REVIEW OF SKINNER VS KEAN DEBATE

REVIEW OF SKINNER VS KEAN DEBATE

• Keane criticizes that it is possible to recover the intentionality claim of the authors behind the authors for basically two reason:

  • Kean says that we cannot ignore the psychoanalyst elements, like the subconscious and so on.

    • And Skinner talks about psychoanalysis also but he dismisses it because, according to him, while explaining an idea one should use terms that are available to the reader

  • Kean says that language is not a transparent toll to refer to realities but, instead, something which create meanings as well. For so, we got to understand…

• Winch says that people have their belief systems, which are different, and each belief systems express itself through a language that, consequently, create a whole world.

• Kean point five talks about the parts on which he agrees with Skinner.

• Kean criticizes skinner for not being hermeneutics in that particular paper

• Habermas, father of hermeneutics, says that any kind of interpretation Is subjective… regarding, both, the subjective of the interpreters and the interpreted.

• Criticizes Skinner from inside, showing failures, and outside, as a post-structuralism.

• Questions raised on all the texts so far

How can the self understand the other?

What is the relation between language and reality?

How legitimate/feasible is it to offer a critique on different societies?

REVIEW "HUMANISM x STRUCTURALISM (AND POST-STRUCTURALISM)"

Review “Humanism x Structuralism”

HUMANISM

 Individual discover

 Agents

 Capacity to reason = common human essence of “humankind”

STRUCTURALISM

 Meanings produced

 Within structure of signification

 Stable structures = Deep strucutures of the mind

 Individual not autonomous agent but produced by structures

POST-STRUCTURALISM

 Unstable structures because structures have outsiders

 Overlapping structures of significations

JOHN KEANE "MORE THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY"

JOHN KEANE “More theses on the philosophy of history”

• Kean rejects that there is always an intentionality claim

• Different from Skinner, who focused on the ideas brought by the text which were initially recognized by the classical author, Kean points that, as he is an outsider, he can recognize some influences of the classical author that were not self-recognized.

• Drives t the psychoanalysis level of interpretation the writings-author reality.

• Denies the Skinner concept according to which “Language is a passive transfer to reality”, by saying that “Language is productive of realities”. Language is a plastic sheet in which words comes reality.

• He denies the association between outsider position and unbiased analysis. By this, he denies the Skinner goal of interpreting the past works without “contaminating” it with ones own reality. To Keane, there’s no such thing.

QUENTIN SKINNER "MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS"

Quentin Skinner “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas”

Text about history of ideas

Debate about what characterize a classic work

Skinner is sarcastic about Leo Strauss definition of classics, according to whom: “The classics are so because they contain extemporal knowledges”

Arguments:

• You have to look to the text in its particular context, both the social condition and, mostly, the individual perspective.

• The semiotic highlights the different meanings and understandings over a same work.

• “Structure vs agent” Debate. Skinner play enfasis on particular context, but, without giving up the idea that individuals do matter in the landscape of the structures.

• When you read a text you should try to discover what the author tried to meant, how he saw that. You should try to understand the meaning of the language he used to express himself according to the authors proper way to see it.

• Against naturalizing meanings, which should always be investigated according to the reality on which they were used.

• Importance of understanding the “speech act”.

• Semiotic sense of the speeches.

• Oblique rethorical strategies (n sakei qq ela quiz dizer c isso ???)...

• A reading unobserving this may lead to anachronism (he explains better on pages 58-59).

• Talks about the different concepts of democracy on pg. 56.

• “MITH OF COHERENCE”… The coherence show it’s failures when viewed and questioned by an outsider

• “RESOLVING ANTINOMICS”

• He focus a lot in Platos, to show the different possible comprehensions. Mainly in his democracy concept.

• Should look for the full range of meanings that the word could have meant when it was initially used.

• 
  

 HE WROTE THAT FOR HIS COLLEAGUES, NOT FOR A BROAD PUBLIC!!!

*The idea of the individual is something extremely new in the history.

** Semiotics were already noted by Parmenides of Eleia, etc...

ABSTRACT OF "REPRESENTATION, MEANING AND LANGUAGE", BY STUART HALL

Abstract of “Representation, meaning and language” by Stuart Hall

• Representation connects meaning and language to culture

• Representation mean using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other person

• 3 different accounts or theories:

1. Reflective

• Language simply reflect a meaning which already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events

  • In the reflective approach meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea, or event in the real world and language functions like a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world.

  • Greeks used the notion of mimesis to explain how language, even drawing and painting mirrored or imitated nature.

    • They thought of Homer’s great poem. The Iliad, as imitating a heroic series of events.

• Critiques:

  • Visual signs do bear some relationship to the shape and texture of the objects which they represent. But as was also pointed out earlier, a two-dimensional visual image of a rose is a sign – it should not be confused with the real plant.

  • If someone says there is no such word as rose for a plant in her culture, the actual plant in the garden cannot resolve the failure of communication between us. For us to understand each other, one of us must learn the code linking the flower with the word for it in the other’s culture.

2. Intentional

• Language express only what the speaker or writer or painter wants to say, his or her personally intended meaning

  • Holds that the speaker imposes her unique meaning on the world through language.

• Critiques:

  • We cannot be the sole or unique source of meanings in language since that would mean that we could express ourselves in entirely private languages.

  • Comunication depends on shared linguistic conventions

  • Our private intended meanings, however personal to us, have to enter into the rules, codes and conventions of language to be shared and understood.

  • Our private thoughts have to negotiate with all the other meanings for words or images which have been stored in language which our use of the language system will inevitably trigger into action.

3. Constructionist

• Meaning is constructed in and through language

  • Neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs.

  • We must not confuse the material world, where things and people exist, and the symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning and language operate.

  • It is not the material world which conveys meaning.

  • Signs may also have a material dimension.

  • Representation is a practice, a kind of ‘work’, which uses material objects. But the meaning depends not on the material quality of the sign, but on its symbolic function.

  • Signs are arbitrary, they are fixed by codes.

• E.G: Traffic lights example:

  • We use a way of classifying the colour spectrum to create colours which are different from one another.

    • The creation of the colour-concept.

    • Other cultures may divide the colour spectrum differently. Use different actual words or letters to identify different colours.

  • It is the difference between Red and Green which signifies.

  • In principle any combination of colours – like any collection of letters in written language or of sounds in spoken language – would do so, provided they are sufficiently different not to be confused. Constructionists express this idea by saying that all signs are ‘arbitrary’.

  • Meaning is ‘relational’.

• 2 main intern distinctions:

• SEMIOTIC APPROACH (Ferdinand Saussure)

• DISCURSIVE APPROACH (Michel Foucault)

• Some main characteristics of constructivist perspectives:

  • Possibility to give meaning to things through language

  • It is the link between concepts and languages which enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people and events.

  • Systems of representation based on two aspects:

1. Meaning depends on the system of concepts and images formed in our thoughts which can stand for or ‘represent’ the world, enabling us to refer to things both inside and outside our heads.

• He considers this to be a very simple version of a rather complex process

2. We also form concepts of rather obscure and abstract things which we can’t in any simple way see, feel or touch.

• It consists not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging, and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them

• E.G: We use the principles of similarity and difference to establish relationships between concepts or to distinguish them from one another.

• Classifying according to sequence

• Meaning depends on the relationship between things in the world – people, objects and events, real or fictional – and the conceptual system, which can operate as mental representations of them.

• Culture is sometimes defined in terms of ‘shared meanings or shared conceptual maps’.

• The conceptual word we use for words, sounds or images which carry meaning is signs.

• However, a shared conceptual map is not enough. We must also be able to represent or exchange meanings and concepts, and we can only do that when we also have access to a shared language.

• Language is the second system of representation involved in the overall process of constructing meaning. Our shared conceptual map must be translated into a common language, so that we can correlate our concepts and ideas with certain signs.

• Signs are organized into language and it is the existence of common languages which enable us to translate our thoughts (concepts) into words, sounds or images, and them to use these, operating as a language, to express meanings and communicate thoughts to other people.

• Any sound, word, image, or object which functions as a sign, and is organized with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is, from this point of view, a ‘language’.

• The relation between ‘things’, concepts and signs lies at the heart of the production of meaning in language. The process which links these three elements together is what we call ‘representation’.

• The relationship in these systems of representation between the sign, the concept and the object to which they might be used to refer is entirely arbitrary.

  • By ‘arbitrary’ we mean that in principle any collection of letters or any sound in any order would do the trick equally well.

  • The meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the word. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to see natural and inevitable.

  • The meaning is fixed by the SYSTEM OF REPRESENTATIONS.

  • Codes fix the relationships between concepts and signs.

• To belong to a culture is to belong to roughly the same conceptual and linguistic universe, to know how concepts and ideas translate into different languages, and how language can be interpreted to refer to or reference the world. To share these things is to see the world from within the same conceptual map and to make sense of it through the same language systems. Early anthropologists of language, like Sapir and Whorf, took this insight to its logical extreme when they argued that we are all, as it were, locked into our cultural perspectives or ‘mind-sets’, and that language is the best clue we have to that conceptual universe. This observation, when applied to all human cultures, lies at the root of what, today, we may think of as cultural or linguistic relativism.

  • E.G: The English make a rather simple distinction between sleet and snow. The Inuit (Eskimos) who have to survive in a very different, more extreme and hostile climate, apparently have many more words for snow and snowy weather.

• SUMMARY

  • Meaning is produced by practice of representation. It is constructed through signifying – i.e. meaning-producing practices.

  • It depends on two different but related systems of representation:

1. Classification and organization into meaningful categories of the concepts which are formed in the mind.

2. The exercise of language, which consists of signs organized into various relationships.

   1. But signs can only convey meaning if we possess codes which allow us to translate our concepts into language and vice-versa.

   2. Codes do not exist in the nature, but are the result of social conventions we learn and unconsciously internalize.

ABSTRACT OF “BLACK ATHENA” BY MARTIN BERNAL

ABSTRACT OF “BLACK ATHENA” BY MARTIN BERNAL

• Differentiate among two views over ancient History, the Aryan and the Levantine (which he calls the ‘Ancient’).

1. Aryan

   1. This view was developed only in the fists half of the 19^th Century.

   2. In its anit-Semitism peaks (1890’s and 1920’s and 30’s), it denied even the Phoenician cultural influence.

   3. There had been an invasion from the north – unreported in ancient tradition – which had overhelmed the local ‘Aegean’ or ‘Pre-Hellenic’ culture.

2. Ancient

   1. Is the version which arose since ancient times.

   2. Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 B.C, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who have civilized the native inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures.

• The author resorts to the Ancient Model, but with some revisions.

  • Agrees on the founding role of Phoenicians and Egyptians founding Greek, with further borrowings from across the East Mediterranean.

  • The earlier population spoke Indo-Hititite language which left little trace in Greek.

  • In the other hand it accepts the Aryan Model’s hypothesis of invasions – or infiltrations – from the north by Indo-European speakers sometime during the 4^th or 3^rd millennium B.C.

• The replacement of the Aryan Model by the Revised Ancient will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history.

• The Ancient Model had no major internal deficiencies or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons.

  • 18^th and 19^th Century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece – the epitome of Europe – to have been the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing African and Semites.

• Model means to him a reduced and simplified scheme of a complex reality.

  • Points that such transposition always distorts.

  • Points that some phenomenas are best seem in two or more different ways, using different models. For this, models are not necessarily exclusive, even when they disagree radically.

• Paradigm to him means generalized models or patterns of thought applied to many or all aspects of ‘reality’ as seem by an individual or community.

• Points that fundamental challenges to disciplines tend to be come from outside, because people emerged in the field are shaped while still students to accept conventional preconceptions and patterns of thoughts that turn them unlikely to be able to question its basic premises.

• Particularly view in the field of ancient history.

1. Its study is dominated by the learning of difficult languages, a process that is inevitably authoritarian: e.g. one may not question the logic of an irregular verb or the function of a particle.

   1. Also because instructors lay down their linguistic rules and because the notions of Greek and Hebrew are taught during childhood.

2. Because there is the trend of relating the Classical or Jewish traditions with the foundation of Western Culture, what make some paradigm shift to be considered heretic. It means that even the Ancient approach today is jeopardized by their pro-Jewish aimed knowledge.

   1. The maximum we have is a comparative studies of ‘myths’, with less value and always focusing on the same cases.

      1. Karl Otfried, is considered the destrcuctor of Ancient Model, when, in the 18^th Century, he urged scholars to study Greek mythology, however, without recognizing any specific borrowing from the East.

• Since the 1840’s Indo-European philology, or study of the relationships between languages, has been at the heart of the Aryan model, however, they refuse to point any link between Greeks and Egyptians and Semitics.

• Outsiders can never have the control of detail gained so slowly and painfully by experts, however, this does not mean that they are necessarily wrong.

• While amateurs are usually unable to help scholarly advance within a model or paradigm, they are often the best people to challenge it.

• The specialists negative opinions cannot be regarded with the same unqualified respect, for, while they have the necessary skills to make a judgment, they have direct stake in the case.

• Although professional opinion should be studied carefully and treated with respect, it should not always be taken as the last word.

• Ultimately, a lay jury has to rely on its own subjective or aesthetic judgment.

• E.G:

  • Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Troy and Mycenae in the 1870’s, made a naive but fruitful conjunction of legends, historical documents and topography, showing that much as academics might like it to be, the obvious is not always false.

  • The 2 most important break-troughs in Hellenic studies since 1850 – the archeological discovery of the Mycenaeans and the decipherment of their script, Linear B – were both made by amateurs: Schliemann and Michael Ventris (Anglo-Greel architect).

  • Time come to confirm some non-specialized hints at their time denied by specialists, such as the Continental Drift proposed by Prof. A. L. Wagener at the end of the 19^th Century and the populist proposal to abandon the gold standard in the 1980’s and 90’s.

• Differentiates among 2 patterns of paradigm challenges:

1. The crank: Tend to add new unknown and unknowable factors into their theories.

   1. Sometimes those assumptions area validated by the discovery of such factors, as in the case of Saussure’s ‘coeficients’ to explain anomalies in IndoEuropeans vowels, which was further discovered to exist in Hittite laryngeals.

2. The less imaginative: Tend to remove actors rather than add them.

   1. E.G: Ventris took away the unknown Aegean language in which Linear B was supposed to have been written, leaving a direct juxtaposition between two known entities, Homeric and Classical Greek, and the corpus of Linear B tablets. Thus he instantly created a whole new academic field.

   2. The authors purpose belongs to this second category. It adds no extra unknown or unknowable factors. It removes two introduced by proponents of the Aryan Model: (1) The non-Indo-Europeanspeaking ‘Pre-Helenic’ peoplesupon whom every inexplicable aspect of Greek culture has been thurst; and (2) the mysterious disease of ‘Egyptomania’, ‘barbarophilia’ and interpretation Graeca which the ‘Aryanist’ allege, have deluded so many otherwise intelligent, balanced and informed Ancient Greeks with the belief that Egyptians and Phoenicians had played a central role in the formation of their culture.

      1. The removal of these two factors and the revival of the Ancient Model leaves the Greek, West Semitic and Egyptian cultures and languages in direct confrontation, generating hundreds if not thousands of testable hypotheses-predictions that if word or concept A occurred in culture X, one should expect to find its equivalent in culture Y.

• The Ancient, Aryan and Revised Ancient models share one paradigm, that of the possibility of diffusion of language or culture through conquest.

  • It goes against the dominant trend in archeology today, which is to stress indigenous development.

• The modernity made 19^th century scientists, especially archeologists, to think that their work, as well as the whole society, had been qualitatively better than any that has gone before. Nevertheless, the destroyers of the Ancient Model and the builders of the Aryan believed themselves to be ‘scientific’.

• They made the Ancient version sounds so absurd as the Minotaur and other legends.

• For the past hundred and fifty years, historians have claimed to possess a ‘method’ analogous to those used in natural science. In fact, ways in which the modern historians differ from the ‘prescientific’ ones are much less certain.

• Today, the charge of ‘unsold methodology’ is used to condemn not merely incompetent but also unwelcome work.

• Especially in archeology, all one can finds is more or less plausibility, but not certains. Thus, debates in these areas should not be judged on the basis of proof, but merely on competitive plausibility.

• ‘ARCHEOLOGICAL POSITIVISM’ is the fallacy that dealing with objects makes one objective.

  • The favourite tool of the archeological positivists is the ‘argument from silence’.

    • E.G. The Thera eruption during the Late Minoan IB.

  • It’s impossible to prove absence.

• Moderns archeologist can’t be compared exactly to the racist ones of the 19^th and 18^th Century, however, they are working with models set up by men who were crudely positivist and racist.

  • This does not in itself falsify the models, but – given what would be seen as the dubious circumstances of their creation – they sgould be very carefully scrutinized, and the possibility that there may be equally good or better alternatives should be seriously taken into account.

THE 16TH SAARC, HELD IN THINPU (BHUTAN) – 2010.

THE 16^TH SAARC, HELD IN THINPU (BHUTAN) – 2010.

This last meeting of the group came under the name of “Towards a Green and Happy South Asia”.

In a movement that weakened the institutional settlement of the organization but possibly strengthened their individual capability to go ahead the rethoric history of promises never lead ahead of the paper, this time the main core was the recover of dialogue between India and Pakistan, ended since the 26-11-2008 terrorist attempt in Mumbay.

This is institutionally harmfull for the SAARC was buil under the clausule of not hosting bilateral differences in its foras.

Pression of all the neighbours and the previous pressure of Obama in his visit to India made India and Pakistan recover dialogue, and that’s clearly the main achievement of the Fora.

However, other dynamics were played, with special emphasis to the Bhutanese goal of improving clean technology transfer and political agreements on management of common goods, mainly watter.

The more concrete decisions on this purpose, however, were barried by the Pakistani refusal of taking part in a Afghani-Bangladeshi road and in a Rapid Response to Natural Disasters Mechanism.

Among the many old projects just in the paper, they mentioned the South Asia University, and settled an academical seminar on the issue to August.

It was also meaningful to note that by the first time civil-society enjoyed a full opinative role, and brought many ideas… it’s expected that this trend continue even after a not so comprehensive chairmanship of the SAAR summit.

The next will be in the Maldives in 2011.

The bilateral approach was not only regarding Indo-Pak… Afghanistan also raised severe critiques to the Pak hosting terrorism.

India didn’t mention that issue in the main speech, just in the parallel meetings and under others auspices… its main speech pointed for the urgency of embodying the vast rethoric of SAARC.

Maldives president stated that the Indo-Pak issue is locking the regional development and urged it to be solved soon… therefore pressuring for the recovery of dialogue.

By its time, Pakistany prime-minister pointed that terrorism is rooted in social-historic lack of justice, implicitly denying its guilt on hosting terrorism and, at the same time, suggesting the continuation of such practices.