[MD] Truth and the Linguistic Turn

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Krimel,

Krimel said:
Holy crap this goes on and on...

Matt:
Ah!  You've been outed as a writer-as-you-goer.  Yes, indeed, you are finding out the hard way why I get made fun of for being long-winded.  Basically, my technique in debate is the filibuster.  People just get tired, and move on.

Krimel said:
There is no fixed absolute reference point. There is no Absolute Truth beyond the conception of Absolute Truth. We can imagine such a thing. We can give it a "tip of the hat or a wag of the finger" But we have no way of being certain that what we tip and wag at, is what we think it is.

Matt:
Actually, I would go further and say we can only _vaguely_ imagine such a thing.  The trouble is filling in the details.  My experience is that the more details you fill in, ya' know, to make it work, the more unworkable it becomes _and_ the more undesirable.  Can you imagine no change?  That's, ultimately, what we're talking about--total stasis.

Krimel said:
One thing that strikes me about you comments here is that as you describe it and whatever form we give to reality or our conceptions of reality it eventually assumes a kind of binary form. Extremes are indentified. I can not account for why this is but this bifurcation seems nearly universal. Our concepts seem to always assume this binary polarity. Why not triads or quartettes? To me this strikes at the heart of the Taoist metaphysics that Pirsig adopts. We see patterns in terms of their extreme manifestations; their poles. We construct opposites out of whatever phenomena present themselves to us whether actual or conceptual. I am torn as to whether this is a metaphysical or a psychological principle or whether a distinction between the two is even possible.

Matt:
I think it's because splitting things into two is the most basic form of reasoning in abstraction (as Pirsig noted with his "analytic knife").  As soon as humans acquired the ability to think abstractly, they eventually discovered the rules of logic and negation is one of the basic things you need for reasoning to even occur.  The differentiation process can only happen if you can distinguish between a thing and a not-thing.  Like truth, binaries are fundamental, but not nearly as interesting or powerful as Plato thought.

Krimel said:
I would argue that what Plato saw was the purity and clarity of Euclidian geometry.

Matt:
I think I would say that it was certainly a necessary cause, but not a sufficient one.  Only someone so angry at the bullshit occurring around him, like say the death at the hands of the state of a loved one, would envision a world of total stasis.

Krimel said:
But language is thought objectified. It is the summation of our interior musings rendered symbolic. Regardless of how we render our symbols, verbally, gesturally, or musically, something it lost in the rendering.

Matt:
This is a very strong feeling in philosophy, and I'm surely not presently equipped to launch either a good attack on the notion of "interior musings" or a general redescription to split the terrain into, on the one side, dispensable "problematic" notions and, on the other, the good ones.  But it is something like this notion that underlies the need to decouple semantics from epistemology.  Or rather, if one doesn't redescribe a whole bunch of reinforcing notions in philosophy, then you keep getting thrown back on the rocks if you try to escape only half-assed.

The general idea is that the notion of "interior musings" is what is making you suspicious, and it is also a notion that has not always existed, so it is a notion we can dispense with.  The notion of interiority you are using is what I called the shift to "experience."  Now, the idea that we can dispense with it doesn't also entail that everything is wrong with it: we just need to figure out what parts are which, good and bad, useful and useless, etc.  It's kinda' like figuring out how the body works.  We started with the four humors, but medicine and physiology have moved on since then.  I think it's the same thing with ideas, including the idea of an idea.  For instance, in our first spin through this terrain, you insisted on spanning the term "idea" over linguistic happenings and perceptual happenings.  I commented at the time that that's the way Descartes had used the term "idée".  The trick is that Descartes had kind of made that way up himself.  Since that time, I think we have learned in philosophy--through trial and error--that it hinders more than it hurts to think of an idea as both a perception and a conception, percept and concept.  We need to distinguish them.

I think you'd find a lot useful to chew on in Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.  Rorty does yeoman's work in tracing out the tangled web we know of as "the mind."  If you like my dashes through history, you'd love his book--he's the one that taught me all my tricks, both how and what to write.  The general scientistic tenor of your writing causes me to think that you'd find much amenable in the book.  Essentially, it is a particular following out of the consequences of a particular position in the philosophy of mind that was created during the 50s, that of mind-brain identity.  That's why David M occasionally gives me cat-calls as a degenerate materialist.  The position that Rorty developed is, from his eyes, not degenerate, but still in some attenuated sense materialist, which makes some feel chilly.  Rorty doesn't have much use for scientism, but he might prove an interesting read.

Krimel said:
All the talk of the sanctity of language reminds me too much of Kant's analytic truth. Truth even with a small 't' is not found in a statement. It is held as a belief. Reason is neither necessary nor sufficient to compel belief. We can divorce Truth and Belief but Justification is the modifier of Belief. Reason is only one of the faces of Justification. More often than not reason is a dash of power covering blemishes of the true face of our justifications.

Why isn't belief the primitive notion? Isn't language just a distillation of symbols to communicate belief?

Matt:
Well, come now, I'm not saying language is sacrosanct, just trying to give a picture (really: relate a picture other people give) of what's going on when we use language, study language, create language.

You ask a good question, though, and I'm not certain that belief isn't a primitive notion.  To put it the other way around, I'm not sure that semantics needs the notion of "belief" to function, though it might.  I would go ahead with saying that semantics doesn't need a notion of "belief," but we certainly can't make much sense of life or action without one.

Matt said:
This is what I meant by saying that truth is an absolute notion, but justification is relative _and_ the only route to truth. The latter, however, contains the epistemological equivocation that still occurs in common sense talk. What we should really say is that truth is an absolute notion, but justification is relative to audience and the only route to _knowledge_ (thus holding the two apart entirely).

Krimel said:
Rather that "... justification is relative to audience and the only route to _knowledge..." shouldn't it be "... justification is relative to audience and the only route to _belief_..."?

Matt:
No, and this I am fairly convinced of.  The reason I would say specifically "knowledge" as opposed to "belief" is because analytic philosophy has done a decent job of noting that there is such a thing as true belief that we are not justified in (and so would not count as knowledge).  I also think we get beliefs all the time from sense perception that aren't immediately justified, and so probably only knowledge in an attenuated sense.  My understanding of "belief" is that they are, following the pragmatists, habits of action.  I think it is the case that there are many kinds of action that we have to improvise without something we would call knowledge, and that it is important to attribute beliefs as their motivation (this allows us, after the fact in reflection, to differentiate between good and bad beliefs/action-motivators).  Pre-knowledge improvisation is something that James called attention to in his "Will to Believe".

Matt said:
The truth (or falsity) that it is raining does, indeed, have nothing to do with whether a person believes it to be raining (or not) or even whether they are justified (or not) in believing so, but only in the fact that it is raining (or not). But while that remains true, it is also true that the only way we'd know if it were raining is if first, someone believed it, and second, they were justified in doing so (thus making it knowledge and not luck).

Krimel said:
Aren't you left with "true" and "justified" as adjectives describing belief? Haven't you just identified one species of belief? What about unjustified true beliefs. Or justified false beliefs?

Matt:
Yeah, "knowledge" is a species of belief, specifically one that is both true and justified.  True beliefs that are not justified are those that you are lucky in believing.  For instance, if you are forced into making a choice between X and Y without much justification in either direction (like on a multiple choice test, though life occasionally forces these decisions--like cutting that wire in the bomb), then we are likely to say you were lucky in choosing X (to which we attribute the action-motivator "I believe the answer is X/I believe X is the best choice").  Justified beliefs that are false are things like the Greeks belief in the ethicalness of slavery.  We are now inclined to say that, while if you have a sense of history you'll want to say they were justified, no amount of history will suggest that they were right in doing so, that the Greeks held a true belief about slavery.

I should also add that at least one philosopher became famous for making the analysis of knowledge into "justified true belief" more complicated (Edmund Gettier).  The most fascinating response that I've read to this version of knowledge (a version that goes back to Plato), however, is in Barry Allen's Knowledge and Civilization.  He suggests that Plato instituted a "linguistic bias" in our conception of knowledge, which makes us focus on "belief" as the main unit and causes us to have Cartesian-like fits of dismay when we are wrong about what we believe we know.  His suggestion is that "knowledge" is indeed absolute in a way that Descartes and Plato would've recognized, but it has nothing to do with belief.  Knowledge is, rather, reflected in things we produce--like an architect's bridge or a surgeon's incision.  His definition of knowledge is "superlative artifactual achievement".  Don't ask me to explain what the hell that means, but it is really interesting.

Matt said:
Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature used a sci-fi story about an alien race, the Antipodeans, that we'd learned to talk to had no conception of an inner space called the "mind" because they'd happened to have made scientific breakthroughs in neurophysiology before physics. He used this story as a means of suggesting how we might talk without a pernicious conception of a mind that gets in between us and reality. This was a means of suggesting that Cartesianism is optional, not inevitable. The whole idea behind the creation of "eliminative materialism" was not that the "mind" is fake, but that we might someday come to speak without reference to it, thus effectively eliminating it. We could conceivably be nudged into becoming Antipodeans, though I doubt we ever will be.

Krimel said:
I just don't think the distinction between your pain and my pain is artificial or avoidable. There is a qualitative difference between my experience of my own nervous system and my experience of that which is other than my nervous system.

Matt:
Oh, no, Rorty would agree that the difference between you and I, your pain and my pain, is neither artificial or avoidable, too.  But all you need for that is a distinction between spatial locations, a distinction between nervous systems.

Now, mentioning "qualitative difference," that does indeed bring up another whole nest of issues in the philosophy of mind, similar to the nest I gestured towards earlier in "interior musings."  It is the same problem with this nest as the earlier: it is big.  This is something that Daniel Dennett has been at the forefront of untangling.  The main idea is that the idea of a qualitative difference, what philosophical jargon refers to as "qualia," is what Thomas Nagel called attention to with his very famous paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"  Nagel argues quite perspicuously that there is no way for us to ever know what it is like to be a bat, that we will never know what it is like to be a bat from a first-person point of view.  Indeed, following this line out, we will only ever know our own first-person point of view, and everything else is imagination, reasoning by analogy.  The trouble is that philosophers on the other side of this issue see Nagel as baptizing an intractable problem, rather than solving.  The only way to solve (or dissolve) this is to reconstrue what we take "mind" and "knowledge" to be.  This process of redefinition is what Dennett and Rorty are involved in.  This is what Dennett calls the "intentional stance."  You earlier called this useful, but incorrect, but that statement is question-begging over the issue of what a mind is--you're beginning with a different one than Dennett.  By Dennett's standards, his is correct, just less rooted in tradition (much like when Copernicus first suggested that the earth revolves around the sun).

This is where you stopped, so I'll end with two selections from Rorty's PMN.  The first is a sentence from a footnote on Nagel I ran across while running down this post.  It's for people that like to call Rorty a degenerate materialist:

"Physicalism ... is probably true (but uninteresting) if construed as predicting every event in every space-time region under some description or other, but obviously false if construed as the claim to say everything true." (28 fn. 4)

This certainly doesn't end controversy, but everything hinges on "interest."  This next is a couple pages in which Rorty lays out his plan for the book, what he's going to do.

----------
The "mind-body problem" which I have just "dissolved" [in the previous 12 or so pages] concerns only a few of the notions which, emerging at different points in the history of thought, have intertwined to produce a tangle of interrelated problems.  Questions like "How are intentional states of consciousness related to neural states?" and "How are phenomenal properties such as painfulness related to neurological properties?" are parts of what I shall call the "problem of consciousness."  This problem is distinct from such pre-philosophical problems about personhood as "Am I really only this mass of flesh and bone?" and from Greek philosophical problems about knowledge as "How can we have certainty about the changing?" "How can knowledge be of the unchanging?" and "How can the unchanging become internal to us by being known?"  Let us call the "problem of personhood" that of what more a human being is than flesh.  This problem has one form in the pre-philosophical craving for immortality, and another in the Kantian and romantic assertion of human dignity--but both cravings are quite distinct from problems about consciousness and about knowledge.  Both are ways of expressing our claim to be something quite different from the beasts that perish.  Let us call the "problem of reason" that of how to spell out the Greek claim that the crucial difference between man and beasts is that we can _know_--that we can know not merely singular facts but universal truths, numbers, essences, the eternal.  This problem takes different forms in Aristotle's hylomorphic account of knowing, Spinoza's rationalist account, and Kant's transcendental account.  But these issues are distinct both from those about the interrelations between two sorts of things (one spatial and the other nonspatial) and from issues concerning immortality and moral dignity.  The problem of consciousness centers around the brain, raw feels, and bodily motion.  The problem of reason centers around the topics of knowledge, language, and intelligence--all our "higher powers."  The problem of personhood centers around attributions of freedom and of moral responsibility.

In order to sort out some of the relations among these three problems, I shall offer a list of ways of isolating beings which have minds in contrast to the "merely physical"--"the body," "matter," the central nervous system, "nature" or "the subject matter of the positive sciences."  Here are some, though hardly all, of the features which philosophers have, at one time or another, taken as marks of the mental:

1. ability to know itself incorrigibly ("privileged access")
2. ability to exist separately from the body
3. non-spatiality (having a nonspatial part or "element")
4. ability to grasp universals
5. ability to sustain relations to the inexistent ("intentionality")
6. ability to use language
7. ability to act freely
8. ability to form part of our social group, to be "one of us"
9. inability to be identified with any object "in the world"

This is a long list, and it could easily be lengthened.  But it is important to go through these various suggestions about what it is to have a mind, for each of them has helped philosophers to insist on an unbridgeable dualism between mind and body.  Philosophers have constantly seized upon some distinctive feature of human life in order to give our intuition of our uniqueness a "firm philosophical basis."  Because these firm bases are so varied, naturalisms and materialisms, when not shrugged off as hopeless attempts to jump a vast ontological (or epistemology, or linguistic) gulf, are often treated as trivially true but pointless.  They are pointless, it is explained, because our uniqueness has nothing whatever to do with whichever abyss the naturalist has laboriously filled in, but everything to do with some other abyss which has all the while been gaping just behind his back.  In particular, the point is often made that even if we settled all questions about the relation between pains and neurons, and similar questions arising out of incorrigibility--(1) above--we should still have dealt, at best, only with (2) and (3) among the other marks of the mental.  We should still have left everything relevant to reason (notably [4], [5], and [6]) and everything relevant to personhood (notably [7], [8], and [9]) as obscure as ever.

I think that this point is quite right, and further, that if it had been appreciated earlier the problem of consciousness would not have loomed so large as it has in recent philosophy.  In the sense of having pains as well as neurons, we are on a par with many if not all of the brutes, whereas we presumably share neither reason nor personhood with them.  It is only if we assume that possession of _any_ non-physical inner state is somehow, via (3), connected with (4) or (5) that we will think that light shed upon raw feels would reflect off onto representational mental states, and thereby illuminate our capacity to mirror the world around us.  Again, only the assumption that life itself (even that of the fetus, the brain-damaged human, the bat, or the caterpillar) has the special sanctity akin to personhood would make us think that understanding raw feels might help us to understand our moral responsibilities.  Both assumptions are, however, often made.  Understanding why they are made requires an understanding of intellectual history rather than an understanding of the meanings of the relevant terms, or an analysis of the concepts they signify.  By sketching a little of the history of discussions of the mind, I hope to show that the problem of reason cannot be stated without a return to epistemological views which non one really wishes to resurrect.  Further, I want to supply some ground for a suggestion which I shall develop later: that the problem of personhood is not a "problem" but a description of the human condition, that it is not a matter for philosophical "solution" but a misleading way of expostulating on the irrelevance of traditional philosophy to the rest of culture.
----------

Pages 34 to 37.

Matt
_________________________________________________________________
Give to a good cause with every e-mail. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft.
http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?souce=EML_WL_ GoodCause