[MD] Idealistic static value patterns

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Tuukka,

I just had some "remainder" comments before we can round up and 
say we pretty much agree on "the nature of rationality," to put it 
pretentiously.

Matt said:
Truth is not about taking a vote.  That's been effective argument 
against consensus-style theories of truth that not many have actually 
tried articulating.  (Many have assumed that pragmatist theories are 
versions of this, but I don't think they are.)  The best way to make the 
point is to say that when you say "I don't even know how that should 
be done [i.e., taking part in the social game, one of which is the 
game of self-identification]," you're actually _practically_ wrong 
because you are implicitly already doing it, participating in the game.  
Wilfrid Sellars called the game I'm talking about "the game of giving 
and asking for reasons."  It's otherwise known as "rationality."  
Rationality is a social game.  Claims, assertions, positions, and 
reasons are all moves in a game, and everyone is keeping their own 
score.  The trick to understanding this "game" is to understand that, 
broadly speaking, it's best not to start by thinking that the name of the 
game is _to win_.  That'd be like saying that the nature of playing 
make-believe with your friends is to win.  Doesn't make sense.  The 
nature of the game is to make sure that you and everyone else is 
_consistent_.  (There are derivative versions of this basic game that, 
however, do call for winners and losers.  Physics, for example.)

Tuukka said:
Yeah, well, everything that's not Dynamic Quality is just a game. But 
you're saying rationality is a social game. If so, how can it be used to 
take a metatheoretic approach to social entities?

Matt:
You might have a thicker notion of "rationality" in mind than the one 
I do.  If rationality is "the game of giving and asking for reasons," 
then it is inherently social because it requires the possibility of other 
people.  (I say "possibility" to avoid saying people can't reason by 
themselves in private.  But following Wittgenstein, there's no such 
thing as a "private language," understood as a language game that 
you and you alone _could_ play.)

I'm not sure what you precisely mean by "metatheoretic approach to 
social entities" (I'm not to hip to a lot of current theoretical 
vocabularies), but I'm not sure what the difficulty would be.  Coming 
up with a vocabulary to talk about an object (and I mean that in a 
grammatical sense) creates a language-game about that object.  If 
you then want to talk about that vocabulary, you kick it up one level 
of abstraction and have a meta-vocabulary about the vocabulary 
about that object (this is essentially just what Socratic reflection is: 
using a vocabulary to talk about the assumptions in the 
object-vocabulary).  But the meta-vocabulary is just, on the other 
hand, another language-game.  (Which then, of course, could be 
talked about--one can add as many metas as one likes, only at the 
cost of lost efficacy.)

Tuukka said:
World War 2 was not a metatheoretical approach to war. It was a 
war. Both sides had armies, and both armies fought on the 
conceptually same level. So that was social. But when rationality 
dictates social affairs, rationality resides as a different level than the 
social gaming. And if a Nazi deserts on grounds that there is no 
rational reason to expect Germany to win Soviet Union, he's no 
longer fighting the same war as most of his countrymen.

Matt:
This is where my sense that you have a stronger notion of rationality 
at work than I do comes out.  It is fundamental to the Sellarsian 
approach to understanding language and reason that we understand 
that "rationality" does not dictate anything.  Only people do that.  
Rationality does not have a language with which to speak, and thus 
dictate.  It is, rather on this approach, a game that speakers play.  
(Actually, quite exactly like breathing, in your earlier ingenious 
riposte that I've omitted, which I think was right on.)  The game can 
tell people what a correct move would be, given the game they are 
playing, but it can't tell them to _keep playing the game_.  When the 
Nazi deserts, he's reasoned, played out the moves in the game he's 
playing, and decided on a course of action (rather than changing the 
game he's playing, and keep fighting for the Third Reich).  All this, I 
take it, you agree with.  The trouble I'm having is seeing how war as 
a social game is a disanalogy to "rationality as a social game."  
Rationality is a different social game than war-making, I can grant.  
In fact, it is something like a meta-game to our nonlinguistic actions.  
The game of giving and asking for reasons allows us to remove 
ourselves from all _other_ kinds of action to take the action of talking 
about acting.  It is in this sense that the pragmatists were right that 
the practical precedes the theoretical, know-how to knowing-that.

It kind of seems as though you wish for their to be a non-game at 
some point.  I think there are non-games (e.g., rocks are not games), 
but to understand the point of view of reasoning creatures, the line 
of thought I'm articulating requires us to say that for reasoning 
creatures, everything is _treatable_ as a game (e.g., how physics 
treats rocks).  (And you need to so treat it to reason about it.)  If I 
knew more about your metaphilosophical position, I'd say it looks like 
you want what Plato called a land "beyond hypotheses."  But I don't 
know.

Tuukka said:
Like I said, sure, I'm participating in the game. But I don't say "I know 
how I breathe" because that sounds silly. If I said so, people would 
be confused instead of thinking, that I'm just telling them I know what 
breathing feels like, and that I'm able to make myself breathe by 
means of conscious effort, even though I do so also without conscious 
effort. The question that would arise from such a claim would be: 
"Why is this person telling us that? Does he think we don't expect him 
to be a normal human?"

Matt:
Breathing is a good analogy for my point.  Because in this case we 
have to wonder, as Darwinian naturalists who want to tell a story of 
biological-cultural evolution, "where did rationality come from?"  
Evolutionary biologists can tell us a story about where breathing came 
from.  But what about rationality?  For Plato and Descartes, it was a 
dash of the divine that separated us from the non-rational animals.  
But I don't allow such answers in my game (the game of Darwinian 
naturalism).  And like breathing, you can be better and worse at this 
thing called the game of giving and asking for reasons.  Some people 
can hold their breath longer than I can through training.  The trick 
about a naturalist explanation of reason is that one has to begin with 
the idea that it is something we learn as children (this is partly where 
Chomskyan linguistics gets tossed half out the door).  It's a skill.  A 
_social_ skill.  We can be better and worse at it.  In fact, it's what I'm 
teaching my students every semester (nearly).

There are, I agree, some cases in which it is pointless to say "I know 
how to reason," on the analogy of breathing: "yeah, of course we 
know you know how to do that--you're talking to us and exchanging 
reasons, aren't you?"  But in some cases, the point is just to talk 
about just _what_ one is saying they know how to do.  You can give 
a more explicit and elaborate response in the case of breathing.  
And just so, too, in the case of reasoning, and in the latter case, it 
is awfully more complicated.

Tuukka said:
I mean, maybe Skutvik didn't know how to play the social game here 
at MD. But it's probably a pointless thing to discuss with him. Because 
if you said to Skutvik: "I'd like to discuss your inability to play the 
social game on MD", I think he'd think you're a fool or something like 
that. He probably thinks others didn't play the game right. So why 
should we discuss the game? We both will think we are playing the 
game right, and we don't know that our conceptions of "right playing" 
differ before they actually do so.

Matt:
Yah, you're certainly right about Bo.  And that punches up the 
difficulty of negotiating different view points and trying to get on the 
same page.  And you're right, we will assume, for the most part, that 
we are playing the same game until it becomes apparent to someone 
that that is possibly a wrong assumption.  And then you talk about 
what game y'all are playing.  It's not that Bo had bad manners.  I think 
nearly everyone I've seen traverse the MD has displayed bad manners 
at some point.  It's that in the game that counted, Bo didn't quite seem 
to know how to play it in a legitimate fashion.  He was making (what 
finally had to be called) illegal inferential moves that emitted in claims 
that looked intelligible but were (what finally had to be called) 
baseless.  (I'm one of a minority that think there were a few 
interesting, plausible, and useful claims to be differentiated in the 
tangle of his philosophical output.  The problem was that he played 
an all-or-nothing game.  It's like he was always one inferential move 
away from an outrageous absurdity, and required other game players 
to acknowledge the necessity of taking the absurd claim as a 
consequence of the plausible one.  That makes a person 
inconversable. Inconversability will certainly not get you kicked out, 
but dogmatically asserting falsities about what Pirsig thinks will.)

Are _we_ two playing a different game?  The game we've just been 
playing is the game of "giving an account of what rationality is."  And 
on that score, maybe, but I don't think so.  But certainly we are both 
giving and asking for reasons.  And this particular game we 
embarked on a post-cycle or two ago doesn't necessarily have 
anything to do with your attempt to model the MoQ in different ways 
with your graphs and theoretical apparatus.  It might.  But I wouldn't 
be sure where.

Some people get annoyed with my penchant for talking 
metaphilosophy, which is necessarily a talking-about the thing one 
was just talking about.  But I'm not sure why, given that some of 
Pirsig's theoretical positions are impacted by his own 
metaphilosophical reflections.  This is just the thing I find easiest 
and most enjoyable to talk about in the limited time I have.  Am I like 
the guy who lost his keys and keeps searching for them where it is 
well lit, rather than where he lost them?  Maybe.  But I was never 
convinced that I lost my keys.  I just like kibitzing.  I'm afraid, in the 
end, that I can be an occasionally useful conversation partner, but 
not for very long about things not in my own obsessional-range.

Matt