[D-G] Concepts seen as functions (malgosia askanas)

[malgosia askanas]

To me, the foremost question about WiP is whether its distinctions are
adequate - not to the actual activities of professionally employed
philosophers, scientists and artists, but to the nature of science,
philosophy and art as modes of thought and creation.  Some examples: WiP
claims that concepts are not functions.  But  if the virtual is the
multiplicity, the substance, from which all of the actual is created, then
it must be energetic in nature; and if it is, then how can there be concepts
adequate to the consistency of the virtual without a close connection
between concepts and energy functions?  WiP claims that science must by
nature rely on exoreference, and cannot give account of endoreferential
relations.  But why should this be?  Just because most science is
characterized by exoreferential approaches doesn't mean that this is an
intrinsic characteristic of science as a mode of thought.  After all, even
though the usual definition of a circle in mathematics is exoreferential (it
refers to a distance between the points and an extraneous a center), there
also exist endoreferential definitions that only use the internal
relationships of the points ot each other.  And, as even D&G point out,
Cantor's definition of an infinite set is endoreferential.  WiP claims that
science is propositional (and therefore gravitates towards the axiomatic);
but again, why should this be its inherent characteristic?  Can't it be
non-propositionally diagrammatic?  In other words, if there really are
intrinsic differences between philosophy and science (and art), it remains -
as far as I am concerned - a very open question whether D&G's proposal in
WiP reaches those differences.

-m


At 12:37 PM -0400 5/1/11, Chris Meade wrote:
>Dear RV, malgosia and everyone,
>
>I'm very fascinated by this thread and especially all of the models being
>referred to which lie outside my knowledge almost entirely and I'm excited
>to read more posts on this subject.
>
>I wonder if we are not taking D&G's distinction between philosophy and
>science further than necessary. Especially in light of a sentence that I
>feel I've read many times in D&G as a disclaimer, 'of course, all we ever
>find are mixtures' (I've read this in reference to the smooth and the
>striated, the times of chronos and aion, the body without organs and the
>organism, and I'm sure it applies to many other concepts in their
>philosophy), I think we might do better not to think science and philosophy
>as excluding one another practically.
>
>Which is only to say that I think, RV, that the conceptual modeling of
>coastal behaviour can be variously oriented to producing knowledge and to
>producing thinking when employed variously. And it is this difference of use
>that seems to be the deciding factor between arresting the infinite in an
>image or tracing the infinite speed of movement. I don't think D&G proposed
>to define science in the manner of fields of employment ( "science as a
>whole") which are after all molar structures so much as in molecular
>processes.
>
>have fun,
>chris