Peregrin on "Logic and Reasoning"

I just finished listening to this talk; I quite liked it. Peregrin defends the view that logic is "constitutive" of rationality, and not merely normative for it: the laws of logic make the game of giving and asking for reasons possible, not what tells you which moves within the game are good ones or bad ones to make. This isn't a new idea, but I very much liked seeing someone defend it without leaning on the fact that they are also trying to exposit Kant's views on general logic, or the views of the author of the Tractatus.

There is one bit that struck me as odd, though, which is why I'm writing this post: at one point Peregrin is concerned to show that his view can still claim that logic is "a supreme arbiter of rationality" despite not allowing the laws of logic to be violated (in general -- he allows occasional violations by single members of linguistic communities, but says very little about the details of how even this could happen given that the laws violated constitute the act which is supposed to defy them). His reply seems odd, though: He says that being rational may be "having implications, negations, etc., not using them in an appropriate way."

This seems wrong for at least two reasons. One is that minutes earlier he'd allowed that there might be linguistic communities which don't have implication (a group in Siberia studied by a Soviet scientist is discussed as a possible example), and so don't have modus ponens because of this. So, what he put on his slide seems to contradict his own commentary on it, unless he wants those linguistic communities to fail to be rational (which is obviously undesirable). The other is a generalization of the point Peregrin made when he allowed for a linguistic community to lack "implication": Why should the material conditional, classical negation, exclusive disjunction, etc. be so important for being rational as such? They seem to be of fairly recent invention, and sit uneasily next to the ordinary-language terms often used to characterize them (as anyone who has ever had to teach undergraduates well knows). How could having them in one's language be so important as to constitute the game of giving and asking for reasons?

The remedy to this, I think, is just what Sebastian Rödl talks about in the first chapter of "Categories of the Temporal": we should retain the idea that logic is constitutive of thought as such, but not identify this logic with a calculus (and so in particular not with classical logic and its material conditional etc.): the possession of any particular logical calculus is an optional tool in reasoning, not constitutive of it. The kind of logic which is constitutive of thought as such is transcendental logic, not general logic: it essentially involves reference to thought's relationship to its objects (and so refers to inquiry, the process by which those objects are known). Being rational cannot plausibly be "having implications, negations, etc." but it is (at least plausibly) having distinctions of truth and falsity, of oneself as an inquirer who can err and be corrected by others or correct oneself, of the objects of inquiry as being capable (at least in many cases) of settling questions about them when some are in error or ignorant of them, etc. It is hard to see how one can be a rational subject without such notions; it is the task of a transcendental logic to outline them and give their laws, without which thought as such is impossible.

I think this sort of view also helps to make sense of so-called disagreements in logic (as between classical and intuitionist logicians, or dialetheists and everyone else): they are not expressing conflicting views on "the" logic constitutive of thought as such (which would have to be a transcendental logic), but expressing views which disagree with one another on which calculus captures the laws of thought as such (or which are normatively correct in describing how one should proceed if one wishes to think rationally, as they tend to think of it). Accepting or rejecting the law of excluded middle, or rejecting (and not merely accepting) the law of noncontradiction can then be seen not as doing the impossible (if laws of logic are constitutive of thought as such), but as advancing rival views on a distinct question -- one which the transcendental logician may reject as relying on a false assumption, that the logic of thought as such is the logic of a calculus, is general and not transcendental logic. So long as it is not among the laws of transcendental logic that one has a particular view of transcendental logic (which would be a surprising result), the disagreements in logic do not need to be seen as violating laws which are constitutive of thought as such, and can be regarded as genuine disagreements without overturning the view of logical laws as constitutive.

It might be thought that the existence of dialetheists still posed a problem: Didn't I say that a distinction between truth and falsity was (plausibly) involved in the laws of transcendental logic, and isn't this just what the dialetheists want to argue about? Are they not still seemingly violating the laws which are supposed to be constitutive of thought as such?

I think not: Even in the extreme case of Graham Priest's acceptance of every version of the denial of the law of noncontradiction he is presented with, one can find him affirming (in "Doubt Truth to Be a Liar") that one cannot both affirm and deny a proposition simultaneously. He views this as a psychological claim, and his ultimate evidence for it is phenomenological, but he recognizes that he needs something of this sort to make his own views so much as stateable: if he has access to no such distinction as this, then he can't intelligibly say that even dialetheists believe that there are monaletheias (propositions which are only true or false, and not both): without something in his system to keep two truth-values apart in the end, there is nothing to keep his opponent from asking "Yes, yes, you accept that P is true and not false, and is a monoletheia -- but how do I know you don't also hold it to be false and not true, and a dialetheia?" (The context in which Priest invokes an absolute psychological-phenomenological distinction between affirmation and denial is one in which he has rehearsed the many "revenge" Liars that a dialetheistical treatment of the Liar leads to; Priest needs some way to handle "This sentence is false and is a monoletheia", which on his treatment is both true and false and has both one and two truth-values, without undermining his own view that dialetheism is compatible with classical monoletheic logic "mostly" holding in everyday reasoning. I would look at my copy of the book to confirm this and find references, but I am lazy and as far as I know I'm the only person who feels a need both to defend the constitutive view of the laws of logic and to make sense of Graham Priest.) So I think that Priest can be seen as still abiding by (and affirming and not denying) the distinction between truth and falsity at the level of generality at which transcendental logic needs to deal with such truth-values: he just has peculiar views about how truth-predicates should be used in formal languages, etc. When it comes to knowing that when a question has been settled in inquiry it is not also still open, or that we can err when we hold that a question has been settled or not and might need reopening, Priest (and I think any other dialetheist who considers the issue) says nothing but what the transcendental logician says we all know qua rational beings: what is, is, and what is not, is not.

McDowell on Cognitive Science and Epistemology

University College Dublin has put online two lectures (and an interview) McDowell gave there recently; kudos to them for doing this. It is all the to better that more talks are going online these days, so that it's easier for those who want to hear them to do so.

I just finished listening to the first one, "Can cognitive science determine epistemology?" Its topic is familiar for anyone who's read McDowell very much, and its content replicates some material available elsewhere recently: McDowell is here replying to Burge's recent attacks on him, just as he was in a talk he gave when visiting IU three years ago.

It's actually interesting to listen to McDowell's views on cognitive science while at IU: he is sanguine throughout on the current state of representationalist cognitive science, and explicitly doesn't want to make any waves or raise complaints against it. This is not exactly the attitude one finds most often at IU. (B.F. Skinner was at IU for nine years, and reportedly designed the psychology building; his influence is still felt here.) It's especially surprising to hear him speak of "representations" so blithely, though I suppose this is in accord with the "representations without representationalism" slogan he urged on Rorty back in "Rehabilitating Objectivity".

But I think that, even if he does harbor secret doubts about the current state of the science (which I have no reason to believe he does, but which I think is the horse he should bet on), it makes sense to be ameliorist in a lecture like this: there's no reason to fan the flames of people who, like Burge, see self-standing epistemology as just an armchair form of psychology by running together such a self-standing epistemology with a rival vision of psychology. This is especially true because of the claim he concludes his talk with, which I think might represent a genuine shift in his thinking: he claims that cognitive science needs epistemology (as a self-standing enterprise) to be able to identify contentful states in the way that it does.

I know McDowell has long claimed that alternative accounts of perceptual knowledge make the very idea of perceptual knowledge unintelligible (this is a central claim of "Knowledge and the Internal", and is tied to the central arguments against Davidson in "Mind and World"), but I can't think of another place where he so straightforwardly says that an empirical science (as opposed to a (discardable) alternative account in philosophy) relies on something that his sort of account of perceptual knowledge provides. I think that's a stronger claim than anything he made up through the 90s, at least; I would need to reread the exchange with Dreyfus to see if there's a similar claim made there, given how Dreyfus views his own relation to psychology. If this sort of thing is true, then philosophy can't be a purely therapeutic enterprise: the sciences need it to do something else in addition to showing flies the ways out of flybottles, in order that they may be sciences. A certain sort of constructive work (in some sense of the term "constructive") is needed from philosophy to allow a properly empirical science to proceed. I don't think that McDowell would have been willing (or happy, at least) to say this at all points in his career, but he seems to have said it explicitly here. I have to wonder whether he thinks claims of this sort generalize beyond the field of representationalist cognitive psychology -- might physics rest on principles like the analogies of experience, or biology on a logical account of the lifeform? If there are some dependencies between empirical sciences and accounts of rational self-consciousness, how deep (far?) do these dependencies go? (This way lies Naturphilosophie, which is worrying and at least a little heady.)

Side-note: Michael Friedman argues for something like the claim McDowell made in his "The Dynamics of Reason", that philosophy needs to provide (and has, in the past, provided) the sciences with something they need in transitions between paradigms during periods of revolutionary science. I was unconvinced that Friedman had shown anything stronger than the claim that, in fact, work done in philosophy was instrumental in making turn-of-the-century revolutions in physics possible; I'm not sure how strong of a case can be made for the usefulness of philosophy in the other scientific revolutions he briefly discusses, and am skeptical of a general claim he argues for, that philosophy in general provides the connections between mathematics and mathematical physics that physics needs. He clearly wants to put forward a vision of scientists and philosophers working in tandem in a certain way, but I came away from the book with the impression that he's too weak to a nostalgia for logical positivism in its heyday. I couldn't see a future for that sort of thing, because I couldn't see how his account generalized beyond the weird combination of Neokantianism and crises in physics that lead to the syntheses he spent so much time looking at. On the authority of Einstein, work in philosophy really was important in certain reformulations of physics -- but it's in the nature of revolutionary science that we can't tell in advance what sorts of reformulating will be called for, and so I don't see how philosophers could intentionally try to provide it. It was just a happy accident that it did in that case, it seems to me. But it was a fun little book regardless.

Sellars Society Interview

The Sellars Society has started an interview series; it's off to a good start.

Aside: As I expected, this semester has me too busy to blog; I get to start grading midterms tomorrow. It's been an unrewarding grind so far, and thinking for fun hasn't seemed like much fun because of it. Hopefully the spring is better.

A Link Post

Robert Stern was interviewed in 3:AM magazine; it is a good read.

In the wake of Förster's book, I have been reading more about Schelling and Goethe. Robert Richards's work has been very helpful here; "Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution?" (PDF) was particularly stimulating.

Richards gave a seminar on "The Origin of Species" while I was at Chicago; I only sat in on the first couple of classes at the time, since I was busy and it was being recorded for posting online. Sadly, the video and podcast links are dead now, but I had most of the podcasts downloaded. (For some reason I didn't download week 2's podcast; ironically, that is the one class I am sure I was present at. The slides for that week of the course are still posted (PDF), and are worth looking at just for the cartoon of Professor Icthyosaurus on page 13. (The context for that cartoon was a cyclical theory of evolution, where extinct species were supposed to arise again once catastrophic floods had changed the character of the Earth so that humans were no longer viable, but e.g. ichthyosaurs were again. I just really like the design on the whole thing.)

Edit: This is a great sentence: "This kind of metaphysics enticed Goethe the way several of his women friends did at this time: with great allure and seduction, with the poet giving way even while recognizing the impropriety of his indulgence." (Source, PDF)

"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy"

This book is the best book on German Idealism I've ever read. Engaging, clear, and deep.

I'm usually really bad about starting books and then putting them down, but I haven't been tempted to read any other books since starting "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy". (Watch "Game of Thrones" instead of read philosophy, yes. Read any other books, no.) I'm in the part about Schelling's Naturphilosophie now, and it's still remarkably clear. I've always wondered how Kantianism somehow lead to that stuff, and Förster is actually making that move seem intelligible. He's already made everything from Kant's first realization that there's a problem about how thought of objects which are not sensibly given can be possible to the Wissenschaftslehre clearer to me than they've ever been, and I am excited to get to the Hegel chapters (and find out what the weird swirly diagram on the cover is about).

I really have nothing to say about this book right now other than that I love it and you should read it immediately. I'm going to go back to reading it now.

"Unclear statements don't get a bit clearer by being repeated!"

Wittgenstein's crack about Principia Ethica came to mind while reading this interview with Kit Fine:

Part of the problem here is that terms like ‘exists’ and ‘real’ are used in many different ways, especially in philosophy. For me, the fundamental question of ontology is not ‘what is there?’ but ‘what is real?’. But what do I mean by ‘real’?

As a first stab, I would say that what is real is what one must make reference to in giving a description of reality. Thus suppose you were a platonist and thought that reality included facts about numbers, such as that 2 + 2 = 4. Then numbers for you would be real. This is to explain the real in terms of reality. But what is reality? Here perhaps the best I can do is to explain the role of reality in metaphysical thinking.

Reality is what accounts, in the most perfect way possible, for everything that is the case. Suppose, for example, that I thought that the existence of a chair consisted in nothing more than certain atoms arranged in the shape of a chair. Then this would strongly suggest that reality did not include the existence of a chairs, since I could account for their existence in other terms.

I am impressed by how resolutely unclear this is: Every sentence seems like it might be the worst of the bunch.

3AM's interviews are odd. I don't know what determines their selection of subjects. The Setiya and Teichmann interviews were both pretty good, though.

A Link Post

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.

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

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

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.)

World's Shortest Philosophy Books

I am easily amused.

(HT: enowning)

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

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".

In Which Hegel is Straightforward

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

Some Brandom Links

Robert Brandom's faculty webpage has a whole lot of downloadable content that I hadn't noticed before. The "Untimely Review of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit" is pretty cute. The conclusions Brandom's Hegel ends up drawing strike me as pretty agreeable (and genuinely Hegelian). Brandom's idiosyncratic reading of "mediation" and "determinate negation" (as, respectively, material inferential relations and relations of incompatibility) continues to irk, but otherwise I like the little essay. It probably helps that it's only nine pages long. No room for detailed misreadings; sufficient room for high-altitude cleverness.

The class page for his Making It Explicit seminar features a pretty ridiculous number of papers responding to Brandom/papers where Brandom responds to his critics. If anyone out there is interested in Brandomism but lacks institutional access to journals: There you go.

Several of his scattered Hegel papers are apparently being reworked as chapters of a book titled "A Spirit of Trust", which he's teaching as a course. All of the papers are available via the class website; the ones I've read are certainly interesting. At least his book-title is good. "A Spirit of Trust". I like that.

Brandom's also put several extracts from the Miller translation of the Phenomenology online. I don't know why he did this, since the book's a cheap paperback, but if you want to have Sense-Certainty/Perception in .doc form, well, you can get them like that this way!

I have to admit that I'm impressed: Chapter eight of "A Spirit of Trust" is 236 pages long. Looks like Brandom's Hegel-book might rival MIE in sheer hugeness.

The full title of that chapter is "From Irony to Trust: Modernity and Beyond". Certainly a nice speculative-sounding title to stick on top of two hundred and thirty six pages of material. Oddly, Rorty's name doesn't appear in the chapter. Rameau's nephew doesn't show up, either. I'm curious how Brandom actually discusses "irony", now. Not going-to-read-236-pages-to-find-out curious (well, not right now), but curious nonetheless.

On an unrelated note, John MacFarlane's "What Does It Mean To Say That Logic Is Formal?" is pretty good so far. I've just started the Kant chapter. It's a quicker read than I was expecting.

Pried from Hegel's Cold, Dead Cake

Thom Brooks points out that today is Hegel's birthday (he is now 238, and still dead). He also links to a YouTube video about Hegel, narrated by Charleton Heston. Which is pretty darned amusing by itself.

Brooks does not mention that the video he links is part one of twenty-two. There's over two hours of Judah Ben Hur talking about German Idealism.

Right now, I am on part 6/22. It is not terrible, or at least not as bad as you might expect from "Charleton Heston Presents: Hegel". So far, he has at least avoided most of the common sorts of errors I expect to encounter in this sort of thing. It's certainly the best 22-part audio introduction to Hegel I've encountered.

Oh, hey, part 6 is "The end of side one." I am supposed to turn over my cassette now.

some links to things

Graham Priest's "The Closing of the Mind: How the Particular Quantifier became Existentially Loaded Behind Our Backs" is entirely dedicated to the history of logic, which is where Priest is the most fun to read. I have no idea how long the issue it's printed in will remain free online; I'd expect indefinitely, but one can never tell with this sort of thing.

On the topic of being free online, someone has scanned in the Cerf & Harris translation of Hegel's "Faith and Knowledge", which is convenient since the book is a bit hard to come by -- it's long been out of print, and Amazon only has two used copies, the cheapest of which is $89. They appear to have not scanned in Harris's lengthy introduction; it's worth hunting down a paper copy just to read that. (Cerf's introduction is fine, but less remarkable because not fifty pages long.) [Link to download is dead; e-mail me if you care about the book.]

On a possibly unrelated note, I've read the first three chapters of Paul Redding's "Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought", and it's excellent so far. The later chapters promise to expand on some cryptic remarks about Hegel's logic as a combination of Aristotelian term logic and Kantian propositional (judgement-centered) logic, with an eye to explaining Hegel's notorious claim that "All things are contradictory". It will certainly be interesting to see how/if Redding cashes out his promissory notes.

A non sequitur: For some reason I had something called "The Revolutionary... 'IF'" in my bookmarks. I don't know when or how I came across it; I vaguely remember being amused by it very late one night as an undergrad. Some of the linked papers are certainly not without interest, and Dudman is pleasant to read. I recall a Language Log post from not-too-long-back mentioning that English does not have a "future tense", but rather uses a variety of idioms to refer to future events & states. It was interesting to see someone making that point do philosophical work. (In addition to making grammar do work for us in other areas -- I'm not sure what I think of "Antecedents and Consequents", but it was certainly a stimulating read.)

Oh hey, a bit of synchronicity: A footnote in Dudman's "On a Point of Logic" notes that the article grew out of correspondence with Isaac Levi. I still have no idea why I had been to "The Revolutionary... 'IF'" before, but it is neat that Isaac Levi seems relevant to the neat things there.

this looks promising

Thom Brooks links to this new blog, "Apperception and Spirit", which only has one post so far. But I definitely like the topic -- the role that Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" plays in Hegel's thought, in particular the relationship between Kant's apperception and Hegel's Geist. I suspect that much e-ink will be shed over "the 'I'" in the future.

Hopefully, McDowell's "Hegel's Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant" will get discussed at some point, since McDowell's article largely centers on his interpretation of the Science of Logic quote which Chitty points out at the end of his post:

It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original-synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.

As far as Chitty's post goes, I only have one short comment. Chitty writes that "it seems doubtful whether when Hegel says 'I is the pure concept itself' he means the same thing as Kant might have meant if he had used the same phrase." I think it's more than doubtful: Kant definitely would not have meant what Hegel means by this phrase. For Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts is not Hegel's; for Hegel, intuitions are already "conceptual" -- they are the sort of thing that can be taken up in thinking, which is just the use of (determinate) concepts in judgements and inferences ("syllogisms"); the moments of "The Subjective Concept" in the Logic are also the moments of "Thinking" in Philosophy of Spirit.

Hegel explicitly links the "I" of apperception to thinking in a broad sense (though he decries Kant's phrasing it in terms of the 'I' "accompanying" my representations as "awkward", presumably because it makes it seem as if the 'I' and its thoughts could be placed alongside one another; Hegel has a general dislike for "spatial imagery" when it comes to discussing thinking). The "Preliminary Conception" in the Encyclopedia Logic features a fairly length discussion of Hegel's use of "the 'I'" and its relation to Kant's "I think", as an overview of where the Logic is headed. "[S]ince I am at the same time present in all my sensations, notions, states, etc., thought is present everywhere and pervades all these determinations as [their] category." "All other humans have this in common with me, to be 'I'... but taken abstractly as such, 'I' is pure relation to itself, in which abstraction is made from representation and sensation, from every state as well as from every peculiarity of nature, of talent of experience, and so on." (Encyclopedia Logic, ss20) What is taken to be valid for 'I', then, is not valid merely for myself as some determinately existing individual, but for thinking generally: if I judge, then I judge not merely how things are for me, but how things are; though my judgement is always my judgement, it also "does not stop short of the fact, but says: This. Is. So." (PI 95)

Hegel is thus clearly committed to "the unboundedness of the conceptual", in McDowell's phrase. Kant, on the other hand, uses "concept" in a more limited way, as something opposed to "intuition", and he thinks that there are "noumena" which are unable to be brought under our determinate concepts, yet which we can still know to exist (as the ground of the material of sensation). Thus if Kant spoke of the 'I' as "the pure concept itself", he would have to mean this in a sense still shot-through with dualisms -- what is concept is diverse from what is intuition, and what is conceptual is diverse from what exists. But all of these -- intuition, concept, and existence -- are something for the 'I'. Hence the 'I' for Kant cannot be simply der reine Begriff selbst, but must be something which includes also these other powers, of intuiting and relating to reality, as separate faculties. Whereas for Hegel, intuiting and relating to reality (and feeling and sensing and etc.) are all moments of the concept, are all unboundedly conceptual; the 'I' can thus be identified with the conceptual generally, without the worry that something is thereby being left out. Hegel is able to reach this position, though, through his radicalization of Kant: once the "transcendental ideality" of space and time is abandoned, the notion that our forms of intuition are merely our forms of intuition drops out, and they become simply the forms of intuited objects generally; thus Hegel can drop the idea that our intuitions might somehow be at variance with "things in themselves" or with conceptuality as such (as with Kant's unschematized categories). Conceptuality is then able to assert the universality which is its rightful possession.

It occurs to me that there might be some persons who do not read "Language Log" regularly.

This would be an error on their part. Language Log is great fun; I would be surprised if the sort of folk who like Wittgenstein & Davidson and all that would not also like much of what is discussed at Languge Log. "Grammar" in the unphilosophical sense is pretty neat, too.

I've almost finished Paul Redding's "The Logic of Affect". I was hoping that it'd offer a more detailed picture of the connections between aesthetic judgements and individuals that Redding'd addressed in "Hegel and Piercean Abduction", but so far the book doesn't seem to be coming together very well. Hopefully the last two chapters, on Hegel and evolution respectively, will help the rest of the book to gel. But the connections he draws between "intellectual intuitions" and qualia are certainly interesting, I'll give him that.

As far as philosophical-type content on this blog goes, I have recently been busy elsewhere.

I like memes (the internet kind, not the Dennett kind)

Alexei at Now-Times has tagged me with the following meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence on that page
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people

By less than a hands-breadth, Quine's "Theories and Things" won. Runners-up were Priest's "Introduction to Non-Classical Logic" and "Death Note 13: How To Read". (Page 123 of "How To Read" contains Major Spoilers, so it's just as well I wasn't closer to it. Death Note is absolutely fantastic, incidentally. If you do not mind reading comics from right to left, pick up Death Note. If you don't like it then I don't know what you want from a comic book.)

So: Theories and Things, which I had out because I realized I'd never read "On The Very Idea of a Third Dogma"; this has since been remedied. Page 123, fifth sentence, from the close of the article "Intensions Revisited":

For my problem is not one of reconciling mind and matter, but only a quest for general criteria suitable for unprefabricated cases.

And that's the last sentence on the page, and of the article. I suppose I'm supposed to wrap to the next page in this event. Page 124, new article, "Worlds Away":

Identifying an object from world to possible world is analogous, it has been suggested, to identifying an object from moment to moment in our world. I agree, and I want now to develop this analogy.
Consider my broad conception of a physical object: the material content of any portion of space-time, however scattered and discontinuous.

Quine then goes on to argue that our way of establishing that some physical object, some collection of time-slices, is a single body can't work for transworld bodies -- in the actual world a body's identity is determined by "continuity of displacement, distortion, and chemical change" but gradual distortions across worlds can change any body into anything else, so all bodies collapse into each other. (There, now you are not left hanging in suspense. I won't be summarizing "Intensions Revisited" though, because it's longer than five pages and that seems like effort.)

And might as well tag people: Duck, N.N., the Self and World guy, Currence, and the guy at Bosphorous Reflections makes five. Obviously, ignore this if you don't feel like playing along, or if you're sick of this meme, or if you never read this paragraph.

Quietism, Theories, and Nonsense again

Wasting time checking old posts on Blogger blogs for comments I've missed, I found this by Duck over at Currence's place:

[W]hen McDowell is speaking in his "Wittgensteinian" voice, he sometimes says of what he rejects that "[such-and-such locution] seems like it expresses a thought but actually it doesn't." So it's like disjunctivism at the next level up: "philosophical" truths are either obvious trivialities dressed up in hifalutin language, or they're not even coherent thoughts at all (so we don't need to see ourselves as substituting true doctrines for false ones). I think I get this, and I like the apparent self-similarity across level here (which I haven't seen much comment on), but sometimes I *do* want to see myself as doing the latter rather than being *required* to call "nonsense".

Scattered comments:
That is a nice little bit of parallelism, and not one I can recall noticing before Currence's thread.

This way of putting things sounds very like the Tractatus -- some apparent sentences do not, after fiddling with them a bit, express a thought i.e. they are merely sequences of signs which haven't been given a use, though we may have mistaken them for a sentence we understood. And "philosophical" sentences are either trivialities (being either tautologies or sentences which draw attention to features of our notation, such as Occam's Razor, and which are unneeded by anyone who has mastered the notational art), or nonsense which hasn't a use of any kind. In either case, philosophical sentences are not ones that turn out to be either true or false, depending on the way the world turns out to be upon investigation, and so philosophy is not composed of thoeries -- is not a body of doctrine. I suspect the Tractatus is where McDowell draws the thought-talk from, at least.

Of course, it wouldn't take much tweaking to make it sound like the later Wittgenstein -- swap talk of "appearing to have a sense" with talk of latent nonsense, and tell a story about what makes something "coherent" that doesn't make reference to some especial notation.

Either way, I think Duck is right to object that McDowell would object to the claim that "[highest common-factor] views at least manage to say what they claim to, even if they end up falling to one side of the oscillation." For example, consider the Myth of the Given. The notion that the world's impact on a thinker has some rational role to play in that thinker's cognitive life, and even that (in one sense) this impact is independent of the thinker's activity (in that it is not willed), is quite correct. But the Myth of the Given only appears to say this -- since it wants to say also that the world's impacts on a thinker are non-conceptual in a stronger sense than that of not being willed thoughts, it can't tell an intelligible story about how the world's impacts are supposed to play a rational role in a thinker's cognitive life. It's not that the Myth of the Given gets the world's influence wrong, by telling a story which could be true of some creatures, but happens to be false of us -- sense-data theories and the like can't be made sense of at all; we cannot imagine creatures of which it would be an accurate account, let alone ask whether we are such creatures. Where there should be an account of how the unconceptualized datum constrains our conceptual maneuvers, if the theory is to be made robust enough that we can follow along with the account it's trying to give, instead there can only be slips (such as between the space of reasons and the space of nature (considered as the realm of law)) or hand-waving about how there must be a way to fill the gap, even if we haven't hit upon it yet (for clearly sensations play a cognitive role!). But a theory with such large explanatory gaps can't plausibly be judged false -- for all we know, any objections we might bring against it could be addressed by the hypothetical material which has not yet been worked out. But neither can it be judged true, since the gaps might be a critical flaw, never repairable. The sense-data theorist has not finished telling her story about how sensations play a cognitive role, and one shouldn't judge a story before its finish. And so there is a clear sense in which whatever replaces the sense-data account will not be an instance of replacing a false theory with a true one, and in which we have not been able to understand the sense-data theory (since no one has ever said how it's all supposed to work, except in a hand-wavy manner).

Consider also the other pole of Mind and World's dialectical shuffle: "Davidsonian" coherentism. Here, the threat is of making thought into a "frictionless spinning in the void", of losing contact with the world at all; the challenge is that Davidson's account does not give a plausible explanation for how our thoughts could have intentional content. What is called "perception" in Davidson's account is at least something conceptual, something which can play an inferential role, and so (unlike in the Myth of the Given) it is intelligible how percepts could play a rational role in a thinker's cognitive life, once a thinker has percepts. But Davidson's account labels "percepts" just beliefs whose efficient cause is the objects they are about. But Davidson's account of causation does not (at least here) allow that causes can also be reasons -- "the only thing that can count as a reason for a belief is another belief", and the world's impacts are not beliefs. Hence the world's impact on me is no reason for my believing that I perceive that things are thus-and-so. But this shows that what Davidson calls "perception" is not perception as we are generally interested in the term -- as an event in which something happens to me and I notice a fact in the process. So Davidson is not, it turns out, discussing perception -- he is discussing the orthogonal category of thoughts which are efficiently caused by the objects they purport to be about. But how an epistemic theory handles perception is where we can judge whether or not the theory gets the facts right about how our thoughts are about anything. So if Davidson does not discuss perception, then he does not give us an account of how our thoughts have intentional content. But if he didn't give us an account of this, then he did not give us a false account, which needs correcting. Rather, the lacuna in his thought seems sizable enough that it's questionable whether he was discussing thought at all, since what he's discussing does not have a clear way of having content, and thoughts without content are not anything we can recognize as the sort of things we think.

In both cases, the oscillatory slips spoil the whole piece -- rather than talking about perception, since both accounts fail to consider natural-causal events which are simultaneously reasons, both accounts end up discussing... well, nothing I can recognize as something philosophers are interested in. Though if we haven't seen the ways in which the Given and "frictionless spinning" both slip into a muddle (in particular, by ignoring the fact that the realm of nature is not just the realm of law -- that natural causes can also be reasons), then we can take both or either to be discussing perception. But once we stop oscillating, we stop viewing them this way. They just seem confused.

There is an ambiguity in "false doctrine" or "false theory". Consider the analogous case in Christianity of Church doctrine and "false doctrines" -- heresies. Take one of the extravagant forms of Gnosticism, such as the doctrines of Basilides. The whole system of Basilides is called "heretical", and one can equally lambast it as "false doctrines", "opposed to the true Gospel", "pernicious lies" etc. etc. But there are two ways in which one can say that Basilides's system is heretical, is not something passed on by the Apostles -- Basilides asserts some things p where the Church asserts that not-p (such as that Simon of Cyrene was crucified on Good Friday, and not Christ, or that God the Father is not the God worshiped by the Jews, but rather is a rebellious angel), and Basilides also asserts some things q which the Church does not assert the contradictory of (such as the order of the procession of the Archons, or the details of how Not-Being gives rise to Being through the panspermia; the Church does not have any notion of Archons, and so does not order them; neither does she speak of God as Not-Being, and so no account is needed of how Not-Being gives rise to Being). Both p and q are "false doctrines", as they are not part of the teaching of the Church. But only doctrines of the p-sort are replaced in Church doctrine with "true doctrines"; doctrines of the q-sort are simply discarded, and nothing put in their place. (A memorable line from Irenaeus concerning certain doctrines of the Gnostics: "To refute them it is only necessary to make their doctrines publicly known.")

I want to say: all philosophical "theories" are "false doctrines" of the q-sort.

But perhaps I should not say this.

Consider the standard Cartesian story: It appears I might be in error in all of my beliefs about the world; I convince myself from pure reason that God exists and would not allow this; ergo whatever I clearly and distinctly discern is true of the world.

One might say that this is all unintelligible, since it's not conceivable that all of my beliefs about the world might be false, hence we can't understand what Descartes was feeling at the onset (and further can't imagine what he thought was needed to treat whatever he thought he was suffering from). (This seems to be the strategy in which we "tell the skeptic to get lost", since Rorty/Davidson do not appear to think that merely rehearsing the content of their own articles will suffice to sway the skeptic.)

Or one might say that it's simply false that I might be in error in all of my beliefs about the world, and/or that I can prove the existence of God through "pure reason", and/or that God's existence is incompatible with my universal erring, and/or that the criterion of truth is my clearly and distinctly perceiving a fact. (Note the and/ors -- one might disagree with the Cartesian reasoning only in part, or hold only part of it to be intelligible enough to agree or disagree with.)

If one went the latter route, one might replace the Cartesian system with something equally bad, or worse. But must one do this, if one goes the latter route? And if one might not -- then what is the harm in choosing the latter route rather than the former? (Or perhaps in going both ways, as the mood suits? For if neither leads into confusion, then it does not seem to matter which way we opt to speak.)

Perhaps the skeptic would not need to be told to "get lost" if we both showed why we are inclined to assert the (at least apparent) contradictory of his doctrines and why we do not find his doctrines something we can sympathize with (but not either alone). In which case refusing to entertain the notion of philosophical doctrines as p-doctrines would be detrimental to the good of our friend the skeptic. So in talk of sense and nonsense, too, one ought to keep shifting one's posture, so as not to get stiff (C&V 27).

One might speak of "true doctrine" as being what is opposed to "false doctrine", meaning by the latter q-type doctrines. "True doctrines" would just be the ones that aren't things one doesn't cotton to -- "truth" here (as Rorty claims is true generally) is just a compliment we pay to a set of sentences; there might not be anything else in common among the sentences (for they might include metaphors, which at least on a Davidsonian account might very well be false sentences, but none the worse for wear for all that). But calling sentences we like "true" (regardless of whether we hold them all true) needn't lead us into confusion (though it might). Homonyms are a perfectly cromulent part of language. And perhaps certain metaphors may consistently prove useful in dispelling certain confusions -- and so one calls them "true", not meaning to say anything about their truth-value. Just as one called the q-type doctrines "false" without being committed to their having a sense.

One might also simply mean "true" and "false" in the normal sense -- is there a clear line between philosophical talk and the human sciences, between the arena where there are only truisms and confusions and the arena where we can speak of true and false theories without shame? And if not the human sciences, what then of the other sciences? I do not see that there clearly is a line here, in all cases, at all times. (Though one could draw one -- but this would seem to be to say ahead of time what the sciences can talk about, which I don't see is possible. For they might change in all sorts of odd ways. Prophecy is not the business of philosophy, to quote Hegel. And if the sciences can't talk about something, why shouldn't this be a finding of the sciences? Is it a conceptual matter that one can't talk about what happens beyond a singularity? Was it a conceptual confusion that lead many of the moderns to believe that we could never know what the stars were composed of? I should think that the answer one gives to these questions would depend on a great many other, related questions -- and it is not clear to me that there is only one set of answers which is a respectable one, here. I take this sort of thing to be one of the lessons of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." There is no analytic-synthetic distinction worth having because one can shift around what one calls "analytic" and what one calls "synthetic" without falling into falsehoods -- one holds one point steady, and revolves the others about it. But one could have done this with points which are currently revolving. And so being held steady is not a property held by the point, but only by the manner in which one holds it.)

On the parallelism noted at the start of this post: Good things to believe and bad things to believe can be indistinguishable to those what consider them, at least for some people some of the time in some cases. This is a way of putting it that makes the parallelism appear obvious. And also it holds for non-disjunctive views of perception, and views of philosophy as a body of doctrine, as well as for McDowell-type views. A narrower way of putting it, which aims to exclude the former sorts of views: Good things to believe and bad things to believe can be indistinguishable to those what consider them, and they might not have anything in common apart from that. (So they might not share a common "representational content", or they might not both be "theories" aiming to address some common problem.)

(When I say "scattered", I meant it.)

Since I am posting anyway: Now-Times is looking pretty good; I've just begun to dig around in its archives.

Discussion about the relation of the Science of Logic (and the Encyclopedia) to the Phenomenology is currently going on in a thread there; the ball's in my court at the moment. Weedling out just what I want to say about ss25 of the Encyclopedia. Though it's worth noting that a search seems to show that this is the only place in the Encyclopedia Logic where the Phenomenology is mentioned, and there's only one unambiguous reference in the Philosophy of Spirit that I find -- ss418 has a brief reference to the "here" and "now" of Sense-Certainty. Given this paucity of direct references, it simply seems implausible to me that the Phenomenology is supposed to be a preface to the Encyclopedia system; if it was that important, it would be said more clearly. (And so I am also skeptical that it is to be a necessary propadeutic to the Logic, given that I'm inclined to view the Greater Logic as just the first part of the final system, in accord with ss11 of the Logic -- Hegel publishes the first part of the system early, and by the time he's finished working out his system he's no longer using the Phenomenology to start it. Though Hegel clearly thought at the time of writing ss11 that this would be the role the Phenomenology would play, I don't think it ends up shaking out quite as Hegel imagined.)

I also liked what I read of Inconsistent Thoughts, which I found via the Philosophy Carnival thing. Dialetheism is neat.

I laughed.

Wittgenstein parody encyclopedia entry on "Uncyclopedia."

My favorite bit was the coloring book page.

"I destroy, I destroy, I destroy" is a real quote, incidentally. Page 21 of Culture and Value.