So there is singular, unified, timeless, complete, and final truth? And it is to be arrived at solely through logical argument? (What of evidence, experience- a point that has already been raised above? But is experience itself unconditioned, unmediated, unquestionable?) But if a logical argument is to be true and not just valid, its premises must be true. Is there a logically self-enclosed space of reasons wherein all premises can be found or derived? (If you refer back to Aristotle, “archai”, first principles or grounds, even and especially in “first philosophy”, could only be derived from dialectical syllogisms, “wherein the premises are merely probable”, rather than from analytic syllogisms, “wherein the premises are certain”.) These are precisely metaphysical beliefs, of the kind Derrida is contesting,- (and not just Derrida),- and it seems to me that if there really were an ultimate logical foundation, which predetermines, derives and justifies all knowledge, experience and normativity, the burden of proof does not fall on Derrida. But if there is not, then philosophy becomes a plural space in which quite different, perhaps incomensurable, projects, with differing aims and styles can be pursued. It’s true that Derrida “attacks” rather than “defends”, but, as I sought to make plain, he is recognizably focused on the philosophical question of premises and presuppositions and, in particular, the implicit, “hidden” presuppositions that subtend explicitly raise premises. It seems to me that if you want to criticize or “attack” Derrida’s arguments, or, perhaps better, what he is doing, you would need to make the effort to adequately interpret them, rather than simply dismissing them as defective solely on the grounds of their style of presentation or their contrary aims. (You might take note of the fact that Derrida’s work is partly rooted in the phenomenological tradition of continental philosophy, wherein “arguments” took the form of careful descriptions of expereince, though he began his career by severely criticizing Husserl’s notions of self-evidence and presuppositionless science.) In fact, the whole line of attack that you’ve been pursuing here, concerning iteration, context and intentionality, is itself a bit of a red herring, since Derrida is overwhelmingly concerned with issue of textuality and writing and their reading and interpretation, wherein the presence of a controlling, animating intention precisely can not be taken for granted.

No, philosophy is not literature,- (Derrida clearly and emphatically does not think so),- but it’s not science either. The universal laws of physics are perhaps not the best model for doing philosophy. (They are not even a good model for doing biology). I wouldn’t simply disparage Anaytic philosophy as a whole, (though, since the title of this thread mentioned “baroque specialization, the whole argument with Derrida has a “pot calling the kettle black” quality to it.) But it seems to me that much of it is taken up with a fairly traditional project of ontological naturalism/epistemological representationalism, or, in other words, with the elaboration of a systematically complete or consistent naturalism, and I fail to see why that project should be obligatory or the exclusively legitimate philosophical project. (I, for one, do not agree with it, since I am an inconsistent naturalist). But if you do not like the notion of a pluralistic philosophy, could you please provide me with some guarantee that we do not live in a plural universe. After all, philosophy must preserve some connection with the living and the meaning(s) of living and not just concern the attainment of timeless truth, else it ceases to exist in its very attainment.

I tried to explain that, on Derrida’s account, traditional philosophical thinking produces and runs up against unthinkable cruxes, philosopher’s stones, if you will, which are self-stultifiying and narrow and cripple the possibilities of further thinking; in a word, more is put into them that can be got out of them. Others here have spoken of Derrida criticizing the “reification of meaning”. It seems to me that in your insistence on “defending” the truth and the strict form of logical argument as its sole means of access, you are running the risk of doing the same.

And the only dualism in question is the dualism of knowledge as rationality and awareness as sense perception (and conditioned response). Qualia are the manifestations as shadows of the conflict between two mechanisms.

You seem to think that all that a philosopher needs to do is to make few remarks on a topic like ‘meaning’ or ‘rationality’ and then he can just sit back .

It doesnt work like that, philosophy is not literature we do not rest content with figuring out what someone says because that is on its own irrelevant. We want to know whether some account of something like knowledge or justice is true ( i.e. can be defended; argument is a proxy for testing hypotheses ); whether our understanding of those concepts is deepened.

So thanks for your insightful exposition of Derrida’s views but I want to know why people think they are true ( I mean how well they can stand up to philosophical scrutiny ).

But this seems to invoke a completely mystical sort of intention. If your “political statement” makes no reference to any context of political terms, in what sense can it be said to be a political statement at all?

And most important I disguise my political statement in such a way that I do not offend the guests. I dont tell anyone about my intention to do that nor does the introduction mention what I am about to do . The context is completely wedding.

Is my attack on the war in Iraq to be interpreted as my making remarks about the groom etc. ? Why because the context supports that interpretation best ? Yes it does but on this occasion it leads astray . The point I want to make is that you cannot make this distinction without bringing in speaker’s meaning which in this case grounds the claim that the interpretation which invokes speaker’s meaning is the correct interpretation.

Ps the point is not that reiteration is irrelevant or that context is irrelevant that would be too strong . I am making a weaker claim viz. that reiteration is not sufficient condition.

or

(2) even if one takes physicalist approach ( in other words mental is physical ) intentions are too obscure and hence once again such notions are useless to unpacking meaning.

I would say that #1 is false : see how much work there has been done in past 30 years and none of it involves taking dualism seriously.

1. 2 strikes me as implausible because you are essentially saying that we can know a priori that current work which tries to naturalise intentions and intentionality of the mental must be false ( as I said you are saing that we can know this apriori ). This is wildly implausible once again see work by Dretske, Block , Devitt, Stich , Dennett , Fodor and others.

So you dont seem to have good philosophical reasons to reject my position and your rejection seems to be ideological.

I’m not terribly familiar with Derrida, nor a big fan. (I’m more familiar with Heidegger and tend toward Wittgenstein). But it seems to me that what you are failing or refusing to grasp is that Derrida is not doing what you think philosophy should be doing, namely, to provide a foundation for rational normativity by means of careful logical argument,- (leaving aside that norms are a matter of enactment or application, such that having a theory of norms might be rather beside the point),- but something altogether different, whereby he does not have any affirmative philosophical “positions”, such as you wish to ascribe to him, (although he does pretty clearly hold the negative position that a logical foundation for normativity is not possible or a fulfillable project, nor an adequate conception of rationality, its scope, and its stakes). It’s doubtful that Derrida has or seeks to provide any theory of meaning or of the meaning of meaning. It also seems that to do what he does, he must presuppose at least some minimal intelligibility of meaning and does not necessarily deny semantic meaning, only the idealization of such meaning. Whatever else “deconstruction” might be, it is clearly parasitical on the text/position it interpretes/analyses. The close scrutiny of the text in its own terms to uncover its “hidden” inconsistencies aims to bring to light the unacknowledged presuppositions and blindspots entailed in the closure of establishing or projecting a “logocentric” position. The point is decidedly not the logic and rationality are reducible to rhetoric and the “play” of words. (Derrida does not so much “play” with words, but rather with aporias, such as, e.g. idealism vs. materialism, which is why his work seems so caught up in aporetic oscillations. Wittgenstein, by contrast, sought to dissolve aporias. He actually once said,” Enough with this transcentental twaddle, when everything is really as plain as a sock in the jaw”.) The claim the Derrida repeatedly makes rather is that any philosophical position contructed through the logical deployment of concepts will “secretly” and inevitably rely on rhetorical “strategies” that fill in its gaps and constitute its interiority and self-presence, the completeness and closure that render it, as it were, persuasive to itself. And those rhetorical moves will involve, in particular, the binary opposition and hierarchical subordination of concepts. In tracing out the rhetorical moves in the text and arriving at points of “undecidability”, of an unmastered and disavowed excess of meaning in the text that contradicts its ostensible claims, the point is not to simply invert the hierarchy or undo the opposition and thereby to proclaim one’s “liberation” from “logocentric” reason. Rather the point is that it is the rhetorical “supplement” itself that renders possible (“quasi-transcendentally”) the operations and self-regulations of the philosophical text/position, that render it successful. Hence after drawing out the rhetorical implications of the text, the next step in deconstructing it is to draw out the logical implications of that rhetoric. (That is presumably what you identify as bad argument, since the implications seem perverse, especially when “measured” against the self-mastering intentions of the author, but it’s really a parodic mode of criticism, based on a radicalized conception of mimesis that goes back, I think, to Nietzsche.)

The Saussurean notion of the sign, (which I’m no fan of), and its materiality is really not all that central to what Derrida is doing rather than something that was current in his initial environment. Its main function, I think, is to bring out the specificity of the contexts in which meaning is always deployed, just as his tremendously extended notion of the “text”, which has no “outside”, is making the point that any text is not an autonomous, self-constituting “object” that disposes sovereignly over the interiority of its meaning, but rather is always already something in the world. That is, Derrida is trying to get at and highlight the “external” pressures that any thinking/writing is subject to, which inflects and infects its “meaning”. But Derrida clearly can not be an “eliminationist” with respect to “meaning”, since that would render his whole project absolutely nonsensical, not just incoherent. Rather his basic point about the iterability of signs is that there can be no final and complete meaning, since other meaning will always be possible. Far from eliminating meaning, Derrida’s point is that there will always be an uneliminable excess in meaning, which can never be gathered together into the self-present interiority and closure of a philosophical system. To the contrary, “logocentric” or foundational philosophical reason, he claims, is itself founded upon this excess, such that it will always be founded and founder on something unthinkable that “grounds” thought, (e.g. Aristotle’s god as pure actuality in thought thinking itself, the final end of the cosmos, or Kant’s pure rational will which always wills itself). Further, it will always “complete” itself through appealing dogmatically to something that (dis)appears outside of its framework and the field of vision and conception that it allows, (such as “God” or “a complete theory of mind”). Derrida is concerned not so much with the history as the historicity of philosophy, (which would also involve its differentiation/delimitation from other formal-rational discourses, which is also its relation to them), and that historicity is always something embedded in and mediated by the world, not something purely autonomous and immanent. Hence the emphasis on the iterability and difference of signs is a focus on the differentiation, redifferentiation, and transformation of meanings/categories, since obviously meanings/categories do, in fact, change historically, (in ways which can’t be captured by an appeal to a timeless logical normativity), and, still more to the point, they are what “give” us the things of the world, in the sense that they render their perceptibility, intelligibility and recognizability possible, (not least, how human beings are recognizable to each other). And, of course, if they permit us to “see” things and distinguish them from each other, just as well, they might blind us to things, to the possibilities of seeing things otherwise. The upshot is that the process by which human beings are delivered up to the world and the things of the world are delivered up to them and the changes in it, as registered in categorial meanings, does not have a center and can not be metaphysically controlled for and mastered.

But the famously proclaimed absence of any center is not really the main point that Derrida is making. Rather, though there is no ultimate center, the desire for a center is inevitable, and thus “necessary”; in other words, the centering of our thinking is a necessary illusion, which renders it possible, a transcendental illusion. Which is why logocentric reason can not simply be done away with, but, so Derrida would seem to claim, can only be deconstructed endlessly from within. Derrida here is clearly in line with the progressive critique of metaphysics initiated by Kant, which, I think, has been the main line of post-Kantian continental philosophy since. (Since the dominant British tradition of logical empiricism sees itself as non-metaphysical, its adherents see themselves as immune from such criticism. But the continentals tend to detect the traits and traces of metaphysics there nonetheless, which accounts for the heatedness of the dispute. The exemplary case here would perhaps be that of the tense relation between Wittgenstein and the surrounding Analytics, since I see Wittgenstein as very much tied to the Kantian line of descent.) Derrida, in his later years, always insisted that he fully respected the standards, canons and logical rigor of philosophical rationality and that his work was aligned with the continuation of the Enlightenment tradition, and was not some sort of irrationalistic/nihilistic abandonment of reason. I think you can see something of what he was getting at, if you see his work as concerned with the relations and tensions between inclusion and exclusion underlying the workings of rational discourses, since there can be no completely inclusive disourse, open to all, nor are the boundaries, relations and applicabilities of rational discourses set once and for all. In that light what his mode of criticism is aimed at is, not crudely the deployment of rationality as a means of oppression, but the defensive (self-)repressions of rationality in the face of its exposure to and complicity with the world. Derrida’s work seems to be very much the opposite of Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality, with its formal-procedural “discourse ethics”, heavily indebted to Analytic philosophy, and obsessed with securing the “transparency” required for rational consensus, for political reasons. But perhaps, in its very rebarbativeness to communication, it amounts to the obverse side of the same aspirations, if not quite the same project. You might not like Derrida’s work, finding it irritating, tedious, noxious, polemically over-aggressive, obscurantistic, and/or overblown, but to simply dismiss it as irrational and/or incompetent is to simultaneously miss and make his point entirely.

There is only one way that meaning has ever been fixed: in an “explanatory” iteration that is subsequent to the iteration under question. [. . .] If I say something and somebody asks, “what do you mean?” I help clarify the matter by offering another, different iteration. If nobody asks for clarification of an iteration, then we leave that iteration alone and there exists no question of its “meaning.” “Meaning,” in fact, has no existence outside of this scenario: where one iteration is put “into question” by another.

If you happen to be satisfied with a given answer to your question “what does that mean?”, and nobody raises any other objectives, then, great, knock yourself out and call that answer the “fixed meaning” of the original statement.

The question “what do you mean?” is not the same as “what does that mean”. “What do you mean?” seeks something like the author’s intent, which does not exhaust the possible meanings of any statement. The problems posed by repeating the question in response to each clarifying iteration, understood as “what do you mean by that?” are in part those of iterability—to “mean,” at all a signifier must already be associated with a recognized meaning before I use it for my own, so I have only limited control over what my words mean to you (or to me)—and in part those of the inaccessibility to me of the full spectrum of my own conscious, subconscious and unconscious “intent”. But those problems arise within a predefined task: to determine which of the possible meanings of my statement is the one I want you to receive.

Derrida is more often concerned with a second problem, that of determining what a text means when when “I” am not there to dictate rules for interpreting what “I” meant to say. Then the question is “what does that mean,” with no pre-agreed norm for identifying a correct answer. Without such a norm, the series of repeated questions results in the proliferation of meanings, not clarification narrowing meaning to an original intent. The problem is not the lack of meaning outside the text, it is the overabundance of meanings and sources of meaning with no way internal to the text itself to anchor it to any particular interpretation. “Fixing” the meaning can only be done by ruling out other possible meanings, but doing so requires application of a rule based not in meaning but in power or policy.

Clark #107:

Brian, it might be better to simply say Derrida argues against reifying meanings.

and Brian #108:

Clark— yes: against reifying meanings, if by that you mean against anything that would imply the existence of a regime beyond that of the signifier. Again, to use the Saussurean terms that Derrida is working against, zdenek wants there to be a world of “signifieds” beyond iteration. Your basic Platonism, really…

It is not so much the existence of a regime beyond the signifier as the ability to rely on that regime to guarantee that a particular meaning is the correct one that is in question. Derrida shows over and over that texts support multiple, even contradictory readings. The “correct” meaning is determined by our use of the text: the reader does not impose meaning on the text but the reader does impose a rule for selecting among meanings based on the reader’s purpose in reading it. Deconstruction is an effort to read a text without a purpose.

This is the problem that drives much of Derrida’s later work after “Force of Law”—the ethical effort to welcome, remain open to all possible meanings, the impossibility of doing so, and the need to take responsibility for the choice to exclude some meaning when it must be made.

That Donald Davidson could be so caught up in self-supporting abstraction that he could make the argument he did amazes me. It’s like constructing a perfect mathematical logic that can’t accomidate fractions. And this is supposed to model the world?
Is there any justification for such stupidity? Perhaps that things should be neat, rather than sloppy. He should talk to Nino.

“Baroque Specialization: Opus Dei, Scholasticism and Constitutional interpretation.” coming next month in First Things.
go read a novel.
I’m reading Elizabeth Bishop.

out

Derrida writes, for instance, on the concept of “spirit” from Aristotle to Heidegger, the concept of “place” from Plato to Husserl; he writes about Freud’s theories of how experience “imprints” itself on what Freud conceives as the smooth surface of brain matter; he famously argues against Saussurean linguistics (a fact apparently unknown to the poster above who claims Derrida agreed with Saussure!); he writes, perhaps most famously, about the history of the “speech” vs. “writing” distinction in philosophy. He writes about a whole array of subjects as they appear in dozens and dozens of influential philosophers since the Greeks. This is the case despite the repeated assertion of those who don’t actually read the books they like to hold forth about—including, say, the obituary writers at the New York Times!—that Derrida forwards no ideas except to say that reality isn’t real and that truth and meaning doesn’t exist! Of these latter “subjects,” I think it would surprise a lot of people to learn that Derrida has never even addressed such bizzare ideas…

Meaning of language ( both speaker and conventional meaning )is derived intentionality which comes from intentionality of mental states.

Take the following scenario. Let’s say I have a computer program that randomly assembles words together in a series. Every day I walk into my favorite coffee shop and post a product of this computer program on the bulletin board. It’s usually nonsense: “cat mortage glisten,” or ” porky might friend,” etc. But let’s say that one day my computer spits out the phrase “charity never fails.” I go post that in the coffee shop; and then some new costomers come in, read that sentence posted on the bulletin board—and it fills them with hope and gladness. “Charity never fails!” How true! The phrase is clearly meaningful to these people, and it changes their lives. It strikes them as a very profound and meaningful truth.

Now: are we going to say that they’re wrong? That the phrase is actually “meaningless” simply because there was no “intention” that produced the sentence? It is clearly ridiculous to say that the exact same sentence suddenly does have meaning if we change the scenario to say that I wrote the phrase myself and then posted it on the bulletin board.

Clearly, “meaning” only exists as an effect of iteration. It is as pointless to worry about some pre-iterative “intent” when you’re studying how language works for exactly the same reason that it is pointless to worry about whether the universe was created by a God when you’re studying how nature works.

if explaining meaning of a passage say involves ‘iteration’ and nothing else then how do we distinguish between good and bad interpretations ?

Now: does this mean that we will never encounter another written interpretation that will seem to have even more, and more relevant, points of contact with the original speech? Maybe, maybe not. Is the measure of a “point of contact” a purely objective one that is beyond debate? Probably not. You have to simply get used to the fact that there is no “meaning” God that could ever “fix” or “finally answer” those subtle local questions about whether this or that iteration is more “relevant” to the original text. But that doesn’t mean we can’t see the difference between that which is very relevant and that which is hardly relevant at all.

But this move commits a naturalistic fallacy . To avoid this problem the theory leans towards eliminativism and we can see even from the debate here that we are dealing with some sort of error theory a la Mackie ( in morality John Mackie famously proposes to explain normativity and objectivity by suggesting that when we make moral judgements we make an error in ascribing normativity to the physical world ).
As you can see what this aproach boils down to is if you cannot find an easy explanation for some phenomenon then just say that it does not exist . We see the same with poststructuralist antics ok but at what price what have they provided in terms of deepening our understanding of language ? If they cannot make sense of normativity then they cannot make sense of meaning I am afraid.

Finally if you want to replace intentionality with something more plausible be my guest. Of course there is no broadly acceptable ,coherent account that works . What we get is poststructuralism with seriuos problems : how do you explain normativity for instance on your account ?