Changing concepts

Creation of Concepts

For Rawls: Indeterminate “ideas” (such as the rights of individual) inform the creation of “concepts” (such as Justice and Original Position), which allow for systematic “conceptions”; principles for deciding which concepts are arbitrary.

With Rawl’s constructivism, the content of the concept (for example Justice) is procedurally constructed not from historically loaded ideas, but as the outcome of a dialogue between ideas. This is definitely not the same as Deleuze.

Deleuze does not see the creation of concepts (i.e. Philosophy) as the result of a conversation. In “What is Philosophy” Deleuze describes a “horror” of discussions within Philosophy. This is his account of a ‘rhizome-book’ of movement in concepts (in Patton’s paper above).

Deleuze sees distinct concepts, but something “passes between them”. So internal consistency, but “exo-consistency” between changes. Source of mobility through these connections. ”Relations to concepts provide pathways to others”. This is linked to the plane of immanence, and the (changing) image of thought; searching for different image of thought. An account of “Becoming Just” contour configuration, constellation.

Patton sees the mobility provided by Deleuze as a useful awareness, thinks it is apparent that the creation of Justice is exemplary of Deleuze’s concept creation: Justice (Rawls) is a mobile concept (Deleuze). Conception of Justice becomes historical as “incremental conceptions”. ”Subject to assumption that firmly held convictions change”. Patton examines how Rawls was Looking at Justice as primary social concept, but focussed on Stability, as he wanted to say the Just was more stable. Through the forces between concepts, the one effected the other.

Conceptual personae

From What is Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari:

“The conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosdopher’s “heteronyms,” and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.”

For Rawls; Rational, Citizens, and Reasonable.
For Deleuze: ”Friend of concept” (Nietzsche, Blanchot), set up to measure forces outside of philosophy . Future transformations. Becoming.

from http://blog.neonascent.net/

Kant and schemata

A Bit on Kant's Schematism

It should be noted how Kant’s proposal for connecting the sensible and the conceptual, though superficially straightforward, is at another level extremely perplexing. Is a transcendental schema a thought about time, or is it time as thought in a certain way? Our ways of referring to transcendental schemata inevitably assimilate them, it would seem, to one side or the other of the concept/intuition divide.

Moreover, it appears necessary to do exactly this, if we are to answer the question of what they are, or say anything contentful about them. The cost of the assimilation, however, in either direction, is to make them apparently unfit for their designated mediating role: if they are either concepts with a special relation to intuition, or intuitions as formed conceptually, then they seem to presuppose the very possibility of connecting the sensible and the conceptual which transcendental schematism is invoked to explain.

Kant may declare that transcendental schemata are irreducibly sensible-and-intellectual, and that this is how the question of their identity should be answered. If so, Kant’s original division of our representations into intuitions and concepts is not exhaustive, for there is a third class, about which we can say very little, other than that it is dependent on and somehow derivative from the others. We can specify it in terms of the transcendental role to which the problem of relating concepts and intuitions gives rise, but the manner of its derivation, and the nature of schemata, we cannot specify. Note, it is not just that we can say relatively less about schemata than we can about intuitions and concepts, and that we cannot identify their ultimate source; we are equally ignorant of the grounds of our faculties of sensibility and understanding. Transcendental schemata remain in a special sense hard to grasp, because they are required to combine in themselves two kinds of property, or representational functions, the seeming immiscibility of which is precisely what made us introduce them in the first place. That this is nevertheless Kant’s own view of the matter is, plausibly, what is suggested by his statement that schematism is ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover’ (A141/B180-1).

Sebastian Gardner: I've been accused of obsession with the schematism, but the intuition-concept gap is for me the core problem that Kant runs into, and I have never been able to find an adequate solution in Kant for it.

Here's Paul Guyer's unsatisfactory explanation:

Thus, in the case of the categories our concepts are not “homogeneous” with our objects, and some intermediary has to be found in order to make them so. But this is not the case with our other concepts, which are inherently homo- geneous with their objects. A pure mathematical concept like circle is homogeneous with our experience, because it describes its object in terms of properties that can be directly presented in experience – that something is a curved, closed line every point of which is equidistant from its center is the kind of thing we can observe because the pure form of all our outer intuition is spatial. And an empirical concept like plate or dog is already homogeneous with its object because it includes predicates that correspond immediately to observable properties of objects, whether those properties are pure, like the circularity of a plate, or empirical, like its non- porousness or like the furriness or noisiness of a typical dog. If you're willing to accept that Platonic concepts like "plate" and "dog" have exact referents in the real world, then fine. But Kant doesn't (since he thinks the application of all concepts is normative and prescriptive and subjective) and his whole project is to figure out a way to salvage conceptual mental content out of a non-conceptual world.

Anyway, I mention this because I was just thinking about how much of modern philosophy grows out of exactly this particular problem. Kant wasn't the first to come up with it, but I think it's his formulation of it and failed solution to it that echoes in Russell (who tries to pull the same trick solution), Heidegger (who tries to punt the problem away), and many others.

And ultimately there's something a little pleasing in Kant's ceding of this problem to "art," which is a rare concession on his part.

See sebastien Gardner

What defines concept

As Douglas Hofstadter says,

`It is the organization of memory that defines what concepts are'.

Hypertext uses machine memory in a way that has no analogue in the traditional text environment, where composition relies on the organization of human memory. It is the organization of memory in the computer and in the mind that defines hypertext and makes it fundamentally different from conventional text.

Slatin

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Formation of form as a linguistic movement

Nothing stands outside the system of differences.

Only the formation of form.

But it is on the other hand the being-imprinted of the imprint. It is well-known that Saussure distinguishes between the “sound-image” and the objective sound. He thus gives himself the right to “reduce,” in the phenomenological sense, the sciences of acoustics and physiology at the moment that he institutes the science of language. The sound-image is the structure of the appearing of the sound [l'apparaître du son] which is anything but the sound appearing [le son apparaissant]. It is the sound-image that be calls signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language), but for the “concept,” undoubtedly an unhappy notion here; let us say for the ideality of the sense.

“I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifé] and signifier [signifiant].”

The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard but the being-beard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that of the real sound in the world. One can only divide this subtle but absolutely decisive heterogeneity by a phenomenological reduction. The latter is therefore indispensable to all analyses of being-heard, whether they be inspired by linguistic, psychoanalytic, or other preoccupations.

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Hypertextual as a circle

Hypertextual exhibits the appearance of a circle which closes with itself, and has no beginning in the same way as the other systems have.

To speak of a beginning of hypertextual has a meaning only in relation to a blogger who proposes to commence the reading (Metablog), and not in relation to the hypertext as hypertext. The same thing may be thus expressed with philosophy. The notion of philosophy — the notion therefore with which we start — which, for the very reason that it is initial, implies a separation between the thought which is our object, and the subject philosophising which is, as it were, external to the former, must be grasped and comprehended by the hypertext itself.

This is in short, the one single aim, action, and goal of hypertextual — to arrive at the notion of its notion, and thus secure its return and its satisfaction.

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Invention of american academics

Post-structuralism is difficult to define or summarize.

There are two main reasons for this. First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or facts about the world. Second, very few people have willingly accepted the label 'post-structuralist'; rather, they have been labeled as such by others. Therefore no one has felt compelled to construct a 'manifesto' of post-structuralism. Thus the exact nature of post-structuralism and whether it can be considered a single philosophical movement is debated.

Indeed, it has often been pointed out that the term is not widely used in Europe (where most supposedly "post-structuralist" theory originates) and that the concept of a post-structuralist theoretical paradigm is largely the invention of American academics and publishers.

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Modalities of work in progress

Multimedia as a concept doesn't make sense to me because I have always been involved with electronics and redefinitions of modalities of work.

Ajay Naidu

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A new function for the language

Reconstruction of our culture by computers is central.
This revolution can radically alter the concept of the book as a legal, even sacred, object, undermining current concepts of the author and the reader as well. It will disrupt established publishing and distribution methods for texts. It will decentralize control and access of information currently dominated by the government, universities and libraries. It even threatens to redefine the nature of texts and, more important, the nature and function of language.

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