Shapiro to the NYT on irony

Michael Shapiro sent to me some days ago for The Peirce Blog a copy of a letter that he wrote to the New York Times about its article "How to Live Without Irony." The Times has chosen not to publish it. Here is the letter along with his comments in his post "The Promiscuousness of Irony as a Rhetorical Label" at his blog Language Lore:

Nowadays, in the print and broadcast media everything is all-too-promiscuously labeled irony and/or ironic, to the point where in its November 18th edition The New York Times gave a grotesque amount of space to an essay entitled "How to Live Without Irony" in its Sunday Review section. This low-brow divagation elicited a letter to the editor from your humble blogger, which the newspaper—characteristically—chose not to publish, so here it is for the record:

“ TO THE EDITOR:

Christy Wampole's 'How to Live Without Irony' (November 18) offers food for thought but, for all its prolixity, entirely misses stating what is at the core of irony as a rhetorical strategy, namely its negativity, its inability to signify anything of positive value. In terms developed by the modern founder of sign theory (semiotics), the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), irony can never go beyond being an index, merely calling attention to itself and always necessarily falling short of being a symbol, which is the only kind of sign that encompasses positive meaning.

Worse yet, irony always tends toward masking the judgmental nature of what is being paraded as fact or the inefficacy of an effete judgment. The ironic statement thus runs the risk of ending up as just another cliché. That is precisely why the contemporary generation of "temporary sophisticates" (in Wayne Booth's apt characterization of those who assume the ironic stance), with their heavy reliance on digitally-bound signification, can only comment on the object of their ironizing without ever contributing to its real substance.

”

Apropos, only the most dogged literalist, without any real-life experience of the situational use of the proverb cited in the preceding post ("Language as an Aesthetic Object"), could comment that the mother must have "taken umbrage" at having her child's provenience ascribed to adultery, thereby implying some kind of misplaced cosmic irony in her expressed admiration withal of the proverb's poetic form and of its utterer.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The Speaking Self, by Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro has just published a book The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage (Amazon link). It draws upon his blog posts and "is an attempt to reconceive linguistics in the light of pragmaticism," as he said in a message to me. He has variously authored and edited a number of books, including the Peirce Seminar Series.

Here is the book's official description:

This book is not a usage manual in the conventional sense. It is a sui generis series of compact, self-contained essays arranged into chapters by broad topic categories of problematic points of linguistic usage in contemporary American speech and writing and cast in an uncompromisingly analytical style that is nevertheless accessible to any educated reader with a love of words, an inquisitiveness about language, and an appetite for exegesis. The bias of the author is unabashedly prescriptivist. It is formed by a long-standing theoretical interest in and empirical observation of English usage, oral and written. Much of the material for analysis is drawn from the language of contemporary media, both print and broadcast. The discussion of examples frequently opens out on a perspective that takes in deeper questions of value and society in America as revealed by present-day language use. The essays that comprise the chapters are what might be called linguistic vignettes. They call attention to points of grammar and style in contemporary American English, especially in cases where the language is changing due to innovative usage, including what older generations of speakers would consider errors in speech and writing.

Anybody who has read his posts at Language Lore will be acquainted with his analysis of linguistic phenomena wherein, again and again, he brings into relief the difference made by a pragmaticist approach with its attention not just to the more obviously or narrowly linguistic factors in language but to conceivable practical implications and to real generals in their sometimes lively interplay affecting the phenomena.

Quotes on the book's back cover:

Michael Shapiro is one of the great thinkers in the realm of linguistics and language use, and his integrated understanding of language and speech in its semantic and pragmatic structure, grammatical and historical grounding, and colloquial to literary stylistic variants is perhaps unmatched today.

Who might be interested in this book? Certainly linguists, language scholars, literary theorists, novelists, poets, essayists, journalists--but also those who find the dictionary entertaining reading (there are surprisingly many of us), or simply those whose fascination with the inner workings of language knows no bounds. This book is a treasure to be shared.

— Robert S. Hatten, The University of Texas at Austin

"Michael Shapiro provides a critical review of contemporary American English usage in a richly multifarious analytical context. The result is both provocative and illuminating."

— Howard Hibbett, Harvard University

The Speaking Self at Amazon.com.
326 pages.
ISBN-10: 1478357045
ISBN-13: 978-1478357049

From the Amazon page:

Michael Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies at Brown University, was born in 1939 in Yokohama (Japan) and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1952 and was educated in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Michael Shapiro’s career as a teacher and scholar spans almost half a century. He has taught at several universities, including the University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley) and Princeton, and served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1991. His articles on English usage have appeared in American Speech and Language.

Michael Shapiro letter in the NY Times Book Review

Sunday Book Review, July 12, 2012: Letter from Michael Shapiro

Letter

An American Philosophy

Published: July 12, 2012

To the Editor:

Anthony Gottlieb’s review of “America the Philosophical,” by Carlin Romano (July 1), seriously mischaracterizes what he calls “America’s principal homegrown school of philosophy,” namely the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Far from being, as Gottlieb caricatures it, the doctrine that our theories “should be judged by their practical value rather than by their accuracy in representing the world,” pragmatism is a theory of inquiry — always emphatically seeking the truth in the long run — that follows what Peirce called the pragmatic maxim: “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the objects of our conception to have. Then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Gottlieb’s assertion (citing Sidney Morgenbesser’s purported witticism) that “the ultimate fate of this idea . . . was all very well in theory but didn’t work in practice” is belied by its undeniable success in underwriting the worldwide scientific advance in the 21st century of disciplines as diverse as linguistics, biology and applied mathematics, not to speak of philosophy and logic. Traducing pragmatism as “either trivial or incoherent when you try to flesh it out” is not worthy of an otherwise sensible reviewer.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Manchester Center, Vt.
The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.

A version of this letter appeared in print on July 15, 2012, on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: An American Philosophy.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

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B.U.: The battle seems unending against the vulgarest interpretations of Peirce's pragmatism. Kudos to Michael Shapiro for keeping it up.

Call for papers on Ransdell

CALL FOR PAPERS:


Transactions
of the Charles S. Peirce Society
Special Issue

“The Meaning of a Thought is Altogether Something Virtual”: Joseph Ransdell and His Legacy

Editors:
Catherine Legg, University of Waikato, New Zealand
Gary Richmond, LaGuardia College – City University of New York

Joseph Ransdell (1931–2010), based for most of his career at Texas Tech University, offered a highly original and focused challenge within academic philosophy at the end of the Second Millennium. His guiding philosophical passion was truth-directed communication. This led him to think deeply about the Platonic Socrates and the Socratic Plato, and the problematics of early modern philosophy. Most of all, however, he claimed that the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce held the key not just to endorsing truth as a regulative ideal, but to showing how the ideal might be worked out in practice by means of a community of inquiry exercising critical self-control.

From early in his career Joe was concerned that professional gatekeeping was hindering progress in philosophy, and was unafraid to speak about it. From the initial evolution of the Internet he grasped its potential as a place “where people can and do critically question and challenge one another without the usual protections of office, rank, agenda, and official moderation”, something that he argued had “all but disappeared from public life — including intellectual life — in the U.S. and many other countries as well during the 20th Century”.

Thereafter he threw enormous effort and enterprise into realizing this vision, swimming against a rising tide of other kinds of institutional reward. This resulted in the email list and online community peirce-l, which he founded in 1993 and moderated in unique style until his death, and the accompanying website that he beta-launched in 1997 and called Arisbe, after the house where Peirce lived during the later years of his life and dreamed of establishing a research centre.

Joe’s exceptionally conscious and critical approach to nurturing online communication may be seen in the “How the Forum Works” guidelines that he wrote for peirce-l: http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm. Much there now seems prescient in the light of subsequent developments on the Internet, whereby ordinary persons build public knowledge resources with no thought of monetary reward. A key example is of course the astounding Wikipedia, whose success was also arguably due to its open, self-correcting development of its own processes (and who would have guessed that so many would gather there and freely give so much energy to help others learn - except perhaps Charles Peirce?)

Many felt that the mores Joe charted for peirce-l made it a unique and valuable place to do philosophy. Another noteworthy feaure of the list was the way in which its composition mirrored the polymathic and international outlook of Peirce himself. One might find, for instance, a semiotician, a theologian, a computer scientist, and a book translator discussing Peirce’s relation to Leibniz.

We are interested in papers which record, honour, explicate, and critically appraise Joe’s published writings, his online efforts and their ongoing legacy, and the relation between the two. In keeping with the spirit of peirce-l, we welcome submissions from a wealth of disciplines, although we expect philosophy to make a prominent showing.

All papers will be blind-refereed, and should be prepared as such. Submissions should follow the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society manuscript guidelines, online at: http://www.peircesociety.org/contributors.html. They may be submitted by email to Catherine Legg at . The deadline for submissions is September 1st, 2012.

“Symbols grow” – Charles Peirce

Shapiro letter to the NY Times

The New York Times published this letter from Michael Shapiro, on the Internet October 28, 2011 and on paper on October 30, 2011 on page BR6 of the N.Y.T. Sunday Book Review.  Shapiro's letter was in response to an essay "I Was an Under-Age Semiotician" by Steven Johnson in the Sunday Book Review October 16, 2011, on the 1980s semiotics scene and some of its intellectual and verbal excesses.  For my part, I remember SemioTexte; it was such that, twenty or so years later, I balked when I started reading Peirce for his categorial work only to find him deeply focused on semiotics; but I kept reading, joined Joe Ransdell's peirce-l, and came to appreciate Peirce's sem(e)iotic as something quite different.  I don't know how Shapiro restrained himself from adding that, for Peirce, signs (including books) are indeed about things. Shapiro's letter:

To the Editor:

Having taught at Brown for 16 years, including a course on Charles Sanders Peirce, the modern founder of sign theory, I found Steven Johnson's essay to be a depressingly accurate characterization of the academic times during his college years. However, readers should know that his identification of semiotics as a field of study by linking it with Peirce, an American philosopher, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is a serious, albeit common, misconception. Saussure's version is defective next to Peirce's, and not curable by patch-up. That it was Saussure's ideas about signs, and not Peirce's, that gave rise to the Continental form Jacques Derrida and others propagated — and gullible American academics swallowed whole — should not be so glibly elided. Peirce is the greatest intellect the Americas ever produced, and it is his whole philosophy, including his semeiotic (note the spelling and the singular number) that now bids fair to prevail as doctrine.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO
New York

The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.

Shapiro is well known among Peirce scholars as editor of the five-volume series Peirce Seminar Papers (1993–2002) and author of numerous works on linguistics and semiotics.

Jerry Dozoretz

Jerry Dozoretz passed away earlier this month. Condolences to his beloved wife Ann and family. Ann emailed Nathan Houser, Gary Richmond, and me about it yesterday.

Denver Post obituary (August 12-14) http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/denverpost/obituary.aspx?n=jerry-dozoretz&pid=153047257 .

Jerry had a Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of Californis, Santa Barbara. He was an Instructor and Assistant Professor of Philosophy from 1970 to 1983. An article of his was published in Peirce Studies 1. Starting in 1983 he worked in the private sector, eventually going into business for himself. He had five children.

Jerry was the chief operating officer of the Peirce Group, which owns the Arisbe website and peirce-l, which were created and long maintained by Joe Ransdell, who passed away in December 2010. Jerry was working on their relocation to the Institute for American Thought at I.U.P.U.I. He was also working on the relocation of Joseph Ransdell's voluminous papers and library to the I.A.T.

In a peirce-l post yesterday, Steven Ericsson-Zenith said,

I am very sorry to hear this.

Jerry and I exchanged email in January. He was open and kind, generous with his support and friendship. He was greatly affected by Joe's passing and wanted very much to ensure the future of peirce-l and related materials. It had been on my todo list to follow up with him.

My best wishes and condolences to Jerry's friends and family.

Jerry was a pleasure to work with. I've been at a loss for words. In our last phone conversation Jerry told me that he and Joe Ransdell had been friends since childhood. As usual he sounded well and upbeat and 20 years younger than he was.

Update October 4, 2011. I thought that Jerry said that they had been friends since childhood; I remember responding during that phone call with that understanding uncontradicted by him. But I must have misunderstood. They were born over 15 years apart.

Joseph Ransdell  June 5, 1931 — Dec. 27, 2010

Jerry Dozoretz  Jan. 11, 1947 — Aug. 5, 2011

Michael Shapiro - Course Announcement

Post last revised/repaired August 2, 2011. - B.U.

The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University presents

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FALL 2011 NEW COURSE

CPLS G4340, 3 pts
Interpretation: Theory and Practice

Michael Shapiro
W 2:10pm-4pm, location: Fayerweather 311

Relying on Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of interpretation in the context of his semeiotic, this course develops a common language powerful enough to underwrite modern interdisciplinary studies in the 21st century. It explores three themes in particular: signs and cognition; the analogy between grammar and nature; historical explanation in the humanities and the sciences.

For more information, please contact ICLS at (212)854-4541 or
send email to
(contact information is at this link).

Registrar link:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/subj/CPLS/G4340-20113-001/

CourseWorks page:
https://courseworks.columbia.edu/cms/public/mainpage.cfm?crs=CPLSG4340_001_2011_3

Note: For more information on the works by Peirce listed below, go to the Main Editions section of the sidebar on the right.

Sem I, 2011-12; Wed 2:10-4:00
FAYERWEATHER 311
Office Hours: Wed 10-12
HB 1-6, Heyman Center

Michael Shapiro
send email
website: http://www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com/
blog: http://www.languagelore.net/

CPLS G4340.001 INTERPRETATION: THEORY & PRACTICE

Relying on Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of interpretation in the context of his semeiotic, this course develops a common language powerful enough to underwrite modern interdisciplinary studies in the 21st century. It explores three themes in particular: signs and cognition; the analogy between grammar and nature; historical explanation in the humanities and the sciences.

MEETING DATES: Sep 7, 14, 21, 28; Oct 5, 12, 19, 26; Nov 2, 9, 16, 23; Dec 7

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: (1) two short papers (3-5 pp.) on a topic to be approved by the instructor, due Oct 26 and Nov 16, resp.; (2) EITHER a longer research paper (10-15 pp.) OR a take-home final exam, due Dec 23.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

• C. S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. (Indiana U.P.)
• T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge U.P.)
• Supplementary Readings[= SR] (Course Packet)

RECOMMENDED:

• Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Harvard U.P.)
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books)
• E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (Phaidon Press)
• Roman Jakobson, On Language (Harvard U.P.)
• James J. Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Indiana U.P.)
• Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Harvard U.P.)
• Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (Bantam Books)
• Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (U of Chicago Press)

RESERVE LIST (in addition to the above):

• Carolyn Eisele (ed.), A History of Science: Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science
• Max H. Fisch, Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism
• Eugene Freeman (ed.), The Relevance of Charles Peirce
• Michael Cabot Haley, The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor
• Charles S. Hardwick (ed.), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby
• Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven : Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
• Kenneth L. Ketner (ed.), A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce with a Bibliography of Secondary Studies
• Kenneth L. Ketner (ed.), Peirce and Contemporary Thought

RESERVE LIST (cont.)

• Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 8 vols.
• Charles S. Peirce, Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings
• Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking
• Charles Sanders Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things
• Charles S. Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 vols.
• Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 7 vols.
• David Savan, An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Full System of Semeiotic
• Michael and Marianne Shapiro, Figuration in Verbal Art
• Michael Shapiro (ed.), The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis, 5 vols.
• Michael Shapiro, The Sense of Change: Language as History
• Michael and Marianne Shapiro, The Sense of Form in Literature and Language, 2nd ed.
• Michael Shapiro, The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic

READING ASSIGNMENTS (except for pages in Gombrich, all references are to chapters):

I (Sep 7 – 21): Peirce's theory of signs
• Essential Peirce I: 1, 2, 3
• Essential Peirce II: 2, 11, 12, 15, 16, 22, 28, 32, 33
• Liszka: 1
• Short: 7, 8, 9
• SR: 1, 2, 3

II (Sep 28 – Oct 26): signs and cognition; grammar and nature
• Essential Peirce I: 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
• Bruner: 3
• Geertz: 1, 2
• Gombrich: 1, 12, 45, 56
• Jakobson: 4, 5, 6, 7, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29
• Liszka: 2
• Mayr: 1, 2, 3
• Prigogine & Stengers: 3, 4, 5, 6
• Sahlins: 2
• SR: 4, 5, 6

III (Nov 2 – Dec 7): historical explanation
• Bruner: 2
• Geertz: 3, 5
• Gombrich: 86, 106
• Jakobson: 2, 9, 10, 25
• Mayr: 5, 6, 7, 8
• Prigogine & Stengers: 7, 8, 9
• Sahlins: 5
• Short: 4, 5, 6
• SR: 7, 8, 9, 10

General Description

This course is inspired by the life and work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), widely acknowledged as an American Renaissance man, our country's greatest thinker, and the only native son who ranks among the world's great philosophers. It is distinguished by its interdisciplinary scope and its orientation towards Peirce's theory of signs (what he called the semeiotic, following Locke), which offers the hope that it may reveal and also foster links of method and of aim among the "three worlds"––the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities (including here the academic disciplines, criticism, and the creative arts). Peirce's whole philosophy, of which his theory of signs is the centerpiece, is an immense synthesis of the key ideas of modern science with the classical logical paradigm that traces its origins from Aristotle through the Stoics, Locke, and Kant. Peirce's great achievement is the addition of the theory of interpretation. The course's significance, therefore, derives in part from its focus on interpretation as the key to understanding the foundations of the separate disciplines.

The purpose of the course is to introduce students to a common language that has the power to underwrite modern interdisciplinary studies––in this century and beyond. Peirce's theory of interpretation, which is at the heart of his semeiotic, treats ideas as integral to the "reality" of human experience, whether the data are derived from observation of the natural world, the earth and the heavens, or people and societies. Science adds to our knowledge, advancing from the known to the unknown, by a coordinate use of both abductive hypothetical) and inductive inference, both by the recognition of similarities and the shock of contrast and opposition. Peirce's conception of the interpretant as a law or rule, invariably instantiated in individual signs, is his most radical advance and provides a systematic understanding of the way this coordination does its work.

The course will draw upon various theoretical and methodological perspectives: the study of behavior and of the structural generalities that bind individuals and groups typologically and historically; the study of ideology or of a culture's representation of itself in its visual and verbal forms; and the study of the articulation of meaning, wherever it might be situated, whether in scientific analysis or in humanistic discourse. Each of these approaches and emphases offers important insights into the role of interpretation in defining the foundations of the various disciplines in their interconnections.

The centrality of interpretation will be brought out by pursuing three themes, which have been chosen to give students of diverse backgrounds and interests a feeling for the kind of synthesis that a coherent interdisciplinary perspective can provide. The themes, in order of presentation during the semester’s work, together with their associated issues, are as follows:

1. Signs and cognition. Peirce conceived of his semeiotic as a theory of cognition (following Plato and Locke). What research program will enable sign theory and cognitive science to join hands successfully with the natural sciences? Like many other philosophers and scientists, Peirce was fascinated by the morphology of the natural world. How can modern cognitive science, particularly linguistics, implement Peirce's understanding that the natural world's diversity and complexity cannot be explained merely by reference to physical, mechanical, or thermodynamic forces? What is the role of interpretation and the structure of thought in relation to the various disciplines? How can Peirce's sign theory and his concept of final causation be understood as congruent with contemporary notions in evolutionary biology such as genetic program? Peirce's theory proposes general answers to some of the questions enumerated above, specifically in alignment with his pragmatist conception of meaning and reality.

2. The analogy between grammar and nature. The course will raise questions about language as a foundational metaphor, an issue that goes back beyond Aristotle to prehistory and is to be found in almost all cultures. Should one attempt to analyze the language of nature like the human body, or the human psyche, "grammatically?" Which aspects of nature are (so to speak) its nouns, verbs, and adjectives? What is its syntax? Pursuing the analogy between grammar and nature in the spirit of such queries will necessarily involve confronting various disciplinary paradigms in their conceptual foundations. The semeiotic approach in Peirce's sense takes anything whatever, including inorganic matter, as potentially significant: anything is capable of signifying if taken to be a sign, i.e., capable of "causing" an interpretation.

3. Historical explanation in the humanities and the sciences. Since historical explanation is the mode of explanation in all disciplines where the agent's purpose is central, what kind of logic do we need in order to deal with historical and evolutionary change as well as action? To what extent is the idea underpinning historical method, that a good description constitutes an explanation, applicable to the language-oriented disciplines? What is the relationship between synchronic and diachronic explanation? Can any given state of affairs (the "synchronic slice") be explained with a more exact understanding of its causality by its evolution? Historical inquiry can be called a "science" in the measure that it utilizes rules of appropriateness grounded in schemas of practical inference. Do these schemas provide an objective framework for the explanatory practice of historians as well as all who utilize (retrospective) interpretation, like biologists and linguists? Peirce's entire philosophy is based on a profound understanding of the role of history and evolutionary growth in the structure of knowledge. His theory of final causation is coordinated with the theory of signs in an organic way.

The major objectives and emphases of this course can be characterized by considering the "eccentric" position peculiar to human beings and the "third world" (in Karl Popper's terminology) which expresses our eccentricity. Peirce's conception of man as a sign, and of the universe as a semeiotic universe, is perhaps the deepest, most fertile, most imaginative, and most practically applicable form of this fundamental matrix of the human universe. Our bodies make us members of the physical world, permeated by forces and energies, events and interactions. Our psyche is a center, a perspective of feelings, emotions, and efforts, tendencies, dreams, by which the world of bodies is captured, tasted, chewed, swallowed, digested, or spewed back in disgust or enjoyment. Our eccentricity lies in the third world, the world of dialogue between the external and the internal worlds--what Peirce (early in his career) called the "Tuistical" (ego.id.tu) and (later) the Semeiotic World.

Although Peirce was a mathematician, logician, and scientist, his semeiotic recognizes the importance of feeling, emotion, sensation, sentiment, action. Put another way, the semeiotic offers us not only a way to understand science as a human enterprise, it also offers an approach to literature and the arts, to religion, to society, to the whole of the third world that lies between the private incommunicable interior and the vast spaces of the exterior universe.