Black & Davidson on Metaphor

Most theories of metaphor look at what occurs inside a metaphorical phrase and posit a shift in meaning in the metaphorical words. This includes the classic “Models and Metaphor,” by Max Black, who distinguishes between the literal words of the phrase and the metaphorical words. On this view, the two interact in such a way that the meanings of the metaphorical words change. In another view, Donald Davidson takes a radical stance in his “What Metaphors Mean” to assert that the words in a metaphor mean nothing other than their original, literal meaning. Both theories suffer from problems: Black fails to explain how the metaphorical words change in meaning. Davidson, on the other hand, while succeeding in refuting most of the “other meaning” theories, only weakly suggests “use” of metaphor to explain its power. In this paper, I will clarify the two respective theories and attempt to reconcile or fuse them. We will find that Black looks to the language itself and finds a shift in meaning, while Davidson asserts that meaning stays literal, and we must instead look at what occurs between the speaker and hearer. An examination of Davidson’s later theory of interpretation applied to Black’s theory of metaphor will clarify Davidson’s ‘use’ as well as allow for literal meaning to stay in metaphor

Universality caused: the case of renormalization group explanation

Recently, many have argued that there are certain kinds of abstract mathematical explanations that are noncausal. In particular, the irrelevancy approach suggests that abstracting away irrelevant causal details can leave us with a noncausal explanation. In this paper, I argue that the common example of Renormalization Group explanations of universality used to motivate the irrelevancy approach deserves more critical attention. I argue that the reasons given by those who hold up RG as noncausal do not stand up to critical scrutiny. As a result, the irrelevancy approach and the line between casual and noncausal explanation deserves more scrutiny

Abstraction and its Limits: Finding Space for Novel Explanation.

Several modern accounts of explanation acknowledge the importance of abstraction and idealization for our explanatory practice. However, once we allow a role for abstraction, questions remain. I ask whether the relation between explanations at different theoretical levels should be thought of wholly in terms of abstraction, and argue that changes of variable between theories can lead to novel explanations that are not merely abstractions of some more detailed picture. I use the example of phase transitions as described by statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to illustrate this, and to demonstrate some details of the relationship between abstraction, idealization, and novel explanation

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Critique of Darwin

Despite his position as one of the first philosophers to write in the ‘post-Darwinian’ world, the critique of Darwin by Friedrich Nietzsche is often ignored, for a host of unsatisfactory reasons. I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of Darwin is important to the study of both Nietzsche’s and Darwin’s impact on philosophy. Further, I show that the central claims of Nietzsche’s critique have been broadly misunderstood. I then present a new reading of Nietzsche’s core criticism of Darwin. An important part of Nietzsche’s response can best be understood as an aesthetic critique of Darwin, reacting to what he saw as Darwin’s having drained life of an essential component of objective aesthetic value. For Nietzsche, Darwin’s theory is false because it is too intellectual, because it searches for rules, regulations, and uniformity in a realm where none of these are to be found – and, moreover, where they should not be found. Such a reading goes farthest toward making Nietzsche’s criticism substantive and relevant. Finally, I attempt to relate this novel explanation of Nietzsche’s critique to topics in contemporary philosophy of biology, particularly work on the evolutionary explanation of culture

A Conversão da Consciência como princípio da moralidade

Kant mostra que uma teoria fundamental da normatividade e da moralidade não pode dar nem uma explanação nem uma prova da normatividade, mas apenas pode articular e explicitar sua origem. Ela pode fazer isso indicando o lugar ou o topos e a virada ou a trope de seu originar. Conforme Kant, o topos da normatividade é a vontade enquanto razão prática e sua trope é o uso geral desta razão que tipicamente é instrumental, no sentido da reflexão. A trope da origem da moralidade é a autonomia, i.e., a virada da razão prática sobre si mesma, tornando-se pura neste ato. Nisso, a razão prática estabelece sua própria forma como lei para si mesma, na forma do imperativo categórico. Em consequência disso, a ética fundamental serve duas funções : formalmente, ela fornece evidência da originalidade e autenticidade da moralidade; materialmente, ela fornece um princípio criteriológico para o conteúdo da moralidade. O artigo argumenta que Kant estava certo em sua visão da fundamentação da ética, mas estava errado com relação à maneira como ele tentou cumprir as exigências estabelecidas. O topos da normatividade e, em consequência disso, da moralidade, não pode ser a razão, mas precisa ser a consciência ou, mais exatamente, o saber de se ; e sua trope fundamental não pode ser reflexão e, depois, autonomia, mas precisa ser o que pode ser descrito como conversão da consciência. Essa conversão pode ser identificada com o philein no sentido de Aristóteles. Este “amar amigável” tem quatro aspectos diferentes: desejo, cognição, benevolência e reconhecimento. Quando este philein for recíproco e estiver continuamente vivido, nasce a philia, a amizade. Essa é descrita, consequentemente, como o topos da origem de normatividade e moralidade

Hear After: Matters of Life and Death in David Tudor’s Electronic Music

In David Tudor’s electronic music, home-brew modular devices were carefully connected together to form complex feedback networks wherein all components—including the composer/performer himself—could only partially ‘influence’ one another. Once activated, the very instability of mismatched connections between the components triggered a cascade of signals and signal modulations, so that the work “composed itself,” and took “a life of its own.” Due to this self-producing, perpetuating nature of his works, Tudor insisted on what he called “the view from inside,” focusing more on the internal observation of his devices and sound than in materials external to the immanence of performance. When Tudor passed away in 1996, it became apparent that the sheer lack of resources outside the work—scores, instructions, recordings, texts—had made many of his music impossible to perform in his absence. The works that took a life of their own could not survive their composer’s death partially because of his utter reliance on them to do their work. By connecting often mismatched resources obtained from extended research on Tudor, this paper presents modular observations that seem to offer certain perspectives on the issue of life and death surrounding Tudor’s music. A comparison with developments in systems theory, most notably autopoiesis, outlines a mechanism for the endless life of sounds that compose themselves. Moving out of this theoretical reflection, a fieldwork report of an ongoing attempt to ‘revive’ some of Tudor\u27s works is offered. This report demonstrates the observer shifting from one ‘inside’ to another—from an electronic circuitry inside a particular device, to a network composed of several devices, and further into the activation of a composite instrument. Meandering away from the archives, the composer’s “view from inside” of his electronic devices is set side by side with recent insights of object-oriented ontology. A certain portion of this observation then feeds itself back to the perspective of autopoiesis, while others proceed to extract a distinct notion of ‘life’ out of object-orientation, this time in programming: an indeterminate ‘waiting’ time inherent in each ‘object’ that cannot be computed within a singular universal time. This latency embedded in objects that await activation correlates to the trajectory of the observer who is always in a transit from one ‘inside’ to another, finding different objects on each level of observation, and for whom, therefore, the delineation between life and death is always indeterminate. This view provides further explanation to the operative mechanism of Tudor’s music, wherein mismatched components sought to activate and influence one another, constituting an ‘electronic ecology’ endowed with a life of its own, but filled with partial deaths. The paper thus observes ultimately a parallel between the composer’s trajectory within his performances and that within his life, while attempting to reenact the complex nature of these said trajectories through the meandering manner of its own delivery

Session 4: Evolutionary Indeterminism

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 4: Evolutionary Indeterminis