Comments Elsewhere

Mark Uzick:

Thanks for explaining where this insane idea of using the word “concept” to mean something existing independently of the mind comes from.

Well, if you have a better word to translate what Frege meant by Begriff you’re welcome to suggest it. Otherwise, it seems to me like it’s probably more interesting, and intellectually more fruitful, to look at what Frege was trying to do with his distinction between Begriffe and Vorstellungen, by trying to suss out the meanings of these words from context, rather than to worry about the sanity or in-sanity of using certain imperfectly-suited English words in the translation, or the discussion of the argument being translated.

You might also keep in mind that this is linguistically slippery ground and has been for thousands of years. For example, does “idea” refer to a private mental presentation or a public, mind-independent logical structure? Well, if you’re reading English-language philosophy or psychology since about the time of Locke, it’s usually the former. That’s why Austin chose the word “idea” to translate Vorstellung, which Frege says are private and representational. But the word originally entered English, via Latin, from the Greek ????, which may be familiar to you if you have read Plato, which certainly doesn’t have anything to do with any of the things that happen in your head. Related terms like “ideal” still preserve some of this meaning (to describe a golf club as ideal for this shot is not to say that it exists only in your mind; it’s to say that it lives up to an objectively specifiable set of features that a club ought to have given the situation). Of course, you could react to this kind of thing by raging against the fact that language shifts or that words end up with many shades of meaning — sometimes even ending up with meanings that fall on opposite sides of some important distinction. “Sanction” means to approve or allow, and “sanction” also means to forbid or penalize; how ever do we survive?

Or you could back up and look at what your interlocutor is trying to say — what the point of their verbal choices might be, even if those choices are different from the choices you would have made. (*) If the only explanations you have ready to hand is that your interlocutor is (a) crazy, (b) dishonest, (c) aiming to confuse, or (d) philosophically ignorant, then probably your philosophical conversations aren’t going to get very far.

(*) How can you try to get the point when you don’t even agree on the meaning of a key term? Well, the same way you get an understanding of any unfamiliar usage — bracket the word for a moment, read closely, and try to glean something from the context.

I see that J. L. Austin calls Wittgenstein a “charlatan.”

Where?

In any case, if that was Austin’s assessment of Wittgenstein, I don’t agree with it.

Would you agree that the proper word for Wittgenstein is “mumpsimus?”

No.

Just as a quick reminder to all concerned, Frege never wrote anything about “ideas” or “concepts.” He neither authoritatively established, nor arbitrarily changed the definitions of either; for the simple reason that he never mentioned either; what he did mention were Vorstellungen and Begriffe.

English words like “idea” and “concept” are words that Frege’s translators (for example, J. L. Austin) supplied in translating his work into English. These terms are certainly not perfect translations of Frege’s meaning (these kind of words are notoriously hard to translate); maybe they are at least adequate, or maybe they aren’t even that. But in any case if you want to figure out whether Frege had good reasons for making the sharp distinction that he does between Vorstellungen and Begriffe, or whether he was just arbitrarily redrawing the language — then it’s probably best to take a look at the use that Frege makes of the distinction and the reasons he gives for making it — in, for example, the introduction to the Grundlagen der Arithmetik/Foundations of Arithmetic. It’s certainly not going to be useful to speculate about whether his distinction is lining up with or not lining up with your precise understanding of the definitions of English terms that he never used.

Bergman,

Wonder no longer. The answer is, of course, that they can and would and already did immediately gun down a man who allegedly threatened them with a “non-lethal” taser.

(In this particular case, based on the victim’s injuries, it’s actually more likely that the cop was simply lying, and that he simply shot an unarmed, fleeing man in the back, and then made up a ridiculous lie in order to get away with the murder. But even if we take his “defense” completely at face value, the whole “defense” rests entirely on the claim that the guy pointed a taser at him — apparently taking it as obvious that this would justify the use of deadly force.)

Dave:

If men are privileged, why does the rule ‘women and children out first’ exist? Shouldn’t it be ‘men first’?

Because chivalry is an exercise of privilege towards those who have been marked as being dependent on men. It is no different from any other form of noblesse oblige, except that it is far more common and deeply embedded in every aspect of patriarchal culture.

Dave:

Why are men only eligible for the selective service (draft)?

Because military force is a central component of historical male power.

Dave:

If men are privileged, why are we still expected by women including many feminists to pay for their meals and things if we go out on a date?

… Come on, really? After chivalry and the draft, this is what’s got you up in arms? It sounds to me like you have a lot of personal grievances to work out. I’m sorry you find “women including many feminists” so baffling but I don’t know what it has to do with a radical feminist analysis of male power and rape culture.

It may win you the approval of some female feminists … but for the majority of women it’s going to have the reverse effect and expose you as a weak, emasculated male with no self-respect. While they continue to date and fuck ‘bad boys’ and you chumps keep wondering why.

Well, whatever. This is a serious political and ethical commitment for me — a matter of what is true about the society that we live in, and how I can and ought to treat other people around me. I didn’t get into this gig to try and convince more women to like me personally.

I can’t speak for Roman, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he feels much the same.

It’s interesting that when a man professes some support for feminist ideas, you do not feel content with confining your response to an attempt to show that those ideas are empirically mistaken; you apparently believe that you need to attack him for his assumed failures at living up to stereotypical norms of masculinity and heterosexual prowess. Is this intended to humiliate your conversation partner? If so, whether you succeed at that or not, I have to wonder what value you see in the attempt.

It’s not a dig at libertarians per se. Clearly Digby has been reading Kevin Carson, and believes that the fellow in the car ahead of him had confused a defense of freed markets with apologetics for actually-existing corporate capitalism.

tolstoycat,

Hey, what about highly specialized sub-genres of pornography by unusual producers that represent maybe 1% of the total commercial sex market? What about purely speculative marginal non-commercial forms of pornography have almost no influence on either the broader culture or the commercial sex market or young men's formative sexual experiences? What about purely hypothetical forms of pornography that I just made up that might exist in an imaginary alternate reality where patriarchy and rape culture don't exist and where women considering sex work face an entirely different set of cultural and institutional incentives from those presented by actually-existing sexual capitalism? Huh? Ever think of those, smartypants?

Clearly these carefully crafted counterexamples, ranging from the marginal to the completely imaginary, provide a deep and fundamental challenge -- indeed, a decisive reputation, about the character and function of the 99% of the actually-existing commercial sex market under real-world conditions of patriarchal rape culture, which does significantly influence the broader culture and young men's formative sexual experiences, as well as your proposals about how to react to it. Take that, anti-pornography feminism!

Faldor: I think your definition of pornography is one developed in cloistered academia

You know, there are a lot of ways you could describe the work of folks like Andrea Dworkin or Women Against Pornography. But I don't think "cloistered academia" is among them. Very few of the women involved in the foundational work on pornography were academics at all; they were mostly journalists and movement activists who were doing things like taking over counterculture rags and leading street tours of Times Square. That's not an argument either for or against the way they characterized "pornography," the definitions of it that they introduced, etc. (there is nothing essentially wrong with being an academic), but the anti-pornography movement was as grassroots and non-academic as anything in Second-Wave feminism (if anything, the literature on "subversion" and "transgression" that is often used to support so-called sex-pos, pro-porn positions have been far more likely to be rooted in academic theory than the anti-pornography writers have been).

Unless the goal of drafting the Constitution was to create the largest government apparatus in human history (and as I recall, the goal was the opposite–but opposite often accompanies violent solutions to problems), the piece of paper has missed its mark.

I don’t doubt that most of the people who drafted the Constitution would be surprised by the kind of government that has resulted, but I don’t think that their goals were “the opposite” of creating the largest government apparatus in human history. Presumably the opposite of the largest government would be the smallest government, but they weren’t aiming to create that; at the time there already was a United States government (under the Articles of Confederation), but the people involved in drafting the United States Constitution generally believed that it was too small, so they created a new Constitution specifically with the purpose of granting more extensive powers to the central government (notably powers to levy compulsory federal taxes, to regularize and administer U.S. territories for the benefit of politically-connected land speculators, and to enable the federal government to more effectively socialize the costs of enforcing the slave system. The purpose was to grow government; at the most, they didn’t recognize just how much genie there was hiding in that particular bottle.

Mark:

I’m unable to use your post at this link to decide which part of the political spectrum you were coming from, but I would have taken your word for it in any case.

Well, the link was to a comment, not to the original post. (The original post at that URL was not by me. The relevant part of the comment I was linking to is the part that begins “But I mentioned it specifically in order to offer myself as an example,” etc. The brief comments about my motivations for getting interested in markets may be tangentially connected to this conversation: the whole point was to deepen my understanding of how spontaneous social orders might emerge and flourish without the need for centralized management or control. The problem with most traditional social anarchists, when there has been a problem, is not that we have called for too little consensual social control, but that we have called for too much; our picture of social transformation has too often looked like one damn committee meeting (*) after another. Markets are valuable as models insofar as they offer an alternative model — mutual exchange and competitive experimentation — for uncontrolled social interaction.

You are mistaking control/government for aggression/the state.

I don’t think that I am. My point about social control (“management,” “government,” etc.) is not limited to a point about coercive forms of control over others. To use the distinction from the “Invisible Fist” essay, I am not just talking about the reality and importance of voluntary orders here; I’m also talking about the reality and importance of undesigned or polycentric orders, which is what I took the business about “no order without control” to be denying. Perhaps what you mean by the word “control” and what I mean by it are different, in which case maybe we should spell out some of the details. My point in talking about orders without control is not merely to point out that there are orders without coercion (I already knew that you acknowledged that). It’s to point out that there are also examples of social order — mutual exchanges among peers in a marketplace, a game of pick-up basketball with no referee, a group of friends settling on the toppings to get on a pizza — where the order emerges without anyone being in charge (who’s in charge of the market exchange? of the basketball game?), and often without any shared purpose or plan (people swapping goods and services in a market often have completely disparate aims; they get along because markets allow the coordination of action without conformity of plans).

Maybe what you mean by “management” or “control” is compatible with social orders in which nobody is in charge and where there may not be any shared purpose or plan among the people participating. If so, I have no objection to the claims you make about it. But I’d be curious who you could say is managing or controlling, and what it is that is being managed or controlled. In any case, if you’re using the terms so that they don’t involve one person having definite power over other people, then I’d submit we’re no longer talking about “governing” in any literal sense.

Not at all. I’m not addressing anarchism’s origins or all its variations. Marxism is a variant of anarchism…

This claim is both ignorant and absurd. How many anarchists do you think would accept your claim that Marxism is a form of Anarchism? How many Marxists do you think would accept that claim? Marx was certainly aware of Anarchism and had some definite views on the relationship between his ideas and Anarchistic ideas; have you read any of the things that he wrote about Proudhon, Bakunin, or Anarchism as a body of ideas?

You keep asking for my credentials. Well, I don’t have any to speak of.

I never asked you for any credentials. I asked you for evidence to back up your claims. Here, the kind of evidence you might have cited are texts that anyone could read, regardless of their credentials or status (**). If you assert that “most Anarchists” believe or say X (***), then you ought to be able to name at least one Anarchist who believes or says X, and to show where X appears in that Anarchist’s work.

If you don’t know enough about Anarchist writing to do that, then that’s no great fault of yours. But it is a good reason to think that — unless and until you have made the minimal effort necessary to make yourself less than ignorant about what actual Anarchists say and believe — you probably ought to wait to find out more about it, or else avoid making strong claims about what “most Anarchists” believe or say. Not because you lack “credentials,” but because you lack knowledge; and if you don’t know what you’re talking about, why keep talking about it?

As for Murray Rothbard, I’m sorry that you found him personally disappointing.

(*) All of them voluntary and run by consensus, natch. But meetings nevertheless.

(**) A lot of them are available for free on the Internet.

(***) The same goes for “Marxist political philosophy,” or any other body of ideas that you know only through a Wikipedia page.

Wayback/Internet Archive has a significant time lag between when they begin archiving a website and when they begin making the archives publicly available. I don’t know whether aaeblog.com is old enough yet to start showing up when requested, or if you’re still in the archived-but-hidden time window.