Derrida: "Signature Event Context" (1972)

In this essay, Derrida makes a number of strongly Wittgensteinian points about meaning and the use of language.

He notes that a sign always relies on a history of use in so far as it has a meaning, but that this history does not in and of itself constitute an unambiguous precedence. Theories with a strong or even mentalistic concept of “literal meaning” — Derrida duscusses Husserl and Austin — thus always have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to make it seem as if it were obvious how this word ought to be used in all future cases.

The Winding Road to Theory

He arrives at this conclusion by a somewhat strange route over a discussion of the concept of “writing.” According to Derrida, there is a classical philosophical theory which singles out writing as being different from speech in that it essentially involves a lot of peculiar absences — the physical absence of the writer, the somewhat vaguely defined role for the reader, and even the possible absence of a communicative intent in the writing itself.

However, he goes on, these features are in fact present in all communication, so we should really count speaking as a kind of “writing” as well if we take this definition literally.

We don't, of course, but the point is well taken: When a sign means something, it is because it echoes something else in the past.

There is therefore an essential tension between the observation that signs have meaning because they conform to a tradition of use, and the assumption that signs express inner, conscious, authentic intentions. Declaring a meeting open or declaring somebody husband and wife always is kind of theatrical, and the attempt in Husserl and Austin to ban all theatrical or “non-serious” uses of language from playing a role in the theory is therefore doomed from the outset.

Why This Post is So (Damn) Long

Book cover; from Wikipedia.

Derrida is such a bad writer that it can be really, really difficult to even parse his sentences, let alone to find out what his point is. Because it is so much work to plow through his layers of nested interjections and weird reverse sentence structures, tt always annoys me when people summarize him in broad strokes without commenting on specifics.

So I'll try something different here: I'll go through the text, literally page by page, trying to paraphrase everything he says in readable, English prose. If anybody finds this blasphemous, then I refer to that French philosopher who says that nobody owns the meaning of a text.

I'm following the page numbers as they appear in Limited Inc. Scans of the text is available from several university websites (e.g., here, here, and here).

I've not followed Derrida's headings, but rather divided up the text into some smaller chunks. This is partly to give the argument some structure and partly to give you some breathing space.

The Problem with Communication, Context, and Writing

The Problem of Communication, pp. 1–2

Derrida warms up with some reflections that are quite weakly related to the rest of the essay: We might, he says, be tempted to say that the invention of writing extended spoken communication into a new medium. But this presupposes a concept of "communication," and we cannot necessarily take this for granted.

The word "communication" can refer to the effects of physical forces as well as the effects of meaning. This might suggest that we can think of the concept of linguistic communication as a metaphorical extension of a literal concept of physical communication.

However, Derrida disapproves of this suggestion on the grounds that

1. he finds the whole idea of "literal meaning" suspect;
2. he considers it circular to base a theory of meaning on a theory of meaning.

The Problem of Context, pp. 2–3

Derrida thinks that there are indeed some problems with the seemingly unproblematic notion of "communication," and he locates these problems more precisely in the concept of "context."

Politeness is notorious for depending on context in subtle ways. Here, etiquette icon Emily Post
sidesteps the issue by giving a cut-and-dry prescription without any qualification. (From Etiquette, Ch. 28)

He asks:

But are the conditions of a context ever absolutely determinable? … Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of context? (pp. 2–3)

Lest you should think that the answer is yes, he asks an even more leading rhetorical question:

Or does the notion of context not conceal, behind a certain confusion, philosophical presuppositions of a very determinate nature? … I shall try to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated. (p. 3)

According to Derrida, this demonstration will

1. raise suspicions about the concept of context;
2. change the way we understand the concept of “writing”; specifically, he will question the idea that writing is a kind of transmission of information.

If Speech is Like Writing, We have a Problem, pp. 3–4

As stated above, Derrida notes that a lumping together speech and writing presupposes a unifying concept of communication:

To say that writing extends the field and powers of lucutory or gestural communication presupposes, does it not, a sort of homogenous space of communication? (p. 3)

If indeed there is such a homogenous space, then speech and writing should share most features. However, he will first argue that the "classical" theory of writing will claim that they are substantially different, and then that they in fact are quite similar after all.

The "Classical" Theory of Writing

Condillac on Writing, pp. 4–5

In order to sketch what the tradition has to say about writing, Derrida provides a couple of quotes by the French Enlightenment philosopher Étienne Condillac (1714–1780), specifically from his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746).

Condillac; from zeno.org.

He then quotes Condillac as saying that

Men in a state of communicating their thoughts by means of sounds, felt the necessity of imagining new signs capable of perpetuating those thoughts and of making them known to persons who are absent. (p. 4)

This passage comes from Part II, Section I, Chapter 13, §127 of Condillac's Essay. In the 2001 translation that I have linked to above, the word "absent" does not occur, but it does in fact in the French original.

Derrida thinks of this hypothetical origin of language as an explanation in terms of "economy," that is, practical concerns.

As one might suspect, Condillac thinks that writing is more civilized when it looks like Eurpoean writing: Thus Greek and Latin letters are the best, Egyptian hieroglyphs intermediate, and pictures are at the bottom.

Comments on Condillac, p. 5–7

Derrida again emphasizes the role of "absence" in Condillac's discussion. He stresses that

1. it is characteristic of writing that it continues to cause effects even after the departure of the writer;
2. to Condillac, absence is a gradual thinning out of presence (as in picture > symbol > letter).

Derrida also emphasizes the central role of analogy in Condillac's theory (words are analogous to thoughts, etc.)

He also repeats that Condillac is just one example of this theory, and that others could be given.

The Grand Claim, Part 1

Speech Might Be A Kind of Writing, p. 7

Derrida then proposes two "hypotheses":

1. All communication presupposes a kind of absence; so if writing is special, it must be because it presupposes an absence of a special kind.
2. Suppose we find out what this special kind of absence is, and suppose that it turns out to be shared by all other kinds of communication too; then there must be something wrong in our definitions of communication, or writing, or both.

This is a somewhat curious rhetorical somersault: First, Derrida has to sell us the rather unconventional idea that there is a classical theory of writing which defines writing in terms of a special kind of "absence." Then he has to shoot down that theory again.

Writing is Iterable, pp. 7–8

A swastika mosaic excavated from
a late ancient church in contemporary Israel.
If there ever was an "overdetermined" sign,
this symbol must surely be an example.
(Image from Wikipadia.)

So what kind of "absence" is characteristic of writing? Derrida proposes that the key is that writing is intelligible in the absence of an author. This means that it can be cited or read indefinitely, or in his phrase, "iterated."

The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code, making it into a [grid] that is communicable, transmittable, decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general. (p. 8)

Here is another way of saying it: If a sign really means something, then other people can use it for their own purposes in other contexts. If they can't, it doesn't really have a meaning:

To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning … (p. 8)

Alleged Consequences of the Iterability Claim, pp. 8–9:

This iterability theory of writing has, according to Derrida, four consequences:

1. It detaches writing from mentalistic notions like consciousness, intended meaning, etc. The theory is inconcsistent with the notion of "communication as communication of consciousnesses" or as a "semantic transport of the desire to mean" (p. 8).
2. It provokes "the disengagement of all writing from the semantic or hermeneutic horizons which … are riven by writing" (p. 9). What he means is perhaps that iterability is different from "meaning" in some limited, conventional sense.
3. It detached writing from "polysemics" (p. 9). Like the previous point, this could mean that the open-endedness of future use and citations is different from ambiguity of the more familiar kind, but I really don't know.
4. The concept of context becomes very problematic.

He says he will come back to all of these points later, but I don't know what he's referring to.

The Grand Claim, Part 2

The Characteristics of “Writing,” p. 9

At this point, Derrida wants to "demonstrate" that the iterability property is found in other kinds of communication in addition to writing, and, more generally, across "what philosophy would call experience" (p. 9).

Continuing his explanation of what he thinks Condillac is saying, he singles out three properties that writing is supposed to have according to the "classical" theory:

1. Writing subsists beyond the moment of production and "can give rise to an iteration in the absence … of the empirically determined subject who … emitted or produced it." (p. 9)
2. Writing "breaks with its context," where context means the moment of production, including the intention of the writer:

   But the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moement he wrote it, i.e. abondened it to its essential drift. (p. 9)

   So once you write a sentence down, you lose control.
3. These breaks are related to the fact that writing is placed at some distance from the "other elements of the internal contextual chain" (p. 9). Presumably this chain is supposed to consist of things like the writer, the time of writing, the intention, etc. Derrida calls this the "spacing" of writing.

As is probably apparent, this list is really just a repetition of things that he has already said earlier.

The Lincoln memorial, finished 1922, mimics Roman architecture
mimicking Greek architecture; picture from Wikipedia.

All Communication is Writing, p. 10

After having made these remarks about the alleged classical theory, Derrida goes on to ask whether the classical characteristics of writing really are characteristics of all communication:

Are [these characteristics] not to be found in all language, in spoken language for instance, and ultimately in the totality of "experience" … ? (p. 10).

As an example of iterability in spoken language, he notes that we need to be able to recognize a word across "variations of tone, voice, etc.". This means that every new application of the word has to be recognized as an echo or citation of some earlier event. Thus, meaning must involve citation, since

… this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability, by the possibility of its being repeated in … the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification, as well as of all intention of present communication. (p. 10).

These iterability conditions are, says Derrida, really characteristic of writing according to the classical theory. Hence, spoken language is a kind of "writing":

This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme … (p. 10).

Again, he generalizes this to experience without going to much into the topic:

And I shall even extend this law to all "experience" is general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks. (p. 10)

The idea is, presumably, that in so far as experience is mediated or interpreted, it is a kind of writing.

Critiquing the Tradition, Part 1

Husserl on Nonsense, pp. 10–11

Husserl; from the Lancet.

Husserl has a theory of how the sign can be detached from its referent. He proposes, according to Derrida, the following taxonomy:

1. Signs that have a clear meaning, but no current referent (I say "The sky is blue" while you can't see the sky);
2. Signs that fail to have a meaning because they are
   
   1. superficial syntactic symbol manipulation, as in formalistic mathematics;
   2. oxymorons, like "a round square";
   3. word salad, like "a round or," "the green is either," or "abracadabra."

This discussion refers to Volume II of Husserl's Logical Investigations. Specifically, the relevant parts of the text are Investigation I, §15 and Investigation IV, §12.

Derrida on Husserl, p. 12

Derrida notes:

But as "the green is either" or "abracadabra" do not constitute their context by themselves, nothing prevents them from functioning in another context as signifying marks. (p. 12)

As an example, he mentions that the word string "the green is either" is used by Husserl as an explicit example of agrammaticality — so it did after all have a use in language. (Consider also how the sentences "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" or "All your base are belong to us" have taken on a life of their own and can now be echoed or referenced.)

This illustrates, he says,

the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written … (p. 12).

Even more explicitly:

Every sign … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. (p. 12)

He goes on to say that a sign which did not have this property of citationality or iterability would not be a sign.

Critiquing the Tradition, Part 2

Things Derrida Likes About Performatives, p. 13

After having discussed Husserl, Derrida moves on to Austin. He wants in particular to talk about the notion of performative speech acts.
This concept, he says, should interest us for the following reasons:

1. Every proper utterance is in a sense performative.
2. The concept of performatives is a "relatively new."
3. Performatives do have referents in the usual sense.
4. The discussion of performatives made Austin reanalyze meaning as a concept of force (and this brings him, says Derrida, closer to Nietzsche).

These four features of performatives undermine the traditional communicative concept of meaning, according to Derrida.

Austin's Blind Angle p. 14

In spite of this subversive potential of performatives, Austin fails to realize that spoken language has the same "citationality" as writing, and this causes problems for his analysis again and again.

Specifically, he holds on to his mentalistic understanding of meaning. The "total context" that Austin has to keep referring in his discussion always contains

consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an intentional meaning … (p. 14)

Infelicity is Structurally Necessary, p. 15

Austin; from University of Washington.

So Derrida claims that citationality is a precondition of meaning. Hence, a theory which tries to exclude the ritualistic or theatrical aspect of word use will either have to push aside a lot of counterexamples or run into problems.

On one hand, Austin can thus recognize that 

… the possibility of the negative (in this case, infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration; (p. 15)

but on the other hand, he

… excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being considered. (p. 15)

Repeating that point once more, Derrida states that:

1. Austin recognizes that there are ritualistic aspects to the context of a conventional performative speech act, but not that there are ritualistic aspects to meaning itself. "Ritual," Derrida asserts, is "a structural characteristic of every mark." (p. 15)
2. Austin does not take the possibility of infelicity seriously enough, and he consequently fails to recognize that it is "in some sense a necessary possibility." (p. 15).

Critiquing the Tradition, Part 3

Serious and Non-Serious Language, pp. 16–17

To illustrate these points further, Derrida quotes a passage from Austin's work in which he says that theatrical or joky language is “parasitic” on the more serious uses of language.

But such theatrical language use is not peripheral, Derrida claims:

For, ultimately, isn't it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, "non-serious," citation, (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality—or rather, a general iterability—without which there would not even be a "successful" performative? (p. 17)

Do you want me to answer? Or is this a questions-only conversation?

A Private Language Argument, p. 17

At this point one might interject, Derrida says, that “literal” performatives are successfully executed all the time (opening a meeting etc.), so shouldn't he take care of those cases before he starts talking about theatrical deviations?

Not necessarily, Derrida says: Even a private language will have to conform to some internal standard, and even an event that happens only once might implicitly be a version of something else.

The Necessity of Infelicity Again, p. 18–19

In effect, Austin thus depicts "ordinary language" as surrounded by a ditch which it can fall into if thing go awry. But according to Derrida, this is a somewhat misleading picture in that the "ditch" is a necessary shadow of meaning.

A possibly infelicitous speech act; by Don Hertzfeldt.

He asks:

Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a "citation"? (p. 18)

(Correct answer: No, it couldn't.)

As a consequence:

The "non-serious," the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be excluded, as Austin wished, from "ordinary" language. And if one maintains that ordinary language, or the ordinary circumstances of language, excludes a general citationality or iterability, does that not mean that the "ordinariness" in question … shelter[s] … the teleological lure of consciousness … ? (p. 18)

(Correct answer: Yes, it does.)

Thus, the concept of "context" itself gets into some problems too, since it is not clear what counts as a theatrical context, and what doesn't:

The concept of … the context thus seems to suffer at this point from the same theoretical and "interested" uncertainty as the concept of the "ordinary," from the same metaphysical origins: the ethical and teleological discourse of consciousness. (p. 18)

To round off, he ensures us that his point isn't that consciousness, context, etc. makes no difference to meaning, but only that their negative counterparts cannot be excluded from the picture.

Who Really Talks When You Are Talking? pp. 19–20

Derrida's signature, jokingly inserted at the end of the paper.

In the last section, Derrida asks who the "source" is of a highly ritualistic sentence like "I hereby declare the meeting open." Austin himself compares such sentences with signatures, so Derrida picks up that thread.

Signatures are funny, he says, because a signature is expected at once to be authentic, and unique to the specific situation, but at the same time, also have a "repeatable, iterable, imitable form."

Being thus authentic if and only if they are good copies, signatures thus illustrate the contradiction that is built into the mentalistic notion of writing.

A Last Salute

Perspectives and Additional Claims, p. 20–21

On the last page of the essay, Derrida very rapidly throws a couple of rather large claims at the reader, mixed loosely with a summary of his main points:

1. The concept of writing is gaining ground, so that philosophy increasingly relies on authenticity concepts like "speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc."
2. Writing is difficult to understand from the perspective of the traditional theory.
3. His project of insisting on the work done by negative concepts (absence, failure, etc.) can be carried further in a larger project of metaphysical criticism.

So that's a dubious claim, a triviality, and a literature reference.

Tversky: "Features of Similarity" (1977)

Tversky argues that objects should be represented as feature bundles, and that the similarity of the feature bundles equals the measure of their overlap minus the measures of the two disjoint parts.

He provides large amounts of evidence that this more versatile (and vague) scheme is a necessary corrective to the metric conception of similarity.

Finding the Relevant Dimensions

The general idea is "feature matching," a pragmatic process relying on background notion of relevance:

When faced with a particular task (e.g., identification or similarity assessment) we extract and compile from our data base a limited list of relevant features on the basis of which we perform the required task. (p. 329)

This process can violate metric properties because the basis for the similarity may be different in different cases:

Jamaica is similar to Cuba (because of geographical proximity); Cuba is similar to Russia (because of their political affinity); but Jamaica and Russia are not similar at all. (p. 329)

This sounds like Wittgenstein, and in the last section of the paper, he does in fact get a citation, during a discussion of Elanor Rosch's work (p. 348).

Symmetry and Reversibility

Symmetry, too, is problematic. Some prototypical examples of certain categories seem to make the central features of the category shine brightly and thus attract attention; this produces higher similarity judgements:

We tend to select the more salient stimulus, or the prototype, as a referent, and the less salient stimulus, or the variant, as a subject. We say "the portrait resembles the person" rather than "the person resembles the portrait." We say "the son resembles the father" rather than "the father resembles the son." (p. 328)

However, in certain cases, both objects may have the stereotypical character of a paradigm case:

Sometimes both directions are used but they carry different meanings. "A man is like a tree" implies that man has roots; "a tree is like a man" implies that the tree has a life history. "Life is like a play" says that people play roles. "A play is like life" says that a play can capture the essential elements of human life. (p. 328)

Whether or not Tversky selects the right features here is doubtful. But his point about feature selection is in general true, I suppose.

Context-Dependence

A large part of Tversky's paper is dedicated to compiling evidence against the symmetry of similarity judgments, and to showing prototype effects. This part of the paper is slightly dated, especially since he does not reprint any of his data, only the test statistics.

However, his examples of context-dependent similarity (pp. 340-344) are more interesting from a contemporary perspective. These include for instance the experiments in which he asked subjects to split a set of four objects into two pairs. This indirectly pointed to the context-sensitivity of feature selection.

One way he did this was by asking people to pick the a cartoon drawing of a face according to similarity. So his subjects would get a neutral face and a set of three frowning or smiling faces with an instruction to pick the face most similar to the neutral one:

As the numbers indicate, the members of the reference set mattered hugely for the judgment of the leftmost and rightmost face, even though these were held constant across the two conditions.

This seems to suggest that merely having two frowney or smiley faces in the reference set implicitly tells the subjects frowns or smiles are essential, stables features, rather than facial expressions drawn from a random distribution. A neutral face will then have a much smaller likelihood of coming from that "category."

The other "category," however, only contains a single example and thus yields higher likelihood levels, as it suggests that more variance within the category might have been possible.

Reformulations

If we set <a,b,c> = <neutral, frown, smile> and <d,e> = <dot-eye, circle-eye>, then the data set can be rephrased as follows:

Which of the following three pairs is most similar to <a,d>?
Condition 1: <b,d>, <c,e>, or <c,d>?
Condition 2: <b,d>, <b,e>, or <c,d>?

Notice that we get a symmetry here: If we swap the names b and c and rearrange the items, the two sets turn out in fact to be the same. Yet, we don't see symmetric choices.

I wonder how abstractly this prompt could be presented to a subject and produce results like those Tversky got. Imagine for instance the following formulation:

Which of the following is most similar to a white mouse?
Condition 1: a black mouse, a brown rat, or a brown mouse?
Condition 2:  a black mouse, a black rat, or a brown mouse?

Whatever the answer is, there is a problem with this design, as it puts too much weight on forced partitioning of the four faces. A better method is used in the experiment reported on page 344. This can essentially be thought of as the following three conditions:

Condition 1:
How similar is Chile to Venezuela?
How similar is Guatemala to Uruguay?
(etc.)

Condition 2:
How similar is Sweden to Norway?
How similar is Finland to Denmark?
(etc.)

Condition 3:
How similar is Chile to Venezuela?
How similar is Sweden to Norway?
(etc.)

With this set-up, Tversky reports to have found a higher average similarity in (what corresponds to) condition 3. This is explained by the fact that the context foregrounds the geographical region as a cue in that case, but not in the two others.

Gendlin: "How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can" (1997)

I've read Gendlin's opening essay in the anthology dedicated to his philosophy. I find it fascinating, but also quite wrong-headed in some ways.

Gendlin's point is that we have something like a bodily intuition about phenomena that is well articulated by some words and not so well articulated by others. His claim is that by attending closely to this intuition, we can become more acute observers of our life-world, or so I read him, at least.

Looking For Words
His favorite example of this phenomenon is the poet searching for a suitable line to continue a poem (p. 17). He also cites the practice of rephrasing your point when someone doesn't understand you as evidence that there is "a . . . ." that we can succeed or fail at making other people appreciate (p. 13).

In other words, the point seems to be a call to "return to the phenomena themselves," as the phenomenologists said. "Any text or theory," he explains, "becomes more valuable when it is taken experientially in this way" (p. 40).


He illustrates this kind of thinking with an example from Wittgenstein, not about poetry-writing, but about letter-writing:

I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. Or a picture occurs to me and I try to describe it. Or an English expressions occurs to me and I try to hit on the corresponding German one. Or I make a gesture, and I ask myself: What words correspond to this gesture? And so on. (PI 335; quoted by Gendlin on p. 37)

His conclusion is, with explicit reference to the "postmodernism" in general (pp. 3, 6, 9, 19, 34-35), and Derrida (pp. 8, 35-36) in particular:

People's lives include a great deal that they cannot say in the existing language, but can become able to say. As philosophers, let us stop telling people that they cannot possibly have anything to say that is not already in the public language. (p. 34)

Trying To Succeed
I am skeptical about Gendlin's flirtation with the concept of authentic language for the reasons that Richard Rorty has explained in his wonderful essay on Heidegger's mysticism. Even though there truly is some experience of looking for and finding the right words, it is not clear how serious we should take this experience.

A different way to conceptualize the situation would be in terms of skill. Just like looking for a word, the attempt to accomplish some bodily action can be associated with immense frustration and satisfaction. This is obviously not because the action was there all along in some non-realized form, and we should look at linguistic skill and success the same way.

This also clears up another confusion Gendlin's story, namely: Why would we even want to explicate our intuitions in the first place? Is it for the sake of "truth"? "Authenticity"? "Correspondence"? He touches on the answer with his example of rephrasing your explanations: This is an attempt to bring your hearer into a different state, not an attempt to create a good fit.

This communicative purpose could in principle be achieved with the most ridiculous or outlandish effect imaginable; a completely "wrong" word, a gesture, a cartoon. The success criterion is here change in the state of the hearer, not a relation between words and bodily knowledge.

Another way to say the same thing is that a seller who puts a price tag on a commodity chooses a certain "word" that may or may not have the right effect. This is not because it does not "fit" the commodity, but because it would create the wrong effect in the hearer, such as the belief that the commodity was of a cheap quality, or that it is too expensive.

Yet another similar example occurs when you speak a foreign language. In that situation, you have a gold standard for ease of communication---communication in your native language---and that association can produce a whole lot of frustration as you try to achieve as fine-grained distinctions and precise effects with your impoverished skills in the foreign language.

Thomas Kuhn: "Metaphor in Science" (1979)

There's a nice little paper by Thomas Kuhn in the book Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony. The paper in an exercise in Wittgensteinian pragmatism with special applications to new, "metaphorical" usage patterns.

Kuhn begins by endorsing an observation:

However metaphor functions, it neither presupposes nor supplies a list of the respects in which the subjects juxtaposed by metaphor are similar. (p. 533)

Rather, he says, a metaphor works by "creating or calling forth the similarities." (p. 533)

His main example throughout the paper is the word planet:

The moon belonged to the family of planets before Copernicus, not afterwards; the earth to the family of planets afterwards, but not before. Eliminating the moon and adding the earth to the list of individuals that could be juxtaposed as paradigms for the term "planet" changed the list of features salient to determining the referents of that term. Removing the moon to a contrasting family increased the effect. (p. 540)

His idea thus rests on a theory of meaning that sometimes sounds a bit like a Bayesian learning algorithm, with the social environment providing a classified set of frequently occuring examples:

Exposed to tennis and football as paradigms for the term "game," the language learner is invited to examine the two (and soon, others as well) in an effort to discover the characteristics with respect to which they are alike (p. 537).

After having learned a term this way, the learner will probably have an easier time categorizing soccer than fencing or professional boxing, as Kuhn notes (p. 536).

The learning algorithm is in any event probably more efficient if it includes negative as well as positive evidence. Kuhn briefly mentions that wars, for instance, are not games, irrespective of the similarities they might have (p. 536).

The paper also explicitly refers to his other nice disccusion of meaning and categorization, the article "Second thoughts on paradigms," which is printed in The Essential Tension (1977).

That's the one in which he writes that "anything is similar to, and also different from, anything else" (p. 307) and argues that you can't learn the meaning of the term duck without acquiring some knowledge and beliefs about ducks as well.

The Gendlin-Johnson debate

Eugene Gendlin is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who's been writing on the interaction between logical thought and intuitive thought since the 1970s.

He argues that we should view intuitive thinking is a resource that may inform logical thinking, but not be simulated by it. He thus recommend a kind of thinking that crosses back and forth between intuitive thought and formalizations of this intuitive thought.

In 1997, he and Mark Johnson engaged in a debate on metaphor. This sprang out of Gendlin's essay "Crossing and Dipping" (1997), but the debate took place in a volume of critical essays on Gendlin's philosophy (Kleinberg-Levin: Language Beyond Postmodernism, 1997).

Gendlin on Metaphor
With respect to metaphor, Gendlin stated in the essay that he sees the meaning of a metaphor---indeed, any sentence---as something that can be explicated, but only on a case-by-case basis and with reference to intuitive understanding.

This means that we may understand and explicate a given metaphor, but not in general formalize the mechanism that produces this understanding. He explicitly cites Wittgenstein for this idea. The resultant theory resembles both the thought of Donald Davidson and of Derrida.

Consider for instance the way he tries to show how language can produce meaning without necessarily relying on a preexisting system:

Even conjunctions can say something when they come here: I promise to and your many viewpoints, rather than to but them. Once some words have worked in a slot, the slot can also speak alone: I will try to . . . . our discussion. (sec. II)

This is indeed creative as well as intelligible tokens of language use, although they come with a quite considerable amount of uncertainty.

Gendlin seems only partly to appreciate the fact that metaphors can be more or less easily understood. He would probably recognize uncertainty on the formal level, but not on the intuitive.

He further stresses the fact that understanding a metaphor requires quite a lot of knowledge, not only about the source domain, but about the target domain as well. A "use-family," as he calls the source concept, can easily be applied wrongly by an incompetent hearer.

A metaphor thus has a "precise new meaning" (p. 174), but this meaning can only be retrieved by "crossing," not by computation (p. 172).

Problems with the Ordering
Gendlin criticizes several key issues in Lakoff and Johnson's theory. For instance, he rejects the idea that the concreteness ordering has bottom elements, or maybe that it is an antisymmetric order. He thus writes of Johnson that

he sometimes sounds as if he were speaking literally about the physical motion domain as if it were original or "basic." (p. 169)

He similarly criticizes Lakoff and Johnson's claim that there is an identifiable set of elements in the ordering that serve as the ultimate basis of our conceptual system.

To exemplify this, he produces a typical cognitive-semantic interpretation of the prices rose. This bases the metaphor on the mapping MORE IS UP, which allegedly arises from our experience with piles and the like.

He then provocatively states:

But I think that prices "rise" because the numbers get larger, and we count up from 1. (p. 171)

This calls the empirical evidence for the cognitive analysis into question. Why would our concrete experience with numbers---including talking about them---not bear any weight on the issue? Could years of schooling not make any difference to whether we saw something as concrete?

Gendlin extends this critique Johnson's way of tackling metaphors in general:

He imports a cognitive scheme in which he formulates the "correlations," and then selects the fewest that could account for the variety of instances. But what he calls "basic" or "experiential" correlation seems no different in character from all the rest, which he calls "resulting" or "subsequent" (p. 171)

This is very similar in style to some of the other critiques of Lakoff and Johnson. Often the components of their analyses seem to come out of nowhere, with no independent motivation, and do exactly the right thing at the right time.

Taking such an analysis as evidence of anything is therefore quite dubious. Gendlin says this in terms of "revers[ing] the order" of explanation (Sec. I) or "reading concepts back" (p. 169). Haser and McGlone puts it in terms of circularity.

The Limits of Prediction
In Gendlin's reply to Mark Johnson (pp. 173-74) as well as in his essay (Sec. II), Gendlin gives examples of the limits of metaphorical inferences.

Johnson seems to admit that he has no systematic theory that can account for the precise layout of these limits:

What cognitive semantics cannot capture in its generalizations, however, is the affective dimension of this experiential grounding of meaning. We can point to it, but we cannot include in our mappings and generalizations the felt sense that is part of what the metaphor means to us, not can we include the way it works in our experience. (p. 167-68)

However, calling this an "affective" issue belies the fact that this actually leads to wrong inferences, not just to anemic descriptions.

What none of these authors seem to consider, though, is that the meaning of expressions may not be entirely settled in the head of one individual. It is true that prior knowledge will inform the best guess of any hearer, but as metaphors fossilize, a social decision process is also going on. This points in the direction of a role for convention.