Magical Thinking
Carl H. Flygt
January 2006
I must confess that the Searlean analysis of speaker’s meaning has always struck me as an appeal to magical thinking. When someone says something or otherwise employs the language faculty, and means what he says or does, he (she) imposes conditions of satisfaction on the tokens he (she) produces – on the sounds or the marks or the gestures in space. Those tokens thereby become intentionalistic in themselves; they are satisfied or fail to be satisfied by states of affairs in the world. It is as if they become living entities, with appetites and aversions. It is as if animism is the purport of Searle’s logic.
How interesting that Searle has now set his sights on engineering the emergence of language in proto-human groups, and asking about the necessary conditions for language to evolve there over long periods of time . One thing we know for a fact about these groups, both from prehistory and in ancient history, is that their thinking was pervasively magical. Magical thinking is the oldest social tradition in the human record. People have always believed that the things to which they accorded meaning had a spirit or spirits at work inside them. Only recently have we begun to think materialistically about our world, and to remove the backwardness of most spiritual thinking from our consensual practices. But there appears to be an element of the magical in even our most materialistic logic about the world. Perhaps the magical is actually there.
Suppose someone says “It is raining” and means it. The analysis would be:
The problem, of course, is with “represents,” which is not a causal notion. For the analysis to work materialistically, we need causation all the way through. Better perhaps is:
2. This intention causes (this token invokes (“it is raining” represents that it is raining)).
“Invokes” is a causal notion. It is something a magician does when he (she) wants a spirit to show itself in something material, and perhaps to create some sort of result in the world. There are, on the magician’s picture, spirits (consciousnesses) everywhere in the supersensible dimensions of the cosmos. An invocation is a planting of some little fragment of consciousness in some material token.
So far so good. Now how about the content of the invocation? Here we can reduce to a simple convention. Everyone in the community expects “it is raining” to represent that it is raining. So we can say:
3. This intention causes (this token causes (everyone in the conversation expects “it is raining” to represent that it is raining)).
Now universal expectation is enough to implant meaning or institutional significance in just about anything. So how does the individual speaker’s intention actually cause universal expectation? By what mechanism does everyone advert to that cause in exactly the right way?
The answer must be that we are homologously constituted. We all work in basically the same way, and we are induced by some sort of sympathetic resonance to represent meaning identically. The communication of meaning is sympathetic resonance.
Now resonance phenomena can have some surprising (i.e. magical) effects. Two grandfather clocks with the same pendulum lengths if wound up and left to themselves in reasonable proximity will be discovered a day later to have fallen precisely into phase with one another. Enough energy is transmitted between them to make this outcome necessary. What surprises could be in store between and among human beings, with their complex assemblage of bodily oscillators, were they given sufficient reason to entrain their conversations to the necessities intrinsic to consciousness, to language and to the spiritual need to satisfy the deepest and most erotic wishes of the imagination and the dream?
My theory of conversation is calibrated to make the semantics of inference and ontological expression into an affair of first-order physics. It is supposed to transform mere philosophy into social ecstasy. It is supposed to render material consciousness commensurable with the dreams and imaginations of our most exalted states of sentience and sapience. By means of causal self-reference, it is supposed to animate and to reify thought and the propositional imagination itself. Subscribers and critics alike are welcome to engage.