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From Walter Kaufmann's prologue to Martin Buber's I and Thou.

Catherine Legg, "‘Diagrammatic Teaching’: The Role of Iconic Signs in Meaningful Pedagogy"

Even if they're often used interchangeably, are there valid distinctions to be made among verbs like "to show" and "to indicate"?

Ultimately, this “other illumination” is consciousness; the question of how “electrical charges in the nervous system” can give rise or contribute to the activity of disclosure is what analytic philosophers of mind call the hard problem of consciousness. But I would like to think that this approach is not just more evocative but more fruitful, steering us away from (say) a preoccupation with isolated qualia or thinking of consciousness as a 'thing' in the brain that can hypothetically be uploaded to a computer or elsewhere.

anaxerneas :

Robert Sokolowski

furryalligator :

(via MLB leans on longtime mud supplier, not Rawlings, to coat balls | SI.com)

Umberto Eco, "Kant, Peirce, and the Platypus"

Daniel Everett, in an interview with Geoffrey Sampson (2009b: 215) is obviously deeply committed to cultural relativism: “The Piraha’s culturally constrained epistemology can only be evaluated in terms of the results that it gives the Pirahas relative to their own values. Since it serves them very well, there is no sense in the idea that it is inferior.” We might choose to avoid terms like “inferior” as vague and tendentious, but it is entirely valid to compare Piraha culture with that of other societies, and in this more general scheme of things it appears to be unusually primitive, and the fact that the Piraha themselves appear quite happy has nothing to do with the matter. (Remarkably, in his book (2008: 272) Everett also says that he no longer believes in truth, a strange position for one who has spent a great deal of time and effort trying to prove that Universal Grammar is false, or who wishes his work to be taken seriously at all.)

C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools

Robert Sokolowski, "Picturing"

tessdaviskensett :

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward R. Tufte

Tufte’s work is somewhat clinical, which may be fitting to the data sets I’ve been collecting. There’s some helpful information about how to put together information designs too.

svenson777 :

Handwritten version of Lord Byron’s poem “Sun Of The Sleepless” (September 8, 1814)

GEORGE GORDON BYRON: Sun Of The Sleepless

Sun of the Sleepless! melancholy star! Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far, That show’st the darkness thou canst not dispel, How like art thou to joy remembered well! So gleams the past, the light of other days, Which shines but warms not with its powerless rays: A night-beam sorrow watcheth to behold, Distinct, but distant – clear – but, oh, how cold!

I guess we all relate to Witkacy sometimes?

anaxerneas :

Just came across a paper from a radical behaviorist/behavioral analyst who criticizes realism, claiming that the the belief in perception-independent reality is fundamentally incompatible with a “science of behavior” (and by this he means Skinner-influenced behavior analysis of course), because it leads to dualism and therefore mentalism, which is essentially the Big Bad for behavior analysts. As far as I can tell from reading the behaviorist literature, it’s the horrible crime of supposing that our thoughts and feelings (’covert behavior’) actually play a role in explaining our outer, overt behavior. The belief that a thought can cause an action (mental causation) is almost always unquestionably associated with dualism.

It amazes me how behaviorists regularly complain about being misunderstood by the wider psychological community, harshly criticizing cognitive psychology and folk psychology, yet when one reads their literature you find they clearly have all sorts of philosophical issues and they aren’t any closer than cognitive psychologists to having them satisfactorily worked out.

Also, consider this passage from another behaviorist commentator:

Let’s  face  it,  “mind”  and  “mental”  do  have proper  uses  in  the language  and  cannot  be  dismissed  tout court,  especially  by  a  behavioral  science which claims to be “thoroughgoing.”  

THE ESCAPE OF METAPHYSICS: COMMENTARY ON… (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319176562_THE_ESCAPE_OF_METAPHYSICS_COMMENTARY_ON_BURGOS_2016 [accessed Jun 05 2018].

The fact that a fellow behaviorist has to come out and specifically defend the use of words such as “mind” and “mental”, to me, indicates that the common criticism that behaviorism downplays or flat-out ignores subjectivity and consciousness is not as much of a myth as behaviorists like to claim it is.

anaxerneas :

This 2018 post of mine is a bit harsh and I think it would be worth rereading that paper, but I largely agree with what I said here still.

latinthusiast :

Apparently Quintilian thought Livy’s prose had a certain ‘milky texture’ (lactea ubertas) to it. So I guess it’s like, sort of viscous and coats your throat.

latinthusiast :

So I read an article (Hays 1986) about this, apparently it’s a nourishment metaphor with an extra side of ‘not-boring’ richness.

Livy: good for the student, and apparently not boring either!

probably also not suitable for singing

Yet, is it not a striking fact that Kant's attempt to thematize presentation itself, i.e., the very principle of the mind's life, makes recourse to a notion whose origin is most evidently the rhetorical tradition? In paragraph 59, entitled "Of Beauty as the Symbol of Morality," he speaks of Darstellung, presentation as sensible illustration, by referring to the Greek concept of hypotyposis.

As his parenthetical explanation of hypotyposis clearly shows, it must be taken as a rhetorical term. Indeed, Kant chooses to define hypotyposis as subjectio sub adspectum, that is as visual presentation, more precisely, as throwing under the eyes, or exhibiting under its appearance or aspect. This is the definition that Cicero gives in De Oratore of hypotyposis when he explains that "dwelling on a single point" and also "clear explanation and almost visual presentation of events as if practically going on," is a very effective device in stating a case, or in amplifying a statement. Quintilian's account of the figure in De Institutione Oratoria, further emphasizes this vivid illustration's specificity when he characterizes it as an "appeal to the eye rather than the ear." Hypotyposis thus does much more than explain or provide clearness. Whereas "the latter merely lets itself be seen ... the former thrusts itself upon our notice (se quodam modo ostendit)," Quintilian writes.

In short, as a rhetorical notion, hypotyposis means an illustration in which the vividly represented is endowed with such detail that it seems to be présent, and to presént itself, in person and completely by itself. Some of the figure's synonyms such as enargeia, evidentia, illustratio, demonstratio, further stress hypotyposis's ability to present a subject matter as if it were actually beheld by the eye.

Rodolphe Gasché, “Some Reflections on the Notion of Hypotyposis in Kant”

I guess I’m still intrigued by the subtitle of Robert Sokolowski’s book Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things. I probably didn't think much of the significance of the verb being "presént" rather than "represent" when I first read it.

Indexical sinsigns do not exhibit their objects but, rather, point to them or in analogous ways “pick them out”. Thus, a spontaneous cry so affects our instinctual or conditioned reflexes as to draw our attention to its source. Similarly, a weathercock indicates the direction of the wind to anyone who considers it in light of the fact that its direction is determined by the wind’s direction, when there is a wind. Clearly, the weathercock must involve an icon of the wind’s direction, viz. in the direction of its own longest horizontal dimension. But it is the actual direction of the wind that is signified, and not a merely possible direction. Therefore, the icon which it involves is part of a more complex sign. The whole is an index of the wind’s actual direction, because it is the actual direction of the wind which determines the actual direction to which the weathercock turns. “. . . it is not the mere resemblance of its Object, even in these respects, which makes it a sign, but it is the actual modification of it by the Object”.

Peirce’s example of a dicent sinsign is a weathercock. The weathercock is by no means a proposition or assertion in the usual sense, and yet it does act compulsively on interpreters of it, causing them to form an opinion about the wind’s direction. Not that interpreters are not free to deny what the weathercock indicates, if they have some reason to believe that it is not functioning properly. But in the absence of grounded doubt, a person who knows how to interpret weathercocks cannot help but be influenced by one if he sees it whilst pondering the wind’s direction. The weathercock also shares the structural features of propositional significance: it is an index of the wind and it embodies an icon of direction, and the combination of these two signifies that that direction is the wind’s direction. “Such a Sign must involve an Iconic Sinsign to indicate the Object to which the information refers. But the mode of combination, or Syntax of those two must also be significant”.

T.L. Short, Life Among the Legisigns

legoloft :

Whacko the Weathercock https://www.flickr.com/photos/herrkraemert/51951162904/

namiharinezumi :

1191 ニワトリさんは何が見えるの？ What do you see, weathercock?

A radical difference between symbol and allegory has been definitely established by Romantic theorists, who have, however, dangerously identified the symbolic with the aesthetic.

Originally, a symbol was produced by the mutual relationship of two pieces of a coin destined to acquire their full purport through their actual or potential rejoining. In other sorts of signs the signans becomes irrelevant at the moment at which its signatum is caught (the signans is thrown away, so to speak); instead, in the signs that Romantic philosophers and poets called symbols, the signatum acquires its full purport only in so far as it is continually compared to the physical presence of its signans.

Schelling identifies works of art with symbols because they are hypotyposes, self-presentations, and, instead of signifying an artistic idea, they are that idea in themselves. There is no “semantic” interpretation of a work of art. Schelling distinguishes schemas, where the general provides us with an understanding of the particular, from allegories, where the particular provides us with knowledge of the general; in aesthetic symbols both procedures are at work simultaneously.

In the same line of thought, Goethe says that allegories designate directly, whereas symbols designate indirectly (1797: 94). Allegories are transitive, whereas symbols are intransitive. Allegories speak to the intelligence, whereas symbols speak to perception. Allegories are arbitrary and conventional, whereas symbols are immediate and motivated. A symbol is an image which is natural and universally understandable. Allegories employ the particular as an example of the general; symbols embody the general in the particular. Moreover, symbols are polysemous, indefinitely interpretable; they realize the coincidence of contraries; they express the unexpressible, since their content exceeds the capability of our reason:

"Symbolisms transform the experience into an idea, and an idea into an image, so that the idea expressed by the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains unexpressible. Allegory transforms an experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and expressible by the image."

In this sense the aesthetic and the symbolic come to coincide definitely, but they define themselves in terms of each other, in a circular way. As a matter of fact, Romantic aesthetics does not explain the semiotic strategy by which, in the poetic use of languages, particular meanings are conveyed: it only describes the effect that a work of art can produce. By doing so, Romantic aesthetics flattens the concept of semiosic interpretation (which undoubtedly acquires a particular status in aesthetic texts) into the one of aesthetic enjoyment. On the other hand, semiotics can explain the phenomenon of symbolic mode, but it cannot fully explain aesthetic enjoyment, which depends on many extrasemiotic elements.

Umberto Eco, On Symbols

I find one of Peirce's brief definitions of the icon relevant here (and Eco does note in this paper that Peirce uses "icon" where others would use "symbol"):

…an Icon is a mere image, a vague form. It makes no distinction between its Object and its Signification. It exhibits the two as one.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment