8 Bit Philosophy: Is A Cat A Cat? (Derrida + Double Dragon)
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Yeah I struggle to see the ultimate point in this one... Congratulations Derrida, you have pointed out that language is flawed, mutable and subjective. Is your proposed "solution" a nihilistic repudiation of language itself and any meaning we could try to obtain through it, or simply accepting that what we have to work with is flawed, doing the best we can with it regardless and moving on?
Because the former is non-functional and the latter is something (I would hope) most humans understand and accept on some level regardless... I suppose as a reminder to awareness, his philosophy did have some worth back in the day, but seems a bit quaint now.
Because the former is non-functional and the latter is something (I would hope) most humans understand and accept on some level regardless... I suppose as a reminder to awareness, his philosophy did have some worth back in the day, but seems a bit quaint now.
Of course nobody can deny that the meaning of the word "cat" doesn't change when the word is "snarf" or something else; we aren't robots and we understand context with empathetic communication, but there are huge issues when social-constructionist theories get applied to society. Post-modernism's pretentious critiques on languages' moral implications are always useless blurbs of word salad. For anyone who believes in the ability to have facts (science and math), it's an untenable assertion that language means nothing (or close to it) and we should give up on objective identifications. What you see today in social politics is the constant derailment of conversations from a deconstructionist who seeks to subvert and redefine terminology because it's a power flipping mechanism.leviadragon99 said:
I remember going through something like this in my senior lit class in highschool. There was a short story where a teacher asks a group of students to tell him what a horse is. A girl whose father works with horses gets up and describes what she feels when she rides horses, then the teacher berates her for being "stupid" while calling on a boy to get up and read the definition from their biology book. (I've found it as of typing this out and I remembered it a little wrong. It's http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/hardtimes/3/). I never liked the meaning behind the story, it tried to argue that creating a taxonomy, a bio-classification, was bad. Or just that the teacher was wrong in being austere? Regardless, it annoyed me at the time.
Science deals with technicalities and mechanisms, classifications and clear definitions. For some deconstructionist to come into a biology class and start throwing around "but what REALLY is a "woman"? That's just a word you use" is absurd to bring against biological knowledge about sexual reproduction. We have words with constant meanings for a reason, so we don't get headaches when communicating.
I... Don't know if I can go along with some of these.
I have had a bout of aphasia for a while, and I still 'knew' what things were.
There was a concept in my head somehow that had nothing to do with any language.
This is one of those things that is near impossible to explain with words though.
See, there clearly are concepts that words do not handle very well.
And several more that only work because we assume the listener experiences things the same way we do, but there is no objectively verifiable way of proving that this is actually true.
Makes some concepts very messy.
I have had a bout of aphasia for a while, and I still 'knew' what things were.
There was a concept in my head somehow that had nothing to do with any language.
This is one of those things that is near impossible to explain with words though.
See, there clearly are concepts that words do not handle very well.
And several more that only work because we assume the listener experiences things the same way we do, but there is no objectively verifiable way of proving that this is actually true.
Makes some concepts very messy.
I should clarify that when it comes to political values and labeling, deconstructionism actually does its most productive work. As opposed to derailment in a science field where terminology needs consistency, it is important to ask questions like:
What do you mean by "equality"?
What do you mean by "freedom"?
What is justice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjtnKFUVnM&ab_channel=Aphonibus
I find quite often that people conflate the words egalitarian, humanist, secular humanist, and humanitarian. Humanist having its origins in the Christian reformation movement, arguing human agency and the potential of good man to be most important. Secular humanist abdicating all ties with the supernatural, rooting itself in science and existentialism/naturalism. Egalitarian necessitating its own deconstruction due to a split between equal rights of opportunity vs equal rights of result. Humanitarian being easier as we frequently hear "humanitarian aid" in catastrophes.
What do you mean by "equality"?
What do you mean by "freedom"?
What is justice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjtnKFUVnM&ab_channel=Aphonibus
I find quite often that people conflate the words egalitarian, humanist, secular humanist, and humanitarian. Humanist having its origins in the Christian reformation movement, arguing human agency and the potential of good man to be most important. Secular humanist abdicating all ties with the supernatural, rooting itself in science and existentialism/naturalism. Egalitarian necessitating its own deconstruction due to a split between equal rights of opportunity vs equal rights of result. Humanitarian being easier as we frequently hear "humanitarian aid" in catastrophes.
