Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 22:57:48 -0500 From: Mark Allen Peterson Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: Linganth MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Proc-type: 3 I want to apologize for my last posting; I was feeling irritable about stuff that had nothing to do with this list.

Actually, this discussion on logic has been very interesting to me because I use 'logic' in a very specific sense in my own writing following Bourdieu (who is in turn following Gadamer).

Bourdieu uses logic to describe the sets of assumptions used to organize action. Lakoff and Johnson's work with schemas actually is fairly consonant with this approach up to a point. Bourdieu further argues that logics have both surface and sub-surface aspects. The surface aspects of logics are divided into orthodox and heterodox approaches to human action. Orthodox aspects of a logic are those which are dominant in the particular social system to which the actor belongs. Heterodox logics are sets of goal oriented strategies and assumptions that are different than (and often seen by social actors as opposed to) orthodox logics. Bourdieu argues that underlying these oppositions are sets of assumptions so deeply embedded in the cultural system of the actors that they are not under normal circumstances able to examine them.

Since someone already brought up a Star Trek example, I'll offer one too. On Star Trek, as I understand it, the spaceships go faster than light without severe temporal dislocation effects because they "warp" space around them in some fashion. The Federation sees these ships as ways of moving through space to find "new worlds and new civilizations" to explore, get to know and learn from, as well as trade with and possibly colonize. Their enemies the Romulans and the Klingons apparently share the same general technology, with lots of minor differences, and they, too, see these ships as ways to travel through space, though their reasons for doing so involve conquest and the establishment of tribute routes. The very shapes of their ships are clearly guided by this logic, all of them being streamlined and roughly aerodynamic even though there's no air in space and these starships aren't made to land. Now in one of the Stars Trek novels (I read it more than ten years ago at a friend's urging so I can't give a cite) the crew of the Enterprise run into a shapeless, non-symmetrical spaceship of enormous size which also runs on warp technology. The motives of the aliens who run it are incomprehensible to the Federation group, even with the help of their universal translator (there's a gadget I'd like to know more about). There logic does not even include the idea of travelling through space. They are, they insist, moving space around them. So we have one logic, a logic of voyaging, divided into two (or more) competing notions of the ends toward which voyaging is oriented; and we have another logic, one of summoning, the ends of which are incomprehensible to those with the logic of voyaging.

Here's where we come to the epistemological problem: are these just two ways of speaking about a common underlying reality? And if so, is there a fundamentally human (or in this sense, sentient) set of assumptions about experiencing the world that can serve as an ur-logic from which we can examine such competing cultural logics? Or are there just cultural logics and we come to know other logics by their similarities and contrasts with our own logics?

The meaning of logic I use is rooted in pragmatism: if possession of these two utterly different sets of assumptions about what they are doing leads to different ways of organizing action, then we are speaking of a logic. IBourdieu's use of logic in practice theory also diverges from Lakoff and Johnson's schema theory in his ideas about the deep roots of culture. Palmer wrote:

In Lakoff and Johnson's framework, image schemata "emerge" from recurrent physical experiences, many of which are universal. These include the experiences of occupying bodies that have weight, dorso-ventral orientation, and lateral symmetry and function as containers.

Bourdieu offers the concept of "hexis" to refer to the ways in which he believes even many basic physical experiences are shaped by cultural experience. Our ways of organizing space, of articulating and many other physical activities are shaped from early childhood by the ways in which we are held and touched, carried or put in play pens, the shapes of our homes, the loudness of our environments and so forth.

In this use of logic, we can no more find a common underlying logic that enables interpretation between otherwise incommensurate languacultures than we can find a common underlying language from which to interpret between different languages. On the contrary, it is from the differences that better understandings arise both of our own languaculture and of the languaculture of the other/Other.

This list is an example of this process. Most of the discussions on this list seem to arise because one person uses a term that one or more of the others uses in quite different ways. As people jump in and offer their multiple perspectives, we never come to a common understanding but we certainly learn a lot about our different approaches to languacultures.