, which might also presuppose some object or scapegoat that can be manipulated and fooled around with in some sort of anti-professionalism of the games. In this lies a paradox of research ethics and of professionalism, in that what to the informed contains sense, to the ousider sounds as outright folly, and then perhaps reach the stages of post-modern parody. The crux of post-modernism is not the impossible distribution of knowledge, but the societal fact that knowledge must function in any case, that some individuals (professionals) must function regardless of which problems of sense they get involved in. Thus the priority of meaning attributed to the mass (mengde) by itself, has been called dis-truth by Kierkegaard, or also it can be conceived of as vicarious sense by some spokesman, and then subscribed to by local consensus, as a sort of private, yet public game. There is a deep conflict between views of authors like Kierkegaard, Sandemose, Borgen, and the local society in its need to be itself in a form of private publicity, and in its local administration and democratic institutions, when interiorally seem supplied in order to maintain and sustain the game of the local. This is also a problem of ethics, and perhaps one of the roots of moralism. What is common in one place, is a taboo in others, and thus the taboos intertwine to a moralistic web when societies communicate. For instance, at a university campus every type of academic discourse is common and even encourage at all student levels, but in the vicinity of a rural college it cannot happen, or only with severe difficulty, due to the privacy of idiom (its societal play value), it is like the impossibility of using a speedy pen on a heavy oil canvas in being. And since the heavy oil is preferred due to its starchy colours, any pen writing is out of phase. It simply leaves a scratch which subsequently vanishes by the viscosity of the canvas painting. These metaphors, if they are, come forth due to experience of a society prone only to itself and its mode of expression, where one can rightly ask with Macintyre whose virtue and which justice was concerned. To articulate critique in such a society resembles evaluating a style of art in which the base of aesthetics is one of viscosity of the mass in itself, where acute details of description cannot get a lasting intentional form except in the choice of a different language of expression. The serendipity of language as it relates to societal facts, is a part of its privacy and part of the secret of good litterature. When analphabetism pronounces itself as a trait of hereditary culture, then it is a symptom of a liberalism of mind, but not sufficcient to encourage the development of academic work and educational fervour, it is a claim that the new should succumb to the ancient. It is as if someone claimed that Europe should retreat to the time before the presocratics. Once the litterate world is admitted, then its influence is also unlimited, tuning on a different sort of romantic liberalism, and the project of conserving an illiterate culture - when it is no longer illiterate - is simply to effectivize the mechanisms of a private language of some faraway place which no longer exists on the map. This illiterate moralism - relating to a past, and partly to mythical lore, has also a sense of converse causality, in that it senses science and research as calling forth the phenomena it investigates, even in nature, and its interest is of seeing "natural acts" as being superior to investigation of a globality which already exists. I think the underestimation of the possibility of private language as a power of nature also can lead to misunderstanding of sense, notably the sense of nature - what I try to express - is that nature tries to limit the ideas by which it can be understood, that it has a resistance to culture. (20000202) The above consideration shows that there must be a difference between what we call sense and meaning or nominatum. Some intentional nominata must have a form of distance to what is concieved as the content of reason itself, that is, they are stated as nature in which causality and relations are constituted in the way Kant explores the criteria. It is the immediate experience of nature which shows a form of biological a priori in what can be expressed in terms of knowledge of nature. How does nature "happen" - that is - in terms of what can actually be perceived. Since a star is not considered to be conscious or to perceive anything, even a supernova, at least in human terms, does not "happen" in any other way as perhaps a faint star in a location where there was no star before. On the other hand, a dolphin in an aquarium must definitely be an event of its own, even when no humans are present. In terms of ecology, human consciousness is perhaps unique first of all because of its literacy, as if the way in which reason terms its figurative or architectonic approach in a search of reality in this way, that there must be something quite abstract that cannot find itself in any particular natural place at all as a geographical or astronomical fact, not even as fixed by some set of reference coordinates. This means, it seems, that the sense within which nature can be seen or felt as a "locality" is the sense which is limited to nature itself, that it has interior boundaries, but no exterior boundaries (or rather that the sense of these exterior boundaries are not phenomena of nature at all). That not all phenomena are phenomena of nature seems to be obvious, but the problem is why nature seems to contain its own restrictions or criteria, and how it is possible to express anything at all about this problem without making a mess of it all. Why do we feel there is an a priori of nature even if - in terms of science or scientific method - it cannot be stated that its is possible to have complete knowledge of nature, or even an idea of what it means to have such a complete knowledge. Preliminarily, the only explanation I have is the Cartesian and Kantian approach, notably that the existence of reason itself is not an "experience" of nature, or that "experience" has to do with that in which it is possible to be wrong or right, or perhaps also "wrong or right" in the sense of being on a faulty or inconvenient track. It is remarkable that seemingly metaphors of nature seem neccessary for expressing a sense of something important, as if that which should be expressed, should be something more independent - as if the concepts of this independence are lacking, despite the conviction that the independence exists. (20000208) I interpret the view of Kierkegaard: "subjectivity is the truth", not as rescourse to subjective knowledge, but to the existence of knowledge only in the form of consciousness. The feeling of a paradox concerning this is excessive, but I think there is a need to understand this in the form of an emotion or passion, that knowledge is not identical to its document, but closer to what is the whole being or existence. The passers by see a library and think that knowledge resides in it, as if the whole building was filled with dignity even when empty of visitors. What they do not see, is that the dignity which is built in like that, is a peripathetic aim of those who wrote the books, and that they perhaps had only that in common. I think of my own subjectivity as something which has lost its senses and use, simply because this type of research (as resembling philosophy) does not exist as a method outside the possibility of being research in conscisousness related to environment (nature) and to cultural emphasis. (20000209) This biotopal bias, of transferring the impression of knowledge to its outward symbol, turns society into an intentional transfiguration of nature, in that the societal forms express an identity of action on cost of the individual as a source of conscious knowledge. This is an intentional bind, in that it is confined in an illdefined border between virtual events and real events, and thus nature gets confused into a societal expression of half-neccessities, as if the habits or laws of society function only in the mode of a reference to an average knowledge, like the "mengde" with Kierkegaard or "das man" with Heidegger. Thus even opposite agendas form into a pattern of only partly defined events (society/nature), in which one must "think away" society in order to come to terms with nature, and finally with society. With Descartes, it could be stated that consciousness, and therefore rationality, resides in this biotopal a priori, that the passions of the mind or soul, derive from its very relation to form a path of reason from its own existence to a "coming to terms" with the extended, the res extensa in nature, and what can be reasonable and emotive in the intersubjectivity of society. This relates even to the smallest events, as well as to what can be condensed as sense in macrocosmic development of nature and culture. The Kantian argument could be that this development does not really take place as an objective cathegory, but must be sought as a source of freedom of reason to contribute to its own existence. But this (above) does not look like an argument for anything in particular, at least not as a good argument, or a convincing one (as a construction of a rebuttal). But perhaps the "term" argument, presupposes some situation of debate or dialogue which in this case cannot be thought as being "between" any participants as such, since it is a description of a situation of reason between the individual mind and societal action, actual or chimerical, of having to comply with something which is not intended, but nevertheless seems perfect in its effects, notably in the compliance to nothing in particular, because it does have no intentional cause, but is a case of the mass (mengde) as it unfolds when it is a mass, a sort of unarticulate natural agent of a compliance to itself. There is no argument for or against it, no real document either, but it is, when it comes to terms, a human condition, or a condition of reason seen as expressiveness of its own existence. The value problem as formed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, how values can be values, leads also to the question of validation, of research, theory, and philosophy. What is called philosophy, perhaps an inclination to wisdom as a search in being, seemingly then can really be validated only in being, as it becomes, if at all. Philosophy is not religion, in the sense of approaching eternity (or only partly), but it could be seen as a from of validation of the valueless, the useless, or that which is in vain. Perhaps thinking what has no value outside itself, being an admittance of the futility of the aim of having reached wisdom, it also helps in finding a lead to values, that it also points to the eternal which is outside it, by showing how flat the stones on the road really are, that there should be no deeper expectations to philosophical research. So then, technology and scientific discoveries get into a perspective of being pavement as well. I remember having one morning in March 1983, after a motel cup of coffee in Mojave, California, started driving the route eastwards towards the Arizonian plateau, how gradually, my eyes lost sight in the immense distances of the upward slopes, the highway tracing itself as a thin thread (and how different from Europe), and finally a changing mood settled in my mind, of what it meant to see for seeing's sake, the value of sight took form all the way up to Flagstaff, where the first snow patches on the ground pulled me back to a habit of the European arctic, og being equally futile as before as a person, being raised to the absence of temper and sentiment. I had got a glimpse of the way in which nature is capable of shifting around the human mind, but I still think it is somehow a fraud in the sense that it really gives a value outside the moment of experience, by seing what really is not to be seen, later as being deprived of exactly that, that also the senses can be of value, like sight, I mean of permanent value, that one really is entitled to experience it. The morosity of the morning before was also a part of the view of how values cannot be reached unearned (it seems), and the paradox that nature should be both an incentive of the mind, yet also its most strict restriction. This is a sort of rage on the question why it is not possible to rely on happiness amidst being "reflected", that the very thought of the happiness by nature also leads to refusal of it, since it is not permanent, it stops, it fades away.(20000211) Since I am left, like Grumphy the pig described by Emerson, without any means of expression, like a "Kulturkreis" consisting of only one person - not only due to the miniscule environment of communication, its non-existingness, but also from a collection of idle non-transferabilities which make even the everyday events exceedingly tiring - then the attempt to analyze or describe resembles a criminal act, a sort of non-virtuousness in attempting philosophical work. (The registrations at the museum are overwhelmingly massive already, and phantastically boring.) The result is a comparison between an everyday life which has already passed away as a machine of culture, and a life which by itself is illegitimate, that of describing a deed of what resembles a deliberate theft of work hours from the employer. I am a professional philosopher deliberately put aside into what can be understood as Aristotelian "Topics", who then have to steal a path into making a different everyday experience, - that of actually being a philosophical criminal in attempting to analyze and understand this paradox, as a philosopher by writing. So in the end, I say, why not do exactly that - supply myself with paid time after 30 professional years after graduation, now finally really sitting down as a professional philosopher who is done with the topics. Now every day will turn out to be only one of 40.000 days having been used for other means. Thus a "Kulturkreis" of the singular acutally legitimates as a transfer to a field through a hollow log. Since Ernst Manker described the time of the nomads, as an intendent at the Nordisk Museet in Stockholm, I feel entitled to analyse and describe my own time. The question of private language again, has to do with the problem of the "Kulturkreis", the cultures being like painted boxes inside each other, untill the arrival of the innermost as the individual. But the interior individual is not necessarily isolated from the outward structure, only that the means of expression are walled in by the languages surrounding and reverberating in the exterior. Thus there is an overthundering from the exterior mediated in the world languages, expressions and ideas which reconsidered are found also interiorally, but almost unknown, printed but hardly read, stuffed away in obscure shelves, and protected by the nomenclature of boxed research, like locked inside chests of drawers of some unfamiliar aunts. This exterior thundering reveals quantitatively some rare geniuses with a special take on their language expressivity, their locality was so to say maximal, at a time of cultural dawn in new lands, in new discoveries of their own ancience, which they had brought with them. The private language is thus one of nemesis, of fate, in the miniscule and in the miniature, a way of painting the box interiorally, privately and invisibly. Finally the box contains the individual only, without "Kulturkreis", as if falling to sleep in its own thoughts. Pehaps the private language issues can be seen as an aspect of the Lifeworld concept of Husserl as commented by Follesdal. Considering the above note, the phenomenon of a Lifeworld, at least in the sense of Husserl, must have comprised a world language and its learning, such that its acceptance also was an access to a real "Kulturkreis". Now this comprehensiveness in itself could have been a hidden criterion for the view of Wittgenstein on the impossibility of a private, interior language - as if the weigth of the learned already had saturated the expressivity possible. So the claim to an interior language was found as a claim on terms, not on relations between exterior and interior, on the passions of the walls between the different worlds along the scale from interior to the outward comprehensive world. With Emerson is found a new use of the English language, in a new world, in a mode strangely distanced to European English, as if the expressions were unforeseen - really highly private in a distant Lifeworld, a sort of transcendentalist transcendence of the phenomenon. I do not know whether Follesdal subscribes to my description. To my view Emerson represent a neccessarily advancing mind in a Lifeworld which was definitely new, yet perhaps also definitely unapproachable, as Cavell titles it, more than hundred years later. Peter Winch writes in the essay "Certainty and Authority" on the diversity between liberty and political obedience, concluding: " - it remains to be ascertained what exactly a consistent life along these lines will look like." I must add to this discussion, without recapitulating it, that once the notion of a primitive state is included in the modern one, how democratic to ordinary measures it might be, then the understanding of political practice will also to some extent be indefinable and left to the individual to assess, that is, more than can be actually observed as political behaviour or action - that there is a private language also in political man. This means for instance that I obey the election rules to the last point, even to execute duties as leader of one party, to organize nomination and voting services. But it does not mean that I actually like my party, I might consider it as the lesser of several evils, and also sympathize with the views of other parties, be it on authoritarian or libertarian grounds, depending on issues. My complete political opinion never unfolds completely as I vote or participate otherwise, since I feel to myself as my own political authority, and I take care that the "primitive state" existing in me is also observed by others down to the fact that I could define the "state" being actually myself as an individual. I allow taxes to myself and follow this or that legislative procedure. I cannot understand the state outside my own political conscientousness, and consequently, the state cannot really understand me, since it sees itself (the parliamentary system) as more important and interesting than what Alf Isak Keskitalo decides for himself. This is a sort of "consistent life along these lines", yet camouflaged in order not to be disclosed, that I am actually a state in the state. This is a deeper truth than normally thought of, since "this is a way in which people think", so actually they obey without obeying, they reserve their innermost decisions to themselves, those decisions which are not even close to being part of political theory. This self-authoritarianism is an actual fact, and somehow it reveals the nature of certainty and authority, that as an application of a principle of action, the state can be understood in the same way as an individual understands what is going on politically. (To add: This is one way to make the sense of the state a presence of personal evaluation of action, as if these were chosen on cost of the state, the person as an analogy to the state, not as an exact paralel, but as a sort of consistent life)(20000211) To understand the phenomenon of the individual resembles the problem of private language. The individual feels its individuality as a certain track of experience, yet the environment of the track does not seem different from that of the others. Perhaps even the ability to describe these phenomena are aspects of certain tracks, but yet the analogy to a record seems too mechanical and even farfetched. It is as if any depth of description is no real depth, but rather shallow, as a dive just beneath the surface on a shallow shore. All the time there is a hunt of pictures and descriptions of something which is in fact the real thing, the real experience. Rossvaer's descriptions of the weather symbols at the coast resemble Emerson's poem of the snowstorm, that the words one by one slowly gain in sense, so that the individual individualizes by a sight of symbols that all the time cover also a common reference to a known sense, even if the words are lent from different circumstances, sometimes borrowed from poems of the tide and the seas, the eternal song of the sea, which is again totally absent in the inland downs, where there is no analogy to the song but a sort of ineffable and permanent sense of an infinitesimal earthquake which does not stop and never gains in strength. This resembles how Per Foell turned crazy at his prairie farm, in the dust and just south of the rain border, watching the thunderclouds in the north, watching on a strange continent to complete an individual journey on which he should never have embarked, only to mark off his own individuality. And then there were those who as far as we know succeeded in becoming, by their very astrayness, for some time, even when returning home, who are remembered as individual human beings, for what they had which seemed to be a sort of private language of their own. In the discription of Rossvaer, the firshery harbour, on the other hand, in its very native nature, is indicated to have taken over a sort of symbolic meaning of giving its inhabitants as if by chance and folklore a recourse to a temporary being of their own, individuals yet conditioned almost to bodily reflexes by the fishery village, as if they shared a common medium of movement several hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years old of symbolic experience. This age, almost geriatricity, of symbolism in the harbour, is simply left behind when people leave it, perhaps for keeps if they go to another continent. But by all means, it can be stated, if they stay, they stay, and if they leave they leave. It is always they who do it, each and some of them, all of whom can be counted and taken into account. From another source, late on Saturday evening, the saying of Paul Feyerabend that "anything goes" seems impossible to take literally, except in the sense that it also may concern the expression of fatigue, the sense of which is something fading away. It also resembles the Duhem-Quine hypothesis on the ability of reason to tie together a new explanation if it is on time to order the explainable in a new way. Having done work within a research programme continuously for a decade, it seems as if there is a necessity to do something else, to transfer from museal theory and practice, to a sort of afterthought on it and its seeming necessity. The Aristotelian ordering of a field of research, or a contribution to that, does indeed have no limits by itself, since such a museal ordering at best approaches model conditions, and can grow by itself as an internal research spiral. This is to call to attention that empirical studies, by their very propensity to grow, at the point when they seem to grow, should be liable to a halt of afterthought, also in the form of non-heuristic distance, of something different and even irrelevant. This distance is very dificult to reach, as if it needs a measure or a negotiable definition, since there is an empty thematism in the distance itself, a silence of almost nowhere in the vicinity of somewhere, where some order was created, in compliance to the history of research and its tradition. So far as the world is understood as consisting in times and places, their relations and coherence is a theme of serious research, but the sense of this coherence has as if temporarily faded into the tight documentaries, and partly also into fictional literature fo the ages, and their palette is searched for their final patches of colour, which then drie into a picture of the palette. And still this was an urge to find descriptions, knowing this and that about it, except letting the institution fall into place as what it is. It will not let go, wooden as it is, it seems partly to suggest the massivity of marble, as if this type of stone could grow up from the soil or from the base wall. But this is surely an illusion of sentiment (or half-illusion), and it is the blood-less result of exhausted reason searching for a raison d'etre, lifting itself by a double hand to be looked at as a classifiable species of some common art. In what sense anything goes, I do not know, except perhaps it says, go on, fro any erason whatsoever. If I said, for the best of it, there would be a feeling of having taken too much out of it. This reason of real disinterest is a true riddle, it resembles playing a game of chess in order to look at the design of the pieces, or trying to determine why anyone plays chess at all. That simply ammounts to the conclusion that almost anyone plays better chess than me, so that must somehow be the reason for it, even if comparatively few prefer to move the King's knight as their first move, mostly simply to see how it looks. (20000212) Museum Monday Morning: Cleared heavy and icy snow at entrance due to Foehn wind. Scholl class visiting later. They drop in onw by one due to long walk from school. Some of them want to talk while others are bored. Teacher arrives and talks in expo. Questions from some girls on ancient caps. Questions on prewar aerrial photograph at foyer wall showing non-existent buildings. Questions on 1750 chest and 1650 Church Hut. Some boys leave, then the others. Teacher and questioning girl leave last. Then I complete this note. The anthology "The American Philosopher" (mainly at Harvard) published by Giovanna Borradori in 1994, attracts special interest because it also refers a sentiment of new universities and colleges at the outskirts of Europe, a result of the education explosion since the 1970ies. The idea is both a reiteration and a distance to a philosophical heritage. To move philosophically with latitude is different from moving longitudinally on the globe, since it also involves adjusting a biological clock, as also the sense of gravity, quite literally. The conditions of light, and of lightness and heaviness, turn more acute moving northwards. And when these conditions get permanence, they perhaps influence the results of writing philosophy, not insubstance, but in mode of sentiment in the approach, as if the sentimentality must pronounce itself clearly, as being beside the track all the time, as if it is really there all the time, as a regret of not seeing the sun, or that the shades of the sun are too long, or longer than usual. (20000214) from Alf Isak Keskitalo --- Email: alf-is (at) online.no
143. [WVQ-A] Feb 19, 2000 "Dreben on Quine, at APA conference" --- About 10 years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Burt Dreben, in glorious force -- at an APA conference in Boston, give a passionate talk with and about Van -- called (approximately) the "Five landmarks of modern Philosophical Progress". As usual-- beyond the fabulous content-- there was a special quality in the moment brought through the wonderful synergistic chemistry of their friendship. This moment, freely shared by them with the audience, was not only highly instructive, exciting and invigorating for refocusing us in the postmodern era, but was such a touching example of their depth of genuine friendship-- conveying a sense of their years of co-effort, comradery, conviction-- as they meanwhile restated clearly, strongly the viewpoints to carry forward as a part of the 'time of our life". It was very moving on those two levels: content and friendship. Again-- five years later at the world conference in Boston (overlooking Copley Square from Weston Hotels projected corner suite) - this special type of qualitative moment occurred, when Burt discussed with Van-- and Strawson , Passmore, Hintika-- Van's original "What is this Thing called Philosophy"-- to which Burt concluded that Van premises remains ever true (and that "we should dismiss the conference")-- we have a beacon in the fog. I write to ask, if possible: 1) Do you know if this first APA talk (Dreben on Five landmarks) is anywhere recorded or written up for access-- even if informally? (Do you recall the event as I do?). 2) Also, Is there a revised or updated writing for Van's autobiography forthcoming? Thank you very much, (if you can or not help)-- and kindest regards, . from Jerry Berard --- Email (updated July 27, 2003): jbjbjb2 (at) hotmail.com
144. [WVQ-A] Feb 19, 2000 "Quine's Algebraic Logic" --- I came across a book at https://www.amazon.co.uk with the title *Algebraic Logic* and the author's name was 'Quine' (no initials given). (WVQ would be pleased with those '''s!) But you don't list this book on WVQ's bibliography. Was it then written by another Quine? A relation? Thanks for your help. from Daniel Hill --- Email: 5119DAHI (at) lgt.org.uk
145. [WVQ-A] Feb 19, 2000 "Quine's Algebraic Logic" (found site through: I'm the webmaster) --- Yes, this name does sound familiar as one of my father's works. I believe that it is a monograph that I saw some years ago - but I cannot remember the publisher. Amazon.com in the USA does offer a little more detail: they call it "Algebraic Logic and Predicate Functors" by Willard Quine. It is shown as out of print with an ISBN of 0672612674. from Doug
146. [WVQ-A] Feb 21, 2000 "PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES II" --- Dear Dr. Quine Forgive me for once more submitting results of my writing itch. I have been thinking of the problem of "philosophy of the ordinary", having written twice on the Tractatus. The problem is that, concerning literature, the philosophy of the ordinary will also meet the hilarious, like Mark Twain writing on Tom Sawyer. Since Tom Sawyer is part of one's memory, he will turn out to be a better "understander" than even Mark Twain. The river bank is very substantial to me, since it is a part of what I see, and people who have grown up in similar circumstances, would be apt to say that Mark Twain is very exact as a writer. I am thinking about how Tom and Finn carry out the procedures of freedom to the minutest detail. Alf Isak - - - Alf Isak Keskitalo: PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES II The experience of having lost a text draft illustrates nothingness, as happened yesterday evening when I failed in storing a screen note. The loss of something of value explains the sense of value. Experimenting in philosophical drafting perhaps exteriorizes an interior project, so when it succeeds somehow, it is not any longer among the values one experiences. Something which has value, seems to be exposed to some experiencial decline, not neccessarily much, but as if being stored away. Yesterday I was writing on Husserl's distinction between natural science and philosophy, seen in the light of his fifth lecture of "Die Idee der Phanomenologie". The commentary seemed quite acute on the phenomenon of duration and change, and it is possible to state it anew as the problem of the permanence of facts, which is not an element of the phenomenon, yet is constituted in the phenomenon. This is also a problem of the medium, that it communicates the phenomenon, but is not as such permanent in the sense of what is communicated, like when an electronic text is printed out on paper, when its electronicity disappears. Husserl terms the abtraction of the content of time as such, and change as such, striving to conceptualize the "Gegenstandlichkeit" of the object of science, and its abstraction within phanomenological research. According to Follesdal, science is a part of the "lifeworld", a totality of acceptance of the sense of our world. Seen as contemporary to the logical ideas of Frege, the outset of phenomenology is also a universalization of the problem of realization of sense seen in the light of the permanence of nature, itself subjected to an abstract change in duration. What remains out of this account is merely a sort of formula, an apprehension of having done a note on the history of philosophy, of having been historical instead of philosophical, as if a change to philosophy is not possible at all, in the sense aimed at by Husserl. In that sense, philosophy is almost a crime meaning time consumption, and yet crime in this sense is understandable only as a judicial fact, of a past duartion. It si like sensing depth only as a direction, not as a real phenomenon, because under the surface only the surface is a real phenomenon. This also means that "crime" is a judicial fact, an object of the science of law, not a part of philosophy, investigating the phenomenon of duration of change. Imagine a professional philosopher being arrested for trying to be professional - at least in relation to an employer. This is perhaps the root of pragmatism as a school, not that it wastes time, but that it points to the necessity of duration and change, and duration within change. But American pragmatism cannot be found in Europe, due to the binding to the old earth of the "mengde", where nature has become a superstition of a collective, that is nature as a form of the "we", be it industrialism or naturalism, it is the conformity of the mass which plagues the European mind, and cause the "emigration of words", because those who originally used the words, now feel safe in their experience, in an immediate identification with their own understanding. In Europe, the form of pragmatism is the form of the individualist, that is, where it is impossible to to anything liberating, at least it is possible to think, and to insist on the freedom of thought as a last recourse against the "mengde" of the self-understanding-cum-applauding, in what they want as horses and individuals in the stable. The safety of experience people want, cannot be attained, rather the experience must take the form of an unearned courage, a desperate flight into the necessity of individual freedom, an experience of the experience that experience really does not really count. Suppose that the consecutive undertaking of Emerson, Wittgenstein, and Cavell is to find out what ordinary language is. What is admirable with Emerson, among other things, is that one does not have to subcsribe to his views (if there are many of them), but that he has the courage to live the sense of his own expressions, his resistance to generalization of the forms, and to the necessity of reiteration, to suppose that the expressiveness of culture in language is a sort of study, and not of life. The three mentioned thinkers do not have to have much in common, that is in common as if they were shareholders and voting on some difficult problem, but they see (Emerson even beforehand) the problem of duration and change in one and the same phenomenon. Personally, I sometimes feel a certain reserve on several points in Wittgenstein's Investigations, especially as it could be understood as an attack on earnestness of earlier philosophy (which it is perhaps not). Rather it could seem as if the world of sense had come to a halt in the perod before Investigations was to come about. Here returning to the problem of the individual in the (mengde), it can be seen that the severity fo the situation is not that the individual does not have recourse to ordinary language as expressivity, but that many people cannot find their "way about" except as in the form of a "common" (mass) opninion. Evidently, common opinion cannot be the same as ordinary language, since what is "ordinary" in ordinary language, is that it is felt as being adequate for the individual as such, that it is expressive in relation to the actual needs of expression on any investigative or research level whatsoever. Otherwise, in order to understand the problem in full, it would have been necessary to have somehow experienced the problems of the Vienna circle before nost of it emigrated to the new world. At that time, the world of Emerson had already grown hundred years older, and perhaps (just perhaps), some of the heritage after Emerson could have passed into habit of expression, a habituated word mass, as one can see in the movements after great minds. This is what Cavell attempts to disclose and rethink, almost in repair of a path in the woods. Referring here to Quine, who in this company must be understood as an independent formulator of the more besieged problems of sense of early 20th century European philosophy, the existence of Pegasus as a problem of what the sense of words at all can refer to, I must confess that Pegasus exists, but it is not a horse, as I have written at another occasion. For Cavell Pegasus definitely exists, perhaps even as a horse, but in relation to his remarks on Emerson it must be termed evanescent as a problem. For Wittgenstein Pegasus was not a problem, but the sense of Pegasus in this connection is that it is a being of courage for expression. Now, I do not think that the contemporary Harvard philosophers have much in common with Emerson, and not with Wittgenstein either, except this, of trying to teach how to find ones way about without taking recourse to a sort of "everyone thinks like this", yet seeing that it is not necessary to mystify the sense of language as such. By the "emigration of words" I mean a real recreation of cultural content, when the original habitat of the words started to misunderstand, and recreation in a setting where there really was a need and a sense of culture, as something that had been left behind in an old world where its distinctions had been partly erased, literally and by purpose. The European problem of "sense" stems from the exteriorization of sense, by it being overelaborated as an intellectual agenda, and thus having moved "away" or "out" from the mind. I have stated at another occasion that one does not always have to have a theory of meaning, but one must mean what one says, so if sense too much gets its own object, then it emigrates to the exterior, and seemingly, at least temporarily, does no longer exist interiorally. Perhaps the discussion of sense is difficult to discern from psychology. In this respect it resembles the problem or aftermath of concentration of mind, that it seems empty, that consciousness turns into an impervious shell, it externalizes, and regains only after a determined rest of mind, when the mind moves back into itself also emotionally. But these descriptions are not exact, and possibly the question of exactitude is not quite relevant, since also the emotions must dwell somewhere, at least in the vicinity of ones own mind. The sense of expressing sense is then as if painting out of a draft of the mind, partly interior and partly exterior, as if training for a better source than can be reached at the moment of the contemporary. The term "Gegenstandlichkeit" (Die Idee, Beilage I) used by Husserl can perhaps be translated with "artefacticity" since he also relates it to art, for example for example to the true sense of a piece of art generally, as well as the real content of a real piece of art as really existing. The difference between a "thing" and an "artefact" can be found in the very phenomenon of duration in perceiving it as a detailed result of human creativity, not as pure matter. Thus the early meaning of artefacticity seems to have been overshadowed by a term resembling "thinglyness" in later continental philosophy, for instance the subject as object in the studies of Sartre. But this is probably a wrong track for finding how that which is human creativity can leave lasting tracks in a world otherwise understood as a dense materiality. This art/artefact as a rarity of a "thing" is essential for finding back into a world of art and sense of art as culture, also of artisanship and ordinary skill in forming the things at hand in human environment. Even the writings of Husserl semm in the additions to his lectures to grow into what is felt as worthful paper, on which the reference to the symphonies of Beethoven do not resemble vanity, but an observation of an experience, the paper being not only a text to be read, but to be lived with. (20000218) This exteriorness or artefacticity, described by Husserl as a fundamental experience, perhaps also of culture, leads back to the roots of the constitution of mind. It is the origin of the meditations of Descartes, finding the decline of culture as a permanence in the exterior, relieving culture from giving the answers of experience, and returning to the interior. This return forged by Descartes, is very different from the principle of recognition or reconnaisance as found in the antique, especially with Plato. and in that sense the modernity thus introduced is also an ancience of the mind as a fundamental cathegory of interiorization, in that it cannot be equated in terms of other cathegories, as that which seeks itself in lack on an exterior measure or criterion, and is exactly that, the mind or the soul. The failure in finding it as "other than that" in language, culture or phenomena of exterior relations, is the root of the problem of the philosophy of mind, the search for an equation which does not exist as a phenomenon. Somehow there is a cultural reduction in this, but not surprising, that what seeks itself as fundamental, does not have more than a few terms or names. This can also be taken as a fact of ordinary language, that the lexical poverty in relation to the fundamentals of what it is itself a function, lead back to itself, to the Cartesian forge of the mind or the soul. Later phenomenologists of the 20th century, like Sartre, when inquiring into the interior, found that it did not belong to themselves, but to others, ir was an object of the exteriorization of and on behalf of the other. This oversympatizing with the societal, being a fact of European intellectuality, a phenomenon of inclusion of the movement, of the fashion of the mind, the fashionability of existence, resembles Wittgenstein's notion of decline, that decline is not caused, but rather a function of letting the words speak exteriorally of the mystery of mind, so that it could become a school, a curriculum of cultural existence. Over again, it is Kierkegaard on the individual and its required sincerity. and the exteriority in the reliance on culture as a cue to a solution, a substitute of the interior. I sense that Kierkegaard perhaps is more right than Wittgenstein, at least in this Europe. What is at stake is not an expression of culture, but a change of mind. This possibility of a change of mind is however not a possibility of the exterior person, the attempt at progress in the form of a school on the change of mind speaks for itself as futile. It is important that ideas like these belong or belonged to someone, but it does not relieve the problem that there is a cultural understanding of it. It all ammounts to some sort of cafeal expertise, that this or that cafe is better in that sense, when it comes to its cultural value, because it is then again a question of a decline of what was originally the sense, a return to the interior. A reliance on the possibility of a constructiveness of culture, remaining in the exterior, is a recourse to substitute toil for the mind, mental activity for the soul. So even if the mind could be learnt, so to speak, in its being of interior inherence, its expression in a culture being more than a consequential decline, in any case would seem to ammount to an exterior agenda, the result of which seems to be fatigue of the overconcentrated. It is true that good company can be at rest, as a cultural setting, the terms of recognition being exactly what is called respect for the individual, a settling of the interior. But this requires not a school, but a change of mind. I chew at an apple in front of the screen, the apple being my company to it, helping me to have expectations of the situation. Writing on the screen is by itself a sort of life. I "hear" someone saying this is idyllic, but I disagree, since the someone who "said" it finds an own idyll in the turmoil of exchangig ideas with children hastily in the morning, sending or receiving them to school, their pasting of discourse as part of the day and the clocks movement. Why cannot something be an idyll, since nothing more costly than an apple was involved? This "hearing" of "saying" which I mentioned has to do with habit in the societal, of having to overhear over again that which was an experience of the past, decades ago, of an inexperienced person overhearing other's inexperience. The strange impact of this in the contemporary is the result of observing that people do not really improve with the years, their insistence really gets more insisting, and their sarcasms more sarcastic and determined than before. At a neural clinic stay 15 years ago, I learned that it is healthy to "take out" observations like these, since they point to what actually destroys (unneccessarily) what there my be of idyllic tasks, these tasks and undertakings being low cost agenda. If a eat an apple, then I eat it, exterior or not, perhaps since it feels as a preparation to something, which is perhaps just a little more than absolutely nothing. This envy or wantonness of the minisculest of experiences which I sometimes find with others due to experience, I feel is most pertinent to "take out", to point to, since it is surely destructive, since it has been heard for decades as a fault in an old grammophone record. For more than a year I have been sitting, when writing, with my neck slightly twisted. This has resulted in an ache which increases towards the end of every workday. Now, that is today, I have finally put the screen exactly in front of the panel, so I can sit normally while writing. This seems and sounds like an improvement. Philosophy can be understood also as placing things right, although that which is placed right is not a "thing", but for instance a way of sitting better. In this sense it has to do with a form of losing pace, since the effort no longer is concerned with the line of sight or the aching neck, since the ache is gone. Now the pessimism turns to the content, since it is now soon after eight in the evening on saturday and, I do not feel like another Feyerabend experimenter. This twist at "anything goes", which is not made at ill will, but rather as a joke of finding a new fatigue of the mind as if being operable, must soon come to a halt. (20000219) Ordinary language does not have to be identical to "ordinary opinion". Sometimes it seems that people say (accumulated in observation): "We have been accustomed to not to have an opinion before we are many to have it." And this must be contrasted to the opinion that "philosophy must leave everything as it is". Perhaps, and this must be a very tentative hypothesis, this is part of the upbringing which declines individual opinion. That the ordinary language entails ordinary opinions. And yet I understand what is meant by "leaving things as they are", that is, I understand that according to common sense, things can never become otherwise. But this migh be a percaution against changes the society cannot survive, a precaution against far more drastic changes than the ordinary. But this means that what is intended by that form of common prophylaxis, is much more drastically defensive, than let us say the "game" of the ordinary really requires. This observation is almost as having experience in geography. The more comprehensive it is, the more comprehensive the geography becomes, its comprehensive tolerance. To see through this problem of the ordinary opinion, it is enough to see that far less is required to remain ordinary than what is commonly supposed. That also society does not have to be that ordinary in opinions in order to remain ordinary. It is as if the deference to change implies invocation of the past, as if not seeing that even the less ordinary is common of its own sort. Therefore, as if completing a deduction, I feel expressing that I am not quite sure that philosophy should let absolutely everything as it is. The same holds for the allegory of the cave, that there is certainly something to be learnt from it. But this does not mean that allegories are the right means by which to learn philosophy in the form of "almost no change". Since if the form of change being wanted should be a change of mind, then the effort must be felt to be an interior one, interiorizing the change of mind, a change that does not have to be outspoken. Such an interiorization might be called a retreat to litterature, but that is how the notepad seems, as of the moment, being a seeing or looking inward, back to the interior. Even if the result of looking inwards becomes a sort of silence (because it cannot be elaborated), then is seems ("seems" is the right word) as if it involves placing something in its right place, even into the place of silence. Referring to Descartes' meditations is not farfetched here, in principle, but they abund with a sense of acitivity, of having something to be done, at a time of ideas when there was really somthing to be done out of necessity of method. But there does not have to be a difference between an active meditative method and a silent one, since what is expected is only that of coming to terms with the place that is the right place of the mind, coming to terms with an interior self that has nothing else but that - a place. As said somewhere above, the grammar or vocabulary of the mind in itself is extremely meagre and lean, like in Descartes' "Les Passions de l'ame". The attempt to attribute acts, volition, emotions and so on do not seem to say what is really important, that the very lacking vocabulary (and mere attributions) discloses that what is all behind it, or its ground, is very important, simply by being a place of silence, of no terms except those one or two used. It is as if that which is most important in the human must rely simply on the grammar of one or two words, since it is at the root of all vocabulary and still in a silent place, the "I" of Augustine learning all the words there were. The "method" of it all was that of (for him) hearing the word "Augustine", and not only as a child. This indicates that somehow one must learn anew in order to perceive the sense of words, a change of mind. This effort to teach oneself about the interior, the one or two terms, cannot be understood as decline, since its really is at the solitude of thought, of leaving things as they are, or almost as they are, retreating from placing oneself outside oneself, really pulling oneself back to oneself, retreating from using words as if I had to be out there somewhere. (2000020) from Alf Isak Keskitalo --- Email: alf-is (at) online.no

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