Analogy and Example: Heisenberg, Negation, and the Language of Quantum Physics

Abstract

formalism, which, like propositional dictum, general and unmarked. In this understanding of interpretation, an interpreta tion always an example of more general preexisting truths, an ex emplary part for whole of truth. Moreover, this conception pre serves our common-sense idea of referential function of interpre tation and sign systems more generally: world to language refers preexists (objectively, substantially) language that de scribes it just as necessities of formal logic preexist phenom ena that exemplify those logical necessities. Interpretation, then, con sists of finding a language conforms to preexisting forms. The second concept of interpretation, Greimas and Courtes argue, is completely different. Within this perspective (which they identify with Saussurian linguistics, Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis—all intellectual movements contemporaneous with quantum theory), no longer a matter of attributing a given to a would otherwise lack one; rather, it a paraphrase formulates in another fashion equivalent con This downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:27:46 UTC All use to http://about.jstor.org/terms 300 Ronald Schleifer tent of a element within a given semiotic (Semiot ics and Language, 159). In this second understanding of inter pretation, and are not distinct, but rather every form is, alternatively, a semantic content as well, a signifying form, so that offers an analogical paraphrase of something already within a system of signification. Such para phrases are alternatively and different from their model, and as such raise serious questions about referential truth value that seems to govern linguistic dicta and science. That is, alternativeness of paraphrase offers what Jacques Derrida calls without paradigm ... [in elements are] at once analogous (hence series) and utterly different, offering no guaran tee of (Living On, 130). The opposition between modality and dictum presents just this seriality without paradigm. This espe cially clear in extreme case of negation of modal articulation: negation of a statement taken to be modally inflected—e.g., It not true that atom in left half of box or It not true that multiplication of two negative numbers equals a number—presents metonymic iteration without paradigm, para phrase as Like Heisenberg's between quantum theory and levels of language, this understanding of interpretation presents form of an example, yet, by virtue of fact that what it exempli fies necessarily semanticized, it offers an analogy rather than an example. Even abstract formalism of mathematics, from vantage of classical logic without content, carries meanings that be translated and paraphrased. Although number i operates like any ordinary number, when apprehended modally—when understood as a paraphrase of \J-1—it alternatively seems to be no number at all. All these difficult definitions and dis tinctions, Heisenberg writes, can be avoided if one confines lan guage to description of facts, i.e., experimental results (Physics and Philosophy, 185). In this, Heisenberg suggesting that as soon as one interprets facts—and elsewhere he defines facts of quan tum mechanics positivistically as the black spots on a photographic plate or water droplets in a cloud chamber (Physics and Philoso phy, 179)—one enters realm of dualism of alternation and paraphrase. Positivism—in facts are assumed to be simple entities like water droplets in a cloud chamber—does not admit negation. The droplets are either present or absent, there or not there, and when they are not there nothing signifies. As Jacques La This downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:27:46 UTC All use to http://about.jstor.org/terms Analogy and Example 301 says, the real, whatever upheaval we it to, always in its place,26 and it so precisely because, unlike symbolic systems (to Lacan opposes real), it does not admit negation. The ab sence of droplets only signifies in logic of semantics in ab sence takes on complex positive meaning within a symbolic system just as unmarked of engagement of vocal chords takes on meaning in phonological system of English in absence of voicing distinguishes phoneme /t/ from /d/. These two traditions of interpretation—one classical, other modernist—themselves present a complex double articulation in same way twentieth-century linguistics and Bohr's description of complementarity do. In this complexity, distinction between these traditions not absolute, but rather alternates as a function of questions asked so that interpretation itself remains undecided. Interpretation and understanding, in Emile Benveniste's terms, are cultural phenomena which have characteristic that they never be taken as simple or defined in order of their own na ture but must always be understood as double from fact that they are to something else, whatever their 'referent' may be.27 In an analogical way, nature of data of physics, at least at subatomic scales, cannot simply be defined in order of their own nature. Instead, in same way that even most straight forward, self-evident literal propositions of a sentence—even pure informative (or non-modalized) utterances Greimas and Courtes describe (Semiotics and Language, 10)—can always also be taken to be a figure for something metonymically of them (such as being behind doing, force behind events, very subject articulating propositions that Nietzsche describes), so of quantum physics also always be taken to be connected to something else outside that data: of (modally in flected) knowledge, quality of spatial and temporal position, semiotic system that governs interpretation.