Silence and Speech
Is it possible to mean something (in the Gricean sense) by being silent? Surely yes: we have the pregnant pause, and silence can speak volumes. I could also make an arrangement with you whereby if I don’t speak at a certain time I am wishing to communicate to you that (say) I want to leave. But then meaning is possible without a speech act, without any kind of utterance. How then can speaker meaning be an action at all? Speech acts need not be acts! Could all communications be silent? If so, Gricean speaker meaning is not a type of action in its essence. Speaker meaning happens to consist of acts with us most of the time, but this is quite contingent. So-called speech act theory is not essentially about acts.
Butterflies and Philosophy
I went to Butterfly World in Ft Lauderdale the other day–which includes several large enclosures where butterflies fly freely around the human visitors. The latter were all entranced; the former generally gracious. Why can deny the magic of lepidoptera? But what does it derive from? It is often remarked that the wings are gorgeous but the body is as unprepossessing as that of any insect. Does this mirror our own dual nature as both glorious and disgusting? They delight the human eye–how do other animals see them? Do other primates thrill to the sight of them? More prosaically, there is the old puzzle of identity: are the caterpillar and the butterfly numerically identical? Are they the same organism? The orthodox view in my day was that they are, because of causal continuity; but then we’d have to say that butterflies are caterpillars and caterpillars are butterflies, by Leibniz’s law. We’d also have to say that caterpillars are as beautiful as butterflies, that they can fly, and that they eat nectar: but none of these seem true. By all means admire the caterpillar, but don’t confuse her with the butterfly. And what of the chrysalis–is that identical to the butterfly? I envisage a nice popular book: The Philosophy of the Butterfly.
Knitting and the Meme
My interview about Prehension was broadcast yesterday from Michigan on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. My section of the hourlong show (called “Handwork”) was preceded by a section on the therapeutic value of knitting and followed by discussions of the delights of drawing and the manual typewriter. This was all good manual propaganda–spreading the hand meme to the culture at large. Today my essay “Memes, Dreams and Themes” ran in the NY Times as one of those Philosopher’s Stone columns. Oh, the comments! No comment. The hand is certainly a theme of Prehension but it needs to become a meme: it needs a jingle or catchphrase. Any ideas? I like the phrase “Grand Order of Gripparians” but it’s not too snappy is it. How about “handlib” or “handlove” or “handiology”?
The Vital Question
I’m reading Nick Lane’s book of that title: it’s all cells and biochemistry and proton gradients. The book is quite philosophical in a hard-nosed science kind of way, because it is about explaining early life from first principles. He dares to suggest that we don’t know the answer to fundamental questions of biology. There is not one reference to Dawkins in it. He avoids discussion of genes, replication and information, preferring to focus on the energetics of the cell, thus grounding biology in chemistry and physics. Not the selfish gene but the energy-sucking cell: it could have been called The Greedy Cell.