Thursday, February 1, 2018

Why Should an Atheist Convert?


Victor Reppert ridicules the idea that a "real atheist" would never convert to Christianity.  He links to an article by Matt Nelson called Why Atheists Change Their Mind: 8 Common Factors, that gives various arguments for belief in God.  When I read it, my first thought was that these are typical arguments for God, but they are not reasons for an atheist to change his mind.  While they may be convincing to some people (including some who call themselves atheists), they certainly aren't convincing to me.  And I'm sure that plenty of atheists who have a similar way of thinking, especially those who have a scientifically-oriented perspective, would also find these arguments lacking.  So that raises the question in my mind:  What does it mean to be a "real atheist"?

I would not presume to claim that no atheist would ever convert to Christianity.  I am well aware that it happens.  But I do think that in order to make this conversion, one would have to abandon his scientific perspective (if he ever had one to begin with), or at least set it aside.  As many scientists have pointed out before (much to the chagrin of religionists), science is generally incompatible with religious belief.  That's not to say that there aren't scientists who are Christians.  In fact that is one of the points Nelson makes in argument #5 in his article.  But I have made the case that such people can be successful in modern scientific endeavors only when they set aside their religious beliefs while conducting scientific investigations, and set aside their scientific perspective while making appeals to their religious beliefs.  But Nelson ignores that, focusing mostly on pre-20th-century Christian scientists.  Yes, early scientists (in Europe) were all Christians.  But they laid the groundwork for the development of a more fully realized modern scientific perspective that leads to the rejection of religious belief.

Nelson prefers to pretend that this incompatibility doesn't exist.  His argument #6 makes the case that science actually supports theistic belief, based on fine-tuning and arguments from design.  Actually, these are theistic arguments based on theist's interpretation of simple facts: there is order in the universe, and in biological creatures.  It is not a scientific fact that this should be interpreted as evidence for God.  People who have a more scientific perspective understand that there are other ways of looking at evidence, rather than always jumping to the one and only conclusion available to theists: "God did it".  In fact, Nelson gives a tacit nod to the "limitations in science", not so much as a reason to believe in God, but as a reason to set aside one's scientific perspective, which seems to undercut his own argument.

Are Nelson's other arguments convincing to someone who has this kind of perspective?  Not in the least, as far as I'm concerned.  Take a close look at argument #1, for example.  We see clues about what really changed the minds of several supposed atheists.  Karen Edmisten says
Then I became desperately unhappy, read up on philosophy and various religions (while assiduously avoiding Christianity), and waited for something to make sense.
She is admitting that she had an emotional need for religion, and that the world didn't make sense to her without it.  That is not the perspective of someone who has a scientific understanding of the world (where things actually do make sense).  How rational is it to deliberately avoid one possible avenue of investigation that you think might a reasonable source of evidence?  I think she's just trying to convince us that she really was a good atheist.  Needless to say, she violated her "atheistic principles" by reading Christian materials anyway.  And much to her "surprise", it was Christian religion that filled that emotional need she was feeling.  But it's no surprise to me, because obviously, that was precisely what she was looking for all along.  She's just not honest enough (perhaps with herself) to admit that.

Likewise, in Nelson's first argument, Lorraine Murray set out in search of reason to believe - not looking for whatever truth the evidence might lead to:
Reading Lewis, I found something that I must have been quietly hungering for all along.
Statements like that do not express an unbiased quest to follow the evidence and learn the truth, whatever it may be.  They are admissions that the authors are trying to fill an emotional need for religion.  Those authors may claim that they were "committed atheists", but that is belied by their own words.  Like many ex-atheists, they weren't seeking truth so much as intellectual cover for allowing their theism, which has been nagging at them and causing their emotional distress, to come out of the closet.  And that's what they find in the writings of CS Lewis and GK Chesterton.

In argument #3, Nelson calls Lee Strobel's book, The Case For Christ, "a prime example of what happens when an honest atheist sets out to establish once and for all whether the claims of the Gospels are reliable or not."  I have commented about Strobel before.  He is yet another one of those so-called "committed atheists" who decided to take the plunge into religious belief, and abandoned any semblance of objectivity in the process.  He found the evidence for the truth of the gospels to be overwhelming.  But that could only be the case if one chooses to ignore science itself, and all the evidence that would argue to the contrary.  I'm not trying to say here that one couldn't find some factual evidence that would help to make a case for Christianity, but to say that this is overwhelming reveals a decidedly Christian predisposition in one's thinking.  And once again, this argument does absolutely nothing for someone who is not already leaning in the direction of Christianity.  If the evidence can be regarded as overwhelming at all (from a more objective perspective), it is not in favor of the truth of these biblical legends.

But the one argument presented by Nelson that struck me more than any other is #8, which is the argument from aesthetic experience.  Nelson quotes Peter Kreeft:
There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Therefore there must be a God.

You either see this one or you don’t.
The claim is made that this argument is responsible for the conversion of atheists.  That may be the case, but what kind of atheist would find it convincing?  Like other arguments presented by Nelson, it is based more in emotion than objective evidence.  And that is typical of the reasons we often see cited by atheists who change their minds.  But the reason I find this kind of argument striking is not its effectiveness, but rather the implicit bias against scientific understanding that it conveys.  The argument presumes that an appreciation of beauty is the province of God.  It says essentially that only God can be responsible for our human experience of beauty.  It makes no allowance for any other perspective.  This attitude among religionists is what feeds into their false accusations of "scientism".  Many religionists deny that it is even possible for an atheist prone to scientism to have any such appreciation, and they often make claims that the life of the atheist is impoverished for that reason.  But these religionists are the ones are suffering from a poverty of reasoning.  It doesn't require God or religious belief to experience aesthetic appreciation.  As humans, we all share aesthetic values, and we all experience the kind of feelings that are evoked by sublime experiences.  Religionists ascribe this to God, but a scientific perspective gives us additional ways to understand and interpret our world besides "God did it".  Religionists have only one answer for everything.  Science opens our eyes to reality, without sacrificing the experience of aesthetic pleasure.

These arguments from Matt Nelson may resonate with some atheists, as I said, but I think they have very little persuasive power power to someone who isn't already inclined toward belief in God.  In particular, someone who has a broader or more scientific view of reality will probably see no earth-shattering revelation here.  That scientific understanding, if it is genuine, can't easily be tossed aside when someone comes along with an argument that is based on emotion, or that takes a one-sided view of evidence.

I often think the return to religious belief is like the case a child who believes in Santa Claus.  He may have been told by his older friends that Santa doesn't really exist, and he reluctantly accepts that, but it isn't comforting to him.  He really wants Santa to be real.  So he asks his parents, who give him the assurance he's looking for.  Or he reads a letter like this one, a modern-day "Yes, Virginia" that tells him what he wants to hear, and presents an emotional case for belief that he finds convincing.  But it isn't because of logic or real intellectual content that this letter is so satisfying to the believer.  The child's friends have grown up and set aside their childhood beliefs.  They have a more realistic understanding of the world, and they are comfortable with it.  The believer prefers emotional comfort, and it is understandable how "Yes, Virginia" sounds good to someone who wants to believe. But for those whose non-belief is based on a more solid understanding of reality, it isn't easy to lay that understanding aside and return to their childhood belief.  Before they change their minds, they need real evidence.   And that's the one thing that is lacking in all of Nelson's arguments.

My question for Victor Reppert is this:  What kind of arguments would you find convincing enough to change your mind about the existence of Santa Claus?

50 comments:

  1. The level of Nelson's argument is akin to arguing that God resides in the pineal gland.

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    1. I have no doubt that these arguments are convincing to some - but mostly to those who are already believers, or perhaps to those who tell themselves they are atheists, but haven't really given up their religion intellectually and emotionally, and are looking for an excuse to come back to Jesus.

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    1. Hypothesis: you will never find a converted person who was an advocate of serious atheological arguments like those from Graham Oppy.

      Hypothesis: you will never find a converted person who has strictly non emotional reasons for their conversion.

      Hypothesis: you will never find a converted person who did not have at least one meaningless sounding belief prior to their conversion. E.g. a belief about the power of "love".

      It is not surprising that conversion stories seem to always involve emotion and/or arguments that are easily refuted. There is a meaningful sense in which the converted people were theists all along.

      I'm posting from my phone so I might make some mistakes. I deleted this comment once due to a shittily typed sentence.

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    2. I wouldn't use the word 'never'. I think these hypotheses are true in many cases - quite possibly the majority. I would be interested in seeing how many.

      Flew is one example they like to point to about someone who had philosophical reasons for converting. I read his book, and I am not convinced of that at all. There wasn't a single statement about what was wrong with his thinking before. Not one statement about what made him change his mind. The biggest give-away comes right at the end, where he says he might even be open to Christianity, after the whole book gives not a single philosophical argument in support of that.


      PS: We are tolerant of "shittily typed".

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    3. How do you define an "unemotional" argument? Esp if the neuroscience says there's no real separation in our brains between our emotive and our "reasoning" functions? It's more like, they go together.... (cf Antonio Damasio's books).

      Is asking for a "rational" syllogism just a "stylistic" choice or....(?)

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    4. Ryan, arguments for belief are often ethically-tinged in one way or another. As in, "we OUGHT to believe (in the absence of absolute, contrary evidence, which is probably impossible) cuz it makes for a better, more hopeful world" or something like that. (Cf Kierkegaards "absurd knight of faith")

      Are those ethical type of arguments "emotional?"

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    5. How do you define an "unemotional" argument? Esp if the neuroscience says there's no real separation in our brains between our emotive and our "reasoning" functions? It's more like, they go together

      - I think you are confusing human thinking processes with logical reasoning. A syllogism in strictly symbolic terms can be devoid of any emotional content. It is certainly possible for us to formulate a logical argument without any appeal to emotion, despite the fact we may passionately advocate the point of that argument.

      My point about the arguments that sway people to become Christians is that they work on an emotional basis rather than a logical basis. The argument from beauty is purely emotional. It's about feelings. That's what works in causing people to believe. Nobody was ever persuaded to believe because of some numerical calculation of probabilities. Arguments like that always come from people who already believe, and are trying to justify that belief in a logical manner.

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    6. I'll ask you the same question as I asked Ryan then: are ethical types of arguments - "one OUGHT to believe because...." - classed as "emotional" or not?

      Is "ethics" a place where human emotional responses and rational philosophy converge?

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    7. Interesting question. The word 'ought' is not necessarily an expression of ethical imperative. For example, I could say "If I want to see the game, then I ought to take the 11:15 to the ball-field." This has no ethical implication, I think. But it does point out the structure of all statements using the word 'ought'. It is part of the consequent of a conditional. IF I wish to achieve outcome A, THEN I ought to take action B. This can be made part of a logical syllogism without any appeal to emotions or any leap of logic (like the claim of deriving an 'ought' from an 'is').

      Often, the conditional clause is omitted, but it is always implied. But with the omission of the conditional clause, it is easy to see such a statement as a simple statement of fact, but it isn't. This has a big impact on one's view of ethics, which often see statements of 'ought' as factual by omitting the conditional. The reality is that outcome A is always a matter of someone's choice or desire, and action B is implied only on the condition that we have made some value judgement about A.

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    8. Well, yeah, I did include a "because" phrase in my example....

      "One ought to believe" ....um, "to defeat nihilism" .... or whatever!

      ...."to make for a more hopeful world!"

      Are these value judgements inherently emotional? Are those emotional appeals?

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    9. I wouldn't say "emotional" is always the right term to use for a value judgment. But it is not a rational thing, either. It is a matter of preference, taste, or desire - not the logical consequent of factual premises. It is a-rational.

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    11. So, if an atheist found that nihilism argument convincing, they wouldn't be responding emotionally? They would be motivated a-rationally (and not rationally) but, nevertheless, that would be different than an emotional appeal?

      I think a lot of God-arguments tend to implicitly make such an appeal, to the "possibility of objective truth and meaning" & that's often where Joe's coming from, too, I believe.....

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    12. There's no question that atheists can have an emotional response to arguments, just like everybody else. But there's a big difference. It's no so much that they accept arguments for atheism (as if atheism is a belief system and worldview that might be adopted for a-rational reasons), but that they reject arguments for theism. They typically aren't emotionally invested in an ideology, the way theists are. For that reason, they can be much less prone to emotional persuasion.

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  3. Okay, philosophical arguments for Xianity....

    http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/slavoj-zizek-on-atheism.html

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    1. This is the kind of thing you can end up with when you try to blend two wacky ideologies (Christianity and Marxism) together: the religion of Marxist Christian Atheism. I have little use for this kind of pseudo-intellectualist sophistry.

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    2. I think it's an interesting Hegelian kind of synthesis.

      It's a bit of a stunt, of course, but his point is basically Nietzche's. As long as there is any "big other" that grounds the hierarchies of thought, it might as well be "God". There's little to choose between divine and, say, "evolutionary predestination" in practical terms, either on a personal level or in socioeconomic or sociohistorical contexts....

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    3. Perhaps I haven't given it the thought it deserves, but after reading the article you cited, I have no idea what Zizek actually believes. I do think that what he calls "atheism" bears no semblance to my own conception of it.

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    4. He's against what he calls "the Western concept of Buddhism", which he thinks is the real spiritual basis of contemporary developed (ie neoliberal) societies because he thinks that predominant belief structure just "harmonizes" everything, good or bad, and can justify.... well, just about anything!

      He likes Xianity better cuz he sees in it a moral duality of "good and evil", "sheep and goats", that could underpin a (Marxist-type) struggle for liberation, justice, etc. But without the "Big Other" judgemental type of "God" which, in Zizek's spin on the narrative as in the video, dies on the cross with Christ.

      All opposed to his belief in an underlying real, barren, ontological meaninglessness, which he says is "unbearable" for humans.

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    5. Hegelian dialectical process aside, I don't see any logic in what he says. He's trying to integrate things that are fundamentally contradictory, and put some kind of pseudo-intellectual spin on it. (And I don't buy a lot of what Nietzsche says, either, for what it's worth.)

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    6. Zizek's God is pretty nihilistic in some ways, I think, but is that a good reading of the essential Xian narrative too? I think it's pretty good, much more interesting and radical than "substitutionary atonement" and other orthodoxies, I'd say.

      Zizek is awfully smart, even if kinda erratic....

      I think his "death of the Big Other God" is sort of an attempt to synthesize away the a/theism debates with a Hegelian spin by rereading the Xian narratives. (It was preceded by the "death of God" and secular theologians in the 60's tho, all of whom used a similar tact even if they weren't actually atheists in the typical "logical positivist" sense.)

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    7. I think an actual atheist doesn't need to find a way to explain the "death of the Big Other God". It is pretty clear that he is trying to fit this into his other ideology. And it doesn't work intellectually, as far as I'm concerned.

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    8. There's also a similar but opposing thing to Zizek's, btw. The idea that " the path to true Xianity goes thru atheism", by which is usually meant "dark night of the soul" kind of stuff.....

      There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God. ~ Simone Weil

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    9. There is also the one where we just don't buy bullshit.

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    10. What exactly don't you buy?

      .... That "an underlying real, barren, ontological meaninglessness is "unbearable" for humans?"

      That'd be a cool thing to deny, yep!

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    11. I don't buy the idea that there is "an underlying real, barren, ontological meaninglessness" (for one thing).

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    12. Kewl ... then what is there & whatever it is, how does it have meaning?

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    13. We make our own meaning.

      And note that when you say "ontological meaninglessness" you are implying something that is absent, as if it is a violation of the natural state. Of course, the theist will assume that the natural state of affairs is God and meaning and all that - and so he presumes that a godless world is missing what it should contain.

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    14. I don't know if, for Zizek, it's a violation of the natural state so much as the sufficiency of all existing meaning-making, sociosymbolic tools, including and most especially all our languages, that's called into question by the Xian "passion" narrative. Which is to say, for him, the narrative of the "death of [a certain] God" a.k.a. the "Big Other" (a term defined by the French psychoanalyst, Lacan and related closely to Freud's "Father-figure"). Iow, in terms of languages, that which guarantees meaning of our socio-symbolic systems of signs and significations, or that which guarantees a "correspondence theory of truth", or a comfortable relation between the "Symbolic" and the "Real" to use Lacan's terms....

      So, it seems, between you and Zizek, there's some confusion here about a "godless" world (in terms of a world sans "Big Other") and the essence of Xianity, which, as he and others claim, contains resources that can be reread to repudiate [certain conceptions of] both "God" and "meaning" and re-establish Xians as some sort of atheists - like they were thought of at the beginnings as per the article - if, that is, Xians stand against the (brutal) socio-symbolic/political orderings of the latest Empire, whatever that happens to be right now, as they reportedly stood up to the Roman one....

      IOW, to make your own meaning, first you must destroy all inherited socio-symbolic "meanings", the web of signifiers, historical and personal, you're already trapped in.

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    15. I think it's disagreement, more than confusion. As far as I'm concerned, there never was a "Big Other" that had to die, for us to be without. The whole thing sounds incoherent to me.

      As for meaning, I think there is confusion between us - as to what we are talking about in the first place. If you see "meaning" as some bright, shiny object that is handed to us as a gift from God (or from any other source external to our brain), then we definitely don't have the same conception of it.

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    16. Well, according to Z, the death of the "Big Other" is symbolic, not literal, and refers to the death of a person's comfortable relation with the "Symbolic," which is to say more or less their relation with their society and with their socially-derived identity. Hence "dying with Christ" (a la some of Paul's comments) involves a forsaking of social statuses and personal identity and "freedom in Christ" also invokes the loss of these "worldly" positions (at least in terms of the ritual spaces where these things can be practiced, if not so literally IRL).

      Z likes to quote Paul from Galatians on this...."there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, male or female in Christ Jesus...." ie there is a loss of socio-symbolic standing, and subsequent loss of "meaning?".

      Ya see?

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    17. Well, one that repudiates the existing social order, at least. But your question was "what does it mean to be a real atheist?"

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    18. I was asking what kind of arguments would be persuasive to a real atheist. I don't think this Zizek character is any kind of atheist at all, except insofar as he thinks it is part of being a Marxist, which is his primary ideology. But his view of atheism is a synthesis of Christianity and Marxism, which makes no sense at all, except perhaps to those who have swallowed his incoherent babbling.

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    19. But, otoh, how can a Marxist ideal repudiate social positions? Seems to me that Marist analysis depends strictly on such definitions like, eg "proletariat", '"bourgeois", "capitalist" et al?

      Ie Marxism is a strong form of identity politics.

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    20. You said it yourself, in the passage from Galatians. I honestly don't know what it has to do with 'meaning', but it does reflect a Marxist (or communist) ideal, where there is no social standing - everybody is the same. And in fact, early Christian communities adhered to that same ideal. I think Zizek finds that aspect of Christianity attractive, and he is searching for a way to to blend that into Marx's call for an atheist society. But as I said, it doesn't work for me.

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    21. Well, I don't think you're entirely wrong...

      As far as "meaning" goes, Z is a psychoanalyst as well as philosopher and his point is the meaning-making tools we have are always given to us when we are still infantile and pre critical. From that perspective, as he says at the end of the video, in his analysis, "God" is simply a marker that guarantees the meaningfulness of the socio-symbolic realm. But there's nothing special about a personal "God" in terms of that function. It can be replaced by 'reason", "evolution", or some other sweeping (& impersonal) concept and still "function" the same, ie as that which reassures us that our symbolic tools are adequate.

      His "Big Other" is, then, pretty much the same in many ways as Joe's TS concept. Only more psychological. But Joe defends in his apologetics the same concept that Z tries to deconstruct with his counter-analysis of the Xian story.....

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    22. Joe's TS in nothing other than God (in his own estimation).

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    23. Well, the TS is a signifier itself, so it would be "God". What is the Tsed, the thing the TS points to? For Joe, it is incomprehensible to humans, but somehow akin to "mind", ie that which makes sense of things. The mind, the subject makes sense of things because of his or her connection with, and/or maybe participation in, God. I think that's how it goes...

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    24. "TS and God share identity, we should assume that God is the Transcendental Signified" - Joe

      Joe seems to use the term TS and TSed interchangeably. It's OK, I suppose, to speak about organizing principles as a basis for our thinking about things, but Joe slides from that into a TS as the summary of organizing principles (the top of the hierarchy). Note that this is still a "principle" (a guidline for thinking). Joe commits two serious errors here. First, he designates it as "transcendental" with no logical basis or justification of any kind. Second, he equivocates between a principle and something that is metaphysically not equivalent to a principle at all. He places it at the top of the metaphysical hierarchy. But this transcendent thing at the top of the metaphysical hierarchy could be nothing other than God. Slick move, but there's some serious equivocation going on here.

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    25. That's the TSed, ie the SignifIED. He did it right there.... ;-)

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    26. Maybe I just don't understand what sharing identity means.

      If you read Joe's article on the subject, he says the signifier is a word. But he also calls it a principle. How can a word be a principle? And he calls it the ground of all principles. I can see how the signified would do that, but I don't see how the word could do anything but refer to the thing itself. But maybe that's just my own thick skull not allowing the message to penetrate.

      Regardless of all that, his argument would flunk philosophy 101, I think.

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  4. Well, it's structuralist/post-structuralist linguistics after Saussure, Derrida, et al. The TS isn't a real word, but more like an abstract placeholder in some theories of systems of meaning. "What words refer to" is more like the question there, not the answer.

    For Derrida, the TS has no (transcendental) signified: "there is nothing outside the text", i.e. nothing that is the "ground of meaning", so to speak. Just, kinda like, the "play of signifiers", words just (sort of) always referring to other words, and meaning "always deferred" and incomplete.

    (Something like that. I don't recall all the technicalities ... but Joe was reading a lot of Derrida once upon a time.)

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    1. Hmm. I'm no expert on Derrida, but from what I've gathered, Joe has taken significant liberties with his work.

      First, the word "transcendental". It seems to me that "transcendent" would be more appropriate to describe what he's talking about, as in something that surpasses the ordinary, or is ultimate. But Joe takes it to mean outside the limitations of space and time, as in God is a transcendental being. But Derrida was talking about linguistics and the meaning of communicated words, not about God.

      Then, Derrida says that there would be many TSeds (if they were not mythical), which makes sense when you consider that any given concept should have its own TSed, or ultimate meaning. But Joe says that they are all rolled up into one single TSed.

      So as far as I can tell, Joe basically making up his own understanding of what a TSed is, and it doesn't really match what Derrida says about it, even though he ascribes all this to Derrida. And yes, I understand that Joe rejects Derrida's deconstructionism, but that's not the point I'm making. He interprets Derrida in a way that I don't think Derrida would accept.

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    2. Hehe! Well, even *if* Joe is misreading Derridas stuff in order to de-deconstruct it, I'm not sure that Derrida would find himself in a position to criticize that?

      After all, according to him, "there is nothing outside the text" etc, etc....

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    3. I think the philosopher has a much better understanding of his own philosophical position than Joe could ever hope to have.

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    4. What's funny to me is Derridas entire oeuvre would totally disagree with that! & see it as the (unjustifiable) predominance of speech over writing in Western thought and as a perfect example of the dreaded "metaphysics of presence"!


      (...tho, admittedly, I do read Derrida quite differently than Joe does too!)

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    5. Are you telling me that Joe understands Derrida better than he does? I doubt it.

      As for the metaphysics of presence, I don't buy that. I have studied communications science, and Derrida's philosophy appears totally inconsistent with it. But I realize that I don't have a deep understanding of his philosophical position.

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    6. Yep, & Derrida is not the easiest of philosophers by a long shot.....

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