"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.

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

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

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

Not in the book: "incommensurability of meaning".

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

Not in the book: "incommensurable meanings".

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

34: theories

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

49: natural languages

60: theories

97: theories

188: pairs of theories

189: theories

And here are some passages that seem especially relevant:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brief notes on various things

I am pretty satisfied with this comment on my previous post.

Paul Redding's "Hegel and Piercean Abduction" (European Journal of Philosophy 22:3) hits a lot of interesting material. It's mostly about the German Idealists' conceptions of the logical structure of judgements and the intuition/concept distinction. Redding, following Brandom, claims that the Idealists adopted an inferentialist approach to conceptual content. Hegel's opposition to Kant's distinction between intuitions (as singular representations) and concepts (as general representations) is shown to flow from his commitment to the notion that empirical judgements have their conceptual content because of their inferential relations; this is related to Hegel's treatment of the syllogism as "the truth of judgement". Empirical judgements are shown to have "syllogistic" structures, with concepts figuring variously as singular, as particular, and as universal, rather than (as on the Kantian account) being combinations of concepts with non-conceptual intuitions. This is related to the Romantic emphases on the authority of "feeling" and of the natural as normative, and Hegel's rejection of both of these, by way of Hegel's treatment of aesthetic judgements as the paradigm of judgements in general. There's also an extended discussion of Pierce's appropriation of Aristotle's syllogistic logic, and a few other lines of thought, all in fourteen pages. It'd be nice to have a more extended treatment of pretty much everything Redding mentions, but what's here is quite nice.

John Divers's "Quinean Skepticism about de re Modality after David Lewis" (European Journal of Philosophy 15:1) is a very nice discussion of Quine's "Reference and Modality", Lewis's response to it, Lewis's use of "On What There Is" to motivate his modal realism, and possible motivations for continued "Quinean" skepticism about de re modalities after all of this is taken into consideration. In the audio interview with Burton Dreben, Quine claims that he rejects Lewisian defenses of de re modality because they are ontologically profligate; "possible worlds" are too high a price to pay to be able to make sense of modal operators. Divers does a good job of showing how this sort of response is in tension with Quine's mathematical platonism: Quine is already willing to allow for unaesthetic extensions to his "desert landscape" ontology to accommodate number-talk, so it's not clear why he can refuse to do the same with modal-talk. Divers ends up offering a suggestion as to how de re modal-talk might still be resisted: Insist that de re modal-talk hasn't been shown to serve any useful purpose, and so there's no immediate reason why we should bother trying to make accomodations for it, rather than just dropping it altogether. I suspect that at least a partial response to this demand might be made by way of the Brandomian-Sellarsian notion that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms", but this sort of answer would show as unmotivated many "metaphysical" uses of de re modal-talk -- there's no need for a theory of counterparts if "A is necessarily p" and "B is possibly q" can be fully cached out in terms of what moves are and aren't allowed in a language-game.

Haugeland's "The Intentionality All-Stars" (Philosophical Perspectives, volume 4, 1990 pp.383-427) has the best meta-philosophy joke ever. I won't spoil it. The article is good apart from that joke, too.

Huwe Price's Metaphysics After Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?" is, as the title suggests, a discussion of the queer fact that metaphysics is alive and well nowadays, after so many attempts to kill it. Price focuses on the role Quine's "On What There Is" has (purportedly) played in the rehabilitation of metaphysics, with an eye to reversing the trend. Price notes that appeal to a supposed Quine-Putnam "argument from indispensability" plays a central role in debates about "modal realism", and offers a rebuttal to it: Refusing to either give or deny an "ontological" ground for our mathematical practices is not "intellectually dishonest" in the way Quine claims. Ironically, Putnam himself opposes the argument attributed to him in a variety of places; he thinks the Quinean insistence on a univocal reading of the quantifier is absurd, and so is mathematical platonism.

Price's "One Cheer for Representationalism" is slated to appear in the "Library of Living [sic] Philosophers" volume on Rorty, which is currently in development. Rorty plays almost no role in the paper. It is mostly about Brandom and Blackburn's "quasi-realism", which Price expands to a "global expressivism", as he has previously urged in other places. (Link has powerpoint slides and audio, for maximal "I-don't-feel-like-reading-this"-ness!) Price seems to me to recoil too far away from representation-talk, just as Rorty did, so perhaps the essay is not as inappropriate as it initially seems. Price only wants to rehabilitate talk of "representations" in an expressivist manner, but I can't see any motivation for stopping there, beyond a "naturalism" which makes the causal world seem "sparse" rather than "rich". I don't know how Price reconciles a global expressivism with this scientism; if no language plays the role of "representing how things are", then why are we supposed to take "our best current science" as somehow giving us a picture of "the causal order"? Why are we supposed to think there's any sense to talking about "the" causal order at all?

I have read in various places that Wiggins was influential for both Davidson and McDowell, so I looked him up on JStor. So far all I've read is "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", because it was only six pages long, and some book reviews. I can already sense why Wiggins might've been a cool dude. A quote from "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", p.92:

If it is a materialistic thesis that T = W [where T=a tree, W=the cellulose molecules that compose the tree], then my denial that T = W is a form of denial of materialism. It is interesting how very uninteresting an obstacle these Leibnizian difficulties-real though they are-put in the way of the reduction of botany and all its primitive terms to organic chemistry or to physics. (If it does not follow from T != W that trees are something over and above their matter, how much the less can it follow that they are immanent or transcendent or supervenient or immaterial beings. This is obviously absurd for trees. A Leibnizian disproof of strict identity could never be enough to show something so intriguing or obscure.) I should expect there to be equally valid, and from the point of view of ontology almost equally unexciting, difficulties in the reduction of persons to flesh and bones, in psychophysical event-materialism, and in the materialisms which one might formulate in other categories (such as the Aristotelian categories property and state or the categories situation and fact). Over and above is one question, identity is another. But of course the only stuff there is is stuff.

That's a pretty elegant way to avoid a bunch of ontological claims that I want to avoid. Is there some particular piece of Wiggins's I need to hunt down ASAP?

I read Derrida's "Signature Event Context"at Barnes&Noble. It was collected along with "limited ink abc...", an afterword where Derrida responded to some criticisms of "limited ink abc...", and a summary of Searle's article; apparently he wouldn't agree to having it reprinted in between the Derrida articles. Derrida's style still strikes me as the opposite of pleasant, but 'd' in "limited ink abc..." was pretty funny. Somewhere partway through 'e' I skipped to the afterword, where (paraphrasing since I didn't buy the book) Derrida is asked if he doesn't assume that concepts must have "rigid" rules for application, such that something is always "A or not-A" (vague or not vague, communicable or not communicable, etc.; he runs through a big list of them). Derrida answers in the affirmative: He does think concepts must be "rigid" in this way, so that one must always say, with the tradition, that (and here he runs through a whole slew of "A or not-A" phrases that I want not to affirm). I am now confident that I'll be fine not reading anything else Derrida wrote. Rorty's "Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition" left me with the strong impression that Rorty only praised Derrida so highly because of his style, and I am now convinced that this is how it is. As a philosopher, Derrida does not seem to have much to recommend him -- he is too caught up with dead projects.

Cavell would be easier to get into if he wasn't so damned erudite. Stop tying your philosophical points in to plays I haven't seen and novels I haven't read, dagnabit!

McDowell has an essay linked here which I can't recall anyone having linked to: "Why Is It Called "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"?", which is a reading of Sellars as an empiricist, contra Brandom. I still haven't read Brandom's "study guide", and I'm now inclined to keep putting it off; McDowell's reading of Sellars strikes me as so obviously correct that I don't know how Brandom could read it otherwise. (I am of course aware that it is uncharitable to think Brandom is ever writing on something other than his own project. But Brandom's claim to be a Sellarsian is rather more forceful than his claim to be a Hegelian or Kantian, so a misreading here is more irksome.)

I'm slowly getting through "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The end of Chapter X left me still wondering why Kuhn thinks it's worthwhile to talk of scientists as "operating in different worlds" rather than just "doing different things" or "seeing things differently". Why the "swinging stone" could not have been seen as the same thing by both Aristotelians and Galileans is unclear to me -- the Aristotelians cannot see it as a pendulum, and the Galileans cannot see it as an object which by nature moves "down", but why can't both see it as a swinging stone? Doesn't Kuhn's presentation of the matter actually require this? Doesn't this leave "different worlds"-talk looking too strong? (A more detailed discussion of Kuhn's account would be needed to flesh this out, I realize.)

I suspect that this is tied to a passage that struck me as bizarre: speaking of the duckrabbit picture beloved of gestalt psychology (and the second part of Philosophical Investigations), Kuhn notes that a subject might eventually come to see the picture as neither duck nor rabbit, but as "lines on paper", "and he may then say (what he could not have legitimately said earlier) that it is these lines which he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit." (p.114 in the third edition) -- Isn't it just as legitimate for him to say that he sees the picture of a duck (or of a rabbit) as "mere lines"? I don't get what "really sees" means here. Surely he sees the ink on the paper (or pixels on a screen) as lines; then it is really the ink (or the pixels) that he sees! But both of these strike me as absurd -- the duckrabbit isn't "really" ink or lines or a duck or a rabbit, though it can be seen as all of these. There isn't anything it "really" is, behind all the aspects that one can perceive. The aspects one sees are what it "really is", in the only sense in which it "really is" anything at all. It's not as if the duck-aspect disappears when we don't see it; if someone (at first) can only see the rabbit, or can't see either picture (as happens with some of the worse gestalt images), then it isn't the case that the aspects have yet to come into being (after all, other people might be able to see them already). The fellow simply hasn't noticed them yet. So "perspectival aspects" seem as real as anything has claim to be.

Kuhn claims that the absence of an "external standard" in duckrabbit-like cases distinguishes simple gestalt shifts from scientific revolutions. If the "seeing lines as such-and-such" approach was supposed to be this "external standard", then scientific revolutions seem to revert to "simple" gestalt phenomena if that line was unintelligible. I want to say: One could view phenomena as they were conceived under an obsolete paradigm, it's simply (exceedingly) inconvenient scientifically, and suicidal professionally, for any given scientist to do so. In fact, it's not clear to me why one can't always go back to "pre-paradigm science" talk, if one doesn't mind giving up huge amounts of utility -- one can always talk in terms of "that thingy over there" and "that other thingy", if nothing else. It's liable to be confusing and there's no reason anyone would ever want to do this, but I don't see that it would somehow fail to "get a grip" on the world discussed by our best paradigm-enabled science. There's an awful lot you won't be able to discuss profitably, but what you can talk about, you can talk about. Similarly, I don't see why anything other than psychological limitations prohibit a scientist from working with multiple incompatible paradigms, at different points in time, and suspect that there have been such individuals. Which seems to sap Kuhn of some of his philosophical interest.

Kuhn seems so focused on the theory-ladenness of observation (not his term) that he ignores how much conflicting paradigms can have in common. For instance, both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems (and our modern systems of astronomy) agree that there are visible stars at some distance from us. There are many other theoretical commitments which incompatible paradigms do not share in common, but they aren't entirely exclusive of one another. There's no "core" of observational data that all theories share among themselves, nor any definite set of observation sentences which are independent of all paradigms. And perhaps there are not sentences shared by all paradigms, since the "is common to these two paradigms" relation needn't be transitive. But I don't see why one can't grant all of this, which seems to be what Kuhn is actually interested in convincing us of, without going to some of the rhetorical extremes that Kuhn does.

But, like I said in an earlier post, I should probably finish the book before thinking about it too much.

And finally, because I do not think I have posted enough random pictures recently: Cirno.

She is the strongest!

how does i can read last page

Finally getting around to reading Murray's paper on McDowell and "second nature" from a little while back; the one Currence liked so much. It's a draft, and sadly one of the things Murray hadn't gotten around to was including a bibliography.

**edit: I really need to sleep. I somehow failed to scroll all the way to the last page, where there is a bibliography. The quote I couldn't locate is from "Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind", which I have as being from 2004. I'm leaving this post up anyway, because I went through the trouble of including content at the end and I'm not letting it go to waste!!1**

I'm not having any luck finding where this quotation is from:

She [Millikan] argues that ‘the biological sciences, including physiology and psychology, are distinguished from the physical sciences by their interest not in lawful happenings…but in biologically proper happenings ’ (‘White Queen Psychology,’ p. 362). But this does not remove the biological, as she
conceives of it, from what I introduced as the realm of law: it is just that the relevant laws are underwritten by considerations about proper function, rather than inductively based on what actually happens. We still have the contrast with the space of reasons. (McDowell 1999:294, fn. 28)

I've checked all of McDowell's work from 1999, according to Wikipedia, and none of it includes a page 294. Millikan's book isn't mentioned in "Having The World In View", so it isn't from there, either. Google is also unable to find it.

Any help?

I'd like to see the context for this quote; it reminds me a lot of Davidson's "Three Varieties of Knowledge", wherein Davidson has to clarify (against Dummett) that the "anomalism of the mental" is different in kind from the "anomalism" of the special sciences. The special sciences, such as geology, can deal in laws only if they include ceteris paribus clauses; these "loose" geological laws are likewise irreducible to strict physical laws. But it hardly makes sense to claim that geological phenomena are "free". Butt Davidson claims that the anomalism of the mental allows for mental phenomena to be considered free, to be considered autonomous. So Davidson has to clarify how anomalous monism can "make room for freedom" in the way that he claimed it did.

Davidson says that his point was not just that there can be no strict mental laws, but that our knowledge of our own and others' minds, of "I and Thou"*, could not even in principle be replaced with knowledge of lawful happenings, even if the relevant laws contain ceteris paribus clauses. This is not the case with geological phenomena, where shifting from (say) talk of plate tectonics to talk of the various relations of force in which plates stand to one another, from geology-talk to physics-talk, needn't defeat one's purposes in talking about the plates. To try to abandon talk of our own and others' minds for talk of (loosely law-like) psychological phenomena would, however, leave us unable to carry on as we do. Our talk of beliefs, desires, etc is not talk of anything which is amenable to subsumption under laws. (I do not think Rorty ever grasps this aspect of Davidson; see his review of "Mind and World", which takes the form of a commentary on Davidson's "Mental Events" and "Three Varieties of Knowledge", for a clear illustration of this. Rorty's compatibilism seems closer to Hume's than to Davidson's.)

*I'm hoping that the Buber reference will help make clear the sense in which "psychological phenomena" are something treatable by the nomothetical sciences and the sense in which they are not. Davidson does allow for "loose" psychological laws, and even psychophysical laws; he simply thinks that nothing of this sort could replace our ordinary way of talking about the propositional attitudes & their cohorts. When I speak of our knowledge of our own minds and of the minds of others, I mean only this latter sort; there is probably a better way to phrase this, but I am tired and really want to know where that reference is from.

The Causal Nexus: a short note on McDowell and Bilgrami

In his reply to Bilgrami's essay in McDowell and His Critics, McDowell notes Bilgrami's suggestion that we should jettison the idea that intentional idioms are "part of the causal nexus that natural science investigates". McDowell says that he is sympathetic to the idea, but objects on the grounds that intentional idioms are (all parties are agreed) part of an explanatory nexus of some sort, and Davidson has made it eminently plausible to regard this sort of explanation as causal: "That we believe and desire what we do makes a difference to what we do" as McDowell puts it. (p. 67)

At this point I wanted to ask: Why should we hang on to the notion that the natural sciences investigate "the causal nexus"? Certainly natural science is often concerned with explaining relations of various sorts causally, and their being concerned with certain sorts of explanations seems to characterize the natural sciences as something distinctive from other varieties of human inquiry. (With the rise of modern science comes the view of nature as a "realm of law", as McDowell puts it in Mind and World, and this way of viewing things has been quite productive in expanding the ways in which we can comprehend and cope with various facets of the world.) But it simply seems false that what is distinctive about the natural sciences is that they are concerned with causal explanation as such, since our use of intentional idioms is not a part of any natural science, yet it is still (often) concerned with explaining various happenings causally. So why should we want to describe the object of the natural sciences as "the causal nexus"? It seems that some regions of "the nexus" are ones which the natural sciences don't devote attention to, but that this is not a failing on the part of the natural sciences. (That "belief that p" is not mentioned in physics, or in chemistry, or in biology, etc. does not indicate that these sciences are in need of revision.)

Then it occurs to me that I should keep reading, and McDowell makes much the same point: Intentional explanations belong to "a causal nexus in their own right" and we should jettison the idea that natural science gives us something we can regard as the causal nexus. (I do not quite like the talk of multiple nexuses; to my ear it suggests that a single nexus, such as those of our intentional idioms or that which natural science investigates, is itself a "complete nexus", yet there are other nexuses which one might be concerned with instead. I should think that this way of talking naturally leaves one susceptible to the worry that a single nexus would already be sufficient to determine "how things hang together", and so there is no room for another nexus to have any say in what follows from what. So if the natural-scientific causal nexus determines how my arms move (via my being an instance of various anatomical structures), then any other causal nexus (say, that of intentional idioms) which wanted to explain why I raise my arm will have to either be "in harmony" with the natural-scientific idiom (perhaps via a psychophysical parallelism, or via strong supervenience, or via the reduction of one type of explanation to the other), or will have to be explaining some other happenings than the ones treated by the natural-scientific causal nexus. But it is surely a confusion to think that the arm I raise when I raise it "because I wanted to stretch my shoulder" and the arm which can be studied by medicine are two different arms; it is because the arm which my doctor studies is the one which I use to satisfy my desires that I visit the doctor in the first place. And the other form of the worry is just the sorts of naturalism which Bilgrami and McDowell want to dissuade us from falling prey to. I think that these sorts of worries are not so forceful if we drop the plural from "nexuses"; then we are only left with the thought that a single happening might have multiple causes, which claim should not trouble anyone. "A causal nexus" appears to have a finality, a completeness, that "a cause" or "a type of cause" doesn't.)

I do not know why there should be a problem with talking about "the causal nexus" tout court. Talk of "all causal relations, in general" doesn't commit us to thinking that there is one sort of explanation which can, in principle, exhaustively treat of all causal relations. And sometimes we want to mention "causal relations" in an arbitrarily-large aggregate: "the causal nexus" seems to me a harmless locution for this purpose.

What counts as a (useful) explanation depends on what we are trying to do at a given moment, and there is no saying in advance what all we might want to do, and so no saying in advance what can count as an explanation or not. But if we cannot list ahead of time all possible explanations that might account for some event, then it would seem that we also can't say what all causal relations involve that event, since some of the explanations we don't think of (because we are not interested in doing anything which would make them useful explanations) might be ones which we would regard as causal if we thought of them at all.

An aside: I notice on page 70 that McDowell notes that his handling of normative talk in a discussion of what is special to free agents is something for which "there is no reason not to classify as metaphysical." This is contrasted to Bilgrami's expansion of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" as a way to avoid metaphysics. Given McDowell's oft-mentioned "quietism", this surprised me. I suppose I may have simply assumed that McDowell regarded "metaphysics" as a dirty word (like Wittgenstein did, or like Conant still does), with even his use of Kant and Hegel meaning to keep us from falling into "metaphysical confusions." If McDowell does not actually have any hostility to "metaphysics" as such, then this makes it a good bit easier to see how he might be handling Kant & Hegel's magisterial transcendental works for Wittgensteinian ends: A little metaphysics is called for to dissolve a great deal of befuddlement. A good metaphysical description of, say, perception, might leave us without the temptation to do the sort of metaphysics Wittgenstein condemned, the sort which follows from being bewitched by our own language. "Metaphysics" in the positive sense would then just be one more philosophical method for treating our conceptual maladies.

edit: Kenneth Westphal has an essay on Kant, Hegel, and McDowell that runs something like this: Westphal talks about Kant and Hegel for about ten or fifteen pages, summarizing some of the transcendental arguments Westphal holds them to be making in their major works, mentions McDowell's gestures to several of the things Kant and Hegel were on about, and then goes "McDowell thinks you can play around with these ideas and be a therapeutic quietist? Really? You really think you can adopt a Kantian/Hegelian notion of spontaneity without getting knee-deep in transcendental arguments? I have my doubts. Admit you are not a quietist, McDowell, and join me in my transcendental pleasure-dome!" (I summarize. Westphal does not mention pleasure-domes.)

Westphal's worries strike me as being pretty good ones. Someone needs to point out that "Hegel and Quietism" is an... odd... pairing. One doesn't usually think of "Wissenschaft der Logik" as being opposed to grandiose speculative metaphysical constructions. I think that Westphal's concerns can be answered, but it certainly does merit saying: "Therapeutic Hegelianism" is a pretty odd idea, on the face of it.

(I am inclined to say that one can make "Therapeutic Hegelianism" look perfectly correct either by getting a better view of Hegelianism, or by better appreciating what all can be necessary for philosophical therapy. But that can wait for a later post.)

On a meta-note: I have noticed this problem before: One often gets inspired to write something as a response to something one is reading when one is in the middle of reading it. But if one stops to begin composition immediately, one risks simply predicting how the rest of the work will fall out. But if one finishes reading before one begins composition, one risks losing the sense of inspiration that one had, one might simply no longer have a desire to write after doing the full sum of reading.

On a more minor point, virtus dormativa explanations are not always pointless. If I tell you that opium has made N sleepy because opium possesses a soporific power, then this lets you rule out some possible ideas for why opium made N sleepy: Say, that N has an allergy to opium, or that N's sleepiness and N's consumption of opium are merely coincidentally linked. (This point I take from Paul Raymont's excellent dissertation, (PDF) which I linked to the other day.)

A point which does not merit its own post: Dennett's near-manic focus on prediction has the advantage of making it practically impossible for him to find it plausible that our intentional states are causally inert. It is just the fact that they do have a great deal of sway in determining how things will be that makes them useful to note, on Dennett's picture of what is in view from the "intentional stance."