What Is A Number? Re-Thinking Derrida's Concept of Infinity

Iterability, the repetition which alters the idealization it reproduces, is the engine of deconstructive movement. The fact that all experience is transformative-dissimulative in its essence does not, however, mean that the momentum of change is the same for all situations. Derrida adapts Husserl's distinction between a bound and a free ideality to draw up a contrast between mechanical mathematical calculation, whose in-principle infinite enumerability is supposedly meaningless, empty of content, and therefore not in itself subject to alteration through contextual change, and idealities such as spoken or written language which are directly animated by a meaning-to-say and are thus immediately affected by context. Derrida associates the dangers of cultural stagnation, paralysis and irresponsibility with the emptiness of programmatic, mechanical, formulaic thinking. This paper endeavors to show that enumerative calculation is not context-independent in itself but is instead immediately infused with alteration, thereby making incoherent Derrida's claim to distinguish between a free and bound ideality. Along with the presumed formal basis of numeric infinitization, Derrida's non-dialectical distinction between forms of mechanical or programmatic thinking (the Same) and truly inventive experience (the absolute Other) loses its justification. In the place of a distinction between bound and free idealities is proposed a distinction between two poles of novelty; the first form of novel experience would be characterized by affectivites of unintelligibility , confusion and vacuity, and the second by affectivities of anticipatory continuity and intimacy

Context Dependence, MOPs,WHIMs and procedures Recanati and Kaplan on Cognitive Aspects in Semantics

After presenting Kripke’s criticism to Frege’s ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanati’s non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplan’s ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these attempts: to insert a procedural or algorithmic level in semantic representations of indexicals. That a function may be computed by different procedures might suggest new possibilities of integrating contextual cognitive aspects in model theoretic semanti

Constructing organization through multiplicity: A microgenetic analysis of self-organization in the dialogical self

The self is in a constant process of becoming that demands the construction of “sameness” and identity throughout the irreversibility of time and changing experience (Valsiner, 2002b). Thus, self-organization is the constant and necessary task of a changing self. Occasionally, this dynamic organization may lead to recursive and inflexible patterns implicated in a perpetuating personal problem. The “Identity Positions Interview” (Gonçalves & Cunha, 2006) was designed to elicit dialogical processes while discussing a personal problem. This allows different dialogues to occur: 1) the actual dialogues from the interaction participant- researcher; 2) the imagined dialogues of the participant and others about the problem (e.g. “What would your mother say about the problem?”); 3) the imagined dialogues between Present and Future possible-selves (e.g. “What would the Future say to you?”). These different phases were inspired in therapeutic techniques that call upon the perspectives of social others or temporal movements as semiotic devices used to generate diversity and novelty in the present. Following a dialogical framework, two case-studies are presented to illustrate the emergence of novelty and difference and its regulation into recursive self-dynamics at a microgenetic-level. This idiographic study has two aims: a) to highlight the dynamism of I-positions within the Dialogical Self, and b) to depict the emergence of novelty, self-innovation and re-organization

Comparative heuristics from an STS perspective: inquiring "novelty" in material practice

"This article proposes reconfiguring comparison as a method for innovation studies. It explores how two objects -a media installation and a robotic hand- are configured as novel through a complexity of materialities, stories, and bodies. In focus are small-scale interactions that signify relations between technological objects and their stories. The methodological approach advanced in this article focuses on the construction of comparability, the perspective from which something is compared, and one’s own bodily involvement in co-producing situations. Through two configurative moments, rendering imagined objects and material referencing, this article delineates how the installation and the robotic hand materialise imaginaries and how they articulate stories of their difference. The proposed reconfiguration avows novelty as a concept through which continuities can be drawn, just as it acknowledges the locality of its articulation in different forms. Its perspective is local, as it is immersed in the net of materialities, stories, and bodies, while it moves on and re-arranges what is understood and what needs to be understood." (author's abstract