Author: gnox

Conversation is taking turns playing First and Second (person).
A Dialog is Third: it says something that neither person could say alone.

If your reading of this text is part of a real dialog, it is not a reading of the author’s intended meaning, or of your own, but a joint reading of the world (i.e. of that face of the world which is currently in focus). A complete comprehension of the author’s intention here is of no importance; what matters is the spark of interaction between two views of a reality which is independent of both views.

We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth.

— Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 29

A path is made by people walking on it; a path discovers itself by crossing with other paths.

Reader, I beg you will think this matter out for yourself, and then you can see — I wish I could — whether your independently formed opinion does not fall in with mine.

— Peirce, CP 4.540 (‘Prolegomena’, 1906)

Once a person has escaped the cage of his own opinions by entering into the quest for truth, even the internal monologue, the stream of consciousness expressed as a train of thought, can be a dialogue, or even a dialog (for the difference, see the obverse of this chapter). What counts is the sense of mission, the spirit of inquiry. The logic of this, as Peirce saw it, is that each thought is addressed by the self you are now to the self you will be momentarily: past self addresses future self through present semiosis, and the former future self proceeds to test the received idea. A philosophical writer like Peirce will typically test an idea in this way, sometimes for years, before she considers it worthy to launch into the great conversation for further testing.

The appearance of monologue, then, can be deceptive. The difference between an ordinary conversation and the reading of a text like this one is mostly a matter of medium (spoken, written, printed, electronic, etc.) and of time scale. The great conversation among authors is simply a macro-dialog, in which each partner can take years, or a lifetime, to consider and deliver his reply to what’s been said before. Since a partner does not have to wait her turn, and can reply to any number of prior texts all at once, this conversation is ‘wired’ in parallel rather than series – it’s a network rather than a train of thought. Even readers who never write are involved in this conversation, to the extent that their reading makes a difference in how they live their lives. True, the reader/author relationship is not symmetrical in ‘real time’ like the partnership in a face-to face conversation, because the text of a book does not change in response to the reader’s contribution – but the meaning certainly does. A book on the shelf means nothing at all. Don’t think that the meaning is all in the text, or all in your mind. The meaning is in the relationship, the intimate space, between you and me. Regardless of scale or medium, dialog is always talking through together.

When we read the primary scripture, the Book of Nature, scientifically, we assume that its development was continuous and consistent – that the Mind of its Creator does not contradict itself, but changes itself continuously (evolves), so that throughout any measurable span of spacetime, at least some of its legisigns continue to govern unfolding events. In science, when well-documented facts or observations appear to be mutually contradictory, we guess that there is something wrong with the theoretical framework(s) within which some of those facts have been hitherto understood.

Likewise, when a systematic philosopher such as Peirce appears to make an assertion incompatible with some previous assertion of his own, without giving any indication that the new assertion is a correction or improvement of the older one, our first guess should be that our interpretation of at least one of his statements is faulty. We could call this the principle of hermeneutic fallibilism. The next step is to look for a more comprehensive interpretation of the author’s work, whereby the statements in focus appear complementary rather than contradictory, or occupy different contextual niches in a consistent meaning space, or represent different stages in the development of a single consistent system. If we do come up with a more comprehensive interpretation, it may bear fruit in future readings of this writer’s work, revealing more of its depth, breadth and complexity – perhaps more than its author himself recognized. Or the hypothetical framework may prove incompatible with subsequent readings, and have to be discarded in its turn. If no such comprehensive interpretation seems to work, then the next hypothesis to try is that the author has changed his mind on the subject without giving notice of the change – or that his system is not so consistent as we thought.

Of course, all this deep reading requires sustained attention, which means not turning attention to other possible objects in the meantime.

If you don’t argue with me, I don’t know what I think.

— Alan Watts ‘On the Nature of Consciousness’

We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.

— J. Hughlings Jackson (Dennett 1991, 194)

“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

— the old lady in the anecdote related by E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Chapter 5

… the thinking subject himself is in a kind of ignorance of his thoughts so long as he has not formulated them for himself, or even spoken and written them, as is shown by the example of so many writers who begin a book without knowing exactly what they are going to put into it.

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 206)

So see we so as seed we sow.

— Finnegans Wake (250)