Sophia speaks - Bruce Alderman

[Neelesh Marik]

Six grammatical categories that underpin philosophical approaches: pronouns, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and prepositions – are understood individually and then woven into a quasi-holographic, integrally philosphemetic formulation of metaphysical pluralism, enacting the principle of non-exclusion. 

Some questions and comments that come up for me both for personal clarification from you Bruce and potentially useful for the discussion forum:

While the role of Integral calculus in dispelling the ‘myth of the given’ is commendable, does IT manage to avoid the epistemic fallacy which occurs wherever 'being' is reduced to our 'access to being.'? Students of Bhaskar may throw some light please. This was a stated objective of ITC 2013, was n't it? I wonder if any other paper covers this.

Is OOO, by virtue of its centrality of the object, positing that even heaps and artefacts have all four quadrant dimensions of being (proto-consciousness etc)? 

Adjectival philosophy treating quality as primary – here does a distinction need to be made between inanimate objects such as the 'warm, yellow sun', and a sentient person (3p) with essence (A.H. Almaas) that is both unqualifiable and a verb-noun? I think that distinction is made later with reference to Cittamatra and bundle theories?

Also the attributed nature of quality is necessarily linked to state (or the temporary mediating endo-structure) of the ‘attributor’ at the time of attribution? 

The differences in the emphasis on the person vis-à-vis the situation between the English and the Japanese could be a good indicator of the individualist/ collectivist tenor of the culture? (Hofstede’s IDV dimension, and perhaps even MAS and PDI)

If we subscribe to the ‘illusion of free will’ theory, then in some sense, all processes are ultimately non-owned processes in an individual level, but perhaps co-owned at an supra-individual level (dominant monad of a socio-cultural holon, which essentially self-organizes without an agentic central controller)? This also seems consistent with Being singular pluralism and centrality of the ‘with’ in co-essentiality. 

Big question: can the embodied and enactive role of grammar in being ontologically resonant and potentially revelatory, move the needle a bit on what is mystically referred to as the ‘ineffability problem’? Matters that need deeper study – perhaps while dwelling on other papers, include Whiteheadian concrescence, Bonnitta Roy’s processual model, Latour, and the effectiveness of Rescher’s process semantics and Bohm’s Rheomode in helping us create a new language to shift our narrative?

I have to say that personally for me, just dwelling on the adjective-noun-verb inter-linkage in silence offered a fabulous meditation experience in which all three parts of speech blended into a phenomenological experience enormously rich, multi-dimensional and ineffable beyond the grammatical categories themselves. Perhaps with some more state-and-stage training, the simultaneous contemplation of all six will take 'the bottom out from under the bucket'!

Thank you Bruce for this gift. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

With my post I didn't mean to suggest that this is the direction Balder should take. Only that Balder may have opened a can of worms, and that these are other directions folks might take in kicking this can down the road. And that some have already taken along these lines, like cognitive grammar and cognitive linguistics. Philosophy in the Flesh, e.g., is a seminal text on how image schema and metaphor shape particular philosophies, and referenced in Balder's paper.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Also recall this post and a few following. It questions that the very notion of developmental levels and/or how they are articulated. And which are likely and significantly influenced by the language/grammar used with its inherent assumptions, undergirded by the Real infrastructure of communication-energy systems. Just something to consider when exploring the developmental level of philosophies.

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

Ah!! Do you know about aUI ?? ah OOH eeA constructed (or perhaps "received") language specifically designed to preclude expressions (and therefore thoughts or feelings, as I understand it) of violence?? 

"The Language of Space," a "international auxiliary language" constructed by philosopher, philologist, and psychoanalyst Dr. John Weilgart in the 1950's. I know a bit about it, if you don't know about it already and want something more but brief. I know there are actually two people in the world who do know how to speak it, his daughters, one of whom is I think a psychotherapist. I have a friend who has learned it for a specific application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUI_(language)

[Balder]

Oh, very interesting -- no, I haven't heard of that language before.  I know of a number of innovative conlangs but not that one, so I'll explore it with interest....

[DavidM58]

Great Bruce! I must correct myself.  The Source of Human Good was originally published in 1946, not 1944.

For anyone who wants an introduction to his thought, I have the following options (but note that I'm new to him too, so buyer beware).

1) Read his most acclaimed book, The Source of Human Good.

2) Peruse the various essays in The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Weiman, volume 4 in the respected series, The Library of Living Theology edited by Robert Bretall. Some essays are better than others, but what's really great about these is that Wieman himself has a response to each essay. Amazon currently has a used copy for under $4, but I'm hoping you could find this in a good library. 

3) You can download a copy of Martin Luther King's PhD thesis on Wieman and Tillich, (A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Till...), complete with scholarly notes about King's plagiarism. The plagiarism might be interesting in terms of insights about MLK, but for me what is more interesting is that you get not only King's renderings, but many of the original texts he quoted from in this 209 page document (not that I've read through very much of it myself). 

4) You can get a copy from me of my notes summarizing a Master's thesis on Wieman written by a friend in 1957. I estimate I'll have about 15 pages or so when I'm done.

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Speaking of how a particular grammar affects the formulation of levels of complexity, recall the linguistic wars between Chomsky et al's generative grammar and Lakoff et al's cognitive linguistics? The former said meaning was determined by word order, while the latter said word order was determined by meaning. The former is based on a context-free metaphysical and structural logic, the latter a postmetaphysical and embodied-enacted logic. The former is the sort of logic used by the model of hierarchical complexity, the latter is the sort of logic used by the dynamic systems theorists. Each has their own version of hierarchical complexity and hence mereological levels of development. And it's not a matter of balancing the two in some higher dialectical level, as that in itself is part and parcel of the metaphysical system. It is though a matter of which is a better or 'integral' interpretation, which in turn determines how one describes levels of development generally. The real/false reason thread (among others) goes into the voluminous details.

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

For sure. I am very skeptical about the cognitive infrastructure of all that. Especially if claims of "research" are made. However, all that typology comes in VERY handy for marketing and pedagogical purposes, among other purposes.

Thanks for the references, I will check back on that as I contemplate my future comments on Terri O'Fallon's latest generation of such theories. The workshop we went through had a heavy emphasis on what it takes for a healthy and healthier version of each stage, ('fully inhabited," we might say, and of course all those definitions are slippery too) as her brother Kim is a psychologist who is collaborating with her on that aspect of it all. And skeptical as I am of the whole infrastructure and other aspects (some questions, some doubts, open to more info as I know so little yet) that emphasis -- much time spent on it -- proved immediately useful to most of the people attending, in their work in the world.

theurj said:

Also recall this post and a few following. It questions that the very notion of developmental levels and/or how they are articulated. And which are likely and significantly influenced by the language/grammar used with its inherent assumptions, undergirded by the Real infrastructure of communication-energy systems. Just something to consider when exploring the developmental level of philosophies.

[Balder]

David, thank you for the additional information on Wieman!

[Balder]

Theurj, on your recent post about the possible local and material contributors to the formation of human language and grammar, the following from a recent blog by Adam Robbert seems relevant:

This is where I think Sloterdijk can help. In The World Interior of Capital Sloterdijk writes persuasively of the relationship between the earth and human speculative faculties. Sloterdijk writes of, “the one earth, which serves as the bearer of world formations” (10), and that “[earth] is now the transcendental star that comes into play as the locational condition for all self-reflections” (25), a star that “carries flora, fauna, and cultures” (29) and that is, “the exemplary hybrid in which the empirical is unified with the transcendental — on the one hand, an ordinary object of ordinary research, and on the other hand, the singular carrier of singular intelligences ” (25), which issue forth in “a semiotic multiverse comprising at least five thousand authentic languages (6,700 at a recent UNESCO count) and a virtually inestimable multiplicity of dialects and sub-dialects that always include mythologies, ‘religions,’ ritualisms, arts, and gestures” (127).   In other words, where Kant gives us a subject-centered account of the conditions of possibility of experience, and Whitehead gives an account of the metaphysical structure of any experience whatsoever, Sloterdijk provides a strange hybrid of the two that is neither completely general in the Whiteheadian sense nor completely anthropocentric in the Kantian sense. It is rather a geocentric account of the relation between nonhuman evolutionary phenomena and the emergence of speculative faculties that possess a general and imaginative character but are nevertheless closely entangled, constrained, and enabled by the geological conditions of possibility set forth by the earth. The move initiated here by Sloterdijk is to my mind one of the most important philosophical projects of the twenty-first century — to place the earth as the condition of possibility for all philosophy, and indeed of all living activity of any kind. The details of this account have yet to be sketched out, but some of the boundary conditions are clearly set: The transcendental is attached to and dependent on the terrestrial.

[Edward theurj Berge]

So the details need some sketching. That's why Rifkin's work is so important, as he deals directly with the ecological infrastructures.* I'm guessing Bryant's latest Onto-Cartography does as well, but with a more philosophical and less practical bent (by his own admission). Does anyone own the latter book? And would be willing to scan and share it here?

* Not in terms of how it affected language development, but in the broader sense of how it affects worldviews.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Speaking of language development from ecological infrastructure, we need to not assume that the latter is strictly a river or soil, etc. The latter includes material infrastructures like the internet. And there is no question that it has changed the ways we think and process information. The nature of the internet's distributive infrastructure has to a large extent not only opened us to that sort of thinking but also to how that thinking is changing our language. One example is in how we combine terms into new hybrids, my theurjisms as but a more specific example. Yes, we've had neologisms before the internet, but that infrastructure has opened up whole new cans of words and ideas heretofore unimaginable.

See internet linguistics.

[Edward theurj Berge]

As an aside, this brings up the issue I've harped on in other times and places. Academia is still caught in the old order of acceptable knowledge generation and format. Hence it ignores forums such as this, which generates knowledge in a different manner and format more exemplified by the internet infrastructure. Academia thus misses out on a lot a significant innovative knowledge to the extent it ignores such formats. There are exceptions but that seems to be the prevailing rule.