Now we’ll change things slightly:

• Everyone you know who has read a certain book comes to believe that free market capitalism is the only viable economic system for the future of humanity.
  • Do you read the book?
• Everyone you know who has taken a certain drug FMC comes to believe that free market capitalism is the only viable economic system for humanity.
  • Do you take the drug?

and, finally…

• Everyone you know who has read a certain book comes to believe that God exists and has a personal relationship with them.
  • Do you read the book?
• Everyone who has taken drug BPG comes to believe that God exists and has a personal relationship with them.
  • Do you take the drug?

In all these cases, of course, we assume that there are no other side-effects of the drug/book/commercial.  Tease out what matters between these different scenarios, if anything in fact, distinguishes them.

Any argument which stems ultimately from induction, because it is based on generalizing from a limited observation rather than from the whole set of data, cannot be verified to be true.

Is it self-referencing, self-refuting, defensible, or something else?

On Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of Princeton

short, and contains a few interesting observations about the supposed nature of “bullshit”–the sort of deceptive claptrap/hogwash which Frankfurt sees as utterly ubiquitous.  While I wouldn’t award the book any prizes for exhibiting exhaustiveness  or exceptional reasoning–nor for providing any earth-shaking conclusions or consequences–it is illustrative at least insofar as it demonstrates that there is much to be said about this odd phenomenon so prevalent that we hardly take note of it (though, frankly, I think a good, in-depth psychological approach might have been more  revealing).

Still, the work’s pertinence and timeliness for me is a testament to its broad applicability.  I speak, of course, of my recent attempts at engaging the Graduate Recognition Examination’s analytical writing component.  To be most fair, I am scarcely a fan of academic grades and testing in general (I think they ought to be used, but in moderation and with somewhat restricted authority over one’s grades, future, and so on), but let us reserve this point for a later journal entry… Quite frankly, after reading some sample questions and “ideal” answers from test practice experts (Kaplan, Princeton Review, Peterson’s, ETS, Barron’s, and friends), I have come to the conclusion that the GRE’s writing component is a carefully-crafted attempt at getting one thing from its victims: bullshit.

This is not a mere ad-hominem (ad-examinem?) attack on my part.  As Frankfurt illuminates, the term, though it does have a pejorative connotation, does not denote an outright lie.  Rather, I mean to accuse the writing component of encouraging the creation of drivel, and nursing the already-commonplace skillset that allows people to promulgate misleadingly content-devoid hogwash.  This may seem pretty benign, in fact, especially to many of my close friends who (like myself, surely) have already developed a rather acute attachment to this sort of rhetoric.  I disagree.

Most of the writing prompts seem to follow a similar form; basically, an uncontextualized nugget of text presents or assumes an overly generalized dichotomization of some topic, and then selects one of the options with little or no substantiation or reason.  The example which I randomly chose to write about today fits this norm pretty well:

In most professions and academic fields, imagination is more important than knowledge.

Perhaps I am so steeped in the tradition of philosophical dichotomy-smashing, or perhaps it has been too long since I have been trapped in some middle-school classroom bombarding me with inspirational posters lauding generic goods like imagination and knowledge, but offhand it seems to me that vague concepts like knowledge and imagination can neither be neatly separated nor have their quasi-practical features like “importance” compared without proper practical context.  In general, is knowledge more important than imagination?  This question seems to me to be inane.  At the extremes, knowledge devoid of imagination seems to me to be impotent, likewise with  imagination devoid of knowledge.  In the abstract, I simply don’t think that these two generic mental states can be organized hierarchically, and I suspect that those who think that they can be have not been very reflective about the topic–in other words, in responding to such an essay prompt, they would simply select their choice capriciously or based on a loose, unreflective preference for whichever option they desire.

I am not arguing, of course, that there is no difference between imagination and knowledge, nor that we cannot distinguish the two notions.  Rather, I am arguing that to make a determination about practical aspects of these vague general terms, one has to consider the specific contexts, and probably only the best results in any case will be achieved by utilizing the highest possible levels of both manners of thinking (again, given the allowance of the circumstances).  If I am given an example in situ, I can actually make some kind of real determination about whether to emphasize my imagination or my knowledge.  If I am, for instance, drafting a legal document to articulate an already agreed-upon end, then I had best focus on my knowledge of established court procedures to ensure the validity of the document.  Yet it may be almost entirely by virtue of my imagination that I can reconceptualize the arrangement of court evidence which allows me to prove my client’s innocence (or as a prosecutor to prove his guilt).  With proper context, examples like these can certainly allow us to distinguish one of these vague terms from another and place a value on each by which they may be compared.  When the only situational information provided is limited to presumably all the activities which occur “in most professions and academic fields”, then I could utilize either of these aforementioned examples to demonstrate the superior “importance” of either of these two concepts.  In other words, the truth does not matter–neither to ETS nor to the student responding to the seemingly meaningless prompt.¹

I think that a reasonable argument could be made as to the harmlessness  of the essay in itself.   Indeed, of the forms of B.S. described by Frankfurt, this seems to be the least overtly dangerous–a rather unintentional variety  which “is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about”.  Furthermore, the essay’s influence will be quite limited.  Presumably, it will only ever be read by two (or in some cases three) likely jaded professional test-graders, who will get only a couple of minutes during which to reflect on the work.

I wonder, though, if there are broader consequences of accepting the authority of such a component on an exam like this.  Undoubtedly, the GRE has an influence on who is admitted into graduate schools in the USA.  I anticipate the counterargument that one’s admittance into any school is probably almost never alone decided by his or her score on the GRE’s writing component; this is true.  However, my impression is that GRE scores are often taken as one of the first excuses for filtering out applicants, if only because these scores are a quick and dirty method for getting some objective value for the level of education from applicants from such diverse educational backgrounds.  This is significant because it means that most applicants to most programs leading ultimately to many, many professional and academic jobs will have been forced to score well on their GRE’s, and more specifically to demonstrate their ability to excel at generating bullshit².

Since I was last writing somewhat regularly, have learned and read a fair amount–a healthy legion of unfinished posts in my publishing queue attest to this.  I rather hope to polish up a post or two on what I have learned about Levinas and religion, Levinas and political systems, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the history of the classical world, relativism, Jurgen Habermas, naturalism, Re:, Hangedup, and a few other broad topics like languages, reason, atheism and theism, poverty, and the like.

In the meantime, the Summer Support Group for Philosophers has kicked off, with one meeting under its belt.  We focused that session, as well as the upcoming one, on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.  My immediate reaction to the work was mixed.  If you have not had the pleasure of skimming the work, I suggest trying it.  You can find copies of the Ogden translation (the version I am reading) all over the web, but I suggest finding a good tabular or tree layout version to help encourage you to read it the way it was intended (read: the way I didn’t read it the first time).

So far, Wittgenstein has proven to be a pretty decent discussion generator.  I am not quite sure of his laconic/aphoristic approach was meant to ensure ambiguity or clarity, but it certainly seems to me that the former is the end result.  At times, the lack of explanation for his terminology is befuddling, and it is easy to lose track of the point of his work entirely from time to time.  Still, many of Wittgenstein’s propositions have proven to be good points for discussion–including such greats as 1, 2.0123, 3.02,  3.328, 3.333, 4.002, 4.003, 6.45, 6.54 (don’ t look ahead!).  So far I can see much of Rorty’s thought in this reading already, but I am trying hard to resist the temptation to defer to the Rortian interpretation–while I may be getting a good idea of how Rorty read Wittgenstein, my suspicion is that his reading might not be completely faithful to the author’s own thoughts.  In fact, I rather wish I would have better used my Rorty-reading time to finish trudging through Principia Mathematica, because this probably would have made Wittgenstein’s responses to Russell more intelligible.  Luckily I had the foresight to pick up a little Frege reading beforehand.

I might try to keep more info about thoughts and future readings for the summer group at another location, where members of our smallish group might enjoy doing public exegesis.  For now, I have put up a message board on the yet unused ThoughtAndPraxis.com.

I recently took it upon myself to read Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz‘s work Naturalism (for sale here).  I highly recommend the book for anyone looking for a good summary of some considerations of modern philosophy on the topic of naturalism.  The work is pithy, cogent, and I think easy to follow even for those not well-versed in the technical jargon and historic arguments surrounding this traditional metaphysical debate.  I would caution, though, that I think that the book seems to me overly critical of some features of naturalism, and also to me seems to overgeneralize many characteristics which I think abound in naturalists and non-naturalists alike.

I had the great pleasure of being introduced to Taliaferro last fall, and will likely be meet him again in a few days, so I took the time to throw together a little gut-reaction response to the work Natualism (which, I rather think might be better titled “Against Naturalism”, which indicates better that the purpose of this book seems to be the construction of an argument against naturalism, rather than some merely informational and “objective” presentation of historic facts and debates).

Here is my response to their work (in either ogg vorbis or mp3 format).

If you don’t feel like taking the 15 minutes to listen, here’s the gist of my thoughts, without most of the explanatory substance:

1. Yes, I agree with Goetz and Taliaferro that naturalism as they characterize it (through examples) stands on shaky ground, but…
2. Naturalist perspectives, being based on the ever-expanding realm of scientific advancement, are not simply reductionist.  Rather, their role can expand as our empirical observations and theories about these observations expand.  My feelings on this follow from my (mildly Kuhnian, i think) view that science is a primarily pragmatic rather than epistemological endeavor.
3. Because science offers us the opportunity to challenge traditional “supernatural” explanations, it bears the possibility to act as a corrective check for, or at least calls us to critically reflect upon, our folk psychology/physics/philosophy/metaphysics/dogmas.
4. Finally, I think that a strict, parsimonious, positive naturalism is not just likely epistemically problematic–it is psychologically untenable even for its most outspoken adherence (but so is anti-naturalism in some ways).  In the long run, though, if the apparent choice is between accepting on or the other tradtional dogma (either naturalist or unnaturalist), I would just assume have both perspectives around as long as possible duking it out, as neither seems wholy cogent to me.  With the argument preserved, we can pragmatically utilize one assumption in one context generally (say, anti-naturalism for religion; naturalism for science), but allow these perspectives to challenge each other in their own contexts as well.  In this way, I hope we can either realize that these distinctions are irrelevant, or that they are somehow complimentary, or that some better alternatives exist instead–and enjoy the fruits of continued argument.

What struck me as interesting, was that when I was looking for some alternative perspectives on naturalism while writing my response, one of the first results provided by my friend Google was lil’ ol me.  Yes, on the first page of my google results was an entry that I posted in October last year, entitled “Hobbes and Modern Science v. Descartes“.  Back in October, though, I was sort of on the other side of the argument.  Back then, I was chastizing modern science for its naturalist assumptions, rather than lauding it for bringing options to the table–at least until the end of the article.  In the end, though, it seems that both today and last october, I was arguing from one side (first against naturalists, then against anti-naturalists) in order to get to the middle.  In both places, I criticized dogmatism, dualism, and hubristic assumptions that we already know what types of substances make up the entirety of the cosmos.

The major discrepancy between my old article and my new one, it seems to me, is that I was content to characterize science in my October post as presuming the sort of materialistic naturalism that Goetz and Taliaferro seem to see in it, but this week I argued that that view of science is short-sighted.  Which description is more accurate?  In a way, I think both.  I think the end paragraph of my recorded response hints at the answer.  It seems that real human beings simply don’t portray stable, context independent dispositions of this sort.  In one context, we might all predictably be naturalists (say, when you consider whether or not you should worry about a 1,000 anvil falling on you from above), and in others we may all be anti-naturalists (say, when considering our plans for the future or interpreting our emotions).  It may simply not be possible to separate these two categories in a way that is both meaningful and able to be held by a real person over time.

Also, if you’re in the Sioux Falls area, I heartily implore you to come to Charles Taliaferro’s talk at the Augustana Naturalism Symposium this week; it will make your life better.

Also, I tried to stream my recorded response to Naturalism, but it does not seem to work for me.  Try it, if it shows up for you:

God: a more concrete version than that for which I will argue

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Ontological arguments are fun, aren’t they?  I’ve had this one on the back burner for a while now¹, and I had hoped to make some improvements before discussing it with anybody.  However, last night after finishing up an article on Levinas by Roger Burggraeve ², I came to all-too-many realizations which should have been obvious to me long ago.  One of these realizations is that my ideas will not improve substantially if they are not subjected to the unexpected (i.e. the perspectives of Others).

I should begin by mentioning a few caveats:

1. This is an argument, not a proof
2. The product of the argument is not the stereotypical Christian God, nor any other well-defined God with knowable attributes.  In fact, it is a more vague God than even that abstracted object of Anselm’s famous argument³.

My argument is something done for my own pleasure and as an example of my method of applying philosophical categories.  One of my long-standing criticisms of most philosophers and most philosophies, is that they tend to proffer, promote, and perpetuate false dichotomies and sets of categories which hold some of these qualities:

• Categories or alternatives are presented as binary opposites, when they are not.  In fact, I would argue that in most of these cases, so-called binary opposites are not even mutually exclusive.
• Likewise, categories are presented as distinct when they are not necessarily so.
• Categories, distinctions, or divisions are presented as the only available or important options, when in fact the only “only” which these categories have in common is that they were the only categories or distinctions that the philosopher could think of at the time.
• Categories distinguish quantities or qualities based on the assumption that these can be meted out discretely, when in fact it is not clear that they can be.

Note that one mode of categorization that I am explicitly ruling out here, is the classic binary 2×2 table.  I don’t think, in other words, that our perceptions, experience, and reason give us enough information to presuppose that, for example, a thing must either be or not be, a thing must either be good or not be good, a thing must either be one thing or many things⁴

In response to this, I have tried to think up some sort of system of categories which can be applied to the real world, and the only categorization I have been able to think up⁵ is the following, presented in a nice⁶, discrete table:

Note: Please forgive my imprecise/confusing language; I have no real experience yet in formal logic.

Now, this little categorization is fun, because it allows me to get away with a lot.  The “anything else” category includes such gems of possibility as: 1) the given quality is extant, 2) the given quality is both extant and not extant, 3) the given quality is somehow neither extant nor not-extant, , 4) the artificially abstracted categorical quality is not itself measurable, identifiable, abstract-ible, describable, or is otherwise irrelevant, or–my favorite–5) anything else.

The Argument for God’s Existence!

Just for fun, I’ll apply my categorization method to God’s existence.  Take the following possibilities:

1. solipsism: either you and only you exist, in a discretely definable way, or…
2. anything else

I suspect I have already gotten you, by this point, to agree to the equation, and, in most cases, to believe that option #1 is false⁷.  Now comes the controversial part of the argument–the definition of God.  My challenge here is to find a way to get you to accept “anything else” as implying God.  A slight reformulation might help get my point across before I go any further.  Take, now, these possibilities:

1. solipsism: either you know/perceive, all that there is to be known/perceived⁸
2. anything else

A tempting route to go from here is to say “if I do not perceive/know everything that can be known/perceived, what exists which can be, counterfactually, perceived?”, or, in other words, “what is the source of my knowledge?”.  Hopefully there are a few romantic transcendentalists out there who are willing to let me apply Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of God/Nature here: the vague not-me⁹.  Of course, this assumes a source is required and that it is the excess of knowledge that makes is disagree with proposition #1.  There is no need, however, to presume any discrete division between a me and a not-me.  It might also be the case, that neither I nor knowledge/perception are discrete in such a way as to fit into the restrictive bounds of option #1.  This is fine, because the fluidity of self-identity jibes well with other definitions of God, such as Spinoza’s great pantheist notion, certain Buddhist and shamanistic approaches, and the like.  Phenomenologists among us will point out that all we need is an Other to demonstrate against proposition #1, and the Other need not be God.  I am rather content, though, to let this Other stand retain the same role as Emerson’s not-me, such that the Other, or indeed an aggregate of others, fulfills the minimum role of God, should no other discrete being be evident.

Okay, whatever…

Alright, perhaps I did not quite get to the grand argument for God’s existence.  What did I learn in the process?  While I have appreciated attempts to give philosophical systems some sort of reasoned foundation, it seems all of these attempts rely on assumptions which do not necessarily hold.  In attempting my own such system, I found really, only one small means of sorting out knowledge which I have been unable to disprove as a tool (my either/or tool used and explained above).  Unfortnuately, this tool, as applied, typically only allows me to say only “okay…so…’anything else’ is the reality”.  In other words, I have found that the strictest standards of scrutiny have shown me that, if we want to say anything, we have to start making precarious generalizations, inadequate analogies, erroneous abstractions, and arbitrary categorizations at some point, if we want to be able to say anything interesting or useful.  Hopefully, time and energy will and has allowed us to demonstrate (with faith in probability as a founding assumption, unfortunately) which of the unprovable tools of logic, perception, and knowledge-making (modus ponens, modus tollens, statistics, calculus, analogies, etc.) give us results that are more true, more often (or at least more beneficial).  Still, I hope my categorization example has gotten someone out there to ponder, in some useful way, the similarity between believing in any not-me and beliving in God.  I do love feedback, if for anyone who has managed to get through this wordy writing.  If you have any rule of logic that you think might survive my scrutiny, I would love to hear about it!

The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which
presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly,
as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing,
and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other
strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain,
and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure,
or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour
because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without.  And this Seeming,
or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye,
in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill,
in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest
of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities,
as we discern by Feeling.  All which qualities called Sensible,
are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions
of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly.  Neither in
us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions;
(for motion, produceth nothing but motion.)  But their apparence to
us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming.  And as pressing, rubbing,
or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare,
produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce
the same by their strong, though unobserved action

The absurdity, to me, was not merely that Hobbes thought that he had figured out the mechanisms that ruled over our senses and feelings simply by expanding simple principles of interaction of bodies.  Rather, I laughed because I thought it was preposterous that Hobbes thought to account for non-physical things, like emotions and mental activity, by means of materialist mumbo-jumbo.

Leviathan, cover from wikimedia.org

Curiously, I was simultaneously quite sincerely open to, if not entirely credulous of, the findings of modern psychological studies which played the exact same role–namely, making the naturalist presumption that those things which seem incorporeal (like thoughts, sensory data, and emotions) could be studied as causes of simple physical interactions observable, for instance, by means tools like nMRI.  Modern naturalist science (I’m convinced that naturalism is not in any way definitional of science, but rather a mere ubiquitous presumption of modern scientists and the in-vogue scientific paradigms) simply has a more complex version of Hobbes’ materialism.  Rather than simply positing that something “preseth on the eye”, biologists a conception of our senses as the products of a complex of chemical and physical interactions which can all be reduced, theoretically, to a naturalistic incarnation of particle physics.

Each of these two perspectives–Hobbesian materialism and modern naturalist science–has issues with the classical Cartesian mind/body dualism.  What I considered incredible in the Hobbesian perspective, I should recall, is not the given dualism ” between two sorts of ‘stuff’, material and immaterial” (as Rorty calls it), but was once an idea marked more by its novelty than its broad acceptance.  With what reasons did dualism replace materialism as the dominant metaphysical structural assumption?  Certainly a number of enticing dualist metaphysical systems exist, and we might have good reason/s–logical or practical–to accept any of these.  I am not convinced that this dualism is essentially reasonable (or for that matter, if it is, that it is reasonable that we should assume that the non-material side of this dualism should have laws similar to our empirically-derived laws for the natural world); I am likewise not convinced that the material dualism has any cogent appeal over metaphysical tri-ism, quad-ism, or infinit-isms (do metaphysicians have terms for these?), other than theoretical parsimony.

Rorty speaketh

Richard Rorty opens Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Chapter 1 with this to say about dualism:

Discussions in the philosophy of mind usually start off by assuming that everybody has always known how to divide the world into the mental and the physical–that this distinction is common-sensical and intuitive, even if that between two sorts of “stuff”, material and immaterial, is  philosophical and baffling”

While I don’t think that this position is completely fair or accurate, Rorty’s point is well-made.  If we need a dozen or more metaphysical systems for bridging that “between” in the mind/body dualism–epiphenominalism, parallelism, occasionalism, and their ilk–and the whole dualist project is so difficult for us to fine-tune, what makes this dualism seem so obvious?  I suspect Rorty is not just being eristic when he implies that its our dogmatic entrenchment which makes this dualism seem natural, not some objectively-apparent metaphysical substructure.  This dogmatic entrenchment, I think, is what made Hobbes’ materialist metaphysics seem so quaint and rediculous; meanwhile, my dogmatic entrenchment in the authority of modern scientific findings allowed me to provisionally accept a sort of materialist perspective.  Perhaps it is unfair of me to so readily accept one while simultaneously poo-poo-ing the other.

I enjoy Rorty’s criticism of this dualism, but I think my position is still largely gauche to his.  We should not ignore the predominant metaphysical assumption of dualism–nor, conversely, the metaphysical (or physical) presumption of monism/materialism (or other metaphysical -isms).  We simply ought to be aware of, but not necessarily strictly opposed to, our dogmatic assumptions.  Likewise, we should take note when our various presumptions do not jibe well.  Do we assume dualism, yet affirm the findings of research that presumes or requires monism?  If so, is it merely the result of the brute cultural force of one over the other, or are there good reasons for believing both?  Certainly we might simply mean “monism” and “dualism” in different ways.  Dualisms, of course, may be distinctions between “subtances”, “properties”, or “predicates”, among other things; or perhaps it is fair of us to utilize dualist assumptions in a monist reality or monist assumptions in a dualist reality, if they get us the practical results we desire in some parsimonious way in some areas.  In the same way that we still utilize Newton’s laws for some gravity calculations, despite the existence of more precise post-Einstein calculations, it may simply be the best to use one or the other as a tool.  By this point you surely have figured out that this is my pragmatic proposition for an approach to metaphysics; It is my belief that a “dualism assumption awareness” campaign is much more likely to give us the results we desire than a “dualist-smashing” campaign which it seems to me Rorty is using to get us to agree to presume materialism for pragmatic purposes (corrections/comments greatly appreciated!).

However, Rorty’s topical differences, which even Waggish says exist simultaneously, hardly come off as differences in philosophical perspective.  If Rorty, who at this point in the work is wearing his goals and influences on his sleeve, is being honest about where this book is going and how it is getting there, the only foreseeable potential for change from 1979 to 2000 would be mere nuance.  Of course, this conclusion is both tentative and flippant, based on a few pages from a handful of varied books written decades apart.

Summary

To return to the content of the introduction itself, Rorty begins with a small gift–a brickbat for modern philosophy.  Philosophers since Kant, he claims, like to think of themselves as having access to the timeless problems and the timeless answers (or search for answers) that serve as the basis for all other human knowledge (and, I suspect he would be willing to agree, founds not only metaphysics/epistemology, but also ethics and now “meaning” as well).  We owe this foundationalism/arrogance, he states matter-of-factly, to John Locke’s ” ‘theory of knowledge’ based on an understanding of ‘mental processes’ ” as well as to Descartes’ conception of “the mind” as a distinct, process-like intangible.  From that point, the role of philosophy was developed into a “tribunal of pure reason, upholding or denying the claims of the rust of culture” with the assumption that philosophers had access to foundational mind/process upon which all of the rest of human knowledge is contingent.  Most of the grunt work here was done by Kant, but the job was not finished until neo-Kantians so embedded this foundationalism that ” ‘philosophy’ became, for the intellectuals, a substitute for religion.”

Many philosophers undermined this position.  Many, like William James and Nietzsche, were simply ignored or marginalized.  Eventually, though, criticisms became too great, and the works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, for instance, have helped erode the authority and faith in philosophical foundationalism.  While many–notably Husserl and Russell–have attempted to re-foundationalize philosophy, Rorty seems to think that philosophy is ineluctably bound to be demoted from its position as high-meta-priest of knowledge and culture, certainly with his help.

Rorty promises to try to convince his readers not to think of philosophy as a means of obtaining objective truth (a mirror of nature); we ought to ditch our Greek/Cartesian dualisms, embrace a mildly Kuhnian historicism and a Deweyian conception of truth, and move on.

Discussion

So, are Rorty’s charges of philosophical foundational arrogance fair?  Anecdotally, I have found many of the philosophers whom I have met to be among the most humble, despite being among the most intelligent, of people with whom I have associated in general.  As a student of philosophy, I suspect that I’m prone to awarding philosophy that arrogant prize that Rorty wants to take away–the claim to holding, if not the answers that provide universal foundational knowledge, the meaningful questions that humans desire, or should desire, to ask.

If this is all that Rorty is getting at, his assessment seems somewhat fair.  I would add, however, that in modernity philosophy is not the only field which makes claims of this sort.  Religion, and theological studies, often make claims or seek objective meaning, objective ends, foundational understanding of truth, a method of prioritizing which places religion or religious belief or religious ethics or religious questions at the foundation of human existence.  Psychology, likewise, has claims to begin at the foundation of knowledge, the human mind itself.  Do not biology and biochemistry seek the same foundational understanding?  Don’t astronomers look for clues which they hope would give us foundational understanding of life and meaning?  Would not particle physicists claim that all these other pursuits are dependent upon their foundational knowledge?  Even in the humanities and social sciences–sociology, rhetoric, anthropology, history–it seems to me that some incarnation of claims to foundational access to knowledge, meaning, or importance are made.  Perhaps few or none of these claims have the same sort of epistemic or metaphysical bent to them, but I reckon that each is guilty of its claims to arrogance in its own way–perhaps moreso the product of the values of those entering these fields than by virtue of the unified claims of the field in general.

However, if perhaps only for historical and cultural reasons, the field of philosophy may be just a bit more chauvinistic than other areas of study.  Certainly after having been the apex of renaissance humanism’s educational hierarchy, after having been Boethius’s consolation, and having been the salient intellectual perspective enduring since the supposed Greco-Roman founding of Western Civilization, Philosophy may yet have a little humility due it.  Rorty thinks philosophers might need to quit calling their questions and answers eternal; we should recognize that philosophy as time and culture bound as the hard sciences.  Yale’s Anthony T. Kronman argues, in Education’s End (sold here), that philosophy and the rest of the so-called humanities are simply the last fields of study to be brought under the research ideal; perhaps an eventual full incorporation into this ideal (which neither I nor Kronman support) would give philosophy that historicist humility which has so far escaped so many philosophers still seeking to write that “last book”.

The “Cash Value” of my reading

I certainly think that Rorty’s criticisms are worth bearing in mind.  Perhaps I am guilty of being too-far embedded in the goals, practice, and culture of philosophy, but I think it is better that we meet Rorty only half way.  His historicist and antifoundationalist positions ought to be recognized and ought to strongly discourage us from believing in the permanence of any philosophical questions and/or answers.  However, I do not think that this means we should not still attempt or cannot ever achieve the kind of permanence or foundationalism that Rorty rails against.  While philosophy may seem old, I argue that is quite young.  Even if you claim that what we today call philosophy is the same animal that arose in Ancient Greece; or perhaps when Gilgamesh first contemplates his mortality; or perhaps the first time the first person “desired to know”, humans are a young species on a young planet with heck of a lot of learning yet to do.  Writing off foundationalism at this youthful stage of our development is, if nothing else, closing a giant door to inquiry.  Yes, Rorty, philosophers do not seem anywhere close to coming up with foundational answers, but leave us, please, our foundational questions and let us cavil a bit about them just in case.

image courtesy of princeton press; apparently only aesthetic philosophers get pretty covers

In my attempt to learn a bit more from some “post”-analyitic philosophers, I’ve decided to begin by revisiting Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (sold here).  I rather regret going back to this text before having had direct experience with the work of Heidegger in particular, but I am also displeased that I have yet to read any substantial works from Wilfrid Sellars, David Donaldson, Rudolph Carnap and W.V.O. Quine.  However, I suspect that I will be aided by the fact that I have ventured at least gotten my feet wet in exploring John Dewey, Hans Gadamer, Richard J. Bernstein, Quine, and Wittgenstein since i first rushed through parts of Rorty’s work two years ago.

I have chosen to start with Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for a number of reasons.  First, it seems to me something of a seminal work–for Rorty, for philosophy internally, and about philosophy from an external perspective.  Rorty’s criticisms are, if I remember well and if my sources are accurate, poignant, reflective, but not pleasing to the ears of most philosophers.  As such, he cannot be ignored.  Either Rorty’s harsh words are valid and philosophy must reform itself in some dramatic ways or philosophers must make a cogent rejoinder.  Since the writing of Rorty’s book, I suspect both have been done with countless subtle incarnations of each, and perhaps some not so subtle.

I have also selected this work for pragmatic reasons, because I think it represents a noteworthy pastiche of early Neopragmatist/postanalytic philosophers’ works (namely Quine, Sellars, and Davidson), as well as those of some of their influences (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and to some extent Dewey).  Furthermore, there is a marked lack of analytic tradition philosopherss in my formal education in philosophy–a deficiency which I hope to allay at least to some degree by reading this work.  Finally, I have selected Rorty’s text over those of his peers because the philosophical exploration that I have just begun was encouraged by epistemological criticisms of Rorty’s later work–work which is foreshadowed very strongly in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

No doubt that one of the most salient sources of the flak that philosophers receive from others is that they are willing to engage in serious discussion about otherwise seemingly worthless minutiae–apparently that includes pragmatists, too.  However, when I happened again upon this piece by William James, I simply could not keep myself from asking a few hair-splitting questions.

From William James What Pragmatism Means: Lecture II [1909]

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

While I appreciate James’ attempt to illustrate pragmatism by example in this case, I think this is a great opportunity to nitpick a bit, hopefully to better elucidate the meaning and uses of pragmatism.

I have a few outstanding criticisms of James’ use of this story above.  First, I am not confident that when James says “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel” [emphasis mine], that the word practically brings any additional meaning its sentence, given the assumption that the rest of James’ paragraph is the explanation of what might be meant practically.  In other words, James might just as well have said that it “depends on what you mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”, because there is no difference in meaning between the two sentences.  When William James goes on to describe the two potential definitions for “going round”, he supplies definitions which do not really touch on the pragmatic nature of the situation.  Each definition is, it seems to me*, metaphysical–as is the question of going round the squirrel (*for the sake of simplicity, I’m proposing a metaphysical v. pragmatic dichotomy here, let’s not bring language/psychology/etc. into the equation).

This is not to say, however, that a pragmatic distinction cannot be made for this metaphysical squirrel question.  Indeed, it seems to me that a clarification drawn between what our squirrel-watching friends “mean” and what they “practically mean” might help us get a better grasp on pragmatism, if we can simply get away from the positions James offers us.

I will begin by examining James’ two potential definitions for “going round” the squirrel.

“Going Round”

First, James says one approach is to claim that going round said squirrel means “being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again”.  My complaint with this description is that it does not satisfy what we expect when we say “going round”; to illustrate this, I’ve composed a little animation (go easy on me, it’s my first attempt ever) which shows a man–William James himself, actually– “going round a squirrel” by this definition:

apposite version of James going round a squirrel

I suspect most people will agree that this does not really illustrate what we mean when we say “going round”; therefore, James’ apposite approach to defining the motion is unsuccessful.  I should say that there are other options for satisfying the conditions of this apposite definition, but they are more difficult to animate.

Now on to the directional approach to defining “going round”.  I have made another animation in a like manner to illustrate a scenario that falls within the bounds of James description “passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again”:

directional version of James going round a squirrel

Again, I think most of us will agree that this is not what is meant by going round, and, again, this is only one animation of a number of possible configurations.

So…what’s the point?

My intent, here, was not merely to disapprove of William James’ options for defining a man going round a squirrel.  Rather, it is to question whether merely defining things in simple relations to each other–and abstracted from the reality of motives and consequences–presents us with metaphysical answers, not pragmatic answers (pragmatic in both the sense of philosophy and of practical use).

My alternative approach, and one which seems to me more indicative of the goals of pragmatism (please correct me if I am wrong), is that the definition of “going round” can be precise, but it must be fluid depending on our ends, our experiences and knowledge, and the prospective consequences of the ends and knowledge which we bring to the table.  I’ll attempt to make this clearer with a quick and dirty example.

A truly pragmatic distinction in meaning requires application.  In this sense, we might need not only to “go round the squirrel”, but to “go round the squirrel for [some reason] “.  For example, if I ask you to go round the squirrel to get a full-view 3D picture for mapping into a computer, and you keep chasing the squirrel around with the camera, but can only ever get the little beast to show its belly to you, then you might rightly tell me “I simply could not get round the squirrel to get those pictures”.  Yet if your task was merely to go round the squirrel to set up pylon cameras to get those same images, you might rightly explain to me that you were able to go round the squirrel in order to complete this task, though in this case you never beheld the rodent’s dorsal side.  In these cases, the definition is formed through the situation and its consequences; there appears to be a real cash value (on the converse, what does James’ situational and definitional distinction get for us?  Perhaps we receive nothing, if we have no interest vested in either consequence).

Perhaps, then, the difference between what we mean and practically mean might not be a difference in denotation.  What I mean by going round the squirrel might be confined to a simple definition, but what I practically mean in the given example is that the act of “going round the squirrel” is an act the whose completion belongs to the category of things required in order for me to accomplish my end goal, one of the things which would get me closer to obtaining the cash-value of the 3D computer image of said squirrel.