Postmodern Epistemologies

Chicago, Ill—How does style affect our perception of the text, and does style itself impart its own distinct meaning? This December, Modern Language Association (MLA) professors attempted to answer these questions by drawing upon postmodern academics who remain skeptical of absolute knowledge, one of whom belongs to the radical “naturalist” Brights movement. Among the scholars mentioned were Donald Freeman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mark Turner, Daniel Dennett, and Noam Chomsky.

The works of Wittgenstein, who first attempted to develop a science of meaning but later abandoned this in favor of skepticism about knowledge, were mentioned in two of the three presentations. According to a Time biography written by Tufts University Professor Daniel Dennett, Wittgenstein “began by trying to reduce all mathematics to logic and ended by finding most metaphysics to be nonsense.” “Wittigenstein set out in particular to subvert the seductive theories about mind and consciousness that philosophers since Descartes had puzzled and battled over,” wrote Dennett.

Professor Robert Chodat of Boston University quoted some of Dennett’s works as an alternative to what he sees as Stanley Fish’s insistence that “all utterances are understood by way of relying on shared background information.” “For both cognitivists and Fish, who draw these very important differences between them, how they use the term information again suggests how features of the text are no more avoidable than the force of gravity,” he said.

Instead, Chodat referred the audience to the works of radical atheist and Brights Movement member Dennett, who is listed on the site as one of the movement’s “enthusiastic brights.” “What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to supernaturalist world view. We brights don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny—or God,” wrote Dennett in a 2003 column for the Bright website. “Our colleges and universities teem with brights. Among scientists we are a commanding majority… Many of the nation’s clergy members are closet brights, I suspect,” wrote Dennett.

Like other professors, Professor Hilary Edwards of Florida Atlantic University celebrated the complexities and “deliberate, unresolvable, ambiguities” within famous writings. Referring to Walter Pater’s The Child in the House, Edwards said that some of Pater’s sentences, replete with complex clauses, “bend back on themselves in infinite regress…are complicated in a way that you cannot get to the bottom of them.” “But that is exactly [Pater’s] point,” she said.

“The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them, like rain; while time seemed to move slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons,” writes Pater in The Child in the House. He later continues, “How indelibly, as we afterward discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax of our ingenuous souls, as ‘lith lead in the rock forever,’ giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise.”

“The title of this panel asks about the relationship between style and knowing, and if Pater’s style gives us knowledge about anything, it would seem to be knowledge about Pater himself, specifically from the…unique way of seeing things,” said Edwards.

Adding to this complex deconstruction of meaning (or lack thereof), Professor Chodat discussed Case Western Reserve Professor Mark Turner’s theories on how humans integrate conceptual metaphors within our discourse, a process by which humans project “a source domain onto a target domain.”

For Turner, phrases such as “Next week was an eternity away,” “It’ll go by faster if you stop thinking about it,” and “I didn’t see those years go by” show that humans “have not merely projected units of measurement onto time, but also turned those units into moving objects.” “In the domain of space, a unit of measurement is not a moving object. These are incompatible sorts of elements. But in the blend, we project onto a temporal experience both unit of measurement and moving object from the domain of space,” Turner and Gilles Fauconnier write in their article, “Rethinking Metaphor” (emphasis original). “From this perspective, metaphor is not a strange feature of our language, but pervasive in our everyday discourse, as, for example, when we describe arguments as warfare,” said Professor Chodat.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.