[Marxism] Semantic Structures (And Social Action)

["OpenSentence Type Foundry" <typefoundry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I assume you mean distaste. Yes, I pictured Quine as a Republican, but
> whether or not he is correct about logic or not, is a logical inquiry. It is
> always handy to have a rigorous Republican logician if you can utilise his
> argument to propagate socialism, simply by drawing the logical conclusion
> from it, that he omits. Personally I am interested in semantics for the
> purpose of communication technique, but there is little "proof" in
> semantics. What is important about Chomsky's linguistics skills is that
> linguistics is a crucial dimension of ideological thought, and therefore
> thorough and critical linguistic inquiry can torpedo many bad ideas. I am
> not as knowledgeable about the biographies of Tarski, Frege, Carnap, Kripke
> and so on. When I attended university they didn't teach about the logician
> much, just about the logic, and you more or less had to find out the rest
> yourself. And as people, they weren't particularly exciting to me, most of
> them.

I assume I meant distaste as well, and Quine was in fact contemplating a run
as a member of a far-right American Liberty Party or something.  He wasn't
that great a logician, and he wasn't that rigorous a Republican (in his time
that became a "faith-based initiative"; and he was too skeptical by half to
permit "nonconservative extensions", a testament to his skills as a writer.)
But this is not quite the Biographeme channel, as the differences between
logicians are very real and cause one to make bad matchups: just as Quine is
not much of a foil (and epee not at all), Chomsky's work has (admittedly)
relatively few consequences for *Ideologiekritik* other than its (quite
spirited and cogent) defense of Enlightenment values about the mind.

But on the other hand, contemporary semantics has a great deal to do with
proof and the van Benthem school (now expanded to part of Stanford) is today
almost alone in suggesting there is an important level to the study of
language beyond stretching provability to fit the exigencies of natural
language; and my theoretical essays (collected in edited form on my website)
address such issues in *relatively readable* prose.  They're not
recommended, really, but such things do exist.

>  But it may interest you
> to know that UvA is currently the world leader in the second style of
> research, gaining converts all the time, and although I don't like some of
> their focus (for sociological reasons, actually) it's a refreshing change.
>
> I don't have much contact with it. In my view, saying things like
> "systematic thinking, or analysing systems" is problematic, is logically
> equivalent to saying horses or trees are problematic, and makes just about
> as much sense. Brothels often offer less nonsense, cheaper and quicker.

The point is, that's a "sideways-on" or structuralist view; the problem is
not so much bad arguments and bad motives as the way they circulate, inside
and outside of one's head.  Bad arguments and bad motives exist, but it has
been my feeling for quite some time but structuralist and post-structuralist
views actually tend to obscure this less than more fashionable "philosophies
of thought".  I'm not too fond of universities, although I don't know about
brothels, but UvA has something worth saying and I can't imagine that
institution costs people around it too much.

> I must have been talking about a different movie. But you are correct, they
> do talk to him. There's actually things to be learnt from that.

Well, movies are art so there are some limits on what can be gleaned; but
I've already spoken my piece concerning that film.

Jeff Rubard