Bekijk Volledige Versie : Postmodernisme? Nee, postskepticisme
Het belangrijkste intellectuele gegeven van deze tijd is de explosieve groei van onze kennis. Dankzij die kennisgroei weten wij meer dan onze grootouders en zullen onze klein kinderen veel meer weten dan wij. En er is een tweede verschil met vroeger: anders dan Descartes, Bacon, Bayle en andere filosofen van de vroege Verlichting twijfelen wij niet meer aan de geldigheid van onze kennis. Het scepticisme van toen, dat filosofen deed twijfelen aan de mogelijkheid van betrouwbare kennis, is een gepasseerd station.
Filosofen houden zich nog wel bezig met de aloude logische en epistemologische paradoxen, maar enkel voor de grap. Bijvoorbeeld met Zeno’s paradox dat we niet van de tafel naar de muur kunnen lopen omdat we dan eerst de helft van die afstand moeten lopen, en daarvóór eerst de helft van die helft enzovoort, met als gevolg dat we niet eens bij onze tafel vandaan komen. Die paradoxen zijn nog altijd nuttige oefeningen, maar niemand neemt ze meer serieus en hetzelfde geldt voor de sceptische paradoxen van weleer.
Drie eeuwen lang waren de basisproblemen van westerse filosofen, van Descartes tot Kant en zijn nazaten, epistemologisch van aard. De kennisleer was het middelpunt van de filosofie. In de twintigste eeuw dachten we de oplossing voor de epistemische problemen te hebben gevonden door ons te richten op de taal, op de betekenis van woorden en de formulering van uitspraken. We vervingen de vraag «Hoe kan ik weten?» door de vraag «Wat bedoel je?» Niettemin viel die laatste vraag vaak samen met de oude epistemische vragen naar de mogelijkheid en uitgestrektheid van de menselijke kennis.
Als ik zeg dat we het bestaan van kennis tegenwoordig niet meer als problematisch ervaren, dan bedoel ik niet dat er geen serieuze epistemische problemen meer zijn. De vragen die de epistemologie opwerpt, zijn in de wereld van vandaag nog even dringend.
Bijvoorbeeld de vraag naar het bewijs voor het bestaan van een broeikaseffect. Weten we wel zeker dat het wordt veroorzaakt door menselijke activiteit? En hoe weten we zo zeker dat het hiv-virus de enige veroorzaker is van aids? Hoewel we ons niet meer pijnigen met de oude epistemologische puzzels houden we ons dus wel degelijk bezig met de beoordeling van alle mogelijke aanspraken op de waarheid. Niettemin groeit onze kennis dagelijks. In een willekeurig studieboek over techniek of biologie vind je tegenwoordig een hoeveelheid informatie die Bayle of Descartes met stomheid zou hebben geslagen.
En die kennis heeft eigenschappen die vroeger generaties filosofen onmogelijk achtten. We weten dat water bestaat uit waterstof en zuurstof, dat de aarde rond is of dat planten en dieren groeien door celdeling.
We beschikken over talloze waarheden van dien aard en ze zijn allemaal zeker, objectief en universeel.
De gedachte dat uitspraken zeker, objectief en universeel kunnen zijn, is uit traditioneel filosofisch oogpunt een vloek. Wetenschappelijke revoluties zijn immers niet uit te sluiten en de uitspraken waarvan we vandaag zo zeker zijn, moeten morgen misschien worden gecorrigeerd of zelfs verworpen. En hoe kunnen uitspraken objectief zijn indien ze worden gedaan door individuen die redeneren vanuit een subjectief standpunt en op grond van subjectieve vooronderstellingen? En hoe kunnen tijd- en plaatsgebonden individuen universele uitspraken doen die gelijkelijk gelden in Rotterdam, Berkeley, Vladivostok en Pretoria? Kortom, hoe kunnen we pretenderen te beschikken over zo’n reusachtig corpus van zekere, objectieve en universeel geldige kennis als die kennis tegelijk corrigeerbaar, subjectief en sociaal en historisch gebonden is?
Het begin van het antwoord op die vraag is dat het gewoonweg irrationeel is om te betwijfelen dat de aarde rond is, dat er een zonnestelsel bestaat of dat het hart bloed rondpompt, even irrationeel als de gedachte dat een mens nimmer van zijn tafel naar de muur kan lopen. Het is uiteraard denkbaar dat er een wetenschappelijke omwenteling plaatsvindt waardoor we die waarheden in een ander licht gaan zien, zoals Einsteins revolutie ons dwong de newtoniaanse natuurkunde als een afzonderlijk geval te zien.
Het volledige antwoord luidt als volgt: filosofen begaan een vergissing door te denken dat zekerheid hetzelfde is als oncorrigeerbaarheid. Zekerheid is een epistemische toestand, geen logische vaststelling. De uitspraken die ik hierboven aanhaalde, zijn zeker in de zin dat het bij de hedendaagse stand van onze kennis irrationeel is om ze te betwijfelen of ontkennen.
En hoe zit het dan met de objectiviteit? Hoe kunnen uitspraken van bewuste subjecten met al hun persoonlijke beperkingen en vooronderstellingen ooit objectief zijn? Het antwoord luidt dat de strekking van een uitspraak niet noodzakelijk samenvalt met de persoonlijke beperkingen en vooronderstellingen van de maker. Subjectiviteit is perspectivisch: je doet een uitspraak altijd vanuit een bepaald persoonlijk perspectief, maar dat wil niet zeggen dat de uitspraak zelf subjectief is. Als ik zeg dat water uit waterstof en zuurstof bestaat, dan beschrijf ik water op een bepaald niveau, namelijk dat van de atomen. Als ik het zou beschrijven op subatomair niveau, dan zou ik het hebben over quarks en muonen. Dat is een ander perspectief, maar nog geen weerlegging. Op dezelfde manier zijn al onze aanspraken op de waarheid perspectivisch: onze representatie van de waarheid is perspectivisch, de waarheid zelf is dat niet.
En ten derde: hoe kan onze kennis universeel zijn als zij tegelijk sociaal geconstrueerd is, dat wil zeggen geformuleerd in specifieke sociale en historische omstandigheden? Het antwoord luidt dat onze uitspraken weliswaar in specifieke sociale en historische omstandigheden worden gedaan en getoetst, maar dat de waarheid zelf geen sociaal construct is. Onze representatie ervan is een sociaal construct. Het waarheidsgehalte van de uitspraak wordt echter bepaald door de wereld daarbuiten, die onafhankelijk van onze representatie bestaat.
Deze drie eigenschappen — zekerheid, objectiviteit en universaliteit — worden zoals bekend met verbluffend gemak ontkend door filosofen die zich «postmodernisten», «deconstructivisten» of «pragmatisten» noemen.
Er is iets ongerijmds aan zo’n postmoderne filosoof die in het vliegtuig stapt en in de lucht op zijn laptop werkt, bij aankomst zijn e-mail ophaalt, vervolgens een collegezaal binnenstapt en zegt dat we eigenlijk niets zeker weten en dat onze zekerheid tot «la textualité du texte» beperkt blijft.
Maar als we stellen dat de moderne tijd aanbrak met Descartes, Bacon en Bayle, met de toepassing van de rede en het gezond verstand op menselijke en maatschappelijke problemen, dan bevinden we ons vandaag helemaal niet in een postmodern tijdperk — integendeel, dan is de moderne tijd nog maar net begonnen. We bevinden ons daarentegen in een «postsceptisch» tijdperk. De mate waarin het bestaan van kennis ons precair en problematisch voorkwam, is voorbij. En onze intellectuele horizon is verbreed door kennis in overstelpende hoeveelheden. Je kunt je nauwelijks meer voorstellen dat er een tijd is geweest toen een ontwikkeld mens alles kon weten wat de moeite van het weten waard was. Niemand van ons kan nog die ambitie hebben.
Wat is nu de consequentie van die enorme hoeveelheid zekere, objectieve en universele kennis voor de hedendaagse filosofie?
de auteur vermeld ik nog even niet
tr_imparator
07-03-07, 00:34
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
Ja,..volgens mij he..bepalen 2 kennisgebieden onze intellectuele 'horizon'...even denken..mmmm,...Google...en hmm de andere weet ik niet meer. :wijs:
:o
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
Er is iets ongerijmds aan zo’n postmoderne filosoof die in het vliegtuig stapt en in de lucht op zijn laptop werkt, bij aankomst zijn e-mail ophaalt, vervolgens een collegezaal binnenstapt en zegt dat we eigenlijk niets zeker weten en dat onze zekerheid tot «la textualité du texte» beperkt blijft.
:engel:
de auteur vermeld ik nog even niet
Da's jammer. Ik had graag een bloemetje gestuurd.
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
de auteur vermeld ik nog even niet
Het is John Searle. Searle is een realist, maar geen echte fysicalist. Het is leuk om bijvoorbeeld Searle en Rorty in debat te zien.
Rorty:
Objective truth understood as correspondence between our knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content. He would prefer to describe objectivity as the search for "the widest possible intersubjective agreement."
En zo is het natuurlijk, waar Searle wederom niet begrijpt dat postmodernisten een onafhankelijke bestaande werkelijkheid helemaal niet ontkennen, legt Rorty nog eens uit hoe het zit. Een sociale constructie is niet een bedenksel maar een "vertaling" van empirische gegevens in een bepaalde culturele setting.
Denk je nu echt dat een postmodernist de zwaartekracht onkent o.i.d?
Searle creeert eerst zijn karikatuur van het pm en gaat er dan op schieten.
het lijkt onze goede vriend Rourchid wel.
Geplaatst door tr_imparator
Ja,..volgens mij he..bepalen 2 kennisgebieden onze intellectuele 'horizon'...even denken..mmmm,...Google...en hmm de andere weet ik niet meer.
Boef! maroc natuurlijk!
Geplaatst door pyrrho
waar Searle wederom niet begrijpt (…)
Aha, natuurlijk, Searle begrijpt het niet!
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Denk je nu echt dat een postmodernist de zwaartekracht onkent o.i.d?
Nee, maar de zwaartekracht is “intersubjectief”. We valle met ze alle naar benede. In onze cultuur dan.
Objective truth understood as correspondence between our knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content. He would prefer to describe objectivity as the search for "the widest possible intersubjective agreement."
Woordspelletjes.
Geplaatst door H.P.Pas
Da's jammer. Ik had graag een bloemetje gestuurd.
Ik wou dat ik de auteur was!
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Het is John Searle. Searle is een realist, maar geen echte fysicalist. Het is leuk om bijvoorbeeld Searle en Rorty in debat te zien.
Rorty:
Objective truth understood as correspondence between our knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content. He would prefer to describe objectivity as the search for "the widest possible intersubjective agreement."
En zo is het natuurlijk, waar Searle wederom niet begrijpt dat postmodernisten een onafhankelijke bestaande werkelijkheid helemaal niet ontkennen, legt Rorty nog eens uit hoe het zit. Een sociale constructie is niet een bedenksel maar een "vertaling" van empirische gegevens in een bepaalde culturele setting.
Denk je nu echt dat een postmodernist de zwaartekracht onkent o.i.d?
Searle creeert eerst zijn karikatuur van het pm en gaat er dan op schieten.
het lijkt onze goede vriend Rourchid wel.
Ik voeg het volgende langer citaat (van Ger Groot) er aan toe:
"
Opmerkelijk genoeg is realisme het eerste waarop de filosofen in de Parijse bundels zich beroepen, al verstaan ze daar iets anders onder dan de meeste van hun geprangde medeburgers. Realisme betekent voor hen allereerst dat de wereld simpelweg de wereld is. Scepsis over de vraag of datgene wat wij waarnemen werkelijk wel met de realiteit overeenstemt, is voor hen niet meer aan de orde.
Dat lijkt vanzelfsprekend, maar is het niet. Eeuwenlang hebben filosofen gedacht dat dat helemaal niet vanzelf sprak. Met obscurantisme had dat weinig van doen. Het waren juist de filosofen van de Verlichting en de — zich altijd op haar nuchtere verstand beroepende — Angelsaksische wijsbegeerte die haar op de agenda plaatsten. De wereld zoals wij die waarnemen wordt gestructureerd door de categorieën van het verstand, schreef Immanuel Kant aan het eind van de achttiende eeuw, na door de schotse filosoof David Hume uit zijn «dogmatische dommel» te zijn gewekt. Je afvragen hoe de wereld in elkaar steekt, was dus volgens Kant eigenlijk vragen naar de werking van het verstand.
Wat ooit metafysica was geweest, werd in de moderne filosofie kenkritiek en — toen men eenmaal had ontdekt dat denken in belangrijke mate samenhangt met taal — taalanalyse. Gedurende de hele twintigste eeuw leek het vaak alsof de taal het belangrijkste, zo niet enige voorwerp van de wijsbegeerte was. Maar de realistische filosofen van vandaag lijken weer helemaal te zijn teruggekeerd naar hun «dogmatische dommel». «Het summum van filosofische kwade trouw is onszelf tot de oorsprong van de wereld te maken en niet andersom», schrijft Searle hatelijk over Kant. Taalfilosofie is uit, philosophy of mind is in. De aard van de werkelijkheid begrijpen, inclusief de menselijke werkelijkheid — dat is ook volgens de populaire Britse filosoof Bryan Magee de roeping van de filosofie.
Magee haalt in zijn — zojuist als pocket verschenen — wijsgerige memoires Bekentenissen van een filosoof fel uit naar de Britse taal filosofie, die volgens hem met een bijna middeleeuwse spitsvondigheid elke oprecht filosofische vraag als onzin trachtte weg te redeneren. Daarbij beroept hij zich graag op Bertrand Russell, die met de taalfilosofie ook niet veel op moet hebben gehad. Het gesprek met de wetenschappen is nodig, aldus Magee, maar niet voldoende. Ook hun (materialistische) wereldbeeld berust immers op een keuze die ze zelf niet kunnen verantwoorden. De filosofie moet dus tegelijk dieper en op een andere manier «wetenschappelijk» zijn.
Liever dan bij de philosophy of mind zoekt Magee zijn heil en inspiratie bij de klassieke wijsgeren, die nog wisten wat echte filosofische problemen waren. Vooral Schopenhauer, die hij pas laat in zijn leven ontdekte, steekt bij hem boven alle anderen uit — misschien wel omdat hij, net als Magee zelf, een allesoverheersend belang hechtte aan de muziek.
Maar daarmee komt hij, vreemd genoeg, meteen weer buiten de wetenschappelijke sfeer terecht. Want wat is er «onwetenschappelijker» dan muziek — wanneer we het niet hebben over de (zeer rationele) muzikale theorie, maar de ervaring van de tonen, waarin de muziek uiteindelijk slechts bestaat? Als muziek ons iets onontbeerlijks zegt over ons bestaan, en filosofie is tegelijk naar dat soort onontbeerlijke antwoorden op zoek, moet ze dan niet een heel ander vlak opzoeken dan dat van de objectiviteit en wetenschappelijkheid? Moet de filosofie zich, met andere woorden, niet veeleer richten op de menselijke beleving?
Met het ontstaan van het bewustzijn heeft zich in de werkelijkheid iets nieuws gevormd dat werkelijk bestaat maar vanuit het unversum iets ireëels heeft. Wat zijn gedachten, gevoelens en ervaringen, materieel gezien, anders dan fysische verschijnselen die door de natuurwetenschap kunnen worden bestudeerd en wellicht ooit verklaard? En toch is er, anderzijds, geen grotere discrepantie denkbaar dan tussen het gevoel van verliefdheid dat iedereen weleens overvallen heeft, en de hormonale en neurofysiologische processen die daaraan ten grondslag liggen. Het een is simpelweg niet hetzelfde als het ander, al bestaan ze beide tegelijk niet zonder elkaar.
Dat filosofie de discipline is die zich bezighoudt met deze ervaring wil niet zeggen dat ze gelijk wordt aan psychologie. Filosofie vraagt naar de betekenis van die ervaring, terwijl psychologie slechts vraagt waardoor de ervaring van die betekenis is veroorzaakt. De werkelijkheid waarover de filosofie het heeft, is niet gelijk aan de objectiviteit. Ze verhoudt zich daartoe als de muziek tot de golfbeweging die haar draagt en die zichtbaar wordt op de oscillograaf. Zonder die trilling bestaat ze niet als werkelijkheid; maar zonder gehoord te worden, bestaat ze niet als muziek.
Filosofie is dus gedoemd tot hetzelfde irrealisme als wat Searle in Kant aanklaagt. Ze maakt de mens niet tot de oorsprong van het universum, maar erkent wel dat hij de enige plek is waarin dat universum een wereld wordt die betekenis heeft. Dat juist Schopenhauers liefde voor de muziek tot die conclusie leidt, is niet zo verwonderlijk. Tenslotte was Schopenhauer een van Kants meest toegewijde volgelingen en is muziek bij uitstek iets dat pas betekenis krijgt voor het menselijke begrip. In die zin maakt de mens inderdaad zijn wereld en maakt hij zich los van de wetten en het noodlot van het universum. Hij leeft pas echt in zijn eigen irrealiteit en in de artefacten waarmee hij zich omgeeft en waarin hij zijn bestaan inbedt.
Het is dan ook nog veel te vroeg om afscheid te nemen van de linguistic turn die de filosofie in de twintigste eeuw genomen heeft. Wellicht is de taalfilosofie inmiddels amechtig geworden, uitgeput als ze is door de scholastieke spitsvondigheden die Magee haar verwijt. Maar vanuit een heel andere achtergrond benadrukt ook de Duitse filosoof Hans-Georg Gadamer aan het slot van zijn grote studie Wahrheit und Methode: «Het zijn, dat begrepen kan worden, is taal.»
Gadamer, wiens verzameld werk ter gelegenheid van zijn honderdste verjaardag vorig jaar in een indrukwekkende pocketeditie is verschenen, zoekt het niet bij de analyse van woorden maar bij de gearticuleerde taal van de literatuur. Daarin drukt zich volgens hem de waarheid van het mensenbestaan pas werkelijk uit en juist aan deze «fictie» moet de filosofie, wil ze daarvan ooit iets begrijpen, haar oor lenen. Zelf wordt ze geen literatuur, want ze praat niet over het bijzondere maar over het algemene, en houdt zich niet op in de verbeelding maar in de rationele analyse. Ze hangt ergens tussen literatuur en wetenschap in. Het gaat haar niet om de naakte, maar om de betekenisvolle werkelijkheid — waarover ze niettemin op een lucide en expliciete manier probeert te spreken.
Dat laatste is voor haar de enige manier om nog «ergens» te blijven. Ze moet publiekelijk durven filosofie te zijn. Daarin lag volgens de christelijke existentialist Gabriel Marcel haar verwantschap met het theater, zoals Sartre dat zo meesterlijk wist uit te buiten. Ook diens filosofie had uiteindelijk meer invloed via zijn toneelstuk Huis clos dan via zijn hoofdwerk L'être et le néant. Marcel — zo vertelt de Franse filosoof Paul Ricoeur in La critique et la conviction, een boeklang interview over zijn eigen denkweg — kon Sartre daar bitter om benijden. Maar bij beiden had je, aldus Ricoeur, het opwindende besef dat het denken leefde en terzake deed. Misschien wel juist omdat het zich niet bekommerde om haar wetenschappelijkheid of realisme."
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
Aha, natuurlijk, Searle begrijpt het niet!
Nee, hij begrijpt het niet. Hij beschrijft pmers als filosofisch idealisten, wat ze niet zijn. Searle baseert zijn gammele redenering op het simplistische uitgangspunt, dat "de waarheid zelf geen sociaal construct is"
Alsof de waarheid een object is, waaraan bepaalde eigenschappen kleven.
Onzin natuurlijk, in een materieel heelal bestaat geen waarheid als een of andere eigenschap in dat heelal. Iets is alleen maar waar in de relatie tussen subject en object. Net zo goed als dat er geen "kleur" is, is een universum, zonder ""kleurwaarneming", is er geen waarheid in een universum, zonder "waarheidsvinding"
Anders gezegd, waarheid is per definitie een sociaal construct
Searle merkt zelf listig op, dat de horizon (van kennis) zich verbreedt. let erop dat hij het woord " komt dichterbij" niet gebruikt.
Dolle Fatima
07-03-07, 12:44
Eigenlijk heb ik best zin in een tosti. :zozo:
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
Open deurtjes. Heb je niks beters?
Navelstaren van een stelletje middelmatige filosoofjes.
Tja, van ad hominem argumenten raak ik niet onder de indruk. Kijk eens, Searle is een wat je kunt noemen: een naief realist, en de argumenten van de naief realist zijn niet nieuw en allang weerlegd.
Quote (Stanford EoPH):
"There is a prevalent conception of scientific objectivity which is historically associated with empiricist conceptions of science, even though it is sufficiently naive that probably no professional empiricist philosopher of science ever defended all of its components. According to it, the objects of scientific study are natural kinds (etc.) which are
1. independent of human practices,
2. defined by
a. eternal,
b. unchanging,
c. ahistorical, and
d. intrinsic necessary and sufficient membership conditions;
3. referred to in
a. fundamental,
b. exceptionless,
c. eternal, and
d. ahistorical laws; and
4. discovered by the deployment of
a. eternal,
b. ahistorical,
c. politically and culturally neutral, and
d. foundational scientific methods.
To a significant extent, anti-realist postmodern conceptions of science take these components of naive empiricism to be definitive of the notion of scientific objectivity. Postmodern students of science hold -- correctly (Boyd 1999; Sismondo 1993a, 1993b, 1996; Knorr Cetina 1993) -- that nothing in actual scientific practice even remotely fits these criteria for objectivity. On this basis they often reach the anti-realist conclusion that scientific research never achieves objective knowledge. It is characteristic of defenses of realism against postmodern anti-realism that they deny, about one or more of the components mention, that they are necessary for practical knowledge.
Searle zegt:
Filosofen houden zich nog wel bezig met de aloude logische en epistemologische paradoxen, maar enkel voor de grap.
Ik sta hier een beetje sceptisch tegenover.
Shemharosh
07-03-07, 14:58
Valt wel mee hoor met dat kennis en technologie.De wereld draait nog steeds op stoomcentrales en achterlijke Diesel motors.Maar we zijn wel naar de maan geweest...niet heus!!
tr_imparator
07-03-07, 15:23
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
Boef! maroc natuurlijk!
grens, wens enzo.
Aha, natuurlijk, Searle begrijpt het niet!
:hihi:
Ik wou dat ik de auteur was!
jarloeewz
Geplaatst door Olive Yao
Het belangrijkste intellectuele gegeven van deze tijd is de explosieve groei van onze kennis. Dankzij die kennisgroei weten wij meer dan onze grootouders en zullen onze klein kinderen veel meer weten dan wij. En er is een tweede verschil met vroeger: anders dan Descartes, Bacon, Bayle en andere filosofen van de vroege Verlichting twijfelen wij niet meer aan de geldigheid van onze kennis. Het scepticisme van toen, dat filosofen deed twijfelen aan de mogelijkheid van betrouwbare kennis, is een gepasseerd station.
Ik twijfel er aan of we als individu daadwerkelijk zoveel meer weten?
En sja, hoogmoed komt vaak voor de val.
Geplaatst door pyrrho
they are necessary for practical knowledge.
Storende fout, daar moet staan: "for objective knowledge"
Geplaatst door pyrrho
het lijkt onze*¹ goede vriend*² Rourchid*³ wel.
*¹ = De dokter zegt dat ik schizofreen ben, maar wij zijn het daar niet mee eens?
*² = Obsessie --> dwangvoorstelling; dat wat iem. onophoudelijk in zijn/haar gedachten bezighoudt?
*³ = Is hier niet , maar ook weer wel?
N.B.
De semi(?)-onzichtbare belettering :naar een idee van Qaiys!
Geplaatst door Rourchid
*¹ = De dokter zegt dat ik schizofreen ben, maar wij zijn het daar niet mee eens?
*² = Obsessie --> dwangvoorstelling; dat wat iem. onophoudelijk in zijn/haar gedachten bezighoudt?
*³ = Is hier niet , maar ook weer wel?
N.B.
De semi(?)-onzichtbare belettering :naar een idee van Qaiys!
Vaak wordt schizofrenie verwart met het mps-syndroom. In de volksmond heet schizofrenie immers een gespleten persoonlijkheid te zijn. Kortom lees je DSM IV.
Voor het overige ook even voor gozertje Rourchid, die zo trouw zijn krypto-solipsistische postjes post.
Deze discussie wordt verplaatst naar nl.filosofie, althans daar kun je me treffen.
Hier is het einde verhaal
Toedeledoki gozertje.
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Deze discussie wordt verplaatst naar nl.filosofie, althans daar kun je me treffen.
Ach so. :bril:
filosofie.nl
Discussieforum
Aangezien wij het filosofisch niveau van de discussies op het forum op dit moment niet kunnen waarborgen, heeft de redactie van Filosofie Magazine besloten het forum voorlopig te sluiten.
Geplaatst door H.P.Pas
Ach so. :bril:
Niet filosofie.nl pepernoot, maar nl.filosofie als in joesnet
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Niet filosofie.nl pepernoot, maar nl.filosofie als in joesnet
:wtf:
Respect broeder.
:student:
Wie anderen bespreekt bespreekt zichzelf.
Google is a bitch:
Wilde u misschien zoeken naar: doesnt filosofie :tik:
tr_imparator
09-03-07, 16:14
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Vaak wordt schizofrenie verwart met het mps-syndroom. In de volksmond heet schizofrenie immers een gespleten persoonlijkheid. Kortom lees je DSM IV.
Je zegt eigenlijk 2 verschillende dingen hier. ''Verward'' is heel wat anders dan anders genoemd(''heet anders'').
mps(multpersonality?)-syndroom. Je bedoelt persoonlijkheidsstoornis. Eigenlijk wordt er met multipersoonlijkheid gewoon schizofrenie mee bedoeld en geen persoonlijkheidsstoornis zoals beschreven in de DSM-IV.
Dus je kan niet zeggen dat er sprake is van verwarring, maar slechts van een *slechte ''synonimisering''.
(slecht omdat het alleen gebaseerd is op enkele symptomen:wanen en hallucinaties, geen symptomen van persoonlijkheidsstoornissen)
Wat Rourchid dus zegt is de facto juist en ben jij degene die de DSM-IV moet raadplegen!
Geplaatst door Rourchid
dwang voorstelling; dat wat iem. onophoudelijk in zijn/haar gedachten bezighoudt?
Dwang of juist Drang? :stout:
Geplaatst door tr_imparator
Je zegt eigenlijk 2 verschillende dingen hier. ''Verward'' is heel wat anders dan anders genoemd(''heet anders'').
mps(multpersonality?)-syndroom. Je bedoelt persoonlijkheidsstoornis. Eigenlijk wordt er met multipersoonlijkheid gewoon schizofrenie mee bedoeld en geen persoonlijkheidsstoornis zoals beschreven in de DSM-IV.
Dus je kan niet zeggen dat er sprake is van verwarring, maar slechts van een *slechte ''synonimisering''.
(slecht omdat het alleen gebaseerd is op enkele symptomen:wanen en hallucinaties, geen symptomen van persoonlijkheidsstoornissen)
Wat Rourchid dus zegt is de facto juist en ben jij degene die de DSM-IV moet raadplegen!
Dwang of juist Drang? :stout:
Quote:
"Dissociatieve persoonlijkheid of Meervoudig Persoonlijkheids Syndroom
In de volksmond wordt het begrip schizofrenie altijd verward met het meervoudig persoonlijkheids syndroom (MPS). Bij MPS leven er in één persoon meerdere individuen naast elkaar, maar vaak zijn ze van elkaars bestaan niet op de hoogte. Schizofrenie heeft daar niets mee te maken. MPS wordt veroorzaakt door traumatische ervaringen, waarvan incest de meest voorkomende is. Schizofrenie is een handicap, een constructiefout in de hersenen die vooral tot uiting komt wanneer de gehandicapte onder spanning staat. Aan buitenstaanders moet je altijd eerst uitleggen wat schizofrenie niet is, voordat ze kunnen begrijpen wat het dan wél is. Als ze het al kunnen begrijpen."
http://www.schizofrenieplein.nl/hulp/advies/aangrenz/prsheist.htm
Quote 2:
Dissociatieve identiteitsstoornis (vh MeervoudigePersoonlijkheidsstoornis)a. de aanwezigheid van twee of meer scherp van elkaar te onderscheidenidentiteiten of persoonlijkheidstoestanden (elk met een eigen betrekkelijklangdurig patroon van het waarnemen (knip)...
...d. de beleving van depersonalisatie komt niet uitsluitend voor in het beloop van een andere psychische stoornis zoals schizofrenie , paniekstoornis, acutestressstoornis of een andere dissociatieve stoornis en is niet het gevolg van dedirecte fysiologische effecten van een middel (bijvoorbeeld drug,geneesmiddel) of een somatische aandoening
http://www.caleidoscoop.nl/pdfs/DSM_IV.pdf
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Vaak wordt schizofrenie verwart
Ja, dat is inderdaad slordig, voltooid deelwoord stam + d, o.i.d, maar kom op zeg, gaan we steggelen over typo's?
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Ja, dat is inderdaad slordig, voltooid deelwoord stam + d, o.i.d, maar kom op zeg, gaan we steggelen over typo's?
Kan ik wel begrijpen.
Stijlkwesties ga je uit de weg als de duivel het wijwater. Spelling dan maar..
Geplaatst door H.P.Pas
Kan ik wel begrijpen.
Stijlkwesties ga je uit de weg als de duivel het wijwater. Spelling dan maar..
Newbie!
tr_imparator
09-03-07, 18:35
Ik zal proberen commentaar te leveren op de door jouw aangehaalde citaten.
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Quote:
"Dissociatieve persoonlijkheid of Meervoudig Persoonlijkheids Syndroom
In de volksmond wordt het begrip schizofrenie altijd verward met het meervoudig persoonlijkheids syndroom (MPS). Bij MPS leven er in één persoon meerdere individuen naast elkaar, maar vaak zijn ze van elkaars bestaan niet op de hoogte. Schizofrenie heeft daar niets mee te maken. MPS wordt veroorzaakt door traumatische ervaringen, waarvan incest de meest voorkomende is. Schizofrenie is een handicap, een constructiefout in de hersenen die vooral tot uiting komt wanneer de gehandicapte onder spanning staat. Aan buitenstaanders moet je altijd eerst uitleggen wat schizofrenie niet is, voordat ze kunnen begrijpen wat het dan wél is. Als ze het al kunnen begrijpen."
http://www.schizofrenieplein.nl/hulp/advies/aangrenz/prsheist.htm
Bij het raadplegen van informatie uit het internet moet je altijd kijken of het up-to-date is en vooral bij psychiatrie, omdat hier veel dingen veranderen. Je ziet dat de bron komt uit 1997 en dat de schrijvers geen dokters zijn.
Ik heb grote moeite met de stelling dat er in de volksmond schizofrenie vaak verward wordt met de dissociatieve identiteitsstoornis. In de volksmond bedoelt men namelijk met een gesplitste persoonlijkheid het naast elkaar bestaan van 'persoonlijkheden' in de vorm van wanen/hallucinaties(bijvoorbeeld als iemand tegen een fictieve persoon praat. Bijv. in de film A Beautiful Mind - vergelijk dat bijvoorbeeld met de film Identity). Bij een dissociatieve stoornis gaat het om persoonlijkheid dat uit zich door 2 verschillende personen in dezelfde lichaam( of/of karakter). De meeste patienten met DIS lopen niet met hun klachten te koop. Het klinisch beeld van DIS horen behalve amnesie van de alters ook fugues, chronische depersonalisatie en derealisatie en akoestische hallucinaties van ruziende stemmen. Deze stemmen zijn te beschouwen als manifestaties van de alters en worden meestal in het hoofd gelokaliseerd. Anders dan bij schizofrenie.
Het beeld dat het volk heeft van MPS past meer bij schizofrenie en is eigenlijk een slechte synoniem voor dit, maar wordt zeker niet verward met het DIS. Dat is wat ik bedoel.
Het klopt dat DIS wordt gezien als een bijzondere vorm van een chronische posttraumatische stoornis. Ook bekend is bijvoorbeeld DIS een iatrogeen verschijnsel is. Maar dat terzijde.
Quote 2:
Dissociatieve identiteitsstoornis (vh MeervoudigePersoonlijkheidsstoornis)a. de aanwezigheid van twee of meer scherp van elkaar te onderscheidenidentiteiten of persoonlijkheidstoestanden (elk met een eigen betrekkelijklangdurig patroon van het waarnemen (knip)...
...d. de beleving van depersonalisatie komt niet uitsluitend voor in het beloop van een andere psychische stoornis zoals schizofrenie , paniekstoornis, acutestressstoornis of een andere dissociatieve stoornis en is niet het gevolg van dedirecte fysiologische effecten van een middel (bijvoorbeeld drug,geneesmiddel) of een somatische aandoening
http://www.caleidoscoop.nl/pdfs/DSM_IV.pdf
Bij DIS worden er eerst vaak andere diagnosen gesteld eerst, maar dat wil niet zeggen dat ze onjuist zijn. Bij DIS is er namelijk ook sprake van een complexe comorbiditeit.
Vanwege de akoestische hallucinaties zouden patienten met DIS vaak ten onrechte de diagnose schizofrenie krijgen. Een vuistregel om de twee stoornissen van elkaar te scheiden is dat DIS met terugkerende amnesieen gepaard gaat en de stemmen overwegend in het hoofd worden gelokaliseerd, terwijl mensen die aan schizofrenie lijden over het algemeen geen amnesieen rapporteren en de stemmen als van buiten komend ervaren(het beeld dat men heeft in het volk).
Ik had eerder gelezen dat jij medeprikkers hier beschuldigd van notoire forumtijger en googelaar, maar jij komt hier toch het meest in aanmerking voor. :o
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Newbie!
Hollander ?
Uit het Westen ?
Geplaatst door H.P.Pas
Hollander ?
Uit het Westen ?
Nee, en nee
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Nee, en nee
Voor een voegwoord geen komma. Je doet dat steeds.
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Niet filosofie.nl pepernoot, maar nl.filosofie als in joesnet
Geplaatst door tr_imparator
Ik zal proberen commentaar te leveren op de door jouw aangehaalde citaten.
Bij het raadplegen van informatie uit het internet moet je altijd kijken of het up-to-date is en vooral bij psychiatrie, omdat hier veel dingen veranderen. Je ziet dat de bron komt uit 1997 en dat de schrijvers geen dokters zijn.
Ik heb grote moeite met de stelling dat er in de volksmond schizofrenie vaak verward wordt met de dissociatieve identiteitsstoornis. Ik had eerder gelezen dat jij medeprikkers hier beschuldigd van notoire forumtijger en googelaar, maar jij komt hier toch het meest in aanmerking voor. :o
Beste jongen, ik reageerde op:
"De dokter zegt dat ik schizofreen ben, maar wij zijn het daar niet mee eens?"
Daar sprak de volksmond, of jij het nu mee eens bent of niet. De desbetreffende site kent dat verschijnsel en zelfs al in 1997, naar blijkt.
Overigens wil ik je er op wijzen dat DIS of MPS nog steeds sceptisch wordt benaderd, maar als je het dan toch in beschouwing wil nemen, formuleer het dan niet zoals je deed nl:
"mps(multpersonality?)-syndroom. Je bedoelt persoonlijkheidsstoornis. Eigenlijk wordt er met multipersoonlijkheid gewoon schizofrenie mee bedoeld"
Dat is een nogal rammelende zin, en hij is niet waar bovendien.
Het laaste postje verraad dat je er best wat van weet, beroep, studie, of gaan we daar weer geheimzinnig over doen?
En waarom dan weer die sneer?
Ik heb mijn studie in 1995 afgerond en mijn exemplaar van het DSM is III, maar het meeste komt nog uit mijn gehuegen en niet uit het zoekmasjien.
Geplaatst door H.P.Pas
Voor een voegwoord geen komma. Je doet dat steeds.
Dat doe ik met opzet, padvinder newbie en als ik Nederlandse les wil (Die mooie taal is niet mijn moedertaal) dan vraagik het mijn echtgenote wel, die doceert het.
Geplaatst door pyrrho
En waarom dan weer die sneer?
Asymmetrisch stijlgevoelig ?
tr_imparator
09-03-07, 19:36
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Overigens wil ik je er op wijzen dat DIS of MPS nog steeds sceptisch wordt benaderd, maar als je het dan toch in beschouwing wil nemen, formuleer het dan niet zoals je deed nl:
"mps(multpersonality?)-syndroom. Je bedoelt persoonlijkheidsstoornis. Eigenlijk wordt er met multipersoonlijkheid gewoon schizofrenie mee bedoeld"
Dat is een nogal rammelende zin, en hij is niet waar bovendien.
Ik wist niet wat je precies bedoelde met MPS. MPS ook wel dissociatieve identiteitsstoornis is namelijk geen persoonlijkheidsstoornis, maar omvat een apart hoofdstukje en hoort bij de dissociatieve stoornissen.
Ik wist niet waar jij het over had: persoonlijkheidsstoornis of een dissociatieve stoornis. Ik dacht dus aan DIS, wat juist bleek te zijn, en verder heb ik uitgezet dat er met MPS vaker schizofrenie wordt bedoeld dan DIS. Daarom was ik het en eerste instantie niet eens met de de door jouw aangehaalde citaat.
Het laaste postje verraad dat je er best wat van weet, beroep, studie, of gaan we daar weer geheimzinnig over doen?
En waarom dan weer die sneer?
Ik heb mijn studie in 1995 afgerond en mijn exemplaar van het DSM is III, maar het meeste komt nog uit mijn gehuegen en niet uit het zoekmasjien.
Dit ondersteunt niet jouw vorige post, dat grotendeels bestaat uit informatie die mbv een zoekmachine gevonden is.
Geplaatst door tr_imparator
Ik wist niet wat je precies bedoelde met MPS. MPS ook wel dissociatieve identiteitsstoornis is namelijk geen persoonlijkheidsstoornis, maar omvat een apart hoofdstukje en hoort bij de dissociatieve stoornissen.
Ik wist niet waar jij het over had: persoonlijkheidsstoornis of een dissociatieve stoornis. Ik dacht dus aan DIS, wat juist bleek te zijn, en verder heb ik uitgezet dat er met MPS vaker schizofrenie wordt bedoeld dan DIS. Daarom was ik het en eerste instantie niet eens met de de door jouw aangehaalde citaat.
Dit ondersteunt niet jouw vorige post, dat grotendeels bestaat uit informatie die mbv een zoekmachine gevonden is.
Hmm, dat laatste is natuurlijk onzin. Ik onderbouwde mijn eerdere stelling met toepaselijke bronnen. Overtikken uit mijn oude studieboeken doe ik niet meer.
Jij wel? Of is het parate kennis? Zeg jij het maar, het doet aan de argumenten niets af.
Als jij niet wist waarover ik het had, moet je het eerst vragen. Mijn formulering was helder genoeg, je met mps niet met schizofrenie verwarren.
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Vooral Schopenhauer, die hij pas laat in zijn leven ontdekte, steekt bij hem boven alle anderen uit - misschien wel omdat hij, net als Magee zelf, een allesoverheersend belang hechtte aan de muziek.
Maar daarmee komt hij, vreemd genoeg, meteen weer buiten de wetenschappelijke sfeer terecht. Want wat is er «onwetenschappelijker» dan muziek - wanneer we het niet hebben over de (zeer rationele) muzikale theorie, maar de ervaring van de tonen, waarin de muziek uiteindelijk slechts bestaat? Als muziek ons iets onontbeerlijks zegt over ons bestaan, en filosofie is tegelijk naar dat soort onontbeerlijke antwoorden op zoek, moet ze dan niet een heel ander vlak opzoeken dan dat van de objectiviteit en wetenschappelijkheid? Moet de filosofie zich, met andere woorden, niet veeleer richten op de menselijke beleving*?
* = richten op de muziekbeleving van doven?
Geplaatst door pyrrho
Voor het overige ook even voor gozertje Rourchid, die zo trouw zijn krypto-solipsistische postjes post.
Krypton is de planeet waar Superman geboren is.
Crypto = heimelijk, in het geheim.
(Cryptomnesie = het herinneren van tot dan geheel onbewust gebleven gebeurtenissen of voorvallen)
Hallo,
Over de stoorins Dissociatieve Identiteitstoornis vroeger dus MPS Meervoudige persoonlijkheidstoornis wordt wel degelijk in verwarring gebracht met schizofrenie. Het verschil hierbij is dat DIS een stoornis is en schizofrenie een ziekte is. Dus van een ziekte kom je niet af en van een stoornis dus wel. Bij schizofrenie horen mensen stemmen buiten het hoofd en bij DIS hoort men stemmen in het hoofd.
Mensen met dis hebben een verleden van incest en andere vormen van mishandeling deze groep mensen moeten dan ook vaak een lange gang maken langs hulpverleners voordat zij iemand hebben gevonden die hun kan behandelen. Bij schizofrenie gaat dit veel sneller en is er geen sprake van incest. Dus is nog steeds een moeilijk vast te stellen diagnose voor vele psychologen. Dit omdat DIS op enig moment meestal ook aan de criteria voor andere belangrijke psychiatrische stoornissen voldoen.
Bodyl
Dus van een ziekte kom je niet af en van een stoornis dus wel.
Niet mee eens. Borderline is ook een stoornis, net als DIS. Deze stoornissen zijn dan geen ziekte, een effectieve behandelmethode is er niet. Wekelijkse gesprekken met een psycholoog kunnen helpen maar veel verandert er niet. Het blijft een probleem, een leven lang.
Deze stoornissen kunnen overigens al door zo iets als een verhuizing worden veroorzaakt, de 'trigger' is bij een ieder verschillend.
Van een borderline stoornis kan je wel van genezen alleen is het een zeer lange weg, net als bij mensen met DIS. Dit gaat echt niet in 2 jaar dit kan wel 10 tot 15 jaar duren het is een lange weg, maar je kan genezen. er zijn vele mensen al van genezen deze hebben veel de therapie Lineham gedaan. Bij een borderline zie je ook vaak dat als mensen de 40 gepasseerd zijn de stoornis minder gaat worden, ik schrijf het kan!
Van een borderline stoornis kan je wel van genezen alleen is het een zeer lange weg, net als bij mensen met DIS. Dit gaat echt niet in 2 jaar dit kan wel 10 tot 15 jaar duren het is een lange weg, maar je kan genezen. er zijn vele mensen al van genezen deze hebben veel de therapie Lineham gedaan. Bij een borderline zie je ook vaak dat als mensen de 40 gepasseerd zijn de stoornis minder gaat worden, ik schrijf het kan!
Aan welke literatuur kan je refereren? Volgens de prof waar ik les van kreeg is borderline niet corrigeerbaar en alleen te onderdrukken met levenslange psychotherapie. Ik weet praktijkgevallen genoeg van 40+.....
Voor het eerst in de geschiedenis is wetenschappelijk aangetoond dat borderline persoonlijkheidsstoornissen behandelbaar zijn. Onderzoekers van de Universiteit Maastricht, Vrije Universiteit en Universiteit Leiden publiceren in het juni-nummer van het JAMA-tijdschrift Archives of General Psychiatry een studie naar de effectiviteit van twee psychotherapeutische behandelmethoden. Daaruit blijkt dat Schema focused therapy bij vijftig procent van de behandelde borderlinepatiënten tot volledig herstel leidt, en bij tweederde tot een aanmerkelijke verbetering.
Het succes van de onderzochte behandelmethoden schuilt vooral in de langdurigheid en intensiteit van de therapie (twee sessies per week gedurende drie jaar). De bevindingen staan lijnrecht tegenover het besluit van minister Hoogervorst uit 2004 om een maximumgrens te stellen aan het aantal psychotherapie-sessies dat wordt vergoed. Vorige week besloot Hoogervorst deze maatregel te verzachten, maar volgens onderzoeksleider Arnoud Arntz is het belang van borderlinepatiënten nog steeds onvoldoende gediend.
Die professor heeft die nog nooit iemand gezien die van een borderline genezen is? Heel merkwaardig! En ik schrijf ook niet dat het in alle gevallen is. Maar zeker is het te genzen al is het voor 50% van de gevallen. Maar wilden alleen aan geven dat schizofrenie zeker niet te genezen is.
Schema focused therapy
Dit is een zeer omstreden therapy waarvan al is aangetoond dat de effecten maar zeer tijdelijk zijn. This een soort psychotherapy met een vleugje Jomanda. Hoop doet leven, alleen is het maar tijdelijk.
Helaas knul.
The_Grand_Wazoo
22-03-08, 09:12
Het belangrijkste intellectuele gegeven van deze tijd is de explosieve groei van onze kennis. Dankzij die kennisgroei weten wij meer dan onze grootouders en zullen onze klein kinderen veel meer weten dan wij. En er is een tweede verschil met vroeger: anders dan Descartes, Bacon, Bayle en andere filosofen van de vroege Verlichting twijfelen wij niet meer aan de geldigheid van onze kennis. Het scepticisme van toen, dat filosofen deed twijfelen aan de mogelijkheid van betrouwbare kennis, is een gepasseerd station.
de auteur vermeld ik nog even niet
Er is dan ook nog al een verschil in de wereld waarin de vroege verlichtingsfilosofen opereerden en de hedendaagse. De crises waarmee Descartes en Bacon zich geconfronteerd zagen waren denk ik toch ook iets radicaler dan die waarvoor wij ons nu geplaatst zien. Met de dag bleek hun wereld groter en groter te worden en onthulde gebieden waar mensen leefden die op geen enkele wijze in het scheppingsplan leken te passen (een plan dat zo lang als archimedisch punt voor de werkelijkheid had gegolden en als fundament van de Thomische waarheidsdefinitie had gegolden); al meer dan eeuw werd het continent verscheurd door godsdienst oorlogen (Engeland: royalisten vs. puriteinen, Frankrijk: Hugenoten vs. Katholieken en vervolgens de oorlog van de drie Henry's; de 80 jarige oorlog in de Lage Landen; de 30 jarige oorlog (Descartes vocht er in mee) in Duitsland; de islam stond voor Wenen) en heersersdynastien die door opbouwen van een centraal overheidsapparaat meer en meer macht wisten te vergaren over hun gefragmeteerde rijken. Kortom, op veel meer vlakken deden zich radicale verschuivingen voor. De 20e en 21 eeuw lijken wel een eeuw van venderingen, maar deze veranderingen zijn minder diepgaand dan die vierhonderd jaar terug. Er is dan ook minder aanleiding voor twijfel.
de islam stond voor Wenen
Nitpick:
De Turken en hun christelijke bondgenoten stonden voor Wenen, met de welwillende instemming van Zijne Allerkatholiekste Majesteit Lodewijk de XIV van Frankrijk. Het ging om een (mislukte) veroveringsoorlog, niet om een godsdienstoorlog.
knuppeltje
22-03-08, 11:40
Het ging om een (mislukte) veroveringsoorlog, niet om een godsdienstoorlog.
Maak me sterk als dat niet altijd het geval is, was en wordt.
Nitpick:
De Turken en hun christelijke bondgenoten stonden voor Wenen, met de welwillende instemming van Zijne Allerkatholiekste Majesteit Lodewijk de XIV van Frankrijk. Het ging om een (mislukte) veroveringsoorlog, niet om een godsdienstoorlog.
Just.
Hoewel ook toen al het begrip 'propaganda' bestond was er geen sprake van een godsdienstoorlog. Net zo min als dat bij dat Servische geurm zo was in 1389 http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo#De_Slag_bij_het_Merelveld
Ja en zo kunen we nog maanden doogaan. Maar goed ik weet in ieder geval dat er wel mensen genezen van beiden stoornissen en het zal heus niet zo zijn dat je een ieder kan genezen dat is vaak met alles zo, maar het ging erom dat mensen ervan kunnen genezen en ik maak het zo vaak mee.
Helaas meid!
Ja en zo kunen we nog maanden doogaan. Maar goed ik weet in ieder geval dat er wel mensen genezen van beiden stoornissen en het zal heus niet zo zijn dat je een ieder kan genezen dat is vaak met alles zo, maar het ging erom dat mensen ervan kunnen genezen en ik maak het zo vaak mee.
Helaas meid!
Het is er mee leren omgaan, cognetive theraphy. 'Werkt' alleen als je er van bewust bent. Het is een oplossing.
Borderline is een vorm van een aandachtstoornis, mps heeft daar zijdelings mee te maken.
The_Grand_Wazoo
23-03-08, 18:36
Voor een voegwoord geen komma. Je doet dat steeds.
Hm, mijn leraar Nederlands oude stempel heeft mij geleerd dat het voor 'en' niet (of zelden), maar voor 'maar' wel was toegestaan. Waarvan akte.
The_Grand_Wazoo
24-03-08, 16:17
Nitpick:
De Turken en hun christelijke bondgenoten stonden voor Wenen, met de welwillende instemming van Zijne Allerkatholiekste Majesteit Lodewijk de XIV van Frankrijk. Het ging om een (mislukte) veroveringsoorlog, niet om een godsdienstoorlog.
Geachte magister, padden op uw pad, tenminste, als ik de juiste Pas voor mij denk te weten,
De godsdienstoorlogen waaraan ik refereerde betroffen niet die tegen de Turken, maar juist die binnen het lichaam van de christenheid zelf. De Turken werden, als ik mij niet vergis, ook gesteund door de Staten van Holland (niet de Staten Generaal, maar dat terzijde). Punt is dat er binnen de christenheid de ene stroming de andere zo na stond dat zij met de Turken heulde. Of zoals het in Holland heette ‘liever Turks dan Paaps’. Niets nieuws onder de zon natuurlijk, zoals soenieten het perifide westen gebruiken om Shiieten dwars te zitten.
Wat je opmerkt is natuurlijk waar, de Turken voerden een veroveringsoorlog. Suleyman's motivatie lag waarschijnlijk in het tevreden houden van de machtelite die hier nieuwe mogelijkheden zagen tot het verwerven van buit, bezittingen en titels; machtsbehoud is voor heersers altijd belangrijker geweest dan prinicpes. Religie was in dit verband het voornaamste middel voor de mobilisatie van mens en materiaal.
Ook de 80 jarige oorlog kan teruggevoerd worden tot banale machtsstrijd. Het smeekschrift dat Hoorne en van Egmond aan Philips II overhandigden en hun de kop zou kosten gingen in de eerste plaats over het verlies aan privileges, het recht van de standen en steden om inspraak te hebben op de hoogte en aanwending van de belastingopbrengsten en prerogatieven op het vergeven van profijtelijke ambten. De Franse burgeroorlogen in de 16e eeuw kunnen ook gereduceerd worden tot dynastieke perikelen van een zwakke dynastie en adelijke families die hogerop proberen te komen en de 30 jarige oorlog kan genoegelijk verklaard worden op botsingen van politieke (dynastieke) en economische aard. In alle gevallen echter was religie van groot belang. Het was tegelijk het decors waartegen en het toneel waarop conflicten over uiteenlopende waarden ten tonele kon worden gevoerd. Het was tegelijkertijd de enige taal waarmee de grote massa gemobiliseerd werd.
Kortom, weldegelijk godsdiensoorlogen, zij het dat religie hier noch als monocausaal verklaring geld noch in al te enge zin moet worden opgevat, zoals mij passend lijkt bij de omvattendheid van religieuze instituties.
The_Grand_Wazoo
24-03-08, 16:23
Grand_Wazoo, je post inspireert. We kunnen ons afvragen voor welke uitdaging in het denken we heden staan, en in hoeverre die lijkt op de uitdaging voor Descartes et al.
(...)
n. b. De 20e eeuw noem ik "de eeuw van het negatieve denken" in filosofie
He Grand_Wazoo, ken jij de Sokal hoax?
De Sokal hoax ken ik niet. En de 20e eeuw zou ik beslist niet de negatieve eeuw van de filosofie willen noemen. De radicale wending was volgens mij niet ingezet door de, overigens inderdaad negatieve post-modernisme (aan wie ik een intuitieve hekel heb), maar met de geestelijke leermeester van Foucault, namelijk Heidegger. Deze maakte het 'zijnsbegrip' en daarmee de epistemologie, ontologie en metafysica historisch.
Geachte magister, padden op uw pad, tenminste, als ik de juiste Pas voor mij denk te weten,
Bij Zazel en Iod ! Dezelfde meneertje; wacht u voor de Horrekop.
Hèhè...:duivel:
Het is John Searle. Searle is een realist, maar geen echte fysicalist. Het is leuk om bijvoorbeeld Searle en Rorty in debat te zien.
Rorty:
Objective truth understood as correspondence between our knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content. He would prefer to describe objectivity as the search for "the widest possible intersubjective agreement."
En zo is het natuurlijk, waar Searle wederom niet begrijpt dat postmodernisten een onafhankelijke bestaande werkelijkheid helemaal niet ontkennen, legt Rorty nog eens uit hoe het zit. Een sociale constructie is niet een bedenksel maar een "vertaling" van empirische gegevens in een bepaalde culturele setting.
Denk je nu echt dat een postmodernist de zwaartekracht onkent o.i.d?
Searle creeert eerst zijn karikatuur van het pm en gaat er dan op schieten.
Dit wemelt van de dubieuze uitspraken. Ik weet bijna niet waar ik moet beginnen.
Inleiding (heel kort en onnauwkeurig):
Realisme zegt dat er een objectieve werkelijkheid is, onafhankelijk van ons, die we kunnen kennen.
Antirealisme ontkent dat we een objectieve werkelijkheid kennen.
(In plaats van “objectief” kun je ook “absoluut” in de zin van “onafhankelijk” gebruiken).
Postmodernisme staat aan gene zijde daarvan. Het neigt ertoe zich tot taal te beperken (“dat onze zekerheid tot «la textualité du texte» beperkt blijft”) en vindt dat we het realisme – antirealismedebat achter ons moeten laten. Voor dat laatste is overigens wel iets te zeggen - maar dan niet op de manier van postmodernisme.
legt Rorty nog eens uit hoe het zit
(…)
Objective truth understood as correspondence between our knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content.
Dit heeft Richard Rorty niet bedacht. De eerste die hierover begon was Frege, meer dan 100 jaar geleden, en sindsdien heeft een legioen denkers zich ermee beziggehouden, waaronder toppers.
He would prefer to describe objectivity as the search for "the widest possible intersubjective agreement.
“Objectiviteit” is geen zoektocht, maar de uitkomst daarvan.
Als mensen het na verloop van tijd met elkaar eens zijn - over de fysieke wereld of hun ervaring daarvan – hoe komt dat dan?
Bijvoorbeeld, na verloop van niet heel veel tijd zijn mensen het met elkaar eens dat er zwaartekracht is (althans een verschijnsel dat wij met dat woord aanduiden). Hoe komt het dat ze het daar met elkaar over eens zijn?
Als kennis niet overeenkomt met een objectieve werkelijkheid, waarom nemen we dan intersubjectief-objectief aan dat er zwaartekracht is? Daar zouden we dan toch ook anders over kunnen denken – en daarnaar handelen?
dat postmodernisten een onafhankelijke bestaande werkelijkheid helemaal niet ontkennen
Postmodernisme staat aan gene zijde van realisme – antirealisme. Het vindt dat we dat debat moeten laten voor wat het is. Daar bestaat zelfs een aparte naam voor, “quetism”.
dat postmodernisten een onafhankelijke bestaande werkelijkheid helemaal niet ontkennen
(…)
Objective truth understood as correspondence between our knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content.
Niet zo gemakkelijk om die twee uitspraken met elkaar in overeenstemming te brengen.
Bijvoorbeeld, hoe onderscheid postmodernisme zich dan van antirealisme?
Een sociale constructie is niet een bedenksel maar een "vertaling" van empirische gegevens in een bepaalde culturele setting.
Allicht. Maar daar hebben we het nu niet over. Onze vraag is nu: hoe is de verhouding tussen die “vertaling” en de “oorsprong” van die empirische gegevens?
Denk je nu echt dat een postmodernist de zwaartekracht onkent o.i.d?
Hun woorden en daden zijn inconsistent. Ze zeggen dat onze uitspraken over zwaartekracht niet verwijzen naar een objectieve werkelijkheid, maar ze zullen niet van de toren springen.
Om met John Searle te spreken:
Er is iets ongerijmds aan zo’n postmoderne filosoof die in het vliegtuig stapt en in de lucht op zijn laptop werkt, bij aankomst zijn e-mail ophaalt, vervolgens een collegezaal binnenstapt en zegt dat we eigenlijk niets zeker weten en dat onze zekerheid tot «la textualité du texte» beperkt blijft.
p. s. Ook dieren kennen het verschijnsel dat we met "zwaartekracht" aanduiden en handelen daarnaar. Katten maken hun sprongen voorzichtig, apen houden zich goed vast in een boom.
Is dit een "sociale constructie" van dieren?
Evolutie en pragmatisme spelen op de een of andere manier een rol bij dit filosofische onderwerp.
Als mensen het na verloop van tijd met elkaar eens zijn - over de fysieke wereld of hun ervaring daarvan – hoe komt dat dan?
Misschien hebben ze onvoldoende nagedacht en praten elkaar na.
Twee citaten waar ik de oorsprong niet meer van weet:
"Als iedereen het met elkaar eens is, heeft iedereen te weing nagedacht."
"When one million people say something foolish, it is still foolish."
Misschien hebben ze onvoldoende nagedacht en praten elkaar na.
Dat komt voor natuurlijk.
Als echter kapitein Brulboei met zijn sextant en een knopenkoordje de omtrek van de aarde bepaalt en op hetzelfde resultaat komt als 2000 jaar eerder Erastostenes met zijn waterput, dan schiet die verklaring toch echt tekort.
Eenvoudiger gezegd doet het bij iedereen au als je tegen een deur aanloopt. Moslim, aboriginal, paulinistisch-materialistische homo...
Dat komt voor natuurlijk.
Als echter kapitein Brulboei met zijn sextant en een knopenkoordje de omtrek van de aarde bepaalt en op hetzelfde resultaat komt als 2000 jaar eerder Erastostenes met zijn waterput, dan schiet die verklaring toch echt tekort.
Hij komt niet tot hetzelfde resultaat. Is dat wel het geval dan is het een toevalstreffer. Hij lomt tot een resultaat dat ongeveer hezelfde is. Als je met dit soort "exacte" voorbeelden komt, moet je ook specificeren hoe exact het is. Je kunt je vervolgens afvragen welke betekenis de uitspraak "De bewering 'de omtrek van de aarde is x (vul zelf maar in)' is waar" heeft. Je kunt je ook afvragen wat de betekenis van het woord waar is en of de toevoeging "is waar" enig nut heeft.
Ik zie even af van de vraag waarover je de omtrek bepaald, als je het over de omtrek van de aarde hebt. Bedoel gemeten over de polen of over de evenaar, bedoel je de geoïde of de lengte van een touwtje gelegd over een "gemiddelde" grote cirkel.
Het ging Olive er denk ik ook niet om, om aan te tonen dat de omtrek van de aarde x is, of dat er zoiets als zwaartekracht is, maar om het proces volgens welke we de "objectieve werkelijkheid" ontdekken of "ware" uitspraken kunnen doen over de "objectieve werkelijkheid". Mijn bezwaar tegen het het systeem van consensus is dat "waarheid" wat mij betreft niet met meerderheid van stemmen wordt bepaald.
Eenvoudiger gezegd doet het bij iedereen au als je tegen een deur aanloopt. Moslim, aboriginal, paulinistisch-materialistische homo...
Behalve als door een (aangeboren) afwijking de signalen van desbetreffende pijnreceptoren dat deel van de hersenen die die prikkels als pijn vertalen niet bereikt.
Behalve als door een (aangeboren) afwijking de signalen van desbetreffende pijnreceptoren dat deel van de hersenen die die prikkels als pijn vertalen niet bereikt.
Juist. Dit komt zeer weinig voor en wordt unaniem als een aandoening gezien. Niet als een alternatieve filosofische benadering van de werkelijkheid.
Juist. Dit komt zeer weinig voor en wordt unaniem als een aandoening gezien. Niet als een alternatieve filosofische benadering van de werkelijkheid.
Ook hier geldt weer dat het niet gaat over het waar zijn van dit specifieke geval, maar om de bedriegelijkheid van de zintuigen bij het ontdekken van de objectieve werkelijkheid. Hierover bestaat toch al heeel lang brede overeenstemming (onder filosofen)?
Ook hier geldt weer dat het niet gaat over het waar zijn van dit specifieke geval, maar om de bedriegelijkheid van de zintuigen bij het ontdekken van de objectieve werkelijkheid. Hierover bestaat toch al heeel lang brede overeenstemming (onder filosofen)?
Ik dacht dat we het over Olive's vraag hadden. Mijn antwoord is: omdat we grotendeels dezelfde ervaringen hebben. Ook dat bedrieglijke is een gedeelde ervaring.
Het gaat dus even niet om de verhouding tussen werkelijkheid en onze impressie daarvan, maar de congruentie van die impressie tussen de mensen. Die is vrijwel 100%. Ongeacht of het door een djinn komt of door chemische processen, zak maar zeggen.
De enige overeenstemming die ik ken is die van de wetenschap: de werkelijkheid (Ding an sich) is onkenbaar, dus construeren we modellen die al dan niet werken. Over de werkelijkheid laten we ons verder niet uit. Heeft ook zo weinig zin. Enfin tenzij je een carrière ambieert als post-denker.
Ik dacht dat we het over Olive's vraag hadden. Mijn antwoord is: omdat we grotendeels dezelfde ervaringen hebben. Ook dat bedrieglijke is een gedeelde ervaring.
Het gaat dus even niet om de verhouding tussen werkelijkheid en onze impressie daarvan, maar de congruentie van die impressie tussen de mensen. Die is vrijwel 100%. Ongeacht of het door een djinn komt of door chemische processen, zak maar zeggen.
De enige overeenstemming die ik ken is die van de wetenschap: de werkelijkheid (Ding an sich) is onkenbaar, dus construeren we modellen die al dan niet werken. Over de werkelijkheid laten we ons verder niet uit. Heeft ook zo weinig zin. Enfin tenzij je een carrière ambieert als post-denker.
Ah ja. Dan moet ik Olive misschien eerst vragen wat ze bedoelt met kennen in 'Ook dieren kennen het verschijnsel dat we met "zwaartekracht" aanduiden' en in hoeverre dit kennen verschilt met het kennen dat we inzetten bij het construeren van "sociale constructen". Als deze twee vormen van kennen verschillend zijn in hoeverre is het dan mogelijk dat het kennen van de dieren van de zwaartekracht enig licht werpt op het kennen van sociale constructen of constructen van de wetenschap?
Ah ja. Dan moet ik Olive misschien eerst vragen wat ze bedoelt met kennen in 'Ook dieren kennen het verschijnsel dat we met "zwaartekracht" aanduiden' en in hoeverre dit kennen verschilt met het kennen dat we inzetten bij het construeren van "sociale constructen". Als deze twee vormen van kennen verschillend zijn in hoeverre is het dan mogelijk dat het kennen van de dieren van de zwaartekracht enig licht werpt op het kennen van sociale constructen of constructen van de wetenschap?
Charlus is een expert op het gebied van sprekende mieren :hihi: dus met hun kenvermogen zal hij ook wel raad weten.
Eh, demande vos questions à Mme Olive s.v.p. haha. Neuh, persoonlijk denk ik niet dat dieren 'kennis' in onze zin hebben. Dat vereist bewustzijn, zou ik zeggen. Dit wordt tricky. We dwalen af naar de wijsgerige antropologie.
Eh, demande vos questions à Mme Olive s.v.p.
Dat deed ik eigenlijk ook, zij het indirect. Mijn excuus dat ik dat over jouw hoofd deed.
We dwalen af naar de wijsgerige antropologie.
Ja, da's wel zo.
Dit heeft Richard Rorty niet bedacht. De eerste die hierover begon was Frege, meer dan 100 jaar geleden, en sindsdien heeft een legioen denkers zich ermee beziggehouden, waaronder toppers.
Beter lezen, pepernoot!
pyrrho: "legt Rorty nog eens uit hoe het zit"
Hij komt niet tot hetzelfde resultaat.
Dat komt hij wel. Alleen boekhouders en kabbalisten zien dat anders; die hanteren een in dit verband onbruikbaar getal-begrip.
Dat komt hij wel. Alleen boekhouders en kabbalisten zien dat anders; die hanteren een in dit verband onbruikbaar getal-begrip.
Als je het louter kwalitatief benaderd hebben ze helemaal niet laten zien dat de aarde rond is. Zij hebben zich onvoldoende gerealiseerd dat hun uitkomst het gevolg is van de aanname voorraf, dat de aarde rond is. Het enige dat ze aangetoond hebben is x=x.
Lorre !
Amongst the essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (1990), is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Rorty defends Rawls against communitarian critics and argues that personal ideals of perfection and standards of truth were no more needed in politics than a state religion. He sees Rawls' concept of reflective equilibrium as a more appropriate way of approaching political decision-making in modern liberal democracies.
Deconstrueer je tosti!
... zonder ham natuurlijk?
:lol:
deconstrueer jou eigen bovenstaand flauwekul dan maar eerst ::fplet:
wij deconstrueren al zonder Derrida ! :lol: : the man hadn't invented that :
well : postmodernisme _post scepticisme :
i say : it's post_materialistisch ideologisch bankroet bullshitisme ! :lol:
Je weet zelf dat sinds Descartes althans , alles stond in het teken van materialisme, individualisme, subjectivisme, determinisme .........met alle gevolgen van dien , ondanks die rationalisme & empirisme hier & daar :
materialisme in de modern wetenschap, in de modern filosofie, in human sciences, inclusief in de psychologie, economie , sociologie ....
zelfs rede, empirie ...zijn van materialistisch aard :
vandaar dat materialisme of materialistisch monisme alleen op het terrein van de materie enorm had gepresteerd , niet op die van human sciences ...
dat komt door de aard, natuur van die 1zijdig 1dilmentioneel color blind gehandicapt materialisme die die dualistisch dimenties van de mens, van het leven ...of hardnekkig negeert of hardnekkig ontkent :
erger nog : of alles naar de materie zou herleiden :
materialisme had zelfs de opvatting van de waarheid drastisch veranderd juist voor materialistisch ideologisch doeleinden = pragmatisme ...
ach...
:zwaai:
Als je het louter kwalitatief benaderd hebben ze helemaal niet laten zien dat de aarde rond is.
Als je met rond bedoelt bij benadering bolvormig dan heb je gelijk; dat was hun uitgangspunt. Dat uitgangspunt had ook fout kunnen zijn.
Zij hebben zich onvoldoende gerealiseerd dat hun uitkomst het gevolg is van de aanname voorraf, dat de aarde rond is. Het enige dat ze aangetoond hebben is x=x.
Nee, ze hebben aangetoond, dat x (2pi * de kromtestraal terplekke) = 40.000 km. Dat resultaat was onontkoombaar op grond van de fysische realiteit, niet op grond van een , al dan niet sociale, constructie.
Het heeft iets bizars om met behulp van een (bijna :)) vlekkeloos functionerend internet andersluidende ideeën in de omloop te brengen.
Vandaar dat bovenvermelde bloemetje. (http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showpost.php?p=3213375&postcount=3)
Als je met rond bedoelt bij benadering bolvormig dan heb je gelijk; dat was hun uitgangspunt. Dat uitgangspunt had ook fout kunnen zijn.
Nee, ze hebben aangetoond, dat x (2pi * de kromtestraal terplekke) = 40.000 km. Dat resultaat was onontkoombaar op grond van de fysische realiteit, niet op grond van een , al dan niet sociale, constructie.
Het heeft iets bizars om met behulp van een (bijna :)) vlekkeloos functionerend internet andersluidende ideeën in de omloop te brengen.
Vandaar dat bovenvermelde bloemetje. (http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showpost.php?p=3213375&postcount=3)
Dat bloemetje verdien ik niet omdat ik niet wil ontkennen dat de aarde een bol is (bij benadering, het meer een peer, dit terzijde). Met x=x bedoel ik dat ze als üitgangspunt nemen dat de aarde een bol is en dan door de omtrek te bereken laten zien dat de aarde een bol is.
Dat bloemetje verdien ik niet omdat ik niet wil ontkennen dat de aarde een bol is (bij benadering, het meer een peer, dit terzijde).
Met x=x bedoel ik dat ze als üitgangspunt nemen dat de aarde een bol is en dan door de omtrek te bereken laten zien dat de aarde een bol is.
De uitkomst is niet 'bol', de uitkomst is '40,000 km' . (Of het equivalent daarvan in Alexandrijnse stadien).
Laten we Erastostenes verder rusten. Waar het mij om gaat is, dat wij wel degelijk beschikken over (een zekere) kennis van de fysische buitenwereld, die zich niet laat wegrelativeren.
De uitkomst is niet 'bol', de uitkomst is '40,000 km' . (Of het equivalent daarvan in Alexandrijnse stadien).
Laten we Erastostenes verder rusten. Waar het mij om gaat is, dat wij wel degelijk beschikken over (een zekere) kennis van de fysische buitenwereld, die zich niet laat wegrelativeren.
Ik wil niet ontkennen dat we over (een zekere) kennis beschikken, waar het mij om gaat is de manier waarop we tot die kennis komen. Ergens van uitgaan en dan laten zien dat dat waar je van uitgaat volgt uit waar je van uitgaat, zegt niets over de fysische buitenwereld.
Om even te nitpicken: als de uitkomst niet 'bol' is maar 40.000 km, wat stelt die 40.000 km dan wel voor? Aangezien je rekent met 2pi*r zou je denken dat het een cirkel (1-dimensionale compacte ruimte), een cirkelschijf (2-dimensionale ruimte), een cilinder (3-dimensionale ruimte) of een bol (3-dimensionale ruimte) is. Andere mogelijkheden laat ik even weg. De 1- en 2-dimensionale ruimten lijken mij niet mogelijk (daar is op zich kritiek op mogelijk) en een cilinder lijkt me ook onwaarschijnlijk). Blijft over 'bol'.
als de uitkomst niet 'bol' is maar 40.000 km, wat stelt die 40.000 km dan wel voor?
Zoals gezegd:
x (2pi * de kromtestraal terplekke) = 40.000 km.
Dat geldt onverminderd als de grondvorm 'aardappel' is.
Daar bestaat zelfs een aparte naam voor, “quetism”.
Quietism.
N.B.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand
Allicht. Maar daar hebben we het nu niet over. Onze vraag is nu: hoe is de verhouding tussen die “vertaling” en de “oorsprong” van die empirische gegevens?
Relativism and Monadic Truth (2009) : http://www.speedyshare.com/944735618.html (.pdf bestand, 982 KB)
N.B.
Er staat een naakte dame afgebeeld op de omslag van vorenstaand boek.
Zoals gezegd:
Dat geldt onverminderd als de grondvorm 'aardappel' is.
Je bedoelt: alleen ter plaatse van de meting is het aardoppervlak krom en dat op grotere schaal de zaak zich zou kunnen uitmiddelen tot een platte aarde?
Bijvoorbeeld, na verloop van niet heel veel tijd zijn mensen het met elkaar eens dat er zwaartekracht is (althans een verschijnsel dat wij met dat woord aanduiden). Hoe komt het dat ze het daar met elkaar over eens zijn?.[/COLOR]
Omdat ze op een door God gegeven dag massaal op hun bakkes tuimelden tijdens het bejubelen van hun gelukzalige onwetendheid?
Ageert postmodernisme niet veel meer tegen waarheid dan tegen werkelijkheid? Tegen waarheidsaanpsraken om precies te zijn?
'Subjectiviteit is de waarheid', zo mopperde een misantroop eens, er daarmee op doelend dat iets pas waar is voor iemand als het betekenis voor hem heeft.
De JSF is beter dan de Grippen?
Hel & Verdoemenis zijn sociale kastijdingsmechanismen versus Hel & Verdoemenis zijn beeldende reflecties van de manecheïstische aard van de mens?
Eppur si muove, fluisterde hij balsturig
(...)
Ageert postmodernisme niet veel meer tegen waarheid dan tegen werkelijkheid? Tegen waarheidsaanpsraken om precies te zijn?
'Subjectiviteit is de waarheid', zo mopperde een misantroop eens, er daarmee op doelend dat iets pas waar is voor iemand als het betekenis voor hem heeft.
Ja. De postmodernisten in deze topic doen dat niet door bijvoorbeeld op de eenzijdigheid van nederlandse media te wijzen, maar met taalfilosofische analyse.
Nu legt het woord "waar" vanouds een relatie tussen een uitspraak en de werkelijkheid - de uitspraak correspondeert met de werkelijkheid -, dus zo komt die aan de orde. Frege is dus begonnen met dit ter discussie te stellen.
(...)
Je kunt je vervolgens afvragen welke betekenis de uitspraak "De bewering 'de omtrek van de aarde is x (vul zelf maar in)' is waar" heeft. Je kunt je ook afvragen wat de betekenis van het woord waar is en of de toevoeging "is waar" enig nut heeft.
(...)
Het ging Olive er denk ik ook niet om, om aan te tonen dat de omtrek van de aarde x is, of dat er zoiets als zwaartekracht is, maar om het proces volgens welke we de "objectieve werkelijkheid" ontdekken of "ware" uitspraken kunnen doen over de "objectieve werkelijkheid". Mijn bezwaar tegen het het systeem van consensus is dat "waarheid" wat mij betreft niet met meerderheid van stemmen wordt bepaald.
(...)
Dat laatste is wel duidelijk lijkt me.
:chinees: waarheid
Inderdaad, sommige mensen verdedigen dat het predicaat "waar" niets cognitiefs toevoegt aan een uitspraak/propositie. Dus "het is waar dat sneeuw wit is" voegt niets cognitiefs toe aan "sneeuw is wit". Door te zeggen "dat is waar" laat je alleen weten dat je het ermee eens bent. Dat is wat Rorty bedoelt als hij zegt dat je een uitspraak met het predicaat "waar" alleen een schouderklopje geeft. Het concept "waarheid" is overbodig, het woord kunnen we vergeten.
Andere mensen denken hier anders over. (...)
:chinees: werkelijkheid
transcendentale Sallah
waarnemende Sallah . . . . . . . . . . . . object
Waarnemende Sallah neemt het object via zijn bewustzijn waar. Om zeker te weten dat Sallah’s waarneming overeenstemt met het object, zou Sallah uit zijn bewustzijn moeten klimmen en van buiten naar het object en naar Sallah’s waarneming moeten kijken, en zien dat dat klopt. Dat kan niet – transcendentale Sallah is zelf een waarnemende Sallah.
Volgens mij kunnen we het grondprobleem van zijnsleer en kennisleer zo formuleren.
Logischerwijs hoeven we zelfs niet aan te nemen dat er een objectieve wereld is. Om pragmatische redenen neemt men dat algemeen aan. Tussen realisten en antirealisten in wetenschapsfilosofie gaat het vooral om de vraag in hoeverre wetenschap een correcte beschrijving van de objectieve wereld afleidt.
(Maar volgens "waarheidsskeptici" is het concept "waarheid" daarbij dus overbodig en nutteloos).
Ik dacht dat we het over Olive's vraag hadden. Mijn antwoord is: omdat we grotendeels dezelfde ervaringen hebben. Ook dat bedrieglijke is een gedeelde ervaring.
Het gaat dus even niet om de verhouding tussen werkelijkheid en onze impressie daarvan, maar de congruentie van die impressie tussen de mensen. Die is vrijwel 100%. Ongeacht of het door een djinn komt of door chemische processen, zak maar zeggen.
De enige overeenstemming die ik ken is die van de wetenschap: de werkelijkheid (Ding an sich) is onkenbaar, dus construeren we modellen die al dan niet werken. Over de werkelijkheid laten we ons verder niet uit. Heeft ook zo weinig zin. Enfin tenzij je een carrière ambieert als post-denker.
Ja, dat is precies het verschil tussen "objectief" en "intersubjectief".
Maar hoe komt het dat onze impressies congruent zijn? Wat zit daar achter, zo iets?
We kennen het "Ding an sich" niet omdat we geen transcendentale Sallah's zijn. Maar in hoeverre mogen we aannemen dat waarnemende Sallah's wetenschappelijke beschrijving, afgeleid uit empirische waarneming, de werkelijkheid benadert?
Ja. De postmodernisten in deze topic doen dat niet door bijvoorbeeld op de eenzijdigheid van nederlandse media te wijzen, maar met taalfilosofische analyse.
Nu legt het woord "waar" vanouds een relatie tussen een uitspraak en de werkelijkheid - de uitspraak correspondeert met de werkelijkheid -, dus zo komt die aan de orde. Frege is dus begonnen met dit ter discussie te stellen.
Dat laatste is wel duidelijk lijkt me.
:chinees: waarheid
Inderdaad, sommige mensen verdedigen dat het predicaat "waar" niets cognitiefs toevoegt aan een uitspraak/propositie. Dus "het is waar dat sneeuw wit is" voegt niets cognitiefs toe aan "sneeuw is wit". Door te zeggen "dat is waar" laat je alleen weten dat je het ermee eens bent. Dat is wat Rorty bedoelt als hij zegt dat je een uitspraak met het predicaat "waar" alleen een schouderklopje geeft. Het concept "waarheid" is overbodig, het woord kunnen we vergeten.
Andere mensen denken hier anders over. (...)
:chinees: werkelijkheid
transcendentale Sallah
waarnemende Sallah . . . . . . . . . . . . object
Waarnemende Sallah neemt het object via zijn bewustzijn waar. Om zeker te weten dat Sallah’s waarneming overeenstemt met het object, zou Sallah uit zijn bewustzijn moeten klimmen en van buiten naar het object en naar Sallah’s waarneming moeten kijken, en zien dat dat klopt. Dat kan niet – transcendentale Sallah is zelf een waarnemende Sallah.
Volgens mij kunnen we het grondprobleem van zijnsleer en kennisleer zo formuleren.
Logischerwijs hoeven we zelfs niet aan te nemen dat er een objectieve wereld is. Om pragmatische redenen neemt men dat algemeen aan. Tussen realisten en antirealisten in wetenschapsfilosofie gaat het vooral om de vraag in hoeverre wetenschap een correcte beschrijving van de objectieve wereld afleidt.
(Maar volgens "waarheidsskeptici" is het concept "waarheid" daarbij dus overbodig en nutteloos).
Ja, dat is precies het verschil tussen "objectief" en "intersubjectief".
Maar hoe komt het dat onze impressies congruent zijn? Wat zit daar achter, zo iets?
We kennen het "Ding an sich" niet omdat we geen transcendentale Sallah's zijn. Maar in hoeverre mogen we aannemen dat waarnemende Sallah's wetenschappelijke beschrijving, afgeleid uit empirische waarneming, de werkelijkheid benadert?
:lol:
Laat salah met rust : die is slechts een fantasie in jou hoofd , meisje ::wohaa:
Salah is te boven jou pet , al moet ik het zelf zeggen helaas :
jou opvatting van hoe salah zou denken & hoe diens eigen opvatting van de waarheid in elkaar zit is ver naast de waarheid _werkelijkheid :
jou "werkelijkheid of waarheid " is slechts ideologisch materialistisch van aard :
ideologisch anti_religie materialisme had de opvatting van de waarheid & werkelijkheid drastisch veranderd voor materialistisch ideologisch redenen :
daar kan je er niet aan ontsnappen sinds Descartes althans met diens materialisme, subjectivisme, individualisme, determinisme ....ondanks die rationalisme hier & daar , ondanks empirie die ook wel van materialistisch aard is :
ideologisch materialisme die nogmaals overheerst in de modern wetenschap (vergeet niet dat deze laatste werd "uitgevonden" door ...."transcendente " salahs _moslims : www.muslimheritage.com www.1001inventions.com !) , in de modern filosofie , in human sciences ...
ik ga niet in herhaling vallen maar weer !
ideologich materialisme die 1zijdig 1dimentioneel color blind gehandicapt is :
zelfs op het niveau van de materie waarin materialistisch monisme enorm had gepresteerd , zal die materialisme vroeg of laat op een dood lopend weg stuitten, zelfs op het niveau van d exacte wetenschappen.....
that materialistic ideological one line of thought since Descartes at least gotta change if Man wanna really achieve some real progress at the level of human sciences, human consciousness , , human brain emotions, ..............including at the level of psychology, economy, sociology ...
This anti_religion ideological materialism can no longer ignore or deny the dualistic dimentions of Man , of life ...= ignorance, neglegt & denial of the reality & truth !:
truth will catch up with u & defeat that silly 1sided 1dimentional color blind handicaped ideological materialism ....
what a bloody shame for humanity , for modern science , modern philosophy , for modern human sciences ......that have been hijacked & taken hostage by ideological materialism = criminal monopoly of the "truth" & reality by ideological materialism :
"scientific , philosophical ..." ignorance at the top in the 21ste century !
congratulations :cola:!
:zwaai:
Je bedoelt: alleen ter plaatse van de meting is het aardoppervlak krom en dat op grotere schaal de zaak zich zou kunnen uitmiddelen tot een platte aarde?
Mogelijk.
Misschien is het wel een golfplaat; dan vind ik alternerend een positieve en een negatieve kromming. De kern van de zaak is, dat Brulboei en Erastostenes met verschillende methoden het gelijke resultaat vinden.
De JSF is beter dan de Grippen?
Omgekeerd. Grippen is goedkoper. Daar is het maar om begonnen. :vierkant:
Hel & Verdoemenis zijn sociale kastijdingsmechanismen versus Hel & Verdoemenis zijn beeldende reflecties van de manecheïstische aard van de mens?
Misschien mankeert er iets aan deze vraagstelling.
Vervang 'zijn' door 'fungeren als' en beide stellingen laten zich probleemloos bevestigen.
Eppur si muove, fluisterde hij balsturig
Forza, dottore !
Natuurlijk beweegt ze. :blowen:
We kennen het "Ding an sich" niet omdat we geen transcendentale Sallah's zijn. Maar in hoeverre mogen we aannemen dat waarnemende Sallah's wetenschappelijke beschrijving, afgeleid uit empirische waarneming, de werkelijkheid benadert?
Op het gevaar af onnozel te lijken, zie ik het probleem niet helemaal.
Wat ik in de hand heb is een waarneming; product van een wisselwerking tussen een waarnemer die mij (nu even) niet interesseert en een constant veronderstelde realiteit.
Het constante element, de realiteit, had ik er graag uitgefilterd (een alledaags probleem in de meet- en regeltechniek).
Ik moet het tweede element variëren en het constante element uit de waarnemingen destileren.
Als ik de ouderdom van een manuscript vaststel aan de hand van een filologisch onderzoek, een C14 analyse van het perkament en een vergelijkende bronnenonderzoek en daarbij onveranderlijk op 1500 jaar uitkom dan heb ik gevonden wat ik zoek.
(...)
Op het gevaar af onnozel te lijken, zie ik het probleem niet helemaal.
Wat ik in de hand heb is een waarneming; product van een wisselwerking tussen een waarnemer die mij (nu even) niet interesseert en een constant veronderstelde realiteit.
Het constante element, de realiteit, had ik er graag uitgefilterd (een alledaags probleem in de meet- en regeltechniek).
Ik moet het tweede element variëren en het constante element uit de waarnemingen destileren.
Als ik de ouderdom van een manuscript vaststel aan de hand van een filologisch onderzoek, een C14 analyse van het perkament en een vergelijkende bronnenonderzoek en daarbij onveranderlijk op 1500 jaar uitkom dan heb ik gevonden wat ik zoek.
En als ik dat herhaal, kom ik daar als het goed is ook op uit.
Eerlijk gezegd begrijp ik het probleem in waarheidsfilosofie ook niet. Een denker in onze tijd, Pascal Engel, komt na lange omzwervingen uit op iets dat verwantschap vertoont met een klassieke, “realistische” correspondentietheorie.
Skeptici op dit terrein proberen (als ik het goed begrijp) het idee van een relatie – althans een “ware relatie” – tussen onze uitspraken en een empirische werkelijkheid te omzeilen, maar ik zie niet hoe ze dat voor elkaar krijgen.
Skeptici op dit terrein proberen (als ik het goed begrijp) het idee van een relatie – althans een “ware relatie” – tussen onze uitspraken en een empirische werkelijkheid te omzeilen, maar ik zie niet hoe ze dat voor elkaar krijgen.
Waarom willen ze dat eigenlijk? Is het allemaal bedoeld als een afrekening met de tijd der grote ideologieën? Na ja ik begrijp er ws. niks van.
Waarom willen ze dat eigenlijk? Is het allemaal bedoeld als een afrekening met de tijd der grote ideologieën? Na ja ik begrijp er ws. niks van.
Bij postmodernisten kan dat zeker een rol spelen.
Frege schreef 100 jaar geleden (in het duits):
“Cannot it be laid down that truth exists when there is correspondence in a certain respect? But in which? For what would we then have to do to decide whether something was true? We should have to enquire whether it is true that an idea and a reality, perhaps, correspond in the laid-down respect. And we should be confronted by a question of the same kind and the game could begin again.
So the attempt to explain truth as correspondence collapses. And every other attempt to define truth collapses too. For in a definition certain characteristics would have to be stated. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise whether it were true that the characteristics were present. So one goes round in a circle. Consequently, it is probable that the content of the word “true” is unique and indefinable.”
Dit kan ik dus al niet volgen. Zoals ik dit lees, verwart Frege wat het concept “waar” betekent met hoe we demonstreren dat iets waar is.
Waarom willen ze dat eigenlijk?
Waarheidsdrang kan het niet wezen. :hihi:
Waarheidsdrang kan het niet wezen. :hihi:
Een verwant argument wordt tegen Richard Rorty aangevoerd: is zijn theorie over waarheid toepasselijk op zijn theorie over waarheid? Rorty afficheert zich dan als "ironist", maar dat helpt hem niet verder.
<...>Een verwant argument wordt tegen Richard Rorty aangevoerd: is zijn theorie over waarheid toepasselijk op zijn theorie over waarheid? Rorty afficheert zich dan als "ironist", maar dat helpt hem niet verder.
Een ander soort pijniging dan ihgv. een wedstrijdje ZITA-Tanger'73-DNA, dat wel.
Een ander soort pijniging dan ihgv. een wedstrijdje ZITA-Tanger'73-DNA, dat wel.
Een waar woord. :)
Frege schreef 100 jaar geleden (in het duits):
Het probleem schijnt mij daarin te liggen dat hij waarheid over de waarheid zoekt.
Ik ga daar nog eens over slapen.
It may seem that my teaching means nothing;
It describes the infinite, so of course it means nothing;
If it meant something it would long since have been refuted.
--LaoTse
Dit kan ik dus al niet volgen. Zoals ik dit lees, verwart Frege wat het concept “waar” betekent met hoe we demonstreren dat iets waar is.
Tis me nog steeds niet duidelijk waarom ze zo zoeken. Het gevoel bekruipt me dat dit meer een semantisch onderzoek is naar de betekenis van een bestaand woord, dan wat anders. En aangezien natuurlijke taal nogal slordig is, wordt het denken dat daarvan uitgaat dat ook.
Waarheidsdrang kan het niet wezen. :hihi:
:hihi: Waarachtig.
'Subjectiviteit is de waarheid', zo mopperde een misantroop eens, er daarmee op doelend dat iets pas waar is voor iemand als het betekenis voor hem heeft.
Vandaar dat - hiervoor opgemeld - Ayn Rand zich in 1962 op vrolijke wijze uitlaat over 'rational egoism'.
Met het schrijven van boeken was zij een welvarende vrouw geworden die zich ongedwongen kon wijden aan filosoferen.
Ja. De postmodernisten in deze topic doen dat niet door bijvoorbeeld op de eenzijdigheid van nederlandse media te wijzen, maar met taalfilosofische analyse.Philosophy After Postmodernism, Paul Crowther:
9 Against epistemological
nihilism
Contra Derrida, contra Welsch
http://www.speedyshare.com/725680159.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/725680159.html)
transcendentale Sallah
waarnemende Sallah
(TRANSCENDENT SCEPSIS)
RUSSELL’S FIRST ARGUMENT
In inferring to the unobservable, Russell suggests, ‘physics ceases to be
empirical or based on experiment and observation alone’, having recourse
to an a priori principle, according to which ‘our sense-data have causes
other than themselves, and that something can be known about these
causes by inference from their effects’ (Russell, 1914, p. 108, original italics).
Now, if this objection were cogent it could be applied so as to rule
out induction by enumeration as well. For this form of inference,
Russell thinks, relies on ‘the principle of induction’, according to
which the constant conjunction of As with Bs increases the probability
that the next A will be a B (Russell, 1912, p. 66). And while this
principle is, according to Russell, incapable of empirical
(dis)confirmation (1912, p. 68), it is presupposed in our reasoning
from experience. This ad hominem reasoning, of course, doesn’t
vindicate inference to the unobservable; it only shows that it is in the
same (possibly leaky) boat with induction. But Russell’s objection, I
shall now argue, is not cogent.
We should first characterize more adequately the inference Russell
faults. To begin with, we do not assume that ‘our sense-data have
causes other than themselves’. Rather, we infer the existence of these
causes from the fact that they figure in a sufficiently good explanation
of the phenomenon. One who thinks the explanation in terms of
external objects isn’t adequate ought to embrace phenomenalism.
What principle does the inference involve? Are we, for instance,
assuming that the world is intelligible when we infer the truth of the
best explanation? The analogy with induction and nature’s
uniformity should persuade us that this way of construing inference
to the unobservable is inauspicious. Just as we do not suppose that
the world is uniform tout court, we do not suppose that everything is
explicable. Indeed, we suppose the contrary: we recognize that every
theory will leave some things unexplained. Furthermore, we give
theories credit for explanatoriness, but we sometimes forego
explanation if it is too complicated or untestable.
Finally, again analogously with induction, just as we learn from
experience the respects in which nature is uniform, so, perhaps, we
modify our conception of what counts as a good explanation.
Russell’s objection against inference to the best explanation is that
it is not empirically justifiable. The response, again in analogy with
induction and deduction, is that inference to the best explanation is a
basic mode of inference, and one not in need of justification, empirical
or otherwise.
RUSSELL’S SECOND ARGUMENT
The second reason Russell cites for shunning inference to the
unobservable is that ‘the inferred entities…[are] wholly remote from
the data that nominally support the inference’ (1914, p. 116). This
claim is adduced in the course of Russell’s attempt to persuade us
that we should replace statements about the unobservable with
statements about the observable in the spirit of his famous dictum:
‘When possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred
entities’ (1914, p. 115).
To justify the maxim, Russell appeals to a mathematical
analogy. We construct the real numbers by identifying them with
sets of rational numbers, and showing that the constructed objects
have the ‘right’ properties: addition of these sets is commutative,
for instance. We ‘thereby gain a new and less doubtful
interpretation of the propositions in question’ (1914, p. 116). In
physics we construct objects from appearances (sense-data). Each
object is identified with the class of its appearances from all
perspectives. I shall now argue that the analogy between
mathematics and physics is not apt, and that Russell’s
methodological principle is untenable.
Why do we prefer the construction of irrational numbers from sets
of rationals to inferring them as limits of series of rationals with no
rational limit? The construction enables us to prove various claims
about the constructed irrational numbers rigorously, whereas before
the construction their very existence was doubtful, inferred ‘as the
supposed limits of series of rationals which had no rational limit’
(Russell, 1914, p. 115).
Is there an analogy here with the physical case? The contrast
Russell draws between inference and construction, is, in fact,
specious. Both Russell (qua physicist) and the mathematician do no
merely construct objects: they form beliefs about them, and do so
inferentially. But the mathematical construction enables us to base the
belief on a deductive inference (a proof); to replace a shaky belief with
a secure one. Analogously, Russell thinks, unlike the belief about the
constructed physical object, the belief about the ordinarily
understood physical object is ‘wholly remote from the data that
nominally support the inference’ (1914, p. 116, my italics). What is
this ‘remoteness’? Since Russell thinks the cases are analogous, it
must refer to the logical gap between the belief and the evidence for it.
But, in fact, the analogy breaks down.A statement about an external
object, according to Russell (1914), is to be construed in terms of claims
about appearances, some of which, namely ‘the "sensibilia" which would
appear from places where there happen to be no minds’, are no one’s data.
This is designed, inter alia, to enable us to attribute existence to an object
even while it is not perceived: Russell’s aim, remember, is to interpret the
statements of physics in as faithful a manner as possible.
This means that the proposition about the constructed physical object
well transcends the evidence (our actual sense-data), and is
justified—if at all—as the conclusion of a non-deductive inference.
Furthermore, it is not clear that the inference to the ‘constructed’ object is
less risky, involves a smaller inductive leap, than the one to the physical
object ordinarily understood. To be sure, a statement about a ‘bundle’ of
sensibilia does not entail anything about a physical object, but the converse
is also true. If a particular table is ‘defined as the class of its appearances’
(Russell, 1914, p. 121, my italics), then any statement about it, ‘The table is
round’, for example, will incorporate all the information as to how the table
appears: its colour, smell and texture, for instance. And this information isn’t
part of the statement when it is construed as being about the physical object.
It well transcends it.We now come to the second disanalogy. The inferred
entities, Russell says, should be ‘similar to those whose existence is given’
(1914, p.116).
Perhaps he has in mind Ockham’s razor, the methodological principle which
enjoins us not to ‘multiply entities needlessly’. If we can make do with
sense-data, we shouldn’t commit ourselves to the existence of physical
objects.The appeal to Ockham’s principle here is ineffectual. Perhaps we
shouldn’t ‘do with more what we can do with less’, but the principle only
enjoins us to prefer a parsimonious theory if none of our ‘needs’ are
thereby compromised. For instance, our theories must accommodate the
evidence: Russell isn’t suggesting that we deny—for the sake of
economy—the existence of sense-data. And there areother things we
want to ‘do’ with our theories which cannot be done with ‘less’. For instance,
we may prefer a profligate theory because we can’t explain as well without it.
In the mathematical case, there is no price to pay for economy, no
explanatory loss involved in restricting ourselves to the constructed
objects. Arguably, mathematical entities do not explain anything. And if
they do, the constructed ones explain equally well. But the case is
different in physics.
Physical objects, ordinarily understood, are distinct from their appearances,
and can be invoked to explain them. A bundle of appearances, on the other hand,
cannot explain any of its constituents. So in eschewing belief about ordinary physical
objects, we detract from our ability to explain. Russell’s mathematical analogy,
we must conclude, does not establish his stricture against believing in unobservable
entities.
pp. 104-107, The Sceptical Challenge, Ruth Weintraub
http://www.speedyshare.com/950798770.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/950798770.html)
En als ik dat herhaal, kom ik daar als het goed is ook op uit.
Eerlijk gezegd begrijp ik het probleem in waarheidsfilosofie ook niet. Een denker in onze tijd, Pascal Engel, komt na lange omzwervingen uit op iets dat verwantschap vertoont met een klassieke, “realistische” correspondentietheorie.
The Correspondence Theory of Truth, Andrew Newman:
3 The Correspondence Theory for Predicative Sentences 53
3.1 Difficulties about States of Affairs in the Tractatus 53
3.2 Truth as Isomorphism between Sentence and State
of Affairs 58
3.3 The Nominalist Account of Atomic* Facts 61
3.4 The Realist Account of Atomic* Facts 66
3.5 Correspondence for Sentences with and without Facts 72
3.6 The Notion of Content 77
3.7 Austin’s Theory of Truth 79
Appendix 3.1: The Role of Mental Sentences in Tractarian
Belief 83
Appendix 3.2: The Tractatus’s Attitude to Truth 86
http://www.speedyshare.com/300651327.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/300651327.html)
* = kerkelijke afgekeurde aristotelische filosofie
Skeptici op dit terrein proberen (als ik het goed begrijp) het idee van een relatie – althans een “ware relatie” – tussen onze uitspraken en een empirische werkelijkheid te omzeilen, maar ik zie niet hoe ze dat voor elkaar krijgen.
Moral Skepticisms, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong:
Chapter 6. Classy Moral Pyrrhonism 112
6.1. Moral Contrast Classes 112
6.2. Unqualified Judgments in Moral
Epistemology 117
6.3. Relativized Moral Skepticisms 119
6.4. Academic Moral Skepticism 121
6.5. Is Moral Nihilism Relevant? 122
6.6. More Problems for Relevance 127
6.7. Moderate Moral Pyrrhonism 130
http://www.speedyshare.com/779842916.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/779842916.html)
Een verwant argument wordt tegen Richard Rorty aangevoerd: is zijn theorie over waarheid toepasselijk op zijn theorie over waarheid? Rorty afficheert zich dan als "ironist", maar dat helpt hem niet verder.
(From the Introduction, Contingency, irony and solidarity, R. Rorty)
The agélastes [Rabelais's word for those who do not laugh], the nonthought
of received ideas, and kitsch are one and the same, the threeheaded
enemy of the art born as the echo of God's laughter, the art that
created the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth
and everyone has the right to be understood. That imaginative realm of
tolerance was born with modern Europe, it is the very image of Europe or
at least our dream of Europe, a dream many times betrayed but
nonetheless strong enough to unite us all in the fraternity that stretches
far beyond the little European continent. But we know that the world
where the individual is respected (the imaginative world of the novel,
and the real one of Europe) is fragile and perishable. . . . if European
culture seems under threat today, if the threat from within and without
hangs over what is most precious about it - its respect for the individual,
for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life -
then, I believe, that precious essence of the European spirit is being held
safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of
the novel.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
Wat bedoel je? Wat is er precies veranderd?
Bedoel je dat het concept waarheid veranderd is?
Of bedoel je dat we tegenwoordig andere dingen voor “waar” houden dan vroeger?
Of bedoel je dat de manier waarop we waarheid ontdekken veranderd is?
:lol:
try to have some real updates & depth insights if u wanna know what i was talking 'bout :
u w'd n't recognise the truth or reality even if they w'd hit u in the eye , silly lady !
:zwaai:
Een ander soort pijniging dan ihgv. een wedstrijdje ZITA-Tanger'73-DNA, dat wel.
ZITA = tanger '73 ???
echt ???
Een waar woord. :)
:lol:
wat is er zo "waar " aan dan ???
I see that many pretentious
silly fools here w'dn't be able to differenciate between the truth, reality & .....fantasy, specualions , subjectivisme, egos ..., including urself, zarathustra , even it hits u ithe eye ! , no offense !
Fichte had bijna gelijk toen die zei dat :
"alles is ....EGO !" :
zelfs het avontuur van materialistisch ideologisch denken sinds Descartes althans was niet meer dan :
"het avontuur van de Europeese EGO " zoals A.Camus 's zei !
congratulations ! :cola:
of zoals Russell's zei :
westerse moreel;; ideologisch, filosofisch....bankroet denken kan de mensheid niets meer bieden, qua niieuwe idee van vooruitgang , van visie van de mens, van het leven, ....
kortom : qua waarheid wat deze ook moge zijn :
Humanity gotta be saved from this enslaving materialistic ideological bullshit , 'fore it's too late !
:zwaai:
Je geeft geen antwoord op mijn vragen. Je ontwijkt ze.
:zozo:
Misschien zijn veel mensen het wel deels met je eens. Dus moet je goed uitleggen wat je bedoelt.
Jij wilt meer dan materialisme.
Jij wilt iets anders dan materialisme.
Je wilt geen materialisme.
Wat wil je wel? Hoe duid je dat aan?
Kun je hier antwoord op proberen te geven - en niet beginnen te brullen?
Ik zit me net af te vragen of Sallah diep in z'n hart eigenlijk nihilist is.:hihi:
Sallahddin
13-05-09, 20:00
Ik zit me net af te vragen of Sallah diep in z'n hart eigenlijk nihilist is.:hihi:
:lol:
ben ik wel geweest hoor : nu niet meer : anders was ik hier niet :
waar het mij omgaat is dat mensen hier & elders , met name materialisten ideologen van alle vormen & maten gedragen zich alsof die The Holy Grail hadden gevonden :
vandaar dat ik een hekel heb aan het kinderachtig onrijp gedrag van Olive bijv. (niet aan haar persoonlijk, ken ik haar ook niet , dus ...) & van al die zgn zarathustras hier & elders :
ze stellen vast hoe de filosofie , modern filosofie zo kinderachtig & lachwekkend soms achteraf hadden gebleken , plat _simpel gezegd , met betrekking tot metafysisch & ander vraagstukken , maar meteen daarna gaan ze profijt maken van wetenschappelijke feiten,resultaten, technieken ....om nieuwe niet_minder tragi_hilarisch zand kastelen daar op te bouwen & vervolgens lekker satisfied , arrogant & bevredigd door het leven gaan alsof die op het recht pad zouden zijn , wat de laatste ook moge zijn ook ,
gedreven daarin namelijk door hun eigen egos, subjectiviteit ......& "puttend" uit tijdelijk materialistisch wetenschappelijke feiten , technieken ...., in theorie althans , of qua eigen materialistisch ideologisch interpretaties van die wetenschappelijke feiten...althans & vervolgens gaan ze beweren concepten of begrippen als ! :lol: objectief, universeel , waar of waarheid te kunnen bepalen ,definieren of benaderen :
erger nog :
de waarheid als zodanig zou niet bestaan of zou die alleen maar een soort instrument worden gebruikt , niet als doel, op z'n best (misleidend machiavellistisch crimineel hypocriet pragmatisme !)= alleen het resultaat zou tellen = lekker materialistrisch ideologisch toepasselijk, zeg .....
ze lijden ook aan een soort filosofisch historisch & & ander selectief amnesia:
vergetend hoeveel machtsfilosofieen waren gesticht zgn op basis van wetenschappelijke feiten, resultaten, technieken :
zelfs nazis trachten nazisme "wetenschappelijk" te maken :lol: , racisten & westerse imperialisten ook met betrekking tot racisme, misdadig puur economisch historisch deterministisch Marxisme ook .....................ondanks die wetenschappelijk claims van de laatste is die toch een totalitair crimineel fascistisch materialistisch stelsel geweest : zie communisme, Stalinisme ...
de mensheid had elk keer weer een zwaar & hoog prijs moeten betalen voor de dwaasheden & egocentrisme subjectivisme irrationaliteit & machts drang van sommige van die dwaze zgn filosofen à la Nietzsche, Marx , Rousseau & veel anderen :
Olive & co. lijden dus aan die selectief historisch filosofisch, moreel , ideologisch , cultureel .....amnesia :
vergetend dat materialisme is van ideologisch aard sinds Descartes althans :
vergetend dat zelfs rede, empirie van materialistisch aard zijn :
vergetend dat materialistisch monisme overheerst in de modern wetenschap,, in de modern filosofie, in human sciences , inclusief in de psychologie, sociologie, politiek, economie, anthropologie, archeologie .....
vergetend dat materialisme alleen op het terrein van de materie had enorm kunnen presteren, niet op het terrein van human sciences bijv. :
geen wonder dus !
de dualistisch dimenties van de mens, van het leven ...ontkenend of negerend of erger :
bewerend dat alles naar materie te herleiden zou zijn ! :lol:
in totaal minachting van de werkelijheid , van de waarheid ...wat de laatsten ook mogen zijn :
ideologisch materialisme die de monopolie van de opvatting van de waarheid toeeigent & misbruikt voor materialistisch ideologisch doeleinden , die de opvatting van realiteit, vrijheid, individueel vrijheid, tolerantie, mensen rechten , gelijkheid _gelijkwaardigheid .......... bepaalt _conditioneert & alle niet_materialistisch pogingnen om de waarheid te benaderen worden per definitie als achterlijk of erger beschouwd ....
ideologisch materialisme die zelfs de interpretatie & analyse van de geschiedebis, gedrag & de rest ...van de mens monopoliseert ...=
& dat alles via die materialistisch 1zijdig 1dimentioneel color blind gehandicapt bril van deze anti_religie materialistisch ideologen .....
rede, wetenschap, de waarheid,, de werkelijkheid ...hebben juist niets er mee te maken met die 1zijdig opvattingnen van die ideologisch materialisten, neo_darwinisten, sociaal darwinisten.....& de rest van die belachelijk materialisten met betrekking tot de waarheid, realiteit , met betrekking tot het menselijk bewustzijn , tot de fundamenteel opvatting & onderscheid tussen subject & object = met betrekking tot geest & materie althans .... !
ach.............
:zwaai:
Sallahddin
13-05-09, 21:44
Als ik dat lees smelt ik altijd weer weg he.
We begrijpen je best, Sallahddin, komop.
:lol:
je begrijpt wat je wilt meestaal = subjectief :
I'm listening right now to : "Is it a crime ??" Sade : nice song : :lol:
is it a crime to say ???? :
dat Islam heeft diens eigen globaal universeel compleet (geest & materie = het juist balans !) objectief redelijk ....opvattingnen van de waarheid, van begrippen & concepten als objectief, universeel, waar ...waarheid , van vrijheid, van individueel vrijheid , van tolerantie, van mensen rechten, van gelijkheid_gelijkwaardigheid als menszijnde , van Godsdienst verdraagzaamheid , van rechtvaardigheid, van vrede , van verzet, van revolutie tegen onderdrukking & slavernij van alle vormen & maten =ideologisch, intellectueel, fysiek, moreel_ethisch, psychisch, spiritueel, mentaal, geestelijk, politiek, economsicsh, sociaal .... .....slavernij_onderdrukking_make believe :
ideologisch materialisme's ,sinds Descartes althans,opvattingnen van de bovenstaande .....heeft juist niets te maken met rede, wetenschap , empirie ................
de laatsten zijn zelfs van materialistisch aard nogmaals !
= materialistisch ideologisch , intellectueel , moreel_ethisch , spiritueel, mentaal, gestelijk, politiek, economisch, sociaal, individueel ....slavernij _make believe !:
de mensheid moet bevrijd worden van al die ideologisch materialistisch slavernij ....
see ya !
:zwaai:
:lol:
de mensheid moet bevrijd worden van al die ideologisch materialistisch slavernij ....
[/B]
En tot slaaf gemaakt door de regels en wetten van de islam, als het aan jou ligt.
It is no crime, but still a load bullshit.
Sallahddin
13-05-09, 21:57
En tot slaaf gemaakt door de regels en wetten van de islam, als het aan jou ligt.
:lol:
de mensheid moet bevrijd worden van alle soorten slavernij opgelegd of verzonen door mensen zoals boven werd geschetst door zich over te geven aan de bron van alle macht , bestuur , aanbidding , wetgeving , kennis ..... = God , met behoud van de menselijk vrij wil, vrijheid, intellect, menselijk natuur ...= ultiem vrijheid !
:zwaai:
Sallahddin
13-05-09, 21:59
It is no crime, but still a load bullshit.
Hoezo ???
ok :
Leg's uit dan !
:lol:
de mensheid moet bevrijd worden van alle soorten slavernij opgelegd of verzonen door mensen zoals boven werd geschetst door zich over te geven aan de bron van alle macht , bestuur , aanbidding , wetgeving , kennis ..... = God , met behoud van de menselijk vrij wil, vrijheid, intellect, menselijk natuur ...= ultiem vrijheid !
:zwaai:
Maar dan moeten ze niet bij de islam zijn, want dat is een religie van bekrompen regeltjes, zoals je zelf demonstreert.
:lol:
ben ik wel geweest hoor : nu niet meer : anders was ik hier niet :
(...)
ach.............
:zwaai:
Hi Sallah,
Wat een fantastische reactie!
Maar mag ik nog wat vragen? Nadat je materialisme, empiri, monisme, egoïsme, subjectivisme en die andere dingen die je noemt afwijst, wat blijft er dan over? Wat stel je er voor in de plaats?
Islam en dualisme? En is daar meer over te zeggen, filosofisch athans? Wat is waarheid bijvoorbeeld? Ik heb nou het een en ander gelezen en wie of wat ik ook lees, het antwoord is steeds teleurstellend. Ik vraag me vaak af of het wel zin heeft te spreken over waarheid. Wat is volgens jou waar? Wanneer weet ik nou of iets "waar" is?
Nice talking to you, Sallah. Bye:)
Sallahddin
14-05-09, 19:04
Maar dan moeten ze niet bij de islam zijn, want dat is een religie van bekrompen regeltjes, zoals je zelf demonstreert.
:lol:
bekrompen regeltjes ??? :lol: = overduidelijk christelijke projecties :
dit is niet een topic over die belachelijk tragi_hilarisch "heilig" paus ! :huil:
:zwaai:
Sallahddin
14-05-09, 19:19
Hi Sallah,
Wat een fantastische reactie!
Maar mag ik nog wat vragen? Nadat je materialisme, empiri, monisme, egoïsme, subjectivisme en die andere dingen die je noemt afwijst, wat blijft er dan over? Wat stel je er voor in de plaats?
Islam en dualisme? En is daar meer over te zeggen, filosofisch athans? Wat is waarheid bijvoorbeeld? Ik heb nou het een en ander gelezen en wie of wat ik ook lees, het antwoord is steeds teleurstellend. Ik vraag me vaak af of het wel zin heeft te spreken over waarheid. Wat is volgens jou waar? Wanneer weet ik nou of iets "waar" is?
Nice talking to you, Sallah. Bye:)
:lol: fantastisch ???
dit is geen Disney land hoor ! :lol:
Ik wijs niet alle bovenstand af , natuurlijk niet :
ik zeg gewoon dat materialisme alleen kan de waarheid of werkelijkheid niet benaderen in al diens dimenties :
materialisme is te 1zijdig 1dimentioneel ....te ideologisch ook nog :
vandaar dat die alleen op het terrein van de materie enorm had gepresteerd , niet elders :
vandaar dat ik het echt lachwekkend vind als deze materialisme buiten diens domein tracht op "onderzoek" te gaan :
op het domein van de modern wetenschap, modern filosofie & vooraal ook op het domein van human sciences :
materialisme moet gecombineerd worden met het geloof , vind ik om die dualistisch dimenties van de mens, van het leven & de waarheid , werkelijkheid te kunnen benaderen :
elk poging om de waarheid te benaderen buiten het geloof is gedoemd te mislukken bijv. :
Islam is geest & materie, plaat _simpel gezegd = geen buitensporig materialisme & geen buitensporig spiritualiteit = het juist balans : tussen geest & materie = tussen de materieel & de immaterieel werelden ...
zie hoe moslim geleerden & wetenschappers , denkers , filosofen.......die zelfs de modern wetenschap hadden uitgevonden , hadden gepresteerd in die geest :
Islamitisch ervaring, praktijk, experimentatie , werk, ....geest :
Islamitisch geloof combineren met wetenschap = beide blijven gescheiden van elkaar qua aard, natuur, functie, methode ....= maar de 1 bevestig & verduidelijkt de ander & vice versa :
www.muslimheritage.com
www.1001inventions.com
www.muslimphilosophy.com
:zwaai:
Modernist Radicalists and its Aftermath (1991)
At the end of the nineteenth century social theories such as
Marxism and Durkheimian sociology could lay claim to a critical
role in public affairs. They promised a unique knowledge of
modern society which would fulfil the radical potential of
modernity. A century later these claims are no longer credible and
the prospects for radical social theory are uncertain. Modernist
Radicalism and its Aftermath investigates the ways in which
Marx, Durkheim, Althusser and Habermas were all caught up in a
paradoxical and fatal quest for foundational guarantees of
knowledge.
Stephen Crook proposes a framework for the analysis of
foundationalism in social theory and suggests a way forward from
the impasse of postmodernism. He identifies important themes in
the work of Simmel, Weber and Adorno, and in some postmodernist
theory, but points out that these are at constant risk of
regression into metaphysics or nihilism. The book concludes with
a plea for an alternative ‘post foundational’ radicalism which can
maintain the accountability of enquiry while facing up to the
contingency of value.
Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath is both an interpretation
of classical social theory and an important contribution to
contemporary debates on modernity and postmodernity. It will be of
special interest to students of sociology, philosophy and other
disciplines concerned with social theory.
Stephen Crook is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Tasmania, Australia.
http://www.speedyshare.com/542454875.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/542454875.html)
Mysticism and Skepticism as Denials of Reason
Ayn Rand defines "knowledge" as "a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation." This definition, which the discussion so far has validated, can serve as summary of the Objectivist epistemology. It also indicates our rejection of two widespread viewpoints. Contrary to skepticism, the definition affirms that man can "grasp reality" contrary to mysticism. It affirms that such grasp is achieved only by observation and/or reason.
Mysticism is the theory that man has a means of knowledge other than sense perception or reason, such as revelation, faith, intuition and the like. As we have seen, this theory reduces to emotionalism. It amounts to the view that men should rely for cognitive guidance not on the volitional faculty or thought but on an automatic mental function. Philosophically mysticism is an expression of intrinsicism; it is the only way to implement the latter. Intrinsicism defines no method of acquiring conceptual knowledge. Such knowledge, it holds, is gained automatically, by passive exposure to revelations of some sort a process that results in one’s "just knowing."‘ This last is the mystical idea of cognition. In fact, however, since there are no revelations to absorb, the advocate of passivity ends up relying on the nonvolitional functions his consciousness does provide That is, he becomes an emotionalist, coasting on his past conclusions and the automatic reactions. They generate while describing these latter as the voice of God.
In practice, the mystic’s injunction to mankind amounts the following. "It is not necessary to question or validate your idea. Instead, take the content of your consciousness however acquired, as a given, which qualifies as cognition simply because it is there." This is an appropriate and unavoidable policy for the lower animals. Because their form ofknowledge is perceptual. But it ignores completely the nature and requirements of the rational animal. The mystic characteristically exalts the spiritual and deprecates the physical. Yet he upholds, as the cognitive model for man to emulate, the unthinking automatism of a mindless brute.
Reason is man’s spiritual endowment. When one rejects it, animality, or less, is all that remains.
Skepticism is an example of the "‘less." Skepticism is the theory that knowledge of reality is impossible in man by any means. This amounts to brushing reason aside as impotent— and more: it is a rejection of axiom of consciousness. The skeptic upholds as the model for man to emulate not even an animal, but (as Aristotle was the first to remark) a vegetable.
Just as mysticism is allied with intrinsicism, so skepticism is allied with subjectivism. If oneholds that mental activity consists in the creation not the grasp, of an object, he will have to conclude that independent reality (assuming he accepts the concept at all) is unknowable.
If mysticism advocates the promiscuous acceptance of ideas, skepticism advocates their promiscuous doubt. The mystic "just knows" whatever he want to believe; the skeptic "just doesn’t know" whatever he wants not to believe.
The operative term and guiding force here is "wants," i.e., feeling. Both viewpoints reduce to emotionalism; both represent the reliance on feeling as a cognitive guide. Both represent a denial of man’s need of logic and an enshrinement of the arbitrary.
Both the mystic and the skeptic are exponents of faith in the technical sense of the term. "Faith" means acceptance on the basis of feeling rather than of evidence. The mystic has faith that there is a certainty which eludes the mind; the skeptic has faith that the mind’s certainties are no certainty at all. And each clings to his faith with the tenacity of a religious zealot. Nor does either have any alternative in this regard. Both doctrines, if upheld al all must be matters of faith: a proof of either would be fatal to it.
A process of proof commits a man to its presuppositions and implications. It thus commits him to an entire philosophic approach—to the validity of sense perception, the validity of reason, the need of objectivity the method of logic, the processes of conceptual knowledge, the law of identity, the absolutism of reality. This approach is incompatible with the ideas of mystics and skeptics alike .
A God susceptible of proof would wither and starve the spirit of mysticism. Such an entity would be finite and limited; it would be one thing among others within the universe, a thing bound by identity and causality, capable of being integrated without contradiction into man’s cognitive context, incompatible with miracles, revelations and the other paraphernalia of unreason. Such an entity would not be an ineffable mystery transcending nature and science. It would be a part of nature to he studied by science, and it would be of no use whatever to a mystic. When Pascal cried: "Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" he knew whereof he spoke.
The same applies to the skeptic’s doubt. A doubt susceptible of objective validation would also have to be finite, contextual, and bound by the rules of evidence. Such a doubt would be one assessment among others within the universe of rational knowledge, not a supernatural anathema transcending that universe and annihilating it from without. A "scientific" doubt is of no more use to a skeptic’ than a "scientific" God is to a mystic. In both cases, the "science" contradicts the essence and purpose of the theory.
That essence and purpose is escape from reason—or, more exactly, escape from the absolutism of reason.
No one seeks to reject reason completely. What many men do seek, however, is not to be (in their words) ‘‘straitjacketed" by reason all the time, in every issue, twenty-four hours a day. It is to these men that mystics and skeptics alike offer a sanction and a loophole. "We all have the right," they say in effect, "to our own approach, our own subjective beliefs or doubts, as an occasional supplement to reason or breather from it. The rest of the time we will be perfectly rational." This means "We want a deal, a middle of the road. We want to take some feelings as tools of cognition. We want a compromise between reason and emotionalism."
In reason, there can be no such compromise.
If one attempts to combine reason and emotionalism, the principle of reason cannot be his guide, the element that defines the terms of the compromise, because reason does not permit subjective feeling to have any voice in cognitive issues. Subjective feeling, therefore, which permits anyone anything he wants, must set the terms; it must be the element that decides the role and limits of reason. Thus the ruling principle of the epistemological middle-of-the-road’er is: "I will consult facts and obey the rules of evidence sometimes—when I feel like it."
This policy goes far beyond an occasional assertion of the arbitrary. It makes the use of logic itself a matter of caprice and thus elevates the arbitrary to the position of ruler of cognition. Such a policy is not a "compromise"; it cannot he described as "partial" emotionalism. It is the full-fledged unadulterated variety. No emotionalist, however extreme, shuns every logical connection; none bypasses data acceptable to his feelings. What makes a man an emotionalist is the criterion by which he accepts an idea; to him, it is not the idea’s logical support that counts, but its emotional congeniality. This is precisely the criterion that governs the so-called middle-of-the-road’er. Such a man may very well invoke the recital of evidence; but when he does, it is not an expression of the principle of objectivity. It is a sham, a social ritual without cognitive significance.
In regard to such a mentality, the skeptic claims are true: the emotionalist is cognitively impotent and cannot fully trust even his better ideas. He has no way to know which conclusions are better or worse, because he has jettisoned the human means of knowledge.
To deny the absolutism of reason is not a harmless indulgence, like having chocolates on a diet. It is more like taking arsenic three times a day as the essence of one’s nutrition.
Mystics often say that, by enabling men to escape from the "prosaic" world of nature, they make life exciting. Skeptics often say that, by undermining all strong convictions, they make life safe The facts belie these promises. In actuality, since both groups work to undercut man’s mind, both lead to a single kind of result and always have done so. They lead to helplessness, terror, dictatorship, and starvation.
Whenever a man promises to lead you to a value, remind yourself of the fact that remaining in contact with reality is a requirement of achieving values. This will help you to resist the philosophic hustlers. It will tell you that the precondition of values is the use and absolutism of reason.
There are many epistemological topics that I have not had space to cover in the foregoing discussions. Among the most important is the validation of scientific induction. 0n the polemical side, I have hardly touched on the dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism, with the many false alternatives it spreads, such as "logic vs. experience", "deduction vs.induction," analytic truth vs. synthetic truth," "concepts vs. percepts," and so forth. I plan to treat all this material in a more advanced work on Objectivist epistemology.
Happily, we do not need to know everything in order to know what we do know. And now we do know, in essential terms, the nature of reality and of our means of knowledge. That is, we know what is necessary in order to move from metaphysics and epistemology as such to the next topic in the philosophic hierarchy.
We have studied in detail a single attribute, the faculty of cognition. Now we must study the entity that possesses it: man.
pp. 182-186 Objectivism; The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
Ayn Rand defines "knowledge" as "a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality,
Ayn Rand was een enge vrouw, die enge boeken heeft geschreven.
Hogepriesteres van de 'objectivism' sekte, een soort scientology voor beter gesitueerden.
Ik zou me daar niet mee bezighouden als ik jou was, het leven is al zwaar genoeg.
Modernist Radicalists and its Aftermath (1991)
At the end of the nineteenth century social theories such as
Marxism and Durkheimian sociology could lay claim to a critical
role in public affairs. They promised a unique knowledge of
modern society which would fulfil the radical potential of
modernity. A century later these claims are no longer credible and
the prospects for radical social theory are uncertain. Modernist
Radicalism and its Aftermath investigates the ways in which
Marx, Durkheim, Althusser and Habermas were all caught up in a
paradoxical and fatal quest for foundational guarantees of
knowledge.
Stephen Crook proposes a framework for the analysis of
foundationalism in social theory and suggests a way forward from
the impasse of postmodernism. He identifies important themes in
the work of Simmel, Weber and Adorno, and in some postmodernist
theory, but points out that these are at constant risk of
regression into metaphysics or nihilism. The book concludes with
a plea for an alternative ‘post foundational’ radicalism which can
maintain the accountability of enquiry while facing up to the
contingency of value.
Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath is both an interpretation
of classical social theory and an important contribution to
contemporary debates on modernity and postmodernity. It will be of
special interest to students of sociology, philosophy and other
disciplines concerned with social theory.
Stephen Crook is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Tasmania, Australia.
http://www.speedyshare.com/542454875.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/542454875.html)
precies , vandaar de "rise van social darwinism" à la Dawkins & co , die alles als survival strategies zouden zien & alles proberen te verklaren via die zgn almacht van die blind natuurlijk selectie van de evolutie :
zeer enge tijden voor de mensheid inderdaad :
de mensheid moet toekomstig "wetenschappelijk" machtsfilosofieen vrezen & die tegen gaan , alleen de combinatie geloof+wetenschap kan deze verdwaald mensheid redden ... niks anders, het juist religieus geloof tenminste combineren met de wetenschap... !
Onderdeterminatie
Vorm van het argument:<O:p</O:p
theorie T is in overeenstemming met waarnemingen <O:pook T' is hiermee in overeenstemming<O:p</O:p
dus: er is geen reden om in T te geloven en niet in T'<O:pVoorbeelden:<O:p
Copernicus vs. Ptolemaios
Einstein vs. Lorentz
<O:pgekunstelde theorieën; bijv. TN(v)<O:p</O:p
`curve fitting problem'<O:p</O:p
<O:p</O:p
Sterkere vormen van onderdeterminatie:<O:p</O:p
T en T' empirisch equivalent voor alle mogelijke (i.t.t. feitelijke) waarnemingen<O:p</O:p
alle theorieën hebben empirisch equivalente rivalen <O:p</O:p
Quine<O:p</O:pMogelijke antwoorden op onderdeterminatie:<O:p</O:p
het argument is incoherent, omdat de empirische inhoud van een theorie niet afgebakend kan worden <O:p</O:p
niet-gekunstelde rivalen zijn er niet altijd; gekunstelde rivalen zijn niet relevant<O:p</O:p
hef de onderdeterminatie op met niet-empirische eigenschappen<O:p</O:p(eenvoud, verklarende kracht, voorspellende kracht, elegantie,...)<O:p</O:p
aanvaard dat theoriekeuze onderbepaald is<O:pSkepticisme<O:p
Pyrrhoonse skepticus (Pyrrho van Ellis, 360 - 275 vC): twijfel aan alles; schort oordeel op<O:p
Academische skepticus: zekerheid is onmogelijk; aanvaard de meest waarschijnlijke proposities<O:p</O:p
Rol van de skepticus:
ontkent dat we (kunnen) weten <O:p
daagt uit tot onderbouwing van kennisclaims<O:p</O:pDescartes: <O:p
droom <O:p
kwade geest / "brein in een vat"<O:p</O:pArgumenten van de skepticus:<O:p</O:p
fouten, illusies, dromen <O:p
waarneming<O:pSkepticisme ten aanzien van:<O:p</O:p
externe wereld <O:p</O:p
verleden, toekomst <O:p</O:p
(bewustzijn van) andere personen <O:p</O:p
inductie <O:p</O:p
onwaarneembare entiteiten<O:p</O:pAntwoorden op de skepticus:<O:p</O:p
weerleggen <O:p
skepticus is incoherent/onbegrijpelijk <O:p
negeren<O:pBron: http://www.phil.uu.nl/~lith/KW5/sheets170602.html (http://www.phil.uu.nl/~lith/KW5/sheets170602.html)
Epilogue
THE DUEL BETWEEN PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The following is an application of Objectivism to a specialized field, history. I am offering this conclusion as a further indication of the power of ideas in man’s life. The material touched on below is discussed in the title essay of Ayn Rand’s For the New Intellectual. A detailed treatment is presented in my book The Ominous Parallels.
Ayn Rand’s theory of man leads to a distinctive interpretation of history. By identifying the cause of human action, her theory enables us to discover the factor that shapes men’s past— and future.
If man is the conceptual being philosophy is the prime mover of history.
A conceptual being is moved by the content of his mind— ultimately, by his broadest integrations. Man’s actions depend on his values. His values depend on his metaphysics. His conclusions in every field depend on his method of using his consciousness, his epistemology. In the life of such a being, fundamental ideas, explicit or implicit, are the ruling power.
By their nature, fundamental ideas spread throughout a society, influencing every subgroup, transcending differences in occupation, schooling, class. The men who are being influenced retain the faculty or volition. But most are innocent of explicit philosophy and do not exercise their power to judge ideas. Unwittingly, they take whatever they are given.
Philosophy first shapes a small subgroup: those whose occupation is concerned with a view of man, of knowledge, of values. In modern terms, these are the intellectuals, who move philosophy out of the ivory tower. The intellectuals count on and use philosophy to create its first concrete expression, a society’s culture, including its art, its manners, its science (if any), and its approach to education The spirit of a culture, in turn, is the source of the trends in politics. Politics is the source of economics.
Objectivism does not deny that "man's factors" are involved in historical causation. Economic, psychological, military, and other forces play a role. Ayn Rand does not, however, regard all these forces as primaries.
There is no dichotomy between philosophy and the specialized factors. Philosophy is not the only cause of the course of the centuries. It is the ultimate cause, the cause of all the other causes. If there is to be an explanation of so vast a sum as human history, which involves all men in all fields, only the science dealing with the widest abstractions can provide it. The reason is that only the widest abstractions can integrate all those fields.
The books of philosophers are the beginning. Step by step, the books turn into motives, passions, statues, politicians, and headlines.
Philosophy determines essentials, not details. If men act on certain principles (and choose not to rethink them), the actors will reach the end result logically inherent in those principles. Philosophy does not, however, determine all the concrete forms a principle can take, or the oscillations within a progression, or the time intervals among its steps. Philosophy determines only the basic direction—and outcome.
In order to grasp the role of philosophy in history, one must beable to think philosophically, i.e., see the forest. Whoever sees it knows that history is not the domain of accident.
For two millennia, Western history has been the expression of a philosophic-duel. The duelists are Plato and Aristotle.
Plato is the first thinker to systematize other-worldliness. His metaphysics, identified in Objectivist terms, upholds the primacy of consciousness; his epistemology, intrinsicism and its corollary, mysticism; his ethics, the code of sacrifice. Aristotle, Plato’s devoted student for twenty sears, is the first thinker to systematize worldliness. His metaphysics upholds the primacy of existence; his epistemology, the validity of reason; his critics, the ideal of personal happiness.
The above requires qualifications, Plato himself, thanks to the influence of paganism, was more worldly than his followers in Christendom—or in Königsberg. Aristotle thanks tothe influence of Plato, never became completely Aristotelian; although his discoveries made possible all future intellectual progress, his system in every branch retained a sizable remnant of intrinsicism. Plato’s followers included philosophers of genius, who finally stripped from his ideas every form of inconsistency and cover-up Aristotle’s followers—aside from Thomas Aquinas, who wrote as a faithful son of the Church— were lesser men, unable to purify or even fully to grasp the master’s legacy.
The first battle in the historical duel was won decisively by Plato, through the work of such disciples as Plotinus and Augustine.
The Dark Ages were dark of principle. As the barbarians were sacking the body of Rome, the Church was struggling to annul the last vestiges of its spirit, wrenching the West away from nature, astronomy, philosophy, nudity, pleasure,instilling in men’s souls the adoration of Eternity, with all its temporal consequences.
"The early Christian fathers," writes one historian,
delighted in such simple self-tortures as hairshirts, and failing to wash. Others proceeded to more desperate extremes, such as Ammonius who tortured hisbody with ared-hot iron until it was coveredwith burns. . . It would not be necessary to dwell on these depressing details if it were not for the fact that the Church erected these appalling practices into a virtue, often canonizing those who practiced them. . . .[St. Margaret Marie Alacoque] sought out rotten fruit and dusty bread to eat. Like many mystics she suffered from a lifelong thirst, but decided to allow herself no drink from Thursday to Sunday, and when she did drink, preferred water in which laundry had been washed. . .She cut the name of Jesus on her chest with a knife, and because the scars did not last long enough, burnt them in with a candle. . . .She was canonized in 1920. . . . St Rose ate nothing but a mixture of sheep’s gall, bitter herbs and ashes. The Pazzi, like the Alacoque, vowed herself to chastity at an incredibly early age (four, it is said).
Neither serf nor lord emulated these eloquent expressions of the medieval soul. But both admired them from afar—as pious, profound, moral. No amount of "practical" considerations can explain this admiration. Nothing can explain it, or the culture, politics, and starvation to which it led, except a single fact: men took religion seriously. This is a state of mind most moderns can no longer imagine, even when they see it on the rise again
For centuries,Aristotle’s works were lost to the West. Then Thomas Aquinas turned Aristotle loose in that desert of crosses and gallows. Reason, Aquinas taught, is not a handmaiden of faith, but an autonomous faculty, which men must use and obey; the physical world is not an insubstantial emanation, but solid, knowable, real; life is not to be cursed, but to be lived. Within a century, the West was on the threshold of the Renaissance.
The period from Aquinas through Locke and Newton was a transition, at gingerly and accelerating. The rediscovery of pagan civilization, the outpouring of explorations and inventions, the rise of man-glorifying art and of earthly philosophy, the alternation of mans individual rights, the integration of earlier leads into the first system of modern science—all of it represents a prodigious effort to throw of the medieval shackles and reorient the Western mind. It was the prologue to a climax, the first unabashedly secular culture since antiquity: the Enlightenment. Once again, thinkers accepted reason as uncontroversial.
The God of the Scriptures became the passive observer mentioned by deism; the miracle-mongers could not compete any longer with the spokesmen of nature who were sweeping the world with their discovery of causality, in the form of temporal laws that are ‘‘eternal and immutable." Revelation became an embarrassment; the educated had discovered "the only oracle of man": observation and the unaided intellect. Salvation as men’s goal gave way to the pursuit of happiness on earth. Humility gave way to an all-but-forgotten emotion, pride: men’spride in the unlimited knowledge they expected to achieve and the unlimited virtue (human "perfectibility," this last was called)
In regard to every philosophic essential. The ruling spirit was the Opposite of intrinsicism—and of subjectivism. The spirit was worldliness without skepticism. This means that, despite the period’s many contradictions, the spirit was Aristotle’s.
Faith and force, as Ayn Rand observed, entail each other, a fact exemplified in the feudalism of the medieval centuries. But reason and freedom entail each other, too. The purest example of this fact was the emergence of a new nation in the New World. It was the first time a nation had ever been founded consciously on a philosophic theory. The theory was the principle of rights.
Man, America’s Founding Fathers said in essence, is the rational animal. Therefore the individual, not the state, is sovereign; man must be left free to think, and to act accordingly. Unlike Plato, whose political ideas followed from his basic premises, Aristotle’s political ideas were mixed, they were a blend of individualistic and Platonic elements (the concept of "rights" had not yet been formulated). In the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that implements it, we see at last the full expression, in political terms, of the Aristotelian fundamentals.
Despite the claims, then and since, about its Judeo Christian roots, the United States with its unique system of government could not have been founded in any philosophically different period. The new nation would have been inconceivable in the seventeenth century, under the Puritans, to say nothing of the twelfth—just as, the power of tradition apart, its selfish, absolutist individualism would never survive a vote today (which is why a second Constitutional convention would he a calamity). America required what the Enlightenment alone offered, enlightenment.
The combination of reason and freedom is potent. In the nineteenth century, it led to the Industrial Revolution, to romantic art, and to an authentic good will among men; it led to an unprecedented burst of wealth, beauty, happiness. Wherever they looked, people saw a smiling present and a radiant future. The idea of continuous improvement came to be taken for granted, as though it were an axiom. Progress, people though, is now automatic and inevitable.
The last thing the nineteenth century imagined was that the next step in the human express would be Sarajevo and the metaphysics of nausea.
The whole magnificent development—including science America, and industrialization—was an anomaly. The ideas on which the development rested were on their way out even as they were giving birth to all these epochal achievements.
Since the Renaissance, the anti-Aristotelian forces had been regrouping In the seventeenth century, Descartes planted Platonism once again at the base of philosophy. Thanks to their intrinsicist element, the Aristotelians had always been vulnerable to attack; above all, they were vulnerable in two crucial areas; the theory of concepts and the validation of ethics (Ethics, Aristotle had taught, is not a field susceptible to objective demonstration.) These were the historic openings, the double invitation that the better intellectuals unknowingly handed to the Cartesian trend. In the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century, just when America was being born, that trend, unopposed, bore its fruit.
The fruit was the end of the West’s philosophical commitment to reason, the conscious changeover in the ivory tower from the remnants of Aristotle to his antithesis. The thinker who ended the Enlightenment and laid the foundation for the twentieth century was Kant.
In order to solve the problem of concepts, Kant held, a new metaphysics and epistemology are required. The metaphysics, identified in Objectivist terms, is the primacy of consciousness in its social variant; the epistemology is social subjectivism and its corollary, skepticism. This approach left Kant free to declare as beyond challenge the essence of the intrinscisist's ethics: duty, i.e., imperatives issued by (noumenal) reality itself. When Kant’s new approach took over Western philosophy fully, as it did within decades, duty to the noumenal world became duty to the group or the state.
Kant’s Copernican Revolution reaffirmed the fundamental ideas of Plato. This time, however, the ideas were not undiluted by any pagan influence. They were undiluted and thus incomparably more virulent.
Plato and the medievals denied Existence in the name of a fantasy. a glowing super-reality with which, they believed, they were in direct, inspiring contact. This mystic realm, they said (or at last its lower levels) can be approached by the use of the mind, even though the latter is tainted by its union with the body. Man, they said should sacrifice his desires, but he should do it to gain a reward. His proper goal, even the saints agreed, is happiness, his own happiness, to be attained in the next life.
Kant is a different case. He denies Existence not in the name of a fantasy, but of nothing; he denies in in the name of a dimension that is, by his own insistent statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. The mind, he says, is cut off not merely from some aspects of " things in themselves," but from everything real; any cognitive faculty is cut off because it has a nature, any nature. Man’s proper goal, says Kant, is not happiness, whether in this life or the next. The "radically evil" creature (Kant’s words) should sacrifice his desires from duty, as an end in itself.
Occasional fig leaves aside, Kant offers humanity no alternative to the realm of that which is, and no reward for renouncing it. He is the first philosopher in history to reject reality, thought, and values, not for the sake of some "higher" version of them, but for the sake of the rejection. The power in behalf of which his genius speaks is not "pure reason," but pure destruction.
The result of Plato’s approach was a form of adoration. The result of Kant, in Ayn Rand’s words, was "hatred of the good for being the good." The hatred took shape in the culture of nihilism.
Modernist intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for kicks. They seek the thrill of the new; and the new, to them, is the negative. The new is obliteration, obliteration of the essential in every field; they have no interest in anything to take its place. Thus the uniqueness of the century behind us; philosophy gleefully rid of system-building, education based on the theory that cognition is harmful, science boastful of its inability to understand, art which expelled beauty, literature which flaunted antiheroes, language "liberated"’ from syntax, verse "free" of meter, nonrepresentational painting, atonal music, unconscious psychology, deconstruction in literary criticism, indeterminacy as the new depth in physics, incompleteness as the revelation in mathematics—a void everywhere that was acclaimed by the avant-garde with a metaphysical chuckle. It was the sound of triumph, the triumph of the new anti-ideal: of the unknowable, the unreachable, the unendurable.
In a Kantian reality, nothing else was possible.
Kant, surrounded by the Enlightenment, did not develop the political implications of his philosophy. His followers, however, had no trouble in seeing the point: from the premises he supplied. Fichte, Hegel, Marx (and Bismarck) drew the conclusion. Thus the two must passionately anti-freedom movements in history, Communism and Fascism, along with all their lesser, welfare-statist antecedents and kin.
Modern statism emanated, as it had to, from the "land of poets and philosophers." The reason is not the "innate depravity" of the Germans, but the nature of their premier philosopher.
Statism cannot sustain an industrial civilization Nihilism cannot abide it. Hence, in due course, another manifestation the growing attacks on technology, i.e., the anti-Industrial Revolution. It was the vow of poverty over again, not as a gateway to Heaven this time, but as a means to the welfare of water, trees, and "endangered species." The latter could be any species—except the human.
So much has been lost so fast. In no time at all, the West moved from "perpetual peace" to perpetual war from the rapture of Victor Hugo to the tongue in the asshole of Molly Bloom; front progress taken for granted to Auschwitz taken for granted.
Ayn Rand is to Aristotle what Kant is to Plato. Both sides of the perennial duel, in their pure form, have finally been made explicit Kant’s philosophy is Platonism without paganism. Ayn Rand’s philosophy is Aristotelianism without Platonism.
At this moment in history, the West is mutating again. The reason is that Kant as a cultural power is dead.
Kant is dead in academic philosophy; the subject has effectively expired under his tutelage. He is dead among the intellectuals, whose world view is disillusionment (they call it the "end of ideology"). He is dead in the realm of art, where nihilism, with little left to defy, is turning into its inevitable product: nihil (this is now being called "mininimalism" and "postmodernism").
Kant is dead even in Berlin and Moscow. As of this writing, although is tooearly to know, communism seems us to be disintegrating.
The collapse of a negative, however, is not a positive. The atrophy of a vicious version of unreason is not the adoption of reason. If men fail to discover living ideas, they will keep moving by the guidance of dead ones; they will keep following, by inertia, the principles they have already institutionalized. For the nations of East and West alike today, no matter what their faddish lipservice to a "free market," the culmination of these principles is some variant of dictatorship, new or revised—if not communist, then fascist and/in religious and/or tribal. Force and fate on such a scale would mean the fate of the ancients over again.
The only man who can stave off another Dark Ages is the Father of the Enlightenment.
It is true that Aristotle has flaws, which always gave his enemies an opening. But now the opening has been closed.
The solution to the crisis of our age is love, as everyone says. But the love we need is not love of God or the neighbor. It is love of the good for being the good. The good, in this context, includes reality, man the hero, and man’s tool of survival.
Some remnant of such love still survives in the West. Above all, it survives in the people of America—which, despite its decline, is still the leader and beacon of the world. This is the grounds for hope. A nation, however, is shaped ultimately not by its people, but by its intellectuals. This is the grounds for fear, unless some "new intellectuals," as Ayn Rand called them, can be created.
A philosophy by its nature speaks to all of humanity not to a particular time or place. A certain kind of philosophy, however, cries out tobe heard by a certain place first.
Objectivism is preeminently an American viewpoint, even though must people, here and abroad, know nothing about it. It Is American because it identifies the implicit base of the United States, as the country was originally conceived.
Ayn Rand’s ideas would resolve the contradiction that has been tearing apart the land of the free, the contradiction between its ethics and its politics. The result would be not America as it is or even as it once was, but the grandeur of a Romantic pinnacle America "as it might be and ought to be."
It one judges only by historical precedent, this kind of projection is the merest fantasy; we are arguably past the point of no return. America, however, is a country without precedent, and man has the faculty of volition
To the end of her life, Ayn Rand upheld her distinctive "benevolent-universe" premise. The good, she maintained, can be achieved; "it is real, it is possible, it’s yours." So long as there is no censorship, she taught, there is a chance for persuasion to succeed.
If no definite prediction can be made, she taught, then in reason only one action is proper: to go on fighting for reason.
"All things excellent." said Spinoza, "are as difficult as they are rare." Since human values are not automatic, his statement is undeniable.
In another respect, however—and this Is Ayn Rand’s unique perspective—the task ahead is not difficult.
To save the world is the simplest thing in the world.
All one has to do is think.
New York City—South Laguna, CA
1984—1990
pp. 451-460 Objectivism; The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
Ayn Rand was een enge vrouw, die enge boeken heeft geschreven.
"...ARCHITECTURE, my friends, is a great Art based on two cosmic principles: Beauty and
Utility. In a broader sense, these are but part of the three eternal entities: Truth, Love and
Beauty. Truth--to the traditions of our Art, Love--for our fellow men whom we are to serve,
Beauty--ah, Beauty is a compelling goddess to all artists, be it in the shape of a lovely woman
or a building....Hm....Yes....In conclusion, I should like to say to you, who are about to embark
upon your careers in architecture, that you are now the custodians of a sacred
heritage....Hm....Yes....So, go forth into the world, armed with the three eternal entities--armed
with courage and vision, loyal to the standards this great school has represented for many
years. May you all serve faithfully, neither as slaves to the past nor as those parvenus
who preach originality for its own sake, which attitude is only ignorant vanity. May you all
have many rich, active years before you and leave, as you depart from this world, your mark on the
sands of time!"
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead: http://www.speedyshare.com/779805833.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/779805833.html)
Hogepriesteres van de 'objectivism' sekte, een soort scientology voor beter gesitueerden.
Meer specifiek: een, op atheïsme gebaseerde, variant van de Scientology Kerk.
Te vergelijken met jullie sekte op dit forum.
Ik zou me daar niet mee bezighouden als ik jou was, het leven is al zwaar genoeg.
Inderdaad is het zo dat teksten van Ayn Rand zware kost zijn, maar de teksten van de eerder in deze draad opgemelde Stephen Crook zijn nog zwaardere kost.
Nu nog even het T-predicaat en "superassertibility" van Crispin Wright.
Daarover Hillary Putnam.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Brainvat.gif
Het document 'onderdeterminatie en skepticisme' was reeds in 2007 eigenlijk bedoeld voor deze draad.
De verstrengeling van onderdeterminatie (Durkheim-Quine!) en skepticisme eindigt wederom in het categoriseren van cultuurrelativisme als ideologie.
Het lanceerplatform om te onstnappen aan deze zoveelste gedwongen act in Circus Plato, is het pyrrhonisme met dien verstande dat ook de inmenging van "ware filosofie' in de "ware' sociologie (en de gevolgen daarvan zoals beschreven door Stephen Crook) uiteindelijk gekanaliseerd worden in het concept 'Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics' van R.W. Sharples geschreven in 1996.
Voorgaande driedeling (Sharples) is natuurlijk wel een 'proto-reflectie' vanuit het Hellenisme op de grosso modo driedeling van gereformeerden (Stoics), katholieken (Epicureans) en hervormden (Sceptics)in het heden.
R.W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: http://www.speedyshare.com/831536872.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/831536872.html)
<...>Inderdaad is het zo dat teksten van Ayn Rande zware kost zijn, maar de teksten van de eerder in deze draad opgemelde Stephen Crook zijn nog zwaardere kost.
De teksten van Rourchid zijn overwegend onverteerbaar:chef:
Te vergelijken met jullie sekte op dit forum.
Kan ik op grond van mijn ervaringen met bekennende objectivisten niet bevestigen; iets dergelijks bestaat op dit forum niet.
Salllah komt qua denk- en betoogtrant nog het dichtste in de buurt.
De teksten van Rourchid zijn overwegend onverteerbaar:chef:
Ik vind dat Rourchid hier interessante bijdrages plaats. Zo had ik nog nooit iets van of over Ayn Rand gelezen, dankzij hem kan ik dat nu doen.
Ik vind dat Rourchid hier interessante bijdrages plaats. Zo had ik nog nooit iets van of over Ayn Rand gelezen, dankzij hem kan ik dat nu doen.
Ja, daar mis je nogal wat aan
De teksten van Rourchid zijn overwegend onverteerbaar:chef:
Avicenna rahmihullah heeft ons het princiope geleerd dat als je een "zieke" wetenschappelijke constructie onderzoekt, je wel eerst dient te weten wat een "gezonde" wetenschappelijke constructie is.
De twee van het volk vervreemde elitaristische wetenschappelijke disciplinetjes (i.c. filosofie en sociologie) ontvlechten en ordenen is een fluitje van een cent als je inzake filosofie de 17 de eeuwse Sadriaanse harmonisatie van analytische - en pragmatische filosofie kent, en inzake sociologie het Khaldunische concept van 'asabiyya kent.
Kan ik op grond van mijn ervaringen met bekennende objectivisten niet bevestigen; iets dergelijks bestaat op dit forum niet.
Modernist intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for kicks.
p. 457 Objectivism; The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
Salllah komt qua denk- en betoogtrant nog het dichtste in de buurt.
Wishful thinking!
Ja, daar mis je nogal wat aan
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged:http://www.speedyshare.com/657455201.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/657455201.html)
Ik vind dat Rourchid hier interessante bijdrages plaats. Zo had ik nog nooit iets van of over Ayn Rand gelezen, dankzij hem kan ik dat nu doen.
Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual: http://www.speedyshare.com/115609956.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/115609956.html)
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: http://www.speedyshare.com/897278469.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/897278469.html)
c h a p t e r 1 9
.................................................. .................................................. .............................
THE ETHICS OF CARE
.................................................. .................................................. .............................
virginia held
The ethics of care is only a few decades old.1 Some theorists do not like the term "care" to designate this approach to moral issues and have tried substituting "the ethic of love," or "relational ethics," but the discourse keeps returning to "care" as, so far, the more satisfactory of the terms considered, though dissatisfactions with it remain. "Care" has the advantage of not losing sight of the work involved in caring for people, and of not lending itself to the ideal-but-impractical interpretation of morality to which advocates of the ethics of care often object. Care is both value and practice.
By now, the ethics of care has moved far beyond its original formulations, and any attempt to evaluate it should consider much more than the one or two early works so frequently cited. It has been developed as a moral theory that is relevant not only to the so-called private realms of family and friendship but to medical practice, law, political life, the organization of society, war, and international relations.
The ethics of care is sometimes seen as a potential moral theory to be substituted for such dominant moral theories as Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, or Aristotelian virtue ethics. It is sometimes seen as a form of virtue ethics. It is almost always seen as emphasizing neglected moral considerations of at least as much importance as the considerations central to moralities of justice and rights, or of utility and preference satisfaction. And many who contribute to the development of the ethics of care seek to integrate the moral considerations, such as justice, that other moral theories have clarified, satisfactorily with those of care, though they often see the need to reconceptualize these considerations.
1. Features of the Ethics of Care
Some advocates of the ethics of care resist generalizing this approach into something that can be fitted into the form of a moral theory. They see it as a mosaic of insights, and value the way it is sensitive to contextual nuance and particular narratives rather than making the abstract and universal claims of more familiar moral theories (Baier, 1994, esp. ch. 1; Bowden, 1997; M. Walker, 1992). Still, I think one can discern among various versions of the ethics of care a number of major features.
First, its central focus is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility. Caring for her child, for instance, may well and defensibly be at the forefront of a person’s moral concerns. The ethics of care recognizes that human beings are for many years of their lives dependent, that the moral claim of those dependent on us for the care they need is pressing, and that there are highly important moral aspects in developing the relations of caring that enable human beings to live and to progress. Every person needs care for at least her early years. Prospects for human progress and flourishing hinge fundamentally on the care that those needing it receive, and the ethics of care stresses the moral force of the responsibility to respond to the needs of the dependent. Most persons will become ill and dependent for some periods of their later lives, including in frail old age, and some who are permanently disabled will need care the whole of their lives. Moralities built on the image of the independent, autonomous, rational individual largely overlook the reality of human dependence and the morality it calls for. The ethics of care attends to this central concern of human life and delineates the moral values involved. It refuses to relegate care to a realm "outside morality." How caring for particular others should be reconciled with the claims of, for instance, universal justice, is an issue that needs to be addressed. But the ethics of care starts with the moral claims of particular others, for instance, of one’s child, whose claims can be compelling regardless of universal principles.
Second, in the epistemological process of trying to understand what morality would recommend and what it would be morally best for us to do and to be, the ethics of care values emotion rather than rejects it. Not all emotion is valued, of course, but in contrast with the dominant rationalist approaches, such emotions as sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness are seen as the kind of moral emotions that need to be cultivated, not only to help in the implementation of the dictates of reason but also to better ascertain what morality recommends (see, e.g., Baier, 1994; Held, 1993; Meyers, 1994; M. Walker, 1998). Even anger may be a component of the moral indignation that should be felt when people are treated unjustly or inhumanely, and it may contribute to rather than interfere with an appropriate interpretation of the moral wrong. This is not to say that raw emotion can be a guide to morality; feelings need to be reflected on and educated. But from the care perspective, moral inquiries that rely entirely on reason and rationalistic deductions or calculations are seen as deficient.
The emotions that are typically considered and rejected in rationalistic moral theories are the egoistic feelings that undermine universal moral norms, the favoritism that interferes with impartiality, and the aggressive and vengeful impulses for which morality is to provide restraints.
The ethics of care, in contrast, typically appreciates the emotions and relational capabilities that enable morally concerned persons in actual interpersonal contexts to understand what would be best. Since even the helpful emotions can often become misguided or worse, as when excessive empathy with others leads to a wrongful degree of self-denial or when benevolent concern crosses over into controlling domination, we need an ethics of care, not just care itself. The various aspects and expressions of care and caring relations need to be subjected to moral scrutiny and evaluated, not just observed and described.
Third, the ethics of care rejects the view of the dominant moral theories that the more abstract the reasoning about a moral problem the better, since the more likely to avoid bias and arbitrariness, and the more nearly to achieve impartiality. The ethics of care respects rather than removes itself from the claims of particular others with whom we share actual relationships (see, e.g., Benhabib, 1992; Friedman, 1993; Held, 1993; Kittay, 1999). It calls into question the universalistic and abstract rules of the dominant theories. When the latter consider such actual relations as between a parent and child, if they say anything about them at all, they may see them as permitted, and cultivating them a preference a person may have. Or they may recognize a universal obligation for all parents to care for their children. But they do not permit actual relations ever to take priority over the requirements of impartiality.
As Brian Barry expresses this view, there can be universal rules permitting people to favor their friends in certain contexts, such as deciding to whom to give holiday gifts, but the latter partiality is morally acceptable only because universal rules have already so judged it (see Barry, 1995; Bubeck, 1995, pp. 239–240; Held, 2001; Mendus, 2002). The ethics of care, in contrast, is skeptical of such abstraction and reliance on universal rules, and questions the priority given to them. To most advocates of the ethics of care, the compelling moral claim of the particular other may be valid even when it conflicts with the requirement usually made by moral theories that moral judgments be universalizable, and this is of fundamental moral importance.2 Hence the potential conflict between care and justice, friendship and impartiality, loyalty and universality. To others, however, there need be no conflict if universal judgments come to incorporate appropriately the norms of care previously disregarded.
Annette Baier considers how a feminist approach to morality differs from a Kantian one, and Kant’s claim that women are incapable of being fully moral because of their reliance on emotion rather than reason. She writes: "Where Kant concludes ‘so much the worse for women,’ we can conclude ‘so much the worse for the male fixation on the special skill of drafting legislation, for the bureaucratic mentality of rule worship, and for the male exaggeration of the importance of independence over mutual interdependence’ " (1994, p. 26).
Margaret Walker contrasts what she sees as feminist "moral understanding" with what has traditionally been thought of as moral "knowledge." She sees the moral understanding she advocates as involving "attention, contextual and narrative appreciation, and communication in the event of moral deliberation." This alternative moral epistemology holds that "the adequacy of moral understanding decreases as its form approaches generality through abstraction" (1989, pp. 19–20).The ethics of care may seek to limit the applicability of universal rules to certain domains where they are more appropriate, like the domain of law, and resist their extension to other domains. Such rules may simply be inappropriate in, for instance, the contexts of family and friendship, yet relations in these domains should certainly be evaluated, not merely described, hence morality should not be limited to abstract rules. We should be able to give moral guidance concerning actual relations that are trusting, considerate, and caring and concerning those that are not.
Dominant moral theories tend to interpret moral problems as if they were conflicts between egoistic individual interests on the one hand and universal moral principles on the other. The extremes of "selfish individual" and "humanity" are recognized, but what lies between these is often lost sight of. The ethics of care, in contrast, focuses especially on the area between these extremes. Those who conscientiously care for others are not seeking primarily to further their own individual interests; their interests are intertwined with the persons they care for.
Neither are they acting for the sake of all others or humanity in general; they seek instead to preserve or promote an actual human relation between themselves and particular others. Persons in caring relations are acting for self-and-other-together. Their characteristic stance is neither egoistic nor altruistic; these are the options in a conflictual situation, but the well-being of a caring relation involves the cooperative well-being of those in the relation, and the well-being of the relation itself.In trying to overcome the attitudes and problems of tribalism and religious intolerance, dominant moralities have tended to assimilate the domains of family and friendship to the tribal, or to a source of the unfair favoring of one’s own.
Or they have seen the attachments people have in these areas as among the nonmoral private preferences people are permitted to pursue if restrained by impartial moral norms. The ethics of care recognizes the moral value and importance of relations of family and friendship, and the need for moral guidance in these domains to understand how existing relations should often be changed and new ones developed. Having grasped the value of caring relations in such contexts as these more personal ones, the ethics of care then often examines social and political arrangements in the light of these values. In its more developed forms, the ethics of care as a feminist ethic offers suggestions for the radical transformation of society. It demands not just equality for women in existing structures of society, but equal consideration for the experience that reveals the values, importance, and moral significance, of caring.
A fourth characteristic of the ethics of care is that, like much feminist thought in many areas, it reconceptualizes traditional notions about the public and the private. The traditional view, built into the dominant moral theories, is that the household is a private sphere beyond politics into which government, based on consent, should not intrude. Feminists have shown how the greater social, political, economic, and cultural power of men has structured this "private" sphere to the disadvantage of women and children , rendering them vulnerable to domestic violence without outside interference, leaving women economically dependent on men and subject to a highly inequitable division of labor in the family. The law has not hesitated to intervene into women’s "private" decisions concerning reproduction but has been highly reluctant to intrude on men’s exercise of coercive power within the "castles" of their homes. Dominant moral theories have seen "public" life as relevant to morality, while missing the moral significance of the "private" domains of family and friendship. Thus the dominant theories have assumed that morality should be sought for unrelated, independent, and mutually indifferent individuals assumed to be equal.
They have posited an abstract, fully rational "agent as such" from which to construct morality (good examples are Darwall, 1983; Gauthier, 1986), while missing the moral issues that arise between interconnected persons in the contexts of family, friendship, and social groups. In the context of the family, it is typical for relations to be between persons with highly unequal power who did not choosethe ties and obligations in which they find themselves enmeshed. For instance, no child can choose his parents, yet he may well have obligations to care for them. Relations of this kind are standardly noncontractual, and conceptualizing them as contractual would often undermine or at least obscure the trust on which their worth depends. The ethics of care addresses rather than neglects moral issues arising in relations among the unequal and dependent, relations that are often emotion-laden and involuntary, and then notices how often these attributes apply not only in the household but in the wider society as well. For instance, persons do not choose which gender, racial, class, ethnic, religious, national, or cultural groups to be brought up in, yet these sorts of ties may be important aspects of who they are and how their experience can contribute to moral understanding.
A fifth characteristic of the ethics of care is the conception of persons with which it begins. This will be dealt with in the next section.
1. I use the term ‘ethics’ to suggest that there are multiple versions of this ethic, though they all have much in common, making it understandable that some prefer ‘the ethic of care’. I use ‘the ethics of care’ as a collective and singular term. Some moral philosophers have tried to establish a definitional distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’; I think such efforts fail, and I use the terms more or less interchangeably, though I certainly distinguish between the moral or ethical beliefs that groups of people in fact have and moral or ethical recommendations that are justifiable.
2. It is often asserted that to count as moral a judgment must be universalizable: If we hold that it would be right (or wrong) for one person to do something, then we are committed to holding that it would be right (or wrong) for anyone similar in similar circumstances to do it. The subject-terms in moral judgments must thus be universally quantified variables and the predicates universal. "I ought to take care of Jane because she is my child" is not universal; "all parents ought to take care of their children" is. The former judgment could be universalizable if it were derived from the latter, but if, as many advocates of the ethics of care think, it is taken as a starting moral commitment, rather than as dependent on universal moral judgments, it might not be universalizable.
2. The Critique of Liberal Individualism
The ethics of care usually works with a conception of persons as relational, rather than as the self-sufficient, independent individuals of the dominant moral theories. The dominant theories can be interpreted as importing into moral theory a concept of the person developed primarily for liberal political theory, seeing the person as a rational, autonomous agent, or a self-interested individual. On this view, society is made up of "independent, autonomous units who cooperate only when the terms of cooperation are such as to make it further the ends of each of the parties," in Brian Barry’s words (1973, p. 166). Or, if they are Kantians, they refrain from actions that they could not will to be universal laws to which all fully rational and autonomous individual agents could agree. What such views hold, in Michael Sandel’s critique of them, is that "what separates us is in some important sense prior to what connects us—epistemologically prior as well as morally prior. We are distinct individuals first and then we form relationships" (1982, p. 133; other examples of the communitarian critique that ran parallel to the feminist one are MacIntyre, 1981, 1988; Taylor, 1979; Unger, 1975). In Martha Nussbaum’s liberal feminist morality, "the flourishing of human beings taken one by one is both analytically and normatively prior to the flourishing" of any group (1999, p. 62).
The ethics of care, in contrast, characteristically sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically. Every person starts out as a child dependent on those providing care to this child, and we remain interdependent with others in thoroughly fundamental ways throughout our lives. That we can think and act as if we were independent depends on a network of social relations making it possible for us to do so. And our relations are part of what constitute our identity. This is not to say that we cannot become autonomous; feminists have done much interesting work developing an alternative conception of autonomy in place of the liberal individualist one (see, e.g., Clement, 1996; MacKenzie and Stoljar, 2000; Meyers, 1989, 1997; see also Oshana, 1998). And feminists have much experience rejecting or reconstituting relational ties that are oppressive. But it means that from the perspective of an ethics of care, to construct morality as if we were Robinson Crusoes, or, to use Hobbes’s image, mushrooms sprung from nowhere, is misleading. (This image is in Hobbes, 1972, p. 205; for a contrasting view see Schwarzenbach, 1996.)
As Eva Kittay writes, the liberal individualist conception fosters the illusion that society is composed of free, equal, and independent individuals who can choose to associate with one another or not. It obscures the very real facts of dependency, for everyone when young, for most people at various periods in their lives when they are ill or old and infirm, for some who are disabled, and for those engaged in unpaid "dependency work" (Kittay, 1999).
Not only does the liberal individualist conception of the person foster a false picture of society and the persons in it but also it is, from the perspective of the ethics of care, impoverished also as an ideal. The ethics of care values the ties we have with particular other persons and the actual relationships that partly constitute our identity. Although persons often may and should reshape their relations with others, distancing themselves from some persons and groups and developing or stengthening ties with others, the autonomy sought within the ethics of care is a capacity to reshape and cultivate new relations, not to ever more closely resemble the unencumbered abstract rational self of liberal political and moral theories. Those motivated by the ethics of care would seek to become more admirable relational persons in better caring relations.
Even if the liberal ideal is meant only to instruct us on what would be rational in the terms of its ideal model, thinking of persons as the model presents them has effects that should not be welcomed. As Annette Baier writes: "Liberal morality, if unsupplemented, may unfit people to be anything other than what its justifying theories suppose them to be, ones who have no interest in each others’ interests" (1994, p. 29). And there is strong empirical evidence on how adopting a theoretical model can lead to behavior that mirrors it. Various studies show that studying economics, with its "repeated and intensive exposure to a model whose unequivocal prediction" is that people will decide what to do on the basis of selfinterest, leads economics students to be less cooperative and more inclined to free ride than other students (Frank, Gilovich, and Regan, 1993; Marwell and Ames, 1981).
The conception of the person adopted by the dominant moral theories provides moralities at best suitable for legal, political, and economic interactions between relative strangers, once adequate trust exists for them to form a political entity (Held, 1984, ch. 5). The ethics of care is, instead, hospitable to the relatedness of persons. It sees many of our responsibilities as not freely entered into but presented to us by the accidents of our embeddedness in familial and social and historical contexts. It often calls on us to take responsibility, while liberal individualist morality focuses on how we should leave each other alone.
This view of persons seems fundamental to much feminist thinking about morality and especially to the ethics of care. As Jean Keller writes, whatever shape feminist ethics takes, "the insight that the moral agent is an ‘encumbered self,’ who is always embedded in relations with flesh and blood others and is partly constituted by these relations, is here to stay"(1997, p. 152).
3. What Is Care?
As with many exploratory inquiries, definitions have often been less than precise, or have been rather hastily assumed, or postponed, in the growing discourse of the ethics of care. Some have attempted clarity, with mixed results, while others have proceeded with the tacit understanding that of course we know what we are talking about when we speak of taking care of a child, or providing care for the ill.
There has been some agreement that care at least refers to an activity, as in taking care of someone. That it involves work and the expenditure of energy on the part of the person doing the caring has usually not been lost sight of. That engaging in care is not merely caring about something or someone has been acknowledged. But there are many forms of care, and there have been different emphases.
Noddings focuses especially on caring as an attitude that typically accompanies the activity. Central to caring are close attention to the feelings, needs, desires, and thoughts of those cared for, and a skill in understanding a situation from that person’s point of view (Noddings, 1986, esp. pp. 14–19). Carers act in behalf of others’ interests, but they also care for themselves. The cognitive aspect of the carer’s attitude is ‘receptive-intuitive’ rather than ‘objective-analytic’, and understanding the needs of those cared for is, in Noddings’s view, more a matter of feeling with them than of rational cognition. Abstract rules are of limited use in caring. Sometimes persons have a natural impulse to care for others, but sustaining this calls for a moral commitment to the ideal of caring (pp. 42, 80). Care is for Noddings an attitude and an ideal manifest in activities of care in concrete situations.
For Joan Tronto, care is much more explicitly labor. She and Berenice Fisher define it as activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible (Fisher and Tronto, 1990, p. 40). This definition is so broad that most economic activity would be included, losing sight of the distinctive features of caring labor, including what Noddings calls the needed "engrossment" with the other. Alternatively, if one accepts Marx’s distinction between productive and reproductive labor, and thinks of caring as reproductive labor, one misses the way that caring, especially for children, can be transformative. It is not only production that transforms human life, while elsewhere biology repeats itself. Care includes the creative nurturing that occurs in the household and in child care, and in education generally, and care has the potential to shape new and ever–changing persons. Care can impart and express increasingly more advanced levels of meaning and culture and society. The idea that what is new and creative and distinctively human must occur outside the realm of care is a familiar but biased misconception.
Diemut Bubeck offers a precise but problematic definition of care. She suggests that "[c]aring for is the meeting of the needs of one person by another person, where face-to-face interaction between carer and cared for is a crucial element of the overall activity and where the need is of such a nature that it cannot possibly be met by the person in need herself" (1995, p. 129). She distinguishes caring for someone from providing a service, so that a wife who cooks for her husband when he could perfectly well cook for himself is not engaging in care but providing a service to him, whereas cooking a meal for a small child would be care. Care, she asserts, is "a response to a particular subset of basic human needs, i.e. those which make us dependent on others" (p. 133). To Bubeck, care does not require any particular emotional bond between carer and cared–for, and it is important to her general view that it can and often should be publicly provided, as in public health care. Care for her is constituted almost entirely by the objective fact of needs being met, rather than by the attitude or ideal with which the carer is acting. This opens her conception to the criticism that, as long as the objective outcome for the child is the same, providing care with the least admirable of motives would have as much moral worth as taking care of a child out of affection and because one sought what is best for the child. This would miss how care can express morally valuable social relations.
For Bubeck, as for Noddings in her early work, the face-to-face aspect of care is central, making it questionable whether we can think of our concern for more distant others in terms of caring. But Bubeck does not see her view as implying that care is then limited to the context of the relatively personal, for Bubeck includes the activities of the welfare state in the purview of the ethics of care. She thinks that in child–care centers and facilities for the elderly, care will be face-toface, but that it should receive generous and widely supported public funding.
And in her later work, Noddings agrees (Noddings, 2002).
In his elaboration of caring as a virtue, Michael Slote thinks it entirely suitable that our benevolent feelings for distant others be conceptualized as caring. He thinks "an ethic of caring can take the well-being of all humanity into consideration"; to him, caring is a "motivational attitude" (2001, pp. ix, 30). And several contributors to the volume Feminists Doing Ethics also see care as a virtue (DesAutels and Waugh, 2001). But some feminists would object, I think, to seeing care entirely as a motive, since this may lose sight of it as work, and encouragement should not be given to the tendency to overlook the question of who does most of this work.
My own view is that care should be thought of as both a practice and a value (Held, 2004). Care is a practice of responding to needs—material, psychological, cultural—but it is not a series of unrelated actions, it is a practice that develops, that has attributes and standards, and that should be continually improved. Care should be carried out with the appropriate attitudes; motives, and what we express in our caring activities, are important, along with outcomes. Adequate care can come progressively closer to being good care, able to express the caring relations that hold persons together and that can transform children into increasingly more morally admirable human beings.
Care is also a value. We value caring persons and caring attitudes, and can organize many evaluations of how persons are interrelated around a constellation of moral considerations associated with care or its absence. We can ask of a relation, for instance, whether it is trusting and mutually considerate, or hostile and vindictive. Care is not, I think, the same as benevolence, because care is more the characterization of a social relation than the description of an individual disposition, such as the disposition of a benevolent person. What caring societies ought to cultivate are caring relations, often reciprocal over time, if not at given times. It is caring relations, rather than persons as individuals, that especially exemplify the values of caring. Caring relations form the small societies of family and friendship on which larger societies depend. Weaker but still–evident caring relations between more distant persons allow them to trust one another enough to live in peace, to respect each others’ rights, and to care together for the wellbeing of their members and of their environment.
4. Justice and Care
Some conceptions of the ethics of care see it as contrasting with an ethic of justice in ways that suggest one must choose between them. Carol Gilligan’s suggestion of alternative perspectives in interpreting and organizing the elements of a moral problem lent itself to this implication; she herself used the metaphor of the ambiguous figure of the vase and the faces, from psychological research on perception, to illustrate how one could see a problem as either a problem of justice or a problem of care but not as both simultaneously (Gilligan, 1982, 1987).
An ethic of justice focuses on questions of fairness, equality, individual rights, abstract principles, and the consistent application of them. An ethic of care focuses on attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to need, narrative nuance, and cultivating caring relations. Whereas an ethic of justice seeks a fair solution between competing individual interests and rights, an ethic of care sees the interests of carers and cared-for as importantly intertwined rather than as simply competing.
Whereas justice protects equality and freedom, care fosters social bonds and cooperation. These are very different emphases in what morality should consider. Yet both deal with what seems of great moral importance. This has led many to explore how they might be combined in a satisfactory morality. One can persuasively argue, for instance, that justice is needed in such contexts of care as the family, to protect against violence and the unfair division of labor or treatment of children. And one can persuasively argue that care is needed in such contexts of justice as the streets and the courts, where persons should be treated humanely. Both care and justice are needed in the way education and health and welfare should be dealt with as social responsibilities. The implication may be that justice and care should not be separated into different "ethics"—that, in Sara Ruddick’s proposed approach, "justice [should] always [be] seen in tandem with care" (1995, p. 217).
Few would hold that considerations of justice have no place at all in care. One would not be caring well for two children, for instance, if one persistently favored one of them in a way that could not be justified on the basis of some such factor as greater need. The issues are rather what constellation of values have priority, and which predominate in the practices of the ethics of care and the ethics of justice. And it is quite possible to delineate significant differences between them. In the dominant moral theories of the ethics of justice, the values of equality, impartiality, fair distribution, and noninterference have priority; in practices of justice, individual rights are protected, impartial judgments are arrived at, punishments are deserved, and equal treatment is sought. In contrast, in the ethics of care, the values of trust, solidarity, mutual concern, and empathetic responsiveness have priority; in practices of care, relationships are cultivated, needs are responded to, and sensitivity is demonstrated.
An extended effort to integrate care and justice is offered by Bubeck. She makes clear that she "endorse[s] the ethic of care as a system of concepts, values, and ideas, arising from the practice of care as an organic part of this practice and responding to its material requirements, notably the meeting of needs" (1995, p. 11). Yet her primary interest is in understanding the exploitation of women, which she sees as tied to the way women do most of the unpaid work of caring.
She argues that such principles as the minimization of harm, and of equality in care, are tacitly if not explicitly embedded in the practice of care, as carers whose capacities and time for engaging in caring labor are limited must decide how to respond to various others in need of being cared for. She writes that "far from being extraneous impositions . . . considerations of justice arise from within the practice of care itself and therefore are an important part of the ethic of care, properly understood" (p. 206). The ethics of care must thus also concern itself with the justice, or lack of it, of the ways the tasks of caring are distributed in society. Traditionally, women have been expected to do most of the caring work that needs to be done; the sexual division of labor exploits women by extracting unpaid care labor from them, making women less able than men to engage in paid work. "Femininity" constructs women as carers, contributing to the constraints by which women are pressed into accepting the sexual division of labor.
An ethic of care that extols caring but fails to be concerned with how the burdens of caring are distributed contributes to the exploitation of women, and of the minority groups whose members perform much of the paid but ill-paid work of caring in affluent households, daycare centers, hospitals, nursing homes, and the like. The question remains, however, whether justice should be thought to be incorporated into any ethic of care that will be adequate, or whether we should keep the notions of justice and care and their associated ethics conceptually distinct. I think there is much to be said for recognizing how the ethics of care values interrelatedness and responsiveness to the needs of particular others, and how the ethics of justice values fairness and rights, and how these are different emphases.3
Too much integration will lose sight of these valid differences. I am more inclined to say that an adequate, comprehensive moral theory will have to include the insights of both the ethics of care and the ethics of justice, among other insights, rather than that either of these can be incorporated into the other in the sense of supposing that it can provide the grounds for the judgments characteristically found in the other. Equitable caring is not necessarily better caring, it is fairer caring. And humane justice is not necessarily better justice, it is more caring justice.
Almost no advocates of the ethics of care are willing to see it as a moral outlook less valuable than the dominant ethics of justice (see Clement, 1996). To imagine that the concerns of care can merely be added on to the dominant theories, as, for instance, Stephen Darwall suggests (1998, ch. 19), is seen as unsatisfactory. Confining the ethics of care to the private sphere while holding it unsuitable for public life is also to be rejected. But how care and justice are to be meshed without losing sight of their differing priorities is a task still being worked on.
My own suggestions for integrating care and justice are to keep these concepts conceptually distinct, and to delineate the domains in which they should have priority (Held, 1984). In the realm of law, for instance, justice and the assurance of rights should have priority, though the humane considerations of care should not be absent. In the realm of the family and among friends, priority should be given to expansive care, though the basic requirements of justice surely should also be met. But these are the clearest cases; others will combine moral urgencies.
Universal human rights, including the social and economic ones as well as the political and civil, should certainly be respected, but promoting care across continents may be a more promising way to achieve this than mere rational recognition. When needs are desperate, justice may be a lessened requirement on shared responsibility for meeting needs, though this rarely excuses violations of rights. At the level of what constitutes a society in the first place, a domain within which rights are to be assured and care provided, appeal must be made to something like the often weak but not negligible caring relations among persons that enable them to recognize each other as members of the same society. Such recognition must eventually be global; in the meantime, the civil society without which the liberal institutions of justice cannot function presumes a background of some degree of caring relations rather than of merely competing individuals (Held, 2000). Further, considerations of care provide a more fruitful basis than considerations of justice for deciding much about how society should be structured, for instance how extensive or how restricted markets should be (Held, 2002).
And in the course of protecting the rights that ought to be recognized, such as those to basic necessities, policies that express the caring of the community for all its members will be better policies than those that grudgingly, though fairly, issue an allotment to those deemed unfit.
Care is probably the most deeply fundamental value. There can be care without justice: there has historically been little justice in the family, but care and life have gone on without it. There can be no justice without care, however, for without care no child would survive, and there would be no persons to respect.
Care may thus provide the wider and deeper ethics within which justice should be sought, as when persons in caring relations may sometimes compete and in doing so should treat each other fairly, or, at the level of society, within caring relations of the thinner kind, we can agree to treat each other for limited purposes as if we were the abstract individuals of liberal theory. But though care may be the more fundamental value, it may well be that the ethics of care does not itself provide adequate theoretical resources for dealing with issues of justice.
Within its appropriate sphere and for its relevant questions, the ethics of justice may be best for what we seek. What should be resisted is the traditional inclination to expand the reach of justice in such a way that it is mistakenly imagined to be able to give us a comprehensive morality suitable for all moral questions.
3. This is not to deny that justice includes responding to needs in the general sense. For instance, any decent list of human rights should include rights to basic necessities, despite the peculiar backwardness of the United States in recognizing this. Most of the world rightly accepts, at least in theory, that economic and social rights are real human rights along with civil and political rights. But justice and fairness require such rights because it is unfair as a matter of general principle for some to have more than they need of the means to live and to act, while others lack such means. See, e.g., Held, 1984; Henkin, 1990; Nickel, 1987; Shue, 1980. See also Copp, 1998. Care, in contrast, responds to the particular needs of particular persons regardless of general principles.
5. Implications for Society
Many advocates of the ethics of care argue for its relevance in social and political and economic life. Sara Ruddick shows its implications for efforts to achieve peace (Ruddick, 1989). I argue that as we see the deficiencies of the contractual model of human relations within the household, we can see them also in the world beyond, and begin to think about how society should be reorganized to be hospitable to care, rather than continuing to marginalize it. We can see how not only does every domain of society need transformation in light of the values of care, but so would the relations between such domains, if we took care seriously, as care would move to the center of our attention and become a primary concern of society. Instead of a society dominated by conflict restrained by law, and preoccupied with economic gain, we might have a society that saw as its most important task the flourishing of children and the development of caring relations, not only in personal contexts but among citizens, and using governmental institutions.
And we would see that instead of abandoning culture to the dictates of the marketplace, we should make it possible for culture to develop in ways best able to enlighten and enrich human life (Held, 1993).
Joan Tronto argues for the political implications of the ethics of care, seeing care as a political as well as moral ideal advocating the meeting of needs for care as "the highest social goal" (1993, p. 175). She shows how unacceptable current arrangements are for providing care: "[C]aring activities are devalued, underpaid, and disproportionately occupied by the relatively powerless in society" (p. 113).
Nancy Fraser showed that how needs are defined are public and contested issues (Fraser, 1987). Diemut Bubeck, Eva Kittay, and many others argue forcefully that care must be seen as a public concern, not relegated to the private responsibility of women, the inadequacy and arbitrariness of private charities, or the vagaries and distortions of the market (Bubeck, 1995; Folbre, 2001; Harrington, 1999; Kittay, 1999). In her recent book Starting At Home, Nel Noddings explores what a caring society would be like (2002).??
When we concern ourselves with caring relations between more distant others, this care should not be thought to reduce to the mere "caring about" that has little to do with the face-to-face interactions of caring labor and can easily become paternalistic or patronizing. The same characteristics of attentiveness, responsiveness to needs, and understanding situations from the points of view of others should characterize caring when the participants are more distant. This also requires the work of understanding and of expending varieties of effort (see, e.g., Lugones, 1991).
Given how care is a value with the widest possible social implications, it is unfortunate that many who look at the ethics of care continue to suppose it is a "family ethics," confined to the "private" sphere. Although some of its earliest formulations suggested this, and some of its related values are to be seen most clearly in personal contexts, an adequate understanding of the ethics of care should recognize that it elaborates values as fundamental and as relevant to political institutions and to how society is organized as those of justice. Perhaps its values are even more fundamental and more relevant to life in society than those traditionally relied on.
Instead of seeing the corporate sector, and military strength, and government and law as the most important segments of society deserving the highest levels of wealth and power, a caring society might see the tasks of bringing up children, educating its members, meeting the needs of all, achieving peace and treasuring the environment, and doing these in the best ways possible to be those to which the greatest social efforts of all should be devoted. One can recognize that something comparable to legal constraints and police enforcement, including at a global level, may always be necessary for special cases but also that caring societies could greatly decrease the need for them. The social changes a focus on care would require would be as profound as can be imagined.
The ethics of care as it has developed is most certainly not limited to the "private" sphere of family and personal relations. When its social and political implications are understood, it is a radical ethic calling for a profound restructuring of society.
6. The Ethics of Care and Virtue Ethics
To some philosophers, the ethics of care is a form of virtue ethics. Several of the contributors to the volume Feminists Doing Ethics adopt this view (see Andrew, 2001; McLaren, 2001; Potter, 2001; Tessman, 2001). The important virtue theorist Michael Slote argues extensively for the position that caring is the primary virtue and that a morality based on the motive of caring can offer a general account of right and wrong action and political justice (Slote, 2001).
In my view, although there are similarities between them, and although to be caring is no doubt a virtue, the ethics of care is not simply a kind of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics focuses especially on the states of character of individuals, whereas the ethics of care concerns itself especially with caring relations. It is caring relations that have primary value. If virtue ethics is interpreted, as with Slote, as primarily a matter of motives, it may neglect unduly the labor and objective results of caring, as Bubeck’s emphasis on actually meeting needs well highlights.
Caring is not only a question of motive or attitude or virtue. On the other hand, Bubeck’s account is unduly close to a utilitarian interpretation of meeting needs, neglecting that care also has an aspect of motive and virtue. If virtue ethics is interpreted as less restricted to motives, and if it takes adequate account of the results of the virtuous person’s activities for the persons cared for, it may better include the concerns of the ethic of care. It would still, however, focus on the dispositions of individuals, whereas the ethics of care focuses on social relations, and the social practices and values that sustain them. The traditional Man of Virtue may be almost as haunted by his patriarchal past as The Man of Reason.
The work of care has certainly not been among the virtuous activities to which he has adequately attended. The ethics of care, in my view, is a distinctive ethical outlook, distinct even from virtue ethics. Certainly it has precursors, and such virtue theorists as Aristotle, Hume, and the moral sentimentalists can contribute importantly to it. As a feminist ethic, the ethics of care is certainly not a mere description or generalization of women’s attitudes and activities as developed under patriarchal conditions. To be acceptable, it must be a feminist ethic, open to both women and men to adopt. But in being feminist, it is different from the ethics of its precursors, and different, as well, from virtue ethics.
The ethics of care is sometimes thought inadequate because of its inability to provide definite answers in cases of conflicting moral demands. Virtue theory has similarly been criticized for offering no more than what detractors call a "bag of virtues," with no clear indication of how to prioritize the virtues, or apply their requirements, especially when they seem to conflict. Defenders of the ethics of care respond that the adequacy of the definite answers provided by, for instance, utilitarian and Kantian moral theories is illusory. Cost-benefit analysis is a good example of a form of utilitarian calculation that purports to provide clear answers to questions about what we ought to do, but from the point of view of moral understanding, its answers are notoriously dubious. So too, often, are casuistic reasonings about deontological rules.
To advocates of the ethics of care, its alternative moral epistemology seems better. It stresses sensitivity to the multiple relevant considerations in particular contexts, cultivating the traits of character and of relationship that sustain caring, and promoting the dialogue that corrects and enriches the perspective of any one individual (for another view, see Campbell, 1998). The ethics of care is hospitable to the methods of discourse ethics, though with an emphasis on actual dialogue that empowers its participants to express themselves rather than on discourse so ideal that actual differences of viewpoint fall away (see Benhabib, 1992; Habermas, 1995; Young, 1990).
7. Care, Culture, and Religion
Questions that may be raised are whether the ethics of care resembles other kinds of ethical theory that are not feminist, and whether there can be nonfeminist forms of the ethics of care. Some think the ethics of care is close to Hume’s ethics (see especially Baier, 1994). Others have debated whether the ethics of care resembles Confucian ethics. Chenyang Li argues that it does. He holds that the concept of care is similar to the concept of jen or ren that is central to Confucian ethics, and that although the Confucian tradition did maintain that women were inferior to men, this is not a necessary feature of Confucian thought (Li, 1994, 2002).
Daniel Star thinks that Confucian ethics is a kind of virtue ethics, always interested in role-based categories of relationships, such as father/son and ruler/subject, and that because of this it will not be able to prioritize particular relationships, such as that between a particular parent and a particular child, as does the ethics of care (Star, 2002).
Lijun Yuan argues that Confucian ethics is so inherently patriarchal that it cannot be acceptable to feminists (Yuan, 2002). But other interpretations are also being developed.4 One way the ethics of care does resemble Confucian ethics is in its rejection of the sharp split between public and private. The ethics of care rejects the model that became dominant in the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as democratic states replaced feudal society: a public sphere of mutually disinterested equals coexisting with a private sphere of female caring and male rule. The ethics of care advocates care as a value for society as well as household. In this there are some resemblances to the Confucian view of public morality as an extension of private morality.
It may be suggested that the ethics of care bears some resemblance to a Christian ethic of love, counseling us to love our neighbors and care for those in need. But when a morality depends on a given religion, it has little persuasiveness for those who do not share that religion. Moralities based on reason, in contrast, can succeed in gaining support around the world and across cultures. The growth of the human rights movement is strong evidence. One of the strengths of the dominant, rationalistic moral theories such as Kantian ethics and utilitarianism, in contrast with which the ethics of care developed, is their independence from religion. They aim to appeal only to universal reason (though in practice they may fall woefully short of doing so).
Virtue ethics is sometimes based on religion, but need not be. The universal appeal of virtue ethics, however, has been less than that of ethics based on reason, given the enormous amount of cultural variation in what have been thought of as the virtues, in comparison to such basic moral prohibitions based on reason as those against murder, theft, and assault, thought to be able to provide the basis for any acceptable legal system.
The ethics of care, it should be noted, has potential comparable to that of rationalistic moral theories. It appeals to the universal experience of caring. Every conscious human being has been cared for as a child and can see the value in the care that shaped her; every thinking person can recognize the moral worth of the caring relations that gave him a future. The ethics of care builds on experience that all persons share, though they have often been unaware of its embedded values and implications.
Various feminist critics hold that the ethics of care can be hostile to feminist objectives. A traditional Confucian ethic, if seen as an ethic of care, might be an example on an ethic of care unacceptable to feminists; traditional communitarian views that appreciate care but hold that women ought to confine themselves to caring for their families while leaving "public" concerns to men might be others. Liberal feminist critics of the ethics of care charge it with reinforcing the stereotypical image of women as selfless nurturers and with encouraging the unjust assignment of caring work to women. They think it lacks the prioritizing of equality that feminism must demand (see, e.g., Nussbaum, 1999; Okin, 1989). Other feminist critics find women’s experience of mothering as it has occurred under patriarchal conditions suspect, or fear that an ethics of care will deflect attention from the oppressive social structures in which it takes place (see, e.g., Card, 1995; Houston, 1987; Jaggar, 1995; but see also Willett, 1995).
Feminist defenders of the ethics of care argue that it should be understood as a feminist ethic. It makes clear, in their view, why men as well as women should value caring relations, and should share equally in cultivating them. It does not take the practices of caring as developed under patriarchal conditions as satisfactory, but does explore the neglected values discernible through attention to and reflection on them. And it seeks to extend these values as appropriate throughout society, along with justice. If one wishes to count any view that prioritizes care as a version of the ethics of care, one must be careful to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable versions.
My own view is that to include nonfeminist versions of valuing care among the moral approaches called "the ethics of care" is to unduly disregard the history of how this ethics has developed and come to be a candidate for serious consideration among contemporary moral theories. The history of the development of the contemporary ethics of care is the history of recent feminist progress.
4. Chan Sin Yee, examining Confucian texts, finds the traditional neo-Confucian denigration of women a misinterpretation. She acknowledges that even a reformed Confucian ethics might subscribe to a gender essentialism in which appropriate though not necessarily unequal roles based on gender would be promoted, but suggests how a return to early Confucianism could avoid this (Yee, 2003).
8. The Feminist Background
The ethics of care has grown out of the constructive turmoil of the phase of feminist thought and the rethinking of almost all fields of inquiry that began inthe United States and Europe in the late 1960s. At this time, the bias against women in society and in what was taken to be knowledge became a focus of attention.
Feminism is a revolutionary movement. It aims to overturn what many consider the most entrenched hierarchy there is: the hierarchy of gender. Its fundamental commitment is to the equality of women, though that may be interpreted in various ways. A most important achievement of feminism has been to establish that the experience of women is as important, relevant, and philosophically interesting as the experience of men. The feminism of the late twentieth century was built on women’s experience.
Experience is central to feminist thought, but what is meant by experience isnot mere empirical observation, as so much of the history of modern philosophy and as analytic philosophy tend to construe it. Feminist experience is what art and literature as well as science deal with. It is the lived experience of feeling as well as thinking, of performing actions as well as receiving impressions, and of being aware of our connections with other persons as well as of our own sensations.
And by now, for feminists, it is not the experience of what can be thought of as women as such, which would be an abstraction, but the experience of actual women in all their racial and cultural and other diversity (see, e.g., Collins, 1990; Hoagland, 1989; Narayan, 1997; Spelman, 1988; P. Williams, 1991).
The feminist validation of women’s experience has had important consequences in ethics. It has led to a fundamental critique of the moral theories that were and to a large extent still are dominant, and to the development of alternative, feminist approaches to morality. For instance, in the long history of thinking about the human as Man, the public sphere from which women were excluded was seen as the source of the distinctively human and moral and creative. The Greek conception of the polis illustrated this view, later reflected strongly in social contract theories. As the realm of economic activity was added after industrialization to that of the political to compose what was seen as human, transformative, and progressive, the private sphere of the household continued to be thought of as natural, a realm where the species is reproduced, repetitively replenishing the biological basis of life.
The dominant moral theories when the feminism of the late twentieth century appeared on the scene were Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism. These were the theories that, along with their relevant metaethical questions, dominated the literature in moral philosophy and the courses taught to students.5 They were also the moral outlooks that continued to have a significant influence outside philosophy in the field of law, one of the few areas that had not banished moral questions in favor of purportedly value-free psychology and social science.
These dominant moral theories can be seen to be modeled on the experience of men in public life and in the marketplace. When women’s experience is thought to be as relevant to morality as men’s, a position whose denial would seem to be biased, these moralities can be seen to fit very inadequately the morally relevant experience of women in the household. Women’s experience has typically included cultivating special relationships with family and friends rather than primarily dealing impartially with strangers, and providing large amounts of caring labor for children and often for ill or elderly family members. Affectionate sensitivity and responsiveness to need may seem to provide better moral guidance for what should be done in these contexts than do abstract rules or rational calculations of individual utilities.
At around the same time that feminists began questioning the adequacy ofthe dominant moral theories, other voices were doing so also, which increased the ability of the feminist critiques to gain a hearing. With the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and others, there began to be a revival of the virtue theory that had been largely eclipsed.6 Larry Blum’s work on how friendship had been neglected by the dominant theories and Bernard Williams’s skepticism about how such theories could handle some of the most important questions human beings face contributed to the critical discourse (Blum, 1980; B. Williams, 1985). Arguments about how knowledge is historically situated, and about the plurality of values, further opened the way for feminist rethinking of moral theory (see, e.g., Anderson, 1993; Stocker, 1990; Taylor, 1985).
Within traditional moral philosophy, debates have been extensive and complex concerning the relative merits of deontological or Kantian moral theory, as compared with the merits of the various kinds of utilitarian or consequentialist theory, and of the contractualism that can take a more Kantian or a more utilitarian form. But from the newly asserted point of view of women’s experience of moral issues, what may be most striking about all of these is their similarity. All are theories of right action. Both Kantian moralities of universal, abstract moral laws, and utilitarian versions of the ethics of Bentham and Mill advocating impartial calculations to determine what will produce the most happiness for the most people have been developed for interactions between relative strangers. Contractualism treats interactions between mutually disinterested individuals. All require impartiality and make no room at the foundational level for the partiality that connects us to those we care for and to those who care for us. Relations of family, friendship, and group identity have largely been missing from these theories, though recent attempts, which I believe to be unsuccessful, have been made to handle such relations within them.
Although their conceptions of reason differ significantly, with Kantian theory rejecting the morality of instrumental reasoning and utilitarian theory embracing it, both types of theory are rationalistic. Both rely on one very simple supreme and universal moral principle: the Kantian Categorical Imperative, or the utilitarian principle of utility, in accordance with which everyone ought always to act.
Both ask us to be entirely impartial and to reject emotion in determining what we ought to do. Though Kantian ethics enlists emotion in carrying out the dictates of reason, and utilitarianism allows each of us to count ourselves as one among all whose pain or pleasure will be affected by an action, for both kinds of theory we are to disregard our emotions in the epistemological process of figuring out what we ought to do. These characterizations hold also of contractualism.
These theories generalize from the ideal contexts of the state and the market, addressing the moral decisions of judges, legislators, policy-makers, and citizens.
But since they are moral theories rather than merely political or legal or economic theories, they extend their recommendations to what they take to be all moral decisions about how we ought to act in any context in which moral problems arise.
In Margaret Walker’s assessment, these are idealized "theoretical-juridical" accounts of actual moral practices. They invoke the image of "a fraternity of independent peers invoking laws to deliver verdicts with authority" (1998, p. 1).
Fiona Robinson asserts that in dominant moral theories, values such as autonomy, independence, noninterference, self-determination, fairness, and rights are given priority, and there is a "systematic devaluing of notions of interdependence, relatedness, and positive involvement" in the lives of others (1999, p. 10). The theoretical-juridical accounts, Walker shows, are presented as appropriate for "the" moral agent, as recommendations for how "we" ought to act, but their canonical forms of moral judgment are the judgments of those who resemble "a judge, manager, bureaucrat, or gamesman" (1998, p. 21). They are abstract and idealized forms of the judgments made by persons who are dominant in an established social order. They do not represent the moral experiences of women caring for children or their aged parents, or of minority service workers providing care for minimal wages. And they do not deal with the judgments of groups who must rely on communal solidarity for survival.
5. I share Stephen Darwall’s view that normative ethics and metaethics are highly interrelated and cannot be clearly separated. See Darwall, 1998, esp. ch. 1.
6. See MacIntyre, 1981. A virtue theorist who was fairly widely read in the period before this was Foot, 1978. See also Rorty, 1980. Other work contributing to the revival of virtue ethics includes Slote, 1983, 1992. See also Flanagan and Rorty, 1992. Nussbaum’s work (e.g., 1986) has contributed to virtue theory, but she is critical of the ethics of care.
9. Feminist Alternatives
In place of the dominant moral theories found inadequate, feminists have offered a variety of alternatives. There is not any single "feminist moral theory" but a number of approaches sharing a basic commitment to eliminate gender bias in moral theorizing as well as elsewhere (see esp. Jaggar, 1989).
Some feminists defend versions of Kantian moral theory (e.g. Baron, 1995; Herman, 1993) or utilitarianism (e.g. Purdy, 1996) or of such related theories as contractualism (e.g. Hampton, 1993; Okin, 1989) and liberal individualist moral theory (e.g., Nussbaum, 1999). But they respond to different concerns and interpret and apply these theories in ways that none or few of their leading nonfeminist defenders do. For instance, taking a liberal contractualist approach and focusing on justice, equality, and freedom, many argue that the principles of justice should be met in the division of labor and availability of opportunities within the family and not only in public life. Of course this will require an end to the domestic violence, marital rape, patriarchal dominance, and female disadvantage in opportunities for health, education, and occupational development that still afflict many millions of women around the world, as it will require that the burdens of child care and housework not fall disproportionately on women. Achieving such aims as these would produce very radical change at the global level. The most influential nonfeminist advocates of dominant moral theories have paid almost no attention to feminist critiques (see Okin, 1989), but when these theories are extended in the ways feminists suggest, they can be significantly improved as theories.
Other feminist theorists, at the same time, have gone much further in a distinctive direction. Rather than limiting themselves to extending traditional theories in nontraditional ways, they have developed a more distinctively different ethics: the ethics of care. Although most working within this approach share the goals of justice and equality for women that can be dealt with using traditional theories, they see the potential of a quite different set of values for a more adequate treatment of moral problems, not only within the family but in the wider society as well. The ethics of care is a deep challenge to other moral theories. It takes the experience of women in caring activities such as mothering as central, interprets and emphasizes the values inherent in caring practices, shows the inadequacies of other theories for dealing with the moral aspects of caring activity, and then considers generalizing the insights of caring to other questions of morality.
I will locate the beginnings of the ethics of care with a pioneering essay called "Maternal Thinking," by the philosopher Sara Ruddick, published in 1980. In it, Ruddick attended to the caring practice of mothering, the characteristic and distinctive thinking to which it gives rise, and the standards and values that can be discerned in this practice. Mothering aims to preserve the life and foster the growth of particular children and to have these children develop into acceptable persons. The actual feelings of mothers are highly ambivalent and often hostile toward the children for whom they care, but a commitment to the practice and goals of mothering provides standards to be heeded. Virtues such as humility and resilient good humor emerge as values in the practice of mothering; selfeffacement and destructive self-denial can be seen as the "degenerative forms" of these virtues and should be avoided. Her essay showed how women’s experience in an activity such as mothering could yield a distinctive moral outlook, and how the values that emerged from within it could be relevant beyond the practice itself, for instance, in promoting peace.
Ludicrous as it now seems in the twenty-first century, at the time this essay appeared, the practice of mothering had been virtually absent from all nonfeminist moral theorizing; there was no philosophical acknowledgment that mothers think or reason or encounter moral problems, or that one can find moral values in this practice. (For some early feminist theorizing about mothering, see Trebilcot, 1983.)
Women were imagined to think or to face moral problems only when they ventured beyond the household into the world of men. The characteristic image was one of human mothers raising their young much as animal mothers raise theirs.
Philosophical thinking about women or mothers had incorporated them into anatural biological or evolutionary framework. Or, if women were portrayed in a psychological or psychoanalytic framework, they might be seen as reacting emotionally, but again, they were not associated with reasoning and thinking, and certainly not with the possibility that there might be distinctive and valid forms of moral thought to which they have privileged access through their extensive experience with caring.
Other caring activities such as caring for the sick or elderly were similarly dismissed as irrelevant for the construction of moral theory, though existing theory, for instance a Kantian respect for persons, might be applied to a problem in medical ethics such as whether a doctor should tell his patient that she is dying, or a Rawlsian view of justice might be used to evaluate how health care should be distributed.
Ruddick’s essay showed that attending to the experience of women in a caring practice could change how we think about morality, and could change our view of the values appropriate for given activities. Though men can also engage in caring practices, if they do not, they may fail to understand the morality embedded in these practices.
In 1982, Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice provided impetus for the development of the ethics of care. Gilligan, a developmental psychologist, aimed for findings that would be empirical and descriptive of the psychological outlooks of girls as they become more mature in their thinking about morality. Gilligan was suspicious of the test results obtained by Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist with whom she worked, which seemed to show that girls progress more slowly than boys in acquiring moral maturity. She noted that all the children studied in the construction of the "stages" that were taken to indicate advancement in moral reasoning were boys; she decided to study how girls and women approach moral problems. To moral philosophers it was striking that the "highest stage" of Kohlberg’s account of moral maturity closely resembled Kantian moral reasoning, presupposing such difficult questions as whether maturity in ethics really is primarily a matter of reasoning, and whether a Kantian morality really is superior to all others.
Gilligan thought from her inquiries that it is possible to discern a "different voice" in the way many girls and women interpret, reflect on, and speak about moral problems: They are more concerned with context and actual relationships between persons, and less inclined to rely on abstract rules and individual conscience.
Gilligan asserted that although only some of the women studied adopted this different voice, almost no men did. As she put it in a later essay, this meant that "if women were eliminated from the research sample, care focus in moral reasoning would virtually disappear" (1987, p. 25).
Gilligan’s findings, to the extent that they were claims about men and womenas such, have been questioned on empirical grounds, since African men showed some of the same tendencies in interpreting moral problems as the women she studied, and when education and occupation were comparable, the differences between women and men were to some researchers unclear (see, e.g., Harding, 1987; J. Walker, 1984). But the importance of Gilligan’s work for moral theory has not been what it showed about how men and women brought up under patriarchy in fact think about morality, whether social position is as or more important than gender in influencing such thinking, or whether women who advance occupationally learn to think like men. It has been its suggestion of alternative perspectives through which moral problems can be interpreted: a "justice perspective," which emphasizes universal moral principles and how they can be applied to particular cases and values rational argument about these; and a "care perspective," which pays more attention to people’s needs, to how actual relations between people can be maintained or repaired, and values narrative and sensitivity to context in arriving at moral judgments. Gilligan herself thought that for a person to have an adequate morality, both perspectives are needed, as men overcome their difficulties with attachment and become more caring, and as women overcome their reluctance to be independent and become more concerned with justice. But she did not indicate how, within moral theory, care and justice are to be integrated.
Feminist philosophers reading Gilligan’s work found that it resonated withmany of their own dissatisfactions with dominant moral theories (see, e.g., Kittay and Meyers, 1987; Morgan, 1987). Whether or not women were in fact more likely to adopt the "care perspective," the history of philosophy had virtually excluded women’s experiences. An "ethic of care" that could be contrasted with an "ethic of justice" might, many thought, better address their concerns as they understood how the contexts of mothering, of family responsibilities, of friendship, of caring in society, were in need of moral evaluation and guidance by moral theories more appropriate to them than the dominant theories seemed capable of being. Theories developed for the polis and the marketplace were ill suited, these feminists thought, for application to the contexts of experience they were no longer willing to disregard as morally insignificant.
Soon after, Nel Noddings’s book Caring (1984) provided a more phenomenological account of what is involved in activities of care. It examined the virtues of close attention to the feelings and needs of others, and the identification with another’s reality that is central to care. The collections Women and Moral Theory (1987), edited by Eva Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, and Science, Morality and Feminist Theory (1987), edited by Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen, contributed significantly to the further development of the ethics of care. Annette Baier’s important work on trust, and her appreciation of Hume’s ethics as a precursor of feminist ethics, added further strength to the new outlook on care.7 Many other articles and books contributed to this discourse, some criticizing the ethics of care and some defending and elaborating it. During and after the 1990s, the numbers expanded rapidly.8 The ethics of care now has a central, though not exclusive, place in feminist moral theorizing, and it has drawn increasing interest from moral philosophers of all kinds.
The ethics of care builds concern and mutual responsiveness to need on both the personal and wider social level. Within social relations in which we care enough about each other to form a social entity, we may agree for limited purposes to imagine each other as liberal individuals, and to adopt liberal policies to maximize individual benefits. But we should not lose sight of the restricted and artificial aspects of such conceptions. The ethics of care offers a view of both the more immediate and the more distant human relations on which satisfactory societies can be built. It provides new theory with which to develop new practices, and can perhaps offer greater potential for moral progress than is contained in the views of traditional moral theory.
7. Annette Baier’s influential essay "Trust and Anti-Trust" appeared in 1986; it and other essays on trust and other matters are collected in Baier, 1994.
8. In addition to the titles mentioned in the text, others include: Addelson, 1991; Bell, 1993; Blustein, 1991; Card, 1991, 1999; Cole and McQuin, 1992; Hanigsberg and Ruddick, 1999; Hekman, 1995; Koehn, 1998; Larrabee, 1993; Manning, 1992; Meyers, 2002; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Sherwin, 1992; Tong, 1993; M. Walker, 1999, 2003; White, 2000.
Oxford Handbook Ethical Theory: http://www.speedyshare.com/743468607.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/743468607.html)
Postbullshitisme ! :lol:
Inwards: pseudo_stoicism, pseudo_epicureanism & pseudo_scepticism!
Outwards: scientology_atheism (thx to H.P.Pas!)
[Oxford Handbook Ethical Theory
Fascinerende post.
Zelf kom ik binnenkort met een download van 'das Kapital' ; ben nog op zoek naar een grondig geannoteerde tweetalige versie.
:hihi: Of ie het ff kan samenvatten, alsmede de relevantie voor dit topic aangeven.
Fascinerende post.
Zelf kom ik binnenkort met een download van 'das Kapital' ; ben nog op zoek naar een grondig geannoteerde tweetalige versie.
Met de zorgvuldig geneste citaten van Charlus en de woest-dadaistische typografie van Sallah kan er dan collectief een aardig artistiek hoogstandje gefabriceerd worden,
Fascinerende post.
Zelf kom ik binnenkort met een download van 'das Kapital' ; ben nog op zoek naar een grondig geannoteerde tweetalige versie.
4 Natural Theology and Naturalist
Atheology: Plantinga’s Evolutionary
Argument Against Naturalism
ERNEST SOSA
Natural theology has always had to contend with the argument from evil. The evil around us seemingly supports a deductive argument for the conclusion that there is no God of the sort affirmed by theology. More recently, natural theology has faced new problems, or old problems with a new urgency. Darwin, for example, showed how evolutionary design rivals Divine design, endangering the important Argument from Design. Suppose certain phenomena admit two rival, independent explanations. Any such explanation no better than its rival is insufficiently supported thereby. Theology had proposed Divine design as an explanation of the order around us. Evolutionary theory offers now a rival explanation that purports to be at least as good while independent of Divine agency.
Both of these attacks are "direct." They both confront theology directly on its own ground, by countering its theses in one of two ways. One way is by direct refutation of a theological proposition: The evil we see leaves no rational room for an omnipotent, fully benevolent God. The other way attacks, rather, the cogency of theology’s rational support: by arguing, for example, that Divine agency is no longer needed to explain the order of things.
Although both of these attacks are direct, the first is more direct, since it clashes frontally with the theological proposition that there is a God. From the premise that there is evil, it concludes that there is no God. The second attack is not frontal. It targets not the truth of a theological thesis but the cogency of its supporting rationale.
Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx launch an even more indirect attack. They all pursue different versions of the same strategy. Their target is not so directly the truth of religious beliefs, nor even the quality of their supporting arguments. Their target is rather the sources of religious belief. Each deplores the factors, psychological or sociological, that originate or sustain such beliefs. For Nietzsche, religion is a way for the weak to gang up on the strong and keep them in line. For Freud, religion is wishful thinking that fills our need for a comforting view of our situation and its prospects. For Marx, religion is opium used to distract the masses and keep them in chains.
To agree that religion can be misused in these ways is to agree with the enemies of religion only in part, for they tend to go much further. In their view, the misuse of religion is not just possible but actual: It is said to be amain use of the Christian religion in Western civilization.
If we believe these enemies of religion, religious belief has deplorable intellectual quality. No matter how practically useful it may be, religious belief will have little by way of epistemic status. Even if by chance it happens to be true, it is hardly knowledge, or even well supported. From a purely epistemic point of view, it would seem little better than irrational superstition.
To avoid superstition, to attain better intellectual quality, a belief would need a more intimate connection with truth. Here we can ignore a belief’s practical justification, its ability to fulfill human needs and desires.
We focus rather on its epistemic justification, on its aiming at the truth in anintellectually acceptable way. What makes a way of forming beliefs intellectually acceptable? What makes a source epistemically worthy? One minimal requirement has to be this: that it deliver truth rather than untruth reliably enough. Its deliverances must be sufficiently probable, given their origin in that source.
Even the Internalist-in-Chief of the tradition agrees on this much. Recall Descartes’s reasoning: Once having hit on the thought that he thinks and therefore exists, and on the thought that he is a thinking being, as his prime examples of certain knowledge, he ponders: "What could be the source of this high epistemic status, of this certainty?" Seeing no other source than its clarity and distinctness, he observes: "But clarity and distinctness could hardly be thus a source of certainty unless it were a reliable source, indeed an infallibly reliable source."
If they lack intellectually reliable sources, our beliefs might be practically effective and justified, but they can hardly be epistemically justified, much less can they be knowledge, even if by luck they turn out to be true. If the enemies of religion are right about the sources of religious belief, then such belief may be comforting, or socially beneficial, but could hardly amount to knowledge.
How can the friends of religion defend against this attack? One way would be to deny what religion’s enemies say about the sources of religious belief. But here the defense of religion would need empirical backing.
Knowing about the actual sources of religious beliefs requires empirical inquiry. A full and credible account would need to draw on the psychology,story, and sociology of religion. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx manage only some initial exploration of broad fields still under patient, disciplined cultivation.However that may turn out, here I would like to consider a very different defense of natural theology, an imaginative and original turning of the tables on the enemies of religion by a contemporary philosopher/theologian. I mean the way in which Alvin Plantinga has in recent writings turned the momentum of religion’s enemies against them, using their own strategy in an attempt to upend them, and indeed make them fall on their own sword.
How is all this supposed to come about?
PLANTINGA’S ARGUMENT, BRUTE FORCES, AND DOUBT
Naturalism eschews or rejects appeal to the supernatural, and traces our origins back to blind and uncaring forces. Relative to forces in that sense brute, however, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable must be either quite low or at best inscrutable. This defeats any belief we may have in the reliability of our faculties. Absent such belief, finally, we are deprived also of epistemic warrant (authority, justification) for all beliefs deriving from such faculties. But among these beliefs is the very belief in naturalism, which therefore defeats itself.
Reply: "Surely we naturalists know more about our origins than that! We know we derive from evolutionary processes that ensure our fitness to do well in our environmental niche." Unfortunately, this ensures at most that we excel in certain respects that help enhance the fitness and survival of our species, and it is unclear just how the correctness of our beliefs can bear on such success. Even given such evolutionary considerations, accordingly, the likelihood that our faculties are cognitively reliable is only low or inscrutable. Naturalism thus remains defeated and cannot be saved by evolution.
So argues antinaturalist Plantinga, who has later defended his argument against a broad and varied set of objections gathered around it in the years since it was first sketched in his Warrant and Proper Function.1
For a defense beyond that initial sketch, Plantinga now explores in some depth the epistemology of defeat. Candidates for defeat are beliefs, and candidates for defeaters are, in the main, other beliefs and experiences. Any belief B that is part of one’s noetic structure N is defeated by a newly acquired belief D if, and only if, one can preserve one’s rationality while retaining belief D only by giving up belief B. It would not be fully rational to retain the noetic structure that includes both B and D. Consider, for example, this proposition:
R that one’s faculties are reliable.
If one somehow believes that one is at the epistemic mercy of a demon bent on mischief, this belief is a defeater for one’s trust that R is true, and is also thereby a defeater in turn for the ostensible deliverances of these faculties. Similarly, argues the antinaturalist, if one comes to believe that one is a product of brute forces, this belief also defeats one’s trust in one’s faculties, and in turn defeats their ostensible deliverances. (Here I have simplified Plantinga’s actual argument by dispensing with the trappings of evolutionary theory and going directly to the belief that brute forces account for our existence and epistemic constitution or character.) How plausible is this?Relative to their having derived from brute forces by evolutionary processes, it is at best inscrutable how reliable one’s faculties are likely to be.
Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that our belief in the reliability of our faculties is indeed defeated by that fact about their derivation, that accepting this fact would preclude our rationally believing our faculties to be reliable. Even so, why should that also defeat our many ordinary beliefs derived from those faculties? Take a child at a prereflective stage wherein one takes no notice of one’s faculties. Is that child irrational in forming beliefs about food, shelter, and other basic matters of its simple life? If not, why then should it be irrational to harbor such simple beliefs conjointly with a belief that we derive from brute forces relative to which the probability of our being reliable is low or inscrutable? Even if we harbor that belief about our brute derivation, and even if this requires that we not believe R, why should this lack of belief about one’s faculties make it irrational to uphold our simple beliefs about food and shelter, if a similar lack does not make such beliefs irrational in a child?
It is here that Plantinga’s antinaturalist argument may connect with the reflective knowledge tied to our Principle of the Criterion. What is so unfortunate in the fate of a child lacking a relevant epistemic perspective on its cognitive doings and their reliability? Perhaps he or she is unfortunate not in being irrational but in being denied the reflective knowledge that requires some such perspective. Absent belief in the reliability of one’s own faculties, one is denied that higher order of knowledge. But is the naturalist necessarily denied the epistemic perspective needed for reflective knowledge? Has the supernaturalist an advantage in this respect?
Of course the belief that one’s faculties are quite unreliable would fit ill with accepting their ostensible deliverances. Here then is an implicit assumption perhaps used by Plantinga: that if our faculties derive from brute forces, then it is quite unlikely that they are reliable. Absent some way of defeating this consideration, therefore, we must hold our faculties unreliable, and this would make it irrational to accept their deliverances at face value. This does require the stronger claim that our faculties are unlikely to be reliable if derived from brute forces (through evolution), and not just the claim that the likelihood of their reliability is inscrutable. But let us proceed on the basis of this stronger claim nevertheless, for the sake of argument.2
Suppose a walk down by the riverside turns up a smooth, round stone, which one picks up and admires, and about which one notes that it would reliably roll down inclines. "That stone must have derived from brute forces," thinks one, however, as a good naturalist, "and relative to that fact there is only a low or inscrutable probability that it be either round or a reliable roller." Have we now in this consideration a defeater of the belief (call it S) that the stone is indeed both round and a reliable roller?
We can plainly see and feel the stone’s smooth roundness, and we know through much experience that such an object would roll reliably. The improbability of its having been rounded so smoothly, given its origin in brute forces, is then, surely, no bar to our still knowing it to be smoothly round, and even a reliable roller, nor does our justification for so believing seem defeated, even if we retain the belief that here the improbable has occurred.
If that is a plausible response in the case of the round stone, why are we deprived of it when it comes to our own nature as reliable perceivers endowed with eyes and ears, and so on, by means of which we have reliable access to the colors, shapes, and sounds around us? Start first with someone else, a friend whom we believe to be a reliable perceiver of the colors and shapes of things seen in good light, and so on. Can’t we forestall the alleged defeat by appeal to our perceptual and other means of knowing that our friend is as described?
Perhaps it’s when one turns to one’s own case that we run into real trouble? Not if the belief concerns only some introspectible feature of one’s present state of consciousness or some perceptible feature of one’s body. I can know that I now ache or that I have hands, no matter how improbable it may be that brute forces should produce someone aching or with hands, and despite my believing us to derive from such forces.
So it must be something concerning the specific belief about oneself involved in R that might make one’s belief in R susceptible to defeat in the ways noted by Plantinga. And what exactly could that be? What might be the basis for the conclusion or for the assumption that R specifically is thus susceptible? Here is a possibility.
One might suppose that a deliverance of a faculty when accepted is based on an implicit reliance on the reliability of the faculty, and that this reliance takes the form of an assumption that plays the role of an implicit premise in reasoning whose conclusion is the acceptance of the deliverance. Call this the implicit premise thesis. On ordinary assumptions, then, as soon as the implicit belief in the reliability of the faculty is put in question, one can hardly find support for that belief by appeal to the ostensible deliverances of that faculty. Such appeal would, after all, require a prior trust in the reliability of the faculty, and we would be in a vicious circle.
Is it perhaps on the basis of such reasoning that belief in one’s own cognitive reliability is held importantly distinct from belief in the reliability as a roller of a smooth stone, and even from belief in the cognitive reliability of someone else? In these other cases, one can rationally base one’s belief on one’s perceptions, memories, and reasonings, overcoming thus any doubts based on the fact that the entity derives from brute forces. In one’s own case, it would be viciously circular to argue in parallel fashion from the deliverances of one’s perception, memory, and reason to the reliability of these faculties seated in oneself.
How defensible is the implicit premise thesis? Compare the following three theses:
R That one’s faculties are reliable.
S That the stone by the riverside is smoothly rounded and would roll.
F That one’s friend is a reliable perceiver of colors and shapes.
If not on the basis of that thesis, how then might we support the required distinction between R, on the one hand, and the likes of S and F, on the other? How to support the claim that R is subject to defeat by brute origins, whereas S and F are exempt from such defeat? What accounts for this distinction if not the implicit premise thesis?
Something like the implicit premise thesis may be found in Thomas Reid, where it raises subtle and difficult issues. While unable to discuss these issues here, I elsewhere conclude that no vicious circularity need be involved.3 As a consequence, I can see no way to support the required distinction between R, on the one hand, and S and F, on the other. So I do not believe that the foregoing line of argument can be successful.
1. Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, New York and xford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
2. Note how well the stronger claim comports with acceptance of the Argument from Design. But here we shall focus on reflective knowledge specifically. It is then plausible to require belief in the reliability of one’s faculties as a condition for enjoying (reflective) knowledge through their ostensible deliverances. Of course, this distinguishes that higher sort of knowledge from the "animal" knowledge that requires no such reflection (like the cognitio that Descartes allows to an atheist mathematician).
3. I take up these issues in my discussion of Reid’s epistemology, "Reidian First Principles," which is my part of a contribution, jointly with JamesVan Cleve, on Reid, to The Modern Philosophers: From Descartes to Nietzsche, ed. Steven Emmanuel, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
REFLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE
That brings us to the more promising reasoning in terms of the requirements of perspectival or reflective knowledge, reasoning that we now explore briefly: Does it offer better support for the case against naturalism? Reflective knowledge requires an epistemic perspective underwriting the knower’s belief from his or her own epistemic perspective. It might perhaps be argued that the naturalist, unlike the theist, is denied such a perspective, and is hence at an epistemic disadvantage. This I have argued to be the leading idea of Descartes’s epistemological project. Descartes crafts for himself, and invites us to share, a theological perspective meant to underwrite his faculties and beliefs. If the faculties valued are those of a priori reflection, moreover, such as intuition and deduction, and if one wants to cast these in a good light, and if the best light is that attainable only by use of these very faculties – if these are "the most sure routes to knowledge, such that the mind should admit no others" – what might one invoke other than rational theology? In fact, it is easy to see why Descartes, with his background and in his milieu, would feel strongly drawn to that recourse.
Is the naturalist at an epistemic disadvantage? Is the naturalist indeed in a position that is rationally self-defeating? This seems implausible in light of the following. As a supernaturalist, one might use certain faculties (as does Descartes his faculties of a priori reflection) in devising an epistemically comforting view of one’s universe, according to which one is so constituted, and so related to one’s environment, that one’s faculties would be truthconducive, not misleading. I take that to be Descartes’s strategy.
What denies such a strategy to the naturalist? Why can’t you as a naturalist develop a view of yourself and your surroundings that shows your situation to be epistemically propitious? You would need to be able to selfattribute ways of acquiring and retaining beliefs that put you so in touch with your surroundings, relative to the fields of interest relevant to you, that you would tend to believe correctly in virtue of using those ways.
What precludes your doing so, by means of science, as a naturalist, if the supernaturalist can do so by means of theology? And now comes a key question in assessing Plantinga’s strategy: Is there any propositionO in a relevant sense just about our origins, whose inclusion in a view V would preclude V’s enrichment by an epistemic perspective of the sort required for reflective knowledge? In other words, would any O-containing view V repel any possibility of being enriched coherently (while still including O) in a way enabling the holders of the enriched V to become thereby reflective knowers?
I myself can see no bright prospect for showing that the following would be such a proposition O: that we humans derive from brute forces. That proposition seems to me tenable compatibly with the view that, in fact, we are quite good cognizers of our surroundings through our use of vision, hearing, and so on; that these faculties put us reliably enough in touch with the truth about empirical and contingent goings-on around us, and that we are thereby enabled to know about these goings-on. Issues of circularity do arise as to how we can rationally and knowledgeably adopt such a view about our own epistemic prowess. But these problems of circularity are not exclusive to naturalism, as Descartes was soon to find out from his critics.4
4. I myself think that Descartes was actually right on the issue of circularity, and the critics wrong. My forthcoming Virtuous Circles contains a fuller defense.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Perhaps Plantinga’s argument is unfairly gutted of crucial content if we omit the part of his reasoning that draws on naturalist evolutionary theory and cognitive science. Naturalism, we are told, leads to acceptance of evolutionary theory. Given evolutionary theory, however, it is at best inscrutable how reliably truth-conducive our cognitive mechanisms may be. Thus, we have little reason to suppose that the beliefs delivered by our mechanisms will be reliably enough true. So, once again, we are led to the conclusion that our beliefs have little by way of epistemic justification, and this includes the belief in naturalism itself.
After all, evolution cares fundamentally about adaptation and fitness. If it cares at all about the truth of our beliefs, this will have to be because of how our true beliefs contribute to our adaptation and fitness. But the probability that our true beliefs make any such contribution is low or at best inscrutable. According to naturalist cognitive science, beliefs are brain states with cognitive content. Their place in the causal order is thus at the juncture between afferent and efferent nerves. But how then can the content or truth of a belief gain any purchase in the causal order? It is presumably the physical, electrochemical properties of the brain and nervous system that link up with our sensory receptors on one side and with our muscles on the other, serving thus as causal intermediaries between perceptual stimulus and behavioral response. It is those electrochemical properties that matter causally. The propositional content of a belief thus seems epiphenomenal, its causal efficacy preempted by the physical properties of the constitutive brain state.
The advocate of naturalism now appears more vulnerable than the friend of religion. For it is naturalism itself that yields the bad result about our belief formation, that its reliability is low or inscrutable. No such result about religious sources is supposed to follow from religious beliefs themselves; not even religion’s enemies suppose otherwise. Accordingly, the enemies of religion are not able to convict religious belief of any sort of self-defeat. Their attack on religion is based on claims about the sources of religious beliefs, but they are not able to draw these claims from religion itself.
Plantinga, by contrast, does take his reasoning to convict naturalism of self-defeat, since he does draw his premises from naturalism itself. The naturalist contends that we, and our faculties, derive from brute forces, from forces that are blind and uncaring about human welfare, including our cognitive welfare. Plantinga responds that once we accept such a brutish etiology for our faculties, we cannot rationally hold on to our implicit trust in their reliability as sources of truth. But if we cannot trust our faculties, then we cannot rationally accept anything we regard as a deliverance of those faculties. If you are a naturalist, however, then your naturalism is itself something you regard as a deliverance of your faculties, in which case you cannot rationally hold on to that belief. This is how, according to Plantinga, naturalism defeats itself.
Consider now any subjects who face the question whether their faculties are reliable, and realize that if they do have reliable faculties, this is a contingent matter, and that they cannot just assume so and let it go at that. Given the contingency of the reliability of their faculties, what assurance is there that though they might be unreliable, in fact they are reliable? Wouldn’t the inability to give a rational, nonarbitrary answer to this question itself constitute a problem?
Compare your situation as a naturalist facing the fact that your faculties derive from brute forces. If you agree that your faculties are brutely derived, does this not defeat your belief in their reliability? Suppose you try through your faculties to attain a picture of yourself and the world around you offering assurance that your faculties are reliable despite their brute derivation. Is this to proceed circularly? Well, it is to proceed in a kind of circle.Will it be said that the circle is vicious? Yes, but such a circle cannot possibly be avoided once we face so fundamental a question.
What, in sum, should we say to Plantinga’s antinaturalist argument? If our faculties are brutely derived, their reliability is then perhaps low or inscrutable, relative to that fact. This can be debated, but let us grant it for the sake of argument. Even granting this, it will defeat our belief in the reliability of our faculties only if we have no other basis for believing them reliable. We do have another basis, however, beyond anything we may believe about the etiology of our faculties. For the deliverances of these faculties themselves give us an additional basis. And what, more specifically, is this basis? Is it the mere fact that our faculties are self-supportive and yield belief in their own reliability? No, that cannot suffice on its own; for superstitious "faculties" might easily have that property with little epistemic effect. At a minimum, our faculties must satisfy two conditions: first, that they be thus self-supportive, that is, productive of a picture of the believer and his or her world according to which those very faculties are reliable; second, that they be in fact reliable.
Can that be a sufficient response? Can the naturalist rest with a naturalist picture according to which we are animals with sensory receptors that enable causal commerce with our surrounding world to the effect of perceptual and eventually other knowledge of that world? How well can this stand up once we reflect that, given the brutish etiology of our faculties, it would be a near-miracle for us to be reliably attuned through our sensory receptors?
Suppose I think that, much more easily than not, my brain could have been placed in a vat, rather than being left to develop in its cranial housing. May I hold that view while still assuming that my brain is cranially housed and receives input through the connected sensory receptors? Suppose it is incoherent to combine these beliefs. Suppose instead that believing I could so easily have been envatted would require me to suspend judgment on what has actually happened to my brain. I could then hardly continue to accept the deliverances of my faculties, of the very faculties whose epistemic standing is now in doubt.
What seems bad for the naturalist is not just that, given our brutish etiology, it is monumental luck that we exist at all. That would seem acceptable and not to preclude that, given our existence, however lucky, our faculties are indeed reliable, and not just accidentally so. What seems bad for the naturalist is that however accidental our existence, it is a further accident that our faculties are reliable, if indeed they are. Suppose we have no basis for supposing that things have turned out well enough for our faculties, despite how little reason we have to suppose they would turn out that way, given their evolutionary origins. This would be bad. It would put us in an epistemic situation about as bad as if we knew that we had taken a pill that nearly always disables one’s faculties terminally, except for those in some minuscule subset. If one believes that one did take such a pill, it seems incoherent to think that one is still cognitively reliable. This would require believing that one falls in the favored minuscule subset. But how could one rationally believe that one is so lucky, unless one had some special reason for so believing? And how could one gain such a reason, given how likely it is that one’s cognition is disabled?
STRATEGIES FOR NATURALISTS
Naturalists face Plantinga’s argument that the success of our cognitive faculties would indeed be a huge accident, if we go by evolution and by the naturalist conception of our minds as our contentful brains. As I suggested, the tables have been turned on the naturalist opposition, and a fully adequate response remains to be formulated. In conclusion, I would like to point in two directions where such a response might be found.
In the first place, perhaps we could not possibly have been in existence, all of us, deprived of our successful cognitive faculties. Perhaps the human species could not have come about while entirely deprived of such faculties. If so, it would not be just an accident that humans qua human come outfitted with reason, memory, and perception, and with the social framework that forms the basis for credible testimony. This might be a strategy for the naturalist to use, one inspired by recent externalist accounts of how our minds acquire conceptual and propositional contents. A line of reasoning championed most prominently by Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson opposes skepticism through a kind of transcendental argument, according to which we could not possibly have contentful beliefs without a substantial amount of built-in truth. The conditions required for our acquisition of empirical concepts, for example, will entail that our application of such concepts could not be too far off the mark. For it is only through adequate sensitivity to the presence or absence of perceptible properties that we acquire corresponding concepts of those properties.
Finally, I will sketch an alternative strategy that the naturalist might employ, one that goes beyond the externalism just indicated, though the two are complementary. Again, Plantinga’s critique requires naturalists to show how they can reasonably trust their cognitive faculties. For a start, while our evolutionary derivation may not entail our reliability, neither does it preclude our reliability; we may be reliable anyhow.We would of course need some basis for believing that we are, and this basis will unavoidably involve the circularity already noted, that of issuing from the very faculties whose reliability is to be affirmed. But no conceivable defense of our reliability could possibly avoid that sort of circularity, and so this cannot be a disabling objection in the end.
This line of defense appears to crash, however, on the example of a cognitively disabling pill – call it DISABLEX. This is a pill that terminally disables one’s cognitive faculties, so that none is any longer reliable. How can you right now be sure that you have never taken any such pill? Appealing to the present deliverances of your faculties would seem vicious, since these are of course deliverances that would be made misleading by your having taken the pill.
Does DISABLEX pose a problem for us?Well, consider right now the possibility that we did once take such a pill. How do we properly get to assume that we did not? How so, if not just by relying on our faculties in the sort of default way in which we normally do? But by so relying, we manifest our commitment to the claim that our faculties are indeed reliable, our commitment to this shown at least in our intellectual practice. If we are justified in that commitment, moreover, what could then prohibit our reflectively making our practice explicit? Certainly we would be within our rights in giving voice to what we were already rightfully committed to in practice. And once we do give voice to this, what prevents our deducing further that we must not have taken any such pill? Surely we would then be entitled to deduce that we cannot have done so. For if we had done so, then we could not have what we are committed to believing we do have, namely, the reliability of our faculties.
We are supposing ourselves entitled to rely on our commitment in intellectual practice to the reliability of our faculties, and to be within our intellectual rights in making that commitment explicit upon reflection. But on a closer look that might seem viciously circular: The step here appears rather too close for comfort. Even so, the step to our having taken no DISABLEX would not be quite so close; it would require some further information and argument.We would need the information that such pills terminally disable you. Only by adducing such further information, and reasoning from it, do we reach the conclusion that this is a pill we cannot have taken. And indeed, how else can you attain justification for your explicit denial right now that you have never taken any such pill?
Of course, there are conceivable scenarios where you acquire considerable evidence that you have taken a disabling pill. But these scenarios cannot render you justified in believing what they initially suggest, that you have in fact taken such a pill. Nor can they even justify you in suspending judgment on the question. For the claim that you have taken any such pill is a self-defeating claim. Both believing that you have taken the pill and even suspending judgment on that question are epistemically self-defeating. The contrary claim, that you have taken no such pill, follows logically from what is epistemically obligatory and self-sustaining, namely, the commitment to the reliability of your faculties. Therefore, it is hard to see how you could possibly go wrong epistemically not only in affirming the reliability of your faculties but also in affirming anything you can see to follow logically from that, including the consequence that you have never taken any such pill.
And the same goes for Plantinga’s evolutionary argument. Again, believing that our faculties are unreliable is self-defeating, as is even suspending judgment on that question. On the question whether your faculties are reliable, you have no rational choice but to assent, therefore, and so you would be within your rights to draw the further conclusion that if your origins are evolutionary, then such origins cannot make your faculties unreliable. Would that necessarily preclude a naturalist from believing in evolution? Only if evolutionary origins entailed the unreliability of our faculties. But nothing like this is shown by any of the considerations adduced in Plantinga’s evolutionary argument. At most, what those considerations show is that the probability that our faculties are reliable is low or inscrutable. And this is compatible with our faculties being reliable. Indeed, from those considerations it cannot even be inferred that it is unlikely that our origins are evolutionary, for inscrutability would permit no such inference.
What exactly is the question that we have no rational choice but to answer in the affirmative? What is the question to which we can respond neither with a no nor even with a suspending maybe? It is the question whether one’s faculties are cognitively reliable. By this I mean whether they are faculties that reliably guide us to the cognitively proper doxastic stances.
Sometimes the proper stance is to believe, sometimes it is to disbelieve, and sometimes it is to suspend judgment. According to externalists, the propriety of these stances will be determined by what would properly enable us to attain truth and avoid error in the circumstances. Why might it be thought that we have no rational choice but to answer in the affirmative the question as to our reliability? Well, consider the alternatives. Suppose we say no. How then can we still coherently trust our faculties in sustaining that negative answer? Indeed, suppose that we so much as suspend judgment on the question, saying "maybe so, maybe not." Even here, how can we coherently commit to this attitude while saying that we have no idea whether, in so proceeding, we are proceeding cognitively aright? This still seems less than fully coherent. Again, on that question the only coherent stance would seem to be the confident affirmative. Once we see this stance to be rationally required, that surely entitles us to draw its deductive consequences, including a) that we have never taken any disabling pill, and b) that our faculties do not have disabling evolutionary origins. Moreover, we have not been shown that evolutionary origins would necessarily be disabling.
Compatibly with one’s inevitable rational trust in the reliability of our faculties, therefore, one is free also to retain belief in a naturalistic, evolutionary account of our origins. And this for the naturalist would seem properly to counter the allegedly defeating belief that our evolutionary origins render our faculties unreliable.
Contemporary Philosophy in Focus, Alvin Plantinga: http://www.speedyshare.com/984814531.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/984814531.html)
:hihi: Of ie het ff kan samenvatten, alsmede de relevantie voor dit topic aangeven.
Ayn Rand, Anthem: http://www.speedyshare.com/425762373.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/425762373.html)
Ayn Rand, Capitalism: http://www.speedyshare.com/221128374.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/221128374.html) (.txt bestand)
Ayn Rand, Anthem: http://www.speedyshare.com/425762373.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/425762373.html)
Ayn Rand, Capitalism: http://www.speedyshare.com/221128374.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/221128374.html) (.txt bestand)
Je begrijpt nu ook al geen Nederlands meer.
Ayn Rand is geschift en ik begrijp niet hoe een fatsoenlijk moslim zich met dat geneuzel kan inlaten.
4 Natural Theology and Naturalist
Atheology: Plantinga’s Evolutionary
Argument Against Naturalism
ERNEST SOSA
Wat een oh. Wil ie hierheen?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_epistemology
2 How naturalism implies skepticism
Alvin Plantinga
My topic is naturalism, skepticism, and the connection there between. I propose to argue that there is a connection between the two, and that indeed the former commits one to the latter. But first a word about each.
Varieties of skepticism
The term ‘naturalism’, of course, is used in a wide variety of senses. For example, there is the naturalism in ethics with which G.E. Moore did battle; there is naturalism in art and literature; there is naturalism as the pursuit of one who studies nature. I use the term as follows: a naturalist is someone who thinks there is no such person as God or anything much like God. Naturalism thus entails atheism. The converse, however, doesn’t hold; it is possible to be an atheist but not rise to the heights (or perhaps sink to the depths) of naturalism. Thus a Hegelian might well be an atheist; she will not be a naturalist, however, because Hegel’s absolute is too much like God. The same goes for a serious follower of Plato, with his Idea of the Good, and similarly for Aristotle with his First Mover who thinks just about himself. Naturalism, as I’m thinking of it, includes the views of people like John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and the like. We might call it ‘Atheism Plus’ or perhaps ‘High Octane Atheism’. According to Oxford philosopher John Lucas, naturalism is the orthodoxy of the western academy. That may be a bit strong; there are also those myriads of postmodern anti-realists with respect to truth. But naturalism is at the least very popular these days. And I propose, as I say, to argue that naturalism commits one to skepticism.
Second, skepticism. Unlike ‘naturalism’, ‘skepticism’ doesn’t have a host of different senses. Still, there are several brands of skepticism. Consider, for example, contextualism in epistemology, and in particular the contextualist response to skepticism. According to Keith DeRose, an eminent authority on contextualism, ‘contextualist theories of knowledge attributions have almost invariably been developed with an eye toward providing some kind of answer to philosophical skepticism’ (DeRose 1999: 185). The basic idea of the contextualist response to the skeptic is as follows. The terms ‘know’, ‘knowledge’ and their like are in fact multiply ambiguous, in that in different contexts, different standards apply for their correct application. We are in an epistemology seminar; the topic is Descartes’s evil genius who creates us only to deceive us. In this context, the standard for the application of the term ‘know’ is very high; one, or one’s belief, must be in an exceptionally good epistemic position to warrant application of the term ‘know’. It may well turn out, therefore, that in that high-standard sense of the term, I don’t know that I’m not being deceived by such a Cartesian demon. In that same sense I don’t know that I’m not a brain in a vat, holding mainly false beliefs; and if I don’t know that, then presumably I don’t know any proposition that entails that I am not thus envatted. In other more ordinary and everyday contexts, however, the standards for the correct application of the term aren’t nearly as stringent. If you ask me whether I know my mother’s phone number, I will reply, quite correctly, that I do. Also I know my name and where I live. In those contexts, the term ‘knowledge’ may properly apply to a given belief, even if it is not in an epistemic position good enough to warrant the term in its high-standard seminar sense.
‘According to contextualists’, says DeRose, ‘the skeptic, in presenting her argument, manipulates the semantic standards of knowledge, thereby creating a context in which she can truthfully say that we know nothing or very little’ (1999: 185). The skeptic, by raising her skeptical doubts, creates a context in which the standards for the proper use of the term ‘know’ go way up; hence she can correctly say that no one has knowledge. More exactly, her use of the sentence ‘No one has knowledge’ expresses a truth in that context. But of course this is compatible with its being the case that when, in an ordinary context, I say, ‘I know that Tom was at the party; I saw him there’ that sentence also expresses a truth.
Well, suppose the skeptic succeeds in confusing me; I apply the wrong standards in an everyday context, and form the belief that no one knows much of anything. What I am then committed to is the thought that our beliefs don’t meet the high standards (for justification, warrant, rationality, whatever) required for the proper application of the term ‘knowledge’ in the seminar context. That is, there are some high standards of epistemic justification or warrant — those required by the application of the term ‘knowledge’ in the seminar context — that hardly anyone’s beliefs ever meet, Of course that is entirely compatible with thinking I’ve got very good reason for many of my beliefs.
Now this is not the kind of skepticism that has traditionally been urged, or lamented, by the Humes and Sextus Empiricists of our tradition. It is also not the sort of skepticism to which I claim the naturalist is committed. We can see why by considering the Hume of the conclusion of Book I of the Treatise (Hume 1951: 263ff.). Here he isn’t coolly announcing, as an interesting fact about us, that few if any of our beliefs meet those very high standards of justification or warrant to which the contextualist refers.
Instead, he finds himself in a crisis which is both epistemic and existential; he simply doesn’t know what to believe. When he follows out what seem to be the promptings and leading of reason, he winds up time after time in a black coal pit, not knowing which way to turn:
Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. (Hume 1951: 269)
Of course, this is Hume in his study, some time before he emerges for that famous game of backgammon. Nature herself, fortunately, dispels these clouds of despair: (she) cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. (ibid.)
Still, the enlightened person, Hume thinks, holds the consolations of nature at arm’s length. She knows she can’t help acquiescing in the common illusion, but she maintains her skepticism of ‘the general maxims of the world’ and adopts a certain ironic distance, a wary double-mindedness: ‘I may, nay, I must yield to the current of nature, in submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this blind submission I shew most perfectly my sceptical disposition and principles’ (ibid.: 269). This is the irony of the human condition: those who are enlightened can see that nature inevitably leads us to believe what is probably false, or arbitrary, or at best extremely dubious; they also see, however, that even the best of us simply don’t have it in them to successfully resist her blandishments. We can’t help believing those ‘general maxims’, or if we can, it is only for brief periods of time and in artificial situations. No one can think Humean thoughts about, say, induction, when under attack by a shark, or when clinging precariously to a rock face high above the valley floor. (You won’t find yourself saying, ‘Well, I do of course believe that if this handhold breaks out, I’ll hurtle down to the ground and get killed, but of course (fleeting sardonic, selfdeprecatory smile) I also know that this thought is just a deliverance of my nature and is therefore not really to be taken seriously’.) Still, in other circumstances one can take a sort of condescending and dismissive stance with respect to these promptings of nature; in reflective moments in my study, for example, I see through them. As a rational creature I can rise above them, recognizing that they have little or nothing to be said for them. Indeed, I see more: this skepticism is itself a reflexive skepticism; it arises even with respect to this very thought; this very doubt, this feeling of superiority, this seeing through what our natures impose on us, is itself a deliverance of my nature and is thus as suspect as any other. The true skeptic, says Hume, ‘will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction’ (ibid.: 273).1 The true sceptic, we might say, has a defeater for each of his beliefs, including those that lead to skepticism; and it is this kind of skepticism to which the naturalist is committed.
1 And this leads to the scandal of skepticism: if I argue to skepticism, then of course I rely upon the very cognitive faculties whose unreliability is the conclusion of my skeptical argument.
Reduction and supervenience
Most naturalists accept materialism with respect to human beings: the claim that human beings are material objects, and material objects with no immaterial parts — no immaterial soul, or mind, or self, for example. From this perspective it is not the case that a human person is an immaterial substance or thing that is connected with or joined to a material body; nor is it the case that a human being has an immaterial soul or mind. Instead, so the materialist thinks, a person just is her body, or perhaps some part of her body, or perhaps some other material object constituted by her body. I am my body (or perhaps my brain, or some part of it, or some other part of my body).
Now what sort of thing will a belief be, from this materialist perspective? Suppose you are a materialist, and also think, as we ordinarily do, that there are such things as beliefs. For example, you believe that Proust is more subtle than Louis L’Amour. What kind of a thing is this belief? Well, from a materialist perspective, it looks as if it would have to be something like a long-standing event or structure in your brain or nervous system. Presumably this event will involve many neurons connected to each other in various ways. There are plenty of neurons to go around: a normal human brain contains some 100 billion neurons. These neurons, furthermore, are connected with other neurons at synapses; a single neuron can be involved in many synapses. The total number of possible brain states, then, is absolutely enormous, much greater than the number of electrons in the universe. Under certain conditions, a neuron fires, i.e., produces an electrical impulse; by virtue of its connection with other neurons, this impulse can be transmitted (with appropriate modification) down the cables of neurons that constitute effector nerves to muscles or glands, causing, e.g., muscular contraction and thus behavior.
So (from the materialist’s point of view) a belief will be a neuronal event or structure of this sort, with input from other parts of the nervous system and output to still other parts. But if this is the sort of thing beliefs are, they will have two quite different sorts of properties. On the one hand there will be electro-chemical or neurophysiological properties (NP properties, for short). Among these would be such properties as that of involving n neurons and n* connections between neurons, properties that specify which neurons are connected with which others, what the rates of fire in the various parts of the event are, how these rates of fire change in response to changes in input, and so on. But if the event in question is really a belief, then, in addition to those NP properties, it will have another property as well: it will have to have a content.2 It will have to be the belief that p, for some proposition p. If it’s the belief that Proust is a more subtle writer than Louis L’Amour, then its content is the proposition Proust is more subtle than Louis L’Amour. If it is instead the belief that Cleveland is a beautiful city, then its content is the proposition Cleveland is a beautiful city. My belief that naturalism is all the rage these days has as content the proposition Naturalism is all the rage these days. (That same proposition is the content of the German speaker’s belief that naturalism is all the rage these days, even though he expresses this belief by uttering the German sentence ‘Der Naturalismus ist diese Tage ganz groß in Mode’; beliefs, unlike sentences, do not come in different languages.) It is in virtue of having a content, of course, that a belief is true or false: it is true if the proposition which is its content is true, and false otherwise. My belief that all men are mortal is true because the proposition which constitutes its content is true, but Hitler’s belief that the Third Reich would last a thousand years was false, because the proposition that constituted its content is (was) false.
Given materialism, therefore, beliefs would be long-standing neural events. As such, they would have content, but also neurophysiological properties (NP properties). Now how is it that we human beings have come to have beliefs, and how is it that those beliefs come to have the content they do in fact have? Naturalists (and of course others as well) ordinarily believe that human beings have come to be by way of evolution; they have evolved according to the mechanisms specified in contemporary evolutionary theory. (The prime candidates are natural selection operating on some source of genetic variability such as random genetic mutation.) We have something of an idea as to the history of those neurophysiological properties: structures with these properties have come to exist by small increments, each increment (ignoring spandrels and pliotropy) such that it has proved to be useful in the struggle for survival. But what about the content of belief? If a belief is a neuronal event, where does its content come from? How does it get to be associated in that way with a given proposition?
Materialists offer two main theories here. According to the first, content supervenes upon NP properties; according to the second content is reducible to NP properties.3 Suppose we think about the second theory first. Consider the property of having as content the proposition Naturalism is all the rage these days, and call this property ‘C’. On the present suggestion, C just is a certain combination of NP properties. It might be a disjunction of such properties: where P1 to Pn are NP properties, C, the property of having the content in question, might be something like (where ‘v’ represents ‘or’) P1vP3vP8v. . . Pn.
More likely, it would be something more complicated: perhaps a disjunction of conjunctions, something like (where ‘&‘ represents ‘and’) (P1&P7&P28. . .) v (P3&P28. . .) v (P3P34P17. . .) v (P8&P83&P107. . .) v.
We could put this by saying that any content property is a Boolean combination of NP properties, that is, a combination constructed from NP properties by disjunction, conjunction and negation. And to say that content properties are reducible to NP properties is just to say that every content property is some Boolean combination of NP properties. In fact, if we think that any Boolean combination of NP properties is itself an NP property, we could say that content properties just are NP properties — a special sort of NP property, to be sure, but still NP properties. So, on this theory, content properties — e.g., the property of having Naturalism is all the rage these days as content — are or are reducible to NP properties.
That’s one of the two materialistic proposals; the other is that a content property isn’t a NP property, or a Boolean combination of NP properties, but rather supervenes on NP properties. What does that mean; what is this ‘supervention’? The basic idea is that a set of properties S supervenes on a set of properties S just if any pair of objects which agree on the S* properties must also agree on the S properties. For example, beauty (of a picture, a face) supervenes on molecular constitution; any two pictures (or faces) with the same molecular constitution will be beautiful to the same degree. Content properties supervene on NP properties, then, if and only if any two objects or structures with the same NP properties must have the same content properties. You couldn’t have a pair of structures — neuronal events, say — that had the same NP properties but different contents.4 Content is afunction of NP properties.
We can put this officially as follows:
(S) Necessarily, any structures that have the same NP properties have the same content.
This is a weak form of supervenience; a stronger one could be put as:
(S+ ) For any possible worlds W and W* and any structures S and S*, if S has the same NP properties in W as S* has in W*, then S has the same content in W as S* has in W*.
Those who think that content properties supervene on NP properties for the most part think, I believe, that the former supervene on the latter in the stronger sense (S) (and hence also, of course, in the weaker sense (S)). For present purposes, however, it doesn’t matter which sense we employ. But what about that ‘necessarily’? Here this supervention suggestion divides into two branches. On the first branch, the necessity in question is broadly logical necessity. According to the other branch of the supervenience theory, the necessity in question isn’t broadly logical necessity, but something more obscure — something we could call ‘causal’ or ‘natural’ or ‘nomic’ necessity.
2 It is of course extremely difficult to see how a material structure or event could have content in the way a belief does.
3 Note that if content properties are reducible to NP properties in the sense of ‘reducible’ suggested below, then they also supervene upon them. Note also that for present purposes I ignore so-called ‘wide content’. If we were to take wide content into account, we’d say that content supervenes, not just on NP properties, but on NP properties together with certain properties of the environment. The same would go, mutatis mutandis, for the suggestion that content is reducible to or identical with NP properties. In the interest of simplicity, I ignore wide content; nothing in my argument below hinges on this omission.
4 So the second possibility is really a special case of the first: if content properties are reducible to NP properties, then clearly structures with the same NP properties will have the same content properties.
Naturalism and reliability
Return now to the question that led us into reduction and supervenience:
how does it happen that those neural structures, the ones that constitute belief, have content? Where does it come from and how do they get it? The basic idea is something like this. As we go up the evolutionary scale, we find neural structures with greater and greater complexity. Near one end of the scale, for example, we find C. elegans, a small but charismatic worm with a nervous system composed of only a few neurons. (The nervous system of C. elegans has been completely mapped.) We human beings are at the other end of the scale; our brains contain many billions of neurons connected in complex and multifarious ways. And now the idea is that as you rise in the evolutionary scale, as you progress through more and more complex neural structures, at a certain point content shows up. At a certain level of complexity, these neural structures start to display content. Perhaps this starts gradually and early on (possibly C. elegans displays just the merest glimmer of consciousness and the merest glimmer of content), or perhaps later and more abruptly; that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that at a certain level of complexity of neural structures, content appears. This is true whether content properties are reducible to NP properties or supervene on them.
So (given materialism), some neural structures at a certain level of complexity acquire content; they thus become beliefs. And the question I want to ask is this: what is the likelihood, given naturalism, that the content that thus arises is in fact true? In particular, what is the likelihood, given N, that the content associated with our neural structures is true? More generally, what is the likelihood, given naturalism, that our cognitive faculties are reliable, thereby producing mostly true beliefs?
We commonsensically assume that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable, at least over a large area of their functioning. I remember where I was last night and that my elder son’s name is not Archibald; I can see that the light is on in my study, that the flower garden is overgrown with weeds, and that my neighbor put on weight over the winter. I know a few truths of mathematics and logic, mostly pretty simple, no doubt, but still The natural thing to assume, and what we all do assume (at least before we are corrupted by philosophy (or neuroscience)) is that when our cognitive faculties aren’t subject to malfunction, then, for the most part and over a wide area of everyday life, the beliefs they produce in us are true. We assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. But what I want to argue is that the naturalist has a powerful reason against this initial presumption and should give it up.
By way of entering this argument, suppose we conduct a thought experiment. Consider a hypothetical species that is cognitively a lot like us:
members of this species hold beliefs, make inferences, change beliefs, and the like. And let us suppose naturalism holds for them; they exist in a world in which there is no such person as God or anything like God. Our question, then, is this: what is the probability that their cognitive faculties are reliable? Consider any particular belief on the part of one of these hypothetical creatures. That belief, of course, is a neural structure of a given sort, and one sufficiently complex to generate content. We may add, if we like, that this structure occurs or takes place in response to something in the environment; perhaps it is a certain pattern of firing of neurons in the optical portion of the brain, and perhaps this pattern arises in response to the appearance of a predator in the middle distance. And a certain proposition has somehow come to be associated with this structure, so that the structure acquires belief content and is a belief.
Now what is the probability (given naturalism) that this proposition is true? Well, what we know about the belief in question is that it is a neurological structure that has certain NP properties, properties, the possession of which is logically or causally sufficient for the possession of that particular content. We are assuming also that this structure arises in response to the presence of that predator, and we can also assume, if we like, that this structure is a reliable indicator of that kind of predator. This structure, we may suppose, arises when and only when there is a predator in the middle distance. But even so, of course, the content generated by this structure, on this occasion, need have nothing to do with that predator, or with anything else in the environment. Indication is one thing; belief content is something else altogether, and we know of no reason why the one should be related to the other. By way of something like a necessary accident, content simply arises upon the appearance of neural structures of sufficient complexity. But we can see no reason why that content need be related to what the structures indicate, if anything. The proposition constituting that content need not be so much as about that predator.
So what, then, is the likelihood that this proposition, this content, is true? Given this much, shouldn’t we suppose that the proposition in question is as likely to be false as true? Shouldn’t we suppose that the proposition in question has a probability of roughly one-half of being true? Shouldn’t we estimate its probability, on the condition in question, as in the neighborhood of 0.5? That would be the sensible course. Neither seems more probable than the other; hence we estimate the probability of its being true as 0.5.
But am I not relying upon the notorious Principle of Indifference? We are trying to estimate the probability that the content in question is true, given that it is generated by adaptive neural structures; I say that given this condition, for all we can see, it is as likely to be false as to be true; so we should judge that probability to be around 0.5; isn’t that to endorse some version of the Principle of Indifference? And hasn’t that principle been discredited?5 Not really. The Bertrand paradoxes show that certain incautious statements of PT come to grief — just as Goodman’s grue/bleen paradoxes show that incautious statements of a principle governing the projection of predicates or properties come to grief. But of course the fact is we project properties all the time, and do so perfectly sensibly. In the same way, I think, we often employ a principle of indifference in ordinary reasoning, and do so quite properly. ‘We also use it in science, for example, in statistical mechanics.6 Of course, problems arise where there are equally natural or plausible ways of selecting the relevant possibilities and where these different ways carry incompatible probability assignments with them.
But aren’t we forgetting something important? These hypothetical creatures have arisen, presumably, by way of evolution. They have come to be by way of something like natural selection working on some process of genetic variation — perhaps random genetic mutation. Presumably, then, it has proven adaptively useful for creatures of that sort to display that neural structure in the circumstances in which this creature finds itself. This structure’s arising in those circumstances has (or had) survival value; it contributes to the reproductive fitness of the creature in question, perhaps by helping cause the right sort of behavior (fleeing, or wary watchfulness, maybe). Whatever exactly the appropriate action is, the neuronal event in question is useful because it is a cause (part cause) of that behavior. And doesn’t that mean that it’s likely that the content associated with this structure is in fact a true proposition?
It is crucially important to see that the answer to this question is NO. This neuronal event or structure has NP properties such as sending electrical signals to other parts of the nervous system as well as to muscles and! or glands. By virtue of these NP properties, it causes adaptive behavior such as fleeing. This neuronal structure also displays NP properties that are sufficient, causally or logically, for the presence of content. As a result of having that neuronal event with that particular constellation of NP properties, the creature in which this event is to be found also believes a certain proposition. But what reason is there to think that proposition true? Granted, the structure in question helps cause adaptive behavior. But that doesn’t so much as slyly suggest that the content that gets associated with the structure — by way of a logical accident, so to say — is true. As far as its causing the right kind of behavior is concerned, it simply doesn’t matter whether the content, that associated proposition, is true or false. At this point, as far as the truth or falsehood of the content that arises, natural selection just has to take pot luck. (Not that it minds — it’s interested, so to speak, just in adaptive behavior, not in true belief.) Natural selection selects for structures that have adaptive NP properties; as it happens, these structures are of sufficient complexity ro generate content; but there isn’t even the faintest reason to think that content true. Given naturalism, it would be sheer coincidence, an enormous cosmic serendipity, if the content that is associated with adaptively useful neurophysiological properties should also turn out to be all or mostly true content. Naturalists who think content supervenes on neurophysiological properties (and that would be most naturalists) tend to assume automatically (at least when it comes to us human beings) that the content in question would be true; but why think that? This assumption is at best a piece of charming but ingenuous piety. Given naturalism, the belief in question is as likely to be false as to be true.
So, with respect to the relevant facts about the origin and provenance of this particular belief on the part of this hypothetical creature, the probability of its being true — i.e., the probability that the content of the neural structure in question should be a true proposition — would have to be estimated as about 0.5. The associated content in question could, of course, be true; but it could also, and with equal likelihood, be false. What, then, is the probability that the cognitive faculties of these creatures will be reliable? A reliable belief-producing faculty will produce a considerable preponderance of true belief over false belief. We ordinarily think our cognitive faculties are more reliable in some circumstances than in others; we are good at such things as remembering what we had for breakfast or perceiving whether there are any trees in the backyard; we are less good at determining (without artificial aids) whether a mountain goat we see at 500 yards has horns. We are also less reliable when working at the limits of our faculties, as in trying to determine what happened in the first 10-33 seconds after the Big Bang. (Given all the disagreements, perhaps we are also less reliable when it comes to philosophy.) But any reasonable degree of reliability, as we ordinarily think of it, requires producing a substantial preponderance of true beliefs. A thermometer that didn’t produce many more true than false readings (in normal circumstances and within the appropriate limits of error) would not be reliable.
And the same sort of thing goes for the reliability of cognitive faculties; they too are reliable, and reliable in a certain area, only if they produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false. Going back to those hypothetical creatures, what we’ve seen is that the probability, on the relevant condition, that any given belief of theirs should be true is in the neighborhood of 1/2. This means that the probability that their faculties produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability is very small indeed. If I have 1000 independent 7 beliefs, for example, the probability (under these conditions) that three-quarters or more of these beliefs are true (certainly a modest enough requirement for reliability) will be less than 10 -58. 8 And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only 100 beliefs, the probability that 3/4 of them are true, given that the probability of any one’s being true is 1/2, is very low, something like 0.000001. So the chances that this creature’s true beliefs substantially outnumber its false beliefs (even in a particular area) are small. The conclusion to be drawn is that it is very unlikely that the cognitive faculties of those creatures are reliable.
So far what we’ve seen is that, given naturalism and the supervenience of content upon neurophysiological properties, it is unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures are reliable; this is true even if we add that the content of their beliefs is generated by structures with NP properties that are fitness-enhancing, adaptively useful.
That’s how things stand if content suprvenes upon NP properties. But what about the other option, reductionism? What if content properties (for example, the property of having as content the proposition Naturalism is all the rage these days) just are NP properties, or complex clusters of NP properties? In this case we get the very same results. To see why, consider, again, a given belief on the part of a given member of that hypothetical group of creatures. That belief, of course, is a neuronal event, a congeries of neurons connected in complex ways and firing away in the fashion neurons are wont to do. This neuronal event displays a lot of NP properties. Again, we may suppose that it is adaptively useful for a creature of the kind in question to harbor neuronal structures of the sort in question in the circumstances in question. The event’s having the NP properties it does have is fitness- enhancing in that by virtue of having these properties, the organism is caused to perform adaptively useful action — fleeing, for example. But some subset of these NP properties together constitute its having a certain content, constitute its being associated, in that way, with some proposition. What is the probability that this content is true? What is the probability that the associated proposition is a true proposition? The answer is the same as in the case we’ve already considered. The content doesn’t have to be true, of course, for the neuronal structure to cause the appropriate kind of behavior. It just happens that this particular arrangement of adaptive NP properties also constitutes having this particular content. But again: it would be a piece of enormous serendipity if this content, this proposition, were true; it could just as well be false. So the probability that this content is true would have to be rated at about 1/2, just as in the case of supervenience. If this is true for each of the independent beliefs of the organism in question, the probability (on naturalism) that the cognitive faculties of these creatures are reliable would have to be rated as low. The conclusion to be drawn so far, then, is that given naturalism, it is unlikely that these creatures have reliable cognitive faculties.
Now the next step in the argument is to note that of course what goes for these hypothetical creatures also goes for us. Suppose naturalism (construed as including materialism) is in fact true with respect to us human beings:
there is no such person as God or anything like God. Then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is low, just as in the case of those hypothetical creatures. For us, too, the main possibilities would have to be supervenience (logical or causal) and reduction or identity. In our case, too, if we focus on any particular belief — say, the belief that naturalism is all the rage these days — on the part of a particular believer, we see that this belief (given materialism) will have to be a neuronal event of some kind. This event will be of sufficient complexity to generate content (by supervenience or reduction); somehow a proposition gets associated with it as its content. We may suppose, if we wish, that it is adaptively useful for creatures like us to harbor structures of that kind in the circumstances in which the believer finds herself. It would be the merest coincidence, however, if the content generated by the structure in question should be true content, if the proposition which is the content of the belief in question should turn out to be a true proposition. That means that the probability of this belief’s being true would have to be judged to be in the neighborhood of 1/2, not much more likely to be true than to be false. But then it will be exceedingly improbable that the whole set of this believer’s beliefs should display the preponderance of true belief over false required by the reliability of her cognitive faculties. So our case is like that of those hypothetical creatures; in our case too the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, ‘P(R/N)’, is low.
5 See, e.g., van Fraassen (1989: 293ff).
6 According to Weatherford: ‘an astonishing number of extremely complex problems in probability theory have been solved, and usefully so, by calculation based entirely on the assumption of equiprobable alternatives’ (1983: 35). See also Collins (1998).
7 ‘Independent’: itcould be that a pair of neural st
uctures with content were such that if either occurred, so would the other; then the beliefs in question would not be independent. Similarly when the content of one neural structure entails the content of another: there too the beliefs in question won't independent.
8 My thanks to Paul Zwier, who performed the calculation.
Naturalism and defeat
But now let’s take one more step: a person who accepts naturalism and recognizes that P(R/N) is low, thereby acquires a defeater for R. A defeater for a belief B I hold — at any rate this kind of defeater — is another belief B* I come to hold which is such that given that I hold B*, I can no longer rationally hold B.9 For example, I look into a field and see what I take to be a sheep. You come along, identify yourself as the owner of the field, and tell me that there aren’t any sheep in that field and that what I see is really a dog that at this distance is indistinguishable from a sheep. Then I give up the belief that what I see is a sheep. Another example: on the basis of what the guidebook says I form the belief that the University of Aberdeen was established in 1695. You, the university’s public relations director, tell me the embarrassing truth: this guidebook is notorious for giving the wrong date for the foundation of the university. (It was actually established in 1595.) My new belief that the university was established in 1595 is a defeater for my old belief. In the same way, if I accept naturalism and see that P(R/N) is low, then I have a defeater for R; I can no longer rationally believe that my cognitive faculties are reliable.
The problem isn’t that I don’t have enough evidence for R, to believe it rationally. The fact is I don’t need evidence for R. That’s a good thing, because it doesn’t seem possible to acquire evidence for it, at least if I have any doubts about it. For suppose I think up some argument for R, and on the basis of this argument come to believe that R is indeed true. Clearly this is not a sensible procedure; to become convinced of R on the basis of that argument, I must of course believe the premises of the argument, and also believe that if those premises are true, then so is the conclusion. But if I do that, I am already assuming R to be true, at least for the faculties or belief-producing processes that produce in me belief in the premises of the argument and belief that if the premises are true, so is the conclusion. As the great Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid says:
"If a man’s honesty were called into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to the man’s own word, whether he be honest or not. The same absurdity there is in attempting to prove, by any kind of reasoning, probable or demonstrative, that our reason is not fallacious, since the very point in question is, whether reasoning may be trusted.10
My accepting any argument for R, or any evidence for it, would clearly presuppose my believing R; any such procedure would therefore be viciously circular.
More important, however, is the following. We all naturally assume R, and assume it from our earliest days as cognitive agents. Now rationality is best explained in terms of proper function: a belief is rational, in a given set of circumstances, just if a rational person, one whose cognitive faculties are functioning properly, could hold that belief in those circumstances.11 But then clearly, it is perfectly rational to assume, without evidence, that your cognitive faculties are functioning reliably. We rational agents do this all the time, and do not thereby display cognitive malfunction. You might wind up in a care facility for believing that you are Napoleon, but not for believing that your cognitive faculties are functioning reliably. It is therefore perfectly rational to believe R, and to believe it in the basic way, i.e., not on the basis of propositional evidence.
But that doesn’t mean that it is not possible to acquire a defeater for R; even if a belief is properly basic it is still possible to acquire a defeater for it. In the above example about the sheep in the field, my original belief, we may suppose, was basic, and properly so; I still acquired a defeater for it. Here is another famous example to show the same thing. You and I are driving through southern Wisconsin; I see what looks like a fine barn and form the belief Now that’s a fine barn! Furthermore, I hold that belief in the basic way; I don’t accept it on the basis of evidence from other propositions I believe. You then tell me that the whole area is full of barn facades (indistinguishable, from the highway, from real barns) erected by the local inhabitants in an effort to make themselves look more prosperous than they really are. If I believe you, I then have a defeater for my belief that what I saw was a fine barn, even though I was rational in holding the defeated belief in the basic way. It is therefore perfectly possible to acquire a defeater for a belief B even when it is rational to hold B in the basic way. This is what happens when I believe naturalism, and come to see that P(RIN) is low: I acquire a defeater for R. I can then no longer rationally accept R; I must be agnostic about it, or believe its denial.
Perhaps we can see more clearly here by considering an analogy. Imagine a drug — call it XX — that destroys your cognitive reliability. Some 95 percent of those who ingest XX become cognitively unreliable within two hours of ingesting it; they then believe mostly false propositions. Suppose further that I now believe both that I’ve ingested XX a couple of hours ago and that
P(R/I’ve ingested XX a couple of hours ago) is low; taken together, these two beliefs give me a defeater for my initial belief that my cognitive faculties are reliable. Furthermore, I can’t appeal to any of my other beliefs to show or argue that my cognitive faculties are still reliable. For example, I can’t appeal to my belief that my cognitive faculties have always been reliable in the past or seem to me to be reliable now; any such other belief is now just as suspect or compromised as R is. Any such other belief B is a product of my cognitive faculties: but then in recognizing this and having a defeater for R, I also have a defeater for B.
Two final matters. First, perhaps you believe the thing to think about P (R/N) is not that it is low, but that it is inscrutable. How, you ask, can we possibly tell what that probability would be? Return to the question of the probability that a belief is true, conditional on N and its supervening on or being reducible to adaptive NP properties. There I said that this probability should be thought of as in the neighborhood of 1/2 (in which case it would be unlikely in excelsis that the creature’s true beliefs should exceed its false with a preponderance sufficient for its cognitive faculties being reliable). But maybe the right answer is that we just can’t tell what that probability is: it’s inscrutable.
There may be something to this objection. But all the argument as stated really requires is that the probability in question not be very high; that it isn’t very high seems clear enough. Suppose, however, that this probability really is completely inscrutable: we haven’t the faintest idea what it is. As far as we can tell, it could be as high as 1; it could also be zero; and it could be anything in between. ‘We still get the same result. If this probability is inscrutable, then so will be P(R/N); but N&P(R/N) is inscrutable is a defeater for R, just as is N&P(R/N) is low. Consider an analogy. You learn that your cousin Sam, whose cognitive faculties you have always assumed to be reliable, has ingested XX. You know that some proportion of those who ingest XX become wholly unreliable; but you don’t know what that proportion is; as far as you are concerned, P (Sam’s faculties are reliable/Sam has ingested XX) is inscrutable. It could be as low as zero; it could be as high as 1; and it could be anything in between. Under these conditions you have a defeater for your assumption that Sam’s cognitive faculties are reliable. You would also have a defeater for R if you believed you had ingested XX and that P (R/I’ve ingested XX) is inscrutable. So what the argument really requires is only that P(R/N) be low or inscrutable.12 Finally, there is one more wrinkle, or perhaps fly in the ointment.13 Consider someone who is cognitively normal, and who comes to believe that she has ingested XX, that reliability-destroying drug mentioned above. This person may very well continue to assume that her cognitive faculties are functioning properly. She may very well carry on her cognitive life in the usual way, even if she becomes convinced she’s contracted mad cow disease, a disease, as she believes, that renders its victims cognitively unreliable. And of course the same goes (in spades) if she believes N and sees that P(RIN) is low. But (and this is the crucial point) in so doing, might she not be functioning perfectly properly, without so much as a hint of dysfunction or malfunction? The answer certainly seems to be Yes. If so, however, then given my account of defeat (in terms of proper function) she doesn’t have a defeater for R in the belief that she has ingested XX or has contracted mad cow disease, and my argument fails.
Here I can only gesture at the response.14 The first thing to see is that one who really rejects R is in a state of cognitive disaster. And some modules of our cognitive design plan are aimed, not at the production of true beliefs, but at the production of other worthwhile conditions, including, presumably, avoidance of cognitive disaster. For example, if you fall victim to a usually fatal disease, you may somehow think your chances are much better than is indicated by the statistics you know; this is the so-called ‘optimistic overrider’. Your faculties may be functioning perfectly properly in producing this belief; this particular bit of the cognitive design plan is aimed, not at producing true beliefs about the possible course of your disease, but beliefs that will maximize your chances of recovery. Still, in some sense those statistics really do give you a defeater for your belief that in all likelihood you will recover. What they give you is a Humean Defeater. You have a Humean defeater for a belief B in a given situation if: (1) the production of B is governed by a bit of the design plan that is aimed, not at the production of true belief, but at some other state of affairs (such as recovery from disease or the avoidance of cognitive disaster); and (2) if only truth-aimed processes were at work in this situation, you would have an ordinary rationality defeater for B. One who believes she’s taken XX has a Humean defeater for R, as does someone who thinks she has mad cow disease. My claim is that the naturalist who sees that P(RIN) is low has a Humean defeater for R.
I therefore have a defeater for R. But if I consider R and do not believe it, then I have a defeater for any belief I take to be a product of my cognitive faculties. Naturally enough, that would be all of my beliefs; all of my beliefs are products of my cognitive faculties. The result so far, then, is that if I believe N (construed as including materialism) and I also see that the probability of R with respect to N is low, then I have a defeater for each of my beliefs. Therefore, if you believe N and see that P(RIN) is low, you will be enmeshed in that virulent, bottomless, self-reflexive sort of Humean skepticism mentioned above. No doubt you can’t really reject R in the heat and press of day-ro-day acriviries, when you are playing poker with your friends, or building a house, or climbing a cliff. But in the calm and reflective atmosphere of your study, you see that you do in fact have a defeater for R. Of course, you also see that the very reflections that lead you to this position are also no more acceptable than their denials; you have a universal defeater for whatever it is you find yourself believing. This is that really crushing skepticism, and it is this skepticism to which the naturalist is committed.
9 Of course there are several kinds of defeaters; here it isn’t necessary to canvass these kinds. The kind of defeater presently relevant would be a rationality defeater, and an undercutting rationality defeater. In addition to rationality defeaters, there are also warrant defeaters; these too come in several kinds. For more on defeaters, see Bergmann (2000, 1997), and see Plantinga (2002: 205—211).
10 Reid (1983: 276).
11 See Plantinga (1993a: 133—137).
12 The first clause of (D) should thus be amended to ‘(1) 5 sees that P(A/B) is low or inscrutable’.
13 As William Talbott pointed out to me.
14 For a fuller version of the response, see Plantinga (2002: 205—211).
pp. 29-44, Analytical Philosophy Without Naturalism: http://www.speedyshare.com/292897361.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/292897361.html)
Je begrijpt nu ook al geen Nederlands meer.
Ayn Rand is geschift en ik begrijp niet hoe een fatsoenlijk moslim zich met dat geneuzel kan inlaten.
Het nationalisme (groepsgevoel) van Ayn wordt gekaderd in het concept asabiyya!
Voorkomen van vermenging van sociologie en filosofie voorkomt reductionisme zoals ook gesteld wordt door de eerder in deze draad opgemelde Stephen Crook (Modernist Radicalists and its Aftermath).
pp. 142-162, Essays on Heidegger and others, Richard Rorty
Part III
FREUD AND MORAL REFLECTION
The mechanical mind: Hume and Freud (part 1)
Freud thought of himself as part of the same "decentering" movement of thought to which Copernicus and Darwin belonged. In a famous passage, he says that psychoanalysis "seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind." He compares this with the realization that "our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness" and with the discovery, by Darwin, of our "ineradicable animal nature."1
Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud do have something important in common, but Freud does not give us a clear idea of what that is. It is not evident that successive decenterings add up to a history of humiliation; Copernicus and Darwin might claim that by making God and the angels less plausible, they have left human beings on top of the heap. The suggestion that we have discovered, humiliatingly, that humanity is less important than we had thought is not perspicuous. For it is not clear what "importance" can mean in this context. Further, the claim that psychoanalysis has shown that the ego is not master in its own house is unhelpful, for the relevant sense of "mastery" is unclear. Does our sense of our importance, or our capacity for self-control, really depend on the belief that we are transparent to ourselves? Why should the discovery of the unconscious add humiliation to the discovery of the passions?
I think one gets a better idea of the similarity Freud was trying to describe by contrasting a world of natural kinds with a world of machines — a world of Aristotelian substances with a world of homogenous particles combining and disassociating according to universal laws. Think of the claim that "man is a natural kind" not as saying that human beings are at the center of something, but that they have a center, in a way that a machine does not. A substance that exemplifies an Aristotelian natural kind divides into a central essence — one that provides a built-in purpose — and a set of peripheral accidents. But an artifact's formal and final causes may be distinct; the same machine, for example, may be used for many different purposes. A machine's purpose is not built in.2 If humanity is a natural kind, then perhaps we can find our center and so learn how to live well. But if we are machines, then it is up to us to invent a use for ourselves.
What was decisive about the Copernican Revolution was not that it moved us human beings from the center of the universe, but that it began, in Dyksterhuis's phrase, the "mechanization of the world picture."3 Copernicus and Newton between them made it hard to think of the universe as an edifying spectacle. When an infinite universe of pointless corpuscles replaced a closed world, it became hard to imagine what it would be like to look down upon the Creation and find it good.4 The universe began to look like a rather simple, boring machine, rambling off beyond the horizon, rather than like a bounded and well-composed tableau. So the idea of a center no longer seemed applicable. Analogously, the result of Darwin's and Mendel's mechanization of biology was to set aside an edifying hierarchy of natural kinds. Viewing the various species of plants and animals as the temporary results of interactions between fortuitous environmental pressures and random mutations made the world of living creatures as pointless as Newtonian mechanics had made cosmology. Mechanization meant that the world in which human beings lived no longer taught them anything about how they should live.
In trying to see how Freud fits into this story of decentering-as-mechanization, one should begin by noting that Freud was not the first to suggest that, having mechanized everything else, we mechanize the mind as well. Hume had already treated ideas and impressions not as properties of a substratal self but as mental atoms whose arrangement was the self. This arrangement was determined by laws of association, analogues of the law of gravitation.
1 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 16:284-285. Future references to Freud will be to this edition (abbreviated S.E.), and will be inserted in the text.
2 There can be such a thing as a "purer" Aristotelian substance — one that realizes its essence better because it is less subject to irrelevant accidental changes. (Indeed, Aristotle arranges substances in a hierarchy according to their degree of materiality, their degree of susceptibility to such changes — a hierarchy with "pure actuality" at the top.) But there is no such thing as a purified machine, though there may be another machine that accomplishes the same purpose more efficiently. Machines have no centers to which one can strip them down; stripped-down versions of machines are different machines, machines for doing or producingdifferent things, not more perfect versions of the same machine.
3 The Copernican model of the heavens could not have been accepted without also accepting the corpuscularian mechanics of Galileo and Descartes. That mechanics was the entering wedge for a Newtonian paradigm of scientific explanation — one that predicted events on the basis of a universal homogenous microstructure, rather than revealing the different natures of the various natural kinds. The reason why "the new philosophy" cast all in doubt was not that people felt belittled when the sun took the place of the earth but that it had become hard to see what, given Galilean space, could be meant by the universe having a center. As it became harder to know what a God's-eye view would be like, it became harder to believe in God. As it became harder to think of the common-sense way of breaking up the world into "natural" kinds as more than a practical convenience, it became harder to make sense of the Aristotelian essence—accident distinction. So the very idea of the "nature" of something as setting the standards that things of that sort ought to fulfill began to blur.
4 In particular, it became difficult to see what the point of man could be — difficult to preserve anything like Aristotle's "functional" concept of man, well described by Alasdair MacIntyre as follows: "Moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition — whether in its Greek or its medieval versions — involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function.. . . Aristotle takes it as a starting-point for ethical inquiry that the relationship of 'man' to 'living well' is analogous to that of 'harpist' to 'playing the harp well'.... But the use of 'man' as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle's metaphysical biology. It is tooted in the forms of a social life in which the theorists of the classical tradition give expression. For according to that tradition, to be a man is to fill a set of roles, each of which has its own point and purpose: a member of a family, a citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept" (MacIntyre, After Virtue, Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 59811, p. 56). I take up MacIntyre's suggestion that we need to recapture such a concept in the final section of this essay.
The mechanical mind: Hume and Freud (part 2)
Hume thought of himself as the Newton of the mind, and the mechanical mind he envisaged was — viewed from above, so to speak — just as morally pointless as Newton's corpuscularian universe. Hume, however, suggested that the mechanization of neither nature nor the mind mattered for purposes of finding a self-image. With a sort of protopragmatist insouciance, he thought that talk about the atoms of Democritus, Newton's shining lights, and his own "impressions and ideas" offered, at most, a handy way of describing things and people for purposes of predicting and control-ling them. For moral purposes, for purposes of seeing life as having a point, such talk might be irrelevant. Like Blake, Hume was prepared to say that the view from above — the view of the Baconian predictor and controller — was irrelevant to our sense of centeredness. His pragmatical reconciliation of freedom and determinism, like his reconciliation of armchair skepticism with theoretical curiosity and practical benevolence, is an invitation to take the mechanization of the mind lightly — as no more than an intriguing intellectual exercise, the sort of thing that a young person might do in order to become famous.
It is tempting to respond to Freud in the same way that Hume responded to his own mechanizing efforts: to say that for purposes of moral reflection a knowledge of Freudian unconscious motivation is as irrelevant as a knowledge of Humean associations or of neurophysiology. But this response is unconvincing. Unlike Hume, Freud did change our selfimage.
Finding out about our unconscious motives is not just an intriguing exercise, but more like a moral obligation. What difference between Hume's and Freud's ways of extending mechanization to the mind accounts for Freud's relevance to our moral consciousness?
If one views Freud's dictum that the ego is not master in its own house as saying merely that we often act in ways that could not have been predicted on the basis of our introspectible beliefs and desires, Freud will be merely reiterating a commonplace of Greek thought. If one views it as the claim that the mind can, for purposes of prediction and control, be treated as a set of associative mechanisms, a realm in which there are no accidents, Freud will be saying little that Hume had not said. So one must find another interpretation. One gets a clue, I think, from the fact that the phrase "not even master in its own house" is to the point only if some other person is behaving as if he or she were in charge. The phrase is an appropriate response to the incursion of an unwanted guest — for example, to the onset of schizophrenia. But it is not an appropriate reaction, for example, to an explanation of the dependence of our mood on our endocrine system. For glands are not, so to speak, quasi people with whom to struggle. Nor are neurons, which is why the possible identity of the mind with the brain is of no moral interest. Physiological discoveries can tell us how to predict and control ourselves — including how to predict and control our beliefs and desires — without threatening or changing our self-image. For such discoveries do not suggest that we are being shouldered aside by somebody else.
Psychological mechanisms will seem more decentering than physiological mechanisms only if one is of a naturally metaphysical turn of mind, insistent on pressing the questions, "But what am I really? What is my true self? What is essential to me?" Descartes and Kant had this sort of mind and so, in our day, do reductionist metaphysicians such as B. F. Skinner and antireductionist champions of "subjectivity" and "phenomenology" such as Thomas Nagel and Richard Wollheim. But the mechanization of nature made protopragmatists of most people, allowing them to shrug off questions of essence. They became accustomed to speaking one sort of language for Baconian purposes of prediction and control and another for purposes of moral reflection. They saw no need to raise the question of which language represented the world or the self as it is "in itself."5
Yet Freudian discoveries are troubling even for pragmatists. Unlike the atoms of Democritus or Hume, the Freudian unconscious does not look like something that we might usefully, to achieve certain of our purposes, describe ourselves as. It looks like somebody who is stepping into our shoes, somebody who has different purposes than we do. It looks like a person using us rather than a thing we can use.
This clue — the fact that psychological mechanisms look most disturbing and decentering when they stop looking like mechanisms and start looking like persons — has been followed up by Donald Davidson. In a remarkable essay called "Paradoxes of Irrationality," Davidson notes that philosophers have always been upset by Freud's insistence on "partitioning" the self. They have tended to reject Freud's threatening picture of quasi selves lurking beneath the threshold of consciousness as an unnecessarily vivid way of describing the incoherence and confusion that may afflict a single self. They hope thereby to remain faithful to the common-sense assumption that a single human body typically contains a single self. Davidson defends Freudian partitioning by pointing out that there is no reason to say "You unconsciously believe that p" rather than "There is something within you which causes you to act as if you believed that p, " unless one is prepared to round out the characterization of the unconscious quasi self who "believes that p" by ascribing a host of other beliefs (mostly true, and mostly consistent with p) to that quasi self. One can only attribute a belief to something if one simultaneously attributes lots of other mostly true and mostly consistent beliefs. Beliefs and desires, unlike Humean ideas and impressions, come in packages.6
Davidson puts these holistic considerations to work as follows. He identifies (not explicitly, but, if my reading of him is right, tacitly) being a person with being a coherent and plausible set of beliefs and desires. Then he points out that the force of saying that a human being sometimes behaves irrationally is that he or she sometimes exhibits behavior that cannot be explained by reference to a single such set. Finally, he concludes that the point of "partitioning" the self between a consciousness and an unconscious is that the latter can be viewed as an alternative set, inconsistent with the familiar set that we identify with conciousness, yet sufficiently coherent internally to count as a person. This strategy leaves open the possibility that the same human body can play host to two or more persons. These persons enter into causal relations with each other, as well as with the body whose movements are brought about by the beliefs and desires of one or the other of them. But they do not, normally, have conversational relations. That is, one's unconscious beliefs are not reasons for a change in one's conscious beliefs, but they may cause changes in the latter beliefs, just as may portions of one's body (e.g., the retina, the fingertips, the pituitary gland, the gonads).
To see the force of Davidson's suggestion is to appreciate the crucial difference between Hume and Freud. This is that Hume's mental atoms included only subpropositional components of beliefs — mostly names of perceptible and introspectible qualia. The mechanization of the self that Hume suggested, and that associationist psychology developed, amounted to little more than a transposition into mentalistic terminology of a rather crude physiology of perception and memory. By contrast, Freud populated inner space not with analogues of Boylean corpuscles but with analogues of persons — internally coherent clusters of belief and desire. Each of these quasi persons is, in the Freudian picture, a part of a single unified causal network, but not of a single person (since the criterion for individuation of a person is a certain minimal coherence among its beliefs and desires). Knowledge of all these persons is necessary to predict and control a human being's behavior (and in particular his or her "irrational" behavior), but only one of these persons will be available (at any given time) to introspection.
5 Nonintellectuals' conviction that what the intellectuals talk about does not really matter was greatly strengthened when the new Enlightenment intellectuals informed them that the previous batch of intellectuals — the priests — had been completely wrong. One consequence of the mechanization of nature, and of the resulting popularity of a pragmatic, Baconian attitude toward knowledge-claims, was a heightened cynicism and indifference about the questions that intellectuals discuss. This is why metaphysical issues about "the nature of reality" and "the true self" have less resonance and popular appeal than religious heresies once did, and why philosophical questions raised within Comte's "positive," postmetaphysical perspective have even less. People always thought the priests a bit funny, but also a bit aweinspiring. They thought German idealists, and Anglo-Saxon positivists, merely funny. By contrast, they take psychoanalysts seriously enough to attempt to imitate them, as in the development of parlor analysis and of psychobabble.
6 Even if, as Hume thought, there is a possible universe consisting only of one senseimpression, we cannot make sense of the idea of a universe consisting only of the belief that, for example, Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Further, there is no such thing as an incoherent arrangement of Humean mental atoms. But there is such a thing as a set of beliefs and desires so incoherent that we cannot attribute them to a single self.
The rational unconscious as conversational partner (1)
If one accepts this Davidsonian explanation of Freud's basic strategy, then one has taken a long step toward seeing why psychoanalysis can aptly be described as a decentering. For now one can see Freudian mechanisms as having, so to speak, a human interest that no physiological or Humean mechanism could have. One can see why it is hard to dismiss the Freudian unconscious as just one more useful, if paradoxical, redescription of the world that science has invented for purposes of saving the phenomena — the sort of redescription that can be ignored by everyday, practical purposes (as, for example, one ignores heliocentrism).
The suggestion that some unknown persons are causing us (or, to stress the alienation produced by this suggestion, causing our bodies) to do things we would rather not do is decentering in a way that an account of heavenly bodies (or of the descent of man) is not. One will be thrown off base by this suggestion even if one has no interest in Aristotelian, metaphysical questions about one's "essence" or one's "true self." One can be entirely pragmatical in one's approach to life and still feel that something needs to be done in response to such a suggestion.
To take Freud's suggestion seriously is to wish to become acquainted with these unfamiliar persons, if only as a first step toward killing them off. This wish will take the place, for a pragmatical Freudian, of the religious and metaphysical desire to find one's "true center." It initiates a task that can plausibly be described as a moral obligation — the task whose goal is summed up in the phrase "where id was, there shall ego be." This goal does not require the Aristotelian notion that one's ego is more "natural" or more truly "oneself" than one's id. But adopting this goal does restore a point to the imperative "Know thyself," an imperative that one might have thought inapplicable to the self-as-machine.
On Freud's account of self-knowledge, what we are morally obligated to know about ourselves is not our essence, not a common human nature that is somehow the source and locus of moral responsibility. Far from being of what we share with the other members of our species, self-knowledge is precisely of what divides us from them: our accidental idiosyncrasies, the "irrational" components in our-selves, the ones that split us up into incompatible sets of beliefs and desires. The study of "the nature of the mind," construed as the study either of Humean association of ideas or of Freudian metapsychology, is as pointless, for purposes of moral reflection, as the study of the laws of celestial motion. What is of interest is the study of the idiosyncratic raw material whose processing Humean and Freudian mechanisms are postulated to predict, and of the idiosyncratic products of this processing. For only study of these concrete details will let us enter into conversational relations with our unconscious and, at the ideal limit of such conversation, let us break down the partitions.
The view of Freud that I am proposing will seem plausible only if one makes a clear distinction between two senses of "the unconscious": (1) a sense in which it stands for one or more well-articulated systems of beliefs and desires, systems that are just as complex, sophisticated, and internally consistent as the normal adult's conscious beliefs and desires; and (2) a sense in which it stands for a seething mass of inarticulate instinctual energies, a "reservoir of libido" to which consistency is irrelevant. In the second sense, the unconscious is just another name for "the passions," the lower part of the soul, the bad, false self. Had this been the only sense Freud gave to the term, his work would have left our strategies of character-development, and our self-image, largely unchanged. What is novel in Freud's view of the unconscious is his claim that our unconscious selves are not dumb, sullen, lurching brutes, but rather the intellectual peers of our conscious selves, possible conversational partners for those selves. As Rieff puts it, "Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious."7
This suggestion that one or more clever, articulate, inventive persons are at work behind the scene — cooking up our jokes, inventing our metaphors, plot-ting our dreams, arranging our slips, and censoring our memories — is what grips the imagination of the lay reader of Freud.
As Freud himself said, if psychoanalysis had stuck to the neuroses, it would never have attracted the attention of the intellectuals.8 It was the application of psychoanalytical notions to normal life that first suggested that Freud's ideas might call for a revision in our self-image. For this application breaks the connection between the Platonic reason—passion distinction and the conscious—unconscious distinction. It substitutes a picture of sophisticated transactions between two or more "intellects" for the traditional picture of one "intellect" struggling with a mob of "irrational" brutes.
The Platonic tradition had thought of articulate beliefs — or, more generally, propositional attitudes — as the preserve of the higher part of the soul. It thought of the lower parts as "bodily," as animallike, and in particular as prelinguistic. But a witty unconscious is necessarily a linguistic unconscious. Further, if "rational" means "capable of weaving complex, internally consistent, networks of belief" rather than "capable of contemplating reality as it is," then a witty unconscious is also a rational unconscious — one that can no more tolerate inconsistency than can consciousness.9
7 Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 36.
8 "The importance of psycho-analysis for psychiatry would never have drawn the attention of the intellectual world to it or won it a place in The History of our Timer. This result was brought about by the relation of psycho-analysis to normal, not to pathological, mental life" (Freud, S.E. 19:205; see also 18:240). Even if analytic psychiatry should some day be abandoned in favor of chemical and microsurgical forms cf treatment, the connections that Freud drew between such emotions as sexual yearning and hostility on the one hand, and between dreams and parapraxes on the other, would remain part of the common sense of our culture.
9 See Davidson, "Paradoxes of Irrationality," in Philosophical Essays on Freud, ed. B. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially his discussion of "the paradox of rationality" at p. 303.
The rational unconscious as conversational partner (part 2)
So we need to distinguish the unconscious as "the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses," strata that know "nothing that is negative, and no negation," in which "contradictories coincide" (S.E. 14:296), from the unconscious as the sensitive, whacky, backstage partner who feeds us our best lines. The latter is somebody who has a well-worked-out, internally consistent view of the world — though one that may be hopelessly wrong on certain crucial points. One needs to distinguish Freud's banal claim that "our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects" (S.E. 14:301) - which is just a replay of Hume's claim that "reason is,and ought to be, the slave of the passions"10 — from his interesting and novel claim that the conscious—unconscious distinction cuts across the human—animal and reason—instinct distinctions.
If one concentrates on the latter claim, then one can see Freud as suggesting that, on those occasions when we are tempted to complain that two souls dwell, alas, in our breast, we think of the two as one more-or-less sane and one more-orless crazy human soul, rather than as one human soul and one bestial soul. On the latter, Platonic model, self-knowledge will be a matter of self-purification — of identifying our true, human self and expelling, curbing, or ignoring the animal self. On thé former model, self-knowledge will be a matter of getting acquainted with one or more crazy quasi people, listening to their crazy accounts of how things are, seeing why they hold the crazy views they do, and learning something from them.
It will be a matter of self-enrichment. To say "Where id was, there will ego be" will not mean "Whereas once I was driven by instinct, I shall become autonomous, motivated solely by reason." Rather, it will mean something like: "Once I could not figure out why I was acting so oddly, and hence wondered if I were, somehow, under the control of a devil or a beast. But now I shall be able to see my actions as rational, as making sense, though perhaps based on mistaken premises. I may even discover that those premises were not mistaken, that my unconscious knew better than I did."11
10 Any associationist psychology will make that claim. For it is a corollary of the claim that reason is not a faculty of contemplating essence but only a faculty of inferring beliefs from other beliefs. Since the initial premises of such inferences must then be supplied by something other than reason, and if the only faculty that can be relevantly opposed to "reason" is "passion," then Hume's claim follows trivially. But it would, of course, be more consistent with the mechanistic vocabulary of associationist psychology to drop talk of faculties and, in particular, to drop the terms "reason" and "passion." Once the mind becomes a machine instead of a quasi person, it no longer has faculties, much less higher and lower ones. Hume is interlacing the old vocabulary of faculties with the results of the new associationism for the sake of shock value.
11 This way of stating the aim of psychoanalytic treatment may seem to make everything sound too sweetly reasonable. It suggests that the analyst serves as a sort of moderator at a symposium: he or she introduces, for example, a consciousness which thinks that Mother is a long-suffering object of pity to an unconscious which thinks of her as a voracious seductress, letting the two hash out the pros and cons. It is of course true that the facts of resistance forbid the analyst to think in conversational terms. He or she must instead think in terms of Freud's various topographichydraulic models of libidinal flow, hoping to find in these models suggestions about how to overcome resistance, what meaning to assign to novel symptoms, and so forth. But it is also true that the patient has no choice but to think in conversational terms. (This is why self-analysis will usually not work, why treatment can often do what reflection cannot.)For purposes of the patient's conscious attempt to reshape his or her character, he or she cannot use a self-description in terms of cathexes, libidinal flow, and the-like; topographichydraulic models cannot form part of one's self-image, any more than can a description of one's endocrine system. When the patient thinks about competing descriptions of his or her mother, the patient has to think dialectically, to grant that there is much to be said on both sides. To think, as opposed to react to a new stimulus, simply is to compare and contrast candidates for admission into one's set of beliefs and desires. So, while the analyst is busy thinking causally, in terms of the patient's reactions to stimuli (and in particular the stimuli that occur while the patient is on the couch), the patient has to think of his or her unconscious as, at least potentially, a conversational partner. These two ways of thinking seem to me alternative tools, useful for different purposes, rather than contradictory claims. I do not chink (despite the arguments of, for example, Paul Ricoeur and Roy Schafer) that there is a tension in Freud's thought between energetics" and "hermeneutics." Rather, the two seem to me to be as compatible as, for example, microstructural and macrostructural descriptions of the same object (e.g., Eddington's table). But to defend my eirenic attitude properly I should offer an account of "resistance" that chimes with Davidson's interpretation of the unconscious, and I have not yet figured out how to do this. {I am grateful to George Thomas, Seymour Rabinowitz, and Cecil Cullender for pointing out this difficulty to me.}
The advantage of this way of thinking of the passions is that it enables one to take a similar view of conscience. For just as this view humanizes what the Platonic tradition took to be the urges of an animal, so it humanizes what that tradition thought of as divine inspiration. It makes conscience, like passion, one more set of human beliefs and desires — another story about how the world is, another Weltanschauung. Most important, it makes it just another story — not one that (in the case of the passions) is automatically suspect nor one that (in the case of conscience) is automatically privileged. It treats, so to speak, the three different stories told by the id, the superego, and the ego as alternative extrapolations from a common experience — in particular, experience of childhood events. Each story is an attempt to make these events coherent with later events, but the stimuli provided by such events are (usually) so diverse and confusing that no single consistent set of beliefs and desires is able to make them all hang together.
To view these three (or more) stories as on a par, as alternative explanations of a confusing situation, is part of what Rieff calls "Freud's egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of an hierarchical human nature."12 To adopt a self-image that incorporates this egalitarian revision is to think that there is no single right answer to the quesion "What did happen to me in the past?" It is also to think that there is no such answer to the question "What sort of person am I now?" It is to recognize that the choice of a vocabulary in which to describe either one's childhood or one's character cannot be made by inspecting some collection of "neutral facts" (e.g., a complete videotape of one's life history). It is to give up the urge to purification, to achieve a stripped-down version of the self, and to develop what Rieff calls "tolerance of ambiguities ... the key to what Freud considered the most difficult of all personal accomplishments: a genuinely stable character in an unstable time."13
On the view I am offering, Freud gave us a new technique for achieving a genuinely stable character: the technique of lending a sympathetic ear to our own tendencies to instability, by treating them as alternative ways of making sense of the past, ways that have as good a claim on our attention as do the familiar beliefs and desires that are available to introspection. His mechanistic view of the self gave us a vocabulary that lets us describe all the various parts of the soul, conscious and unconscious alike, in homogenous terms: as equally plausible candidates for "the true self."
But to say that all the parts of the soul are equally plausible candidates is to discredit both the idea of a "true self" and the idea of "the true story about how things are." It is to view the enlightened, liberated self — the self that has finally succeeded in shaping itself — as a self that has given up the need to "see things steadily and see them whole," to penetrate beyond shifting appearances to a constant reality. Maturity will, according to this view, consist rather in an ability to seek out new redescriptions of one's own past — an ability to take a nominalistic, ironic view of oneself. By turning the Platonic parts of the soul into conversational partners for one another, Freud did for the variety of interpretations of each person's past what the Baconian approach to science and philosophy did for the variety of descriptions of the universe as a whole. He let us see alternative narratives and alternative vocabularies as instruments for change, rather than as candidates for a correct depiction of how things are in themselves.
Much of what I have been saying is summarized in Freud's remark, "If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the Universe which Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the sun does not move" (S.E. 11:137).14 This recommendation that we see chance as "not unworthy of determining our fate" has as a corollary that we see ourselves as having the beliefs and emotions we do, including our (putatively) "specifically moral" beliefs and emotions, because of some very particular, idiosyncratic things that have happened in the history of the race, and to ourselves in the course of growing up. Such a recognition produces the ability to be Baconian about oneself. It lets one see oneself as a Rube Goldberg machine that requires much tinkering, rather than as a substance with a precious essence to be discovered and cherished. It produces what Whitehead called "the virtues which Odysseus shares with the foxes" — rather than, for example, those which Achilles shares with the lions, or those which Plato and Aristotle hoped to share with the gods.
12 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 56.
13 Ibid., p. 57.
14 It is interesting that in the passage cited Freud is referring back to a passage (S.E. 11:76) where he credits Leonardo not only with anticipating Copernicus but with having "divined the history of the stratification and fossilization in the Arno valley," a suggestion that Leonardo anticipated Lyell (and so, in a way, Darwin) as well.
From this Baconian angle, the point of psychoanalysis is the same as that of reflection on the sort of character one would like to have, once one ceases to take a single vocabulary for granted and begins the attempt to revise and enlarge the very vocabulary in which one is at present reflecting. The point of both exercises is to find new self-descriptions whose adoption will enable one to alter one's behavior. Finding out the views of one's unconscious about one's past is a way of getting some additional suggestions about how to describe (and change) oneself in the future. As a way of getting such suggestions, psychoanalysis differs from reading history, novels, or treatises on moral philosophy only in being more painful, in being more likely to produce radical change, and in requiring a partner.
Purification and self-enlargement (part 1)
Because morality is associated both with human solidarity and with tragedy, my claim that attention to personal idiosyncrasy "remoralizes" a mechanistic self may seem paradoxical.One might protest, in the spirit of Kant, that the whole point of morality is self-forgetfulness, not making an exception of oneself, seeing oneself as counting for no more than any other human being, being motivated by what is common to all humanity. To emphasize idiosyncrasy is to emphasize the comic variety of human life rather than the tragedies that morality hopes to avert.
The appearance of paradox results from the fact that "morality" can mean either the attempt to be just in one's treatment of others or the search for perfection in oneself. The former is public morality, codifiable in statutes and maxims. The latter is private morality, the development of character. Like Freud, I am concerned only with the latter. Morality as the search for justice swings free of religion, science, metaphysics, and psychology. It is the relatively simple and obvious side of morality — the part that nowadays, in the wake of Freud, is often referred to as "culture" or "repression." This is the side of morality that instructs us to tell the truth, avoid violence, eschew sex with near relations, keep our promises, and abide by the Golden Rule.The story of progress in public morality is largely irrelevant to the story of the mechanization of the world view.15
15 The Enlightenment attempt to connect the two by seeing both feudalism and Aristotelian science as instances of "prejudice and superstition" was a self-deceptive neo-Aristotelian attempt to preserve the idea of man as an animal whose essence is rationality, while simultaneously identifying rationality with certain newly created institutions.
Galileo, Darwin, and Freud did little to help or hinder such progress.They have nothing to say in answer either to the Athenian question "Does justice pay?" or to the Californian question "How much repression need I endure?" Freud, in particular, has no contribution to make to social theory. His domain is the portion of morality that cannot be identified with "culture"; it is the private life, the search for a character, the attempt of individu-als to be reconciled with themselves (and, in the case of some exceptional individuals, to make their lives works of art).16
Such an attempt can take one of two antithetical forms: a search for purity or a search for selfenlargement.The ascetic life commended by Plato and criticized by Nietzsche is the paradigm of the former. The "aesthetic" life criticized by Kierkegaard is the paradigm of the latter. The desire to purify oneself is the desire to slim down, to peel away everything that is accidental, to will one thing, to intensify, to become a simpler and more transparent being. The desire to enlarge oneself is the desire to embrace more and more possibilities, to be constantly learning, to give oneself over entirely to curiosity, to end by having envisaged all the possibilities of the past and of the future. It was the goal shared by, for example, de Sade, Byron, and Hegel.17
16 Here I am agreeing with Rieff against, for example, Fromm and Marcuse: "Psychoanalysis is the doctrine of the private man defending himself against public encroachment. He cultivates the private life and its pleasures, and if he does take part in public affairs it is for consciously private motives" (Rieff,The Mind of the Moralist, p. 278). Rieff seems to me right in saying that Freud had little to say about how and whether society might be made "less repressive": "Like those who worked for shorter hours but nevertheless feared what men might do with their leisure, Freud would have welcomed more constructive releases from our stale moralities, but did not propose to substitute a new one. Our private ethics were his scientific problem: he had no new public ethics to suggest, no grand design for the puzzle of our common life" (ibid., p. 38).
17 See Hans Blumenberg's discussion of "theoretical curiosity," and especially his contrast between the medieval criticism of curiosity and Bacon's praise of it, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Robert Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).
On the view I am presenting, Freud is an apostle of this aesthetic life, the life of unending curiosity, the life that seeks to extend its own bounds rather than to find its center. For those who decline the options offered by de Sade and Byron (sexual experimentation, political engagement), the principal technique of self-enlargement will be Hegel's: the enrichment of language. One will see the history of both the race and oneself as the development of richer, fuller ways of formulating one's desires and hopes, and thus making those desires and hopes themselves — and thereby oneself — richer and fuller. I shall call such a development the "acquisition of new vocabularies of moral reflection." By "a vocabulary of moral reflection" I mean a set of terms in which one compares oneself to other human beings. Such vocabularies contain terms like magnanimous, a true Christian, decent, cowardly, God-fearing, hypocritical, self-deceptive, epicene, self-destructive, cold, an antique Roman, a saint, a Julien Sorel, a Becky Sharpe, a red-blooded American, a shy gazelle, a hyena, depressive, a Bloomsbury type, a man of respect, a grande dame. Such terms are possible answers to the question "What is he or she like?" and thus possible answers to the question "What am I like?" By summing up patterns of behavior, they are tools for criticizing the character of others and for creating one's own. They are the terms one uses when one tries to resolve moral dilemmas by asking "What sort of person would I be if I did this?"
This question is, of course, not the only question one asks when reflecting about what to do. One also asks, for example, "How would I justify myself to so-and-so?" and "Would this action violate the general rule that ... ?" But answers to these questions will reflect the vocabulary of moral reflection at one's disposal. That vocabulary helps one decide to which sort of people to justify oneself. It puts some flesh on abstract rules like the categorical imperative and "Maximize human happiness!" It is distinctions between such vocabularies, rather than between general principles, that differentiate the moralities of communities, historical epochs, and epochs in the life of the curious intellectual. The availability of a richer vocabulary of moral deliberation is what one chiefly has in mind when one says that we are, morally speaking, more sensitive and sophisticated than our ancestors or than our younger selves.
Much could be said about how the addition of specifically psychoanalytic concepts to religious and philosophical concepts (and to the invocation of historical and literary archetypes) has influenced contemporary patterns of moral deliberation.18
18 See, for example, Adam Morton, "Freudian Commonsense," in Philosophical Essays on Freud (cited above in n. 9). I think that Morton asks just the right questions, although I have doubts about the character—personality distinction that he draws.
Purification and self-enlargement (part 2)
My theme, however, is different. I want to focus on the way in which Freud, by helping us see ourselves as centerless, as random assemblages of contingent and idiosyncratic needs rather than as more or less adequate exemplifications of a common human essence, opened up new possibilities for the aesthetic life. He helped us become increasingly ironic, playful, free, and inventive in our choice of self-descriptions. This has been an important factor in our ability to slough off the idea that we have a true self, one shared with all other humans, and the related notion that the demands of this true self — the specifically moral demands — take precedence over all others. It has helped us think of moral reflection and sophistication as a matter of selfcreation rather than self-knowledge. Freud made the paradigm of self-knowledge the discovery of the fortuitous materials out of which we must construct ourselves rather than the discovery of the principles to which we must conform. He thus made the desire for purification seem more self-deceptive, and the quest for self-enlargement more promising.
By contrast, the history of modern philosophy has centered on attempts to preserve an enclave of nonmechanism, and thus to keep alive the notion of a "true self" and the plausibility of a morality of self-purification. Descartes was willing to follow Galileo in dissolving all the Aristotelian natural kinds into so many vortices of corpuscles, with one exception. He wanted the mind to remain exempt from this dissolution. The mind and its faculties (notably intellect, conceived of as immediate, nondiscursive grasp of truth) were to remain as Platonism and Christianity had conceived of them. This enclave of nonmechanism that Descartes claimed to have descried became the preserve of a subject called "metaphysics."19 Kant recognized the ad hoc and factitious character of this Cartesian attempt to keep the world safe for nonmechanism, and so he developed a different, more drastic, strategy to achieve the same end. He was willing to put mind and matter on a par, and to follow Hume in dissolving what he called "the empirical self" into predictable associations of mental atoms. But he distinguished that self from the true self, the moral self, the part of the self that was an agent, rather than a subject of scientific inquiry. This still smaller and more mysterious enclave of nonmechanism became the preserve of a subject called "moral philosophy." Kant tried to make morality a nonempirical matter, something that would never again have anything to fear from religion, science, or the arts, nor have anything to learn from them.20 For, Kant explained, the reason why the New Science had described a world with no moral lesson, a world without a moral point, was that it described a world of appearance. By contrast, the true world was a world that was, so to speak, nothing but point: nothing but a moral imperative, nothing but a call to moral purity.
19 Consider Leibniz's novel and influential use of the terms physics and metaphysics to name the study of mechanism and of nonmechanism, respectively — to distinguish between the area in which Newton was right and the area in which Aristotle and the scholastics had been right.
20 As J. B. Schneewind has pointed out to me, this remark is accurate only for Kant's early thinking on morality. Later in his life the purity and isolation claimed for morality in the Grundlagen became compromised in various ways. It was, however, the early writings on morality that became associated with Kant's name, and that his successors were concerned to criticize.
One result of Kant's initiative was to impoverish the vocabulary of moral philosophy and to turn the enrichment of our vocabulary of moral reflection over to novelists, poets, and dramatists. 21 The nineteenth-century novel, in particular, filled a vacuum left by the retreat of one-half of moral philosophy into idealist metaphysics and the advance of the other half into politics. 22
21 See Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 58: "It is a shortcoming of much contemporary moral philosophy that it eschews discussion of the separate virtues, preferring to proceed directly to some sovereign concept such as sincerity, or authenticity, or freedom, thereby imposing, it seems to me, an unexamined and empty idea of unity, and impoverishing our moral language in an important area." Murdoch's claim that "the most essential and fundamental aspect of our culture is the study of literature, since this is aneducation in how to picture and understand human situations" (p. 34) would have meant something different two hundred years ago. For then the term literature covered Hume's Enquiries and his History as well as novels, plays, and poems. Our modern contrast between literature and moral philosophy is one result of the development that Murdock describes: "Philosophy ... has been busy dismantling the old substantial picture of the 'self,' and ethics has not proved itself able to rethink this concept for moral purposes. . . . Moral philosophy, and indeed morals, are thus undefended against an irresponsible and undirected self-assertion which goes easily hand-in-hand with some brand of pseudo-scientific determinism. An unexamined sense of the strength of the machine is combined with an illusion of leaping out of it. The younger Sartre, and many British moral philosophers, represent this last dry distilment of Kant's view of the world" (pp. 47—48).
22 The latter phenomenon is exemplified by, for example, Bentham and Marx — philosophers who have been responsible for much good in the public sphere but who are useless as advisers on the development of one's moral character.
Another result was what Alasdair Maclntyre calls the invention of "the individual" — a moral self who existed "prior to and apart from all roles, who was independent of any social or historical context. 23
To say that the moral self exists apart from all roles means that it will remain the same no matter what situation it finds itself in, no matter what language it uses to create its self-image, no matter what its vocabulary of moral deliberation may be. That, in turn, means that the moral self has no need to work out a sensitive and sophisticated vocabulary as an instrument to create its character. For the only character that matters is the one it already has. Once it began to seem (as it did to Kant) that we had always known a priori all there was to know about the "morally relevant" portion of human beings, the Hegelian urge to enrich our vocabulary of moral reflection began to seem (as it did to Kierkegaard) a merely "aesthetic" demand, something that might amuse a leisured elite but which had no relevance to our moral responsibilities.24
23 See the passage from Maclntyre quoted in note 4 above.
24 For a contemporary account of the contrast between the Kantian and the Hegelian attitudes, see Alan Donagan, A Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), chap. 1, on "Hegel's doctrine of the emptiness of the moral point of view" (p. 10).
This account of modern philosophy can be summarized by saying that when modern science made it hard to think of man as a natural kind, philosophy responded by inventing an unnatural kind. It was perhaps predictable that the sequence of descriptions of this self that begins with Descartes should end with Sartre: the self as a blank space in the middle of a machine — an être pour-soi, a "hole in being." By contrast, Freud stands with Hegel against Kant, in an attitude of Nietzschean exuberance rather than Sartrean embarrassment. He offers us a way to reinvent the search for enlargement, and thereby reinvents the morality of character. I can summarize my account of how he does this in five points:
1. Whereas everybody from Plato to Kant had identified our central self, our conscience, the standard-setting, authoritative part of us, with universal truths, general principles, and a common human nature, Freud made conscience just one more, not particularly central, part of a larger, homogenous machine. He identified the sense of duty with the internalization of a host of idiosyncratic, accidental episodes. On his account our sense of moral obligation is not a matter of general ideas contemplated by the intellect, but rather of traces of encounters between particular people and our bodily organs. He saw the voice of conscience not as the voice of the part of the soul that deals with generalities as opposed to the part that deals with particulars, but rather as the (usually distorted) memory of certain very particular events.
2. This identification did not take the form of a reductive claim that morality was "nothing but ..." delayed responses to forgotten stimuli. Since Freud was willing to view every part of life, every human activity, in the same terms, there was no contrast to be drawn between the "merely" mechanical and reactive character of moral experience and the free and spontaneous character of something else (e.g., science, art, philosophy or psychoanalytic theory).
3. Nor did this identification of conscience with memory of idiosyncratic events take the form of the claim that talk about such events was a ("scientific") substitute for moral deliberation. Freud did not suggest that we would see ourselves more clearly, or choose more wisely, by restricting our vocabulary of moral reflection to psychoanalytic terms. On the contrary, Freud dropped the Platonic metaphor of "seeing ourselves more clearly" in favor of the Baconian idea of theory as a tool for bringing about desirable change.25 He was far from thinking that psychoanalytic theory was the only tool needed for self-enlargement.
4.This Baconian attitude was the culmination of the mechanizing movement that had begun in the seventeenth century. That movement had replaced the attempt to contemplate the essences of natural kinds with the attempt to tinker with the machines that compose the world. But not until Freud did we get a usable way of thinking of ourselves as machines to be tinkered with, a self-image that enabled us to weave terms describing psychic mechanisms into our strategies of character-formation.
5.The increased ability of the syncretic, ironic, nominalist intellectual to move back and forth between, for example, religious, moral, scientific, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical vocabularies without asking the question "And which of these shows us how things really are?" — the intellectual's increased ability to treat vocabularies as tools rather than mirrors — is Freud's major legacy. He broke some of the last chains that bind us to the Greek idea that we, or the world, have a nature that, once discovered, will tell us what we should do with ourselves. He made it far more difficult than it was before to ask the question "Which is my true self?" or "What is human nature?" By letting us see that even in the enclave which philosophy had fenced off, there was nothing to be found save traces of accidental encounters, he left us able to tolerate the ambiguities that the religious and philosophical traditions had hoped to eliminate.
25 Rieff makes this contrast between Platonic and Baconian attitudes, saying that the latter, the "second theory of theory," views theory as "arming us with the weapons for transforming reality instead of forcing us to conform to it. . . . Psychoanalytic theory belongs to the second tradition" (Triumph of the Therapeutic, pp. 55-56). This view of Freud's aim is central to my account of his achievement, and I am much indebted to Rieff's work.
"The Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist"(part 1)
My account of Freud as a Baconian has taken for granted that the move from Aristotelian to Baconian views of the nature of knowledge, like that from an ethics of purity to one of selfenrichment, was desirable. My enthusiasm for the mechanization and decentering of the world is dictated by my assumption that the ironic, playful intellectual is a desirable character-type, and that Freud's importance lies in his contribution to the formation of such a character. These assumptions are challenged by those who see the mechanization of nature as a prelude to barbarism. Such critics emphasize, as I have, the link between a pragmatic, tinkering approach to nature and the self, and the aesthetic search for novel experiences and novel language. But they condemn both.
The most thoroughly thought-out, if most abstract, account of the relation between technology and aestheticism is offered by Heidegger.26 But the more concrete criticisms of modern ways of thinking offered by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue are more immediately relevant to the topics I have been discussing. MacIntyre would agree, more or less, with my description of the connections between Baconian ways of thought and Nietzschean values. But he takes the fact that the paradigmatic character-types of modernity are "the Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist" (p. 29) to show that these ways of thought, and these values, are undesirable. In Maclntyre's view, the abandonment of an Aristotelian "functional concept of man" leads to "emotivism" — the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations" (p. 22).
MacIntyre is, I think, right in saying that contemporary moral discourse is a confusing and inconsistent blend of notions that make sense only in an Aristotelian view of the world (e.g., "reason," "human nature," "natural rights") with mechanistic, anti-Aristotelian notions that implicitly repudiate such a view. But whereas MacIntyre thinks we need to bring back Aristotelian ways of thinking to make our moral discourse coherent, I think we should do the opposite and make the discourse coherent by discarding the last vestiges of those ways of thinking.27 I would welcome a culture dominated by "the Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist" so long as everybody who wants to gets to be an aesthete (and, if not rich, as comfortably off as most — as rich as the Managers can manage, guided by Rawls's Difference Principle).
Further, I think that we can live with the Freudian thought that everything everybody does to everyone else (even those they love blindly and helplessly) can be described, for therapeutic or other purposes, as manipulation. The postulation of unintrospectible systems of beliefs and desires ensures that there will be a coherent and informative narrative to be told in those terms, one that will interpret all personal and social relations, even the tenderest and most sacred, in terms of "making use of" others. Once those extra persons who explain akrasia and other forms of irrationality are taken into account, there are, so to speak, too many selves for "selflessness" to seem a useful notion. But the increased ability to explain, given by Freud's postulation of additional persons, hardly prevents us from drawing the common-sense distinction between manipulating people (i.e., consciously, and deceptively, employing them as instruments for one's own purposes) and not manipulating them. The availability of a description for explanatory purposes does not entail its use in moral reflection, any more than it precludes it.
26 See Heidegger's essays "The Question Concerning Technology" and "The Age of the World View" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). I suggest a Deweyan response to Heidegger's view of technology at the end of "Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism," above. MacIntyre would join me in repudiating Heidegger's attack on technology but would retain Heidegger's account of the shift in moral consciousness that followed upon the abandonment of an Aristotelian world view.
27 It is tempting to say that I would accept Maclntyre's claim that the only real choice is between Aristotle and Nietzsche, and then side with Nietzsche. But the choice is too dramatic and too simple. By the time MacIntyre gets rid of the nonsense in Aristotle (e.g., what he calls the "metaphysical biology"), Aristotle does not look much like himself. By the time I would finish discarding the bits of Nietzsche I do not want (e.g., his lapses into metaphysical biology, his distrust of Hegel, his ressentiment, etc.) he would not look much like Nietzsche. The opposition between these two ideal types is useful only if one does not press it too hard.
Maclntyre construes "emotivism" as the only option left, once one abandons the Aristotelian idea of man, because he retains a pre-Freudian division of human faculties. In terms of this division, "desire" or "will" or "passion" represents the only alternative to "reason" (construed as a faculty of seeing things as they are in themselves). But dividing people up this way begs the question against other ways of describing them — for example, Freud's way. Freud (at least according to the Davidsonian interpretation I have developed here) drops the whole idea of "faculties," and substitutes the notion of a plurality of sets of beliefs and desires.28
Maclntyre's definition of "emotivism" ("the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling" {p. 11}) makes sense only if there is something else such judgments might have been — for example, expressions of a correct "rational" grasp of the nature of the human being.
Moral psychology, like moral discourse, is at present an incoherent blend of Aristotelian and mechanist ways of speaking. I would urge that if we eradicate the former, "emotivism" will no longer be an intelligible position. More generally, if we take Freud to heart, we shall not have to choose between an Aristotelian "functional" concept of humanity, one that will provide moral guidance, and Sartrean "dreadful freedom." For the Sartrean conception of the self as pure freedom will be seen as merely the last gasp of the Aristotelian tradition — a self-erasing expression of the Cartesian determination to find something nonmechanical at the center of the machine, if only a "hole in being."29 We shall not need a picture of "the human self" in order to have morality — neither of a nonmechanical enclave nor of a meaningless void where such an enclave ought to have been.
28 Or, more generally, premechanist (and thus pre-Humean: see note ro on Hume and faculty psychology).
29 Metaphysicians like Sartre would, to paraphrase Nietzsche, rather have a metaphysics of nothingness than no metaphysics. This was a trap around which Heidegger circled in his early work but eventually walked away from, leaving Sartre to take the plunge.
"The Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist" (part 2)
It seems a point in my favor that Maclntyre does not answer the question of whether it is "rationally justifiable [pace Sartre] to conceive of each human life as a unity" (p. 189) by saying (with Aristotle) "yes, because the function of man is.. .." Rather, he offers us "a concept of a self whose unity resides in the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end" (p. 191).30 Maclntyre tacitly drops the Aristotelian demand that the themes of each such narrative be roughly the same for each member of a given species, and that they stay roughly constant throughout the history of the species. He seems content to urge that in order for us to exhibit the virtue of "integrity or constancy" we must see our lives in such narrative terms. To attempt that virtue is just what I have been calling "the search for perfection," and I agree that this search requires the construction of such narratives. But if we do drop the Aristotelian demand, contenting ourselves with narratives tailored ad hoc to the contingencies of individual lives, then we may welcome a Baconian culture dominated by "the Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist" — not necessarily as the final goal of human progress, but at least as a considerable improvement on cultures dominated by, for example, the Warrior or the Priest.
On my account of Freud, his work enables us to construct richer and more plausible narratives of this ad hoc sort — more plausible because they will cover all the actions one performs in the course of one's life, even the silly, cruel, and self-destructive actions. More generally, Freud helped us see that the attempt to put together such a narrative — one that minimizes neither the contingency nor the decisive importance of the input into the machine that each of us is — must take the place of an attempt to find the function common to all such machines. If one takes Freud's advice, one finds psychological narratives without heroes or heroines. For neither Sartrean freedom, nor the will, nor the instincts, nor an internalization of a culture, nor anything else will play the role of "the true self." Instead, one tells the story of the whole machine as machine, without choosing a particular set of springs and wheels as protagonist.
Such a story can help us, if anything can, stop the pendulum from swinging between Aristotelian attempts to discover our essence and Sartrean attempts at self-creation de novo. This suggestion that our stories about ourselves must be stories of centerless mechanisms —of the determined processing of contingent input — will seem to strip us of human dignity only if we think we need reasons to live romantically, or to treat others decently, or to be treated decently ourselves. Questions like "Why should I hope?" or "Why should I not use others as means?" or "Why should my torturers not use me as a means?" are questions that can only be answered by philosophical metanarratives that tell us about a nonmechanical world and a nonmechanical self — about a world and a self that have centers, centers that are sources of authority. Such questions are tailored to fit such answers.
30 There seems to be a tension in Maclntyre's After Virtue between the early chapters, in which it is suggested that unless we can identify a telos common to all members of our species we are driven to the "emotivist" view that "all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference" (p. i 1), and chapters 14-15. In the latter chapters, which Maclntyre thinks of as a rehabilitation of Aristotelianism (seep. 239), nothing is done to defeat the suggestion that all moral judgments are nothing but choices among competing narratives, a suggestion that is compatible with the three paradigmatically Aristotelian doctrines that Maclntyre lists on pp. 183—186 of his book. By dropping what he calls "Aristotle's metaphysical biology" (p. 183), Maclntyre also drops the attempt to evaluate "the claims to objectivity and authority" of "the lost morality of the past" (p. 21). For unless a knowledge of the function of the human species takes us beyond Maclntyré s Socratic claim that "the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man" (p. 204), the idea of one narrative being more "objective and authoritative" than another, as opposed to being more detailed and inclusive, goes by the board.
So if we renounce such answers, such metanarratives, and fall back on narratives about the actual and possible lives of individuals, we shall have to renounce the needs that metaphysics and moral philosophy attempted to satisfy. We shall have to confine ourselves to questions like, "If I do this rather than that now, what story will I tell myself later?" We shall have to abjure questions like, "Is there something deep inside my torturer — his rationality — to which I can appeal?"
The philosophical tradition suggests that there is, indeed, something of this sort. It tends to take for granted that our dignity depends on the existence of something that can be opposed to "arbitrary will." This thing, usually called "reason," is needed to give "authority" to the first premises of our practical syllogisms. Such a view of human dignity is precisely what Freud called "the pious view of the Universe." He thought that the traditional oppositions between reason, will, and emotion — the oppositions in terms of which Maclntyre constructs his history of ethics — should be discarded in favor of distinctions between various regions of a homogenous mechanism, regions that embody a plurality of persons (that is, of incompatible systems of belief and desire). So the only version of human dignity that Freud lets us preserve is the one MacIntyre himself offers: the ability of each of us to tailor a coherent self-image for ourselves and then use it to tinker with our behavior. This ability replaces the traditional philosophical project of finding a coherent self-image that will fit the entire species to which we belong.
Given this revisionary account of human dignity, what becomes of human solidarity? In my view, Freud does nothing for either liberal or radical politics, except perhaps to supply new terms of opprobrium with which to stigmatize tyrants and torturers.31 On the contrary, he diminishes our ability to take seriously much of the traditional jargon of both liberalism and radicalism — notions such as "human rights" and "autonomy" and slogans such as "man will prevail" and "trust the instincts of the masses." For these notions and slogans are bound up with Aristotelian attempts to find a center for the self.
31 But diagnoses of the Freudian mechanisms that produce suitable candidates for the KGB and the Gestapo, of the sort made popular by Adorno and others who talk about "authoritarian personalities," add little to the familiar pre-Freudian suggestion that we might have fewer bully boys to cope with if people had more education, leisure, and money. The Adorno-Horkheimer suggestion that the rise of Nazism within a highly developed and cultivated nation shows that this familiar liberal sorution is inadequate seems to me unconvincing. At any rate, it seems safe to say that Freudo-Marxist analyses of "authoritarianism" have offered no better suggestions about how to keep the thugs from taking over.
On the other hand, Freud does nothing to diminish a sense of human solidarity that, rather than encompassing the entire species, restricts itself to such particular communal movements as modern science, bourgeois liberalism, or the European novel. If we avoid describing these movements in terms of metaphysical notions like "the search for truth," or "the realization of human freedom," or "the attain-ment of self-consciousness," histories of them will nevertheless remain available as larger narratives within which to place the narratives of our individual lives. Freud banishes philosophical metanarratives, but he has nothing against ordinary historical narratives. Such narratives tell, for example, how we got from Galileo to Gell-Man, or from institutions that defended merchants against feudal overlords to institutions that defend labor against capital, or from Don Quixote to Pale Fire.
Letting us see the narratives of our own lives as episodes within such larger historical narratives is, I think, as much as the intellectuals are able to do in aid of morality. The attempt of religion and metaphysics to do more — to supply a backup for moral intuitions by providing them with ahistorical "authority" — will always be self-defeating. For (given the present rate of social change) another century's worth of history will always make the last century's attempt to be ahistorical look ridiculous. The only result of such attempts is to keep the pendulum swinging between moral dogmatism and moral skepticism.32 What metaphysics could not do, psychology, even very "deep" psychology, is not going to do either; we pick up Freud by the wrong handle if we try to find an account of "moral motivation" that is more than a reference to the historical contingencies that shaped the process of acculturation in our region and epoch.
Historical narratives about social and intellectual movements are the best tools to use in tinkering with ourselves, for such narratives suggest vocabularies of moral deliberation in which to spin coherent narratives about our individual lives. By contrast, the vocabulary Freud himself used in much of his writing — an individualist, Stoic vocabulary, charged with ironic resignation — does little for the latter purpose. It has too much in common with the vocabulary of the self-erasing narratives of Rameau's nephew, Dostoevsky's "Underground Man," and Sartre's Roquentin: stories about machines chewing themselves to pieces. By contrast, narratives that help one identify oneself with communal movements engender a sense of being a machine geared into a larger machine. This is a sense worth having. For it helps reconcile an existentialist sense of contingency and mortality with a Romantic sense of grandeur. It helps us realize that the best way of tinkering with ourselves is to tinker with something else — a mechanist way of saying that only he who loses his soul will save it.33
32 For a discussion of the causes and effects of such pendulum swings, see Annette Baier, "Doing without Moral Theory?," in her Posturer of the Mind (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
33 This paper owes a great deal to the comments of J. B. Schneewind, Alexander Nehamas, an the late Irvin Ehrenpreis on a draft version.
pp. 142-162, Essays on Heidegger and others, Richard Rorty
Wat een oh.
Men zegt dat Christen zijn een vrijwillige keuze is!
Wil ie hierheen?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_epistemology
Prachtig.
Heb. en Cor. walmen meteen in je gezicht!
Meerdere malen heb ik op dit forum verwezen naar William Wainwrhight die in zijn Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (OUP) zichzelf en Heidegger reformed epistemologists noemt.
Reformed epistomologist & karygmatic ontology heb ik vergeleken met hermeneutical ontology & aesthetic epistemology en daaruit voortvloeiend: (forcefully) reforming epistemologist :ego:
Het Engelse karygmatic betekent prekerig, prekende en kerygmatische ontologie leert dat moraliseren de ren van bestaan is.
Het moraliseren gaat vergezeld van het opgeheven wijsvingertje. Wil degene tegen wie het opgeheven wijsvingertje geen 'ja' zeggen tegen de legitimatie van het opgeheven wijsvingertje dan verschijnt vroeg of laat het opgestoken middelvingertje (incl. o.a. 'the tongue in the asshole of Molly Bloom', p. 458, Objectivism; The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff).
Terugkerend naar het onderwerp van de draad: de topicstartster heeft duideluijk aangegeven na de - gewenste - eliminatie van het postmodernisme geconfonteerd te worden met postskepticisme.
Aan het begin van deze draad heeft prikker pyrrho de articulatie 'kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristotelische filosofie' ingebracht.
In het stukje van R. Rorty (hiervoor geplaatst) is er sprake van Hume's mental atoms' en atomisme is een brug te ver voor de 'kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristotelische filosofie.
E. Sosa en A. Platinga (hiervoor geplaatst) blijven binnen de kaderstellingen van de kerklijke goedgekeurde aristotelische filosofie en met hun stellingnames proberen ze skeptisme weg te schrijven zonder dat ze door hebben dat christelijk-theologische benadering permanent uitnodigt tot skepticisme.
Ook in deze draad is het verschil uiteengezet tussen 'virtue ethics' en 'ethics of care'.
Daar 'virtue etics' uiteraard een aristotelische insteek heeft kunnen discussies als deze onaanvaardbaar vervuild worden door de 'kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristotelische filosofie'.
Dhr. Sosa en dhr. Plantinga laten zich in hun Gdsdenken geremd worden en dat mogen ze doen op voorwaarde dat zij het (eeuwig?) skepticisme genereerd door de kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristolische filosofie buiten filosofische discussies houden. Maar ze nemen hun christelijk-theologische existentiële problemen wel mee naar discussies zoals deze.
N.B. (1)
Hiervoor is Vrginia Held's beschouwing over 'Ethcis of Care' geplaatst. M.b.t. feminisme geldt ook voor haar:feminism without postmodernism (Miranda Fricker).
N.B. (2)
Over amerikaans/europese spraakverwarring doet Clive Cazeaux een boekje open in Metaphor and Continental Philosophy (http://www.speedyshare.com/201503865.html) (from Kant to Heidegger).
wao, Rourchid :
het is maar de vraag of jou groot moeite wel beloond & gewaardeerd zou kunnen worden door deze kleuren blind post bullshitisten-sectes hier ...
maar het is wel de moeite waard om te proberen om al die luchtballonetjes door te prikken & al die post bullshitisme belachelijk zandkastelen omver te werpen ! :lol:
u do play by their rules , i'm afraid !
unconsciously giving them right , i guess !
post bullshitisme
Synoniem van Paulinisme?
Synoniem van Paulinisme?
heeft er niets mee te maken !
Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 3
I. SYMPOSIUM: HUMAN BEINGS
2. "Human Beings" Revisited: My Body is Not an Animal
Mark Johnston
Twenty years ago, in the paper "Human Beings" and elsewhere, I defended an alternative methodology for arriving at an answer to the question: What kind captures our essence and so determines our conditions of survival over time?1
Previously, when it came to philosophical theorizing about personal identity, the popular methodology—"the method of cases"—had been to collect "intuitions" about real and imaginary cases of personal survival and ceasing to be, and then bring those intuitions into some sort of reflective equilibrium that bore on the question of the necessary and sufficient conditions for an arbitrary person’s survival. Imagined cases were treated as more or less on a par with real cases; for the then natural idea was that we should not restrict our evidence base to the adventitious experiments of step-motherly nature, when we could also avail ourselves of the ingenious thought experiments in the philosophy journals.
1 "Human Beings", Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), reprinted in M. Tooley (ed), Metaphysics (Garland Press, 1993); J. Kim and E. Sosa (eds.), Metaphysics: An Anthology (Basil Blackwell, 1999); and Postgraduate Foundation in Philosophy (Open University Press, 2002).
1 There are a number of reasons why this simple method of cases, with its implied parity of the real and the imaginary, should be rejected. First, the specific necessary conditions on our survival, conditions that are the upshot of our common essence, need not be available to armchair, or "a priori", reflection. Certainly, it would be strained to require that we must grasp such de facto necessary conditions in order to count as semantically competent with terms or phrases like "person" or "is the same person". That thought generalizes to put pressure on a once popular model of philosophical analysis as the teasing out and codifying our semantic competence. This model, which makes philosophy look and feel like a sort of advanced lexicography, might be replaced with the idea of philosophical analysis as aiming for the real definition of the item or phenomenon in question. This involves using all of the relevant knowledge and argumentative ingenuity we can muster in order to say what it is to be the given item or phenomenon. Clearly, much of that knowledge will be a posteriori, even if not particularly recherché.
A large part of my reason for returning to the topic of personal identity after so many years is to provide an illustration of the viability of the method of real definition.
Real definition is not inherently at odds with conceptual analysis. Concepts are themselves among the legitimate targets of real definition. For given any complex item, we can enquire after its constituents, and the relevant manner of combination that yields the complex in question. So a concept may be a conjunction of other concepts, or a quantification over other concepts, or built up from other concepts in still more detailed ways. Articulating any such conceptual structure looks as though it deserves the name "conceptual analysis", even though we now know that the results of cognitive science and empirical linguistic semantics will properly condition most of the interesting claims about conceptual structure. Even in the case of the analysis of (read: the real definition of) concepts, a posteriori matters of fact will play a crucial role.
Still, it will be urged that the application conditions of a concept must be at least implicitly understood by possessors of that concept, unless those possessors are disposed to defer either to experts (as with the concept of a tort in law) or to reality itself (as with the concept of water) to settle the extension of the concept. Just so; none of that need be denied in order to put real definition at the center of the philosophical stage. When the pattern of deference goes all the way to reality itself, as with the concept of water, then, in determining the extension of the concept across possible situations, we would do well to note our partial understanding of the concept, and get on with the inquiry into the real definition of the phenomenon itpicks out. So when investigating the concept of water and its extension across possible situations, we quickly find ourselves considering the question of what itis to be the stuff water, and whether, for example, the manifest form of water enters into its nature or essence along with its chemical composition, or is instead no more than a contingent appearance of water.2 So if, in the same way, we defer to reality in our use of the concept of personal identity then we would do best to go straight to the real definition of a (human) person.
2 For more on this approach see "Manifest Kinds", Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997).
Even so, it may plausibly be held that in possessing the concepts of a person and of personal identity we are not deferring to experts, or even to a reality that is beyond the ken of ordinary users of these concepts. We all know well enough what persons are! This may be the best remaining defense of the old a priori method of aiming to articulate the application conditions of the concept of personal identity simply by considering our intuitive judgments in imagined cases.
Against this defense of the method of cases, "Human Beings" argued that our common concept of a person is "highly determinable", a polite way of saying that it does not carry very much content. This is shown first by the enormous range of detailed and conflicting conceptions (theories, ideologies, theologies) of persons and personal survival that have been expressed by using the common concept. Secondly, when we let the concept of a person run free in the full range of imaginary cases, the resultant picture of what it picks out is that of a "Bare Locus" of mental life, something that in principle could survive any amount of psychological and physical discontinuity. it is quite implausible to suppose that we are tracing any such things when, in the easy and offhand ways that we do, we trace ourselves and others through time.
So the method of cases, understood as a way of articulating the application conditions of our concept of personal identity is, at the very least, in need of reining in by a more robust sense of what is really possible in the way of human survival. Where could that come from if not from the real definition of a (human) person, an account of what it is to be a (human) person? Hence the somewhat non-standard way of putting the question of personal identity: What kind captures our essence and so determines our conditions of survival over time?
2 There is a second worry about the appeal to the method of cases in articulating the necessary and sufficient conditions of the survival of something over time. We do not find much evidence that in tracing objects and persons (as opposed to things in other categories, such as performances, for example) through time we are actually deploying knowledge of sufficient conditions for cross-time identity. Instead, as a matter of empirical fact, it appears that nature saves us cognitive labor by having us "offload" the question of sufficiency onto the objects and people themselves—if I may put it that way. Objects of various kinds are salient to us, they attract our attention, and we trace them through space and time. As long as they do not manifest changes in respects we know to be important for their kind, we are ready to credit them as having survived, even if we remain properly agnostic about what their persistence actually consists in. So we should be prepared to discover that in tracing objects we are deploying knowledge of some necessary conditions for their survival over time—the thing can’t explode into smithereens, for example—but not of any non-trivial sufficient condition. The objects just take care of themselves in this regard, they either persist or cease to be; to witness such outcomes we need not know any sufficient condition for their persistence.
If this plausible empirical conjecture as to "offloading" turns out to be true, it should be very bad news for those philosophers who suppose that in tracing objects or persons we are in the cognitive situation of having to stitch together short-lived entities like phases or temporal stages into significantly persisting wholes by means of "gen-identity" relations. A gen-identity relation is a necessary and sufficient condition for two temporal stages (or phases, or temporal parts) to be stages of the same persisting object. But as to the sufficient conditions, they are precisely what we do not need to know when we are tracing salient objects which are naturally individuated anyway.
An example might bring out the point more clearly. Here I confess immediately to using an imaginary case, but only in the service of clarification. (I also hope the example shows that rejecting the parity between real and imagined cases doesn’t have to be a puritanically joyless exercise; we need not banish the small pleasures of cartoonlike science fiction from the topic of personal identity. Everything depends on how the cases are used.)
Suppose we are in a civilization where androids are, on the surface, and in terms of speech and behavior, indistinguishable from humans. Unlike ours, however, their heads just contain air-conditioners; that is, their heads contain "organs" for cooling their bodies. (Aristotle’s view of us would actually be true of them.) The androids’ heads, unlike ours, are not at all where the action is when itcomes to their survival over time. An android can function very well for days without a head. Everything important is going on in the torso of the android. Now suppose that you have become familiar with someone, whom you take to be an android, while he is in fact a human. And suppose you have been unwise enough not to rely on offloading, that is, on just letting this salient person capture your attention as he does in fact persist through time. Instead, you concentrate on short-lived stages of your acquaintance, and knit them together in terms of some criterion of identity; which, because you take him to be an android, amounts to something like: one stage of such a being is a stage of the very same being if and only if there is a pattern of continuity connecting the torsos of the stages.
Then, the inevitable takes place. Your acquaintance loses his head. But the torso, or "head complement", remains intact. Even though we have stipulated that your acquaintance is human and has not survived, you will count him as surviving, at least until the manifest signs of death are undeniable. For the gen-identity criterion you were using knits together "headless torso" stages with the earlier stages of your acquaintance. For you have been treating continuous preservation of the torso as sufficient for identity.
In doing this you are led to the wrong judgment; in fact, your acquaintance does not survive the destruction of his head. He is a human, not an android.
You would have been much better simply waiting and seeing just what kind of thing he was. You had no business deploying a sufficient condition for his identity over time. In fact, your using that sufficient condition did not help you trace him forward in time. All the previous evidence for his survival, the evidence of gross bodily integrity and consistency of dispositions to speech and behavior, would have been just as good evidence that he survived. You did not need to settle what exactly he was in order to trace him through time.
Your fault was unnecessarily to settle in advance, a priori as it were, what kind of thing he was. You could have "offloaded" that cognitive task onto him; his nature, which you do not fully know, settles what kind of thing he is.
My hypothesis is that our cognitive system does "offload" in precisely this way. For the very simple purposes of tracing and recognition, we need not know, and do not know, sufficient conditions for identity over time. The developmental facts, concerning among other things the early age at which we in fact trace objects and persons, seem to support this hypothesis.
Notice that something about the case of the "android" who was really a human suggests that we can be aware of persisting items and trace them through time even if we are ignorant of the sufficient conditions for their identity. In the case of the "android" who was really a human, you made a mistake about your acquaintance. That implies that you still had your acquaintance as a topic of your thought and talk, and that you were able to trace him through time, even though you were ignorant of the sufficient conditions of his persistence through time. This suggests that tracing objects through time does not involve drawing on sufficient conditions for their persistence.
Trying to make our implicit knowledge of sufficient conditions for identity explicit by examining our reactions to merely possible cases will be a particularly pointless task if the hypothesis of offloading is correct.
3 Both "Human Beings" and "Reasons and Reductionism" played up a third worry about the implied parity of real and imaginary cases.3 In the massive core of real cases, many sources of evidence for personal survival, such as persistent bodily integrity and mental continuity, converge and agree; whereas the whole philosophical charm and utility of the imagined cases in the literature on personal identity lies precisely in teasing these elements apart. The obvious question arises: Might we not have thereby undermined our ability to make good judgments about personal identity when considering these very cases?
3 "Reasons and Reductionism", The Philosophical Review 101 (1992).
That question acquires a sharper bite if we make the distinction not exactly between real and imaginary cases, but between the massive core of ordinary cases in which bodily, behavioral, and mental evidence converges, and the fringe cases, real or imaginary, where those sorts of evidence come apart. Bear in mind the moral horrors that await many of us around the end of our lives, thanks to the perverse incentives of modern medicine; mental death, coma, and absurdly protracted languescent shade-life. Who is to say that such all-too real conditions present very much simpler objects of philosophical diagnosis than Derek Parfit’s most outré imagined cases? The same goes for pre-fetal matters. Neither the beginning nor the end of life present the best starting points for a theory of personal identity. it’s in the massive core of ordinary cases of viable healthy human life where we can best trust our judgments of personal identity.
That the relevant distinction is between ordinary and fringe cases and not between real and imagined cases should have been obvious upon reflection. For imaginary cases can sometimes presage real cases; our imagination is sometimes the source of future reality. But where the imagined case is also a fringe case, it will remain so even if it becomes a real case.
In order to press home the worry about the alleged parity between ordinary and fringe cases, "Human Beings" noted three potentially distorting influences that could condition our judgments in fringe cases. The distorting influences were the psychological and social continuer effects, and the effect of a quasi-Cartesian illusion that we are only essentially just that of which we can be certain of being.
it is possible to imagine cases in which a person ceases to be, but nonetheless has an excellent continuer of his psychological life. In my view, teletransportation, in which a person’s body is destroyed and immediately copied at a remote location, is just such a case. The person who appears at the receiving end remembers the acts and the experiences of the previous person, he will carry out that person’s intentions, and he has beliefs and desires that almost precisely correspond to those of the person he replaced. Yet, those of us who think of teletransportation as a method of copying people which has the singular defect of destroying the original copy, will have to admit that teletransportation would serve up, at least on the mental side, the best sort of evidence we usually have for personal identity. There is therefore, in such imagined cases, a natural tendency simply to accede to such evidence, and trace a person through the events which preserve such psychological continuity. This I dubbed "the psychological continuer effect". it could very well just be an understandable overgeneralization from the ordinary run of cases, where such psychological evidence is highly correlated with the preservation of the bodily integrity of the person in question.
A further possible distorting factor in the fringe cases—"the social continuer effect"—arises from our practical interests in the relation of personal identity. In everyday life the persistence of a person typically guarantees that over the short term there will continue to be some occupant of the particular complex of detailed and manifold social roles (lover, friend, leader, supporter, colleague, nemesis, regular customer, etc.) which made up that person’s social life. Typically, over short periods, the holding of personal identity guarantees that one will have a unique social continuer, namely oneself. And the holding of personal identity is typically the only explanation of social continuation. So, reinforcing the psychological continuer effect we have the tendency to trace a person in terms of his social continuer. This will be a distorting effect so long as we are not essentially occupants of complexes of social roles.
When I wrote "Human Beings" the dominant position in the philosophy of personal identity was the so-called Wide Psychological View; which has it that a person survives some event or series of events just in case he has a unique psychological continuer around after the event.4 In order to defend the Wide Psychological View, a theorist needs to appeal to intuitions about fringe cases, cases like teletransportation that are designed to tease apart bodily and psychological continuity. Otherwise, he has no argumentative leverage against views which require some form of bodily continuity in order for personal identity to hold.5 Any such defense of the Wide Psychological View must face the question of whether the crucial intuitions are simply driven by the psychological and social continuer effects. Which makes the Wide Psychological View quite hard to defend.
4 See Lewis, "Survival and Identity", in Amelie 0. Rorty, (ed.), The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: California UP, 1976); Quinton, "The Soul", The Journal of Philosophy 59/15 (19 July 1962), 393 409; 5. Shoemaker, with Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Shoemaker clearly had some sympathy for the view that bodily continuity is constitutive of personal identity when he wrote Self-knowledge and Selfidentity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1963), although he allowed that in exceptional cases the bodily criterion of personal identity could be overridden by the memory criterion. He decisively abandons the bodily criterion in "Persons and Their Pasts", American Philosophical Quarterly 7/4 (October 1970), 269—85. There is one exception to this claim. In "Personal Identity: A Materialist’s Account", in S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne (above n. 4) and elsewhere, Shoemaker offers an argument from functionalism in the philosophy of mind to the Wide Psychological View. This argument is well met by Eric Olson in "What Does Functionalism Tell Us About Personal Identity?" Nous 36 (2002). See also my review of the Shoemaker and Swinburne volume in The Philosophical Review 96 (1987).
Perhaps the best thing we can say for the Wide Psychological View is that it gives roughly correct conditions for the persistence of "personas", that is, the psychological and social continuers of developed persons. In saying that, we need not give up on the ordinary thought that persons predate and outlive their personas.
The third potentially distorting effect on our intuitions mentioned in "Human Beings" is a misleading reification of an unspecific concept of ourselves as "this subject of experience". That way of picking ourselves out, associated with (but not semantically equivalent to) some uses of "I", does not make any commitment as to the specific nature of the subject picked out. If one mistakes this lack of specificity in the way in which one is thinking of oneself in first-person thought for a lack of specificity in the thing we are thinking of, or simply elide that distinction, then one can readily imagine surviving any amount of psychological and bodily discontinuity, as if one were a pure ego or Bare Locus of mental life. Thus I can imagine, from the inside as it were, turning into a dolphin, that is, undergoing a wild transformation in my body and psychology, thinking all the while "What is happening to me?"
So the method of cases stands seriously impeached, as does the Wide Psychological View, which appears to depend on an appeal to intuitions about fringe cases.
4 What then is the alternative methodology for theorizing about personal identity; equivalently, about what kind of thing we are? At one level, it can be none other than the method of real definition; namely using all of the relevant knowledge and argumentative ingenuity we can muster in order to say what is it to be the given item or phenomenon. "Human Beings" made a more concrete proposal as to how to approach such a real definition. The humble and ubiquitous activity of tracing ourselves and others over time places significant constraints on the kind of thing we are. Whatever kind itis, you won’t get very far saying that it’s a kind whose members we would find it very hard to trace in the easy and offhand ways in which we seem to trace ourselves and others. For the cost of saying that comes close to the severing of all connection with the topic of personal identity.
So, for example, we can set aside the idea that we are Bare Loci of mental life, barely constrained either by bodily or by mental continuity. Perhaps the idea that we are separable mental substances that are only remotely connected to bodily activity also can be set aside. The argument is not that these things do not exist, although I do reserve the right to argue that. The argument is that even if they do, they are not the things that we are tracing when we trace persons. Otherwise, our offhand methods of tracing by way of carefree observation of bodily continuity, sometimes augmented by observing some sort of consistency in behavior, would be woefully inadequate to the task of tracing persons. Relative to our easy and offhand methods of tracing persons, judgments about the persistence of Bare Loci or separable mental substances would be highly adventurous conjectures. And yet we do have knowledge of personal identity over time, at least in the massive core of ordinary cases. Indeed, it is among the most secure sort of knowledge that we possess.
So the suggestion was that our point of departure in theorizing about personal identity should be the hypothesis that we are some natural kind that is "epistemologically ready to hand", that is, one whose members are easily traceable in the undemanding ways in which we trace ourselves and others. A good place to start, I said, was with the biological kind Homo sapiens sapiens, and with the concomitant thought that we are certain kinds of animals. That point could be reinforced by observing that much of our tracing of our fellows through time is strongly akin to the tracing of cats by dogs, or dogs by dogs, or dogs by us. Similar perceptual and cognitive mechanisms appear to be involved. And in all these cases, the object of attention is (almost) unquestionably another animal.
5 Now it has been the position of those who style themselves "Animalisis", most notably Paul Snowdon and Eric Olson, that this point of departure is also the terminus of our journey in theorizing about personal identity.6 For them, the answer to the question with which we began is that we are essentially members of the biological kind Homo sapiens sapiens. And I know from my very pleasant conversations with him, that Snowdon, at least, regards my resistance to this obvious position as particularly puzzling. For, after all, the objection that the Animalists regard as putting most pressure on their position is one that can be dismissed given the resources developed in "Human Beings"!
6 Paul Snowdon "Persons Animals, and Ourselves", in Christopher Gill (ed), The Person and The Human Mind (Oxford University Press, 1990); Eric Olson, The Human Animal (Oxford University Press, 1997). I think of these writers as reviving the position of David Wiggins, who wrote "a person is any animal that is such by its kind to have the biological capacities to enjoy fully the psychological capacities enumerated"; and, "There would be no one real essence of persons as such, but every person could still have the real essence of a certain kind of animal. Indirectly this would be the real essence in virtue of which he was a person" (Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Oxford University Press, 1980), 176).
Let me explain. Thomas Mann, during his wartime sojourn in Princeton, New Jersey, wrote a novella entitled Transposed Heads (1945), in which the fantastic conceit of head-swapping is given a brilliant seriocomic treatment. (it is worth looking into Mann’s implied judgments about who turns out to be whom!) it seems that the credit for introducing a roughly equivalent conceit into philosophical discourse should go to Sydney Shoemaker, who writes in his Self-Knowledge and SelfIdentity, it is now possible to transplant certain organs.. . in such a way that the organ continues to function in its new setting. . . . t is at least conceivable . . . that a human body could continue to function normally if its brain were replaced by one taken from another human body.... Two men, a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Robinson, had been operated on for brain tumors, and brain extractions had been performed on both of them. At the end of the operations, however, the assistant inadvertently putBrown’s brain in Robinson’s head, and Robinson’s brain in Brown’s head. One of these men immediately dies, but the other, the one with Robinson’s head and Brown’s brain, eventually regains consciousness. Let us call the latter "Brownson." . . . When asked his name he automatically replies "Brown." He recognizes Brown’s wife and family. . . and is able to describe in detail events in Brown’s life . . . . Of Robinson’s past life he evidences no knowledge at all.7
7 [I]Self -Knowledge and Self-Identity (Cornell University Press, 1963), 23—4.
As a matter of statistical fact, by far the most common reaction to this case is to suppose that Brownson is Brown. Yet it seems clear that Brownson is not the same organism or human animal as Brown. In fact, Brown’s dc-brained body—let’s call it "Brownless"—could be provided with enough in the way of brain stem tissue, transplanted from still another source, so as to be kept alive in what has come to be called a persistent vegetative condition. it can seem that this human "vegetable" Brownless is identical with the very human animal that once exhausted Brown’s bodily nature. Brownless is that animal in a surgically mutilated condition.
If that is so, and if Brown is not identical with Brownless, but with Brownson, then Brown and his kind-mates, those essentially the same as he, are not essentially human animals. If, in such cases, you go where your brain goes, then you are not essentially constituted by a human organism, even if in all ordinary situations you are wholly constituted by one.
Note that this is a classic appeal to an intuition about a fringe case, a case which is precisely designed to tease apart mental continuity (holding between Brown and Brownson) and the organic physical continuity (holding between Brown and Brownless) that secures the survival of a human animal. As Snowdon urged, shouldn’t the author of "Human Beings" be the first to reject the appeal to such cases, on the grounds that in separating out mental and physical continuity they may well undermine the contingent preconditions of our being good judges of personal identity?
Furthermore, the standard reaction to this case can seem to have the flavor of a sort of "Materialist Cartesianism". Here is the brain, kept alive and functioning during the transplant. it is easy to imagine a self contingently attached to it,a self understood as a Bare Locus of mental life, or as a separable mental substance. In tracing Brown so that he ends up as Brownson, might we not be misled by imaging the brain as a sort of organic chariot for such a Bare Locus, or such a separable mental substance? If that is a likely possibility, if we are likely to be thinking of the brain as a chariot of the pure ego, shouldn’t the author of "Human Beings" be the last person to credit the dominant intuitive reaction in such cases?
Moreover, notice that Shoemaker neatly frames his question about identity in precisely the terms that would invoke the psychological and social continuer effects. He writes: When asked his name [Brownson] automatically replies "Brown." He recognizes Brown’s wife and family. . . and is able to describe in detail events in Brown’s life. . . . Of Robinson’s past life he evidences no knowledge at all.
Shouldn’t the author of "Human Beings" be most suspicious about this sort of framing of an imaginary case? So might my friends the Animalists berate me!
But of course, I agree with them on all three counts, and said as much twenty years ago. I wrote: Usually. . . the "predominant" reaction to Shoemaker’s case, viz., the fact that most judge that Brownson is Brown, is taken as establishing that Brownson is Brown. But this is justanother example of uncritical reliance on the method of cases. Indeed, the predominant reaction can be explained in terms of the distorting influences described below as the psychological- and social- continuer effects. We need a principled reason, consonant with the alternative method, for taking seriously the judgment that Brownson is Brown and thereby departing from the straightforward naturalistic view of ourselves as essentially human organisms.
it is noteworthy that the most forceful defender of Animalism, Eric Olson, writing ten years later, appeals to what amounts to the psychological and social continuer effects, precisely to discredit the intuition that you go where your brain goes.8
8 Eric Olson, (above n. 6) 68 70.
6 So why am I not an Animalist? it is because Animalists are badly placed to account for the status of "remnant" persons.
Suppose Brown’s whole head and neck is removed, and kept alive and functioning by artificial means. His torso, or "head-and-neck complement" is destroyed. Brown’s head is not an animal. An animal is wholly constituted by an organism, something with the power of self-maintenance in the natural environment in which the animal’s species developed. The head and neck can be maintained as a functioning unit only by extrinsic, highly artificial means. Even if we consider that the larger whole includes the head, the machines, and the medical staff, we do not find anything that deserves the name of "an animal". So, in holding that ordinary human persons are essentially animals, Animalists are committed to the claim that Brown does not survive as his separated head and neck.
This is philosophy, so we should be prepared for the comeback that the head and neck is an animal, perhaps because itincludes what was a controlling part of the life of an animal, namely the brain. But then consider the head without the neck; it too includes the brain, so is it an animal? But then consider the brain, and then the cerebrum, on the assumption that something like the cerebrum is the minimal part that could subserve reflective mental life of some complexity. Is the brain an animal? Is the cerebrum an animal? The argument that follows could be run through with any such minimal remnant. Do we want to say that any such minimal remnant is an animal? Surely not. An animal is (constituted by) an organism, not by a mere organ or mere organ part.
The crucial point to notice is this: In order to disable the following argument from remnants, the Animalist would have to argue that any remnant that is complex enough to be a locus of reflective mental life counts as an animal. And that would depart significantly from any ordinary sense of "animal". For that reason, Animalists have supposed that such remnants are not animals.
So consider such a remnant, Brown’s separated head and neck, kept alive and functioning. Suppose itis provided with a continuous flow of air through its larynx and mouth. We might then observe a lengthy diatribe emanating from Brown’s head. In this, and other ways, we might come to have massive evidence that Brown’s head, or the head and its mechanical sustainers, constitutes a person in John Locke’s sense of "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, that can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, at different times and places". Let’s call the ostensible person constituted by Brown’s head, or the head and its mechanical sustainers, a "remnant person".
Animalists are happy to use John Locke’s characterization of a person. Their point is simply that we human persons turn out to be animals. But what of remnant persons? Animalists need not implausibly say that these would be animals too. But they will then have either to deny that there would be such remnant persons or maintain that they come into being with the destruction of the "head-and-neck complements" of human animals.
As to the first option, it looks like a mistaken philosophical strategy. For it involves foreclosing something that any philosophical theory should leave as an open empirical possibility, it is likely that we could have massive evidence that there was such person in the vicinity of a severed head, if it were kept alive and functioning. He could vociferously lament his condition; or describe pains in his phantom body, or complain about the paralysis of his phantom limbs.
The remaining option is to suggest that a remnant person would come into being as a result of the destruction of the torso or head-and-neck complement of a human animal. The Animalists should say that the person constituted by Brown’s head and neck could not be Brown. But they can allow that it is a new, numerically distinct, person who was produced by the destruction of Brown’s head-and-neck complement.
Now here is a general conviction that many will share, one which organizes some of our thinking about persons and physical reality: You can’t bring a person into being simply by removing tissue from something, and then destroying that tissue, unless that tissue was functioning to suppress mental life or the capacity for mental life. A developing fetus might have a massive tumor in its developing brain, which suppresses its mental life, and perhaps even its capacity for mental life. Given that, we can understand how removing the tumor could allow a person in Locke’s sense to be present for the first time. But how could removing a sustaining torso bring this about? The presence of a person seems not to depend on this sort of extrinsic matter. (I cannot see how, in accepting this last principle, we must be implicitly relying on some argumentative route that is prey to any of the distorting influences detailed in Section 5.)
Thus, by denying that Brown survives as the person constituted by his separated head and neck, the Animalists run out of good options when in comes to accounting for remnant persons. They must either deny that there could be remnant persons or suppose that we bring such persons into being by removing and destroying tissue that was not functioning to suppress mental life, or the capacity for mental life.
7 The important thing to recognize is that in thus rejecting Animalism, one need not reject the plausible naturalistic view that we are animals, and that in tracing ourselves and each other in the massive core of ordinary cases, we are tracing things which are animals. We may distinguish two claims, accepting the first but not the second.
We are animals, members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens.
We are essentially animals, and so such that we are animals in every possible situation in which we survive.
The Animalist’s strongest argument, the "too many minds" objection, only supports the first claim. Yet Animalists like Eric Olson write as if it went all the way to supporting the second.
In "An Argument for Animalism" Olson argues that we are animals as follows: I turn now to my case for Animalism. it seems evident that there is a human animal intimately related to you. it is the one located where you are, the one we point to when we point to you, the one sitting in your chair. it seems equally evident that human animals can think. They can act. They can be aware of themselves and the world. Those with mature nervous systems in good working order can anyway. So there is a thinking, acting human animal sitting where you are now. But you think and act. You are the thinking being sitting in your chair. It follows from these apparently trite observations that you are an animal. . . .and there is nothing special about you: we are all animals. If anyone suspects a trick, here is the argument’s logical form.
1. (∃x) (x is a human animal & x is sitting in your chair)
2. (x) ((x is a human animal & x is sitting in your chair) → x is thinking)
3. (x) (x is thinking & x is sitting in your chair → x = you)
4. (∃x) (x is a human animal & x = you)9
9 In J. Barresi and R. Martin (eds.), Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003). The argument is taken from pp. 325—6.
The motivating thought is that animals, especially highly evolved human animals, can think; that is, can be subjects of belief, desire, feeling, and sensory experience. But if you are not identical with such an animal then there are, bizarrely, at least two thinkers occupying your chair. For there is an animal there, and you are, indisputably, a thinker.
Olson supposes that resistance to his argument will take one of three forms: either there are no human animals, or human animals can’t think, or there are indeed two thinkers there. Speaking for myself, all of these options seem a little silly. (There may be other reasons, arising from cases of commissurotomy and the like, that could prompt us to multiply thinkers justly, but it would be absurd to do thisjust because of the ordinary case of a person sitting in his chair.)
I think Olson has a sound argument here, one that it is a little silly to reject, and one that must condition all further discussion of personal identity. We are animals.
8 Elsewhere, I have taken some tronble to argne that constitntion is not identity.10
10 "Constitution is Not Identity", Mind 101 (1991), reprinted in Michael Rca (ed), Material Constitution (Cornell University Press, 1995). See also "Constitution", in F. Jackson and M. Smith (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2005).
There is, however, a mistaken deployment of that thought which is very seductive in the present context. it is important to see why it is mistaken.
Shouldn’t an advocate of the view that we are essentially human beings say that although a human being is constituted by a human animal it could also be constituted by a head (or brain, or head and neck) kept alive and functioning? If so, the diagnosis of Olson’s master argument would then proceed as follows: The first premise has a reading on which it is true. Yes, there is something constituted by a human animal that is in your chair. The second premise has a reading on which it is true. Yes, everything constituted by a human animal and that is also in your chair, namely you, is thinking. The third premise is straightforwardly true: you are the only thing in your chair that is thinking. So the conclusion should be now read as: There is something which is constituted by a human animal which is you. But that constituted thing is a human being.
The problem with this diagnosis is that it is something of a platitude that higher animals can "think", that is, at the very least they can feel, and sense their environment. Non-human animals do this all the time. (Some philosophers have denied this, I am sad to report.) Why should highly evolved animals like us, with our highly complex brains, be unable to do this? If animals can feel and sense their environments, why should some animals fail to do this just because they wholly constitute something else? Would you fail to be a thinker while you were working as, and so constituting, a living street-statue of Dante? No, the animal that allegedly constitutes you is now seeing the scene before it, and you are too. If you are not that animal, this is a bad result; we have one too many things seeing the scene before you.
Some are tempted to say that a human person counts as seeing the scene before him because the associated animal does. We have two thinkers, the person and the animal, but the person counts as a thinker derivatively. In saying this they may have in mind the analogy with weight; a statue is not identical with the bronze that makes it up. But if the bronze weighs ten pounds, then the statue does too; for a material item’s weight is just the weight of its matter. The statue "inherits" the property of weighing ten pounds from the matter that constitutes it. Once you recognize this, you will feel that there is nothing paradoxical about the thought that in a given region there are two "things", the statue and the bronze, that each weigh ten pounds. There is for example no temptation to conclude that the weight of the things in the region occupied by the statue is twenty pounds. Once we accept this, doesn’t the "too many thinkers" objection look to be something of a trick, which we already know how to unravel?
The crucial point, the point that changes one’s take on the "too many thinkers" objection, so that it will no longer seem like a mere trick to the friends of constitution, is that the analogy with weight gives the wrong result! it is not a good way out to say that the property of thinking is "inherited" by the person from the animal that constitutes it. For if I had to pick which of the two things I am identical with, the person or the animal, a good rule would be: Pick the thing which is non-derivatively the subject of mental acts. And on the present proposal with its appeal to "inheritance" it is the animal, and not the person, that is non-derivatively the subject of my mental acts. I would be identical with the animal, and so not with the person it constitutes. But the result we wanted was that I am identical with the person. That is a datum which any theory must capture.
So claiming that a human being or a human person is constituted by a human animal simply plays into Olson’s hands. For we can’t plausibly deny that an animal thinks, that is, senses and feels. This is why we should accept Olson’s argument as he intends it. I am not constituted by a human animal. I am (this is the "am" of predication) a human animal.
What I reject, however, is the next consequence Olson draws from this argument. Speaking of the position which he believes it supports, he writes:
But what of the case against Animalism? it seems that you would go along with your cerebrum if that organ were transplanted.. . . And that is not true of any animal. Generations of philosophers have found this argument compelling. How can they have gone so badly wrong?11
11 Eric Olson, (above n. 6), 331.
Olson’s answer is that they have mistaken a certain sort of evidence for personal identity, namely psychological continuity, for what personal identity consists in. (That is the thing I would say myself, if I held his view.)
However, as noted earlier, Olson’s view has the repugnant consequence that we can make a new person simply by removing tissue which previously played no role in suppressing mental life, or the capacity for mental life. Or ithas the repugnant consequence that there could be no person associated with my severed head, even when that head is kept alive and functioning, when the rest of my original body has been destroyed.
What has gone "so badly" wrong? An unstated assumption has slipped into the argument.
9 Why should the conclusion of Olson’s master argument (line 4) be taken to be at odds with the claim that you would go where your brain (or cerebrum) goes?
Consider this argument, directed at an adolescent sitting in her chair.
5. (∃x) (x is an adolescent & x is sitting in your chair)
6. (x) ((x is an adolescent & xis sitting in your chair) → x is thinking)
7. (x) (x is thinking & x is sitting in your chair → x = you)
8. (∃x) (x is an adolescent & x = you)
Again, this is a perfectly sound argument. Yet the conclusion is obviously consistent with the fact that the adolescent can survive the process of ceasing to be an adolescent and becoming an adult. As philosophical logicians used to say, "adolescent" is a phase sortal. it applies to a thing only during a certain phase of that thing’s existence. What isn’t true is:
9. If x is an adolescent then x is essentially an adolescent.
Along with phase sortals, that is, kind classifications which apply temporarily to things that they classify, there are contingent sortals, that is, kind classifications which happen to apply to things throughout their entire careers, but need not. By contrast with contingent sortals and phase sortals, there are "substance sortals", which classify things by their essential features.
Animalists may have implicitly assumed:
10. "Animal" is always a substauce sortal; that is, if anything is an animal then it is essentially so.
Once articulated, this looks like quite an embarrassing assumption to have made in the context of a discussion of brain (or cerebrum) transplants. For, the Animalists’ opponents, some of them at least, are suggesting that during the transplant, while the brain (or cerebrum) is kept alive and functioning the original person has been reduced to the condition of a brain (or cerebrum). And that view could be put this way:
before the transplant the original person was a human animal, and during the transplant he is not an animal. (No brain or cerebrum, and indeed no head, constitutes an animal.) This entails that
11. "Animal" is not always a substance sortal; there are some things that are contingently animals.
Indeed, my somewhat regimented use, twenty years ago, of the term "human being" was intended to pick out just such a thing. So long as we do not mistakenly endorse 10, the alternative view that we are essentially human beings—namely, things that in every ordinary case are human animals, but which could be reduced to the condition of a mere head or brain—is entirely consistent with the real insight in Animalism, namely that we are animals.
10 Animalists initially may resist the idea that there is some natural kind classification like "animal" which applies essentially to some class of things, say worms, and contingently to another class of things, say human beings. Nevertheless, this is something that Animalists need to get used to anyway.
For one example, consider the charge e on the electron. This looks as though it is had essentially by the electron; physicists will not call anything that lacks the charge e an electron. But there could be variable composites of particles whose charges at some time sum to e. Such a variable composite could lose one of its constituents, and so come to have a different charge from e. So, the sortal "physical item with charge e" is a substance sortal when applied to electrons, and a phase sortal when applied to such variable composites of particles.
Among the things classified by natural classifications are species themselves, changing items in space and time whose varying constitution consists in different populations of animals or plants at different times. So far as I can see, it might well be that thanks to their simple digestive systems, certain animals that are herbivores more or less must be so; while others that are actually herbivores could come to be carnivores or omnivores. Here again, we have the possibility of a natural classification that holds essentially in some cases and contingently in other cases.
For another example, consider ploidy, a measure of the number of copies of its basic chromosomes that an organic thing produces. The ploidy of cells can vary within an organism. In humans, most cells are diploid, containing two copies of the chromosomes, though sex cells are haploid, containing a single copy of each chromosome. The ploidy of a simple cell might be held to be essential to it, so that for a cell, "haploid" and "diploid" are substance sortals. But a multi-cellular organism might alternate between grossly haploid and diploid conditions. It seems that algae are in fact like this.12
12 Thanks to Karen Bennett for drawing my attention to this phenomenon.
These considerations might be combined with a rather humdrum speculation: after my conception it took me some time to develop into an animal. For a while, I was a multi-celled organism—a pre-fetal embryo—wholly parasitic on my mother. I developed into an animal, and was not always an animal. So although I am (now) an animal, I once was not.
Earlier, it was said that such speculations are not probative; there are many things we could say about the beginnings of life. it is one thing to admit that, and quite another to say that I must always have been an animal because I am one now! it is clearly a substantial, even controversial, assumption that if a natural classification like "animal" applies essentially to one class of things, it applies essentially to all the classes of things to which it applies.
There is then room for the claim that we human animals are human beings, who could in principle be reduced to the condition of a head, or of a brain, kept alive and functioning, even though no animal could survive in this condition. Weare however, for all practical purposes locked into a "permanent" phase, that of being an animal. "Human animal" is what we might call a "crypto-phase sortal". It is not an obvious phase sortal like "adolescent", but it can be shown to be a phase sortal upon philosophical reflection.
11 The "too many minds" objection may now seem to have been based on a simple mistake about sortal predication. To return to Locke’s famous characterization of a person, no one would deny that an adolescent is "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, that can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, at different times and places". (Well, no one other than the adolescent’s parents would deny this.) But then there is the person who is the adolescent, and can cease to be an adolescent. So do we have two persons in the same place, at the same time? Of course not, the person is (predicatively) the adolescent; there is one thing that is a person and an adolescent. So also, there is one thing here which is a human being, an animal, a person, and an adolescent. Only the first of these classifications bears on the essence of the thing in question.
That might seem reassuring, but I think that it is an incomplete response to Olson’s "too many minds" objection. Despite its disarming simplicity, it is a subtle objection, which Olson has elaborated in convincing ways, and it needs to be handled with some delicacy. To meet that objection fully we need to respect the idea that the things that have minds, the things that "think", are persons or animals. (Leave thinking machines out of it for the moment.) So much follows from the logical grammar of our predications of mentality. If we are saying that something is seeing or thinking or feeling then the subject of predication should be an animal or a person. I do not say that such logical grammar is ontologically very deep, but only that it organizes our thought about thinking things, and that if we fail to respect it, we will be led astray.
Nor do I say that good philosophers always respect it. Just to take one notable example, Patricia Churchland, in her very fine book Brain-Wise, is continually saying that brains see, hear, plan, imagine, remember, and so on.13 Of course I know a paraphrase on which what she says comes out true. Still, remarks like "the brain sees" make me balk, and largely because of the considerations that Olson has so well articulated.
13 Brain-Wise (Mit Press, 2002), passim
You are now seeing the scene before you, and you are not identical with your brain. You are bigger than your brain. And it is just lazy to suppose that you derivatively count as seeing the scene before you because your brain does. For, if one had to pick which thing one is, a good rule would be: pick the thing which is non-derivatively the source of your mental acts. So you are your brain, you have been encased in your head all this time! That is an absurdity that follows from the idea that the brain sees or thinks. The same absurdity can be derived from the idea that a head sees or thinks.
Could a body or a human organism be said to think? Obviously "thinking human organism" and "thinking human body" are weird phrases; but the argument that your body or organism cannot think only emerges if we suppose (rightly on my view) that you, the person, are wholly constituted by, but not identical with, your body. Then, if your body thinks, there will be two thinkers, the person you are and your body; and itlooks as though your body thinks in a more primary way. Thus we have it that you are your body, contradicting our supposition that you are the person constituted by that body.
So we should deny that a brain or a head thinks, and also deny that an organism thinks, in any primary, non-derivative sense. Instead we should say that these are things such that some of their operations constitute the thinking of a person or animal. (That might be loosely described as "thinking", just as some natural structure might be called a shelter.) Our concept of a thinking thing is non-accidentally and primarily tied to persons and animals.
But, it will be objected, isn’t this true:
(x)(x is a animal → x is an organism)?
And if it is possible for an animal to think, surely it follows that it is possible for an organism to think. By this route, doesn’t the "too many thinkers" problem come back to haunt us, after all?
No. What is true is:
(x)(x is an animal → x is wholly constituted by an organism).
I am an animal. This organism here, the H. M. S. Johnston, is my body. But my body is not an animal. Therefore, I am not identical with my body. Therefore, the animal that I am is not identical with my body. "My body" denotes the organism that constitutes the animal that I am. Some of the operations of that organism constitute my thinking. They provide the matter of my thoughts, in a way analogous to that in which my body provides my matter.
I have been in odd discussions, where people talked indifferently of "my body" and "my animal". Yet it must be said that the latter is a very odd usage; unless, say, I’m talking about my dog. I am wholly constituted by an organism, I have a body, and I am (the "am" of predication) an animal. "My animal" is too close to me to be mine. it is me. To speak of my animal is like speaking of my me. As with phrases like "Das Ich", you might be able to give such phrases as "my animal" a use in a philosophical discussion, but you should be very clear about what it takes to do that.
In contrast, there is nothing wrong with the phrase "rational animal". I am a rational animal, even though as a real definition "I am a rational animal" is a failure. But "rational organism" and "rational body" are just weird. Ordinary logical grammar seems to be signaling that animals and organisms are not one and the same.
If we respect this ordinary logical grammar which frames talk of one’s body, the organism that one is constituted by, and the animal that one is, then we will see that the "Organismic" argument that models itself on the sound Animalist argument supports a different sort of conclusion:
12. ((∃x) (x is a human organism & x is in your chair)
13. (x) ((x is a human organism & x is in your chair) → x is thinking)
14. (x) (x is thinking & x is in your chair → x = you)
15. ((∃x) x is a human organism & x = you) The first premise has a reading on which itis true. Yes, there is something constituted by a human organism that is in your chair. That is the only sense in which you are an organism. The second premise has a reading on which itis true. Yes, everything constituted by a human organism and that is also in you chair, namely you, happens to be thinking. The third premise is straightforwardly true: you are the only one in your chair that is thinking. So the conclusion should be now read as: there is something, you, which is constituted by a human organism. A truth no doubt, but a truth that now has been immunized against the virus of "too may minds". While it is absurd to deny that a healthy animal with a complex functioning brain can think, we have independent grounds to deny that a brain or a head or an organism can think.
The suggestion that organisms (bodies) constitute animals can be filled out by describing a situation where we have the organism (body) that constituted an animal, but not the animal itself. it seems to me that there are such situations; death is the end of an animal’s life, and hence the end of an animal. But itneed not be the end of the organism that constituted the animal. A dead organism is still an organism. A dead body is still a body. When we talk of "dead animals", we are talking of dead organisms or dead bodies that constituted animals.
I suppose the Animalist might argue as follows: just as a body is contingently alive, an animal is also contingently alive. A dead parrot is not an ex-parrot, contrary to Monty Python. it is still a parrot, itis just a parrot that is dead. But then I would say (putting aside all hopes of an afterlife, at least for now), surely death is the cessation of my existence, a dead person is an ex-person. That can make things look bad for the Animalist. For he wants to claim that there is something that is me and also an animal, and he wants to claim that "animal" is here functioning as substance sortal. Yet the animal in question exists for a while after my death, until itdecays. I do not exist for a while after my death.
I suppose an Animalist might deny that, say by construing our talk of recently dead people as talk of existent people who happen to be dead. One consequence of this is that it could be literally true that Paddy died, and then, as if that had not been bad enough, a week later at his cremation, he ceased to exist!
I offer the Animalists an alternative, one which sides with Animalism in insisting that we are animals, members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, but avoids strange commitments, such as the claim that we can make a person merely by tissue-removal, even though the removed tissue was in no way suppressing mental life or the capacity for mental life.
The alternative goes like this. You are a human being. Like many things that persist through time, you have a variable constitution over time. Perhaps you were first constituted by a multi-cellular organism, a pre-fetal embryo, and this organism turned into a living human body. As to whether that body is the original organism in a highly developed condition, and so is just a phase of a longer-lived organism, we may remain agnostic. In any case, without settling that question, we can say that you were first constituted by an organism, then by a body, that is, an organism of the sort that makes up an animal. Moreover, in the bizarre event of your head-separation, and the destruction of the rest of your body, you would then come to be constituted by a head, something which is neither a human body nor an organism. You would cease to be an animal, but you would not cease to be.
You are an animal at all those times at which you are wholly constituted by the right sort of living organism. Plants are organisms too, as are zygotes; they are obviously the wrong sorts of organisms. Perhaps "body" is a good name for the right sort of organism. As long as you have a body, and it is alive, you are an animal. The very beginnings of our lives aside, in all real cases we have ever encountered, we are animals.
12 Thus, the sound Animalist argument to the conclusion that we are, all of us, now animals is thus entirely compatible with the view defended in "Human Beings". it is at odds with the Wide Psychological View, at least when that view is understood as defining a person as a cross-time bundle of mental events and states united by relations of psychological connectedness and continuity. (The Wide Psychological View can satisfy materialist scruples by requiring further that each mental state and event in the bundle is physically realized, though not necessarily by the same animal, brain, or human being.) Such a bundle of mental events and states is not predicatively an animal at any time. For no animal is such a bundle of mental events and states, or a slice of such a bundle. And yet, you and I are now animals. When we trace each other in the ordinary ways we do, we are tracing things that are animals. So the view that treats us as such cross-time mental bundles is not to be favored, once we adopt the methodology outlined in "Human Beings".
Since a person is a thinker, the friend of the Wide Psychological View, who treats a person as a bundle of mental events and states, had better say that such a bundle can think. Then such a theorist faces a version of Olson’s problem: he must hold either that there are no human animals, or that human animals can’t think, or that there are indeed two thinkers in all the ordinary situations where we are convinced there is just one. And aren’t these options rather silly, or at least very unattractive?
The foregoing shows that the Wide Psychological View had better bundle up something which is, under all normal conditions, predicatively an animal. This may seem a simple matter. Why not bundle in with the mental events and states the very physical events and states that realize them? The cross-time unity conditions for the bundle, the gen-identity conditions in the sense introduced earlier, will still be purely psychological, and still hold among mental events and states. But the physical realizers of these states and events, namely physical events and states of the bodies of animals, will also be included in the bundle. There is now no straightforward argument that neither the bundles nor their time slices can be said to be animals.
Still, I shall argue that when we trace ourselves and others through time we are not in fact tracing such bundles, at least if nature has been wise enough to have us rely on the method of offloading. This will be part of the burden of my response to Denis Robinson.
13 In his insightful and probing discussion of "Human Beings" (chapter 1, this volume), Robinson, who favors the Wide Psychological View, is pleased to goad me with the very good question of whether, given my alternative methodology, I have any principled reason to reject Animalism. In so doing, Robinson hopes to engage me in an unpromising battle on two fronts. Alas, such is the fate of moderate compromises between extreme positions!
Perhaps enough has been said about Animalism, but I should note that Robinson’s systematic substitution of the term "human animal" for my preferred term "human organism" is not as harmless as he seems to imagine. it leads him to mischaracterize what on my view counts as a potentially temporary condition of human beings, and what typically constitutes human beings. In "Human Beings" I was concerned mostly with the latter, and I took some stylistic trouble to systematically talk of "human organisms" as the constitutors of human beings. Robinson ignores this, and substitutes the phrase "human animals". So contrary to the impression that Robinson gives, it was not, and is not, my view that human beings are constituted by animals! My body is not an animal, although I am an animal, thanks to being wholly constituted by that body, or human organism.
Let us turn to the Wide Psychological View, which has itthat psychological continuity (holding in a one—one fashion) is sufficient for the survival of a person, even if that continuity is secured by a series of distinct brains or brain-like-items.
Recall that the alternative methodology began by asking: What kinds of things are such that they could be traced in the easy and offhand ways in which we trace ourselves and each other over time? Call the kinds that pass this test "the initial pool". We have been looking in detail at two candidates in the initial pool, the kind animal (understood as applying to us essentially) and the kind human being. Even if the kind human being fares the better of the two, are there not other candidates in the initial pool? In this vein, Robinson writes:
A central weakness of Johnston (1987) is the lack of any overt argument in favor of the preference, albeit a fashionable one, for a pool which contains biological and other natural kinds, but which excludes mentalistically mdividuated substances per se. Johnston’s choice here (to allow only non-mentalistically individuated entities as bona fide substances) is not altogether arbitrary or unmotivated. He claims that the method of cases fails in this context, in part because "the" concept of a person, taken as what is in common to all the different conceptions of personhood which have historically been held or which may emerge from reflection on imaginary cases and the like, is impossibly vacuous. Nothing but a soul pellet could fit it, yet a capacity unproblematically to reidentify soul pellets would be impossible to account for; nor would itmake sense to attach the kind of importance to the vicissitudes of soul pellets which we in fact attach to issues of personal identity. Thus it is natural for him to assume that his alternative method must to some extent rely on nature, rather than on our concepts, to demarcate the persons: to assume, in other words, that the kind "Human Person" must be constructible relatively straightforwardly out of natural kinds. And in this context, as noted, Johnston identifies the relevant natural kinds as the biological kinds. (Ch. 1, pp. 17—18)
Robinson goes on to register the fact that I myself indicated that more needed to be said to remove the Wide Psychological View from contention, and that this would take a detailed discussion of the persistence of various kinds of things.14 (Some of that will be provided below.) In any case, he asks another very good question: In tracing ourselves and others in the easy and offhand ways in which we do, how can we be so sure that we are not tracing "mentalistically individuated" items?
Perhaps because he favors the Wide Psychological View, and thinks of that as the main contender, Robinson does not provide other examples of what he calls "mentalistically individuated" items. So let’s examine a few, first in the category of substances, and then in the category of cross- time bundles.
14 See Ch. 1, n. 19.
14 Are we Bare Loci of mental life, "soul pellets" that could survive any amount of psychological or physical discontinuity? One might think of a Bare Locus as a reified mental haecceity, something that carries the identity of a person, and can attach to this or that body or functional psychology. In one way, this conception fits with the wilder possibilities of reincarnation, as when I am supposed to be able to come back as a frog. In another way, it does not. Why should a Bare Locus bear any Karmic responsibility for the mental and physical life to which ithappened to be attached? The Bare Locus is ontologically too thin a thing itself to make any choices that warrant Karmic retribution.
The argument of "Human Beings" was that we are not Bare Loci, because these are not the sorts of things that could be traced in the easy and offhand ways in which we trace ourselves and each other.
Are we then "Cartesian" mental substances, primary bearers of mental properties, which are not dependent for their survival on the survival of the organism or the brain with which they causally interact? This view has a variant on which people, "the men and women themselves", are not identical with such mental substances. They are composites of bodies and mental substances, composites whose principle of unity is that the mental substances do interact with the bodies in question. So on this variant, when the body dies, the man or woman in question ceases to be, even though his or her soul or mental substance continues on.
Either variant of the "Cartesian" view would be made quite probable if we took at face value the reports that appear in roughly ten percent of all successful resuscitations after cardiac arrest. These are reports of leaving one’s body, while still being a thinking and perceiving thing, indeed a thing that occupies a point of view above one’s body, and the doctors trying to resuscitate it.
No account of our essence should ignore such evidence, if it really is evidence. However, the alternative method outlined in "Human Beings" still constrains what we should say if we were persuaded by the problematic, post-resuscitation reports. The things that we have been tracing, in the easy and offhand ways in which we trace ourselves and each other, are more likely to be the composites rather than the souls, for it is the composites that have the manifest bodily configuration that captures our attention. Our tracing is not a highly inferential matter, as itwould have to have been if we are to be credited with having ever traced Cartesian mental substances. So the first viable position to consider is the Cartesian Composite View, on which a person is a composite.
I do not want to enter my skeptical responses to the post-resuscitation reports here. Our question should rather be: Is there a philosophical argument against the Cartesian Composite View? Well, for one thing, it is not clear to me that the composite couldn’t be called "an animal". Accepting the view might be held to be accepting a novel account of what the members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens consist in, namely a soul and a body. The view would in no way deny the bodily, organic aspect of our natures. After all, the composite would cease to exist when the animal dies. Only the mental substance or soul lives on.
The argument from tracing is less conclusive against the Cartesian Composite View than itwas against the view that we are Bare Loci. For very young children readily understand tales about princes turning into frogs, so long as the princely mentality is carried across into the froggy body. Perhaps in tracing persons as opposed to mere bodies, children are deploying an implicit conception of a person as an embodied mind, where embodiment is compatible with the interactive unity of an independent mental substance and a body.
However, the "too many thinkers" objection destabilizes the Cartesian Composite View. The Cartesian mental substance is the primary source of thought. If we follow the rule for picking ourselves out, namely picking out the thing that is the non-derivative or primary source of the thought in us, then we will be the mental substances and not the composites. So, even if there are Cartesian composites, they are not human persons. it is the Cartesian mental substances, "souls" if you like, that will count as persons.
Perhaps then the best we can say is that in tracing the bodies associated with such souls, we were, by happy accident, tracing something strongly causally tied to the persisting persons. For all that can be set out in a relatively a priori fashion, we might just be such independent mental substances. At least that is so, if they are lodged in animals more intimately and less adventitiously than, say, pilots in ships, to use Descartes’ own example. For in watching a ship go by we are not tracking its pilot, unless we know that there is a pilot there. In tracing each other in the offhand ways in which we do, do we have such a working hypothesis, let alone knowledge, of mental substances driving the bodies before us?
The real difficulty with the idea that we include, or are, independent mental substances is the massive amount of evidence of the dependence of our mental functioning on the condition of our brains. The simpler empirical hypotheses that account for this all suggest that we are not independent mental substances. That leads to the next "mentalistic" version of what we essentially are.
Are we then associated with mental substances that emerge from the development of brains, and are dependent on the brains that they emerge from, and so suffer a loss in their capacity to function if those brains are damaged? Of all mentalistic views, perhaps the most natural is that animals come to be able to think by having some such mental substance develop in them. Such an account could be reconstrued as an account of what human animals consist of, besides their bodies. For, by hypothesis, the dependent mental substance ceases to exist with the destruction of the brain, and hence with the total destruction of the animal. Because the mental substance has no possibility of post-mortem existence and operation, we are not compelled to think of it as a thing which literally thinks, as opposed to a thing whose operations constitute the thinking of the animal. it is as if an animal is being taken to have a mental organ dependent on its brain, an organ whose operation constitutes the animal’s thinking.
Such an account seems compatible with the view that we are human beings. (Even though it implies that my body is not wholly physical, it still provides adequate ontological underpinnings for the view that I am a human being.) For on this account, we would be contingently animals. We would go where our living brains, or heads, go. For those items are the loci of the physical complexity responsible for our mental substances and hence for the things whose operations constitute our thoughts. The brain is now conceived not as the chariot of a pure ego or Bare Locus, but as the essential physical underpinning of a dependent mental substance. So the view that we are human beings is compatible with either materialism or an emergent mentalism that claims that any developed and undamaged human animal has a dependent mental substance as a part.
15 We now cross an ontological Rubicon, and consider a class of entities in a different category. Those already considered were substances. We will soon be dealing with cross-time bundles.
Now there are at least three philosophical conceptions of substance. The most demanding incorporates the idea that a substance must be ontologically independent, so that no level of ontological analysis will properly treat it as some other item modified a certain way. Set that aside. The least demanding characterization is that a substance is at the bottom of the hierarchy of predication; thus a substance is said to be "a bearer of properties that is not itself a property". That will seem insufficient to those who believe in events as well as substances, for events also seem to be at the bottom of the hierarchy of predication. I would say the same for species, understood as higher-order individuals; species are not predicated, it is membership in a species that is predicated. The same could be said for cross-time bundles.
The third conception of substance augments the least demanding characterization by requiring that anything that deserves the name of "a substance" has, at each moment of its existence, a power of self- maintenance, development, and persistence (at least relative to its natural environment) which would have to be cited in any adequate account of what it is to be the substance in question. Something like this seems to be behind Aristotle’s idea that paradigm sublunary substances are ‘the individual man and horse". Consonant with the Aristotelian tradition, we may further require that the essence of a complex substance involves a form or principle of unity, a relation among its possibly varying parts which is such that if it holds at a given time then the substance exists at that time, and has a power of self-maintenance, development, and persistence (at least relative to its natural environment).15
15 For a more complete development of this view see "Hylomorphism as a Theory of Unity", forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy (2006).
Given this, it is also natural to require that anything that deserves the name of "a substance" persists by enduring, which is to say that it has all of its essence present at each time at which it is present.16 In this respect substances contrast with perduring things, which are not such that all of their essence is present at each time at which they are present. This completes the conception of substance that is useful for present purposes.
16 This, and not the more familiar condition that an endurer be wholly present at each moment of its existence, is a better characterization of "endurance" as opposed to "per durance"; a now familiar terminology first introduced in my dissertation, Particulars and Persistence (Princeton, 1984). Unfortunately, my dissertation’s gloss on endurance in terms of being wholly present, a gloss taken up by David Lewis in Plurality of Worlds (Oxford University Press, 1984), has now become standard. Given this account of endurance, it is unclear how a variably constituted entity, one that can gain and lose parts, can even be a candidate to be an enduring entity. (Are all of the parts it has over time to be present at each time? Of course not! But then which parts are to be wholly present at each time?) ‘let many enduring substances arc variably constituted.
In respect of their manner of persisting, substances are to be contrasted with what I will call "cross-time bundles" or "successions": items that persist from one time to another by having distinct phases of their total reality present at the two times. Think of a cross-time bundle in this way. it is present at any time at which one of its phases or temporal parts is present, in the same way in which I am present wherever one of my material parts is present. The bundle’s being present at a time consists in its phase or temporal part existing at that time, just as my being present where my foot is consists in my foot existing there. Any cross-time bundle that is a candidate for being a human person essentially persists, it could not be an instantaneous existent, like an utterly punctuate event. Humans cannot have an instantaneous existence. So the candidate cross-time bundles consist of events and states that exist at different times, events and states tied together by a cross-time principle of unity. So if we restrict ourselves to the reality of such a bundle at a time, a phase of the bundle, we are not thereby capturing the essence of the bundle. What it is to be the bundle involves something more than what is going on at the given time. it lies in the essence of such a cross-time bundle of phases that there should be more to it than what is present at an arbitrarily chosen time. The then present phase itself hardly constrains which bundles include it. That depends on what has happened elsewhere and else-when, and on the available cross-time unity conditions—sometimes called "gen-identity relations"—that can bundle phases together.
The reader familiar with perdurance and endurance will see in the text that follows the germ of an argument to the effect that endurers are epistemologically more ready to hand, and probably epistemologically more basic than correspondingly long-lived perdurers. Short lived perdurers, for example short events like noises and flashes, can simply capture our attention, without the subvention of a grasp of gen-identity conditions.
So I would say that a cross-time bundle does not have all of its essence present at each time at which it is present, just as I do not have all my essence present at each place at which I am present. For example, not all of what is essential to me is present where my foot is. (In fact, none of what is essential to me is present where my foot is.) Not all that is essential to the history of New Jersey is present now. The cross-time bundle of states and events that is the history of New Jersey "perdures" through the times at which it has proper temporal parts, just as I perdure through those spatial regions where I have proper material parts.17 Cross-time bundles perdure through time.
Having introduced the distinction between enduring and perduring, along with the claim that cross-time bundles perdure, we may now consider a bundle view that parallels the substance view of human beings described in the previous section. The phases are to be complexes of time-restricted physical states and events, states and events which obtain in the relevant person’s body or brain at the time to which the phase corresponds. When the human being is enjoying some mental life, the complex phase associated with any such time will also involve the relevant mental states and events. So the required gen-identity relation will have to be able to unite the following types of phases into a cross-temporal whole.
[Pi,Pj, . . .], [Pl,Pm Mi, Mj, . ], [Ps,Pt, . . . ], [Pv,Pq Ms, Mt, . . .]
Where Pi, Pj, . . . etc. are (appropriate temporal restrictions of) physical states and events, and Mi, Mj, . . . etc. are (appropriate temporal restrictions of) mental states and events.
17 So I think we should not say dt I exist in the region ouaipied by my toot; and we should not say that the cross time bundle exists at each time at which itis present. My foot exists there, and some or other phase exists at each time at which the bundle is present. But, for example, itseems wrong to say that this semester exists now; only its present phase exists now. Is this connected with our reluctance to say that momentous events are now existing, as opposed to now occurring?
Given that, the gen-identity requirement will have to be something like this: one phase [Xi. . . ] is a phase of the same human person as another phase [Yi. . . ]if and only if the physical constituents of [Xi . . .] are physically continuous with those of [Yi. . .], and the mental constituents of [Xi . . .]if any, are psychologically continuous with those of [Yi...], if any there be.
A human person can now be defined as a maximal bundle of such continuous phases. Every phase that stands in the above relation to any phase in the bundle is included in the bundle.
There are several things to note about this ontological picture of a human person. First, there is the complexity of the gen-identity relation, defined as itis in terms of physical continuity. The notion of physical continuity is to be further defined as the ancestral of tight connectedness, an immediate relation of dependence, which holds between successive phases in the bundle. Secondly, to know just what degree of connectedness to insist upon, we need to have already considered a wide range of cases in which a person would survive. For example, to properly demarcate the cross-time bundles that correspond to human beings, we would need to allow that there would be sufficient physical connectedness among a person’s phases when he is, all of a sudden, surgically reduced to the condition of a head.
Knowledge of such relatively sophisticated empirical matters is not plausibly taken to be part of what we are relying upon when we trace each other through time. Instead, we appear to offload such issues onto the persons themselves. In tracing persons we are deploying knowledge of some necessary conditions for their survival over time—they can’t explode into smithereens, for example—but we need not be relying on knowledge of any non-trivial sufficient condition for their survival over time. In order to trace persons, we need not know what condition suffices for their persistence in every future or possible situation.
We can offload onto substances, for at any time at which they capture our attention, all of their essence is present before us; and so at any such time the basis of their natural power to persist is present. Without taking any specific view of what that basis consists in, or even any specific view of the conditions under which it would persist, we can rely on there being such a basis. So even though we do not bring to bear any sufficient condition for the identity of a substance over time; when a substance does capture our attention, there is something in that substance at that time, namely its natural power to maintain itself in a certain way, which settles the question of what it would be for the thing which has captured our attention to persist. As the earlier example of the "android" who was really human brought out, that question is settled by the nature of the substance; itdoes not depend on what cross-time identity conditions we are deploying to trace the substance.
Can we offload in this way onto cross-time bundles? Suppose that a phase of such a bundle now captures our attention. There is nothing in that phase which itself selects one cross-time bundle from a host of others as the bundle to which itbelongs. There is an enormous variety of gen-identity relations which could connect that bundle to this, that, or the other sort of phase in the future. There are an enormous variety of past and present things whose phases could be bundled together with any given phase that is present to us at a time. Even with respect to a specified series of evolving phases, more restrictive gen-identity relations determine shorter-lived bundles, and less restrictive gen-identity relations determine longer-lived bundles. The present phase itself determines none of these bundles. So which bundle are we tracing? Absent our seeing the present phase as a phase of a bundle of a definite kind, there is no definite answer to that question. And if we are to see the present phase as a phase of a bundle of a certain kind then we need to have some gen-identity condition in mind.
On the bundle view of persons, the object of our attention when we glimpse a person is a phase, and by association some bundle which contains that phase as its present part. But the phase radically under- determines the content of, and hence the answer to, the question: What would it be for the bundle that is the object of attention to persist or fail to persist through time? There is no such thing as the bundle we are attending to; there are as many such bundles as there are gen-identity conditions that apply to the phase.
If in tracing objects and persons through time, we were implicitly or explicitly deploying specific gen-identity conditions, then this would determine a content for, and an answer to, the question: What would it be for the bundle to which I am now attending to persist or fail to persist?
The claim that we are implicitly or explicitly deploying specific gen-identity conditions in tracing objects and persons through time is just the denial of the plausible hypothesis of offloading.
This implies that if human beings were the cross-time bundles introduced above, then we would not have been tracing them, when in our easy and offhand ways, we trace ourselves and each other. And that would suggest that we are not human beings, after all.
That conclusion can be avoided, thanks to the availability of a plausible conception of human beings as substances. A human being is a substance that begins life either as an embryo or a fetus; and as such, it has the natural power to develop into a grown animal whose brain becomes the material basis of a person’s mental life. All of that potentiality, quasi-miraculously, is encoded in the embryo or the fetus at any time at which it exists. The animal that develops in the course of the natural development of the fetus has at each time at which it exists the natural power to maintain itself as, and so persist as, an animal. (its essence involves the power to sustain itself as such in its natural environment.) The person that develops in the course of the animal’s development also has the natural power to persist as such, until the animal’s brain is severely degraded. And this natural power to persist would also operate in those artificial situations in which the animal’s physiology can be medically replaced or augmented. So on this conception a human being as a substance, at any time at which it exists, has the capacity to survive as a separated head, artificially kept alive and functioning.
You diehard Carnapian conventionalists out there take note! Even though there is a mapping from a substance conception of human beings to a bundle conception, the substances can play an epistemological role that the bundles cannot.
The question arises whether the items deemed persons by the Wide Psychological View can be understood as substances, or only as cross- time bundles.
16 The Wide Psychological View first came clearly into focus because of an observation of Jerome Shaffer’s, which was followed up by David Lewis.18 The observation was that a Materialist, a theorist who regards persons as wholly constituted by their (wholly material) bodies, could nonetheless consistently allow that persons can survive the destruction of their bodies!
18 J. Shaffer, Persons and Their Bodies , The Philosophical Review 75 (1966) and D. K. Lewis, "Survival and Identity", in A. 0. Rorty, (ed), The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: California UP, 1976).
The resurrection of the dead is thus possible without the resurrection of the actual bodies of the dead; so all that theological subtlety about what happens when at the general resurrection when God has to resurrect even a third-generation cannibal whose body was made up of flesh made entirely from the bodily elements of others, goes by the board.19
19 The "solution" was that at the general resurrection of the dead, we all will come back slightly shorter than we were so as to accommodate the shortage of parcels of flesh due to all the cannibals there have ever been.
We can, after all, distinguish synchronic and diachronic unity conditions for a person. A Materialist does need a purely bodily synchronic unity condition for (human) persons; he needs to maintain that at any time a person is wholly constituted by his body. But this seems to leave the conceptual possibility that over time different bodies could constitute the same person. Well, what then would make it the same person who had those different bodies? The answer was given by Shaffer and Lewis. The different bodies could be such that their (physically reducible) mental lives were psychologically continuous.
Isn’t this precisely what is depicted in the fantasies of teletransportation, as in Star Trek and the like? Maybe not; maybe the teletransporter is just an independent Cartesian mental substance that moves from one body to a new body made in the old body’s likeness. Set that aside, since our total evidence concerning the dependence of mind on the brain counts against such independent mental substances. Still, the Wide Psychological View can easily accommodate the idea that we would survive teletransportation; for the body-copying that it incorporates does secure psychological continuity. The person in the newly created body has memories of the acts and experiences of the person who stepped into the teletransporter, and he intends to carry out the plans of that person; his beliefs, outlook, and character rather exactly correspond as well. On the Wide Psychological View, this is sufficient for him to be the same person as the one who stepped into the teletransporter.
The Wide Psychological View thus implies that we are the sorts of things that can survive bodily destruction and replacement. it also implies that we are the sorts of things that survive a brief interlude of not existing. After all, the passing of the signal from the teletransportation booth to the supposed new destination of the person, takes a finite amount of time. During that time, the person who is supposed to survive the overall process has no bodily or psychological reality! Nor is he constituted by a signal, for the signal is not the sort of thing that could be psychologically (or physically) continuous with a human person. The supposed survivor does not exist during that period.
So here is a not-widely-noticed consequence of the Wide Psychological View: we can intermittently exist. This in itself is not an objection to the view. However, it is worthwhile to investigate the sorts of things that can be intermittent, and ask how it is that they can be so.
Performances can be intermittent. During the interlude between the first and second acts of a performance of Tristan und Isolde, the performance is not taking place. it has (mercifully, some might say) ceased for twenty minutes or so; itwill begin again with the prelude to the second act. In the last raucous and disorienting moments of the performance of the first act, there is not something with all of its essence present which is the performance, and which incorporates the natural power to generate the prelude to the second act. That power lies in the conductor and the orchestra, who will play the music, and in the stage hands and the stage manager, who will see that the curtain opens upon "a garden with tall trees in front of Isolde’s apartment". The performance can be intermittent because these continuously existing items generate it. So, the performance is not a substance. it does not contain within itself, at each moment while it is going on, a power of self-maintenance, development, and persistence which would have to be cited in any adequate account of what it is to be that performance.
The performance should instead be modeled as a cross-time bundle of phases made up by events and states, phases united by a gen-identity condition that might say something like: one phase is a phase of the same performance of Tristan und Isolde as a later phase if and only if they are in the ancestral of the relation of being the immediate next phase of a performance of Tristan und Isolde; where one phase is the immediate next phase of a performance of Tristan und Isolde if and only if the same company (of singers, musicians, and stage hands) produced both phases, and the later phase followed in sequence from the earlier in accord with the score, libretto, and stage instructions of the work Tristan und Isolde.
So there will be a non-trivial sufficient condition for the last phases of Act One of a particular performance to be stages of the same performance of Tristan und Isolde as the first phases of the prelude to Act Two. And that condition will not require that the last phase of Act One be anything like a substance, whose always present essence would involve a power of self-maintenance, development, and persistence that will itself under normal conditions bring about the first phases of Act Two.
We can distinguish two ways, among many, of attending to what is going on during a performance of Tristan und Isolde. One may simply be attending to the music, the singing and the acting; simply drinking it in, however it happens to go. (A child may do this at her first opera.) Or one may also be tracking this particular performance, and evaluating it, say by comparison with near ideal performances, such as the fabled June 1937 Covent Garden performances with Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.
Notice that the second sort of audience member, but not the first, would have made a mistake if he had sat down at the Met expecting the performance of an opera, and the conductor had raced the orchestra through the prelude to the first act of Tristan, but only as the introduction to a lecture about the music of Wagner. For this auditor would have heard the prelude as the opening of a performance of the opera, and perhaps doubted whether the same frenetic tempo could be kept up throughout the whole performance.
If one’s object of attention includes not just the music, the singing, and the acting, but the unfolding performance of the opera, then one has to be seeing and hearing the phases of the opera as parts of a performance of an opera. And there is no way to do that without deploying knowledge of what a performance of an opera is. And that involves at least implicit knowledge of what is sufficient for one phase of such a performance to be a phase of the same performance as another phase.
I believe that what here applies to performances applies to cross-time bundles of phases in general. To trace such a bundle is to perceive phases in the bundle as parts of the same bundle. And that involves at least implicit knowledge of what is sufficient for one phase of such a bundle to be a phase of the same bundle as another phase.
I also believe that the best explanation of what we are, consistent with the surprising (and I think false) claim that we can intermittently exist, is that we are psychologically continuous cross-time bundles. A substance, by contrast, cannot come back from the existential grave. Even if one substance causes an exactly similar substance to come into existence a few seconds after the first has ceased to be, that is one substance being replaced by another.
I also believe that in tracing ourselves and others through time, we are offloading; that is, we are relying on the power of self-maintenance, development, and persistence of salient substances, rather than deploying sufficient conditions for bundling phases together. Certainly we trace people even when we are at a very early developmental stage, say by the age of two, just to opt for a quite conservative estimate. We do not then have knowledge of such sufficient conditions.
Anyone with these beliefs should reject the Wide Psychological View. To make the argument explicit:
16. In tracing ourselves and other people through time, we are frequently offloading.
17. Given its toleration of intermittent existence, the Wide Psychological View should be construed as the view that we are certain sorts of psychologically continuous cross-time bundles.
18. We cannot trace such a bundle by offloading.
19. So, the Wide Psychological View gives the wrong account of what we are tracing when we trace ourselves and others.
20. So, the Wide Psychological View gives the wrong account of personal identity.
We need not make things rest on the consideration of intermittent existence. Here is an empirical fact: there are no independent mental substances. So any substance associated with a person, be it a body, an animal, or an emergent but dependent mental substance, would cease to exist if the whole material reality of the person were destroyed. But the whole material reality of a person who gets into a teleporter is destroyed. So if the Wide Psychological View is to preserve its distinctive claim that we can survive teletransportation and the like, then itmust view persons as cross-time bundles. Yet, in tracing persons we offload onto the persons themselves. So we, the persons that we have been tracing and re-cognizing, are not cross-time bundles. The Wide Psychological View does not apply to us. But we are the persons who are the subject matter for the philosophy of personal identity. So the Wide Psychological View should be rejected as an account of personal identity.
17 Just as the Animalists are wrong to identify me with something essentially constituted by the H. M. S. Johnston, the friends of the Wide Psychological View are wrong to take me to be a maximally temporally extended Johnston-esque performance or bundle, or anything of that sort.
I am a human being. Well, more precisely, at a certain level of ontological analysis appropriate to the kinds of considerations that divide the Animalists and the friends of the Wide Psychological View, the thing to say is that I am a human being.
Even so, in the light of other considerations not appropriately canvassed here, it might emerge that our natures are more Protean than we think, so that "human being" turns out to be a crypto-phase sortal, just like "human animal".20
20 For a defense of this position, which does not depend on endorsing the Wide Psychological View, see my "Relativism and the Self", in M. Krausz (ed), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
pp. 54-74 Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 3
Synoniem van Paulinisme?
Deze vraag kun je beantwoorden met nee en ja.
Nee, omdat niet iedere postmodernist lid is van een paulinistische (trinitaire, niceense) sekte.
Ja, omdat het trinitarisme vertaald naar deze discussie als 'kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristotelische filosofie' als het welbekende zwaard van Damocles boven deze draad hangt.
Naar 'kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristotelische filosofie' ( door prikker pyrrho ingebracht) heb ik verscheidene keren verwezen op dit forum.
De essentie van deze opmerking is uiteraard dat niet alleen Aristotelische metafysica maar metafysica in het algemeen, aan paulinistische kerkelijke restricties onderhevig is.
Vandaar dat ik om twee redenen verwezen heb naar Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (Volume 3) waarvan hieronder de inhoudsopgave:
<DIR><DIR>CONTENTS
Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar
Prize Announcement ix
I. SYMPOSIUM: HUMAN BEINGS
1. Human Beings, Human Animals, and Mentalistic Survival 3
Denis Robinson
2. ‘‘Human Beings’’ Revisited: My Body is Not an Animal 33
Mark Johnston
II. MODALITY
3. Worlds, Pluriverses, and Minds 77
Mark Heller
4. Analyzing Modality 99
Michael Jubien
III. COINCIDENT OBJECTS AND TEMPORAL PARTS
5. Four-Dimensionalism and the Puzzles of Coincidence 143
Matthew McGrath
6. Time Travel, Coinciding Objects, and Persistence 177
Cody Gilmore
IV. MEREOLOGY
7. Theories of Location 201
Josh Parsons
8. Brutal Simples 233
Kris McDaniel
9. Contact and Continuity 267
William Kilborn
V. FREE WILL
10. Metaphysical Compatibilism’s Appropriation of Frankfurt 283
Ted A. Warfield
Index of Names 297
</DIR></DIR>Zoals te zien hierboven overschrijdt met name Matthew McGrath (Four-Dimensionalism) de door kerkelijke autoriteiten gestelde grenzen (de brandstapel wacht!).
De tweede reden voor plaatsen van Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 3 is dat 'Modality & Free Will' synchroon loopt met 'modus' (ma'nâ) & free will (ajal)' in 'The Philosophy of the Kalam (H. Wolfson). Het verschil tussen Philosophy of the Kalam en Oxford Studies etc. is dat in Philosophy of the Kalam de strijd tussen atomisten en anti-atomisten beschreven wordt en in Oxford Studies etc. de uitgangstelling is dat atomen en de vierde dimensie bestaan.
In 'Philosophy of the Kalam' wordt echter - vanwege gebrekkige informatie - het gedachtengoed van Imâm Ash'ari niet correct weergegeven. Dit laatste is inmiddels gecorrigeerd door Prof. T Winter (Cambridge) waarmee dan 'hermeneutical ontology & aesthetic epistemology aan de orde komt met daaruit voortvloeiend o.a. de inhoud van Epemistic Injustice (Power & the Ethics of Knowing) van Miranda Fricker de schrijfster van Feminism without Postmodernism enz. enz.
Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 3
V. FREE WILL
10. Metaphysical Compatibilism’s Appropriation of Frankfurt
Ted A. Warfield
I. TWO DEBATES AND THE FREEDOM!
RESPONSIBILITY ARGUMENT
In discussions of causal determinism, the names "Compatibilist" and "Incompatibilist" are sometimes used in different ways. When focusing on the question of whether causal determinism precludes metaphysical freedom (or "free will" as it is unfortunately often called) a "compatibilist" is one who believes that the truth of causal determinism is consistent with the existence of human freedom and an "incompatibilist" is one who believes that these theses are not consistent. These same labels are also used, in the obvious parallel way, in discussions of whether causal determinism precludes moral responsibility.
The freedom/determinism debate and the moral responsibility/determinism debate are, of course, tied together by more than this parallel use of terminology. Most philosophers who work on the metaphysics of freedom at least partly motivate this work by gesturing towards issues about moral responsibility. This is, for example, what is commonly included in the advertising copy for most books about the metaphysics of freedom in a rather transparent attempt to draw in a wider audience. An additional connection between these two debates is that most philosophers are compatibilists about both issues.1 These are only three examples of connections between these debates. The full extent of this connection is surely tighter than the combination of terminological overlap, advertising copy, and close percentages of philosophers adopting eponymons positions suggests. Indeed, most philosophers concerned with this pair of compatibility issues believe that the two debates are closely connected in some philosophically important way because they believe that, at a minimum, there is some at least fairly intimate connection between freedom and moral responsibility.
1I do not think that this claim is true of most philosophers who work professionally on these issues. I think that most of these philosophers are incompatibilists about causal determinism and human freedom and I think these philosophers are evenly divided on the causal determinism/moral responsibility compatibility issue.
I agree with the widely shared view that these two debates are intimately connected because metaphysical freedom and moral responsibility are in some way importantly connected. I will identify one initially plausible view of the nature of the connection between metaphysical freedom and moral responsibility. This view will suggest an argument that I believe is widely implicitly endorsed though never, to my knowledge, explicitly formulated and defended. The argument, if sound, forces philosophers to adopt compatibilism about causal determinism’s relation to both moral responsibility and metaphysical freedom. Furthermore the considerations driving the argument (even if the argument is not sound) suggest that one cannot mix and match verdicts on these two compatibility debates. That is, the considerations suggest that one must be either a compatibilist about both issues or an incompatibilist about both issues.
It seems likely to me that a fair number of philosophers have been mistakenly led to these conclusions by the argument I will be rejecting.2 So, if I am right, the mistaken argument to be identified shortly leads to nontrivial philosophical confusions. If by chance I am wrong and what I am so far calling only the "mistaken argument" is sound, this has important consequences for some important philosophical debates. Let’s move in for a closer look at some of these issues and to identify this argument.
2 In saying that philosophers are "mistakenly led" to these compatibilist positions, I mean two things. First, and this is the "primary meaning" of the statement for purposes of this chapter, I mean that this particular argument should not lead anyone to any compatibilist position even if that position is true. Secondly, though I will not take the time to argue for this position here, I mean that the argument should not lead anyone to any compatibilist position about causal determinism and metaphysical freedom and or moral responsibility because these positions are false (see Warfield 1996, 2000, and forthcoming for arguments for this latter claim).
It will be useful to have some stipulative terminology in place so that we do not confuse distinct philosophical positions. As noted above, the two determinism debates share some names for key positions. In an attempt to avoid confusion, let’s call those who accept compatibilism about causal determinism and responsibility "R-Compatibilists" (for "Responsibility compatibilists") and those who accept compatibilism about causal determinism and metaphysical freedom "M-Compatibilists" (for "Metaphysical compatibilists"). Use "R—Incompatibilist" and "M—Incompatibilist" in the obvious parallel manner. Let’s call those who accept both R- and MCompatibilism "Full Compatibilists" and those who accept both R- and M—Incompatibilism ‘‘Full Incompatibilists". Lastly, let’s call those who accept the conjunction of R-Compatibilism with M-Incompatibilism "Semi-Compatibilists".
3Fortunately we will not need to consider the position that combines R Incompatibilism with M Compatibilism and so we can avoid introducing the term "semi incompatibilist" into the discussion. Those familiar with John Martin Fischer’s important work on these issues know that Fischer has described and defended Semi-Compatibilism (see his 1994 and Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Some who accept M Incompatibilism think that though moral responsibility is consistent with a lack of alternative possibilities it is not consistent with causal determinism. This position is not "Semi Compatibilism" in my sense: this position is one version of Full Incompatibilism.
Harry Frankfurt’s important work on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities is at the root of the contemporary Full Compatibilist position.4 My defense of this claim and rational reconstruction of the roots of contemporary Full Compatibilism begins now. Most R-Compatibilists have appropriated Frankfurt’s work on PAP in defending R-Compatibilism. Additionally many (perhaps most) R-Compatibilists think that Frankfurt’s work on PAP also has important consequences for the defense of M-Compatibilism.
4As formulated by Frankfurt, PAP says "an agent is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise" (Frankfurt 1969: 828). 1 do not know if Frankfurt would endorse the Full Compatibilist position. Frankfurt’s account of freedom does seem to commit him to M Compatibilism and many people take Frankfurt to be a R Compatibilist as well. So far as I am aware (but I am no Frankfurt scholar), though Frankfurt has argued that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities he has not in print argued or claimed that it is consistent with causal determinism. As indicated in the previous note, this is potentially an important difference.
It is not hard to see why philosophers might think that Frankfurt’s work on PAP has something to do with the R-Compatibilism debate. Though they are not equivalent notions, "causal determinism" and "lack of alternative possibilities" are conceptual cousins (it seems that the former entails but is not entailed by the latter). Why, though, would anyone think that Frankfurt’s work on moral responsibility (rather than his independent work on metaphysical freedom) has important ramifications for the M-Compatibilism debate? The answer to this question is "for the same sort of reason as given a second ago: though moral responsibility and metaphysical freedom are not equivalent notions they are conceptual cousins". If one uses Frankfurtian considerations about PAP to argue for R-Compatibilism and then combines that result with reflections on the intimate connection between metaphysical freedom and moral responsibility, one might naturally be led to an argument for M-Compatibilism. Let’s investigate what this argument involves.
The conclusion of the argument needs to be that M-Compatibilism is true. Furthermore, as we just observed, the argument begins by using Frankfurtian considerations to support R-Compatibilism. So the first premise of the argument is surely that moral responsibility is consistent with causal determinism and the premise is supported by reflection on Frankfurt cases. If one wants to tie this premise to the M-Compatibilist conclusion, there seems to be an obvious way to do this that is worth exploring. What is needed, and all that is needed, to argue from R-Compatibilism to M-Compatibilism is the thesis that moral responsibility requires metaphysical freedom: equivalently, that metaphysical freedom is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Let’s now display the full argument and let’s call it the "Freedom/Responsibility Argument". Here it is:
The Freedom/Responsibility Argument
P1. Moral responsibility is consistent with causal determinism.
= R-Compatibilism
P2. Moral responsibility requires metaphysical freedom.
Cl. So, metaphysical freedom is compatible with causal determinism.
= M-Compatibilism
Note that the conjunction of the argument’s first premise with its conclusion is equivalent to Full Compatibilism. I suspect that many philosophers who are Full Compatibilists and arrive at their position from a starting point of reflections on Frankfurt’s work on PAP would, if pressed, formulate this very argument in defense of their Full Compatibilist position.5 The argument is also of independent interest even if no contemporary compatibilist would endorse it. The argument is at least initially plausible and suggests that the two compatibilism debates are tightly enough connected to rule out some contemporary positions (e.g. semi-compatibilism). It is time to examine this argument more closely.
5There are other ways to arrive at the Full Compatibilist position. One might do so, for example, via independent reflections on Frankfurt on PAP (supporting R Compatibilism) and some independent argument for M Compatibilism. For some critical discussion of independent arguments for M Compatibilism see van Inwagen (1983) and Warfield (2003).
II. EVALUATION OF THE FREEDOM! (part 1)
RESPONSIBILITY ARGUMENT
The Freedom/Responsibility argument is formally valid: if A is consistent with C and A implies B then B is consistent with C. Because the argument is driven primarily by the Frankfurtian considerations in favor of its first premise, I will devote the bulk of my attention to this premise. Before beginning that discussion, let me say a tiny bit more about the argument’s second premise. This premise was chosen because it is the natural (and I think needed) way to get from R-Compatibilism to M-Compatibilism and because this is one natural suggestion about the nature of the alleged "intimate connection" between moral responsibility and metaphysical freedom. These are good reasons to consider whether the premise is true, but why should we believe that the premise is true?
Let me make two points for now. We will return to this premise later. First, one good thing for fans of the Freedom/Responsibility argument is that at least many M-Incompatibilists (the primary targets of the argument) will concede the premise immediately. Most M-Incompatibilists will agree with those defending the argument that the "real action" with this argument is in the evaluation of the first premise. Secondly, we do not have to strain ourselves to find at least some intuitive support for the premise. Surely an at least plausible defense against a charge of moral responsibility for some action or outcome would be that "I did not do it freely". This, at a minimum, suggests that the claim that moral responsibility requires metaphysical freedom has considerable intuitive appeal.
As we turn to the key first premise of the argument we reach familiar and heavily traveled roads in contemporary philosophy of action. We reach the border of the vast "Frankfurt debate". Elsewhere I have contributed to parts of this large discussion.6 On this occasion I will restrict my attention to those parts of the Frankfurt debate that bear on the evaluation of the Freedom/Responsibility argument. I want to disunss some familiar and some less familiar issues from the broader Frankfurt debate through the lens of the Freedom/Responsibility argument.
6See Warfield (1996, 2003, and forthcoming). One wanting a good overview of this large set of related issues can do no better than begin with Fischer (1999).
What in Frankfurt’s work on PAP is supposed to support the claim that moral responsibility is consistent with causal determinism? Clearly it is the "Frankfurt stories" that are supposed to do this. Frankfurt stories (I will tell one in a moment) are stories that at least strongly suggest that moral responsibility is consistent with a lack of alternative possibilities.7 Many think that causal determinism threatens moral responsibility precisely by precluding alternative possibilities. So if Frankfurt cases show that the removal of alternative possibilities does not thereby remove moral responsibility, then Frankfurt stories provide at least some reason to think that R-Compatibilism is true.
7 Some think the stories somehow literally show that this is correct but this is surely too strong a claim (if it’s a coherent claim at all).
Let’s look at one Frankfurt story:
Larry rudely pushes Freddy. Larry pushes Freddy because this is what Larry wants to do. Larry is in no way pressured into pushing Freddy. It seems quite plausible to say in this case that Larry is responsible for pushing Freddy. This is so even if we add to the story that Geoffrey was monitoring Larry’s activities and stood ready and able to force Larry to push Freddy if Larry showed any inclination not to do so on his own.
Because Larry pushed Freddy "on his own"—that is, without Geoffrey’s intervention—and did so precisely because he wanted to do so, it is at least tempting to say that Larry is morally responsible for pushing Freddy. Larry, it is natural to say, would have pushed Freddy even if Geoffrey had been absent from the scene. It is also tempting to claim that because of the presence, plan, and ability of Geoffrey as stipulated in the story, there were no alternative possibilities to Larry’s pushing Freddy: it was going to happen no matter what. Perhaps then, this is a case of moral responsibility without alternative possibilities and therefore a case which provides, as discussed in the preceding paragraph, some reason to think that causal determinism is consistent with moral responsibility.
If this reasoning in support of R-Compatibilism (equivalently, premise one of the Responsibility/Freedom argument) is allowed to stand along with the earlier support for the second premise of the argument then M-Incompatibilists of both stripes (both Full Incompatibilists and SemiCompatibilists) are in trouble. This argument drives straight through from R-Compatibilism to M-Compatibilism which means that if the argument is sound we are stuck with Full Compatibilism. The argument can and should be resisted.
I will now present and discuss three big worries about the Freedom/ Responsibility argument. Two of these worries are about the support just discussed for the argument’s first premise. The third objection concerns the interplay of the argument’s two premises. Some, but not all, of these points will be at least somewhat familiar from the broader Frankfurt literature. I will discuss the objections at length.
First, it is at least not obvious that the Frankfurt story we are considering really is a case of moral responsibility without alternative possibilities. I grant, at least for purposes of discussion, the responsibility attribution but challenge the claim that the case does not involve alternative possibilities. After all there are, intuitively, two ways the pushing of Freddy by Larry could have unfolded. In one possible scenario (the actual one) Larry pushes Freddy on his own. In what appears to be an open alternative possible scenario, Larry pushes Freddy only after first showing signs of refraining from doing so and only after being forced by Geoffrey to do so. There seem to be alternative possibilities present in the story both in what the story tells us about Larry and what it tells us about Geoffrey.8
8 The apparent alternative possibilities involving Geoffrey are probably inessential to the story: the role of Geoffrey could be played by a device deterministically responding to differential inputs from Larry. Though this is a topic of some controversy in the broader Frankfurt literature (see Fischer 1999 for an introduction) it does not appear that the apparent alternative possibilities involving Larry are inessential to the story.
Of course, fans of Frankfurt’s attack on PAP are likely to want to defend Frankfurt in the following way. Though there may well be "alternative possibilities" in some sense in the story we are examining, there are no alternative possibilities to Larry pushes Freddy. And though there are no alternative possibilities to this in the story, Larry is, I have seemingly conceded, morally responsible for Larry pushes Freddy. If these claims are correct then we do have a case of moral responsibility for an act without alternative possibilities to that act.
This reply distinguishes two readings of PAP. On the first reading, PAP requires that moral responsibility for P requires alternative possibilities (full stop). On the second reading, PAP requires that moral responsibility for P requires alternative possibilities to P. This second reading implies, but is not implied by, the first reading. The response suggested above to my first worry about the support for the Freedom/Responsibility argument’s first premise is equivalent to insisting that PAP be interpreted according to this second reading and urging that the Frankfurt story is a clear counter-example to PAP so interpreted.
One wanting to resist this pro-Frankfurt reply might focus (as many have in the broader Frankfurt literature) on promising and metaphysically interesting issues about the individuation of, in this case, acts of pushing. One might suggest, for example, that the pushing of Freddy that would have occurred had Larry not pushed Freddy on his own is an act distinct from the pushing that actually occurred. One might thereby reject the claim that there was no alternative possibility present in the story to the specific act for which Larry seems to be morally responsible, namely, the particular pushing of Freddy that occurred.9 In the context of the evaluation of the Freedom/Responsibility argument, however, an even better strategy is available. The clarification offered in this defensive reply to my first worry about the Freedom/Responsibility argument leaves the argument vulnerable to a second criticism.
9 In broad terms, this is the "fine grained" response to Frankfurt preferred by, among others, Peter van Inwagen. See, for example, van Inwagen 1983. Defenders of Frankfurt are, of course, aware of this strategy and it has received much attention in the relevant literature. I do not discuss this literature here because in the context of the evaluation of the Freedom/Responsibility argument I think that R Incompatibilists can pursue an even more promising strategy. Again, see Fischer (1999) for one strong introduction to large parts of this debate.
II. EVALUATION OF THE FREEDOM! (part 2)
RESPONSIBILITY ARGUMENT
The second criticism is this. Understanding PAP in the way suggested in the response to the first criticism seems to imply that the Frankfurt story does not provide any evidence at all for R-Compatibilism which is, you will recall, the content of the premise that the story is supposed to support. After all, the reply concedes that there are alternative possibilities in the story (just not alternative possibilities to Larry’s pushing Freddy). What was supposed to be a Frankfurt "no alternative possibilities story" not only does not entail determinism but also, when understood in this way, is not even consistent with determinism. We already knew that there being no alternative possibilities in the story does not imply determinism, but we were supposed to take the story as evidence for R-Compatibilism because of reflections on the idea that causal determinism threatens moral responsibility precisely by taking away alternative possibilities. Surely, however, the threat causal determinism brings to moral responsibility comes (if it comes at all) in part because causal determinism takes away all alternative possibilities.10 The Frankfurt story as we are understanding it now is not even consistent with causal determinism and so the story seems to have lost all interesting contact with the issue of R-Compatibilism. The Frankfurt story was supposed to be the evidence for R-Compatibilism but on this reading it cannot play that role.11
10 A small minority of philosophers (holding various positions on the two compatibilism debates) do not think that determinism threatens moral responsibility by taking away alternative possibilities. These philosophers think that even determinism is consistent with the presence of genuine alternative possibilities (some use this claim in attempts to support R and/or M Compatibilism but not all do). I set aside this minority position for purposes of this chapter.
11 This reply grants to the Frankfurtian the second reading of PAP noted above and the claim that the Frankfurt story provides a counter example to it. This reply, however, emphasizes that a counter example to this second reading of PAP provides no support for R Compatibilism.
Some R-Compatibilists would dispute this claim. Some defenders of R- Compatibilism think that Frankfurt stories support R- Compatibilism even granting that the stories contain alternative possibilities. Most notably, this is the position of John Martin Fischer (see Fischer 1994 and 1999 and Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Fischer claims that the alternative possibilities identified in Frankfurt stories are "insufficiently robust" to "ground" the moral responsibility we find in the stories. He concludes that the stories support R-Compatibilism despite the presence of alternative possibilities in them. "Grounding", however, is surely a matter of sufficiency, not necessity. No one is claiming that alternative possibilities are sufficient for moral responsibility: R-Incompatibilists claim only that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility. R-Compatibilists can therefore agree with Fischer that the alternative possibilities do not "ground" the responsibility that appears to be present in Frankfurt cases. It is not easy to see how this discussion of "grounding" is supposed to help R-Compatibilism.12
12 Fischer is likely to claim further that if we concede that the alternative possibilities do not ground moral responsibility in these stories, then the alternative possibilities also cannot make the difference between cases with moral responsibility and cases without moral responsibility. This latter claim does not follow: small differences often make big differences in philosophical analyses. This debate about the "robustness" of alternative possibilities in Frankfurt stories is, of course, an ongoing debate. I do not claim to have ended the debate here. See the Fischer references already cited and Warfield (2003 and forthcoming) for further discussion.
R-Compatibilists who concede that the Frankfurt story contains alternative possibilities seem to encounter difficulties. Can R-Compatibilists stipulate that causal determinism obtains in the Frankfurt story and thereby eliminate the presence of alternative possibilities in the story? If so, the story and its evaluation are clearly relevant to the discussion of both R-Compatibilism and M-Compatibilism. This attempt to stipulate the relevance of the story, however, runs into severe difficulties. If one adds to our Frankfurt story that Larry’s pushing of Freddy occurs in a causally deterministic situation with literally no alternative possibilities, one must surely say more about the two places in the Frankfurt story that seem to contain genuine alternative possibilities.
One making this stipulation would need to explain in what sense, if any, it was open to Larry to push Freddy not on his own (as in the actual story) but only after being forced to do so by the intervention of the inactive counterfactual intervener Geoffrey. And one would need to say more about the sense in which inactive counterfactual intervener Geoffrey stood by ready and able to intervene. Both parts of the story seem important for defending the key claims that Larry is responsible though he could not have done otherwise (though perhaps only Larry’s apparent alternative possibilities are essential to it). Supposing Larry and Geoffrey to be able to do other than they actually do in a causally deterministic story is to suppose that M-Compatibilism is true. As part of the Freedom/Responsibility argument, however, the story is supposed to be supporting a premise of an overall argument for MCompatibilism and so this supposition is presumably not permissible in this setting. I therefore fail to see how the Frankfurt story is supposed to support R-Compatibilism and fail to see how the story is supposed to support the first premise of the Freedom/Responsibility argument.
I conclude that those defending R-Compatibilism by appealing to Frankfurt are in some trouble. They need some response to the first worry I raised about the defense of the Freedom/Responsibility argument’s first premise. In the spirit of philosophical cooperation I offered them a response to this worry. The response I generously provided may well be a strong defense of Frankfurt’s rejection of one reading of PAP. As I have just pointed out, however, the response is of no use to one wanting to appropriate Frankfurt’s attack against PAP in a defense of the Freedom/Responsibility argument. The Full Compatibilist therefore needs to look for a different response to the first worry I raised if she is to avoid the second worry. I have no suggestion to make on her behalf.
I turn now to my third and final worry about the Freedom/Responsibility argument. Though I have argued that this is unlikely, assume for purposes of discussion that we somehow come to see that Frankfurt cases strongly support R-Compatibilism. Even stronger, assume for purposes of discussion that R-Compatibilism is true. Are we then pulled inevitably to Full Compatibilism? I think that the answer to this question is "no". Assuming the truth of R-Compatibilism helps us focus on worries we should have about the second premise of the Freedom/ Responsibility argument.
Let’s take another look at this second premise. If we really did accept that the Frankfurt story involves moral responsibility without alternative possibilities in some way that helps establish R-Compatibilism, M-Incompatibilists should challenge the second premise of the argument using the very Frankfurt story introduced by the R-Compatibilist. That is, M-Incompatibilists should use Frankfurt stories to defend Semi-Compatibilism.
Recall the description of Larry and his behavior. Larry pushed Freddy, did so because he wanted to, and was not pressured or forced to do so by Geoffrey or anyone else. The M-Incompatibilist will surely note that none of this is sufficient for Larry’s being metaphysically free in the story. Perhaps this description is sufficient for Larry’s being metaphysically free in the story if M-Compatibilism is true. But again, the premise under discussion is part of an argument for M-Compatibilism and so it would be dialectically inadvisable to introduce M-Compatibilism as an additional premise supporting premise two of the original argument.
The M-Incompatibilist observation here is simply this: the Frankfurt story is at least as plausible when considered as a candidate for being a story in which Larry is morally responsible but not metaphysically free, as it is when viewed as a candidate for being a story in which Larry is morally responsible but lacks alternative possibilities. The more we incline towards accepting the first premise of the Freedom/Responsibility argument, the more we are pushed towards rejecting the argument’s second premise (or so the M-Incompatibilist should say). At one limit of this relation, if we concede for purposes of discussion that the story provides perfect support for the first premise, we should insist that the story also provides perfect support for the rejection of the second premise.
Can a defender of the Freedom/Responsibility argument point to the existence of alternative possibilities in the story as evidence of Larry’s metaphysical freedom? This would support the claim that the Frankfurt story is a story involving both moral responsibility and metaphysical freedom, consistent with the second premise of the Freedom/Responsibility argument. The Freedom/Responsibility argument’s defender would, however, be ill-advised to make this move. The M-Incompatibilist would be too quick to embrace the point. The point concedes the earlier criticisms of the first premise of the argument, conceding that there are alternative possibilities present in the story that is supposed to be a case involving moral responsibility without alternative possibilities.
III. CONCLUSION
Lots of philosophers are compatibilists about causal determinism and both metaphysical freedom and moral responsibility. One source of this Full Compatiblism is, oddly enough, Harry Frankfurt’s work on PAP. This is odd because, as noted earlier, Frankfurt’s work on PAP directly concerns neither metaphysical freedom nor causal determinism and therefore makes explicit contact with only one of the three concepts in play in contemporary discussions of Full Compatibilism. It is, however, easy to see how to transition from Frankfurt’s work on PAP to R-Compatibilism and then on to M-Compatibilism. The Freedom/ Responsibility argument brings out this natural progression. I hope to have convinced you that there are some weaknesses and serious confusions in this argument.
Though Frankfurt’s attack on PAP can be resisted, it can also be reasonably endorsed. Philosophers can reasonably go either way on this issue. Those who go further and appropriate Frankfurt for purposes of defending R-Compatibilism are, I believe, making a mistake, but their position is also defensible and it is not crazy to defend it in this way. Metaphysicians who press on from these positions in an attempt to reach M-Compatibilism (and therefore Full Compatibilism) have, it seems to me, stretched the resources of the Frankfurt material beyond the breaking point.13
13 I thank Thad Botharn, Torn Crisp, EJ Coffman, John Martin Fischer, Christian Miller, Mike Rea, and Ted Sider for helpful discussion. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Colorado where the general discussion was enjoyable and where Michael Tooley, Michael Huerner, Christopher Shields, and George Bealer provided insightful cornrnentary. Dean Zimmerman and an anonyrnous referee for Oxford Studies in Metaphysics provided extrernely helpful organizational and substantive feedback on the penultirnate draft. As always when working on this topic, rny deepest intellectual debts are to Peter van Inwagen and Christopher Hill.
REFERENCES
Fischer, J. M. (1994) The Metaphysics of Free Will (Blackwell).
—(1999) "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility", Ethics 110: 93—139.
—and M. Ravizza, (1998) Responsibility and Control (Cambridge University Press).
Frankfurt, H. (1969) "Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility", Journal of Philosophy 66.
van Inwagen, P. (1983) An Essay on Free Will (Oxford University Press).
Warfield, T. A. (1996) "Determinism and Moral Responsibility are Incompatible", Philosophical Topics 24.
—2000 "Causal Determinism and Human Freedom are Incompatible: A New Argument for Incompatibilism", Philosophical Perspectives 14.
—(2003) Compatibilism and Incompatibilism: Some Arguments", in M. Loux and D. Zimmerman (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press).
forthcoming) Metaphysical Freedom in.
END
wao, Rourchid :
het is maar de vraag of jou groot moeite wel beloond & gewaardeerd zou kunnen worden door deze kleuren blind post bullshitisten-sectes hier ...
maar het is wel de moeite waard om te proberen om al die luchtballonetjes door te prikken & al die post bullshitisme belachelijk zandkastelen omver te werpen ! :lol:
I can relate to the Rortian concept of 'The rich aesthete, the manager and the therapist' in one person who's is preaching to the slaves(=us) of 'superstition.
u do play by their rules , i'm afraid !
unconsciously giving them right , i guess !
TO ACQUIRE FREEDOM FROM MATERIALISM
الوَاحِدُالأَحَدُ
The One And Only
Significance:To acquire independence in the heart recite the above
name of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala 1000 times. The importance
of material objects will depart from the reader’s heart.
Er is iets ongerijmds aan zo’n postmoderne filosoof die in het vliegtuig stapt en in de lucht op zijn laptop werkt, bij aankomst zijn e-mail ophaalt, vervolgens een collegezaal binnenstapt en zegt dat we eigenlijk niets zeker weten en dat onze zekerheid tot «la textualité du texte» beperkt blijft.
:engel:
Een analoge redenatie gaat op wanneer postmoderne filosoof wordt vervangen door ET-verwerper.
Een analoge redenatie gaat op wanneer postmoderne filosoof wordt vervangen door ET-verwerper.
Post _bullshitisme ! :lol:
Michael Bergmann - Justification without Awareness~ A Defense of Epistemic Externalism - Oxford University Press, USA
3 THE BLAMELESSNESS ARGUMENT
The Blamelessness Argument: Justification is equivalent to epistemic blamelessness. Therefore, you are blameworthy for your unjustified beliefs. But you aren’t blameworthy for something unless you can tell that you ought not to have done it. So you can tell whether or not your beliefs are justified. And this implies that there is an awareness requirement on justification.
As will become clear below, my dissatisfaction with this argument has to do with the third and fourth sentences in it.18 After briefly explaining how I’ll be thinking of blameworthiness and blamelessness and how justification thought of as blamelessness is relevant to the concerns of this book, my task in this section will be twofold. First, I will consider several ways of more carefully formulating the Blamelessness Argument. I will conclude that, despite the fact that the Blamelessness Argument seems to be the most promising defense available for the conclusion that some sort of deontologism entails internalism, it fails. Second, I will explain how focusing on blameworthiness, as the original version of the Blamelessness Argument does at points, contributes to the illusory appeal of the idea that justification thought of as epistemic blamelessness is subject to awareness requirements.
18 See nn. 31 and 32 below.
3.1 Blameworthiness, Blamelessness, and Justification as Blamelessness
Let’s begin by considering what seems like a respectable account of generic blameworthiness:
BW: S’s doing A at t is something for which she is blameworthy if and only if either (i) S believes at t that she ought not to do A or (ii) S’s failure to believe at t that she ought not to do A is relevantly due to some other doing or failure of hers for which she is blameworthy.19
This account is motivated largely by the assumption that a person is not blameworthy for doing A if she is nonculpably unaware that she ought not to do A.
I take that assumption to be relatively uncontroversial, especially in this context since it seems to be the sort of thing to which deontological defenders of internalism will want to appeal.
Two questions arise in connection with this account of blameworthiness. First, is BW correct in saying that it is sufficient for S’s blameworthiness that she believes that she ought not to have done the thing she did? Take for example Huck Finn. Was he blameworthy for helping the slave, Jim, to escape when he believed that doing so was immoral and that he’d be sent to hell for it? Shouldn’t we say instead that he was doing something praiseworthy, not blameworthy?
19 Clause (ii) will require some work if one is to say exactly what counts as being ‘relevantly’ due to some other blameworthy doing or failure. Fortunately, for our purposes, we can leave that work undone here.
One could answer this first question by defending BWas follows:
If Huck Finn believed only that he was going against what his society (and their god) claimed was right even though what he was doing seemed to him to be the only decent thing to do, then he wasn’t really going against his conscience. However, if he seriously thought that what he was doing was an immoral thing to do and yet he did it anyway, then he is blameworthy because he is violating his conscience.
(Of course if, instead, he had turned Jim in because his conscience told him to do so, you might think he had something else wrong with him morally, such as having a confused sense of right and wrong.)
That’s a defensive response. A concessive response would concede the point behind the question and say that although satisfying clause (i) of BW isn’t sufficient for blameworthiness (in which case the ‘if’ part of BW’s ‘if and only if’ claim is mistaken), this problem could be solved by changing BW from an ‘if and only if’ principle to an ‘only if’ principle.20 My own response to the question is just this: for reasons to be explained below,21 we can see that if we weaken BW by making it an ‘only if’ principle rather than an ‘if and only if’ principle, that only makes matters worse for supporters of the Blamelessness Argument. Hence, if the concerns raised by the question at the end of the previous paragraph are genuine, they cause trouble not for me but for those who want to use the Blamelessness Argument to show that deontologism entails internalism. Thus, because I want to give the Blamelessness Argument a careful hearing, I’ll just ignore the concerns raised by the first question.
20 Notice that if we changed the ‘if and only if’ in BW to ‘only if’, it would be asserting nothing more than the extremely plausible claim that a person isn’t blameworthy for doing A if she is nonculpably unaware that she ought not to do A.
21 See n. 25.
The second question connected with BW has to do with the fact that the term ‘blameworthy’ appears in the second clause of what is supposed to be an explanation of what makes an act blameworthy. Isn’t that in some sense circular?
No.
To see why, notice that an act’s blameworthiness can be original or derived. The blameworthiness of an act is derived if that blameworthiness is relevantly due to some other blameworthy act of the agent. It is original if it isn’t. In other words, an act’s blameworthiness is original if it is blameworthy because clause (i) above is satisfied; it is derived if it is blameworthy because clause (ii) is satisfied. Now if I am blameworthy for something, not all of the blameworthy behavior in my life is derivatively blameworthy. Instead, the derived blameworthiness of my behavior must always be traced back ultimately (perhaps via the derived blameworthiness of other acts of mine) to behavior that is originally blameworthy. Thus, the account above avoids circularity. Clause (ii) of BW functions as a recursive clause while clause (i) functions as a base clause.
To make use of this notion of blameworthiness in arguing for an awareness requirement on justification, we should first remind ourselves that the concept we’re speaking of isn’t generic blameworthiness but epistemic blameworthiness.
Looking to BW as our example, we can define epistemic blameworthiness as follows:
EBW: S’s believing p at t is something for which she is epistemically blameworthy if and only if either (i) S believes at t that she ought not to believe p or (ii) S’s failure to believe at t that she ought not to believe p is relevantly due to some other doing or failure of hers for which she is epistemically blameworthy.22
22 According to this definition, it is sufficient for being epistemically blameworthy in holding B that you think you ought not to hold it. But what if you think both that you epistemically ought to hold B and that you morally ought not to hold it? Are you still epistemically blameworthy for holding B? See Bergmann (2000a: 93) for some discussion related to these questions. To simplify matters, I will ignore these questions here.
Next, we can spell out the corresponding notion of epistemic blamelessness which is just the absence of epistemic blameworthiness:
EBL: S’s believing p at t is something for which she is epistemically blameless if and only if (i) S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p and (ii) S’s failure to believe at t that she ought not to believe p is not relevantly due to some other doing or failure of hers for which she is epistemically blameworthy.
I’ll start by assuming that when the Blamelessness Argument above says, in its first sentence, that justification is equivalent to epistemic blamelessness, it is speaking of epistemic blamelessness understood in accord with EBL.
Even though we have yet to consider a careful formulation of the Blamelessness Argument, there is one question that immediately comes to mind. We can now see how the Blamelessness Argument can be used to argue from a version of deontologism to internalism about justification if our focus is justification understood as epistemic blamelessness. But I have already made clear in Section 1 of Chapter 1 that I’m interested in a different sort of justification—what I there called ‘ordinary justification’, which I said is more objective than mere epistemic blamelessness. So why bother with this particular argument from deontologism to internalism?
There are two reasons. First, I think that the argument from deontologism to internalism fails even if the internalist is using it to defend internalism about justification understood as epistemic blamelessness. And I don’t want internalists to think my objection to internalism is successful only if I focus on more objective sorts of justification and ignore justification thought of as epistemic blamelessness.
Second, although it is a given that ordinary justification (the sort in which I’m interested) is not merely epistemic blamelessness, it isn’t a given that it doesn’t require epistemic blamelessness and more besides. True, epistemic blamelessness isn’t sufficient for ordinary justification. But it might be argued that it is necessary for ordinary justification. And if that were correct, then an argument from the necessity for justification of epistemic blamelessness to the conclusion that internalism about such justification is true, would be of use in defending internalism about ordinary justification. For if blamelessness is required (even though insufficient) for ordinary justification and it is the sort of thing that is, of necessity, something accessible to the subject, it follows that ordinary justification requires access to at least one of the things contributing to it. For this reason, the Blamelessness Argument, used to argue from deontologism to internalism about justification thought of as epistemic blamelessness, can be viewed as relevant to whether internalism about ordinary justification is true.
3.2 Some Versions of the Blamelessness Argument
Our question, then, is whether internalism is entailed by justification’s requiring epistemic blamelessness, where the latter is understood in accord with EBL.
A natural first reaction is that the answer is ‘no’. For a person can’t always tell on reflection alone whether her failure to think she’s violating a duty is due to some other failure (perhaps in the past) for which she is blameworthy. In other words, derived epistemic blamelessness isn’t always accessible to a person. In light of EBL, this implies that a person can’t tell on reflection alone whether she is epistemically blameless (since that requires the absence of both original and derived epistemic blameworthiness). And if justification is a matter of epistemic blamelessness, this suggests that a person can’t tell on reflection alone whether her beliefs are justified. The problem, in a nutshell, is that because current blameworthiness can depend on past blameworthiness and past blameworthiness isn’t always accessible, I am not guaranteed to be able to tell on reflection alone whether or not I amcurrently blameworthy.23
23 Cf. Greco (1990: 256–7) and Alston (1986: 208).
But perhaps we can still use this version of deontologism (according to which epistemic blamelessness is required for justification) to argue for internalism. Consider the following more careful formulation of the Blamelessness Argument:
The Blamelessness Argument: Version 2
1. S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t.24
2. S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t only if S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p. [from EBL]
3. Therefore, S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p.
By focusing in premise 2 on only a necessary condition of epistemic blamelessness, we avoid mentioning the ‘past blamelessness’ requirement, the satisfaction of which isn’t guaranteed to be accessible on reflection alone. We thereby sidestep the worry that surfaced in the previous paragraph.25
24 I want this argument to be applicable to both ordinary justification and justification thought of as epistemic blamelessness. It is for this reason that I’ve formulated this first premise as an ‘only if’ rather than an ‘if and only if’ claim. It is only the ‘only if’ claim that has a chance of being true of ordinary justification (see the last paragraph of Section 3.1 of this chapter for discussion of this point). And the ‘if and only if’ claim isn’t required for this argument to succeed since the ‘only if’ part does all the work.
25 I can now explain why the Blamelessness Argument would be in trouble if we had simply conceded the point made in the ‘Huck Finn’ objection I mentioned above to BW near the beginning of Section 3.1. That concession would have led us to change both BW and EBW from ‘if and only if’ claims to ‘only if’ claims. And that would have forced us to change EBL from an ‘if and only if’ claim to an ‘if’ claim. The result would be that we couldn’t derive premise 2 above from EBL and, hence, that the Blamelessness Argument wouldn’t go through.
If the conclusion of Version 2 of the Blamelessness Argument implied that there is an awareness requirement on justification, then we would have an argument from deontologism to internalism. But it doesn’t. For the conclusion isn’t that justification requires awareness of a justification-contributor. Instead, it’s that justification requires the absence of awareness of a justification-defeater.
We could alter our accounts of epistemic blameworthiness and blamelessness in order to get an argument with a conclusion that requires not merely the absence of awareness of a justification-defeater but, instead, the presence of awareness of a justification-contributor. This could be done by defining a strongerversion of epistemic blamelessness:
EBLS: S’s believing p at t is something for which she is epistemically blameless if and only if S believes at t that she is permitted to believe p.
According to EBLS it isn’t enough for epistemic blamelessness that S satisfies the negative requirement of (nonculpably) refraining from believing that she ought not to hold the belief in question. In addition, S must also satisfy the positive requirement of believing that she is permitted to hold the belief in question. It is because it imposes a positive requirement, not merely a negative one, that EBLS is stronger than EBL. With this account of epistemic blamelessness at our disposal, we can replace Version 2 of the Blamelessness Argument with the following:
The Blamelessness Argument: Version 3
1. S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t.
2*. S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t only if S believes at t that she is permitted to believe p. [fromEBLS]
3*. Therefore, S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S believes at t that she is permitted to believe p.
This time the conclusion is that there is an awareness requirement on justification since, for her belief B to be justified, the subject must have the further belief that she is permitted to hold B.
But this revised argument is only as plausible as the account of epistemicblamelessness on which it depends. As I noted above, those who prefer EBLSover EBL think that refraining from thinking you ought not to believe B isn’t enough for being epistemically blameless in holding B—in addition, you must believe that holding B is permissible. But surely such opponents of EBL won’t think that just any such belief about B’s being permissible, no matter how insane or irrational or blameworthy it is, is enough for being blameless in holding B. The very intuitions that push one to require, for epistemic blamelessness in believing B, a further belief that B is permissible also demand that only a justified belief about B’s permissibility will be sufficient for B’s epistemic blamelessness. This suggests that opponents of EBL will think of justification in terms of a version of epistemic blamelessness that is even stronger than EBLS, a super strong version which we can define as follows:
EBLSS: S’s believing p at t is something for which she is epistemically blameless if and only if S justifiedly believes at t that she is permitted to believe p.
This changes the Blamelessness Argument as follows:
The Blamelessness Argument: Version 4
1. S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t.
2** S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t only if S justifiedly believes at t that she is permitted to believe p. [fromEBLSS]
3** Therefore, S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S justifiedly believes at t that she is permitted to believe p.
But although this conclusion gives us an awareness requirement on justification, the obvious problem is that it gives us a strong awareness requirement since it says that justification for one belief requires a further justified belief.26 And, as I argued in Chapter 1, this leads to vicious regress problems since the required additional belief is at least slightly more complicated than the original belief for whose justification the additional justified belief is required. Moreover, for the reasons discussed in Section 3.2 of Chapter 1, it won’t help to require only the potential for such an additional justified belief.27 Thus, the strong version of epistemic blamelessness (EBLS) results in a deontological account of justification that she is permitted to believe p. But then epistemically blameless belief that p requires epistemically blameless belief in that is too permissive to satisfy opponents of EBL; and the super strong version of epistemic blamelessness (EBLSS) results in a deontological account of justification that is too demanding to be plausible. The lesson seems to be that we must stick with the original account of blamelessness (EBL) which requires only the absence of a belief about being obligated not to hold the belief in question.
26 See Chapter 1, Section 2.1, for an account of the difference between strong and weak awareness.
27 One might try replacin EBLSS with EBLSS*: S’s believing p at t is something for which she is epistemically blameless if and only if S epistemically blamelessly believes at in something slightly more complex than p. And this will lead to a vicious regress exactly parallel to the one discussed in Section 3.2 of Chapter 1. Moreover, the prospects in this case for avoiding the viciousness of the regress are just as slim as they are in the case of the regress discussed in Chapter 1.
But perhaps there is another way to save the Blamelessness Argument. Perhaps we can somehow derive an awareness requirement from the original ‘absence of awareness’ requirement. Consider the result of extending version 2 of the Blamelessness Argument as follows:
The Blamelessness Argument: Version 5
1. S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t.
2. S is epistemically blameless in believing p at t only if S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p. [from EBL]
3. Therefore, S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p.
4. Necessarily, if S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p, then S is aware or potentially aware of the fact that she doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p.
5. Therefore, S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S is aware or potentially aware of the fact that she doesn’t believe at t that she ought not to believe p.
The idea here is that the alleged necessary truth stated in 4 enables us to derive a requirement for one sort of awareness from the requirement that another sort of awareness is absent. Unfortunately, 4 seems false. For even if we allow that the claim 4 says is necessary is contingently true for all actual persons, there’s no reason to think it is necessarily true for all possible persons. Why couldn’t some believer be defective in such a way that she is incapable (due to brain damage or the interference of an evil demon) of being aware of the fact that she doesn’t believe that she ought not to believe p? Given that not believing you ought not to believe p is one thing and that being aware of that absence of belief is another, it’s hard to see why you couldn’t be rendered incapable of detecting such an absence.28
28 One possible response to this objection to premise 4 is to argue as follows: ‘The proponent of the argument from deontologism to internalism can avoid this objection to premise 4 by imposing a proper function condition on justification. For then we could change the argument by adding premise 3.5: S’s belief, at t that p, is justified only if S’s cognitive faculties are functioning properly in forming B. And we could change 4 to 4*: Necessarily, if (a) S doesn’t believe at t that she ought not with Dobj. And things aren’t any more hopeful when we turn to Dsubj. Moreover, Ginet’s argument from deontologism to internalism doesn’t work. Nor do the various versions of the Blamelessness Argument discussed above. It’s beginning to look, therefore, as if there is no good way to argue from deontologism to internalism.
3.3 Why Deontologism Seems Relevant to Internalism
I’ve presented objections to what I think of as the most promising arguments from deontologism to internalism. But although those arguments seem to fail, there remains the sense that there is some connection between justification (understood as epistemic blamelessness) and awareness requirements. If we can identify what that connection is and see why it doesn’t enable us to argue from deontologism to internalism, then we can be more confident in concluding that deontologism can’t be used to defend internalism.
What we noted above is that there is no awareness requirement on blamelessness (epistemic or otherwise). Instead, there is an ‘absence of awareness’ or ‘absence of higher-level belief’ requirement on B’s blamelessness: you must not believe you are violating a duty in holding B. For this reason, we can’t appeal to the necessity for justification of epistemic blamelessness in arguing for an awareness requirement on justification. At best, that would enable us to establish that there is an ‘absence of awareness’ requirement on justification.
But suppose we focus, as the original rough statement of the Blamelessness Argument does, on epistemic blameworthiness. Recall that we are thinking of that notion as follows:
EBW: S’s believing p at t is something for which she is epistemically blameworthy if and only if either (i) S believes at t that she ought not to believe p or (ii) S’s failure to believe at t that she ought not to believe p is relevantly due to some other doing or failure of hers for which she is epistemically blameworthy.
Earlier we distinguished between original and derived blameworthiness. A belief is originally epistemically blameworthy if clause (i) is true of it; it is epistemically blameworthy in a derived way if clause (ii) is true of it. Thus, S’s belief, at t that p, is originally epistemically blameworthy if and only if S believes at t that she ought not to believe p.29 What this shows is that there is an awareness (or higher-level belief) requirement on original epistemic blameworthiness: original epistemic blameworthiness for a belief B requires you to have the higher-level belief that you ought not to hold B.30
29 It is perhaps worth noting that the ‘Huck Finn’ objection to BW needn’t trouble us here. The reasoning laid out here goes through even if we change EBW from an ‘if and only if’ claim to an ‘only if’ claim. Likewise, we could change the sentence to which this note is attached from an ‘if and only if’ to an ‘only if’ claim without affecting the point I’m making here.
30 No regress results from this requirement because the belief that you ought not to hold B needn’t be justified in order for it to result in your being epistemically blameworthy for holding B.
Thus, there is a connection between, on the one hand, deontological considerations having to do with epistemic blameworthiness and, on the other hand, awareness requirements. But the connection is due to awareness requirements on original epistemic blameworthiness, not on derived epistemic blameworthiness or on epistemic blamelessness or on justification. One can’t infer from the fact that there is an awareness requirement on original epistemic blameworthiness that there is such a requirement on derived epistemic blameworthiness.31
For this reason, one can’t infer that there are such requirements on epistemic blamelessness (since that requires the absence of both original and derived epistemic blameworthiness). And if one can’t infer that there are such requirements on epistemic blamelessness, then there seems to be no hope of inferring that there are such requirements on a deontological version of justification. One can’t even infer, from the fact that there are awareness requirements on original epistemic blameworthiness, that there are such requirements on the absence of original epistemic blameworthiness—a state we might call ‘original epistemic blamelessness’.32 All we can say about original epistemic blamelessness in holding B is that it requires the absence of awareness of a certain higher-level belief—namely, that one ought not to hold B. But that isn’t an awareness requirement. And, in light of the failure of the argument relying on premise 4 near the end of Section 3.2, there doesn’t seem to be any good way of deriving an awareness requirement from the requirement that another awareness is absent. In short, the only awareness requirement we can get from deontologism is an awareness requirement on original epistemic blameworthiness; and we can’t get from there to an awareness requirement on justification. These considerations explain both why it is tempting to agree with the argument from deontologism to internalism as well as why that argument is mistaken.
31 By recognizing the fallaciousness of this inference, one can see what is wrong with the third sentence of the original (rough) statement of the Blamelessness Argument, which said: But you aren’t blameworthy for something unless you can tell that you ought not to have done it. For if there is no awareness requirement on derived blameworthiness then there is no reason to endorse that third sentence, even if there is an awareness requirement on original blameworthiness.
32 The attractiveness of this mistaken inference is what tempts people to endorse the fourth sentence in the Blamelessness Argument. That fourth sentence asserts that you can infer from the third sentence (according to which you’re blameworthy only if you can tell you’ve done what you ought not to have done) that you can tell whether or not your beliefs are justified or blameless.
Michael Bergmann - Justification without Awareness~ A Defense of Epistemic Externalism - Oxford University Press, USA: http://www.speedyshare.com/423953459.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/423953459.html)
Een analoge redenatie gaat op wanneer postmoderne filosoof wordt vervangen door ET-verwerper.
Fictionalism in Metaphysics <--> Modern Fictionalism <--> Hermeneutic and Revolutionary Fictionalism <--> Two Constrasts: Reductionism and Nonfactualism <--> Pyrrhonism as Protofactualism
Mark Eli Kalderon, Fictionalism in Metaphysics: http://www.speedyshare.com/659128469.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/659128469.html)
P.S.
The aim of science is not truth but empirical adequacy.
p. 1 Fictionalism in Metaphysics, Mark Eli Kalderon
John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View
CHAPTER 20
Zombies
20. 1 Philosophical Zombies
Perhaps it is fitting to bring this volume to a close with a brief discussion of a topic that has featured prominently in recent philosophy of mind. If nothing else, this will provide a test case for my contention that it is useful to see philosophy of mind as applied metaphysics: if you get the ontology right, problems in the philosophy of mind take care of themselves.
A prevailing view in the philosophy of mind is that what makes it so difficult to find a place for consciousness in the physical world is the elusive qualitative dimension of conscious experiences. It would seem to be possible to construct systems that are functionally equivalent to conscious creatures, but lack (or apparently lack) conscious experiences. Such systems would behave in ways indistinguishable from ways we behave. Why, then, should we, or any other creature, be conscious? What possible benefit could consciousness bestow? And—the old problem from Locke—why should our conscious experiences have precisely the character they do?
After the same manner, that the Ideas of these original qualities are produced in us, we may conceive, that the Ideas of Secondary Qualities are also produced, viz. by the operation of insensible particles on our Senses. For it being manifest, that there are Bodies, and a good store of Bodies, each whereof is so small, that we cannot, by any of our Senses, discover either their bulk, figure, or motion, as is evident in the Particles of the Air and Water, and other extremely smaller than those, perhaps, as much smaller than the Particles of Air, or Water, as the particles of Air or Water, are smaller than Pease or Hail—stones. Let us suppose at present, that the different Motions and Figures, Bulk, and Number of such Particles, affecting the several Organs of our Senses, produce in us those different Sensations, which we have from the Colours and Smells of Bodies; that a Violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter of peculiar figures, and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications oftheir Motions, causes the Ideas of the blue Colour, and sweet Scent of that Flower to be produced in our Minds. It being no more impossible, to conceive, that God should annex such Ideas to such Motions, with which they have no similitude; than that he should annexthe Idea of Pain to the motion of a piece of Steel dividing our Flesh. with which that Idea hath no resemblance. (Locke 1690/1978:11. viii. 13)
Why should red things look red? Why should middle C played on a Steinway give rise to experiences with a particular qualitative character? Locke suggests that the connection between the nature of material objects and the qualities of our experiences of these objects is abrute fact, not something susceptible to further explanation. This is the ‘explanatory gap’.
Locke’s suggestion that there is nothing in the character of the material world that could explain the existence or nature of conscious experiences has been aggressively promoted by David Chalmers (1996). Consciousness, Chalmers argues, must be an addition to the ontology of the material universe. Imagine a world indiscernible from ourworld physically, but with consciousness absent. Such a world would include beings like us in every physical respect, but who lacked consciousness. These beings—the ‘zombies’—would have brains like oursdown to the last detail.1 Zombies would be functional replicas of human beings; they would talk, argue about politics, write poetry, take Prozac, weep at weddings, complain of toothaches, and in general be indistinguishable from us by any behavioural or physiological standard. Zombies would, however, fail to be conscious: ‘all is dark inside’ (D. Chalmers 1996: 96).
According to Chalmers, the possibility—the bare logical possibility—of zombies makes salient the fact that consciousness is an addition of being to the material world. In creating the material world, God need only create the basic entities and see that these are appropriately arranged.In so doing, God would thereby have created rocks, planets, living creatures, and everything else populating our universe.
1 For readers lucky enough to have remained ignorant of them until Zombies are theinventionof Robert Kirk (1974);see his (1994) forsome second thoughts on zombies. Philosophers’ zombies differ from the zombies of folklore. Philosophers’ zombies are intended to make salient the idea that consciousness is an addition of being, something over and above’ the physical world. if that is so, then could consistently conceive of beings precisely like us in every respect save one: they lack consciousness.
The addition of consciousness, however, would require a further act of creation. The idea is not that consciousness requires a theological explanation, but only that consciousness is a genuine addition of being, something ‘over and above’ the material world. On Chalmers’s view, this means that there must be laws of a fundamental sort linking consciousness to material goings—on.
20.2 Functionalism and Consciousness
It is tricky to spell this out, but the idea can be illustrated by thinking of the laws of physics on the model of an axiom system. We must add to this system additional laws, laws independent of the physical laws in the sense of not being derivable from those laws. A zombie world would be a world sharing our physical laws, and basic physical facts, but lacking these additional laws: an axiom system minus one of its independent axioms. Our world contains no zombies—or so we believe:
the zombies believe the same! But, according to Chalmers, the bare possibility of zombies, the ‘logical possibility’ of there being a world like ours in every physical respect but lacking consciousness, is all we need to establish the thesis that consciousness, although dependent perhaps on physical occurrences, is not reducible to anything physical.
Chalmers holds that laws required for consciousness are anchored in functional features of the material world. If you are conscious, this is because you have a particular sort of functional organization and because a fundamental law of nature associates conscious experiences of a definite sort with this kind of functional organization. Laws of this kind are missing in a zombie world.
Functionalism has been widely criticized on the grounds that it is implausible to think that functional organization alone could suffice for conscious experience. To borrow an example from Ned Block (1978), imagine the population of China coordinated so as to duplicate the functional organization of a conscious creature. It seems crazy to think that the system as a whole would undergo conscious experiences.2 Chalmers takes a measured view of such cases.
2 Ofcourse, individual Chinese people ou1d he conscious. If functionalists are to be believed, however, the system of which these people are mere components must itself be conscious solely by virtue of its being organized as it is.
He accepts the critic of functionalism’s contention that functional organization by itself does not suffice for conscious experience. He parts company with the critic, however, in insisting that the right functional organization, together with the right laws of nature, is sufficient for conscious experience. If by chance the population of China, appropriately organized, duplicated the functional organization of a conscious creature, then (given the laws of nature that prevail in our world) this organized system would be conscious.
Although the possibility might strike you as wholly implausible, this in itself need not constitute an interesting objection to Chalmers. It could well be that the kind of functional organization required for consciousness is vastly more complex than anything that might be contrived using as ingredients the Chinese population. In that case, there would be no question of the imagined system’s being conscious. Critics are likely to regard this as irrelevant: add as many units as necessary and organize them as you please, there is no reason to suppose that the resulting system would be conscious. Here we are pitting intuition against theory. As history amply illustrates, however, when a theory has enough to offer, theory trumps intuition.
20.3 Logical and Natural Supervenience
The possibility of zombies is founded on the idea that consciousness is, as Locke seems to suggest in the passage quoted in §20.1,related contingently to physical states and processes. Chalmers puts this in terms of supervenience: the conscious facts do not ‘logically supervene’ on the physical facts.What is logical supervenience? When A—facts logically supervene on B—facts, ‘all there is to the B—facts being as they are is that the A—facts are as they are’ (1996:36, emphasis in the original); ‘once God (hypothetically) creates a world with certain A—facts, the B—facts come along for free as an automatic consequence’ (1996: 38); ‘the B— facts are a free lunch [... ] the B—facts merely re—describe what is described by the A—facts’ (1996:41). According to Chalmers, every fact about our world logically supervenes on the fundamental physical facts, with one important exception: facts involving consciousness (1996:36—41).
God could create a tree, for instance, by creating the fundamental particles and arranging them appropriately. The particles, thus arranged, amount to the tree; the tree is nothing ‘over and above’ the particles arranged as they are. In the same way, a human being considered as a biological entity is nothing more than an arrangement of particles.3 Facts about trees and facts about human beings (exclusive of facts about human beings’ conscious states) logically supervene on the physical facts.
Facts about consciousness are taken to depend in a more robust sense on the physical facts. The physical facts together with certain contingent laws of nature necessitate the mental facts. God can create a human being by arranging the particles in the right way. The creation of a conscious human being, however, requires appropriate arrangements of particles together with distinctive laws of nature linking consciousness to these arrangements.
Suppose God creates a world consisting wholly of granite boulders. By rearranging the particles making up these boulders, God could create a world resembling ours in every physical respect: a world of trees, tables, and human beings .The addition of consciousness would require more than the mere rearrangement of particles, however. To add consciousness, God would need to add new fundamental laws of nature. These laws of nature would ground the emergence of consciousness from non—conscious physical processes.
According to Chalmers, then, every physical fact logically supervenes on the basic physical facts. Think of logical supervenience as the ‘nothing—over—and—above’ relation. Chalmers labels the relation between the physical facts and facts about consciousness ‘natural supervenience’.The mental facts naturally supervene on the physical facts. Call this the ‘arising—from’ relation. The mental facts ‘arise from’ the physical facts by virtue of contingent psycho—physical laws. Chalmers’s terminology might suggest that logical and natural supervenience are species of a common genus.This is misleading. Logical supervenience is easy to understand. Put crudely, logical supervenience is just the idea that, if you organize the parts in the right way, you have thereby created the wholes. If you arrange matchsticks in a particular way, you have thereby created a square; the square is nothing more than the matchsticks so arranged. Natural supervenience, however, is profoundly different. Here we have a relation between levels of being: if you arrange the parts correctly, then, given certain laws of nature, a completely new kind of entity appears on the scene.
3 lf you think that an entity could count as a tree or a human being if it had an appropriate causal history, then the story ill need to be made more complicated: the arrangement of particles constituting a tree or human being would need to have the right kind of causal history. See Chs. 15 and 16 above.
20.4 The Ontology of Zombies
Philosophers comfortable with levels of reality might find thoughts of natural supervenience wholly unremarkable. I have argued at length (Chapters 2—6)that belief in levels of reality is misplaced: reality is not hierarchical. Although the world presents us with endless levels of complexity and organization, there is at most one level of being. In any case, in so far as you take putatively higher—level features of reality to supervene logically on lower—level features, you abandon the levels model for those features. Once you give up levels of being elsewhere, natural supervenience stands out. Consciousness as a higher—level phenomenon, something that ‘arises from’ physical phenomena on the basis of contingent laws of nature, occupies an ontologically unique niche.
The baffling character of this relation is camouflaged by Chalmers’s use of the labels ‘logical supervenience’ and ‘natural supervenience.’ Orthographical similarities aside, logical and natural supervenience are as different as could be. Whatever natural supervenience is supposed to be, it is not required to explain physical phenomena; the physical world, given logical supervenience, is ontologically ‘flat’. Only mental items ‘arise from’ states and processes occupying a lower level. When all this is put together, the result appears unappealingly ad hoc.
Chalmers holds that fundamental laws of nature connect properties of conscious experiences (the qualia) to functional states. He embraces the idea that functional states are multiply realizable in endless physical configurations. You, an octopus, and an Alpha Centaurian can each be in the very same functional state, F1. Your being in this state is a matter of your being in some complex physical state, P1. P1 differs (perhaps dramatically) from P2, the state of the octopus, and P3, the state of the Alpha Centaurian, by virtue of which the octopus and the Alpha Centaurian, respectively, are in functional state F1. On Chalmers’s view, P ‘logically supervenes’ on P1, P2, P3 . . . This, as we have seen, means that there is nothing to being P1 ‘over and above’ being P1, P2, P3 . . .4
4 If this were all there were to multiple realizability, then the view would be compatible with the line on multiple realizability defended in earlier chapters. It could be easy to read Chalmers and not appreciate this, however. One result is that the kinds of difficulty discussed here are rendered invisible.
http://i31.tinypic.com/w2nma.jpg
Now consider the fundamental laws of nature Chalmers takes to be responsible for consciousness. You might think that the laws associate conscious qualities with functional properties like P1 (Figure 20.1). Given logical supervenience, however, there is nothing to F1 over and above P1, P2, P3 . . . This means that the fundamental laws will need to connect the very same conscious property with an ungainly, heterogeneous, open—ended collection of complex physical properties, P1, P2, P3 (Figure 20.2). More than four decades ago, J. J. C. Smart commented on a puzzling aspect of a conception of this kind.
States of consciousness [. . .] seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be so. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics (together, of course, with descriptions of the ways in which the parts are put together roughly, biology is to physics as radio—engineering is to electromagnetism) except the occurrence of sensations seems to me frankly unbelievable. Such sensations would be ‘nomological danglers’, to use Feigl’s expression [Feigl (1958),428]. It is not often realized how odd would be the laws whereby these nomological danglers would dangle. It is sometimes asked, ‘Why can’t there be psycho—physical laws which are of a novel sort, just as the laws of electricity and magnetism were novelties from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics?’ Certainly we are pretty sure in the future to come across ultimate laws of a novel type, but I expect them to relate simple constituents: for example whatever ultimate particles are then in vogue. I cannot believe that the ultimate laws of nature could relate simple constituents to configurations consisting of billions of neurons (and goodness knows how many billions of billions of ultimate particles) all put together for all the world as though their main purpose in life was to be a negative feedback mechanism of a complicated sort. Such ultimate laws would be like nothing so far known in science. (Smart 1959: 142 3)
This passage nicely captures a deeply troubling feature of Chalmers’s ontology of mentality. If the ontology is abandoned, these worries evaporate, and with them the possibility of zombies.
20.5 The Impossibility of Zombies
Card—carrying functionalists deny that zombies are possible on the grounds that states of mind (including conscious states) are purely functional states. If two agents are in the same functional state, regardless of qualitative differences in the ‘realizers’ of that state, the two agents are thereby in the same mental state. Whatever your views on functionalism, a flat—footed response to Chalmers of this kind is notably unsatisfying. Zombies strike us as outrageous precisely because they resemble us functionally but not qualitatively. The official functionalist response concedes this possibility, but denies that it is relevant. In that case, however, the zombies could be regarded as counter— examples to functionalism. It is no good defending a theory against a putative counter—example by reaffirming the theory and pointing out that the theory implies the counter—example’s falsehood.5
5 This, I think, is one reason why so many readers find Dennett’s approach (1991)to consciousness unpersuasive.
What are the alternatives? I have argued that qualities and powers cannot be prized apart: every property of a concrete object is a power and is a quality. Agents or systems possessing identical powers must be qualitatively identical as well. It will turn out that, so long as ‘same functional state’ is given a sufficiently narrow reading, the functionalists are right: functionally identical agents will be qualitatively identical. If you read ‘same functional state’ more broadly, if you employ a highly non—specific functional characterization, then this need not be so: at best we should have imperfect qualitative similarity.
Imagine God creating the world. Doing so is a matter of God’s creating the fundamental objects and placing them in particular relations. The fundamental objects possess fundamental properties.These properties, arranged as they are, endow their possessors with particular powers. The objects behave the way they do because of their properties. Laws of nature are what they are because the objects that make up our world possess these properties and not others. In addition to endowing their possessors with particular powers, the properties endow objects with definite qualities. Qualities and powers cannot vary independently. The possibility of zombies depends on the denial of this thesis.
You may remain unmoved. Why should anyone think that the possibility of zombies could be disproved solely because that possibility is inconsistent with a particular thesis about properties—especially when that thesis is not widely shared?
Let us be clear about the character of this debate. Zombies did not fall from the sky. Indeed, many who encounter it find the zombie possibility barely intelligible. The zombie possibility turns on substantive philosophical theses concerning properties, powers, and laws of nature. I have argued at length, and on independent grounds, against these substantive theses. You may not like my arguments or the view of properties I take those arguments to support, but you will need at least to concede that what we have here is an issue that can be settled only by settling fundamental matters in ontology. I take the fact that the conception of properties defended in earlier chapters implies the impossibility of zombies as providing support for that conception.
The point I should like to leave with you the reader is just that decisions made about ground—level ontological matters determine the space of possibilities in the philosophy of mind—and, of course, in other domains as well. The zombie possibility arises only against a particular ontological background, one according to which powers and qualities are only contingently related. I have argued at length that we have excellent reasons to reject this thesis, reasons that have nothing to do with the philosophy of mind per se. If that argument is on the right track, then we can reject Chalmers’s appeal to ‘natural supervenience (the ‘arising—from’ relation) and with it the possibility of zombies.
20.6 Concluding Remark
You may find the ontology I have defended in foregoing chapters unattractive. In that case, I hope I have at least managed to convince you that the pursuit of ontology in philosophy is unavoidable. Philosophers who attempt to sidestep ontological issues too often implicitly adopt a substantive ontological scheme. Unacknowledged, the scheme works behind the scenes in a way that can be difficult to detect. In many cases, the scheme does most of the work in subsequent debate. This is so in Chalmers’s case; it is so, as well, in the vast literature on mental causation. Problems stem from commitments to ontological theses that rarely see the light of day. Exposed to the light of day, these theses may strike us as less compelling than they do so long as they remain invisible.
Some readers might find in this reason to be sceptical of substantive philosophical theses generally. Such readers could be attracted to anti— realism in one of its many guises. Anti—realist philosophers, and those who hope to reduce metaphysics to (or replace it with) the philosophy of language, owe the rest of us an account of the ontology of language. Berkeley, at least, was honest: all that exists are minds and their contents. What of those who regard the world as text or a social construct? Are texts and social constructs real entities? If they are, what are they?
These are old battles, but it is of the nature of philosophy that the old battles must be taken up by successive generations of philosophers. Philosophy progresses, not linearly, but helically. At the onset of the twenty—first century, pressed by issues arising in the philosophy of mind, we are in a period of flux. Anti—realism, always seductive, pulls us in one direction; serious ontology pulls in the other. I cast my lot with the ontologists.
pp. 240-249 John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View: http://www.speedyshare.com/670233960.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/670233960.html)
Post _bullshitisme ! :lol:
Since postmodernism never was and never will be, postskepticism can be regarderd of expressing that the world is still ruled by the North-West European white male Lutherans. R.W. Sharples: Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics! (Calvinists, Catholics, Lutherans)
Post-skepticism in this framework can be read as a sociological determination and therefore I referred - earlier in this thread - to Stephen Crook and his 'In the Aftermath of Modernist Radicalists'.
Next step is to put the leftovers into a copy of the Mulla Sadra (r.a.) Library and this makes it a lot easier to evaluate modern philosophy and as Muslims we don't have any obligation to reinvent hermeneutical ontology.
So we can focus on aesthetic epistemology and get into the latest on modern ontology studying the existence of the controversial Philosophical Zombies (as linguistic constructions) and an interesting point is the anti-realistic input from paulinean sources (words & syntax)into language.
Earlier in this thread I placed Viriginia Held's 'The Ethics of Care' in which she distances herself from Christianity and it's virtue ethics, since 'virtue ethics' is not only a macho thing but is also vulnerable for the 'Church-restricted Aristotelean philosophy' and predictable in this matter is that Calvinists will try to pursuit in absorbing 'The Ethcis of Care' for placing it into the proverbial Plato's Cave (= Circus Plato).
Because of the substantial amount of literature, however, I think it is time to slow down things a little.
Most of all, it's obvious that philosophy is breaking away from the Nicene-Christian past. So even writers like R. Dawkins are in some way or another attributing in bringing down the "creators" of Nicene (=Philosophical) Zombies.
After all, Allah SWT shows his signs everywhere.
impressive indeed !
The assistance of the management is impressive too.
Eleven days ago I requested to make supersccript & subscript possible since the text written by Plantinga (earlier in this thread) was almost impossible to place on this forum: within the hour it was arranged including striketrough.
The history of epistemology
Ancient philosophy
The pre-Socratics
The central focus of ancient Greek philosophy was the problem of motion. Many pre-Socratic philosophers thought that no logically coherent account of motion and change could be given. Although this problem was primarily a concern of metaphysics, not epistemology, it had the consequence that all major Greek philosophers held that knowledge must not itself change or be changeable in any respect. This requirement motivated Parmenides (fl. 5th century BC), for example, to hold that thinking is identical with "being" (i.e., all objects of thought exist and are unchanging) and that it is impossible to think of "nonbeing" or "becoming" in any way.
Plato
Plato accepted the Parmenidean constraint that knowledge must be unchanging. One consequence of this view, as Plato pointed out in the Theaetetus, is that sense experience cannot be a source of knowledge, because the objects apprehended through it are subject to change. To the extent that humans have knowledge, they attain it by transcending sense experience in order to discover unchanging objects through the exercise of reason.
The Platonic theory of knowledge thus contains two parts: first, an investigation into the nature of unchanging objects and, second, a discussion of how these objects can be known through reason. Of the many literary devices Plato used to illustrate his theory, the best known is the allegory of the cave, which appears in Book VII of the Republic. The allegory depicts people living in a cave, which represents the world of sense-experience. In the cave people see only unreal objects, shadows, or images. Through a painful intellectual process, which involves the rejection and overcoming of the familiar sensible world, they begin an ascent out of the cave into reality. This process is the analogue of the exercise of reason, which allows one to apprehend unchanging objects and thus to acquire knowledge. The upward journey, which few people are able to complete, culminates in the direct vision of the Sun, which represents the source of knowledge.
Plato's investigation of unchanging objects begins with the observation that every faculty of the mind apprehends a unique set of objects: hearing apprehends sounds, sight apprehends visual images, smell apprehends odours, and so on. Knowing also is a mental faculty, according to Plato, and therefore there must be a unique set of objects that it apprehends. Roughly speaking, these objects are the entities denoted by terms that can be used as predicates—e.g., "good," "white," and "triangle." To say "This is a triangle," for example, is to attribute a certain property, that of being a triangle, to a certain spatiotemporal object, such as a figure drawn in the sand. Plato is here distinguishing between specific triangles that are drawn, sketched, or painted and the common property they share, that of being triangular. Objects of the former kind, which he calls "particulars," are always located somewhere in space and time—i.e., in the world of appearance. The property they share is a "form" or "idea" (though the latter term is not used in any psychological sense). Unlike particulars, forms do not exist in space and time; moreover, they do not change. They are thus the objects that one apprehends when one has knowledge.
Reason is used to discover unchanging forms through the method of dialectic, which Plato inherited from his teacher Socrates. The method involves a process of question and answer designed to elicit a "real definition." By a real definition Plato means a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that exactly determine the entities to which a given concept applies. The entities to which the concept "being a brother" applies, for example, are determined by the concepts "being male" and "being a sibling": it is both necessary and sufficient for a person to be a brother that he be male and a sibling. Anyone who grasps these conditions understands precisely what being a brother is.
In the Republic, Plato applies the dialectical method to the concept of justice. In response to a proposal by Cephalus that "justice" means the same as "honesty in word and deed," Socrates points out that, under some conditions, it is just not to tell the truth or to repay debts. Suppose one borrows a weapon from a person who later loses his sanity. If the person then demands his weapon back in order to kill someone who is innocent, it would be just to lie to him, stating that one no longer had the weapon. Therefore, "justice" cannot mean the same as "honesty in word and deed." By this technique of proposing one definition after another and subjecting each to possible counterexamples, Socrates attempts to discover a definition that cannot be refuted. In doing so he apprehends the form of justice, the common feature that all just things share.
Plato's search for definitions and, thereby, forms is a search for knowledge. But how should knowledge in general be defined? In the Theaetetus Plato argues that, at a minimum, knowledge involves true belief. No one can know what is false. A person may believe that he knows something, which is in fact false, but in that case he does not really know, he only thinks he knows. But knowledge is more than simply true belief. Suppose that someone has a dream in April that there will be an earthquake in September, and on the basis of his dream he forms the belief that there will be an earthquake in September. Suppose also that in fact there is an earthquake in September. The person has a true belief about the earthquake, but not knowledge of it. What he lacks is a good reason to support his true belief. In a word, he lacks justification. Using arguments such as these, Plato contends that knowledge is justified true belief.
Although there has been much disagreement about the nature of justification, the Platonic definition of knowledge was widely accepted until the mid-20th century, when the American philosopher Edmund L. Gettier produced a startling counterexample. Suppose that Kathy knows Oscar very well. Kathy is walking across the mall, and Oscar is walking behind her, out of sight. In front of her, Kathy sees someone walking toward her who looks exactly like Oscar. Unbeknownst to her, however, it is Oscar's twin brother. Kathy forms the belief that Oscar is walking across the mall. Her belief is true, because Oscar is in fact walking across the mall (though she does not see him doing it). And her true belief seems to be justified, because the evidence she has for it is the same as the evidence she would have had if the person she had seen were really Oscar and not Oscar's twin. In other words, if her belief that Oscar is walking across the mall is justified when the person she sees is Oscar, then it also must be justified when the person she sees is Oscar's twin, because in both cases the evidence—the sight of an Oscar-like figure walking across the mall—is the same. Nonetheless, Kathy does not know that Oscar is walking across the mall. According to Gettier, the problem is that Kathy's belief is not causally connected to its object (Oscar) in the right way.
Aristotle
In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle (384–322 BC) claims that each science consists of a set of first principles, which are necessarily true and knowable directly, and a set of truths, which are both logically derivable from and causally explained by the first principles. The demonstration of a scientific truth is accomplished by means of a series of syllogisms—a form of argument invented by Aristotle—in which the premises of each syllogism in the series are justified as the conclusions of earlier syllogisms. In each syllogism, the premises not only logically necessitate the conclusion (i.e., the truth of the premises makes it logically impossible for the conclusion to be false) but causally explain it as well. Thus, in the syllogism
All stars are distant objects.
All distant objects twinkle.
Therefore, all stars twinkle.
the fact that stars twinkle is explained by the fact that all distant objects twinkle and the fact that stars are distant objects. The premises of the first syllogism in the series are first principles, which do not require demonstration, and the conclusion of the final syllogism is the scientific truth in question.
Much of what Aristotle says about knowledge is part of his doctrine about the nature of the soul, and in particular the human soul. As he uses the term, the soul (psyche) of a thing is what makes it alive; thus, every living thing, including plant life, has a soul. The mind or intellect (nous) can be described variously as a power, faculty, part, or aspect of the human soul. It should be noted that for Aristotle "soul" and "intellect" are scientific terms.
In an enigmatic passage, Aristotle claims that "actual knowledge is identical with its object." By this he seems to mean something like the following. When a person learns something, he "acquires" it in some sense. What he acquires must be either different from the thing he knows or identical with it. If it is different, then there is a discrepancy between what he has in mind and the object of his knowledge. But such a discrepancy seems to be incompatible with the existence of knowledge. For knowledge, which must be true and accurate, cannot deviate from its object in any way. One cannot know that blue is a colour, for example, if the object of that knowledge is something other than that blue is a colour. This idea, that knowledge is identical with its object, is dimly reflected in the modern formula for expressing one of the necessary conditions of knowledge: A knows that p only if it is true that p.
To assert that knowledge and its object must be identical raises a question: In what way is knowledge "in" a person? Suppose that Smith knows what dogs are—i.e., he knows what it is to be a dog. Then, in some sense, dogs, or being a dog, must be in the mind of Smith. But how can this be? Aristotle derives his answer from his general theory of reality. According to him, all (terrestrial) substances are composed of two principles: form and matter. All dogs, for example, consist of a form—the form of being a dog—and matter, which is the stuff out of which they are made. The form of an object makes it the kind of thing it is. Matter, on the other hand, is literally unintelligible. Consequently, what is in the knower when he knows what dogs are is just the form of being a dog.
In his sketchy account of the process of thinking in De anima (On the Soul), Aristotle says that the intellect, like everything else, must have two parts: something analogous to matter and something analogous to form. The first of these is the passive intellect; the second is active intellect, of which Aristotle speaks tersely. "Intellect in this sense is separable, impassible, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity. …When intellect is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: it alone is immortal and eternal…and without it nothing thinks."
This part of Aristotle's views about knowledge is an extension of what he says about sensation. According to him, sensation occurs when the sense organ is stimulated by the sense object, typically through some medium, such as light for vision and air for hearing. This stimulation causes a "sensible species" to be generated in the sense organ itself. This "species" is some sort of representation of the object sensed. As Aristotle describes the process, the sense organ receives "the form of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold."
Ancient Skepticism
After the death of Aristotle the next significant development in the history of epistemology was the rise of Skepticism, of which there were at least two kinds. The first, Academic Skepticism, arose in the Academy (the school founded by Plato) in the 3rd century BC and was propounded by the Greek philosopher Arcesilaus (c. 315–c. 240 BC), about whom Cicero (106–43 BC), Sextus Empiricus (fl. 3rd century AD), and Diogenes Laërtius (fl. 3rd century AD) provide information. The Academic Skeptics, who are sometimes called "dogmatic" Skeptics, argued that nothing could be known with certainty. This form of Skepticism seems susceptible to the objection, raised by the Stoic Antipater (fl. c. 135 BC) and others, that the view is self-contradictory. To know that knowledge is impossible is to know something; hence, dogmatic Skepticism must be false.
Carneades (c. 213–129 BC), also a member of the Academy, developed a subtle reply to this charge. Academic Skepticism, he insisted, is not a theory about knowledge or the world but rather a kind of argumentative strategy. According to this strategy, the skeptic does not try to prove that he knows nothing. Instead, he simply assumes that he knows nothing and defends that assumption against attack. The burden of proof, in other words, is on those who believe that knowledge is possible.
Carneades' interpretation of Academic Skepticism renders it very similar to the other major kind, Pyrrhonism, which takes its name from Pyrrho of Elis (c. 365–275 BC). Pyrrhonists, while not asserting or denying anything, attempted to show that one ought to suspend judgment and avoid making any knowledge claims at all, even the negative claim that nothing is known. The Pyrrhonist's strategy was to show that, for every proposition supported by some evidence, there is an opposite proposition supported by evidence that is equally good. Arguments like these, which are designed to refute both sides of an issue, are known as "tropes." The judgment that a tower is round when seen at a distance, for example, is contradicted by the judgment that the tower is square when seen up close. The judgment that Providence cares for all things, which is supported by the orderliness of the heavenly bodies, is contradicted by the judgment that many good people suffer misery and many bad people enjoy happiness. The judgment that apples have many properties—shape, colour, taste, and aroma—each of which affects a sense organ, is contradicted by the equally good possibility that apples have only one property that affects each sense organ differently.
What is at stake in these arguments is "the problem of the criterion"—i.e., the problem of determining a justifiable standard against which to measure the worth or validity of judgments, or claims to knowledge. According to the Pyrrhonists, every possible criterion is either groundless or inconclusive. Thus, suppose that something is offered as a criterion. The Pyrrhonist will ask what justification there is for it. If no justification is offered, then the criterion is groundless. If, on the other hand, a justification is produced, then the justification itself is either justified or it is not. If it is not justified, then again the criterion is groundless. If it is justified, then there must be some criterion that justifies it. But this is just what the dogmatist was supposed to have provided in the first place.
If the Pyrrhonist needed to make judgments in order to survive, he would be in trouble. In fact, however, there is a way of living that bypasses judgment. He can live quite nicely, according to Sextus, by following custom and accepting things as they appear to him. In doing so, he does not judge the correctness of anything but merely accepts appearances for what they are. If the Pyrrhonist needed to make judgments in order to survive, he would be in trouble. In fact, however, there is a way of living that bypasses judgment. He can live quite nicely, according to Sextus, by following custom and accepting things as they appear to him. In doing so, he does not judge the correctness of anything but merely accepts appearances for what they are.
Ancient Pyrrhonism is not strictly an epistemology, since it has no theory of knowledge and is content to undermine the dogmatic epistemologies of others, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism. Pyrrho himself was said to have had ethical motives for attacking dogmatists: being reconciled to not knowing anything, Pyrrho thought, induced serenity (ataraxia).
Epistemology, Encyclopaedy Britannica Article: http://www.speedyshare.com/953827320.html (http://www.speedyshare.com/953827320.html)
Fraai!
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/683/mosqueinbrazil.th.jpg (http://img26.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mosqueinbrazil.jpg)
Taalfilosofie is geen postmodernisme
Ik voeg het volgende langer citaat (van Ger Groot) er aan toe:
(...)
Wat ooit metafysica was geweest, werd in de moderne filosofie kenkritiek en — toen men eenmaal had ontdekt dat denken in belangrijke mate samenhangt met taal — taalanalyse. Gedurende de hele twintigste eeuw leek het vaak alsof de taal het belangrijkste, zo niet enige voorwerp van de wijsbegeerte was.
(…)
Bertrand Russell, die met de taalfilosofie ook niet veel op moet hebben gehad
(…)
Het is dan ook nog veel te vroeg om afscheid te nemen van de linguistic turn die de filosofie in de twintigste eeuw genomen heeft. Wellicht is de taalfilosofie inmiddels amechtig geworden, uitgeput als ze is door de scholastieke spitsvondigheden (…)
Natuurlijk is taalfilosofie van onoverschatbaar belang. Het taalfilosofisch debat is ook niet afgesloten. Wel raken filosofische stromingen en ideeën uit de mode – om met de ethicus C. L. Stevenson te spreken, “People just stopped talking about it”. Maar ook als dat zou gebeuren, heeft taalfilosofie een onoverschatbare bijdrage geleverd.
Overigens is Betrand Russell een van de grondleggers van taalfilosofie.
Maar daaruit volgt niet dat postmodernisme juist of waar of goed is. Taalfilosofie en postmodernisme zijn niet hetzelfde. Je kunt aan taalfilosofie doen zonder postmodernist te zijn. Zo is de rationele meta-ethische theorie universeel prescriptivisme van oorsprong taalfilosofie in meta-ethiek; R. M. Hare’s eerste boek heette The language of morals.
John Searle schrijft:
Er is iets ongerijmds aan zo’n postmoderne filosoof die in het vliegtuig stapt en in de lucht op zijn laptop werkt, bij aankomst zijn e-mail ophaalt, vervolgens een collegezaal binnenstapt en zegt dat we eigenlijk niets zeker weten en dat onze zekerheid tot «la textualité du texte» beperkt blijft.
Dat idee over la textualité du texte kunnen we taalfilosofisch noemen. Maar ten eerste heeft het implicaties ver buiten taalfilosofie, ten tweede hoeft een taalfilosoof geenszins zo te denken.
Kortom pyrrho, met je artikel pleit je met recht voor taalfilosofie, maar niet voor postmodernisme.
SENSE, WORLD AND METAPHYSICS
(…) the relationship between the philosophy of language and metaphysics. Philosophers no longer believe the positivist idea that philosophy of language can enable us to dispense with metaphysical debate: instead, the philosophy of language has come to be viewed as a tool we might use in attempting to get clearer on what metaphysical questions are and on how they might be answered. In particular, philosophy of language has come to be regarded as central in the metaphysical debates between realists and their opponents. (…) Inter alia, we will also introduce some issues about the relationship between language, mind and the world: in particular, about the relationship between a speaker’s grasp of sense and facts about the nature of his worldly environment.
uit Alexander Miller, Philosophy of language (2007) blz. 306
Uit dit citaat blijkt dat metafysica, philosophy of mind en taalfilosofie in samenhang bestudeerd worden, met taalfilosofie als gereedschap - wat nogal voor de hand ligt.
Realisme is kort gezegd de opvatting dat ons denken en spreken een objectieve werkelijkheid beoogt weer te geven en soms met succes weergeeft. Op dit thema bestaan diverse variaties.
Ik voeg het volgende langer citaat (van Ger Groot) er aan toe:
"
(…)
Maar de realistische filosofen van vandaag lijken weer helemaal te zijn teruggekeerd naar hun «dogmatische dommel». «Het summum van filosofische kwade trouw is onszelf tot de oorsprong van de wereld te maken en niet andersom», schrijft Searle hatelijk over Kant. Taalfilosofie is uit, philosophy of mind is in. De aard van de werkelijkheid begrijpen, inclusief de menselijke werkelijkheid — dat is ook volgens de populaire Britse filosoof Bryan Magee de roeping van de filosofie.
Magee haalt in zijn — zojuist als pocket verschenen — wijsgerige memoires Bekentenissen van een filosoof fel uit naar de Britse taal filosofie, die volgens hem met een bijna middeleeuwse spitsvondigheid elke oprecht filosofische vraag als onzin trachtte weg te redeneren.
(…)
Liever dan bij de philosophy of mind zoekt Magee zijn heil en inspiratie bij de klassieke wijsgeren, die nog wisten wat echte filosofische problemen waren.
(…)
Het is dan ook nog veel te vroeg om afscheid te nemen van de linguistic turn die de filosofie in de twintigste eeuw genomen heeft. Wellicht is de taalfilosofie inmiddels amechtig geworden, uitgeput als ze is door de scholastieke spitsvondigheden die Magee haar verwijt. Maar vanuit een heel andere achtergrond benadrukt ook de Duitse filosoof Hans-Georg Gadamer aan het slot van zijn grote studie Wahrheit und Methode: «Het zijn, dat begrepen kan worden, is taal.»
"
Hier zie je steeds het idee – toegeschreven aan Searle, Magee en Gadamer – van óf metafysica óf philosophy of mind óf taalfilosofie bestuderen, of vanuit één van die invalshoeken denken. Dat lijkt me evident onjuist.
Overigens is Betrand Russell een van de grondleggers van taalfilosofie.
Bron?
Zo is de rationele meta-ethische theorie universeel prescriptivisme van oorsprong taalfilosofie in meta-ethiek; R. M. Hare’s eerste boek heette The language of morals.
The same bottom line as 'Religion wants to impose an universal morality' at 0:44-0:48.
YouTube - Why does faith deserve respect?
Hier zie je steeds het idee – toegeschreven aan Searle, Magee en Gadamer – van óf metafysica óf philosophy of mind óf taalfilosofie bestuderen, of vanuit één van die invalshoeken denken. Dat lijkt me evident onjuist.
Dat 'óf metafysica óf philosophy of mind óf taalfilosofie' zie ik toch echt niet staan in de tekst van pyrrho.
Wat pyrrho zegt is dat Gadamer zich liever beidt aan klassieke filosofen dan aan filosofie die vernauwd is tot enkel philosophy of mind. Want, vervolgt pyrrho, i.pv. je beiden aan filosofie, die is vernauwd tot enkel tot philosophy of mind, kun je je beter beiden aan psychologie (sec) dat overigens net zo als filosofie unviversitair wordt onderwezen.
En voor alle duidelijkheid: pyrrho weet waar hij het over heeft omdat hij na gepromoveerd te zijn als filosoof in Nederland, in België gepromoveerd is als psycholoog.
Voor zover je 'philosophy of mind' in een breder perspectief plaatst kun je daarbij o.a. denken aan 'social agents' waar je een ander over kunt opsnorkelen met behulp van een zoekmachine.
Ook Miranda Fricker, van wie ik onlangs de 'Introduction*' uit haar meest recente boek heb geplaatst, gaat in op 'social agents'.
* http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=4072123#post4072123
Bron ?
Encyclopaedia Brittannica (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/754957/philosophy-of-language/257828/Russells-theory-of-descriptions)
Bron?
Frege was grondlegger van taalfilosofie, daarna kwam Russell, daarna Wittgenstein. Bron? Hun publicaties.
In Philosophy of language waaruit ik hierboven citeerde, gaat hoofdstuk 1 dan ook over Frege, hoofdstuk 2 over Russell. Las gisteren nog een stukje uit Russells publicatie An inquiry into meaning and truth (1944).
The same bottom line as 'Religion wants to impose an universal morality' at 0:44-0:48.
Nee nee nee! Het woord “universeel” heeft meer dan één betekenis. In universeel prescriptivisme betekent het niet “overal en altijd geldig”, maar “geldig voor alle gelijke gevallen”. Je velt een moreel oordeel. Dat hoeven andere mensen niet te aanvaarden, laat staan dat het overal en altijd zou gelden. Maar jij bent gehouden tot hetzelfde oordeel in gelijke gevallen.
Dat 'óf metafysica óf philosophy of mind óf taalfilosofie' zie ik toch echt niet staan in de tekst van pyrrho.
Letterlijk niet nee. Uit de geciteerde text blijkt niet duidelijk wat deze drie figuren precies vinden. Er staan zinnen in als:
Taalfilosofie is uit, philosophy of mind is in. (…) afscheid te nemen van de linguistic turn (…) «Het zijn, dat begrepen kan worden, is taal.»
Voor zover je 'philosophy of mind' in een breder perspectief plaatst kun je daarbij o.a. denken aan 'social agents' waar je een ander over kunt opsnorkelen met behulp van een zoekmachine.
Ook Miranda Fricker, van wie ik onlangs de 'Introduction*' uit haar meest recente boek heb geplaatst, gaat in op 'social agents'.
* http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=4072123#post4072123
:fpetaf:
Encyclopaedia Brittannica (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/754957/philosophy-of-language/257828/Russells-theory-of-descriptions)
:fpetaf:
Encyclopaedia Brittannica (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/754957/philosophy-of-language/257828/Russells-theory-of-descriptions)
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. For continental philosophers, however, the philosophy of language tends to be dealt with, not as a separate topic, but as a part of logic, history or politics.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language)
Ordinary language philosophy or linguistic philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by forgetting what words actually mean in a language. These approaches typically involve eschewing philosophical "theories" in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday, "ordinary" language. They are generally associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the works of Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, Peter Strawson, John R. Searle, and Norman Malcolm.
The name comes from the contrast between these approaches and the earlier approaches that had been dominant in analytic philosophy, now sometimes called ideal language philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy was a dominant philosophic school between 1930 and 1970, and remains an important force in present-day philosophy.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy)
Frege was grondlegger van taalfilosofie, daarna kwam Russell, daarna Wittgenstein. Bron? Hun publicaties.
In Philosophy of language waaruit ik hierboven citeerde, gaat hoofdstuk 1 dan ook over Frege, hoofdstuk 2 over Russell. Las gisteren nog een stukje uit Russells publicatie An inquiry into meaning and truth (1944).
Het boek van Arthur Miller heb ik ook en gezien je belettering van het citaat vermoed ik dat je de 'e-versie' niet bij de hand hebt. Dus plaats ik hier een link naar de e-versie: http://www.speedyshare.com/628418138.html
Het boek zelf zou wat mij betreft beter 'linguistic philosophy' genoemd kunnen worden. De verwarring over 'linguistic philosophy' en 'philosophy of language' heb ik mijn prik hiervoor beschreven.
Wat in je citaat omschreven wordt als 'language, mind and the world', zal naar mijn inschatting in de (nabije?) toekomst onder de overkoepeling van analytische filosofie komen en omschreven worden als 'linguistics (linguistic philosophy), psychology and sociology'.
Voorgaande beschrijft de grote lijnen net zoals als het zinnetje dat je hebt weggelaten uit je citaat (hierboven) ook de grote lijnen beschrijft (rough map).
Philosophy of Language (A. Miller) wordt in Nederland gerangschikt onder 'Sociologie algemeen'.
Met dit laatste komt de ordening van filosofie door Mulla Sadra wederom in beeld:
MULLA SADRA INSTITUTE
LIBRARY:
Scientism
Ontology (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Ontology/Titles.htm)
Knowledge of GOD (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Knowledge%20of%20GOD/Titles.htm)
Anthropology (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Anthropology/Titles.htm)
History of Philosophy (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/History%20of%20Philosophy/Titles.htm)
Comparative Studies (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Comparative%20Studies/Titles.htm)
Gnosis (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Gnosis/Titles.htm)
Modern Theological Problems (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Theology(Kalam)/Modern%20Theological%20Problems/Titles.htm)
Old Theological Problems (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Theology(Kalam)/Old%20Theological%20Problems/Titles.htm)
Analytic Philosophy (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Analytic%20Philosophy/Titles.htm)
Logic (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Logic/Titles.htm)
Methodology (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Methodology/Titles.htm[/url)
Epistemology (ttp://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Epistemology/Titles.htm)
Western Philosophy (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Western%20Philosophy/Titles.htm)
Mathematics (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Mathematics/Titles.htm)
Philosophy of Knowledges
Religion (http://www.mullasadra.org/New_Site/English/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Religion/titles.htm)
Ethics (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Ethics/Titles.htm)
Law (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Law/Titles.htm)
Art (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Art/Titles.htm)
Science (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Science/Titles.htm)
Politics (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Politics/Titles.htm)
Mind (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Mind/Titles.htm)
Language (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Philosophy%20of%20Language/Titles.htm)
Hermeneutic (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Philosophy%20of%20Knowledges/Hermeneutic/Titles.htm)
Some preeliminaries:
Sources (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/sources.htm)
Methodology (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Methodology.htm)
Structure (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/structure.htm)
Principals (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Intoduction%20on%20Principals.htm)
Ontology (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Ontology.htm)
Epistemology (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Epistemology.htm)
Eschatelogy (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Soul-Resurrection.htm)
Hermeneutics (http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Hermeneutics.htm)
De bovenstaande discrepantie tussen (Philosophy of) 'Language' en 'linguistic philosophy' wortelt primair in het verschil tussen sociale stratificaties.
De "fixatie" op taal, of zo je wilt taalfilosofie, van de afgelopen tijd kan uiteraard niet los gezien worden van het sociale streven om het volk te voorzien van betere taalvaardigheden. De probleemstelling 'verbale dictatuur' (H. Marcuse) is hier een voorbeeld van (taal is kapitaal!).
'Philosophy of Knowledges' (hierboven) is in dit geheel het pragmatische gedeelte van filosofie met daarbij niet uit het oog verliezend dat het niet persé noodzakelijk is om op iedere werkvloer precies te weten wat bijvoorbeeld Aristoteles zoal op een dag deed.
Nee nee nee! Het woord "universeel" heeft meer dan één betekenis. In universeel prescriptivisme betekent het niet "overal en altijd geldig", maar "geldig voor alle gelijke gevallen". Je velt een moreel oordeel. Dat hoeven andere mensen niet te aanvaarden, laat staan dat het overal en altijd zou gelden. Maar jij bent gehouden tot hetzelfde oordeel in gelijke gevallen.
In dit verband is 'alzijdig*' het synoniem van 'universeel'?
Zoals 'Islam is een alzijdige religie' :hihi:?
*In België: omnilateraal.
Letterlijk niet nee. Uit de geciteerde text blijkt niet duidelijk wat deze drie figuren precies vinden. Er staan zinnen in als:
1.) A sentence is said to be effectively decidable if there is some procedure which a speaker can in principle apply in order to determine whether or not the sentence is true. Thus, "2 + 2 = 4" and "John Major had cornflakes for breakfast yesterday" are both effectively decidable: we can carry out an elementary arithmetical calculation in the first case, and we can gather the obvious sorts of evidence in the second case, in order to determine the truth-values of the respective sentences. But "James II had a migraine on the afternoon of his 32nd birthday" and "Every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes" are not known to be decidable: in neither case do we know a procedure which we can apply to determine whether or not they are true. Now intuitively, we think that even though these sentences are not known to be decidable, we can nevertheless still assert that they are either true or false: "Every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes" has a determinate truth-value, it’s just that we cannot work out what this truth-value is. In other words, even though the sentence is not known to be decidable, we still think that the principle of bivalence, that every (non-vague) sentence is determinately either true or false, applies to it. Now this is an idea which is put under pressure by the conclusion of the anti-realist arguments we have been considering. If truth is not verification-transcendent, it is epistemically constrained. One way to spell out what it means to say that truth is epistemically constrained is to say that it must be construed in terms of some notion like correct or warranted assert-ability: to say that a sentence is true is to say that there is a warrant to assert it, or that it possesses some other property which is constructed out of warranted assertability. Now given that truth is thus epistemically constrained, what can we say about "Every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes"?
We do not have a warrant to assert this – since no-one has yet been able to construct a mathematical proof of it – not do we have a warrant to assert its negation – since no-one has yet produced a counterexample to it, or established that such a counterexample must exist. Given this, and given that truth is to be construed in terms of warranted assertability, we cannot assert that the sentence "Every even number is the sum of two primes" is either true or false. That is to say, we cannot assert a priori the principle of bivalence for sentences that are not known to be decidable: we cannot assert, a priori, that they are either true or false.
2.) The anti-realist thus claims that we cannot assert a priori the principle of bivalence, at least as applied to sentences that are not known to be decidable. Now the principle of bivalence – that every (non-vague) sentence is determinately either true or false – is closely associated with the theorem of classical logic known as the law of excluded-middle:
⊢ Pv -P
Refusing to assert a priori the principle of bivalence, as the anti-realist proposes, thus appears to threaten the law of excluded middle, and the classical system of logic which is founded upon it. There is much debate among anti-realists as to whether antirealism implies revisionism about classical logic: Dummett has argued that anti-realism implies that classical logic must be given up in favour of some form of intuitionistic logic which does not have the law of excluded middle as a theorem.
p. 320-321, Philosophy of Language, Arthur Miller (Routeledge, 2007)
3.) Richard Nisbett's book The Geography of Thought proposes that the passion for strong ontology and scientific rationality based on forward chaining from axioms is essentially a "Western" phenomenon. The ancient Greek passion for abstract categories into which the entire world can be taxonomically arranged, he claims, is prototypically Western, as is the notion of causality.
" In Rome intellectual tradition there is no necessary incompatibility between the belief that A is the case and the belief that not-A is the case. On the contrary, in the spirit of the Tao or yin-yang principle, A can actually imply that not-A is also the case, or at any rate soon will be the case…. Events do not occur in isolation from other events, but are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves. to think about an object or event in isolation and apply abstract rules to it is to invite extreme and mistaken conclusions. It is the Middle Way that is the goal of reasoning. "
He claims, in other words, that [I]the law of the excluded middle is not applied in Chinese thought, and that a different standard applies. This has been described by other thinkers as being hermeneutic reasonableness.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Thought (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Thought)
Het boek van Arthur Miller heb ik ook en gezien je belettering van het citaat vermoed ik dat je de 'e-versie' niet bij de hand hebt. Dus plaats ik hier een link naar de e-versie: http://www.speedyshare.com/628418138.html
Bedankt Rourchid; handig om het boek ook electronisch te hebben. Creatieve post verder, man, met name omdat je antirealisme en chinees denken met elkaar in verband brengt.
taalfilosofie
Je posts gaan nu goeddeels over namen. Denk dat we het zonder probleem “taalfilosofie” kunnen noemen, waaronder dan verscheidene verschillende maar wel samenhangende gebieden en invalshoeken vallen. Je citaten brengen taalfilosofie onder bij analytische filosofie, terwijl pyrrho op zijn beurt het in verband bracht met postmodernisme. In moderne analytische filosofie gaat men ook te rade bij “gewone taal” (kan ik voorbeeld van geven). Om dat boek bij sociologie onder te brengen vind ik onzin en iets zegt me dat het typisch nederlands is. Mulla Sadra lijkt me enorm belangrijk, voor mij kwestie van tijdgebrek.
He claims, in other words, that the law of the excluded middle is not applied in Chinese thought, and that a different standard applies. This has been described by other thinkers as being hermeneutic reasonableness.
Belangwekkend, en dit kan ik uit andere bron bevestigen. Het is niet alleen chinees, maar ook india’s. In boeddhisme bestaat de “logica van de ontkenning”. Een zekere Nagarjoena (Inda, 19 eeuwen geleden) geldt als de belangrijkste klassieke denker daarvan. Dit houdt onder meer in dat men kan zeggen: p en niet-p, terwijl bij ons als elementair geldt: als p, dan niet niet-p.
Die logica van de ontkenning kun je in verband brengen met boeddhistische metafysica, met name nirvana: dat is transcendentaal en onzegbaar … dus kun je noch p noch niet-p ervan zeggen.
De mogelijkheid van deze logica volgt als je logica opvat als spel met spelregels die we zelf afspreken; we kunnen dan afspreken dat de spelregel als p, dan niet niet-p niet geldt. Steun daarvoor kun je vinden bij Carnaps “tolerantiebeginsel”: er is niet één logica maar veel logica’s, en elke uitspraak in taal is mogelijk als er maar spelregels zijn die de logische toepassing van die uitspraak regelen.
Echter, er is een beslissende pragmatische reden voor de spelregel als p dan niet niet-p. Als je op het punt staat om een brug over een kloof over te gaan, heb je niets aan de informatie “deze brug staat op instorten en staat niet op instorten”. Dat geldt in India en China net zo goed.
Anders gezegd, zoals vaak in filosofie komen we er niet met logica alleen, en is praxis een onmisbaar ingrediënt.
Misschien kunnen we zeggen dat die logica van de ontkenning goed past in oosters filosofisch-metafysisch denken (over nirvana bijvoorbeeld), minder bij het dagelijkse leven maar daarop wel van invloed is.
(…)rationality based on forward chaining from axioms (…)
Men onderscheid twee oude cultuurstromen, de indo-europese en de semitische, o. a. gekenmerkt door “cyclisch denken” tegenover “lineair denken”, bijvoorbeeld een cyclische tegenover een lineaire opvatting van geschiedenis; zo is de joodse heilsgeschiedenis lineair. Dit strookt met Richard Nisbetts idee dat dat lineaire redeneren niet de chinese manier van denken is.
(Overigens is herhaaldelijk genoemd prescriptivisme geen geen lineaire deductieve manier van ethisch redeneren maar een cyclische in die zin dat je ethische oordelen “bij je terugkomen”).
The ancient Greek passion for abstract categories into which the entire world can be taxonomically arranged, he claims, is prototypically Western, (...)
Komop. Klassiek boeddhisme bevat uitgebreide indelingen.
(...) as is the notion of causality
Hier heb ik moeite mee. Oorzaak en gevolg zijn een essentieel element in boeddisme (als ik het goed begrijp). In het westen is Hume begonnen oorzaak en gevolg ter discussie te stellen; misschien is dat een ondermijning van dit beginsel van boeddhisme.
In Rome
Rome?
zit er wel wat in :
interesting here & there , maar :
over het algemeen :
Post-modernisme = Postbullshitisme ! :lol:
or as had put it the scientist who had written :
"Geography of thought " or how Asians & westerners think differentely & why ??? :
westerners ' comlusive behaviour to treat subjects out of their contexts , their compulsive behaviour to use dry logics everywhere had made them produce many Accademic bullshit !
when R gonna those guys realise that 1sided , 1dimentional handicaped color blind cartesian ideological materialism is history, is bankrupt , even on the very level of the matter , let alone on other levels : human sciences = Philo, psychology, sociology , economy , politics .....
when R those silly guys gonna know that there's not only one kind of Thought , when R they gonna have the brains, he nerve, the guts ....to abandon that one line of thought siince Descartes or at least combine it with other kind of thoughts ...
when R they gonna realise that western thought is not universal ....
By the way : that Bacon thief was not the one who had "invented" experimentation in science :
muslims had !
pffff...
zit er wel wat in :
interesting here & there ,
Had het hierbij gelaten, joh!
westerners ' comlusive behaviour to treat subjects out of their contexts , their compulsive behaviour to use dry logics everywhere had made them produce many Accademic bullshit !
Hierboven komen indiase en chinese logica ter sprake.
when R those silly guys gonna know that there's not only one kind of Thought , when R they gonna have the brains, he nerve, the guts ....to abandon that one line of thought siince Descartes or at least combine it with other kind of thoughts ...
when R they gonna realise that western thought is not universal ....
Oosters denken is allang van invloed op westers denken. Europa behoorde oorspronkelijk tot de indo-europese cultuurstroom; met de joodschristelijkmoslimse godgeloven is de semitische cultuurstroom hiergekomen.
Korter geleden, oude oosterse filosofie beïnvloedde Schopenhauer.
Gotama en Hume zijn mensen uit verschillende tijden en verwoorden een moeilijk filosofisch thema op vrijwel gelijkluidende manier - namelijk het idee dat er geen "zelf" of "ik" is.
Het is inderdaad zo dat van veel denken dat in het westen verkondigd wordt, wordt aangenomen dat het ook geldt als mensen ergens anders in de wereld wonen. Mensenrechten bijvoorbeeld beschermen noden en belangen die vaak levensvoorwaarden zijn; maakt niet uit waar je woont.
Als er dus weer ergens een hongersnood uitbreekt of een tsunami aanspoelt roept een universeel menswaardig bestaansrecht je niet op om een centje bij te dragen, dat is alleen een mediahype die dat doet? Dan brengt je ontkenning van universele mensenrechten je tot egoïsme en dat kan niet zo zijn, Sallahddin.
By the way : that Bacon thief was not the one who had "invented" experimentation in science :
muslims had !
pffff...
a muslim fox cannot have been the bacon thief : for muslims don't eat pork :baard:
p. s. kun je je typografie misschien alsnog een beetje beschaafder maken?
Sallahddin
20-09-09, 22:57
Had het hierbij gelaten, joh!
Hierboven komen indiase en chinese logica ter sprake.
Oosters denken is allang van invloed op westers denken. Europa behoorde oorspronkelijk tot de indo-europese cultuurstroom; met de joodschristelijkmoslimse godgeloven is de semitische cultuurstroom hiergekomen.
Korter geleden, oude oosterse filosofie beïnvloedde Schopenhauer.
Gotama en Hume zijn mensen uit verschillende tijden en verwoorden een moeilijk filosofisch thema op vrijwel gelijkluidende manier - namelijk het idee dat er geen "zelf" of "ik" is.
Het is inderdaad zo dat van veel denken dat in het westen verkondigd wordt, wordt aangenomen dat het ook geldt als mensen ergens anders in de wereld wonen. Mensenrechten bijvoorbeeld beschermen noden en belangen die vaak levensvoorwaarden zijn; maakt niet uit waar je woont.
Als er dus weer ergens een hongersnood uitbreekt of een tsunami aanspoelt roept een universeel menswaardig bestaansrecht je niet op om een centje bij te dragen, dat is alleen een mediahype die dat doet? Dan brengt je ontkenning van universele mensenrechten je tot egoïsme en dat kan niet zo zijn, Sallahddin.
a muslim fox cannot have been the bacon thief : for muslims don't eat pork :baard:
p. s. kun je je typografie misschien alsnog een beetje beschaafder maken?
Go back to school & read some real books , girl :
oosters _westers wederzijds wisslewerkingnen op het niveau van denken zijn algemeen bekend :
met betrekking tot Hindoeisme, Buddhism, Confucious, Taoisme ....
ook met betrekking tot Islam & westen...
daar heb ik het niet over : da's een ander verhaal :
read for example : " Orientalism" book van Edouard Said,
"Enlightenment from the Orient " : the encounter between Asian & western thought : will give u the name of the writtter later on, if u want to ...great book !
Read : "Geography of thought " by Richard.E.Nisbett :How Asians & westerners think differently & why ? = ask Rourchid 'bout it !
= westerse denken is niet universeel :
mensen denken niet allemaal hetzelfde , of op dezelfde manier , ...westerse denken is nogmaals niet universeel !
read that book ! :
it might change ur life & egocentric narrow_thinking ...
ach...
besides :
opvattingnen van waarheid, mensen rechten, vrijheid, individueel vrijheid , tolerantie , gelijkheid_gelijkwaardigheid .....zijn een kwestie van ideologie & moreel_ethisch referentiekaders .....
zgn gay rechten of gay marriage zijn bijv. geen universeel rechten van de mens, volgens Islam bijv. ...............
I'm not gonna waste my breath on u ...u're way too narrow_minded :
u need some real updates too....
save ur breath, no sweat !
P.S.: Bacon was a thief as was the case with many western thinkers ....: see his relationship with muslim influences, thinking, inspirations ...from muslim Spain at that time !
Try to spare us ur intellectual mental spiritual psychological ...prostitution, masturbation , strip_tease, porn...girl :
don't wanna make any part of this pervert pathetic pathologic psychic orgy ! :lol:
Have fun with it : that has nothing to do with reality, objectivity, "objective relaity", universalism .....or with the truth, whatever that might be indeed :
just fantasies,taalspel ..maerialistic egocentric subjective individualistic ideology ...no more :
Congratulations ! :cola:
:zwaai:
P.S.: Even the epistemology , or philo of knowledge, or any theory of knowledge for that matter , can never be objective, universal, true .....=
'cause any epistemology is just a product of culture, society, politics, economics , history , ideology , belief in the broader sense .....
u, me , ur "way of thinking & mine" ...are just products of our own societies, cultures, ideologies , beliefs in the broader sense .................
me, u ...we can choose via our consciousness to turn our own backs on our own ways of thinking, beliefs in the broader sense ,habits, streotypes, prejudice,............. i know i can at least : but i've surpassed that stage by the strength , truth , power of my convictions = fruits of many tears, sweat & blood , experience, research, thinking, studies ...we can & should change our thought if our own ways of thinking are proven wrong ..... can u ???
so, truth, whatever that might be indeed , can never be approached outside of the last one & only left true universal belief = Islam :
the best objective epistemology ever can be "extracted" from that Islam spirit , in combination with experience, work, practice, constant search , science ....
@ Dear silly pathetic Olive :
Read this 'bout Orientalism ,the so_called pôst_modernism & Orientalism ...
"Oriental enlightenment"
The encounter between Asian & western Thought
by J.J.Clarke...
u w'd be speechless ....
:zwaai:
Sallahddin
22-09-09, 18:05
"Post -modernisme " :lol:
Bedankt Rourchid; handig om het boek ook electronisch te hebben. Creatieve post verder, man, met name omdat je antirealisme en chinees denken met elkaar in verband brengt.Die e-versies zijn ook handig als iemand wil weten waar het over gaat.
In (tradititionele?) filosofie wordt realisme gekoppeld aan idealisme en dat zou in dit verband de vraag kunnen doen stellen wanneer realisme antirealisme is en idealisme realisme is.
Je posts gaan nu goeddeels over namen. Denk dat we het zonder probleem "taalfilosofie" kunnen noemen, waaronder dan verscheidene verschillende maar wel samenhangende gebieden en invalshoeken vallen. Je citaten brengen taalfilosofie onder bij analytische filosofie, terwijl pyrrho op zijn beurt het in verband bracht met postmodernisme. In moderne analytische filosofie gaat men ook te rade bij "gewone taal" (kan ik voorbeeld van geven).
Taalfilosofie is en blijft voorlopig een (vaag) containerbegrip (amorfe nomenclatuur).
Uit de definities die te vinden zijn op Wikipedia over taalfilosofie is er een linguistic philosophy die twee smaken kent te weten de europese en de anglo-saksische. Daarnaast is er 'ordinary language philosophy'.
Je kunt het ook vergelijken met behaviourisme dat zowel een sociologische - als een psychologische (Skinner) strekking heeft.
De tendens van 'forgetting what words actually mean in a language' is een kenmerk van postmodernisme.
Het Engels kent de tweeledige uitleg van 'quiddity' als 'essence' en als 'quible' waarmee je voorkomt ergens op in te gaan.
'Quible' kan, naast spitsvondigheid, vertaald worden als sofisme en daar verwijst pyrrho naar met zijn opmerking over scholastieke spitsvondigheden.
En het predikaat scholastiek dat pyrrho gebruikt geeft tevens de beperkte speelruimte(s) aan. De scholastiek waar pyrrho naar verwijst is namelijk kerkelijke goedgekeurde aristotelische scholastiek.
Om dat boek bij sociologie onder te brengen vind ik onzin en iets zegt me dat het typisch nederlands is. Mulla Sadra lijkt me enorm belangrijk, voor mij kwestie van tijdgebrek.In de V.S. wordt het boek van Arthur Miller zelfs ondergebracht onder 'theology'.
Mulla Sadra heeft zoals je dat zegt zowel de hoogste prioriteit als de minste haast. Het zal nog wel geruime tijd duren voor diens visionariteit begrepen zal worden.
Belangwekkend, en dit kan ik uit andere bron bevestigen. Het is niet alleen chinees, maar ook india’s. In boeddhisme bestaat de "logica van de ontkenning". Een zekere Nagarjoena (India, 19 eeuwen geleden) geldt als de belangrijkste klassieke denker daarvan. Dit houdt onder meer in dat men kan zeggen: p en niet-p, terwijl bij ons als elementair geldt: als p, dan niet niet-p.
Die logica van de ontkenning kun je in verband brengen met boeddhistische metafysica, met name nirvana: dat is transcendentaal en onzegbaar … dus kun je noch p noch niet-p ervan zeggen.
De mogelijkheid van deze logica volgt als je logica opvat als spel met spelregels die we zelf afspreken; we kunnen dan afspreken dat de spelregel als p, dan niet niet-p niet geldt. Steun daarvoor kun je vinden bij Carnaps "tolerantiebeginsel": er is niet één logica maar veel logica’s, en elke uitspraak in taal is mogelijk als er maar spelregels zijn die de logische toepassing van die uitspraak regelen.
Echter, er is een beslissende pragmatische reden voor de spelregel als p dan niet niet-p. Als je op het punt staat om een brug over een kloof over te gaan, heb je niets aan de informatie "deze brug staat op instorten en staat niet op instorten". Dat geldt in India en China net zo goed.
Anders gezegd, zoals vaak in filosofie komen we er niet met logica alleen, en is praxis een onmisbaar ingrediënt.
Misschien kunnen we zeggen dat die logica van de ontkenning goed past in oosters filosofisch-metafysisch denken (over nirvana bijvoorbeeld), minder bij het dagelijkse leven maar daarop wel van invloed is.
Men onderscheid twee oude cultuurstromen, de indo-europese en de semitische, o. a. gekenmerkt door "cyclisch denken" tegenover "lineair denken", bijvoorbeeld een cyclische tegenover een lineaire opvatting van geschiedenis; zo is de joodse heilsgeschiedenis lineair. Dit strookt met Richard Nisbetts idee dat dat lineaire redeneren niet de chinese manier van denken is.
(Overigens is herhaaldelijk genoemd prescriptivisme geen geen lineaire deductieve manier van ethisch redeneren maar een cyclische in die zin dat je ethische oordelen "bij je terugkomen").
Nagarjoena was in je oorsponkelijke post niet aanwezig. Maar hier kom je ook op een indeling zoals gekend in (traditionele) filosofie. Namelijk dat immanentie gekoppeld wordt aan transcendentie terwijl in het hindoeïsme immanentie gekoppeld wordt emanentie.
Als je net zoals in het hindoeïsme immanentie koppelt aan emanentie dan zou joodse heilsgeschiedenis net zoals de islamitische heilsgeschiedenis lineair zijn. Maar dan kom je op de vraag uit in hoeverre van links naar rechts lezen zodanig verschilt van rechts naar links lezen dat jodendom en islam zich onderscheiden van het hindoeïsme.
Maar in dit discours komt deze (vraag)stelling later aan de orde.
In aanloop naar Geography of Thought (2005) heeft Richard E. Nisbett samen met Kaiping Peng, Incheol Choi en Ara Norenzayan een soort voorstudie geschreven met de titel 'Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition' (2001).
Naast voorgaande 'vs.' worden er nog vier andere vormen van 'vs.'beschreven:
Continuity vs. discreteness.
Field vs. object
Relationships and similarities vs. categories and rules
Dialectics vs. foundational principles and logic
Experience-based knowledge vs. abstract analysis
Na deze nadere specificatie volgt een uiteenzetting over Socio Cognitive Systems.
Voor toelichting in de collegezaal van 'Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition' is er een powerpoint presentatie gemaakt door Mahmoud Seifi die aansluit op je opmerking over pragma:
http://i36.tinypic.com/sq2ve9.jpg
Culture and Systems of Thought: http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/nisbett-et-al-2001.pdf
Powerpoint presentatie Mahmoud Seifi: http://mahsaifi.googlepages.com/cultureandcognition.ppt
Komop. Klassiek boeddhisme bevat uitgebreide indelingen.
Richard E. Nisbett vergelijkt de onderliggende waarden van de bestaande samenlevingen in het Westen en het Verre Oosten.
In de context van niet alleen Geopgraphy of Thought, maar eveneens in het hiervoor opgemelde 'Culture of Toughts, samen met co-auteurs geschreven werken, heeft Richard Nisbett met co-auteurs over de Aristotelische inwerking op het Romeinse Rijk.
Markant is hierbij dat huidige minister-president van Nedeland J.P. Balkenende, in een eens door hem geschreven boekje 'Anders en Beter', op de door hem gestelde (retorische) vraag 'Wat zijn de onderliggende waarden van de Nederlandse cultuur?', als antwoord geeft: De joods-christelijke traditie en het Griekse denken zijn belangrijke, bepalende bronnen voor onze cultuur.
Hier heb ik moeite mee. Oorzaak en gevolg zijn een essentieel element in boeddisme (als ik het goed begrijp). In het westen is Hume begonnen oorzaak en gevolg ter discussie te stellen; misschien is dat een ondermijning van dit beginsel van boeddhisme.
Ook met co-auteurs heeft Richard Nisbett zich al enkele decennia gebogen over het thema 'Visual perception of causation'. Een indicatie van wezenlijk verschil tussen de culturen van het het Westen en het Verre Oosten is uiteraard het verschil in het schrijven. De manier waarop je visueel redeneert wordt bepaald door hoe je gewend bent om je abstracties op schrift te stellen. En het verschil tussen van Chinese pictogrammen (karakters) en het Westerse schrift is groter dan dat je op het eerste gezicht al zou denken.
Rome?
De verwijzing naar Rome (Grieks-Romeins) heb ik hiervoor al aangegeven.
Na Geopgraphy of Thought heeft Beichen Liang in 2008 een korte toelichting geschreven die hoofdzakelijk marketing doeleinden dient:
http://i36.tinypic.com/2hz5shf.jpg
Proceedings Template: http://www.a-cme.org/Proceedings/2008%20Proceedings%20Template.pdf
Een indicatie van wezenlijk verschil tussen de culturen van het het Westen en het Verre Oosten is uiteraard het verschil in het schrijven. De manier waarop je visueel redeneert wordt bepaald door hoe je gewend bent om je abstracties op schrift te stellen. En het verschil tussen van Chinese pictogrammen (karakters) en het Westerse schrift is groter dan dat je op het eerste gezicht al zou denken.
SCRIPT AND COGNITION
THE IMPACT OF ORTHOGRAPHY ON WESTERN AND EASTERN PATTERNS OF THOUGHT
WILLIAM C. HANNAS
ABSTRACT
The "Greek" alphabet made literacy widely available and facilitated the growth of ideas that underpin Western society. A more important effect, however, has been the cognitive impact of the mechanism itself. Learning the alphabet entails an early and decisive investment in abstract cognitive practices that define Western theoretic culture. Oral societies, and the societies of East Asia where literacy depends on nonalphabetic scripts, lack this developmental cue and employ patterns of thought that are mirror opposite.
ASIAN AND WESTERN THOUGHT
-----For many decades Asian and Western scholars working in a variety of disciplines from philosophy, physics, and history to linguistics, psychology, and politics have made similar observations about the unique cognitive styles associated with Chinese-inspired East Asian culture and Greek-inspired Western culture.
-----Not only are these generalizations widely held, they have also withstood an intellectual climate hostile to the idea that deep-seated cognitive differences exist between peoples of different cultures. That these dichotomies—polar opposites—between Eastern and Western thought have been elucidated by scholars on both sides of the world is causing even the most cosmopolitan among us to question the validity of cognitive convergence.
-----Joseph Needham, a famous admirer of Chinese science, was puzzled by China’s lack of interest in theory and emphasis on concrete, observable phenomena, which he contrasted with the logical, theory-based science of the West. Paul Herbig, who studied Japanese innovation patterns, observed this same penchant for "holistic right brain thinking as opposed to rational left brain analysis" and for seeking "empirical rather than theoretical knowledge" (1995:12). Hajime Nakamura, in his survey of Asian thought, also remarked on China’s concern with particular instances and disinterest in universals and on Japan’s preference for "concrete intuitions" over the abstract conceptualization preferred by the West (1964:543).
-----These historical differences carry into the present. Richard Baum, in studying Chinese scientific practices, noted a marked preference among Chinese scientists for observation over conceptualization, concrete thinking over theoretical speculation, and induction over deduction (1982:1170). Richard Suttmeir, in another contemporary study, remarked on Chinese scientists’ neglect of underlying theory in favor of "simple empiricism and inductivism" (1989:379). Robert Logan, author of a book on the cognitive effects of writing, characterized Chinese thought as nonlinear, analogical, inductive, concrete, and intuitive, and Western thought as the exact opposite: linear, logical, deductive, abstract, and rational (1986:49).
----More recently, Richard Nisbett et al. (2001:193–4) portrayed the differences between Eastern and Western thought as continuity vs. discreteness, field vs. object, relationships vs. categories, dialectics vs. logic, and experienced-based knowledge vs. abstract analysis. Through a series of psychological experiments, Nisbett validated the existence of these cognitive differences between EastAsians and Westerners even today. He later added interdependence vs. independence and communal vs. individualistic to his catalog of differences, which he ascribed to global preferences between the two groups for holistic vs. analytic thought (2003:56, 88).
ORAL AND LITERATE THOUGHT
-----Given the consistency with which these dichotomies are cited and the wide-ranging backgrounds of the scholars who cite them, it is surprising that no one has pointed out the parallel between these differences and the differences between oral and literate societies. I suspect this is one of the many instances in science where prior assumptions have ruled out concrete data, inasmuch as East Asians, historically and now, were and are among the world’s most literate people. But the parallels are too striking to ignore.
-----A.R. Luria, the Russian psychologist, was one of the first to marvel at the aggregative, pragmatic tendencies of nonliterate populations in contrast to the analytic and theoretical disposition of literates. In his experiments with nonliterate and literate farmers Luria found differences between the ways the two groups viewed objects—holistically or as a collection of parts—and in their ability to identify abstract relationships. When presented with problems, nonliterates focused on their practical aspects while literates were more interested in their theoretical dimensions (1976).
-----Walter Ong, who also studied the contrasts between oral and literate societies, argued, "A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies." It fosters "situational," not abstract thinking, while "abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena" is a function of literate culture (1982:8, 69). Derrick de Kerckhove, the author of several studies on the cognitive effects of writing, wrote similarly that "Oral languages are always, of necessity ‘contextualized.’ Their usage is both field and context-dependent" (1988:107).
-----Merlin Donald, a cognitive scientist who believes that consciousness developed in stages, observed that literate or "theoretic" cultures are characterized by "differentiation, quantification, idealization, and formal methods of measurement. Arguments, discovery, proof, and theoretical synthesis are part of the legacy of this kind of thought" (1991:273–4). "Narrative" thought, that is, thought not informed by literacy or supported by a literate culture, contrasts with the "analytic, paradigmatic, or logico-scientific" thought associated with literate peoples.
-----The same tendencies to view things in a relational, synthetic, and pragmatic context, or to view the world abstractly, analytically, and theoretically that respectively characterize East Asian and Western cognitive styles also describe oral and literate cultures.
LITERACY’S HIDDEN DYNAMICS
-----How can this fact be explained? As I mentioned above, it is too facile— indeed, simply wrong—to attribute these different cognitive styles to differences in literacy rates per se. Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon in the West and there is substantial evidence that functional, shop-based literacy prevailed through much of East Asia’s history (Rawski 1979). Although doubts can be raised about the quality of literacy today in Asia (or for that matter in the West), there is no doubt that it is universal, or nearly so, in Japan and Korea and widespread in China.
-----One clue toward resolving the issue is found in the backgrounds of those who studied the so-called "literacy effect" on cognitive preferences. With one very important exception, all scholars—including those of the "Toronto school" founded by Marshall McLuhan and the line of Russian psychologists that included Luria and Vygotsky—who argued that writing causes a shift from holistic to analytic thinking, worked within an alphabetic tradition. They assumed that what was true of alphabetic literacy was true of literacy in general.
-----Hence they were unprepared to deal with a study that looked outside that tradition and contradicted their claims of a general link between the acquisition of literacy and a transformation in cognitive preferences. This is the famous study by Scribner and Cole (1981) of the Vai, a West African people literate in a syllabic orthography, who did not show the characteristics claimed by the Toronto school and others for writing in general. Since the study was designed specifically to test the cognitive facilitation hypothesis, many scholars associated with it were moved to temper their claims about the effects of literacy on thought, instead of drawing a conclusion, which in retrospect seems obvious, that it is not literacy per se that promotes this shift but alphabetic literacy.
-----According to the earlier theory, which the Vai study contradicts, literacy in any script confers an ability to reflect on language as an abstract entity, apart from the medium with which it is naturally associated, namely speech. The verbal behavior that nonliterates accept as a concrete part of nature is found by literate people to be a representation of an underlying set of abstractions. The resulting metalinguistic awareness, by this argument, carries over into one’s general cognitive disposition.
-----There are data to support this line of reasoning, but the element driving this cognitive facilitation, beyond what can be attributed to the raw literacy effect itself, is the need to manipulate abstract units that are obscured in speech but forced on literate users by alphabetic orthography. Syllabic writing makes no such demand, or does so minimally. Whereas all writing entails recognizing that languageis not speech, alphabets go beyondthis by requiring one to analyze speech sounds into small (butfinite) components—phones—and to express these phones as phonemic abstractions (roughly,letters), which correlate with nothing in nature. Most alphabets also entail the depiction of words—abstractions on the macro level that, like phonemes, correspond to nothing in concrete speech. -----By contrast, the trouble nonliterates or those literate in nonalphabetic orthography have identifying words and associating phonemes with letters is well documented and caused by the abstract nature of the operation.Herein also lies the major block to literacy in the West. Western children not only must learn the concept of representation. They are also making their first foray into the worlds of abstraction and analysis. This decidedly unnatural task introduces one to the possibility of abstraction in general and is reinforced whenever a pupil, who is schooled in phonics, spells a word, types it, or even visualizes it.
THE ANATOMY OF ASIAN ORTHOGRAPHY
-----Although there is some dispute, among nonspecialists at least, over how to classify the dominant character-based orthographies of East Asia, they clearly are not founded on alphabetic principles. As DeFrancis (1984, 1989) and others have shown, there is good reason to believe that Chinese characters are, more than anything else, a large syllabary. In Chinese writing each character is associated with a syllable sound. Due to the way they are formed, parts of a character sometimes give a hint of its pronunciation. But the representation is holistic. There is no discrete, fractional mapping of symbol to sound and nothing resembling the phonemic analysis required of alphabet users.
-----In Japanese as well, whether reading phonetic kana or kanji characters, the focus is entirely on syllables. Kanji, "Chinese characters" in Japanese, are associated with two types of sounds, depending on whether they represent a borrowed Chinese morpheme or an indigenous Japanese word. In the former case, a character is read as one syllable.In the latter case, the character functions logographically to represent the uninflected part of a native Japanese word. In neither case is there discrete modeling of sound. The kana systems themselves, derived from Chinese characters, are archetypal syllabaries, whose shapes have no relationship to the elements of the composite sounds they individually represent.
-----Consequently, when Chinese and Japanese learn to read, they do not analyze speech sounds much beyond the concrete level that people are equipped from birth to perceive.
Nor is there a corresponding demand to abstract sound into phonemes or to relate the two systems of speech and writing on a higher abstract level. Finally, Chinese and Japanese readers are not made to identify words—abstract entities not distinguished in speech. The orthographies simply run the symbols together one after another in an unrelieved stream, in a manner characteristic of oral societies the world over.
-----Instead of fostering analysis and abstraction, Sinitic scripts require only that the user map vague units of meaning (morphemes) and concrete sounds (syllables) onto a large set of mostly opaque signs. Although complex in one sense—the number of symbols stretches into the thousands—the operation rarely gets past concrete, surface facts.
-----Even Korea’s hangul orthography, which is an alphabet by design, subverts the cognitive facilitation associated with Western alphabets by its practice of lumping hangul letters together into syllables, which is how they are taught, used, and perceived. The convention is obligatory. Even when all that is wanted is a single letter, the letter appears as a formatted syllable. Beyond hangul, Chinese characters still play a prominent role in the educational systems of both Koreas, where they are taught as an aid to understanding all-hangul texts.Moreover, mass hangul literacy is a recent phenomenon. For most of its five hundred years, hangul was used not as an orthography at all but as an aid to learning Chinese characters.
-----Vietnam, which uses an alphabet mostly of Western letters, may also be diluting the cognitive effects of alphabetic writing by its practice of grouping text into syllable-sized units. Unlike Korean hangul, which arranges letters of a written syllable horizontally and vertically within an imaginary square, Vietnamese quoc ngu puts its letters in serial order in the manner of Western alphabets. But it does not take the next step, adopted by most other alphabetic systems, of identifying words. Instead the orthography uses blank spaces between each syllable, letting the reader infer what "sounds" group with what others to form words—much as one does in speech.
-----Despite their move toward alphabetic writing, Korean and Vietnamese still emulate the area’s dominant Chinese character–based orthography with its emphasis on concrete syllables and its neglect of language’s more abstract components. Although alphabetic notations, which incorporate word division, have been devised for all four of these Asian languages, they play a subsidiary role and have no part in the literary life of East Asians. Thus there have been, until quite recently, few opportunities for the tutorial effects of alphabetic literacy to take root in countries of the "Chinese character cultural sphere."
-----The one exception has been—of all places—Tibet. Unlike other Asian writing systems, which are based on Chinese characters or to some degree modeled after them, Tibetan writing was adapted from an Indic script and is alphabetic. Its twenty-eight consonant forms have a default value of consonant + the vowel [a] but are treated as simple consonant letters, as evidenced by their use in clusters and in syllable final position, where the default [a] is ignored. Importantly, they are complemented by four separate vowel symbols, which is remarkable when you consider that vowels were not part of the Western alphabet for the first several hundred years of its evolution and are still not part of Semitic writing.
-----Paralleling this orthographic divide between East Asian syllabic writing and Tibetan alphabetic writing is a sharp distinction in the cognitive and philosophical traditions of East Asia and Tibet. Nakamura, in his comprehensive study of Asian thought, found "more points of similarity than points of difference" between Chinese and Japanese thinking, both of which he characterized as holistic, concrete, mystical, and particular (1964:347). Tibet, by contrast, has a tradition of analytic, abstract, logical, and universal thought that seems out of place in East Asia and more becoming the Western tradition.
WESTERN WRITING VERSUS THE SEMI-ORAL SOCIETY
-----It is argued that "oral society" means more than a lack of writing.The term depicts a set of behaviors and mental outlook that differ markedly from the analytic, serial behavior commonly associated with literate society but which, I claim, are actually a product of alphabetic literacy. And to the extent that the alphabet is associated with a cognitive shift in the West, the use of nonalphabetic writing should also be seen as a contributor to the so-called "East Asian" style of thinking, which is hard to distinguish from oral societies.
-----The argument that orthography has a direct and enduring effect on a society’s dominant patterns of thought is uncontroversial, and has formed the basis for hundreds of studies that impinge on communication theory, epistemology, anthropology, and even politics. Given the universal acceptance of a dichotomy between oral and literate societies, and widespread agreement on the nature of the mechanism that effects these differences, it is surprising that studies linking orthographic types to particular cognitive styles have met with little enthusiasm from mainstream intellectuals.
-----One factor inhibiting acceptance of the view that particular orthographies affect cognitive dispositions in particular ways—beyond the present academic bias to treat all artifacts of Western civilization negatively, or where that is impossible, to ignore them entirely—has been the failure of those making this claim to demonstrate that the alphabet itself, and not orthography in general, facilitated the abstract "theoretic" thinking that is associated with Western civilization. Although support can be adduced from the specific nature of alphabetic literacy, a better case can be made by pointing to the counterexample of East Asia, whose writing lacks the alphabet’s abstract and analytic characteristics, and whose thought is characterized by the concrete, holistic patterns of oral culture.
-----Accepting this argument entails certain corollaries, beginning with the need to reject the notion of intrinsic Eastern and Western cognitive styles and embrace a simpler and more technically satisfying explanation: that East Asia’s dominant orthography fails to provide the developmental cues supportive of an analytic mindset. This may be good news to scholars who admire oral culture and blame the alphabet for its dehumanizing effects—people who, not coincidentally, also find comfort in the "harmonizing" ideal of the East. However, to many East Asians eager to elevate their accomplishments in scientific theory and abstract thinking to the same high level achieved in economic and aesthetic pursuits, such "sentimental egalitarianism" (Goody and Watt, 1968:67) will have little appeal.
-----Finally, those wishing to preserve the cognitive basis of Western culture must recognize the unique role the alphabet plays in creating and sustaining that foundation. Although there is no danger of the alphabet being replaced as the West’s orthography, its functionality has been eroded by the shift from reading toward graphics and multimedia, and by misguided efforts to replace phonics with "whole word" instruction.
-----This pedagogical practice, which puts Westerners on the same level as Chinese vis-à-vis their ability to apprehend and interact with orthography, replaces the alphabet’s abstract task of phoneme analysis with holistic word-shape recognition, on the premise that adult readers routinely perceive words and phrases, not letter-phonemes. This is only partly true: mature readers rely on multiple strategies to derive meaning from print, including a "direct access" method that bypasses phonology (initially) and "phonological recoding" that entails converting the symbols to a speech-based code (Hannas, 1997:154–164). The latter style is employed when a reader confronts novelty and depends on prior instruction in phonics.
-----The limitations of the whole word method and its failure as an instructional tool have led to a grudging return in American primary schools to traditional phonics as a matter of practical necessity. But there is more to the picture.
Learning the alphabet’s grapheme-to-sound correspondences constitutes a child’s first explicit introduction to analysis and abstraction—an opportunity that is not shared by members of nonalphabetic cultures. It is a wrenching experience that not all children adapt to in equal measure but one with implications that extend beyond literacy to the cognitive foundations of Western society.
By William C. Hannas: http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol5no3/53-wch-script.pdf (http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol5no3/53-wch-script.pdf)
Inspiration by Sallahddin/DNA
P.S.: Even the epistemology , or philo of knowledge, or any theory of knowledge for that matter , can never be objective, universal, true .....=
:duim:
Epistemology: The Morning Star is the Evening Star.
Ontology: The Morning Star is the Morning Star; the Evening Star is the Evening Star; Venus is Venus.
Continuity vs. discreteness.
Contextualiteit van pictogrammen vs. losse letters alfabet.
http://www.filosofieblog.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/yin_yang.voorbeeld.jpgEr zijn dingen die enkelvoudig zijn. Voor de westerse religies is er bijvoorbeeld maar één God. Er hoort ook maar één kapitein op een schip. En we leven ook maar in één wereld. Onze droomwereld en de wereld van de fantasie, daar leven we niet in, die bezoeken we alleen maar. Er zijn ook dingen die drievoudig zijn. Christenen hebben het over de goddelijke drieëenheid. En de gang van zaken in een democratische rechtsstaat wordt geregeld door drie machten: de wetgevende, de rechtsprekende en de uitvoerende. Dan zijn er ook nog viervouden, vijfvouden, enzovoort. Maar de meeste zaken zijn toch duaal, binair, dubbelzijdig, bipolair, gepaard of simpelweg tweevoudig. Veel van wat we willen uitdrukken, drukken we uit in tweetallen. We hebben het over enerzijds - anderzijds, primair- secundair of over het midden tussen twee uitersten. We zien tegenstellingen of alternatieven. Ik en de ander, binnenwereld - buitenwereld, het eerste gezicht en de keerzijde, boven - onder, links – rechts, voor – na, enzovoorts. Van alle veelvuldigheden zijn de tweetallen de meest voorkomende.
Veel filosofie is een zaak van dialectisch denken. Het is een zoeken naar tegenstellingen, om daaraan de feitelijke situatie af te meten. Socrates probeerde voortdurend beweringen te toetsen door het tegengestelde ervan te onderzoeken. Als een generaal beweerde dat moed een kwestie was van koste wat kost standhouden in de strijd, probeert Socrates voorbeelden te vinden die laten zien dat een strategische terugtocht soms meer oplevert dan standhouden en je doodvechten. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) heeft zelfs een hele filosofie gebaseerd op het zoeken naar tegendelen. In zijn gedachtewereld levert een synthese van thesen en antithesen nieuwe kennis op.
Vandaar ook dat het filosofische gereedschap – het begrippenapparaat waarmee filosofen hun problemen te lijf gaan – voor een groot deel bestaat uit tegenpolen. Ieder polenpaar spant een dimensie op waarbinnen het oordeel over een stand van zaken een plaats kan krijgen. En voor een goed begrip van filosofische vertogen is kennis van dergelijke polaire tegendelen van groot belang. Natuurlijk is niet iedere oppositie van even groot belang voor elk probleem, maar met elkaar geven ze toch een redelijk overzicht van de objecten waarmee filosofen hun handwerk verrichten.
Als iemand twee begrippen tegenover elkaar stelt kan dat verschillende betekenissen hebben. Hij kan het hebben over twee uitersten op een schaal waartussen verder nog eindeloze mogelijkheden zijn, zoals koud en heet, groot en klein, jong en oud. Hij kan het ook hebben over twee elkaar uitsluitende categorieën waarbij je iets of in de ene of de andere kunt onderbrengen. En wat je in zulke categorieën onderbrengt kan variëren. Soms sorteer je gewoon dingen in twee vakjes, zoals je messen en vorken bij elkaar legt in een la. En soms stop je alles bij elkaar en dient het andere alleen als contrast. Zo heb je het carthesische onderscheid tussen geest en materie, waarbij het denken, voorstellen en waarnemen bij het domein van het geestelijke hoort en het bewegen en omvatten bij het materiële. Maar je hebt ook het onderscheid tussen dualisme en monisme, dat een principiële keuze impliceert. Als je uitgaat van een monisme dan verwerp je het dualisme, overal en altijd. Filosofische stromingen komen vaak in paren die elkaars tegenpolen en alternatieven vormen. Filosofen onderscheiden vaak naast het vanzelfsprekende ook nog een andere mogelijkheid. En ze dwingen je vaak te kiezen tussen twee alternatieven, ook als het jou eigenlijk niet zoveel uitmaakt.
De tegenpolen die hier zijn beschreven tonen zulke alternatieven. Het zijn begrippenparen die door filosofen vaak worden gehanteerd. Met zijn twintigen overdekken ze het hele landschap van de filosofie, maar zonder dat met elkaar volledig te claimen. Er zijn nog vele andere indelingen mogelijk. De keuze van tegenpolen is een persoonlijke, en pretendeert geen beredeneerde canon van de filosofie te bieden.
· Eenheid en veelheid (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=365)
· Vorm en substantie (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=367)
· Immanentie en transcendentie (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=369)
· Act en potentie (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=371)
· Noodzakelijkheid en contingentie (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=372)
· Subject en object (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=374)
· Res cogitans en res extensa (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=380)
· Impressies en ideeën (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=383)
· A priori en a posteriori (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=384)
· Analytisch en synthetisch (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=389)
· Zin en betekenis (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=391)
· Inductie en deductie (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=395)
· Constitutief en regulatief (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=399)
· Scepticisme en dogmatisme (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=402)
· Grote verhalen en kleine verhalen (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=405)
· Rationaliteit en irrationaliteit (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=407)
· Pour soi en en soi (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=409)
· Realisme en idealisme (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=411)
· Zegbaar en onzegbaar (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=413)
· Iets en niets (http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=417)
©Pim Lemmens: http://www.filosofieblog.nl/?p=425
He Sallahddin, lijkt een interessant boek. Kep er gauw enkele vragen over.
Lees het maar , Olijfje : it's really worth it indeed :
That w'd change ur life & thinking ...somehow , hopefully, or not, who knows ??? !
Good luck :
see ya !
:zwaai:
:duim:
Epistemology: The Morning Star is the Evening Star.
Ontology: The Morning Star is the Morning Star; the Evening Star is the Evening Star; Venus is Venus.
Yes, even though many western & other thinkers had so couragoeusly come to that logical conclusion that epistemology = a product of society, culture, history , econmics, politics ....= a product of the environment to some extent , main_stream western thought has been still acting as if western thought is universal, true, objective .... as if there's no other thought , no other alternatives ........ :lol:
unbelievable !
Thanks !
Mr. Rourchid :
I hate to say i'm afraid u have been wasting ur time writting down all that text nobody is gonna read anyway !
well, Good luck with it !
Thanks !
:zwaai:
Read : "Geography of thought " by Richard.E.Nisbett :How Asians & westerners think differently & why ? = ask Rourchid 'bout it !
Editorial Review (From Publishers Weekly)
This book - Geography of Thought - may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars. Nisbett, an eminent psychologist and co-author of a seminal Psychological Review paper on how people talk about their decision making, reports on some of his latest work in cultural psychology. He contends that "human cognition is not everywhere the same"-that those brought up in Western and East Asian cultures think differently from one another in scientifically measurable ways. Such a contention pits his worksquarely against evolutionary psychology (as articulated by Steven Pinker and others) and cognitive science, which assume all appreciable human characteristics are "hard wired."
Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, Clive Cazeaux:
Chapter 6
Cutting nature at the joints
Metaphor and epistemology in the science wars
Postmodernism’s disavowal of meta-narratives and universal truth claims has recently manifested itself in a series of debates that has become known as the ‘science wars’: scientists, cultural theorists, sociologists, and philosophers in dispute over the status of scientific knowledge (Collins and Pinch 1993; Franklin 1996; Levins 1996; Martin 1996; Rose 1996; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Snow 1964; Sokal 1996). Is science a disinterested reflection of the world as it really is or a discourse whose findings are heavily influenced by the interests and prejudices of those who work within it? Strong objections are raised by the realists in the debate to the sociologists’ metaphor of scientific knowledge as a‘construction’. What the sociologist understands by this is that scientific theories are constituted by the perspectives and research opportunities which are made available within a particular community. However, the realist reacts to the more subjective, ‘fabricated’ associations of ‘construction’ and interprets the relativism of the sociologist to mean that it is the scientific community and not nature which determines where ontological divisions lie. Do we create or do we discover truths about the world? Surely, the realist demands, it cannot be the former? It is in this context that Richard Dawkins’s often quoted remark – ‘show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I will show you a hypocrite!’ – is made (quoted in Franklin 1996: 143).
This chapter argues that much of the epistemological conflict which makes up the science wars is attributable to the metaphors that are at work in the competing theories of knowledge. Two cases I cover in detail are ‘cutting nature at the joints’ and the concept of ‘world’ used as a metonym. In both cases, it is ambiguous whether what is being described is the (noumenal) world as it is in itself or the (phenomenal) world as it is accessed and made available to us through perception. My argument though is not against metaphor; I am not accusing metaphor of disrupting the passage of rational thought. Rather, I am claiming that more attention needs to be paid to the way in which figurative language functions at the epistemological level and, in particular, to the way in which the same metaphor can lend itself to conflicting epistemologies.
Explanations of how knowledge ‘fits’ the world are invariably metaphorical, for example, talk of knowledge mirroring the world, knowledge as a construction, correspondence and coherence theories of truth, receiving sensory impressions or sense-data. The reason for this, I argue in the second part of the chapter, is that there is a fundamental two-way relationship between metaphor and epistemology. On the one hand, epistemology is metaphorical in the sense that the task of describing how our faculties mesh with the world requires us to make claims which exceed what is given in experience and which therefore can only be articulated by drawing on external areas of discourse. But, on the other, metaphor itself has been ‘epistemologized’ by recent research in philosophy and psychology, that is to say, metaphor has been shown to be central to the mapping and organizational procedures we employ in perception at large. What this two-way relationship means, I suggest, is that metaphor acquires an epistemological significance which (a) goes some way towards explaining why it is that the same metaphor can adapt itself to opposing theories of knowledge, and (b) can guide epistemological thought through the science wars in a fashion which avoids the binarism of phenomenal appearance and noumenal reality. As I show in the following chapter, such guidance already exists in the philosophy of science, and has been plotted by Heidegger and Bachelard along the lines of a single family of metaphors.
In the science wars, the deepest epistemological lines are drawn between ‘glass mirror epistemology’ (GME) and the strong sociology of knowledge (SSK). The former is essentially a version of direct realism and rests upon a belief in the transparency of perception. Reality, it is assumed, exists in itself with its own inherent structure independently of any perceiver, but is directly (or indirectly, via apparatus) open to view and knowledge can be derived by naming the various, distinct natural kinds which the scientist discovers through increasingly refined observation. This position is tied to the emergence of science as a distinct discipline in the seventeenth century. In this time, the senses are affirmed as true and reliable channels of information on the world and, as a result, the new empiricist mind is promised the possibility of accessing or ‘reading’ the secrets of nature. We find this sentiment in Bacon’s ‘alphabet of nature’ and Galileo’s concept of the universe as a ‘great book ... written in the language of mathematics’ (Arbib and Hesse 1986: 149).
SSK theorists contest GME. The interests of SSK are, as the title suggests, primarily social and political: to disclose and emphasize the moral and political concerns which, it is claimed, have been active in determining what we accept as knowledge and, more especially, what we accept as scientific knowledge. According to SSK, two unwarranted assumptions are made by GME: (1) the world is immediately and unproblematically open to view, and (2) (as Franklin makes the point) ‘things can be known in and of themselves through a method of observation and description that does not leave a mark upon its objects’ (1996: 142). In these respects, science views the world from a God’s-eye point of view; it maintains a perspective which is not a perspective. This is where the danger lies for, according to Franklin, it is the denial of the perspectival and partial basis of science ‘that attempts to render invisible and inaccessible to scrutiny or questioning exactly how that perspective works, what it includes and excludes, and how that inclusion or exclusion is a cultural effect’ (1996: 151).
Examples of the value-ladenness of science cited by SSK theorists include the ubiquity of chemical therapy in medicine and farming as expressions of the interests of the chemical industry (Levins: 107), the assertion that the female body is of merely secondary or marginal importance in anatomy, and the privileging of ‘scientific discovery’ over the human or animal suffering generated by research (Martin 1996: 46).
Against this, anti-realism is a form of subjective Kantianism: instead of the content of our thoughts being determined by external objects impinging upon them, it is the nature of our concepts which determine the shape of reality. Kuhn’s commentary on Lavoisier is a good illustration of the position:
"In learning to see oxygen ... Lavoisier also had to change his view of many other more familiar substances. He had, for example, to see a compound ore where Priestley and his contemporaries had seen an elementary earth, and there were other such changes besides. At the very least, as a result of discovering oxygen, Lavoisier saw nature differently. And in the absence of some recourse to that hypothetical fixed nature that he ‘saw differently’, the principle of economy will urge us to say that after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world." (Kuhn 1962: 118)
As a result of discovering oxygen, the methods and vocabularies which constitute Lavoisier’s practice as a scientist are completely redefined. The processes and objects with which he is dealing are therefore different, and so ‘the principle of economy’ urges us to sayhe is working ‘in a different world’. In support of this is Goodman’s claim that the concept ‘world’ should be understood as short hand for ‘descriptions and depictionsof the world’, since a world undescribed, undepicted or unperceived is something which (according to Goodman) cannot enter our conceptual reckoning (Goodman 1978: 4).
It is easy to see how friction between the two positions is generated. SSK argues that it is not ‘the world’ or not just ‘the world’ which determines theory-choice but social, cultural, extra-scientific affairs. This conclusion is reached on the understanding that necessarily there cannot be a direct, transparent ‘looking at the world’, Franklin’s ‘looking through a toilet paper tube’ (1996: 143). This utterly contradicts GME, cancels altogether the notion that our knowledge is, first and foremost, a reflection of the way the world is. In this way, SSK approaches anti-realism. Nature’s joints are either non-existent or sufficiently malleable to the degree that the categories of entity we accept as existent are determined by contingent, independent factors. The claims that science always works with a particular interest and from a particular cognitive perspective are taken to imply the denial of the existence of self-similar objects or, in Putnam’s idiom, self-identifying objects: ‘objects that intrinsically correspond to one word or thought-sign rather than another’ (Putnam 1981: 51). In other words, objects which, because of their self-similar, self-evident nature, cannot help but direct the scientist towards defining her concepts so that they are in point-to-point correspondence with them.
A key SSK text is Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). This argues that it was political sensitivity rather than epistemic success which led to Boyle’s theory of a vacuum winning over Hobbes’s theory of a plenum in the seventeenth century. Boyle argued that it would be physically possible to create a vacuum (an absence of all matter) given the right conditions and apparatus, whereas Hobbes maintained that every portion of nature must contain some form of material substance, which he referred to as a ‘plenum’. For a period of time, the vacuist and plenist theories both ‘saved appearances’, that is, both Boyle’s and Hobbes’s ontologies fitted the observed phenomena.
However, according to Shapin and Schaffer, Boyle’s theory was ultimately accepted not because it provided a better fit with the world but because it was felt to be in keeping with ‘the settlement and protection of a certain kind of social order’ (1985: 342). The openness and consensus of opinion which were characteristic of Boyle’s empiricist scientific method were perceived to be congruent with ‘civil stability and peace’ and ‘the polity that emerged in the Restoration’ (1985: 342).
Epistemologically, the contrast between GME and SSK is a kin to the opposition between realism and anti-realism. Although the variety of realisms within analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science arguably make the realism–anti-realism distinction an over simplification, for example, metaphysical, semantic and epistemic, as Psillos describes them(1999:xix), the various realisms nevertheless share a commitment to a mind-independent reality underlying appearances which is either directly or indirectly knowable through appearances, and it is the contrast between this commitment and the lack of it within anti-realism that I am interested in. Realism, in its strongest, metaphysical form, as Putnam characterizes it (although it is not his position), adopts the perspective of the God’s-eye point of view alongside GME. It understands truth to be ‘some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things’ (1981: 49). It maintains what Putnam calls a ‘similitude theory of reference’: ‘the relation between the representations in our minds and the external objects that they refer to is literally a similarity’ (1981: 57). Ideally, no differences between the properties we perceive and the properties the object has in itself should emerge in the process of coming to know the object. The empiricist notion of a sense impression – originally described by Aristotle in De Anima as the impress of a signet ring in wax – is one version of this ideal (Aristotle 1987b: 424a).
Metaphor is by no means an innocent bystander in all of this. Not only are key epistemological concepts metaphorical (as I illustrate in my introduction), but also the appearance of metaphors in scientific theories has been taken by some as a test case of whether (with GME) new scientific entities are discoveries from a range of pre-existent, self-similar objects or (with SSK) constructions made as a result of the scientific mind’s increasingly refined fashioning of nature. The exchange between Richard Boyd and Thomas Kuhn is a good example (Boyd 1979; Kuhn 1979). Boyd’s intention is to show how metaphor can help us discover or grant us ‘epistemic access’ to new natural kinds. Epistemic access, for Boyd, qualifies the success with which our categories acquire, assess, refine, and communicate knowledge about the entities or purported entities to which they refer. In this respect, Boyd claims, metaphors can function as ‘a sort of catachresis’ in science, that is to say, ‘they [can be] used to introduce theoretical terminology where none previously existed’ (1979: 357). If a metaphor enables sustained information gathering about a presumed or partially understood natural kind, Boyd reasons, then ‘the only epistemologically plausible explanation’ is that the metaphor in question refers (1979: 401). On this account, metaphor is granted a referential value and, as a result, made consistent with the causal realist project of accommodating language ‘to the causal structure of the world’ or, as Boyd puts it, ‘the task of arranging our language so that our linguistic categories ‘‘cut the world at the joints’’’ (1979: 357). He gives as examples tropes from cognitive psychology drawn from the terminology of computer science and information theory, e.g. ‘the claim that thought is a kind of ‘‘information processing’’ and that the brain is a sort of ‘‘computer’’’ and ‘the suggestion that certain motoric or cognitive processes are ‘‘preprogrammed’’’ (1979: 360).
However, the epistemological value of metaphor for Kuhn is not one of discovery but of creation. The problem with Boyd’s idea that metaphors can help to identify natural kinds, Kuhn asserts, is that it assumes that ‘nature has one and only one set of joints to which the evolving terminology of science comes closer and closer with time’ (1979: 417). This, Kuhn thinks, fails to acknowledge that the world and nature are themselves, to some extent, constituted by theory and language. Kuhn favours an ontology ‘without ‘‘things in themselves’’ and with categories of the mind which could change with time as the accommodation of language and experience proceeded’ (1979: 418–19). Such a view, he adds, need not make the world ‘less real’ (1979: 419). Metaphor contributes to this ontological diversity, Kuhn argues, because it is forever redefining conceptual boundaries. The effect of combining two semantic fields in a metaphor, he suggests, is that both regions are never seen in quite the same way again, their outlines are completely reconfigured. Our linguistic divisions, Kuhn maintains, far from being governed by divisions in nature, are constantly open to renewal thanks to the highlighting of new aspects and features that comes with metaphorical juxtaposition.
The way in which the terms of the science wars are set would seem to preclude the possibility of any resolution. Any attempt to offer a response will inevitably have to adopt some of the assumptions of one side and so will be dismissed by the other as partisan. For example, to argue for the necessarily perspectival nature of perception (as SSK does) will be taken by the realist as simply another assertion of anti-realism. Alternatively, it could be argued against SSK (as Norris makes the point), that the historical contexts of discovery must not be confused with the scientific context of justification (Norris 1997: 33). That is to say, the procedures for either supporting or falsifying a hypothesis ensure that the way reality appears to the scientist is not wholly a product of her historically and culturally rooted conceptual scheme. But the SSK theorist can reply to this by observing that whatever is brought forward as evidence will have been selected from a range of possible phenomena and, by virtue of this selection process, will already be affected by certain ideological determinants. On this account, even appeals to experimentation and the evidence of the senses – pivotal to scientific method – cannot avoid the conceptual organization present in experiment design and the determination of what is and is not significant. Some might see the debate as concerned merely with whether our theories talk about ‘the world’ or about ‘our perspective on the world’. Rorty (1980, 1982), in his typically dismissive manner, would argue that, either way, it doesn’t really matter: whether we think we are dealing with reality as it is or reality as it appears to us does not alter the fact that it is the reality we have to deal with in constructing a better existence. But there is more at stake here. Not only is this one of the oldest disputes in the history of epistemology (although Rorty would take the lack of resolution as an indication of its vacuity), but it is also fundamental to the idea that there is a reality which transcends and resists our judgment in some way; things can be otherwise than they seem to be. Even if one does not value epistemology, it ought to be recognized that epistemological notions of concept-or culture-transcendent realities are central to debates regarding what is morally and politically right.
Kant and the metaphorical nature of epistemology
What, then, follows from the fact that the ‘world’ and ‘joints’ metaphors can be taken as expressions of both realism and anti-realism? The epistemological and ontological leeway which they permit would seem to support the claim, often made in the history of philosophy (e.g. by Plato and Locke), that figurative language obstructs clear, rational thought. However, I don’t think it is merely a case of metaphor waywardly exacerbating the opposition between realism and anti-realism. Rather, we face these difficulties, I propose, because the task of epistemology is itself fundamentally metaphorical.
Epistemology necessitates a looking down on oneself from above, an attempt to view how one views, a double perspective which, it seems to me, can only be achieved through metaphor. We are never in a position to describe fully the nature of our cognitive acquaintance with the world, it could be claimed, because we can never extricate ourselves fully from our form of perception in order to view the meshing process from above, so to speak. This is one of the problems Kant addresses in the Critique of Pure Reason (1929): how to explain the possibility of perception given that we can never exceed a particular form of perception. As he argues in the transcendental deduction, the conditions of possibility of subjectivity are at one and the same time the conditions of possibility of objectivity, which is to say that perception is only possible because our cognitive faculties necessarily apply to the world, organizing and shaping it for us (1929: A95– 130, B129–69; in particular A108).
Because the conditions under which perception is possible are already ones of active engagement, it is impossible for the epistemologist to step outside the process in order to examine the components of perception when they are in a restful state; Kant situates the noumenon as a limiting concept precisely to indicate the impossibility of knowledge beyond the limits of experience (1929: A139–40, B178–79). It is this predicament which gives epistemology its metaphorical dimension. Without a field of its own that is open to direct inspection and, therefore, without a vocabulary that would correspond to this God’s-eye view, epistemology can only proceed by drawing its terms metaphorically from other areas of discourse. This would seem to go some way towards explaining the prominence of metaphorical concepts within epistemologies, such as mirroring, impression, sense-datum, correspondence, coherence, etc.
Furthermore, the lowest common denominator of epistemology is the conceptof independence: as Devitt put sit,the ‘startingplace’ for epistemology is the question of ‘the independence of what exists from theories and theorists’ or, in other words, the question of where one thing (reality) ends and another thing (the representation of reality) begins (1997: 233). But, as far as Kant is concerned, reality and our perception of it, at a fundamental level, cannot be separated, since the conditions of possibility of one are also the conditions of possibility of the other. This grants Kant’s epistemology a second metaphorical aspect, in as much as metaphor is the conjunction of those categories or domains which we normally regard as separate or independent (i.e. in Kant’s case, concept and intuition or subject and object). If we plug this Kantian, metaphorical intertwining back into the science wars, then the aporetic switching backwards and forwards between the realist’s noumenon and the anti-realist’s phenomenon – ‘Is this the world as it is in itself or the world as it is carved up by us?’ – becomes a particular instance of the metaphorical action whereby two concepts exist in an irrevocably integrated state rather than standing as mutually exclusive and isolatable categories.
This is a proposal though that I can imagine some will find hard to accept, especially the realist, since it seems to reduce our capacity for rational, cognitive insight to the mere formation of images and metaphors. However, what such a response fails to consider is the extent to which metaphor has been ‘epistemologized’ or made perceptually significant in philosophy and psychology over the past few decades (Kittay 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Ortony 1979). While it cannot be claimed that all the research in these areas is pointing in the same direction or making consistent and confirmatory claims, there is nevertheless the shared recognition that our capacity for creating metaphors is central to the mapping and organizational processes we employ in perception at large. On this account, far from being a muddier of truth, metaphor is theorized as an operation which is constitutive of truth or at least constitutive of the possibility of the conceptual relationships which allow truth to be determined. Thus, in suggesting that epistemology itself is fundamentally metaphorical, I am in no way making the theory of knowledge simply a kind of poetry or a kind of writing. Rather, my point is that epistemology is enabled by the cognitive possibilities that such metaphorical thinking brings, forexample, with Plato, assessing how a particular object can be thought of as ‘sharing’ the form of its universal template (1987a: 452c) or, with Locke, exploringhow knowledge of the world can be constructed from sensory ‘impressions’ or‘simpleideas’ (1997: 2.1.6; 2.2.1).
By showing that the epistemological conflict between realism and antirealism is attributable to the metaphors at workin their theories of knowledge, and by offering a Kantian explanation for why their epistemologies operate in this way, it could be objected that I am locating myself wholly within the anti-realist camp and that therefore my analysis amounts to nothing more than a partisan contribution to the wars, an argument in favour of antirealism and SSK. Such an assessment, I admit, is inevitable, primarily because one of the principles of realism is that it is possible to talk about the world possessing a structure independent of any form of perception and this is, in effect, to exclude from consideration by definition the cognitive predeterminants responsible for granting the observer perceptual access to the world in the first place. Furthermore, by presenting the concept of ‘world’ as a metonym above, I am committed to the view, with Berkeley, that the notion of the ‘in itself ’ cannot be divorced from metaphor and our capacity for producing images. Thus, as I have already intimated, it would seem that any attempt to adopt a perspective on the science wars which could lessen the conflict between the two sides or offer some hope of reconciliation cannot avoid being interpreted as the restatement of one or the other side’s epistemological preferences.
However, there is a way in which this account of metaphor and Kant can avoid the dichotomyof realism and anti-realism. This stems from the fact that, in one very important respect, it is wrong to classify Kant as an anti-realist. He is traditionally identified as such on the grounds that he has categories in the mind determine the ontological structure of reality. The thesis that categories located in our understanding organize the world for us is taken by anti-realists to mean that ‘we cut up the world into objects’ when we introduce one or another conceptual scheme or, as Devitt recounts it (as part of his critique of anti-realism), ‘the cook imposes cookie cutters (concepts) on the dough in order to create cookies (appearances)’ (1997: 73). But we have the wrong image in mind if we see concepts determining intuition as stencils pressing shapes into an utterly submissive and pliable dough. This image does not do justice to the conclusion of the transcendental deduction, which states that the conditions of possibility of subjectivity are, at one and the same time, the conditions of possibility of objectivity. In other words (as we have already seen in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological development of Kant),the categories I need to make my experience intelligible arealso those which I find apply to the bits and pieces of the world.One consequence of this argument is that ‘subjectivity’ no longer denotes the subject and the subject alone, and ‘objectivity’ no longer denotes the world and the world on its own, for the former term now extends to embrace the conditions of possibility of objectivity, and the latter term extends to embrace the conditions of possibility of subjectivity.
A similar claim is made for Kant by McDowell (1994). In Mind and World, McDowell warns us that the realism–anti-realism debate is in ‘danger of falling into interminable oscillation’ between the concepts of a mind-determined reality and a mind-independent reality (1994: 9). He aims to jump off the see-saw and delineate an intermediate standpoint which accommodates the mind-dependence of the anti-realist and the mind-independence of the realist. His position is based upon a ‘naturalized’ reading of Kant’s epistemology, ‘naturalized’ in that human cognitive faculties are acknowledged as belonging to the nature they access. This gives the utmost epistemological and ontological weight to the mutual dependence between mind and world expressed in Kant’s dictum, ‘thoughts without content are empty, [and] intuitions without concepts are blind’ (Kant 1929: A51, B75). Because of the inextricable tie between mind and world, McDowell argues, we are in error if we frame epistemological debate in terms which start from the assumption that one is isolated from and exclusive of the other. Once epistemology is moved away from questions of how two components, conceived as distinct, can intersect, the oscillations between realism and anti-realism cease. Kant’s epistemology can help us in this, McDowell thinks, because it is able to meet the dual requirement of receiving a world through intuition (to satisfy the realist), yet this intuition is located within a rational framework structured by the understanding (to accommodate the anti-realist). Thus, Kant’s transcendental interweaving of subjectivity and objectivity is distinct from the ‘cookie-cutter’ anti-realism with which he is often associated.4 What is more, on this reading of Kant, he would in actual fact stand alongside the realist in criticizing the ‘imposing’ or ‘cutting’ metaphors of anti-realism for making reality too much a ‘product’ of mind. As Kant makes it clear, objectivity in his transcendental idealism is not conferred ‘by means of the will’ (1929: A92, B125).
Thus, attributing the realism–anti-realism aporia to the metaphors at work within epistemology, and giving a Kantian explanation for why epistemology operates in this way, do not amount to reassertions of antirealism. Rather, what these steps show is that picturing or envisioning is intrinsic to the configuration of the subject–object relation in epistemology, where the associations introduced by the image are decisive in shaping our understanding of how subject and object interact. As I have argued, existing epistemological metaphors within the science wars require us to assign priority either to the ‘world’ and ‘the joints’ of the object (with GME and the realist), or the ‘world’ and ‘the joints’ of the subject (with SSK and the anti-realist). The themes of both metaphors are ultimately spatial in origin: reality is conceived as a realm containing objects, and the human subject, while not exactly represented as a place, is nevertheless conceived as a domain to which claims, concepts, and possibly objects can belong. The oscillation between realism and anti-realism is created because the ‘domain’ metaphor only entertains the binary alternatives of inside or outside.
Problems with visualizing the subject–object distinction
These concerns over the subject–object distinction are not new. They are often encountered in terms of the contest between the correspondence and the coherence theories of truth, a contest that is not altogether removed from my interest here in Kant, especially given Walker’s presentation of Kant as a coherence theorist (1989: 61–82, 102–21). Truth, for the correspondence theorist, is understood as a form of correspondence relation between proposition and reality: p is true if it is the case that p. On this account, the truth content of statement p, uttered by a subject, is established by the way objects are in the world. This arrangement, however, creates the problem of having to explain how entities of one type, concepts or propositions, can be seen to ‘correspond’ with entities of an altogether different type, namely, material objects in the world. The main objection to the notion of correspondence, raised by defenders of the opposing, coherence theory of truth, is that no account can be given of what this relation of correspondence consists in (Walker 1989: 21). Any attempt to spell out further the conditions which might determine how a particular arrangement of words can correspond to a set of objects will have one of two unsatisfactory outcomes: either it will be workingwithin the categories of wordand object and so willbe leavingthe gap between them unaddressed, or it will try to explain ‘correspondence’ in terms of a comparable metaphor, one which is in equal need of explanation.
The coherence theory of truth seeks to avoid the problems attached to correspondence, but the way it does so is rendered highly problematic by the subject–object opposition. Whereas correspondence theory emphasizes correspondence with the world, coherence theory gives priority to the notion that knowledge necessarily occurs within the subject. Testing a knowledge-claim involves not a check between proposition and a mind-independent reality but between one proposition and another or one perception and another. This still involves contact with the world, except it is the world as it is perceived and reported by other individuals. Thus, the problem of correspondence is avoided because coherentism is working with only one kind of being – cognitions or propositions and the relations which hold between them – rather than two. But this is also the basis for the main objection to coherentism, levelled by correspondence theorists: namely, that it loses contact with mind-independent reality or (echoing the charges made against anti-realism above) that it reduces reality to a series of subjective reports. As Pollock writes in his critique of coherentism:
"The basic difficulty with [the coherence theory] is that it cuts justification off from the world. A person could be justified in believing anything. All that would be required would be a sufficiently outlandish but coherent set of beliefs ... [While these beliefs may cohere with one another, they] are nowhere tied down in any way to the evidence of [the] senses. "(Pollock quoted in Walker 1989: 176–77; emphases added)
The difficulties involved in trying to rethink the subject–object distinction should not be underestimated, as Putnam is all too aware. He argues that the subject–object distinction needs reconceptualizing (1981: ix–xii), and offers internal realism as his contribution to the process (1981: 49–74). Internal realism denies that ‘there are any [experiential] inputs which are not themselves to some extent shaped by our concepts, by the vocabulary we use to report and describe them’, and denies also that there are ‘any inputs which admit of only one description’ (1981: 54). Truth, for the internal realist, resides in ‘some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system and not correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent ‘‘states of affairs’’’ (1981: 50). However, Putnam’s position is dismissed by many as a mere restatement of epistemological subjectivism. For example, internal realism is judged by Devitt to be synonymous with anti-realism. Devitt finds anti-realist sentiment in the following expressions of internal realism by Putnam:
"everything we say about an object is of the form: it is such as to affect us in such-and-such a way. Nothing at all we say about anyobject describes the object as it is ‘in itself’, independently of its effect on us." (Devitt 1997: 252, quoted from Putnam 1981: 61)
"I ... advance a view in which the mind does not simply ‘copy’ a world which admits of description by One True Theory. But my view is not a view in which the mind makes up the world, either (or makes it up subject to constraints imposed by ‘methodological canons’ and mind-independent ‘sense-data’). If one must use metaphorical language, then let the metaphor be this: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. (Or, to make the metaphor even more Hegelian, the Universe makes up the Universe – with minds – collectively – playing a special role in the making up.)" (Devitt 1997: 220, quoted from Putnam 1981: xi)
For Devitt, Putnam’s incorporation of the subject in the construction of the world and knowledge about the world can mean only one thing: knowledge and the world are taken to fall wholly within the realm of the subject (where subjectivity is understood to stand in opposition to objectivity), and therefore to suffer from the subjective attributes of whimsy, unreliability, caprice, in fact all the qualities that a stable, continuous, determinate, mind-independent world does not exhibit. Similarly, Alston, while not applying the term ‘anti-realism’ to Putnam, nevertheless accuses him of making reality subjectively internal (1996). As Alston makes the point:
"if the aim of thought is to satisfy its own internal standards, rather than conform itself to the character of something other than thought it is about, then we can’t suppose that what determines whether our beliefs are true or false is the character of what they are about." (Alston 1996: 186)
Thought either satisfies its own internal standards or is about something other than thought; knowledge is either ‘in contact with’ the world or ‘floats above it’, merely cohering with itself. It is one or the other.
But if it is the case that metaphor is intrinsic to the configuration of the subject–object relation in epistemology, then it certainly does not follow that we have to be confined to metaphors which commit us to the oscillation between realism and anti-realism.
What is needed, I suggest, is another epistemological metaphor or family of metaphors which can articulate the relation between subject and object in a way which does not repeat the internal–external dichotomy. This would be a metaphor whose subject matter is organized in such a way that both sides’ commitments – the subjective predetermination of experience with anti-realism, and the realist’s idea that knowledge is a representation of how things are in the world beyond subjectivity – can be accommodated in a non-polar fashion. Looking for a new metaphor to meet this end is not simply casting around for a novel or alternative image for the sake of it, but an act which acknowledges the metaphorical nature of epistemology and the possibility of there being a metaphor which can provide a much-needed revision of epistemology. Such a metaphor, I think, exists, and I shall set out its philosophical origin and epistemological efficacy in the next chapter.
Pp. 133-138
[I]Note:
[Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, Chapter 5]
{p. 104} Nietzsche is the first Western philosopher to define the human as a metaphorical being. I could rephrase the point by saying that, for Nietzsche, we are in metaphor or we are metaphor: our being is not derived from a Platonic, eternal essence or from a Cartesian thinking substance but (in as much as there is a way of being we can call ours) is emergent from tensional interactions between competing drives or perspectives. (1979: 22).
{p. 105} Stretching metaphor beyond being a literary or poetic device to being a mode of perception is a well-supported move in recent philosophy and psychology, for example, the neural transformations involved in perceiving colour form part of Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphor as an embodied neurological structure (1999: 24).
Related links:
http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showpost.php?p=3492674&postcount=116
http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=3974564#post3974564 {post #164}
http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Paper%20Bank/Comparative%20Studies/kamal.htm
http://www.mullasadra.org/new_site/english/Mullasadra/Ontology.htm
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You're right.
No time now.
:lol:
I wanna catch up with..... Rourchid ! :lol: , in some ways, perspectives, insights .... at least :
Rourchid : is there a way to download ur data , info, knowledge directly from ur brain to ....mine !? :lol:
ach....no, there's always that immaterial side of Man: consciousness, spirit, soul ........ in the way that w'd make such a transfer ...impossible of course ! :lol:
Editorial Review (From Publishers Weekly)
This book - Geography of Thought - may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars. Nisbett, an eminent psychologist and co-author of a seminal Psychological Review paper on how people talk about their decision making, reports on some of his latest work in cultural psychology. He contends that "human cognition is not everywhere the same"-that those brought up in Western and East Asian cultures think differently from one another in scientifically measurable ways. Such a contention pits his worksquarely against evolutionary psychology (as articulated by Steven Pinker and others) and cognitive science, which assume all appreciable human characteristics are "hard wired."
Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, Clive Cazeaux:
Chapter 6
Cutting nature at the joints
Metaphor and epistemology in the science wars
Postmodernism’s disavowal of meta-narratives and universal truth claims has recently manifested itself in a series of debates that has become known as the ‘science wars’: scientists, cultural theorists, sociologists, and philosophers in dispute over the status of scientific knowledge (Collins and Pinch 1993; Franklin 1996; Levins 1996; Martin 1996; Rose 1996; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Snow 1964; Sokal 1996). Is science a disinterested reflection of the world as it really is or a discourse whose findings are heavily influenced by the interests and prejudices of those who work within it? Strong objections are raised by the realists in the debate to the sociologists’ metaphor of scientific knowledge as a‘construction’. What the sociologist understands by this is that scientific theories are constituted by the perspectives and research opportunities which are made available within a particular community. However, the realist reacts to the more subjective, ‘fabricated’ associations of ‘construction’ and interprets the relativism of the sociologist to mean that it is the scientific community and not nature which determines where ontological divisions lie. Do we create or do we discover truths about the world? Surely, the realist demands, it cannot be the former? It is in this context that Richard Dawkins’s often quoted remark – ‘show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I will show you a hypocrite!’ – is made (quoted in Franklin 1996: 143).
This chapter argues that much of the epistemological conflict which makes up the science wars is attributable to the metaphors that are at work in the competing theories of knowledge. Two cases I cover in detail are ‘cutting nature at the joints’ and the concept of ‘world’ used as a metonym. In both cases, it is ambiguous whether what is being described is the (noumenal) world as it is in itself or the (phenomenal) world as it is accessed and made available to us through perception. My argument though is not against metaphor; I am not accusing metaphor of disrupting the passage of rational thought. Rather, I am claiming that more attention needs to be paid to the way in which figurative language functions at the epistemological level and, in particular, to the way in which the same metaphor can lend itself to conflicting epistemologies.
Explanations of how knowledge ‘fits’ the world are invariably metaphorical, for example, talk of knowledge mirroring the world, knowledge as a construction, correspondence and coherence theories of truth, receiving sensory impressions or sense-data. The reason for this, I argue in the second part of the chapter, is that there is a fundamental two-way relationship between metaphor and epistemology. On the one hand, epistemology is metaphorical in the sense that the task of describing how our faculties mesh with the world requires us to make claims which exceed what is given in experience and which therefore can only be articulated by drawing on external areas of discourse. But, on the other, metaphor itself has been ‘epistemologized’ by recent research in philosophy and psychology, that is to say, metaphor has been shown to be central to the mapping and organizational procedures we employ in perception at large. What this two-way relationship means, I suggest, is that metaphor acquires an epistemological significance which (a) goes some way towards explaining why it is that the same metaphor can adapt itself to opposing theories of knowledge, and (b) can guide epistemological thought through the science wars in a fashion which avoids the binarism of phenomenal appearance and noumenal reality. As I show in the following chapter, such guidance already exists in the philosophy of science, and has been plotted by Heidegger and Bachelard along the lines of a single family of metaphors.
In the science wars, the deepest epistemological lines are drawn between ‘glass mirror epistemology’ (GME) and the strong sociology of knowledge (SSK). The former is essentially a version of direct realism and rests upon a belief in the transparency of perception. Reality, it is assumed, exists in itself with its own inherent structure independently of any perceiver, but is directly (or indirectly, via apparatus) open to view and knowledge can be derived by naming the various, distinct natural kinds which the scientist discovers through increasingly refined observation. This position is tied to the emergence of science as a distinct discipline in the seventeenth century. In this time, the senses are affirmed as true and reliable channels of information on the world and, as a result, the new empiricist mind is promised the possibility of accessing or ‘reading’ the secrets of nature. We find this sentiment in Bacon’s ‘alphabet of nature’ and Galileo’s concept of the universe as a ‘great book ... written in the language of mathematics’ (Arbib and Hesse 1986: 149).
SSK theorists contest GME. The interests of SSK are, as the title suggests, primarily social and political: to disclose and emphasize the moral and political concerns which, it is claimed, have been active in determining what we accept as knowledge and, more especially, what we accept as scientific knowledge. According to SSK, two unwarranted assumptions are made by GME: (1) the world is immediately and unproblematically open to view, and (2) (as Franklin makes the point) ‘things can be known in and of themselves through a method of observation and description that does not leave a mark upon its objects’ (1996: 142). In these respects, science views the world from a God’s-eye point of view; it maintains a perspective which is not a perspective. This is where the danger lies for, according to Franklin, it is the denial of the perspectival and partial basis of science ‘that attempts to render invisible and inaccessible to scrutiny or questioning exactly how that perspective works, what it includes and excludes, and how that inclusion or exclusion is a cultural effect’ (1996: 151).
Examples of the value-ladenness of science cited by SSK theorists include the ubiquity of chemical therapy in medicine and farming as expressions of the interests of the chemical industry (Levins: 107), the assertion that the female body is of merely secondary or marginal importance in anatomy, and the privileging of ‘scientific discovery’ over the human or animal suffering generated by research (Martin 1996: 46).
Against this, anti-realism is a form of subjective Kantianism: instead of the content of our thoughts being determined by external objects impinging upon them, it is the nature of our concepts which determine the shape of reality. Kuhn’s commentary on Lavoisier is a good illustration of the position:
"In learning to see oxygen ... Lavoisier also had to change his view of many other more familiar substances. He had, for example, to see a compound ore where Priestley and his contemporaries had seen an elementary earth, and there were other such changes besides. At the very least, as a result of discovering oxygen, Lavoisier saw nature differently. And in the absence of some recourse to that hypothetical fixed nature that he ‘saw differently’, the principle of economy will urge us to say that after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world." (Kuhn 1962: 118)
As a result of discovering oxygen, the methods and vocabularies which constitute Lavoisier’s practice as a scientist are completely redefined. The processes and objects with which he is dealing are therefore different, and so ‘the principle of economy’ urges us to sayhe is working ‘in a different world’. In support of this is Goodman’s claim that the concept ‘world’ should be understood as short hand for ‘descriptions and depictionsof the world’, since a world undescribed, undepicted or unperceived is something which (according to Goodman) cannot enter our conceptual reckoning (Goodman 1978: 4).
It is easy to see how friction between the two positions is generated. SSK argues that it is not ‘the world’ or not just ‘the world’ which determines theory-choice but social, cultural, extra-scientific affairs. This conclusion is reached on the understanding that necessarily there cannot be a direct, transparent ‘looking at the world’, Franklin’s ‘looking through a toilet paper tube’ (1996: 143). This utterly contradicts GME, cancels altogether the notion that our knowledge is, first and foremost, a reflection of the way the world is. In this way, SSK approaches anti-realism. Nature’s joints are either non-existent or sufficiently malleable to the degree that the categories of entity we accept as existent are determined by contingent, independent factors. The claims that science always works with a particular interest and from a particular cognitive perspective are taken to imply the denial of the existence of self-similar objects or, in Putnam’s idiom, self-identifying objects: ‘objects that intrinsically correspond to one word or thought-sign rather than another’ (Putnam 1981: 51). In other words, objects which, because of their self-similar, self-evident nature, cannot help but direct the scientist towards defining her concepts so that they are in point-to-point correspondence with them.
A key SSK text is Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). This argues that it was political sensitivity rather than epistemic success which led to Boyle’s theory of a vacuum winning over Hobbes’s theory of a plenum in the seventeenth century. Boyle argued that it would be physically possible to create a vacuum (an absence of all matter) given the right conditions and apparatus, whereas Hobbes maintained that every portion of nature must contain some form of material substance, which he referred to as a ‘plenum’. For a period of time, the vacuist and plenist theories both ‘saved appearances’, that is, both Boyle’s and Hobbes’s ontologies fitted the observed phenomena.
However, according to Shapin and Schaffer, Boyle’s theory was ultimately accepted not because it provided a better fit with the world but because it was felt to be in keeping with ‘the settlement and protection of a certain kind of social order’ (1985: 342). The openness and consensus of opinion which were characteristic of Boyle’s empiricist scientific method were perceived to be congruent with ‘civil stability and peace’ and ‘the polity that emerged in the Restoration’ (1985: 342).
Epistemologically, the contrast between GME and SSK is a kin to the opposition between realism and anti-realism. Although the variety of realisms within analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science arguably make the realism–anti-realism distinction an over simplification, for example, metaphysical, semantic and epistemic, as Psillos describes them(1999:xix), the various realisms nevertheless share a commitment to a mind-independent reality underlying appearances which is either directly or indirectly knowable through appearances, and it is the contrast between this commitment and the lack of it within anti-realism that I am interested in. Realism, in its strongest, metaphysical form, as Putnam characterizes it (although it is not his position), adopts the perspective of the God’s-eye point of view alongside GME. It understands truth to be ‘some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things’ (1981: 49). It maintains what Putnam calls a ‘similitude theory of reference’: ‘the relation between the representations in our minds and the external objects that they refer to is literally a similarity’ (1981: 57). Ideally, no differences between the properties we perceive and the properties the object has in itself should emerge in the process of coming to know the object. The empiricist notion of a sense impression – originally described by Aristotle in De Anima as the impress of a signet ring in wax – is one version of this ideal (Aristotle 1987b: 424a).
Metaphor is by no means an innocent bystander in all of this. Not only are key epistemological concepts metaphorical (as I illustrate in my introduction), but also the appearance of metaphors in scientific theories has been taken by some as a test case of whether (with GME) new scientific entities are discoveries from a range of pre-existent, self-similar objects or (with SSK) constructions made as a result of the scientific mind’s increasingly refined fashioning of nature. The exchange between Richard Boyd and Thomas Kuhn is a good example (Boyd 1979; Kuhn 1979). Boyd’s intention is to show how metaphor can help us discover or grant us ‘epistemic access’ to new natural kinds. Epistemic access, for Boyd, qualifies the success with which our categories acquire, assess, refine, and communicate knowledge about the entities or purported entities to which they refer. In this respect, Boyd claims, metaphors can function as ‘a sort of catachresis’ in science, that is to say, ‘they [can be] used to introduce theoretical terminology where none previously existed’ (1979: 357). If a metaphor enables sustained information gathering about a presumed or partially understood natural kind, Boyd reasons, then ‘the only epistemologically plausible explanation’ is that the metaphor in question refers (1979: 401). On this account, metaphor is granted a referential value and, as a result, made consistent with the causal realist project of accommodating language ‘to the causal structure of the world’ or, as Boyd puts it, ‘the task of arranging our language so that our linguistic categories ‘‘cut the world at the joints’’’ (1979: 357). He gives as examples tropes from cognitive psychology drawn from the terminology of computer science and information theory, e.g. ‘the claim that thought is a kind of ‘‘information processing’’ and that the brain is a sort of ‘‘computer’’’ and ‘the suggestion that certain motoric or cognitive processes are ‘‘preprogrammed’’’ (1979: 360).
However, the epistemological value of metaphor for Kuhn is not one of discovery but of creation. The problem with Boyd’s idea that metaphors can help to identify natural kinds, Kuhn asserts, is that it assumes that ‘nature has one and only one set of joints to which the evolving terminology of science comes closer and closer with time’ (1979: 417). This, Kuhn thinks, fails to acknowledge that the world and nature are themselves, to some extent, constituted by theory and language. Kuhn favours an ontology ‘without ‘‘things in themselves’’ and with categories of the mind which could change with time as the accommodation of language and experience proceeded’ (1979: 418–19). Such a view, he adds, need not make the world ‘less real’ (1979: 419). Metaphor contributes to this ontological diversity, Kuhn argues, because it is forever redefining conceptual boundaries. The effect of combining two semantic fields in a metaphor, he suggests, is that both regions are never seen in quite the same way again, their outlines are completely reconfigured. Our linguistic divisions, Kuhn maintains, far from being governed by divisions in nature, are constantly open to renewal thanks to the highlighting of new aspects and features that comes with metaphorical juxtaposition.
The way in which the terms of the science wars are set would seem to preclude the possibility of any resolution. Any attempt to offer a response will inevitably have to adopt some of the assumptions of one side and so will be dismissed by the other as partisan. For example, to argue for the necessarily perspectival nature of perception (as SSK does) will be taken by the realist as simply another assertion of anti-realism. Alternatively, it could be argued against SSK (as Norris makes the point), that the historical contexts of discovery must not be confused with the scientific context of justification (Norris 1997: 33). That is to say, the procedures for either supporting or falsifying a hypothesis ensure that the way reality appears to the scientist is not wholly a product of her historically and culturally rooted conceptual scheme. But the SSK theorist can reply to this by observing that whatever is brought forward as evidence will have been selected from a range of possible phenomena and, by virtue of this selection process, will already be affected by certain ideological determinants. On this account, even appeals to experimentation and the evidence of the senses – pivotal to scientific method – cannot avoid the conceptual organization present in experiment design and the determination of what is and is not significant. Some might see the debate as concerned merely with whether our theories talk about ‘the world’ or about ‘our perspective on the world’. Rorty (1980, 1982), in his typically dismissive manner, would argue that, either way, it doesn’t really matter: whether we think we are dealing with reality as it is or reality as it appears to us does not alter the fact that it is the reality we have to deal with in constructing a better existence. But there is more at stake here. Not only is this one of the oldest disputes in the history of epistemology (although Rorty would take the lack of resolution as an indication of its vacuity), but it is also fundamental to the idea that there is a reality which transcends and resists our judgment in some way; things can be otherwise than they seem to be. Even if one does not value epistemology, it ought to be recognized that epistemological notions of concept-or culture-transcendent realities are central to debates regarding what is morally and politically right.
awesome !
Let's hope to see more anti_mainstream scientists with real scientific "balls " in the near future to confront & ridiculise the "scientific materialistic neo_darwinistic " dictatorship of all those materialistic so_called evolutionary sciences for example & more :
Let's hope we'll have more of those anti_mainstream scientists who w'd revolutionuise n science, human sciences ......
remember , it can take only one single scientist or a few of them to ....revolutionise science .....for ever .... :
let's hope to see some of those anti_mainstream scientists who w'd confront , ridiculise ....:
evolutionary biology ...
evolutionary psychology ....
....................sociology.....
.................anthropology........
Hilary Putnam
PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE*
For over a hundred years, one of the dominant tendencies in the philosophy of science has been verificationism: that is, the doctrine that to know the meaning of a scientific proposition (or of any proposition, according to most verificationists) is to know what would be evidence for that proposition. Historically, verificationism has been closely connected with positivism: that is, at least originally, the view that all that science really does is to describe regularities in human experience. Taken together, these two views seem close to idealism. However, many twentieth century verificationists have wanted to replace the reference to experience in the older formulations of these doctrines with a reference to "observable things" and "observable properties". According to this more recent view, scientific statements about the color of flowers or the eating habits of bears are to be taken at face value as referring to flowers and bears; but scientific statements about such "unobservables" as electrons are not to be taken as referring to electrons, but rather as referring to meter readings and the observable results of cloud chamber experiments. It is not surprising that philosophers who took this tack found themselves in a certain degree of sympathy with psychological behaviorism. Just as they wanted to "reduce" statements about such unobservables as electrons to statements about "public observables" such as meter readings, so they wanted to reduce statements about phenomena which, whatever their private status, were publicly unobservable, such as a person's sensations or emotions, to statements about such public observables as bodily behaviors.
--At this point, they found themselves in a certain bind. On the one hand, the doctrine that talk about sensations or emotions is simply talk about a person's behavior is so implausible that almost no philosopher has been able to maintain it, or at least to maintain it for long. On the other hand, if the intuition behind recent verificationism is right, and to know the meaning of a statement is to know what would be public evidence for it, then it seems as if there has to be something right about behaviorism.
--And so philosophers tried to develop a philosophy to this effect -a philosophy that would say that "naive behaviorism" was false but that nevertheless there was some kind of seman tical or logical relation between statements about emotions and feelings and statements about behavior.
In my opinion, verificationism and behaviorism are fundamentally misguided doctrines. While it is certainly possible to do a certain amount of philosophy of science from a non-verificationist and non-positivist point of view, but without developing in detail a theory of meaning alternative to the positivists', one of the major tasks in the present period is the development of such a theory of meaning, a non-verificationist theory of meaning, and the critique of verificationist philosophy of mind.
*A slightly altered version of this paper appears as forward to my book Mind, Language, and Reality (Philosophical Papers. vol. 2). Cambridge. 1975. 1 The sense in which this is so is discussed in The Analytic and the Synthetic', chapter 2 of my Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge 1975). and in David Lewis' Convention, (Harvard 1969).
I. THE DEFECTS OF VERIFICATIONISM
One of the defects of verificationism that was early noticed by the more sophisticated verificationists themselves, and especially by Hans Reichenbach, was a certain distortion of the character of actual scientific methodology and inference. Naive verification ism would say that the statement "There is current flowing in this wire" means "The voltmeter needle is displaced," or something of that kind. That is, the relation between the so-called theoretical statement that current is flowing in the wire and the evidence for it is assimilated to the relation between "John is a bachelor" and "John is a man who has never been married". Now the latter relation is itself not as simple a thing as it may seem at first blush, but it is roughly right that the relation is a conventional1 one: "John is a bachelor" is equated by some kind of conventional agreement with "John is a man who has never been married". But, as Reichenbach pointed out in Experience and Prediction, the relation between the theoretical statement and the evidence for it (say, "There is current flowing in the wire" and "The voltmeter needle is displaced") is a probabilistic inference within a theory. It is not that we equate the sound-sequence "There is current flowing in this wire" with "The voltmeter needle is displaced" by an act of conventional stipulation; it is rather that we accept a theory of electricity and of the structure of voltmeters from which it follows that with a high probability, the voltmeter needle will be displaced if there is current flowing in the wire, and vice versa To represent what are in fact probabilistic inferences within theories as logical equivalences is a serious distortion. To represent these inferences as purely conventional meaning equivalences is an even more serious distortion.
--But sophisticated verificationism found that it had escaped from one difficulty to land in another. If meaning is conflated or confounded with evidence, and what is evidence for a statement is a function of the total theory in which the statement occurs, then every significant change in theory becomes a change in the meaning of all the constituent words and statements of the theory. One of the early verificationists, Charles Peirce, anticipated this difficulty in the last century when he came to the conclusion that every change in a person's "information" is a change in the meaning of his words. But the distinction between the meaning of a man's words and what he believes about the facts, the distinction between disagreement in the meanings of words and disagreement about the facts, is precisely central to any concept of linguistic meaning. If we come to the conclusion that that distinction is untenable then, as Quine has long urged, we should abandon the notion of meaning altogether. With the exception of Quine, most verificationists have found this course unattractive.
-Thus they were caught in a serious dilemma -caught between their desire to continue talking about linguistic meaning and their adherence to the network theory of meaning which taken seriously implies that nothing can be made of the notion of linguistic meaning.
--For a realist, the situation is quite different. No matter how much our theory of electrical charge may change, there is one element in the meaning of the term "electrical charge" that has not changed in the last two hundred years, according to a realist, and that is the reference. "Electrical charge" refers to the same magnitude even if our theory of that magnitude has changed drastically. And we can identify that magnitude in a way that is independent of all but the most violent theory change by, for example, singling it out as the magnitude which is casually responsible for certain effects.
--But the realist has his problems too. Traditionally realists thought that reference was determined by mental or Platonic entities, intensions. This doctrine of fixed "meanings", either in the head or in the realm of abstract entities (and somehow connected to the head), determining reference once and for all, is open, interestingly enough, to some of the same objections that can be brought to bear against verificationism.
--Thus, very recently certain realists like Kripke and myself have begun to redevelop our theory of meaning. Instead of seeing meanings as entities which determine reference, we now are trying to see meanings as largely determined by reference, and reference as largely determined by casual connections.
--I would not wish to give the impression that the only problem with verificationism is its inability to give a correct account of our notion of linguistic meaning, however. Truth and falsity are the most fundamental terms of rational criticism, and any adequate philosophy must give some account of these, or failing that, show that they can be dispensed with. In my opinion, verification ism has not succeeded in doing either. There is a sense in which Tarski's technical work in mathematical logic enables one to explicate the notion of truth in the context of a language with fixed meanings and as long as there is no doubt that the terms of that language have clear reference. (Even in that context, as Hartry Field has pointed out, one may question whether we have been given an account of what "true" means, or simply a substitute for the word "true" designed for that specific context.) But if the meaning of words is a function of the theory in which they occur, and changes as that theory changes, then if we limit ourselves to Tarski's methods, "true" and "false" can only be defined in the context of a particular theory. In particular, Tarskian semantics gives no explanation of the meanings of "true" and "false" when they are used to compare and criticize different theories, if meaning is really theory dependent. But it is just the extra-theoretic notions of truth and falsity which are indispensable for rational criticism2, which is why they have always been taken as fundamental in the science of logic. In particular, a verificationist cannot explain why, if even the commonest scientific terms (e.g., "voltage", "density", "pressure") have different meanings in the context of different theories, it should ever be justified to conjoin a proposition verified by one group of scientists and a proposition verified by a different group of scientists.3 The simple fact that the conjunction of true statements is true becomes replaced by the mysterious fact that scientists are in the habit of conjoining statements which use words with different meanings and somehow, nevertheless, manage to get successful results. In an insightful unpublished essay titled 'Realism and Scientific Epistemology', Richard Boyd has recently argued that these defects of verificationism and positivism are symptomatic of a deeper defect; that even if verificationism could give a correct description of the practice of scientists, it lacks any ideas which would enable one to explain or understand why scientific practice succeeds.)
1The sense in which this is so is discussed in The Analytic and the Synthetic', chapter 2 of my Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge 1975). and in David Lewis' Convention, (Harvard 1969).
2I say this even though these terms are not often used "neat". Very often we say a theory is probably false. or likely to be close to the truth, not "false" or "true" simpliciter. For probable truth and approximate truth presuppose the notions of truth and falsity themselves.
3This difficulty cannot be avoided by saying that every group of scientists should be thought of as sharing a "formalization of total science", For then it becomes a miracle that I can say anything true, if the very meaning of my terms presupposes a theory most of which I don't know.
II. THE A PRIORI AND THE ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DISTRACTION
In 1951, Quine caused a commotion in the community of professional philosophers by publishing an attack on the venerable distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. In their reply to Quine, Grice and Strawson advanced two arguments:
--(1) When there is so much agreement among the relevant speakers (in this case, professional philosophers) upon how to use a pair of terms with respect to an open class of sentences, then that pair of terms must mark some distinction;
--(2) Grice and Straws on argued that the cases in which it appears that an analytic proposition was falsified can be explained away by contending that in each case the meaning of the words changed, and so the proposition that was at one time genuinely analytic was not the same proposition that was later falsified, although it was expressed by the very same sentence.
--I agree with the first argument There is an obvious difference (even if we have difficulty stating it) between, say, "all bachelors are unmarried", as a representative analytic sentence, and "my hat is on the table", as a representative synthetic sentence. It seems impossible to say that so obvious a distinction does not really have any basis. But Grice and Strawson's second argument seemed to me to be far less successful. Consider the statement that one cannot return to the place from which one started by traveling in a straight line in space in a constant direction. If this statement was once analytic or a priori (in 1951, few philosophers of an analytic persuasion would have troubled to distinguish the two notions), and was later falsified by the discovery (let us say) that our world is Riemannian in the large, then the Grice-Strawson rescue move would consist in saying that some term, say, "straight line" has changed its meaning in the course of the change from Euclidean to Riemannian cosmology. But even if "straight line" has changed its "connotations" -even if the theoretical aura surrounding the term is different -still this would not effect the truth value of the sentence unless the very reference of the tern "straight line" has changed, unless we are now referring to different
paths in space as straight lines. But, having studied philosophy of physics and philosophy of geometry with Hans Reichenbach, I was not satisfied with this story at all. Whatever the nature of the conceptual revolution involved in the shift from Newtonian to relativistic cosmology may have been, it was not simply a matter of attaching the old labels, e.g. "straight line", to new curves. What seemed a priori before the conceptual revolution was precisely that there are paths in space which behave in a Euclidean fashion; or, to drop reference to "paths", what seemed a priori was precisely that there were infinitely many non-overlapping places (of, say, the size of an ordinary room) to get to. What turned out to be the case (or, rather, what will turn out to be the case if the universe in the large has compact spatial cross-sections), is precisely that there are only finetely many disjoint places (of the size of an ordinary room) in space to get to, travel as one will. Something literally inconceivable has turned out to be true; and it is not just a matter of attaching the old labels ("place", "straight line") to different things.
--To state the same point more abstractly: it often happens in a scientific revolution that something that was once taken to be an a priori truth is given up; and one cannot say that what has happened is simply that the words have been assigned to new referents, because, from the standpoint of the new theory, there are not and never were any objects which could plausibly have been the referents of the words in question. Nor can we say that the proposition in question used to mean that certain entities ("Euclidean straight lines", "Euclidean places") would have certain properties if they existed, and that what has happened is that words ("straight line", "place") which used to have no referents at all have now been assigned referents; for in the geometrical case there certainly were such entities as places the size of a room, and what seemed necessary was that these places had the property of being infinite in number.
--To put it another way, it seemed a priori that the terms "path in space" and "place the size of an ordinary room" had referents. To say that the existence propositions, "There are places the size of an ordinary room" and "There are paths in space", were a posteriori (in the old sense of the words), whereas if the if-then proposition "If anything is a place the size of a room, then there are infinitely many such places" is a priori is utterly unmotivated, since these propositions did not differ in epistemological or methodological status prior to the conceptual revolution under discussion.
--I am driven to the conclusion that there is such a thing as the overthrow of a proposition that was once a priori (or that once had the status of what we call an "a priori" truth). If it could be rational to give up truths as self evident as the geometrical propositions just mentioned, then, it seems to me that there is no basis for maintaining that there are any absolutely a priori truths, any truths that a rational man is forbidden to even doubt. Grice and Strawson were wrong; the overthrow of "a priori" propositions is not a mere illusion that can be explained away as change in the meaning of words. Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction seems to me to be correct. At the same time, if by an analytic truth, one means a statement which is reducible to something like principles of elementary logic via meaning relations that are in some sense conventional, then it still seems to me that there are analytic truths. Empiricist philosophers had bloated the analytic-synthetic distinction by making it coextensive with the a priori-a posteriori distinction; the question of the existence of analytic truths, in the sense just mentioned, has to be separated from the question whether any truths, even truths of elementary logic, are a priori.
III. CONVENTIONALISM
An issue which is closely connected to the issues surrounding the analytic synthetic distinction, and its misuse by philosophers, is the issue of conventionalism. Just as some philosophers try to clear up some philosophical puzzles by contending that certain statements which appear to be statements of fact are really "analytic", so some philosophers contend that certain statements which appear to be statements of fact are really "up for grabs", i.e. their truth-value is a matter of convention. It is of interest that conventionalism in the philosophy of space and time was originally motivated by a desire to give an account of the reference of scientific terms. Thus the critique of conventionalism naturally involves one in the very questions about reference that are in the forefront nowadays.
--I have not attempted in this talk to put forward any grand view of the nature of philosophy; nor do I have any such grand view to put forward if I would. It will be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the history of "howlers", and progress in philosophy as the debunking of howlers. It will also be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the enterprise of putting forward a priori truths about the real world (since, for one thing, there are no a priori truths on my view). I see philosophy as a field which has certain central questions, for example, the relation between thought and reality, and, to mention some questions about which I have not written, the relation between freedom and responsibility, and the nature of the good life. It seems obvious that in dealing with these questions philosophers have formulated rival research programs, that they have put forward general hypotheses, and that philosophers within each major research program have modified their hypotheses by trial and error, even if they sometimes refuse to admit that that is what they are doing. To that extent philosophy is a "science". To argue about whether philosophy is a science in any more serious sense seems to me to be hardly a useful occupation. The important thing is that in spite of the stereotypes of science and philosophy that have become blinkers inhibiting the view of laymen, scientists, and philosophers, science and philosophy are interdependent activities; philosophers have always found it essential to draw upon the scientific knowledge of the time, and scientists have always found it essential to do a certain amount of philosophy in their very scientific work, even if they denied that that was what they were doing. It does not seem to me important to decide whether science is philosophy or philosophy is science as long as one has a conception of both that makes both essential to a responsible view of the real world and of man's place in it.
Harvard University
will try to read it ...later on :
no time left indeed !
Thanks !
:zwaai:
http://i37.tinypic.com/21od2es.jpg
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors vii
Preface xii
Chung-ying Cheng
Introduction
Nicholas Bunnin 1
Part I
Pioneering New Thought from the West 15 15
1 Liang Qichao’s Political and Social Philosophy 17
Yang Xiao
2Wang Guowei: Philosophy of Aesthetic Criticism 37
Keping Wang
3 Zhang Dongsun: Pluralist Epistemology and Chinese Philosophy 57
Xinyan Jiang
4 Hu Shi’s Enlightenment Philosophy 82
Hu Xinhe
5 Jin Yuelin’s Theory of Dao 102
Hu Jun
Part II Philosophizing in the Neo-Confucian Spirit 67
6 Xiong Shili’s Metaphysics of Virtue 127
Jiyuan Yu
7 Liang Shuming: Eastern and Western Cultures and Confucianism 147
Yanming An
8 Feng Youlan’s New Principle Learning and His Histories of Chinese Philosophy 165
Lauren Pfister
9 He Lin’s Sinification of Idealism 188
Jiwei Ci
Part III Ideological Exposure to Dialectical Materialism 211
10 Feng Qi’s Ameliorism: Between Relativism and Absolutism 213
Huang Yong
11 Zhang Dainian: Creative Synthesis and Chinese Philosophy 235
Cheng Lian
12 Li Zehou: Chinese Aesthetics from a Post-Marxist and Confucian Perspective 246
John Zijiang Ding
Part IV Later Developments of New Neo-Confucianism 261
13 Fang Dongmei: Philosophy of Life, Creativity, and Inclusiveness 263
Chenyang Li
14 Practical Humanism of Xu Fuguan 281
Peimin Ni
15 Tang Junyi: Moral Idealism and Chinese Culture 305
Sin Yee Chan
16 Mou Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition 327
Refeng Tang
Afterwords 347
Recent Trends in Chinese Philosophy in China and the West 349
Chung-ying Cheng
An Onto-Hermeneutic Interpretation of Twentieth-Century Chinese Philosophy: Identity and Vision 365
Chung-ying Cheng
Glossary 405 Index 411
awesome !
Let's hope to see more anti_mainstream scientists with real scientific "balls " in the near future to confront & ridiculise the "scientific materialistic neo_darwinistic " dictatorship of all those materialistic so_called evolutionary sciences for example & more :
Let's hope we'll have more of those anti_mainstream scientists who w'd revolutionuise n science, human sciences ......
remember , it can take only one single scientist or a few of them to ....revolutionise science .....for ever .... :
let's hope to see some of those anti_mainstream scientists who w'd confront , ridiculise ....:
evolutionary biology ...
evolutionary psychology ....
....................sociology.....
.................anthropology........
Yep.
'Potmodernism' as a disowal of a meta-narration and universal justice' says it all!
As already stated earlier, for us Muslims there is nothing in postmodernism to take seriously since the Qur'ân is the meta-Narration and the Last Messenger (pbuh) brings universal justice to the world.
So Clive Cazeuax is an excellent writer who knows what he is talking about.
At the end of Ramadan 2007 bought the first part of 'Chinees? Een Makkie!'
From last July on the fourth and final part is avalaible so I being the proud owner of the complete course, have more than a hunch what Richard E. Nisbett is trying to explain in Geography of Thought.
A superb treat on Chinese philosophy is 'Contemporary Chinese Philosophy' (OUP 2002).
Advocading China is Richard Angle with 'Human Rights and Chinese Thought'.Last but not least, Kwok Pui-Lan (Hongkong) in Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology:
"Feminist theology has become a global movement as women with different histories and cultures challenge patriarchal teachings and practices of the church and articulate their faith and understanding of God. Feminist theology is no more defined by the interests of middle-class European and American women and by Eurocentric frameworks and mind-set. Its scope has been much broadened to encompass the theological voices of women from the Third World and from minority communities in the United States."
Read more: http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=4087643#post4087643
In 2005 yet another interesting avenue was shown with African Philosophy: http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=4092419#post4092419 (chapter 5)
Returning to Clive Cazeau's 'Metaphor and Continental Philosophy'.
Chapter 7 describes how non-Euclidean geometry evolves in 4D-thinking.
The closing chapter 8 describes the retrait of metaphor (metaphor exists only within metaphysics) and proposes a return to Gadamer's hermeneutical revolution for a more aesthetic approach of epistemology.
Note
(Cambridge Companion to Gadamer)
In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Although he authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato's Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, "Philosophical Hermeneutics." The publisher responded that "hermeneutics" was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed "Truth and Method" for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made "hermeneutics" and Gadamer's name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into ten languages thus far -including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in the attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language. "Being that can be understood is language," writes Gadamer in the culminating section of the work in which he proposes a "hermeneutical ontology" (TM 432). For his concept of the understanding and the task of ontology, Gadamer relies importantly on Martin Heidegger's treatment of these concepts in Being and Time (1927).
p. 1
The 1920S were tumultuous times in Germany and tumultuous times for Gadamer in Marburg. He attended lectures in a wide variety of fields, including those of the leftist art historian Richard Hamann who declared the end of European culture.
p. 15
Yep.
'Potmodernism' as a disowal of a meta-narration and universal justice' says it all!
As already stated earlier, for us Muslims there is nothing in postmodernism to take seriously since the Qur'ân is the meta-Narration and the Last Messenger (pbuh) brings universal justice to the world.
So Clive Cazeuax is an excellent writer who knows what he is talking about.
At the end of Ramadan 2007 bought the first part of 'Chinees? Een Makkie!'
From last July on the fourth and final part is avalaible so I being the proud owner of the complete course, have more than a hunch what Richard E. Nisbett is trying to explain in Geography of Thought.
A superb treat on Chinese philosophy is 'Contemporary Chinese Philosophy' (OUP 2002).
Advocading China is Richard Angle with 'Human Rights and Chinese Thought'.Last but not least, Kwok Pui-Lan (Hongkong) in Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology:
"Feminist theology has become a global movement as women with different histories and cultures challenge patriarchal teachings and practices of the church and articulate their faith and understanding of God. Feminist theology is no more defined by the interests of middle-class European and American women and by Eurocentric frameworks and mind-set. Its scope has been much broadened to encompass the theological voices of women from the Third World and from minority communities in the United States."
Read more: http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=4087643#post4087643
In 2005 yet another interesting avenue was shown with African Philosophy: http://www.maroc.nl/forums/showthread.php?p=4092419#post4092419 (chapter 5)
Returning to Clive Cazeau's 'Metaphor and Continental Philosophy'.
Chapter 7 describes how non-Euclidean geometry evolves in 4D-thinking.
The closing chapter 8 describes the retrait of metaphor (metaphor exists only within metaphysics) and proposes a return to Gadamer's hermeneutical revolution for a more aesthetic approach of epistemology.
Note
(Cambridge Companion to Gadamer)
In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Although he authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato's Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, "Philosophical Hermeneutics." The publisher responded that "hermeneutics" was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed "Truth and Method" for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made "hermeneutics" and Gadamer's name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into ten languages thus far -including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in the attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language. "Being that can be understood is language," writes Gadamer in the culminating section of the work in which he proposes a "hermeneutical ontology" (TM 432). For his concept of the understanding and the task of ontology, Gadamer relies importantly on Martin Heidegger's treatment of these concepts in Being and Time (1927).
p. 1
The 1920S were tumultuous times in Germany and tumultuous times for Gadamer in Marburg. He attended lectures in a wide variety of fields, including those of the leftist art historian Richard Hamann who declared the end of European culture.
p. 15
Yes, man, now u're talking :
I w'd like to see ur own Islamic perspective on the matter :
how Islam sees all those philosophies, thoughtstreams .....
we must not fall into the western or other non_islamic trap by playing by their own rules ....
kom ik op terug !
P.S.: those books are .....noted !
Thanks !
:zwaai:
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
1
Introduction
Seeing through the Conceptual Languages of Others
Lee M. Brown
Among the goals of this collection is to provide accurate and well-developed characterizations of some of the salient epistemological and metaphysical concerns that have shaped the conceptual languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Another goal is to enable readers to enhance their functional understanding and their appreciation of the epistemological and metaphysical perspectives that have driven traditional African philosophical thought. Among the motives for striving toward such goals is obedience to an ancient Western injunction.
Socrates and Plato urged that we must know ourselves, and although those two philosophers did not say so, one of the necessary routes toward self-knowledge is knowledge of others. Self-knowledge and knowledge of others are coeval in human individuals, and this kind of knowledge leads us toward the recognition of the importance of knowledge of other cultures. Moreover, seeing ourselves through the conceptual lenses of others enables us to have a more informed view of ourselves, and the derived knowledge empowers us to enable others more appropriately.
Most of what has been made known through literature about traditional African philosophical thought emerged through Eurocentric characterizations of African cultures. Those characterizations emerged primarily from the perspectives of Western anthropologists and Christian-trained African theologians and clerics, who interpreted and translated traditional African conceptual idioms into Western conceptual idioms. The process was either poorly informed or self-serving, preserving the integrity of African conceptual idioms, and without clear and accurate understanding of the underlying ontological commitments that grounded those idioms.1
Moreover, the institutionalization of racialism within Western cultures tainted honest efforts to be objective when studying African philosophical thought.2 The cultures of sub-Saharan Africa were viewed by Western colonizers and missionaries as primitive, backward, and in need of radical reconstruction. In contrast to Western religions, traditional African religions were viewed as grounded upon superstition and metaphysical fantasy, and the cultures on the whole were viewed as having little value outside of the resources that could be extracted for Western use.
Within Western cultures, those sentiments became an institutionalized lens through which African cultures and Africans came to be viewed. Such sentiments were fostered by the racist perspectives of well-respected philosophers such as Georg Hegel, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.3 Because of their stature within the Western intellectual community, their stereotypes of the "essential dispositions" of Africans helped fuel racialism and served to marginalize any intellectual activity by those of obvious African descent.
Like most stereotypes, theirs were far from accurate. That is to say, there is no causal link between the amount of melanin in an individual's body and in the ability of an individual to waltz, to appreciate fine wines, to be ethical, or to engage in abstract reasoning. In brief, racialism is a false theory. Moreover, people of African descent—not unlike any other population with a language—have long engaged in philosophical thought, and their perspectives have much to contribute to many of the concerns that have plagued Western philosophy for the past 2,500 years.
Not taking seriously the philosophical concerns within other cultures can severely limit the ability of Western philosophy to evolve or otherwise grow. Their having a sagacious format or their not being rooted in Western ideology is no compelling reason for discounting their merit or their ability to enable Westerners to enrich their common conceptual base. Significant growth often occurs when we look at ourselves though the lenses of others. Sometimes that growth amounts merely to greater confirmation of existing perspectives, and that can be a good thing to have happen. Other times, seeing as do others precipitates a significant change in our own view, and if it is wisdom we seek that too can be a good thing to have happen.
Philosophy begins with experience, and at some point, our experiences and emergent concepts become influenced by our dispositions and by our beliefs about what is real, what is necessary, what is possible, and what is true. Our conceptual language provides the format that structures how and what we come to understand as real, as necessary, as possible, and as true. With the advent of new perspectives, challenges to older perspectives emerge that require clarification or resolution. Reflections upon such concerns form a significant component of philosophical discourse, and in many respects reflecting upon such concerns can be characterized as reflecting upon concerns that are universal. That which is real or necessary or possible or true is universal, while that which is taken to be real, necessary, possible, or true may be otherwise.
Given that philosophy, as an activity, is the pursuit of wisdom, the concern of philosophy is acquiring knowledge and its implications regarding what is real, necessary, possible, and true. Our conceptual language provides the format that structures how and what we come to understand as real, as possible, and as true. However, there are arenas in which language itself seems to fail us. This can occur when perplexities emerge because language has fostered an implication that is not consistent with our intuitions, or because language does not accurately capture or otherwise reflect what we have in mind. Concerning the latter, there are times when a painting or non-lyrical musical composition can better capture what we have in mind than can words. Also, some concepts—"knowledge" and "game" are notable examples—do not seem to be readily analyzable or amenable to being provided necessary and sufficient conditions for appropriate usage.4
Concerning the former, in opposition to perspectives in artificial intelligence, a thermostat is not conscious. Also, no matter the clarity of the proof, the unending decimal fraction consisting only of an infinite number of nines proceeded by a decimal point does not obviously designate the number one.5 Just as the early adaptations of emergent populations to vastly different environments and ecosystems fostered the emergence of biological diversity, they also fostered cultural diversity.
The diversity in languages was reflective of what was needed for adapting to specific environments and to existing cultural influences that had implications for efforts to adapt. Reflecting those adaptations, the emergent cultures and their associated conceptual languages differed in ontological commitments, in how those commitments were given an order, and in what was viewed as most fundamental for grappling with issues of vital human concern: those concerns that impinged upon one's quality of life and upon one's longevity and upon one's quest to find purpose and meaning in life.
Accordingly, they also differed in what could count as being known and how. Still, underlying those differences are ancient concerns about what is real, what is necessary, what is possible, and what counts as knowing and what counts as truth. It is perhaps through viewing the world through the conceptual lenses of others that we can realize a collective human experience and subsequently realize significant progress in personal and in interpersonal human development.
Having such a realization requires having a richer understanding of the conceptual idioms of others. Philosophers are those who seek wisdom, and to have wisdom one must have truth in hand and one must not only understand why the truths are as such, but also see their implications for the rest of what is known and what is valued. Little wisdom can be realized if one's perspectives are confined as were those of the challenged persons attempting to gain knowledge of the elephant by touching only one part while being unwilling to learn from others.
To appreciate the philosophical perspectives of other cultures, one must come to understand those perspectives from the points of view of those who hold them. Granted, unless one is intimately familiar with a culture, it is often difficult to appreciate or even to understand the how and why of the ontological and epistemological commitments that ground the perspectives upon which a culture is built. But unless the effort is made, one's knowledge is likely to be only superficial, and so little genuine appreciation will be realized.6
This phenomenon is not merely specific to cases where there are significant cultural differences. It is also prevalent within a culture when there are incompatible variations in ontological and epistemological commitments. A brief example will show how this occurs even within the natural sciences. Significant technological progress has occurred when something previously dismissed or otherwise ignored was given full hearing. One such case is when physical theory was in conflict with human experience, and human experience was characterized as silly, self-indulgent, misguided, and delusional. It was not until the early 1980s that many otherwise very astute engineers and physicists were able to hear differences between audio cables and between amplifiers with identical measured specifications and performance characteristics.7
According to physical theory, the human ear is not capable of detecting or otherwise distinguishing differences in the quality of signals whose only difference is distortion that is less than 0.05%. Accordingly, for any two functionally equivalent amplifiers whose distortion products remained below 0.05%, there is no audible distortion or difference that can be discerned.8 Similarly, since the measurable total harmonic distortion products of audio cables is less than the residual of existing test equipment, 0.001%, the ear is not able to discern any difference between functionally equivalent audio cables. Still, avid audiophiles claimed to be able to hear differences between audio equipment that test results—in conjunction with the associated theory—imply cannot be discerned. Moreover, many audiophiles claimed to be able to recognize specific audio equipment solely on the basis of the audible distortions it added to reproduced music. Here we have a case where well-entrenched and well-supported physical theories within the natural sciences tell us what is not possible, while personal experience suggests otherwise.
Notes
1. Ontological concerns are concerns about what makes up the furniture of the universe—the stuff, if you will, that we count as real as opposed to imaginary or fictitious. By definition, unicorns are not real—they cannot exist as actual objects in the world in which we live. Even if a single-horned horse were excavated, it could not be a unicorn. If we are speaking and writing literally, the occurrence of a unicorn is neither likely nor biologically possible in the world we inhabit. An ontological commitment is a disposition to accept and a willingness to use specific conceptual idioms or characterizations of reality as true of the world in which we live.
2. Racialism is the theory that human races exist and that the biology that gives rise to the phenotypes that permit racial classification also gives rise to essential qualities such as intellectual, spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic dispositions. Racism is racialism accompanied by the belief that one's membership in a particular race makes one biologically superior to those in another race. Typically, accompanying that belief is the belief that one's racial superiority gives one the right to oppress those believed to be racially inferior. Neither theory is true.
3. This is not intended as an exhaustive list of philosophical concerns.
4. For concerns about what counts as knowledge, see discussions of "the Gettier Problem."Edmund Gettier's essay, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" first appeared in Analysis 23 (1963). For concerns about what counts as a game, see Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussions about the definition of "game" in Philosophical Investigations. For results that at least partially challenge Wittgenstein's view, see various works of Alan Ross Anderson and Omar Khayam Moore—in particular their work on autotelic learning environments, in numerous publications.
5. An offered proof that 0.99999…equals 1.0:
a. 1/3=0.33333…
b. 3/3=0.99999…Both sides of the previous equation were multiplied by 3.
c. 1=0.99999…3/3 in the previous equation was reduced to 1. The underlying assumptions here are that the fraction 1/3 is equivalent to a never ending series of threes preceded by a decimal point and that the expression "1/3" and the expression ".33333…" are different names for the same number. The concern about equation c is that the contained expressions refer to different numbers—that there is a number between the numbers that each expression mentions.
6. If, for example, one wants to acquire an appreciation for what it is to be in a state of starvation, one cannot do so by merely coming to know what is meant by the word "starvation." One must have a sensitivity for what it is to be without food and to have no access to food for more than, say, a week. Fasting and starving are not the same.
7. In brief, under the guise of the audio industry standards for measuring the performance of amplifiers, two amplifiers can be said to have the same gain-bandwidth products when their output signals are equal for any input signal at any frequency. They can be said to have the same harmonic and intermodulation distortion characteristics when their distortion products are the same for all input signals at any continuous frequency or combination of continuous frequencies. Unless specified, when speaking about distortion, the reference is to total harmonic distortion, THD, or to intermodulation distortion, IMD.
Those who believed the theories could not hear differences between equipment with the same measured results, and they could not hear distortion contributed by equipment whose measured results were below the threshold of theoretical audibility. However, in the late 1970s, a new method of gathering information about the distortion products of audio devices was developed. That method showed that many amplifiers with measured total harmonic distortion below 0.01% actually had transient intermodulation distortion products greater than 5%. Transient intermodulation distortion was a new-found distortion. Its recognition showed that the dynamic performance of audio devices could not be reliably discerned by using the existing standard methods.9
Strangely, accompanying the acceptance of the more accurate method of measuring distortion was an increase in hearing astuteness of those who had previously accepted the old theories. One of the consequences of the new-found awareness by previous believers of the old theory is that amplifier and cable design changed within the audio industry, and more musically accurate devices became available to the general public. Both Norwood Hanson and Thomas Kuhn have aptly pointed out that what we are capable of seeing depends upon the beliefs we bring to our experiences.10
The richer our concepts, the more access we have to the objects that make up the universe. Seeing life through the conceptual lenses of others can increase the depth and enrich the breadth of our conceptual scheme. Such growth fosters the development of wisdom. Among the more problematic concerns that emerge when deciding between theories from different cultural traditions is that there are factors involved that make knowing which is true exceedingly difficult to discern. Unless we know what is intended by the use of the words within a language, there is little chance of discerning whether any claims within the language are true.
Concerning the essays in this collection, although it is not explicitly stated, a theme common to all is that a word that is shared among different cultures can have different extensions while being taken to have the same sense. This phenomenon is not consistent with the tenet that sense determines reference. If we hold the latter to be correct, then we need to reevaluate our perspectives on the extent to which a translation or reduction of one cultural idiom to another can be said to be complete or one of synonymy.
This brings into question the extent to which we can be sure that our understanding of the conceptual languages of others is accurate, and that brings into question the appropriateness of making comparative judgments about the merits of the philosophical perspectives of other cultures. This is not a tacit support of skepticism. It is instead a reminder that our ability to appreciate or otherwise understand the content of the conceptual languages of others turns on the extent to which we are able to view the content from the perspectives of the native users of the language.
In "Akan and Euro-American Concepts of the Person," K. Anthony Appiah explores these issues from the perspective of trying to discern conceptions of what it is to be a person when those conceptions are from different cultural traditions. His focus is upon conceptions of the person within Western and within Akan traditions. He discusses six obstacles to realizing which of the two traditional conceptions of the person is most accurate. In so doing, he notes that there may be no non–question-begging way of comparing theories, since the theories themselves play central roles in our coming to understand how each is to be used. In other words, how each is to be used determines the extensions of its concepts, and that condition plays a critical role in determining the extent to which one theory can be said to map onto the objects subsumed by the other. Even if question begging were itself not an issue, there still remain questions about how to discern which conceptualization is most accurate, since each will fail to capture something of significance.
There can also be cases when both are equally accurate, but about different things, and the issue then comes to deciding what things most matter. As to what most matters, discerning that often comes down to what is most valued by the reducing culture. If having powers to bring about changes in others by casting spells is not significant within a culture, then reducing talk about witches to talk about psychotics works well. However, psychotics do not have the powers purportedly had by witches, so something fairly significant gets lost when witches become mere psychotics—people with a specific kind of delusional perspective on life.
There are at least two notable dangers with such reductions. First, they can destroy components of a culture that are essential to the survival of the culture, and often what is gained by the reduction does not offset the loss that results from the reduction. Second, replacement idioms typically have problems of their own and they themselves are typically replaced in some future by something else. Such transitions get us further away from being able to understand what was of significance in the original conceptual language, and that gets us further away from being able to understand what was important to the people of the culture out of which the language emerged. This is perhaps most alarming, since the fundamental questions that people are asking today are those that were asked scores of translations ago.
Perhaps were we better able to see how they grappled with their concerns, we could get a better handle on how to grapple with ours. Such insights are nearly impossible when the other's conceptual language is not taken as seriously as our own. In "Truth and an African Language," Kwasi Wiredu compares conceptions of truth within Akan and Western languages. He treats truth as a primarily epistemological rather than an ontological concept. Even so, he does not disregard the ontological concerns that are part of epistemological inquiries.
Although objects, situations, and their relations to, say, a person are the subjects of that which is claimed to be true, when speaking literally, neither an object nor a situation nor a subject can be said to be a truth. Wiredu views truth as something about that which is claimed to be reality. He argues that truth has to do with judgments and that those judgments accord, in some sense, with reality. The focus of his essay is on the nature of the judgment that is seen as essential for ascertaining truth. Wiredu's essay provides an interesting and accessible tour of Frege's and of Tarski's criteria for something's being true. During his investigation, he explores Western conceptions of truth, with a focus upon the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories of truth. The exploration then makes a transition to Dewey's characterization of truth as warranted assertibility, and Wiredu subsequently shows how the concept of truth within the Akan language can be an aid to clear thinking about how to come to know what can be characterized as truth.
Wiredu suggests that a possible unification of the three competing Western theories of truth can be realized by an infusion of the Akan conception of truth. However, he notes that some philosophical problems are not universal, and that they are instead language relative and as such their existence depends upon the peculiarities of the culture in which the language is rooted. He cautions us to be cognizant of this so that we will be less prone to take language-dependent issues for universal issues. This exemplifies one variety of case in which a philosophy can be one of a specific culture—when the concerns are indigenous to the cultural and linguistic idioms of a people. In traditional Yoruba thought, a necessary condition for an individual to be a person is that it has taken on a destiny.
In "An Outline of a Theory of Destiny," Segun Gbadegesin puts forth the thesis that when viewed under the guise of modern philosophical rigor, the traditional Yoruba concept of destiny seems to bring with it more conceptual problems than its usage is otherwise thought to help explain. His concerns are with an apparent inconsistency in held beliefs, within traditional folk African culture, about what it means to have a destiny.
Among those concerns is how one makes sense of the tenet that having a destiny fixes one's life experiences with the tenet that one can be held responsible for one's actions. He is concerned also with what it means to choose a destiny, and with whether it is appropriate to say of something that does not have a destiny that it is a person. Associated with that concern is the issue of whether the person that emerged from the process of getting a destiny is responsible for having its destiny and accountable for how it subsequently lives. Given traditional Yoruba perspectives on personhood, something becomes a person only when it has chosen a destiny for its life. Since that process occurs during life in utero, questions are raised about what it is that actually chooses a destiny.
A person emerges only after the selection is made, and life in utero is not the life of something that is typically thought to be capable of making quality-of-life decisions. He contends that it is not wholly obvious that one can be held accountable for something that one did not do or for something for which one lacked the required tools, and that both seem to be operative during the purported choosing of one's destiny. One of the underlying concerns in Gbadegesin's essay is how best to account for holding a person accountable for behaviors that he or she did not obviously choose. Grounding this concern are broader issues about the extent to which an individual can be said to have willingly participated in something before becoming a person and about whether such participation supports the having of a depth of consciousness and wisdom that is typically associated with Plato's contention that individuals have knowledge while in utero.
Gbadegesin specifically addresses related concerns about reincarnation and about surviving as an ancestral spirit after death. Since essential to being a person is the having of a chosen destiny, and since it is not wholly obvious that a chosen destiny is a thing that can survive the death of a body, it is not wholly obvious that the person who was fashioned by its destiny can survive in spiritual form after death. This is problematic in large part because destiny is not viewed as something that is by nature spiritual and because on some traditional conceptualizations, since destiny and ori are the same—or in the least, destiny is contained in the ori—when the ori dies, so dies the destiny. "Ori" in Yoruba is usually translated "head," but clearly these translation issues are closely interrelated. A Westerner usually does not speak of the head's dying apart from the body's dying, except when talking in metaphor.
There are other perspectives on this issue and some are discussed in depth in "Understanding and Ontology in Traditional African Thought" and in "Personal Identity in African Metaphysics." The concerns with which Gbadegesin wrestles are weighty, and they have significant implications for Western concerns about having free will in light of determinism. Also, efforts by Western theologians to reconcile omniscience with free will are fraught with similar difficulties. It is Gbadegesin's contention that believing in destiny is not irrational and that the Yoruba concept of destiny deserves more investigation before any such charges can be made justifiably. He suggests that viewing one's life as having a destiny gives it purpose and direction and that since one's destiny can be made more to one's liking through known types of practices, the quality of one's life can be joyous and fruitful even though it is fundamentally determined before birth. Perhaps most interesting about the kind of destiny that Gbadegesin seems to embrace is that it is flexible, in the sense that it can be influenced by those who approach life in a manner that is respectful of the phenomena that are ultimately responsible for the formation of destinies.
Still, as traditionally conceived, the notion that individuals have destinies is problematic, but it is no more problematic than the free-will–determinism problem, and it raises no more difficulties than are raised by fatalism within some protestant traditions. I leave it to the reader to discern whether said perspectives are any less compelling than those associated with efforts to reconcile free will with either determinism or omniscience. With respect to either of these two phenomena, that which is fixed by omniscience or by deterministic chains is not amenable to being altered. Hence, in light of either, it can be said that one's belief that one could have done otherwise can be viewed as illusionary as another's belief that one's actions are destined.
The truth of the matter is still not known, and perhaps the discussions contained in Gbadegesin's essay will promote less jaundiced perspectives when evaluating the merits of conceptual languages that are different from one's own. In "Personal Identity in African Metaphysics" Leke Adeofe explores some of the issues involved in discerning what it is to be a person within the context of a Yoruba metaphysical worldview. Those issues are viewed in light of Western conceptions of personal identity. His concerns are: What is the nature of persons? What is it for a person to be the same persisting entity across time? What relationship, if any, exists between an individual's first-person subjective experiences and our objective third-person perspective? Adeofe's primary focus is on the extent to which his characterization of the Yoruba theory of reality has provided integrated responses to personal identity questions. He characterizes Yoruba thought as having a tripartite conception of persons, while arguing that it does not fall prey to criticisms that have plagued notable Western conceptions of persons.
Notes
8. I do not know whether a difference of less than 0.05% can be discerned by the human ear. It seems to me that it can when, for example, one amplifier has a distortion of, say, 0.09% and the other 0.045%.
9. The new method of measurement showed that the audible distortion characteristics of state-of-the-art audio devices cannot be reliably evaluated by using continuous or steady state signals (sine waves and square waves) as the source to be measured. Music, for the most part, is a series of pulses, and steady state measurements do not tell us much about how a device handles pulses.
10. Norwood R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Variants of the continuity and persistence theories that are associated with Kant, Descartes, and Hume are discussed in light of Yoruba conceptions of persons. Adeofe also explores the Lockean idea of linking social roles to personal identity and suggests that the Yoruba characterization provides a more promising conception. He argues that the Yoruba conceptual language provides a tested conception of human existence that is sufficient for clarifying personal identity concerns within Western culture.
D. A. Masolo's "The Concept of the Person in Luo Modes of Thought" begins with a characterization of salient influences of European colonialism on traditional conceptual idioms of Luo modes of thought. He discusses what he sees as external cultural impositions that function as obstacles to acquiring an accurate understanding of ontological commitments in traditional African cultures. His early focus is upon what Rosalind Shaw, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others have characterized as the European construction of previously inexistent realities in traditional African ontology.
Those constructions are characterized as inventions that emerged through the imposition of Eurocentric taxonomies on African cultures. Also discussed are contributions of European anthropologists and European-trained African theologians and clerics to the translations of traditional African cultural idioms into Eurocentric idioms. Masolo suggests that their characterizations were self-serving and inaccurate and that the subsequent infusions into colonial and postcolonial African cultures have distorted African cultural idioms and have given Westerners inaccurate characterizations of the ontological commitments within traditional African cultures. Masolo goes into great detail to distinguish traditional African conceptual idioms from those presented as African via Eurocentric interpretations.
Although there is discussion of the colonial influences upon ethical and political perspectives within traditional African thought, Masolo's discussions are primarily focused on concerns in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology. Therein, he focuses upon conceptions of personhood and personal identity. He contends that in many African systems of thought, conceptions of individual identity often exceed the confinement of the two Cartesian categories—mind and body—that are offered by Westerners to explain individual capacities to think and act in objectively discernable ways. Masolo notes that Jackson and Karp and Wiredu and Gyekye have argued that several African communities think of personhood as constituted of several more categories.11
He suggests that this raises questions about what constitutes human agency and about how various senses of responsibility can be used to explain both everyday and extraordinary occurrences. In keeping with such concerns, Masolo examines the concept of jouk that is found among the Southern (Kenya) and Central (Uganda) Luo. He focuses upon the implications of the concept for understanding what constitutes personhood, for grounding the principles of moral discourse and judgment, and for determining the principles of social geography of the Luo world. He discusses the similarities and the differences between Luo, Yoruba, and Akan ontological commitments and claims that they are notable. It is claimed that each ontology has efficacy within each of the cultural domains. In addition, Masolo suggests that within each culture there is a firm commitment to the belief that underlying the experiential world is a reality that gives order to our experiences.
In concluding, Masolo suggests that perhaps by focusing upon that which is substantially common to all, we can develop a more fruitful perspective for solving some of the problems that are still dominating concerns in Western philosophy. Ifeanyi Menkiti adds another dimension to the concerns raised by Masolo.
Menkiti argues that the ontological commitments within traditional African cultures are not grounded upon supernaturalism. He suggests that characterizing the theoretical posits within traditional African cultures as supernatural posits infuses Western idioms into traditional African conceptual languages. In "Physical and Metaphysical Understanding: Nature, Agency, and Causation in African Traditional Thought," Menkiti sheds light upon a flawed but deeply entrenched Western perspective that has significantly influenced how the ontological commitments within African cultures have been viewed. Within Western cultures there exists the tenet that traditional African conceptual schemes are pre-theoretic and hence lack the foundations that are required for explaining natural phenomena.
That perspective is offered to account for the flawed position that those belonging to traditional African cultures do not understand natural phenomena because African perspectives on how and why phenomena occur are rooted in mere superstition and metaphysical fantasy and as such lack the theoretical grounding that permits a genuine understanding of how and why phenomena occur. Understanding natural phenomena requires seeing the phenomenon to be explained and the phenomenon offered to explain it as being subsumed within a theoretical framework. For causal explanation, the event to be explained and that which caused it must be linked by a true generalization—one that makes sense within our conceptual scheme.
From a Western perspective, claiming that the man died because a spell was cast upon him makes no sense when the man was drowned by a crocodile. Without its making sense, no genuine understanding takes place, and it is because of the inability of Westerners to achieve an understanding from the offered explanations within traditional African cultures that African cultures are viewed as not having an understanding of natural phenomena. The claim that a cast spell caused a person's death is viewed as evidence for believing that traditional Africans are superstitious and that their ontological commitments are not amenable to the kind of empirical grounding that is required for theory formation and for subsequently explaining natural phenomena.
Menkiti challenges this perspective and argues that traditional African culture is largely misunderstood. To that end he argues that it is not rooted in supernaturalism and that its metaphysics are empirically grounded. He provides compelling reasons for Westerners to acquire a more informed perspective on traditional African thought, and he suggests that there is much that Westerners can learn from traditional African thought that will better enable solving salient philosophical concerns within Western culture. Particularly noteworthy about Menkiti's discussion is his bringing to light how one's ontological commitments determine what can be seen and valued. It is not only our physiology—our hard wiring—that determines the limits of our experiences, it is also our worldview.
Just as boiling water can rid it of contained bacteria that cause illness, boiling water can rid it of contained demons that cause illness. This is not to say that demons and bacteria are one and the same. It is also not to say that they are radically different. It is to say merely that each, in a sense, is a characterization of the same phenomenon and that it is often our uninformed responses to those characterizations that determine how we view and treat those whose expressed ontological commitments differ from our own. Perhaps by acquiring a better understanding of why demons are viewed as harmful while germs are not and of why germs are viewed as harmful while demons are not, we can acquire a better understanding of human nature and of our propensity to posit only the unobservables that make sense to us, during our efforts to account for the phenomena that perhaps reside in all of nature, but are only noticed within specific conceptual schemes.
In "Witchcraft, Science, and the Paranormal in Contemporary African Philosophy," Albert Mosley explores the traditional African philosophical foundations that have given rise to current perspectives on the supernatural within contemporary African philosophical thought. He argues against the comparative Western tenet that while Western ontology is grounded upon facts about nature, traditional African ontology is rooted in mere metaphysical fantasy. Mosley objects to critiquing African ontology outside of the contextual framework that gives it structure and meaning. Moreover, it can be argued that almost any effort to analyze concepts outside of the scheme that provides the foundations for their meanings will result in unjustifiable biases. This is the case even within modern science.
For example, in, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Nancy Cartwright suggests that when taken literally, almost all the laws of nature are false. If she is correct, and the law statements that science offers as true are otherwise, how ought we to proceed when attempting to access the extent to which a purported relationship between types of events obtains? Having such information is often important when assessing what to believe or do within specific situations. In fairness to Western science, when a law statement is assessed outside of the boundary conditions that fashion the arena in which its claim purports truth, that law statement can be said to be too broad—to be saying more than what would have been otherwise understood were the boundary conditions made obvious.
The gas laws of Charles and Boyle reflect the behavior of ideal gases, and as such, one is not likely to realize the precise predicted value of the gas laws when using gases that are not ideal. Similarly, when building an electronic circuit with resistors, one should not be surprised when the results fail to follow Ohm's law. Most resistors are not linear and as such they have capacitance or inductance, and either can affect current or voltage in ways that are not reflected by the stated value of the resistor. Still, accurate and reliable circuitry is designed on the basis of physical theories that employ law statements that characterize relations that are not as precise as found readily in nature.
Note
11. Michael Jackson and Ivan Karp, Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 14, end p.19 Uppsala University (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye, Person and Community (Washington, D.C.: CRVP, 1992).
The success of such projects is rooted in there being an understanding of the specifications of the objects over which a universal generalization ranges. For example, without reservation we can apply the general rule that unless one is very skilled at differentiating types of mushrooms, picking a mushroom from the wild and eating it is dangerous. While it is not true that all wild mushrooms are lethal, it is true that most mushrooms of specific types cause death when ingested. Given the apparent looseness in how seemingly exceptionless generalizations are interpreted and subsequently used, we can perhaps say that those who embrace the laws of nature understand that there is variability within the types of relations that law statements characterize and that when that variability is considered, the resultant claim by a subsuming law statement is true.
For example, we can say with certainty, that were the value of the resistor 1 ohm at all frequencies, then the current for any applied frequency would be 1 ampere for an applied 1 volt potential. However, when a resistor has an associated parallel capacitance, there will be frequencies where current flow will be greater than 1 ampere for an applied 1 volt potential. Also, as a matter of practice, where the current is greater than 1 ampere for the same applied voltage, one can deduce that a capacitance or inductance is associated with the resistor and one can deduce its value—all things considered.
It seems safe to say that accepting law statements within science as true requires some degree of generosity. Can such generosity be extended to the law statements and theories within traditional African culture that make use of magic, witchcraft, and incorporeal spirits to account for observed phenomena? Mosley argues that it should, and that implies—if he is correct— that it can. However, it is not wholly obvious that the generosity can be extended. The law statements that emerge from Western science are rooted in empirical inquiry. They are testable and confirmable. The generalizations that emerge from positing magic, witchcraft, and incorporeal spirits are not obviously testable or otherwise confirmable through empirical methods, and hence it can be argued that there is no obvious viable basis for assessing their truth. Mosley's essay tackles this problem, and his arguments are in many respects compelling. When one looks at his position in light of Western religious tenets, his position has even greater plausibility.
Much of Western religion is rooted in faith—where to have faith is to believe without empirical evidence. Mosley argues for a more inclusive view of both knowledge and the scientific enterprise wherein non-experimental evidence and societal perspectives factor into how research is to proceed and into what can be discerned as true and as justification for accepting a proposition as true. In "Understanding and Ontology in Traditional African Thought," I discuss how the ontological commitments within modern Western culture can be viewed as no less problematic than those within traditional African cultures. Each posits unobservable entities to explain the experiential world, and in neither is there ready access to those posits that are held as grounding or as otherwise determining what is experienced.
I look at the conceptions of persons in each tradition and suggest there is something of significance that each tradition can learn from the other. Concerning what is meant by "person," upon careful scrutiny it becomes apparent that "person" as used in Western culture is not coextensive with "person" in traditional African culture. What would be called a person in Western culture might not be called a person in African culture, while what would be called a person in African culture would be called a person in Western culture. The asymmetry speaks to telling difficulties associated with capturing African conceptual language within Western conceptual language—with replacing African conceptual language with Western theoretical idioms. It speaks also to the need for caution and perhaps charity when making judgments about what should count as significant or as well grounded when evaluating conceptual schemes that are not one's own12
Concerning the view that traditional African ontology is rooted in mere superstition or metaphysical fantasy, a careful viewing will reveal that Western ontology can be characterized similarly. It is not simply obvious that one rather than the other has a firmer foundation. Moreover, there seems to be something of significance that African ontology can lend to Western conceptual language during efforts to account for how a person's mind can affect its body and for how something can be the same throughout its existence.
According to traditional African thought, all persons are in some sense physical, and it is that aspect of personhood that can lend explanatory efficacy to the Western practice of attributing causal efficacy to incorporeal beings and to the associated spiritual world that plays a fundamental role in grounding Western culture. When we consider that our best science tells us that matter and energy are in principle interchangeable, that E=MC2, the traditional African characterization of ancestral spirits as quasi-material seems far less fantastic than might initially be thought by someone who is being introduced to the philosophical perspectives in traditional sub-Saharan cultures.
It will be evident to the careful and sympathetic reader that the purposes of the authors represented in this book are less polemical than they are irenic. It is among our aims to provide the opportunity for a new dialogue between practitioners of varying methods of accomplishing philosophical tasks. And it is with the hope that increased understanding of each other will be the result of that dialogue, that each of us has rendered these contributions to the study of humanity and its nature.
Note
12. See Donald Davidson, "Radical Interpretation," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
Pp. 3-20 AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY (OUP 2005)
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
2
Akan and Euro-American Concepts of the Person
K. Anthony Appiah
Introduction
I propose to begin with a little analytical philosophical "apparatus," even though a hatred of—or at any rate a distaste for—such "technicality" may discourage some readers. So before getting down to the apparatus, I would like to say that I believe it is going to be helpful in addressing a question that is far from a technicality: namely, what is being lost when African conceptual languages are increasingly replaced with theoretical idioms from the West. I am going to suggest that it is far from obvious that this is a good thing: and not for nationalist reasons but for universalist ones.
Comparing Theories: Preliminaries
Sometimes we are faced with two ways of thinking that seem to be in competition with one another—I will call them theories— and we want to decide which we prefer. What it is for theories to be in competition can sometimes be straightforward: they may make predictions about the same sorts of things and those predictions may be different, and so they are about the same subject matter and they cannot both be right about it. It can be less than obvious, however, in real cases, in what sense two theories deal with the same subject matter. For the theories are likely to use different languages—they will have different theoretical vocabularies, different concepts—and some of what is said in the vocabulary of one theory, T, may be about things that, for example, T1 does not refer to at all.
Why do we think that Mendel's genes and our talk of sequences of nucleotides in DNA molecules deal with the same subject matter? For, as it happens, almost nothing that Mendel thought about genes is exactly true of DNA sequences. Why do we call some people in some societies "medicine men" or "witch doctors," which assumes that they are aiming to heal diseases, as opposed to say protecting your mbisimo (spirit) from the assaults of mangu (witchcraft); as was the case in Zandeland according to E. E. Evans-Pritchard? Still, as I say, we can find ourselves in situations where we have to choose between two ways of thinking and talking about a situation, and, to put it at its most practical, we can judge that looked at in the T-way, we should do A, and looked at in the T1 -way, we should do A1, and we cannot do both. And so, somehow, we go with T.
Notice that this practical dilemma does not force us to choose between T and T1 absolutely: for it may be that in other circumstances, where T recommends doing B and T1 recommends doing B1, we would go with T1. And it might be that proceeding in this way, things turn out just as we wanted. (Thus, T might be the theory of our Western-trained allopathic doctor and T1 might be the view of our herbalist: and when it is headaches we take aspirin and not herbs, and when it is infertility we take herbs and not surgery.) Still, practical dilemmas of this sort can lead one to reflect on the question whether one should prefer T to T1 over all, or, more likely, whether there is not some new picture, T*, that explains why we should do A in one case and B1 in the other. And such a question urges on us the ranking of theories overall: in this case a search for a T* that ranks above both T and T1. Even when we are clear that two theories are about roughly the same things, we will usually need more than this to help us decide how to rank them. For usually it is hard to say exactly what it is for the theory to get things right because we use theories for so many different purposes. (Medical theories are used for everything from trying to understand what has happened to us, to deciding what therapies to use, to deciding whether we are in the right frame of mind to make a decision.)
If we knew what we wanted theories and their correlative concepts for, we could line them up against each other and compare their performances. There would still be no guarantee that we could rank any two theories that came along because the things we wanted them for—their uses, let us say—might be diverse and incommensurable. So one theory, T, might do very well on one criterion, C1, and another, T1, do much less well; but then with respect to some other criterion, C2, T1 might be the winner. If we did not know which of these criteria mattered most, this would leave us still unable to rank them. Even if we thought that, on balance, C1 mattered more than C2, there would still be the need to decide how to trade off a small win on C1 against a big loss on C2. And, once again, if we did not know how to do this, we would be left without a ranking again. Some people think we do not need to worry about the problems created by multiple criteria because there is only one serious criterion for assessing theories and that is truth.
One trouble with truth as a criterion is that it can be too undemanding. There are lots of little unimportant truths, vaguely stated, that are not worth collecting. Surely we want not just the truth but the truth about something that is worth having the truth about: and that takes us straight back to multiple criteria, since it is generally the case that what is important depends on many things. Another trouble with truth is, it does not seem to come by degrees: most of our theories get some things right and some things wrong. Overall, then, they are wrong, since the only way to be right is to get everything right. (Well, not everything, exactly: a theory needs to get everything right that it says anything about at all. If a theory says nothing about apples, it cannot be the whole truth, but it could be the whole truth about oranges.) And once we grasp this, we see that, until a theory comes along that just gets the whole truth (about something interesting)—and this is an event for which I do not recommend holding your breath—what we need is some notion of closeness to the truth, verisimilitude. But now we are back with the problem of multiple criteria: for (once we have some sort of measure of distance from the truth) a theory can be close to the truth in some respects and far from it in others, and so we are going to have to trade off relative success in some areas against relative failure in others. (For it is not likely, in general, that T will get right everything that T1 gets right and then get some things right that T1 gets wrong. If that were the situation, the choice would, of course, be easy.)
The fact that what theories provide is verisimilitude (which is a favored way of not being strictly true) is already built into the ways we make and use them. Idealizations abound: and to say that a theory idealizes is to say either
1. that its claims are close to the truth or
2. that it ignores some factors that are, in fact, significant, at least sometimes, and would get things pretty much right if those factors were taken into account, or
3. both.
To suppose that an idealization is of type (1), you need to have a measure of distance from the truth, which is easy enough if what the theory predicts is some measurable quantity, like velocity or the proportion of offspring that will have black eyes and red fur; here you may say that a theory, T, is closer than a theory, T1, in what it says about the measurable quantity if the value, v(T), that T ascribes to it is close to the actual value, v, than the value, v(T1), that T1 predicts. But lots of theories do not predict things of that sort: one predicts that A will happen, another that B will. C happens, which is neither A nor B, and there is no real sense in which A is closer to C than B is, or vice versa. (I predict your mother will buy the dahlias. You predict she will buy the roses. She buys the cactus. Who is closer to being right?) To suppose that an idealization is of type (2) is once again to face the question of what is significant, which will, once more, depend on what your aims are. So, to summarize, here are some of the obstacles to deciding which of two theories is better.
1. They are about overlapping subject matters or it is hard to say whether they are about the same thing; that is, there is a problem about the sense in which they are in competition with each other.
2. We do not know what criteria to use in comparing them.
3. We do, but the criteria point in different directions and we do not know how to weigh their relative importance.
1. They are about overlapping subject matters or it is hard to say whether they are about the same thing; that is, there is a problem about the sense in which they are in competition with each other.
4. We have a criterion, verisimilitude, but one of the theories is closer in its predictions in some areas and the other is closer in others, and we do not know how to decide which area matters more (or by how much) and so we are back with problem 2.
5. We have a criterion, verisimilitude, but the theories differ in ways that mean the notion of relative distance from the truth is not applicable.
Let me mention one more problem that can arise because it will matter in what follows. That problem is:
6. that the two theories themselves play a role in our understanding of what their uses are: and so there may seem to be no non–question-begging way of comparing them.
(So, to return to the debate between healers I mentioned earlier, our herbalist might well tell us that the infusion we have been taking every night has strengthened our chi, while the Western doctor says that the antibiotics we did not take would have killed off the bugs by now. If you are comparing these two points of view as views about health, how can we find a way of saying what health consists in that does not beg the question of who is right?)
Theories of the Person in Particular
Every society has at least one collection of ideas that I am going to call a theory of the person. A theory of the person is a collection of views about what makes human beings work. It will include views about why people do things: in America we speak, for example, of fear, hope, belief, intention, desire, envy, lust, and kindness when we are trying to explain behavior.
But it will also include views about what people need for survival: food, for example, or air or light or family and friends. And it will usually put all this together in a way that involves some account of the relations between the events inside people that make them act and the bodies that do the acting. Westerners currently do this in terms of talk about minds and brains; for we think that fear and belief and hope and the like are largely housed in people's brains (though we also think that some forms of excitement have to do with hormones like adrenaline, which act not only on the brain but also elsewhere in our bodies).
But in other societies it has been not the brain but the breast that has been thought of as the home of many of the most important states that make people act—so it was, for example, in the societies that produced the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible; and breath was for both those societies the name of an animating principle that explained why people's bodies sometimes acted under the guidance of inner states and sometimes (when dead) behave like other inanimate things.
A theory of the person is not something that the people in the society will necessarily think of as separate from their views about many other matters. For people interact, of course, not only with each other, but also with a world, both social and natural, around them; and are also widely believed to interact with the sorts of spirits, gods, and the like that we are inclined to call "supernatural." So, simply asking someone how they explain the things people do or what people need for survival is not generally guaranteed to produce a well-organized body of prepared doctrine.
Nevertheless, the readers of this book will be familiar with the assumptions about how people work that are among the shared operating assumptions of most people in Europe and North America; and they will also be aware, too, that there are in their own countries people whose theories of the person contain some less orthodox elements. (There are people around, for example, who think that the state of the heavens when we are born helps to explain why we do what we do or that some people are sometimes "taken over" by other [dead] people for whom they act as mediums.)
But there will be no guarantee that you will know about a fully fledged account from an African culture; no guarantee, in particular, that you will know about the picture of persons that was the normal view a century ago in Asante—where I grew up—and is still strongly present in the Twi language that is spoken there. So let me give you a brief sketch of that theory, that picture of how people work, before I turn to the question of how we might decide whether to prefer it to the sort of Western view with which you are probably familiar.
Asante Theories of the Person
Naturally, a theory of the person is hard to isolate from the general views of a people about the world—social, natural, and supernatural—in which they live. So it will help to have a broader context within which to place an Asante theory of the person. But in order to make any sense of Asante life, it is necessary to say a little about social organization1. For, as we shall see, many ritual acts of a religious nature have components that appear to be modeled on other social acts and the conception of social relations amongst people informs the notions of relations with other sorts of beings. As social anthropologists often discover, some of those things that we take most for granted within one culture cannot be assumed in another. And so it is when we come to consider the organization of the family in Asante. For Asante is a matrilineal culture: children belong to the families of their mothers.
If we call a group of living people who share common descent through the female line a matriclan, we can say that the Asante family is a subgroup of the matriclan, usually consisting of a group with a common ancestress in their grandmother or great-grandmother. This group is what is usually referred to as the "abusua." The head of the family is typically a child's maternal uncle—his or her mother's brother—but it may be a great-uncle, a nephew, or a brother. For the senior male member of this group need not be the eldest member. This head of the family holds property in trust for the whole group and is responsible for the maintenance and the behavior of its members.
This property descends in the matriclan, again typically from uncle to nephew (sister's son) though there are a number of exceptions to this rule. (Thus, for example, jewelry passes from elder to younger females in the matriclan and a hunter's gun may pass to his son.) Wider than the matrilineal family is the maternal clan, which is also called the abusua or nton. There are seven or eight clans into which all of Asante is divided: but the functioning group for most people consists of fellow clansfolk who live in the same village or town.
Associated with the nton are a number of taboos: restrictions on food, for example, or on the utterance of certain words. Membership of this maternal group is held to flow from the fact that a person's body (nipadua) is made from the blood of the mother (the mogya) hence the abusua is sometimes called the bogya. The other two components of a person are the sunsum (individual spirit) and the okra of which the former—the sunsum—derives from the father at conception, and the latter, a sort of life force, is sent to a person at birth from Nyame, the high god, and departs the body only at the person's last breath (and is sometimes, as with the Greeks and the Hebrews, identified with breath). (The child also acquires at birth a "day-name," the name for a male or female child born on that day of the week.) Despite the primary descent group being matrilineal, Asante people also belong to a paternal clan, called the ntoro, which also has its associated taboos.
These taboos are seen as arising out of the fact that the members of the ntoro have souls that share a common source, and similarities of personality between father and son are held to derive from this inherited sunsum. Both abusua and ntoro were traditionally exogamous: that is, it was incestuous to marry a member of the same matriclan or patriclan. Since, therefore, my father's sister or brother is bound to marry someone who belongs to a different ntoro (for I and my father's siblings are in the same exogamous patriclan) and may quite possibly marry someone who is not in my mother's (and therefore my) matriclan, there is no barrier to my marrying my paternal cousin.
To marry your mother's sister's child, however, would be incestuous: you belong to the same abusua. To someone who is used to seeing the children of the siblings of either parent as cousins, distinguishing between one group as being totally prohibited in marriage and another as not only not prohibited but also sometimes encouraged is no doubt confusing. But it must be remembered that a child's mother's brother is very often the head of his or her family. He or she may actually live in the maternal uncle's household and be brought up with the children of other maternal aunts.
To marry within this group would, in effect, be like marrying a brother or sister—indeed my mother's sisters I call "mother" and their children I call by the same term I use to call my siblings. In sum, then, according to Asante traditions, a person consists of a body (nipadua) made from the blood of the mother (the mogya); an individual spirit, the sunsum, which is the main bearer of one's personality; and a third entity, the okra. The sunsum derives from the father at conception. The okra, a sort of life force, departs the body only at the person's last breath; is sometimes, as with the Greeks and the Hebrews, identified with breath; and is often said to be sent to a person at birth, as the bearer of one nkrabea, or destiny, from Nyame. The sunsum, unlike the okra, may leave the body during life and does so, for example, in sleep, dreams being thought to be the perceptions of a person's sunsum on its nightly peregrinations.
Since the sunsum is a real entity, dreaming that you have committed an offence is evidence that you have committed it, and, for example, a man who dreams that he has had sexual intercourse with another man's wife is liable for the adultery fees that are paid for daytime offenses.
Note
1. These notions are to be found in the writings of R. S. Rattray, who was the first ethnographer to give a written account of Asante ideology; and they can be confirmed by discussion with people in Asante today; see R. S. Rattray, Ashanti (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 46. They are discussed also by Wiredu in Richard Wright, African Philosophy: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 141 and Kwame Gyekye in "Akan Language and the Materialism Thesis," Studies in Language 1.1 (1977): 237–44; and also in his African Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Comparing Asante Theories with "Western" Ones: Ramsey Sentences
Now it is very natural to contrast this theory of the person with another, broadly disseminated, one, much influenced by Western philosophy and science, in which a person is a body with a mind that resides in a brain. There are disputes about the exact relation of the mind to the brain and about whether the former is capable of disembodied existence. Many Europeans and Americans—and Africans—believe that the departure of the mind from the body is death; and end that the mind, released from the body, renamed the "soul," survives somehow, perhaps even somewhere. This seems like a different theory—sunsum and okra are dual non-bodily entities, for example, while the mind is one—and so we are now faced concretely with one of those situations whose abstract characterization I began with, where we might want to make a choice.
Let us call the broadly commonsense Western view, W, and Akan common sense about the person, A. How are we to characterize what is at stake in the choice between A and W? I suggest we can adapt an approach developed by the British philosopher Frank Ramsey. The details do not much matter here, but the idea is straightforward enough. Take, first, A. Collect all the claims that A makes. Identify all the terms in it that aim to refer to entities—sunsum, okra, and so on— not recognized by W. (For the moment, I will put aside issues of translation: I assume that we can identify many terms in Asante Twi and English that have the same meanings.) For each such term introduce a distinct variable and replace that term with its variable. What you now have is something a bit like A, but without any of the words that are in dispute between it and W. So, for example, where you once had, as part of A, the claim that the okra leaves the body at death, you have the "claim" that x leaves the body at death; and for the claim that the sunsum travels during dreams, you have the "claim" that y travels during dreams. (I call these "claims," in scare quotes, because, since "x" does not yet have any function explained, saying that x does something, so far tells you nothing at all over and above that x does something.)
Of course there are many, many such "claims" about x and about y. You can now capture the distinctive content of A by saying that it holds that there exists an x and a y such that…; and write down the conjunction of all the "claims." You have now constructed a Ramsey sentence of A, where all the terms in A that do not correspond to terms in W are treated as theoretical, and all other terms as observational. What that sentence says is, in essence, that there exists an entity that behaves in the way that Akan people believe the sunsum behaves, one that behaves in the way they think the okra behaves, and so on. Let us call the Ramsey version of W, WR. You can now do the same for W.
If A does not recognize the word "mind," then replace it with a variable; if A does not believe in the "unconscious," replace it with another. And now we can make the Ramsey version of A, AR. What you have now is a couple of theories, AR and WR .Here are some important facts about the relations between them.
1. They share all the concepts that are shared between Akan and Western theories of the person.
2. They make different predictions about how people will behave: If I recall a dream of meeting you, then my sunsum met your sunsum last night, and you and I ought to recall the same dreams, for example; but that is not a consequence of WR.
3. They entail the existence of different states and entities.
The first strategy I suggested in such a case would be to decide what the two theories are for and then to see if we can decide which of them does that thing better. Well, what are A and W for? One reasonable answer, as I also said, might be: many things. But of those potentially many things one in particular suggests itself as central, and that is understanding—and thus anticipating—how people will behave under the various circumstances that they encounter. If we could agree on a way of characterizing behavior—the things people do—and context (the circumstances they encounter), there is then an obvious way of comparing the two approaches, available in recent Anglo-American philosophical tradition.
So How Does the Comparison Go?
I argued at the start that there were half a dozen problems that might arise in the course of theory comparison. The first obstacle, I said, was that there might be a problem about the sense in which AR and WR were in competition with one other. But if we could see the two theories as attempts to explain and predict behavior, then we could compare them over that domain, provided we could describe (a good deal of) behavior in non–question-begging terms that did not commit in advance to one way of looking at things or the other.
I do not think that most Asante people would think of talk of the interior states of people as simply a way of predicting and explaining behavior; that is not surprising, given that most Westerners would not think of their theory of the person that way either. After all, it seems more natural to describe much of what is going on here as attempts to describe the behavior of the sunsum, for example, which is not at all the same thing as describing the behavior of a person. And, similarly, most people in the United States do not think that references to, say, "love," are just ways of helping to explain and predict what their lovers will do.
They care about whether they are loved, not just about whether their loved ones will behave like lovers. (I shall return to this point again later.) But even though the users of AR and WR do not think of them behavioristically, we might be interested in the question of which did better by this criterion. It is, after all, an intrinsically interesting question who gets more of the behavior of more people right. Here we move out of the realm of conceptual into more obviously empirical matters. But I rather suspect the answer to the question who does better, will turn out to be something like this: people who use AR are better at predicting the behavior of other users of AR; and those who use WR do better with other WR users. There are at least two reasons why this is likely to be so. One is banal: people know more about the people in their own society than they do about people in others. The other is a little deeper.
One of the reasons people act the way they do is because they have the theories of the person that they do. You are more likely to behave like a preference-maximizing utility consumer after doing an introduction to economics. Whereas, if you are an AR-user, you are more likely to believe your sunsum met your boyfriend's last night, even if you do not remember it at first (especially if he gives you that flashing smile because, unlike you, he does remember his dreams). You may thus end up behaving as AR predicts.
One consequence of these facts—neither of them, I think, very profound—is that the choice opting for AR over WR will have among its consequences that we come to think of ourselves and others differently and thus behave differently. Now both of these theories get many, many things wrong from the point of view of behavior prediction. Both get many things right. And, of course, while the class of things that one gets right (like the class that it gets wrong) overlaps with the class that the other gets right (or wrong), they are not coextensive. Sometimes one does better, sometimes another. It is hard, I think, to make an overall comparison. Furthermore, if our criterion is truth, neither does very well, even over the limited domain of behavior. That makes the suggestion that we should base our decision on which one gets the most truth about behavior seem eccentric at best. We have reached my second obstacle: not knowing what criteria to use.
It is not that there are no standards (beyond truth) against which to test these pictures of the person, but that there are many. One obvious further criterion is something like "truth to introspective experience." Do I sometimes feel as if someone else has taken control of my body?2 If so, does WR have anything to say about why I feel like this? If not, that suggests that, for these purposes, AR does a better job. Another is consilience with the rest of what we believe about the natural world. There is no doubt that contemporary natural science does a terrific job of managing, explaining, and predicting many things in our world; better, I think it will be acknowledged by most Asantes, than many of the older theories that were developed in Asante.
To the extent that one of our theories of the person is easier to fit into that broader picture, that might be thought to weigh in its favor. At this point, however, we have reached a situation (which I labeled obstacle 3 at the start) where we have a bunch of criteria that point in different directions and we do not know how to weigh their relative importance. And it is at this point that some will want to insist that the right thing to do is to turn to verisimilitude and ask, head on, which of the theories is closer to the truth. Here we meet my obstacle 4. For, as we have seen, it is likely that one of the theories is closer in its predictions in some areas and the other is closer in others, and we do not know how to decide which area matters more (or by how much) and so we are back with trying to find criteria independent of verisimilitude. We also face obstacle 5: for the theories differ in ways that mean the notion of relative distance from the truth is not easy to apply.
Note
2. In the epilog to In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), I described a moment when I certainly felt this way.
How to Proceed?
I have not made a very serious effort actually to overcome my five obstacles because, as I said, the issues are heavily empirical (and, I should add, the tests have mostly not been done). But I have also not made much of an effort because, as I mentioned at the start, there is a sixth obstacle to theory comparison, which I put by saying: "The two theories themselves play a role in our understanding of what their uses are: and so there may seem to be no non–question-begging way of comparing them." Now, here is the problem in the particular case of AR and WR.
All my discussion so far, in terms of criteria for assessing the theories, has involved discussion of such matters as evidence, belief, and purposes. When you are trying to decide whether to adopt a theory, you are asking what grounds you will act on, for what purposes; what you will be willing to believe and the like. But purposes and beliefs are among the sorts of thing that theories of the person are about. In particular, to return to an earlier example, if my purpose is to discover whether you love me, the content of what matters to me is specified in part by the very theory that I am trying to evaluate.
In Conclusion
If I am right, it is not at all easy to see what non–question-begging arguments can be given for preferring AR to WR (or vice versa). As a result, giving up on our Asante concepts of the person is going to be premature, at best. Given that they have functioned successfully in the management of social relations for a long while, they are, at least, good for something. And, since social relations in Asante continue to strike both Asante and non-Asante people as having some attractive features, giving up on concepts that are clearly somehow partially constitutive of those relations needs to be justified by something better than the thought that our theories (like everybody else's) are incorrect. To give them up would be to give them up in exchange for something else.
It is hard to see what argument could be made for such a wholesale substitution over the development of new insights within the existing framework. This will be worthwhile not only for us in Asante—improving theories in various respects is always desirable, by definition; the question is what counts as an improvement—but also for people generally. For, just as some useful discoveries—that you can make some sad people less sad with Prozac—developed within WR, there is no reason to doubt that different useful discoveries could be made within AR. In the long run, it will turn out, I am sure, that people will decide there is no sunsum; but I am equally convinced that eventually we shall lose our belief in the mind.
Pp. 21-34 AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, OUP 2005
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
3
Truth and an African Language
Kwasi Wiredu
Since my thinking about the meaning of truth has been conditioned by both a formal training in Western ideas and an originally informal education in an African way of thinking, I would like in this discussion to work my way through both environments.
I start from the Western angle. We all, not unlike St. Augustine in the matter of time, understand very well what truth is until we are asked for a philosophical elucidation. Trivially, truth is what is so. But what is the nature of the what and of the being so? Thus interrogated, philosophers are quickly driven to a Babel of theories. Consider the first of these two enigmas. It is agreed on all hands that it is an item of discourse rather than a slab of reality that may or may not be so.
The question is: "What exactly is the unit of discourse that is susceptible of those characterizations?" Some say it is a sentence, others that it is a proposition, and still others that it is a judgment, a claim, a belief, or different from all these, that it is an idea. Frontal onslaughts on this issue have seemed, traditionally, to get bogged down in logical and ontological obscurities. Let us therefore try an indirect approach, utilizing a thought of Tarski with what might, perhaps, be considered an un-Tarskian intention. It was a basic part of Tarski's "semantic" theory of truth that any definition of truth that had any pretense of material adequacy must of necessity imply all equivalences of the form "Snow is black" is true if and only if snow is black.1
The intuitive persuasiveness of this suggestion consists in the fact that it depicts at once with clarity, simplicity, and concreteness the basic logical form of the idea of something being so. The semantic unit enclosed in quotes illustrates a something whose being so is exemplified by the second component of the equivalence. But to depict the logical form of an idea is not to explain it. And it may justly, therefore, be said that even with all the supplementary elaborations and refinements, Tarski's completed theory provides a rigorous depiction of the logical form of truth predication but not an elucidation of its philosophical import. (Actually, in at least some of his moods Tarski himself was not averse to this minimal, if not minimalist, construal of his construct. 1)
The logical depiction, to be sure, may be a tremendous achievement in itself. But if explanation is our objective, then it is obvious, by the same token, that what we need is some account of the epistemic status, or, if it comes to that, the ontological significance of the two sides of the equivalence. In particular, it should be quite clear that some such account of the second component is necessary from our (premeditated) variation on the actual sentence employed by Tarski in his equivalence. As is well known, Tarski's equivalence in his 1944 article2 was, "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.
Because readers are likely to think that snow is, in fact, white, they are likely to perceive the second component of the equivalence as having the status of a revelation rather than a judgment from some point of view or perspective. But there is nothing sacrosanct about Tarski's particular example, and our particular substitute example has the following significance. Since, by all appearances, snow is not black, the standing of the second component in our chosen instance of Tarski's equivalence is easily seen to be, not revelatory but, on the contrary, essentially perspectival. This is reinforced by a simple structural consideration: The equivalence ‘"Snow is black" is true if and only if snow is black’ logically implies the conditional ‘If snow is black then "Snow is black" is true.’
From this it is plain that the thought that snow is black, which held the position of a consequent in the equivalence and now serves as an antecedent, is just that, a thought. But it is a thought that stands in a certain relation with the thought that occurs in the other component (of the equivalence or the conditional, as the case may be).
The nature of this relationship is the most important issue in the theory of truth. It turns out, not surprisingly, that the traditional theories of truth in Western philosophy may be seen as involving varying responses to this demand. To see the problem in this way is already to demystify it. Here are the resulting schemata of demystification.
(1) Correspondence theory:
a. "p" is true if and only if it is a fact that p.
b. Instance: "Snow is Black" is true if and only if it is a fact snow is black
(2) Coherence theory:
a. "p" is true if and only if it coheres with our system of beliefs that p.
b. Instance: "Snow is black" is true if and only if it coheres with our received system of beliefs to hold that snow is black.
(3) Pragmatic theory (in Dewey's formulation):
a. "p" is true if and only if it is warrantably assertible that p.
b. Instance: "Snow is white" is true if and only it is warrantably assertible that snow is white.
These proposals are, of course, merely, suggestive until explanations are supplied for the concepts of fact, correspondence, coherence, warranted assertibility, and "our" system of beliefs, an undertaking that, in each case, has proved to be studded with snares. However, an interesting affinity between the coherence and pragmatic theories already leaps to the eye. In both theories, truth is a matter, not of the reference of a sentence, but of its logical and cognitive affiliations.
In both theories, moreover, as I shall suggest later, the litmus test for truth amounts to the same thing, when properly conceived. By contrast, the correspondence theory, in so far as it goes beyond schema (1), seems to suggest that a true sentence is one that, by itself and as a whole, bears a certain relation to something noncognitive.
It is clear why a typical correspondence theorist will not be content with that schema. To take the given instance of the schema, both of its two components, namely, ‘"Snow is black" is true’ and ‘It is a fact that snow is black’ look, structurally, too much like claims, and would therefore be thought to be apt to communicate the impression that the correspondence relation is "merely" a relation between propositions.
On the contrary, the message of the theory seems to be that the equivalence schema holds only because a true sentence refers to a "nonlinguistic" reality. More interestingly, the referring seems often to be thought of as isomorphic in the manner of a picture.
A sentence is true if and only if it accurately pictures the given portion of reality, point for point. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus is famous for the picture theory of propositions (among other things). In fact, it does not begin with him. It only reaches its reductio ad absurdum with him.
Notes
1. Alfred Tarski, "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1944). Reprinted in H. Feigl and W. Sellars, eds., Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1949) and in many other anthologies.
2. Ibid.