Heward Wilkinson – The Cancellation of ‘Reference’

Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/11/2024
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm




What happened to Reference – “I was referring to Napoleon” – at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Is Reference so very exciting that people need to abolish it? Seemingly so!

  1. Drawing on empiricism, Russell ‘On Denoting’ [=referring], 1906, in the context of discussion of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, wrote:
    “The difficulties concerning denoting are, I believe, all the result of a wrong analysis of propositions whose verbal expressions contain denoting phrases.”
    https://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Russell(1905).pdf
    And the resulting theory of descriptions eliminated reference except by logical variables, which leaves reference in a contradictory position, as I shall explain.
    Quine follows him in this:
    https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil375/Quine.pdf ,
    And it seems as if both Nietzsche and Derrida are in the same territory.
  2. Drawing on, and in the context of proto-postmodern discussion of the illusions of being and substance, Nietzsche ‘Twilight of the Idols’, 1888, “I am afraid we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”
    Effectively, both Russell (and Quine), and Nietzsche, draw back from reference because they cannot presuppose actual existence (‘the present king of France’, etc), something I shall explain.
  3. Drawing on, and in the context of deconstructive discussion of signatures, vis a vis J.L. Austin, Derrida, ‘Signature, Event, Context’:
    “We are witnessing…..the increasing expansion of a general writing, of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would be only an effect and to be analysed as such. It is the exposure of this effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism.”
    But is this aligned with the Russell-Nietzsche position?
  4. Meinong, from whom Russell took his point of departure and who is alluded to by Quine, though not named, does not find it necessary to eliminate direct reference at several levels of reflexivity. He recognises that language mediates connection with Objectivity, and that its meaning can be positive, negative, qualitative/relational, and a combination of all these, at several levels. A truth or a falsehood, even ‘the round-square cupola on Berkeley College’, are equally referrable to. It does not need to be unpacked into immediate ‘acquaintance’ to have meaning, as Russell thinks in ‘On Denoting’. The later Wittgenstein grasped that much, but privileged actuality in another way.  Meinong is difficult
    https://www.hist-analytic.com/Meinongobjects.pdf
    and I shall mediate this type of thinking by appeal to the status of fiction, in particular the quasi-reality of Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
    https://www.london-walking-tours.co.uk/secret-london/little-dorrits-church.htm
    Meinong appeals to Husserl and via Husserl we do reach Derrida in the above quotation, and we can understand why he has been so important to literary students, how close he is to both Meinong and Plato, and where at least some of the resistance to his becoming Honorary Professor at Cambridge in 1992 came from!
    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jacques-Derridas-Cambridge-Affair-Institutionality/dp/1786612607
  5. Finally, I shall touch on a strange observation, about the objectivity of colour, of G.E. Moore’s in his Refutation of Idealism, connect this with what Heidegger is up to in his thinking about Being, and ask what is the deeper meaning of the polarisation, straddling all Eurocentric philosophising, which I am exploring.  Relevant material on the meaning of absence and loss for grasping reality, in Freud’s thinking, which has a deep bearing on this, is found here:
    http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/sites/default/files/Freud-Hegel-and-Dialectics2.pdf

 

We meet in The Crown, 102 Lavender Hill, London, SW11 5RD but Heward Wilkinson is not London based and will present his talk on Zoom. For details see  SLPC Zoom Meeting

 

We always welcome new speakers.  If you would like to give a talk on a philosopher or a philosophical topic please contact Adrian Carter at southlondonphilosophy@gmail.com

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