SOH-Dan

McDowell and Phenomenologists

2012-01-25T20:03:00.004-06:00

This NDPR piece was a very enjoyable read.

I suspect the actual book would annoy me, though; McDowell is almost always misread when his position is assimilated to other analytic philosophers. When he says that all perceptual content is conceptual, he doesn't mean this to be contentious; "non-conceptual perceptual content" is not supposed to be intelligibly a sort of content rational animals could be given, so saying that our perceptual content is conceptual is not meant to be asserting a thesis. "Conceptual" is supposed to be pleonastic -- it has a use in a slogan, but not in any thesis. But when people find something awkward in McDowell (usually the McDowell of "Mind and World", in isolation from his later ~20 years of writings), they often want to articulate what bothers them as being that McDowell was "wrong" to "deny" non-perceptual content: so they find some thesis they would articular by means of the form of words "All perceptual content is conceptual", attribute it to McDowell, and then argue against it as if they were arguing against something McDowell had said. (Sean Kelly comes to mind as someone else who has done exactly this, but I know I'm forgetting others.)

This seems to be what has happened in the book under review: the author treats "All perceptual content is conceptual" as if it were saying that there is no way to distinguish the content of a judgement from the content of an experience, and then his points about percepts being accompanied by "empty intentions" lets him argue against it: for a perceptual content is always accompanied by empty intentions, and a judgemental content is not. But McDowell has no reason to deny this; he never pretended to have given an exhaustive phenomenology of perception, and he never wanted to say that perception just is a sort of judgement (indeed, this is basically the view of Davidson's he wanted to argue against). His later shift to talking of perceptual content as "not propositional" because merely "articulable", as opposed to judgemental content which "is propositional" because "articulated", marks this difference more clearly than he did in "Mind and World". But when he shifts to talking in this new way in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given", he's clear that he still wants to say "All perceptual content is conceptual" because he never meant this to say anything more than he now says: it's a reminder that our judgement and our perception belong together. Attacking that slogan is not a place to productively argue with McDowell.

Was Heidegger an Analytic Philosopher?

2012-01-15T16:28:00.002-06:00

Brian Leiter is poking fun at the analytic/continental distinction again, this time by way of the late Dummett:

Unnoted, of course, is that Dummett's conception of "analytic" philosophy--as "an armchair subject, requiring only thought" and as trying "to clarify the concepts in terms of which we conceive of [reality], and hence the linguistic expressions by means of which we formulate our conception" as he put it in his last book--was such that huge numbers of philosophers in the Anglophone world today wouldn't qualify, though one can happily stipulate that Dummett is an "analytic" philosopher in his sense, and Heidegger is not.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure that Heidegger doesn't get counted as an "analytic" philosopher, if all we look at from Dummett's book is this one claim. He clearly wasn't doing "empirical" work in the way that Leiter likes to promote, so he can only be ruled out by the second part of Dummett's quote's criterion: Did Heidegger attempt to "clarify the concepts in terms of which we conceive of [reality], and hence the linguistic expressions by means of which we formulate our conceptions"?

My initial reaction is to say that he did, at least in Being and Time. It's easy to find passages like the one from section 14, where Heidegger presents a list of four ways in which the word "world" is used, and notes that he's "unraveling" these uses so that "we can get an indication of the different kinds of phenomena that are signified, and of the way in which they are interconnected." (p.93 in the Macquarrie translation). This looks to be straightforwardly what Dummett's quote says analytic philosophers do. But this is only a particularly clear instance of a general strategy: Being and Time is largely made up of discussions of ordinary sorts of words and experiences in a context which makes clear that it's easy to get confused about them. For instance, Heidegger's discussion of "reality" (the concept) is largely focused on the ways in which Descartes misunderstood things in this area, and the problems it lead him into. (Also fun is Leiter's joking attempt to unify "analytic" philosophers by the fact "that they all probably read "On Sense and Reference" at some point, given that we know that Heidegger read this work.)

What spurred me to think about this was a post Enowning linked to the other day; the post itself doesn't interest me, but I quite liked being pointed to a passage I had overlooked (it wasn't highlighted in my copy of the book): "Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems." (p.262 in the Macquarrie) The context of this quote is section 44 of the first division of Being and Time, the discussion of truth which closes that division, and why Heidegger is looking at (what he thinks of as) the etymology of "ἀλήθεια" in Greek. He notes that he needs to avoid "uninhibited word-mysticism" in doing this, and I'm not sure he meets his own demand here (and later on I think he clearly falls into it). But the success of what he's aiming at here doesn't interest me as much as what the goal he set for himself was: he's trying to avoid "that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems" which comes from a "common understanding" which "levels off" words.

It seems to me that one of the main things that Heidegger is concerned with warding off in this section is the idea that it is only in true thoughts (judgements, assertions) that we (our minds, our thoughts, our language) "come into contact" with the world. This comes to seem obvious to us when we think of truth as exhausted by things like the T-schema: "S" is true IFF S. Truth is here a predicate of concatenated strings of signs, and to say of a string that it is true "is just to say what the string says itself": truth is chased up the tree of grammar. As a truth-predicate can be added onto any existing language without changing the inferential connections between the portions of that language which do not contain a truth-predicate, it can thus appear that truth is "not deep", is "redundant", "does not refer to a real property": thus we should handle how the language works without truth, and then a truth-predicate can be added onto it. This is what Heidegger has in view when he criticizes the idea that truth is rightly thought of as simply a property of judgements: to do so makes it easy to think that judgement should be intelligible without truth, and then truth be made intelligible in terms of antecedently-understood judgements.

Against this, Heidegger tries (in various ways) to get us to see that our ability to judge at all, rightly or wrongly, is possible only because of our "disclosedness": there is a binary hiddenness/revealedness to the entities uncovered in our being-in-the-world which is more primordial than explicit judgements, and our ability to say anything (truely or falsely) by means of concatenated strings depends on it. The appearance that the binary true-false predicates of truth could be added onto a language which was antecedently understood thus covered up the fact that the language was understood only against a background of some such disclosedness, which should itself be apprehended in a discussion of truth and falsity, as its binary and the true-false binary are kin. The "common understanding" that allows concatenated strings of signs to be regarded as "saying something (in a language)", and to take these independently-intelligible relations as a foundation for work in semantics, can only be achieved by a "leveling off" which occludes the fact that we symbolize only in the course of our lives together, and that we leave things unsaid if we insist on treating language solely in terms of signs, sets, and satisfaction-relations. Signs "in the language" have the set-theoretic relations they are established to have in the set-theoretic universe; symbols have meanings only in our life together.

So, it seems to me that Heidegger was concerned with clarifying our concepts (our thoughts) and the words we use to express them; if it is necessary to any analytic/continental distinction that Heidegger be opposed to the "analytic" group, then Dummett's quote does not give us such a distinction.

Heidegger on Frege

2011-08-01T05:47:00.003-05:00

From "New Research in Logic" (1912, when Heidegger was 23), translated in "Becoming Heidegger", p. 33. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time Frege is mentioned in Heidegger's corpus. I would be interested to learn otherwise, if I'm wrong about this.

Nevertheless, we ourselves are inclined to attribute a far-reaching significance to Husserl's penetratingly profound and very propitiously formulated Investigations, for they have truly broken the psychological spell and brought the above-mentioned clarification of principles into play. Husserl here does not hesitate to express his gratitude for the influential suggestions that he received from the Wissenschaftlehre (1837) of the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano. The planned reprint of this now rare book will probably soon appear. In this connection, the name of a German mathematician cannot be left unmentioned. Gottlob Frege's logical-mathematical researches are in my opinion not yet appreciated in their true significance, let alone exhausted. What he has written in his works on "Sense and Meaning" and on "Concept and Object" cannot be disregarded by any philosophy of mathematics. But it is also equally valuable for a universal theory of the concept. While Frege overcame psychologism in principle, Husserl in his Prolegomena to a Pure Logic has systematically and comprehensively confronted the essence, relativistic consequences, and theoretical worthlessness of psychologism.

Free Issue of Philosophical Investigations

2011-06-11T00:54:00.003-05:00

The journal Philosophical Investigations has published a "virtual issue" that collects some of their best material from the past 30 years, without a paywall. It looks like a pretty good group. So far I've read the Stove review (which is fun fluff) and the Rush Rhees article, which I recommend to anyone who cares about Wittgenstein's views of what he was doing in (at least) his later philosophy. This bit in particular jumped out at me, given my most recent post:

There was something misleading about Wittgenstein’s use of the phrase Krankheiten des Verstandes: since we do not know what a Gesundheit des Verstandes would be. He certainly did not think that the unreflecting philistine was in a better state of mind than the person who knows genuine philosophical puzzlement. And the notions of ‘health‘ and ‘illness’ are not very helpful here.

Rhees also discusses the relationship between the übersichtliche Darstellung der Grammatik and the Tractarian say/show distinction, though at a disappointingly short length. This is an interesting bit though:

[The say/show distinction] was an idea which he did retain [in his later philosophy], in his account of recursive proofs or proofs by induction, for instance; and it had much to do with the discussion of generality.

Here we have a clear instance of a place where the thing "shown" has to have the shape of something like "how to go on". You can't add something propositional to an inductive proof that makes it into a deductive one -- there's no point at which "logic takes you by the throat" (and I think that the "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" case is another example of this). If you try to add a premise like "If you've checked N cases and they've had results consistent with [x,y,z] then all cases will give results consistent with [x,y,z]" or "If you've checked N cases and they've had results consistent with [x,y,z], assume that all cases will have results consistent with [x,y,z]" then you have the problem of having to motivate those assumptions/imperatives, and there's no way to do that without falling back on induction. It's formally akin to the "interpretations" in the "rule-following paradox" of PI 201:

It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.

I think this passage from Rhees lends some support to Kremer's view of the say/show distinction as lining up with the knowing-that/knowing-how distinction. These aren't cases where you might (per impossible) be able to say something that "grammar" or "logical syntax" forbids you from saying, and have it do the work you want. There's something deeper to "showing" than that.

A Better Sort of Reader: therapy

2011-06-09T05:40:00.003-05:00

I think this is my favorite passage from Monk's paper:

One reason (not mentioned by Hacker) for being suspicious of the tendency to regard Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a kind of therapy is that, although in this context, the word "therapy" is used as the opposite of "theory," in almost all other contexts it is assumed that a form of therapy is founded upon and shaped by a particular theory. To psychoanalytic therapy, there corresponds Freudian theory, to Gestalt therapy there corresponds Gestalt theory, to "primal therapy" there corresponds Janov's theory of repressed pain, and so on. To call Wittgenstein's later work "therapy" is not, therefore, necessarily to assume that it does not express a theory; on the contrary, it might well invite the question of what theory this therapy is based on.

I suspect I have not been as attentive to this point as I should have been. It misses Wittgenstein's point to approach all philosophy as "sick" and in need of treatment, for one can rightly take up such a position only if one comes in already knowing a great deal about philosophy -- so that one can recognize illness for illness and not health. But one can't have this sort of knowledge; philosophy doesn't have the sort of unity a species of animal does, so there cannot be the same sort of distinction between illness and health you can draw in medicine. And anything a philosopher can do, they can do; it is not the Wittgensteinian's place to forbid them anything. It is important not to take the position of a doctor treating a patient when trying to "lead words from their metaphysical back to their everyday use"; doctors have knowledge that justifies their taking the stance they take. There is nothing analogous that could allow a Wittgensteinian to identify a "metaphysical use" of a word. All that there is to be done is to either learn what sense they attach to their words, and then proceed from there (beyond philosophy), or to come to a shared recognition that their words have no clear sense to them.

I think this is the irony of TLP 6.53

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions.

when considered beside TLP 4.11

The totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences).

Reading 6.53 by itself, it might appear that Wittgenstein is advocating a sort of naturalism or positivism: we should take the natural sciences as a model for all thinking, and avoid philosophizing. This is a sort of perspective which it isn't hard to find proponents of; Dawkins comes to mind. But when a Dawkins praises science, he has in mind things like physics, chemistry, and biology. You can identify something as a science (in this sense) by its content. It is opposed to things like mathematics, history, and philosophy. (To say that life should be approached in a "mathematical spirit" or a "historical spirit" is very different from saying, with the naturalist, that life should be handled scientifically.) But this isn't how the Tractatus delimits "natural science": 4.11 tells us that by "the totality of natural science" Wittgenstein means merely "the totality of true propositions". You can't tell from the content of a proposition whether or not it's a scientific one; the mere fact of it having content settles all that one is concerned with, if one is trying to follow the advice of 6.53. To say nothing but the propositions of natural science is just to not talk nonsense.

But "Don't talk nonsense" isn't something one can accomplish by deciding to do it; it is a key thought of Wittgenstein's, both early and late, that it is easy to start speaking nonsense without realizing one has begun doing so. Even if one is aware that this is easy to do, one still slips into it from time to time. One can't follow "the right method of philosophy" because of this.

An analogous problem affects the other half of 6.53. It might seem that we can recognize someone's wish "to say something metaphysical" by the content of what they're trying to say. A "metaphysical" statement would be something about God, the soul, the nature of Reality, Being -- the sorts of things one finds badly handled in the "Metaphysics" section of a bookstore, and handled not much better in philosophy departments. But this isn't how the Tractatus thinks of metaphysics, either. Wittgenstein doesn't give us an account of what metaphysics is in the Tractatus (which is worth noting by itself), but the method he prescribes for dealing with it in 6.53 is clearly an echo of 5.4733:

Every possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and if it has no sense this can only be because we have given no meaning to some of its constituent parts. (Even if we believe that we have done so.)

which is a comment on 5.473, where we find

A possible sign must also be able to signify. Everything which is possible in logic is also permitted. (“Socrates is identical” means nothing because there is no property which is called “identical”. The proposition is senseless because we have not made some arbitrary determination, not because the symbol is in itself unpermissible.)

-- and looking at these passages together, it seems clear that "metaphysics" is just a label for nonsense.

So to follow the advice of 6.53, we would need to be able to tell when someone wanted to say something nonsensical. But we cannot tell when this is happening, as a rule: nonsense can slip us by. Nor are there any particular topics which we can know a priori will constitute a slide into "metaphysics" if they come up. TLP 5.557:

The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. What lies in its application logic cannot anticipate.

-- and since, in the Tractatus, all propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions, logic cannot anticipate what propositions there are. And as a proposition is just what has sense, we cannot anticipate what will have sense. How, then, are we to tell whether something has a sense or not?

To answer this, I think it helps to look at TLP 3.326:

In order to recognize the symbol in the sign we must consider the significant use.

and 3.227

The sign determines a logical form only together with its logical syntactic application.

and 3.363

What does not get expressed in the sign is shown by its application. What the signs conceal, their application declares.

and, as a terminological reminder, 3.2:

The sign is the part of the symbol perceptible by the senses.

Our trouble, in trying to follow the advice of 6.53, is to determine from the signs (sounds, ink-marks) someone has given us whether or not we are dealing with "metaphysics". But nothing in a sign tells us what symbol we are to recognize in it: 3.21

Two different symbols can therefore have the sign (the written sign or the sound sign) in common—they then signify in different ways.

and 3.22 (my emphasis)

It can never indicate the common characteristic of two objects that we symbolize them with the same signs but by different methods of symbolizing. For the sign is arbitrary. We could therefore equally well choose two different signs and where then would be what was common in the symbolization?

So what we need to know, when presented with some signs, cannot be "read off" from the signs themselves. The sign does not tell us whether it is being used metaphysically, and neither does logic.

Consider now 4.002:

Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.... The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

which is followed by 4.003

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their nonsensicality. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

It seems that here we get another version of the advice of 6.53: we are to state the nonsensicality of propositions which philosophers have often tried to put forth (which are, one presumes, "metaphysics"). But there is no temptation to think that this can simply be taken up as a "method" here: we are told that understanding colloquial language is "enormously complicated" and that it is humanly impossible to immediately gather the logic of such language.

To recognize nonsense as nonsense, we need to consider the significant use (sinnvollen Gebrauch) of a sign and recognize the symbol in it (recognize its application). If this is impossible, then we're dealing with nonsense -- but a verdict that this is impossible can only be a pessimistic induction over failed attempts to "consider its signifcant use". Logic always leaves open that we have simply, thus far, missed how the sign is being used.

So if we try to take 6.53's advice and follow "the only strictly correct method" in philosophy, we will quickly find that "there easily arise the most fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full)": we treat as nonsense what is not, and as not nonsense what is; we take ourselves to be in possession of a method where there cannot be one. For we do not understand ourselves or each other as well as 6.53 makes it seem like we can: 5.5563

(Our problems are not abstract but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)

A Better Sort of Reader: the ethical

2011-06-09T02:16:00.002-05:00

"A Better Sort of Reader", Ray Monk's paper from the conference, opens with a line from one of the preface drafts in "Culture & Value".

It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon -- this is what I wish for it -- be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader.

His paper is an exploration of Wittgenstein's hatred for "professional philosophers" (which Monk takes to be what LW meant in this passage) and his rejection of the idea that philosophy could be done by means of "theses" or "theories".

This paper lead to the best discussions I heard at the conference. I think it's because what was being argued about was largely inside baseball: everyone there agreed that it was crucial to take seriously Wittgenstein's rejection of "theory", and that most "Wittgensteinians" have not done this. So what was up for debate was how exactly to get this part of Wittgenstein right. Things got down to brass tacks a lot more quickly than they often do at conferences.

Much of the paper is pro forma criticizing Hanjo Glock's claim that "The conflict over philosophical theories may be spurious, since Wittgenstein had a very restrictive conception of theory, confining it either to the deductive-nomological theories of the empirical sciences or to the attempt to provide an analytic definition of what he regarded as family resemblance concepts." But the real heart of the paper seems to be "Here is a collection of interesting Wittgenstein quotes on topics related to this area." Beating up on Glock was just an excuse to string together things to bring up for the benefit of discussion. I'm honestly surprised more conference papers aren't like this; I thought it worked very well.

I'll skip any real recapping of Monk's paper; anyone who's at all interested in this area of Wittgenstein should read it. It's short and punchy, and a copy could easily be gotten by asking someone who had one. (But be aware it's very much a draft -- many of his quotations still lack citations, and there are certainly places where Monk will revise things in light of the discussions at the conference.) So from here on I'll just note some things that seemed worth noting. And because the last post ended up crazily long and I suspect nobody's read it because of this, I'll be breaking this up into shorter posts.

Here's a quotation from Wittgenstein's discussions with the Vienna Circle that I found interesting.

What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever.

This is strikingly similar to part of Tractatus 6.41: "In the world there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value." I'm always interested in places where Wittgenstein seems to repeat the Tractatus outside of the limits of 6.54 (which tells us that the propositions of the book are nonsense), and the differences here seem significant.

The Tractarian version of the saying trafficked in a paradoxical notion of a "value" as a sort of thing which there might be in the world, but in fact there cannot be: for not only does the proposition get its sense only by negating the claim "There is value in the world", but the conditional has us entertaining this possibility, only to see that it would lead to "valueless values". The later saying doesn't have this same parallelism: the antecedent of the conditional is not identical with the negation of the first part of the claim. But this shift might just be loose talk on Wittgenstein's part.

The Tractarian saying is also attached to considerations about the accidental nature of all that happens and comes to pass in the world, and seems to say that this is why there can be no values in the world. This sort of thing I take to be attached to all sorts of other nonsense in the Tractatus that we're supposed to climb over in coming to understand its author. The Vienna Circle remark I think gives us more respectable reasons for thinking of "the ethical" in the way (at least the early) Wittgenstein did, in that it opposes two things which do make sense: One might think that ethics is something that you need to be taught, and one might think that "ethics" as a branch of philosophy is concerned with explaining the essence of the ethical. And getting these two points wrong seems to be possible, in an interesting way: it's not so much an empirical mistake as ethical self-deception. One obscures oneself, ethically, by thinking of ethics like this.

With regard to this first, Conant brought up "the footnote in the Groundwork where Kant says that his grandmother knew very well what was right and wrong, without ever having studied philosophy". I can't find any footnote which resembles such a remark in Kant (I think there's something similar in one of his letters -- anyone know what passage Conant had in mind?), but the idea is certainly something Kant is aware of. Here are some passages from the close of the first part of the Groundwork:

Here it would be easy to show how common human reason, with this compass in hand, knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity with duty or contrary to duty, if, without in the least teaching it anything new, we only, as did Socrates, make it attentive to its own principle; and that there is, accordingly, no need of science and philosophy to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous.... Would it not therefore be more advisable in moral matters to leave the judgement of common reason as it is and, at most, call in philosophy only to present the system of morals all the more completely and apprehensibly and to present its rules in a form more convenient for use (still more for disputation), but not to lead common human understanding, even in practical matters, away from its fortunate simplicity and to put it, by means of philosophy, on a new path of investigation and instruction? [AK 4:404]

I think this bit from Kant is actually illustrative for both of the points I want to make: I think that Wittgenstein not only agreed with Kant that philosophy was not needed to appreciate the ethical, but he didn't think that any philosophical presentation of "the system of morals" could actually have the ethical in view. The idea that this could make ethics "more convenient for use" is an illusion. What is of ethical importance in our lives just doesn't lend itself to this sort of systematic treatment. Where there is "system" in the ethical, this is already apparent, and there is nothing to explain. And if a philosophical "explanation" brings out anything surprising, this can only show that it has clothed the ethical in robes that don't fit it. So where you have any sort of philosophical ethics, this "ethics" has no value -- it's not the thing one needs to actually attend to, if one is to be ethical. At best, it's superfluous; at worst, it's a distraction.

I find this sort of thought attractive, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It seems clear that most of what philosophers do under the rubric of "ethics" is not worth doing, but I'm not sure if this is inherent to the subject, or if it's just a result of 90% of everything being crap.

A sidenote: I think it's worth noticing Wittgenstein's use of "essence" here. I don't think he's using it with any sort of disdain -- the problem with a theory which would explain "the essence of the ethical" isn't that the ethical doesn't have an essence (because it's a "family-resemblance concept"), but that you're trying to use a theory to explain it. Sometimes the later Wittgenstein is taken to be "anti-essentialist" in that he's opposed to essences; what he is really opposed to is only looking for essences where there aren't any, and thinking you've found one when you haven't. (I recently picked up Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, and Szabados's essay gets just this point exactly wrong.)

A Conference viewed Sub Specie Aeternitatis

2011-06-06T07:39:00.005-05:00

The third day of the Wittgenstein conference was terrific.

I missed the first paper due to sleeping in a little late and then having to prepare for leaving town etc. It was about "Count Eberhard's Hawthorn", which is the poem of which Wittgenstein, in a letter to Engelmann, famously said "Uhland’s poem is really magnificent. And this is how it is: when one does not attempt to utter the unutterable, then nothing is lost. Rather, the unutterable is, – unutterably – contained in what is uttered." I would've liked to have heard the discussion of this, but I definitely needed the extra sleep for the drive home at the end of the day. If anyone reading this was at this part of the conference, I'd be interested to hear how it went.

The second paper discussed was a piece Michael Fried has published in Critical Inquiry vol. 33 no. 3, "Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday". Fried is fantastically interesting to see speak, and his passion for this material is infectious. I know nothing about art history or art criticism, but here's some of what I took away from his talk:

The previous day of the conference, someone had mentioned that Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein had bonded over their love of movies. Wittgenstein claimed that there could not be a great British movie, and Ryle conceded that there had not yet been one (at this point Conant interrupted "And the evidence has mounted ever since!"). Wittgenstein blamed this on British actors being too theatrical: even in a movie, you could tell they were acting as if they were in front of an audience, etc. Fried said that a similar sort of worry had struck Diderot in the 18th century, that stage-acting was too manifestly stage-acting to really have the sort of impact he wanted it to have. So Diderot introduced the dispositif of the "dramatic tableau", basically an invisible "fourth wall" of the stage, with the actors acting as if there was nothing outside of the walls of the stage (while still being conscious of themselves as acting, and so not having this hinder their ability to project to the back of the room etc.) (I am sure my presentation of this is woefully inadequate, but I'm out of my depth here.) In this way you can portray "ordinary" life on the stage without it being obtrusively theatrical: you can put ordinary happenings in front of an audience and have them seem ordinary, not staged. But this isn't quite the right way to put it: ordinary events in life are not seen in this way (not usually), so the ordinary happenings which are seen "as ordinary" on the stage are in fact seen in a way different than how they would ordinarily be seen. To get the audience to see the ordinary as the ordinary, you have to give it to them on a stage which they don't notice. Fried also related this to the photography of Jeff Wall, an artist & friend of his, in particular his photo of Adrian Walker, where you see Walker absorbed in his work, but can also see both his sketch of a hand and the model he's sketching from. Many of the works Fried discusses in his paper are striking because in them we see figures totally absorbed in what they're doing, but (says Fried) before Wall this was not thematized, but merely taken advantage of: every decade or so, an artist would stumble upon the idea of depicting someone totally absorbed in what they were doing, and this would amaze everyone, and then people would get tired of it and forget about it until someone else discovered it a little later. In Wall's Adrian Walker photo, Wall both takes advantage of the aesthetic appeal of absorption and shows us an artist copying something, thus making us realize that we are not seeing the everyday, but an artificial copy of it. (I suspect that this paragraph is worse than a freshman Art History major could write. Fried's article is good.)

Fried has been a friend of Stanley Cavell's for years, and it was through Cavell that he became interested in Wittgenstein. Fried stressed that he is "not a philosopher, and couldn't do philosophy", but that Wittgenstein (Cavell's Wittgenstein) was still hugely important for him and his work. Fried said that while he was working on his Diderot book he wished that Diderot and Wittgenstein could've met each other, somehow -- "and then when I read this passage from Culture & Value, I realized that they had!" -- here Fried proceeded to read the following passage C&V 6e-7e, from 22 August 1930. I wish someone'd been filming it, his reading was so animated; he noted and emphasized each punctuation mark with little hand-gestures. Delightful. Anyway, the passage, as he has it in his paper:

Engelmann [Paul Engelmann,Wittgenstein’s close friend and faithful
correspondent] told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so glorious that he thinks they would be worth presenting to other people. (He said it’s the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) But when he imagines a selection of them published he said the whole business loses its charm & value & becomes impossible. I said this case was like the following one: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes,—surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage.We should be seeing life itself.—But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view.—Similarly when E. looks at his writings and ﬁnds them splendid (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually), he is seeing his life as God’s work of art, & as such it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life & everything whatever. But only the artist can represent the individual thing [das Einzelne] so that it appears to us as a work of art; those manuscripts rightly lose their value if we contemplate them singly & in any case without prejudice, i.e. without being enthusiastic about them in advance. The work of art compels us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justiﬁable coldness; insofar as it is ever justiﬁable to look at something with coldness.[)]
But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is—as I believe—the way of thought which as it were ﬂies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its ﬂight.

Fried seems to be entirely right to connect the Diderotian tableau, his theme of absorption, and this passage: Wittgenstein's imaginary scenario about a theater is pretty much what Diderot wanted. And then the final lines connect all of this back with the Tractatus and the 1916 Notebooks. Lot of stuff going on here.

One thing to note: the passage I underlined is italicized in Fried's paper. Joachim Schulte noted that this was a place where "Culture & Value" had an unfortunate critical apparatus: the passage is underlined with a squiggle in the manuscript, but C&V has it underlined normally (and then Fried converted all the underlinings into italics). But squiggly underlines are how Wittgenstein marked words he wasn't sure about. So when Wittgenstein says "the work of art compels us to see it in the right perspective", "right" is a word that's not quite right, here.

Another thing to note: Fried thinks the shift from das Einzelne to der Gegestand is significant: art makes us see an ordinary Gegenstand as something Einzelne. This fits very well with the October 7 1916 Notebooks passage:

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics.

The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeterinatis from outside.

In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

Is this it perhaps--in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space and time?

Each thing modifies the whole logical world, the whole of logical space, so to speak.

(The thought forces itself upon one): The thing seen sub specie aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space.

One of the (many) ideas here is that seeing something as a work of art is seeing it not "from the midst of things" (as we ordinarily see things) but "from outside": with space and time instead of in them. The object is seen as with the whole world, not as part of it: it stands out from the whole world, which recedes as into a background.

This is redolent of the way Schopenhauer thinks of artworks: the importance of artworks is that in viewing them my individual will is quieted, and I apprehend things as a "pure subject of knowing", as a non-individual subject.

The third book of "The World as Will and Representation" is Schopenhauer's aesthetics, and begins with a lengthy discussion of "the Platonic Ideas". The Idea which a particular object manifests is always one and unchanging, but the objects which manifest the Ideas are always many and changing. Schopenhauer takes this Platonic distinction between the Many and the One to be at heart identical with the Kantian distinction between the phenomena and the thing-in-itself: plurality, change, duration, extension are all mere forms of our awareness, and do not condition the things themselves (Plato's ontos on, the proper objects of episteme as opposed to doxa, knowledge rather than opinion). Schopenhauer takes as one of his main additions to philosophy the idea that we can become aware of this distinction not only "in abstracto" through philosophy, but also "in exceptional cases" intuitively: the work of art shows us the truth of transcedental idealism/Platonism. Spelling this out and making it plausible is the task of book three of WWR.

I think the best way to make sense of this is to look at how artworks function, on Schopenhauer's account. In most artforms (music is an exception), Schopenhauer thinks that we see the art-object not as the particular object it is, but as the Platonic Idea which it manifests. Architecture gives us Ideas of hardness and rigidity, landscape paintings of various species of plant-life, portraiture the Ideas of various human types, etc. These are very odd claims to make, but I think I've found a way to make Schopenhauer's view look non-insane: the trick is to think of artworks as opposed to ordinary objects.

Normally, the way I apprehend objects is in terms of their practical significances for my purposes: I see the clearing as a good spot for building a fire, the fire as for cooking over, the pot as for making soup in, the soup as for eating, eating the soup as for satisfying my hunger, etc. Schopenhauer is withering about the endless nature of these fors: "satisfying" desire is an endless task, and he thinks it fundamentally misguided. The way to deal with a desire is not to satisfy it (since this brings more desires in its tow), but to stop desiring. (The Buddhist influence on Schopenhauer is obvious and self-conscious here.)

So, when we perceive an ordinary object, for Schopenhauer, this is entirely at the service of our will: we see it as for this-or-that task which we care about. We see it only in relation to ourselves (our tasks, our desires) and other things (to use it with/for). But perceiving an artwork is not like perceiving an ordinary object. So if you think about ordinary perception in the way Schopenhauer does, it's natural to think that what this means is: we see a work of art as not in relation to ourselves or other objects. We just see it by itself, not as an element of a totality which is spread out around it. We see it as One, not as one-among-many. So the idea that an artwork presents us with a Platonic Idea is not the pure rubbish it initially appears as, seen in this light. (Music is said to present us with "the will itself", and not an Idea, because music does not involve representing a particular sort of thing in the way that painting or sculpture does (or architecture, where the represented thing is identical with its representation) and so there's no particular sort of Idea it could be presenting. But the contrast is still present: listening to music involves perceiving the world in general in a way that is not related to our will or other things.)

From section 34 of WWR:

Raised up by the power of the mind, we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another, whose final relation is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it.... It was this that was in Spinoza's mind when he wrote: Mens aeterna est, quatenus res sub aeterinitatis specie concipit [The mind is eternal insofar as it conceives things from the point of view of eternity.]

To be fair to Schopenhauer, he thinks this is a place where he's going to be misunderstood (and taken to be ridiculous). He prefaces the above remarks with the plea that "the reader must suspend his surprise at it for a while, until it has vanished automatically after he has grasped the whole thought to be expressed in this work." So this is a place where Schopenhauer is aware that he's having a hard time saying what he wants, and doesn't think anyone will understand him unless they're in a position to understand his work as a whole: the claim about what Spinoza meant by conceiving of things sub specie aeternitatis is key to all of Schopenhauer's philosophy. And it's doubtless that Schopenhauer is where Wittgenstein took the phrase from (there being no evidence he ever read Spinoza). I am still working out what to make of this, but the conference was helpful for stimulating thinking on it.

...so with all that said, back to Fried: the contrast he sees between Einzelne and Gegenstand can easily be worked out along the lines I did above, but the German also allows for der Gegenstand to just be a pronoun that refers back to das Einzelne. And the Notebooks passage talks in terms of Gegenstand throughout, except for the line where Wittgenstein says "Jedes Ding bedingt die ganze Logische Welt" (where I can't help but feel the pun as doing work). So Fried might be reading too much into that particular word-choice. The German doesn't demand his reading.

Shifting focus: Someone asked Fried if the pleasure taken in seeing a work of art in which someone is totally absorbed in their doings was not a voyeuristic pleasure. Fried was adamant that it was not: A voyeur is a hidden spectator, and there is nothing like this in viewing an absorptive work of art. One does not view an absorptive work of art as a spectator at all -- there is no place in the picture that one is supposed to be viewing from (though of course it has to be drawn/shot from a visual perspective, this is not part of the content of the picture).

Here Conant added some remarks related to his work on film (he's part of the Film Theory group at Chicago): In an ordinary objective shot in a film, the question "Where is the camera in this space?" is something he says "has no application". There are ways of shooting a scene such that this *is* a question you can ask, like with point-of-view shots or tracking shots, but it is not a question you can intelligibly ask about an objective shot. Fried added that you can splice together things shot with different cameras or at different times, such that no camera in any location could've taken the shot you end up with in the film, which I think makes Conant's point more vivid.

In an objective shot, we are not seeing things from a place in the space of the film: thus it is natural to say we are viewing it from "outside" the space. But it is easy to be misled by this: Saying we view things from "outside" the space of the film is not to answer the question "Where in the space of the film is the camera located?" but to refuse it: viewing things "from outside" is not viewing them from any place. "Viewing things from outside the space" isn't a matter of having the things in the space being related to some point outside it, but is a matter of how the whole of the space is arranged. Shooting something "objectively" is a style of shooting, not a special position you're shooting from. To view things "from the point of view of eternity" is not to view them from a special point of view, eternity's, but to have the way one views things differ from the normal in some other way.

Conant related this to what he sees as the central concern of Wittgenstein: he is criticizing the idea that we need (or could have) a "view from outside", what McDowell calls a "sideways-on view", of our lives/thoughts/practices, in logic, in ethics, and in aesthetics. ("Skepticism is not irrefutable, but is obviously nonsense" is a pregnant Tractarian slogan here, for those familiar with Conant's writings.)

A sidenote: Someone asked Conant how the C&V passage relates to part two of Philosophical Investigations and its discussion of aspect-seeing, given that one thing Wittgenstein says in C&V is that Engelmann is "seeing his life as God's work of art". Conant's "gut reaction" was to say that this was a metaphor, and that you could push it too far, but that there was a similarity here: In both cases you see things the same, and you see them differently. The same drawing is now a duck, now a rabbit; similarly, Engelmann's life is not different when he views it as God's work of art and when he views it as he normally does, but there is a difference between those two. I'm not sure how Conant thinks you could push this line too far (and in fairness, he said this was only his gut reaction, not a considered opinion). Perhaps what he had in mind was that you can capture the aspect-changes of a duckrabbit by making different judgements: "I see a duck" vs. "I see a rabbit". It's not clear you can do this with seeing Engelmann's life normally and seeing it as God's work of art -- and more to the point, I think the author of the Tractatus would adamantly deny that any differences in judgements would capture the distinction he wanted. ("In the world there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.")

That's about all I have noted for Fried's talk (and I've missed/left out a lot -- it was a very fun two hours), but I'll close with a Walter Benjamin quotation that David Wellbury drew our attention to, because I don't have it quite right and I'm failing to google up the source: "What is the difference between this world and the world messianically redeemed? The difference is everything, but miniscule."

This post is probably already too long, so I'll leave my notes on Ray Monk's paper for another post. It was easily my favorite paper of the conference. Skipping past it: I really enjoyed the reception at the end of this day. I feel like this was the first conference reception that I really "got" how these receptions are supposed to go; the socializing was fun and stimulating and I didn't end up sitting in a corner sipping on a drink. I spoke to Ray Monk for around half an hour about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, which was good times. He thinks that when Wittgenstein refers to his first philosophy as "a Schopenhauerian idealism" he probably is referring to something he'd outgrown before he ever met Frege or Russell, since his interests had by then shifted to the foundations of mathematics. (Before he'd written to Russell he wrote a letter to Philip Jourdain about the axiom of choice.) But there's no knock-down evidence about this. More interestingly: I mentioned in passing that there wasn't any evidence Wittgenstein had read anything beyond the first volume of "The World as Will and Representation", and he said that he was pretty sure he'd mentioned "On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason" once. I pressed him on this, and his best guess was: He thinks that Anscombe had told him in conversation that Wittgenstein had mentioned it in conversation!

Also, Irad Kimhi said that the first "Twilight" movie was "beautiful", but he didn't like the second one. I just want this to be out there in the public record: Kimhi liked the first "Twilight" movie. He also seemed to be really enthusiastic about "Cowboys and Aliens".

ungrumbles

2011-06-03T20:55:00.005-05:00

Day two of the Wittgenstein conference was better. On reflection, part of my trouble yesterday was just that I was tired from the previous day; I was in a bad mood to start with, and then little things bugged me more than they should have.

I got to the first presentation about halfway through, because Hyde Park is hard to find a parking spot in. The paper being discussed was just what I wanted, though: It included a discussion of Ramsey's remark about double-meanings I posted about a while ago, and much ado was made of Wittgenstein's personal aesthetic demands (which were always serious and severe). A welcome shift from the previous day's discussion, which just spent too much time explaining how the resolute readings of the Tractatus are supposed to work, and not enough actually poking at Wittgenstein or his weird little book.

The line pitched about Ramsey's remark seemed to be a very general one: Wittgenstein really liked puns and wordplay, and apparently often took quite seriously a pun he would notice in something he'd written, or would reorganize his remarks to emphasize the repetition of certain words, etc. The main example discussed was something from the middle period: Wittgenstein started a few typescripts with a discussion of "übersehen" and its dual meaning of "miss" and "get an overview of". ("Overlook" has some of the same ambiguity, in English, though generally in descriptions like "a scenic overlook".) I can buy this. It would mean that Ramsey was probably talking more about the things Wittgenstein was saying/writing while he was visiting him than in the Tractatus itself, but it wouldn't surprise me to find some German wordplay in the Tractatus with a deeper point to it.

The discussions about Wittgenstein's aesthetics seemed to not really reach a resolution, or at least I didn't write down much. I suspect there were some points made in passing that I either was already aware of, or just didn't think to write down. We seemed to spend a good deal of time today just looking very hard at passages from "Culture & Value", then having someone mention their original context, then doing it again. Amusingly, one of the presenters had been meaning to read "Culture & Value", but hadn't gotten to it yet because he was trying to buy a German copy. ("Culture & Value" is a collection of various coded remarks from across his corpus, so it doesn't correspond to anything specific in the German edition of his works.)

David Wellbury claimed that Wittgenstein's aesthetics were responding to/criticizing Schopenhauer's aesthetics, or something like that (it was a very broad and vague claim, made in passing). I asked him about literature on the Schopenhauer/Wittgenstein connection. Basically all he could think of was one chapter of Brian Magee's "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer" (which was one of the first things on Schopenhauer I read). He told me to ask Ray Monk about this.

Monk was good to talk to. The first thing that came to his mind was the chapter from Brian Magee's book. I told him that I'd read it, and some other things, and that I'd had trouble finding anything other than pieces that just list all of the places where it looks like there's some connection between early Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer (and there are a lot!) -- that nobody ever has much of a story to tell about what this comes to. He mentioned "Insight and Illusion", which (in fairness) I should look at again, but we both wished there was something that told a story about this which was tied to a better reading of the Tractatus than Hacker gives. Monk asked if any of the "resolute" readers had discussed Schopenhauer, and I realized this was something I should've already asked.

Monk also said he thought Michael Tanner's Schopenhauer book had something about Wittgenstein; Amazon search-inside says it's just a brief note that Wittgenstein thought music was important. He also said that the Blackwell Companion to Schopenhauer has probably commissioned an essay on Wittgenstein, which is probably true: I'll find out when it comes out in 2012.

The Blackwell "Great Minds" volume on Schopenhauer does have a brief chapter on Wittgenstein, though. The reading of Wittgenstein isn't very good (I just read it, while writing this post), but it does make a suggestion that I can't remember if I've seen before (Holbo's dissertation might have made it): Just as Schopenhauer replaced Kant's architectonic (the categories, the forms of intuition, Reason and Understanding etc.) with his (fourfold) Principle of Sufficient Reason, Wittgenstein replaces Schopenhauer's PSR with modern formal logic. And just as Schopenhauer's shift lead him to deny things of the thing-in-itself that Kant had affirmed (at least problematically), like that practical reason could be causally efficacious, so Wittgenstein denies even more than Schopenhauer did of the thing-in-itself: he now denies everything of it (since there is nothing "outside" logic), so the thing-in-itself shrinks to an extensionless point.

I don't think the story can go this quickly, but there's probably something to it. Wittgenstein had told Frege he still believed there was a "deep and true core in idealism, an important feeling that is wrongly gratified, hence a legitimate need" in a letter lost in WW2, and Frege brought this up again when Wittgenstein complained about "The Thought" attacking idealism on its weak side instead of its strong side (Frege's reply was, in effect, to wonder why Wittgenstein was defending those dorks, since he agreed with Frege that they were dorks, right??). And the 1916 notebooks have Wittgenstein saying "There are two godheads: the world and my independent I". You can take the story we get in the Tractatus about the solipsistic self shrinking to an extensionless point, apply it to the other "godhead" of the thing-in-itself, and get the sort of picture the Blackwell "Great Minds" book paints. (This is probably moving too quickly, but I'm just thinking aloud here.)

Weirdly, the "Great Minds" book says that Schopenhauer's ending in mysticism is just inconsistency on his part, and should be jettisoned. The worry is that if Schopenhauer allows that there are mystical truths that he can't talk about, then they might include things like "The thing-in-itself isn't actually Will, it's this other thing, Pwill" and this would make his metaphysics inconsistent. But surely this is putting things backwards: I don't doubt for a moment that Schopenhauer would abandon his metaphysics, if he could be assured of the sorts of mystical bliss he thinks the Vedic sages had. It also means you lose what's surely the most striking parallel between the Tractatus and "The World as Will and Representation": they both end by saying "Oh yeah, there's also stuff I can't talk about. It's really important. It's called the mystical. The book is over now, bye!"

One thing that's obvious now that I think of it, but which had slipped from my view: The Tractatus at least nominally says there is value outside of the world (and not in it). Schopenhauer says this. Frege never says anything like this. I doubt Russell ever said anything like this, though I'd need to check. (I suspect he generally just went with Moore's "non-natural" property of goodness as part of the world, or else just denied that there is value to be found anywhere -- but I really don't know. Surely Russell wrote about moral philosophy at some point during his early work, at least in passing?) So this is a big area of the Tractatus that can't have been meant to be appealing to either Frege or Russell. Today I saw Conant and Kremer not have much of interest to say about the "Death is not lived through" parts of the Tractatus, and I am feeling more and more firmly that the "New Wittgensteinians" need a story to tell about Schopenhauer. (That the world ceases with death is something Schopenhauer has to say, since the world only exists as long as the subject exists, and the subject is mortal. This is not the most awkward thing Schopenhauer has to say about the subject.)

Kremer noted that "In death the world does not change, but ceases" is said in a book dedicated to a dead friend, David Pinsent. I thought this was a cute thing to notice. I suspect that one of the things Wittgenstein is playing with in the Tractatus is an ambiguity in the notion of "world". There can't be more than one world of "the totality of facts", but "the world of the happy is quite another from that of the unhappy". Relatedly, the metaphysical subject is the limit of the world, but (if good or bad willing changes the world) willing changes the limits of the world. Our ordinary talk of "world" is ambiguous in a way that allows this, of course (two people who share an apartment can live in different worlds), but it's also an oddness you get in Schopenhauer: the world as representation is a correlate of the subject, so there should (it would seem) be as many worlds (as representation) as there are subjects. Schopenhauer dodges this by claiming that all of us are one subject. And also different subjects. We're each two subjects, one of which is the only subject. (You can see why a Schopenhauerian young Wittgenstein could be attracted to solipsism: it lets you keep the world-subject correlate without the weirdness about how many subjects there are. Incidentally, Schopenhauer's argument against solipsism is literally "It's crazy". He admits it's theoretically irrefutable, but only crazy people could hold it, so he passes it by. And then gives arguments that only work if solipsism is false. Schopenhauer's a glorious mess.)

So anyway: Next I asked Michael Kremer if there was any good work on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. He said he wasn't the one to ask, as he'd never read Schopenhauer(!), but mentioned Brian Magee's book. He also said there was a really bad book about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, but he couldn't remember the title. He said Conant would probably know what it was called.

This is pretty much how the conversation went after this point:

Kremer: Hey, Jim, what was that book called? The small one? Wasn't any good?
Conant: ... you need to give me more to go on.
Kremer: The one about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein.
Conant: Oh, that one. It was small. No idea what it was called.

Kremer later guessed "Art and Talent". I've since figured it out: "Genius and Talent: Schopenhauer's Influence on Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy" has to be what he meant. It's 138 pages, according to Amazon. I figure I should read it, even if it's not any good, since it's small.

I then asked Conant if there was any good work on the Schopenhauer-Wittgenstein relationship. His answer: No. Everything he'd seen just read the Schopenhauer into Wittgenstein.

So, I now know why Schopenhauer hasn't been coming up in these discussions: Nobody's done any good work on his relation to Wittgenstein, and some first-rate Wittgenstein scholars haven't bothered reading him. These both seem fair excuses.

Oh, I should probably say something about the other two papers discussed today. One was by a French guy and used Flaubert for some purpose, and Michael Fried tore him a great many new assholes. I honestly don't remember much else about this paper. But know this: Do not claim that Flaubert was responding to a crisis in the French novel if Michael Fried is within earshot. He will end you.

(It was fun to watch.)

The third paper of the day was about a little travelogue Berkeley wrote about visiting Vesuvius, and also Martin Gustafsson suddenly realizing his daughter would outlive him, and also Wittgenstein's remark "Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur Dichtung", which remark's translation was discussed so much that I didn't have to look up the German to type that. It was actually a really good discussion (until they opened questions up to the floor), but I'm not sure I took much away from it. Other than "Dichtung is hard to translate" and "Holy crap, Berkeley almost got killed by a volcano".

And then I went to Powell's and got a hardback of "Science and Metaphysics" for $20. Good day, all in all.

grumbles

2011-06-02T21:28:00.004-05:00

I am currently in Chicago for this, and I found myself feeling bothered about how the first day's discussions went. So this is a rant post, more or less.

One thing that Conant said at the workshop today was that the Tractatus is "a book at war with experience" (or something close to this), and noted that Wittgenstein doesn't talk about experience or epistemological matters in the book. This is in stark contrast to Russell, who considered certain sorts of acquaintances as foundational for logic: acquaintance with logical constants was what let us use symbols like "and", "not", etc. This is fair enough, so far as it goes. The idea that some sort of experience is (or could be, or would have to be) important for logic is something Wittgenstein is fighting against in the 1914 Notebooks, and it's something that Russell held.

Kimhi raised a question about this in connection with the "Lecture on Ethics". In the Lecture, Wittgenstein talks about a certain sort of experience which he calls "ethical", wondering at the existence of the world. This is clearly not a particular sort of experience in the sense of an experience of a sort of particular, but Kimhi said that it was a sort of experience that Wittgenstein thought you needed to have, or else you'd be deficient somehow, ethically. Conant objected that he didn't think that Wittgenstein would've been willing to say this sort of thing at the time he wrote the Tractatus, and that starting to talk about "experience" is something he does only once he returns to philosophy and starts moving away from the Tractatus. Kimhi said he thought there was the same sort of stuff in the Tractatus, but Conant said there wasn't. Conant then tried to think of what was closest to what Kimhi was saying, and starting talking about the world of the happy man and the unhappy man. Conant said that the world of the happy man and the unhappy man was the same world, and this was objected to: he then clarified that he meant there aren't two worlds. The workshop ended shortly after this, due to time.

I should've brought up 6.45: "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling."

True, Wittgenstein doesn't talk about experience (Erfahrung, Erlebnis) in this passage. But the word for "contemplation" here is Anschauung. This is the word rendered "intuition" in Kant and Frege, and "perception" in (the Payne translation of) Schopenhauer. These are sorts of experiences, as are feelings. This seems to be precisely what Kimhi had in mind. It's even preceded by 6.44: "Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical." A dead ringer for the Wittgenstein of "Lecture on Ethics". It looks like even in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein in some sense thinks there is a certain sort of experience (feeling, perception) that is ethically significant. It's not an experience of some particular fact about "how the world is", but it's something. And Kimhi was right to bring it up: it doesn't fit in at all with anything Conant or Kremer says about the ethical importance book. Neither of them has any sort of special experience as part of the story.

One aspect of Conant's reading of the Tractatus is that it draws the reader in by having sentences that the reader recognizes as being sentences she would like to use to express thoughts, but then (through further reading of the book and thinking about it) they fall apart on her: she realizes there was no such thought as she thought she wanted to express, only confusion on her part. Conant mentioned Frege and Russell in particular as people Wittgenstein wanted to have read the book in this way. Russell could see "The world is all that is the case" and think "Ah, yes, this is what I call 'the totality of atomic facts'". But I don't see how this can work with propositions like "As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases." Nor with the other solipsism passages: Frege and Russell are two of the most adamant opponents of idealism you can find. I don't know who Conant thinks these could've been written for, unless Wittgenstein was writing for himself circa the 1916 notebooks. What other sort of reader is supposed to have wanted to say "Of the will as the bearer of the ethical we cannot speak"?

Conant also said some false things about Frege and elucidations, but my notes are too brief for me to be fair to him. The impression I got was that Frege's "Concept and Object" was supposed to be one of the chief things Wittgenstein was reacting to, and that in it Frege had thought he was communicating unsayable insights into the deep ontological structure of reality by saying paradoxical things like "The concept horse is not a concept." But there are three big problems here. One is that Frege doesn't introduce the notions of concept and object by saying paradoxical things; he introduces them in the preface of "Foundations of Arithmetic", in the three rules he says will govern his inquiry. (I don't have my copy on-hand, so I won't quote it, but I'm pretty sure it's the second rule: Don't confuse the subjective with the objective, don't confuse concepts and objects, and don't ask for the meaning of a word outside the context of a sentence, if memory serves me.) "Concept and Object" only gets written because Kerry misunderstood Frege, and Frege wanted to take the opportunity to try to get more people to care about his project. It's not an essential part of Frege's project, and Frege didn't take it as essential to making the object/concept distinction clear. He's already using what he needs from it in Begriffschrift (the book), insofar as he distinguishes between two slots you can quantify into, and it shows up explicitly, with no fanfare, in the preface to "Foundations". Saying "The concept horse is not a concept" and lamenting that your language misses your thought is a later addition Frege makes, not something there at the outset. The second big problem is that a lot of things Frege says are "elucidations" aren't remotely paradoxical. The prose from the opening sections of "Basic Laws of Arithmetic", where Frege is introducing the vocabulary of his Begriffschrift, is characterized as elucidatory remarks. (I don't have this text on me, either, but you can look it up: the opening stuff is straightforward Fregean prose, not paradoxes.) "Elucidation" is Frege's blanket term for any way vocabulary gets introduced when it's not introduced by explicit definitions. (Kremer seemed to get this part straight, but he seemed to agree with Conant about the first thing I objected to.) The third problem is that some of the things that seem like they should count as paradoxical elucidatory remarks can be expressed in a (slightly) expanded version of Begriffschrift: it's easy to express "Everything is an object" in Begriffschrift, for example. The weirdness in Frege doesn't attach to elucidations, but to the specific terms "function" and "concept" (and possibly a few others -- Frege doesn't tell us much about thoughts, for example, and there's no clear way to talk about them in Begriffschrift, but there's also nothing that looks similar to "Kerry's Paradox" there). Conant seemed to just be getting Frege wrong, and I don't see Wittgenstein getting Frege similarly wrong. But, again, my notes are very sketchy and it's possible I just took Conant wrong on some or all of this.

The only time Schopenhauer came up during today's workshop discussion was when Conant was summarizing his essay "What Ethics in the Tractatus is Not": he mocked those who try to say what Wittgenstein thought about ethics in the Tractatus by saying what Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer thought about ethics. But the curious thing is: a lot of people writing on Schopenhauer's ethics quote the Tractatus to explain what Schopenhauer thought about ethics.

I continue to feel strongly that Schopenhauer is somehow really important for the Tractatus in a way I can't nail down, and that this has been largely neglected by commentators on the book.

Aside: I found it incredibly frustrating how little Conant and Kremer had to say about the propositions of the Tractatus which are nominally about ethics. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have a general story about how "the ethical" works in the Tractatus without being able to say anything about "Ethics and aesthetics are one", for example. Hopefully the other presenters look at those parts of the book more!

Appendix on an incredibly minor textual issue:
Here are some things I learned from the article "A Note on the Text of the Tractatus" (C. Lewy, "Mind" 1967): One of the revisions Wittgenstein marks in Ramsey's copy of the Tractatus is to change 6.522 from "There is indeed the unexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical." to "There is indeed the inexpressible. This appears; it is the mystical." Wittgenstein doesn't say to change the German, and the verb used in this proposition is the same one translated as "show" throughtout the rest of the book (Ramsey and Wittgenstein were marking places to change the text for the 1933 reprint of the Ogden-Ramsey edition.). He also changes 6.23 in the same way: Whether it is the case that two expressions can be exchanged for one another "must appear from the expressions themselves". He doesn't mark the other appearances of the same verb, and there are occurences between these two instances, which he doesn't change, such as 6.36, "If there were a law of causality, it might run: There are natural laws. But that clearly cannot be said. It shows itself."

I don't know what to make of this, but these are corrections made in Ramsey's copy of the Tractatus that weren't incorporated into the 1933 revision. The other two such changes as in 3.33 Wittgenstein wrote "the object meant by" above "the meaning of the sign", but without crossing anything out, and in 5.557 he changed "The application of" to "Applied". The first change seems to me reasonable to skip: he didn't mark out the original. The second strikes me as inexplicable: the revised proposition would begin "Applied logic decides what elementary propositions there are." My guess is that Wittgenstein thought this sounded like better English,
which it doesn't, and that this is why it wasn't incorporated.

I can't shake the feeling that the revision to 6.522 is significant. Even though I can't see any significance in changing 6.23 in the same way. And despite the fact that (for whatever reason) it wasn't incorporated into the 1933 revision. I am perhaps overthinking this: Wittgenstein might have just toyed with changing the translation of "zeigen" and only marked the two spots, then changed his mind.

The Metaphysics of Lobstergod

2011-05-15T16:37:00.003-05:00

DR linked to a silly "New Apps" post, "In Praise of the Incredulous Stare", and I'm proud enough of my comments on his comments on the comments to that post that I'm making a post out of them.

Here is a defense of philosophers who boldly go against common sense. It's weird (not exactly unusual, but disorienting) to see things from that point of view. In comments there, dmf writes that "If memory serves Rorty reads Davidson, after Kuhn, on "living" metaphors as non-sensical creations (perhaps provoked by encounters with the unassimilated) that evoke paradigm shifts and then are slowly incorporated into everyday use and slowly “die”." I don't know whether Rorty would have liked calling such things nonsensical (maybe that's just the word that Davidson uses, I don't know), but otherwise this idea sounds fine to me. It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me.

Rorty wouldn't have been entirely happy with calling such things nonsense, and Davidson didn't. The problem with doing so is that the question of sense/nonsense is orthogonal to the issue of something's functioning as a live metaphor. A true sentence such as "Obama puts his pants on one leg at a time" or a false one such as "Love is a battlefield" can function as metaphors, and so can sentences like "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language" where I don't know what to say about its truth, falsity, or sensicality (does it presuppose that language can sleep? is "of language" an objective or subjective genitive?). And then some sentences of patent nonsense ("Books are rhomboid fluorine") and some sensical sentences ("There are black dogs") would be hard-pressed to do any work as metaphors. Sense/nonsense and good metaphor/bad metaphor are just independent axes of assessment.

Davidson says that metaphors function in the way that pictures do, and that "a picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture." A picture can lead its viewer to think of certain things alongside one another, or in connection to or contrast with one another, which he would not have otherwise done. But the way it does so cannot be reconstructed as by supplying things which can serve as premises in a valid inference to the conclusion which is the thoughts inspired in the viewer, or anything along those lines -- pictures are not the sort of thing that can have the sort of content a sentence has (that is "the wrong currency"). Not all of our thoughts are arrived at rationally (in a way codifiable in valid inferences), and this is a good thing: creativity is a lovely and useful part of our lives, for example, and it is not a rational process. To say of some connection between thoughts that it is merely causal, not rational, is not necessarily to denigrate it.

"It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me."

I'm actually not sure that this isn't a profitable way to think about those guys: they're providing new ways of talking, ways which are initially (at least somewhat) metaphorical (thus their air of paradox), but which can sediment into just being one more optional vocabulary we can take up at leisure. I don't think that this is how *they* think of what they're doing (though I'm less sure of David Lewis than of Sider or van Inwagen), but then the Idealists, Realists, and Solipsists of PI 402 don't think that they're working in the way Wittgenstein there says they are, either. But it seems to me that the shoe fits: Lewis wants to make it no longer seem pressing to answer questions like "What are modal claims about?" by talking in terms of "real non-actual worlds", and a lot of opposition to "modal realism" attacks this shift of vocabulary as if they were attacking something they already were talking about, but which (before David Lewis) everyone knew was false ("There is only one world!"). What looks like (can look like) disagreements in metaphysics are actually disagreements about metaphysical vocabularies: there's only a show of there being some theses which one side accepts and the other rejects, since there's no agreement in how any such thesis is to be understood (even where, among the supposed theses, are theses which look like "...and we understand by this claim that...." or "...which is meant in the sense of..."). The two "metaphysicians" disagree with one another not over the truth-value of a proposition, but over how metaphysicians should talk.

I think this is quite contrary to the spirit of the "New Apps" post, but I'm not sure it isn't closer to what Deleuze & Guatarri actually saw as the value of their work: as I see them, they were providing new vocabularies we could take up (or not), not trying to make us better "understand" "common sense" in the way that "conceptual analysis" or Hume's psychological speculations were meant to. Guatarri said that what he really wanted to do was "say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow", and it seems to me that any value in such a project would be very different from anything Hume could see as the value of *his* project, let alone Sider or van Inwagen. "Creating concepts" in the D-G sense is saying "God is a lobster" and then talking about the God-lobster in geological terms, not "God is an entity possessing maximal greatness" and then trying to derive as many conclusions from this as possible. The point is just to get us moving in different directions and see where that takes us. The bizarre style of Deleuze/Guattari's work is not an accidental feature of their philosophy.

(This is an extension of my short post on Andy Clark's extended mind thing from a while back.)

Ramsey's Testimony regarding the Tractatus

2011-04-01T06:18:00.004-05:00

I find I have spent the past four or five hours reading "Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951". I blame the fact that the letters are almost all very short, so it always feels like I can read just one more. I am stopping after 100 of the 439 in the book.

Anyway, I found these two passages striking. They're from a letter of Ramsey's to his mother, p.139:

[Wittgenstein's] idea of his book is not that anyone by reading it will understand his ideas, but that some day someone will think them out again for himself, and will derive real pleasure from ﬁnding in this book their exact expressions.

This probably only looks remarkable if you've been spending the past few weeks grappling with Schopenhauer (which I have); it is puzzling what one is doing in writing an avowedly incomprehensible book. This quote doesn't really tell us anything that wasn't already stated in the preface to the book, but I found it noteworthy that he'd repeat it in conversation.

It’s terrible when he says “Is that clear” and I say “no” and he says “Damn it’s horrid to go through that again”. Sometimes he says, I can’t see that now [—] we must leave it. He often forgot the meaning of what he wrote within 5 minutes, and then remembered it later. Some of his sentences are intentionally ambiguous having an ordinary meaning and a more difficult meaning which he also believes.

I don't know quite what to make of that last bit. I can't tell from the context if Ramsey is talking about sentences of the Tractatus or sentences Wittgenstein was using in their conversations about the book. In any case, it's an interesting thing to see said.

A Link Post

2011-03-26T17:14:00.005-05:00

I haven't been keeping my blogroll maintained, so here's some links to blogs the reader might not have known of:

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy is about reading the early moderns along an experimental-speculative dichotomy rather than an empiricist-rationalist one. This has the merit of being a distinction actually in use at the time, rather than being one which first comes into full flower with Karl Reinhold. I continue to be impressed with how much of what "everyone knows" about Kant and Kantianism comes from places where Reinhold varied from Kant.

OLP & Literary Studies Online regularly links to/mentions new work on Cavell and Wittgenstein.

The Renaissance Mathematicus is a history of science blog. I should probably read more of those. They're fun.

Child's Play is a psychology blog that regularly says nice things about both Wittgenstein and "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs". They also had a nice post on the "Knobe Effect" a while back that I can't recall if I ever got around to linking.

Extrablogically, I am currently going back and forth between Schopenhauer, Frege, and Wittgenstein, looking for term paper ideas. Lots of connections slip in and out of view. Still in search of something term-paper-sized to poke at.

Wittgenstein: Bacon and Potatoes

2011-03-14T06:08:00.003-05:00

I record this quotation for Google, because I'm happy to finally run across it again. (It's something Anscombe told Bryan Magee in conversation, apparently. This is why I never could find it in "Culture & Value" when I looked for it there. The context is Magee's wondering why Wittgenstein doesn't mention Schopenhauer more.)

From Brian Magee's "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer":

[Wittgenstein] used to say that if a man had been physically nourished on bacon and potatoes we should all see the folly of trying to identify which bits of his person derived from bacon and which bits from potatoes, and yet we make exactly that mistake with regard to whatever intellectual nourishment he may have metabolized into himself.

"And then there’s Kuhn’s philosophical concept – the incommensurability of meaning - ...."

2011-03-10T02:20:00.002-06:00

A claim in one of Eroll Morris's footnotes bugged me, specifically the bit I made my title.

Using Google Books, here are the things Kuhn calls "incommensurable" in "Structure" (with the page numbers in parentheses): ways of seeing the world (4), traditions (103), "the world of his research" (112), traditions (148), paradigms (150), solutions to problems (165), viewpoints (175), theories (not said in his own voice -- this is part of a view philosophers have attributed to him) (198). viewpoints (200). Here are things of whose "incommensurability" he speaks: traditions (148), standards (149), paradigms (150), paradigms (157).

Not in the book: "incommensurability of meaning".

In the collection "The Road Since Structure", we find the following called "incommensurable": theories (34) the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle (35), the circumference and radius of a circle (35), theories (36, twice), terms (36 -- he does mention "the meanings of incommensurable terms" here), "parts of an older scientific vocabulary" (53), portions of French and English vocabularies (56), points of view (124), theories (163), theories (164), theories (189), the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle (189), theories (204).

Not in the book: "incommensurable meanings".

"Incommensurability" shows up 50 times, says Google Books, and this doesn't count repeated hits on a single page. Often it's occurring without being clearly "of" anything in the immediately context, where it's something like a watchword for Kuhn's ideas about the history of science broadly. Where it does seem clear to me that the text allows for a citation of what "incommensurability" is of or between, I get these results, tabulated by page first now:

34: theories

36: theories, a local claim "about language, about meaning change" (this is introduced with "insofar as incommensurability was a claim about...").

49: natural languages

60: theories

97: theories

188: pairs of theories

189: theories

And here are some passages that seem especially relevant:

p. 34, footnote 2: "Both Feyerabend and I wrote of the impossibility of defining the terms of one theory on the basis of terms of the other. But he restricted incommensurability to language; I spoke also of differences in "methods, problem-field, and standards of solution" (Structure, 2nd end., p. 103), something I would no longer do except to the considerable extent that the latter differences are necessary consequences of the language-learning process." (He notes in footnote 1 on the previous page that Feyerabend and he had arrived at the metaphor independently at around the same time.)

p.36 : "'meaning' is not the rubric under which incommensurability is best discussed."

p. 93: "Incommensurability thus becomes a sort of untranslatability, localized to one or another area in which two lexical taxonomies differ."

p. 309 (the final interview): "...but it struck me very forcefully that all of them entirely dropped the problem of meaning when they made that [historicist] turn, and that they therefore dropped incommensurability...."

p. 237-8: "In Structure I spoke of meaning change as a characteristic feature of scientific revolutions; later, as I increasingly identified incommensurability with difference of meaning, I repeatedly referred to the difficulties of translation. But I was then torn, usually without quite realizing it, between my sense that translation between an old theory and a new one was possible and my competing sense that it was not.... I was wrong to speak of translation. What I described, I now realize, was language learning, a process that need not, and ordinarily does not, make full translation possible."

So, Kuhn usually speaks of the incommensurability of theories. He used the term more widely in "Structure", and never for anything narrowly linguistic. Post-"Structure" he does emphasize language more, but he realizes before too long that meaning is not the aspect of language that matters most for his purposes. That's not the way to frame the problem, if he's to make any progress.

But, Morris is no innovator, as Googling "incommensurability of meaning" easily shows. I did like that Reed & Sharrock put that phrase in the mouth of their "mainstream critic" of Kuhn. And it is still nice to see some real philosophy discussed in the NYT, and Morris is a fine writer. But what bugs me bugs me. And I'm not even touching the "relativism" rubbish. Or the straight-up depressing fourth part, where Morris misses that the thing about the two Kuhns is a joke. (Kuhn notes, immediately following the bit Morris quotes, that he "lacks the wit to further develop the fantasy" and so drops the gag. Morris's misreading is so striking that I suspect it's genuinely out of malice. I can't even bring myself to care about the absurd charge that Wittgenstein is a relativist, at the end of the piece, due to how sad that opening is.)

Also, the entire third part of Morris's series is ridiculous: Kuhn never says anything about getting his metaphor from the legend of Hippasus. He gets it from the boring mathematical fact: You can't say what the square root of two is if you're limited to expressing numbers as ratios of whole numbers. To talk about the square root of two, you need to learn a new way of thinking about numbers. And once you have, you still can't express the square root of two as a ratio of whole numbers. I don't see how he missed this. It's not a complex metaphor. But the imaginative fiction he weaves to suggest "that Kuhn’s entire theory of scientific change might be an imaginative fiction" does make for a more gripping yarn than something about irrational numbers.

Conference Announcement: "The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel's Subjective Logic"

2011-02-01T14:26:00.003-06:00

Thought this might be of interest. It's certainly a topic that could use more discussion, especially with the use McDowell & Brandom have made of Hegel with regard to judgement.

SECOND ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

BONN UNIVERSITY, GERMANY

“The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel’s Subjective Logic”

I am pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the Second Annual International Summer School in German Philosophy, hosted by Bonn University, Germany, to be held July 4 - 15, 2011.

This year’s topic is “The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel’s Subjective Logic.” The course will be led by Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) with keynote addresses by Michael Forster (University of Chicago), Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt University, Berlin), and  Axel Hutter (LMU, Munich). Course readings and discussions will be in English.

There are no registration or course fees for the summer school. A limited number of travel stipends are available for students coming from outside of Germany.

Application is open to graduate students and recent PhD recipients with backgrounds in philosophy. For a full course description, application instructions, and further information about the summer school, please visit our website:

http://www.idealism.uni-bonn.de/

The application deadline is MARCH 15, 2011. Application materials (CV and short letter of intent, plus a separate letter explaining financial needs if applying for a stipend) should be sent via email to idealism2011@gmail.com.

It turns out the new translation of "The Science of Logic" came out last year

2011-01-23T23:43:00.006-06:00

I didn't notice when this happened, so I figure others probably missed it, too: di Giovanni's translation of "The Science of Logic" is out now. From what I've read of it so far, it's not radically different from Miller's translation, but the mere addition of some modern critical apparatuses is very welcome. Like, just having some more footnotes is a great addition. As is changing the font. The Miller is just an ugly book to look at. So even if this doesn't end up being a radical change, it's definitely welcome. (Now they just need to print it in paperback so I can own a copy of the thing legally.)

It looks like there are actually three volumes of the Cambridge Edition of Hegel's Works out now. I'd only heard about the Heidelberg Writings (which I haven't had time to think about looking at yet), and I just found out they were working on (and have already published) another translation of the Encyclopedia Logic earlier this evening. I'm not sure why they did this one, especially this early-on; the Hackett edition is from 1991, and strikes me as perfectly serviceable still. I would've thought that they were working mainly on unpublished or out-of-date materials, based on the fact that they started with the Heidelberg Writings volume. I suppose they might have been trying to get the major works out there (with Pinkard's translation of the Phenomenology presumably destined to come out in this series), but it still strikes me as odd. The other volumes of the Encyclopedia are badly in need of either new translations or a reprint of the Petry editions in a format that people other than major research libraries can get access to. (I've not seen them outside of reference collections, even there. Amusingly, Amazon offers the third volume of Petry for $2.30 as a Kindle edition, but this is actually just the version you can find online at places like Marxists.org, not even the Miller edition that has the Zusatze etc. So save your $2.30, nature-philosophers!)

Anyway, I'm reading di Giovanni's preface to "The Science of Logic" now. One bit that leaped out at me when I was reading:
"In this respect, since [The Phenomenology of Spirit] is governed throughout by the idea of spirit, it also constitutes the First Part of the System of Science, as Hegel surnamed it in 1807. This is a title which was dropped in the second edition of 1832, because it no longer corresponded to the subsequent publication history of the then planned System, and because Hegel later incorporated a much abbreviated version of the Phenomenology in the Encyclopedia as part of the Philosophy of Spirit."

I was very happy to see someone established say this; I've never actually seen it stated in print before (though I've said it on blogs). I have seen the opposed view (both in print and online), that the Phenomenology elevates its reader to the status of Absolute Knowledge and thus enables her to make sense of the System Of Science which begins with "The Science of Logic", which has always struck me as nuts.

Unrelated note: My handwritten McDowell notes gnaw at my soul like a beaver on soft wood. They demand to be typed up. I am not very good at blogging.

"Extended Mind Redux"

2010-12-15T12:40:00.004-06:00

From Andy Clark's "Extended Mind Redux":

Themewise, I was struck by the somewhat remarkable fact that about half the commentators thought the general line about extending the mind was plausible and even obvious, while about half thought it was implausible and perhaps even self-evidently false. In optimistic mode (which I mostly am) I take this as a good sign: as suggesting that there is indeed something worth thinking about here.

Philosophical Investigations 402:

For this is what disputes between Idealists, Solipsists and Realists look like. The one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were attacking a statement; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being.

Clark also allows that perhaps he shouldn't be optimistic: "If I were feeling less upbeat, I might take it as a sign that I just hadn’t made the thought clear enough." I rather doubt "clarifications" of his thesis could help him here.

I preferred it when "The Stone" was publishing columns that were transparently insane, like the one about autism (and sex-ratios and the TLP). Then I could just shake my head at the NYT, rather than the profession.

Metablogical note: I have finally finished my paper on chapter 5 of Sebastian Roedl's "Self-Consciousness". Submitted the final version an hour or so ago. God willing, I'll have time to finally finish my McDowell Week notes come this weekend.

Making a Davidson Quote more Available, and a Hegel Paper

2010-12-01T10:51:00.003-06:00

I've gestured at this quote before (in posts and in conversation), but Google shows that I've never actually typed it all up: it only showed up on Google Books and then in some guy's dissertation in Portuguese. I think it's revealing enough to deserve more prominence than that.

"I am deeply puzzled by McDowell's alternative account.... I do not see how the (propositional) content one takes in can be evidence for a belief, since it does not, in itself, have any subjective probability (if it did, it would be a belief). How can an attitude that assigns no probability to a proposition convey a probability (positive or negative) of, or provide positive evidence for, a belief?" ("Reply to Roger F. Gibson", p.135 in "Donald Davidson: Truth, meaning, and knowledge").

PS: I will finish recapping McDowell week after I get a draft knocked out for a paper I'm writing on Sebastian Roedl for a class on internalism & externalism. Sorry it's taken so long, been a busy couple of months.

Also, "Hegel on Reality as a Modal Notion" is one of the most stimulating things I've read in a while (and I heard Stekeler was a lot of fun in person). Here's some stuff I wrote on Facebook, which I shamelessly recycle to generate blog-content. The original context was my defending Stekeler's interestingness and intelligibility against a cultured critic; I would go back in and add citations to Hegel if I wasn't a hack, but it's all in the Logic chapters that are explicitly on modal topics ("Reality" in Stekeler's paper is Wirklichkeit, not Realitat -- which makes his title seem silly, since "actuality is a modal notion" is not news to anyone):

I thought he really did make Hegel's views on modality clearer. The role of contingency in Hegel's thought seems to me to be pretty much what Stekeler says on p. 21; or at least if this is Hegel's view, then this makes sense of how Hegel can both insist that there really is contingency (and that it would be foolish to try to reduce away all contingency as merely veiled necessity) while also often sounding like a necessitarian, even affirming some form of the principle of sufficient reason: it always makes sense to ask after the cause of any happening.

Answering this causal question takes the form of characterizing the happening as the result of some ground that it follows from in accord with some "generic law", some general claim that relates the sorts of things that the cause and the effect are such that the effect makes sense as being there, given that the cause is there. But no system of "generic laws" says what particular things there are, and to try to make "generic laws" imply the existence of particulars would be to fall into confusion about how causal explanations function (since they do their work by setting particulars in a broader framework, and using the fact that the relations in the framework are understood to make sense of the relations the particulars stand in; if the relations the particulars stood in needed to be understood to make use of the framework, then positioning them within the terms of the framework wouldn't be explanatory, but would merely bring back out what was already known). So it's foolish to try to pretend there's no contingency in nature, just because everything in nature has a causal explanation: Denial of "contingency" in the sense of things that happen for no reason at all, like the atomists' clinamen, doesn't mean that contingency has been shown to be an illusion or a result of our ignorance (which is how Spinoza thought of it - E1P29). Both of these views misunderstood contingency.

This also fits in with another of his criticisms of Spinoza in the "History of Philosophy" lectures: Spinoza has no way of getting attributes into the picture. He fudges that part: God has infinite attributes (by definition: E1D6), but "attribute" is something Spinoza characterizes only by reference to "what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance" (E1D4 -- he needs to appeal to *us*, as intellects, to get attributes into play). He doesn't actually prove that God/Nature has any multiplicity to itself at all, from definitions; he merely seems to, because he's smuggled in our own viewpoint alongside the definitions. Thus Hegel's regarding Spinoza as an "acosmist", someone who has no place for a world at all. And as Spinoza is the paradigm denier of contingency in nature, it seems natural to connect these points in Hegel: denying contingency in nature happens when you've actually lost nature from the picture.

Before reading this paper, Hegel's stuff about contingency had confused me. Now it seems like good sense.

McDowell Week Retrospective: "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" (Wednesday part 1)

2010-10-16T22:39:00.005-05:00

Now that I have all of the phil100 papers for my section graded, I can get back to this.

On Wednesday there was a catered lunch in the department to give grad students a chance to talk to McDowell without professors present. Thus far in McDowell week, I had not said a word to McDowell, because I get anxious about things like that; at lunch, McDowell asked me an embarrassing question about my eating habits, and this served as an icebreaker. So I started asking him about "Avoiding the Myth of the Given".

One of the first things I asked him was whether his post-"Avoiding" view committed him to saying that all we see is facing surfaces of objects -- whether or not we saw objects as having backs. He said that we just see the facing surfaces, and not the backs, and that we see them as things with backs by seeing their surfaces. He compared it to seeing that John is at the table, where that it's John at the table isn't part of the content of the experience, as someone might not know the fellow's name and still see things the same as someone who did. This all left me flummoxed for a bit. I couldn't see how this could be said satisfactorily.

McDowell mentioned Anscombe's essay "Substance" as something he was teaching in his "Philosophy of Perception" seminar at Pittsburgh. I found this essay quite helpful; it's in the second volume of her papers, and runs shy of seven pages.

I asked McDowell how my belief that I see that John is at the table is supposed to be justified, if the content of my experience doesn't give me that the person I see is John. McDowell said that even if the content of my experience didn't involve my capacity to recognize people by name, it still brought those people into view. A little more work on trying to get clear at what bothered me lead McDowell to remark that recognitional capacities (which involve concepts over and above those involved in the content of an experience) can issue nondefeasible warrants to know that-P.

And this was around the time that lunch ended and I had to go to my office hours, and then to Kaplan's epistemology seminar. Then I got some closing-hour baked goods at City Bakery and it was time for McDowell's public lecture.

Somewhere in this expanse of time, I realized what had been bothering me about "Avoiding": I had missed two points. One is that recognitional capacities issue in warrants that are just as good as those gained by "carving out" a particular bit of the content of an experience (the two are epistemologically on a level). I thought that the warrants perception issued in were supposed to be tied to the fact that it was from intuition that I took what I claimed to know, but this is just not part of McDowell's story.

"Avoiding", page 259:

Such locutions -- "I see that...", "My experience reveals to me that..." -- accept, in their "that..." clauses, specifications of things one's experience puts one in a position to know non-inferentially. That can include knowledge that experience makes available by bringing something into view for someone who has a suitable recognitional capacity.

In a footnote to the first sentence, McDowell notes that "These locutions can even be understood in such a way that inferential credentials are not ruled out for the knowledge in question. Consider, for instance, "I see that the mailman has not yet come today.""

I believe I have misread this footnote in the past. What McDowell means here is that I can claim to know that the mailman has not yet come today because "I can see that this is so", but that what this means is that I take what I can see to give me grounds for a materially good inference to the claim that the mailman has not yet come today (say I see that the flag on the mailbox is still up, and the package I placed in it to be sent is still sticking out). The knowledge I attribute to myself in saying "I see that the mailman has not yet come today" is inferential. This shows up in how I reply if someone asks me why I think the mailman hasn't come today: "I see my package is still there, and the mailman would've taken it if he had come. So he hasn't come yet today." It can also be used to state things I am in a position to know non-inferentially, and that these things are known non-inferentially likewise shows up in how I reply: "Why do you think your package is still there?" -- "I can see it from where I'm standing". I stop there; I do not claim to infer the presence of my package from something else.

In the block-quoted portion, I had previously been misunderstanding what "bringing something into view" meant. I took it to be something that experience('s content) did, which then led to recognitional capacities kicking in. But nothing like that was meant: knowledge gained via recognitional capacities being actualized in perception works just like perceptual knowledge did before "Avoiding". I was over-reading McDowell.

The second point I had been confused on was this: I was worried that someone might want to say that all experience really gives me warrant for believing myself to see is colored expanses of various shapes and sizes; the warrants perception gives are solely those gained by articulating bits of intuitional content -- if I take myself to know that John is at the table because I can see him, this supposed knowledge must have some ground other than what experience presents to me, for experience presents only colored expanses, or perhaps it has no ground but is granted due to custom or habit etc. (The worry had the physiognomy of the idea that it is only in logic that we can be certain of anything, and that if we claim certainty in any non-logical matter we are, strictly speaking, irrational. Thus the young LW's refusal to grant Russell that there was no rhinoceros in his office.)

Relatedly, I was worried about the idea that it is only by abstracting from our everyday view of objects around us that we can see ourselves as presented with "expanses of color" (I recall Alva Noe having a nice paper on how hard it is to take up "the painterly point of view" and see a coin held at an angle as an elipse, though if you look at a photograph of a coin so held it's easy to draw the elipse at its border), and with related phenomeological ideas like Heidegger's argument that ready-to-handedness is prior to present-at-handedness, or Merleau-Ponty's "the blue of a carpet would never be the same blue were it not a woolly blue". All of these seemed to give compelling reasons for thinking that what McDowell had as "the content of experience" had to be an abstraction from how the world was presented to me. Which is an awkward-sounding idea.

But McDowell is committed to it being impossible for someone's experience to only ever put her in a position to know things non-inferentially via the articulation of bits of intuitional content. She has to also be able to tell things like whether the lighting is normal, which is not a matter of what colored expanses she is presented with, nor is it something she settles ahead of time or via an inference. (This is just following Sellars's line.) So it's already a part of his position that "the content of experience" is never the entirety of what experience gives to me. So he can keep accepting Heidegger's argument about ready-to-handedness and all that; "the content of experience" is just a name for the lowest-common-denominator stuff that one is able to take in just by virtue of having functioning sense-organs and being a rational animal.

This isn't the only place McDowell uses "content" like that. According to McDowell's disjunctivism in perception, "the content" of experience is never the whole story about experience. "The content of experience" is what he calls the common factor between the good case and the bad case, between veridical and nonveridical experiences. There is more to experience than its content. That's just the way McDowell uses the words.

So there was no reason for me to feel worried that taking McDowell's position seriously ought to shrink the circle of what experience puts us into a position to know to that of which colored expanses we're presented with. That possibility was already ruled out by other things McDowell was committed to.

So, I think I am now clear on both of the revisions McDowell made in "Avoiding". Both seem fine.

This post is long enough that I think McDowell's public lecture should be in another post. But I've actually run together some things from Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday together here; I think I can stop talking about "Avoiding" now. That has become a bit of philosophy that I can stop doing when I want to. Which is now.

McDowell Week Retrospective: Tuesday

2010-10-10T14:45:00.007-05:00

I finally asked McDowell things I wanted to ask him about on Friday, after using lunch on Wednesday to get clearer on what I wanted to ask. I was happy with all the answers I got.

But let's go in order. McDowell got into town late on Monday (he had a seminar on the Philosophy of Perception that afternoon at Pitt), and the first thing I saw him at was a seminar on Tuesday.

Before his visit, McDowell had recommended that interested parties read two Tyler Burge articles: "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology" and "Perceptual Entitlement", along with certain of McDowell's earlier works. These were the things the McDowell reading group at IU read through over the past few weeks.

The Tuesday seminar was on "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology". On page two of that essay, Burge says "Disjunctivism is, roughly, the view that there is never any specific perceptual state kind in common between a perception of one object and a perception of another object (even if the objects are not discriminable to the perceiver through the perception), or between the perception of an object and a perceptual referential illusion that is contextually indiscriminable to the perceiver from the successful perception." McDowell said he liked this way of putting it well enough.

Some of Burge's other ways of putting it, McDowell found less congenial. For example, Burge claims that disjunctivism denies that there is any explanatorily relevant state in common between the good case and the bade case.

One odd thing about the (eighty-page-long) article that McDowell drew attention to is that in the main body of the article, "disjunctivism" is not attributed to any philosophers by name. It's only in the appendix to the article that any particular philosophers come into view, and then a lot of them do. So the body of the article is not targeting any one philosopher in particular, but is meant to hit McDowell, Evans, Snowdon, Campbell, and Martin all together.

This gives McDowell an easy reply to the bulk of Burge's article: The views Burge attacks are not held by McDowell. "I don't think Burge even contemplates my view." McDowell does not deny that there is a perceptual state in common between the "good case" and the "bad case" in perception; he just denies that that state is the only state which can be attributed to a perceiver in trying to explain how her experience presents things to her as being.

The state type which is common between the good case and the bad case is that both are states of having it appear to the perceiver that things are thus-and-so. "I am not in the business of denying that there is a common state. But I have more to say, and the more I have to say is well-expressed by means of a disjunction: it's like this, or it's like that."

McDowell asked for people to raise questions whenever they came up during the seminar (which lead to him not finishing his remarks on this paper, but I'm pretty sure the remainder just bled into Wednesday's lecture). Burge had cited "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space" while criticizing McDowell, and someone asked a question about that. McDowell then spent some time saying how he had been trying to build on Burnyeat's "What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed" in that essay, and quite a bit of time was lost while people asked questions which revealed that they weren't familiar with that essay and had no idea what McDowell was trying to say about its relationship with STatEoIS. This was the low point of the seminar.

One good point that did come up in this discussion was that Burge tends to talk about perception in terms of the identification of particular objects. McDowell thinks that he can say what he wants to say about "disjunctivism" without getting into that at all. He is presently inclined to say (but has not yet convinced himself that it's all right to say) that the content of an experience is existential in form: "There is a man in front of me" as opposed to "John is in front of me". Which removes the mystery of what to say about the "common factor" between the perceptual analogues of singular thoughts and what merely seem to be the perceptual analogues of singular thoughts (the perceptual analogues of Evans's Frege's "mock thoughts"). We can say that the content of the experience is the same whether or not John exists, even if the experience inclines me to say that John is in front of me, and if John is in front of me and I am in a position to know that he is in front of me via perception. For even if I was mistaken in all of this, it could still be the case that my experience is a state of having it appear to me as if there is a man in front of me.

This seems to me to be a very welcome revision, if that is what it is. (McDowell wasn't sure if he had said anything that contradicted it before; he said he would have to go back through and reread all of his earlier articles to check, and he doesn't think anyone really cares (nor does he) whether or not his position on this topic has changed since the 70s.) If the content of an experience (as opposed to what an experience inclines you to say via the exercise of your other recognitional capacities) does not include singular contents, then disjunctivism doesn't need to be complexified to handle the weirdness of "Scheinegedanke", and it also looks to be independent of what one wants to say about singular thoughts.

Another point McDowell had to clarify, but which I think is clearly not a revision: "being in a state" is just having a verb-phrase true of one. Someone asked for more clarification on how to characterize the common factor between the good case and the bad case: "Find a true thing of a state-ish type you can say, and you have the common type." I was just glad to have this clear Carnapian point repeated: being in a state does not mean that there is a state which one is in.

McDowell noted that he didn't think any of this stuff actually got at what really bothered Burge, which is discussed in section III of his paper, about the perceptual capacities of brutes. He didn't actually get back to this point in depth, I don't think, but the Wednesday lecture seemed like it probably covered the material he'd not had time for. This is a place where my notes are not as clear as I would like; hopefully I can get the recordings from the seminars.

Before he got to what he thought was really bothering Burge, McDowell noted one flagrantly invalid argument Burge appealed to.

Burge claims that it follows from the fact that a perceptual capacity is fallible that it cannot be the case that a particular exercise of that capacity on a particular occasion can issue in an indefeasible warrant to know that p. He thinks that the idea of our having a capacity to know which rules out our being wrong is incompatible with recognizing that we are human, and our capacities to know are fallible.

McDowell notes that it doesn't follow from a CAPACITY'S being fallible that what it is a capacity FOR must leave it open that the capacity failed. He used the example of "a capacity to sink eight-foot putts". Everyone who has a capacity to sink eight-foot putts is fallible; nobody makes the putt 100% of the time. But when they do sink the putt, the ball goes in the hole and doesn't come back out. The capacity is fallible, but particular exercises of it can be such as to rule out that the capacity was anything less than entirely successful. "Fallibility is one thing, indefeasibility another. Indefeasibility attaches to warrants, which are on particular occasions." Fallibility is about capacities, which are only exercised on particular occasions.

Apart from this bad argument about our fallibility, McDowell doesn't see that Burge gives any argument for ruling out that perception can give indefeasible warrants. Burge just characterizes perception in such a way that the warrants it provides can be, at best, defeasible.

A good portion of Burge's paper is devoted to saying what the state of the field is in perceptual psychology. McDowell thinks this part of the paper is "beautifully done". There really is a puzzle about the underdetermination of the visual system: very different levels of light can hit the retina in different scenarios, but we can identify the surface we see as maintaining its shade throughout. McDowell seemed genuinely engaged while recounting some of the stuff he'd read about luminescence. I suspect this was intended to counter Burge's claim that "[McDowell's] claims about the science rest on a string of misunderstandings that elementary familiarity with the science would have prevented."

McDowell grants that "It might be a bad thing to just keep doing epistemology without caring about the science of how visual systems work." He mentioned Hegel's supposed proof that there can only be seven planets as a thing for philosophy to avoid; philosophers in armchairs should not deny scientific theories. He thinks Burge charges philosophy with something stronger than this, though: He seems to say "here is science, ergo epistemology has to be like this".

Burge claims that the states of a perceptual system are also those of the perceiver whose system it is: "Perceptions as of three-dimensionally shaped objects, and the motions and colors of these objects, are among the representations produced by the perceptual system. They are equally the individual's perceptual representations." Burge argues that the states a perceptual system can get into in "good cases" and in "bad cases" are the same, and hence disjunctivism (and naive realism) are false.

McDowell takes it to be obvious that this is right about perceptual systems: learning more about how perceptual systems work lets you create new perceptual illusions, for example. The possibility of convincing illusions requires that they appear to be what they aren't. The trick to getting someone to see an illusion is to get their perceptual system to be in the state that it would be in if it were a case of veridical perception, but without it being a case of veridical perception. There aren't "factive" states in perceptual systems, just as an empirical matter; that's not how the science turns out, as Burge attests.

But, if this is true about the states of perceptual systems, then no state of a perceptual system can be such that it is incompatible with a perceptual system's being in that state that things are not as that state represents them as being. And so no state of a perceptual system can be such as to issue in an indefeasible warrant to know that things are thus-and-so. And Burge had no argument why we can't conceive of perception in that way. So it's simply open to McDowell to claim that perception is not being in a particular state of a perceptual system.

So, McDowell can grant everything Burge says about the science, and still claim "Perceivers perceive, perceptual systems don't perceive", which makes much of what Burge said entirely besides the point. McDowell noted that "The perceiver is an animal. We have to be careful if we are talking about things animals do or things functionally specified parts of animals do.... The heart circulates blood. I circulate blood? No, I don't. That's not my job. It's taken care of for me."

So, none of the science Burge talks about can be constitutive of being in the sort of perceptual state McDowell's disjunctivism is concerned with, but that doesn't show that there's anything wrong with either of them. McDowell can continue to say that the stuff Burge brings up is enabling of perception, and deny that it is constitutive of it.

And then it'd been two hours, so the seminar ended. The reception afterwards was very poorly catered, I thought; I just had a couple of cans of diet coke (which they quickly ran out of) and waited for dinner. The available food at the reception was like, crackers with some sort of spread. I don't know where I was for dinner afterwards, but I don't want to go back, and nothing interesting philosophically came up there.

And there was evening, and there was morning, and it was the second day. That will be another post, because this one turned out to be pretty long.

McDowell Week at IU

2010-10-04T11:24:00.005-05:00

McDowell is visiting IU this week.

Some numbers for the week:

Number of receptions: Two.
Number of dinners the department's paying for that I'm signed up to attend: Two.
Number of catered lunches for grad students: One.
Number of parties: One.
Number of the above that McDowell will be at: Six (assuming he attends his own receptions).

Hooray for free food~

Also there's a two-part seminar for the department, a public lecture, and open office hours. I'm hoping that somewhere in there I can get McDowell to explain what's going on with "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" (the bit where he limits which conceptual capacities are involved in the content of experience).

I need to figure out what else I want to ask him about in the next day or so. "Davidson in Context" and the indeterminacy of translation both come to mind. I also hear he presented a paper on the B-Deduction at the Haugeland (RIP) conference this spring; I should try to get a copy of that.

I also want to know why "The Content of Perceptual Experience" hasn't been collected yet. It's from April 1994, The Philosophical Quarterly (Vol 44, No. 175), and he told us to read it in preparation for his visit. So far as I could find, it's the only piece of his that wasn't collected in any of the four volumes of his papers (apart from short replies). If he hadn't told us to read it, I probably wouldn't have known it existed. (It's about Dennett and animal cognition; nothing world-shaking, but a solid statement of McDowell's rejection of the (more than causal) relevance of sub-personal states to personal-level explanations.)

There are some other things that've come up in the McDowell reading groups that I want to hear McDowell respond to, but I figure other people can worry about remembering those. Nobody else is going to bug him about "Avoiding". (It was news to most people here that McDowell had revised his views in the past decade.)

Meta-note: The blog is not dead; I was just busy with moving & work & such all summer, and since I've gotten to IU I've been busy with school things. Also, random articles and such I've wanted to link have ended up getting linked on facebook instead of here, which has cut down on the amount of random incentives to post I've had. (Feel free to friend me if you read this.)

One thing I meant to note when it happened, but didn't: Barry Stroud spoke here a few weeks ago, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with almost everything he said. It seems his view of perception is now pretty close to McDowell's, with a strong disjunctivist aspect to it. The only place he explicitly disagreed with McDowell was in whether there was any reason to call his view "idealism" (which I tried to smooth over in the Q&A*), and the only place I noticed him missing something McDowell noticed is that Stroud didn't seem to distinguish between experiences and beliefs formed on the basis of experience. (Which made his views an interesting hybrid of McDowell and the still-not-quite-right parts of Davidson.) I need to get a copy of the paper he delivered, to make sure I heard him right; it felt strange to agree with Stroud so strongly.

*Stroud was referring to the part at the end of "Conceptual Capacities in Perception" where McDowell says the label "idealism" is "a good fit" for the view he defends (p.143 in "Having the World in View"). Stroud took himself to be defending the same view as McDowell, but was troubled by the fact that McDowell thought that this view was an "idealism". I suggested that all McDowell meant to be doing by saying his views are "idealism in an obvious sense" was indicating solidarity with Hegel, since it's clear that McDowell wants to defend "common-sense realism" (also on p.143), and Hegel is an example of a self-avowed "idealist" who also wasn't an idealist in the sense that seemed to worry Stroud. (He's also the only person I can think of who could say "the world itself is structured by the form of judgement" and not mean anything worrisome about it, which is another thing McDowell says. Kant can almost say this and get away with it, but McDowell is clear in holding that transcendental idealism spoils the story. I should ask McDowell if he thinks the TLP says it, since proposition 1 of that book is nonsense.) Stroud's reply was "Well, when I asked McDowell about this, he told me 'Idealism is not a theory'". And then everyone in the auditorium had a good laugh about that.

McDowell on Gjelsvik on McDowell on Rorty on Davidson on Brains in Vats

2010-05-10T01:46:00.002-05:00

McDowell's criticism of Davidson on pages 16/17 of "Mind & World" has always bothered me. The topic is what Davidson says about brains in vats, based on the testimony of Rorty in "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth". It turns out that there's a volume of "Theoria" made up of critical essays with McDowell's responses, and this comes up there. I didn't know McDowell had responded to any of those essays until a few hours ago; I was excited to find them. McDowell's return to this argument was the best thing I found in there.

M&W 16/17: "Suppose one feels the worry in this familiar form: so far as the picture goes, one might be a brain in a mad scientist's vat. The Davidsonian response seems to be that if one were a brain in a vat, it would be correct to interpret one's beliefs as being largely true beliefs about the brain's electronic environment.... But the response to the brain-in-a-vat worry works the wrong way round. The response does not calm the fear that our picture leaves our thinking possibly out of touch with the world around us. It just gives us a dizzying sense that our grip on what it is that we believe is not as firm as we thought."

And then McDowell has this footnote; I'll bold the part that's always upset me:
"It takes care to say precisely why the response is unsatisfying. It is not that we are being told that we may be egregiously wrong about what our beliefs are about. If I protest that some belief of mine is not about electronic impulses or whatever but about, say, a book, the reply can be: "Certainly your belief is about a book -- given how 'a book' as you use the phrase is correctly interpreted." The envisaged reinterpretation, to suit the hypothesis that I am a brain in a vat, affects my higher-level beliefs about what my first-level beliefs are about in a way that precisely matches its effect on my first-level beliefs. The problem is that in the argument Rorty attributes to Davidson, we ring changes on the actual environment (as seen by the interpreter and brought into the interpretation) without changing how things strike the believer, even while the interpretation is supposed to capture how the believer is in touch with her world. This strikes me as making it impossible to claim that the argument traffics in any genuine idea of being in touch with something in particular. The objects that the interpreter sees the subject's beliefs as being about become, as it were, merely noumenal so far as the subject is concerned."

In "Experience" (Theoria volume 70, issue 2-3), Olav Gjelsvik complains about this passage in just the way I have in the past: "McDowell allows himself a description of the case Davidson would hardly subscribe to, namely that “we ring changes in the actual environment without changing how things strike the believer”. Davidson,in this mood Rorty describes, would hardly let in the line “without changing how things strike the believer”." Gjelsvik makes the obvious point that "how things strike the believer" is, for Davidson, a matter of which beliefs the believer holds, and McDowell grants that those change with environmental changes in his footnote (what I mean by "a book" is not a book, if I've never come into even remote contact with books). So what's supposed to be the problem for Davidson, here?

McDowell's response clears things up (after regretting that he tried to make much out of a secondhand report about an oral remark about such a tricky topic):
"When I spoke of ringing changes in the actual environment without changing how things strike the believer, I was not talking about what an interpreter might come up with when faced with something that is undoubtedly a brain in a vat. Davidson’s remark, I took it, was meant to respond to the sceptical thought (or supposed thought), supposedly entertainable by each of us, “Perhaps I am a brain in a vat”. How things strike me (which I would express by saying such things as that there seems to be a computer screen in front of me) is given by the current state of my consciousness. In the thought experiment, we are invited to switch - without changing the current state of my consciousness - between the case as I take it to be, in which there really is a computer screen in front of me, and the case in which my visual experience is produced by electrodes implanted in the brain that, in this alternative scenario, is all there is to me. The putative reassurance of Davidson’s remark was that even if the case is the second of these, my beliefs (which I express by saying, for instance, that there is a computer screen in front of me) are still mostly true; it is just that my expressions of them need to be interpreted as being about the electronic environment of the brain that, on this hypothesis, I am. I stand by my claim that this is not much reassurance. But for someone who thought it was, it would be exactly the point - contrary to what Gjelsvik says - to allow the line “without changing how things strike the believer”. The whole point of the supposed reassurance would be to grant to the sceptic that the difference between the two scenarios would not make a difference to the state of my consciousness, but to deny that this threatens the thesis that most of my beliefs are true."

McDowell took "the Davidsonian response" to the brain-in-a-vat worry to grant that one's experience is indistinguishable from the experience of a brain in a vat, but that this shouldn't worry anyone because brains in vats have mostly true beliefs, too. This is supposed to be a plausible line for Davidson because for him "experience", "consciousness" etc. are epistemically inert to begin with. So McDowell didn't just (somehow) forget that the radical interpreter would change how he took things to be striking the believer to fit with changes ringed in the environment; he took Davidson's response to grant to the skeptic that "how things strike my consciousness" can swing wildly free of how the world is. And then the argument about "the veridical nature of belief" "comes too late", just as McDowell says, for the skeptical claim about experience is left untouched, and that's the spot that itches.

This is much more plausible as a criticism of Davidson, and I no longer hate that part of "Mind & World". I don't think it quite works as a criticism of Davidson (because I don't think that that is how Davidson actually thinks of brain-in-a-vat skepticism or of "experience"), but it's intelligibly directed against a "Davidsonian" view. And addressing it helps McDowell better get into view that what we need is a conception of a natural happening which is the world's impressing itself on a thinker. I think some of McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Mind & World" are less than perfect (as McDowell eventually recognizes in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given"), but he's certainly right that making sense of such a conception is a desideratum, and that Davidson was ill-poised to give it to us.

Putnam and Analyticity

2010-04-27T02:10:00.003-05:00

As the previous post probably implied, I've been reading more about the analytic/synthetic distinction (and other Quinean themes). Just finished Putnam's essay "The Analytic and The Synthetic". I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, much of what Putnam says against Quine's critics seems to me entirely right and laudable. It's certainly useful for some purposes to have arguments against many philosophical uses of the supposed distinction but which affirm that it exists (since so many people still feel it obviously must have some merit, including the Quine of "The Roots of Reference"). Certainly I'd prefer that everyone agree with Putnam here than with Carnap; if the analytic-synthetic distinction doesn't do any active harm in philosophy then it's rather moot what else we say on the topic.

On the other hand, I'm unconvinced by Putnam's attempt to distinguish "law-cluster concepts" from some other kind (with this other kind being what's susceptible to becoming the subject of an analytic truth). I still think Davidson is right in holding that a concept gets the sense it has by having the inferential connections it has, but that there are no privileged connections here; it's just that if we change too many of them, it's hard to see how we can be working with the same concept we started with. (And it's of a piece with this to not try to make the notion of "same concept" do any heavy theoretical lifting; we can, in general, make that judgement however we like, provided we make appropriate accommodations elsewhere in our story.) So I doubt that there's anything special about the laws connected with a given concept (as opposed to beliefs which make use of that concept more broadly), or that there's a good reason to think any part of language is not like this.

Also, it's worth noting that Putnam is in a sense not defending the analytic/synthetic distinction; he explicitly rejects the notion that analytic-synthetic forms a dichotomy. Putnam thinks there are analytic statements, synthetic statements, statements that are close to analytic, statements that are close to synthetic, and a fifth miscellaneous class. Putnam argues solely in defense of the notion of analyticity: he thinks there are some parts of language which we must not deny as analytic. It was striking how different his defense of analyticity was from Morton White's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, reading them back to back like this. (And as a trivial note, Putnam never mentions White in this article, though White was his teacher, nor to anyone else who attacked the distinction; his criticisms are solely directed at Quine.)

I'm not going to try to do justice to everything Putnam has to say in his essay (it's long and dense), but there are a few lines of argument that seem to me to be both central and flawed.

First, a bit I liked, from where Putnam is laying out what he means by way of talking about "law-cluster concepts":

I want to suggest that the term 'energy' is not one of which it is happy to ask, What is its intension? The term 'intension' suggests the idea of a single defining character or a single defining law, and this is not the model on which concepts like energy are to be construed. In the case of a law-cluster term such as 'energy', any one law, even a law that was felt to be defiitional or stipulative in character, can be abandoned, and we feel that the identity of the concept has, in a certain respect, remained. (p.53)

This is very agreeable. Talk of "intensions" carries around the baggage of the "Myth of Meanings": of there being such a thing as The Meaning of a word, and of this as being what a good dictionary entry is supposed to communicate. Dictionaries do not do this, and this is not a flaw; a good dictionary entry gives you some clues as to how a word is used (at least in general, in most cases, by normal speakers), often more by the examples than by the "definitions", and this is often enough sufficient for you to settle any doubts about what so-and-so meant by such-and-such you might've had. Talk of "intensions" or of "meanings" as entities is not a helpful way to understand this.

But, sadly, Putnam does not stop the essay there.

In the case of the terms 'energy' and 'kinetic energy', we want to say, or at any rate I want to say, that the meaning has not changed enough to affect 'what we are talking about'; yet a principle superficially very much like 'All bachelors are unmarried' [the "definition" e=1/2mv^2] has been abandoned. What makes the resemblance only superficial is the fact that if we are asked what the meaning of the term 'bachelor' is, we can only say that 'bachelor' means 'unmarried man', whereas if we are asked for the meaning of the term 'energy', we can do much more than give a definition. We can in fact show the way in which the use of the term 'energy' facilitates an enormous number of scientific explanations, and how it enters into an enormous bundle of laws. (p.53)

I really doubt that it's true that this is the only thing we can say if someone asks what "bachelor" means. Always more than one way to skin a cat, after all. We could, I think, exhibit a great number of sentences in which "bachelor" is used, and trust our hearer to work out the word's significance. And this is plausibly what happens in a great many cases of language-learning; even for terms which Putnam wants to say there are true analytic judgements which take those terms as subjects, it's hardly likely that the use of those terms is *always* taught by explicit statement of an "analytic" definition, or that there's any need for this to be the case. (I imagine this in some more detail in the post on "The Roots of Reference" I linked above.)

And this is connected to my next point: I don't see what's special about the "enormous number of scientific explanations" and "enormous bundle of laws" that "energy" enters into; it just looks to me like a particular case of a word having meaning because it has a use in a form of life (very broadly speaking). Putnam doesn't address this at any point in the essay; I suspect he's privileging laws just because he's using an example from the history of physics to make his anti-Quine's-critics points. Putnam's certainly right that it's this holistic web that gives "energy" the meaning it has, but I see no reason to think the vocabulary of the natural sciences is special in this respect.

I *think* the reason Putnam introduces the notion of a law-cluster concept is just because the notion of a "cluster concept" was already floating around, and Putnam regards this concept as applying solely to "typical general names like 'man' and 'crow'" (p.52). As a philological note, I don't know if this was standard. Putnam attributes the view to Wittgenstein, and the obvious proof-text there is the discussion of "Moses" in PI 79, which is not a general term but a proper name (I'm setting aside for now the nitpick that the "cluster concept" reading of that passage given by Searle is not the best reading). So I'm not sure where the link between "cluster concepts" and general terms is coming from. But as a philosophical matter, I don't see that there's any good reason to distinguish between "cluster concepts" which are "constituted by a bundle of properties" and "law-cluster concepts" which are constituted by "a cluster of laws which, as it were, determine the identity of the concept". Putnam says he agrees with Quine's emphasis on "the monolithic character of our conceptual system", but I think Quine does this monolith more justice by not making the distinctions Putnam here makes. In general, the web of inferential connections a concept is embedded in "as it were, determine the identity of the concept". We can leave out just what those inferential connections are as unimportant; inferential links are inferential links.

Putnam does have more to say about why "bachelor" is not a law-cluster concept:

... 'energy is a law-cluster term, and 'bachelor' is not. This is not to say that there are no laws underlying out use of the term 'bachelor'; there are laws underlying our use of any words whatsoever. But it is to say that there are no exceptionless laws of the form 'All bachelors are...' except 'All bachelors are unmarried', 'All bachelors are male', and consequences thereof. Thus, preserving the interchangeability of 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' in all extensional contexts can never conflict with our desire to retain some other natural law of the form 'all bachelors are...'. This cannot happen because bachelors are a king of synthetic 'class'. The are not a 'natural kind' in Mill's sense. They are rather grouped together by ignoring all aspects except a single legal one. One is not going to find any laws, except complex statistical laws depending on sociological conditions, about such a class. Thus it cannot 'hurt' if we decide always to preserve the law 'All bachelors are unmarried'. And that it cannot hurt is all the justification we need; the positive advantages are obvious. (p.57)

The first part of this is simply wrong; "all bachelors are nonlobsters" is a counterexample. And Putnam later in the essay gives the definition of "bachelor" as "male adult human being who has never in his life been married" (p.59), which isn't a consequence of "all bachelors are both male and unmarried". And Putnam entertains the (logical) possibility that there are laws like "all and only bachelors suffer psychological trouble Phi" (where Phi is something like "sexual frustration"); he says that if it turns out anything like that is true, then it will have turned out that "bachelor" is a law-cluster concept. His confidence that nothing like this will happen is his ground for saying that "bachelor" is not a "natural kind" and that it cannot hurt to decide to always preserve the law "All bachelors are unmarried men"; if it turns out that "bachelor" is a law-cluster concept then Putnam would reject it as the possible subject of an analytic truth. All of this strikes me as fishy enough to be suspicious that Putnam's "analyticity" is something we'd be better of without. (We can still say that "All bachelors are unmarried men" is something to not give up simply because it's true, and stop there.) But, Putnam says that there are obvious benefits, and he appeals to these as one of the chief motivations for retaining the notion of analytic truths.

So I now turn to the supposedly obvious benefits:

Most important, there is the advantage of brevity. Also, there is the question of intelligibility. If some of the statements in a language are immune from revision and if some of the rules of a language are immune from revision, then linguistic usage with respect to the language as a whole is to a certain extent frozen. Now, whatever disadvantages this freezing may have, there is one respect in which a frozen language is very attractive. Different speakers of the same language can to a large extent understand each other better because they can predict in advance at least some of the uses of the other speaker. (p.56)

Putnam says nothing else on the topic of brevity. I doubt there's any real gain in saying "bachelor" rather than "single man"; both are trisyllabic. Certainly there are advantages to having multiple words with similar meanings (for poetry and to avoid monotony), but we don't need "strict synonymy" for that.

The gain in intelligibility, then, is what I take to be the real supposed benefit. But I don't see that this works, either. For one thing, if we reject Putnam's notion of analyticity we can still say that everyone believes that all bachelors are unmarried men, so we can still predict in advance that any particular speaker will believe this. There's no need to have a "frozen language" when there're frozen beliefs. This I take to be a fully adequate rejoinder; Putnam does not show any good reason to not drop "analytic" from our vocabulary, as Quine would have us do.

But I think there is a real risk that Putnam doesn't address. I think it's not entirely crazy that someone might chaff at "All bachelors are unmarried men"; certainly "married" and "man" are both terms certain people have problems with. (I vaguely recall reading an interview with Judith Butler where she complains about the supposed "necessity" of just this categorical statement, in the mouth of Kripke.) Perhaps there are some intersex persons who feel comfortable self-identifying as "bachelors" but not as "male". Or perhaps some unconventional partnership arrangements lead to men who regard themselves as equally husband and bachelor (perhaps it's an open marriage and they keep separate apartments). If Putnam is right, anything like this involves ceasing to speak English; a "nonmale bachelor" and a "married bachelor" would simply involve equivocation on the term "bachelor". But this seems to me unfair, at least on the a priori grounds Putnam supplies; presumably the intersexed person and the unconventional husband think of themselves as "bachelors" not because of some crazy new meaning they've attached to the word, but because they see themselves as being what is called in English a "bachelor". To say whether their projections of the term are reasonable seems to me impossible to decide without seeing how life works out if we do project with them or we don't. It's not something philosophers have any privileged view on.

So, my conclusion is the inverse of Putnam's: I don't see any gain to retaining the analytic/synthetic distinction, and I see some real possible risks. So I'm happy to go without it.

Morton White and the Dualism of the Analytic and Synthetic

2010-04-25T03:05:00.004-05:00

I just finished Morton White's 1950 essay "The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism", which is something Quine footnotes near the end of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". I liked it; it's a nice companion piece to Quine's essay. Here are some observations, largely made to help me remember them later.

White's essay opens as follows: "John Dewey has spent a good part of his life hunting and shooting at dualisms: body-mind, theory-practice, percept-concept, value-science, learning-doing, sensation-thought, external-internal. They are always fair game and Dewey's prose rattles with fire whenever they come into view."

It's this Deweyan approach to dualisms that guides White throughout the piece; whereas Quine seems (especially outside of "Two Dogmas" itself) purely skeptical of notions like "meaning" and "synonymy". Many of the arguments White makes are similar to ones in Quine, but the way they pose the challenge is slightly different: most of "Two Dogmas" is devoted to trying to find a non-circular definition of "analytic", most of "An Untenable Dualism" is devoted to trying to find a way to draw a sharp line between analytic and synthetic statements in ordinary language. In both cases, the conclusion reached is that any distinction we can make sense of here is plausibly one of degree rather than kind (centrality vs. periphery in a web of belief, for Quine), but this conclusion is much more centrally stated in White. White's piece ends as follows: "[If the analytic-synthetic distinction is only one of degree] an unbridgeable chasm will no longer divide those who see meanings or essences and those who collect facts. Another revolt against dualism will have succeeded."

It's also worth noting that Quine called his version of empiricism "pragmatist" just because that was the label Carnap gave to the view he was opposing, and this position was what Quine took up to defend; White does not call his view "pragmatist", but does align himself with Dewey. So you have primarily nominal versus primarily movementarian pragmatism in the two authors.

One place where White distinguishes himself from Quine (explicitly) is that where Quine suspected he would need a behavioristic criterion for sameness of meaning to make any sense of the notion, White only asks for a term extensionally equivalent to "X is synonymous with Y" (other than "X has the same meaning as Y" and others which are similarly in need of clarification), as "X is a featherless biped" is to "X is a rational animal". I don't think these demands differ a great deal in practice, but it's always nice to be able to trim away some of the mid-century behaviorist trappings of Quine's thought.

One bit from White that's not explicitly in "Two Dogmas" resembles an early version of the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. White notes that if we're dealing with a formal language some logician has cooked up, it can be a simple matter to say whether "X is a rational animal" and "X is a man" mean the same or not: the language can simply have explicit meaning postulates (here he grants his opponent more than Quine does). But if we then try to decide whether a given artificial language is "the rational reconstruction" for a natural language, no means of deciding this has been provided; White concludes that the attempt is suspect. He makes the same point with regards to attempting to treat analyticity as a matter of convention: no criterion has been given for distinguishing between what is conventional in language and what is there for other reasons, though in particular cases we can establish explicit conventions of word-usage without much trouble.

White is also much more explicit about the sorry state of contrary-to-fact conditionals than Quine is (in "Two Dogmas" anyway), and his criticisms are more extensive than those Quine made (at least when it comes to modal semantics, as opposed to modal logic). Quine notes the connection between meaning and essence in passing ("Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word"), but White explicitly sets himself against "essentialism" repeatedly. A discussion of C.I. Lewis's views on modality makes him sound awfully Kripkean:

He holds that I only need to make what he calls an "experiment in imagination" to find out whether all men are necessarily rational animals. And when I try this experiment I am supposed to conclude that I cannot consistently think of, that I cannot conceive of, a man who is not a rational animal. But how shall we interpret this "cannot"? How shall we understand "thinkable"? I suspect that this view leads us to a private, intuitive insight for determining what each of us individually can conceive.... One either sees or doesn't see the relationship and that is the end of the matter. It is very difficult to argue one's difficulties with such a position, and I shall only say that I do not find this early retreat to intuition satisfactory.

So, it seems that even before modal logic & semantics were made respectable (by Kripke's soundness and completeness proofs and his possible worlds semantics), the semantics had a similar sort of backing to it: we're supposed to just have intuitions about modal matters, and that's what the modal logic is used to talk about. This is exactly how Kripke handles things like the necessity of origins; the fact that we're supposed to get similar "insights" from science in the case of "Water is necessarily H2O" and "Gold is necessarily the element with the atomic number 79" does not seem to me to make those less suspect. In both cases the modal element seems to come from a magical faculty we are supposed to each have that lets us know an essential predication when we see one.

Finally, White's article is just a fun read. At one point he considers the defense that we can identify self-contradictory claims because they "produce a certain feeling of horror or queerness on the part of the people who use the language". White notes that for this to work

we will have to be careful to distinguish the horror associated with denying firmly believed synthetic statements from that surrounding the denials of analytic statements. The distinction must not only be a distinction that carves out two mutually exclusive classes of sentences but it must carve them out in a certain way. It would be quite disconcerting to the philosophers I have been criticizing to have the whole of physics or sociology turn out as analytic on their criterion and only a few parts of mathematics.

Indiana Bound

2010-04-14T17:07:00.003-05:00

I have accepted an offer of admittance from Indiana University for philosophy PhD program.

It's been a really long few months waiting for all this to get settled out; I finally got the offer yesterday, and accepted this morning. I will be a real grad student in the fall!

Posting here will hopefully resume at some point; while I was waiting to get accepted someplace I was not in the mood for blogging. Mood much improved now.

The Representation of Stereotypes

2010-02-22T20:08:00.003-06:00

Adam Kotsko has an interesting post up at An und für sich about what stereotypes "are". Kotsko argues that we run into difficulties if we try to treat beliefs about stereotypes as being "in the head", and so we should instead treat them as being in the environmental conditions which give rise to their instances (or something along those lines -- his post is clearer than my one-sentence summary of it). I think that this moves a bit fast; a more "traditional" way of accounting for racist beliefs seems to me to work perfectly well: they are (often unconscious) beliefs about what blacks or asians (etc.) are like, and are not different qua belief from beliefs about whether milk builds strong bones or dogs return to their own vomit.

"Indeed, when pressed even people who seem to be hardened racists will most often admit that of course not all black people are like that, etc. — calling into question whether racists, as stereotype-believers par excellence, really “believe” in stereotypes in some straightforward way."

Here I think the problem isn't with the idea that racists believe racist things, but with how those racist contents are conceived. I think this is best handled by treating statements about stereotypical Xs as what Michael Thompson calls "Aristotelian Categoricals" in "The Representation of Life". (Paper available at his webspace.)

Aristotelian Categoricals are not universally quantified statements ("If anything is an X, then it is like this"), so the fact that any given racist will admit that not all Xs ɸ (for some given class X and some stereotypical behavior ɸ) does not mean that the racist doesn't really believe the stereotypical claim "Xs ɸ" is true. They don't even have to believe that (as a statistical matter) if you took a pole of all currently existing Xs, it would turn out that a majority of them ɸ. They just have to believe that the Xs which ɸ are more typical of Xs generally (albeit maybe not at the moment), or are more authentically X-ish, or something like that. The stereotype has normative force for how (stereotypically) black a given racist thinks a given black person is.

Aristotelian Categoricals strike me as very useful for thinking about this sort of thing. Nothing else seems to get the logical contours of the stereotype-claims quite right, as Thompson argues in the parallel case of claims like "Bobcats mate for life". Some bobcats never mate, or are impotent etc., but that doesn't contradict the Aristotelian Categorical claim (think of it as something you hear in a National Geographic documentary). Healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments mate for life. (Thompson has further arguments for why we can't treat this as a disguised universally quantified statement about "healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments", namely that making sense of things like "health" and "bobcat-friendliness" is dependent on making sense of the Aristotelian Categoricals, and not vice-versa.)

I also don't think that the fact that stereotypes can be incoherent (Kotsko's example being that Mexicans are lazy and yet desperate to work) is problematic; it just shows that racists have weird beliefs about Mexicans. They think that both sloth and being a hard worker make one a "really Mexican" Mexican. There's not even an incoherence in this example, if you treat the beliefs as Aristotelian categoricals rather than universally quantified statements. The two extremes could both be typical of Mexicans, whereas the middle-ground would not be. There's no commitment on the part of the racists to thinking that there are some Mexicans who are both lazy and desperate to work. (Compare to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans are baked into pecan pies", and contrast to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans grow into rose bushes").

Given this, I don't see any problem with treating stereotypical beliefs as being "in the head" (which of course doesn't conflict with their showing themselves in our practices, or with being unconscious some of the time; those are both normal for things "in the head" -- the outer is inner as inner, as Hegel said).

"[This] points toward the idea that black people just naturally enjoy cheaper food (not beef, but chicken; not fruit juice, but Kool-Aid) and therefore that the dominance of fast food outlets and convenience stores (rather than good restaurants and grocery stores) in black neighborhoods simply reflects the way black people are and is therefore “okay” — and so you don’t see the mayor of Chicago trying to get more grocery stores into black neighborhoods, for instance."

This strikes me as a paradigm case of unconscious stereotypical beliefs at work. The mayor of Chicago would surely deny that black people liked cheap food as such, if you asked him; he does not consciously believe that. But he probably does (at least unconsciously) believe that black people are poorer than non-blacks. And he probably believes (likely consciously) that poor people have less money to spend on food, and so prefer purchasing cheaper food. So it seems appropriate to the mayor that black neighborhoods mostly have cheap places to buy food, since black[/poor] people prefer shopping at those sorts of places. So it's easy to explain the mayor's behavior as issuing from a combination of conscious and unconscious beliefs on his part; there's no need to posit beliefs in city blocks or anything like that. Surely the fact that many black people are poor helps to reinforce the unconscious belief, but the belief isn't anywhere special.

A Very Bad Argument for Skepticism

2010-02-06T00:40:00.003-06:00

This post irritated me. Ignore the following if you don't think Jon Cogburn's thoughts are worth your time; continue reading if you do think they're worthwhile. (There is no big payoff at the end.)

The bit in the post that I think is most egregiously confused is what Cogburgn labels "2b", which is supposed to be one horn of a constructive dilemma.

Here we are assuming that the kind of sense dependency Brandom describes (between mind and world) holds. And, by the law of excluded middle, either the relevant reference dependency claim is true, or it is false.

A preliminary clarification: Sense-dependency is a relation between concepts; mind and world cannot be sense-dependent on one another, though MIND and WORLD can (to adopt the convention of using capslock to indicate concepts). Brandom is clear on this in the quote Cogburn cites before his argument:"The determinateness of the objective world and the structured process of grasping it are reciprocally sense dependent concepts, each intelligible only in terms of the other"; Brandom regularly underlines terms for concepts in "Tales of the Mighty Dead", and I will follow him in quotation). Cogburn on the other hand does nothing to distinguish mind and MIND. Also, I'm assuming that the sense-dependency Cogburn mentions is the one he just cited, between "the determinateness of the objective world" and "the structured process of grasping it".

I don't think the disjunction has any problems; I don't think McDowell would hesitate to endorse the sense-dependency claim Brandom makes, or to assert one of the disjuncts Cogburn mentions: The "determinateness of the objective world" is not referentially dependent on "the structured process of grasping it". The world could have a determinate structure even if there were no structured processes capable of grasping it. For instance, this was the case before the dawn of life (if not before the dawn of sentience or sapience), McDowell would surely say. (And probably does say somewhere or other; he's been asked some silly questions about "idealism" before -- I would check "Reading McDowell" and "Experience, Norm, and Nature" if I felt like hunting for a reference. Dinosaurs may've been mentioned in this context.)

Cogburn:

If the world is not reference dependent upon the mind, then the determinateness of the objective world could exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. And remember (crucially) that this denial is a denial of pantheism! The world could exist without possessing the mental properties that we are forced (by sense dependency, which we are assuming to be true) to attribute to it. But this is just to say that we have no idea what the world is really like, because we are forced to understand it in such a way that we have no idea if it really is. This is skepticism.

Cogburn's argument seems to be this:
Assume (A) The world could have a determinate structure without a mind which grasps that structure -- i.e., the world could exist without anything bearing mental properties.
(B) Given the sense-dependency of MIND and WORLD, we are forced to attribute mental properties to the world.
Assume (C) MIND and WORLD are mutually sense-dependent.
ergo (D) We are forced to attribute mental properties to the world. (from B and C)
(E) The world could exist without anything bearing mental properties, but we are forced to attribute mental properties to it (from A and D).
(F) Skepticism (supposed to somehow follow from E, I suppose because E shows there is a possibility we can't rule out. This step strikes me as a non sequitur, confusing epistemic and metaphysical possibilities, but I don't need to touch it to dissolve this argument so I'll just ignore it.)

Let's substitute in for some variables to see what the dependencies in question here amount to. Brandom defines "reference dependence" thusly:

Concept P is reference dependent on concept Q just in case P cannot apply to something unless Q applies to something

So the claim that Cogburn says leads to skepticism is "It is not the case that "determinateness of the objective world" cannot apply to something unless "the structured process of grasping it" applies to something".

Brandom defines "sense-dependency" thus:

Concept P is sense dependent on concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q

Substituting in, we get "One cannot count as having grasped "determinateness of the objective world" unless one counts as grasping "the structured process of grasping it", which gives (C) with trivial steps.

Where does (B) come from? Brandom's claim is that we cannot think thoughts involving MIND or WORLD unless we can think thoughts involving both. This doesn't mean we have to be able to think true thoughts involving both -- that would be to confuse sense and reference at the level of sentences (thoughts vs. truth-values). Nor does it entail that we have to endorse thoughts involving both concepts; one of the reasons Frege introduced the sense-reference distinction in the first place was to handle cases where a thought was entertained without being endorsed (in quotational contexts), and this is a central case in his later papers "Thought" and "Negation". Nothing about the mutual sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD commits Brandom to the existence of minds or worlds. (B) is simply false, and so the rest of the argument falls apart. Cogburn's argument "2" fails; the reciprocal sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD entails none of the weird consequences Cogburn thinks we need to choose between.

And now for a short bit about "quietism". Cogburn:

This is precisely where McDowell backs into Wittgensteinian quietism (according to my somewhat impoverished understanding of Mind and World). His denial of "bald naturalism" seems to return us to a kind of enchanted/pantheistic world, but it's not clear if it really does.

It is apparently quite an impoverished understanding indeed; McDowell wouldn't think that the sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD entails anything bizarre, so there's nothing to "back away from". This is genuine quietism: The supposed philosophical problem is seen to be nothing, so there's nothing to say about it.

Also, McDowell's "partial re-enchantment of the world" has nothing to do with pantheism; the only things McDowell ever considers as minded are humans. (Non-human animals are minded in a derivative sense. Non-animals are never said to be minded in any sense at all.) This is what makes it "partial": the only things in nature that are "special" are humans, not stars or rivers or clouds. Humans can do things meaningfully; stars just do whatever they do with no significance (contra the "enchanted world" where the movement of the stars mean something, i.e. astrology is supposed to not be a load of hokum). McDowell never gives any comfort to astrology or shamanism or any such superstition, and his "Hegelianism" does not include anything about a Weltgeist or Hegel's "Lectures on World History". (Incidentally, the best thing I've read on McDowell and "bald naturalism" is this paper.)

A Kuhn Quote

2010-01-26T13:29:00.003-06:00

From "Dubbing and Redubbing":

Clearly, however, only a certain number of examples [used to introduce Newtonian mechanics to students] may be altered piecemeal in this way. If too many require adjustment, then it is no longer individual laws or generalizations that are at stake, but the very vocabulary in which they are stated. A threat to that vocabulary is, however, a threat also to the theory or laws essential to its acquisition and use. Could Newtonian mechanics withstand revision of the second law, of the third law, of Hooke's law, or the law of gravity? Could it withstand the revision of any two of these, of three, or of all four? These are not questions that individually have yes or no answers. Rather, like Wittgenstein's "Could one play chess without the queen?", they suggest the strains placed on a lexicon confronted by questions that its designer, whether God or cognitive evolution, did not anticipate its being required to answer. What should one have said when confronted by an egg-laying creature that suckles its young? Is it a mammal or is it not? These are the circumstances in which, as Austin put it, "We don't know what to say. Words literally fail us." Such circumstances, if they endure for long, call forth a locally different lexicon, one that permits an answer, but to a slightly altered question: "Yes, the creature is a mammal" (but to be a mammal is not what it was before). The new lexicon opens new possibilities, ones that could not have been stipulated by the use of the old.

And a footnote about that Wittgenstein quote, in case it didn't seem familiar:

Twenty-five years ago the quotation was a standard part of what I now discover was a merely oral tradition. Though clearly "Wittgensteinian," it is not to be found in any of Wittgenstein's published writings. I preserve it here because of its recurrent role in my own philosophical development and becuase I've found no published substitute that so clearly prohibits the reponse that the question might be answerable if only there were more information.

This amuses me in particular because of Haugeland's fondness for chess examples. He seems pretty firmly committed to answering Witt with a "No!" -- which makes it interesting that Kuhn [correctly] thinks that there not being an answer is the whole point, given that Haugeland is one of Kuhn's executors.

edit: I have begun to twitter

Social Externalism, Senses, and Frege's Puzzle

2010-01-03T21:14:00.005-06:00

Akeel Bigrami's "Naturalism and Reference" is pretty terrific.

There's a bit in Bilgrami's Crispin Wright piece (also on his website) that I'd been puzzling over for a while. Bilgrami argues there that if an individual can fail to know the sense of one of his expressions, then Frege's puzzle rears its head again (and so the original motivation for positing senses falls away). So social externalism (a la Putnam, Kripke, or Burge) must be false: what I mean can't depend on what my social group says I mean. This is an attractive conclusion, but I couldn't follow Bilgrami's argument for it. Turns out "Naturalism and Reference" is largely devoted to laying out this argument.

It seems that the inspiration for the argument comes from a criticism Jerry Fodor makes against senses (following someone named "Mates" who Bilgrami doesn't cite; I will simply credit Fodor for this line of thought in my post). Fodor wants to handle all of language denotationally -- only reference, not sense, strikes Fodor as naturalistically acceptable. (I'll leave Fodor's supposed naturalistic reconstruction of reference out of this; I'll also not be concerned with Fodor's response to the puzzles, but only with his criticism of the orthodox (Fregean) response.) Now, this is just the position that Frege is arguing against in "Sense and Reference".

As a reminder, the challenge Frege poses for such a position is to make sense of the difference between "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" in sentences like

a) John believes that Hesperus is visible from his window in the evening.
b) John does not believe that Phosphorus is visible from his window in the evening.

Given a purely denotational theory of meaning, it looks like John is irrational (since Hesperus is Phosphorus; they're two names for the planet Venus). But John needn't be irrational for sentences a and b to both be true; John could simply be ignorant of the fact that "Phosphorus" names the same heavenly body as is visible early in the evening. A purely denotational account of meaning thus seems committed to treating garden-variety ignorance of this sort as a failure of logic: John is said to both believe and not believe the same proposition.

The same issue arises also in our attempt to evenstate the puzzle: if "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" have the same meaning (since they denote the same planet), why would it be wrong to rephrase b as b'

b') John does not believe that Hesperus is visible from his window in the evening.

since b and b' ought to be the same sentence?

Thus Frege posits "senses", ways in which a subject is presented with objects, as a component of meaning alongside reference. "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are said to have different senses despite having the same reference, and thus the puzzles dissolve. So goes Frege's account.

Fodor does not see how this is supposed to help. He asks why the puzzle can't simply arise again at the level of sense. Suppose "Besperus" has the same sense as "Hesperus", but John doesn't know that; you can then replace b with b''

b'')John does not believe that Besperus is visible from his window in the evening.

and it looks like Frege's puzzle arises anew. Now, this requires that it be possible for someone to fail to know the sense of something they (e.g.) utter. But Fodor thinks that this could easily happen, on Frege's picture. For Frege, senses are Platonic entities which exist in the Third Realm (being neither mental nor physical, and being the common inheritance of the whole human race); they are entities which we express in our various human tongues. Now, if senses are at all like other entities, then we should be able to misidentify them: we can grasp a sense without knowing all of the senses it's identical to. I can grasp a mug without knowing it's identical to the mug you forgot to wash, or used to rinse your mouth with; likewise I should be able to grasp a sense without knowing everything about it, e.g. that the sense of "Besperus" is identical to the sense of "Hesperus". And if John does just this, then you can recreate Frege's Puzzle with a and b''. "Hesperus" and "Besperus" have the same reference and the same sense, and yet there is a difference between them that stands unexplained.

Bilgrami takes this as a good reason to reject Platonism about senses, and that seems right to me. If senses are not entities which are present to the mind, but are simply ways in which referents are present to the mind, then this puzzle doesn't arise. If "Besperus" and "Hesperus" have the same sense, then they present one with an object in the same way, and John can't be confused in the way this puzzle posits. Seeing something in a certain way doesn't meant that one sees two items, the "something" and the "certain way". Like Carnap said, being in a state does not mean there exists a state which one is in (unlike being in a can, which does mean that there exists a can that one is in).

(As an aside, I suspect that Frege just thought (or would've thought if anyone raised this puzzle to him) that we couldn't grasp senses without identifying them perfectly; they are really weird like that. "Grasping of senses" thus looks like some magical happening, but I don't think Frege was worried by that sort of thing at all: it's a problem for psychology, not logic, how "grasping" is supposed to work (says Frege in "The Thought"). This is of course not a very happy position for anyone less willing to burden psychologists than Frege was, i.e. for anyone other than Frege himself.)

But, this is not the only possibility Fodor raises for someone getting senses wrong. Even if senses are not entities, it might be the case that (as many in the literature have claimed, e.g. Tyler Burge and Hilary Putnam) sense is dictated by one's linguistic community. "Social externalists" about meaning say that the sense of what one says depends on what one's words mean in the language one is speaking, where a language is an essentially social/shared/public creature (like French or Mandarin), something with a community of users that can criticize/endorse various uses of words. One makes noises, and then they mean what the communal norms say they mean. (This is perhaps an uncharitable way of putting it, since the relevant community is always supposed to be something of which the speaker is a part. Still, the point remains that for social externalists, one can mean something radically different than what one thought one meant, because of how a word is used in one's linguistic community [apart from oneself].)

Now, the problem here is fairly straightforward: Suppose "bachelor" and "unmarried man" have the same (social externalist) sense in a given linguistic community of which John is a member. Then you can recreate Frege's puzzle with c and d:

c) John believes that Tom is a bachelor.
d) John does not believe that Tom is an unmarried man.

Now, this might seem queer at first glance; it might be thought that John can't be truly described by c and d without being irrational, so you can't reframe Frege's puzzle in these terms. (The issue of the analytic/synthetic distinction is tied up in how one reacts to this; Bilgrami has a lovely brief parenthetical about this on page 12 of his paper that he says he won't be elaborating on for reasons of space. I will plead similarly.) I think this can be smoothed by adding e to the mix

e) John believes that to be a bachelor is to be a bearded Oxford alumnus, and that bearded Oxford alumni may or may not be married.

i.e., if we say that John is a member of the linguistic community who thinks some strange things. The social externalists are committed to this not disbarring John from the linguistic community, as the discussion in the literature of a fellow who says "I have arthritis in my thigh" shows: they would say of John that he believes of unmarried men that they may or may not be unmarried (but must have beards and diplomas from Oxford). Social externalists thus think that one can fail to know (at least on odd occasions) what senses one's words have. And so Fodor complains that adding senses to the picture doesn't dissolve Frege's puzzle; they simply push it back a level. For c and d can both be true despite "bachelor" and "unmarried man" having the same sense (and the same extension), and this is not a case of John being irrational but of him being ignorant of an empirical fact (i.e. that his linguistic community treats "bachelor" as a synonym for "unmarried man" and not for "bearded Oxford alumnus"). So senses fail to do the job demanded of them.

Fodor is right: if social externalists are right about senses, then senses don't take the teeth out of Frege's puzzle. But the correct move (says Bilgrami, and I agree) is to modus tollens this modus ponens and reject social externalism about sense. One can't fail to know the sense of what one says, contra social externalism (at least one can't fail to know it due to philosophical problems -- one can mean things without knowing it due to e.g. Freudian-style unconscious intentions to insult the reader, or in other psychologically interesting diseases of rationality; these weird psychological phenomena are not what motivate social externalist accounts of sense, and I believe they are largely a distraction from the issue under discussion).

So, there's a pretty little argument that social externalism gives a false account of senses, couched in Fregean terms: the things that dissolve Frege's puzzle from "Sense and Reference" can't fly free of the subject's grasp like the social externalist picture lets them. (Too bad I didn't get clear on this before I finished my thesis; it would've been nice to work it in somewhere.)

Kuhn and Putnam/Kripke Essentialism

2009-12-28T19:12:00.003-06:00

From Rupert Read & Wes Sharrock's "Thomas Kuhn's Misunderstood Relation to Kripke-Putnam Essentialism":

It is only given our post-Lavoisieric framework that we are forced to see water as largely H2O. Absent that framework, ‘water’-in-all-its-states is not necessarily viewed as a natural kind (as the quotes above from Kuhn make clear: liquidity was regarded as an essential property of water [in the 1750s]) – and still less is H2O. Kuhn is bringing talk of possible worlds, one might say (paraphrasing Wittgenstein), back from its metaphysical to a more everyday (i.e. everyday scientiﬁc) use. A taxonomy supplies a ‘set’ of possible worlds between which normal science goes on to choose. If something really threatens the taxonomy, we (imagining ourselves now into the position of scientists actually confronted by such an anomaly) cannot retreat to philosophers’ assurances about what all possible worlds must turn out to be like. Rather, sometimes, we must face the need to uproot fundamental assumptions about the set of possible worlds available to us and enabled for us by our taxonomy, our ‘ontology’, our thought-style.

Redubbing is then at least as important as dubbing; and, of course, in concert with Kuhn’s reasoned scepticism as to ‘Correspondencism’: progress through revolutions is not well-described as bringing us taxonomies which themselves come closer and closer to matching the universe’s ‘own’ taxonomy.

This sounds like a Kuhn much more to my taste than I found in "Structure"; I need to read Kuhn's later stuff some day. Though I'm not quite sure what a "taxonomy" is; it seems it can't just be a vocabulary if it carries with it "assumptions", but it's clearly supposed to be something more like a vocabulary than like a set of beliefs, or else the name (and all of the talk of "failures of translation") seems quite strange. Maybe the "assumptions" here are supposed to be analytic truths; but then it looks strange that they can need revising when things get rough. Though perhaps I'm wrong that Kuhn thinks they can need revising; perhaps it's just a fact that we do revise them. It's not that a taxonomy starts to look confused so much as that whatever taxonomy you use will end up looking shaggy after repeated use. So you get a new one, which isn't better, just new. Kuhn then ends up looking weirdly Carnapian. This seems like it can't be right.

The picture seems to be that a "taxonomy" involves assumptions about how the world might be, and it's these assumptions (inter alia) which provide a set of possible worlds that normal science tries to whittle down to a singleton. And then when that inevitably falls apart, a different taxonomy is adopted. And I think Kuhn does hold it to be inevitable; this seems to be why he denies that change of paradigms is progressive. You cease to be bothered by certain anomalies in normal science; this is the progress made by changing paradigms. But there will always be more anomalies elsewhere which previous paradigms didn't have to worry about (because they didn't come up). (I may be misremembering "Structure" here; I can't remember if he allowed a sense in which revolutions meant progress. Skimming the last chapter suggests he didn't.) Maybe it is a sort of ersatz Carnapianism, then. Hmm. Have to read more about this.

Read's article is a good counter to the "'Water' is a rigid designator, so it was never an element" line that people seem to take as decisive against Kuhn, though. This other article of his is pretty decent, too; he wants to stump for a version of "incommensurability" which is "non-semantic", but involves something related; he opens with Wittgenstein's bit about someone who "believed in the Last Judgement" and how his disagreement with the believer "would not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning" of their words. Incidentally, Jason Bridges's paper "Wittgenstein and Contextualism" (which has very little about Wittgenstein) closes with this quote, to make the point that "meaning" and "point" (in the Charles Travis sense, that the meaning of an utterance is heavily tied to our particular point in making it) are not the same thing. Getting clear on what's at stake in saying that something is or is not a matter of meaning seems potentially fruitful. It seems to be something different for Bridges and for Read.

Spinoza and Anomalous Monism

2009-12-18T22:59:00.003-06:00

From the comments to my previous post:

And that Spinoza class sounds awesome. Nadler is the man. Maybe you could post the Davidson/Spinoza stuff. My sense is the comparison is much richer than just saying, gee, they're both kind of saying "there's just one kind of stuff with different aspects." But I wonder what you said, and if Nadler said anything interesting back.

I do think that there's a deeper connection between Davidson and Spinoza than that. I think the most straightforward expression of this is actually in "Aristotle's Action"; Davidson is really free with his historical connections there, and praises Spinoza for his dismissal of "the will" in favor of having ideas themselves having force. (This is Spinoza's famous criticism of Descartes as imagining ideas as being like "mute pictures on a wall".) Davidson and Spinoza both have a keen sense of humanity as being a special sort of thing within nature, and not something which is added to nature from outside, as "a kingdom within a kingdom". This basic sense that "We are just bodies, though mental-talk isn't body-talk" is one thing that makes Spinoza feel special among the early moderns, and makes him relatable in a way that someone like Malebranche isn't.

My Spinoza paper's main argument was that to make sense of the argument for E2P7 as actually being something like a good argument, we had to understand Spinoza as committed to there being only one "order of things in nature", with each "connection" being both a causal connection between ideas and a causal connection between bodies (depending on how we make sense of it -- and we can only make sense of it in one of those two ways, and not just as "connected things in nature", because of Spinoza's connection of causation with knowledge in E1Ax4, which is supposed to be a sufficient proof for E2P7). Now, it's still hard to see how the argument in E2P7D is supposed to work, but if all Spinoza wants to say there is "Look, there's just the one nature with its mess of causal connections", then it can at least begin to make sense how this claim could have such slim argumentative support. Any richer notion of "psychophysical parallelism" as being what E2P7 is talking about has a serious problem trying to make sense of the idea that this follows "evidently" from "The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause". That's just not a wide enough base to build much off of.

And if I can get that much from E2P7, then it's pretty easy to see that Spinoza is an anomalous monist: he's committed to there being no psychophysical laws (because all explanations are internal to a single attribute), he holds that all causation is backed by strict physical laws (because all things in nature are at least modes of extension, and all causation is lawlike, by E1Ax3), and he's committed to there being (in some sense) psychophysical causal relations. Which are close to the three premises from which Davidson gets to anomalous monism in "Mental Events"; at any rate they're close enough that showing their consistency leads to an interesting position.

This last premise was the part I had to argue for the most, since Spinoza seems to flatly deny it in E3P2. Davidson has some arguments for what to say about this in "Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects", but I found some aspects of his reading of Spinoza to be unsatisfying (because he relies on Curley's reading of "Ethics", which Nadler used as a foil for a lot of the class). Thankfully Della Rocca's work was incredibly helpful here ("Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza" is fantastic). The key twist was to treat "a causes b" as intensional, for Spinoza. You can change its truth-value by changing how 'a' or 'b' is described. So Spinoza's explicit rejections of cross-attribute causation do not show that he has to reject an extensional notion of cross-attribute causation, which is what's at issue for Davidson's argument. And then all of the standard "psychophysical parallelism" bits in "Ethics" are pretty smoothly handled by treating Spinoza as talking about psychophysical causation while not mentioning extensional causal relations, and the general close connection of the mind and the body through "Ethics" (especially in the treatment of the affects) becomes easy to understand. (This obviously has a "principle of charity" motivation to it, too, since the complete rejection of psychophysical causal relations is pretty nuts; Spinoza's mockery of Descartes's attempts to make sense of the soul literally moving the body look a lot more sensible if he has some other way of saying how our attitudes can make us move. If Spinoza's real gripe there is that the idea of a Cartesian mind which is totally separate from the body does not make sense (and so instead we should identify the mind and the body, while understanding it in two different ways), then BS is suddenly a much more attractive character for we modern naturalists.)

Della Rocca also has a nice little argument that "things" (as in "one and the same thing expressed in two ways", E2P7S) have to be modes: all there is (for Spinoza) is substance and its modes, E1P15D; "thing" as "substance" does not make sense in the context of E2P7S, since then "the circle in nature" might as well be identified with "the idea of the Panama Canal" as with "the idea of the circle'; ergo things=modes. So modes can expressed in multiple ways (as bodies and as ideas). This was the only place where Nadler had a problem with my paper: Spinoza never talks about modes that way, as if they could have different descriptions under different attributes. And he sometimes seems to speak of the mind and the body as two modes, not one. But my answer to that was to take the same line as I did with causation: Spinoza has an intensional notion of mode-identity. The truth-value of "a is the same mode as b" depends on how 'a' and 'b' are described.

Now, one big difference between Davidson and Spinoza is on the nature of psychological understanding. Spinoza is the theorist of man as "a sort of spiritual automaton"; Davidson does not believe in psychological laws. One interesting thing that I realized during this paper is that the way Davidson introduces "anomalous monism" does not entail accepting the three principles he argues from in "Mental Events"; the position Davidson defends in that paper is just one possible form anomalous monism can take. So the three principles Spinoza accepts which I said were "similar" to Davidson's are in fact sufficiently similar to make him a genuine anomalous monist by the terms of "Mental Events".

The way Davidson divides up his four categories (nomological monism [materialism], nomological dualism [interactionism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism], anomalous dualism [Cartesian dualism], and anomalous monism) is by looking at whether one accepts or rejects psychophysical laws, and whether one identifies mental events with physical events or not. Spinoza clearly rejects psychophysical laws and identifies mental events and physical events. So Spinoza is an anomalous monist despite holding a nomological view of the mental. Which is an interesting sort of position.

One thing I didn't deal with in my paper (except very briefly) was adjudicating between Davidson and Spinoza on the topic of psychological laws. Davidson I think gets this just right: the anomalism of the mental is just the sort of freedom we should want the mind to have. I can't see the attraction Spinoza is supposed to have here; his lists of affects just felt tedious, though some of the definitions are clever, and I just don't see how the conatus argument in E3P6 is supposed to work at all. (Della Rocca and Nadler both said that the argument just doesn't work; it's a key part of the book where the argumentation is just shoddy, as with E1P6D. In fairness to Spinoza, his bad arguments are at least very clearly laid out.) This isn't even to mention the really embarrassing parts of Spinoza's psychology, like the incredibly simplistic account of memory in E2P18S. The interesting stuff in "Ethics" seems to me to largely be in the broadly naturalistic picture Spinoza offers, and in the fun Descartes-bashing and anti-religion stuff sprinkled throughout. (I think it's this last bit that Nadler got most excited about.)

I should read "Spinoza's Heresy" some day to see just how E5P23 is supposed to get dealt with; Nadler's view seems to be that the "eternal" part of the mind is just the abstract idea of its essence. Which seems to fit with the demonstration well enough, but I can't see how it fits into the book. On Nadler's reading, Spinoza just thinks that the soul is mortal and dies with the body, end of story; which makes all of the stuff about the "intellectual love of God" and "the eternity of the mind" that closes the book out very, very weird. On Nadler's reading it seems like all of the weirdness is superficial; really Spinoza is not saying anything that a materialist would have any problems with. But it feels like Spinoza has something in the background here that's going lost; that superficial weirdness is really weird, in a way that (e.g.) his doubletalk about the value of "religion" is not. The praise of religion is plausibly just Spinoza trying to win over converts to his anti-religious way of thinking; the stuff about the amor intellectus Dei doesn't seem like something that we're supposed to just slough off once we are converted to Spinozism. It's supposed to be genuinely liberating in some way; the sad passions are somehow being combated by the eternal part of the mind. This part of Spinoza is just dark to me. I don't get it.

i has an m.a.

2009-12-18T05:58:00.005-06:00

I officially graduated last weekend. Finished my thesis in late November; I haven't been blogging because whenever I would get the urge to blog (or would begin a post), I would think "Shouldn't I really be working on my thesis instead?", and that killed the fun of it. And then after finishing my thesis, I had to get PhD applications done. Finished those of earlier this week. I am now free of any academical-type obligations, for the first time in quite a while. (It feels strange, like I must owe someone a paper, and just can't figure out who.)

So, now I can blog freely again.

Because it seems like a thing to do, here's a brief recounting of my year at Chicago:

Fall quarter was when I had to take the MAPH "core" course, which was about Theory. I was reminded of the "Theory's Empire" book-event from The Valve often. I did not enjoy this course, and was glad when it ended. I really can't say I got anything from this course, except some painful and awkward introductions to Freud, Lacan, and Adorno (and some other guys I would've been happy to never encounter). It wasn't even good for writing practice; the longest paper I had to write was five pages or something like that. And that paper was about Lauren Berlant and some movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Just a mess of a class.

There was an "introduction to analytic philosophy"-type course that was only open to MAPH students; I figured it was a good thing to take. There were issues that lead to the class being taught by a PhD student, Tom Lockhart, but he did a good job of it I thought. I enjoyed the class, and it was a pretty gentle way to get back into the swing of things after having a semester off (and before that, a semester of law school). I wrote a paper on the second part of "Mental Events" for it (and a shorter one on "Naming and Necessity", which was much easier to lay out than the second part of "Mental Events").

Haugeland's Heidegger's "Being and Time" was a good excuse to read the rest of division one of "Being and Time". I fell a day behind in the reading at one point, and caught up by skipping a section I'd read before: the bit about the broken hammer. It turns out that if you read all of division one except that bit, the "present at hand" sounds like a philosopher's fiction: nothing is ever actually given to Dasein like that. It's always something richer, like the ready-to-hand, the living, Daseins, etc.; the "present-at-hand" is paradigmatically what is presented to a res cogitans (i.e., it is nothing but something confused philosophers dreamed up). Now, in the broken hammer passage, this is clearly not Heidegger's view. We can see the broken hammer, and he says we see it as just something present-at-hand. So I spent a lot of this quarter misreading "Being and Time". I like my misreading a lot more than Heidegger's actual view, though, and I think that my misreading makes sense for pretty much all of the rest of division one (especially section 21, "Hermeneutic Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the 'World'"). Incidentally, this is the class that taught me how the quarter system works: I suddenly had to scramble for a paper topic when I realized the course was almost over, and ended up having to get an extension for the paper (by a week or two). I ended up writing something about Dreyfus's Heidegger and "Telling" that I don't think really came together, but was kinda fun to work on.

Winter quarter was very cold and dark.

I sat in on Ford's "Action and Practical Knowledge" seminar, which gave me an excuse to read Anscombe's "Intention" and Thompson's "Naive Action Theory", along with some more of Davidson's old action papers. This also got me up to speed on philosophy of action well enough to know some of what was going on at the Anscombe Conference in the early spring. Definitely glad I didn't take this for credit, though; I'm still mulling a lot of it over, and I'm not sure I really get what's so important about Thompson. (I've read the rest of "Life and Action" now, and still don't see it. Though he did say some stuff about gold and Kripke-Putnam essentialism in the third part that lead me to suspect I in fact do not want to get on board with his broader program. I should probably look at that passage again, and post on it.)

I also sat in on Irad Kimhi's "Active Thoughts" seminar. It was utter madness from beginning to end and I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't tell you what the class was about, but there was a lot of interesting stuff crammed in there. Sitting in on it also gave me an excuse to read more Frege ("The Thought" and "Negation" especially), and some other fun logic-y stuff.

For credit, I took "Intermediate Logic", "Modern Moral Philosophy", and Pippin's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". Logic did not require me to write a paper, or to read very much; this made it an excellent course for the winter quarter. It was also fun to do more logic homework, though some of the completeness proofs were annoying.

"Modern Moral Philosophy" was taught by a visiting professor from Rome, Piergiorgio Donatelli. We read a little Bernard Williams, several Iris Murdoch pieces, two chapters from "The Claim of Reason", a McDowell essay I hadn't read yet, and then a lot of Cora Diamond's stuff. And Donatelli brought up dozens of other figures in the lectures. It was a heady mix of stuff; my lecture notes are a mess (though not as bad as the notes for "Active Thoughts"). I read an article of Diamond's that wasn't assigned for class (her piece in the "Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein") that bothered me in ways I couldn't quite get a handle on; I wanted to write on that, but wasn't getting a grip on it, so instead I wrote about something Diamond said about McDowell, and somehow a quarter of the essay ended up being about Davidson.

I read several Diamond pieces about Truth and Tarski-type approaches to it for this paper; I did not like them very much. She seemed to go after Rorty for the wrong reasons (as Conant did, in much greater length, in his article about Rorty and Orwell), and she seemed unhappy with Davidson's take on truth for no reason I could figure out. (If I recall correctly, it had something to do with there being "many ways something could be true"; I couldn't see how this was a problem for Davidson, since any difference between e.g. moral facts and chemical facts would be paralleled in the relevant T-sentences: they would say that the different sorts of sentences are true IFF different sorts of things are the case. Diamond didn't flesh any of this out so much as say we needed to pay attention to it. I can't tell what exactly I'm supposed to notice, so I don't see why Diamond-on-ethics-and-truth is so great.)

For Pippin's class I wrote a paper on the Transcendental Aesthetic. It was straightforward: Kant says that the transcendental ideality of space and time are established here; what are his arguments, and do they work? I defended the venerable "neglected option" objection, more or less. It was pretty easy to write, which was good because the rest of the quarter had me pretty frayed.

The Anscombe Conference was in the early spring. Thompson is a lot of fun to watch, and McDowell is surprisingly frail and birdlike in person; he looked like he might break if someone ran into him. I made it to most of the papers; most of them were good. McDowell had a paper on Anscombe-on-sensations that was pretty much the paper you would expect him to write on that topic. I will need to find my notes to say much about the rest of the speakers, but I do remember this: Thompson is a genius.

I was supposed to have a draft of my thesis done early in the spring; difficulties finding a workable topic lead to that not happening. I ended up writing about McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism"; most of the paper was devoted to setting the stage, since "Epitaphs" is a tricky paper to get right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though Kremer (my advisor) remains unconvinced. One section of the paper ended up getting cut before it was even to the draft stage, what I was trying to articulate in the comments here, because a) I realized that spelling things out would take another paper to do well and b) I'm not at all sure that McDowell makes this argument against "Epitaphs" (and I'm suspicious that he doesn't make it because he knows it's not a good objection; certainly the closest he comes to making it explicitly is very hand-wavey stuff, and he could've made it very straightforwardly. I think Dummett does make it, for instance.). This paragraph probably makes sense to nobody except me, since only three or so people on the planet have read my thesis, but I refuse to cut it! Blogging is for vanity's sake.

Bridges taught a course on "Rationality" and a seminar on "Contextualism" in the spring; I considered both, but ended up taking neither. (I didn't know anyone in the seminar and it felt awkward; the "Rationality" course was not exciting in the first few courses, and was overfull -- I dropped it so someone else could have my slot.) Stephen Nadler (a visiting prof from U Wisconsin-Madison) had a course on Spinoza's "Ethics" which was simply phenomenal; I'd planned on just sitting in on it (and asking some questions about Hegel and Spinoza), but by the end of the second class I knew I had to take this course. Nadler did an amazing job leading the class: we got through the entire book, and discussion was always lively and unforced. I wrote a paper on Spinoza and anomalous monism, which I thought turned out very well, and it was the third Davidson-y paper I'd written in as many quarters. (When I asked Nadler about the topic, I assumed it was probably too banal to write on, and was going to ask for suggestions as to what in specific to focus on in the area; turns out it's not all that well-represented in the Spinoza literature, though Della Rocca does defend the connection, so I got to write a paper that came very easily.) Hands-down the best course I took for credit at Chicago.

Another (regularly) visiting professor, Jocelyn Benoist, was teaching a seminar titled "Intentional Objects: An Inquiry into the Common Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology"; about half of the course name shows up on my transcript. Benoist lectured about a lot of interesting people I'd had only superficial knowledge of before, like Bolzano and Brentano and Meinong, and some I had never heard of (mostly Polish philosophers, who were all interesting to read). All of it was shiny and new, and Benoist covered a lot of material very quickly. The guiding thread through most of the class was what to do about terms with sense without reference (if Meinong is wrong and there are any), and what lead into that question getting asked in that way. I wrote a paper about Frege and Evans's account of him in chapter one of "The Varieties of Reference", basically just trying to make sense of how Frege could be so cavalier in saying that "Odysseus" has the same sense whether or not Odysseus ever existed. (One nice point Benoist stressed was that Frege's example was not random; this was around the time when Troy was discovered by archaeologists, after having been considered as mythical for centuries.) I read a lot of Frege (and a fair bit of Evans) in preparation for this paper, but something just didn't quite come together in the end; I'm happy with what I have in the paper, but feel like I didn't really finish it. I don't know what I failed to write, but I definitely did not write something that needed writ.

It was a fun year.

And randomly: these conference papers are pretty good listenin'. And the "Coherentisme" paper is actually delivered in English. Hours of Sellarsian fun.

I want this to be true so badly

2009-04-19T04:32:00.002-05:00

To be fair, when Russell was in full propaganda mode for the new logic he was quite capable of blaming subject-predicate logic for the oppression of women, famine in China, and the First World War.

From Brandom's "Hegel and Analytic Philosophy". Sadly, no footnotes to the relevant Russelliana are provided.

Towards a Reading of McDowell on English in Hegel and Gay People

2009-04-13T20:54:00.002-05:00

McDowell, from "Toward a Reading of Hegel on Action in the Reason Chapter of the Phenomenology". He's just invoked Wittgenstein's claim that "light dawns gradually over the whole" -- the capacity to think doesn't come piecemeal, but involves a metabasis eis allos genos, as Aristotle and Kierkegaard put it -- a leap into another kind.

Now suppose that light has dawned for one, in the specific way that consists in becoming a speaker of English. If there are other speakers of English around, they will recognize one as a speaker of English. That is not an empirical claim -- as if speakers of English just happen to be good at recognizing one another (like gay people, as some folk wisdom has it). Being a speaker of a language is not contingently connected with the ability to recognize one's fellow-speakers. It includes that ability. It makes no sense to suppose someone might be a speaker of English though people who recognize one another as speakers of English do not recognize her as one, or she does not recognize them as fellow-speakers. This is an a priori link between the status and the idea of recognition.

I think that speaking English is more like "gaydar" than McDowell sees. Consider the Jive-talking scene in Airplane!

I venture the following bold conjecture: The Jive-talkers here are speaking English. (If it please you, they are speaking a dialect of it, but I shan't suppose there is any other way to speak English than by speaking some dialect or other.) Further, I claim that the stewardess and the old lady who "speaks Jive" recognize one another as speakers of English.

Hence this scene serves as a counter-example to McDowell's claim: It not only makes sense to suppose that someone might speak English despite not being recognized by other English-speakers (who can recognize each other as English-speakers), but I find it hard to believe that such things don't actually happen. Some people have really thick accents, or speak with odd grammars (Ebonics comes to mind), or just have vocabularies which are unfamiliar to the point of not being immediately comprehensible. (Jargon.) Or to use one of Davidson's favorite examples: it is hard to buy that James Joyce wrote in something other than English, and it is easy to understand why someone would deny it. (There's more than one way to write "in English".)

A possible response: "Jive" really is not English. After all, the lady claims to "speak Jive" like one might claim to "speak Spanish". But the old lady's claim to "speak Jive" is of course a joke; Airplane! is a comedy. One can "speak Jive" only by speaking English.

I think this is even clearer in this parody from a terrible webcomic: "Does anyone here speak 1337?" The fellow who needs his pills is merely employing an odd typographical scheme (and some odd spellings), in one of the manners which constitutes the family of "13375|>34|<". One can't understand what "| n33d m4 p|11z" means without understanding what "I need my pills" means (or at least, that's not how it generally goes -- I suppose there's nothing stopping someone from learning 1337 as their primary English script). (We can imagine all of this happening in a chat room, to skirt the issue of how one can speak in a particular typographical scheme.) Here we have three monolingual English-speakers, two of whom can understand all three, and a third who can only understand one of the others. But everyone involved would select "English" when asked to select a language at the ATM.

Mutual recognition just isn't as closely linked to "speaking the same language" as McDowell claims it is; it's not transitive. Two English-speakers can recognize each other as such without it being the case that any English-speaker one of them can recognize as such could be recognized as such by the other. (The fellow in the fourth panel can recognize all parties involved as English-speakers-writers, even if the stewardess can't.)

Historical shifts work here, too; there's a diachronic as well as a synchronic sense in which "English" is not One Thing. As an empirical matter, I'm not at all sure that most of the people we can agree are English-speakers would be able to tell you that "And these few precepts in thy memory look thou character" is a sentence of English, as opposed to random English words in a string. A moment's inquiry has convinced me that I don't know what this sentence means, at least if I don't look at it in context. So, if I did manage to correctly guess that this is English, I would get its meaning wildly wrong, if I could even hazard a guess at it.

Now, all of this is pretty obvious. But overlooking the obvious is de riguer in philosophy. Especially if one tells oneself things like "Speaking English is a matter of being a member of the community of English speakers".

The upshot of all this is, I think, that McDowell's initial supposition doesn't make sense. There is no specific way of having "light dawn on one" that is "becoming a speaker of English". There are many such ways to become the many such things which fall under the vague umbrella-heading of "speaker of English".

Now, even if McDowell's universal claim fails, there's clearly a weaker claim that's right: Being an English-speaker requires there being some other English-speakers that recognize you as an English-speaker. (Here "there being" should be read broadly: they can all be dead, and none of the ones that would recognize you need to have ever recognized you as an English-speaker, since you could learn the language from audio tapes.) Stronger than that: There have to be some causal connections of the right kind connecting one English-speaker up to some other English-speakers -- it has to be possible to tell a story about why a particular speaker counts as an "English-speaker" rather than a speaker of some other kind. The stories could be convoluted, in particular instances. But some sort of story has to be capable of being told, in principle, even if no one actually knows all the details.

This weaker claim, though, is compatible with taking Davidson's line on "natural languages" like English: Speaking English is a matter of being able to understand other English-speakers, more or less, much of the time, for the most part, in many cases, etc.. It's not cleaner-cut than that. (We can draw firmer lines, if we like, for particular purposes. Maybe there's good reason to not teach Ebonics-friendly grammar in middle-school English courses. If we like, these could also be grounds to say that Ebonics "isn't English". Or we could simply say they're reasons not to teach that sort of grammar to students, and remain silent on whether or not Ebonics "is English".) There is no one thing that is "knowing how to speak English". Speaking English is a motley.

McDowell seems to be a bit unfair to Davidson, in addition to being wrong about English. In introducing the notion of a broadly Hegelian approach to practices such as "speaking a language", he notes that it's not a given that this is a viable approach. "Donald Davidson, for instance, argues that there is nothing essentially communal about the ability to make oneself understood by, say, doing what we call "speaking English.""

In one sense, this is right: There's no identifiable community that we can point to as the body which is capable of judging what is or is not "speaking English". There is no such "community", if communities are entities with identity. (The French pretend to have such a body, but I think that is all they do: pretend. People speak French as they please, and the official body tries to make them stop using English loan-words.) This is presumably how McDowell meant to be understood, in context. It strikes me as rash to think that there's anything un-Hegelian in this. (More on that in a moment.)

In another sense, this is just wrong: "speaking the same language" for Davidson is a matter of frequently converging on passing theories, and this can hold between many speakers all at once. Adam and Betty and Charles can all frequently converge on passing theories when speaking to one another, and this would mean they all "speak the same language". Davidson does focus on the minimal case of two speakers trying to communicate with each other, but the sort of communality which is in play here isn't limited to groups of two. In the sense in which "speaking English" is mentioned at all, it's a case of this wider communality. One has to frequently converge with many speakers, at least counterfactually, to be a speaker of something like "English". (It's important to not take Davidson's position as more radical than it is. He thinks we should take measures to preserve Basque, for instance. He sees no puzzle in the idea that there are speakers of Basque, or of German, or of French, or of English. It's just that many philosophers and linguists have made it impossible to get what that involves into view, because of prior commitments about what "languages" are.)

The sense in which McDowell is right about Davidson is that there is no notion of the community which can be appealed to to make sense of "speaking English". But there are many groupings which we appeal to to make sense of someone who "speaks English", and Davidson recognizes this. From the response to Pereda in the appendix to "Truth, Language, History": "Pereda has the sensible idea of trying to reconcile the Wittgensteinian and Tarskian modes by emphasizing the importance of a general background against which deviant verbal behavior is understood.... I see nothing wrong with Pereda's view, as long as it is taken as saying that members of a "speech community" share a host of overlapping, non-identical, habits of speech, and have corresponding expectations about what others in the community will mean by what they say (such a set of expectations is what is characterized by what I called a "prior theory"). It's worth noting that Davidson's treatment of metaphors also requires this sort of general background be in view: only if the literal meanings of words is settled can metaphors be employed.

In the context of McDowell's article (which is a response to Pippin's most recent views about Hegel on action), the remarks about Davidson are a preamble. But the reason the preamble exists is because McDowell claims that we have to assume that Davidson is wrong about language if we are to take a Hegelian view of action (such as saying that things are thus-and-so). This would be unfortunate, if true. (Certainly I have a fair bit invested in its being wrong.) But I don't think the conditional holds.

Here's how McDowell puts the upshot of the Phenomenology: "The point is to equip the consciousness that is the recipient of the education recapitulated in the Phenomenology with a satisfactory conception of what it is to be an autonomous inhabitant of the space of reasons at all.... What is needed is awareness that one is in touch with reasons only by virtue of one's formation in a Sittlichkeit, combined with a critical attitude to the conception of reasons one finds oneself with." I think this is entirely compatible with Davidson, given a certain reading of "formation in a Sittlichkeit".

It would certainly be Davidsonian to claim that one can be in touch with reasons only by having been made a member of the "community of minds", and that it is in dialogue that understanding is reached -- not only understanding of others, but also of oneself, and of our shared world. This gives us the two parts of the Hegelian requirement McDowell mentions: the critical attitude is that openness to the other that characterizes genuine dialogue, which Davidson tends to thematize as the "understanding of the possibility of error", and the "formation in a Sittlichkeit" is just that whereby one has been made capable of coming to be a dialogue-partner at all: membership in the community of minds.

(I hasten to add that dialogue can involve more than two parties, as is the norm in Plato's dialogues. To put the point in a way McDowell should like: dialogue is not simply a matter of "I-Thou" relations between speakers, but is a matter of speakers coming under the sway of the dialogue itself; that I am a participant in the dialogue is thus a salient "I-We" relation. I can be made sense of, even in my self-understanding, only with reference to the dialogue, which can involve an open-ended number of participants. Apart from such ongoing enterprises of inquiry, I could not be in touch with reasons at all. And contrariwise, for a period of time I can be the only participant in a dialogue, soliloquizing. I can do this only against the background of inquiry in common with others, who are also capable of passing judgement on the notions I produce in my temporary solitude.)

Now, it's reasonable to think that I've here pushed the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit to the breaking point: such fluid and open-ended communities as "wherever conversations happen" don't seem to be the sort of thing Hegel meant. Sittlichkeit is more closely tied to World-History and the State, in Hegel. Forms of Sittlichkeit are the sort of thing that can be conceived as elements in the World-Historical unfolding of the Idea (from the Orient to the Germanic nations by way of Greece and Rome). So, "formation in a Sittlichkeit" must be more-or-less "becoming a citizen in some state or other". But I think this betrays the bad orientation towards Sittlichkeit that Hegel identifies with Greek culture: one's Sittlichkeit is simply given and stands independent of one. The proper, modern orientation is rather to see one's Sittlichkeit as not independent of one's subjectivity, but partly constituted by it: I am a moment of it, in my free particularity. There is nothing freestanding that I could be related to that would do the job of a Sittlichkeit; I simply find myself in the midst of a mass of concerns, and this is being formed into a moment of Sittlichkeit. There's nothing in the notion of Sittlichkeit as such that demands more than this. It takes more work for Hegel to show that the notion of "lots of subjects interacting with one another" has more structure than this, that it is and ought to be laid out in the way states are. Such concerns, I think, carry us beyond the arena McDowell is concerned with. A more chaotic, Davidsonian conception of what Sittlichkeits are will do as well for the purpose of providing a context in which mindedness can come on the scene. The question whether or not the very idea of responsiveness to reasons as such has any necessary connection to any particular way of organizing ourselves can be set to the side.

This approach also seems to fit more nicely with the "modernist" Hegel that McDowell takes over from Pippin: "In reflecting about how to think and act, we cannot take on trust the deliverances of any received authority. We are entirely on our own." Who the relevant "we" is can't be "taken on trust" either, but is also up for reflecting on. I have to judge for myself who my dialogue-partners are, and what the dialogue is about, and if there's even anything like this at all.

A postscript about the reading of Hegel that forms the bulk of the article: It all looks right to me; McDowell's reading here seems as able as his reading in Heterodox Lordship and Bondage. His reading here is less radical, though, since his opponent is just Pippin, rather than the received view of the "master-slave dialectic". McDowell seems to me to ably put paid to Pippin's view, both in itself and as a reading of Hegel.

A Puzzle about Reception History

2009-03-22T06:28:00.004-05:00

In "Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective" McDowell wishes that Davidson offered us an account of brutes which had more to say than the rough, unsatisfying bits he actually offered. It's clear in the context that McDowell doesn't just wish that Davidson had offered a fuller account, but that he wants a fuller account period. Davidson's story is (at best) frighteningly incomplete, and probably just wrong on a lot, but McDowell doesn't have anything to offer in its place.

This essay was published in 2003. It can't have been written much earlier, since it was presented at a symposium devoted to Davidson's third collection (thus the title), and that collection didn't come out until 2001.

Michael Thompson had been an assistant professor at Pitt since 1992. He'd been an associate professor since 1999. "The Representation of Life" was first published in 1995.

It seems implausible that McDowell would not have mentioned "The Representation of Life" in this context, if he'd read it. It offers him just the sort of thing he asked for. It's not particularly subtle about it, either. McDowell wants a better treatment of brutes: here it is! That is all it is about! It is devoted to doing justice to just the sorts of facts that Davidson has to paper over!

But, McDowell shows no indication of being familiar with Thompson's treatment of brutes.

How could McDowell have missed reading one of Thompson's key essays for so long? Or if he hadn't, what the hell happened here? It can't be that he thought Thompson would be inimicable to Davidson (because of essentialism or whatever), since McDowell is normally fine with urging things on Davidson. But what problem could McDowell have had with Thompson? (There are no hedges when he footnotes "The Representation of Life" in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" three years later, where he is drawing explicitly on Thompson's treatment of animals.)

I guess we all have things we mean to read, but haven't gotten around to....

Watchmen review

2009-03-06T04:00:00.000-06:00

It was awesome.

McDowell's Certainty

2009-03-03T23:34:00.002-06:00

Tim Thornton:

["Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty"] was suggested to me by one of Moyal-Sharrock’s PhD students at Hertfordshire, who said that it was an interesting counter to McDowell. I think that the contrast she had in mind was between McDowell’s commitment to the connection between mind and world being always within the realm of concepts and Moyal-Sharrock’s emphasis on a non-propositional bedrock of animal certainty / certainties.

Not having read the book, but having been keeping an eye out for McDowell's references to "On Certainty", my first impression is to expect that the difference comes in whether or not one wants to call "hinge propositions" things known. Wittgenstein pretty clearly thinks there's something wrong with that; McDowell thinks it's alright.

Now, going just by the bits I skimmed on Moyal-Sharrock's webpage and Thornton's remarks, I'm inclined to suspect that she crosses two different sorts of necessary conditions:

One has to be capable of reacting differentially to the sorts of things one is supposed to be regarding as salient in one's environment to be capable of reporting on how those things stand, or to be capable of "taking in" how those things are via experience. If one doesn't react in different ways to different sorts of stimuli, then one can't take notice of the distinctions between those sorts of things experientially. (I take this to be the point of Brandom's "RDRD"s, reliable discursive responsive dispositions.) If one's body was dead to the world, then one's mind would be, also. I take this to be what Thornton was gesturing at when speaking of the "animal" background necessary for the "game of giving and asking for reasons". All very standard Sellarsian stuff. This sort of thing is a necessary condition on being able to take a stand in the space of reasons (as it's a necessary condition on being able to know things noninferentially, and a body of knowledge needs noninferential "groundings" to distinguish it from "rumors and hoaxes", so being able to give reasons for what one holds requires RDRDs).

This is, I think, different from the sort of thing that bothered Wittgenstein in (large parts of) "On Certainty" -- "hinge propositions" (so-called because of two or three places where W. employs the metaphor of our practice "turning on them"). The thing that bothered Wittgenstein was that we can't sensibly try to figure out what is the case, in a particular instance, or what so-and-so means, in a particular instance, unless there is a great deal we simply do not put under question, in that instance. This is a necessary condition for inquiry or interpretation to be possible. Putting something in question requires not putting everything in question at once. (This is also a familiar Sellarsian/Davidsonian point.) It doesn't seem plausible to me to call this "animal" certainty -- what sort of certainty would it be being opposed to? For this sort of certainty is just: not doubting that that this is how things are.

This, I think, is what bothered Wittgenstein about Moore's "here's one hand, and here's another": In a situation in which no one is trying to figure out if there are any hands to be found, Moore presents himself as having concluded that: Yes, there are. Here is one hand, and here is another. But if this wasn't in question, then there's no conclusion drawn here. So Moore seems to "cross the streams". He takes something that was being held constant, and acts as if it was something he'd just discovered to be the case (or at least thought that we'd not noticed).

Now, McDowell. From a footnote in "Knowledge by Hearsay": "Much of "On Certainty" is about the status of this sort of knowledge. Wittgenstein himself is dubious about counting it as knowledge; but I think that is inessential to his main point, which is to warn against assimilating the sort of thing in question -- propositions that function as pivots on which our practices of looking for grounds for belief can hinge, by not being on the agenda for testing or confirmation -- to cases where it makes sense to look for the grounds of a belief. (Wittgenstein's doubt about counting these propositions as known may reflect the influence of the kind of conception of knowledge I am going to attack.)" For those who haven't read the essay, the attack in "Hearsay" is just what a reader of "Mind and World" would expect; McDowell thinks that testimony can put its hearer in touch with the facts themselves, and he opposes a "highest common factor" conception of what knowing via testimony must be like.

(A fun bit of trivia: in this essay, McDowell refers to his own position as "coherentism" and calls Davidsonian coherentism "the heroic position" -- heroic because it tries valiantly to just do without "absolute starting points" by just dropping noninferential groundings for knowledge tout court. The third position is still just the "Myth of the Given". I rather like the designation "the heroic position". And this way of laying out the dialect does a better job, I think, of making clear where Davidson fits into the dialectic of "Mind and World".)

Now, the way McDowell presents Wittgenstein's point here strikes me as agreeable. It is important to not assimilate things held in doubt to things not held in doubt. Missing this distinction will make a hash of any attempt to give an account of inquiry: it'll make it seem like Descartes was asking questions in the only way that it makes sense to ask them (or at least the only way that's not partly dogmatic). Any inquiry which doesn't begin by putting everything in question will look like it's "chickening out" in the face of hard, empirical Reality. From another vantage point: Not making Wittgenstein's distinction will make it seem like any claim to know something noninferentially is dependent for its strength on a background of premises which justify it, so that knowing that there's a pink cube in front of me must rely on my antecedently knowing that the world is laid open to view in front of me. And any attempt to know that the world is laid out in front of me by looking at it will beg the question, as the sort of knowledge I get from looking presumes what I here want to know by looking. Not drawing Wittgenstein's distinction then leads to a "highest common factor" view of knowledge. This is familiar territory for McDowell.

But, I think there's something more going on in McDowell here, and I don't like some of the other things I find. Spelling out what's bothering me here (and it's been bothering me since I first read the first appendix to "Mind and World") will require some quote-mining. I'll assume that the interested reader can look at section nine of the first appendix to "Mind and World" themself, but there are other bits that bear noting.

From the opening paragraphs of "Knowledge by Hearsay":

much of the knowledge we have through language was surely not acquired by understanding a linguistic production. Part of the point here is that we were not yet capable of understanding the elements of what we know through language when we started to acquire them. The body of sentences we accepted from our elders needs to have become quite comprehensive before any of them were comprehended. "Light dawns gradually over the whole." ("On Certainty" ss141) But the image of dawning light does not apply only to coming to understand the members of a stock of sentences accepted from one's elders. The image also fits a general sense in which growing into a language is growing into being in possession of the world, as opposed to having a mere animal ability to cope with a habitat. [Here McDowell footnotes "Truth and Method" p.443: "Language is not just one of man's possessions in the world, but on it depends the fact that man has a world at all."] And much of the knowledge that enters into our possession of the world, even though we have it through language, is not something we have been told. It need never have been enunciated in our hearing; rather, we find it implicit in the cognitive-practical ways of proceeding into which we were initiated when we learned our language.

Now, read in one way, I have no problem with any of this. Knowing something because one has been handed down the knowledge by one of the traditions one has been initiated into is a real way of knowing things. It's unwise to assimilate it to knowledge gained via testimony, for reasons McDowell explores in "Hearsay": being able to learn something via testimony requires having a conception of oneself as a hearer, and the other fellow as trying to impart knowledge. This sort of self-conception is necessary if one is to be capable of judging whether or not accepting a particular bit of testimony is doxastically responsible. And this sort of self-conception is only available downstream of picking up one's first language, being initially led into the space of reasons. So the sorts of things one knows because one has been initiated into a tradition aren't known by testimony. (I think this is a stronger way of putting the point than McDowell offers here -- from the fact that what is known hasn't been enunciated in one's hearing it remains an open question whether or not what one knows here mightn't be something gained via inference from what one learned via testimony. This is one sense in which something can be "implicit in the cognitive-practical ways of proceeding" in which we proceed as rational animals: the way of proceeding includes knowledge gained by experience or by testimony (because the way of proceeding involves communicating with others and taking in one's surroundings), and what is "implicit" is just what follows inferentially from this knowledge. This clearly isn't what McDowell wants to draw attention to.)

One neat benefit of drawing this distinction: We can rehabilitate the idea that two people can disagree with one another because of differing background commitments (or even "conceptual schemes") while agreeing on "empirical matters". For they can agree in what experience discloses to them while disagreeing about something each of them has been handed down by their tradition (one can be handed down P, the other ~P). This would be akin to two people disagreeing over whether or not a certain bird is an emu because one of them recalls the bird-book wrong (and so wants to call it an ostrich, and wants to say it lives in Africa and lays the largest egg of any bird etc.). Belief in the possibility of incommensurable conceptual schemes (in the relativistic sense) would then follow if one held that what one had been handed down by one's tradition was invulnerable to revision by experience or testimony; the sort of scheme-content dualism Davidson attributes to Kant (where there's only one scheme) would follow from believing that there's only one possible set of beliefs one can be handed down by one's tradition. (Both of these further claims, I hasten to add, seem implausible. And it would only be in certain narrow circumstances that two people could agree on what experience discloses while disagreeing on what inferences experience licenses them to draw. And narrower still cases where the disagreement about inferential licenses follows from a background difference in beliefs acquired via tradition, rather than differing in other beliefs picked up via experience or testimony.)

Where I want to differ with McDowell, then, is not on the very idea of knowing things via "the teachings of the elders" or things like that. One can simply have a belief because of how one was raised, and if it's true I have no problem with counting it as knowledge. (If one insists, you can add: and provided one has the belief due to being raised in the right way, so that it counts as justified in the right way to be knowledge.) And placing this sort of knowledge alongside learning a language seems right. Learning to cope with a novel vocabulary involves coming to know things through, so to speak, seeing that they're in the air around the practice. I don't think Davidson would reject this sort of thing, either -- when he denies that it's necessary that a speaker has ever spoken the same language as anyone else, he affirms that a speaker can only pick up what language they have by interacting with other speakers. So a child who doesn't learn to speak just as his teachers aimed at might still pick things up from their attempts, and this could be the same sort of knowledge by tradition that he would've gained if he had learned to speak just as his teachers wished. (He might have missed some of the things they aimed to teach, or he might have grasped some things they didn't think they were imparting, or even that they would reject. But I don't think any of this is a threat to the general Gadamerian idea McDowell is keen to defend.)

If this is all McDowell wants out of "the endogenous given", then the endogenous given is harmless. Where I think McDowell goes wrong is in linking this good Gadamerian idea about tradition to the good Wittgensteinian idea about a distinction between hinge propositions and others: McDowell assimilates the two, and further identifies them with "necessary forms of mindedness" and with analytic propositions (all in some very dense paragraphs at the end of the first appendix to "Mind and World"). Setting aside the further identifications, the first one seems to me to be wrong.

I think Wittgenstein was right to include "man has never been on the moon" among his examples of a "hinge proposition". It's something that (in the 50's) one would be right to hold fast as one went about in the world. If something implied that a man had been on the moon, then this would be sufficient to show it false (by modus tollens). Once the "space race" began, it would've gradually shifted from hinge to door (so to speak). And the way in which it could so shift would not be a matter of, say, experience simply revealing that it was no longer true: for hinge propositions are the standard by which we manage experience, by which we judge whether to accept or reject a particular case of things seeming to be thus-and-so. Experience would then not disprove a hinge proposition for the same reason that thermometers don't have a line that reads "this thermometer is broken". How one accounts for changing hinge propositions is just going to be a different sort of thing in epistemology. One which, as far as I can tell, McDowell doesn't give us any help in coping with.

It might be thought that McDowell was right to identify hinge propositions with analytic propositions and "necessary forms of mindedness", if experience can't threaten them. But here I think my presentation suffers from the fact that I don't have a clear grip on what I want to offer as an account of change in hinge propositions. (Barring unhappy surprises, I aim to just crib from Isaac Levi on the matter.) For I think that, in another sense, experience can lead one to reject a hinge proposition. Continuing the analogy with the thermometer, it would be similar to trashing a thermometer which read -20 degrees on a summer day, when one had intended to use the thermometer to measure the temperature outside. One had further ancillary commitments which lead one to reject the standard one was using, because of something in the way that standard had functioned in its use as a standard. It can't be "standards all the way down", so it might seem that McDowell must be right: there's a bedrock of absolutely firm standards, and these are the necessary forms any possible mindedness must take. But I think this is too quick. Levi gives an account of something he calls routine contraction, in which beliefs are rejected simply because they form a contradictory pair (P and ~P), and such things are unfit for use in the way beliefs are used (that is, as standards in inquiry). For anything is compatible with them -- anything which conflicts with P agrees with ~P, and vice-versa. The reason this is called "routine" is because it is parallel to routine expansion, in which beliefs are gained via an operating habit (as opposed to explicitly deciding to take what the map says as right, or to believe what one's mother says about how to treat a cold, or whatever). The set of beliefs one uses as a standard in inquiry function as a background against which such habits can be intelligible to have, but routine expansion is distinguished from expansion due to inquiry. I omit the details because I am not entirely firm on them; hopefully Duck can correct me if I've messed up any of this so far. But the upshot is: it is the case that taking one's experience at face value can lead to a routine contraction which eliminates a hinge proposition from one's set of beliefs. Or, more concretely, one might cease to hold as a hinge proposition the claim that Man has never been on the moon because of what one read on the front page of the New York Times. Though if one had been trying to make sense of an arbitrary stranger who was talking about NASA landing on the moon, one would have ruled out of court at the outset that he might be right that man had been on the moon -- the stranger would be taken to be a crank, as it were a priori. Like I said: the manner in which hinge propositions can be revised is tricky. (One can just say "one revises them as one judges best" but this says nothing, for they are the standard by which one judges what is best.)

Hinge propositions, I then want to say, are corrigible. This doesn't distinguish them from beliefs gained by tradition: here, too, I want to say they're corrigible. And here McDowell has to agree with me, or else his rhetoric about the "standing duty to reflect" on what one's traditions have handed one down, as what guarantees the rationality of taking the Gadamerian line on traditions, is just empty gassing.

What, then, prevents identification of hinge propositions with propositions held true because of how one was raised?

It is this: one can pick up hinge propositions other ways, too. It's easily thinkable that some children in Wittgenstein's day did not learn that man had never been on the moon via their tradition, but rather via reading about it in astronomy books, or by asking an adult whether or not there were men on the moon, as there were men in distant countries. And there's no reason to think that Wittgenstein gained this particular belief in any special way. Who knows when he first realized that men had never gone to the moon?

Now, it might seem that I'm stacking the deck against McDowell by my choice of example. But I think that the more standard examples of "hinge propositions" are not relevantly different. For in each case, the proposition's status as a "hinge" is contingent on how things fall out as life goes on. It might end up retracted due to the commitments one gained via habitual expansion. (And this would include cases such as accepting the conclusion of a skeptical argument, where it's the sort of thing one finds compelling.)

As a conclusion, I want to say: "Hinge" is a status, not a kind. A proposition which one holds as a hinge might later be rejected as simply false. And I want to say exactly the same thing about "invulnerability to experience" -- which is just to repeat C.I. Lewis's position on the issue from A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori. And if I say the same thing about analyticity, then this is close to Quine's mature position: For late Quine, "a bachelor is an unmarried male" is analytic for a speaker because that speaker learns that this is a true sentence at the same time that the speaker learns to use the word "bachelor". For non-native speakers, it is not analytic, nor is it analytic for the odd native speaker who learns the word in some way other than learning that "a bachelor is an unmarried male" is true.

"Necessary forms of mindedness" are a different issue: here I don't want to hold on to the notion at all. If I can't make sense of someone holding that ~P where I hold that P, then I want to say that this is a failure of imagination on my part. (Which isn't to say it's blameworthy. Unlimited imaginative power is no duty, which is good because it's clearly impossible for we mortals. And of course it says nothing about the truth or falsity of P.) And where I want to talk about conceptual relations -- say, "belief is intrinsically veridical" -- it seems to me silly to claim to be limning the "necessary forms any mindedness must take" -- unless this be said with a keen awareness that philosophy is hard, and philosophers are often wrong. Rather, I want to just say: this is true, and the modality attached to it can go hang. (To deny "necessity" to a claim is not to say that it's only possible instead.) For the sorts of claims made here are as shaky as any (and so as firm as any). Rationality thus seems to demand that we recognize a standing duty to reflect on them. Which means not ruling out serious reflection a priori, by lumping them into a pile labeled "analytic" or "necessary" or "a priori".

As a final caveat, another of the few places where McDowell mentions "On Certainty". From "Knowledge and the Internal Revisited":

I recognize my own authority as a reporter of greenness. But I would be at a loss if pressed for premises for an argument that would have my reliability about greenness as a conclusion. My reliability about that kind of thing has for me, rather, a sort of status Wittgenstein considers in "On Certainty". It is held firm for me by my whole conception of the world with myself in touch with it, and not as the conclusion from an inference from some part of it.

I take it that this status is that of a hinge proposition. I also take it that there is no temptation whatsoever to claim that "McDowell can recognize green things, in normal lighting conditions" is analytic, or necessary, or anything of the kind. I also take it that it would be uncontentious to speculate that McDowell picked up his capacity to recognize green things when he learned to use the word "green", as taught by his elders. This would then be a case of an endogenously given hinge proposition which is neither analytic nor necessary, and which is further plainly in danger of being made false by experience -- if McDowell goes blind, for example (Heaven forbid). So it's not clear to me how much I'm trying to distance myself from McDowell, and how much I'm just trying to get clear on what his view is.

I can make up an interpretation on which it's reasonable to talk about rehabilitating "interesting analytic judgements" and an "endogenously given" conceptual scheme, but I can't both do this and claim to be disagreeing with "the familiar tenants of Quinean philosophy". And the necessity-talk (and the kind words for Lear's "Leaving the World Alone") just strike me as bad moves. Lear's piece tries to argue for an a priori refutation of Dummett's claims that our logic needs an intuitionistic revision, as in he doesn't deal with Dummett's arguments in reaching the conclusion that Dummett is wrong. This just seems to me to be as wrong as wrong can be. And McDowell shouldn't be so hard on Quine.

This post is an attempt to work things out that I'm not entirely settled on. What could be a better tribute to "On Certainty"?

Avoiding the Myth of the Given

2009-02-23T08:31:00.002-06:00

I've attempted, once again, to get a grip on "Avoiding the Myth of the Given". I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I just ignore the part I hate!

If the formatting is a little odd, it's because it didn't copypasta quite right.
In a retrospective account of “Mind and World” McDowell writes that

“Trying to spell out [the possibility that we can regard judgements as being justified by experiences, conceived of as actualizations of conceptual capacities], which I found missing from Davidson's picture, I made one of the assumptions I have here [in this article from 2008] renounced: that if experiences are actualizations of conceptual capacities, they must have propositional content. That gave Davidson an opening for a telling response. Davidson argued that if by "experience" we mean something with propositional content, it can only be a case of taking things to be so, distinctive in being caused by the impact of the environment on our sensory apparatus. But of course his picture includes such things. So I was wrong, he claimed, to suppose there is anything missing from his picture. I want to insist, against Davidson, that experiencing is not taking things to be so." (p.268/9 of “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”)

Here McDowell rehearses one of Davidson’s responses to “Mind and World”: if an experiencing is something which can provide reasons for believing that things are thus and so, then it must be something to which the subject attaches a subjective probability – the subject must associate the content of the experience with some degree of credence. But then the experiencing must just be a belief. In this article, McDowell grants to Davidson that this is the correct thing to say if one does not distinguish “propositional content” from a novelty McDowell introduces in “Avoiding”, called “intuitional content”: "If we avoid the Myth [of the Given] by conceiving experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, while retaining the assumption that that requires crediting experiences with propositional content, Davidson's point seems well taken. If experiences had propositional content, it is hard to deny that experiencing is taking things to be so, rather than what I want it to be: a different kind of thing that entitles us to take things to be so." (p.269) It thus seems that, as of his most recent publications, McDowell is of the opinion that his new distinction between “intuitional” and “propositional” content is essential to making clear what’s missing from Davidson’s system. Without it, if one simply speak as McDowell had been of “experiences possessing propositional content”, the point is ceded to Davidson: experiences can only be more beliefs (albeit ones distinguished by a peculiar causal history). This is precisely what Davidson wants to say about perception, if he has to speak of it at all: “To perceive that it is snowing is, under appropriate circumstances, to be caused (in the right way) by one’s senses to believe that it is snowing by the actually falling snow. Sensations no doubt play their role, but that role is not of providing evidence for the belief.” (Introduction to Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective p.xvi) (Earlier comments in this introduction make it clear that Davidson is keen to deny that sensations provide evidence so as to ensure that perception can be direct, offering us unmitigated contact with reality – the actually falling snow, in this case. He notes that he ought to have been giving credit to Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” for making him sensitive to this, years and years ago. Davidson thus opposed McDowell in order to secure something McDowell takes himself to be securing for us.)

Given that the position articulated in “Avoiding” is McDowell’s most recent position, and given that he here cedes to Davidson that his main criticism hit its target, it is worth trying to work out what McDowell’s new position is supposed to be. It will turn out that it’s not clear that McDowell’s new position is coherent as stated, but it is suggestive of a position that McDowell could adopt to evade Davidson’s criticism. (Many exasperating details of “Avoiding” will be sidestepped in this presentation, since I think they can come apart from this revision of McDowell’s position. The other revision seems to me to simply be a mistake, and I will pretend McDowell never brought it up.)

First off, in changing his mind about what kind of content experiences have, McDowell has not given up the claim he’s most famous for, that the content of experiences is “unboundedly conceptual”: "it is right to say the content unified in intuitions is of the same kind as the content unified in judgements, that is, conceptual content." (p.264) In “Avoiding” as in his earlier position in “Mind and World”, McDowell urges us to regard experiences as passive actualizations of a subject’s conceptual capacities, where conceptual capacities are paradigmatically those capacities actively utilized in acts of judgement. But in “Avoiding” McDowell regards these two actualizations of a subject’s conceptual capacities as involving two different kinds of unity. The contents of intuitions have intuitional unity, and the contents of judgements have propositional unity. The main contrast between the two seems to be whether the content is articulated or merely articulable. McDowell continues to speak of the former as “propositional content” (or “discursive content” – in both cases the sort of content involved in judgements is intended); the latter he calls “intuitional content”. The kinds of unity are just the kinds that belong to the kinds of content.

"Discursive content is articulated. Intuitional content is not." (p. 262) This should not be taken as saying that intuitions involve some kind of content which is utterly foreign to judging: "an intuition's content is all conceptual, in this sense: it is in the intuition in a form in which one could make it, that very content, figure in discursive activity." (p.265) Problems should be coming into view: if the “very content” which is present in an intuition is capable of being part of the content of a judgement, and if the content of a judgement is both discursive and articulated, then must not the content of the intuition be likewise? This formulation is not the only place in the article where McDowell seems to slip up, either: "Whether by way of introducing new discursive capacities or not, the subject of an intuition is in a position to put aspects of its content, the very content that is already present in the intuition, together in discursive performance." (p.264)

Talking of aspects of “the very content” of an intuition as also being (potentially) the content of a judgement is something natural for the McDowell of “Mind and World” to say. It is given to me in experience (in an intuition) that there is a red cube in front of me, and so I can knowledgeably judge that there is a red cube in front of me. But if one of the main points of “Avoiding” is to avoid saying that intuitions have the same kind of content as judgements, it seems simply incoherent for McDowell to continue to speak this way. He should rather speak elliptically: Part of the content of my experience is such that, were I to articulate it discursively, I should articulate a claim to the effect that there is a red cube in front of me. The content of an intuition as such is unarticulated and non-discursive. Hence I cannot express it by directly mentioning a sentence (such as there is a red cube in front of me), for sentences are already articulated and discursive entities – they are ready-made to make claims with. Intuitional content can only be understood on analogy with sentences, on pain of losing the distinction between intuitional and propositional content which McDowell now thinks is so important. Or, perhaps less enigmatically, McDowell might say that a particular intuition has the content that would license a claim that there is a red cube in front of me; the removal by one level would thus distinguish it from a judgement, which might have the content that there is a red cube in front of me, while also making it perspicuous how the two contents are supposed to be related. It would also make clear the difference between knowledge gained by experience and knowledge gained by testimony: the content of a piece of testimony is of the that there is a red cube in front of me form. It is literally a claim, whereas experiences only “so to speak” contain or make claims (to echo a claim of Sellars’s that McDowell claims is “wrong in letter, but right in spirit”; I think that one can read Sellars’ claim as right even in letter, if one puts a proper stress on the “so to speak”).

Read this way, McDowell’s position does not appear to have changed since “Mind and World”, or at least not so substantially as he implies in “Avoiding”. McDowell can still say something like “Seeing (veridically) that there is a red cube in front of one is being in a state such that one is licensed to believe that there is a red cube in front of one, provided one believes that one is in normal lightning conditions etc., or else to (unlicensedly, but rationally) believe that it merely appears to one as if there were a red cube in front of one, or to suspend judgement between these two.” Such a state is not a belief, but is internally related to beliefs. It is not itself taking a stand on how things are, but being in the state makes a certain kind of stand rationally justified to take up (namely judging that there is a red cube in front of one). Such a state also provides a “ground” for justifications in the sense McDowell wanted in “Mind and World” and Davidson wanted nowhere: forming a belief on the basis that one is in a state of seeing that things are thus-and-so is not the sort of thing one can ask for further justification regarding; a skeptic has to shift ground and question whether or not one is really in that state, and not another. For forming a belief that things are thus-and-so on the basis of a veridical experience is not something that could need further grounding: it is a case of the world making itself manifest to a subject. Taking experience at face value like this is only possible with a background of beliefs of an appropriate sort (about normal lighting etc.) and with an accompaniment of beliefs of an appropriate sort (that one is in a state of seeing that there is a red cube in front of one, for instance), but the belief formed on the basis of experience is not an inference from any of these. And so there is no question of its inferential credentials: it comes from no premises, and so there is no question about the truth of the premises from which one reasoned in coming to hold it.

This sort of position would give McDowell what he did not find in Davidson, while also making clear why Davidson’s response does not win the day: it is a method of justifiably forming beliefs which is noninferential, yet which is an exercise of a subject’s rationality. And so it is neither a case of forming a belief on the basis of another belief, nor forming a belief through simply being “struck” with one due to the causal impacts of the world. It is simply not something Davidson gives any account of, though the parenthetical “in the right way” in which beliefs have to be formed to count as “perception”, by Davidson’s definition, probably would demand something like this account to flesh it out. For it is hard to believe that “deviant causal chains” would be avoidable in any other way of fleshing out the story than experiences “so to speak, containing claims” which they licensed their subjects to take at face value. Without the “right way” involving forming beliefs because they are how things are disclosed to one in experience, it also seems implausible that our perceptual contact with objects would be “direct”, as Davidson wished it to be. Hence for Davidson to be right, he has to be wrong: if he wants to account for direct perception of objects & events in the world within his system, he must modify it to include the sort of picture of experience McDowell offers us. Without modification, his system leaves it mysterious how perception is supposed to fit into things, and thus we can feel a sense of vertigo: What if the objects I behold in perception just have no relation to the things I believe? And this is just the fear of “frictionless spinning” that McDowell lays out as one end of the teeter-totter in “Mind and World”.

Davidson's Conceptual Dualism

2009-02-22T19:32:00.002-06:00

A citation from a post from a while back at "Frame/Sing":

Here I want to refer to my friend and former colleague at Warwick University Tim Thornton, a Wittgensteinian. He told me years ago that he never understood why Davidson was a conceptual dualist. Why stop at two conceptual spheres or modes of description? Why is the distinction between the mental and the physical so much more compelling than any other way that we can think of to describe the world? Would it not be sensible to say that all situations can, in some way, be described as moral? Tim Thornton thought that conceptual pluralism made more, Wittgensteinian, sense. (footnote, p. 27, Davidson and Spinoza: Mind, Matter and Morality, Floris van der Berg)

This actually comes up in one of the "Davidson in Conversation" interviews, with Stuart Hampshire. Here's a quote from Davidson:

I certainly think that we have more than two ways of conceiving reality. I often sound as if I think there are just two, natural science and psychology or something, but, no, there are a lot of natural sciences, and they have different ways of describing things, perhaps irreducibly different…. I don’t know how you’d count potential conceptual schemes, so I don’t see that one should boggle at them [like Spinoza did].

So ,it seems that Thornton’s point was appreciated by Davidson. He just wrote as if he hadn’t thought of it a lot of the time, because the only relevant schemes in the context were the mental & the physical (the rational and the nomic).

Incidentally, this is a nice instance of Davidson talking about "conceptual schemes" in a way that doesn't involve the scheme-content dualism. Later in the same interview, he notes that in physics we plausibly "don't have the best conceptual scheme for the task" (of formulating laws with no exceptions etc.) and that we can advance by changing our scheme. So it seems that Davidson was fine with talking about "conceptual schemes" in a basically Kuhnian way. Which is interesting. Certainly a lot of people have worried about a tension between the two. (I know I have.) Davidson doesn't seem to feel a tension -- he just uses "conceptual schemes" here, without comment.

There's a lot of interesting things in the "In Conversation" videos. I wish they were more easily accessible; only the Rorty one is online, as far as I can tell.

Counterfactual Wittgenstein

2009-02-19T18:07:00.002-06:00

From section 3 of the epilogue to Brandom's Between Saying and Doing:

"One constant in Wittgenstein's thought, early and late, is his denial of methodologically monistic scientism[, the idea that the only way knowledge can be gotten is the way the natural sciences, especially physics, give us knowledge]. "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences," he says in the Tractatus, and this view seems to be part of what lies behind the theoretical quietism of the later work. In fact, I think Wittgenstein thinks that if systematic philosophical theorizing were possible, it would mean that philosophy is an empirical science. Since it is not, philosophers must eschew theorizing, restricting themselves instead to light, local descriptions of discursive practices, where such descriptions might provide helpful reminders in freeing ourselves from the sorts of misunderstandings and puzzlements that arise precisely from the theories implicit in inherited pictures of what is going on when we talk and think. Whether or not Wittgenstein himself reasoned in this way, I take it that it is common for his admirers to see him as presenting us with a forced choice: either embrace scientism about philosophy of the methodologically monistic sort -- that is, take philosophy to be an empirical, scientific discipline -- or give up the idea of systematic philosophical theorizing once and for all.

I think this is a false choice. Rejecting scientism of the methodologically monistic sort does not entail giving up the possibility of systematic philosophical theorizing about discursive practice.... I want to claim that what is objectionable about the methodologically monistic form of scientism is its exclusivity. Rejecting that at least leaves open the question of whether, and which, features of natural scientific investigation, explanation, knowledge, and understanding ought also to be counted among those useful and appropriate in philosophy. After all, description is also a central and essential element of scientific methodology, and even the most rigorous versions of Wittgensteinian quietism allow philosophers to describe features of our linguistic practices.

I've bolded the part that struck me; I've quoted the rest for context, and because I liked the passage.

My initial response to Brandom's hypothetical was to agree: Wittgenstein probably did think something like this. The natural sciences (including the social sciences) are engaged in theory-building, hypothesis testing, etc.; philosophy doesn't do this sort of thing (and when it tries to, it does so out of confusion). But it's a weird counterfactual. You have to imagine that what Wittgenstein took philosophy to be also involved what Wittgenstein categorically thought philosophy was not. Tricky business, if you can manage it at all.

After thinking about it a bit more, I'm inclined to say that Brandom skips over the therapeutic nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy -- therapeutic is opposed to constructive in roughly the way quietistic is opposed to theorizing, after all. It's not just that Wittgenstein doesn't give general accounts with theoretically posited entities as explananda; it's that he's not interested in doing that, even if it is possible. Or rather, stronger than that: even if Wittgensteinian philosophy does provide general accounts, with theoretical posits, the point of doing so is to ease some antecedently felt philosophical tension. To keep us from feeling obliged to answer other sorts of philosophical questions, Wittgensteinian philosophy asks and answers questions of its own. (The questions may be rhetorical, the answers obvious. But they are still posed, and they have right and wrong answers. And the therapy can misfire if the questions become points for debate, when they were supposed to be anodyne.) So he's wrong to think that Wittgenstein thinks there's a forced choice between anti-theoretical "quietism" and scientism. (To be fair, he hedges his claims here. But he seems to do so not because he's unsure that they do justice to his understanding of Wittgenstein, but because he wants to avoid offending those who read him differently.)

In any case, I thought his discussion of the issues was interesting. It's a good epilogue.

Thompson Puzzles

2009-02-16T03:36:00.002-06:00

From "Naive Action Theory", footnote 33:

It is interesting that the examples through which Anscombe attempts to illustrate the idea of "many descriptions of the same" do not actually illustrate it: it is the rare act of moving an arm that can be classified as a replenishment of a house water-supply.

I have no idea what's supposed to be wrong with Anscombe's example (from ss23 of "Intention"). It looks to me like a perfectly fine case of redescribing an action in multiple ways. The rest of the footnote seems to imply that Thompson wants to say that "replenishing the house's water-supply" has "moving my arm" as a proper part, rather than this being something it's identical to. But this doesn't seem right. Moving my arm, in these circumstances, just is my replenishing the house's water-supply. It's not a part of something else I do; the only thing I do to replenish the house's water supply is move my arm (while holding the pump-handle). Once the event that is my moving my arm is in view, there's nowhere else to look to see me replenishing the house's water supply. (Though you might need to look elsewhere to get the necessary background in view to recognize that I am in fact replenishing the house's water supply by moving my arm. Taking in this background is not taking in more actions performed by me. It's seeing that the house has functioning plumbing, and that my hand is holding the pump-handle.)

The preceding footnote also mystifies me:

Mention of this great paper [Davidson's "Agency"], in the present context, invites the remark that its account of the concept of agency fails to take proper account of actions with parts. Surely it will be "agency" in the sense Davidson means to capture if the agent sinks the Bismark, or ruins her finances, by doing A, B and C, each of them intentionally. But the events falling under the descriptions A, B and C need not fall severally under the description "a sinking of the Bismark" or "a ruining of her finances", as the case may be; none by itself, we may suppose, adds up to that. And so it might be that nothing done intentionally falls under that description, and thus that something "done", in the emphatic sense Davidson means to elucidate, isn't done intentionally under any description.

I can't see how this argument is supposed to work. Suppose {A,B,C} are things like "moved her arm towards the firing button", "moved it even closer to the firing button" and "pushed the firing button". The third would be identical to a sinking of the Bismarck (in the sense of "sinking" which people do, as opposed to what boats do). Standard "pulling-the-trigger-is-killing-Jones" sort of example. But that doesn't fit Thompson's criteria. He needs items {A,B,C} such that none of them is identical to a sinking of the Bismarck. So, none of them can be anything like "pushing the button that launches the torpedo that sinks the Bismarck". Suppose we change C to "moved her arm closer still to the firing button" -- now we have intentional actions {A,B,C} such that none of them is a sinking of the Bismarck, but each of them are done as part of the agent's attempt to sink the Bismarck. But this doesn't work, either, since she doesn't sink the Bismarck by doing A, B, & C; she sinks the Bismarck by doing A, B, C, and D (where D gets her the rest of the way to the button and has her pushing it). I'm not able to think of any {A,B,C} that actually fit Thompson's criteria.

The "ruining her finances" bit seems like it might work a little better: Sue can do A, B, and C such that any two of them would not ruin her, but all three bankrupt her if done together. But then it seems like whichever happens to be the third will be identical with her ruining her finances -- as the straw that breaks the camel's back. Thompson's "none by itself adds up to that" seems to obscure this feature of Davidson's theory of action: what casual relations an event ends up standing in can determine what descriptions are true of it. "By itself" an event doesn't tell you what descriptions are true of it. Other events are relevant for that.

Another thought I had was: it's a gestalt thing. Whole is more than its parts. Maybe nothing she did was, by itself, "ruining her finances", but she just ended up with ruined finances after doing various things. But here it looks like either there is no action of hers which is a ruining of her finances, or else the thing she did which is a ruining is composed of the other things she did. In the former case, there is no action to account for; in the latter case, the fact that no part of the action is describable as a ruining doesn't cut against Davidson, that I can see. For there is an action which is describable as a ruining: the event composed of A, B, and C (or whatever went it to the relevant gestalt in this case). If there are gestalt-y actions, then I'm not seeing why Davidson has any problems with that.

Also: saying "this is no worse than the Sorite's paradox" does not seem like much of a help when trying to defend a doctrine. But this seems to be what Thompson says here:

Such an appeal to the idea of vagueness carries with it a number of theoretical difficulties, but supposing them handled, the same vagueness would no doubt then be found to infect the division of our nested classes of descriptions into "pre-intentional" and intentional. In that case, my conjecture ── viz., "Acts of moving something somewhere intentionally always have an initial segment which is also an act of moving something somewhere intentionally" ── could again be sustained, if only it were given the sort of construction that an adequate theory of vagueness would supply for such sentence as "No one is made bald by the loss of a single hair".

I'm not sure how such a construction could work for Thompson's conjecture. Avoiding the Sorite's requires mathematical induction breaking down at some point (or else removing hairs one at a time until they're all gone does not give you a bald head). It seems plausible that vague terms are like this. Induction with them only works for a bit, then it shades off into not working anymore. You take a hirsute head, remove a hair (not bald), remove a hair (not bald), and then eventually he's bald. (What you say in the details of this are, as far as I can tell, generally still up in the air.) It doesn't strike me as very plausible that Thompson's terminology her employs vague terms. "Initial segments of acts" is not the sort of phrase that you pick up from ordinary language (the usual home of vagueness); it's a technical term in the theory of action. More to the point, I don't know how the vagueness story would go, here. You identify an initial segment of an action (which gives you another action), and then an initial segment for that action, and then at some point you can't? (This also seems to cut against Thompson's "quasi-Kantian" defense of his claim, which rests on the "Axioms of Intuition"'s claim that what is given in intuition is always an extensive magnitude. Thompson seems to offer two different and incompatible defenses for his weird view.)

A Note on Triangulation

2009-02-12T23:13:00.004-06:00

While rereading Rorty's response to Ramberg in "Rorty and His Critics", I had a thought about why McDowell doesn't seem to like the notion of "triangulation". Davidson introduces the notion as something that doesn't require language. Monkeys can triangulate -- they react one way to snakes, another way to lions, and another way to eagles, and monkeys can notice these different reactions, and in this way avoid predators. Which makes it seem like the point of the notion is to explain animal behavior, primarily; human behavior is then a type of animal behavior that it explains. I've reread several of Davidson's later essays recently, and he pretty consistently uses it in ways that can be read like this: triangulation is something generic to rational and non-rational animals, and in interpretation of a rational animal some additional factor is brought into view. Triangulation + Language = Rational Animals.

Davidsonians seem to speak a bit differently (though I'd argue that they simply bring forth what's already present in Davidson's texts). Here's the bit from Davidson that Rorty, in his response to Ramberg, said he had previously found "utterly opaque":

We depend on our linguistic interpretations with others to yield agreement on the properties of numbers and the sort of structures in nature that allow us to represent those structures in numbers. We cannot in the same way agree on the structure of sentences or thoughts we use to chart the thoughts and meanings of others, for the attempt to reach such agreement simply sends us back to the very process of interpretation on which all agreement depends.

And here's Rorty:

I did not understand the second sentence in this passage until I read it in Ramberg's way. Read that way, it can be paraphrased as saying "Whereas you can, in the course of triangulation, criticize any given claim about anything you talk about, you cannot ask for agreement that others shall take part in a process of triangulation." The inescapability of norms is the inescapability, for both describers and agents, of triangulating.

This is a far cry from "running when the other monkey hoots, climbing a tree when he hollers". If McDowell reads "triangulation" in the more generic sense, this might explain why he misses some of the more Gadamerian elements of Davidson.

In addition, rereading Rorty's response has reminded me just how fantastic this volume is. This stuff is just captivating. Really terrific.

"Active Thoughts?" What?

2009-02-11T17:24:00.002-06:00

Here is a description from the UChicago time schedule from this quarter:

51603. Active Thought. A widely accepted historical narrative celebrates the liberation achived by the modernist Fregean understanding of predication from the Aristotelian pre-modernist conceptions. The pre-modernist saw the inner composition of thoughts as displaying an intellectual act. Frege according to this widely accepted narrative had discredit this pre-modernist picture and gave us an act-free conception of logical unity of thoughts. Thus according the post Fregean understanding a person—a soul is logicaly speaking, non-active substance. On the face of it, the considerations Frege brought against the pre-modernist conception were strong. Yet we shall that by accepting them as conclusive modernist philosophy took a wrong turn. We present a conception of active thoughts which is not susceptible to the Fregean objections against the traditional conception. We shall consider the implications active conceptions of thoughts to our understanding of the nature of the soul and of Being. Professor Irad Kimhi.

When looking at courses for the coming quarter last December, the consensus was that this paragraph was totally incomprehensible. It started off like something you understood, and then it suddenly got weird, and then... well, you can read that last sentence. Kimhi totally means it.

I have been sitting in on the course (we had our sixth meeting this afternoon); it is wild.

I'd already typed up my notes for the first class (weeks ago, right after it got out); I have put them under the fold. The weird examples are Kimhi's. (A more recent class had "humans cannot eat and drink at the same time". He retracted it when it was pointed out that they can in fact do that. He changed it to "cannot breath and drink at the same time", which is at least closer to true.) I've polished them up only slightly, for readability. I think they give a good impression of the course so far: a whole slew of... things... and some vague feeling that there is something important, somewhere, in all of it.

also: a quotation from Kimhi, from 1995. Still hilariously accurate.

There was a handout of quotations (four pages).
Aristotle, Metaphysics Gamma III 1005b 15-30.
J. Lukasiewics, "The Three Versions of the Principle of Non-Contradiction" (Kimhi is supposed to put this on Chalk).
De Interpretatione 16b26, 16b33, 17a25, 17a26.
De Anima 426b29.
J. Lukasiewics, "Aristotle on the Law of Non-Contradiction" (from "Articles on Aristotle 3. Metaphysic. ed. J Barnes, M. Schofield, R. Sorabji)
S. Cavell, "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy", MwM p.91
G. Frege, Negation (extract not read in first class) [we spent the next two classes talking about Frege's "Negation" at great length. Great, great length. The thing Kimhi was interested in was pretty much what Geach was interested in in "Assertion". The thing about conditionals.]
B. Spinoza, Ethics II P49 Scholium.

1)The Shulamite is dark;
2)The Shulamite is pale.
-This pair of beliefs cannot coexist in one consciousness -- the psychological law of noncontradiction (PLNC). They are psychologically incompossible.

-These states of affairs cannot coexist -- they are incompatible. The ontological law of noncontradiction (OLNC). They are logically/metaphysically impossible.

What is the relation between PLNC and OLNC?

Four possibilities:
Psychologism: Reduce OLNC to PLNC.
"Logopsychism": Reduce PLNC to OLNC.
Psychological Dualism: PLNC =/= OLNC
Psychological Monism - Spinoza, where Kimhi wants to put Wittgenstein. AKA "Immanentism". [Six weeks in, we are still waiting to hear how this works.]

Three versions of the law of noncontradiction (Lukasiewics):
(1) The Ontological: it is impossible for the same thing both to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.
(2) The Psychological: it is impossible for the same person at the same time to believe the same thing is and is not.
(3) The Logical (Semantological): "The most certain of all principles is that contradictory assertions are not true at the same time" Met. Gamma VI 1011b13-14.

(3) and (1) collapse into one another given the T-schema, ["p" is true IFF p].

The LNC involves simple predication for Aristotle. In "The Shulamite is dark" the predicate "is dark" is affirmed of the Shulamite. The LNC is a restriction on what can be predicated.

A common trope in modern philosophy: take an ancient concept, make a modern distinction. This is not a return to the ancient concept.

For Aristotle, sentences are things like prayers and assertions -- acts. Sentences are not selfstanding entities.

For Aristotle, "S is P" = affirmation that S is P = belief that S is P.
Contrasted with Frege, where affirmation/belief that S is P is a complex entity: a proposition plus a force (assertional force + proposition = affirmed proposition).

Kimhi claims that Lukasiewics, Husserl and Frege all endorse "psychological dualism".

Lukasiewics criticizes Aristotle for treating mental acts as things standing in logical relations.

Comment made in response to Cavell quote, regarding "psychological monism": "you have to depsychologize psychology and psychologize logic". Kimhi makes a comparison to Heidegger, where "fundamental ontology" just is "the existential analytic of Dasein", and to Aristotle's claim that "the soul is all being". Investigation of the soul is investigation of all being.

Immanentism collapses into logopsychism if you do not psychologize logic.

For Frege judgement has two components -- a content, a truthbearer, and an act of affirmation.
A properly logical component (stands in logical relations) and a psychological act.

One question the course is meant to address: What is the force you face when you cannot avoid a certain conclusion?

(The pressure of a logical law.) [We read "What The Tortoise Said to Achilles" for the third class, and have discussed it a great deal. Kimhi thinks that Frege is not entitled to say the Tortoise is doing anything wrong, except in the sense that he is doing what he ought not to do. He is doing what he says, accepting "P" and "P>Q" and rejecting "Q" etc.]
Luk. says Aristotle regards this as a logical pressure. Accuses Aristotle of confusing logic with psychology.

Luk. understands "belief" like Frege does: propositional attitude + proposition as its object

on the subjective side, the attitude. Force.

on the objective side, the proposition (truthbearer, sentence). Content.

Kimhi: Desire treated as a force directed at a proposition rather than a state of affairs. Specifying a proposition not specifying a state of affairs. [Kimhi taught a seminar on Lacan last quarter; I am guessing this is related to Lacan's discussion of desire in "The Signification of the Phallus". When I realized I'd drawn a connection to something in Lacan I'd read, part of me died inside. ;__; ]

One view is that specifying a proposition is specifying a possible state of affairs.

Desire not towards a state of affairs, but to a state of affairs obtaining (on the Fregean picture). [the preceding lines were in response to a question from Gabriel Lear -- there are six-to-eight professors attending this course, and then are a great deal of fun to watch. Robert Pippin is the happiest man on the planet. And Kimhi's feet get held to the fire often.]

Modern conception of sentences: Sentences are forceless things. Forces given from outside.
Aristotelian view: Sentence is a product of an act. Force characterizes the act.

Aristotle -- can believe that P and can hope that P. Not enough to force decomposition into force and propositions.

Kimhi calls the entity/act distinction a "metaphysical dualism"

One thing Kimhi wants to achieve is a proper understanding of the distinction between act and entity.

Searle's denial that belief/fear/hope are "mental acts"
Sellars's "Science and Metaphysics" p.74, section 33, "Intentionality" (both these were read to us by Kimhi)

Intentional action not a *type* of action.
Intentional/nonintentional a seperate question from question of type of action.
Raising of arm, unintentional raising of arm.

Sellars: Nonsense to speak of taking something to be the case on purpose.

"Act" as in "actuality" not "action". Energeia and Dunamis. Metaphysics Theta VI & X.

Carpenter in energeia is a carpenter in action.

Metaphysics Theta has a discussion of truth and falsity in a book about actuality/potentiality (energeia/dunamis)

actuality -- not something that can be done intentionally or unintentionally

[Kimhi has said a bit more about this sort of thing since then -- the Aristotelian idea of "actuality" looms large in his thought. An assertion or a negation is an actualization of a "determinable"; the assertion or denial can be true or false, but the determinable cannot. Only acts are truthbearers, for Kimhi. "Nothing spatial-like can be a truthbearer." He is like, a for-real Spinozist.]

PLNC: Affirmation and denial cannot coexist in one consciousness.

Witticker (sic?) -- the real subject of "De Interpretatione" is the contradictory pair. [I don't know if I spelled this guy's name right, or what the article referred to is.]

Not that contradictory pair is a more specific sense of assertion; study of assertion is study of contradictory pair.

A distinction that is often not made: Set of inconsistent beliefs, and set of beliefs that are psychologically incompossible.
We all have inconsistent beliefs; no one can have incompossible beliefs.

Not all incompossible sets are inconsistent:
{~P, I believe that P}; {P? P}
(two examples of incompossible sets)

First is incompossible, but not inconsistent.
Second: I cannot wonder if P and believe that P.

The psychomodal relation of two members of an inconsistent pair is incompossibility.

Inconsistent pairs are incompossibles which are not incompossible with a third.

Meg is blonde; Meg is brunette. Also excludes "Meg is a redhead".
Not contradictory, but incompossible.

Contradictories need some form of excluded middle.

Thinker never in a position in which both of a pair are incompossible with existing beliefs and the pair are incompossible: this can serve as a definition of inconsistent pairs.

[For anyone who read this far, trivia: Kimhi spent the first half of our fourth class with his fly down. While standing at the front of the class to lecture. An hour and a half like that.]

are a contradictory pair IFF
of compossible beliefs
No such that
incompossible and
incompossible

Never in a position to reject both members of a contradictory pair or to accept both.

Two views of the "act form" of a contradictory pair:
Pair of contradictory acts are affirmation and denial: same content, different forces
Pair of contradictory acts are affirmation of P and affirmation of ~P: different contents

Classical: + -----> <------ -
Modern: -------> <+>
-------> <->

[Kimhi draws a lot of whiteboard diagrams. They are hard to reproduce in ASCII art okay ;__; ]

Classical: Negation sign not part of content. Displays force of act.
Frege: Negation sign part of the content.

Aristotle: Cannot assert P & ~P, as cannot present oneself as knowing both P and ~P.

Assertion holds subject and predicate together.
Denial holds subject and predicate apart.

Descartes: Affirmation is an act of the will. Intellect can grasp an idea, then will can go on to affirm it. (Spinoza criticizes Descartes's dualism of intellect and will.)

"Propositionalism" -- "Combination theory" (two names for Kimhi's target)

Aristotle: Affirmation creates unity of truthbearer.
Descartes: Logical unity of truthbearer independent of affirmation or denial.

Descartes middle figure between Aristotle and Frege.

Views of contradictory pairs:
Combination-Seperation theory (Aristotle)
Only combination with negative and positive predicates (Hobbes)
Combination theories: positive or negative attitude towards object (Descartes)
Only affirmation. Negation part of content of propositions. (Frege)

An aporia in Spinoza's criticism of Descartes: If the two members of an inconsistent pair do not share a common content, how do they oppose one another (Kimhi emphasized the point by slapping his fists against one another). First class ended with this aporia.

reading those notes again, it actually does make more sense now (five weeks later). Still, lots of weirdness in this course.

too good to be buried in the middle of a sea of scraps

2009-02-07T00:33:00.002-06:00

From a recent post at Siris:

"Logic makes us reject certain arguments, but it cannot make us believe any argument." Lebesgue
- the editors of Lakatos, Proofs & Refs (p. 53n4) claim that modern logic shows this is false if taken literally; we can determine, precisely, that some arguments are valid, & therefore logic can make us believe the argument even if not the conclusion.
- But what we can characterize precisely is validity for a domain; and thus we are back at Lebesgue, for one can say that we still have the question of whether the domain is rightly chosen. The editors have slipped, either they have forgotten Lakatos for the moment or think logic works differently from mathematics.
-I see by their further note on Lakato's historical note (56n) that this is their considered opinion. Disappointingly unimaginative and uncritical; what is worse, they think they can have this for free: infallible arguments without infallible principles. This is simply absurd; it is pulling certainty out of a hat.

Incidentally, if anyone was wondering about the short piece on Lakatos in the recent Quine collection, here's a summary: "This is a book about Euler's formula. It is a lot of fun and I enjoyed it." About the only point of substance was: Quine liked that mathematics looked like it was being revised like happens in the other sciences. Apart from that, it's pretty much "This is fun, you should read the book if you like things that are fun." Which is a reasonable way to do a book review.

Pippin Interview

2009-01-27T19:22:00.003-06:00

Skip to the last part of this (PDF) for a long-ish interview with Pippin about various things Hegelio-Academic. It's a good read.

I didn't know that Pippin started out as a literature guy, or that he had a seminar with Sellars. And the stuff about the structure of universities and the analytic/continental split is really interesting -- Pippin discussed some related topics on the first day of his Hegel seminar; he clearly feels pretty strongly about all this.

(HT: Perverse Egalitarianism -- incidentally, bjk's comment on that post is something sublime.)

Eliminating Externality

2009-01-17T02:22:00.003-06:00

I found this Sebastian Roedl paper while looking through some old e-mails. It's a response to McDowell's "Hegel's Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant" (now available in "Having the World in View"); the first footnote in McDowell's paper refers to a response by Roedl from when the paper appeared in English, and that's what this is.

It's good. I really don't have anything to add to it; just go and read it. It's only 14 pages.

The last part has Roedl working out in more detail how the Critique of Pure Reason's categories turn into the Science of Logic's categories, once one eliminates a problematic part of the intuition/concept dualism. The example is a fairly standard one for the from-Kant-to-Hegel genre -- it's a Hegelian treatment of the first Antinomy -- but Roedl's presentation is one of the nicer versions I've encountered. Roedl also looks at why Hegel doesn't have a Kantian architectonic, which isn't a topic I can recall seeing explicitly treated of before. It was nice to see the details of that laid out.

Roedl also disagrees with McDowell's reading of the structure of the Transcendental Deduction; that particular topic is one I'd need to do more work on to judge concerning it. Roedl's reconstruction looks more like what's actually going on in Kant's text, from what I recall of it, but I'd have to go through the Deduction with McDowell's version in mind to really decide the matter.

In any case, Roedl seems to me to be entirely right in saying that Mind and World isn't really concerned with trying to be a "simple route" from the first Critique to Hegelianism, nor is it trying to be another version of the Transcendental Deduction (contra the last footnote in McDowell's paper). In the responses in "Reading McDowell" McDowell made it pretty clear that he wanted to avoid having to give a Transcendental Deduction a la Kant, and that avoiding this obligation was one of the goals of Mind and World. And while McDowell certainly intended Mind and World to be a bridge to Hegel in many respects, calling the book a "simple" version of what Hegel does in the Science of Logic is just disingenuous. The Science of Logic is concerned with a good deal more than just correcting Kant's idealism. Mind and World is a much more modest work. Which of course is no criticism of it; McDowell's rhetoric simply got away from him, I think.

First impressions of "The Representation of Life"

2009-01-13T18:49:00.002-06:00

This quarter is busy. I'm currently sitting in on four classes (three of them seminars) in addition to the courses I'm actually signed up for. And I'm considering trying to sit in on the Mill seminar, since apparently Donatelli wants more people in there and I figure he's a very pleasant lecturer in "Twentieth Century Moral Philosophy.

All of this is very tiring. I have been getting to sleep pretty early recently, just because I can't stay awake anymore after days like these. So, I haven't found time to edit/revise a post I wrote up about Thompson a week ago. It seems a shame to not post it, so here it is, sans revisions. I stuck it behind the fold, since it's rough.

This quarter is looking pretty good so far!

A while back someone recommended Thompson's stuff to me as being a contemporary attempt to "rehabilitate Hegel" (in a similar vein as McDowell). Having read "The Representation of Life", I can certainly see what he was getting at. This article reminded me quite a bit of Jim Kreines's "The Logic of Life: Hegel's Philosophical Defense of Teleology", which is now available in the Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth Century Philosophy -- though I read it online in January of '07 (I know the date because I know where I saw it linked).

I like Kreines's article a lot better, though I should perhaps reread it before coming down too hard on Thompson. (A quick glance shows that "The Representation of Life" is footnoted once, so Kreines plausibly draws some of the things I like from Thompson.) I certainly prefer Kreines's context as a way of getting at these issues -- discussing teleology in light of Kant strikes me as a promising approach; discussing it in light of Frege seems to lead to really awkward prose and load-bearing metaphors. (You can discuss teleology with Kant and he provides you with ready-made terms: regulative ideal, constitutive ideal, reciprocal causation of whole and part. Frege gives you nothing to work with except for the idea of a logical distinction akin to concept/object.) Kreines's article is a pleasant read; Thompson's prose is... distinctive.

It saddens me to see that Thompson wants Swampman to do work for him. I still think that Swampman is a lousy "intuition pump", and I'm not a fan of those to begin with. Extending Swampman-type conclusions (not only can't he think, but he can't be alive!) seems to me to be hopeless -- if anyone is convinced by this sort of hypothetical, it can only be because they already agreed with Thompson to begin with. Kreines's article mentions the same idea (a simple one-celled organism created by a lightning strike) in the context of a Kantian response to Hegel, and I'm inclined to prefer his take on it to Thompson's: skepticism is unmotivated here, because insofar as the thing maintains itself organically it looks like a perfectly good organism. Swampman would only look like he can't be alive, then, because we look at him at a snapshot, or else we dogmatically presume that since his birth was miraculous he can't be a perfectly normal animal. Kreines stresses that such an entity might reproduce ("reproduce", to avoid begging the question against Thompson), and that the offspring would be unproblematically alive: they have the features they have because of the sort of thing they are. (If it's "indeterminate" what sort of thing they are, which seems to be the sort of thing Thompson wants to say about Swampman, based on his "poly-metamorphic butterfly" example -- well, I guess I don't see what's the problem with having an "indeterminate" species. It's not as if it's utterly indeterminate; many things are ruled out by even a snapshot of Swampman's life/"life". An elephant doesn't look like Swampman even for an instant, so he can't be an elephant, etc.)

Looking to Hegel rather than Thompson also makes it less unsettling to see natural selection so rarely mentioned when talking about specieses. I suspect Thompson would stress that he's discussing something logical/conceptual rather than empirical, and so Darwin is out of place here; I worry about the idea that we can happily talk about how we understand living things without looking at... how we moderns understand living things. (Is it a form of scientism to feel unnerved that when Thompson gives examples for how species are described, he cites Aristotle's Historia animalium?)

I don't know what Thompson is trying to get at when he mentions "Cartesian-Davidsonian" intermediaries at the end of section two. I think he's siding with Anscombe against Davidson, but I can't tell quite what the issue under discussion is. Hopefully reading Intention will clear it up.

I don't like the ethical direction things seem to be heading.

If someone then asks, "But what does 'what most of them do' have to do with what it does?", the answer will have to be, "Not much, really." But if, in the other case, someone asks, "What bearing does 'what they do' have on what it does?", the answer will have to be, "Everything." A true judgment of natural defect supplies an 'immanent critique' of its subject.

Well, it could show that (say) some wolf is a bad wolf. But a bad wolf may be just what one wants, or just what the wolf wants. ('The' wolf does not live particularly long in many environments. 'The' wolf suffers in many circumstances. In view of these sorts of aristotelian categoricals, wolves might be advised to be bad wolves.) -- I can easily imagine someone thinking that one ought to be "more than human" -- that to be a "good human" (and not more) is really something blameworthy. (Nietzsche probably said something like this. Kojeve clearly has something like this kicking around.)

I don't want to give the wrong impression: I find a lot of what Thompson says perfectly congenial. I'd just prefer to get it from other sources. Such as Hegel directly.

Davidson, Monkeys, and McDowell: Trianglers

2008-12-31T10:10:00.002-06:00

I got the two new McDowell collections for Christmas. (In case you didn't know they were out already: they are. "The Engaged Intellect" and "Having the World in View" are the titles. Go and buy them!) Lots of delicious essay here.

So far I've only read one essay from them: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. (A quick look at my McDowell folder shows that I've had a copy of this essay for some time; I have no idea why I hadn't read it before. I didn't even recognize the name when I saw it in the table of contents for "The Engaged Intellect". Seems to have slipped through the cracks. I must have assumed it was not about the Davidson volume, for some reason.)

McDowell's "Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective" is a lecture on the third volume of Davidson's essays (which I will refer to as “ISO”, to disambiguate it from McDowell’s essay); apparently there was going to be a symposium about his work generally, but Davidson was able to get the topic changed to that volume in particular. McDowell's piece is pretty straightforwardly "Here are places in the volume where I want to poke at." It's a good essay.

Unsurprisingly, he agrees with the conclusion of "Three Varieties of Knowledge" wholeheartedly. Knowledge of one's own mind, of other minds, and of the external world all presuppose each other. His only criticism of the essay is that he dislikes how Davidson seems to "give priority to the intersubjective". He quotes Davidson as saying that "we come to have the belief-truth contrast through having the concept of intersubjective truth", that we "arrive at the concept of objective truth" through the idea of intersubjective truth. (p.105 of ISO – the essay is “Rational Animals”.) McDowell is puzzled by the suggestion that one of the legs of the tripod is somehow giving rise to the other two, and urges Davidson to adopt a more clearly holistic view.

I think McDowell is just misreading Davidson. Davidson's point is not that intersubjective knowledge somehow grounds the other two kinds of knowledge, but that once we have a notion of ourselves as part of "a community of minds" we also understand "the belief-truth contrast" (and the truth which is opposed to belief is "objective truth" –“the concept of an intersubjective world is the concept of an objective world, a world about which each communicator can have beliefs”, p.105 of ISO). There's no priority given to intersubjectivity, because Davidson could just as well have said that "we come to have the idea of intersubjective truth through having the concept of a belief-truth contrast" (after all, the distinction between what people believe and what is the case is just the sort of distinction needed to have an idea of "intersubjective truth"). So, I think Davidson already held the view McDowell urged upon him in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, at least by the time of McDowell’s essay. It's only an infelicitous phrasing that suggests he has an unbalanced tripod. (I should probably hunt down the issue of "Philosophy and Phenomenological Research" this essay was originally printed in, to see if Davidson published a response to the symposium.)

It’s worth noting that the passages McDowell struggles with are from an essay first published in 1982; “Rational Animals” is one of the earliest essays in ISO (tied with “Empirical Content”). “Three Varieties of Reference” comes along almost a decade later

This essay is the most I've ever seen McDowell say about triangulation; he makes it fairly clear why he generally doesn't talk about it. It seems to be tied to his qualms about Davidson on animal minds:

We need more than just the insistence, which I applaud, that our ways of understanding brutes differ crucially from our ways of understanding ourselves and one another. We need a positive line about our ways of understanding brutes [this is an odd thing for a "quietist" to say-D], and it is not satisfying to suggest that crediting them with intelligent engagements with their environment is just a convenience, called for only by the fact that we lack detailed knowledge about their internal control machinery.

That Davidson's discussion of animal minds (cf. "Rational Animals") is unsatisfying is certainly right (cf. Finkelstein's essay in the Cora Diamond Fechtschrift). McDowell tries to tie this unsatisfyingness to the doctrine of triangulation -- to be fair, triangulation features prominently in "Rational Animals" -- and makes some vague gestures towards a view of animal minds which comes closer to viewing them from an interpretive standpoint (though McDowell says he finds Davidson's "human chauvinism" on the point of animal minds "perfectly congenial"). These parts of the article are all pretty high-altitude and not very clearly sketched out, but McDowell’s worry about Davidson on animal minds seems pretty standard, and his suggested repair seems anodyne. But the connection to the doctrine of triangulation isn’t made very clearly at all.

I suspect that McDowell doesn't quite appreciate the role triangulation plays for Davidson. For instance, he writes that "even if we grant that triangulation might be essential for objectivity, that does not warrant the suggestion of a priority for intersubjectivity." (154) I don't think Davidson gives intersubjectivity any such priority, so if McDowell thinks that this "priority" is part of why Davidson talks about triangulation so much in his late works: Well, that seems like a problem.

Though it doesn't prevent many of McDowell's comments in this essay from being insightful, I think he underestimates how holistic Davidson's picture is (especially by the time ISO is published). He admits to finding Davidson's "imagery of exploitation (taking advantage, making use of) [intersubjectivity/triangulation] a bit mysterious" (156); I think it would cease to be mysterious if he just read Davidson as already holding some of the views he urges upon him. McDowell frets about Davidson's claim that rational animals "make use of the triangular situation to form judgements about the world" (p.130 of ISO); I think Davidson simply meant that subjects can be subjects because they're subjects who understand one another in a common world. They can "form judgements about the world" because of the tripod of subjectivity/intersubjectivity/objectivity. Triangulation is just an abstract form of the tripod -- the two reactors and their common cause are the three things the tripod's "varieties of knowledge" are concerned with, after all, not just one of them. (That the remark from p.130 of ISO shouldn’t be a case for stumbling is, I think, made clear by context: Davidson is just trying to express “why language is essential for thought”, and he makes it clear that he could say “much more” on the topic.)

As an aside, I think that a suitable account of animal minds needn't talk about triangulation at all (nor do I think Davidson thought it did, though he may have thought that a suitable account of "animal minds" would just show them to be really unmindlike after all -- sometimes Davidson just starts to sound like Descartes when talking about animals). A lot of animals don't react to others of their kind in any particular way (though of course social animals do), and I don't see that there's any reason to think an animal mind would have to have any notion of itself as anything like "one mind among others". Supposing sharks don't need any educating, but act only on instinct, and never work in concert with other sharks, I can't see why a shark mind couldn't be considered to be a perfectly good solipsist: it could treat all objects it encountered (apart from itself) as merely moving, not reacting to anything. In which case the shark mind does not triangulate. All of this, of course, needs the caveat that talking about "animal minds" using the terms we normally use for the normal sort of minds might lead to seriously problematic anthropomorphizing of animal minds. Also I suspect that sharks are actually smarter than this. But the point remains: intersubjectivity is clearly a lot less important when you're talking about animal minds.

Also: McDowell worries that Davidson doesn't seem to anywhere acknowledge the special role played by "hinge propositions". (He says similar things, at a bit more length but less clearly, in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism".) I don't think anything is missing in Davidson here, though I think McDowell is right that he doesn't have anything like what McDowell is looking for. (After my Nth rereading of "Davidson in Context", which is the first appendix to Mind and World, I've become convinced that what McDowell thinks about "hinge propositions" is central to his defense of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the "cutting down to size" of the Quine/Duhem Thesis, the wary glance cast at the indeterminacy of translation, etc. etc. In this essay he identifies propositions which have a "status as hinges" with "fundamental propositions about reality, such as that there were things that happened a very long time ago" (157). It would be nice if I could find someplace where McDowell just talked about hinge propositions as such, rather than in passing. If he has an extended discussion of them anywhere, I really do need to look at that for my thesis. I'm pretty sure I can guess the sort of view McDowell has operating in the background of "Davidson in Context", but I don't have a clear grip on just why he thinks what he does.) Incidentally, I think Davidson does have an essay specifically about these sorts of propositions, and I think he misapplies his own ideas: I recall "Method and Metapyhysics" as being one of Davidson's worst essays. (I should reread it, to make sure, but I recall Davidson trying to use the principle of charity to conclude to a great many of our specifically metaphysical beliefs being true -- he gave examples. I don't think this is the right way to go about things. But, again, I should reread the essay.)

Postscript: Davidson, in a piece from around the same time as Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective seems to commit the same sin I above attribute to McDowell: he fails to realize how much McDowell's views agree with his own. Davidson, from "Quine's Externalism":

The additional force of the social is best brought out by posing two questions to those who have promoted perceptual externalism without linking it to the social (I think here of those who have followed Russell, like Gareth Evans and John McDowell). One question is this: where, in the infinite causal chains that lead to the sense organs, should we locate the elements that give content to our observation sentences and their accompanying perceptual beliefs? The short answer is that the location is given by two or more observers whose simultaneous interactions with each other and the world triangulate the relevant stimulus. This is something one person alone cannot do.

This sort of criticism of McDowell by Davidson makes it a good bit clearer what McDowell is responding to in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. I can easily see how McDowell could take this sort of criticism as implying that "triangulation" names something that a mere fan of Davidson-style interpretivism like McDowell is ignoring; McDowell's puzzlement at what's going on with triangulation-talk is then easy to grok. I'm not sure why Davidson thinks this sort of question is a problem for McDowell, since you can answer it by just talking about the special way observation sentences figure in interpretation... in exactly the way Davidson does. Which McDowell is happy to do. (Perhaps his criticism hits Evans; I wouldn't know. I suppose it probably does hit some position or other which Russell held at some point. But it’s not as if McDowell was just trying to rehabilitate “knowledge by acquaintance” or something like that.)

That Davidson is being less than charitable in the questions he poses to McDowell is even clearer from the "second question" he poses: "What, in the process of acquiring a first language and propositional thought, gives us the idea of error (and so of truth)?" That Davidson has an answer to this that McDowell can't steal strikes me as highly implausible. (The extremely condensed account he gives later in the paragraph is clearly not his whole story, but, again, I can see how McDowell takes this sort of mode of presentation of Davidson's views to imply that the intersubjective somehow has a "priority".)

Incidentally, I think that “Quine’s Externalism” should’ve been collected someplace, even if it wasn’t something Davidson had a chance to edit for publication. It would’ve fit nicely in the first part of “Truth, Language and History”. There’s another Davidson piece, simply titled “Externalism”, which I mean to read soon; that also looks like something that needed to be more readily accessible. (I have recently begun hunting for Davidson pieces which were unjustly not collected in the five volumes of his papers, as it occurred to me that pretty soon I’m going to run out of Davidson to read.)

PPS: Triangler. Macross Frontier's music is fantastic, as befits a Macross series. Yoko Kanno is still fantastic; "What 'bout my star" is probably my favorite track of the year. Mizuki Nana's "Trickster" is my favorite album though.

Rorty and the Dogmas

2008-12-31T01:27:00.003-06:00

In The Search for Logically Alien Thought Conant compares Descartes's pious refusal to claim that God was "bound by the laws of logic" to Quine's claim that there are no truths which are in principle immune to revision, that there are no a priori truths. Conant compares Cartesian piety (of the old-fashioned sort) to Quinean scientistic piety: Who are we to say what Future Science will show us it is correct to think? This comparison is only made as a segue into what really interests Conant in this paper (which I haven't gotten all the way through yet), but he thinks "there is certainly something to the thought that certain classic papers of Putnam and Quine offer perhaps the closest thing to be found in twentieth-century philosophy to an attempt to rehabilitate Descartes's claim that it would be hubris for us to assert of an omnipotent God that He would be inexorably bound by the laws of logic -- those laws which happen to bind our finite minds."

Put like this, it occurs to me that this is similar to something Rorty likes to say: We shouldn't rule out that someday smarter, better people will come along who will show us that what we've said and done up to this point isn't the best we could've said and done. (Which isn't to deny that, so far, the best we've come up with is the best we've come up with, and we can't presently see how it could be improved on, or perhaps can't even imagine something being better than it.) Rorty even connects this with piety (in the old-fashioned sense), since both are tied to hope, the future, what is-to-come etc. It seems to me that Rorty's way of tying Quine to old-fashioned religious "piety" has the inverse effect of Conant's: Rorty's makes the Quinean view of the a priori appear genuinely humble, rather than fanatical. We aren't bowing in awe of Future Science, but merely holding open the possibility that the future will disclose things which are world-shakingly important (as has happened before).

I think a Rortyan approach also lets us see what's wrong with responses to Quine that present certain propositions ("Not every statement is both true and false") and challenge the Quinean to show how it could be rational to reject them: The Rortyan-Quinean can agree that we can't make sense of how it could be rational to reject the given proposition, while holding back from the conclusion that the proposition is therefore a priori true, incorrigible, unrevisable, untouchable by all possible experience, etc. For it might just be our present epistemic limitations that prevent us from seeing what a rational revision would be like, in any given case. Note that these "limitations" aren't the limitations of "a finite thinker" or "a being who cognizes through concepts" or "a being with a discursive understanding" or anything like that -- they're just blind spots we happen to have at this current moment. That such blind spots are a real possibility is something we can see through historical study (people can just overlook possibilities for long periods of time), which is also how we can see that there doesn't appear to be anything particularly systematic or consistent in what blind spots thinkers have. Sometimes, people just miss things, or an inferior option becomes the dominant one, or a paralogism garners wide assent, without there being anything interesting to say about why this happens in myriad cases.

Of course, this sort of historicizing shouldn't lead us into skepticism (which Rorty is less reliable on). It might be the case that something we can't see a way to do without is just right, and that the alternatives we can't imagine would all be inferior to our current practices anyway. And even where we can imagine how things could be otherwise, this doesn't commit us to any real doubts about how things actually are -- a contingent/a posteriori/empirical truth can be as certain as any. The question of whether a proposition is true (or of whether we should be sure of its truth) is to be held apart from whether or not to we should say it's true a priori, unrevisable etc. The Quinean/Rortyan view I want to advocate is just that we shouldn't say the latter sort of thing about anything -- we shouldn't pretend that some of our beliefs are protected from criticism in the way some philosophers have taken them to be. For any belief, one ought to stand ready to modify that belief if given a compelling reason to do so, and there's no telling in advance what reasons might eventually present themselves (for if one knew all such reasons beforehand, they would never provide an occasion to change one's beliefs). Eternal corrigibility is the price of rationality.

Go on, guess

2008-12-26T02:18:00.001-06:00

Guess who wrote this:

Because it was unclear how to harness Wittgenstein's insight, it was hard to view Wittgenstein's later work as leading to a coherent view of the general structure of language. As a result much of the work he inspired led to a dead end. Nevertheless, the basic idea is right: meaning is use; what is needed is to take this in, and apply it to the right use.

It's not Brandom.

(Incidentally, this is the 100th post on this blog.)

An Idle Thought on the History of Analytic Philosophy

2008-12-02T02:22:00.003-06:00

Sellars claimed to be trying to move analytic philosophy from its "Humean phase" to its "Kantian phase". Brandom takes the next step, and wants to move analytic philosophy to its "Hegelian phase". The next logical step would be: Kierkegaard phase. Which is presumably when we start making fun of the very idea of analytic philosophy, and recognize that the very attempt shows that there's something wrong with us. (Rorty clearly saw this coming. Brandom also mentions McDowell's remark about grafting "perfectly healthy pragmatist organs" onto the corpse of analytic philosophy in the afterword to his Locke Lectures, where he defends his attempt to keep the beast alive. I need to find a copy of that so I can finish the afterword. Incidentally, the Amazon reviews for that book are crazy.)

I'm not sure who comes after Kierkegaard. I suppose Heidegger lifts more than he acknowledges from Kierkegaard, so maybe we synch up with the Continentals. (First as tragedy, then as farce.) I for one look forward to analytic philosophy's Derrida Phase.

Recent posts at The Valve are what brought Kierkegaard to mind. Incidentally, I just tracked down a copy of "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity" this afternoon. It is apparently Valve Nostalgia Week.

Appreciating the Little Things

2008-12-01T00:34:00.003-06:00

The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy has footnotes, rather than endnotes. This is the first Cambridge Companion I've noticed this for.

They really do make the book a lot easier to read. Death to endnotes!

(The Cambridge Companions even had endnotes after every essay rather than all at the back of the book, so you couldn't even just stick a bookmark in the back and use that for all of the footnotes in the book.... Just terrible.)

So far, I've read the first two essays, and both are good. I need to read Pinkard's full biography at some point. The distilled version here was a fun read. Much better than Horst Althaus's biography, which is the only full Hegel biography I've read.

Also: I am amused at the title of this volume. None of the essays is about Hegel's relationship to the rest of "nineteenth-century philosophy"; every essay has Hegel alone as its theme. Nothing about Hegel & Marx, or Hegel & Kierkegaard, or even Hegel & Schelling. Every article focuses on a period of Hegel's life or a segment of his work, except for the introduction and Pinkard's biographical chapter. Where Hegel is related to other philosophers, Kant looks to be the main interlocutor. The title of the book just doesn't make any sense. Guessing it was decided as a formality; it has the same format as "Kant and Modern Philosophy", which did have a few pieces about how Kant fit in among his predecessors.

Redding on Opposing Idealism

2008-11-29T02:06:00.002-06:00

"Taking Berkeley as the prototype of idealism is a bit like taking the emu as the prototype of the bird."

(from "Idealism as a love (of wisdom) which dare not speak its name", which reminds me of how crazy the history of the University of Sydney's philosophy department is. I recall reading an article about it online once upon a time: at one point Althusser wrote a letter to one of the two(!) departments, reminding his "comrades" that philosophy shouldn't be entirely collapsed into political engagement. I don't know where I read that. I recall the site also having an article about how "in Australia" was a sentential operator which functioned as a form of negation: Thus "There are black swans in Australia", "Christmas is celebrated in the summertime in Australia", "Some mammals lay eggs in Australia", when of course there are no black swans, Christmas is celebrated in the winter, and mammals give birth to live young.)

"The point of the book is ethical"

2008-11-14T04:23:00.003-06:00

I've occasionally been annoyed at how rarely Wittgenstein interpreters try to flesh out the "ethical point " of the Tractatus. I recall Insight and Illusion particularly annoying me on this point: Hacker clearly had no problems "effing the ineffable" on every other point where there was supposed to be something which "couldn't be said, but only shown", but when he got to "the mystical" he suddenly hits something which really can't be said, and so he just compares it to "feeling absolutely safe" and "wonder and amazement at the existence of the world" -- the only original note Hacker seems to offer as an interpretation of what Wittgenstein was whistling here is that it's "a romantic ethics of the ineffable." "Resolute" readings of the book generally don't leave me greatly more satisfied -- there's often some gesturing to the virtues of avoiding confusion & thinking clearly, but it always seems like thin gruel as ethics.

Kremer's "The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense" explains Wittgenstein by a preliminary discussion of Saints Paul and Augustine, attributes the showing/saying distinction to pride, and claims that the book aims to promote humility & love of one's neighbor. Now that's "not chickening out"!

(Kremer also moves seamlessly from a discussion of "justification" in Romans to a discussion of "justification" in epistemology, which is something I'd always wanted to see done. They're the same word, after all -- we can seek to justify all sorts of things, not just beliefs. Paul's not using "dikaiosune" as some weird technical term; it just means "being right/good", like in normal Greek.)

(I am also reminded here of Isaac Levi's attack on "pedigree epistemology"; Levi's rejection of a justification component in knowledge appears even more radical, in this company. I suppose this sort of thing should be expected when one wants to break down the "theory/practice" dichotomy, like a good pragmatist, but it's still striking when one notices it.)

Kremer's essay is good in general. I like this piece more than "The Cardinal Problem in Philosophy", but I suspect that's partly because I read that one first. "Cardinal Problem"'s central claim about LW's letter seems more plausible now that I've seen more of how Kremer would want to tell this story. Some of the details still seem sketchy -- Kremer likes to claim that "We can't say that p" is nonsense, where it just looks like a contradiction to me (and thus like something with a sense). But his responses to Hacker on the specific points he looks at in the later portions of the paper seem pretty compelling. They require Wittgenstein to have spoken ironically in his letters at some points, but it doesn't seem to me to be a great stretch to think that Wittgenstein didn't talk "straightforwardly" when rushed, since he clearly doesn't in his published works. His writing is just always like that.

Also Kremer quotes an amazon.com reviewer at the start of the paper. The kind of reviewer that spells "philosophy" wrong.

World's Shortest Philosophy Books

2008-11-08T12:33:00.001-06:00

I am easily amused.

(HT: enowning)

An Observation

2008-11-04T23:52:00.003-06:00

I had my suspicions while reading Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, but reading Sellars's Autobiographical Reflections confirmed it for me: Sellars is a terrible prose stylist. Sellars complains in the piece about how difficult he found writing for publication, and I can easily believe that it didn't come naturally to him. This essay makes me want to go back and re-read Davidson's Autobiographical Sketch a third time, just to appreciate how pleasant a read it is.

(Holy crap, there's a used copy on Amazon for $36! That is like $90 less than the last one I saw on there, and I haven't seen one on there at all in months! Library of Living Philosophers volume Get. Alibris actually shows a cheaper copy, in hardcover, but the seller doesn't appear to be reliable and I prefer having Amazon back my transaction.)

One thing that leaped out at me from Sellars's autobiographical essay: He specifically notes that he studied everything but ethics to begin with, but one of the central segues in the piece is Sellars's desire to cash out "deontological intuitionism" in naturalistic terms, partly by means of an appropriation of emotivist insights. It's hard to avoid ethics entirely.

I had no idea that Sellars studied under Quine; I had always thought of them as contemporaries. I guess Quine did start teaching when he was pretty young; he's only Davidon's senior by nine years.

Bashing My Head Against Objects

2008-11-02T02:02:00.004-06:00

Haugeland, "Having Thought" p.262, "Objective Perception":
"[Suddenly you see something that looks like your sister, sounds like your father, moves like your grandmother, and smells like your little brother. Then it has your mother's head on your uncle's body with a baby's limbs, then it has two heads and no torso or limbs and smells like a watermelon and sounds like a truck.]And moments later, [it changes] again, with new divisions and new participants. What would you say? Surely something like: 'Egads! Am I going crazy? Am I being tricked or drugged? I can't really be seeing this -- it's impossible.' That is, you would reject what you seemed to perceive, you would not accept them as objects."

I have no idea what I should say. I suspect I should stare blankly. I might say that I was "seeing something impossible", but I doubt it; that sounds like an idiom I am uncomfortable with. Rather, I suspect I should say (or at least think, since I suspect I would be going catatonic) "I must be seeing things". I wouldn't reject "what I saw" as not being "object(s)"; I would reject what I saw as not being veridical. (Perhaps more properly: I would reject the notion that I was seeing anything at all, rather than hallucinating.)

I should think that I would do exactly the same thing if I were to "see" my great-grandparents standing at the door. They've all been dead for some time, and so I regard it as impossible that they could be at the door (or anywhere else, aside from buried). This is not because the "objects" I "see" as seeming to be my great-grandparents would fail to satisfy some standard qua objects or qua persons, or even qua the persons whom I regard as being my great-grandparents, but simply because I don't think my great-grandparents have risen from the grave. (Perhaps I would revise this judgement if they started making conversation with me, and I became convinced that either they had not died, or they had somehow been resuscitated from their eternal rest. If I did revise my judgement as to whether or not my great-grandparents are/remain dead, then I should now probably have no problem with changing my mind further, and deciding that they had been standing at my door back then, after all.)

In fact, for me to reject the shades as actually being my great-grandparents, they have to satisfy whatever standards I might hold for some objects to be my great-grandparents, in a sense. For the experience I reject as non-veridical is an experience which seems to be of them standing at the door. And so Haugeland's non-objects must satisfy some standard for objecthood, for they seem to be impossible objects. If they have properties which cannot coherently exist in a single object, then they have properties and so have at least that much coherence to them. (I suspect that pressing this line would lead Haugeland to simply reject the example entirely. But it seems to me that he has to have something to replace it, and I don't see that anything can.)

There's no need to come up with counterfactuals this strange: If I were to see Barack Obama riding alongside me on CTA 172 some morning, I should have no doubt that I would decide I was hallucinating (probably from lack of sleep). Is "does not use overcrowded public transit" part of what constitutes a senator? (That seems an odd thing to say. And I could certainly come up with any number of other reasons Obama would not ride my bus, even if it wasn't so crowded. Which ones would be the ones I use to judge whether or not the fellow who looks like him next to me on the bus is actually him?) And in a sense it's possible that Obama might walk down a few blocks and get on the bus. There's a stop less than two blocks from his house, and it's faster than walking.

In each case, I can imagine that (mirabile dictu) further circumstances might incline me to simply accept the wild appearances as veridical. Perhaps the Large Haldron Collider has started to have catastrophic effects, and among those is creating things with two heads that sound like trucks and smell like watermelons, and are prone to sudden shapeshifting. (Perhaps these things only seem to have heads, but really they're just lumps with the shapes of heads, like with statues. Or perhaps the LHC actually creates monsters which exist only for a moment before dissolving, and what Haugeland describes as a kind of shapeshifting is actually many monsters replacing one another in a series. I don't see why it matters what we should say about things like this. Our ordinary ways of talking are perfectly servicable in the workaday world, but words might simply fail us when we come across LHC-derived monstrosities.) [Everything in this paragraph seems like an overwrought version of Austin's bit about the finches that suddenly explode etc., and what we should say about them. I can't recall where that passage is. I need to read more Austin.]

The very idea of giving a "constitutive ideal" for "thinghood" strikes me as inadvisable. It seems obvious to me that here there just aren't rigorous rules for how we talk (and so no such rules for how we regard entities as standing-forth for us, or anything like that). How we handle "things" varies depending on why we give a flip about them in a particular instance.

"To perceive objects is to insist upon their coherent integrity -- the constitutive standard for thinghood -- just like insisting on legality in chess, rationality in interpretation, and ordering with precision and scope in empirical science."

(Emphasis mine.) I think this is a fine place to focus on in saying what seems wrong with how Haugeland approaches these topics. In interpretation one doesn't insist that the speaker one interprets is rational. The presumption of rationality has the character of an "analytical hypothesis", to speak Quinean; one begins by assuming that the interpretand is rational, with the hope of figuring out what it is that they're saying and doing, what they believe and desire, etc. -- the hope of coming to understand them. Without such an initial hypothesis, there's simply no way to get traction in interpretation: Anyone whom I am able to understand I take to be largely rational (since any irrationality requires a background of rationality to be intelligible as irrationality, and whatever I can understand in them I understand to be either rational or irrational), and it's my standards of rationality that I use to winnow down what I regard as possible ways to take what it is they're saying and doing etc. I don't insist that whoever I try to interpret be rational -- perhaps they just aren't and I end up giving up the idea that there's anything there to be understood. Rationality is constitutive of anyone I understand not because I insist upon it, but because without perceiving rational patterns in someone's behavior I have no way to make sense of them as a person. (And what is "constitutive" here may shift and alter; the standard of rationality I use is always my standard of rationality at the moment, and there's nothing sacrosanct about that.)

I continue to dislike the chess example. As given here (and this is typical, both in Haugeland's writings and in what he says about chess in class), it is impossible to cheat at chess. For anything which is cheating is in violation of the rules of chess, and anything in violation of the rules of chess just isn't chess. And so anything which is cheating isn't chess -- a "move" which is illegal (say I castle despite my rook having moved since the start of the game) isn't a move of any game of chess (because an illegal move is a square circle), and so it can't affect the state of the board in any game of chess, and so if this "move" leads to one player "winning" they in fact did not win, since they were not playing chess. For Haugeland, "cheaters never win" is thus a priori true. In fact, cheaters never finish a game at all (and so never lose either).

I can easily imagine a game of chess in which neither player remembers the rules for castling (and so never castles, as they don't want to admit their ignorance). For Haugeland, these people can't be playing chess (since castling is among the rules of chess). Though many games of chess can be played without either player ever castling. (Suppose one of the players knows how to castle, and the other doesn't -- he can never remember which piece he switches with his rook. It seems that for Haugeland, these two can't play chess, since only one knows the rules. The fact that they might sit across from one another, move carved ivory figures around on the board, etc. would not change the matter -- one Can't Play Chess If One Doesn't Know The Rules. And one of the "players" doesn't, and so no chess is played. The fellow who does know the rules for castling (and so can play chess, even on Haugeland's view) is then unable to tell what he's doing, since he surely thinks he's playing chess.)

I can easily imagine a game of chess in which both players cheat -- when either gets up to go to the bathroom or get a drink, the other alters the board slightly. Haugeland is emphatic that such a thing Would Not Be A Game Of Chess; I can't see why it matters what we say about it. (My inclination is to call it a game of chess, since understanding how one plays chess is how one makes sense of the ways in which each player is cheating -- why they don't replace rooks with pawns or remove their own king from the board. But if one is counting games of chess played for some reason, say there's a chess league going on and each game played is worth some points, then I can see why one wouldn't count this game, if one knew about the cheating.)

A larval thought about why I can't abide Haugeland's way of treating these matters: Haugeland treats objects initially, and truth falls out later -- in "Truth and Finitude" the primary locus of truth is getting an entity right, with the truth of a sentence being something derivative. This is putting the cart before the horse: Truth and falsehood are properties of sentences. (In "Two Dogmas of Rationalism" Haugeland claims that "There was no truth a billion years ago" is true in some sense stronger than just the fact that there were no speakers (and thus no sentences or utterances etc.) back then. This strikes me as a foreboding, and impenetrable, claim. If "truth" is supposed to be something other than a property of true sentences (/utterances/propositions etc.), I don't know that it exists now.)

Edit: The response to Conant in the paragraph that bridges p.255/256 is painful to read:

The arguments that matter, therefore, are those to the effect that chess itself presupposes language, either for learning it or for playing it. But to those, I think, a simple reply is decisive. It is certainly no harder to learn and play chess than it is to learn and speak a natural language. Quite the contrary: games are clearly less demanding than languages by all counts. In particular, languages are just as constituted by standards, hence just as dependent on speakers' insistence, as any game. Yet, it must be possible to learn and speak a language without benefit of (any other or prior) language, on pain of regress. So, in principle, it's possible for games as well.

Learning a first language comes effortlessly to toddlers; learning a first game takes a modicum of work (it doesn't happen at all if no one makes an effort to teach the kid a game). Languages are not "as constituted by standards" as games -- if I "break the rules" in chess I cheat (or at least have to take the move back); if I "break the rules" in English I might be the next Joyce (or if I just speek unlovilily, then still I speak and might make myself understanded). And the argument here is just a non sequitur: Even if learning a language is generally harder than learning a game, and learning a language is possible without a prior language, it doesn't follow that learning a game is possible without a prior language. (Learning to play "Pictionary" is certainly easier than learning to speak Arabic, and learning to speak Arabic is possible without a prior language, but learning to play Pictionary is impossible without a prior language. So there's no "in principle" reason to think chess can be learned without a prior language -- especially given the stuff about having to be able to make it known that one regards a move as illegal, which is what Conant's point seems to have been.)

Happily, the paragraph on p.255 (which is footnoted as being due to a conversation with Conant) makes the points I would want to make about most of this essay.

Another howler, p.257: "The rules of a playable game must be consistent, complete, and followable". "Magic: The Gathering" is thus not a game, or at least wasn't a game in the first several years it was around, because it didn't have firm rules. (I'm told that even the current rules aren't consistent & complete -- there are places where the game is held together with spit and bubblegum, basically. That's why there are rules updates every few months.) The "Illuminatus!" card game had a rule that said that cheating was allowed, unless you were caught -- is this even intelligible on Haugeland's conception of a game? (It's certainly easy to make the rules inconsistent, if cheating is allowed.) Certainly people played Illuminatus!; that's how they were able to cheat, and how people were able to catch them cheating, etc.

I very much dislike the chess example.

Haugeland's class is wearing on me. At least the analytic class is going well. (We finally hit Two Dogmas on monday. Last class was entirely taken up by trying to make sense of Kripke's positive picture of reference in "Naming and Necessity"; it was fun.)

"There are here hugely many interrelated phenomena and possible concepts."

2008-10-27T19:21:00.003-05:00

First off, Brandom's Hegel course has started, and so his website has been updated with several handouts, sets of notes, and some new readings of parts of the Phenomenology by Brandom. I'm linking this at the top of the post so that I can remember to check it for updates; I have no idea how long the class website will stay up once the term ends.

For a similar reason, I've added links to the websites for various workshops to my sidebar. It's surprisingly hard to google up the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop's blog. (Incidentally, the Philosophy of Mind workshop is wonderful, and someone should update their blog. This year it appears we're reading various articles on referring to oneself -- so far we've read Anscombe's "The First Person" and Strawson's "The First Person and Others", plus an extract from "The Bounds of Sense". Finkelstein is great. Also at the last meeting a female grad student yelled "CHICKEN SEXERS!" at an inappropriate time. It is a good workshop!)

I just finished listening to the McDowell-Davidson interview again, and it's still good. I picked up on a lot of things that I'd missed the last time I listened to it. For instance, I'd missed the point of the chicken-sexing discussion here (or at least I'd forgotten it was about just this point). One thing that leaped out at me was that, in an attempt to get Davidson to see what his story was missing about perception & the first-person, McDowell opposed the thing he thought was missing to what is "discursive". Davidson was saying that he could see the guy behind the camera, but that there was a guy there was a belief he held, and he couldn't see what was missing from his story about perception, since it looked to him like there was just his being caused to form a certain belief, here. McDowell tried to draw attention to the fact that Davidson was talking in third-personal terms of himself, and mentioned that anything he could say that way would be "discursive". (He just said it as an aside, it seemed to me -- this part of the interview has McDowell struggling noticeably to find a way to put the point.) I had thought that the opposition between "intuition" (in the Kantian sense of what McDowell thinks Davidson needs to account for) and the "discursive" (in the sense of what's articulated) was something recent -- new to "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" -- but it's present in this interview, which (according to a citation in "Reading McDowell") is from 1997.

Recently I've been re-reading some of Davidson's stuff from the nineties, i.e. post-Mind and World, with an eye to making sense of McDowell's revisions to his views in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given". It's easy to miss just how subtle the issue of what McDowell thinks is wrong with Davidson's picture is.

Incidentally, I've finally gotten a copy of "John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature" via ILL; some of the things McDowell says in his responses there do nicely resolve some of the things I found puzzling about the book's lead-essay; McDowell refers to "Avoiding" in several of his responses. For instance, from his response to Houlgate's paper, p.232/233

But [that sensory experience takes in that things are as they are represented to be by the sensory content of experience] does not eliminate the possibility of a position according to which we do not strictly see cars and trees. Sellars distinguishes what we see, as common ways of talking would have it, from what we see of what we see, the proper and common sensibles that what we see instantiates. For instance, when in ordinary speech we would say we see a car, what we see of the car is something other than the car itself, perhaps its colour, shape, and motion or lack of it. It would be possible to introduce a notion of what we see, strictly speaking, that coincides with this notion of what we see of what we, ordinarily speaking, see. And for some purposes it would be a useful notion. Houlgate cites Hegel[*] saying one can bring something's qualities before the eyes, but not the something itself. I think that belongs in this kind of context, not the kind of context determined by Houlgate's explication of Hegel's talk of 'positing'. What we see of what we see is not something taken in by our visual sensations, from which we would need to go on, in an act of 'positing', in order to arrive at something with the form of thought. In seeing what we see of what we see, our seeing is already informed by our conceptual capacities. What is in question here is a restriction, well motivated for some purposes, on what conceptually informed content can count as strictly speaking sensory content -- not a gesture in the direction of content that is not yet conceptually informed at all.

I think this sort of example is very helpful in making sense of Avoiding the Myth of the Given, since it gives another example of how McDowell wants to distinguish between the conceptual capacities he thinks are involved in the content of an experience (the common and proper sensibles) and those he doesn't (those involving recognitive capacities). I'm inclined to find this example problematic -- I don't think that "the car itself" is something other than what one sees when ("ordinarily speaking") one sees a car, except in the sense that there is always more to see -- more perspectives one might take in of the car, more ways one might view it. What one sees in the "color, shape, motion or lack of it" sense is just the color of the car, the shape of the car, the motion or lack thereof of the car. One might not see the car as a car, if all one sees of it is describable in this manner, but I still want to say it is the car that one sees. (If one's perception is of a "red thing", and a red car is what one is looking at, I don't see what could possibly be the object of one's perception if not the car. I suppose one could say "the paint on the car" or somesuch, but i) I'm inclined to count that as part of the car, and so perception of it is perception of the car and ii) this sort of answer seems to tempt one into saying things like "all we ever perceive are the surfaces of things", which strikes me as bad phenomenology.) Suffice to say, I think that the only reason to say "we don't strictly see cars or trees" is that one has been lead astray by philosophy.

(I remember this came up in the discussion of Boyle's "Sortalism and Perceptual Content" paper at the workshop last week, and he clearly thought the issue was a mess -- he wanted to avoid saying anything one way or the other (the example was whether one can see a beach when one looks at it, since after all there is a great deal too much beach to take it all in with a glance). The fact that McDowell doesn't seem to hesitate like Boyle did gives me pause. Incidentally, Boyle was great the second time, too. I've not yet finished this paper -- it's longer than the logic one was, and I'm tripping up trying to get through the ending sections. He mentioned in the discussion period that his paper is "programmatic"; perhaps that's part of why I'm finding it so damned hard to follow. I should probably read Evans.)

Perhaps I'm just reading McDowell with the wrong emphasis -- certainly there are some purposes for which a "restricted" view of what's sensed makes sense. (See PI section 11, especially p.196 on putting the "organization" of a visual impression "on a level with colors & shapes". To be able to say what stays the same when you see the duckrabbit shift from a duck to a rabbit, you have to draw some such distinction as this.)

More from PI section 11:

Then is the copy of the figure an incomplete description of my visual experience? No.—But the circumstances decide whether, and what, more detailed specifications are necessary.—It may be an incomplete description; if there is still something to ask.

This seems just right: An account of the content of an experience solely in terms of "common & proper sensibles" seems both an exhaustive account and to leave something out. ("And now just look at all that can be meant by 'description of what is seen.'")

At a minimum, McDowell's modification of Davidson needs to be able to distinguish chicken-sexing from perception -- this is just the thing McDowell used as an example of what Davidson couldn't account for, in the interview. It seems to me that McDowell's setting of "recognitive capacities" outside of the passive actualization of conceptual capacities which he conceives experience to be leaves seeing a chicken as a chicken on the same level as chicken-sexing. It's a belief which is causally formed by having the chicken in view, but there's no way to give a justification for the claim by appeal to anything which is given in experience.

"Here we are in enormous danger of wanting to make fine distinctions", says Wittgenstein; it appears to me that McDowell has succumbed to the danger in his limitation of what conceptual capacities can be involved in the content of an experience.

(It occurs to me that I still don't know what to do with the Thompson-inspired bit about "intuitional forms". I still need to finish "Representation of Life"; I set it aside when I had to reboot a while back, and haven't thought to finish it. I doubt it answers the object I put here, but perhaps it'll shed more light on what motivated McDowell's revision.)

*Houlgate's Hegel quotation is from Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie des Geistes, which doesn't appear to have been translated into English yet, so I can't tell if context changes its import. It sounds like the sort of thing I think Hegel shouldn't say -- it sounds to me like the sort of thing one would say in a reductio of the idea that what one is given in experience is "sensible qualities" of objects rather than the objects themselves. But Hegel says a lot of things in "Subjective Spirit" that I don't think are quite what he should have said; Houlgate brings a lot of them up, and McDowell spells out why he doesn't want to follow Hegel on those points. McDowell claims that holding on to a lot of Hegelian insights requires jettisoning some of the stuff Hegel says about (e.g.) what Hegel calls "sensations" and "intuitions", and I think he's right about that, for the reason he gives (among others). When reading "Subjective Spirit", the relation between "Thought" and the earlier chapters which referenced it (i.e. nearly all of the chapters in "Subjective Spirit") was often a bit mysterious; Hegel seemed to both insist that everything before "Thought" could only be on the scene when thought was (since the "content" of sensations/intuitions/representations was of the sort proper to thought -- only in thought did the form fit the content), but also allowed that it could be on the scene (in infants for instance) when thought was not. He also seemed to offer a psychological account of how thoughts were to be built up from representations (and representations from intuitions, and intuitions from sensations) through habits & various secret workings of memory, and that seems like that has to fall prey to the criticisms of the Myth of the Given. It's one of the thornier patches of Hegel's system. Lots of good stuff in there, though; definitely not like the "Philosophy of Nature".

Update on Professor Callard

2008-10-14T18:44:00.003-05:00

From e-mail:

Could you maybe add a post saying something along the lines of--"I talked to Ben Callard, and while his situation is clearly very serious indeed, he doesn't have a prognosis yet, so (to paraphrase Mark Twain) reports of his imminent death have been exaggerated."

Yes. Yes I could. I talked to Ben Callard, and while his situation is clearly very serious indeed, he doesn't have a prognosis yet, so (to paraphrase Mark Twain) reports of his imminent death have been exaggerated.

No doctor has said anything like "terminally ill", "inoperable", or "not long to live" (if any such thing is to be said, God forbid, it would be said at the prognosis, which is apparently due this friday). Professor Callard also says it's probably a a thyroma or a lymphoma, not lung cancer.

(I know I heard in the MAPH office that it was lung cancer, because someone doubted that Professor Callard "had ever had a cigarette in his life". The consensus in the room was that he did indeed seem like the sort of guy who has never had a cigarette.)

So, everything except "pretty bad cancer" was erroneous. I apologize for the errors.

The Callard children remain cute. I stand by that part. (And the rainbow-colored backpack/sling/wrap thing that the younger kid gets carried around in is adorable. Though it's the most impractical-looking thing I've ever seen; I have no idea how the kid gets in or out. Maybe it just looks complicated, and it's actually held together by velcro or something.) And the class was starting to get good; I'd heard a lot of uncertainties expressed about the course after the first class or two, but everyone seemed to like last monday's class. (And the post-doc that's currently teaching the class decided to skip to Frege, so I'm sitting in on it for at least a while longer*.)

But it's good to know I was wrong about the worst of the details.

*I'm really not sure whether this or Non-Deductive Inference is the course I should be registered for; I suppose being registered for NDI forces me to get out the door earlier on tuesdays & thursdays, which is good because the buses run more often then. It would feel weird to not show up for the analytic class, though. It felt weird to not show up to the Darwin class today, and I was mainly sitting in on that to see how many classes I could stand to sit through -- and I only missed it today because I had a doctor's appointment!

Boyle's paper on Kant's logic is terrific

2008-10-10T23:58:00.006-05:00

I am sick as a dog at the moment, but I managed to haul myself to the Modern Philosophy Workshop this morning. The paper was "Kant on Logic and the Laws of the Understanding", and it was very illuminating. Boyle's presenting a paper on sortals at the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop on monday; that also looks good, though I haven't read the paper for it yet.

Conant was at the workshop this morning, which was nice; he mentioned that the paper seems to slide between two sorts of oppositions: Kant's view of logic vs. Frege's view of logic and Kant's view of logic vs. the "post-Hilbertian" view of logic that Conant actually thinks is what you most commonly come across nowadays (he specifically mentioned Brandom, Belnap, and some other guy at Pitt that Boyle studied under). Boyle conceded the point, modulating the claim of his paper to the claim that Frege's view is an illuminating waystation between Kant's view of logic and the post-Hilbertian view which is not regnant.

I found the notion of a "post-Hilbertian" view of logic very agreeable, and the term is apt. The idea is that logic is a "purely prescriptive" science; you have the various axiom systems etc. and the question of whether a given system has anything to do with things like "truth" or "reason" or "inference" is a concern which is outside of the purview of logic. The parallel is of course to Hilbert's view about geometry: You have the various geometries that geometers study, and the question of which (if any) describe a physical space is not something geometry is concerned with. (I recall hearing that Frege wrote a letter to Hilbert complaining about this, and Hilbert basically rolled his eyes in response.)

I took a good deal of other notes, but I mainly wanted to just throw a post up before I forgot, and in case the paper isn't online forever. Easily the best paper on Kant and logic that I can recall coming across.

edit: Note the strikethroughs.On a jarringly unrelated note, newly-hired U Chicago professor Ben Callard is ~~terminally~~ ill. Cancer. He just found out, apparently; he held class on monday, and didn't seem that sick to me then. (He'd said he had a doctor's appointment right after class; he wasn't sure if he was going to end class early or what, since he really felt terrible. He did not end class early, and the general consensus was that the class was starting to take form and looked like it would be fun -- I know of at least three people who weren't enrolled in the class who were planning on continuing to sit in, just because the discussions were good -- including me. Callard was doing a good job leading the discussion, keeping it going interesting places, etc.) But, apparently he has ~~inoperable~~ ~~lung~~ cancer~~, and not very long to live~~. (The longest I heard was "less than a year". I won't repeat some of the things I heard, but I heard nothing good on this front. edit: Practically everything I heard on friday was groundless. See above post.) The Callards had their second child this August. Cute lil' guy. Suffice to say, today's news was horrifying, is horrifying, on all sorts of levels.

Friday was an eventful day.

In Which I Wonder if I am "Out of Touch"

2008-10-06T17:50:00.003-05:00

Because I am free to read and comment on the use that has no link (and because I am putting off reading Von Mises) I reread Hauerwas's article on Macintyre from "First Things". I was particularly struck by this passage early on:

To understand MacIntyre takes work. Indeed, he intends for it to be a daunting and challenging task to understand him. I suspect he assumes most of his readers, possessed as they must be by the reading habits of modernity, cannot help but refuse to do the work necessary to understand him. Which is but another way to say, as he makes explicit in the last chapter of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, that those who think they must think for themselves will need to undergo a transformation amounting to a conversion if they are to understand “that it is only by participation in a rational practice-based community that one becomes rational.”

I immediately thought "But that's a truism!"

Perhaps I have an inordinate acquaintance with philosophy of the Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Hegel/Haugeland/Brandom/McDowell/Davidson/Rorty/Gadamer/Sellars... sort, where that sort of claim looks totally reasonable and not like the sort of thing anyone would stumble over. (Though "rational practice-based" looks pleonastic to me.) I suppose there are tenured philosophers who would think something like that claim is false.

Hauerwas apparently thinks that "academics" have some problem with this sort of thought, as do people who "think they must think for themselves". (It's not clear to me why he thinks this; I gather it has something to do with "capitalism" and with the ghostly things Yoder got himself so exercised about. Hauerwas seems to have some wacky ideas about "academia" generally; I suspect his own presence might distort how he sees things. I doubt things are as they would be otherwise when Hauerwas is looking around.)

On "thinking for oneself" I side with Hegel: No one else can think for me, as no one else can eat or drink for me, so I don't need to worry about "thinking for myself". If I think at all, I think for myself. Trying to do something above and beyond thinking, so that I might "think for myself", is liable to be a hindrance to thinking. But there's no harm in saying that everyone should think for themself, if all that means is that they should think instead of just parroting what they recall hearing once-upon-a-time. Though even this sort of "unthoughtful" behavior requires that one has become acquainted with thinking, for one must have some facility in discriminating among all the things one might parrot. So the injunction to think (for oneself) is always really just the injunction to think some more. Which is rarely bad advice.

Hauerwas seems to associate "thinking for oneself" with thinking from some Olympian height, removed from other people and from the tawdry affairs of humanity generally. But this is silly. If I am to think for myself, I should do my thinking where I am. Which is down here in the muck of history, with everyone else, enmeshed in all sorts of practices and norms and cultures and language-games and etc. -- if anyone is in a position to think for themself outside of all this, they aren't me. I'm right here.

When I see this sort of rhetoric employed by the likes of Hauerwas, I worry that the denigration of "thinking for oneself" is going to slide into an affirmation of "not thinking for oneself" -- of accepting dogmatically some "base" to "start thinking from". It's not clear to me whether or not Hauerwas (or Barth, or Macintyre) are guilty of this charge (though I have my suspicions). But I think this use of the rhetoric is a real worry in any case. The idea that we need to establish or choose a starting-point for thought strikes me as an egregious error -- if we are in the market for looking at possible "starting points" then we're already thinking, and so we don't need to find a "starting point" to think from, since that point is already in the past. Dame Understanding invites us all to come as we are to the Hermeneutical Circle-Dance, to put the point clumsily.

(The right response to "Whose justice? Which rationality?" is, I think, the same as the answer to "Which conceptual scheme?" -- to quote Putnam, "You want I should use someone else's conceptual scheme?" The joke being, of course, that a "conceptual scheme" is supposed to be something which is Given, and so not something one could pick up or discard. And the same holds for "rationalities" -- I can shift my standards for what's rational or not as it seems just to me to do so, but I can't discard my rationality and take up "something else". Indeed, I was surprised when I found out that Macintyre's book really does seem to take its titular question seriously.)

On not reading Macintyre: I've tried to read several of his works. I don't like his style, so the going is hard. At one point, it occurred to me that Macintyre sounds like he's peddling some doctrine which depends on the scheme/content dogma. So I checked his indexes to see if he'd ever mentioned Davidson. He had, and his discussion of him was so inept that I haven't looked at him since. (I think it was in "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" but the book's not searchable on Amazon, and I don't own a copy.) I figure if I ever manage to get through "After Virtue" it'll be because I have someone beside me that I can constantly gripe to, to ease the pain. (It was how I got through all the Barth I had to read. Read him the night before class, complain about him during and after class, repeat. The trick is to have someone to complain to who doesn't dislike whatever you're complaining about -- otherwise the whole game is rather masturbatory.)

On an unrelated thematically relevant point, I've finally started reading Micheal Thompson's stuff. So far I've made it through the introduction of "Life and Action", and about a quarter of the way through "The Representation of Life". Definitely interesting stuff, and definitely wish I'd gotten around to looking at this stuff earlier. I do suspect that Thompson might be the source for some of the odder form/content distinctions McDowell draws in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given"; Thompson stresses in the introduction the formal nature of his project. Though it's a formality which doesn't "disregard the particular characteristics of objects". Which is an odd sort of formality. (I doubt that the success of Thompson's work actually hinges on its being "formal" -- certainly nothing he's said so far has struck me as wrong, apart from his self-characterization of his project. I'll need to read more to get a grip on what's going on, I'm sure; these are early impressions.)

P.S.: Haugeland opened up registration for the "Being and Time" course again, so I am a formality away from enrollment in the course. Hooray~

P.P.S.: The syllabus for Finkelstein's "Later Wittgenstein" seminar is online (in the Chicago system). They read chunks of PI, chunks of The Claim of Reason, two McDowell essays, Diamond's "Realistic Spirit" essay, and various things from Zettel. Didn't look too world-shaking. But they read a lot more Cavell then I would've guessed.

In Which Hegel is Straightforward

2008-09-28T15:46:00.005-05:00

But not straightforwardly spoken-of. It's a theology post :o

I have hidden it so you don't read it by accident. It's a screenshot from the Derrida movie.

(and now that you know that, you can skip the movie. Total letdown.)

Given my background in theology, one of the first things I tried to figure out when I was getting into Hegel was whether he was some sort of atheist/pantheist/proto-Marxist radical/gnostic (etc.), or if he was a Lutheran of more or less orthodox stripe. All of the secondary literature I came across came down pretty strongly in favor of the former: Hegel was a modern Simon Magus, an Arch-heretic for a new age, or else he was secretly a Marxist before Marx, or some sort of pagan nature-mystic, or he was a follower of Valentinus, or... (there wasn't a clear consensus on what Hegel was, only that he wasn't a plain ol' Lutheran). The textual support for these claims was never particularly clear to me -- Hegel clearly opposed certain theological positions and certain conceptions of God, but then so does every orthodox Christian thinker. And when Hegel considers the question, he certainly doesn't seem to mince words: the longest paragraph in the "Philosophy of Spirit", §573, is dedicated to taking down those who "know" that philosophy promulgates a pantheistic doctrine. (He also devotes a great deal of attention to the topic in the introductions & prefaces to the Encyclopedia; Jacobi had claimed that all philosophy leads to pantheism, by which he meant Spinozism, since Spinozism is the only consistent philosophy.)

(An aside: I think it's clear that Spinoza is fairly counted as an atheist; the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus clearly wanted to convince his readers to give up their (Judaeo-Christian) religion in favor of a modern, natural science-minded philosophy. Strauss's reading of Spinoza here is, I think, blatantly correct. And so, by the standard Hegel refers to in §573, Spinoza is rightly considered an atheist by Jewish/Christian thinkers -- Spinoza is opposed to their religious conceptions, and intentionally sets out to undermine them. I don't think it's inconsistent to say all this while still allowing Hegel to be right in claiming that Spinoza is more properly viewed as an "acosmist" than an "atheist". For by §573's standard, someone can be a "theist" in some sense while still being an "atheist". Which is where Spinoza seems to fall. For in Spinoza's positive doctrine, he does posit a deus sive natura, and he does deny that "the world" apart from this monad has any reality. (I am aware that this is sketchy; I need to read more Spinoza.) Hegel's aufhebung of Spinoza here sets aside the polemical purpose Spinoza had in the Tractatus, just as it sets aside the acosmism -- insofar as Hegel is a Spinozist, he's a Spinozist who is not fairly counted as an atheist.)

It's become clear to me that many of Hegel's interpreters simply want him to not be a Lutheran. For if they regard themselves as Hegelians, they don't want to be seen as endorsing Christianity (or religion generally -- certainly not any sort of orthodox Protestantism); if they regard themselves as anti-Hegelians, they don't want to be seen as opposing Christian thought. I've noticed this in some of Pippin's stuff: whenever Hegel's religion is mentioned, it's always "Hegel's heterodox Christianity". (I'm not even going to go into what it would mean for a Protestant thinker to be heterodox -- if there's just one way to be an orthodox Protestant, than either Luther or Calvin or both are heterodox, for they disagree with each other over what each took to be foundational matters of doctrine. To say nothing of all the other branches of Protestant Christianity, such as Anabaptism or the various American phenomena. If you want to find some common core of Orthodoxy among all these groups, it's going to end up being pretty darn thin. And so it's going to become less and less plausible that Hegel rejects it.)

I recently read Hegel's foreword to Hinrich's Religion in its Inner Relation to Science. It's good. Really wish I'd encountered it a few years ago -- would've saved myself a lot of effort. Hegel even praises the Scholastics, which is really strange. Normally he says good things about Anselm, and then there's a few centuries of Deep Darkness under those Fiendish Papists and their retrograde "philosophy" which consisted of bungling Aristotle and contributing nothing positive. (It's not clear that Hegel read any medieval philosophy, apart from Anselm.) But when Hegel has his face set on arguing against Schliermacher-and-friends that speculative philosophy and theology aren't innately opposed to each other, well, he's clearly trying everything he can think of to show that they are dumb and wrong. Hegel writes a pretty decent polemic when he takes a mind to it.

But anyway, on to the impetus for my writing this post. I've been skipping around in "Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition", which is agreeably crazy and fun. (Yes, Hegel really liked Jacob Boehme. He also admitted that it's hard to figure out what the heck he was getting at, and that you can't read him for long before putting the book down because it's too darned strange.) In the introduction, in a footnote, Magee quotes from Hegel's letters. I'll just reproduce the entire footnote:

In a July 3, 1826, letter to Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (1799-1877), Hegel writes, "I am a Lutheran, and through philosophy have been at once completely confirmed in Lutheranism." See Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christianne Seiler [citation details omitted]. In 1826 a small controversy erupted in Berlin when a priest attending Hegel's lectures complained to the government about allegedly anti-Catholic statements made by Hegel. Hegel responded: "Should suit be filed because of remarks I have made from the podium before Catholic students causing them annoyance, they would have to blame only themselves for attending philosophical lectures at a Protestant university under a professor who prides himself on having been baptized and raised a Lutheran, which he still is and shall remain."

Pro Tip: Don't respond like this when someone threatens to take you to court for being a bigot.

So far, Magee's book is trying too hard to find "hermetic" elements in Hegel. There's certainly some weird stuff in there -- Magee's right that "anti-theological" readings of Hegel have to excise a lot of stuff -- but sometimes he goes too far. For instance, the quotation at the head of his introduction is itself a quotation; I remember chasing down the reference once (it required a good bit of work to figure out who "C.F.G." was), and it didn't turn out to be anything earth-shattering. If memory serves, he was a theologian. He certainly wasn't anyone who I wouldn't expect to be quoted as expounding Christian ("revealed religious") doctrine. Magee holds back on the fact that his header is neither original to Hegel nor Hermetic in origin.

Magee's exposition of "hermeticism" is also tilted in favor of his conclusion. He positions it between Christianity and pantheism, ignoring the fact that 1) Hegel doubts that anyone has ever held the latter position and 2) Christianity is a bigger tent than he lets on. He implies that Hermeticism spoke of "moments" in the way Hegel did; it did not. Hegel took the term from contemporary mechanics. (I'm positive that this is mentioned in an endnote in the Hackett Encyclopedia Logic, but "moment" is not in the index and I can't find it by skimming. The point was credited to Findlay.) He claims that Hegel's philosophy of nature spoke of nature "emanating" from God; this was a point at which Hegel criticized von Baader (see the third preface to the Encyclopedia, ps.15/16 in the Hackett Encyclopedia Logic, footnote. The relevant paragraph in the Philosophy of Nature, which is what von Baader was discussing, is admirably clear, considering its subject-matter).

I've not gotten to his attempt to claim the Phenomenology as a sort of hermetic "initiation" to the System yet. I'm pretty sure that my antecedent commitments about the relationship between the PhG and the Encyclopedia system are going to outweigh whatever evidence he can dredge up for that conclusion. I'm curious if he has anything more to back up his claim that Hegel is "not a philosopher", past that one line about raising "love of wisdom" to "wisdom itself". Certainly Hegel continued to refer to what he was doing as "philosophy"; he seems to use "philosophy" and "science" interchangeably when referring to his System. Magee requires "science" to mean something very specific, and very peculiar; Hegel seems to be using it in that good ol' super-broad sense it has in German.

Magee does have a section on Hegel and Mesmer (animal magnetism and all that); that should be fun. Hegel really did have some weird views there -- though most of them are presumably unremarkable for his time, they really do look crazy now. This is one way I can tell that most slanderers of Hegel haven't read him: they never mention animal magnetism. (A short version: Hegel thought that mind-reading was real. He cites a slew of sources to back himself up on the point, which tells me that the view was at least a little crazy at the time. But, in his theoretical account of how it might work, he only allows that feelings might be communicated from one body to another -- not thoughts. Communicating thoughts requires language (or gestures, or writing, or something cultured like that).) There really is some flat embarrassing stuff in the "Subjective Spirit" section of the Encyclopedia -- I'm curious how much of the "cures for insanity" section in the Zusatze to ss408 is credible and how much is credulous. Incidentally, in Findlay's introduction to Miller's & Wallace's translation of that volume, he claims Hegel's openness to "E.S.P." phenomena as one of the good parts of Hegel. Findlay was a theosophical nutcase -- Magee is at least right in connecting his reading of Hegel to Findlay.

PS: Classes start in a matter of hours! :o