![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotBeen meaning to post these notes I made in regard to a Daniel Davies post and comments that Mark linked when we were discussing "What do philosophers talk about these days?" Was holding off until I got a chance to read the Crispin Wright piece that Davies' cited, but decided to go ahead anyway, Wright unread, so that Mark can see this before going on holiday:
This interchange among Davies and crew does indeed point at a lot of what philosophers are or are not discussing. Also, I'll note rather irrelevantly that either Davies mistyped or he thinks the Tractatus was published forty years later than it actually was. In any event, here are three other points, possibly related:
(1) Following blog and comment-thread etiquette,* neither Davies nor any of his commenters states any of the ideas they are discussing; rather, they just refer to the ideas, by naming a broad field of endeavor or by naming a person who holds the idea. There are only a few exceptions, which are:
(a) several sentences about Clive Granger.** ("These people are fully aware of Granger. They take it as a principle that making inferences from data to claims about causal relationships can't be done on the basis of purely statistical assumptions; one needs non-statistical premises about the possible structure of causal dependencies. The analysis of causality that Granger offered can be seen as acknowledging that point, but only to a limited extent: the non-statistical assumption on which Granger causality depends in [is?] just the (true) assumption that effects can't temporally precede their causes. That's fine as a structural constraint on causal inference, but it's a very weak one, and one can only get so far without additional causal premises.")
(b) the example given by Davies from a paper by Crispin Wright ("t1 Sue: 'Bill could be in Boston' Ted: 'Actually, I just saw him board a flight to Houston' t2 Sue: 'Oh. Then I was wrong.' Apparently it is very difficult to fit this sort of thing into a consistent logical framework"); but Davies doesn't then detail Wright's idea, though he does provide a download link.
(c) Davies' main complaint, which is that, while this formal highly abstract work has the most prestige and gets the most attention in high-end [Anglo-American?] philosophy departments, it doesn't address any substantive issue. Davies draws an analogy to the situation in modern economics, where, he believes, the highly abstract work doesn't address the problems it says it addresses. Not quite sure if he's also saying exactly that about Wright's paper and its ilk, though that may well be what he intends. But there's a difference between saying on the one hand that Wright is working on an unimportant problem and, on the other, that Wright isn't addressing the issue he thinks he's addressing - the latter can result in the former; still, it's a different argument.
My problem here is that Davies doesn't say, "This is Wright's idea X, it doesn't seem to apply to situation Y or anything like it, so just what's the point of working on X?" And then in the comments, although Brian from Rutgers does say, wait, Wright's work can potentially be applied, Brian doesn't go on to say, "Wright's idea X can potentially be applied to situations X1, X2, and X3, and here's how." So even if I do get around to reading Wright's piece, I won't know how Davies and Brian interpret it, much less why or where they think it can or can't be applied. Fortunately, I also don't know that Davies and Brian won't follow through, whereas the vagueness that afflicts my 'hood exists so that people can avoid following through.
(2) A huge part of the core of my critique of philosophy, of deconstruction, of discussions of relativism pro and con, and the like is precisely that philosophers et al. don't address the issues that they think they're addressing. The example I often use as a prototype is that I can say, "Nothing exists in isolation," and two hours later say, "I grew up in an isolated village," without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences - the problem being that the first sentence is meant to address the issue in the second. And as with isolation, so with independence, autonomy, presence, stability, essence, necessity, reality, and so on (the philosophical standard being that for something to qualify as independent of something else it would have to remain absolutely 100% unaffected and unchanged if the other thing were itself to change or to cease existing; this standard would be pathologically extreme in any other context but philosophy or philosophically inclined theology). But notice here there's nothing particularly formal or complex or technically impressive about my two sentences. So my complaint isn't that philosophers et al. are too formal or abstract to be relevant, just that they don't address the issues they say they're addressing. I don't see how Copernicus and Kepler and subsequent astronomers and physicists could have gotten anywhere without going formal and abstract and falling in love with the game for its own sake, so I don't see that formality and abstraction are the real issue here.*** That Wright or [certain economists] in their formality and abstraction are, according to Davies, unmoored from the questions they ought to be or think they're addressing isn't inherent in formality or abstraction. That they're formal and abstract doesn't explain the disconnect.
(3) Which brings us back to Thomas Kuhn. Among other things, his notion of "paradigm" is meant to explain why the natural sciences progress and answer their own questions better than the social sciences do. When the members of a scientific discipline share a paradigm, they fundamentally agree as to what they're talking about. Whereas if a profession doesn't have a steady sense of what its basic terms refer to, its methods and models and calculations and attempts at precision are likely to come to naught. Abstractions don't do you any good if you can't make a strong connection to what they're supposed to be abstracted from.
"Paradigm" itself is a word that people use every which way, few connecting back to Kuhn's usage, which is why Kuhn eventually dropped the term. But he didn't drop the ideas he was trying to embed in the term, and his own expansion of the term's reach in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions - in which he was using the term "paradigm" in both a narrow and a broad sense and wasn't at all clear about this even in his own mind - existed for a reason. "Paradigms" in the narrow sense - concrete achievements (often the solutions to puzzles) that scientists within a field use as models or examples for solving the problems in their field - are usually dependent for their effectiveness on the broader "paradigm" in which they're a part.
"Paradigm" in the broader sense (Kuhn came to use the term "disciplinary matrix" for this broader use) means a constellation of shared theories, techniques, beliefs, vocabulary, models, and so on. Here's my Cliff's notes account of his two uses of "paradigm." The passage from those notes that I want to highlight is this one:
A crucial feature of an exemplar ["paradigm" in the narrow sense: an example or model] is that its use involves seeing one situation as similar to another, and elements of the second situation as similar to elements of the first. But in reading "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" you'll see that "similarity" is a more extensive theme than just that, since a scientific revolution involves a shift in vocabulary. We might even say a scientific revolution is a shift in vocabulary: no vocab shift, no revo. Some crucial words are abandoned and others adopted; or, if the words don't change, their usage changes. And this entails a change in what the words designate - that is, a change in what is perceived as similar to something else and therefore gets the word applied to it.
So having a paradigm in the broad sense (disciplinary matrix) can help direct your use of a paradigm in the narrow sense (exemplar), since the former directs your sense of what is analogous to what else. And my complaint about "theory" as it tried to apply philosophy to literature and art and science and culture in late 20th century academia is that the slippy slide it would pull in its vocabulary resulted in exemplars being used poorly. E.g., let's take as our exemplar Willard Van Orman Quine's attack on empiricism, particularly his attack on reductionism. His basic point is that no statement can stand on its own unrelated to other statements. This might seem obvious, but when he wrote it in the 1950s there was still a belief among some philosophers that for a statement to be meaningful it had to at least hypothetically be reducible to a logical construct upon terms referring to immediate sense experience, such reference being a condition for a statement's being meaningful (this leaving out the statement's relation to other statements). Now the problem in trying to apply Quine's insight (or some Saussurean or Derridaean or Wittgensteinian or Kuhnian equivalent) to literature or art or anything else other than philosophy or philosophically inclined theology is that no literature or art etc. ever claimed to be reducible to logical constructs upon terms referring to immediate experience. No endeavor other than philosophy demands that what's fundamental or autonomous also be context-free and nonrelational. The terms "fundamental" and "autonomous" themselves only make sense when comparing something to something else. So to point out that something is contextual or relational is vacuous unless this is tied to its needing to be seen in a different context or the context's needing to be rethought. But that's a different matter, unrelated to the philosophical insight. (There's more to be said on this subject, and I doubt that this paragraph will explain itself to those who don't already know what I'm talking about. A lot of "theory" was a hodge podge of interesting ideas and quasi-philosophical babble, and e.g. you don't want to throw out the bulk of what Harold Bloom said just because of the philosophical posturing. While I'm in parentheses I'll add that there's no way to extrapolate Quine et al.'s insight into a critique of science, either. A critique of empiricism isn't a critique of science.)
*Yes, I am being sarcastic. It's not etiquette but cluelessness, and not necessarily on Davies and crew's part, since they all seem to assume that they and the people they're addressing know the ideas and don't need them re-explained, and unlike in my neighborhood of the 'Net, their assumption may be correct.
**Whom I'd never heard of, but that's not his fault.
***I wouldn't be surprised if Davies knows this; I just haven't read enough of his blog to know what he knows.
This interchange among Davies and crew does indeed point at a lot of what philosophers are or are not discussing. Also, I'll note rather irrelevantly that either Davies mistyped or he thinks the Tractatus was published forty years later than it actually was. In any event, here are three other points, possibly related:
(1) Following blog and comment-thread etiquette,* neither Davies nor any of his commenters states any of the ideas they are discussing; rather, they just refer to the ideas, by naming a broad field of endeavor or by naming a person who holds the idea. There are only a few exceptions, which are:
(a) several sentences about Clive Granger.** ("These people are fully aware of Granger. They take it as a principle that making inferences from data to claims about causal relationships can't be done on the basis of purely statistical assumptions; one needs non-statistical premises about the possible structure of causal dependencies. The analysis of causality that Granger offered can be seen as acknowledging that point, but only to a limited extent: the non-statistical assumption on which Granger causality depends in [is?] just the (true) assumption that effects can't temporally precede their causes. That's fine as a structural constraint on causal inference, but it's a very weak one, and one can only get so far without additional causal premises.")
(b) the example given by Davies from a paper by Crispin Wright ("t1 Sue: 'Bill could be in Boston' Ted: 'Actually, I just saw him board a flight to Houston' t2 Sue: 'Oh. Then I was wrong.' Apparently it is very difficult to fit this sort of thing into a consistent logical framework"); but Davies doesn't then detail Wright's idea, though he does provide a download link.
(c) Davies' main complaint, which is that, while this formal highly abstract work has the most prestige and gets the most attention in high-end [Anglo-American?] philosophy departments, it doesn't address any substantive issue. Davies draws an analogy to the situation in modern economics, where, he believes, the highly abstract work doesn't address the problems it says it addresses. Not quite sure if he's also saying exactly that about Wright's paper and its ilk, though that may well be what he intends. But there's a difference between saying on the one hand that Wright is working on an unimportant problem and, on the other, that Wright isn't addressing the issue he thinks he's addressing - the latter can result in the former; still, it's a different argument.
My problem here is that Davies doesn't say, "This is Wright's idea X, it doesn't seem to apply to situation Y or anything like it, so just what's the point of working on X?" And then in the comments, although Brian from Rutgers does say, wait, Wright's work can potentially be applied, Brian doesn't go on to say, "Wright's idea X can potentially be applied to situations X1, X2, and X3, and here's how." So even if I do get around to reading Wright's piece, I won't know how Davies and Brian interpret it, much less why or where they think it can or can't be applied. Fortunately, I also don't know that Davies and Brian won't follow through, whereas the vagueness that afflicts my 'hood exists so that people can avoid following through.
(2) A huge part of the core of my critique of philosophy, of deconstruction, of discussions of relativism pro and con, and the like is precisely that philosophers et al. don't address the issues that they think they're addressing. The example I often use as a prototype is that I can say, "Nothing exists in isolation," and two hours later say, "I grew up in an isolated village," without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences - the problem being that the first sentence is meant to address the issue in the second. And as with isolation, so with independence, autonomy, presence, stability, essence, necessity, reality, and so on (the philosophical standard being that for something to qualify as independent of something else it would have to remain absolutely 100% unaffected and unchanged if the other thing were itself to change or to cease existing; this standard would be pathologically extreme in any other context but philosophy or philosophically inclined theology). But notice here there's nothing particularly formal or complex or technically impressive about my two sentences. So my complaint isn't that philosophers et al. are too formal or abstract to be relevant, just that they don't address the issues they say they're addressing. I don't see how Copernicus and Kepler and subsequent astronomers and physicists could have gotten anywhere without going formal and abstract and falling in love with the game for its own sake, so I don't see that formality and abstraction are the real issue here.*** That Wright or [certain economists] in their formality and abstraction are, according to Davies, unmoored from the questions they ought to be or think they're addressing isn't inherent in formality or abstraction. That they're formal and abstract doesn't explain the disconnect.
(3) Which brings us back to Thomas Kuhn. Among other things, his notion of "paradigm" is meant to explain why the natural sciences progress and answer their own questions better than the social sciences do. When the members of a scientific discipline share a paradigm, they fundamentally agree as to what they're talking about. Whereas if a profession doesn't have a steady sense of what its basic terms refer to, its methods and models and calculations and attempts at precision are likely to come to naught. Abstractions don't do you any good if you can't make a strong connection to what they're supposed to be abstracted from.
"Paradigm" itself is a word that people use every which way, few connecting back to Kuhn's usage, which is why Kuhn eventually dropped the term. But he didn't drop the ideas he was trying to embed in the term, and his own expansion of the term's reach in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions - in which he was using the term "paradigm" in both a narrow and a broad sense and wasn't at all clear about this even in his own mind - existed for a reason. "Paradigms" in the narrow sense - concrete achievements (often the solutions to puzzles) that scientists within a field use as models or examples for solving the problems in their field - are usually dependent for their effectiveness on the broader "paradigm" in which they're a part.
"Paradigm" in the broader sense (Kuhn came to use the term "disciplinary matrix" for this broader use) means a constellation of shared theories, techniques, beliefs, vocabulary, models, and so on. Here's my Cliff's notes account of his two uses of "paradigm." The passage from those notes that I want to highlight is this one:
A crucial feature of an exemplar ["paradigm" in the narrow sense: an example or model] is that its use involves seeing one situation as similar to another, and elements of the second situation as similar to elements of the first. But in reading "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" you'll see that "similarity" is a more extensive theme than just that, since a scientific revolution involves a shift in vocabulary. We might even say a scientific revolution is a shift in vocabulary: no vocab shift, no revo. Some crucial words are abandoned and others adopted; or, if the words don't change, their usage changes. And this entails a change in what the words designate - that is, a change in what is perceived as similar to something else and therefore gets the word applied to it.
So having a paradigm in the broad sense (disciplinary matrix) can help direct your use of a paradigm in the narrow sense (exemplar), since the former directs your sense of what is analogous to what else. And my complaint about "theory" as it tried to apply philosophy to literature and art and science and culture in late 20th century academia is that the slippy slide it would pull in its vocabulary resulted in exemplars being used poorly. E.g., let's take as our exemplar Willard Van Orman Quine's attack on empiricism, particularly his attack on reductionism. His basic point is that no statement can stand on its own unrelated to other statements. This might seem obvious, but when he wrote it in the 1950s there was still a belief among some philosophers that for a statement to be meaningful it had to at least hypothetically be reducible to a logical construct upon terms referring to immediate sense experience, such reference being a condition for a statement's being meaningful (this leaving out the statement's relation to other statements). Now the problem in trying to apply Quine's insight (or some Saussurean or Derridaean or Wittgensteinian or Kuhnian equivalent) to literature or art or anything else other than philosophy or philosophically inclined theology is that no literature or art etc. ever claimed to be reducible to logical constructs upon terms referring to immediate experience. No endeavor other than philosophy demands that what's fundamental or autonomous also be context-free and nonrelational. The terms "fundamental" and "autonomous" themselves only make sense when comparing something to something else. So to point out that something is contextual or relational is vacuous unless this is tied to its needing to be seen in a different context or the context's needing to be rethought. But that's a different matter, unrelated to the philosophical insight. (There's more to be said on this subject, and I doubt that this paragraph will explain itself to those who don't already know what I'm talking about. A lot of "theory" was a hodge podge of interesting ideas and quasi-philosophical babble, and e.g. you don't want to throw out the bulk of what Harold Bloom said just because of the philosophical posturing. While I'm in parentheses I'll add that there's no way to extrapolate Quine et al.'s insight into a critique of science, either. A critique of empiricism isn't a critique of science.)
*Yes, I am being sarcastic. It's not etiquette but cluelessness, and not necessarily on Davies and crew's part, since they all seem to assume that they and the people they're addressing know the ideas and don't need them re-explained, and unlike in my neighborhood of the 'Net, their assumption may be correct.
**Whom I'd never heard of, but that's not his fault.
***I wouldn't be surprised if Davies knows this; I just haven't read enough of his blog to know what he knows.
