tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post6943626386722368437..comments2023-05-13T07:41:26.217-05:00Comments on SOH-Dan: Disjunctivism, Skepticism, and Why I Shouldn't Start Writing Things at One AMDaniel Lindquisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-17958046740058367132008-04-30T05:25:00.000-05:002008-04-30T05:25:00.000-05:00The only other Wright paper I can recall getting a...The only other Wright paper I can recall getting a significant way through is his essay in "Reading McDowell". Ironically, there he lambasted McDowell for not writing in a properly analytical/rigorous style. (<A HREF="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/10/wright-on-mcdow.html" REL="nofollow">Leiter</A> has cited this bit approvingly.)<BR/><BR/>I'm inclined to agree about disjunctivism; in this post, I was trying to figure out how McDowell's response to perceptual skepticism works (assuming, for this post, that it can do just the job demanded of it). There are definitely ways of responding to the skeptic that I prefer, and I'm not sure why McDowell doesn't take advantage of them. Certainly Davidson took a different approach to the topic, for instance, and McDowell normally doesn't shy from cribbing from Davidson.<BR/><BR/>I suspect that McDowell may be trying to dissolve the problem more "elegantly", for quietist reasons. The idea is that if we go in for something moderately elaborate <I>here</I>, then the answer will come "too late", like McDowell said of Davidson's arguments for the "veridical nature of belief" as a way to avoid the "see-saw" of Frictionless Coherentism & The Given. A "proper" exorcism should take the problem out at the first step, rather than through careful footwork over an extended period of time. Otherwise, whatever originally prompted the philosophical worry will remain untouched, and presumably will continue to irritate.<BR/><BR/>If this is the sort of reason McDowell has for wanting a "one step" answer to the skeptic, then it strikes me as unmotivated. I'm inclined to think that what (from one point of view) appears to be an elaborate dialectical shuffle can do the sort of quietistic work McDowell wants done. McDowell seems to admit this much when, in his response to Pippin, he speaks of seeing such-and-such a doctrine of Hegel's "as the truism that it is", once we've cleared away some philosophical blinders. That line originally struck me as pretty obviously strained; I've softened on it a bit.<BR/><BR/>A "Culture & Value" quote, p.11: "The solution of philosophical problems can be compared with a gift in a fairy tale: in the magic castle it appears enchanted and if you look at it outside in daylight it is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the sort)." It is only after the problems have been solved, after we have returned to "daylight", that what appeared to be something magical appears as what it has always been -- something common & unremarkable. I think this is a very fruitful picture for approaching the question of "quietism", of exorcising philosophical problems rather than answering them with philosophical theories.<BR/><BR/>I want to juxtapose this with Hegel's occasional remarks on "The Absolute" as really something common, with his parallel remarks about how "Divine Service" in Protestantism just amounts to living as a good citizen of one's home, etc. See especially the notes to ss237 of the <I>Encyclopedia Logic</I>, which I've mentioned before in this context: "When the expression 'absolute Idea' is used, people may think that it is only <I>here</I> that we meet up with what is <I>right</I>, that here everything <I>must</I> give itself up. It is certainly possible to indulge in a vast amount of senseless declamation about the absolute Idea. But its true content is only the whole system, which we have been hitherto studying the development of. It may also be said in this strain that the absolute Idea is the universal, but the universal not merely as an abstract form to which the particular content is a stranger, but as the absolute form, into which all the categories, the whole fullness of the content it has given being to, have returned. The absolute Idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion, he cannot but imagine them to be something outside of which lies the whole of life and the whole of the world." (emphases mine)<BR/><BR/>The "absolute Idea", the unity of subject and object, form and content, etc is not some <I>special</I> category (some new sort of cognitive access to How Things Are which has been enabled by the final development of Hegel's System), but is just all of the other logical categories (judgement, concept, substance, cause, organism etc) all conceived as they are & placed in their place. There's not some big "reveal" at the end of the Logic (or at the end of the System itself); what was wanted from the outset turns out to just be the various steps which, <I>in medias res</I>, may have seemed to be mere intermediaries on the way to Absolute Truth. In effect, Hegel wants us to end up "outside in daylight", where we can see that what we really needed was "an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the sort)". This will both end the building of "castles in the air" (since we can see that what we really want is a more terrestrial dwelling) and show up pessimistic resignation to the "fact" that we can never find what we <I>really</I> needed as likewise confused. For the "Absolute" which speculative philosophy treats of is not something special to philosophy; philosophy is "its own age summed up in thought", and takes its material from the flux of life. Nor is logic some special topic that philosophy might discover new treasures in; Logic is the study of thought as such, and this is just what is most familiar -- speculative logic is merely our everyday ways of thinking, perspicuously arranged (so that we might <I>see</I> the relationships that hold between the categories, that make them what they are -- the "seeing" is what makes it "speculative"). Which is just the thing that "quietism" was supposed to be concerned with.<BR/><BR/>So, if McDowell is shying away from a more complicated, Davidson-&-pals response to Wright-style skepticism because he wants to be a good quietist, I think this is a misstep. That McDowell really does struggle with these sorts of tensions is evidenced by Brandom's remark in the first Locke Lecture that McDowell "is a wild-eyed constructive philosopher, though he gets squeamish when I call him that." Disjunctivism might then not be the true reason McDowell rejects the skeptic (since he does hold to many of the Davidsonian/Kantian/Hegelian/Sellarsian ideas that a more complex response would involve), but it's just what he thinks is a more attractive response (in the physical sense -- if it worked as an exorcism, it would <I>look very nice</I>).<BR/><BR/>Of course, it's possible that I'm just missing how the disjunctivist is supposed to respond to perceptual skepticism, and there really is a witheringly elegant strategy in McDowell's response. But I doubt it.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-87513091222560833152008-04-28T23:57:00.000-05:002008-04-28T23:57:00.000-05:00Yeah, Wright's not getting it, all right. And his...Yeah, Wright's not getting it, all right. And his style is atrocious – did you read his paper in <I>Reading Putnam</I> (on BIVs)? It takes him 20 pages to get to the (fairly simple) point.<BR/><BR/>But I'm still a bit queasy about disjunctivism as a (supposedly sufficient) response to skepticism in particular. Like Moore's argument, it's <I>true</I>, but not entirely satisfying. Interestingly (I just thought of this) I suspect that what I reject here is a sort of "dialectical parsimony" which tries to turn back skepticism in one step rather than with a possibly unwieldy collaboration of epistemological, semantic, and metaphysical doctrines (like I do).Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com