McDowell (and Cavell) on criteria and skepticism

The other day, Currence reported on Ed Witherspoon's talk entitled "Wittgensteinian Criteria and the Problem of Other Minds." In his post, he wondered

how Witherspoon's discussion of Wittgenstein on criteria and whether he was a McDowellian or a Cavellian -- or whether it makes a substantial difference if they're essentially the same -- ties in at all to the discussion of two kinds of skepticism, except that Witherspoon thought Wittgenstein took himself to be addressing both kinds of skepticism.

Here are some thoughts of mine on that subject which I hope will be of some use. (You should probably read his post first, if you haven't already.)

Let me start with the intuitive motivation for skepticism. When the evidence points to something, the natural thing to do (the everyday thing, the default thing) is to believe it ( = take it to be true). If one finds the evidence insufficient, one suspends judgment; but that's not philosophical skepticism. The philosophical skeptic is the guy who says "sure, I don't have any problem with your evidence – it looks that way to me too, so I'm not asking for more or better evidence – but still, we might be wrong; so we better not say we know." In other words, we are fallible, in that perfectly compelling appearances can cause us to believe falsely; the skeptical conclusion is that in every case, we cannot know if this is one of those times, so we must therefore suspend judgment on the truth or falsity of (possibly "mere") appearances, no matter how compelling they may be.

In addressing this "scandal for philosophy," Kant diagnosed it as a variant of a much deeper problem. If subject and object are so radically distinct as to threaten the former's knowledge of the latter, as the Cartesian insists, it seems that this metaphysical gap threatens our ability not only to know, but even to think about the world. This "Kantian skepticism," as Conant terms it (as we will see if that darn book of his ever comes out), addresses the Cartesian confidence in the possibility of contentful yet radically false "appearances". Turning it around, we may say that if we are in close enough contact with the world to form contentful thoughts about how it might be, then the Cartesian epistemological scruples are pointless. You may of course bite the bullet and try to deny that your thoughts have content; but then why should I listen to your self-admittedly meaningless babble?

In the contemporary context, after the linguistic turn, we speak not simply of contentful thought but also of meaningful assertion. This is where "criteria" come in. The idea of appealing to criteria in replying to epistemological skepticism is to add to the original reason for belief (i.e. that the evidence points to the truth of P) the idea that to take P as true in such situations just is to use the term correctly. After all, generally speaking, that's how we learn the term in the first place: in the (apparent) presence of a yellow banana, nanny says "look at the nice yellow banana!", and we say "yehw bana," and so on (this is not to commit oneself to the "Augustinian" picture of the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations, but to the manifest facts which make that picture seem obligatory). Once we have learned the relevant terms, to withhold assent to "there's a yellow banana" in such situations is not to show virtuous epistemic scruple, as the skeptic has it, but instead to show vicious semantic incompetence. That's the thought anyway (and there is indeed something like this in Wittgenstein; the question is what exactly).

However, as both Cavell and McDowell point out, it would be wrong to suggest that "criteria" get you across the skeptical gap. When we answer the skeptical challenge, saying that we (do too) know that P because the criterion is satisfied, there are two ways in which the epistemic chain may yet break. First, the criteria for asserting P might actually apply, but fail to entail P; or the criterion indeed entails P, but we cannot know whether it actually applies here (that is, whether the "appearance" that P is veridical). We cannot have both, on pain of dogmatism. Our manifest fallibility is as undeniable a fact as any.

Where does this leave us? Putting Wittgenstein himself to one side for now, let's compare Cavell and McDowell. According to Currence, Witherspoon suggested at the talk that the two views differ mainly in a terminological difference between them concerning the term "criterion." McDowell takes the satisfaction of criteria for X to entail the truth of X, but allows that we can take criteria to be satisfied even when they are not, while Cavell goes the other way: criteria themselves can mislead us, but we can and do know when they obtain. In any case, both reject the "criterial theorist's" view that criteria take one across the skeptical gap. So they agree; but even so, this difference reflects an important difference in emphasis and strategy, in explaining which I think we can make helpful reference to the various types of skepticism, on the one hand, and that confusing talk about types of doubt (and whether LW was a "fallibilist") on the other. In any case that's what I'll try to do here.

Let's start with McDowell. One of McDowell's consistent concerns – becoming more explicit in his recent work on Kant and Hegel – has been to reject the Cartesian metaphysical opposition between subject and object, which is the source and stay of the corresponding epistemological skepticism. In Mind and World (MW), pressing the "Kantian skeptic" line (though not in those terms), he insists, following Wittgenstein, that the content of our concepts is not confined to the subjective side of the Cartesian gap, but instead "[does] not stop anywhere short of the fact" [PI §95]. In contemporary terms (MW p. 27):

[T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. [...] Of course thought can be distanced from the world by being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought.

The idea, then, is that when we turn to the more fundamental semantic consequences of radical subject-object dualism, the familiar fact of human fallibility no longer even seems to have the epistemological significance the skeptic claims it does. This can thus help us resist a perennial philosophical temptation, viz., to metaphysicalize that innocent epistemic gap and identify it with that same picture's supposed ontological gap between subject and object (thus reinforcing it, as well as the resulting skepticism). If we do this, when we turn back to epistemology, the Cartesian argument "effects a transition from sheer fallibility (which might be registered in a 'Pyrrhonian' scepticism) to a 'veil of ideas' scepticism" ["Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge" [CDK] p. 386n).

Here's how that works. The skeptical argument gets its traction from the idea that deceptive appearance and veridical manifestation are phenomenologically indistinguishable, and thus that "one's experiential intake—what one embraces within the scope of one's consciousness—must be the same in both kinds of case" [CDK p. 386] That "highest common factor" [HCF] between the deceptive and veridical cases is thus essentially incapable of providing evidence for one or the other. The difference between the two cases is something extra: the actual connection to the world which makes the veridical case veridical. But ex hypothesi we cannot tell which is which; the world's contribution to the veridical case, on this view, is "blankly external" to our experience.

But as we have seen, McDowell disputes the idea that the content of our experience must be construed as an HCF in this way. When I lack an actual connection to the world, it's not that my contentful perceptual experience was deceptive, but instead that I haven't had a perceptual experience at all, only an illusion of one. (I have conflated them here, but as I read it, the connection to the somewhat different linguistic version of this thought is this. My illusion of perceptual experience can result in my having a mistaken but contentful thought if on other occasions I have indeed had (veridical) perceptual experiences in the course of learning and using the concepts which make it up. The virtue of McDowell's focus on the perceptual-experience aspect instead of the contentful-concept aspect of his picture is that the latter, like Davidson's holistic view, makes it look as if it is only global skepticism which it renders ineffective: this thought can be a contentful mistake only if not all of them are. That is of course true too; but the perceptual-experience version is more powerful – and its metaphysical import more directly anti-dualistic – in that it applies even to single cases.)

McDowell's alternative conception of perceptual experience is "disjunctive":

[A]n appearance that such-and-such is the case can be either a mere appearance or the fact that such-and-such is the case making itself perceptually manifest to someone. [CDK p. 387]

I either have a perceptual connection to the world or I do not. Let's say it seems to me that I see a cat. Either I do, and a cat has manifested itself in my experience – a veridical appearance – or there is no cat to be seen. In neither case is there an epistemological or metaphysical "intermediary" (either standing between me and the cat, on the one hand, or disguising its actual absence, on the other), in the manner of the HCF.

When a fact is perceptually manifest to one, saying or believing that it is is thus guaranteed to be true, and thus, in the skeptical context, a "criterion" of truth (though of course we may not take advantage of this fact: McDowell is careful to identify manifestation with the availability of knowledge, not its achievement, as even a veridical appearance may not lead to belief (perhaps because of skeptical scruple!)). Of course the skeptic, suspicious of this talk of epistemic "guarantees," makes the natural objection, as if McDowell were trying to sweep our fallibility under the rug in order to meet the skeptical challenge. This distinction, he says, doesn't help; the fact remains that we can't tell when we are deceived.

But McDowell's concern is not to deny epistemic fallibility, but to render it epistemologically, and thus metaphysically, uninteresting. His strategy is thus inherently anti-skeptical, affirming knowledge in the face of skeptical doubt. The skeptic can extract a concession that there remains a sense in which we cannot know when we are deceived (after all, to deny this is to deny that deception is even possible). Even where we are most sure, he says, we must leave room for doubt. But if this be doubt, it is an uninteresting – or perhaps "weak" or "imaginary" or "possible" – doubt, a mere footnote to our firm affirmation of belief. I am certain – beyond present doubt – that I am sitting before the fire at my computer; but every such belief is corrigible, in that I grant the conceptual, if not actual (or, as some pragmatists say, "serious") possibility of error. Give me more evidence, and I may come to change my view (so while I may be completely certain, I'm not "absolutely" certain – like I care about that anyway). That's all the "doubt" that human fallibility gets you – and it's not enough to underwrite a seriously skeptical position.

Currence reports that here was some discussion of this point at Witherspoon's talk:

Witherspoon did make a really odd claim, however, that everyone (Conant, Finkelstein, grad students) picked on during the discussion after the talk: Wittgenstein was a fallibilist. He said this in the context of a distinction he drew between "weak doubt" and "strong doubt". He switched between "weak doubt" and "imaginable doubt". This seemed massively confused to everyone; if being a fallibilist means no more than recognizing one has been wrong about things before, then every reasonable person is a fallibilist, and the claim is uninteresting. If, however, being a fallibilist means something substantial -- and I think it does, something along the lines of making intelligible assertions like 'I am justified in believing x, but I could be wrong' -- then Wittgenstein is about the last person I'd want to say was a fallibilist.

Conant made this point through a humorous example in which someone doubts that the room is not safe, saying, "This room is not safe!"; we ask, "Why isn't the room safe?", and they respond, "I don't know, it's just not!"; we wouldn't say they've offered a doubt at all. "Chicken Little worries" do not fall under the genus "doubt", and it is a sham to call them "weak" or "imaginary" or "possible" doubts.

My first reaction to this was that I don't see why anyone (anyone in that room, anyway) should be surprised if Wittgenstein thinks it important to stress something which "every reasonable person" believes, and which would thus constitute an "uninteresting" claim. On some views, that's all he ever does. But let's let that go.

Conant's Chicken Little example looks weird to me. (I assume that there is a typo here, and that it should be "doubts that the room is safe," not "not safe".) If someone says "This room is not safe!", he is indeed doubting that the room is safe; but he's also claiming that it isn't, which is not a skeptical thing to do. Chicken Little acted on his belief, insisting that the King be notified that the sky was falling. We have no difficulty attributing belief to him (and thus actual doubt about our safety). In fact his problem is not skepticism but gullibility, and our proper response to him is itself skeptical (i.e. garden-variety rather than philosophical): his evidence – a conk on the bean (or "I don't know, it just is") – is insufficient for such a remarkable claim. So Conant is right that this shouldn't count as "doubt" in the relevant sense; but that's only because it's a belief and thus not relevant to the issue of skeptical doubt. In particular, that's not what I take to be the point of talk of "weak" or "imaginary" or "possible" doubt.

The more relevant case, it seems, is this. I say, or assume, that the room is safe, but our friend demurs. Unlike Chicken Little, though, he is perfectly happy to remain here with us. Practically speaking, he says, the evidence is sufficient to warrant staying; yet he prefers (he says) to suspend judgment on the truth of "the room is safe," for familiar skeptical reasons: if we were deceived, and poison gas were about to seep from the ventilation, killing us all, things would look exactly as they do now. There's no evidence that this will happen, so there's no reason to leave. But we cannot claim knowledge that the room is safe.

This is what Peirce calls "paper doubt": philosophically motivated (e.g. Cartesian) demurral, conspicuously not backed up by action. You say you are in doubt; but you not only show no intention to leave the room (as you would if you were actually in doubt about your safety), but you're not even trying to allay your alleged doubt through inquiry. In claiming to doubt, you are simply registering your fallibility and drawing what seems to you to be the proper philosophical conclusion. But purported doubt (or belief), which has no connection with inquiry and deliberation is not doubt (belief) at all. The problem is not that the "doubter" cannot support his purported doubt, but that given his actions there's no reason, beyond his mere assertion, to attribute it to him at all. So the Chicken Little case is not germane. No-one denies that C. L. actually believes the sky is falling (and thus doubts that we are safe); it's the best way to explain his actions, including his urgent desire to see the King.

"Weak doubt" is not a good word for the bare concession of fallibility, but there's nothing wrong with "possible" as opposed to "actual" doubt (again, pragmatists oppose "theoretical" to "serious" possibility of error; it is when the former aspires to the latter condition that they (we) expose it as "paper doubt"). As for what Wittgenstein thought, that's a thorny issue. His reflections on these and related matters in On Certainty are inconclusive at best. I do agree, though, that simply to state that he was a "fallibilist" (not that that simple view is Witherspoon's) is highly misleading. But I won't get into it here.

I've already gone on for ages, so let me defer extended discussion of Cavell's position. I'll just finish the comparison with McDowell re: skepticism and criteria. As we saw, Cavell too concedes the failure of criteria to bridge the skeptical gap. But his philosophical strategy is very different from McDowell (even while sharing a great deal, in Wittgenstein and out). I quote from the back cover of Richard Eldridge's Cavell volume in the "Contemporary Philosophy in Focus" series:

At the core of [Cavell's] thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory [i.e. "constructive philosophy"] but a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others, and of the external world that must be accepted. Developing the resources of ordinary language philosophy and the discourse of thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Thoreau, and Emerson, Cavell has explored the ineliminability of skepticism in philosophy, literature, drama, and the movies.

It's a good collection (check the link for an irresistible used price!), but unfortunately there's no article devoted to Cavell's views on skepticism in particular. Anyway, where McDowell as well as Cavell grants human fallibility (where the "criterial theorists" had no room for it, as the skeptic shows), the former shrugs it off as uninteresting, on the way to reaffirming our metaphysical and epistemological connections to the world, while the latter instead allows it to bring in its train the skeptical point about fundamental limitations on our knowledge, famously granting "the truth in skepticism," i.e. that our relation to the world "may not be one of knowing – or at least what we think of as knowing." So the skeptic wins; but then the victory turns to ashes from a Cartesian point of view, as Cavell proceeds to reinterpret its significance profoundly. So while he and McDowell may not easily be seen to agree on doctrine, or even on Wittgenstein interpretation, their views may yet be seen as helpfully complementary.

What about "The Twit"?

Yesterday's post, about the archaic terms for various levels of mental deficiency, put me in mind of one of the funniest books I've ever seen. It's called The Book of Sequels, with excerpts from, or promotions for, everything from Brideshead Revisited Revisited to Pride and Extreme Prejudice. Here's the blurb (featuring, as do many of the books, appropriate cover art) for the latter:

The action-packed sequel to Pride and Prejudice introduced a new Bennet sister, "Dirty" Harriet, who won the hearts of Jane Austen fans by forestalling an insult from Elizabeth Bennet's old nemesis, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, with a cool "I have no objection, your ladyship, to your proceeding, since, by so doing, you shall render my afternoon quite agreeable."

Naturally, the sequel I was reminded of here was that to The Idiot. In fact, as the ad tells us, Dostoyevsky wrote no fewer than nineteen such sequels, and for a limited time only, you may subscribe to The American Sequel Society's series, starting with two representative volumes, and receiving a new volume every month. If you decide to cancel, you may return The Imbecile and keep The Fathead absolutely free! Here's the complete list:

The Idiot I: The Idiot
The Idiot II: The Imbecile
The Idiot III: The Moron
The Idiot IV: The Cretin
The Idiot V: The Lamebrain
The Idiot VI: The Dimbulb
The Idiot VII: The Nitwit
The Idiot VIII: The Fathead
The Idiot IX: The Numbskull
The Idiot X: The Dumb Bunny
The Idiot XI: The Yo-Yo
The Idiot XII: The Dolt
The Idiot XIII: The Clod
The Idiot XIV: The Chump
The Idiot XV: The Sap
The Idiot XVI: The Dunce
The Idiot XVII: The Boob
The Idiot XVIII: The Dope
The Idiot XIX: The Ninny
The Idiot XX: The Nincompoop

Interestingly, the first three titles follow the official categories from low to high, as I explained yesterday: idiot, imbecile, moron. Of course, in Dostoyevsky's time those terms, so construed, were not anachronistic.

By the way, the amendment passed, but only by 59 percent to 41. That looks crazy – who would bother to vote no? But what they think happened is that a lot of people voted the same way on all five questions (there were Republican signs saying "vote no on all questions"). That (the sign anyway) makes a bit of sense; it's easier to say (or remember) "vote no on all" than "vote no on numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5; 4 sounds okay". Of course, if you bothered to read the thing, you can see it doesn't raise your taxes.

Just be glad there isn't a Later Bedtime Party

Today was of course the Day of the Solemn Yearly Festival of Choosing our Leaders and Deciding Important Questions Concerning Our Governance. Not too many people paid attention to the Festival this year, as the Leaders to be chosen were on the order of County Freeholder and the like (what is a "freeholder" anyway?). In the province in which I reside, one of the I.Q.C.O.G. to be decided was the following:

Constitutional Amendment Concerning the Right to Vote for Certain Persons

Shall the amendment of Article II, Section I, paragraph 6 of the Constitution, agreed to by the Legislature, revising the current constitutional language concerning denial of the right to vote by deleting the phrase "idiot or insane person" and providing instead that a "person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting" shall not enjoy the right of suffrage, be adopted?

In case that wasn't clear enough, here's the accompanying Interpretive Statement on the ballot (which of course I have here because they mail out copies of the ballot beforehand, so you don't have to stand there reading it):

Approval of this amendment concerning the denial of the right to vote would delete the phrase "idiot or insane person" and replace that phrase with "person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting" in describing those persons who shall be denied the right to vote.

I imagine it would. That was in fact the impression I had gotten from the text of the amendment itself. But there's more:

The phrase "idiot or insane person" is outdated, vague, offensive to many, and may be subject to misinterpretation. This constitutional amendment acknowledges that individuals with cognitive or emotional disabilities may otherwise be capable of making decisions in the voting booth and that their right of self-determination should be respected and protected in this regard. The amendment only denies the right of suffrage to those individuals determined by a court, on a case-by-case basis, to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting.

That second sentence is has a slight whiff of political correctness about it; but the first one is well said, and I was happy to vote for this amendment with great confidence that it will pass. Interestingly, though, on consulting the dictionary afterwards I found that the word is more outdated than it is vague (or even offensive, in its original meaning). For definition 1 is quite specific; an idiot is

a mentally deficient person with an intelligence quotient of less than 25; person mentally equal or inferior to a child two years old: idiot is the lowest classification of mental deficiency, below imbecile and moron.

An imbecile, apparently, has IQ 25-50, equivalent to a child of 3-8; while a moron has IQ 50-75, equivalent to a child of 8-12. So if you wanted to insult a moron, you'd call him an imbecile, and to really insult him (or the imbecile), you'd call him an idiot. I'm not sure what to be impressed with more: that they thought they could get so precise about it, that these words, which we all use interchangeably, are actually tied to these classifications, or, more specifically, that those who wrote the Constitution of my province thought that while it was perfectly fine to allow mental 3-year-olds the right to vote, we really have to draw the line at the idea of idiots voting.

All kidding aside, I do think that some people should indeed be denied the right to vote on these grounds (lest, for example, they be exploited by well-meaning relatives); but clearly case-by-case is the way to go.

Incidentally, take a look at the etymologies of these words. Moron comes from the Greek word (moros) for "foolish," while imbecile comes from the Latin word for "weak." Fair enough; but check out idiot:

OFr. idiot, an idiot; L. idiota, an ignorant, common person; Gr. idiotes, one without professional knowledge, an ignorant, common person, from idiousthai, to make one's own, from idios one's own, peculiar.

So "idiots" are those who have spurned (or cannot but spurn), well, "higher education" in favor of their own idiosyncratic ideas, that is, a set of ideas "of their own mixture." Boy, if that made you ineligible to vote, presidential campaigns would be very different from the way they are now. (Not that the results would necessarily be better, mind you!)

UPDATE: Right after writing this, it occurred to me: if you only needed to have a mental age of 3 in order to be considered qualified to vote, then why is the voting age 18? Maybe we should judge that on a case-by-case basis too.

Another reason why this mental age determination method isn't so great: I was a fairly precocious child; but in the 1968 election, when my mental age was much greater than 3, my reason for supporting Humphrey for the nomination over his rivals (after the assassination of RFK; my parents were Eugene McCarthy people) was basically that I thought it was cool that his initials were H.H.H. On the other hand, very many supposedly competent people voted for his opponent in the fall; and we know how that turned out.

Try to remember the 5th of November

Strange but true: a Guy Fawkes Day themed Philosophers' Carnival.

Genius recognized

Here's another of those darn lists. This time it's the top 100 living geniuses. It's not worth taking seriously – Steven Hawking, at #7, is beaten out by Matt Groening at #4, and topping the list is the guy who discovered LSD – but it's kind of interesting. Naturally one wonders which philosophers are on it. I won't quibble with Chomsky (#32, tied with Prince, among others) as either belonging there nor as being called a philosopher; but if Richard Dawkins (#20, tied with Rupert Murdoch) is a philosopher, then so is Brian Eno (#15). Other than those two, only two other listees were philosophers, and you'll NEVER guess, so I'll tell you: Annette Baier (#72, tied with film composers John Williams (bleah) and Hans Zimmer), and Alastair Hannay (#91), the Kierkegaard scholar. How about that.

Oh, and by the way

Floyd (not Pink)

After having warned us not to think of the early Wittgenstein simply as a Russellian logical atomist, Juliet Floyd follows up with this:

I suggest, more generally, that we should beware of insisting that the best way to do history of philosophy is to look for labels that join these philosophers together in a tradition by way of commonly held doctrine or method. Instead, we should look toward how the Tractatus is transforming the Fragestellungen, the problem-contexts and concepts that it inherits from Frege, Russell, and others. This implies that we may sometimes need to look outside the Tractatus, to its wider intellectual context, in order to gauge its language's purposes, effects, debts, successes, and failures. It also implies that we need to be willing at times to question the idea that the most interesting way to account for Wittgenstein's philosophical evolution, and the evolution of early analytic philosophy as a whole, is in terms of the mistaken-thesis, correction-of-the-mistaken-thesis model. The situation is more complex. The evolution might be better conceived as an evolving expressive tradition within philosophy, a way in which the formulation of various kinds of conceptual questions and problems is constructed rather than foreseen, in which certain questions and problems come to be solved in their very formulation and certain others are, in Ernst's vivid phrase, simply allowed to fall away as silly or insignificant.

This is fairly obvious, but still worth saying (not sure about "constructed rather than foreseen" though, as a way of making the point). It does mean, however, that we may not then turn around and deny the relevance of extra-textual (i.e. extra-Tractarian) evidence concerning Wittgenstein's intentions in that book, as wielded so impressively by those (e.g. Hacker) opposed to the "resolute" reading (or as Floyd calls it, the "Jacobin" reading). This is from her article "Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible," in Alice Crary, ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. This brand new release (only $36 in paperback from Amazon!) also features that humongous essay by James Conant, "Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism," (which is also available as a pdf file on his webpage).

I got this from Amazon's "Look inside this book!" feature, which unfortunately does not allow you to copy and paste. I need the typing practice, though, so here's another excerpt, from the beginning:

The most fundamental divide among interpreters of Wittgenstein lies, for me, between those who detect in Wittgenstein's writings some form of semantic or epistemic resource argument, an argument ultimately appealing to the finitude or expressive limitations of language—whether it be truth-functional, constructivist, social-constructivist, antirealist, assertion-conditionalist, formalist, conventionalist, finitist, empiricist, or what have you—and those who instead stress Wittgenstein's criticisms of the assumptions lying behind the desire for such resource arguments, criticisms that in the end turn upon stressing the open-ended evolution, the variety, and the irreducible complexity of human powers of expression. The former kind of reader sees the inexpressible as a limitation, a reflection of what is illegitimate in grammar or fails to be epistemically justifiable; the latter sees the inexpressible as a fiction, an illusion produced by an overly simplified conception of human expression.

Naturally the latter readers are the good guys – including of course Diamond, on whom, Festschrift-style, she bestows effusive praise, as well as Cavell, Dreben, and Warren Goldfarb. Hmm, maybe I should have applied to Harvard after all (I wouldn't have gotten in, but it's the thought that counts, right?). Incidentally, when Columbia/Barnard was searching for a senior woman a while back, we were treated to a round of job talks by the candidates, including Floyd, Jennifer Hornsby, and Constance Meinwald. I would have been stoked (as the kids say nowadays) if one of them had been hired, but none was (although not, rumor has it, for lack of offers).

Anyway, that seems an important connection for the "New Wittgensteinians" (of whom Professor Floyd is of course one) to make – between their characteristic obsession with rejecting the inexpressible, on the one hand, and Wittgenstein's equally characteristic procedure (congenial, I imagine, to Wittgensteinians of all eras) of criticizing the assumptions underlying what he sees as an illicit desire for certain types ("constructive" or otherwise) of philosophical argument. Still, I think that even the metaphilosophical skepticism of the latter approach (as opposed to what we might call the transcendental skepticism of the former) can be overdone. But let's not get into that today.

It's hard to defeat the purpose of the Look Inside feature by reading the entire thing without buying the book, but it's not impossible, so I may be back with more quotes.

Book sale!

It's that time of year again! I don't know if I was concerned more with the limits on my reading time or my shelf space, but in any case I only got six books this time (total outlay = $2.85).

Thomas Hardy – The Return of the Native

I've always wanted to read this, ever since I heard the novel-writing sketch on Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief, that three-sided LP (both physical sides labeled "side 2") I got as a (birthday?) present in ... well, some time ago now. Here's that first sentence, which the crowd was really getting into:

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.

Just think if he hadn't crossed out "the" and written "a" instead. Narrow escape there. (Or, as Dennis the commentator mourned at the time: "It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again.")

Lao-Tzu – Te-Tao Ching (R. G. Henricks, ed. and trans.)

You probably thought the title was Tao Te Ching (or Daodejing, as I have also seen it). But no. According to the introduction, this edition is based on recently (=1973) discovered texts which they think are earlier (and presumably less corrupted) than the ones we know. And these "Ma-wang-tui" texts have the Tao and Te sections in the opposite order. So there.

Grant Gilmore – The Ages of American Law (1977)

According to a blurb on the back, the New York Law Journal believes this book to be "an exciting and lively little intellectual history of American law." It's an expanded version of the 1974 Storrs Lectures on Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. What are these ages, you ask? They are 1) The Age of Discovery (post-Revolution through Civil War); 2) The Age of Faith (Civil War through WWI); 3) The Age of Anxiety (post-WWI through what in 1974 was the present). Here's Professor Gilmore on The Age of Faith:

My description of American law before the Civil War sounded like a romp through the Garden of Eden. [...] When we turn to our next period [...] we find ourselves expelled from our lovely sunlit garden and condemned to wander uncertainly in the law's black night. And yet American law apparently achieved its greatest triumphs during this period. Never had lawyers and judges and the new breed of law professors been so confident, so self-assured, so convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they were serving not only righteousness but truth. [...] Perhaps, when everyone is blind, it is child's play to persuade ourselves that we now see better than our sighted predecessors ever did.

Perhaps a revised edition will describe a new age: the Age of Prozac. But I know little of these matters.

Our next book is also an historically oriented work:

F. M. Cornford – From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (1957)

Cornford is the distinguished Plato scholar whose Republic adorns many of our shelves. From the back cover:

[The book] is a needed reminder to our day of the intricate connections which continue to exist between critical scientific thought and social and emotional experience. In Cornford's own words: Philosophy, when she puts aside the finished products of religion and returns to the 'nature of things,' really goes back to that original representation out of which mythology itself had gathered shape.

Related to this, sort of, we have:

Sir James G. Frazer – The Golden Bough

This is a one-volume edition (864 pp.) edited by Sir James himself in 1922. This is of course a very famous work, but actually I only know it from Wittgenstein's brief remarks, which are mainly critical. Here's the beginning of the preface:

The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia. When I first set myself to solve the problem more than thirty years ago, I thought that the solution could be propounded very briefly, but I soon found that to render it probable or even intelligible it was necessary to discuss certain more general questions, some of which had hardly been broached before. In successive editions the discussion of these and kindred topics has occupied more and more space, the enquiry has branched out in more and more directions, until the two volumes of the original work have expanded into twelve.

I think we've all been there. Here's a blurb from Harry Woodburn Chase, Chancellor of New York University:

Dip into Frazer's Golden Bough and sense something of the mesh of fear and suffering and regimentation and bloody sacrifices from which civilization has meant escape.

So, good Hallowe'en reading, then. Here's a random selection, from the section entitled "Kings Killed When Their Strength Fails":

[I]t used to be the regular custom with the Shilluk to put the king to death whenever he showed signs of ill-health or failing strength. One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be an incapacity to satisfy the sexual passions of his wives, of whom he has very many, distributed in a large number of houses at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who are popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A hut was specially built for the occasion: the king was led into it and lay down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile virgin: the door of the hut was then walled up; and the couple were left without food, water, or fire to die of hunger and suffocation. This was the old custom, but it was abolished some five generations ago on account of the excessive sufferings of one of the kings who perished in this way. It is said that the chiefs announce his fate to the king, and that afterwards he is strangled in a hut which has been specially built for the occasion.

So they changed to the new way because the king suffered too much the old way. Got it. Of course, maybe the Fashoda chapter of the Shilluk Nubile Virgins Union had something to do with it. We may never know.

Anyway, let us turn, finally, from this barbarism to the modern period of Science and Rationality:

Steven Pinker – How the Mind Works (1997)

Having gotten other books by Pinker at previous sales, I was actually wondering whether I might score this one this time. And lo, it has come to pass. It might be sniffed that this is a popularization rather than Real Science, but according to the index, there are as many references to Descartes as there are to Debra Winger and Andrew Lloyd Webber combined. It'll have to wait, though, not only because I haven't read the other two yet, but also because I have his latest one out of the library, and that one I have to take back. Of course, I'll probably buy it from them five years from now. Maybe I'll have read this one by then.

Oktoberfest

That is, another Philosophers' Carnival. Reap the bounty here.

Pinball-Dämmerung usw.

My good friend Herr Professor Doktor J. E. H. Smith, while clearly insane (not really!), is becoming a very good writer indeed. Check out his reflections on his pinball obsession at n+1 (if it's not on the main page anymore, check the web archive for "Freispiel, Berlin") and on race at 3QD. His archive is at www.jehsmith.com.

Philosophical Tribulations

From Wittgenstein Forum: a satire on Philosophical Investigations. This is not Jerry Fodor's parody, but another one. (Interestingly, in both parodies some actual Wittgensteinian points survive their parodic form.) Here's a good bit:

24. Suppose I intend to shoot someone. I tell him, “Stand over there.” Then I raise the gun and take aim. Now he says, “I say there. Hang on. What are you up to?” I want to say, “You stupid git! What part of ‘stand over there’ don’t you understand? Now get over there and shut up!” The hardness of the logical must.

And of course I appreciate §33 as well.

The parodist is one Flash qFiasco, whose remarkable name is familiar to me from his tangle with Douglas Hofstadter in the latter's Metamagical Themas. Unfortunately, I no longer remember what it was about, or who was right. Check out his site, which has some other funnies and some "serious" stuff as well, including reviews of Wittgenstein literature. Here's his take on Philosophical Occasions, published (yes, under that odd moniker) in International Journal of Philos. Studies, Sept. 1995:

The editors apparently hold the opinion that having the entire Nachlass to hand in a definitive edition will solve the problems of interpretation. I disagree. The Nachlass consists of over 120 notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts, comprising nearly 30,000 pages in all (’scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Wittgenstein?’). Springer Verlag of Vienna is undertaking the monumental task of publishing a definitive edition, in German and English. They foresee the publication of two to five volumes per year; the first 15 volumes will cover only the years 1929 to 1933 of Wittgenstein’s hand-written notebooks. I submit that, even after the Springer Verlag edition is completed, no one in his right mind is going to read the whole thing in order to unravel the ’final interpretation’ of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Hard to disagree with that.

What's in a name?

A Philosophers' Carnival by any other name would, uh, be as interesting? (Nah, doesn't scan.)

Riches beyond the wildest dreams of avarice!

And here I am just giving them away. Our riches consist of ... more Wittgenstein bloggage! Both this'n and this'n seem to be dedicated exclusively to LW. At the latter blog, a book seems to be being written. Here's the introduction. The idea seems to be that practicing philosophy, for Wittgenstein anyway, is very much like (practicing) playing the piano. Go see why.

HT: Yet another new-to-me Wittgenstein blog (intro post here)

One page at a time

I see P. Z. has another book meme thing (following Wilkins). Now the point of this one is not to show how well-read you are, or to list classics (indeed, some of these books are far from great), but to see which books one might have left unread (a commenter at one of those two places thinks the list is of those books most likely to be labeled "to be read" at LibraryThing). Bold means I finished it; italics means I read part of it.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

This one's long, but if you get past the slow beginning you won't be able to stop.

Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment

I loved this – no trouble here.

Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude

I blazed through this one in a couple of days.

Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose

Same here – what a great book. In fact I think it was the very next thing I read after One Hundred Years of Solitude (so, a good week).

Don Quixote

Okay, you got me. I did read part I though, which is plenty long.

Moby Dick
Ulysses

I read all the way to the end – the last three chapters are brilliant – but I skipped some in the middle.

Madame Bovary

High school extra credit. Not worth it to me at the time.

The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov

Not as gripping as Crime and Punishment, but worth reading. I'm sure a lot of it went right over my head though (read it 20+ years ago).

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace

Someday.

Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged

Never.

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Skip Ulysses if you must and read this one instead.

Love in the Time of Cholera

I guess I'm just afraid it won't be as good as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Brave New World

High school.

The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch

Finished Book I, before it picks up (if it ever does, that is).

Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons

Isn't this Dan Brown?

The Inferno
The Satanic Verses

Never read any Rushdie. I hear Midnight's Children is good.

Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray

A while ago. Too clever by, well, more than half.

Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Not this one, but The Mayor of Casterbridge is a kick in the head (that's good).

Oliver Twist

I barely cracked this. I did a book report on it though.

Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Why would anyone stop reading this one? It's short and very readable.

Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury

I did bog down in As I Lay Dying, which I picked precisely because it was short. On the other hand, I finished Absalom, Absalom, which is not only long, but also, as I read it, purposely oppressive in its difficult prose. Must be a masochist (I don't hate it I don't).

Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present

Howard Zinn, right? No thanks.

Cryptonomicon

I like this guy, really I do, but I don't know about those doorstops.

Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces

This I found overrated.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners

This is a book of short stories, for crying out loud. Just read it.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This is good, but The Joke is the key Kundera. I think I've had enough though.

Beloved

I did bog down in Song of Solomon. Just didn't grab me.

Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter

High school. I did finish it, out of pure spite (though not without bitter complaint). I do hope they don't assign it any more.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon

About 400 pages too long, but I did get through it.

Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita

Now, Ada is the one to ask about. A long time ago I puzzled through about 20 pages of that one. My guess here also is that once you get over the hump you're set.

Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything

Why yes. (See my post here.)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

I actually liked this. He messes it up ultimately, but for a non-philosopher (okay, he was a grad student in philosophy) he does pretty well. That is, while making mistakes of his own, he at least avoids other mistakes made by certain name-brand philosophers who will remain undesignated by me here today.

The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow

Good one to ask about. Never started it. I did read V though, which isn't that much shorter (nothing since except Crying).

The Hobbit

Get real.

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Not sure what I was expecting here. I got about half way though.

Now of course there are plenty of others one might ask about. Proust, for example. Like many others, I too have begun Recherche without reaching the end. On the other hand, though, I have read Swann's Way, However you want to translate the second one, and The Guermantes Way, petering out some 200 pages into Sodom and Gomorrah. Great stuff, but it really does take determination.

One more thing. I eventually did read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I liked, I think. The reason I mention this is that when I picked up his When We Were Orphans at one of those library book sales I said that I had been putting him off, and that I would try Never Let Me Go first. So maybe I'll start The Unconsoled – and not finish it.

McDowell, Davidson and truth

James at spontaneity&receptivity, that new McDowell-centered blog I mentioned the other day, wonders about McDowell's possible adherence to something called "the identity theory of truth." Here are a few (okay, more than a few) thoughts on the matter.

Truth is obviously a central notion for philosophers. It has seemed natural, nay obligatory, to try to provide a theory or at least a definition of truth. That's what philosophers do, isn't it? Unless you think that truth doesn't exist – and how could anyone think that? – then the word refers to something, and the task of metaphysics (ontology) is to say what there is, and that includes truth. That's the thought, anyway.

So we have the "correspondence theory of truth," the "coherence theory," etc. The problem with these accounts, generally speaking, is that they take us one step forward and two steps back. So truth is "correspondence" between true statement and fact. What does that mean? What sort of mysterious metaphysical relation could this "correspondence" be? And how is it supposed to explain the concept of truth?

On Davidson's view, the concept of truth is "admirably clear" compared with anything we might use to explain it (or, as I like to say, perhaps to show off my Latin, theories or definitions of truth are necessarily per oscurius). Consequently, he is sometimes described as having "taken truth as primitive." I don't think this is quite right. It's true that one of the key moves in his early work on semantics is the switch from a) providing a Tarski-style theory of truth for a language in terms of T-sentences, to b) "holding truth constant and solving for meaning," giving the meaning of each of the quoted sentences on the left-hand side of those T-sentences in terms of their truth-conditions ("grass is green" is true iff grass is green). The result, then, is a theory of meaning, one which has the virtue (for Quineans such as the early Davidson) of being extensional (and thus in principle empirically verifiable).

But "holding truth constant and solving for meaning" isn't the same as "taking truth as primitive," even given Davidson's reluctance to provide a theory of truth. It's not that we can't say anything about this ineffable concept; it's that whatever we do say would not be intelligible to anyone who did not already understand the concept of truth (enough, that is, to know what a "definition" or "theory" or even "statement" is). It is in this sense that truth is "central."

Supposedly following Davidson (but not exactly claiming agreement – see "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth"), Rorty sometimes talks as if he endorses a "deflationary theory" of truth, which consists simply in what we like to call the "disquotational platitude": "p" is true iff p. (I really should use Quinean square brackets here, but you know what I mean.) This is supposed to put all that tendentious metaphysics behind us; but while it's certainly true that (say) the English sentence "grass is green" is true just because grass is indeed green, that doesn't mean the "deflationary theory of truth" is of any use to us. Rather than spurning the very idea of providing a "theory" for a concept that cannot support one, the "deflationary theory" makes it look as if we have indeed provided one, without in fact telling us anything. (See also, but without taking what he says there to be that important, Crispin Wright's argument, in Truth and Objectivity, that "deflationism reinflates.")

So what about the "identity theory" of truth? James points us to Stewart Candish's article at SEP, which he quotes as saying at one point that “One such pressure [i.e. in favor of this theory] is the wish that there should be no gap between mind and world: that when we think truly, we think what is the case.” And of course McDowell says things very much like this all the time (James has a typical quote from M & W), and for that very reason: that we not be misled into thinking that there is a metaphysical gap between mind and world, such that (say) we should attempt to construct over it a philosophical bridge. In McDowell's thinking (though he does not put it this way), that would be to try to build a bridge between the two peaks of Kilimanjaro, a (philosophically) suicidal undertaking.

As commenter Tom rightly points out, though, while McDowell is indeed willing to accept the "identity theory" in these terms (Tom points us to McDowell's replies in Willaschek, ed., Reason and Nature, even giving a link to a pdf), his position (as Tom puts it) "seems to be another 'quietistic' one, that the identity theory is a truism and not really a theory in the philosophical sense at all." Why bother affirming it then? McDowell now (p. 94): "Just that keeping it in view helps to prevent unprofitable philosophical anxieties from arising."

So far, so good – the "quietist" refusal even to take on the theoretical requirements seemingly foisted on us simply by employing the Cartesian picture is an important part of McDowell's conception of his Wittgensteinian heritage. But still, when such a "truism" is something of which we must be reminded, it seems that we might indeed take a close look (closer, paradoxically, than one at that of "truisms" usually rewards) at its content (or, better, its (overlooked or misunderstood) consequences) in our context. That is, we might look at it, for the moment, as if it were a "doctrine" or "theory" after all. (It is McDowell himself who reminds Rorty that, and I forget the exact quote, traditional philosophy has resources Rorty overlooks – that is, for combating the confusions of traditional philosophy itself.)

But it is not as the "identity theory of truth" that I think we should look at it. Here's what the SEP article says, in an introductory section, about this theory:

The simplest and most general statement of the identity theory of truth is that when a truth-bearer (e.g., a proposition) is true, there is a truth-maker (e.g., a fact) with which it is identical and the truth of the former consists in its identity with the latter. The theory is best understood as a reaction to the correspondence theory, according to which the relation of truth-bearer to truth-maker is correspondence. A correspondence theory is vulnerable to the nagging suspicion that if the best we can do is make statements that merely correspond to the truth, then we inevitably fail to capture the reality they are about and thus fall short of the truth we aim at. An identity theory is designed to overcome this suspicion.

This doesn't sound right at all to me. I'm not denying that people do indeed talk this way, as Candish claims they do. But it won't work for our purposes. For one thing, that's not the problem with the "correspondence" theory, or at least that's not the best way to put it. In fact I'm surprised that this slipped past the editors. What's that "nagging suspicion" again? The correspondence theory is an account of what it is in which the truth of true statements consists (assuming, of course, that it is indeed of statements that truth is to be predicated). When we speak truly, then, what we say "corresponds" to how things are; and historically it has been this account which has (e.g. as laid out in Aristotle: "to say of what is not, that it is not, or of what is, that it is, is true"), been regarded as virtually truistic. So when we do "the best we can," what happens is not that we "make statements that merely correspond to the truth"; what happens is that we speak the truth, which "corresponds" not to the truth, which we have, but to how things are.

So what's the problem? I presented it above, as Davidson does, as being that the idea of "correspondence" is impossible to cash out intelligibly (i.e., as an informative theory of truth). Candish presents it here as being an essentially skeptical worry (so that he should say that the worry is that even when we speak the truth, all we do is make statements that "merely correspond" to how things are). That's not exactly wrong, but it deflects attention from the real problem (i.e. with giving a "theory of truth" in the first place) to what is at least a slightly different one. Rorty does this too: he equates the idea of "correspondence" with the dualistic conception it is (usually) meant to illuminate (or at least manifest). That is, he essentially allows the correspondence theorist intelligibly to advocate a theory Rorty believes false or problematic: that when we speak truly, we make statements that describe a reality which is ontologically detached from, or transcends, anything to which it seems that we can be sure of having epistemic access. In other words, he equates it with metaphysical realism.

This makes it look like the skeptical difficulties into which that position "inevitably falls," as Kant puts it, are problems concerning the notion of truth, and that we need therefore to deny or redefine that notion, or downplay its importance. But it is important, and (as Davidson protests) even central – and it certainly should not be redefined as "that which our contemporaries let us get away with"! (How can someone who claims such inspiration from Davidson – even to the point of defining pragmatism in Davidsonian terms, as trying to do away with the scheme-content dualism – say such a thing??) [Actually I have an answer to this one...]

They are instead, these skeptical difficulties, due of course not to the very idea of "correspondence" – which in its truistic form says pretty much what we said before: that when we think truly, we think what is the case – but to its characteristically Cartesian metaphysical perversion. (So to rescue it, all we need do is, as Wittgenstein would say, to retrieve it "from its metaphysical to its everyday use.") At root, then, the problem here is the Cartesian picture itself, with its metaphysical dualism of subject and object. One aspect of our attack will then be, if perhaps not straightforwardly described as a metaphysical theory of our own, at least something which takes place on a characteristically metaphysical battlefield (as in Kant and Hegel; which partly explains McDowell's interest in these thinkers).

It is with this in mind – that our concern is with multiple manifestations of the same fundamental Cartesian confusion – that we should handle the concept of truth. That is, while it is true that one manifestation of that disease is a metaphilosophical compulsion to lay down specific requirements [see PI § 107 and environs, discussed below] or constructive tasks for our philosophical theories to fulfill, another head of that same hydra is the realistic/skeptical metaphysics/epistemology that complements that compulsion at the ground-philosophical level. In other words, I think we can kill two birds with one stone; or, better, show, by killing them with simply the one stone differently construed, that there was just the one Übervogel after all. Going back to our above context, this means seeing what does the work of what might otherwise seem to be (just another) metaphysical theory – a non-dualistic one – as at the same time the straightforward consequences of a mere truism, newly recognized as such. If the "identity theory" of truth isn't even seen as a truistic non-theory, as it seems Candish would have it, then we aren't left with either one of the two things I want us to bring together. It asks us to put just the wrong spin on the dictum "when we think truly, we think what is the case" – however true that dictum may be.

Okay, so let's get back to it. What, then, are the supposedly overlooked, momentous-but-not-necessarily-theoretical consequences of the "truism" that when we think truly, what we think is the case?

While he does resist the call for a "theory of truth," Davidson, unlike McDowell, does not put the point in the Wittgensteinian terms of the salutary effect of reminding ourselves of forgotten truisms. Instead, as I began to discuss above, he trades that purported obligation for his preferred project, a theory of meaning. For Davidson, as we shall see, truth is the transparent conceptual link between what we mean and how things are. We might say, then, that for Davidson truth is a semantic notion, not a metaphysical one. Indeed, a key article of Tarski's to which Davidson refers is called "The Semantic Conception of Truth." But (again) what Davidson says is best considered not w/r/t the form of its treatment of truth, but instead the content of that of meaning. It is when we understand the latter that we will be able to see the former in its properly truistic light (as in McDowell).

Davidson can naturally be read as a semantic externalist. But his externalism is not the metaphysically realistic kind, like that of Kripke et al. As early as "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Davidson says (let me quote the stirring conclusion):

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. [Inquiries, p. 198]

Compare his criticism of Quine in "Meaning, Truth, and Evidence," in which Davidson makes a corresponding move. Here he rejects Quine's explanation of meaning and content in terms of the "firings of sensory nerves" (Truth, Language, and History, p. 47.) Instead of this "proximal" theory, Davidson substitutes a "distal" theory, where the relevant content-bestowing cause of our belief and/or utterance is (say) not the sensations which are (in fact, when they are) caused by a rabbit, but instead the rabbit itself. Just as the content of our thought is not so far removed from us as a potentially, or indeed inevitably, inaccessible world-in-itself, it is also not so near as the excitations of our sensory surfaces. As Davidson points out, "proximal theories, no matter how decked out, are Cartesian in spirit and consequence" (p. 58). The problem with seeing the senses as "epistemic intermediaries," he says, um, somewhere else, is that "we cannot swear them to truthfulness," and skepticism is again the unexpected result.

We must pass over the best part of Davidson's (later) account, which he explains in the often misunderstood terms of a semantic/epistemic "triangulation" among inquirer, interpreter, and world. Let's cut directly to the bottom line in this context. Once the idea of explaining meaning in terms of truth-conditions, and semantic externalism generally, is rescued from the imputation of a perverse Kripkean realism, it becomes clear how the semantic content of what we say can indeed be provided by the "external" world. At the same time, the world to which we answer (semantically and epistemically) is, in McDowell's terms now, nothing more independent of us, in the relevant sense, than "the world as it figures in our world view," a locution meant to fit with its Kantian/Hegelian counterpart in Mind and World, i.e. the "unboundedness of the conceptual realm," which can now (if not before) be seen as having no more idealistic consequences than the former did skeptical ones.

In other words, again, the thought is perfectly symmetrical. Let us not be distracted by the qualifications I have added; they merely reflect the holistic and contextual constraints on interpretation and inquiry revealed by the triangulatory account.

What X means (in my mouth at a certain time) is how things are when X (so construed in that context) is true.

By the same token, again, turning the thought around: just as what I mean cannot be conceptually detached from how things are, how things are cannot "transcend" my meanings. How things are can, of course, "transcend," in a perfectly ordinary sense, my knowledge; but that's different. All that means is that sometimes I speak or believe falsely, and sometimes I don't know how things are; and sometimes I simply don't know what to say. But even when I speak falsely, what I mean is how things would be if I had instead spoken truly. There's no reason to think that what I don't know must be thought of in this metaphysically transcendent way – even if there are things I can never know. That impossible sense of "transcendence" is a gratuitous Cartesian addition.

So while there is a certain sort of unobjectionable realism here, it cannot lead to the sort of skepticism we feared, due to the lack of the necessary metaphysical "gap." (Ignorance, even necessary ignorance, is not a metaphysically loaded state of affairs.) McDowell himself calls his view "naturalized platonism" rather than "domesticated realism," perhaps because of the plethora of similarly modified "realisms" of the past – "empirical" realism, "internal" realism, "external" realism, "scientific" realism, "pragmatic" realism, "common sense" realism – none of which have panned out, and some of which simply repeat the errors of metaphysical realism in a new register. And in fact this lines up with my own usage, as I tend to use the term "realism" only for the bad kind, and for the same reason. (Still, "platonism," ugh; and "naturalized," no less: double ugh.)

And if there is no gap, then there is no need for philosophy to construct theoretical bridges over them. Let me conclude by once again recommending the attempt to bring about in oneself a "Magic Eye" sort of shift in perception here. When Davidson is criticizing Quine, there is no question of (what would in that context seem to be) a limply quietistic retreat to the mere reaffirmation of non-theoretical platitudes. Davidson thinks Quine is wrong and he is right, about, well, meaning, truth, and evidence. He refers, after all, to the combating positions as proximal and distal "theories," and gives arguments (convincing ones, even) for the truth of the latter. But just as in "Very Idea," Davidson's ultimate opponent is the metaphysically dualistic Cartesian picture – the very one which, in the metaphilosophical context, it can be effective to combat by resisting the characteristically Cartesian temptations to "constructive" philosophy against which (McDowell's) Wittgenstein warns.

So seeing (a properly "theoretical" reason) why there is no metaphysical gap can be the same thing, in the end, as seeing a reason to reject the seeming requirement to cross a metaphilosophical gap: i.e., that between naïve pre-philosophical ("truistic") intuition over here and solidly grounded philosophical results over there. Even better: it is the very rejection of scheme and content which Davidson's theory of meaning and interpretation demands which allows us to see it, qua theoretical, as not inconsistent with (as if we had to choose a single "scheme"), but simply another way of grasping, the anti-dualistic confluence of mind and world which licenses rejection of Cartesian philosophical requirements. It is no accident that a favorite quotation of McDowell's from Philosophical Investigations (§95, excerpted: "When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but we mean: this—is—so") comes a mere page before Wittgenstein indicts those – including his former self (§114) – who would read the forms of our language back into philosophy as supplying an ideal which must be found in our philosophical accounts of reality as well; see e.g. §101: "We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this "must". We think it must be in reality; for we think we see it there." §107 contrasts the actual use of language with the picture implied by the requirement (and vice versa); and soon we are into the heart of the Investigations' call for a rethinking of the entire idea of thinking philosophically.

Back to school, again

The Philosophers' Carnival has moved back indoors. Go and learn.

Grated Romano

A recent post by Brian Leiter eviscerates Carlin Romano for his recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education noting Richard Rorty's passing. (The whole chunk of Romano is behind a sub wall, but in addition to Leiter's quotes, it's excerpted here and (differently) here.) Romano is mainly known as a book reviewer (for the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, and other periodicals), but I'm pretty sure he has a Ph. D. in philosophy, and has definitely taught in philosophy departments (he had an adjunct position, and even his own office, at Penn when I was there). I wouldn't be surprised if Leiter knew this, but rhetorically at least, the post slams "Mr. Romano" as an empty-headed journalistic dilettant; the post's actual subtitle is "Total Ignorance of Philosophy is No Obstacle to Opining about Richard Rorty." Yikes!

Leiter's points against the poor man are generally correct, as Professor Romano has indeed tended (needlessly carelessly, in my view) to sacrifice accuracy (and often cogency) to his florid narrative agenda. But let's take a look. The issue about the usual practices concerning Festschrifte we may put to one side, as no one cares (for the record, I think of Rorty and his Critics as, well, a "... and his critics" volume more than as a Festschrift); but the next bone of contention is more serious. Here's the contested sentence:

The big chill began with [Rorty's] 1970s apostasy from positivistic analytic philosophy.

Leiter jumps on this slip like the wolf on the fold:

What in the world is "positivistic analyic philosophy"? Logical positivism was moribund by the 1970s, and Princeton in the 1970s was the fertile ground for new metaphysical theorizing, launched by Kripke and Lewis, which would have been anathema to positivists. The make-believe label "positivistic analytic philosophy" is the first clear giveaway that Mr. Romano has no idea what he is talking about.

At the very least, this is a giveaway that our author is writing for non-philosophers. Now of course this is no sin in itself; and a couple of posts ago I allowed as how non-philosophers might indeed, in a quick-and-dirty way, see many or even most philosophers as having failed to grasp something that, when stated as a philosophical thesis, looks trivial or false or both, or in any case not that helpful even if true (in that case, it was that the answers to Is there a world out there? and If so, do the differences and similarities we see in it come from it, from us, or both? are "yes" and "both" respectively). Here too, non-philosophers often do refer very generally to a certain philosophical tendency typical of those analytic philosophers who were Rorty's targets, even when we within philosophy see them (i.e. as well) as differing significantly from and indeed as opposed to each other. The confusion is compounded – again, unnecessarily, as Romano might very well have taken the opportunity to clear it up – when the term used to denote this tendency is "positivist." For Leiter is right that no analytic philosopher called his own view "positivist" for 50 years; the term functions within philosophy as labeling a tendency which everyone takes to have been overcome. Accusing fellow Princetonians Kripke and Lewis of being "positivist" is precisely what Rorty did not do, and rightly so.

Yet I have suggested that the terminological muddle conceals a similar point. For we should indeed see metaphysicians like Kripke and Lewis as targeted by Rorty in much the same way he (with Davidson) targets the residual positivism in Quinean empiricism (but see below for his ambivalence on this matter). How so? What, if not "positivism," do these philosophers have in common, which we would fail to see if we accepted Leiter's point at face value? Here Romano has a chance to save himself; but he boots it. For what he accuses analytic philosophers of (as an implicit explanation of the "positivist" jab) is a lack of interest in history:

Princeton philosophy professors and grad students at that time liked to act as if any work not mimeographed within the past three years, and circulated exclusively in the department, was probably too passé to be worth studying.

But of course this leaves Leiter with the obvious comeback:

Really? This would certainly come as news to [a whole list of historians of philosophy at Princeton in the 70's].

and allows him to make a valid, if delimited, version of Romano's (and Rorty's) point himself:

What is unfortunate about Mr. Romano's mindless polemic is that there is a real point that could be made here, namely, that some Anglophone philosophers really were (and are) indifferent to the history of philosophy, and that includes some of those at Princeton: but it is just a falsfication of the history to saddle the Princeton Department in toto with that attitude.

Maybe a look at Rorty's key break with the tradition, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, will help. Here's Romano:

In the shrinking Fach of academic philosophy — its territory truncated by psychology, invaded by literature, long ago reduced by natural science — Rorty challenged the theory of knowledge, the last remaining crop philosophy professors could sell to overlord deans and presidents, and declared it practically carcinogenic.

As Leiter points out in rhetorical puzzlement ("did Mr. Romano actually read the book, one wonders?"), this can't be right. Philosophy in 1980 was much more than epistemology. So what was Rorty's project in PMN? Leiter fills us in, turning to one of his two favorite contemporary reviews of the book, this by Jaegwon Kim (the other, equally dismissive, is Ernest Sosa's). According to Kim,

the argument of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is directed [not against epistemology specifically, but instead] against three very general doctrines, none of which are peculiar to (or even distinctive of) English-speaking philosophy in the 20th-century. Kim identified them (again, correctly) as [quoting Kim now]:

(1) The Platonic doctrine concerning truth and knowledge, according to which truth is correspondence with nature, and knowledge is a matter of possessing accurate representations.

(2) The Cartesian doctrine of the mind as the private inner stage, "the Inner Mirror," in which cognitive action takes place. The Platonic doctrine of knowledge as representation was transformed into the idea of knowledge as inner representation of outer reality. The Cartesian contribution was to mentalize the Platonic doctrine.

(3) The conception of Philosophy according to which it is the business of philosophy to investigate the "foundations" of the sciences, the arts, culture and morality, and adjudicate the cognitive claims of these areas. Philosophy, as epistemology, must set universal standards of rationality and objectivity for all actual and possible claims of knowledge.

Rorty does indeed attack these very general doctrines in PMN, and again Leiter's riposte is a natural one: that these doctrines (as the terms "Platonic" and "Cartesian" suggest, as does Rorty's explicit blaming of Kant for (3)) are not particularly "analytic":

Romano's polemic gives the wholly false impression that Rorty was simply overcoming a "recent" blip in the history of philosophy ("analytic" philosophy) in order to return the discipline to its "traditional" concerns. In fact, the opposite is the case: Rorty, like Marx (though for different reasons), would have us give up two thousand years of philosophical inquiry in order to do something else. He pitched part of that case as being against "analytic" philosophy, though the latter was far more continuous with the philosophical tradition than Rorty's (hard to pin down) alternative.

Leiter segues into his next point with another dismissive swipe at Romano ("Romano, however, has no actual interest in or knowledge of philosophy, even of Rorty's critique of it, so he moves right along"), but in fact his disagreement with Romano's Rorty is getting tangled up with his rejection of Rorty himself, which tends to dilute the former somewhat. If Rorty did "[pitch] that part of the case as being against 'analytic' philosophy," which he certainly did, then it is hardly "wholly false" to speak in terms of "overcoming a 'recent' blip in the history of philosophy ("analytic" philosophy)", even if the ultimate destination is not after all the status quo ante. If there is a mistake here, it is just as much Rorty's (as accurately portrayed by Romano) as Romano's own. (I smiled here at Leiter's characteristic tic, a substitution for argument, on points to win which it would require more than a vitriolic wielding of proof-texts or obvious counterexamples, of attribution of obscurity, a tactic which Leiter often deploys against McDowell, an "unclear" writer. Still, he's not exactly wrong here, that Rorty's positive views are "hard to pin down." Indeed, on certain important points he flat-out equivocates.)

The next quotation features another gratuitous use of "positivistic," as well as a reference to Rorty as "a red-white-and-blue Nietzsche," the latter of which Leiter surprisingly lets pass without comment. Later, though, Leiter objects when Romano suggests that analytic philosophers were threatened by Rorty's endorsement of such controversial thinkers as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He sidesteps the point about Heidegger, pointing to other, less radical appropriators of his thought (Dreyfus et al.); but even if we hadn't seen it before we could surely predict Leiter's riposte w/r/t the other guy:

Wittgenstein is, of course, part of the philosophical canon throughout the Anglophone world, even if opinion is divided about the import and sometimes the meaning of his ideas.

Here again is the familiar "heads I win, tails you lose" attitude towards Wittgenstein's reception in contemporary philosophy. Do analytic philosophers ignore Wittgenstein? Heavens no, he's one of us! Russell's student, patron saint of the Vienna Circle, influence on Kripke and Dennett and Searle and Stroud! Don't you know anything?? Oh, it's your version of Wittgenstein you mean – well, opinions differ, you know – hard to say what he really meant, what with that obscure style of his.... But you "literary" types like that sort of thing, don't you....

We'll get back to this, as well as another look at the idea that "epistemology" is the target of PMN. Let's continue with Leiter's post first. What happens next is that both Romano and Leiter, in turn, take both opposing positions on whether Rorty was "marginalized." Romano: he was marginalized by the profession ... but he was discussed and honored the world over. Leiter: he marginalized himself by not responding to criticism ... and other philosophers besides Rorty were also discussed and honored the world over, so he's not that special. [Huh?] Leiter just falls down here; the idea that Rorty didn't respond to criticism is absurd. He didn't respond to the stupid criticism (duh, realism is so true, you, you relativist you), but not only are there detailed replies to essays in at least two books of criticism (the Brandom book and Saatkamp, ed., Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics), many essays are entirely dedicated to responding to criticism (okay, some implicitly, but still, he engages the issues, or at least tries to): see Truth and Progress, which replies to Taylor, Dennett, Putnam, Brandom, McDowell, Davidson, and Michael Williams, among others. Plus there are a number of interviews and other things. Would that other people had done as well with him as he did with others (modulo, that is, the limitations in his view inherent in, well [heh heh], not saying about these matters what I would ...). Naturally the main issue here is that Romano writes as if Rorty had in fact won the day and rightly so (referring, in a phrase which Leiter naturally mocks, to "Rorty's devastating exposure [my emphasis – DM] of positivistic [there's that word again] philosophy's ahistorical, pocket-full-of-examples approach to knowledge"), while Leiter seems at one point to imply that Rorty as well as Romano falls into the category of non-philosopher (that is, non-actual philosopher). If Romano had characterized Rorty's views in exactly the same way, yet taken (mutatis mutandis) a negative view of them, I don't think Leiter would even have bothered to correct what are after all mostly minor and typically journalistic infelicities.

Let's get back to Mirror of Nature. It's certainly true that the three theses Kim mentions (above) are all targets in that book. But why does Romano say that Rorty thought that 1) all that was left of philosophy (analytic or otherwise) was epistemology, and 2) that he was set to deliver the death blow to it and thus to philosophy (or analytic philosophy) as a whole? Without going into great detail, we can look at Rorty's project in PMN like this (so this is my paraphrase, not Rorty's). At the time, the philosophy associated with the scientific revolution of the 17th century looked like (in the words of 1066 And All That) a Good Thing. The cure for metaphysics was a healthy empiricism. Descartes, however, bought the independence of the material world from (the need for) metaphysics at the unacceptably high price of substance dualism. This allowed the immaterial mind itself to remain a subject (no pun intended) for metaphysical speculation. Viewed from the empiricist angle, though, the salient thing about the mind is not its metaphysical constitution but the nature of its epistemic access to the external world. We are presented in experience with sensory data: how do we get from there – i.e., all we are entitled to, epistemically speaking – to knowledge? This is not metaphysics but epistemology.

Indeed, even today most people identify the Cartesian picture of the mind with substance dualism, and take empiricism (say in its Humean form) as the proper antidote, justifying a form of materialism to replace dualism. (This is why people like Searle can present themselves as "anti-Cartesian," i.e. materialists about the mind.) But Rorty sees the empiricist picture, which he naturally traces to Lockean foundationalism, and the epistemological problem of how to justify our knowledge (i.e., as an accurate representation of an external world our only connection to which passes through the senses, from which we must build said representation) as no improvement on Descartes. (Indeed, in the form of the skeptical problem it is Descartes.) So the supposedly "anti-Cartesian" movement from metaphysics to epistemology merely moves the bump in the rug from one place to another. A natural way of continuing the thought might then be that if (as Kim says) Cartesianism "mentalizes" Platonism, and empiricism "epistemologizes" Cartesianism, then if we can dissolve the empiricist problematic we may be able to achieve a final victory against Platonic metaphysics – the novelty in this thought being, again, that it was empiricist materialism which billed itself as the natural opponent, indeed the undertaker, of metaphysics. In this context, one in which it is qua metaphysics that epistemology is to be criticized, it makes sense to see contemporary metaphysicians like Kripke and Lewis as subject as well to Rorty's critique of what we might call the metaphysical realism-epistemological skepticism axis (especially given what he then goes on to say about "capital-P Philosophy" as what we must leave behind in order to usher in the pragmatist utopia). Again, though, calling this "positivism," as Romano does, is just odd.

I myself sing a version of this song (except for the part about the "pragmatist utopia," for which I substitute a Wittgensteinian acknowledgment of the ineradicable stain of original philosophical sin), although I have come to hear Rorty's own rendition as being importantly off-key in several ways. Ironically, given Romano's bizarre application of the "positivist" label to Rorty's target, one of the things holding Rorty back is his own ambivalence about his positivist heritage. The problem is not, I hasten to add, that he was ambivalent: we see an analogous ambivalence in Quine (Carnap's student and critic), and pragmatists cannot deny the positivist elements in their (our) own doctrine (Carnap, for example, sounds very pragmatist in spots – though not enough, for most people, to count as one himself). As an example of his own positivist sympathies, consider Rorty's near-pathological resistance to talk of (say) "believing the truth about how things are" in favor of consensus or "coping" or whatever – as well as, of course, the rank eliminativism on display in chapter 2 of PMN ("People Without Minds").

The other main problem (not counting his use of Davidson, about which I am myself ambivalent) was Rorty's attitude toward Kant. Kant figures in PMN, and Rorty's philosophy generally, as the poster child for a pernicious unpragmatic foundationalism. In bringing out the point about epistemology above, I elided Rorty's connection of the epistemic foundationalism of Lockean empiricism with the methodological foundationalism Rorty finds in Kant (philosophy as the "queen of the sciences" and all that). Leiter pounces on this as well, pointing out that for naturalists like Quine (i.e. an "analytic" philosopher if anyone is) philosophy is no queen but instead merely a "handmaiden" to natural science. (While true, this seems more like a point against Romano's sloppy summary than against Rorty himself; but let's not get into it here.) This use of Kant gives a superficially attractive symmetry to Kim's three theses above: Plato founds the discipline looking into Eternal Questions; Descartes mentalizes the Platonic picture, throwing the ball to epistemology; Kant rescues the tradition by cementing philosophy as the ground of intellectual culture generally (i.e., as the universal arbiter of intelligibility). I agree, although I guess not everyone does, that everyone telling this sort of world-historical story has to make narrative sense of the Plato-Descartes-Kant sequence. But if you do not bring out how Kant was just as much an anti-Cartesian as he was Cartesian, in the relevant senses, you make hash of the subsequent reaction to and development of that powerful anti-dualist force ("anti-dualist" in the most general sense). As only one example: why would Dewey want to "naturalize Hegel" if Hegel thought of his own task as that of finishing the Kantian project?

Plus you get Kant wrong. Leiter ends his post with a compound slam at Romano and Rorty, attacking Rorty for his, and I quote, "'bad' or 'fraudulent' scholarship" and Romano for his defense of it. This is an important issue (to tip my hand, I do think Rorty was too careless, and Romano says far too little to explain Rorty's practices), but let me provide the traditional ending for my post by promising to get back to that some other time.

Even more philblogs

At Methods of Projection, N. N. points us to SOH-Dan, whose proprietor Daniel has commented here occasionally, and to Brain Scam, a properly philosophical complement to that blogger's arts & culture blog The Parrot's Lamppost. Daniel has already blogged on Brandom, the "resolute" reading of Wittgenstein, and (at positively Holbonian length) on Hegel. Anton A., on the other hand, describes Brain Scam as "a rampart against naive materialist views of consciousness," and has some truly pungent things to say about the reductionism and eliminativism he sees in contemporary cognitive science. I'm not convinced (okay, I really doubt) that cognitive science is so uniformly reductionist as Anton claims it is, but in his opening rants (and I mean that in the best sense) he does say some gratifyingly Wittgensteinian things. He promises an upcoming post about

the idea that there is "something it is like" to have a particular form of consciousness, that this is perspectival or subjective, and that it therefore cannot be stated in the objective language of materialism, or at least we have no idea how that would be done.... Unfortunately, this response is itself fundamentally flawed, for much the same reason that materialism itself is flawed.

Quite right! I can tell I'll be spending too much time in these places. (Better stop reading The Valve ...).

Addendum: I see N. N. has another Wittgenstein blog, Language Games, in the blogroll. I haven't checked this one out yet, but don't let that stop you.

New philblogs

Avery from The Space of Reasons recommends spontaneity&receptivity, a blog dedicated, as the name suggests, to John McDowell; Brian Leiter points us to Tim Crane and Colin McGinn, while John Protevi likes 4EA Cognition and Outside Philosophy (not surprisingly given their addresses). The first and last sound most interesting to me, but time will tell.

At Outside Philosophy, John McCumber is posting a talk he gave at the International Association for Philosophy and Literature a few years ago. It's not entilrely clear what his point is yet, but in the second installment he writes, with respect to the question of "realism":

Is there a world out there? If so, do the differences and similarities we see in it come from it, from us, or both? These are not exactly burning issues for the rest of the intellectual world by now; the answers, since Kant, have been “yes” and “both” respectively. Various versions of this "soft realist" view, if we may call it that, long ago become endemic in literary studies. Among the sciences, quantum mechanics has generally reinforced it. So do such diverse forces as empirical psychology, Karl Popper, and contemporary work in virtual reality.

If I were to grant these questions sense (which I might), I would indeed find the given answers ("yes," "both") the least unobjectionable ones, and the resulting "soft realism" a decent enough quick-and-dirty attitude for non-philosophers to take. But quick-and-dirty is all it is; and even so, I don't see what quantum mechanics, empirical psychology, and virtual reality have to do with the metaphysical issue. (Plus, Popper is a ... well, let's just say his fallibilism is unattractive to my sort of pragmatist.) If McCumber's point is that this issue has actually been long since settled and some people still haven't gotten the memo, then I must protest. If we feel obliged to enshrine commonsense anti-sophism as a philosophical doctrine called "realism," it won't achieve a stable degree of "softness" without a proper philosophical understanding of why exactly that degree is indeed "just right" (as Goldilocks would say). Haven't we seen what happens, inside philosophy and out, when we leave this job undone?

This, of course, is part of my frustration with Rorty and others like him. "Quietism," whether or not "Wittgensteinian," is the proper move (or principled refraining from same) only in particular circumstances, ones where the Cartesian thing to do is to demand an answer to a supposedly pressing question. Wittgenstein himself sets up the dialectic in the Investigations very carefully in order to bring this out. It's all ruined if we just boil it all down to "Metaphysik? Nein danke!" or the equivalent. That's what naturalists do; and I wouldn't want to accuse Professor McCumber of that.

Return to the source

Philosophers' Carnival #52, at the home of our fearless leader (who seems to have had some work done - looks nice!).

Michael Frede RIP

According to Leiter Reports, Michael Frede has died. Frede was a scholar of ancient philosophy, and probably the first to get me to see how the debates in that area could be directly relevant to the present. He didn't lean on the tired we-are-all-merely-footnotes-to-Plato line, or look down his nose at rootless moderns who abandon the Eternal Philosophical Problems because they're too hard or not fashionable enough. He simply discussed the issues in a way which brought out the continuing relevance of classical texts. I'm not extensively familiar with his work, but one of my favorite books is Burnyeat & Frede, The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (available used from Amazon for a mere pittance). I also have this one, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

PC LI

Philosophers' Carnival #51, that is. Check it out here.

Death must be a cinephile

Edward Yang wasn't enough for him, so he comes back and picks up Bergman and Antonioni on the same day. What, are they having a film festival up there? These things come in threes, I hope. Otherwise Wim Wenders better start looking over his shoulder.

Naturally most of the memorial fuss has been made over Bergman (though Yang's passing did not go unnoticed in spots). Antonioni was uneven in a way that Bergman was not. I haven't seen Red Desert, but Zabriskie Point is a mere curiosity. Blow-up and The Passenger are fine films, but for me they leave a lingering aftertaste of self-conscious artiness. (I should say "left," as I haven't seen them for a while; maybe I'll give them another chance.) Il Grido is an early one which I recommend.

L'Avventura, however, was a real kick in the head. It's tough sledding (it got booed at Cannes), but it's a real milestone in cinema. 1960 must have been some year, with Breathless too. I find it very difficult to say what I got out of these films (there's a reason I'm not a film critic!), but it has something to do with close attention to the nature of time (and the experience of same). No doubt this reflects the influence of existentialism on the Continent.

As for Bergman, his consistency is remarkable. I just saw Smiles of a Summer Night a while back, one of his breakthrough films (1955), and Faithless (2000) was just as good (actually, Liv Ullmann directed this one, from Bergman's script). I look forward to seeing Saraband (2003); the library has it but I haven't gotten to it yet.

RIP to both; but Death better cut it out or all we'll have left is Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Gagne with a spoon

Hope everyone's having a nice summer. Here are some reflections on a particular summer activity of great importance.

I see the Red Sox couldn't let the trading deadline go by without doing something. Unfortunately, I'm not sure they did the right thing. What they did was trade starter Kason Gabbard to the Rangers along with a couple of minor-leaguers, for closer Eric Gagne. Now Gagne is a fine closer, no doubt about it (as the Red Sox noticed when they faced him earlier this season and failed to score). But they have a fine closer already, not to mention a set-up man with an ERA of 0.87, plus a number of other quality relievers (they lead the majors in bullpen ERA). So I'm not sure that Mr. Gagne won't be a bit redundant. On the other hand, they did announce that Brendan Donnelly won't be returning after all, but will instead undergo season-ending elbow surgery. Plus they traded Joel Pineiro to the Cardinals for a player whose identity, in this context anyway, has yet to be determined. So there's that. Still, Gabbard had done very well, and while it seems that when Curt Schilling rejoins the team this weekend, there won't be a place for Gabbard in the rotation (what with Jon Lester's return), I hate to lose him. If any starter goes down, they'll be stuck with Julian Tavarez, a man who has Middle Reliever written all over him (10.80 ERA in his last three starts). Tavarez starts tonight, in Gabbard's place – let's see how he does tonight.

Now the Sox had also apparently been trying to land Jermaine Dye from the White Sox, who is admittedly having an off year, but he still runs rings around the Red Sox reserve outfielders Wily Mo Pena and Eric Hinske, both of whom have spent the season hovering limply around the Mendoza Line. (The former in particular fails to impress me. So he's a big guy and can hit it a long way on the rare occasions that he happens to tag one. Big deal. IIRC, even the time he went 5 for 5, 4 of them were seeing-eye grounders.) I think I heard they had even settled on Pena plus X for Dye, but they couldn't agree on X. Too bad; they need some more pop from the outfield bats, given the off seasons from Coco Crisp (gotta love that name though) and J. D. Drew.

So they went with the Gagne trade instead. It may all work out, if the hitting picks up, or if Hideki Okajima gets hit by a meteorite. At least it won't be as bad as the infamous L**** A******* – J*** B****** trade (*shudder*). But if Gabbard wins the 2010 Cy Young, don't come crying to me.

UPDATE [8/2]: Tavarez did okay, 3 runs, 7 hits through 5 innings. Back to the bullpen with you though! As for Wily Mo Pena, the man is an LOB machine:

3rd: man on first, no out: pops up
4th: first and second, 2 out: grounds into force
6th: first and second, 2 out: grounds into force
7th: bases loaded, 1 out: pops up, infield fly rule

Total LOB: 8

The duck days of summer

I mean "dog" days (what a strange locution). In any case, the DD edition of the PCarn is here. Number 50! Let's have a big ... oh, forget it, it's too hot.

Christmas in July

Hark the herald angels sing,
'Glory to the new-born DuckRabbit'.

Hark The Herald Angels Sing
from the Christmas Song Generator.

Get your own song :

So if the Son has two aspects all to Himself, then does that leave only one for the other two Guys, or does that make six total, or what? (Theology is so hard!)

HT: Asphalt Eden

Edward Yang RIP

I missed this; film director Edward Yang died on June 29. He was best known for Yi Yi [N.B.: the original DVD release is supposed to be subpar; go for the Criterion reissue instead]. I've also seen A Confucian Confusion (at the NYFF) and A Brighter Summer Day, neither of which, alas, seem to be on DVD. All three films are brilliant. Yang was only 59.

imdb's bio page here. Another blogger's eloquent remembrance here.