Frank Kogan

Been 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.

( The frequent dependence of exemplars on disciplinary matrices )

*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.

( footnote 3 )

B. Michael's response to yesterday's question includes this statement:

Professional philosophy is pretty balkanized. It's like any other professional academics: There are fifteen people on the planet who can talk intelligently about any given thing. Everyone else argues about the validity of that thing and questions whether that thing is a thing. None of it has anything to do with day-to-day life.

In the meantime, yesterday's thread continues to roll, or unroll, as the case may be.

Int: In Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a relativist?

Rorty: Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.

. . .

Int: Do you disagree with any of Davidson's views?

Rorty: I can't think of anything we really disagree about that doesn't seem to me a verbal issue, but Davidson may have a different view of the matter. Well, one thing is that he keeps saying truth is an absolutely central concept, and I can't see what makes it central or basic. I take Davidson to be saying that truth, belief, meaning, intention, rationality, cognitivity - all these notions are parts of a seamless web, and that seems to me a useful point to make, that you can't have any of these notions without all the others. It's just that he then wants to say, "And truth is in the middle." I can't see why you have to have a middle.

Int: Putnam has also criticized you for deemphasizing truth.

Rorty: Putnam keeps saying that you have to have what he calls "substantive truth." I take Davidson to be saying: there's not much pointing in saying truth is substantive. I don't think Davidson has any better idea than I do what Putnam means by that. Nonetheless, he somehow attaches a weight to the notion that I can't seem to attach to it.
--Interview with Richard Rorty in January 1995 by Joshua Knobe

( It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone )

Me, responding over at Tom's tumblr in regard to contenderizer and Tim Finney on this ilX Pitchfork's Albums thread (search for "tough and complicated idea" and "partners"*)(I like ogmor's comments**). I'm repeating myself, of course (saying in less full form what I'd said here), but I think this needs to be repeatedly hammered in: "Personal taste" and "objectively true" not only aren't the only two choices, neither can be fallen back on when the issue is a value judgment. Here's what I wrote:

The problem with either analogy - taste in music is like taste in gender, taste in music is like taste in partners - is that "best album" is not an expression of taste. It's a value judgment, and in our society, at any rate, no one has successfully been able to pry it loose from "value judgment" and relegate it to the "taste" category. If anything, the reverse is true: apparent expressions of taste - "I love this," "this is my favorite," "this is boring," "this turns my stomach" - tend to play as value judgments anyway. So even if my judgments are just rationalizations of my taste, they function in the world as judgments. Now, there's plenty of recognition that judgments are connected to taste and to personality and to social role and the like, so we're not expected to all make the same judgment. But in my online world we are nonetheless encouraged and even expected to give reasons why we think something is good or bad, not just reasons for why something appeals to us. People's outrage or contempt at our taking Mariah and Taylor and Ashlee seriously (to take Dan's triumvirate of dislike) isn't outrage at our taste, at our personal preferences, but at our thinking that we're at least in some way right, and that those who dislike those artists are wrong, and at our thinking these women are worthy of time and space, the reader's or listener's time as well as our own - and those who won't give them time can fuck off with their opinions (except that such opinions are usually a sociological gold mine).

*I'm searching for both.

**Does anyone know who contenderizer and ogmor are (or their former ilX names, at any rate; I've lost track of who is who)?

I like this response I just made to Nate on the several-days-old pain thread, so I'm reposting here so it doesn't get lost:

One of my favorite papers I wrote in college argued that - despite what philosophers claim - in standard usage intensity of pain is not strictly personal and ineffable but is a social value judgment that we can and do argue about, just as we argue about beauty, etc. - well, not "just as," since "beauty" is sometimes said to inhere in a sunset or sculpture or other inanimate object (despite the eye-of-the-beholder bromide), but we most certainly don't leave it up to an individual's self-report to decide how hurt he's feeling, whether his pain-statements are valid, whether or not he's malingering or whining, etc.

[And I'll add here that in instances where pain confers legitimacy - e.g., you are accorded personal or political validity on the basis of your suffering - pain is something of a Superword. E.g., "Hero Of Fear": "Terry says he's more real than me 'cause he's sick all the time/Not like I get sick/Or you get sick/But real sick." (For meaning of "Superword," click link on sidebar.)]

Over on Blue Lines Revisited, Tom throws a couple brief criticisms at most music convos about subjectivity, objectivity, and relativism, and I add some pessimistic comments of my own, including this one:

My complaint about the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism conversations, beyond most people's not knowing how to do them, is that what motivates the conversations gets sidestepped in the actual conversations themselves. The conversations arise from an uneasiness with the conventions for discussing and judging music, those conventions forcing us to make judgments but putting those judgments up for question and debate. And what the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism conversation generally avoids or botches is the question of authority: What authorizes what we say about music, and [a question that's more subterranean] who authorizes it? The subjectivity/objectivity/relativism terminology is awful because it gives us two dumb choices neither of which matches actual social practice: "subjectivity" tells us that we can say whatever we want, "objectivity" tells us that it's the facts that authorize what we say. Neither choice is correct, neither corresponds to what we actually do, which is to constantly make judgments about the music, judgments that, as I said, are up for question and debate. And the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism convo is generally a dishonest way to influence the debate by trying to persuade someone not to question judgments - either 'cause the judgments are "subjective" so our only choice is to agree to disagree or because they're "objective" hence based on facts about which we're not allowed to disagree, supposedly - so almost everything that actually goes into the judgments (including but hardly limited to where the music is being listened to, why, and who with) is avoided in the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism discussion... except when I'm part of the discussion, in which case you'll find me recommending that we eliminate the words "subjective" and "objective" from the language altogether and insisting that no one gets to use the word "relativism" without explaining what the hell he or she means by it.

The term "paradigm shift" has made it into the common language as "a fundamental change in the way of seeing or doing something." Of course, many people's threshold for what counts as "fundamental" or "change" is really low, and "paradigm shift" is usually what people want the other guy to undergo so that his ideas will come to match the ones we've already got. But that's not the term's fault, that a lot of people become posturing dumbasses when they employ abstract intellectual terminology. A more damaging problem is that people are interested in paradigm shifts but not in paradigms; that is, the idea of breaking through restrictions is appealing, whereas the idea of creating new restrictions and being supported and nurtured by those restrictions is less appealing. But Kuhn came up with the idea of shifts back in the 1940s, along with the idea that the shifts were between incompatible modes of thought. It wasn't until the late '50s, however, that he developed the notion "paradigm," and he did so not only to understand how shifts occurred, but to understand how it was that the hard sciences were so much better at asking and answering questions and at creating fundamental shifts in thought than were the social sciences, which seemed to continually be reverting to square one.

If Kuhn is right, this is what paradigms do for the sciences:

1. Paradigms organize and focus a science's activity by telling the scientist what questions to ask and how to go about answering them. Which is to say that paradigms restrict and specialize the scientist's attention. And as a science develops and undergoes scientific revolutions it breaks into more and more subsciences that are ever more specialized.

2. Paradigms create expectations that are sufficient enough in their precision that anomalies can occur. And when anomalies can't be explained away as equipment failure or scientist error and can't be worked into the paradigm, then they become impetuses for a scientific revolution, i.e., a paradigm shift, and for the ultimate creation of new restrictions and new specialization.

(I recommend that you look back at Kuhn 8½, which contains excerpts from "The Essential Tension," the 1959 article in which Kuhn first uses the word "paradigm.")

Working away on the question of the distinction that Kuhn draws between rules and paradigms, and why he thinks it's important to draw such a distinction:

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions p. viii: I was struck by the number and extent of overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists and sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of "paradigms." These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.

pp 3-4: Instructed to examine electrical or chemical phenomena, the man who is ignorant of these fields but who knows what it is to be scientific may legitimately reach any one of a number of incompatible conclusions.

So, the success of the natural sciences as opposed to the social sciences lies not in the natural scientists' knowing better than the social scientists what it is to be a scientist, or their having a better grasp of something called "scientific method," but in the members of a particular field or subfield sharing a set of model problems and solutions (i.e., paradigms). This isn't yet telling us the difference between paradigms and rules (as opposed to a paradigm being a type of rule, say, or a collection of rules), or why Kuhn thinks it's important that we notice such a difference. But it tells us what he thinks is at stake: a paradigm is what allows a particularly scientific community - a scientific field or subfield - to proceed with effect, without constantly having to ask itself what it's doing.

Mark informs me that a well-regarded philosopher once said something somewhere linking "paradigm" to "metaphor." I haven't read this thing that the well-regarded philosopher said, but I felt like posting a caution anyway.

( Not all resemblance is metaphoric )

byebyepride and tarigwaemir and Anonymous have comments on my Heidegger thread that still merit responses from me, but I'm going to put off responding for the time being. In my Heidegger post I was asking a question of Nietzsche and Heidegger that I've been asking of myself as well, and I've decided that the question will be clearer if I simply ask it of myself, and leave Nietzsche and Heidegger out of it for the time being.

The question is, "What is the importance of the idea of transcendence?" By "transcendence" here I don't simply mean "rising above circumstances" (e.g., "he transcended his militaristic upbringing to become one of the great humanitarians of the age") but rather the demand that - to mix metaphors - one's grounds, causes, or reasons must be absolutely transcendent. That is, one's grounds, causes, or reasons must be so independent of what they ground, cause, or justify that if the latter were to cease existing, the grounds, causes, and reasons would nonetheless remain unchanged. So, by this standard, if my theories are to be grounded in fact, the facts must in no way be dependent on the theories. Get rid of the theories and all that accompany them - including their premises, assumptions, vocabulary - and the facts remain identical to what they were before. (If the standards for transcendence aren't stated so explicitly, nonetheless the feeling is that all the strength or solidity or authority or capacity to shape comes from the grounds-causes-reasons, and none from what is being grounded or caused or justified.)

( What I mean by importance )