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Saturday, November 24, 2012

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

Friday, August 31, 2012

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.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

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



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

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

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.

Joseph Ransdell

“Symbols grow” – Charles Peirce