COLLECTION OF POSTS FROM TYPEPAD SITE, ON CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 8:41PM
THE TWO REALISMS
Three motives 4 rebirth of anti-prags. But 2 realisms - technical and intuitive.
3 Motives
1.new developments Question pragmatist rejection of correspondence theory of truth.
Kripke & Dummett
2. Prags underestimate human significance of old phil problems, dissolve too much.
Nagel & Cavell
3. No more philosophical Fach.
Nub for intuitive realist = prags dissolve problems using Verificationism. That is prags say that if we cannot check it directly it is not worth talking about.
Intuits object: prags reject the Ideas that 1.non-solvable phil problems are interesting and 2 - that there are facts beyond language.
Second lot, the technical realists, believe that prags have verificationism wrong for different reasons: following Kripke they believe, pace Frege, that meaning does not determine reference. They believe that real natural kinds determine both thinking and language.
They think that words do not carve up and order an inchoate world, but that things, kinds of things that are real & unchanging, do so.
Ultimately to call a sentence true does not for Rorty mean that the sentence corresponds to the Real but that it does a job, works for us.
To say that a sentence's value resides in it's correspondence to facts rather than in the fact that it provides a fruitful habit of action is for the prags to say something that does no useful work and creates weird problems that cannot be solved.
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MORE ON INTUITIONS AND REALISM
First, Rorty claims that we do have many intuitions because we have been educated in a particular intell tradition. But R's point is that we have no special responsibility to these time bound intuitions. If we had lived earlier we might feel responsibility to other intuitions.
Intuition people think we have a responsibility to these things and that it is wrong to repress them. They believe this because they believe that if we dig deep enough and teach people the right vocab, they will all find a set of intuitions that they all share.
If these guys are right one of two things have to be true:
E/ language does not go all the way down O/ at base all languages are commensurable.
Rorty believes something different and interesting. He believes that our job is to create intuitions for the common future, to act as poets rather than as Philosophers, makers
rather than discovers.
He does not question the intuitions but questions how loyal we need to be to them .
INTUITIVE REALISM
INTUITIVE REALISM CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM SECTION FOUR
THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER WE HAVE CERTAIN INTUITIONS. WE HAVE THEM SAYS RORTY BECAUSE WE LIVE IN AN INTELLECTUAL CULTURE IN WHICH SUCH INTUITIONS ARE IN PLAY, JUST AS OTHER ONES USED TO BE IN PLAY.
WHAT PRAGS WANT TO DO IS NOT TO DEVELOP “A PHIL VIEW WHICH CAPTURES SUCH INTUITIONS” BUT TO STOP HAVING SUCH INTUITIONS AND THE PHIL VIEWS THAT CAPTURE THEM. NO INTUITIONS NO NEED FOR THE VIEW THAT CAPTURES THEM.
THOSE WHO PLUMP FOR INTUITIONS SAY THAT we have to do justice to everyone’s intuitions.
If this is so then we have to say that intuitions go deeper than language, that is, views of the world occur and are universal despite culture and language.
Or, despite the appearance of differences in culture, “all vocabularies are commensurable.”
Two things are meant: first that culture has nothing to do with intuitions and second that Homeric heroes and Genghis khan both talk about what we talk about.
Ok; to see the problems and intuition proposed as Philosophy as indispensable to understanding how philosophy and intellectual has gone in our culture makes perfect sense. Thus studying the history of philosophy is a Good Thing. (do Hacking article on this from HO) But it is not a Good Thing if we do it to protect these allegedly timeless “intuitions”
We need, thinks R, to step back from the tradition and see it as a tradition rather than as something spontaneously given to all people in all cultures.
He sees Cavell and Clarke as looking at “the legacy of scepticism” as indication “of soemthing important about human beings,”, rather than as telling us something about how modern Westerners see consciousness and awareness.
Nagel is a good example when he collects a bunch of allegedly “deep” problems under a single, capital letter rubric, “Subjective-Objective”. Here he is saying that there are sets of old and insoluble but real philosophical problems to which we keep returning, and we study guys from the past not because their answers are believable anymore but to see how they dealt with these issues, issues with which we still must deal, accepting that human understanding has some built-in, important and informative limits, rather than stuff it just cannot do.
Rorty does an interesting analysis of Nagel’s take on “moral luck”. Let’s do this very carefully.
1. The problem is that we can only blame people for what is under our control and yet almost nothing is. What he means is that when you write a great blog entry, this might be a function of your genetic inheritance, how much sleep you got, whether you are getting along with your ferret, your blood sugar level and your typing skills.
2. As Nagel puts when we really examine things people do we find less and less wiggle room.
3. He offers a “flabby” “compatibiist account” of moral judgments such as Hume might offer. Hume might suggest that Bob is responsible for whatever we generally hold people responsible for. That is, we look at such gross factors as absence of coercion(no one held a gun to your neck as you wrote the blog entry); ignorance (you did not understand that what you were writing was rivetingly brilliant); involuntary movement(you got up at night and wrote it in your sleep, or your hands just raced over the keyboard out of your control). Under these very rough circumstances we would say that you had diminished responsibility for the blog.
4. But a Hume would accept these rough guidelines knowing full well that Bob’s genes, blood sugar, relationships with his ferret and so forth all affected his decision. The reason Hume would accept this is that he does not believe that there is anything deep going on here. He does not believe that there is some deep problem with something called Free Will. For him using community standards of responsibility is just fine, on the understanding that we can freely wrangle about degrees of culpability, introducing arguments about mitigating circumstances and so forth in an endless interchange.
5. Nagel’s problem is that this loosy-goos
6. y approach does not account for one salient fact - namely that philosophers have thought that is a problem here.
7. Here is how he thinks it: he thinks that if we raise skeptical objections, that is, raise questions about why we keep having to take away all the factors we regard as external to truly moral judgment, even though taking them away leaves us with nothing at all in such judgment except those accidental factors - shows us that there is a problem.
8. Nagel being a naturalist kind of guy does not plump for Kant’s solution -- that there just has to be some deeper reality to Freedom, some aspect of our moral identity that transcends this animal world (can you say, ‘Categorical Imperative’?), but he does say that this intuition about subtracting all accidental factors remains with us always, a problem, a deep problem, that might have no solution but that we feel some responsibility to try to solve. We must at least admit that the problem remains, the intuition is unkillable, and we have a responsibility to admitting that it is there.
9. “in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events or people being things.”
10. What do this mean? Well, here: Nagel wants to say that when we think agency, that is, moral acting and the responsibility we attach to it, we have an intuition, a deep and unchangeable sense, that when we describe moral acts -- the killing of innocents, going to a Jonas Brothers concert - we just cannot accept that such acts should be described as events, that is as occurrences like water gushing from a faucet or a Google search once the Return key is struck. Events are lawlike and occur according to predictable rules; acts carry a connotation of being authored, of having unique originators who could have done otherwise. You cannot stop the email once you hit the send button, but we like to think, we cannot help but think, that we had some choice, some agency, in deciding whether to hit the button in the first place.
11. But we also know with every scientific bone in us that acts really are events, that people really are things -- but we cannot, according to Nagel, but keep coming back to this deep, troubling intuition that to be fully human means to possess some level of moral agency.
12. We are this left an insoluble puzzle that attests to “the limits of our understanding.”
Rorty contrasts Nagel’s approach with that of Iris Murdoch, whom I consider a wildly under-appreciated resource in moral philosophy. Her little book on goodness, which I used when I used to teach ethics, is a gem and I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to get a quite different, intriguing and plausible read on moral philosophy.
Murdoch sees this Nagelian “intuition” as an intellectually disastrous wrong turn because it posits an isolated moral agent outside space and time. This agent is isolated, not just from space-time but, as M points out also from “belief, reason, feeling, and yet is the essential center of the self.”
To solve this disaster Murdoch wants to get back behind the whole Kantian discourse about the unbridgeable difference between moral and empirical self, to drop the language of existentialist isolation and alienation from the world and to revive an oder vocabulary, once used by 16th century Platonic Christians (or, Aristotelians). Rorty’s point is not to embrace Murdoch as right but to suggest that Nagel’s intuition, and his exciting sense that the question of moral agency leads inevitably to “ineffable depths and limits of language”, raises question not about the limits of language but about the image of man on which such a formulation of problems is grounded. What can Nagel be thinking, in the grip of what historically limited template does he write and think, such that these become intuitions and problems?
Nagel sees these as wonderful problems; an outside will see then as “reductiones ad absurdum of a vocabulary”. On understanding that phrase will depend your understanding of this whole sectionb, so let’s look at it carefully.
What is going on here is something that tells us how 20th century European intellectuals think, and where their language, their vocabulary, leads them.
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