Differance and the web of meaning.

[reddragdiva]

Stuff's been occurring to me and I've been just completely failing to note it, so I actually bought a notebook yesterday to build Bayesian postmodernism in. I just filled ten A7 pages with spider scrawl and my hand is aching from more writing than I've done in a burst in years.

Fucking Derrida. Differance and the Web of Meaning very nicely describe the Bayesian network of meaning that is how humans actually operate: every word is defined in other words, with roots in your evolved predispositions; you can't have certainty of meaning, you have to make do with what you've got and can get. Derrida successfully hit upon this purely by feel, with no maths and no evidence I can find that he'd even heard of Bayes.

The Wikipedia article is full of annoying deepities, with the problems the concept brings to light presented as semantic stopsigns you're supposed to go "oh, wow" at rather than actually answerable (and pretty easy to answer, at that) questions, but makes the congruence pretty damn clear if you know the Bayes half.

But this is where I'm enormously glad for Wikipedia, and people who try that hard to explain things actually clearly. Here's the actual chapter. See how far you get before you want to throw your computer against the wall. I managed about a sentence into the third paragraph. I might finish this thing before I die, if I manage to hate myself enough.

Comments

[sidhedmento]

You did what? And what the hell size is A7? And what the hell are you talking about? All I understand is "fucking Derrida".

[reddragdiva]

A7 is 1/4 A5 or 1/8 A4. This is my start. "Fucking Derrida" is the essential point of this post.

[jld]

You've got things that can only be defined in terms of themselves? There's a theorem for that.

I'm sort of joking here, but I can't help wondering about the possibility of a domain-theoretic interpretation of postmodernism.

[reddragdiva]

Qualitative mathematics/physics, which is as far as I've got here, is strictly inferior to the quantitative variety. But if I WON BIG, which would also require leveling up remarkably in utterly disparate fields simultaneously then joining them, then at the end I would indeed have the actual formula for money, chicks and fame.

[reddragdiva]

(Although I suspect applying it would be a bit like being presented with the Schrodinger equation and being told "now you have all you need to solve every extant problem in chemical engineering.")

[tcpip]

Ahh, Margins of Philosophy... Haven't read that in years..

Derrida rejects the claimed dominance of phonocentric language ("writing preceeds speaking") and reference semantics ("there is no outside text").

In the first point he is not referring to writing words on paper (or even finger to keyboard), but rather the inscription of meaning of words within metaphorical and metonymic axes. One could even justifiably claim that he's making allusions to literal neurological inscription as well, although I'm not too sure about that.

In the second he is not claiming that that language is a reality independent of referents, a confusion between the signifier and the signified, rather he claims that the signifieds are related by their difference to other signifiers and signified.