Integrating Traditions

1

• Integrating Traditions
• Communication Revisited
• Zsuzsanna Kondor
• Institute for Philosophical Research of the
  HAS

2829 November 2005, Sofia, Bulgaria
2

• Hungarian Traditions in Communication Philosophy
• Main Research Perspectives
• Conclusion

3

• Hungarian Tradition in Communication Philosophy
• Palágyi
• Balogh
• Hajnal
• Balázs

4

• Melchior Palágyi
• Language is not just means of communication but
  also the vehicle of thinking
• Alphabetical writing conducts to abstract
  conceptual distinctions
• The phenomenon of silent thinking gives the
  impression of pure reason

5

• József Balogh
• Silent reading and writing
• The activity of audire, legere and intelligere
  constituted one single unity
• Why did reading become silent? - The first
  decisive reason was printing
• Overmechanization of the word

6

• József Balogh
• Balogh regards all instruments of communication
  such as typewriter, dictating and speaking
  machines, telegraph and telephone tools of
  mechanization. These instruments made reading and
  writing more comfortable, but this convenience
  resulted in superficiality and speediness,
  through which the "art of writing was degenerated
  into mass production". (J. Balogh, Voces
  Paginarium. Beträge zur Geschichte des lauten
  Lesens und Schreibens, Budapest, 1921, p. 29)

7

• István Hajnal
• Hajnals concept of literacy
• Objectifying ideas and internalizing technology
• Hajnals Criticism

8

• Objectifying ideas
• Movements and sounds do disappear, still,
  humans can use them and their matter-relatedness
  to produce something, that is objective,
  something that functions as an extrinsic
  intermediator for inner life. (I. Hajnal,
  Történelem és szociológia, 1939)

9

• Internalizing technology
• New technologies should be rooted in everydays
  life. They should harmonize with the needs of
  human interrelationships.
• E.g. the invention of printing press
• Bookprinting was, as it is well-known, the
  produce of the exact melting of many details of
  masterly transcribing work, of school dictata, of
  paper manufacturing, of several types of
  inks/paints, of the metal industry and the finest
  engraving craft. (Hajnal, A európai város
  kialakulása, 1941)
• The invention of bookprinting was only an
  inevitable consequence of the deep-rooted and
  large-scale writing culture of the late Middle
  Ages. As many people understood written texts,
  there was a large reading audience and also a
  wide-scale bookproduction in the last centuries
  of the Middle Ages, which brought forth by pure
  practical expediency the invention of printing.
  (Hajnal, Európai kultúrtörténet írástörténet,
  1932)

10

• Hajnals Criticism
• Writing is actually an artificial instrument for
  thinking, through which ideas can free themselves
  from the context of real life, that gave them
  life.
• Letters produced letters, writing produced
  writing. Naked and speculative thinking used to
  be very refined, even in the smallest
  detail-exercises. The more one-sidedly it
  functioned, the more it sliced professions into
  mechanical details, the more it exempted them
  from sensing life's heavy material, the more
  perfect it was. (Hajnal, Évforduló, 1948)

11

• Béla Balázs
• In film speaking is a play of facial gestures
  and immediately visual facial expression. They
  who see speaking, will learn things very
  different from they who hear the words

12

• Béla Balázs
• Psychological and logical analysis have proven
  that our words are not subsequent representations
  of our thoughts, but forms which will from the
  beginning determine the latter. (B. Balázs, Der
  Sichtbare Mensch (1924) quoted by K. Nyíri, From
  Palágyi to Wittgenstein, in P. Fleissner and J.
  C. Nyíri (eds.), Philosophy of Culture and the
  Politics of Electronic Networking, 1999, pp. 7-8)

13

• Main Research Perspectives
• Historical Point of View
• Cognitive Point of View
• Representational Point of view

14

• Some Preliminaries
• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The
  Technologizing of the Word, London/New York 1982

15

• Primary orality
• The only possibility to maintain and preserve
  knowledge was communicating, i.e. sustaining
  living language.
• The mode of expression was
• additive,
• redundant,
• the expressions and words used were very
  closely embedded in concrete situations,
• intercourse was empathetic, participatory and
  agonistic.

16

• Literacy
• recording ideas makes necessary to substitute
  for the living situation
• general subjects,
• abstract concepts detached from the human
  life-world,
• linearly structured arguments,
• and the time-scale emerged.

17

• Secondary orality
• set in with telephone, radio, television and
  various kinds of sound tape, electronic
  technology.
• This new orality has striking resemblances to
  the old in its participatory mystique, its
  fostering of communal sense, its concentration on
  the present moment, and even in its formulas. But
  it is essentially a more deliberate and
  self-conscious orality based permanently on the
  use of writing and print, which are essential for
  the manufacture and operation of the equipment
  and for its use as well.

18

• Historical Point of View
• (Metaphysics)
• Language
• Personality

19

• Metaphysics
• The main endeavour of metaphysics shows an
  impressive trajectory from the Pre-Socratic
  notion of arkhé, which is tailored according to
  the physical world, to the Heideggerian
  thrown-ness into the world which suggests to
  leave behind the analyzing, speculative and from
  the everyday practice alienated tradition of
  Western philosophy.

20

• Language
• Logos
• Logic
• Communication

21

• Logos
• things function according to Logos and
• Logos is common in everyone (Heraclitus)
• Logos means on the one hand a kind of ruling
  principle,
• and on the other hand some sort of articulation
  of it
• certain revealing force

22

• Logic
• Aristotles logic the main endeavour is to
  provide a proper instrument, i.e. a set of rules
  which can help to decide whether an argument is
  true or false, and to arrange everyday experience
• Modern logic eliminated the importance of the
  reference, i.e. the algorithm has crucial role.
  According to Leibniz, the signs are instead of
  things.

23

• Communication Social embeddedness
• Wittgenstein
• The speaking of language is part of an
  activity, or a form of life.
• language-game
• private language argument
• If language is to be a means of communication
  there must be agreement not only in definitions
  but also in judgements. (Philosophical
  Investigtions 242)

24

• Communication Social embeddedness
• Heidegger
• Language can be seen as ready-at-hand
  zuhandene along the practice we articulate our
  comprehension Being-with others. In that case
  language is a tool to be used in social
  intercourse, an instrument of communication.
• But language is also a constitutive element of
  being-in-the-world as it is an important momentum
  of revealing.

25

• Personality
• Involvement
• Solitude
• Reintegrated individual

26

• Involvement
• Once upon a time mankind lived, by and large, in
  closed intimate communities, governed by
  practices simultaneously geared both to
  maintaining internal order and adjusting to
  nature . The criteria adapted for judging the
  acceptability of practices were, so to speak,
  self-validating, traditional. They were not
  systematised no attempt was to deduce them
  either from some supposedly self-evident general
  premise or from some single authoritative
  revelation. (E. Gellner, Language and Solitude.
  Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg
  Dilemma, Cambridge University Press 1998)

27

• Solitude
• Atomistic individualism, that is the Crusoe
  tradition which started with Descartes, sees
  human knowledge as developing step by step due to
  the intellectual effort of the individual

28

• Reintegrated individual
• New communications technology provides the
  opportunity to communicate continuously
• New opportunities mean at the same time new forms
  of life, new habits and new norms

29

• Cognitive Point of View
• Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind. Three
  Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition,
  Cambridge Harvard Univ. Press, (1991) 1993
• Donald outlined the history of cognitive
  evolution. According to his theory, the
  development of representational skills were in
  close relation to social intelligence.

30
Cs. Pléh, Communication Patterns and Cognitive
Architectures, in K. Nyíri ed. Mobile
Communication. Essays on Cognition and Community,
Passagen Verlag, 2002, p. 130
31

• Cognitive Point of View
• Andy Clark, Being There. Putting Brain, Body, and
  World Together Again, Cambridge MIT Press, 2001
• Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds,
  Technologies, and the Future of Human
  Intelligence, New York Oxford Univ. Press, 2003

32

• Scaffolding
• We build designer environments in which
  human reason is able to far outstrip the
  computational ambit of the unaugmented biological
  brain. Advanced reason is thus above all the
  realm of the scaffolded brain the brain in its
  bodily context, interacting with a complex world
  of physical and social structures.
• Mind cannot be usefully extended willy-nilly
  into the world. He sums up the important
  conditions as follows the overall picture is of
  a rather special kind of user/artifact
  relationship one in which the artifact is
  reliably present, frequently used, personally
  tailored, and deeply trusted.

33

• Representational Point of view
• Verbal expression (M. Tomasello, M. Donald)
• Linear
• Ordered according to priorities
• Detailed
• Similarities

34

• Similarities vs. Differences
• All that words can deal with, however, are
  similarities. The simple reason for all this is
  that words, with the exception of proper names,
  relation words, and syntactical devices, are mere
  conventional symbols for similarities. Although
  differences are just as perceptible as
  similarities, words are not able to cope with
  them. But that these differences are not
  statable in words does not mean that they are
  ineffable, for they are clearly communicable in
  non-verbal ways. (William M. Ivins Jr.,Prints
  and Visual Communication, Cambridge,
  Massachusetts Harvard University Press 1953, p.
  139)

35

• Pictorial expression
• Differences
• Immense wealth of living shapes
• Holistic (We can capture the whole as well as the
  details of an image at a glance.)

36

• Conclusion
• Some general considerations
• Further steps
• Collaboration and Integration

37

• Communications technology gains special
  importance regarding
• Cognitive skills and
• Social institutions, norms and ideals

38

• Program design and theoretical considerations
• The already given forms of communication have
  crucial importance

39

• Further steps
• Workshop Chat in a New Key
• Findings
• Media convergence
• Dunbar number

40

• Collaboration and Integration
• In the philosophical domain, the Hungarian team
  finds the Kaleidoscope network's activities an
  ideal framework for collaboration and
  integration, reviving, in the new digital medium
  of the 21st century, the tradition of centuries
  of European scholarly collaboration.