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Author
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Comment
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(6/29/05 5:13 pm)
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Obsessive Definition Disorder
Why have I become obsessed with trying to define what a fairy tale is? I feel the obligation to acknowledge (if not apologise for) any localised irritation this may be causing.
It's something to do with the student's first flush of knowledge, I think. (No toilet jokes!) And I've been warned to expect frequent, periodic flare-ups.
Here's another one... "Fairy tale: a story about, and only about, a process of mind moving from imbalance to balance."
All right, yes I know, I know... I'm going to have to limit visits to this site because it's becoming dangerous...
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(6/30/05 8:03 am)
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Re: Obsessive Definition Disorder
It may be because you're trying to deal with the prejudice of what you thought a fairy tale was. The definition of fairy tale has been changed to suggest stories only intended for children. Then there's the distinction between folk tale and fairy tale. Most fairy tales are folk tales, but a modern story about fairies would also be considered a fairy tale, even though it might not come from the folk tale tradition. Then there's things such as urban legends, which are not fairy tales but are folk tales, even though their origin is relatively modern.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(7/1/05 4:27 am)
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Re: Obsessive Definition Disorder
I think it's more to do with trying to discover why fairy tales have such a personal fascination.
I believe the psychological world we all swim through is composed of its own analogues of atoms and molecules, but our understanding is still at the level of the alchemists.
While fire, electricity and light work magic in the physical world, stories are the psychological mirror. They work magic on the individual as well as the culture... But not without reason - there are real things at work here, for which we have no proper names yet. When we can name these things, we will be able to look at them in relation, and psychology will become an objective science (with all it's attendant benefits and dangers).
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Helen
J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(7/1/05 9:23 am)
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Re: Obsessive Definition Disorder
I haven't commented on the thread in question, but what an absolutely beautiful way to put it ...
The only thing which gives me pause is the idea of folklore/psychology as an objective science: while this approach was incredibly useful in giving us tools such as the AT index, and to a certain extent, Proppian analysis, it's also very difficult to apply across the board, simply because there *is* such a high degree of subjectivity, both cultural and personal, at work in the tales.
While the interpretation of the material is one of my great passions, I think that a certain portion of the discipline's magic *does* come from its inexplicable fluidity: similarly, many of psychology's benefits come, not from its generalizations (to fall back on the old cliche how it's all about the mother), but from its insights into inidividual character and motivation. The two have a lot in common, but cross-referencing them solidly might raise more problems then it's worth ...
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(7/3/05 11:09 am)
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Re: Obsessive Definition Disorder
Helen - No, my optimism for the objective status of psychology isn't given with any great certainty. But it always seems to be taken for granted that any study of psychological processes is trapped in either 1st-person experience or (at best) inter-subjective interpretation. My belief is that this will turn out not to be the case.
Obviously there's no way of getting away from the ultimately 1st-person nature of the content of study. However, practical applications of highly subjective psychological ideas have been so successful that it's hard to believe they don't have a nugget of something objectively describable.
But I'm not sure I'm talking about objectivity in this sense of generalisation. I suppose the sort of thing I have in mind is the sort of thing sought in the field of artificial intelligence - A kind of mathematical projection of subjective processes. A psychological algebra. It couldn't eradicate the 1st person problem, but it could (possibly?) serve as an objective language with which to manipulate psychological ideas with limitlessly greater sophistication and complexity.
The test of such a system would be whether it made successful predictions. It could make no claim to absolute truth any more than the physical sciences.
But it seems to me, as a general example, that there are things we can loosely say in psychology with enough objectivity for pretty much everyone to agree on them - "gratuitous cruelty is wrong", "addictive behaviour is unhealthy" - but so long as we are content to leave these as value judgements (ultimately of the order of "red jelly is nice") then we have no clear defence against the consumed addict who asserts "This is healthy because I need it."
I think the analogy is to a statement like "This book is red" - which we want to say has a high degree of objective verifiability even though the statement would not be true under certain light or retinal conditions - That question was more or less insoluble until we were able to project it in terms of quantifiable wavelengths of light.
People fear algebra, as if it had the power to remove magic in story-telling/-listening/-reading. It can't, any more than interpretting Mozart mathematically ever stopped his music from making people cry. (I'm told, and am prepared to believe, that mathematicians are sometimes moved by the beauty of their language.)
A more real fear might be that, where once scientists created dragons (were fairy-tale tellers) now some of them create bombs. God knows where the psychological equivalent of that would take us, but I guess that would be a different kind of debate.
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(7/4/05 4:25 am)
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Re: Obsessive Definition Disorder
It might just be a fear of chaos...
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(7/4/05 5:01 am)
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Re: Obsessive Definition Disorder
Alison - Why do you think so?
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(7/4/05 11:59 am)
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beauty in algebra
[[ (I'm told, and am prepared to believe, that mathematicians are sometimes moved by the beauty of their language.) ]]
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare....
That's how I feel about Propp's 'functions' and even the Tale Type numbering: that sort of thing connects me to the world of Faerie better than most stories do.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(7/4/05 7:28 pm)
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Re: beauty in algebra
Mathematics is beautiful--it describes and creates some of the most spectacular objects in the world. It also is elegant, seductive, satisfying... lay on the adjectives. It is, ultimately, an art form: the most elementary and the most complex.
Best,
Alice
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(7/6/05 6:21 am)
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Re: beauty in algebra
Alice - Sounds like you might've been thinking along similar lines.
Edmund Husserl is credited as making the first thorough attempt at creating a full scientific system of phenomenology (the logic of sense data). It's given rise to a strand of thinking that includes existentialism, philosophies of politics, sociology, economics, psychology (yes, including Laing) and now artificial intelligence. (Husserl is becoming known in some circles as the father of AI.)
I think, as I'm guessing you do, there is a direct parallel between phenomenology and chaos theory - that in fact phenomenology is probably no more and no less than a chaos theory of the mind. I don't see any reason in principle why a complete mathematical model couldn't be built from something like Husserl's to represent the phenomenological relations of a subject of experience to sets of sense data. Given this, it should be possible to demonstrate a chaotic mapping.
Phenomenology and its offspring have been dirty words in traditional English philosophy because they are non-empirical and it's exponents have, of necessity, tended to use opaquely figurative language. Sartre's Being and Nothingness a prime example. If phenomenological relations do involve a chaotic mapping, then this would be inevitable. Try to describe, particle by particle, the mathematical processes involved in egg-whisking, but do so using English vocabulary - you'll quickly be driven to opaquely figurative language. Just as chaos theory couldn't arrive until the advent of fast computers, so (in my opinion) the foundation of phenomenology can only be completed with the advent of chaos theory.
Edited by: DividedSelf at: 7/7/05 3:11 am
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Lamplighter
Registered User
(7/20/05 7:18 am)
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Definitions
Definitions also permit a person to limit what they will and will not be considering when they start to analyse a subject. As DividedSelf points out, a lack of empiricism makes the job harder to start than say, the crisp logic of defining maths, but ultimately all systems of thought may come undone due to over-analysis, or over-definition.
Classic examples of this effect are paradoxes. My favourite concerns replacing the planks of wood on a boat, one-by-one, as they become worn. Eventually we will be left with a completely different boat, yes? Or not... Our body completely regenerates every two-years or so, so are we five different people per decade? An addition problem with the boat paradox occurs if we collect the planks were are replacing and re-build the "original" boat. Which boat is the "real" boat now?
The wonders of language disguise its probable origins in the primates to deceive predators in dense forest...
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(7/20/05 8:18 am)
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Re: Definitions
One of the ideas of a science is not to define the whole world, but to see how much you can express in terms of a few limited axioms. The artificial conceit of physics is that the universe is mechanistic, but you don't have to believe that to be a physicist. The artificial conceit of phenomenology is a solipsistic examination of perceiver and perceived and the logic of subject-object relations. Much of this is supposed to be non-empirical, in the way that maths is non-empirical. Although if it worked, it would be to psychology what maths is to physics.
Love paradoxes. The reason they work though is because they gnaw at the meaning of the definition. Science doesn't use its definitions in this way. They sit as axioms, which people can and do question in metaphysics - but in the scientific system itself, they are inviolable.
Edited by: DividedSelf at: 7/20/05 3:35 pm
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(7/21/05 4:36 pm)
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Re: Definitions
"Love paradoxes. The reason they work though is because they gnaw at the meaning of the definition. Science doesn't use its definitions in this way. They sit as axioms, which people can and do question in metaphysics - but in the scientific system itself, they are inviolable. "
Erm... Quibble here. There are whole branches of mathematics that start with, "What if axiom X wasn't true..." That's part of what theorists do: play with definitions, be they scientific or linguistic.
Best,
Alice
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(7/22/05 4:26 am)
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Re: Definitions
Not entirely sure what you're referring to - which is my fault,
because I used the word "axiom", which can be ambiguous.
Sometimes it refers to a supposedly self-evident truth, and sometimes
it means "postulate". For instance, Euclidean geometry
has certain postulates, which it is possible to question outside
of Euclidean geometry. Yet it may also be the case that behind these
postulates lie certain self-evident axioms.
Or you may have in mind the sort of work that's been done on the foundations (and paradoxes) of mathematics (Frege, Russell etc.). This might be called metamathematics, but is often regarded as part of the system. The reason, as I understand it, is that maths is not an empirical system. Its foundations are supposed to be self-evident, so where paradoxes are not resolvable it follows they define the limits of the system.
To take paradoxes like the boat above - apart from being fun, they're important because they show some of the limits of meaning.
With respect to empirical science: if a system S contains a postulate
P and the question "What if postulate P were not true?"
is a valid question within S, then system S can't
be an empirical science.
Empirical science is essentially reductionist. So, yes, theorists play with definitions - but not scientific theorists.
Edited by: DividedSelf at: 7/22/05 4:28 am
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Lamplighter
Registered User
(7/22/05 4:51 am)
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Re: Definitions
Perhaps you have answered your own question? Might an obsession with definition indicate a desire to be able to test a reductionist set of propositions? In effect, to find out "how it works" at something approaching simplest terms?
That our collection of fairy tales appear to share underlying symbolism may make this task seem straightforward. And yet even though the symbols appear constant, our relationship with them may be so different between even readers of a similar background as to make this an impossible venture.
For example, only after reading Anne Sexton's Rapunzel did I see that her intepretation was there all along...
So perhaps ODD is a way to get a grip on our slippery subject, before we take a good look at what we think we have caught?
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