Hello.
"Spelling has rules. Now repeat after me: i before e except after c, and in
foreign tongues, and other exceptions too numerous to mention"
Anyway, it just popped into my mind that before I left for my recuperative
visit to the Etymologia islands in the Aegean...
(I sent postcards - did you get them? Sorry not to give a name, only we
both know how Stepmother can be about gentlemen correspondants, so all for
the best really - anything for an easy life)
...I had promised to tell you all about the connection between Plato's
account of truth and the fabulously wacky Monist world of Parmenides the
Eleatic. Well I simply wasn't up to it, what with my feverish high
temperature and all - that's why I had to leave. So I failed to keep a
promise I had made to someone. We mustn't make promises if we don't intend
to keep them, so I'll try to make up for my failure there.
You will remember that the following is my telling of it only, and challenge
me intelligently and often.
Let me see, we are carrying on from where we left off, and where we left off
was with the business about Plato thinking that Truth attaches to linguistic
entities, static though they are. On the one hand there is mystic reality:
northrop's aesthetic continuum that Phaedrus speaks of, all undivided and
dynamic and infinte and real. On the other hand we have language, a clumsy
dichotomising dividing thing that cuts the world up and gives names to all
the parts. Clumsy, but usefull for drawing up motorcycle handbooks. And
maybe we can struggle towards motorcycle handbooks that are so good they
could never be improved on: the form of a motocycle handbook. To apply to
all motorcycles everywhere, though, it would have to be a fairly sparse
volume. All the specific particular identifying features of bikes would
have to be subtracted, and we might end up with very little indeed, in the
way of positive indentifying features, to go on. One way of thinking about
this is to say that there would be no synthesis at all in this volume, just
analysis. In fact, it would be pretty useless if we wanted to fix the BMW -
that's for sure. But what it might be is *true* in some deeper, better,
analytic sense of *true*: it would tell you what it is to be a motorcycle.
That's usefull if you need your thought to fix on a linguistic truth that
doesn't parade itself as a report of the aesthetic continuum out there.
Language is language, and continuum is continuum: the two can never really
meet head on, but atleast we could have some GOOD honest unpretentious
language that can deliver what it promises, an analysis aimed at describing
the linguistic realm, rather than a synthesis IMMORALLY pretending to
capture the aesthetic continuum in discrete language, as if that wasn't a
contradiction in terms.
Right, where does Parmenides figure in all this? Well Parmenides is a
threat to Plato's veiw in a big way: actually he's a threat to every
conception of truth that you are ever likely to hear of. Here's why.
Parmenides thinks that there's no such thing as falsehood. Falsehood is a
myth, a phony, it never happens. All those frauds and blusterers telling
you that black is white - apparently this never happens. Politicians, they
must be liars? Nope: truthsayers everyone. You think your Girlfreind lied
to you? She can't have - it's a logical impossibility. Everything anybody
ever says is completely true. Weird. But that's what Parmenides thinks, or
atleast what he argues. And ofcourse this makes a mockery of truth. Now
we find there isn't any discrimination or use in the concept 'truth'. If it
attaches to every damm statement there is, including contradictions and
fantasys and lies and what have you, then there's just no point in using the
concept at all. Saying 'everything is true!' is as good as getting rid of
truth altogether. And that's a big worry to Plato, because it's just the
sort of neat move that a really determined streetwise Sophist is likely to
make when cornered. You know the line: 'Yeah, that's what you say, but,
like, what is truth anyway, dude?'
What's interesting and dangerous is that Parmenides makes some really
profound points to back up his bizarre claim that falsehood is impossible.
But before we get on to them, lets take a moment to point out that this is
not relativism we are talking about here - this has nothing to do with
Protagoras. Relativism is the idea that what's true is true for specific
individuals, and that what's true for me might be false for you.
Parmenides' point runs completely counter to that, because he's suggesting
that it's just impossible for anything to be false for anyone anywhere ever.
As I said: weird. So why would he say such a thing?
It all has to do with the fundamental issue that I've been talking about in
these posts on Plato and truth: the relationship between language and the
world. The particular part of language whose relation to the world
Parmenides is so profoundly interested in is negation, but this is as part
of an implicit general veiw about how words have meaning, which is relevant
even to discussions in the Philosophy of language today. That general veiw
is that words have meaning through reference to beings, and not just beings,
but particular beings: objects. 'Cat' refers to a cat. 'Hat' refers to a
hat. 'Empire state building' refers to a lump of metal and concrete - and
so on. The world contains this resource of referents, and language comes
along and picks up the meaning that the world contains just by refering to
those referents that the world contains. A pretty commonsense view, you
might think, of the world of particular objects preceeding linguistic
desciptions.
But there's a problem. In fact there are several, but there's one in
particular which leads Parmenides to go off at a tangent over truth. The
problem? Well if 'cat' refers to a cat and means what it means because it
refers to that cat, what does 'not' mean? Think about it. Problem: no
referent. In fact 'not' is a word pupose made for excluding referents, it
is the excluder itself. In a sentence refering to the cat, the addition of
the 'not' to create 'not the cat' suddenly has our referential tentacles
reaching off into void of nothingness - not the cat, but what then? So, a
word: 'not', but no referent. Hm. The only particular referent we would
suggest for this would be some particular non-being, supposing voids could
have identities, but in anycase non-being isn't a being, and we were saying
that words have meaning because they refer to beings. That is how words
mean things isn't it, by picking up referents that exist in the world?
Isn't it? In that case this word 'not', it doesn't refer, so, well it just
doesn't mean anything at all does it? In learned philosophical metaphor,
this is called 'biting the bullet', although the difference between this
teeth trick and shoting yourself through the back of the intellectual
apparatus at close range with a walther ppk is not at first easy to discern.
Because if you think that 'not' has no meaning because it doesn't refer to
anything then you will think that all negations are meaningless.... which
will prevent you from saying that anthing is not the case... which will make
the word 'truth' quite pointless and useless.... which will get poor Plato
very worried indeed.
Here's an example of Plato getting very worried:
"this form of speech of ours involves the rash assumption that that which is
not is, since otherwise falsity wouldn't come into being. But when we were
boys, my boy, the great Parmenides testified to us from start to finish,
speaking both in prose and poetic rhythms that 'Never shall this force
itself on us, that that which is not may be; While you search, keep your
thought away from this path.' [Sophist 237a3]"
And here are some more examples of Parmenides' relentless logic, beginning
with the clincher and going on to the consequences:
"That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be."
"that it is not and that it is necessary for it not to be, this I point out
to you to be a path completely unlearnable, for neither may you know what is
not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor may you declare it."
"I will not permit you to say or to think [that it grew] from what is not;
for it is not to be said or thought that it is not..."
As a side effect, all this knee-trembling about negation results in
Parmenides having to adopt, by the force of his own argument, the most rigid
absolute and ultimately incoherrent monism that the world has ever seen, yet
established with the clearest logical necessity anyone had ever deployed in
the classical world. Monism can mean a number of things, and one of the
things it has come to mean is monism about substance: the idea that there is
just one kind of stuff. But in another sense, and the sense relevant to
Parmenides, what Monism actually means is the idea that there is JUST ONE
THING. You had the idea that your finger was one thing, and the empire
state another? Wrong. Your finger, the empire state, the pacific ocean,
and for that matter the hunting patterns of tribsmen in the namib desert
during prehistory are all ONE THING. The idea that what we have here is a
collection of different objects would require us to be able to say that the
empire state building is *not* your finger. But we can't: that's just a
meaningless collection of words, because 'not' does not refer. So,
necessarily, all is one. Now Plato points out, of course, that even stating
Parmenides' argument here we have to use negation in the phrase 'not refer',
but that's by the by. Nobody expects any picture which results from a
decision that negations are meaningless to make any kind of sense, and I'll
even wager that Parmenides didn't expect this either. The problem was: he
couldn't see any way out of the logic of his own argument. Words mean what
they mean because of the existence of particular objects as their referents
("That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be."), there is no
particular object that negations refer to (they 'refer' to a void),
therefore negations are meaningless, therefore there are no falsehoods, your
girlfriend never lies, and your finger is the empire state building. Sure
as two plus two is four.
Ok, nice mess. A way out? Symultaneously very easy, and the hardest
project in philosophy. Easy in a way because it's plain for us to see that
the false move was the one made right at the start: the assumption that
words mean what they mean because of a one-to-one correspondance between
words and referents in which the referents come first: the "That which is
there to be spoken and thought of must be" move. Hard, however, because
now we have to think of some smart idea to put in place of this reference
theory of meaning we are hoping to abandon. Actually even the first part
wasn't easy for Parmenides or Plato to see - because the problem about the
relation of language to the world hadn't then been formulated like that, and
the assuptions I am talking about, and the attempts to wrestle with them,
were deep and obscure, not sitting on the surface like coffee cup on a
table. As far as we know, Parmenides never managed to find a way out, and
instead his school confined itself very successfully to pointing out that
their monism theory, although absurd, was no more absurd than any of the
other bright ideas anyone else had to offer at the time - Zeno's paradoxes
are a stirling bit of work in this direction against the atomists, trying to
show that they too deny commonsense, e.g. motion (want more?). A popular
way to tweak Parmenides' nose at the time was to point out that if there is
only THE ONE, then there is no sense in which there could ever be time or
distance or motion, since all of these things require relations between two
or more objects. So Parmenides' argument denies motion, and motion exists,
therefore we deny Parmenides' argument. Good sport that, but hardly a way
to help Parmenides with the problem he had found in the relationship between
language and the world.
Plato took rather a different attitude, and a more constructive one, I hope
you may agree. He had a deal of respect for Parmenides and the Eleatics in
general, because he could see that Parmenides had just come up with his
monism for the fun of it, and that there were some serious questions here
that needed to be asked seriously. Like: what does 'not' mean? Like: what
comes first: language or particular referents? In an important sense Plato
was on Parmenides' side, because alot of the jeering about Parmenidean
Monism was of the 'hark at these funny philosophers' variety, and basically
the best argument that anyone could come up with against Parmenides, for a
long time, was that he had contradicted everybody's assumption that there
was more than one thing in the world. That's pretty counter-intuitive,
sure, but our intuitions and assumptions are not the end of the matter when
Philosophy really gets serious: we have to sit down and work things through,
logically. At that point Parmenides could have said, with justice, 'for all
you know I'm right in my attitude to monism and falsehood, and you haven't
even begun to address the logic of my argument'. Well, they hadn't. Plato
was really the first to do Parmenides the basic courtsey of addressing his
argument, and as often happens in these rare moments, significant
philosophical progress resulted.
What Plato observed was what I've been saying from the start, because I
learnt it from Plato: that the whole argument, with monism at the top and
the negation problem at the bottom, turns on a very specific conception of
what (or how) 'not' ought to mean. Plato then arged that there was an
alternative reading for 'not', and for everything else in the dictionary
too. Instead of saying that words mean what they mean because of a
particular existent referent that they latch on to, he argued at great
length (the dialogue is called The Sophist, by the way, generally agreed to
be the among the hardest and most controversial that there is) that the
primary referents of language, those that give it the meaning that it has,
are not the particulars which are supposed to exist in the world prior to
language, but certain universal forms that we have in us, and which we,
through language, use to create the discrete world of cats and dogs, tables
and chairs etc, out of the aesthetic continuum (in Plato's terms: flux).
Applying this thought to 'not', he pictured negations not as refering
problematically in the abscence of the negated particular to a void of
nothingness, but as essentially dependant on whatever specific universals
and syntheses of universals the negation was attached to:
"It seems that when we say that which is not, we don't say something
contrary to that which is, but only something different from it. -Why? -It's
like this. When we speak of something as not large, does it seem to you that
we indicate the small rather than the equal? -Of course not. -So we won't
agree with somebody who says that a denial signifies a contrary. We'll only
admit this much: when 'not' and 'non-' are prefixed to names that follow
them, they indicate something other than the names, or rather, other than
the things to which the names following the negation are applied. [Sophist
257b3]"
Now this seems like purest commonsense - but we need to understand what a
revolution this represents in ideas about the relation of language to the
world. Parmenides had assumed that meaning was built up from the smallest
existent objects in the world, reference to them being the roots of language
from which it could grow to produce general ideas, complex sentences and
philosophical discourses - that had been what caused him problems about
'not', because there wasn't any basic referent handy. Plato, in the
innocent looking passage above, is turning this picture on it's head. Now
language determines the shapes that the world can take. Instead of looking
for the meaning of 'not' in connection to a particular in the world, he
identifies it in relation to specific universals: eg the equal. And now we
can understand 'not' as indicating 'other than' such and such, which is only
possible where that such and such is universal rather than particular. If
it were particular, then 'other than...' would be no advance over 'not... ',
because in both cases the referential tendrills (so to speak) would be
hanging over a void: supposing that paticulars are the fundamental referents
it follows that a lack of specific particulars is a lack of referents, so a
lack of meaning. But with universals in the driving seat, 'not F....'
becomes 'other than F...', where the 'other-than-F...' is a universal all of
it's own, with an extension and an intension just 'F....'. The void is
filled. The negation refers: the other-than-beautiful is a referrable
essence just as much as the beautiful is. Instead of indicating the void
which is the contrary of a particular being, 'not' now indicates an essence
which is the other-than for a universal being.
Of course, the expression 'not Bill' makes perfect sense - but the question
is *how* it does this. It cannot do this in virtue of a reference to the
void which emerges when through the negation we are denied the definite
particular referent 'Bill', because on the assuption that reference depends
on particulars a reference to no thing is a non-reference.
Plato's case is (I think) that 'not Bill' successfully refers only through
the unique description in terms of universal qualities for which 'Bill' is a
shorthand. Bill thus becomes a kind of complex universal himself, such that
'not Bill' refers successfully to a corresponding 'mirror image' complex
universal: the oppositeness of Bill (shades of Quine, though he wouldn't
have taken kindly to the comparison). The crucial point is that language
got here first: that when it comes down to it Bill is a linguistic entity
dependant on the dichotomising and connecting power of language in the shape
of all these universals and negative universals out of which his full
description is composed, or, to be fully accurate, synthesised. This being
so, the action of one linguistic power, negation, is no problematic marvel
requiring referential support in the shape of an existent particular or
particulars, but the continuation of the universal-deploying process that
has been carried on from the start.
This is difficult stuff, so I propose to stop here and go to bed.
This leaves Parmenides argument addressed in some detail, something of a way
out proposed, and a diagnosis of Parmenides' error in a wrong conception of
the relation of language to world. It is not, however, a full defence of
the proposed way out, and so the best we can say is that the immediate
threat to truth contained in Parmenides' negation problem has been overcome,
at first glance. But as it happens I think modern philosophy of language is
mining quite close in this mountain of ideas, from a different direction,
and there could be a catastrophic cave-in pretty soon. I've no real idea
who gets out alive in the end, but on racing form over a couple of thousand
years, I'd lay bets on Plato.
A relevent question for MOQers might be: how does Pirsig think about the
relation between language and the world? What is the meaning of 'not' for
him? This is an area in which american pragmatism in it's recent forms has
a lot to say. But I guess it's a non-problem for Pirsig? So it is, but you
have to get inside it and do some thinking to see why this is.
If you want to see for yourself, for Parmenides in English the best ISBN is
0 87220 326 3, and for Plato's Sophist 0 87220 202 X (how many digits is
there supposed to be in an ISBN: 10, 9, or 8? If it's 8 they begin with the
8722, but what's stamped on the book never seems to match what they need at
Amazon).
You can check out a longer drier version of what I'm saying here at:
www.plato.plus.com/c4.html
All the best,
Elephant
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
