Coming home from class there was a seriously beautiful crescent moon setting in the south west. Its upper tip looked like it was embedded in cloud and so it appeared to hang there, a pendulous yellow sliver hung from a cloud.

The air felt wet but the rain clouds had broken up during the 4 hours of class. The roads and fields were still sodden and it was warm so earth smells carried high and clear. Running home was like swimming through a light scented sea. Odd way to put it, but true to the experience.

I really like the class. Partly this is because the material is of deep personal interest, but partly it is because the way in which analytical philosophers disarticulate the body of any theory is so alien to me, it feels as if I am an anthropologist in an alien world – and I love that. It is really hard and takes a lot of work to learn to see in this new way, to predict how the next step of the argument for or against any position will go, or to, more generally, see the body of an argument as an articulated thing that can be dis-membered and re-membered.

When I see a body, what I see are patterns of movement, the shapes a body makes in the world, the interactions of bodies in action with other bodies, the flutter and dance of time expressed by movement. That, as far as I can tell, is not what philosophy is trying to describe. So to learn this I have to endlessly put my way of seeing aside long enough to allow this other disarticulation method to cohere, to make sense, to become visible to me.

You know, I wonder if this is related to an example I gave in class tonight. The teacher was talking about Davidson’s “Thought and Talk” and mentioned that (with respect to his theory) that there could be a case where an utterance is translated in such a way as to make sense when used by both the native speaker and the non-native (but learning) speaker but where the utterance nevertheless really means two different things. She asked for an example.

I said that in Salish (Interior) the word “yaya” is translated into English as “grandmother.” For the English speaker this means the person. The word “yaya“, for English speakers, means the object/person. In Salish it doesn’t really do that. “Yaya” denotes the relationship between people. However, in all cases where the word is used there would be a woman who is there that could bear the term so the English translation isn’t wrong even though it isn’t what the term means in Salish. The upshot of this is that meaning is borne not in the word itself but in its relationship to other sentences and circumstances of its use.

One thing that this points to is that English is part of a noun-centered set of beliefs. These predispositions are part of what enable meaning to occur and are also very hard to both learn once one is out of childhood, and very hard to perceive. Of course “grandmother” means the person! It’s so obvious that we don’t even question it, which makes it hard to see that it isn’t obvious at all. It’s not inevitable that “grandmother” means the person. It’s just a predisposition to see the world as a set of defined objects with boundaries and limits, just as my “relational” take on the world is a predisposition to see the world from the verb’s point of view – as a set of constantly shifting relationships/actions.

Philosophy class, for me, is culture crossing. Fun.

It does make me wonder how the teacher sees the moon. When she was driving home, when she felt the air and saw the moon, what did she see? And was it anything like what I saw? Because this difference that I have described by using the term “yaya” surely doesn’t stop with language. I wonder how deep it goes.