Hey Krimel,
Krimel said:
Holy crap this goes on and on...
Matt:
Ah! You've been outed as a writer-as-you-goer. Yes, indeed, you are finding
out the hard way why I get made fun of for being long-winded. Basically, my
technique in debate is the filibuster. People just get tired, and move on.
Krimel said:
There is no fixed absolute reference point. There is no Absolute Truth beyond
the conception of Absolute Truth. We can imagine such a thing. We can give it a
"tip of the hat or a wag of the finger" But we have no way of being certain
that what we tip and wag at, is what we think it is.
Matt:
Actually, I would go further and say we can only _vaguely_ imagine such a
thing. The trouble is filling in the details. My experience is that the more
details you fill in, ya' know, to make it work, the more unworkable it becomes
_and_ the more undesirable. Can you imagine no change? That's, ultimately,
what we're talking about--total stasis.
Krimel said:
One thing that strikes me about you comments here is that as you describe it
and whatever form we give to reality or our conceptions of reality it
eventually assumes a kind of binary form. Extremes are indentified. I can not
account for why this is but this bifurcation seems nearly universal. Our
concepts seem to always assume this binary polarity. Why not triads or
quartettes? To me this strikes at the heart of the Taoist metaphysics that
Pirsig adopts. We see patterns in terms of their extreme manifestations; their
poles. We construct opposites out of whatever phenomena present themselves to
us whether actual or conceptual. I am torn as to whether this is a metaphysical
or a psychological principle or whether a distinction between the two is even
possible.
Matt:
I think it's because splitting things into two is the most basic form of
reasoning in abstraction (as Pirsig noted with his "analytic knife"). As soon
as humans acquired the ability to think abstractly, they eventually discovered
the rules of logic and negation is one of the basic things you need for
reasoning to even occur. The differentiation process can only happen if you
can distinguish between a thing and a not-thing. Like truth, binaries are
fundamental, but not nearly as interesting or powerful as Plato thought.
Krimel said:
I would argue that what Plato saw was the purity and clarity of Euclidian
geometry.
Matt:
I think I would say that it was certainly a necessary cause, but not a
sufficient one. Only someone so angry at the bullshit occurring around him,
like say the death at the hands of the state of a loved one, would envision a
world of total stasis.
Krimel said:
But language is thought objectified. It is the summation of our interior
musings rendered symbolic. Regardless of how we render our symbols, verbally,
gesturally, or musically, something it lost in the rendering.
Matt:
This is a very strong feeling in philosophy, and I'm surely not presently
equipped to launch either a good attack on the notion of "interior musings" or
a general redescription to split the terrain into, on the one side, dispensable
"problematic" notions and, on the other, the good ones. But it is something
like this notion that underlies the need to decouple semantics from
epistemology. Or rather, if one doesn't redescribe a whole bunch of
reinforcing notions in philosophy, then you keep getting thrown back on the
rocks if you try to escape only half-assed.
The general idea is that the notion of "interior musings" is what is making you
suspicious, and it is also a notion that has not always existed, so it is a
notion we can dispense with. The notion of interiority you are using is what I
called the shift to "experience." Now, the idea that we can dispense with it
doesn't also entail that everything is wrong with it: we just need to figure
out what parts are which, good and bad, useful and useless, etc. It's kinda'
like figuring out how the body works. We started with the four humors, but
medicine and physiology have moved on since then. I think it's the same thing
with ideas, including the idea of an idea. For instance, in our first spin
through this terrain, you insisted on spanning the term "idea" over linguistic
happenings and perceptual happenings. I commented at the time that that's the
way Descartes had used the term "idée". The trick is that Descartes had kind
of made that way up himself. Since that time, I think we have learned in
philosophy--through trial and error--that it hinders more than it hurts to
think of an idea as both a perception and a conception, percept and concept.
We need to distinguish them.
I think you'd find a lot useful to chew on in Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature. Rorty does yeoman's work in tracing out the tangled web we know of
as "the mind." If you like my dashes through history, you'd love his
book--he's the one that taught me all my tricks, both how and what to write.
The general scientistic tenor of your writing causes me to think that you'd
find much amenable in the book. Essentially, it is a particular following out
of the consequences of a particular position in the philosophy of mind that was
created during the 50s, that of mind-brain identity. That's why David M
occasionally gives me cat-calls as a degenerate materialist. The position that
Rorty developed is, from his eyes, not degenerate, but still in some attenuated
sense materialist, which makes some feel chilly. Rorty doesn't have much use
for scientism, but he might prove an interesting read.
Krimel said:
All the talk of the sanctity of language reminds me too much of Kant's analytic
truth. Truth even with a small 't' is not found in a statement. It is held as a
belief. Reason is neither necessary nor sufficient to compel belief. We can
divorce Truth and Belief but Justification is the modifier of Belief. Reason is
only one of the faces of Justification. More often than not reason is a dash of
power covering blemishes of the true face of our justifications.
Why isn't belief the primitive notion? Isn't language just a distillation of
symbols to communicate belief?
Matt:
Well, come now, I'm not saying language is sacrosanct, just trying to give a
picture (really: relate a picture other people give) of what's going on when we
use language, study language, create language.
You ask a good question, though, and I'm not certain that belief isn't a
primitive notion. To put it the other way around, I'm not sure that semantics
needs the notion of "belief" to function, though it might. I would go ahead
with saying that semantics doesn't need a notion of "belief," but we certainly
can't make much sense of life or action without one.
Matt said:
This is what I meant by saying that truth is an absolute notion, but
justification is relative _and_ the only route to truth. The latter, however,
contains the epistemological equivocation that still occurs in common sense
talk. What we should really say is that truth is an absolute notion, but
justification is relative to audience and the only route to _knowledge_ (thus
holding the two apart entirely).
Krimel said:
Rather that "... justification is relative to audience and the only route to
_knowledge..." shouldn't it be "... justification is relative to audience and
the only route to _belief_..."?
Matt:
No, and this I am fairly convinced of. The reason I would say specifically
"knowledge" as opposed to "belief" is because analytic philosophy has done a
decent job of noting that there is such a thing as true belief that we are not
justified in (and so would not count as knowledge). I also think we get
beliefs all the time from sense perception that aren't immediately justified,
and so probably only knowledge in an attenuated sense. My understanding of
"belief" is that they are, following the pragmatists, habits of action. I
think it is the case that there are many kinds of action that we have to
improvise without something we would call knowledge, and that it is important
to attribute beliefs as their motivation (this allows us, after the fact in
reflection, to differentiate between good and bad beliefs/action-motivators).
Pre-knowledge improvisation is something that James called attention to in his
"Will to Believe".
Matt said:
The truth (or falsity) that it is raining does, indeed, have nothing to do with
whether a person believes it to be raining (or not) or even whether they are
justified (or not) in believing so, but only in the fact that it is raining (or
not). But while that remains true, it is also true that the only way we'd know
if it were raining is if first, someone believed it, and second, they were
justified in doing so (thus making it knowledge and not luck).
Krimel said:
Aren't you left with "true" and "justified" as adjectives describing belief?
Haven't you just identified one species of belief? What about unjustified true
beliefs. Or justified false beliefs?
Matt:
Yeah, "knowledge" is a species of belief, specifically one that is both true
and justified. True beliefs that are not justified are those that you are
lucky in believing. For instance, if you are forced into making a choice
between X and Y without much justification in either direction (like on a
multiple choice test, though life occasionally forces these decisions--like
cutting that wire in the bomb), then we are likely to say you were lucky in
choosing X (to which we attribute the action-motivator "I believe the answer is
X/I believe X is the best choice"). Justified beliefs that are false are
things like the Greeks belief in the ethicalness of slavery. We are now
inclined to say that, while if you have a sense of history you'll want to say
they were justified, no amount of history will suggest that they were right in
doing so, that the Greeks held a true belief about slavery.
I should also add that at least one philosopher became famous for making the
analysis of knowledge into "justified true belief" more complicated (Edmund
Gettier). The most fascinating response that I've read to this version of
knowledge (a version that goes back to Plato), however, is in Barry Allen's
Knowledge and Civilization. He suggests that Plato instituted a "linguistic
bias" in our conception of knowledge, which makes us focus on "belief" as the
main unit and causes us to have Cartesian-like fits of dismay when we are wrong
about what we believe we know. His suggestion is that "knowledge" is indeed
absolute in a way that Descartes and Plato would've recognized, but it has
nothing to do with belief. Knowledge is, rather, reflected in things we
produce--like an architect's bridge or a surgeon's incision. His definition of
knowledge is "superlative artifactual achievement". Don't ask me to explain
what the hell that means, but it is really interesting.
Matt said:
Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature used a sci-fi story about an alien
race, the Antipodeans, that we'd learned to talk to had no conception of an
inner space called the "mind" because they'd happened to have made scientific
breakthroughs in neurophysiology before physics. He used this story as a means
of suggesting how we might talk without a pernicious conception of a mind that
gets in between us and reality. This was a means of suggesting that
Cartesianism is optional, not inevitable. The whole idea behind the creation of
"eliminative materialism" was not that the "mind" is fake, but that we might
someday come to speak without reference to it, thus effectively eliminating it.
We could conceivably be nudged into becoming Antipodeans, though I doubt we
ever will be.
Krimel said:
I just don't think the distinction between your pain and my pain is artificial
or avoidable. There is a qualitative difference between my experience of my own
nervous system and my experience of that which is other than my nervous system.
Matt:
Oh, no, Rorty would agree that the difference between you and I, your pain and
my pain, is neither artificial or avoidable, too. But all you need for that is
a distinction between spatial locations, a distinction between nervous systems.
Now, mentioning "qualitative difference," that does indeed bring up another
whole nest of issues in the philosophy of mind, similar to the nest I gestured
towards earlier in "interior musings." It is the same problem with this nest
as the earlier: it is big. This is something that Daniel Dennett has been at
the forefront of untangling. The main idea is that the idea of a qualitative
difference, what philosophical jargon refers to as "qualia," is what Thomas
Nagel called attention to with his very famous paper, "What Is It Like to Be a
Bat?" Nagel argues quite perspicuously that there is no way for us to ever
know what it is like to be a bat, that we will never know what it is like to be
a bat from a first-person point of view. Indeed, following this line out, we
will only ever know our own first-person point of view, and everything else is
imagination, reasoning by analogy. The trouble is that philosophers on the
other side of this issue see Nagel as baptizing an intractable problem, rather
than solving. The only way to solve (or dissolve) this is to reconstrue what
we take "mind" and "knowledge" to be. This process of redefinition is what
Dennett and Rorty are involved in. This is what Dennett calls the "intentional
stance." You earlier called this useful, but incorrect, but that statement is
question-begging over the issue of what a mind is--you're beginning with a
different one than Dennett. By Dennett's standards, his is correct, just less
rooted in tradition (much like when Copernicus first suggested that the earth
revolves around the sun).
This is where you stopped, so I'll end with two selections from Rorty's PMN.
The first is a sentence from a footnote on Nagel I ran across while running
down this post. It's for people that like to call Rorty a degenerate
materialist:
"Physicalism ... is probably true (but uninteresting) if construed as
predicting every event in every space-time region under some description or
other, but obviously false if construed as the claim to say everything true."
(28 fn. 4)
This certainly doesn't end controversy, but everything hinges on "interest."
This next is a couple pages in which Rorty lays out his plan for the book, what
he's going to do.
----------
The "mind-body problem" which I have just "dissolved" [in the previous 12 or so
pages] concerns only a few of the notions which, emerging at different points
in the history of thought, have intertwined to produce a tangle of interrelated
problems. Questions like "How are intentional states of consciousness related
to neural states?" and "How are phenomenal properties such as painfulness
related to neurological properties?" are parts of what I shall call the
"problem of consciousness." This problem is distinct from such
pre-philosophical problems about personhood as "Am I really only this mass of
flesh and bone?" and from Greek philosophical problems about knowledge as "How
can we have certainty about the changing?" "How can knowledge be of the
unchanging?" and "How can the unchanging become internal to us by being known?"
Let us call the "problem of personhood" that of what more a human being is
than flesh. This problem has one form in the pre-philosophical craving for
immortality, and another in the Kantian and romantic assertion of human
dignity--but both cravings are quite distinct from problems about consciousness
and about knowledge. Both are ways of expressing our claim to be something
quite different from the beasts that perish. Let us call the "problem of
reason" that of how to spell out the Greek claim that the crucial difference
between man and beasts is that we can _know_--that we can know not merely
singular facts but universal truths, numbers, essences, the eternal. This
problem takes different forms in Aristotle's hylomorphic account of knowing,
Spinoza's rationalist account, and Kant's transcendental account. But these
issues are distinct both from those about the interrelations between two sorts
of things (one spatial and the other nonspatial) and from issues concerning
immortality and moral dignity. The problem of consciousness centers around the
brain, raw feels, and bodily motion. The problem of reason centers around the
topics of knowledge, language, and intelligence--all our "higher powers." The
problem of personhood centers around attributions of freedom and of moral
responsibility.
In order to sort out some of the relations among these three problems, I shall
offer a list of ways of isolating beings which have minds in contrast to the
"merely physical"--"the body," "matter," the central nervous system, "nature"
or "the subject matter of the positive sciences." Here are some, though hardly
all, of the features which philosophers have, at one time or another, taken as
marks of the mental:
1. ability to know itself incorrigibly ("privileged access")
2. ability to exist separately from the body
3. non-spatiality (having a nonspatial part or "element")
4. ability to grasp universals
5. ability to sustain relations to the inexistent ("intentionality")
6. ability to use language
7. ability to act freely
8. ability to form part of our social group, to be "one of us"
9. inability to be identified with any object "in the world"
This is a long list, and it could easily be lengthened. But it is important to
go through these various suggestions about what it is to have a mind, for each
of them has helped philosophers to insist on an unbridgeable dualism between
mind and body. Philosophers have constantly seized upon some distinctive
feature of human life in order to give our intuition of our uniqueness a "firm
philosophical basis." Because these firm bases are so varied, naturalisms and
materialisms, when not shrugged off as hopeless attempts to jump a vast
ontological (or epistemology, or linguistic) gulf, are often treated as
trivially true but pointless. They are pointless, it is explained, because our
uniqueness has nothing whatever to do with whichever abyss the naturalist has
laboriously filled in, but everything to do with some other abyss which has all
the while been gaping just behind his back. In particular, the point is often
made that even if we settled all questions about the relation between pains and
neurons, and similar questions arising out of incorrigibility--(1) above--we
should still have dealt, at best, only with (2) and (3) among the other marks
of the mental. We should still have left everything relevant to reason
(notably [4], [5], and [6]) and everything relevant to personhood (notably [7],
[8], and [9]) as obscure as ever.
I think that this point is quite right, and further, that if it had been
appreciated earlier the problem of consciousness would not have loomed so large
as it has in recent philosophy. In the sense of having pains as well as
neurons, we are on a par with many if not all of the brutes, whereas we
presumably share neither reason nor personhood with them. It is only if we
assume that possession of _any_ non-physical inner state is somehow, via (3),
connected with (4) or (5) that we will think that light shed upon raw feels
would reflect off onto representational mental states, and thereby illuminate
our capacity to mirror the world around us. Again, only the assumption that
life itself (even that of the fetus, the brain-damaged human, the bat, or the
caterpillar) has the special sanctity akin to personhood would make us think
that understanding raw feels might help us to understand our moral
responsibilities. Both assumptions are, however, often made. Understanding
why they are made requires an understanding of intellectual history rather than
an understanding of the meanings of the relevant terms, or an analysis of the
concepts they signify. By sketching a little of the history of discussions of
the mind, I hope to show that the problem of reason cannot be stated without a
return to epistemological views which non one really wishes to resurrect.
Further, I want to supply some ground for a suggestion which I shall develop
later: that the problem of personhood is not a "problem" but a description of
the human condition, that it is not a matter for philosophical "solution" but a
misleading way of expostulating on the irrelevance of traditional philosophy to
the rest of culture.
----------
Pages 34 to 37.
Matt
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