'Varieties of Meaning' by Prof. Franson Manjali

Meaning, one of the most ubiquitous phenomena of our quotidian life, is also perhaps the most difficult to figure. The varieties of meaning, or the attempts to understand meaning are as ‘mindboggling’ as the approaches to figure mind. Mind and meaning, which depend on and elude each other, can only be figured, but never conclusively. A short survey of the figures of meaning, from different traditions and schools is attempted here. These include the philosophical, semiotic and cognitive approaches, such the sign, embodied meaning, interpretation, sense (in many senses), reference, metaphor, trace, différance, sphota, apoha, rasa, jouissance, etc.

* Meaning in / of Life: the location of meaning?
* ‘Meaning of Meaning’: The ‘semiotic triangle’
* Sense and Reference. (Sinn und bedeutung): Truth and Meaning.
* Meaning for behavioural (structural) linguistics:

L. Bloomfield (Language, 1923) : The situations which prompt people to utter speech include every object and happening in the universe. In order to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of a language, we should have a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker’s world. The actual extent of human knowledge is very small compared to this.

"the statement of meaning is, therefore, the weak point of linguistic study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances far beyond its present state."

* C. S. Peirce and Semiotics: Icon, Index and Symbol.
* Saussure, Semiology and signification:
* Phenomenology: knowledge as meaning, and intention.
* Hermeneutics: Meaning of being; ontico-ontological difference.
* Linguistic relativism of Sapir and Whorf.
* Indian Theories of Meaning: Sphota and Apoha; Rasa and Artha
* Structuralism and the humanities: Jouissance
* Lacanian psychoanalysis:
* Speech acts: performative.
* Post-structuralism.
* Derrida: Writing, trace, and difference
* Levinas: Sense and Trace.
* Writing and Sense: Jean-Luc Nancy.
* Morphogenesis of Meaning.
* Formal Semantics: Narrow and Broad Content.
* Body, Mind and Meaning: Metaphor and the Metaphor of Language; ‘Accusative’ model of language.
* Neuroplasticity and Metamorphosis.

'Defining Science, Relation between Science and Language, and the Indian Rational Tradition' by Prof. Sundar Sarukkai

What is science? Why is it so difficult to define? Why is it such a matter of contention? We may define science as objective inquiry, as empirical, as experimental, as observational, as rational, as determining cause and effect, as demanding verifiability, as prediction, as hypothetical-reductivist. Problems arise (1) because each science within the sciences privilege one over the other - astronomy privileges observation while chemistry privileges the experimental and (2) when we try to fit these terms to areas of study ... from cooking to astronomy or from mathematics to social sciences. Scientists themselves define science differently; at times as that which is ahistorical, apolitical and acultural (as against the human sciences which have all the above attributes). Most often, science has been defined not by what it is but by what it is not. It's definition is in that sense exclusionist, not only of those areas of study that it cannot legitimize, such as metaphysics but it is also exclusionary within itself. There has traditionally been a hierarchy within the sciences. Mathematics reigns at the top as the science that is necessary to all other sciences. Then comes physics, then chemistry and lastly biology.

Prof. Sarukkai then starts to clearly state the foundations of the Institution of science. First of all, it is about membership and about associations such members form. Science is defined as what scientists do; science is what scientists say it is. This understanding does not allow for engagement with science by the perceived outsider. Also it is about title-giving. The title is an acknowledgement of authorship and of the authority it bestows upon one; it confers the identity of being an expert in science. Thus, the institution of science protects its own terrain - in terms of both state support and funding.

We next come to the the relationship between science and language. Ultimately science is about description and making that description as accurate as possible; it is about presenting the real as real. Language is the tool science requires to carry out its task but herein lies a problem. Language is imprecise and ambiguous. Worse, it is used by ordinary people to describe the world ordinarily scientists describe it must be scientific and pure (pure in the sense that it must approximate the real as closely as possible); it must be better than 'natural language'. Better still, it must be mathematical. Galileo recognised this relationship between science and language. He recognised the necessity of description in measurable quantities and terms of primary qualities, and in mathematical terms. He felt that mathematics is the language of Nature as it eerily allows the scientist a precise linguistic method to describe the world. Nonetheless language, although metaphorical, even verbose and perhaps unreal itself can also describe reality. However to describe the real, you need to transcend it. You need to engage with the imaginary. And it is mathematics that allows you to do that.

At this point we make some qualifications. Who decides if you are doing science? Why did Europe and modern science decide that India had no logic, no rationality and thus no science? Indian science, that predates Western science, in all its branches (except Charvaka) is based on logic; it has a system of inferences. There is an argument that because modern science has come from Europe, only a European tradition of philosophy should be used to evaluate it - hence the 'philosophy' component of philosophy of science would need to be western; here Prof. Sarukkai would say that Indian philosophy could also be used to evaluate science - only the terms of evaluation would be different. All the more because while modern, western science struggles with the problem and the divide of the empirical and the theoretical, Indian Science (and philosophy) travels somewhat with ease from the empirical to the theoretical. This is because the separation of the empirical and the theoretical is according to Prof. Sarrukkai a Greek problem, not an Indian one. Critiques of Indian science ask then why was the origin of Modern Science not in India. Prof. Sarukkai answers that the rational tradition of Indian thought did not create modern science (the way it got created in the west post-Galileo) because it did not need to modify language and mathematics to understand the real the way the West needed to.

Session 10: October 12th, 2009

This session was so interesting because we all travelled back to the origins of the problem. The questions move backward but the initiative moves forward...

I invite responses from everyone who can think of possibilities and alternatives for the problems posed here.

What is a concept? What is a category? How do we distinguish between the two? For instance, is money a category or a concept?

Is it that Human Sciences deal with concepts while Natural Sciences deal with categories?

Can the nature of engagement with a concept or category be represented as the subjectivity and objectivity polemic?

What is the primary distinction between the Human Sciences and Natural Sciences?

Causal explanations seem to be central to the Natural Sciences. Is it that Natural Sciences are about strict causal relationships while Human Sciences require only loose causal relationships?

Why do we assume that the human sciences cannot be explanatory? Or Natural Sciences cannot be introspective?

Why are we trying to integrate the Human Sciences and the Natural Sciences? What really is the necessity for this definition and delineation?

Why do we not try to integrate the different schools of Indian Philosophy? Why are we dealing with these Western Sciences?

If Natural Sciences concern themselves with explanation and Human Sciences concern themselves with interpretation, would integration bring intervention? Knowing and Being are not sufficient without doing. Should not that be our aim?

Is the ought question a part of both Sciences? Or is it a separate space?

Session 9: October 7th, 2009

Course 903 is an excellent melting pot for ideas. The questions that crop up during class discussions ferment and produce aromas that draws the Integrated Science Education Initiative forward. These questions are crucial and if these can be definitely answered, I think we can all sit down to a banquet of results.

I invite responses from everyone who can think of possibilities and alternatives for the problems posed here.

Integration is risky. Descartes' contribution to Western Science produced in time a disciplinary regime. The Episteme-Techne-Phronesis model we are discussing now can produce instead a thematic regime. But can it avoid disciplinary sedimentation itself?

Can a thematic regime avoid being trapped in the problem of the sponsor's hegemony in deciding which theme merits study?

How do we determine what is a theme? Empirically anything can be a theme. So how do we distinguish between a thing and a theme?

Once determined, what will be the mode of addressing the theme?

Would studying an integrated theme require one person to study all the different disciplinary specializations?

Can we actually bring matters of the material world to the dimension of phronesis? For example in astrophysics, we are studying the star and it is the sole concern. How then to bring that area of study to the human sciences?

Week 3: Revisiting Plato and the Question of Paradigm

One of the important themes discussed at the beginning of the third session was Plato’s allegory of the cave in ‘Book VII’ of The Republic. The major concern was to revisit and clarify the classical questions regarding knowledge production. Our course instructor suggested that the allegorical character of our existence in the world, as Plato describes in the case of prisoners in the cave, predetermines an inevitable method to arrive at the truth beyond the realm of ordinary things. This journey, in Plato’s conceptual architecture, is again quite allegorical to the prisoner who happens to go out of the cave and experience the reality for himself. However, the prisoner is fatally bound to get back and live in the prison among others, and there arises the problem. He may not be able to convince others of his experience and exposure to truth. One of the possible interpretations of the passage is: this was an allusion to Socrates’ death. His fellow citizens who sentenced him were exactly like the prisoners who refused to believe the experience of the enlightened one.

Beyond the manifest nature of things and visible effects of natural processes, the path towards the ultimate knowledge for Plato is the path, allegorically speaking, that leads to the reality outside the cave. Whether it is a profound meditation on justice or any attempt to understand the deeper secrets of things in nature in the creation a technological artefact, one has to necessarily follow the same path. [However, while interpreting the allegory of Cave our instructor made many a contextual references to alternative readings of Plato including the feminist inversions.] The major conclusion of the discussion was that in the Platonic scheme of thinking there is hardly any possibility of separating sciences. A paradigmatic exposition of Plato’s allegory therefore shows one of the possible models of an integrated view on knowledge.
Another major text discussed was an autobiographical interview of Thomas Kuhn in The road since structured philosophical essays, 1970-1993 eds Kuhn,Thomas;Conal,James; Hangeland,John. Chapter ten of the same book was also discussed. Kuhn makes his reservations on the possibility of drawing a line between natural sciences and human sciences while responding to Charles Taylor’s paper entitled ‘Interpretation and Sciences of Man’ in Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

The discussion singled out one of the common grounds to which both Taylor and Kuhn agree. It is the possibility of sharing a concept between individuals without at the same time sharing any belief. This point was further clarified by invoking the classical relationship between knowledge and justified belief. Kuhn maintains that it is impossible to identify a tenable principle that bars human sciences from engaging in puzzle solving research like natural sciences. It also equally applies to natural sciences that “no lasting base for normal puzzle solving science need be available to those who investigate them; hermeneutic reinterpretation may constantly be required”.

Our discussion concluded that the line between the sciences is there in some areas with some modest variations in their contours.

This was however only an introduction to the Khunian idea of paradigm. The major exercise in the session thereafter was to arrive at a conceivable definition of paradigm. Our instructor led us to discover the two meanings of paradigm in Kuhn’s work. First one implies the ideas, methods and techniques collectively shared by scientists. These are fundamental to the constitution of a normal science which decides as to whether a particular case in question can be considered scientific or not. The second meaning of course is paradigm as an example, which stands for the general disciplinary matrix.

Week 2: A Philosophical Response to the Two Cultures

At the outset of the second session our course instructor pointed out a couple of important pedagogic principles concerning the nature of one’s engagement with philosophical works. The emphasis was essentially on methods of developing an argument with respect to a concrete case in question. He cautioned us against the importance of arriving at a theoretical position as a result of a tenable heuristic exercise in an a posteriori manner, rather than get swayed by a priori assumptions.

Thereafter the discussion briefly dealt with relativist’s critiques of truth and the question of reflexivity. Apart from a brief elucidation of the concepts, he suggested, as a way out, that what is seminal to the making of any coherent method of identifying truth is to identifying the ‘truth of the relative’. This was a clear allusion to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. And, thus this discussion set up the background for discussing the readings.

The discussion thereafter was on select excerpts from C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures. One of the important points Snow makes is that it is the respective pedagogic practises of both natural sciences and social sciences that bring about the two cultures. Natural scientists and Social scientists get therefore deeply rooted in this culture of relative ignorance of each other. This imposes an already implied limitation on the possibility of integration. The broader approximation we arrived at was that it is important to address the cultural implications of the existing practices of the sciences and to re-examine the role of the ‘pedagogic conveyer’.
Against the background of this material a serious concern was raised regarding the possibility of a unified culture. In response to this question our instructor spoke about the importance of redefining the existing disciplinary relations as well as the importance of rephrasing some of the long standing questions that guide present modes of inquiries.