Thoughts and Musings

This blog collects my final thoughts and musings on the thinkers, concepts, and ideas presented in my Context, Style, and Audience course.

[profeminist]

[micdotcom]

Watch: In another clip, Sanders explains the real reason he got into politics.

[wilwheaton]

“What’s scary about Trump is you have a lot of people out there who feel certain ways and then you see somebody who’s running for president say these things. ‘Oh, Trump said that? I can say that! I can beat up the Muslim in my community. I can be a racist on a college campus.”

And it’s not just Trump. It’s all of them who are running for the Republican nomination. Trump just says it plainly and loudly and doesn’t use the coded language that the rest of them use.

[sadprincegirl]

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

The Relationship Between Language and Truth: Locke, Nietzsche, and Derrida

When I first started this course, I had to readjust my perceptions of what the discussion of rhetoric would be about somewhat. Part of the reason for the need to readjust was that I hadn’t ever really been presented with the discussion surrounding the relationship between language and truth that is deeply rooted in the history of rhetoric.

The Relationship Between Language and Truth

Now, there are a ton of thinkers that you could use to discuss the relationship between language and truth; however, for me personally, I was drawn to John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on their relationship. I’ll try to briefly sum up each of their points, before getting to my thoughts; however, I encourage you to read more about what they have to say on this subject beyond this post.

Locke

In a previous post, I discussed Locke’s (and Nietzsche’s) views on the manmade and arbitrary nature of language. However, I only briefly mentioned that both thinkers were discussing those views in the larger context of the language/truth relationship.

For Locke, unlike the two thinkers below, he believed that there was such a thing as truth:

Secondly, By the philosophical use of words, I mean such a use of them as may serve to convey the precise notions of things, and to express in general propositions certain and undoubted truths, which the mind may rest upon and be satisfied with in its search after true knowledge.

In other words, for Locke there are certain truths, especially if those truths exist in the natural world, that humans can come to find and understand. Further, once they understand them, they can use them as standards with which to measure whether something else is true or not.

Unfortunately, Locke also believed that because of language’s manmade and arbitrary nature, it obscured that true from humans:

...it is easy to perceive what imperfections there is in language, and how the very nature of words makes it almost unavoidable for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their signification.

In order to clear away the cloudiness of language, humans should throwaway “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented,” so that they can arrive at the truth they seek. In other words, if humans can be as clear as possible with their words, then they can understand each other, and both arrive at the same truth.

Nietzsche

Unlike Locke, Nietzsche believed that there is no truth that humans can actually understand, only the metaphor for a truth:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are not considered as metal and no longer as coins.

In short then, since Nietzsche also believes the language is manmade, that means that truth is also what humans make of it through their use of metaphor.

Derrida

Ah, Derrida. If it were not for my professor and the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age, I might never have come to the (still very limited) understanding of his views on the relationship between language and truth.

According to the Encyclopedia, like Nietzsche, Derrida doesn’t believe in the idea that there are “undoubted truths” (to use Locke’s words) that humans can come to understand:

Derrida attacks the presupposition that language--and, consequently, meaning--possesses a metaphysical presence, essence, or center that provides a stable structure or foundation on which we can confidently construct our judgements and beliefs about the world.

For Derrida, then, the relationship between language and truth is an unstable one, and one that rests on the shoulders of hierarchies that dictate what is true and what is not through the a structure of privilege:

For Derrida, the Western philosophical tradition has been dominated by the search for a metaphysical order that possesses at its center an enduring structure of reason, meaning, or essential truth....As Derrida points out, philosophers in the Western philosophical tradition have privileged good before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, and the imitated before the imitation. These hierarchies, in turn, establish a binary relation based on negation.

In essence, what Derrida was saying throughout his many works is that not only do “undoubted truths” not exist, but that through the use of language, humans come to place the truths they do construct into hierarchies that privilege one side of a binary, whatever that binary might be.

He also went on to put form the method of deconstruction which was centered around, you guessed it, the deconstruction of the hierarchical binaries that humans construct so that those constructs can be made known:

In its rhetorical dimension, deconstruction stresses the indeterminacy of textual meaning through an analysis of the oppositional hierarchies that provide the text with its aura of stability and closure....To deconstruct a text therefore means to dismantle the oppositions and hierarchies that give a text its aura of stability in order to make known that which the text conceals. Such a move allows the deconstructionist to reinscribe the text within a different order or meaning.

Thoughts and Musings

Part of the reason why I chose to use these three thinkers for this post is that I am drawn to aspects of each of their points on the relationship between language and truth.

On the one hand, I do somewhat believe (as Locke believed) that there are some truths that exist outside of humans that they can come to understand. Such as, for example, that there is no denying the truth that the sun exists and it’s in space.

However, like Nietzsche and Derrida, I also believe that there are some “truths” that only exist because humans say that exist. Particularly when it comes to “truths” related to the hierarchical binaries that Derrida would like us all to deconstruct.

In fact, now that I am thinking about it, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that much of the current political fighting over almost any of the top hot button issues probably has at its root a hierarchical binary that is being concealed because we don’t even recognize it as such anymore. It would be interesting to apply Derrida’s method of deconstruction to some of the language surrounding these debates to see what binaries or meanings might arise.

But alas, I think that might need to be saved for another post, seeing as this one seems to have gotten just a bit long. Until next time.

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are not considered as metal and no longer as coins.

Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

It is this way with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers: and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.

Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus.

Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation. But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as 'truth' from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real.

Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

The study of arranging and expressing our thoughts with propriety, teaches to think, as well as to speak, accurately.

Hugh Blair (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

What we call human reason, is not the effort or ability of one, so much as it is the result of the reason of many, arising from lights mutually communicated, in consequence of discourse and writing.

Hugh Blair (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

A correct judgment deems that men--who are, for the most part, but fools--are ruled, not by forethought, but by whim or chance. The doctrines judge human actions as they ought to be, not as they actually are (i.e. performed more or less at random). Satisfied with abstract truth along, and not being gifted with common sense, unused to following probability, those doctrinaires do not bother to find out whether their opinion is held by the generality and whether the things that are truths to them are also such to other people.

Giambattista Vico (On the Study Methods of Our Time)

[tabithaakinsfinalproject]

No doubt all that man is given to know is, like man himself, limited and imperfect.

Giambattista Vico (On the Study Methods of Our Time)

[participled]

for real though, internet english is STAGGERINGLY multi-modal. the problem with communicating via writing is that you lose certain dimensions of spoken conversation, like intonation, facial expression, body language, pauses and fillers etc, but there’s been so many linguistic innovations to maintain richness in communication, like

emojis/emoticons

use of capslock and purposefully creating/not fixing typos to convey excitement, or likewise not capitalizing anything

use of punctuation (or lack thereof) to indicate /emphasis/ or ~irony~ or apathy

reaction images and memes

use of familiar songs in tumblr text posts or vines etc

variational spellings like you/u or true/tru

bolding, italics, strikethrough, font size, line breaks, etc

(using parentheses to whisper)

tags as commentary, also the body of commonly used/commonly mocked hashtags

like i could go ON and ON about the things that internet language users have created to get around the difficulties of non-verbal communication, like ??? what other dialects can do all that and change that much in 30 years????

[my-singing-soul]

why is it that all the most popular posts on tumblr

are written like this

with no capitals

and no punctuation

i just really want there to be a popular and grammatically correct post on tumblr

[lyallsmistake]

I think the majority of Tumblr’s dialect (is there a word for a written dialect? Hardly anyone speaks Tumblr.) comes from influence within the tag system.

My theory is that the lack of capitalization is stylized, ironic laziness (same reason as the increasingly popular use of abbreviations such as idek and ikr, and particles like desu), whereas the punctuation stems from the tag system, where commas split up tags. So, “this is like, so totally cool” would be tagged “this is like” “so totally cool.”

With commas struck from the tumblr blogger’s arsenal, they rely on run-on sentences and other means to show emphasis. One such means, spacing, is another quirk influenced by the tags. If you repeat a tag, it will only show once, which is why you get “really r e a l l y weird things like this.”

Also common on Tumblr are people who show their enthusiasm through their text by pretending their haNDS ARE FRKEAKIGN OUT AN D THEY CANT TPYE OMFGGGG. This adaptation is actually pretty cool, I think, as it serves to communicate tone across a very toneless medium.

[linguafandom]

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don’t need to explain further, and you should know about this because it’s a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing’”). It conveys brevity (Carey: “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone” “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone”).

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes — and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.

[cubstearns-blog]

Reblogging. Because linguistics.