The Institutions of Meaning: A Defense of Anthropological Holism

393 Pages·2014·2.26 MB·English

by  Vincent Descombes

the institutions
of me a ning

t h e i ns t i t u t ions
of m e a n i ng
A Defense of Anthropological Holism
Vincent Descombes
Translated by
Stephen Adam Schwartz
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2014
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Les institutions du sens, copyright © 1996 Les Éditions de Minuit
www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978-0-674-72878-3 (alk. paper)
Contents
Preface to the English Translation ............................ xi
part i
Intentionalist Conceptions of Mind
1. The Intentionality of the Mental ..........................3
1.1.— The distinctive quality of psychological descriptions is to be expressed in 3
intentional language. Any language that has a logic analogous to that of verbs
of declaration is an intentional language.
1.2.— The psychological description of a person is as much the description of his 7
environment as of his states. Thus, Achilles’s anger is only comprehensible
when set in Achilles’s world.
1.3.— How are we to explain this intentional character of a mode of description? 9
There are two possibilities: by means of a thesis regarding the transitive struc-
ture of consciousness (Brentano) or through an anthropological holism of the
mental (Wittgenstein).
1.4.— The Scholastic conception of intentionality holds that the intention of a 12
term is comparable to the direction of an arrow that a bowman sends toward
the object aimed at. This image illustrates the fact that there are two possible
relations between the thinking subject and the object of thought: an inten-
tional relation (aiming at it) and a real relation (physically touching it).
1.5.— Wittgenstein evokes the distinction between these two relations to an 20
object in an aphorism regarding the thief that can be looked for when he is
not present, but who can be hanged only if he is present.
vi contents
1.6.— “All consciousness is consciousness of something”: Brentano’s now- classic 23
formulation seems to assimilate verbs of consciousness to the transitivity of
action verbs.
1.7.— The transitivity of an intentional verb is paradoxical since such verbs must 26
necessarily take a direct object, even if there is nothing in the world that is
the object of the intentional act signified by the verb.
1.8.— If intentional verbs were really transitive, they would have an intentional 32
passive form that would describe a real change in the object they aim at.
1.9.— Several French philosophers have sought to give substance to the idea of a 36
real history of the intentional object by, for example, taking up Kojève’s claim
that the word is “the murder of the thing” (Lacan) or by developing a form of
social constructivism (Foucault). These theories rest on an illegitimate assimi-
lation of intentional relations to real relations.
2. The Paradox of the Intentional Object .....................47
2.1.— What Husserl calls “the paradox of the intentional object” is the fact that 47
the perceived tree, taken as such, unlike the tree itself, does not have the nat-
ural powers of a physical thing (it can be seen to be burning up, but it cannot
burn up). How is this doubling of the tree— into both an object of physical
actions and an object of mental operations— to be avoided?
2.2.— According to Husserl, the only tree that can be seen in the garden is the 55
intentional object.
2.3.— Intentional objects are not entities endowed with a specific mode of exis- 59
tence. It is meaningful to ask “Where is the tree perceived?” but meaningless
to ask “Where is the perceived tree?”
3. A Holistic Conception of Intentionality ....................65
3.1.— The question of the intentional passive is about knowing the conditions in 65
which an active intentional form (“Romeo loves Juliet”) can be changed into
an intentional passive form (“Juliet is loved by Romeo”).
3.2.— Intentional logic examines the function of intentional operators such as “It 66
is said that . . .” or “It is believed by N that . . .” It shows that the intentional
relation of the mental act to the object (when the object exists) necessarily
depends on a real relation.
3.3.— “To look for” forms a system with “to find” (Wittgenstein). The verb “to 77
look for” is always intentional, while the verb “to find” assumes that the
intentional object sought coincides with the real object. Indeed, one cannot
find what one is looking for under a certain description without at once
finding the object under all of the descriptions applicable to it, including
those that did not form part of the definition of the object sought.
3.4.— Mental holism, which allows us to solve the Husserlian paradox of the 86
intentional object, is not simply a rejection of psychical atomism. It is a
holism that can be called “anthropological” in order to stress that it places the
mind within the context of collective habits and common institutions.
contents vii
part ii
The Anthropological Holism of the Mental
4. The Question of Holism ................................95
4.1.— The question of mental holism is first raised regarding signs and subse- 95
quently about the mind manifested by those signs. Can there be an isolated
sign? That is impossible, according to the holistic conception of meaning.
4.2.— Meaning holism appears incompatible with the fact of communication: 98
how could one understand someone’s speech if his words were only intelli-
gible when resituated within the whole of his language?
4.3.— Pierre Duhem maintained that the theories put forward by the experi- 103
mental sciences were global in character. In the case of a conflict with
experience, the entire construction is rejected and not an isolated hypothesis.
4.4.— Semantic holism does not bear on the confirmation of theories, but on the 109
way in which units of meaning are to be defined. Quine maintains that the
unit of meaning is not the sentence, but the whole set of sentences that con-
stitute the discourse of a theory. For him, this discourse is a collective whole
made up of sentences.
4.5.— Collectivist holism consists in conceiving the whole as a collection of indi- 113
viduals that together possess collective attributes.
4.6.— Structural holism consists in conceiving the whole as a system of parts that 115
depend upon one another in virtue of the relations that define them.
5. The Illusion of Collective Individuals .....................123
5.1.— A collective whole cannot be defined both as a collective being consisting 124
of a plurality of individuals and as a higher- order individual.
5.2.— A proposition is collective if it has a collective subject. Nevertheless, a col- 129
lective subject is not the name of a collective individual but a logical
construction that allows the predicate to be related to several individuals by
saying that together they are doing something or have a certain status.
5.3.— Methodological individualism is right to hold that collective individuals 136
are fictions. However, concrete totalities are precisely not made up of individ-
uals that are independent from one another, but of interdependent parts.
5.4.— Logical atomism cannot account for real complexity. 143
5.5.— Nominalist analysis cannot account for the diachronic identity of complex 149
beings.
6. The Order of Meaning ................................ 155

6.1.— There are three philosophies of structural analysis: structural holism seeks 156
to understand the interdependence of the parts of a whole; formalism seeks
purely formal characteristics that remain invariant between one domain and
viii contents
another; structural causalism seeks to reveal the action of the form of a pro-
ductive process upon the product.
6.2.— A description of a whole made up of parts is not a description of several 160
individuals through the attributes they collectively possess; it is a description
of a thing as it presents itself in one or another of its parts.
6.3.— The material description of a meaningful totality is not sufficient to iden- 166
tify it. One must also describe the order that the elements must have for the
whole to be meaningful. Formal description provides this order of meaning.
6.4.— A holistic analysis distinguishes two levels. At the higher level, the whole is 176
identified in relation to other totalities. At the lower level, it is described in its
internal differentiation into parts. At no point does a holistic analysis end up
with individual elements.
7. The Logic of Relations ................................186
7.1.— What are called internal relations are relations that enter into the reality of 186
their terms. William James carried out a pluralist critique of the monistic idea
of a universe organized entirely by internal relations: individuals must exist
before they can have relations.
7.2.— Russell criticizes the monistic doctrine that the relation between two 189
objects expresses the intrinsic reality of those objects and characterizes the
whole of which those objects are the parts. He sets against this doctrine the
fact that a change in the relation is not necessarily an intrinsic change.
7.3.— An intrinsic change is a change in the thing; an extrinsic change is a 196
change in the environment exterior to the thing.
7.4.— The monism of internal relations and the pluralism of external relations do 198
not distinguish between essences and accidents. This is why their discussion
is general: either all relations are internal or none is. However, the distinction
between internal and external must be relative to a description.
7.5.— Leibniz did not seek to eliminate relational propositions (as Russell 202
believes), but to analyze them in their logical complexity.
8. The Subject of Triadic Relations .........................211
8.1.— What Peirce calls a real relation is a relation whose description is irreducible 211
to the conjunction of several propositions asserting facts that are independent
from one another. When the description of a relation can be analyzed as such
a conjunction, it is a relation of reason.
8.2.— Peirce does not merely note the irreducibility of relations to qualities, but 219
he shows that within the very category of relations, triadic relations
(grounded in intentional actions) are irreducible to dyadic relations
(grounded on natural actions).
8.3.— Like Hegelian philosophers, Peirce criticizes the way in which logic is tra- 226
ditionally expounded. But the reform he advocates is both analytic and
holistic and not dialectical.
contents ix
9. Essays on the Gift ....................................238
9.1.— The act of giving something to someone is an irreducibly triadic fact: 238
the three terms of the relation are linked to one another in virtue of a rule.
The description of the gift cannot separate the link between the people and
the thing given from the link between the people who are the giver and the
recipient.
9.2.— Mauss, in his study of the obligatory exchange of gifts, aims to describe 246
institutions as a system. Lévi- Strauss believes that such a description is insuf-
ficient and that ideological facts can only be explained by facts that are
intellectual without being intentional.
9.3.— The structures of the mind cannot be conceived as the mechanisms of psy- 259
chical functioning. They are schemata for the production of a meaningful
order of human affairs. The anthropologist must account not only for the way
in which individuals establish relations of equality among themselves by
means of schemata of reciprocity but also for the way they establish relations
of order among different statuses.
10. Objective Mind ......................................270
10.1.— The philosophies of language that want to stay within the speech acts of 271
speakers run up against the problem of determining an impersonal meaning
of discourse. If there is no impersonal meaning of words, communication
would be nothing but perpetual misunderstanding.
10.2.— Phenomenologists accept the idea of an impersonal mind in the sense of 284
objectified mind, as when an author’s thought can be contained in an object
(his text). However, in order to account for communication, more is required:
impersonal meanings must precede and provide the measure for personal
meanings.
10.3.— Institutions constitute an objective mind because they rest on ideas. These 295
ideas are common, not because they are in fact shared by a great many indi-
viduals, but because they are authoritative.
10.4.— The subject of the institutions of social life is not the individual but the 303
system formed by the partners in a triadic relation and their common object.
11. Distinguishing Thoughts ..............................314
11.1.— The fact of having the same thought as someone else would be similar to 314
the fact of having the same car if thoughts could be individuated in the same
way that we individuate cars. This is not the case: thoughts are identified con-
textually, by their content.
11.2.— One could call a reflexive personal thought a thought by which the 323
thinking subject conceives of itself according to a description. To compare
the reflexive personal thoughts of two subjects is to bring out an intersubjec-
tive identity or difference.
11.3.— A social thought is a personal thought by which two (or more) subjects 329
conceive of themselves as the members of a system founded on their relation.