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"Nature is a temple where living pillars. . ." No.
It is mistaken, Travis says, to think of the world as structured in some way (logically) so as to harmonize with the structures of our sentences. It is mistaken even to think that expressions must be structured. (We can say the same thing in many, differently-structured ways; gestures have no structure at all.) There needn't be facts that correspond to statements via some correspondence between the structure of each. This much makes perfect sense. And helps discredit the idea that our experience is representational, which I despise.
But I too have always wanted to find some way whereby nature is structured in the same way that our language is. When I brought up the Meno paradox with a tutor senior year, he seemed to think the solution was obvious and was just that "all of nature is akin" --and so we already know what we don't know. This I found too quick. But I am guilty of similar formulae, and similar desires. First, it seemed to me a mechanism that did a lot of work in Nietzsche: that we can give words new meanings, make new values out of old because we have the material in the interconnectedness of all things; thereby one thing leads to another without any leaps or gaps, but continuously. (Discretely? Rationally? Conceptually? I hope not the last.) Really I'm not sure what to do with the idea at this point. Or what it could mean.
On Travis's view, which I want to endorse, there is a stage of looking at the world ("The Silence of the Senses"), which we share with animals, and at which nothing is articulated, catergorized ("recognized" in Travis) or conceptualized (analyzed with respect to how we apply the categories, etc. by which we recognize things). So no already conceptualized world. This is good, since the conceptualized world--especially as McDowell conceives it, as making claims, doesn't make sense. And in a way, I have always been in this camp, since the first time the thoughts occurred to me, I assumed that perception was "silent" and opposed to the traffic of concepts that characterizes what we can articulate and communicate to others.
It seems like Travis is again biased towards thinking that recognition always has to have the content an assertion would have (if you can tell a pig when you see one, you're prepared to say that that's a pig). He seems biased towards thinking of articulations of recognitional capacities (as he calls them) as claims that can be true or false. Maybe this is so, and the other verbalizations we make are just animal sounds (albeit animal sounds with meanings, and occasions under which they can mean this or that). But this is an issue I'm uncertain about. Anyway the concepts are divorced from the world, as we receive it. He doesn't say that they don't arise naturally, that they don't grow out of our activity, etc.
Yet there are cases in which one is tempted to ask how Zarathustra's animals can speak, or when one feels that some familiar sound is like an utterance, feels voices and words implicit in things. (This tends to happen when one is far from human contact, especially. The trees are both silent--conspicuously so--and seem as if there must be something they're articulating.) But this wanting-to-say-the-world-speaks is probably an exceptional phenomenon; like aspect perception, an exceptional, psychological phenomenon that says nothing about perception per se. It would be nice to find a strange metaphysical connection whereby the world could speak, and that would also solve problems as to how we can make new meanings out of old ones, find those we didn't have before, or show people they were wrong about, say, "God" or "good" or "thinking." But WHAT IS this connectedness? Are there particles of similarity that enable things to be semantically similar too? I think I have to give up this wish. It was telling that, for the Meno paradox, interconnectedness was not a satisfying answer.
Rationality is like interconnectedness both in that it makes it possible for us to show people they were wrong about what words mean and for what I might, cautiously and timidly, call structural reasons. Whenever we think rationality holds we have a system that's complete (I don't mean this to encompass everything we say, just where we think we can talk about being rational), by which we can point out inconsistencies. (I expect that in a lot of these cases, this involves pointing out that people aren't recognizing some assumption they're making, or perhaps in showing that the domain of things with which their views need to be consistent is bigger than they thought.) But then this would just be a method of thinking; nothing metaphysical about the world or about language. I have no idea at the moment how this relates to what Travis calls "factive meaning"; but I'm pretty sure it does.
When I read Wittgenstein last, I still didn't entirely know how to take his claims about whether statements imply or hold true in the case of certain facts. I can't remember my leaning, but I remember wobbling--and now presume (given my desire for pre-established harmonies) that it was towards acceptance of facts in the world corresponding with statements. What the view would be, then, is (on one level): If you see there's a pig, then there's no question about there being a pig, and you can say "there's a pig." But that's not a structural correspondence between the world and what you say; it's just you, calling it as you see it. The statement itself doesn't have any way of conspiring with events to hold true. [This is the essence of the Austin-W.-Travis view, I think.] But under different circumstances we will sometimes call a statement true and sometimes false. (Honestly, I still don't understand why W. thinks English sentences are the sorts of things to be true or false, but Austin doesn't--unless of course he just means that sometimes we do talk of sentences as being true or false.) But yes, sometimes we say there's a pig when there really is one. No mystery.
So the mechanisms whereby we solve these problems must be more complex than just some ineffable connectivity. And to be credible they must fall out of an ordinary-language phenomenological (Travis calls ordinary lanugage phenomenology; just when I was about to say it was!) account, and a correct one, of all these matters.
It is mistaken, Travis says, to think of the world as structured in some way (logically) so as to harmonize with the structures of our sentences. It is mistaken even to think that expressions must be structured. (We can say the same thing in many, differently-structured ways; gestures have no structure at all.) There needn't be facts that correspond to statements via some correspondence between the structure of each. This much makes perfect sense. And helps discredit the idea that our experience is representational, which I despise.
But I too have always wanted to find some way whereby nature is structured in the same way that our language is. When I brought up the Meno paradox with a tutor senior year, he seemed to think the solution was obvious and was just that "all of nature is akin" --and so we already know what we don't know. This I found too quick. But I am guilty of similar formulae, and similar desires. First, it seemed to me a mechanism that did a lot of work in Nietzsche: that we can give words new meanings, make new values out of old because we have the material in the interconnectedness of all things; thereby one thing leads to another without any leaps or gaps, but continuously. (Discretely? Rationally? Conceptually? I hope not the last.) Really I'm not sure what to do with the idea at this point. Or what it could mean.
On Travis's view, which I want to endorse, there is a stage of looking at the world ("The Silence of the Senses"), which we share with animals, and at which nothing is articulated, catergorized ("recognized" in Travis) or conceptualized (analyzed with respect to how we apply the categories, etc. by which we recognize things). So no already conceptualized world. This is good, since the conceptualized world--especially as McDowell conceives it, as making claims, doesn't make sense. And in a way, I have always been in this camp, since the first time the thoughts occurred to me, I assumed that perception was "silent" and opposed to the traffic of concepts that characterizes what we can articulate and communicate to others.
It seems like Travis is again biased towards thinking that recognition always has to have the content an assertion would have (if you can tell a pig when you see one, you're prepared to say that that's a pig). He seems biased towards thinking of articulations of recognitional capacities (as he calls them) as claims that can be true or false. Maybe this is so, and the other verbalizations we make are just animal sounds (albeit animal sounds with meanings, and occasions under which they can mean this or that). But this is an issue I'm uncertain about. Anyway the concepts are divorced from the world, as we receive it. He doesn't say that they don't arise naturally, that they don't grow out of our activity, etc.
Yet there are cases in which one is tempted to ask how Zarathustra's animals can speak, or when one feels that some familiar sound is like an utterance, feels voices and words implicit in things. (This tends to happen when one is far from human contact, especially. The trees are both silent--conspicuously so--and seem as if there must be something they're articulating.) But this wanting-to-say-the-world-speaks is probably an exceptional phenomenon; like aspect perception, an exceptional, psychological phenomenon that says nothing about perception per se. It would be nice to find a strange metaphysical connection whereby the world could speak, and that would also solve problems as to how we can make new meanings out of old ones, find those we didn't have before, or show people they were wrong about, say, "God" or "good" or "thinking." But WHAT IS this connectedness? Are there particles of similarity that enable things to be semantically similar too? I think I have to give up this wish. It was telling that, for the Meno paradox, interconnectedness was not a satisfying answer.
Rationality is like interconnectedness both in that it makes it possible for us to show people they were wrong about what words mean and for what I might, cautiously and timidly, call structural reasons. Whenever we think rationality holds we have a system that's complete (I don't mean this to encompass everything we say, just where we think we can talk about being rational), by which we can point out inconsistencies. (I expect that in a lot of these cases, this involves pointing out that people aren't recognizing some assumption they're making, or perhaps in showing that the domain of things with which their views need to be consistent is bigger than they thought.) But then this would just be a method of thinking; nothing metaphysical about the world or about language. I have no idea at the moment how this relates to what Travis calls "factive meaning"; but I'm pretty sure it does.
When I read Wittgenstein last, I still didn't entirely know how to take his claims about whether statements imply or hold true in the case of certain facts. I can't remember my leaning, but I remember wobbling--and now presume (given my desire for pre-established harmonies) that it was towards acceptance of facts in the world corresponding with statements. What the view would be, then, is (on one level): If you see there's a pig, then there's no question about there being a pig, and you can say "there's a pig." But that's not a structural correspondence between the world and what you say; it's just you, calling it as you see it. The statement itself doesn't have any way of conspiring with events to hold true. [This is the essence of the Austin-W.-Travis view, I think.] But under different circumstances we will sometimes call a statement true and sometimes false. (Honestly, I still don't understand why W. thinks English sentences are the sorts of things to be true or false, but Austin doesn't--unless of course he just means that sometimes we do talk of sentences as being true or false.) But yes, sometimes we say there's a pig when there really is one. No mystery.
So the mechanisms whereby we solve these problems must be more complex than just some ineffable connectivity. And to be credible they must fall out of an ordinary-language phenomenological (Travis calls ordinary lanugage phenomenology; just when I was about to say it was!) account, and a correct one, of all these matters.
