tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-106669012024-03-12T23:05:42.108-04:00DuckRabbitPhilosophy, culture, philosophy of culture, and other stuff as neededDuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.comBlogger354125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-23512921151281890992012-05-26T21:50:00.000-04:002012-05-26T21:50:16.215-04:00Life before Amazon and GoogleSo Daniel <a href="http://sohdan.blogspot.com/2012/05/twenty-five-years-of-philosophy.html" target="_blank">recommends</a> the new Eckart Förster book, which I ordered, and now here it is. Looks good, and in fact I may already report an interesting bit from it. Check this out (p. 13):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The <i>Critique</i> appeared in 1781 in an edition of one thousand copies and went out of print within just a few years. [...] [I]t is important to remember that (with the exception of Jacobi) the later thinkers who followed upon Kant [...] were only familiar with either the second or even later editions of the <i>Critique</i>. The original edition did not again become available until 1838 when the first complete edition of Kant's works was published—seven years after Hegel's death! Today's practice of printing the first and second edition on facing pages or at least in the same volume was unknown in those days. Neither Fichte nor Schelling nor Hegel was familiar with the first edition of the <i>Critique</i>, and we must remain open to the possibility that this fact might have had consequences for the manner and extent to which they understood themselves to be engaged in a Kantian project.</blockquote>
Wow, I totally did not know that. Of course you might think, well, the B-edition is Kant's considered view, so what does it matter? But even the A-deduction alone is hugely informative about what Kant thought he was doing (and I always liked the threefold synthesis anyway). And Förster has promised to say more about this later, so I look forward to that.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-74346350717111775192012-05-19T20:03:00.000-04:002012-05-19T20:03:18.250-04:00Dann ist die Welt so trübeRIP Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.<br />
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When I was in high school I was a big fan, and it was a huge thrill to see him at Lincoln Center in an all-Schubert program (not <i>Winterreise</i>, but some good stuff nonetheless). I never warmed to him as an opera singer for some reason. You would have thought that his wonderfully lyrical singing, which worked so well for lieder, would be ideal for roles like Rodrigo (in <i>Don Carlo</i>) and Iago, and he's recorded both, but I found the very familiarity of his voice distracting there. He also sang the <i>Rheingold</i> Wotan, I think, but I never heard that (and again the very idea seems weird). My favorite record of his at that time was not Schubert but Mahler, a duo record with Leonard Bernstein on piano. I think it had the <i>Kindertotenlieder</i> on one side but I only ever listened to the other, which had (the first four of) the sublime <i>Rückert-Lieder</i>, of which "Ich atmet' einen linden Duft" is the most beautiful song ever, full stop.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-14287628770550591862012-04-24T10:22:00.000-04:002012-04-24T10:24:01.050-04:00Philosophers' Carnival #141<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I used to link to these Carnivals all the time, but it's been a while. <a href="http://www.noahgreenstein.com/wordpress/2012/04/23/philosophy-carnival-141/" target="_blank">This one</a> has not one but two of my recent posts, the one on rules (just below, so I won't link), and <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/04/what-is-philosophy-again.html" target="_blank">my latest column</a> at 3 Quarks Daily, which I think makes an interesting counterpoint, as it puts the Hackensteinian version of the "linguistic turn" in a wider context.<br />
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Noah, the blog's proprietor, is less than impressed by the familiar DR logo, and points us to one he thinks more modern and stylish. Isn't it nice? What do you think? I think I'll keep the old one though, as I am old school in these matters.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-60775434567990563152012-04-04T15:08:00.004-04:002012-04-04T15:40:20.156-04:00Are semantic rules true or false?Over at Daniel's place the other day there was <a href="http://sohdan.blogspot.com/2012/02/endogenous-given-why-i-am-not-satisfied.html">an interesting discussion</a> about McDowell's views of what he calls the "endogenous given." I'm not going to talk about McDowell here though; instead I want to back up and look at the fault lines in the ensuing discussion. Basically I see a conflict between two readings of, or ways to follow, Wittgenstein. I'll say more about that later, but in this post let me jump right into the way it came up in the thread. The hope is not so much (yet, if ever) to show that my team is <span style="font-style:italic;">right</span>, whatever that may turn out to mean, as to see where the differences lie (which may in fact turn out to be all we want to do). That itself says something about my team, or at least about me; but let's press on.<br /><br />Whether or not it amounts to a theory of truth or even a definition of "truth", my team customarily refers to the disquotational schema "'[P]' is true iff [P]" (where "[" and "]" are Quinean corner brackets; you know the drill) as a <span style="font-style:italic;">platitude</span> (to wit, the "disquotational platitude", hereinafter DP) – <span style="font-style:italic;">i.e.</span>, something whose <span style="font-style:italic;">truth</span> is not in dispute.<br /><br />For example, I am inclined to say that this English sentence <blockquote>(1) This is red.</blockquote>is true iff the object indicated is indeed red. Note that this does not solve our problem (below, concerning the status of (1) as an empirical statement or a semantic rule); but nobody said it would. All the schema does is disquote. After that you're on your own. If after being dumped into the object language we still don't know what to say about the reason we brought it up, that's not (1)'s fault, nor that of the schema. This may become clearer as we continue.<br /><br />In particular, it seems to me not to matter to the truth value of (1) if it was meant as an ostensive definition of "red" rather than "just" an empirical observation about the thing indicated. If the thing isn't red then how can it function as part of an ostensive definition of "red"? And if it's red then (1) is true. When you ask me to bring you a red thing, the thing pointed to in (1) is not exempt simply because it's <span style="font-style:italic;">paradigmatic</span> of redness. So it's red, and (1) is true, like I said.<br /><br />Compare the meter stick. Sometimes people arguing in what they take to be a Wittgensteinian spirit deny that the meter stick is a meter long. As I recall, this is because (or at least <span style="font-style:italic;">if</span>) to be "a meter long" just means that it is the same length as the meter stick, and what <span style="font-style:italic;">that</span> means (on this view) is that if you hold it up to the meter stick they match; and of course you can't hold the meter stick itself up to the meter stick, so the idea that it is itself a meter long collapses into incoherence, making "the meter stick is a meter long" nonsensical, or at least <span style="font-style:italic;">sinnlos</span>, and thus neither true nor false.<br /><br />I get the point of saying this, which I take to be a healthy resistance to platonistic reification of things like "lengths"; but I don't think taking this line is worth it. Of course the meter stick is a meter long; that's why I can use it to measure off meter-long pieces of cloth (or wood, to make more meter sticks). There are better ways of resisting platonism than by this sort of semantic sleight-of-hand.<br /><br />Note the form of that statement. Naturally most critics of this "Wittgensteinian" position are <span style="font-style:italic;">defenders</span> of platonism in the relevant sense. If I just reject it in favor of "common sense" I look like one of these critics, or at best depriving our side of a potent weapon. Instead I say that weapon isn't worth it: it costs too much and we have better ones anyway. I'm still just as much a critic of platonism, and a follower of Wittgenstein in this respect, as anyone else.<br /><br />Still, we need to account for the seeming imperviousness to empirical refutation of definitional statements; and that something is red is in most cases both contingent and empirically revisable, as are most uses of (1). This is what motivates the idea that (1) <span style="font-style:italic;">considered as a definition</span> is neither true nor false, but instead a <span style="font-style:italic;">semantic rule</span> for use of "red": <span style="font-style:italic;">revisable</span>, if I want to change the way the "game" is played; but not <span style="font-style:italic;">empirically falsifiable</span> – and thus, on this view, strictly nonsensical as an <span style="font-style:italic;">assertion of fact</span>.<br /><br />This is what I get from N.N.'s remarks on the Soh-Dan thread. The idea is also batted about by Wittgenstein in <span style="font-style:italic;">On Certainty</span>: again, the idea is that such statements are neither true nor false, truth-values being reserved for statements which are, as we might say, <span style="font-style:italic;">moves in the game</span> rather than rules setting out how the game (of indicating how things are by making true statements about them) is supposed to be played. But as I said, (1) doesn't seem to work for this. Let's try another sentence: <blockquote>2) This color is red.</blockquote>I don't think this helps any. Its only function, as opposed to (1), would be to make clear that it is the <span style="font-style:italic;">color</span> of the indicated object that you are calling "red", but it most likely already is – "red" is after all a common English color-word – and in our context it certainly is (unless you're pointing to a photograph of Red Auerbach, or indicating which sections of "The Communist Manifesto" are objectionable to your free-market sensibilites, or something). How about this one?<blockquote>3) This color is called "red."</blockquote>This is the same as (2). Here the speaker is emphasizing the linguistic aspect of his statement, which of course you're always allowed to do; but it's still true if the thing is indeed red (that is, the color which English speakers call "red") and not otherwise, just like (1). Finally, in an effort to wrest control of the matter, we could try:<blockquote>4) I will call this color "red."<br /></blockquote>After trying to retreat from empirical statement (about the object and its color) to grammatical rule with (1) - (3), we finally come to a first-person statement – a statement not about the object, or even its color, but about me and my (subsequent) verbal behavior. This is what Daniel and N.N. go back and forth about on the thread.<br /><br />One worry about this seems to be that if (4) is <span style="font-style:italic;">simply</span> predictive of my future behavior, it doesn't mean what we want it to mean (this is N.N.'s point in certain comments). I myself wonder about the force of that italicized adverb.<br /><br />Another reading can be paraphrased as "I intend to call this color 'red'". According to the DP, this is true iff you do indeed intend to call that color 'red'. (Again, the DP is remorselessly unhelpful here; but that's no reason to reject it as <span style="font-style:italic;">false</span>. Instead, again, we just need to recognize that you get out what you put in, semantically speaking.) But then we get into the performative aspects of <span style="font-style:italic;">stating</span> that you <span style="font-style:italic;">intend</span> to do something, and what effect that has on the truth value of (4) – see esp. Daniel's remarks about Roedl <a href="http://sohdan.blogspot.com/2012/02/endogenous-given-why-i-am-not-satisfied.html">there</a>.<br /><br />In any case, the trick here, for N.N. and his Hackensteinian friends, is to try to pack into the statement itself as an <span style="font-style:italic;">interpretation accomplie</span> the idea that it is asserting a grammatical rule rather than making an empirical claim, and thus to indicate that responses of "no it isn't" will be met by "what do you mean, it isn't? I'm telling you how to use the word."<br /><br />That's what leads us, finally, to N.N.'s example (replacing similar statements about bachelors, which he takes to be too baggage-laden for our purposes):<blockquote>5) A <span style="font-style:italic;">blork</span> is a purple flower.</blockquote>or<blockquote>6) A blork is <span style="font-style:italic;">by definition</span> a purple flower.</blockquote>Chew on that for now; I'll come back to talk about blorks later on.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-24278654145273562732012-04-01T15:54:00.001-04:002012-04-01T15:57:55.324-04:00This is an April Fool postApril Fool! (Discuss.)Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-73756272629980261032012-02-05T20:23:00.003-05:002012-02-05T20:30:01.269-05:00Cousin Victor [not really] fills us inVictor Mair at <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3747">Language Log</a>:<blockquote>Before I went to my ancestral village of Pfaffenhofen, Austria in 1967, I had always assumed that "Mair" was an Anglicization of "Maier" or some other spelling of the German surname (e.g., Meyer, Meier, Mayer, Maier, Mier, Meir). Indeed, many people used to ask me if I were related to Lucy Mair, the British anthropologist, but I knew that could not be so because her name was of Scots or English origin, while mine was of German derivation. It is interesting that I am listed in Wikipedia as being a person with the surname Mair in a Scots context, though I'm sure that it won't be long after this post goes up that the Wikipedia editors shift me to the much smaller group of people named Mair in a German context. In any event, when I went to Pfaffenhofen, I discovered that there were many individuals whose surname in the church record books and on tombstones was given as "Mair", and in the Innsbruck phonebook there were scores of people surnamed "Mair". Even more surprising to me was that it was not uncommon for families to change their name from "Maier" (or some other spelling) to "Mair" and vice versa, depending upon fashion or personal preference.<br /><br />For those who might be curious, the German surname "Mair" derives from Middle High German <span style="font-style:italic;">meiger</span>, meaning "higher or superior", often used for stewards of landholders or great farmers or leaseholders; today a Meier is generally a dairy farmer. Meier and Meyer are used more often in Northern Germany, while Maier and Mayer are found more frequently in Southern Germany.</blockquote>How about that. I had often wondered where our family name came from. But why would you change your name from Maier to Mair when the former is so clearly superior [heh heh] in every way? I mean, really.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-4744391539179695342011-12-04T20:25:00.002-05:002011-12-04T20:35:58.656-05:00Hear, hearBrian Leiter likes to pour scorn on the NY Times's philosophy blog <span style="font-style:italic;">The Stone</span> (he really doesn't like Simon Critchley), but <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/art-and-the-limits-of-neuroscience/">this post by Alva Noë</a> is absolutely spot on. I can hardly decide which choice bits to put here in order to incite you to go over there and, as they say, read the whole thing. Let's try this one, which sounds very much like what I always say when this issue comes up (so naturally I like it):<blockquote>The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. <i>You are your brain.</i> Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that we <span style="font-style:italic;">are</span> that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.<br /><br /> What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is <i>people</i>, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.<br /><br /> We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, <i>among other things</i>). Importantly, to break with the Cartesian dogmas of contemporary neuroscience would not be to cave in and give up on a commitment to understanding ourselves as natural. It would be rather to rethink what a biologically adequate conception of our nature would be.</blockquote>Well, that would be "what I always say" if I were better at saying it than I actually am. You go, Professor Noë! Woo hoo! There's more, too, so ... you know what to do.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-12787773831188583602011-11-09T20:20:00.002-05:002011-11-09T20:23:54.128-05:00Wait, what about pumpernickel?I have just discovered that on February 16, 1962, one C. M. Mullen of G. & C. Merriam Company wrote a letter to my maternal grandfather, informing him that:<blockquote> We are glad to reply to your letter of February 12 in regard to the word <u>bagel</u>. This word has been entered in the Addenda Section of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, for the last few years. It is now entered in its regular alphabetical place in our recently published Webster's Third New International Dictionary, the definition reading as follows:<blockquote>a hard roll shaped like a doughnut that is made of raised dough and cooked by simmering in water and than baked to give it a glazed browned exterior over a firm white interior</blockquote></blockquote>Okay then. Carry on.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-58991628580666344712011-09-19T22:13:00.001-04:002011-09-19T22:16:31.594-04:00Click clickI clicked over today to an interview with Brian Leiter in a post on <a href="http://thebrowser.com/interviews/brian-leiter-on-nietzsche">The Browser</a> today, and in the "Related Articles" sidebar there I noticed a link to my own recent 3QD post on Nietzsche's perspectivism (<a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/09/what-kind-of-perspectivist-is-nietzsche.html">here</a>), where it is described as "thought-provoking." How about that. You may also reach that same post by going over to the latest <a href="http://philosophyandpsychology.com/?p=1845">Philosophers' Carnival</a> at Minds and Brains. Whichever way you get there is fine with me. (That is, there's no one <i>single, correct</i> way ... never mind.)<br /><br />In other news, my post on Kant squeaked into the <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/09/3qd-philosophy-prize-2011-finalists.html">final round</a> of 3QD's 2011 philosophy competition as a wild card (like the Red Sox will if they don't choke). So Patricia Churchland will become acquainted with my views on Kant. I repeat: how about that.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-9012554089316949252011-09-09T00:22:00.002-04:002011-09-09T00:25:40.134-04:003QD philosophy prizeThe <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/09/3qd-philosophy-prize-2011-voting-round-is-now-open.html">voting round</a> of the 3 Quarks Daily philosophy prize for 2011 is now open. I've got a post there, but don't just go there and vote for it! Take a look at the others too. (<i>Then</i> vote for it.) Deadline: Sunday night.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-28437888306633321522011-08-24T23:17:00.004-04:002011-08-24T23:27:17.206-04:00Bored with the Beguine?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AsT0fpTjoiM/TlXAhgkmdMI/AAAAAAAAAJE/qmApInAtni8/s1600/220px-Roxy_Music_-_For_Your_Pleasure_%2528Polydor_1973_LP%2529.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px; height: 220px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AsT0fpTjoiM/TlXAhgkmdMI/AAAAAAAAAJE/qmApInAtni8/s320/220px-Roxy_Music_-_For_Your_Pleasure_%2528Polydor_1973_LP%2529.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644629389890450626" /></a>I don't usually post things like this, but I want to get back into the habit of posting, and you must admit I have been pretty restrained with the "I watered my plants today" sort of blogging. However, I feel obliged to report that for the past few days the Roxy Music song "Do the Strand" has taken up residence in my skull and will not leave for greener pastures no matter what. Even now I hear therein the voice of Bryan Ferry, the thinking man's Freddie Mercury (did someone already say that, or did I just make it up?). I have no idea why this is, as I have not heard that song in, well, years probably. Such is life.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-39832956104541275132011-06-30T22:18:00.003-04:002011-06-30T22:30:19.223-04:00Epistemic luck (intro)When I was about 10 years old, I had a philosophical discussion – or disagreement anyway, as we did not get very much farther than simply stating our positions (and then again, more firmly) – concerning the definition of knowledge. My interlocutor claimed that he could <i>know</i> that 2 + 2 = 5, even though that statement is false. I replied, that no, you can't <i>know</i> something unless it's <i>true</i>. You may <i>believe</i> that 2 + 2 = 5, but that's not enough: you can't <i>know</i> it (even though, in stating your belief, that may indeed be what you'll <i>say</i>), because <i>knowledge</i> must be <i>true</i>.<br /><br />Contemporary philosophical consensus on the subject comes down on the side of my youthful self: knowledge must be <i>belief</i> which is <i>true</i> (so there, D___ O_____!). However, it is also generally accepted that a third condition is also required. And by "generally accepted" I mean "virtually universally simply assumed, on page 3 of just about every Epistemology 101 textbook, where no dissent is ever even imagined, let alone conceded actually to exist, let alone taken seriously." And yet not only are there more than one of us dissenters (for so I am), but we do so in various ways for various reasons. Analytic epistemology can be as dreary a subject as there is in philosophy, but as it turns out this is really, <i>really</i> important to get clear on, for reasons I hope to make clear as we continue.<br /><br />The proximate stimulus for this current effort was a post (now two actually) on the <i>New York Times</i>'s online philosophy blog <i>The Stone</i>. Distinguished Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/epistemology-and-the-end-of-the-world/">there</a> deigns to enlighten the great unwashed about the importance of justifying one's beliefs, as opposed, apparently, to believing any old tosh that enters one's head:<blockquote>Apart from its entertainment value, Harold Camping’s ill-advised prediction of the rapture last month attracted me as a philosopher for its epistemological interest. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, its nature, scope and limits. Camping claimed to know, with certainty and precision, that on May 21, 2011, a series of huge earthquakes would devastate the Earth and be followed by the taking up (rapture) of the saved into heaven. <b>No sensible person could have thought that he knew this. Knowledge requires justification; that is, some rationally persuasive account of why we know what we claim to know</b>. Camping’s confused efforts at Biblical interpretation provided no justification for his prediction. <b>Even if, by some astonishing fluke, he had turned out to be right, he still would not have <i>known</i> the rapture was coming.</b> [my bold]</blockquote>True belief, in other words, is not enough for knowledge: we need <i>justified</i> true belief (JTB).<br /><br />I can already feel my eyelids drooping, so let me say this just the once and I'll be done with it. Since my dissertation (which went into it at some length, to little avail) I have resisted writing about this stuff, because to do so requires what seems to be the sort of academic nitpicking and intuition-mongering that makes so much contemporary philosophy look pointless and arcane. But if we get this right the payoff could be immense (for some of us at least, and part of my point is that you may not yet know who you are), so I hope I can count on the reader's patience as we wade together through the bog.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iIbfig_F-ZE/Tg0uq048rtI/AAAAAAAAAI8/QfMK1MPwxyQ/s1600/pritchard.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 210px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iIbfig_F-ZE/Tg0uq048rtI/AAAAAAAAAI8/QfMK1MPwxyQ/s320/pritchard.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5624202822942502610" /></a>A relative newcomer to the current epistemological scene, Duncan Pritchard already has a zillion papers (available on his <a href="http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/people/full-academic/duncan-pritchard.html">website</a>) and <a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199229789.do">an important book</a> on the subject. As he explains on p. 4 of <i>Epistemic Luck</i>, the idea that true belief does not suffice for knowledge is very widely held indeed, to the point of invisibility:<blockquote>[A]s befitting its status as a universal intuition—what these days we philosophers tendentiously call a 'platitude'—one finds this thesis both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. That is, whilst this line of thinking is clearly being presupposed in much of contemporary epistemological thought, the thesis itself is rarely drawn up to the surface of discussion, and even then it is left to stand as it is: a pure platitudinous intuition that is in need of no further explication.</blockquote>As an example Pritchard points us to the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/">SEP article on knowledge</a> by Matthias Steup, who faithfully reflects the consensus of the discipline with only a gesture in the direction of argument:<blockquote>Why is condition (iii) [i.e., the justification condition on knowledge] necessary? Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief that is true just because of luck does not qualify as knowledge. Beliefs that are lacking justification are false more often than not. However, on occasion, such beliefs happen to be true. Suppose William takes a medication that has the following side effect: it causes him to be overcome with irrational fears. One of his fears is that he has cancer. This fear is so powerful that he starts believing it. Suppose further that, by sheer coincidence, he does have cancer. So his belief is true. Clearly, though, his belief does not amount to knowledge. But why not? Most epistemologists would agree that William does not know because his belief's truth is due to luck (bad luck, in this case). Let us refer to a belief's turning out to be true because of mere luck as <i>epistemic luck</i>. <b>It is uncontroversial that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck.</b> [again, my bold]</blockquote>Steup continues, naturally enough, given the purpose of mentioning it at all, to discuss the effectiveness of the justification condition for its purpose, that of ruling out lucky guesses ("mere" true beliefs) as cases of knowledge, which leads to the next section of the Gettier problem.<br /><br />Now Steup does seem to give an argument here, with his cancer example. But when we look at it we see that there is no argument at all. Even though for some unknown reason only "most epistemologists" would agree here (who dissents and why need not concern us here, as we are busy men), our platitude is "clearly" true, and, again, "uncontroversial" for no actually stated reason. I should add that given the actual state of the discussion at this point Steup is entirely justified [!] in telling the story this way for this audience. No reason stretching out an already long SEP article with tracking down every last objection and quashing it.<br /><br />Okay, let me just close for today with this last quote. Even after a couple of objections to his JTB account in the comments, which we will discuss later on, Gutting came back in <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/argument-truth-and-the-social-side-of-reasoning/">his most recent piece</a> with this:<blockquote>Plato long ago pointed out [aside: I love that rhetorical tic! If he <i>pointed it out</i>, it must be <i>true</i> – so I need not argue for it, right?] that it is not enough just to believe what is true. Suppose [oh good, another example] I believe that there are an odd number of galaxies in the universe and in fact there are. Still, unless I have adequate support for this belief, I cannot be said to <i>know</i> it. It's just an unsupported opinion. Knowing the truth requires not just true belief but also justification for the belief.</blockquote>Again, no argument at all, just an example. It's just obvious!<br /><br />All right, so I've established that the consensus view is the consensus view. Next time I'll start distinguishing the various ways one might object to this "universal consensus."Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-85243298312795040712011-02-09T17:54:00.003-05:002011-02-09T18:04:50.831-05:00The past is never dead; it's not even pastI recently had occasion to dine at an establishment with which most people are at least familiar, as it is a fairly large chain. I speak of Applebee's. The food was fine; I am not a connoisseur of steak, but the Asiago Peppercorn [sirloin] steak was very tasty, and small enough to be a) eaten whole at one sitting, and b) probably accurately placed on the 550 Calories menu (served with veggies).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TVMbcu3X_2I/AAAAAAAAAIw/zXZnNyCvZE4/s1600/ZZ_Top_-_Eliminator.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TVMbcu3X_2I/AAAAAAAAAIw/zXZnNyCvZE4/s200/ZZ_Top_-_Eliminator.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571827344418013026" /></a>However, it is not the food that made the experience so memorable. It was earlier in the evening (around 6 PM) than most suburbanites dine, so the place was relatively empty, but even so (or perhaps because of this) the music was fairly loud. I went to high school in the 1970s, and as far as this restaurant was concerned, it seems that we have never left. Here, to the best of my memory, is the soundtrack to the meal for your imaginative perusal.<br /><br />We arrived during Jimmy Page's extended guitar break in Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker", which continued, as is the custom, into "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)", the next track on <i>Led Zeppelin II</i>. I am leaving a track or two out, including a blues song which might have been Muddy Waters and an album rock track (clearly from that same era) which I did not recognize, but the time matches up about right so this must be about it. Continuing after Zeppelin:<br /><br />J. Geils Band - Love Stinks<br />Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon<br />Heart - Barracuda<br />Queen - Somebody to Love<br />Bob Seger - Hollywood Nights<br />ZZ Top - Gimme All Your Lovin' [hey, this one's from 1983!]<br />Tom Petty - The Waiting [1981]<br />The Cars - Bye Bye Love<br />The Beatles - Something<br />The Eagles - Hotel California [we left during Joe Walsh's guitar solo, which I even paused at the door to listen to]<br /><br />While I never listen to this stuff voluntarily (although I do own <i>Eliminator</i>, from which I would have played "Got Me Under Pressure" or "I Need You Tonight"), I enjoyed this set perfectly well (except for Bob Seger, whom I can do without). In a weird time-capsule sort of way. And "Bye Bye Love" has been running through my head constantly since then. Still, I'm not going back there, Asiago Peppercorn steak or no.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-86467210712714460402011-02-08T22:20:00.002-05:002011-02-08T22:47:11.918-05:00Let's not read too much into thisAbbas just sent me this picture:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TVIICORPseI/AAAAAAAAAIo/VCaWZZSh6Ys/s1600/ci908.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TVIICORPseI/AAAAAAAAAIo/VCaWZZSh6Ys/s200/ci908.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571524523293913570" /></a><br />The title of his email was "Duckrabbit!", but when I looked at it, all I saw was a duck. I mean, it's a duck – it's got wings, it's swimming in water, the whole duck bit. But then I looked more closely at the head, trying to see it as the rabbit-looking-the-other-way which is the other aspect of the famously ambiguous drawing. I succeeded; but it turned out to be a particularly unpleasant instance of aspect-dawning, as that perception was accompanied by a sickening wave of, let's say, <i>Unheimlichkeit</i>, as perhaps expressed in the utterance "Yikes, that is one <b>seriously</b> deformed rabbit" (what with the wings and all).<br /><br />Then I looked at it a third time, and I noticed that indeed, it was picture of a duck onto which a rabbit head had been Photoshopped. (No doubt those who are more familiar with these creatures would have noticed that right away, but I rarely see either in the, um, flesh.) Now, having noticed the rabbit head as a rabbit head when looking to see the image as a rabbit, I now see the duck as well (and can hardly believe I failed to do so earlier) only as a seriously effed up specimen of its kind – I mean, look at that soft furry beak!<br /><br />So, a clever trick; but (to be way too literal about it) I think we lose something in the translation to photography. The duck part is clearly a duck and only a duck; and the rabbit part (once you see it!) is clearly a rabbit and not a duck. So in a way it's really not an ambiguous figure at all, just an impossible one – where the point of the duck-rabbit figure is that it really is a picture-duck, just as much as any other, and a picture-rabbit as well ... but not at the same time. And off to the philosophical races we go.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-66829020212842751732011-02-01T16:50:00.005-05:002011-02-01T17:19:52.914-05:00Baby stepsOkay, I said I was going to start 'er up again, but not surprisingly that is easier written than done. So let's start out small. I direct your attention to the Amazon widget, which I have restocked with more timely items than were in it previously. I'm up to page 587 or so of <i>Anna Karenina</i>, which means that after reading it for six weeks I am about a third of the way through. Right now (in Part Three) Anna's sister-in-law Darya Alexandrovna Oblonsky (aka Dolly) is talking with Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, a rejected suitor for the hand of Dolly's sister Kitty, at Dolly's summer house. I expect we'll get back to Anna within the next hundred pages or so. (I should mention that the direct link to Amazon provided by the widget is to an edition of the book different from that indicated by the icon, so beware.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiBYVKiY-I/AAAAAAAAAIM/5fPZZKcE0Zc/s1600/cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiBYVKiY-I/AAAAAAAAAIM/5fPZZKcE0Zc/s200/cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568843194241803234" /></a>I've already finished the other fictional work, <i>The Half-Made World</i>, which was pretty good but falls short of unconditional recommendation. It was recommended by a couple of people on a thread at Crooked Timber, where I have found they know their stuff, esp. when said stuff is science fiction-y; this book is an example of the subgenre known as "steampunk," if you know what that is. Without going into detail, I really like the set-up here, and the characters are great. I wasn't sure about the ending though, as it remains unclear whether the author is setting up a sequel or just allowing us to imagine for ourselves what happened next. Good stuff.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiA33DL41I/AAAAAAAAAIE/GwWOTkp-OCY/s1600/cover.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 127px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiA33DL41I/AAAAAAAAAIE/GwWOTkp-OCY/s200/cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568842636402090834" /></a>I've just started the Garry Hagberg book, which looks really good, if a bit intimidating in its thoroughness. The Cartesian subject/object dualism, which still pervades philosophy even after all this time, has two main aspects (duh). I say (duh), but in practice it seems very difficult to see them as related at all, let alone different aspects of the same thing. The Cartesian conception of objectivity is most directly manifested in doctrines of "metaphysical realism" in Putnam's sense (when arguing against it, that is, not when, Kerry-like, he was for it before he was against it). In such contexts we fight against it by trying to show how the Cartesian picture, in its seductive urging that we simply identify it with prephilosophical common sense ("of course there's a real world out there!"), forces incoherence upon us. I guess that's what we do in the other context too (where the bait is instead "of course my mental states are 'inner'!"), but the details end up making the two cases very different in practice. Anyway, in these former contexts we tend to spend all our time arguing about the possible senses in which the world is "real" or "independent" or "objective," and the Cartesian subject figures simply as the supposedly detached observer of the objective world however construed.<br /><br />However, we can't arrive at a stable position no matter what we say about objectivity, unless we also deal with the Cartesian subject itself (<i>qua</i> Cartesian). Here our target is the Cartesian "inner," as manifested for example in Nagelian qualephilia or more overtly dualistic doctrines in the philosophy of mind (Chalmers, G. Strawson, etc.). But of course in this case the main charge against "dualism" has been led by materialists and other naturalists concerned to make the world safe for empirical science (here, brain science and other sorts of empirical psychology, including but not limited to evolutionary psychology). So what we end up with is a lot of straightforward reductionism/eliminativism and its more discreet heirs, all concerned to emphasize (properly enough as far as it goes) the publicity and non-spookiness of "subjective" phenomena like mental states. However, in its often overt scientism this line tends to leave in place, or at the very least not replace, the very conception of objectivity which is the subjective correlate of their target. This leaves them open to counterattack, although rarely in those very terms.<br /><br />In any case these two anti-Cartesian projects have not really been brought into line with each other in a satisfactory way. Rorty and to a lesser extent Dennett (in his case you have to dig it out as he is not exactly forthcoming on the matter) have been onto this, but each takes some pretty important missteps by my lights. Davidson and Wittgenstein are more promising guides, even though – or possibly because – neither makes a big deal out of marrying the one criticism to the other, instead simply pursuing a more unified project from the beginning, and only subsequently allowing us to take this or that aspect of it for this or that purpose. (Or maybe we're just slow.)<br /><br />Hagberg sees himself as promoting a Wittgensteinian view of subjectivity, as manifested in discussions of autobiographical writing, the philosophy of same, autobiography as philosophy, etc. – where the very overlapping of these topics is meant to bring out the Wittgensteinian nature of each, which seems promising. I read an earlier book, <i>Art as Language</I>, in which he argues, along Wittgensteinian lines, that art is not a language, making one wonder if perhaps another title would have been better. This new one, <i>Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness</i>, looks to be written in the same style. I shouldn't complain (especially as I can do no better myself), but I have to say that this style – very, very carefully setting out the position and arguing very, very, carefully for its truth, or at least provisional plausibility, very, very carefully anticipating and defusing every. possible. objection. – makes me crazy. In some cases this is just what we want, but in Wittgensteinian contexts it really seems like one risks getting the words Just Right at the expense of messing the tune up big time. Alice Crary and Oskari Kuusela do it too, which is why I started their books with real anticipation but bogged down, like, right away. Like I said, though, I've just started the book so maybe I'm wrong.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiGpBjciLI/AAAAAAAAAIc/x0Zmb4a2PrQ/s1600/cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiGpBjciLI/AAAAAAAAAIc/x0Zmb4a2PrQ/s200/cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568848978593482930" /></a>One person who can't be said to do this is Cavell (but of course there are corresponding dangers to this approach too, as anyone who has tried to wade through Stephen Mulhall's books can tell you). His latest, which looks wild but which I have not yet begun, seems to be autobiographical, but only deals with the last few years, and only a particular line of thought/events within that time. I'll say more when and if I get to it (or not).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiENZY3zeI/AAAAAAAAAIU/Hr3ZY53m-QM/s1600/48009444.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/TUiENZY3zeI/AAAAAAAAAIU/Hr3ZY53m-QM/s200/48009444.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568846304931991010" /></a>Lastly we have another book on Wittgenstein, on a topic very close to this blog's heart: aspect perception (and indeed there the d/r is right on the cover, along with the kid from Jarman's <i>Wittgenstein</i>, which I just saw the other day). It's a collection, and one of the editors, William Day, was a very advanced grad student in my program when I was there. This meant of course that I rarely saw him, and in fact I didn't even meet him until several years in, at a conference. Nicest guy you'll ever meet, and very impressive – as articulate on these matters as your humble blogger is stammeringly incoherent. So I very much look forward to reading this.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-44691512821640499992011-01-03T13:30:00.002-05:002011-01-03T13:34:12.770-05:00A note from the managementMy goodness, I haven't been around since July?! Okay, right. Let me do a little dusting, and then let's see if we can't start the engine up.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-36282356015287425302010-07-17T11:51:00.002-04:002010-07-17T11:54:45.375-04:00Too true, alas<!-- Begin I Write Like Badge --><br /><div style="overflow:auto;border:2px solid #ddd;font:20px/1.2 Arial,sans-serif;width:380px;padding:5px; background:#F7F7F7; color:#555"><img src="http://s.iwl.me/w.png" style="float:right" width="120"><div style="padding:20px; border-bottom:1px solid #eee; text-shadow:#fff 0 1px"> I write like<br><a href="http://iwl.me/w/d7939cdb" style="font-size:30px;color:#698B22;text-decoration:none">David Foster Wallace</a></div><p style="font-size:11px; text-align:center; color:#888"><em>I Write Like</em> by Mémoires, <a href="http://www.codingrobots.com/memoires/" style="color:#888">Mac journal software</a>. <a href="http://iwl.me" style="color:#333; background:#FFFFE0"><b>Analyze your writing!</b></a></p></div><br /><!-- End I Write Like Badge -->Not the best model for philosophical writing, to be sure, although I do like him; and he was a philosophy major himself. But there it is.<br /><br />HT: it's all over the place by nowDuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-30560258647098856202010-03-25T22:55:00.003-04:002010-03-25T23:04:13.197-04:00In lieu of a widget<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/S6wkCtF_kfI/AAAAAAAAAHw/lj13xTmudMQ/s1600/klee.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/S6wkCtF_kfI/AAAAAAAAAHw/lj13xTmudMQ/s200/klee.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452772877721899506" /></a>... let me just say that I have decided to post some of my ambient mixes on a new streaming audio site, Mixcloud (<a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/duckrabbit/">link</a>). I had held back because some such podcasting seems kind of shady and/or downright illegal. But this site assures us (in the <a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/faq/#link16">FAQ</a>) that all is taken care of and the artists will be paid. In that case, if ambient/drone is your thing, then go to it! While you're there, check out <a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/lowlight/">this guy</a> and <a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/ambientblog/">this guy</a>.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-50408523853645331082009-12-04T00:09:00.004-05:002009-12-04T00:17:32.085-05:00Our hero contemplates the prospect of attaining the sublime and funky love that he craves<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/Sxian5-FS3I/AAAAAAAAAHo/AQE_EFAn4a4/s1600-h/MB.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/Sxian5-FS3I/AAAAAAAAAHo/AQE_EFAn4a4/s320/MB.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5411244962652441458" /></a><br />Michael Bérubé in a pensive moment.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-73574555878595373832009-09-05T21:45:00.003-04:002009-09-05T21:59:54.678-04:00Why Davidson is not Humpty DumptyI promised in the comments to the other post to say something about Davidson's argument in "Nice Derangement," which is of course the <i>Ursprung</i> of all this talk about rejecting the idea of "linguistic norms." (In the context of that discussion everybody is clear on this, except possibly me, but let me just tie up that loose end.) Unlike Bilgrami, Davidson does not direct his argument against Kripke and Burge in particular (and McDowell's somewhat differently focused criticism of same). Instead Davidson simply argues that we should not base our conception of language use, and thus of meaning, on the concept of <i>convention</i>, i.e., as manifested in linguistic rules which <i>pre-exist and thereby determine</i> the meanings of particular utterances on particular occasions, as if they were, in Davidson's dismissive terms, "portable interpreting machines."<br /><br />Instead, the fundamental idea is that language is used above all to <i>communicate</i> (i.e. rather than to <i>denote</i> or <i>represent</i>, which it does in only a derivative manner). Similar ideas are already present in Davidson (q.v. "Reality Without Reference," and "Communication and Convention," in <i>Inquiries</i>), but here he spells out the implications more provocatively. Indeed, in asserting a primary role for the intentions of the speaker in determining meaning, he provokes suspicions of "internalism" and downright semantic nihilism.<br /><br />The specific thesis he rejects is that "[t]he systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character." Okay, that's pretty much what I said above. But later on, he elaborates: "[i]n principle communication does not demand that any two people speak the same language. What must be shared is the interpreter's and the speaker's understanding of the speaker's words." [438] Now there are some constraints on this sharing, some of which involve what can count as a possible communicative intention of the speaker in the given situation (here leaning on Grice's analysis of same); and it is these constraints which separate Davidson's account from nihilism and/or internalism.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SqMVL4Ky8DI/AAAAAAAAAHg/X-Et638PZnQ/s1600-h/Humpty_Dumpty_Tenniel.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 171px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SqMVL4Ky8DI/AAAAAAAAAHg/X-Et638PZnQ/s200/Humpty_Dumpty_Tenniel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378165673810915378" /></a>Here Davidson points to Keith Donellan's previous (albeit somewhat differently focused – Davidson explains but I will skip that part) discussion of similar matters. Alfred MacKay had accused Donellan of Humpty Dumptyism ("When *I* use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean"), and in reply, Donellan "explains that intentions are connected with explanations and that you cannot intend to accomplish something by a certain means unless you believe or expect that the means will, or at least could, lead to the desired outcome. A speaker cannot, therefore, intend to mean something by what he says unless he believes his audience will interpret his words as he intends (the Gricean circle)." As quoted by Davidson, Donellan says:<blockquote>If I were to end this reply to MacKay with the sentence 'There's glory for you' I would be guilty of arrogance and, no doubt, of overestimating the strength of what I have said, but given the background I do not think I could be accused of saying something unintelligible. I would be understood, and would I not have meant by 'glory' 'a nice knockdown argument'?</blockquote>Davidson approves of this reply (and then explains a disagreement I have here elided). Okay, let me just quote the money paragraphs and then I'll stop.<blockquote>Humpty Dumpty is out of it. He cannot mean what he says because he knows that 'There's glory for you' cannot be interpreted by Alice as meaning 'There's a nice knockdown argument for you.' We know he knows this because Alice says 'I don't know what you mean by "glory"', and Humpty Dumpty retorts, 'Of course you don't – til I tell you.' It is Mrs Malaprop and Donellan who interest me; Mrs Malaprop because she gets away with it without even trying or knowing, and Donellan because he gets away with it on purpose.<br /><br />Here is what I mean by 'getting away with it': the interpreter comes to the occasion of utterance armed with a theory that tells him (or so he believes) what an arbitrary utterance of the speaker means. The speaker then says something with the intention that it will be interpreted in a certain way, and the expectation that it will be so interpreted. In fact this way is not provided for by the interpreter's theory. But the speaker is nevertheless understood; the interpreter adjusts his theory so that it yields the speaker's intended interpretation. The speaker has 'gotten away with it.' The speaker may or may not (Donellan, Mrs Malaprop) know that he has got away with anything; the interpreter may or may not know that the speaker intended to get away with anything. What is common to the cases is that the speaker expects to be, and is, interpreted as the speaker intended although the interpreter did not have a correct theory in advance. [440]</blockquote>One more thing. I think that what this means is that when Wittgenstein asks us to consider whether I can say "bububu" and mean "if it does not rain I will go for a walk," the answer is yes, I can; but only after what he elsewhere calls "stagesetting." Before that, not so much (and certainly not by a Humpty Dumpty-like act of, say, inner ostention).Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-45789124565679367172009-09-03T22:41:00.003-04:002009-09-03T23:01:44.309-04:00Bilgrami's critique of the Platonistic urge (or: why reject the very idea of semantic normativity?)The previous post was a bit of a bear, wasn't it. (By the way, if you liked it, you may vote for it <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/3qd-philosophy-prize-voting-round-open.html">here</a> - once they work out the bugs, that is.) Let's back up a bit, and see if we can't get clearer on the various players. The dialectic here is quite complicated, with strange bedfellows all over the place, and a number of distinct yet overlapping positions on the issue(s). (When we get back to vagueness, we'll see that there too the teams have a somewhat unusual alignment, which is what provoked Marinus's remarks about Wittgenstein in the LL post.)<br /><br />Why would anyone deny that there were linguistic norms? If there were no such norms, it is easy to assume, there would be no constraint on meaning. An agent could mean anything by anything, simply by intending to do so (that is, that whatever "norms" constrained his meanings – if we still want to call them "norms" at all – are merely "internal"). But maybe this is correct. This position is called "internalism" or "individualism," and its Cartesian flavor is undeniable, thus attracting criticism from all across the philosophical spectrum (including from closet or residual Cartesians themselves). Rejecting internalism seems to require that there be external linguistic norms, and thus that I can make errors in meaning as determined by others.<br /><br />But what is it to make an "error in meaning"? On one view, <i>whenever</i> I refer to an ocelot as a lynx, I make an error in <i>judgment</i> (i.e. get the world wrong/say something false), and in so doing, I misuse the word "lynx," which should only be applied to <i>lynxes</i>, and I thus "use the word wrongly" in this way. What determines that this is the "wrong" use of the word? Answer: linguistic rules ("norms"). Among those who take this view, there is some variation about what constitutes the linguistic norms in question: obviously other English speakers have something to do with it, but there is also some role to be played by ocelots and lynxes themselves (what role this is exactly will depend on how you feel about natural kinds and Kripkean metaphysical realism more generally).<br /><br />Now we can respond to this conception of meaning errors in a few ways. A natural way is to object to a conflation between two cases: 1) using a word "wrongly" (coming out with the wrong fusebox), and 2) using it <i>correctly</i> to express what happens to be a false belief (I perfectly correctly characterize how things <i>appear</i> to me, but as it happens I am mistaken). In one sense, Davidsonians will be happy to make this distinction, as one of their (our) main concerns here is the holism of belief and meaning: that in attributing the two together, we have some interpretive leeway (or even indeterminacy) in saying what falls under what. This doesn't mean there are *no* constraints on interpretation – that someone's meaning may swing free entirely from what both subject and interpreter see as observable evidence for it; it just means that we have a better sense of how content is attributed in interpretation than do those with non-Davidsonian accounts of meaning.<br /><br />However, even after distinguishing in this way, the question remains how to characterize the first case (and the sense of "correctly" in the second). We are nowhere near out of the woods. It can be a further Davidsonian point that we fall directly back into the Platonistic soup if in making this distinction we carve out a realm of purely or <i>sui generis</i> semantic normativity, or in other words, those same "linguistic norms." On this view, we need nothing so robust (or theoretically questionable) as linguistic normativity so construed to account for the <i>actual</i> constraints we make on meaning attribution. We can perfectly well, for example, think of such "mistakes" as prudential ones, in which the sound I make is <i>inconveniently chosen</i> to convey my perfectly determinate (and indeed often perfectly intelligible) meaning – a prudential "error," not a contravening of "linguistic norms" in the disputed sense.<br /><br />This is the point Bilgrami is making in "Norms and Meaning," in which he criticizes Kripke and Burge, not for opposing "internalism" or "individualism" <i>per se</i>, but for not getting at the root of the problem, and thus perpetuating it in a new form. In hurrying to explain my attempted moderation of Bilgrami's rejection of semantic normativity, I kind of skipped over his reasons for rejecting it in the first place. So let me go back and say more about that.<br /><br />In Kripke's and Burge's discussions, the "individualist" is pretty much someone with a "private language," someone whose inner intentions determine his meanings no matter what other people say, which is why the issue comes up in Kripke's book on Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. Naturally Wittgenstein rejects this view; and so does Kripke, who takes the RFC (whether or not Wittgenstein himself does so) to require an appeal to a "social theory of meaning" to save us from the meaning-skeptical paradoxes to which "individualism" so construed famously leads. On Kripke's picture, if we are to account for meaning at all, *something* must provide the norms manifested in linguistic rules. In distancing itself from mere linguistic nihilism, individualism promises to locate the source of normativity in the speaker's linguistic dispositions. However, as the paradoxes show, such dispositions cannot do this, as they are compatible with *any* subsequent behavior. Nor, Kripke argues (following Wittgenstein at least this far), can we find the source in Platonistic "rigid rails" or whatnot; so "[w]hat then can the source of the desired normativity be but the social element?" ("Norms and Meaning," p. 126). The result is Kripke's "skeptical solution" to the meaning-skeptical paradox, an appeal to the dispositions of the surrounding linguistic community. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SqCByVqr3XI/AAAAAAAAAHY/yNfGHeRUXIs/s1600-h/akeel_bilgrami.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SqCByVqr3XI/AAAAAAAAAHY/yNfGHeRUXIs/s200/akeel_bilgrami.jpg" border="0" alt="Akeel in a typical pose"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377440656889994610" /></a>However, Bilgrami rejects this forced choice (dare I say "dualism"?) between anything-goes-if-I-say-so "individualism" on the one hand and external linguistic normativity on the other, such that we must locate a source for it in this way. Bilgrami frequently qualifies his criticism of Kripke and Burge, rejecting normativity "in the sense demanded by" K/B, or "such" normativity. (This is what encourages me to risk re-expansion of the concept into the semantic realm, or that is, recognizing a properly semantic <i>component</i> to our normative commitments.) Yet he is determined to pull the objectionable picture out by the roots, and takes so doing to require a stronger line against "linguistic norms" than has seemed feasible until Davidson's criticism.<br /><br />Bilgrami's diagnosis goes like this: <blockquote>[I]n rejecting the abstractions and metaphor of [platonistic] Meanings and 'rails' on the one hand and the internalistic mentalism of inner facts of the matter on the other, one has not yet succeeded in rejecting what in Platonism <i>underlies the search</i> for these things being rejected. Without rejecting this deeper urge, one will no doubt find another such thing to gratify the Platonist urge and indeed one has found it in society. This deeper urge underlying Platonism is precisely the drive to see concepts and terms as governed by such normativity. (p. 127)</blockquote>John McDowell has of course also criticized Kripke's diagnosis and attempted solution to the paradoxes. In particular, McDowell too criticizes Kripke on his own terms - that his "skeptical solution," locating semantic norms in community practice, fails to do what it promises. And he too wants to dissolve the problem and allay the skeptical anxiety, just as does Bilgrami, only without giving up semantic normativity entirely. It is in trying make sense of McDowell's approach not only to this issue, but to normativity generally (especially in response to Davidson), that I am motivated to moderate Bilgrami's flat rejection of semantic normativity in the way I did the other day.<br /><br />But let's see what Bilgrami says about McDowell. According to Bilgrami, McDowell says <blockquote>that the way Kripke brings in the social is just an extension of the normativity-denying position of the dispositionalist because all Kripke does is bring in the dispositions of other members of society to account for an individual's meanings. So if he says something was missing in the individual dispositionalist account in the first place, then it will be missing in the social extension as well. This criticism seems to me to be fair enough, if one accepts the normativity demand as one finds it in Kripke and as one finds it in these others who think that Kripke has himself failed to live up to that demand. But I do not accept the demand in the first place. So mine is a much more fundamental criticism of Kripke. In my view, one should repudiate the 'Platonism' altogether (even in its ersatz forms) and in so doing give notions like meaning and concepts a much lower profile, whereby it does not matter very much that one is not able to say [referring here to the familiar examples in Kripke and Burge] that KWert is making a [properly semantic, or as Bilgrami puts it, "intrinsic lexical"] mistake on January 1st 1990 or that Burge's protagonist has all along made a mistake when he applies the term to a condition in his thigh. [...] [I]t makes no difference to anything at all, which answer we give. His behaviour is equally well explained no matter what we say. There is no problem, skeptical or otherwise. (p. 128)</blockquote>Because of the holism of belief and meaning, we can attribute either concept, adjusting the belief component accordingly, and equally well explain the agent's behavior, which is after all the constitutive function of interpretation in the first place. This is the sense in which Bilgrami's is a Davidsonian view (and in response to this article, Davidson agrees heartily).<br /><br />In this sense, again, I have no problem with this view. However, I think that here too (that is, w/r/t this view itself) we have other options in explaining the anti-Platonism we are after, options which leave the concept (or again, *a* concept) of "properly semantic normativity" in place. I was no doubt remiss in the previous post not to stress that it is only after the point has been understood that we safely can go on and try to accommodate McDowell's way of talking, with its characteristic stress on normative rather than (as readers of <i>Mind and World</i> will recognize as the criticism of Davidson there on analogous grounds) "merely causal" (or again, descriptive) relations between mental contents and the world they are about. When we do this we can see how McDowell's criticism can be properly directed. Davidson is not making a "Platonistic" error, as Kripke et. al. are, but in recoiling to a picture devoid of properly semantic normativity (properly construed), he misses a chance to tell a better story about normative commitment generally speaking, and thus recover gracefully from the error he really does make which results in his "coherentism," dismissed by McDowell as "frictionless spinning in a void" (again, see <i>Mind and World</i>, esp. ch. 1-2). I hope that helps place the other post in dialectical space (if not actually vindicate what I say there, and I still have some more fast talking to do on that score as well).<br /><br />Okay, that's enough for Bilgrami. Next time: Davidson.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-45276885621669650162009-08-31T18:29:00.006-04:002009-08-31T19:55:32.578-04:00Can words be used incorrectly?The other day at Language Log there was a <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1700">post</a> directing us to a philosophically-themed Dinosaur Comic, where T-Rex jubilantly schools philosophers with his deflationary solution to the sorites paradox. I have a number of comments about that, but for now I want to address one aspect of one of the comments there (as you'll see, that will be plenty for today). The commenter, Marinus, after giving an excellent explanation of why the sorites paradox is indeed a real problem in philosophy, suggests that some philosophers, Wittgenstein among them, are committed to the idea that it is impossible for anyone to use a word incorrectly. Marinus does not mention any other such philosophers, and the attribution to Wittgenstein seems like a stretch, or is at least not obvious.<br /><br />Putting Wittgenstein to one side for now, I can attest that Akeel Bilgrami, following Davidson, has stated explicitly that "normativity is irrelevant to the meaning of words" ("Norms and Meaning"). Here, however, I would like to give some reasons why such talk of using words wrongly is perfectly natural, and, more importantly, can be harmless even by Davidsonian lights. That is, it will seem at first that in helping myself to properly semantic normative considerations, I invite the Platonism which both Davidson and Bilgrami correctly reject. My task will be to show, or at least suggest, that in so doing I issue no such invitation. (Bilgrami actually does qualify his claims somewhat, but not in the way I would prefer. I'll say a bit about this at the end.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxZZBljqII/AAAAAAAAAG4/pV2khiaGUfE/s1600-h/ocelotsmall.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxZZBljqII/AAAAAAAAAG4/pV2khiaGUfE/s200/ocelotsmall.jpg" border="0" alt="an ocelot"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376270341631092866" /></a>Lynxes and ocelots are members of the cat family. They're bigger and wilder than domestic cats, but smaller than the big cats (tigers, etc.). Other than that I get a little fuzzy on the details. I think ocelots might be a bit smaller than lynxes, and I think lynxes have little tufts on the ends of their ears. As you might expect, though, cat family classification is somewhat more complicated than I make it appear here, and as it turns out, lynxes and ocelots aren't really <i>that</i> similar. I don't think that affects the following argument, as our question is still what to say if someone <i>were</i> to confuse them: is the mistake epistemic, semantic, both, indeterminate, or something else? If the example bothers you, ignore the kitty pictures and think about elms and beeches instead.<br /><br />With that in mind, let's say I work at a zoo (a real zoo, that is). I've spent the morning admitting an ocelot: having it checked for the standard ocelot parasites, feeding it ocelot food, cleaning out the ocelot cage, etc. At lunch the conversation centers around lynxes and ocelots, and I mention that the lynx I admitted today had some interesting markings. You've seen the animal in question too – maybe you received delivery and glanced in the cage before signing – and you reply: "Lynx? You mean ocelot, don't you?" My response: "Right, the ocelot." In other words, I don't bat an eye, but simply acknowledge what we would call a slip of the lip. My <i>belief</i> is fine: I knew all along it was an ocelot – that's why I did all those ocelot-specific things – but just now I made a <i>semantic</i> error. I simply came out, as does Michael Palin uncontrollably in a certain Python skit, with the wrong fusebox.<br /><br />In particular, I attempted to express my (true) belief that the cat was an ocelot, but in so doing, I misused the word "lynx," which after all means <i>lynx</i>, not <i>ocelot</i>, and therefore cannot (or so it seems; I consider a qualification below) be used <i>correctly</i> in expressing beliefs – true or false – about ocelots rather than lynxes.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxZwPrAqjI/AAAAAAAAAHA/TGGulYw2Huw/s1600-h/lynx_sm.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxZwPrAqjI/AAAAAAAAAHA/TGGulYw2Huw/s200/lynx_sm.jpg" border="0" alt="a lynx"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376270740549052978" /></a>So far, so good. However, I can also make a mistake about the <i>cat</i>, rather than the word. In order to do so, however, I have to use the (mistaken) word <i>correctly</i> in order to express my false belief. Let's say I simply made a cursory examination (before I had my morning caffeine?) and handed the "lynx" over to my assistant for the admission procedures I myself performed in the previous example, only this time it's cleaning out the <i>lynx</i> cage, etc. Again at lunch I speak of the "lynx's" markings, and again your reaction is "Lynx? You mean ocelot, don't you?" Now my response may very well be to frown, and say something like: "My goodness, you're right, it <i>was</i> an ocelot! I better get Terry to clean out the <i>ocelot</i> cage. After he's finished with the lynx cage, anyway."<br /><br />Again, in referring to the "lynx" as I did, I expressed my <i>mistaken belief</i> that the cat was a lynx; but in order to do that by so speaking, I must have been using the word "lynx" correctly – to refer to <i>lynxes</i>, which the cat in question was not.<br /><br /><br />Now for some clarifications. My point here is certainly not that we <i>must</i> speak in this way – that the first <i>really is</i> a case of properly semantic error as opposed to the latter, a clear case of properly doxastic error. So already some peace can be made, as I take the Davidsonian point to be mainly that there can be nothing which <i>forces</i> us to speak this way. It's just that the natural way to make that point is to make sure to speak the other way instead, referring in all cases to doxastic error only, rather than semantic error; and I grant in advance that even this example can be spun that way if you like, as again no force was intended. I simply think there's no real reason not to speak of semantic error in particular cases if we so prefer, and that it can in fact be salutary to remind ourselves that that possibility is open to us.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxaIhAuR1I/AAAAAAAAAHI/Kxdf1WuvUl0/s1600-h/ocelotclose.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxaIhAuR1I/AAAAAAAAAHI/Kxdf1WuvUl0/s200/ocelotclose.jpg" border="0" alt="another ocelot"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376271157520385874" /></a>That we can construe each example in either way is further suggested by the qualification I promised above; for there is a sense in which I can indeed refer to ocelots (i.e. successfully), and express beliefs about them, even when using the word "lynx." Suppose I say "This lynx here [patting yon ocelot on the head] has worms, can you give him a deworming pill?" I've expressed a belief, let's say a true one [i.e. that he's got worms] about what is in fact an ocelot, albeit by using the word "lynx." It would be perverse of you to pretend that I haven't said anything about the ocelot at all, simply because I used the "wrong word" to refer to it. Note that this case is intermediate between the two others, at least so far. For all you know, my response to "I think that's an ocelot, not a lynx" could be either "right, an ocelot; can you give him the pill?" or instead "no, it's a lynx; look, he's got the little tufts on his ears"; where the first suggests that I merely misspoke (failed to express my true belief that the cat is an ocelot), and the second sounds more like I have misidentified the cat rather than misused the word.<br /><br />Yet these are mere suggestions, at least in advance of further investigation. After all, maybe the former of these responses acknowledges a false belief (if one I regard as unimportant and easily corrected), while the latter confusion about lynxes can also be construed as instead concerning the proper referent of "lynx," a semantic matter.<br /><br /><br />Now for the moral. The trick here, in my view, is to see two things at the same time. First, "using a word properly" ("having the concept") has (at least) two aspects: first, the semantic part: getting the <i>meaning</i> right; and secondly, the epistemic part: getting the <i>world</i> right. Secondly, on the other hand, these two things, while not <i>identical</i>, are very closely related, indeed interconstitutive, rendering interpretation (determination of meaning) more complicated than simply checking the dictionary to see if a speaker has used a word "correctly." It is in this anti-Platonistic sense <i>only</i> that such obligations are, in Bilgrami's not entirely univocal terms, neither "sui generis" nor "intrinisic."<br /><br />Sometimes we will emphasize one of these two points rather than the other. For example, we sometimes say that knowing the meaning of a word is knowing how to use it correctly, where the paradigmatic example is that of using the word X to correctly identify X's. If someone says "that's a lynx" when and only when in the presence of lynxes, he most likely knows what "lynx" means. Similarly, when we are teaching someone a word, especially children, we test their understanding by seeing if they do the "appropriate" thing, e.g. apply "doggie" to dogs and not to ferrets, or responding "five" when asked to "add three and two."<br /><br />This can make it seem that what we have here is a <i>single</i> determination – one of the meaning of a subject's utterances – which is determined behaviorally, by seeing if the subject makes correct judgments. The idea is that knowing the word (having the concept) "add" just is to add correctly; and knowing (the meaning of) the word "lynx" just is identifying lynxes correctly. But this leaves no room for going on to claim a distinct notion of semantic normativity over and above that involved in <i>judgments</i> that things are thus and so, a <i>doxastic</i> matter (Bilgrami is correct that McDowell can be careless on this point).<br /><br />In other words, this conception of the relation between belief and meaning puts them too close together. In response, we point out that while I can indeed express a false belief that that cat is a lynx, I must, in so doing, be using the word "lynx" in its proper meaning – to refer to lynxes. Recognizing the conceptual distinctness of the two components restores the proper flexibility to an interpretive process which requires us, in standard cases, to attribute beliefs and meanings simultaneously. This reflects the internal connection to the learning process, in which, in learning "how to use words," we learn both <i>what they mean</i> and a whole bunch of <i>truths about the world</i>: what "lynx" means and what lynxes are, and what "add" means and how to add, without those two amounting to (exactly) the same thing.<br /><br />On the other hand, however, we don't want to think of belief and meaning as two different phenomena (or things) <i>entirely</i>, in the sense of being determinable by separate processes (instead of the single complex process of interpretation <i>cum</i> inquiry); instead, again, we need to see them as interconstitutive.<br /><br />According to Davidson and Bilgrami, we risk doing this when we speak of "linguistic norms" at all – that is, as in any way distinct from the doxastic norm of "getting things right." To do so makes it sound like meaning is determined not in the interpretive process itself but instead by allegedly independent facts about, say, English: given the actual dispositions of English speakers, on this view, if I make the sound /links/ (or inscribe l-y-n-x), then I <i>necessarily</i> thereby refer to <i>those things</i> (i.e., lynxes) – no matter what an engaged interpreter may say – simply because "that's what 'lynx' means in English." This semantic Platonism makes utter hash of the holistic Davidsonian picture, and is what provokes Davidson to declare, famously, in "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," that "there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed."<br /><br />(Let me just give a bit more from that article. The quote continues: "There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases." Earlier on, he says that to say this means that "we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally"; or, as I would say, between meaning and belief. "Erasing the boundary" in this way, however, sends us back to the first point – that we must not think of these things as <i>identical</i> or simply reducible to the normativity of belief. The two are not dualistically opposed, but distinct.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxanQOQ_qI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/5ih0RGxZ-Do/s1600-h/Calero_Creek_Trail_Bobcat.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 113px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SpxanQOQ_qI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/5ih0RGxZ-Do/s200/Calero_Creek_Trail_Bobcat.jpg" border="0" alt="another lynx (here, a bobcat)"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376271685589728930" /></a>My claim is that even loyal Davidsonians can recognize a difference between "linguistic norms" in this deceptive sense, on the one hand, and on the other, the idea that "getting things right" is a norm for meaning just as much as it is for belief. We can have the latter without the former. Consider the Davidsonian triangle, with a subject at one point, an interpreter (or an informant) at another, and our shared but objective world at the apex. Each point can exert normative pressure on what we say (and believe and do): I get <span style="font-style:italic;">the world</span> right when I believe the truth; I get <span style="font-style:italic;">meaning(s)</span> right when I speak properly; and I get <span style="font-style:italic;">myself</span> right when I act in accordance with my most fundamental commitments. Yet in each case talk of "getting right" need not commit us to the existence of some separably characterizable thing. The lack of a language, in the sense in which Davidson rejects it, is analogous in this image to the lack of the Cartesian world-in-itself on the one hand, and the non-existence of my "true self" on the other. Just as with belief and meaning, it is the <i>dualism</i> of norm and norm-follower that is rejected, not the distinction (and the relation). Even if that means we give up the terminology of concrete "norms" for something fuzzier like "normative commitment" (or as above, normative "pressure"), there is still a role for such a relation between meaning and "language" (if not *a* language).<br /><br />Bilgrami does suggest that "norms" of meaning could be salvaged if construed as the "extrinsic" <i>prudential</i> norm of "speaking as others do" (rather than "speaking rightly"), or the <i>hypothetical</i> imperative of "... if you wish to be understood." But while prudence is indeed a part of the interpretive picture, I think, for the above reasons, that even properly semantic normativity (if not "norms") can be unobjectionable. But there's a lot more to say about that, so I'll leave Bilgrami's views for another time.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-3735363559224226242009-08-25T21:41:00.002-04:002009-08-25T21:52:03.861-04:00Who says philblogging isn't the royal road to riches?As Abbas points out in the comments to the previous post, 3 Quarks Daily is now accepting nominations for a prize to be awarded to the best philosophy blog post of the past year. Here's the <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/08/3-quarks-daily-prize-in-philosophy-open-for-nominations.html">link</a>. Better hurry though, nominations must be submitted by August 31st. The top prize ("Top Quark," get it?) will net the winner *one thousand* smackers, so choose wisely!Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-4148038406833458792009-07-11T01:49:00.005-04:002009-07-11T02:12:10.808-04:00Now that's some strict finitism<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SlgqNrCqF0I/AAAAAAAAAGw/ScdXDL_LhlI/s1600-h/Naming+inf.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mKeqlRKfkBA/SlgqNrCqF0I/AAAAAAAAAGw/ScdXDL_LhlI/s200/Naming+inf.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357078171137742658" /></a>I just ran into this quote from L. Graham and J-M Kantor, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Naming-Infinity-Religious-Mathematical-Creativity/dp/0674032934/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247291759&sr=8-1"><i>Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity</i></a>:<blockquote>Alexander Yessenin-Volpin [was] a Russian logician of the ultra-finitist school who was imprisoned in a mental institution in Soviet Russia. Yessenin-Volpin was once asked how far one can take the geometric sequence of powers of 2, say (2e1, 2e2, 2e3, ... , 2e100) [sorry, I don't know how to do superscripts, so for "2e1" read "2 to the first power," and so on]. He replied that the question "should be made more specific." He was then asked if he considered 2e1 to be "real" and he immediately answered yes. He was then asked if 2e2 was "real." Again he replied yes, but with a barely perceptible delay. Then he was asked about 2e3, and yes, but with more delay. These questions continued until it became clear how was going to handle them. He would always answer yes, but he would take 2e100 times as long to answer yes to 2e100 than he would to answering to 2e1. Yessenin-Volpin had developed his own way of handling a paradox of infinity.</blockquote>2 to the 100th power is well over 10 to the 30th, so if he took a tenth of a second to decide that 2 to the 1st power is real, then once you ask him about 2 to the 100th, you can go get a cup of coffee while you wait. In fact you better get something to eat too, because you won't have to come back for over [performs quick 'n' dirty calculation] 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. I wonder how far they actually got. I should mention that just because it was in Soviet Russia, in which mental institutions were routinely used as de facto prisons for political dissidents, that Comrade Yessenin-Volpin was institutionalized, this need not mean that he wasn't actually insane. In fact this sad tale should be a lesson for us all.Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10666901.post-88786225409099155202009-06-20T13:18:00.002-04:002009-06-20T13:22:34.555-04:00Resistance is futileNo doubt this one will sweep the <strike>geek</strike>blogosphere. Too bad there aren't more avatars though.<br /><br /><p align="center"><a href="http://cyborg.namedecoder.com"><br /><img src="http://cyborg.namedecoder.com/webimages/edox-DUCK.png" width="240" height="180" alt="Digital Unit Calibrated for Killing" border="0"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://cyborg.namedecoder.com"><small>Get Your Cyborg Name</small></a></p><br />HT: <a href="http://evolvingthoughts.net/2009/06/20/my-cyborg-name/">Wilkins</a>Duckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com0