Aswad
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
I gave the citation earlier when I first mentioned the experiment.
My mistake. I thought you had a modern medical source in mind to back up Focault's assertions; he doesn't provide a source for them, and indeed the distinctions that I wondered about hadn't been made at the time when The Order of Things was first published.
quote:
It's taken from the Introduction to "The Order of Things" by Foucault. The entire work is well worth reading, though it was one of the denser works I have attempted. 
The preface was unimpressve, but I'll assume it gets better, also that his point of departure was merely a starting point, and that he was projecting obscurity onto something reasonable to illustrate what the seed of his inquiry was, rather than actually making a point. There's nothing arcane about the process of refactoring the fabric of thought toward minimal entropy and maximum accuracy. For that matter, to me, the prevailing systems of classification around me have always been as unnatural as the example he gives, and as nonsensical since my late teens when I first refactored the structure of both my own thoughts and all absorbed symbols into a new fabric, accomplished by leaving behind the necessity of tying that fabric to language ("transcended language", if you will).
I'll entertain the notion that language may be necessary to bootstrap the process, but I seriously doubt it is true, extrapolating from the process involved in inventing a new field of discourse and historical antecedents where fields have been synthesized without a proper precursor external to the the synthesist (e.g. Archimedes did this). Discrete thinking is necessary, on which is built symbolic thinking, that I'm inclined to posit as necessary, on which is built language, which I will entertain as a prerequisite, as I said, with the caveat that this is not the same as accepting it as a prerequisite, which I don't.
No, scratch that, I reject the prerequisite of language, as there are demonstrably instances where new fields of discourse have been developed without the presence of an external speaker with adequate cognition and familiarity with the antecedents to serve as a partner for discourse that could in any way be instrumental to the process. It is entirely conceivable to start without language and, with sufficient cognition, construct in sequence the layers of complexity that are required to become able to synthesize a field of discourse without there being anyone to discourse with, or indeed any outside participants to the process.
It's certainly not normative, though; I'll grant you that.
Incidentally, the process of refactoring toward minimal entropy and maximum accuracy can, if you're able to treat your own thougts and thought patters as first order elements, be abstracted in such a way as to permit the inference of one or more singularities- arguably a divine notion- with very limited effort. The greater effort is in further abstracting this to permit inference of the ultimate singularity, whereupon one might, given a certain inclination, have exclaimed something akin to the quoted biblical passage, with it being understood by anyone that has, as have I, undertaken that process, to be an evocative statement, not a declarative or explicative one, that expresses the experience of attaining unto such a singularity, a thing of unsurpassed beauty for any (wo)man to behold or touch, even if only in the mind. A thing so beautiful that it simply must exist, as a cause unto itself, if only by virtue of it being that it be, if you'll pardon the biblical imagery.
Whew, for a moment there I was worried I might wax lyrical on this.
And, again incidentally, I had a first order element, a concept, that correlates perfectly with entropy, perhaps even being coincident with it and conceivably having identity with it, long before I encountered the word, or even the concept itself, in any external source. It has been part of how I have been able to converge on minimum entropy arrangements of ideas in the absence of external guidance; and, of rather direct bearing on this discussion, it is for me direct, tangible evidence of higher order conceps without any verbal antecedent, or indeed a linguistic antecedent, except in the more abstract sense of "discrete thought", which I submit it's a failure of classification to be able to even conceive of as being language or indeed even in the same domain as language.
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Foucault describes an experiment where aphasiacs were required to sort coloured balls of wool by colour in much the same way as you have outlined. They were completely unable to perform this task.
No, he doesn't provide adequate information to decide this. For instance, he fails to state how the task was described to the participants in the experiment, which opens the door to any number of confounding factors in analyzing the results. In addition, if we are to take the set of initially listed groupings as having actually occured, then we may infer that they correctly classify the colors in the same categories as do humans whose native language is one with stage 2 color words. That they produce piles sorted according to other criterion might well be a matter of not having been given adequate instruction as to how to sort the wool, so that they are trying to decide on the optimal set of classifications across multiple variables, which is an inherently undecidable task for most, if not all, humans- language or not.
The only thing he's entirely clear on, is that they are completely able to perform classification based on abstract criterion, but don't form a consistent, persistent paradigm of classification in the course of the test, which is hardly a surprise, as I see analogous limitations in most of the people around me on an everyday basis and am as perplexed by that as Focault was at the aphasics' supposed limitations, with the principal difference being that I've been able to resolve my perplexity and for the most part treat those limitations in their proper frame of reference. I'm assuming Focault does this himself, later in the book, but the preface doesn't support your statement.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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