What it is like to be mistaken

Whenever I hear or read mention of "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?", I always think, "ah yes, that's the work that Cassirer mentions in the beginning of the second part of An Essay on Man, whose addressing JZ Smith said was more or less obligatory because it was notorious/fashionable at the time.".  But in fact that never turns out to be the case (nowadays remembering that I'm wrong has become the second thing I always think), because that to which Cassirer refers was written by a fellow named Johannes von Uexküll, and Cassirer describes his views thusly:

As he points out, it would be a very naïve sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings.  Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms.  Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being.  It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own.  The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species.  The experiences—and therefore the realities—of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another.  In the world of a fly, says Uexküll, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things."

(and of course he doesn't stop there, oh no.  And we are instructed to see Uexküll's books Theoretische Biologie and Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, even though Cassirer basically brings him up in order to start ignoring him two paragraphs later and never stopping.)

Anyway, I think it's the "fly things" bit that's at the heart of my mistaking—that and never having read the Nagel essay.

Comments

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

that to which Cassirer refers

I find it helpful to think of parts of speech—like that noun phrase up there, say—as kittens, and apply the general rule that you should not torture kittens.

[ben wolfson]

I promise not to torture the noun phrase "that to which Cassirer refers", if you tell me how to avoid doing so. Is employing said phrase equivalent to torturing it? If so, does that hold for other phrases as well?

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

When I wrote "that noun phrase up there", I had in mind (implicitly, you see) the NP in its unhorriblymangled state. I imagine it was something like "what Cassirer refers to".

[ben wolfson]

When I quoted "that noun phrase up there", I too implicitly had in mind the NP in its unhorriblymangled state. Now can you get on with telling me how to avoid torturing said NP?

Surely you don't subscribe to the antiquated notion that a horribly mangled NP is a tortured NP. (NPC, sure.)

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

You never quoted "that noun phrase up there".

[ben wolfson]

I was wondering how to go about writing that. (Ought it to have been "'that noun phrase up there'"? That's what I was originally going to write.) When I quoted the following five words: that noun phrase up there.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

In the world of a language pedant, do we find only "language pedant things"?

[ben wolfson]

Now you're just dodging the question. Is it because, despite your intimate familiarity with torturing kittens, you don't actually know what it is to torture a noun phrase?

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

You're right. I am simply incapable of torturing a noun phrase.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Torture:

NP ::= "that" PP "which" NP VP

Whereas not-torture:

NP ::= "what" NP VP PP

[ben wolfson]

This is not proper BNF.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

I have abused notation!

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

My normal form is not rigorously bisjunctive.

[ben wolfson]

Backus-ALGOL Form would be more appropriate anyhow.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Thinking about it some more, what I meant to indicate by "that noun phrase up there" was the phrase's equivalence class under syntactic hocus-pocus—its phraseme—and by "torture", I meant your realization of the phraseme by one of its unlovely members, or allophrases.

[ben wolfson]

"what Cassirer refers to" is just syntactic sugar for "that to which Cassirer refers", and as we all know, syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

[ben wolfson]

NB most of those epigrams I find rather ... wrong, I guess. Perlis was (apparently) a smarty, though.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Yes—some of the epigrams are all pith and no, uh, helmet.

Uexküll is so fantastic a name it hurts.

[dave zacuto]

This is a hydra in the same way that it's a hair split with a scalpel

[Jacob Haller]

The Nagel essay is anthologized in 'The Mind's I', edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, which is a book in which I read all sorts of crazy stuff.

[Matt Weiner]

SB, surely when you wrote "that noun phrase up there" you meant the NP as it exists in LF? (Note: antiquated vocabulary if not concept.)

[Matt Weiner]

Actually "phraseme" is most likely more up-to-dately what I said. Consider me pwned.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Is "phraseme" in current use? I thought I was just making it up, by analogy to other linguistic terms of art. Also, my vast ignorance uncomprehends your use of "LF". "Logical Form", maybe?

[washerdreyer]

This seems like the place to comment: Wolfson, do you have thoughts on the proper ratios of liquors for a "perfect manhattan"?

[Matt Weiner]

LF does mean logical form--I think it's Chomsky's original thang. I really have rather poor linguistics chops--enough to snow first-years from Stanford, but by the third year Ben will be pwning me left and right. (This would be the subject of a post at my blog about philosophical insecurity if I didn't have norty-feven other things to do.)

[Matt Weiner]

Point being, I don't even know what's in current linguistic use. Tried to read Barriers, Chomsky's 1986 book, recently, and could not make head nor tail of it. Quite humbling. Though the part about how "government" is defined in terms of exclusion rather than domination might be nice to throw to the anti-idiotarian crowd.

[ben wolfson]

2oz rye or bourbon, 1/2oz dry vermouth, 1/2oz sweet vermouth. This is based on my understanding of the meaning of "perfect" and proper ratio for an ordinary manhattan.

[brookes]

On Uexkull, see large portions of Agamben's _The Open_, if I remember correctly.

[ben wolfson]

Thanks, I picked it up in the library. Interestingly (based on what of it I've read so far) it seems that, as opposed to Cassirer's interpretation, on Agamben's account (which discusses ticks, hence ticks not flies here) there simply is no world of the tick, let alone tick things; he seems to describe ticks as essentially biological state machines.