[KB] Deacon's Neo-Aristotelian Complication of Simple Action/Motion
wessr at onid.orst.edu
wessr at onid.orst.edu
Mon Aug 11 18:20:21 EDT 2014
Ed, perhaps add another passage to those under consideration, this one
from the Grammar, page 157:
"In reducing all phenomena to terms of motion, biology is as
unambiguously scenic as physics. But as soon as it encounters the
subject of self-movement, it makes claims upon the areas covered by
our term agent. We have improvised a solution, for our purposes, by
deciding that the biologist's word, "organism," is Grammatically the
equivalent of `agent-minus.'"
Bob
Quoting Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>:
> But the question I am asking, David, is not the one that has to do
> with what Burke says here in "Terministic Screens" concerning the
> difference between "persons" and "things," in regard to possible
> "negative intuition" of some kind. The question has to do with the
> difference between us symbolizers and nonverbal animals, in respect
> to negative intuition of some kind, and the possible difference
> between the so-called "motion" of those life forms and that of
> inanimate matter. That's the focal problem, if we are to credit
> both Deacon and Bateson---and I would say, too, the Burke of the
> opening of P&C---on the subject of negativity, a possible "absential
> feature," trial and error, self-correctiveness of a sort, can we say
> "purpose"?
>
> And by the way, we don't treat dogs and chimps and some other
> pets/work animals exactly like ocean waves, electrical impulses, the
> wind or the rain. I'm surely not saying the symbolic dislocations
> of 200,000 years ago ware not profound. I'll reference Chapter 6 in
> my book on the "Anthropology of Dramatic Action." I'm asking
> whether Deacon and Bateson are on to something in respect to our
> doctrinaire labeling of the "activity" of animals, particularly the
> "higher" ones, as "motion" not to be distinguished from the
> "motions" of the cosmos.
>
>
>
> Ed
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 8/11/14, Payne, David <dpayne at usf.edu> wrote:
>
> Subject: RE: [KB] Deacon's Neo-Aristotelian Complication
> of Simple Action/Motion
> To: "Edward C Appel" <edwardcappel at frontier.com>, "Carrol Cox"
> <cbcox at ilstu.edu>, "Herbert W. Simons" <hsimons at temple.edu>
> Cc: "kb at kbjournal.org" <kb at kbjournal.org>
> Date: Monday, August 11, 2014, 2:21 PM
>
> As far as
> "elaboration of its meaning" goes, I submit
> Burke's own explanation in Terministic Screens (LAS p.
> 53):
>
> I should make it
> clear: I am not pronouncing on the metaphysics of the
> controversy. Maybe we are but things in motion. I don’t
> have to haggle about that possibility. I need but point out
> that whether or not we are just things in motion, we think
> of one another (and especially of those with whom we are
> intimate) as persons. And the difference between a thing and
> a person is that one moves whereas the other acts. For the
> sake of the argument, I’m even willing to grant that the
> distinction between things moving and persons acting is but
> an illusion. All I would claim is that, illusion or not,
> the human race could not get along with itself on the basis
> of any other kind of intuition. The human animal, as we
> know it, emerges into personality by first mastering
> whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic
> environment.
>
> David
> Payne
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From:
> kb-bounces at kbjournal.org
> <kb-bounces at kbjournal.org>
> on behalf of Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
> Sent: Monday, August 11, 2014 1:24 PM
> To: Carrol Cox; Herbert W. Simons
> Cc: kb at kbjournal.org
> Subject: Re: [KB] Deacon's Neo-Aristotelian
> Complication of Simple Action/Motion
>
> Burkophiles,
>
> Actually, it’s
> not a gloss on the blink and the wink distinction that may
> be called for. It’s modification of Burke’s
> action/motion pair, or a needed elaboration of its
> meaning.
>
> So way
> back when, Jim Chesebro criticized Burke’s stinting on
> nonverbal motivations, and I did not, at the time, think
> through the full implications of that caveat. Deacon’s
> tour de force points up that possible problem with a sharper
> differentiation between mechanistic causation and the
> dynamical dislocations that came with nonverbal living
> beings and the possibly teleological, “absential”
> dimensions of process they introduced to the ecology of
> planet earth.
>
> I
> label Deacon’s analysis “Neo-Aristotelian.” As Burke
> emphasizes (Appendix A, Dramatism and Development, p. 58),
> “Aristotle’s concept of the entelechy . . . could be
> applied to any being or ‘substance,’ such as an amoeba
> or tree . . . . In these pages . . . we are concerned
> solely with a ‘logological’ tendency intrinsic to the
> resources of SYMBOLIC ACTION.”
>
> But can we usefully and uniformly
> conflate the “nonsymbolic motion” of stars, planets,
> oceans, and atoms, on the one hand, and whatever it is
> living animals in the wild are capable of, on the other?
> Are there some attributes these “lower” creatures share
> with us symbolizers that Burke’s dramatism deflects
> attention from, terministic screen that it is, and that
> Burke acknowledges (PLF, 124; LASA, 44-62).
>
> Burke surely hints
> at a chasmic difference between the “motions,” if we can
> still call them that, of fish, and the motions of stars,
> planets, and moons. He describes fish, indeed “All
> Living Things,” as “critics” of their environment,
> capable of “the changed behavior that goes with a new
> meaning” (P&C, p. 5). The “new meaning” in the
> experience of the fish he talks about is “’jaw-ripping
> food’” in the form of a fisherman’s bait. Fish might
> steer clear of a lure like that after such a trauma.
> Nonverbal animals can thus learn, can strive, so to speak,
> in a different direction than they did in the past. The
> “absential feature,” Deacon’s term, the
> “difference” in future experience that “makes a
> difference,” will be some “preferred state” which will
> “activate the corrective response,” namely, a bite into
> fish food that doesn’t have the hook.
>
> I quote in that last sentence from
> Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson (Ballantine,
> 1972, 381). That “difference” that “makes a
> difference” in generating “preference” is
> “information” derived via “negative entropy,”
> according to Bateson, “information” an important term
> for Deacon in respect to the “absential feature,” or
> absential “functioning.” Bateson’s “negative
> entropy” results, one presumes, in a “lack of
> predictability” of the kind that characterizes a
> mechanistic system (see “entropy” in the Shorter O.E.D.,
> 6th Edition, Vol. 1).
>
>
> “Let me list,” Bateson says, “what seem to me to
> be those essential minimal characteristics of a system,
> which I will accept as characteristics of mind”:
> (1) A “system” operating
> “with and upon DIFFERENCES.”
> (2)
> “Closed loops or networks of pathways” transmitting
> “news of a difference.”
> (3)
> “Many events within the system . . . energized by the
> respondent part,” not just the “triggering part.”
> (4) The system “showing
> self-correctiveness,” self-correctiveness implying
> “trial and error” (482).
>
> Borrowing terms from something Carl
> Jung wrote, who in turn got
> these notions
> from the second-century Gnostic Basilides, Bateson contrasts
> operations in the “PLEROMA” and those in the
> “CREATURA.” “The pleroma knows nothing of difference
> and distinction,” Bateson avers. “It contains no
> ‘ideas’ in the sense I am using the word.” “In the
> creatura, effects are brought about precisely by
> difference. In fact, this is the same old dichotomy
> between mind and substance” (456).
>
> Now, if we’re going to credit
> nonverbal animals---let’s soften the blow, for the sake of
> argument, by referencing those on an advanced level of
> development in particular---if we’re going to ascribe to
> such nonverbals, activity motivated by a sense of a negative
> of some kind, we have to characterize that negative
> intuition differently. Those denizens of the
> “creatura” are not “MORALIZED by the negative”
> (LASA, 9-13, 16). Or, as I’ve put it (1993a, 1993b,
> 2012), nonverbal animals would have no conception of the
> “infinite negative,” the global negative that confers
> guilt and shame upon a weak and finite being that has nary a
> chance of measuring up to its vision of “perfection.”
>
> Thus, a second
> “dislocation” of chasmic proportions in the evolution of
> beings on planet earth.
>
>
> That’s enough to chew on for now, except to pose
> this question: Do these ruminations suggest a need for
> modifying Burke’s perhaps simplistic action/motion
> dialectic in any way? Is some intermediate notion called
> for, in respect to the nonverbal “creatura”?
>
> I forwarded to
> Terrence W. Deacon some of the things I’ve posted on his
> book. He has answered back. He is interested in dialogue
> with us on these matters. I have asked permission to post
> his reply on kb, and will do so if granted that request.
> Professor Deacon is on vacation now, and, currently, mostly
> away from e-mail.
>
>
> Have a good day, everyone!
>
>
> Ed
>
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Sat, 8/9/14, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
> wrote:
>
> Subject: Re: [KB]
> Deacon's Neo-Aristotelian Complication of Simple
> Action/Motion
> To:
> "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>,
> "Herbert W. Simons" <hsimons at temple.edu>
> Cc: kb at kbjournal.org
> Date: Saturday, August 9, 2014, 3:48 PM
>
> Burkophiles,
>
> At a Burke
> panel at
> ECA, Portland Maine, 1992, Jim
> Chesebro raised an objection
> to Burke that
> is possibly pertinent to the basic
>
> action/motion distinction Herb just reiterated, and
> surely
> complicated by Terrence
> Deacon. A lacuna in
> dramatism
> is the failure to take cognizance of nonverbal
> motives, Jim offered. At the time, I
> surmised that Jim
> meant the classic motion
> of chemical processes of the kind
> Jerome
> Kagan (Harvard social scientist) examined in his
> book, Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human
> Nature
> (BasicBooks, 1994, Kagan’s
> research updated in a fairly
> recent NYT
> Magazine piece). Kagan homed in on human
>
> anxiety. It is aggravated by an excess of
> norepinephrine,
> a neurochemical, in the
> baso-lateral area of the amygdala,
> and in
> its projections to cortical and autonomic targets.
> From such motions of nature derive inhibition,
> melancholia,
> and neurosis, Kagan
> convincingly argues.
>
>
> I didn’t much credit Jim’s naysaying
> at the time. Burke was a philosopher and
> critic of the
> human drama, that aspect of
> observable behavior that, in one
> way or
> other, cannot be reduced to the motions of nature,
> and will boldly manifest its uniqueness in
> anthropological
> terms (see Chapter 6 in the
> Primer). Sure, an
> individual’s
> characteristic “drama” will be modified,
> perhaps radically, by those “chemisms,” to
> use Theodore
> Dreiser’s word. Burke
> gives enough heed to such
> influences,
> thought I, in his description of the way
>
> different folks will react to the same stimuli, identical
> scenic pressures and circumstances (GM). No
> need for
> elaborated neurochemistry, however
> germane in a scientific
> context.
>
> Deacon, I
> believe, challenges this chink in Burke’s
> thought in the
> sense of how to handle, what
> to call, the kind of
> nonsymbolic
> “motion”---isn’t that what Burke calls
> it?---of what are commonly labeled the
> “lower”
> animals. In what might be
> denominated Neo-Aristotelian
> fashion,
> Deacon “outline[s] . . . a theory of emergent
> dynamics that shows how dynamical processes
> can become
> organized around and with
> respect to possibilities not
> realized.
> This is intended to provide the scaffolding for
> a conceptual bridge from mechanistic
> relationships to
> end-directed,
> informational, and normative relationships
>
> such as are found in simple life forms [and, a fortiori,
> in
> primates and mammals in general!].”
>
> Recall that
> in my first post on his
> book, I emphasized
> Deacon’s insistence on two
>
> “dislocations” in earth’s evolutionary history, not
> just one. “Natural
> teleology,”
> “teleodynamics” to use
> Deacon’s neologism, would
> certainly
> characterize the putative transition from
>
> prokaryotic bacteria to eukaryotic bacteria around 2.6
> billion years ago, at the onset of the
> Proterozoic Eon.
> Something radically new
> came to planet earth:
> nuclei-possessing,
> oxygen-producing, photo-synthesizing
>
> single-celled animals that pumped that oxygen into the
> oceans and then the atmosphere, changed the
> color of the
> water and likely the sky,
> generated the life-sustaining
> qualities of
> sea, land, and atmosphere, including the ozone
> shield, indeed transformed earth into the
> “miracle”
> planet nothing we’ve
> discovered out there in space likely
> comes
> close to. (I think of have this scenario roughly
> correct,)
>
>
> Two
> billion years later,
> after the hiatus of “Snowball
> Earth”
> had passed, the “Cambrian Explosion” could
> begin.
>
>
> The Gaia guru
> Lovelock said
> it was the radically different composition of
> earth’s atmosphere---21 percent oxygen, 76
> percent
> nitrogen, 3 percent all the other
> stuff, including the
> growing concentration
> of carbon dioxide---that clued him
> into his
> notion of a kind of living planet Earth. Both
> Venus and Mars? About 97 percent carbon
> dioxide in both
> cases, albeit with
> strikingly different concentrations.
>
> Back to Herb’s
> blink and one-eyed wink next time, with,
> perhaps, a gloss
> that Deacon’s Incomplete
> Nature might suggest.
>
>
> Ed
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Sat, 8/9/14, Herbert W. Simons <hsimons at temple.edu>
> wrote:
>
>
> Subject: Re: [KB]
> (no subject)
> To: "Carrol Cox"
>
> <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Cc: kb at kbjournal.org
> Date: Saturday, August 9, 2014, 10:03 AM
>
> A
>
> theoretical explanation provides an answer to
> a why
> question
> in a
> thought experiment. Example:
> Gilbert Ryle
> asked the
> question: What's
> the difference between a wink and a
>
> one-eyed blink? His answer
> took him to the mind-brain
> distinction
> and could have taken KB to
> action-motion.
> WINKS
> ARE DONE IN ORDER TO;
> BLINKS TO BECAUSE OF.
>
>
>
> On Fri,
> Aug 8, 2014 at
> 10:46 PM, Carrol Cox
> <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> wrote:
>
>
> (You
> need to click "Reply All";
> otherwise it goes
> to the post's
> sender
>
> rather than to
> kb.)
>
>
>
> I'm
> interested in your
> somewhat cryptic message because
> on
> another list I am
>
>
> writing on the difference between theory on
>
> the one hand and
> "what needs to
>
> be explained" on
> the
> other. And involved in that is a
>
> differentiation
>
> between
>
> empirical generalization and theoretical
>
> EXPLANATION.
>
>
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original
> Message-----
>
> From: kb-bounces at kbjournal.org
> [mailto:kb-bounces at kbjournal.org]
> On Behalf
>
>
> Of de gava
>
> Sent: Friday,
> August 08, 2014 9:34 PM
>
>
> To: kb at kbjournal.org
>
> Subject: [KB] (no
> subject)
>
>
>
> I think I can add to
> this
> discussion. In earlier days I
> replied to
> the
>
> emails I received but
> they went to Ed so to kick off I'd
> like
> to test
>
> kb at kbjournal.org
> as
> an address to the e-list
> and ask if
> anyone has looked
>
> closely
>
> into the nature of 'explanations'. More to
> follow perhaps.
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
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>
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>
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>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> KB mailing list
>
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>
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>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Herbert
> W.
> Simons,
> Ph.D.
> Emeritus
> Professor
> of
> Communication
>
> Dep't of Strategic
>
> Communication,
> Weiss Hall 215
> Temple
>
>
> University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home
> phone:
> 215 844 5969
>
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
> Academic Fellow, Center for
> Transformative
> Strategic Initiatives
> (CTSI)
>
>
>
>
>
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