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.

Briefly Noted

Truth and Predication is now available in paperback. The "Predication" part is okay. I'm not sure I quite get how Davidson thinks Tarski (unwittingly) solved the problem -- it wasn't clear to me if he meant to distinguish Tarski from Frege on any grounds other than the fact that Tarski doesn't posit entities to correspond to predicates (whereas Frege did). I may have rushed through that last part, though; the book was due back at the library.

The book is notable for a few things, though. Davidson discusses Sellars and Strawson at more considerable length than he does elsewhere, for one. He doesn't discuss Wittgenstein at length. An editorial footnote:

[Davidson added the following note about this chapter: "My decision not to talk about Wittgenstein's view needs a comment. The reason is simply that try as I may I cannot satisfy myself that I have a sufficiently justified opinion what his views on predication were. I lament my failure here (as no doubt elsewhere) to fill in an important piece of the picture. There were clearly portentous exchanges between Frege and Wittgenstein, and between Wittgenstein and Russell. I have touched on some of the consequences of these exchanges, though of course I do not know exactly what they contained."]

I suspect Davidson had similar reasons for not discussing Wittgenstein much of anywhere else: He wasn't satisfied that he had justified opinions as to just what Wittgenstein thought.

The book's probably not worth reading unless you just like reading Davidson, or you haven't read "The Structure and Content of Truth" elsewhere. As posthumous works go, I guess it beats the Opus Postumum, but it's no Philosophical Investigations.

Also, as a trivial note, Davidson finally is satisfied by an account of non-referring terms:"[Parsons comments (in his notes on the original manuscript): "Davidson conditionalizes the whole truth definition with ('p' is true or 'p' is false) > ('p' is true IFF p)." Davidson remarks: "Wonderful! This also takes care of names that don't name."]" -- I remember Davidson admitting in a few essays (as an aside) that he didn't know what to do with non-referring singular terms. Seems he's happy to go paracomplete; I have no objections.

Next note: "Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory" was pretty good. I wish I'd read it a few months ago, when N.N. et al were discussing analyticity. I really need to read McFarlane's dissertation some day.

I confess that until recently I thought Strawson's "Introduction to Logical Theory" was just a logic textbook. An ordinary-language critique of modern symbolic logic sounds pretty interesting. (Though Geach notes in a brief review in "Mind" that Strawson is insufficiently critical about the fit between the traditional syllogistic logic and ordinary language -- I gather that the book is, in part, a defense of the virtues of the Old Logic. I found both of these essays about Strawson while trying to find "On Referring", which I have not read because, really, who does things that they set out intending to do? That is boring.)

Sudden transition: Finklestein's Wittgenstein seminar this term is limited to PhD students. I was leaning away from it anyway, since it conflicts with Haugeland's class. Apparently it's the first course at Chicago on the latter Wittgenstein in five or six years -- Conant's TLP class last term was the first time the early Wittgenstein was taught in about as long. Apparently this is something the PhD students at Chicago often complain about: you have to get your Wittgenstein subterraneanly/extracurricularly.

The Wittgstein Worksop is also limited to PhD students (or others with special permission), and I have a conflict with it this fall anyway. Hopefully I can manage to at least hear Price and Murray talk in February; I want to know how Murray's paper ends, and Price's paper is a lot of fun.

On a further not-good-note, Leiter Reports notes that Haugeland is retiring after this year. Well, I guess it's a good time to take a Heidegger course with him, then. :v

I'm halfway through "Truth and Finitude: Heidegger's Transcendental Existentialism". It's great so far. As a bit of idle speculation, I wonder if what Haugeland identifies as "ontological sofindingness" might be useful in formulating an argument against dialetheism. (See, ontological sofindingness is the rejection of impossibilities in Dasein's projecting-on of the possibilities of entities. Which works out to be a rejecting of inconsistent characterizations of entities. So at least on the surface, this looks like it might be a ground for denying that there can be true contradictions without relying on Explosion. If there's some "ontological" reason to reject inconsistent possibilities, then maybe that can be useful other places where Just Saying No To Contradictions crops up.)

An aside that probably could've just been a short e-mail to Duck: Isaac Levi can't really think that beliefs about set theory are incorrigible. For the first few beliefs of that sort that Frege & Russell had lead to inconsistency, hence they were revised in fact, hence they must have been corrigible in principle. So his exclusion of logic/set theory/mathetmatical beliefs from consideration in "The Enterprise of Knowledge" seems like it has to be (at least in part) for simplification.

A happy note about Chicago: There's a conference on (if memory serves) practical philosophy in the spring. McDowell will be there. So will several other people I know I was somewhat excited about when I heard about their attending, but whose names I now am forgetting. Hooray McDowell~

Another happy note: The guy on the faculty who studied Spinoza left last year. So, the Early Modern Philosophy Workshop suddenly had no one to run it. It has since been retooled into the "Modern Philosophy Workshop". Note that the page says it has been "expanded to cover the entire modern period". This is a bluff. All of the fall speakers are talking about Kant, except for Sally Sedgwick, who's talking about Kant and Hegel. Apparently the Early Modern Workshop generally had people talking about Spinoza and Leibniz. I am totally happy to make that trade.

Another happy note: I don't have to read any more Freud! Hooray!

A note on Chicago (not that one): I like the view from my apartment, and the weather's gotten a little better. Still not good weather, but not as bad as it had been. I still hate buses and think anyone who honestly likes the public transportation here must never have lived someplace where it was easy to get around by car, like Dallas. I miss Dallas. (Getting around by bus here is easier than trying to drive around and find a place to park, but I count that as a strike against the city generally. Getting anywhere takes forever here, no matter how you go about it. I suspect this will just get worse once it gets colder out and the nights come earlier.)

Only one more week until real classes start! The stupid theory class will keep going, but at least Freud will be done! Yeah for not-Freud!

blah blah links blah blah smashed car blah blah

Self and World is a good blog.

This Robert Pippin video Currence linked to is pretty great for a short lecture.

I haven't seen anyone link to Sorting Out Wittgenstein yet; if you liked Vexations With Wittgenstein, well, it's like that. Except black instead of pink.

(Blog&~Blog) looks promising.

I'm not sure what Graham Priest can say about a sentence T="This sentence is neither true nor both true and false" where "this sentence"=T. Priest's paraconsistent logic is four-valued: True only, false only, neither true nor false, and both true and false. But if T is true only, then it's not true (and so not true only). If T is false only, then it's also true (and so not false only). If T is neither true nor false, then it's true (and so not neither true nor false). And if it's both true and false, then it's both true and not true, both false and not false. So none of Priest's four truth-values can be assigned to it. So it looks like Priest also has to deal with a "strengthened liar", while one of the selling points of dialetheism was supposed to be that it didn't have to worry about strengthened liars.

Bosphorus Reflections gave my blog's RSS feed its own subheading, which is how I found it. I've liked what I've read of his blog. Clear writing that discusses Foucault/Derrida is still kinda hard to find.

Incidentally, the "partner site" which he links to (which I take to be run by the same guy, based on the URL) has a link to a PDF version of Zizek's "The Indivisible Remainder" on MediaFire. I'm actually curious what Zizek thinks about his stuff being pirated; I'd be surprised if he was much opposed. I'm not sure it's hurting Verso to have a book or two of Zizek's floating around, either; I suspect that a free version of "The Indivisible Remainder" might serve as fine advertising for some of Verso's other offerings. This of course does not make it any more legal, but I really doubt anyone would try to take this to court. It's worth noting that the "Facts, Ideas and Logic" site is legal; it's not a crime to link to a site that violates copyright. And most of what he links to is not pirated material; it's just articles that have been posted in places where he can link to them. I'm curious how he came across the MediaFire links, though.

Oh hey, I just noticed that he added a link to a PDF of "Glas" sometime in the last few days. At least that one makes more sense to pirate; Glas costs upwards of $60 and is somewhat hard to find, while The Indivisible Remainder is a $12 paperback at list price. Though PDFs make for lousy coffeetable books. Huh, the PDF has "Copyright 1986" circled in it. Maybe Turkey has really liberal copyright laws, such that a book from 20 years ago whose author died recently is in the public domain? Still, it's published by University of Nebraska press, so I'm pretty sure this is also illegal. US copyright lasts forever, because of Mickey Mouse, and I'd be surprised if Turkey has not signed some sort of copyright-respecting treaty. But hey, if you don't mind it being illegal: Free unreadable Derrida book. (It's not the scan's fault that it's unreadable. The quality is tolerable. But the book is infamous for being, uh, creatively presented.)

Philosophy things I have found via BitTorrent: Several of Fodor's books, most of Foucault's books, Frege's "Foundations of Arithmetic" and various essays, "Being and Time" and "What is Metaphysics", "The Sickness Unto Death", Kripke's completeness proof for modal logic, public domain works by Hobbes/Hume/Locke and public domain translations of Kant/Hegel/Leibniz/Spinoza, "On Denoting", various Quine essays including a full PDF of "From A Logical Point of View", PDFs of "Philosophical Investigations" and "Zettel", Wittgenstein's collected works in both English and German (though missing a few odd bits, mainly the ones collected in "Philosophical Occasions"), the Zizek! movie, the Derrida movie, what looks like a site dump of marxists.org, and recordings of Dreyfus's existentialism lectures. And that's just the stuff I bothered to look at. I'm actually curious where the Wittgenstein collected works thing came from; it's in some weird e-book format and claims to be an ISO rip. I have no idea who that could have been marketed to, given how expensive the collection would have to be; were there libraries that got jazzed up about e-books? I don't know who else could afford something like this.

I recall reading a "London Review of Books" article by Fodor where he mentioned that he occasionally goes into bookstores to check out the philosophy sections -- he then proceeds to stare at the shelf-full of Foucault books, which are just to the right of where his books would be, if they were there at all. At least BitTorrent likes you, Fodor!

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is posted a few places online; the sites it's on seem to all claim that it's in the public domain. I am fairly certain this isn't the case. "From A Logical Point of View" had its copyright renewed, and so I'm pretty sure that at least the revised 1961 version of "Two Dogmas" isn't going to be public domain until 2060, 60 years after Quine's death, under current US copyright law. At least, this is what Wikipedia has lead me to believe.

It's worth noting that "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is online legally; the site hosting it got permission from the University of Minnesota to reprint a paper from 50 years ago.

also, I have some pics of my car! Ignore the black bars; I only have MSPaint to edit with on my laptop.

This gives you a look at how smashed it was. The back door on the driver's side is the only door that still works, and that's the only good tire. The engine's shifted over to the passenger's side of the car. The white stuff is where battery acid leaked all over the place. The car was worth $400 as scrap, at least.


I just liked the guy's face here. He owns the tow-yard. He was pretty happy to see me walking after doing that to my car. Also, you can see my leg in this photo; most of it looks purplish like that now. That's really the only injury I got, apart from some nicks & bruises on my other leg and my right hand. But you can see I'm still standing, so it's all good. Though I'm anxious for my knees to be the same size again.