Finally, Nat continues:

3:

Also, he argued against historian C.B. Macpherson, that John Locke could not have been basing his writing on capitalism because it had not yet codified into an available language. (But would soon do so.) I studied with Pocock but disagreed with him about Macpherson.

Anyway, you can see how that fits into "Babel 17." BTW, In those days no one would bring up SF in a grad class.

#SamuelRDelany #JLAustin #wittgenstein #ThomasKuhn #JGAPocock #CBMacpherson

Nat:

2:

His argument for a linguistic empiricism contradicted political theorist Leo Strauss's combination of ahistoricism & conspiracy theory that, sadly, most of the current Supreme Court justices pretend to base their decisions on.

#SamuelRDelany #JLAustin #wittgenstein #ThomasKuhn #JGAPocock #CBMacpherson

Nat:

1:

In the 1970s & 1980s the historian J.G.A. Pocock introduced a concept he called "available languges," based on such ideas as Wittgenstein's "family resemblance," J.L. Austin's "speech acts, & Thomas Kuhn's "paradigms." The idea was that at any given moment folks could only make political arguments given the concepts/languages available to them.

#SamuelRDelany #JLAustin #wittgenstein #ThomasKuhn #JGAPocock