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Old 1st December 2012, 07:43 PM   #401
dafydd
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Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post

There's reality. And there's only one of those. And in science, unlike philosophy, that matters.
True. Philosophers make it up as they go along, no need to prove anything.
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Old 1st December 2012, 08:16 PM   #402
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Originally Posted by tsig View Post
And you are one of the hearing people who will laugh out loud but never explain anything.

IOW a true philosopher
Ah, you want me to explain. It made me laugh out loud because it is hilariously wrong and profoundly stupid at the same time. Juxtaposed with the fact that, as a member of JREF forums, you probably think you are smart and understand science, well that made it the icing on the cake. So I had a hearty belly laugh. Thanks, I needed that.
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Old 1st December 2012, 08:18 PM   #403
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
True. Philosophers make it up as they go along, no need to prove anything.
That's not exactly true. If a philosopher said, "I decided this morning, over breakfast, that the whole world is made of jam. I don't need to prove it." then your characterization of philosophy would be correct. In reality a philosopher would not get away with doing that. A philosopher would only usually say something like that to point out the fact that not all explanations are equally worthwhile and that if someone were to make a statement like that the burden of proof was on them rather than the person listening.

Instead, philosophers may try to give an account of what it is that people mean when they talk about human concepts such as justice, morality, aesthetic judgement etc...*

For example, Hume gave an account of how humans make moral judgements that can be either agreed to or dismissed according to the argument itself. Science cannot really determine whether Hume is correct or incorrect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Enqu...ples_of_Morals


* And, of course, knowledge, language and various other things.

Last edited by angrysoba; 1st December 2012 at 08:19 PM.
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Old 1st December 2012, 08:24 PM   #404
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Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post
There's reality. And there's only one of those. And in science, unlike philosophy, that matters.

…yes of course. That would be the ‘one’ (reality) about which you had this to say:

Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post
No.We know how the Universe works. We know that there's only one sort of stuff.

…and about which Richard Feynman had this to say…

The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work

Would appear that someone has missed a few science classes.


Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
Which branch of philosophy really knows the meaning of meaning?

Question #1: Does meaning exist?

Question #2: Which branch of science has explained it?

....something else Mr. Feynman had to say:

One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much.
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Old 1st December 2012, 08:28 PM   #405
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Originally Posted by annnnoid View Post
…yes of course. That would be the ‘one’ (reality) about which you had this to say:

…and about which Richard Feynman had this to say…

The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work
And?

Quote:
Would appear that someone has missed a few science classes.
You've missed more than a few; so far as anyone can tell, you've missed all of them.
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Old 1st December 2012, 08:43 PM   #406
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Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post
And?

...I dunno Pixy...you tell me. You say we know how everything works, Feynman does not seem to agree (does that sound like an understatement????). For whom does the credibility toll?

Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post
You've missed more than a few; so far as anyone can tell, you've missed all of them.

Feeble....really. You need a vacation Pixy.
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Old 1st December 2012, 09:55 PM   #407
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Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post
Double and triple bollocks. Either you had a lousy science education (quite possible) and are committing the fallacy of hasty generalisation, or you slept through science class and are just making this up.

That's not how scientists are "trained" at all. Not remotely.

Absolutely key to studying science is how established facts and theories became established - and how wrong ideas were falsified. You spend a lot of time repeating experiments that were done decades, even hundreds of years ago, so that you understand how we got where we are, and how to continue the process.

How is one to reconcile this with what these physicists had to say about Popper's idea of falsification?

Quote:
In their book Fashionable Nonsense (published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures) the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticized falsifiability on the grounds that it does not accurately describe the way science really works. They argue that theories are used because of their successes, not because of the failures of other theories. Their discussion of Popper, falsifiability and the philosophy of science comes in a chapter entitled "Intermezzo," which contains an attempt to make clear their own views of what constitutes truth, in contrast with the extreme epistemological relativism of postmodernism.

Sokal and Bricmont write, "When a theory successfully withstands an attempt at falsification, a scientist will, quite naturally, consider the theory to be partially confirmed and will accord it a greater likelihood or a higher subjective probability. ... But Popper will have none of this: throughout his life he was a stubborn opponent of any idea of 'confirmation' of a theory, or even of its 'probability'. ... [but] the history of science teaches us that scientific theories come to be accepted above all because of their successes." (Sokal and Bricmont 1997, 62f)

They further argue that falsifiability cannot distinguish between astrology and astronomy, as both make technical predictions that are sometimes incorrect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Fairly certain PixyMisa has me on ignore. If any body is interested in seeing how he/she might respond to this they are probably going to have to quote this post
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Old 1st December 2012, 10:22 PM   #408
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…fine with me…but I’m not quite getting the issue you’re bringing up here re: the reconciliation thing.

Originally Posted by Frank Newgent View Post
How is one to reconcile this with what these physicists had to say about Popper's idea of falsification?

Quote:
Quote:
In their book Fashionable Nonsense (published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures) the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticized falsifiability on the grounds that it does not accurately describe the way science really works. They argue that theories are used because of their successes, not because of the failures of other theories. Their discussion of Popper, falsifiability and the philosophy of science comes in a chapter entitled "Intermezzo," which contains an attempt to make clear their own views of what constitutes truth, in contrast with the extreme epistemological relativism of postmodernism.

Sokal and Bricmont write, "When a theory successfully withstands an attempt at falsification, a scientist will, quite naturally, consider the theory to be partially confirmed and will accord it a greater likelihood or a higher subjective probability. ... But Popper will have none of this: throughout his life he was a stubborn opponent of any idea of 'confirmation' of a theory, or even of its 'probability'. ... [but] the history of science teaches us that scientific theories come to be accepted above all because of their successes." (Sokal and Bricmont 1997, 62f)

They further argue that falsifiability cannot distinguish between astrology and astronomy, as both make technical predictions that are sometimes incorrect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability


Fairly certain PixyMisa has me on ignore. If any body is interested in seeing how he/she might respond to this they are probably going to have to quote this post
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Old 1st December 2012, 10:23 PM   #409
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Old 1st December 2012, 10:26 PM   #410
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Originally Posted by Frank Newgent View Post
How is one to reconcile this with what these physicists had to say about Popper's idea of falsification?




Fairly certain PixyMisa has me on ignore. If any body is interested in seeing how he/she might respond to this they are probably going to have to quote this post
I have read Sokal and Bricmont's book, and my understanding of what they said was that they largely agreed with Popper on falsification, as opposed to Feyeraband's "anything goes" anti-method method, that a scientific principle must be falsifiable in principle, but that they disagreed with the strong form of Popper's argument that all scientific theories will remain mere conjecture regardless of how many times something is tested. Sokal and Bricmont argued that tests which don't falsify a scientific principle will amount to a certain amount of confirmation and support for the principle.

What Popper was largely arguing against was the logical positivists' assertion that verification was the only means by which something is regarded as scientific. The problem for the logical positivists is that by their own standards nothing was verifiable, including causation (which they believed, in agreement with Hume, couldn't be verified), therefore they were left with a big problem of not being able to say anything at all about the physical world.

Also, the logical positivists believed there were only two kinds of knowledge, that which is demonstrated by logic and reason, i.e analytic a priori truths, or things which were true by definition and told us nothing interesting about the world, and that which was confirmed by experience, i.e synthetic a posteriori truths. They emphatically disagreed with the Kantian notion of synthetic a priori truths which were truths which could be determined by reason that did tell us something useful about the world. Unfortuantely for them, if true, the verification principle would also be a synthetic a priori truth.
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Old 1st December 2012, 11:23 PM   #411
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Originally Posted by Frank Newgent View Post
How is one to reconcile this with what these physicists had to say about Popper's idea of falsification?
What's to reconcile? It doesn't address the point I made at all.
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Old 1st December 2012, 11:27 PM   #412
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Originally Posted by angrysoba View Post
I have read Sokal and Bricmont's book, and my understanding of what they said was that they largely agreed with Popper on falsification, as opposed to Feyeraband's "anything goes" anti-method method, that a scientific principle must be falsifiable in principle, but that they disagreed with the strong form of Popper's argument that all scientific theories will remain mere conjecture regardless of how many times something is tested. Sokal and Bricmont argued that tests which don't falsify a scientific principle will amount to a certain amount of confirmation and support for the principle.
And, at the very least, scientists treat the data that way, even if philosophically speaking the should not.

And, most of the time, that works. Which of course is why scientists do it.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 08:38 AM   #413
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Quote:
originally Posted by PixyMisa
No.We know how the Universe works. We know that there's only one sort of stuff.
When did Pixy say this? I can't find the quote.

Anyway, it's laughably arrogant, seeing as how 95% of the energy and matter of the universe are still a mystery to us.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 08:52 AM   #414
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Originally Posted by Fudbucker View Post
When did Pixy say this? I can't find the quote.
It was a while ago. I certainly said that, and it's entirely correct in context. (That context being that dualism is worthless nonsense even if it is correct.)

Quote:
Anyway, it's laughably arrogant, seeing as how 95% of the energy and matter of the universe are still a mystery to us.
That's exactly the point I was making. The reason we know that there is a mystery in the first place is precisely because there's only one type of stuff. If dark matter and dark energy didn't interact with regular matter and energy - if there were more than one type of stuff - we wouldn't know that there was anything we didn't know, because they would not, in any meaningful sense, exist.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 08:59 AM   #415
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Originally Posted by PixyMisa View Post
It was a while ago. I certainly said that, and it's entirely correct in context. (That context being that dualism is worthless nonsense even if it is correct.)


That's exactly the point I was making. The reason we know that there is a mystery in the first place is precisely because there's only one type of stuff. If dark matter and dark energy didn't interact with regular matter and energy - if there were more than one type of stuff - we wouldn't know that there was anything we didn't know, because they would not, in any meaningful sense, exist.
That makes more sense. But what do you mean by "there's only one type of stuff"? Do you think dark energy is a kind of "stuff"?
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Old 2nd December 2012, 09:07 AM   #416
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Originally Posted by Fudbucker View Post
That makes more sense. But what do you mean by "there's only one type of stuff"? Do you think dark energy is a kind of "stuff"?
Again, this makes the most sense if you contrast it with dualism.

Dark energy interacts with space-time, and thus with matter and energy. We know this, because we detect the effect it has on space-time via matter and energy. (We look through our material telescopes, collecting light energy, and see that there's a pattern of acceleration of distant galaxies.)

Since all these things interact, they are ultimately all the same kind of stuff - in a Grand Unified Field Theory sense.

Under dualism, the concept is that you have two (sometimes more, but usually two) types of stuff - matter and mind, or the prosaic and the spiritual - that don't interact at all. That is, they are fundamentally distinct, and can't be unified by definition. Of course, dualism also says that these two fundamentally distinct types of stuff do interact, which is why it is useless even if it is true.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 09:44 AM   #417
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Originally Posted by Jorghnassen View Post
Ah, you want me to explain. It made me laugh out loud because it is hilariously wrong and profoundly stupid at the same time. Juxtaposed with the fact that, as a member of JREF forums, you probably think you are smart and understand science, well that made it the icing on the cake. So I had a hearty belly laugh. Thanks, I needed that.
Always glad to be of service.

Now what's so funny about asking for an explanation?

You're a member of the JREF so I guess you think you are smart and understand science so you're laughing at yourself.

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Old 2nd December 2012, 09:47 AM   #418
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Originally Posted by annnnoid View Post
…yes of course. That would be the ‘one’ (reality) about which you had this to say:




…and about which Richard Feynman had this to say…

The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work

Would appear that someone has missed a few science classes.





Question #1: Does meaning exist?

Question #2: Which branch of science has explained it?

....something else Mr. Feynman had to say:

One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much.
Why do you feel the need to hide behind others words?
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Old 2nd December 2012, 10:09 AM   #419
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Originally Posted by tsig View Post
Always glad to be of service.

Now what's so funny about asking for an explanation?

You're a member of the JREF so I guess you think you are smart and understand science so you're laughing at yourself.

Asking for an explanation wasn't particularly funny, so I didn't laugh out loud on that one. But I was laughing at your quote, not myself or yourself (technically on the latter, though I presume every body on these boards think they are smart and somewhat at least understand science). I am curious as to whether you realise how wrong your statement (that scientific reasoning does not rely on assumptions) was though.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 02:11 PM   #420
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This guff made me laugh.

''Since the moral principle of the categorical imperitive requires that the moral agent abstract from the concrete content of duties and aims, its application necessarily leads to tautological judgements''
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Old 2nd December 2012, 02:30 PM   #421
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
This guff made me laugh.

''Since the moral principle of the categorical imperitive requires that the moral agent abstract from the concrete content of duties and aims, its application necessarily leads to tautological judgements''
Perhaps their aim should be to produce an algebra that can be used to evaluate logic. While they use the inadequate tools of written language they will be mired in this type of complexity.

Or as a famous philosopher said:
Quote:
“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much culture that is part of the absurdity of consciousness, but rather the meaninglessness, and thus the rubicon, of culture. Baudrillard promotes the use of posttextual narrative to modify and read sexual identity. It could be said that Lyotard uses the term ‘the capitalist paradigm of expression’ to denote a mythopoetical paradox.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 02:42 PM   #422
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
This guff made me laugh.

''Since the moral principle of the categorical imperitive requires that the moral agent abstract from the concrete content of duties and aims, its application necessarily leads to tautological judgements''
I believe that is an example of a sentence actually eating itself.

Philosophers spin out webs of words in hope to catch a stray fact which they will then rush over and kill and wrap it in obscuring threads of silk.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 04:12 PM   #423
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Originally Posted by tsig View Post
I believe that is an example of a sentence actually eating itself.

Philosophers spin out webs of words in hope to catch a stray fact which they will then rush over and kill and wrap it in obscuring threads of silk.
Earlier on somebody said that they could read that like they read a newspaper. I would be interested in a translation into English.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 04:14 PM   #424
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Quote:
“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much culture that is part of the absurdity of consciousness, but rather the meaninglessness, and thus the rubicon, of culture. Baudrillard promotes the use of posttextual narrative to modify and read sexual identity. It could be said that Lyotard uses the term ‘the capitalist paradigm of expression’ to denote a mythopoetical paradox.

I can discern no meaning that word salad. Why would consciousness be absurd? Perhaps one of the philosophy aficionados can explain.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 04:34 PM   #425
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
Earlier on somebody said that they could read that like they read a newspaper. I would be interested in a translation into English.
I'll play this game with you for one more round, but I don't place a very high probability on the theory that you have any genuine desire to learn something. I think you've committed yourself to philosophy-bashing at this stage and to try to save face you'll be contributing nothing but vacuous ridicule from this point forward.

I note that you haven't taken on board, for example, that moral philosophy is completely uncontroversially part of philosophy, and that moral philosophy is important.

Anyway, ''Since the moral principle of the categorical imperitive requires that the moral agent abstract from the concrete content of duties and aims, its application necessarily leads to tautological judgements''.

The moral principle of the categorical imperative is that you should act in such a way that you could will with a good conscience that everyone else in the same situation act likewise. Or alternatively, to treat people always as ends in themselves not merely as means to your end. (Kant contended that these two formulations were functionally identical but many think this is nonsense).

From this principle Kant got to the conclusion that nobody should ever steal, for example, because if everyone stole society wouldn't work and also because stealing people's stuff treats them solely as means to your end of having more stuff.

So it's accurate to say that "the categorical imperative requires that the moral agent abstract from the concrete content of duties and aims". You aren't doing moral reasoning based directly on concrete duties like "do not park on a yellow line" or "do not steal that purse" but on more abstract, higher-level reasoning.

A "moral agent" is an entity capable of knowing right from wrong. Animals aren't usually considered moral agents, and profoundly brain damaged humans might not, but if sapient aliens landed on Earth tomorrow they'd probably count.

The argument they are gesturing towards without explicating in detail is something about how this leads to tautological judgments. Tautological judgments would be things like "You should not steal because you should not steal", which would be circular and hence meaningless. I'm not sure how they plan to get to that conclusion and I doubt their argument is going to be watertight, but that's what they are saying Hegel showed. Since it's Hegel I doubt he managed it to my satisfaction but I speak without having read the specific argument so maybe I'm wrong.

Why do they write that way? Well, maybe part of it is obscurantism or a desire to appear academic. On the other hand "categorical imperative" is a term every moral philosopher understands immediately, "moral agent" is a very useful term to avoid making claims that are too broad or too narrow, "tautology" is a logical term every philosopher understands, "necessarily" is a very useful logical connective used to express a specific claim, and if you think words like "abstract" or "application" are highfalutin' then academia definitely isn't an area you're cut out for.

There is obscurantist philosophical writing, and as far as I'm concerned Acleron's quote is representative of such writing (“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much culture that is part of the absurdity of consciousness, but rather the meaninglessness, and thus the rubicon, of culture. Baudrillard promotes the use of posttextual narrative to modify and read sexual identity. It could be said that Lyotard uses the term ‘the capitalist paradigm of expression’ to denote a mythopoetical paradox."). That's Continental philosophy for you.

However the text you've found simply is not obscurantist. It's not aimed at you. it's aimed at philosophers, and to them it's perfectly comprehensible.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 05:09 PM   #426
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As if philosophy had the patent on obscure, in-crowd chatter:

"A Hilbert space is an abstract vector space possessing the structure of an inner product that allows length and angle to be measured. Furthermore, Hilbert spaces must be complete, a property that stipulates the existence of enough limits in the space to allow the techniques of calculus to be used."

Talk about abstract nonsense! (And that's the easy version.)
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Old 2nd December 2012, 05:46 PM   #427
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Originally Posted by Kevin_Lowe View Post

There is obscurantist philosophical writing, and as far as I'm concerned Acleron's quote is representative of such writing (“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much culture that is part of the absurdity of consciousness, but rather the meaninglessness, and thus the rubicon, of culture. Baudrillard promotes the use of posttextual narrative to modify and read sexual identity. It could be said that Lyotard uses the term ‘the capitalist paradigm of expression’ to denote a mythopoetical paradox."). That's Continental philosophy for you.
You didn't explain why consciousness is absurd, or meaningless. Are you just taking that for granted? Why would
crossing the Rubicon be involved? A google of ''post textual narrative'' produced this load of cobblers:

Madona, Marxism and the Post-textual Paradigm of Narrative
Boyang Zhang

''The main theme of the works of Madonna is the stasis of capitalist society. In a sense, the destruction/creation distinction prevalent in Madonna's Sex emerges again in Material Girl, although in a more self-referential sense.

If one examines the posttextual paradigm of narrative, one is faced with a choice: either accept Derridaist reading or conclude that language may be used to exploit the proletariat, but only if the premise of predialectic theory is valid; if that is not the case, Foucault's model of the posttextual paradigm of narrative is one of "subdialectic material theory", and thus part of the genre of art. Marx uses the term 'predialectic theory' to denote a mythopoetical paradox. Therefore, Reicher[1] holds that the works of Madonna are modernistic.

The primary theme of Tilton's[2] analysis of the posttextual paradigm of narrative is the role of the observer as artist. Bataille suggests the use of predialectic theory to challenge sexism. In a sense, the main theme of the works of Madonna is a semioticist whole.''

http://voices.yahoo.com/madona-marxi...ve-138890.html


If you can read that without laughing then you have a heart of stone ( with apologies to Oscar Wilde)

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Old 2nd December 2012, 05:50 PM   #428
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Originally Posted by Acleron View Post
Or as a famous philosopher said:
Which famous Philosopher said that, Acleron? I ask because I don't think you're actually proving the point you think you are.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 05:55 PM   #429
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Originally Posted by joesixpack View Post
Which famous Philosopher said that, Acleron? I ask because I don't think you're actually proving the point you think you are.
From Aceleron's post.

Quote:
“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault;
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:01 PM   #430
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
Quote:
“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much culture that is part of the absurdity of consciousness, but rather the meaninglessness, and thus the rubicon, of culture. Baudrillard promotes the use of posttextual narrative to modify and read sexual identity. It could be said that Lyotard uses the term ‘the capitalist paradigm of expression’ to denote a mythopoetical paradox.

I can discern no meaning that word salad. Why would consciousness be absurd? Perhaps one of the philosophy aficionados can explain.
There's a reason why you can discern no meaning from that, Dafydd. Acleron may let you in on what that reason is, if he chooses to be forthcoming about his source.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:02 PM   #431
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
From Aceleron's post.

Quote:
“Culture is part of the absurdity of consciousness,” says Foucault;
Guess again.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:04 PM   #432
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Originally Posted by joesixpack View Post
There's a reason why you can discern no meaning from that, Dafydd. Acleron may let you in on what that reason is, if he chooses to be forthcoming about his source.
Ah, the mind games of philosophy. Fascinating. Have you any idea what that gibberish about Madonna is supposed to mean?
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:07 PM   #433
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
Ah, the mind games of philosophy. Fascinating. Have you any idea what that gibberish about Madonna is supposed to mean?
Perhaps if you looked at the source text you'd see why this isn't making the point you think it is.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:07 PM   #434
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Ironic that the people with the highest post counts are saying the least.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:15 PM   #435
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Originally Posted by Fudbucker View Post
Ironic that the people with the highest post counts are saying the least.
Not half as ironic as the fact that those arguing that philosophy is meaningless drivel are quoting a parody of opaque post modernist writing.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:15 PM   #436
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Originally Posted by Fudbucker View Post
Ironic that the people with the highest post counts are saying the least.
The high post count is caused by questions that are never answered. Can you explain to me what that guff about Madonna means?
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:16 PM   #437
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Originally Posted by joesixpack View Post
Not half as ironic as the fact that those arguing that philosophy is meaningless drivel are quoting a parody of opaque post modernist writing.
It's hard to tell the difference. Are you saying that the Madonna piece is a parody?
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:22 PM   #438
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
It's hard to tell the difference. Are you saying that the Madonna piece is a parody?
Yes. As was Acleron's quote.

ETA; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism_Generator
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:28 PM   #439
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Originally Posted by dafydd View Post
It's hard to tell the difference.
And just to be clear, it's actually not that hard to tell the difference. Sadly, there's probably more parody of post modernism on the web than there is actual post modernist writing.
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Old 2nd December 2012, 06:33 PM   #440
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