Jon Cogburn's Blog

There is no such thing as good history of philosophy, a derivation

This is absolutely clear from the following deduction.

1. Good historians realize that inconsistency in belief is the norm for humans, and that any writer who has written enough will have achieved inconsistency.
2. Good philosophers read anachronistically.
3. People who do history of philosophy try to discern consistent interpretations that are not anachronistic.
4. Therefore, the history of philosophy is neither good philosophy nor good history.
5. Thus, from 4. by logic, it follows that there is no such thing as good history of philosophy. Q.E.D.

I think I'm actually serious about this.*

[Note:

*This being said, the above deduction should make us appreciate all the more people like Frederick Beiser, Jonathan Bennett, Strawson, and Martha Nusbaum who manage to do good history and good philosophy, though the fact that Bennett, Strawson, and Nusbaum are routinely derided by other historians of philosophy for being anachronistic proves my point in the most chilling possible way. Beiser rocks so much that he is sui generis. If the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" means anything, then Beiser's picture is in the dictionary next to it.]

Another quick thought about Brandom

I just read Brandom's "Unsuccessful Semantics" and I can't for the life of me figure out why the same argument doesn't apply against Brandom's own views.

Brandom critiques the view that the content of a belief is fixed by the role it plays in sets of beliefs and desires leading to action (or construed as practical inferences leading to imperatives to action). The basic criticism trades on the way that such inferences are highly defeasible, depending upon what other beliefs and desires one has.

But on Brandom's own view the content of a desire is fixed by the role it plays in such practical inferences. So why doesn't the defeasibility also hit Brandom's own view of desires.

And things get worse, as Brandom's view of the content of subsentential expressions has them be a function of theoretical inferences involving those expressions (contrasted with the Heideggerian view that they are a function of practical inferences). But such theoretical inferences are also highly defeasible. So, again, why isn't the criticism a criticism of Brandom's own view.

(1) In Brandom's recent work he follows Mark Wilson and stresses the way content is underdetermined and appeals to a neo-Hegelian historical model of rationality to explain how we go on in light of this. This is a longer story, but I think that this move ends up addressing how the "Unsuccessful Semantics" argument applies against Brandom's own view. But I also suspect that it would be equally successful for the Heideggerian (and in fact, there is probably a connection here between this and  Lee Braver's interpretation of Heidegger's own historicism).

(2) If this tu quoque business is correct, then a lot hinges upon Brandom's critique of teleo-semantics, which I haven't read yet. If that critique is well motivated and doesn't apply to his own views, then there will clearly be a reason to go with him on the priority of theoretical inferences.

(3) The more I study Brandom, the deeper my adviser Neal Tennant's work appears (I'm writing something now on his paper on the withering away of formal semantics, which I contrast with Brandom's anti-representationalist strategy in Making it Explicit). It would be really interesting to take Tennant's account of cognitive significance in The Taming of the True as a starting off point for clarifying the above debate.

This weekend I hope to get clearer about the structure of the "Unsuccessful Semantics" argument so I can see if the above works out.

question about internalism

In Chapter 3 of Articulating Reasons, Brandom holds that it would be enough for the justificatory internalist (the person who thinks knowledge requires that one be able to provide a justification of one's true beliefs) if one merely was able to offer as a reason for the true belief that one is in fact reliable.

I'm not an internalist so I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I think there's something almost circular about this. What if the person believes they are reliable but are unable to provide a justification of the claim that they are. And what if their justification for that is just the true belief that they are reliable in determining when they are reliable.

My intuition is that if one could luck into the true belief that one is reliable, then just believing in one's reliability isn't going to work for the internalist. Maybe one would have to have the true belief that one is reliable in judgments of one's own reliability. Could one luck into that? How would that go? You flip a coin and believe you are in general reliable if it is heads and in general unreliable if it is tails?

Sorry if this is confused. Like I said, I'm not an internalist so my intuitions might be a little off here.

Something I better figure out in the next two weeks

I'm in Chapter 5 of Brandom's Making it Explicit (have read all three of his shorter books and big chunks of Tales of the Mighty Dead), and I'm really caught up on something that should be basic.

I just don't get what Brandom means by "entitlement." On the one hand commitment and permissibility are treated as a species of obligation and permissibility, but on the other hand he wants it to be the case that being entitled requires either the ability to produce a justification or to defer to someone who can.

For the life of me, I can't see how both of these are true, at least without serious logical revision. (1) If commitment and permissibility are a species of obligation and permissibility, then it should follow from one being not committed to believing that P, that one is entitled to believe that P is not the case, (2) if entitlement carries with it the responsibility to defer to the right person or produce a justification yourself, then merely not being committed to something does not entitle one to believe it's negation. I mean you should just sit on the fence for lots of beliefs you are not committed to.

One could possibly (though even this seems implausible to me) get out of this with logical revision. One way to be an intuitionist about modality is to accept that Possibly P is true if and only if there exists a possible world where P is true and that Necessary P is true if and only if P is true at all possible worlds, but to reject the claim that one can define the two in terms of each other (e.g. Possibly P equals Not Necessarily Not P, and vice versa), just because in intuitionistic logic it not being the case that something holds at all possible worlds does not entail that there exists a possible world where something is the case. This means that it not being necessary that P does not in general entail that it is possible that not P. But this is exactly analogous to it not being obligatory that P not entailing that it is permissible that not P. Which is the problematic inference for Brandom's notions of comittment and entitlement.

That doesn't seem that plausible to me just because intuitionism is inconsistent with their being third values. Not (P and ~P) is a theorem of intuitionist logic. But the problem with Brandom's notions is that there do seem to be claims that are such that we are not committed to them and that we are not entitled to their negations. By the analog with modal systems, this would be like a claim that is not true at any possible worlds and such that it is not the case that there is a possible world where it is false. To affirm this is to run afoul of intuitionistic logic.

I suspect I'm missing something.

Jonathan Bennett influential inferentialist?

It’s a strange experience to be reading Brandom’s Making It Explicit at the same time as I’m reading Jonathan Bennett’ Kant’s Analytic. Brandom’s reading of Kant as being so important in part because he thought of concepts inferentially as opposed as quasi-perceptually (e.g. Humean ideas) is one of Bennett’s guiding ideas. Even weirder, some of the specific views I associate with Brandom were argued for explicitly by Bennett.

The question of whether a language is a concept-exercising one does depend upon what sorts of statements can be made in it: for example, it depends partly upon whether statemetns of a general or reason-giving kind can be made in it (Bennett 1966, 87).

Then he goes on and differentiates between measuring devices and actual asserters in the same way that Brandom does.

The class of possible languages divides into those whose use does, and those whose use does not, consist solely in a pattern of responders to sensory stimuli. I discuss this at length in my book Rationality, and here sketch it only in outline. A language consisting solely in statements of the form ‘This is. . .’ and ‘That is. . .’ can be seen as a technique ofr the linguistic handling of items which are presented to the speaker: it has been called the speaker’s way of ‘hitting back’ at the things which sensorily bombard him. But human languages have means for making at leat two sorts of statements which are not like this: general statements, and statements about the past. These do not have to be responses to, or operations upon, the environments in which they are made.

Then Brandom gives the example of a dog digging up a buried bone in this context. In doing so he discusses Kant’s view that “the dog does not think that the bone is there unless it has reasons for thinking this. . . (Bennett 1966 88)."

The next section has the clincher though.

It is arguable that any concept-exercising language must contain negative statements: perhaps not precise analogues of the form ‘It is not the case that. . .’, but statements which reject or rule out other statements. I have argued for this in Rationality on the grounds--roughly--that a concept-exercising language must contain something like ‘because’ which in its turn requires something like ‘That doesn’t follow’. At a non-technical level it is perhaps worth noting that any pattern of behavior looks blind and mechanical unless it contains something of a mistake-recognizing and mistake-correcting kind (Bennett 1966, 89)

Both the interpretation of Kant and the reformulation of the metaphysical deduction look like pretty strong historical precursors to Brandom. Of course there are important differences; particularly that Bennett doesn’t subscribe to what Brandom calls the “Kant-Sellars Thesis” about modality; but the project of inferentialistically reformulating the deduction in a Quine friendly manner is in common to both Brandom and Bennett. I need to check out Rationality.

In Making it Explicit Brandom just attributes a story to Bennett and later contrasts his own perspective with the Gricean intention based one that Searle, Bennett, and Lewis have in common. The only Bennett book he cites is Linguistic Behavior. It Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom just parenthetically lauds Bennett and Strawson for making the study of Kant respectable for analytic philosophers. 

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I should note in passing that I loathe the way people casually put Bennett's (and Strawson's for that matter) Kant and Spinoza books down. When you read these books you get to be party to a great philosopher struggling with the ideas of greater philosophers. You never lose sight of why Kant and Spinoza continue to be philosophically important. Actually, again, this is one of the great things about the essays in Brandom's Tales of the Mighty Dead too.

I worry that too many specialist historians today feel that it is anachronistic to read great philosophers as if their work is still philosophically relevant. I forget the sneering Sorabchi piece where he castigates Nusbaum and Putnam for not realizing that Aristotle hadn't read Descartes. Habermas actually explicitly discusses this issue in the beginning of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He refuses to apologize for entering into philosophical dialogue with the thinkers he is presenting.

nice scientific american article about animal cognition

Article HERE.

I hope in the next two years (in addition to a bunch of other projects) to work through a good set of the relevant empirical work (I'll need to teach THIS BOOK). What seems to me to be basic to sapience is the ability to work through counterfactual scenarios "off-line," instead of making minute adjustments in trying a task different ways, sitting back and considering the different and novel ways it can be done and then picking one.

Moreover, I think the extent to which non-language users do this with means-ends reasoning is both empirical and something experimenters are already operationalizing.

meditations on Harman and transcendental idealism

Sorry the blog is marginal notes on Graham Harman's blog today, but there is a fascinating post HERE in response to Shaviro  post (HERE). [In contrast to Levi, who actually does lots of philosophy via dialogue on his blog, I often use this space to take notes for things I might write about in paper or book form in the future]. Anyhow, here's the relevant bit from Harman.

Here’s one of his key passages:

“In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. (Quite ironically, this means that Harman and Bryant are more Kantian than I am — in spite of what I have said on this subject before).”

As for the Kant point, I already agreed with Shaviro last summer that my position is in agreement with Kant’s on the things-in-themselves. It’s the other side of Kant (privilege of the human world relation) which is more dominant these days, and on that point I have nothing to do with Kant. Shaviro knows and concedes this; I’m just adding the clarification for others.

This makes me happy because it fits very well with the way I situate Harman's work in terms of John McDowell's update of Davidson's problematic about the scheme/content distinction. Kant, of course, invented the distinction via his insistence on the hard and fast distinction between intuitions and concepts (he accused both empiricists and rationalists of collapsing this distinction but in characteristically different ways; it's actually not clear that we would differentiate philosophers into empiricists and rationalists had Kant not made this claim).

I realized while reading Tool Being that Harman's radical externalization of the Heidegger Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit distinction (where the play between presence at hand and objective presence takes place between objects themselves) could be read as a strategy for radically externalizing the scheme-content distinction. If I understand the Shaviro-Harman debate correctly, the extent to which Harman is a Kantian is actually in virtue of two things: (1) the externalization of scheme-content, and (2) thinking of content in similar ways as a Kantian would think of intuitions (as blind, or empty? I always get that confused).

The second part gives rise to what many regard as the overly Leibnizian weirdness of Harman's views, but I think a lot of people who disagree with that are uncharitable in that they don't recognize the philosophical import of the first point. I mean, you may not agree with the way he works out the insight, but it is a fundamental insight and to work it out in any way at all to the extent he has is important, and should become part of the story of these issues.

I think this is really pretty obvious with some historical background. The major part of Maimon's central importance was that he invented the trope picked up by Fichte, then (arguably) Hegel, and then a lot of phenomenology. This is the radical interiorization of transcendental idealism, where the distinction between appearance and the thing in itself is thematized as being a distinction within the realm of appearance.

Graham Harman turns this upside down (I want to say that Harman is Marx to Maimon's Hegel, but that would be confusing since Maimon ultimately gave rise to Hegel). Instead of radically interiorizing the relation between appearance and thing in itself, Harman radically exteriorizes it. Take whatever it is that is independent of humans in the sense that it existed long before human beings. These things have appearance/reality with respect to each other in precisely the neo-Kantian way Heidegger captures with Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit.

Again, whatever you think of the details, the guy gets a spot in dialectical space named after him.

I would be very happy if the dialectic proceeded to where lots of philosophers followed Harman and radically externalize scheme-content, but try to do this with different models of scheme and content. I think that some of the debate in the Object Oriented Philosophy blogosphere is exactly on this point. A lot of the interesting things Levi Bryant writes about can be understood in exactly these terms.

[Two things to think about: (A) And the potential ontological prize is huge. Phenomenology's (broken) promise of dissolving the problems of the external world and the mind-body problem will be redeemed. In this light I disagree with Gary Williams and see Alva Noe's enactivist philosophy of perception as actually being part and parcel of Harman's program. I also disagree with Harman in seeing Dreyfusarian approaches to Heidegger as being part and parcel of the Harman's program. Again, this is because I separate two facets of his program: (1) the radical externalization of scheme/content, and (2) Harman's particular model of scheme and content. Dreyfusarian/pragmatist approaches to Heidegger can be reinterpreted in terms of (1). (B) Maimon in many ways reintroduced Leibnizian tropes into post-Kantian German Idealism. It would be very interesting to compare the pressures for him to do this with the way that Harman's metaphysics ends up recapitulating Leibnizian themes.]

Beiser on Maimon (with morals for McDowell and Brandom)

This is from pages 288-289 of Beiser's The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte.

The main target of Maimon's skepticism is Kant's transcendental deduction. Like Shulze, Maimon maintains that the deduction is a petitio principii, presupposing precisely what Hume calls into question. According to Maimon's interpretation, the deduction attempts to demonstrate that synthetic a priori principles are a necessary condition of possible experience, where 'experience' is understood as the universal and necessary connection between distinct representations and not only as the contingent constant conjunction between them. Although Maimon is willing to admit the argument of the deduction, that possible experience requires the application of the categories, he still disputes its premise, that there is possible experience. If we closely examine our sense impressions, he claims, then all we find are contingent constant conjunctions. Maimon puts the problem this way: Kant answers the question quid juris? Under what conditions do synthetic a priori principles apply to nature? But that still leaves the question quid facti? Are these conditions in fact the case?

Likewise to Brandom on the Kant-Sellars thesis, discussed in the previous post. I can agree with him that speaking a language requires us to make distinctions regarding necessity and possibility. But with Maimon and Fichte and Hegel (who built on his ideas) we should not regard this as  in any way solving Hume's problem. Yes from Brandom we know that successful use of language requires us to view the world in such a way. But is the world really like that?

Pete Wolfendale really excellently argues that this is where Brandom's quietism comes in (and I'm going to reread Making it Explicit this Summer with this question in mind). In this regard, I should also note, that after this Beiser attributes another anti-Kantian argument to Maimon that is really, really similar to the upshot of the Kripke/Wittgenstein paradox (which motivates quietism for McDowell). But then consider Beiser's footnote 15.

Kant himself misses this point. In his reply to Maimon's Versuch Kant argues that he can overcome Maimon's objections simply by remaining within the sphere of consciousness. It is impossible to explain the correspondence between a priori concepts and experiences, he says, only if experience is understood as the realm of things-in-themselves. If, however it is assumed that experience consists in nothing more than appearances, the problem disappears. See Kant's letter of May 26, 1789, to Herz, in Kant, Briefwechsel, p. 397. kant's reply does not explain the correspondence between such distinct kinds of representations as a priori concepts and a posteriori intuitions.

I don't think it's possible to read Graham Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought and not regard Wittgensteinian quietism as exactly analogous to the way Kant "misses the point" here.

progress on Kant notes and weird issue with Maimon and Heidegger

I've got a good working set of notes both to the Introduction and the Aesthetic now (HERE) that are good enough to help with teaching.

My goal for this summer is just to put in some marginalia to Bennett's two books, and then to take part in Mikhail's Maimon reading group, and maybe get some notes up on him. It will be a couple of years before the Kant notes will be a helpful stand alone resource for anyone interested in Kant, just because it's going to take me that long to get through the secondary stuff and to have anything coherent to say about the first part of the transcendental logic.

Maimon is fascinating for a number of reasons I'm already aware of: (1) his views about infinity, (2) his attempt to push Kant backwards on the absolute distinction between intuition and concepts, and (3) him being the first Kantian to propose that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves should be made in the realm of appearance.

Maimon's move about the distinction being in the realm of appearance is exactly analogous to what some Heideggerians propose to try to read the passages about idealism and realism in Being and Time as consistent (Lee Braver cites people who go this route; I think it's incoherent in the case of Heidegger, but that Maimon's views about infinity and appeal to God render his view considerably more plausible, though still false for reasons that the two Grahams (Priest and Harman) go into).

But, weirdly, I haven't seen any of the high church Heideggerians note that the very same move they attribute to Heidegger was made even before the publication of the third critique by Maimon (and then picked up by the other German idealists) to save Kant from "the affection argument" (the claim that in transcendental idealism causality is simultaneously invoked to explain the relation between things in themselves and appearance and also restricted to just being a relation between appearances). It's a very strange historical blindness for scholars who adopt the pose of taking the history of philosophy more seriously than everybody else (as an analytical philosopher interested in continental philosophy, I've been on the receiving end of that condescension from high church Heideggerians more times than I can remember; in many cases it's been justifiable condescension). I think that maybe Heidegger's own propaganda about his own work being this radical break in the history of philosophy can be pretty devastating to the reading habits of people who take him seriously in that regard (and I say this as someone who places him firmly in the top ten philosophers in the history of philosophy).

Maimon's writing is notoriously difficult, so I'm kind of nervous about showing up to the reading group and having nothing to say. We'll see how it turns out.

Notes on the Introduction to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason

I have a good set of notes to the Introduction up. The overview is HERE (all the notes I have so far on the first critique are HERE).

By the time summer begins I'll have a good set of notes through the Aesthetic. Then my only goal in the summer for this project is to get through the Bennett and Strawson books, adding to the web notes just enough to consider their substantive interpretive claims. I'm not going to try to make the discussions of the Transcendental Logic hang together as something that could maximally help a student until next year though. Having the notes on the Aesthetic and the marginal notes on the parts of the Logic discussed by Bennett and Strawson will be enough to prep for what I'm doing with Kant in the early modern class I'll be teaching next year.

As I go through more secondary material my goal is to have these notes be something that could stand alone and help a first time reader of Kant.

I also want to do the same with the other critiques and with key texts in German Idealism more generally, but that's going to take a decade at least. In the next five years I should be able to some good stuff for Maimon and Schopenhauer though.

Guyer on kinds of skepticism

In Spring 2011 I'm slated to teach our sophomore level Modern philosophy class and I've started boning up on the material by beginning Paul Guyer's Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume.

The first essay is really fantastic. Guyer argues that the first half of the first Critique are a response to Humean skepticism (where empiricist epistemic limitations undermine knowledge of first principles; Kant thought he could deduce these as necessarily presupposed by the activities of the mind) and the second half a response to Pyrrhonian skepticism (where contradictory claims are shown to be provable with equal plausibility; Kant thought he could block these with just enough empiricist epistemology; Graham Priest notes that they all involve totality in some sense and also follows early critics of Kant to show how his empiricist restriction doesn't work). Kant didn't concern himself with the problem of Cartesian skepticism (knowledge of the external world) in the first version of the first Critique, and only added the "Refutation of Idealism" to the second version after early reviews claimed he was committed to Berkeleyan Idealism (and of course every variety of transcendental idealism does either collapse into incoherence or back into Berkeleyan Idealism as critics from Maimon to Meillasssoux have argued; Interestingly, Priest's arguments that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian skepticism fails is similar to these earlier argumetns).

One of the weird things to me was that I have intuitions about each of these and am not sure I will ever be able to adequately work through them. . .

Schopenhauer's writings on the body seem to me to provide a the genesis of a good answer to Humean skepticism about necessity (both alethic and deontic). Graham Priest's dialetheism strikes me as providing a good response to Pyrrhonian skepticism. And the relation between the hermeneutic and apophantic "as structures" in Division One of Heidegger's Being and Time as well as his related notion of "world richness" strike me as providing the genesis of a good answer to Cartesian skepticism (the problem of reference being the linguistic/conceptual version of the problem of the external world).

I wish I had even a hint of an idea about how to tie all of these together into a unified picture (and of course Kant's genius was that his answers to the Humean and Pyrrhonian skeptic fit together so nicely). . . If I can tie them to the train of thought expressed in THIS POST, then I'll have something.

real life rock and roll moment in the life of Solomon Maimon

Today I'm reading Solomon Maimon's fascinating autobiography and he relates a great story about what happened after he sent Kant a manuscript for his first book Transcendental Philosophy. Kant wrote him back a fantastically glowing letter full of praise. After repeating some of the letter Maimon writes,

It may easily be imagined how important and agreeable to me was the approbation of this great thinker, and especially this testimony that I had understood him well. For there are some arrogant Kantians, who believe themselves to be sole proprietors of the Critical Philosophy, and therefore dispose of every objection, even though not intended as a refutation, but as a fuller elaboration of this philosophy, by the mere assertion without proof, that the author has failed to understand Kant. Now these gentlemen were no longer in a position to bring this charge against my book, inasmuch, as by the testimony of the founder of the Critical Philosophy himself, I had a better right than they to make use of this argument.

A couple of thoughts: (1) This is like a real life version of that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is irritated by a pompous windbag in front of him who keeps going on about Marshall McLuhan. When he complains to Annie, the guy turns around and arrogantly announces that he teaches a class on McLuhan. Then Woody Allen produces McLuhan in the flesh, who proceeds to take the piss out of the hapless professor. Here Maimon is Woody Allen, Kant McLuhan, and the Kantians of the day the irritating professor in line in front of Maimon. (2) This was kind of a synchronicity. A few days ago in THIS POST I was thinking about various ways to be philosophically obnoxious, and one of the key ones is to take it as a priori that anyone who disagrees with your favorite philosopher therefore misunderstands that philosopher. It's really weird to see how old this very tendency is, that in fact early disciples of Kant employed it. And how nice it is to see that Kant helped disarm it, providing such strong support to some of his earliest and most incisive critics. Can anyone imagine Heidegger or Derrida doing such a thing? I realize that great philosophers can be nasty people, and this is depressing. But it is likewise joyful when great philosophers show genuine humanity. Remember that at this point Maimon was an unknown Polish Jewish autodidact living in poverty in Berlin. For Kant, during the time he was teaching a ton of classes and writing the Third Critique, to read and study Maimon's manuscript and write a public letter (at that point in history it was common for letters to be publicized, cf. the Hume-Rousseau imbroglio) of such powerful praise is really a testament to his humanity.

Brandom on (sentient) categorizers versus (sapient) inferers

I worry I'm being terribly obtuse here, but one of Brandom's central arguments totally loses me. Over and over again he contrasts mere classification with inference, claiming the former is not indicative of conceptual mastery while the latter is. This underwrites his dismissal of animals as "merely sentient," as he baldly groups (it should be noted with no citation of any relevant empirical research; see great Wolfendale/Silcox discussion HERE on this issue) parrot and pigeon behavior with that of thermometers and rusting iron, contrasting this with humans who are doing something more.

But when he says what we do that is more it is incredibly paltry, in fact the kind of thing that computer programs also do well. Here's a representative passage from Reason in Philosophy.

One could at this piont throw up one's hands, jettison the functionalist project, and concede that what is missing can only be supplied by invoking intrinsically conceptually contentful states of understanding-something that we concept-mongering sapients have, but that mere sentients such as pigeons do not. But there is an alternative. The rationalist's idea is that what is distinctive of the conceptual is its specifically inferential articulation. For a response reliably differentially elicited by red things to qualify as the application of a concept, it must have the significance of a move in the game of giving and asking for reasons. It must be available as a premise for drawing further conclusions, and be liable to challenge by inferences from premises with incompatible consequences. Grasping the concept red requires practical mastery of its inferential role, as well as its non-inferential role as an appropriate response to certain sorts of stimuli. This means being able to discriminate what follows from it, what it follows from, and what is incompatible with it-endorsing in practice the move from red to colored and from scarlet to red, and treating red as ruling out green. (Brandom 2009, 184)

Chinese room anyone? What am I missing?

Of course, the very highest conceptual ability Brandom writes about in the fantastic Chapter 3 of Reason in Philosophy, the Hegelian/existentialist ability to change concepts and reinvent a history that shows this change to be rational, is something that computers can't do. In fact, the old school of theory revision (where you just have to derive a good consistent subset of an inconsistent theory) is computationally intractable in all sorts of ways. However, these abilities are also the ones that are very, very hard for humans too!

So Brandom seems to either have to say that a simple expert system programmed in LISP or PROLOG is sapient, or to hold that only philosophers are sapient. Something's gone wrong.

Right after the above quote Brandom writes,

(Indeed, the considerations advanced by the pragmatist can be seen to be subsumed by those advanced by the rationalist, for the inferential role of a claim or concept includes its service as a premise in practical inferences: those whose conclusions are intentional actions.) (ibid)

Richard Dreyfus would strongly beg to differ here (and What Computers Still Can't Do should still be required reading). His Heideggerian critique of linguaform explanations just is a critique of this kind of assurance. I think it is here that Brandom goes wrong, and this Summer hope to show so with a paper on Heideggerian world-richness how this works (see my earlier post HERE on how this will go; I've also got to read Okrent's fascinating new book while doing this).

[Addendum: the same article has a very nice discussion of how "the generality problem" for epistemic reliabilism and "the disjunction problem"/gavagai issue play out, but again Brandom almost constitutively deals in false dichotomies whenever animals come up. He acts as if the disjunction problem (i.e. "is the frog responding to flies or moving dots") occurs only when we try to attribute conceptual mastery to animals, but that inference solves the problem for us, e.g.

What picks out one kind of thing as what is being reported to is a matter of the inferential commitments that response is involved in. These inferential consequences of going into a state make it clear that what is being classified is something outside the system. They are what determine that a physicist is reporting the presence of a mu meson in a bubble chamber, and not simply a large hook-shaped pattern. For the consequences of classifying something as a microscopic mu meson are quite different from those of classifying something as a macroscopic hook-shaped trace. It is the lack of such consequences that makes Dretske's dual thermometer liable to a disjunctive proximal interpretation (ibid, 195)

But surely it is not too science fictiony to imagine an alien race with a more intensionally rich idiom for whom our physicist's mu meson is just as crude as the frog's fly or moving spot, that is where the reactions to the mu meson are reactions to two different things that co-occur enough for it to work for human physicists.

And we don't have to go to aliens, normal human expertise do this, think if the experts' jadeite and nephrite to the non-experts jade (which is correctly applied either to jadeite or nephrite). And I'm sure we seem incredibly naive to our dogs in terms of how we differentially respond to smells.

Again, Brandom treats something that admits all sorts of degrees as if it were an on-off switch. I'll just reiterate that I think that this is a function of the way he is slighting "pragmatist" explanations, and that one can make sense of intensional richness entirely in terms of practical means-ends behavior.

Again, there are adult humans who are entirely non-linguistic (being born deaf and never having learned a language) who are migrant farmers. These people have been studied. They certainly can differentiate barn facades from real barns, and the abilities that make that possible for them interact with possible courses of action in all sorts or ways relevant to attributing to them conceptual mastery. Or consider a severe aphasic who only retains the word "red" but whose behavior makes it clear she grasps the relevant concept. As far as I understand him, Brandom is stuck a priori saying these things aren't possible. But they are actual, so of course they are possible. Again, I think the solution is to work out Heidegger's notion of world richness along early Heideggerian lines.]

[ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM:

Here's another one from the next essay, which presents itself as advice to cognitive scientists, (without citing any actual cognitive science).

We might train a parrot reliably to respond differentially to the visible presence of red things by squawking "That's red." It would not yet be describing things as red, would not be applying the concept of red to them, because the noise it makes has no significance for it. It does not know that it follows from something's being red that it is colored, that it cannot be wholly green, and so on. Ignorant as it is of those inferential consequences, the parrot does not grasp the concept (ibid. 204).

Does Brandom mean to say that speakers of language with impoverished color words relative to ours (there are plenty of languages with only two, three, or four color words), do not grasp the concept of Red because they don't conclude that red things aren't green? This would be puerile, and really just be the result of individuating content too finely, with the result being that  people with different beliefs end up having different concepts automatically.

So I guess it's that the parrot makes no conclusions from her labeling something red. But Brandom and Sellars include "practical inferences" and clearly the Parrot will manifest all sorts of these. So does he just have a catastrophically empirically ill informed picture of bird cognition?

Weirdly, on the next page he says that one can stretch the word "conceptual" to include animals and computers, but that such things still don't have "genuinely descriptive-concepts" as if the distinction between being descriptive and not descriptive was clear. But then he makes the distinction in terms of drawing inferences in the first case and not the second. Does he mean inferences in natural language? Then aphasics and adult deaf non-language users have no concepts! So does he allow that practical inferences could be sufficient? Then he has to admit that there is continuum with higher animals such as parrots, dolphins, chimps, etc. closer to the average human. But he refuses to do this. Again, I'm not sure if this is just because he hasn't studied any of the empirical research about animal cognition, or what.]

PAIN or ONE's OWN PAIN

I think you are able to be the least philosophical about things that just seem obvious to you. I've seen this with lots of friends. The seeming obviousness gives you an excuse not to think any more about whatever issue it is.

For me it's meta-ethics. It just seems obvious to me that pain has intrinsic normative significance.

That's not quite the end of the story, because one might raise a "disjunction problem" between the concepts PAIN and ONE'S OWN PAIN. If all that has intrinsic normative significance is one's own pain, then ethics won't get off the ground.

I think that there are two responses. First, there is the Hegel/Marx/Heidegger/Sartre/Wittgenstein/Levinas reversal, which argues that the concepts concerning the self are in some sense dependent on concepts involving others. A Wittgensteinian would do this in terms of having to learn the public applicability of "pain" which involves perceiving other people's pain and grasping its normative significance in terms of their pain. Or, if that is implausible (and I think it is) one can do something similar by arguing that the primary concept is PAIN, just because the differentiation between self and others is something that comes later.

I think the second type of response is a lot more promising. With some interpretive stretching, one can read Kant [I'll post the relevant passage from the Groundwork here later today] as raising a burden of proof issue. The challenge is to produce an argument to the claim that one's own pain has normative moral force while everybody else's does not. You can't do this, so if you believe that your own pain has normative moral force, you are rationally constrained to believe that everybody else's does too.

This just seems like it should be commonsense to me, which makes me pretty bad at engaging in philosophical disputes regarding it. Maybe it's not commonsense because it borrows both from the Millean utilitarian tradition and Kantian deontological tradition, but I just don't buy the over-application of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium to the project of ethics. I think the phenomena of tragic choices shows that there are genuine moral contradictions, and that a lot of these arise out of the way utilitarianism and kantian ethics contradict one another. But, again, this just seems like commonsense to me. . .

In any case, here's this boss Danzig song that involves some of the same concepts.

Schopenhauer to the rescue in a neat issue raised by Austin and Harman

There's an interesting exchange between Michael Austin of Complete Lies (HERE) and Graham Harman (HERE). Both are really clear, so I'll just quote the relevant parts.

Both Graham and Levi say that objects can't be simply nothing more than their relations or else change is impossible, so Graham (I'm not sure how Levi does this, so I'll speak only of Graham here) takes the position that we need some substance-like-thing, that is, substance that is not inalterable or eternal, but some dark untapped core at the heart of things in order for there to be potentiality and change (while saying also, like Leibniz, that finite things contain infinity or maybe it's closer to Nicholas of Cusa's "relative infinity...") Graham also says that it is this problem that causes Latour to move to his talk of plasma, which approaches monism or at least quasi-monists like Deleuze and Bergson, essentially the idea of an infinite reserve underlying all objects). It seems to me though that another option besides positing infinity either within all objects, or underlying all objects, is to work with an idea of drive, will, or conatus. In this way, I think you get a model of change which better reflects reality. I suppose this is the option I've chosen to explore, which is why I tie myself to the vitalist tradition so strongly, since they, along with certain neo-Platonists (the ones who claim the world-soul to be more primary than the divine intellect) and voluntarists also seem to make this move, or at least a similar one. I'm hoping to write more about this tradition soon.

Harman responds-

The reason I’m never sympathetic to calls for conatus is that they seem to me to amount to a vis dormitiva. “Objects change by means of a changing force.” “Objects change by means of appetite.” “Objects change by means of drive.”

In all of these cases, it would need to be shown where this supposed drive for the new is inscribed in what the thing is now.

Harman's response is really interesting. I want to say that the figure they are both leaving out is Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer doesn't get enough credit for being the first "philosopher of the body" (usually Merleau-Ponty is cited as the forefather of embodied cognition), and the relevance of his discussion of body for the realism anti-realism debate is really quite big, in part because it provides an answer to Harman's challenge, one structurally isomorphic to Harman's own position.

Harman radically externalizes Kant's scheme-content distinction (as this distinction occurs in Heidegger's Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal, which Kant himself prefigured in his critique of Hume). Epistemically, attempts to get at reality in itself always involve abstracting away from what our conceptual schemes add, but when you do this enough the reality disappears. If one thinks that that is all the metaphysical story, then one ends trying to defend some form of transcendental idealism. But Harman radically externalizes this by presenting a metaphysics where our the Kantian subject-object epistemic situation is just an instance of fundamental processes that occur whenever two objects interact (this may seem weird, but it does a lot of philosophical work).

I think Schopenhauer is doing something exactly analogous with the bodily experience of will. One way to approach the Kantian problematic is via Hume's problematization of necessity, alethic necessity in the case of causality and deontic necessity in the case of value. In both cases Hume gives you a valueless world where causality and norms are somehow added by the subject. Kant argues that this isn't possible, that the very idea of a purely actual world doesn't make sense. For something to be a cat actually is in part for it to have a bunch of counterfactual properties (again, this is the predecessor of Heidegger's Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal). The problem for Kant then is to explain where necessity comes from (Heidegger in 1919 notes that Kantianims (through the Southwest School) has led to the repeating of exactly what Hume was doing; so he radicalizes the initial anti-Humean move in Being and Time).

Schopenhauer can be understood as answering this question in a way analogous to Harman. The body is an object in the world, and it experiences frustration when the will is blocked. But this is an experience of something not being possible. From "not" and "possible" you can get necessity, as what is necessary is just that which is not possible not to obtain. But then, like Harman, Schopenhauer suggests that this is not merely epistemic, but rather metaphysical, and the thing our body experiences with frustrated and successful will is taken to be an instance of something pervasive in the universe. But then the Kantian problematic, of answering Hume's challenge about necessity, can be answered in a realist manner.

If we just have a root experience of frustration, then I don't think this is a case of dormitive virtue, any more than the epistemic basis of Harman's move (and the basis does *not* make either correlationist in Meillassoux's sense).

So I think both that Austin is correct and that Harman's challenge can be answered.

Incidentally, I should note that: (1) the late Heidegger adopts a number of Schopenhaurian themes in precisely around this area, and for similar reasons as I've discussed above (Dale Jacquette has gone over some of this), and (2) I've long thought that Schopenhauer deserves pride of place among continental realists, and should be considered perhaps the founding figure of the Speculative Realist tradition. The other tradition of continental realism starts with Kierkegaard and goes through Derrida (on a realist reading of him) and stresses how aporia and radical surprises impinge upon the phenomenal realm (of course, elements of late Heidegger here too). Lee Braver has a fantastic essay on this tradition. I would call the Schopenhaurian vein the Speculative Realist tradition (for obvious reasons, though this is unfair to Brassier) and the Kierkegaardian one the A-poretic Realist tradition.

From Heidegger's Preface to Richardson's Through Phenomenology to Thought

I'll have more about this later today. I think it is a schocking confirmation of what I put forward in THIS POST, though I now realize (after some helpful input from my colleague, and the person who has been teaching me Heidegger this last year, Francois Raffoul) that the story is much more complicated than what I presented there. Anyhow, here's the quote.

One need only observe the simple fact that in Being and Time the problem is set up outside the sphere of subjectivism - that the entire anthropological problematic is kept at a distance, that the normative issue is emphatically and solely the experience of There-being with a constant eye to the Being-question - for it to become strikingly clear that the "Being" into which Being and Time inquired can not long remain something that the human subject posits. It is rather Being, stamped as Presence by its time-character, [that] makes the approach to There-being. As a result, even in the initial steps of the Being-question in Being and Time thought is called upon to undergo a change whose movement cor-responds with the reversal.

Later today or tomorrow I'll do another post with how I think the standard story of "the turn" is actually consistent with what I posted earlier. Basically, both come from Heidegger accepting Schopenhaurian anti-Kantian affection arguments, one with respect to the thinker (this ends up being the standard view), and another with respect to external reality (this is the view I defended in the earlier post, which Heidegger accepts in the above quote).

Question about Brandom versus McDowell on Sellars

I'm getting a sneaking suspicion that Brandom and McDowell read Sellars "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" in radically different ways. Brandom takes the main message to be that there are no purely non-inferential reports. For the assertion that something is red to count as an assertion it must be possible for it to be the conclusion or premise of an inference, even though it can also be non-inferentially asserted.

McDowell on the other hand takes Sellars to show that objects in the causal realm cannot play a justificatory role vis a vis propositions in the space of reasons. One can easily believe Brandom's moral while completely rejecting McDowell's moral (which was sent up by Jerry Fodor in his review of Mind and World with the simple question, "Why can't the actual Oak tree justify my belief that it's an Oak tree?")

I know there's a chapter in Brandom's Articulating Reasons where he talks about externalism in epistemology, which should settle this, since externalism directly contradicts McDowell's Selllars. For the epistemic externalist the mere reliability of a belief counts as justification for that belief. If I remember right, Brandom agrees with this as far as it goes, but says it's not a belief unless it is inferentially articulated in the right way. Again, one can agree with this and, like Fodor, be completely unmoved by McDowell's claim that there is a kind of naturalistic fallacy in going from the causal to the space of reasons.

Brandom has a study guide to Sellars' essay in the Oxford publication of that essay. It would be fun to teach a class on that and McDowell's Mind and World.

Idealism, Pantheism, Skepticism, or Quietism in Brandom's Hegelianism (hat tip Andrew Johnson)

As part of research for a review I'm doing of Robert Brandom's Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas and as part of a independent study I'm doing with Andrew Johnson, I just read Brandom's fantastic essay "Holism and Idealism in Hegel's Phenomenology" (chapter 6 of Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays on the Metaphysics of Intentionality ).

One of the many great things in the essay is the way Brandom uses a distinction between sense dependency and reference dependency, and his explanation of how the first does not entail the latter. In the context of Brandom's discussion, this allows one to avail oneself of Hegel's insights without being committed to idealism. But I think Brandom gets this wrong in important respects. First, he isn't quite careful enough to distinguish between pantheism and idealism, and second he doesn't consider the role of skepticism. When  you do this what you get is that Hegel's insights (as expressed in the relevant sense dependency claims) entail either skepticism, Berkeleyan idealism, pantheism, or Wittgensteinian quietism.

1. Sense and Reference Dependency and how they block the inference to Idealism

Brandom defines the two concepts in this manner:

(11) Concept P is sense dependent on concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q.

(12) Concept P is reference dependent on concept Q just in case P cannot apply to something unless Q applies to something. (194-195)

Example- The concept "having the same mass as Earth" is sense dependent upon the concept "Earth." One cannot understand it with out understanding "Earth." However reference dependency does not hold here. There are possible worlds where things have the same mass as Earth does in this universe, but where Earth does not exist.

Brandom uses this distinction to be able to accept key theses of Hegel's idealism while blocking the idea that reality is mind dependent. I think his argument only works with important (and philosophically important) qualifications.

Brandom's Hegel shows that a lot of concepts concerning the world are sense dependent upon concepts concerning language and mind (and vice versa). So for example, a Hegelian might hold that the concept of fact is sense dependent upon the concept of true sentence. Brandom quite rightly points out that this does not entail that the concept of fact is reference dependent upon the concept of true sentence. Just because we cannot understand the concept of fact without understanding true sentence does not mean that facts are dependent upon true sentences for their existence. So he concludes:

The determinateness of the objective world and the structured process of grasping it are reciprocally sense dependent concepts, each intelligible only in terms of the other. So understood, objective idealism does not entail or involve any claims of reference dependence--as though our concept using activity were required to produce, as opposed to being required to make intelligible, the conceptually structured world. (208)

So we can help ourselves to Hegel's insights (and, as much as I love Schopenhauer, Chapter 3 of Brandom's Reason in Philosophy absolutely convinces me that we have to help ourselves to them) without committing ourselves to idealism.

2. A simple argument using excluded middle.

Here we are assuming that the kind of sense dependency Brandom describes (between mind and world) holds. And, by the law of excluded middle, either the relevant reference dependency claim is true, or it is false.

2a. If world is referentially dependent upon mind then the determinateness of the objective world would not exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. This could be because Berkeleyan idealism is true, where minds like ours or God's somehow bring into existence the world (which is what Brandom is trying to block). But it could also be true for pantheistic reasons, that is because the world itself is engaged in the structured process of grasping itself. On this model it's not that God or people's minds think the world into being, but rather that the world itself has a lot properties we normally associate with minds.

So if reference dependency is true, then either idealism or pantheism (of some sort) is true.

2b. If the world is not reference dependent upon the mind, then the determinateness of the objective world could exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. And remember (crucially) that this denial is a denial of pantheism! The world could exist without possessing the mental properties that we are forced (by sense dependency, which we are assuming to be true) to attribute to it. But this is just to say that we have no idea what the world is really like, because we are forced to understand it in such a way that we have no idea if it really is. This is skepticism.

So if I can apply excluded middle to Brandom's reference dependency claim it follows that either idealism, pantheism, or skepticism is true.

3. McDowelliana

This is precisely where McDowell backs into Wittgensteinian quietism (according to my somewhat impoverished understanding of Mind and World). His denial of "bald naturalism" seems to return us to a kind of enchanted/pantheistic world, but it's not clear if it really does.

Well maybe one could affirm Brandom's sense dependency of mind and world and neither affirm nor reject reference dependency. One rather refuses to say one way or the other. But then you are not saying that idealism is false, but rather refusing to comment on it.

I want to study this strategy more. I'm deeply skeptical of it, though I don't yet have an knockdown argument (and need to study McDowell more before committing to one).  My suspicions come from: (1) researching and writing about reasons against universal applicability of excluded middle from Michael Dummett, (2) suspecting that Meillassoux's After Finitude contains an argument (the one about "semantic doubling") that can be reconstructed to argue against this strategy, (3) playing around with three valued systems in trying to reformulate Boghossian's "Status of Content" argument against similar moves (I was in the process of this when I saw an article in Mind where the guy did something very similar and I got so depressed I dropped it; I have to go get that article).

(4) Conclusions-

4a. Assuming that quietism is a no-go here, then since Berkelyean idealism is also deeply unsatisfying (for the similar reasons that transcendental idealism is; first discovered by Maimon, Fichte, and Schopenhauer; discussed as "the affection argument" in Lee Braver's A Thing of This World; and also really clearly presented in Graham Priest's Beyond The Limit's of Thought), it follows that Brandom's Hegelian is committed to either pantheism or skepticism. Since I agree with Brandom's Hegel I find myself committed to pantheism or skepticism. Pretty fun.

4b. I'd like to push this a little bit with regards to Speculative Realism. First, how does the nihilism of Ray Brassier (Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction) fit in? Brassier might be read as a critic of the initial Hegelian insight (sense dependency), or as someone supporting skepticism over pantheism, or as someone putting forward nihilism as an alternative. I really want to reread his book in terms of this dialectic. Second, does the kind of pantheism gestured at above encompass Graham Harman and Levi Bryant's  Object Oriented Philosophy version of Speculative Realism? The Harman of Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects is sometimes presented (and I'm almost positive that I was the first person to so represent it so on internet discussions during the Halcyon days) as radically externalizing Kant's scheme-content distinction. But this is a species of Brandom's Hegelianism in terms of  taking certain mental properties and applying them to the world itself. Harman would certainly reject the view that his philosophy is just making claims of sense dependency, and he would certainly reject that the kind of reference dependency involves him in Berkeleyan idealism. Now interestingly (along with Brandom!) he tends to reject what he regards as overly naturalistic or scientistic philosophies (google Harman eliminativism). Is it fair to characterize his and Levi's views as pantheistic? Levi applies the notion of "translation" to objects in the world itself (see the essay in the forthcoming Speculative Realism anthology, I should note that I heartily approve). This seems to be a case of Hegelian sense dependency too.But I don't think he wants to deny reference dependency (skepticism) and I know he doesn't want to be an idealist (Berkeleyan or transcendental). To what extent is it fair to characterize him (and Graham) as thinkers in the pantheistic tradition (and who else besides Spinoza and some readings of Hegel fit in this tradition?)?

Or should they also as part of the critique of correlationism try to reject the sense dependency claims? This seems like a vital set of questions (and a productive way of framing them) for anyone interested in Harman and Bryant's thoughts.

brief note on my take on Heidegger and realism/anti-realism (hat tip Lee Braver, Graham Harman, Herman Philipse, and Gary Williams)

Gary Williams has a post HERE about an MA thesis on Heidegger and realism/anti-realism debates that raises a number of interesting questions and has provoked me(which is a good thing in philosophy) to write one more thing about this here. I haven't seen the view below expressed in the literature, but I would be surprised if someone didn't already hold it. Probably it is closest to Graham Harman, who also takes Division 1 of Being and Time to be incoherent in exactly the way that I do [And Graham's Tool Being, which can be ordered from Open Court's web site HERE where there are affordable copies, is indispensable for two reasons: (1) it shows just extraordinarily important a metaphysician Heidegger is if you resolutely kick out the idealist/correlationist strands in Being and Time, and (2) it has a very nice discussion of how Harman's interpretation jives with other main interpretations of Heidegger on these issues.]

One big problematic concerns whether Being and Time era Heidegger faces what Herman Philipse ("Heidegger's "Scandal of Philosophy": The Problem of the Ding an Sich in Being and Time," in Crowell and Malpas' Transcendental Heidegger) characterizes as Heidegger's own problem of the external world. Williams correctly adduces prima-facie evidence that Heidegger does not, as Philipse's view involves him in a pretty simple contradiction, which would lead us to conclude that Heidegger was a fool.

For what it's worth, I think Philipse is correct that Division 1 of Being and Time is incoherent on this very issue, attempting to debunk the problem of the external world while being committed to a form of neo-Kantianism through phenomenology that clearly gives rise to just this problem. Moreover, if you look at where Being and Time sits with respect to all of his other lectures this is not that mysterious. In Heidegger's fantastic 1919 emergency war lecture (printed as Towards the Definition of Philosophy) he is responding to Rickert and Windelbaud and critiques Southwest school neo-Kantianism with the first version of the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal that then shows up in the fantastic "first draft" of Being and Time, History of the Concept of Time (still explicitly referencing neo-Kantians there) and then forms the basis for Division 1 of Being and Time (with the reference to his neo-Kantian teachers removed). This aspect of Heidegger leads directly to the dissolution of the problem of the external world, as the very problem is shown to arise when Vorhandenheit/objective presence is wrongly taken to be in some sense basic, with the relational/valuative/modal realm of Zuhandeheit somehow added to that with the mind (and it should be noted that this reversal is actually Kantian in origin, since it is the basis of Kant's critique of Hume; Heidegger takes it much further though, with Hume's problematic re-appearing for Kant; also note that here is one of the many places Heidegger is very similar to Schopenhauer!).

However, between the 1919 lectures and History of the Concept of Time, you get all this Husserlian stuff from Heidegger where he's trying to be a good phenomenologist, much of it (IMHO) so inestimably awful (e.g. The Phenomenology of Religious Life) that I have to think there's a reason Heidegger himself didn't publish this stuff. The phenomenology presupposed in much of this work just is the kind of neo-Kantianism that Heidegger was overturning with the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal.

These two strains come together in Being and Time (which was written very quickly) to give us both a correlationist/idealist strand rooted in the centrality of the supposed phenomenological method where Dasein is equated with humanity and Being rooted in Dasein, and a radical anti-correlationist strand which actually gives you enough material to radically critique phenomenology (see Dermot Moran's chapter on Heidegger in the excellent Introduction to Phenomenology). The incoherence of these two strands come together when Heidegger says things like stars can exist (exist!) without being (the problem of being is how anything can exist at all).

Now I don't think this makes Heidegger a fool. By Being and Time he just wasn't able to square his commitment to the phenomenological method with his deep (Schopenhaurian) insight into how Kant's critique of Hume ends up undermining Kantianism. But this isn't even the end of the story. The "turn" after Being and Time I think is partly motivated by this very problematic. Division 2 of Being and Time attempts to give the constitutive structure of the human mind in a pretty straightforward neo-Kantian way. And Heidegger progressively drops this kind of thing all-together in what people characterize as an anti-humanism.

I don't think Heidegger was a fool (well at least not when thinking about ontology). I think the later "anti-humanism" was an attempt to remain true to both his debunking strategy with the problem of the external world and to phenomenology, and one that does the job. The turn in part is motivated by the fact that Being and Time fails in this regard. The problem arises in Being and Time because we are still thinking in a Kantian manner of the human mind being some kind of machine that organizes and structures reality via its conceptual scheme (see the discussion of "Active Knower" in Braver's excellent A Thing of this World on this very point). Division 2 was the story of how this worked. But once you give up this aspect of neo-Kantianism, then you really can't even pose a lot of the realism/anti-realism issues in terms of whether or not the world is dependent upon such a mind. And it works, if you follow Heidegger into the anti-humanism, you really can deconstruct the issue.

So, now viewing Division 1 of Being and Time as incoherent on this point does not make Heidegger a fool. The incoherence is part of his life-long project of reconciling phenomenology with his brilliant early Schopenhaurian anti-Kantian insight, one that gave rise to the later period where he himself rejected the model of the human mind that gives rise to the problem.

My first genuinely philosophical thoughts about food and other distressing artforms

One of the anonymous posters (729) at Philosophers Anonymous notes that in gastronomy, the locution "deconstruct" refers to a chef's separating out taste components of a classic dish into distinct components, and then putting the separated ingredients together in a visually stunning way that recovers the flavor of the original dish. This is one of the basic tropes of molecular gastronomy following Ferran Adria's el Bulli (in the U.S. most famed with Grant Achez at Alinea in Chicago).

So here's one question. What makes a deconstructed dish different from the original dish. Certainly they look radically different. And the textures can be quite different too. But another difference is that when you are eating a deconstructed dish you more vividly simultaneously taste the separated components as well as the flavor of their combination (the original dish). The deconstructed dish ends up being something like a meta-commentary on the way distinct flavors achieve aesthetic balance in traditional gastronomy.

This is a really interesting case for the metaphysics of emergence in a lot of ways. I think haute cuisine has always had this norm of creating emergent flavors out of flavors that the discerning palate can differentiate. It's sort of a game to be able to guess what the ingredients are, but a major part of the gastronomic thrill is experiencing the new properties that are created by their skillful combination.
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Since I've been reading Noel Carroll's excellent The Philosophy of Horror, this has particular salience. Carroll's final view is that the paradox of horror is solved in a "co-existentialist" way, where the pleasure qualia (innate fascination with the repulsive and metaphysically peculiar, the play of curiosity from plotting devices) and pain qualia (unpleasant emotions) are distinct and added up so that the pleasure outweighs the pain. He notes that in some instances one might want to think of the paradox being solved in an "integrationist" way, where the kind of pain is part of the pleasure, but the only example he comes up with are teenage boys who watch particularly gory horror for the meta-pleasure of finding themselves to be able to take it without being scared or sickened.

But if you look at the phenomena of the delicacy, you often see the repulsive and the pleasant combined in ways that I think can only be accounted for in an integrationist manner. Take the humble Durian fruit, whose custard-like interior is both deliciously sweet and smells nauseatingly like decaying dead mammal. I don't think there is an innate fascination with tasting road kill. So you don't get the analog to our innate fascination with viewing the repulsive. But at the same time, if you could separate out the custardy sweetness and get rid of the repulsive aspect, it would no longer be a delicacy and epicures would not be interested in it. The same holds for stinky cheese, such as Epoisses [And one can't say that Epoisses just seems stinky to Americans because we weren't acculturated (maybe the repulsiveness of fermented bean curd to Americans can be accounted for this way?). In France you are absolutely not supposed to carry this cheese on the train because the smell is so awful.]

Somehow the repulsive and non-repulsive combine in many delicacies to give rise to emergent taste profiles in a thoroughly integrationist manner.

Two questions- (1) Are delicacies analogous enough to horror films to undermine Carroll's co-extistentialist response to the paradox of horror? I do think it's clear that the paradox of repulsive delicacies requires an integrationist response. (2) Why don't skilled chef's ever deconstruct these kinds of delicacies? Clearly people couldn't eat them if you managed to separate out the flavors. Imagine a little piece of delicious custard with a tiny piece of a vomitously smelly part of a rotted dead animal in the middle, set out in a visually beautiful way. No chef does this. Somehow repulsive delicacies are the limit of deconstructed cuisine. I think this is because if they were deconstructed we would immediately go into co-existentialist mode and the pain qualia would win out. Part of the aesthetic appeal of such dishes then is I think just this tension. The integrationist mode wins out. Again, I wonder if horror movies and other kinds of distressing art are analogous. If they are, then Carroll's theory needs to be expanded significantly.

For eliminativism about presupposition

I know there's an old Boer and Lycan paper about this very topic that I haven't read yet, so nothing I say here may be new.

I don't think that the linguistic phenomena of 'presupposition' really exists, but that in all cases what we're calling presupposition is really a mixture of semantic entailment, implicature, and possibly related discourse phenomena (such as the procedural knowledge that indefinites usually refer to things not introduced into the discourse yet).

First, the standard definition of presupposition doesn't work. Everybody holds that a sentence's presupposition is whatever information needs to been in the common ground in order for an assertion to be felicitous. So if I say, "Mary stopped smoking" it would only be a felicitous assertion if we both already know that Mary did smoke. 

Except when it's not. In every single case of presupposition one can imagine cases where the sentence is felicitously asserted without the "presupposed' information being in the common ground. Typically, pragmatics folks say that in such cases the hearer "accommodates" the information by adding it into the common ground. But this is nothing more than an admission that the definition does not work. Since there is no generative theory of accommodation, all it does is function as a place to throw recalcitrant counterexamples. It's as though Newtonians had said that Mercury was accommodating the sun and that light accomodated different inertial frames and left it at that.

Second, the biggest reason one needs a different theory of presupposition is because of "presupposition holes," where people can reliably infer material that is provably not entailed. So, in most cases, if "Mary stopped smoking" is the antecedent of a material or subjunctive conditional, we can still infer that she used to smoke, even though nothing is entailed by the antecedent of a conditional.

But I think this is purely a case of conversational implicature (at least with stop/start and definites; I need to look at other constructions). Asserting a material conditional implicates that you don't know if the antecedent is true. Asserting a counterfactual conditional implicates that the antecedent is false.

To see how this removes the need for presupposition, consider definite descriptions. Assume that the Russellian analysis holds. Then, inote that negation has a strong tendency to narrowly scope (and Michael and Ann Hegarty have a very good explanation involving discourse effects of why this is the case). Then the implicature of a counterfactual conditional with the antecedent that "The present king of France is bald" is that there is a present king of France and he is not bald. So there is an implicature that there is a present king of France! Likewise if the information that we don't know narrowly scopes. Then the implicature for a material conditional with the antecedent that the present king of France is bald is that there is a present king of France and we don't know if he's bald. Moreover, the way these implicatures cancel I think explains the cases that linguists call "acccomodation." This clearly works with "stop/start" type presupposition because in a rich enough lexical decomposition you will get exactly analogous places for wide and narrow scope negation.

We'd need to look at the way "presupposition" works with relative clauses, and also see if the account can handle "filters" where a presupposition is blocked. These are canonically conjunctions where the second conjunct asserts (or directly entails?) the presupposition of the first conjunct. I know in some of these cases the second conjunct is providing information about scope, i.e. "The present king of France is not bald, and there is a present King of France." This works fine if uttered in a context (Sherlock Holmes type induction scenarios) where the person might have thought you meant the first conjunct to have wide scope negation. My prediction is that in other cases the second conjunct is in a quasi meta-linguistic way working to tell us something about what implicatures the hearer should be drawing, and that the entailment still goes through anyhow (see the nice discussion in the last chapter on presupposition in Kadmon's book about this). That may be completely wrong though.

some connections between Schopenhauer and Heidegger

Somebody has to have remarked on this before, but a lot of the famous Heideggerian moves are prefigured pretty strongly in Schopenhauer.

Schophenhauer takes the realm of representation to be governed by the principle of sufficient reason, and to be inherently relational. We can however abstract from this to the realm of Ideas/Forms, but when we do so our subjectivity is completely absorbed into that realm.

Heidegger takes the realm of Zuhandenheit (readiness to hand, tool-being) to be inherently relational. We can however abstract from this to get to the realm of Vorhandenheit (objective presence) to the realm of things that persist self-identically over time. I would bet a decent sum of cash that Heidegger presents Plato's theory of the forms (I need to ask some friends if this is right) as being a paradigm instance of this kind of abstraction. If so, then Heidegger's innovative reading of the history of philosophy is just a part of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In this light the early Heidegger's genius might have just been: (1) characterizing the relational realm as also modal and valuative (I don't know to what extent Schopenhauer does this), and (2) seeing all traditional ontology, in particularly the Cartesian metaphysical physics, as an instance of the Schopenhauerian reading of Plato.

There may also be some similarities with the late Heidegger's subsumption of the self and Schopenhauer's two modes of subsumption (artistic genius and aescetic renunciation). At the very least these are worth comparing, given the other similarities.

I remember somewhere Heidegger saying contemptuous things about Schophenhauer, but it would be too easy to conclude too much from that. (1) He said contemptuous things about Husserl, and some have argued that this is the narcissism of small differences (also see this book by Burt Hopkins). (2) The neo-Kantian genesis of Heidegger's thought is something people are taking into account much more these days; but I think we still too easily forget that the "back to Kant" movement (first with the Marburg School of Cohen et. al., then with the Southwest School of Heidegger's teachers) was in part the result of Schopenhauer winning the argument against Hegel. For example, it was Schopenhauer who convinced publishers to re-print the first edition of Kant's First Critique. So while this is really speculative, I think Heidegger's anti-Schopenhauer comments could also be the anxiety of influence.

Finally, it would be interesting to compare Schopenhauer's arguments for Platonism with Graham Harman's neo-Heideggerian arguments for substance. Both are motivated by a critique of the idea that we have relations all the way down. Schopenhauer thought that scientific understanding was intrinsically relational and dispositional all the way down (which is still a respected position in metaphysics), which is in part why he brings in the forms as something non-relational. This may tie nicely to Harman's critique of scientism too.

[Addendum: Oops, I see that Dale Jacquette raised this issue in an intersting way in his 2005 Schopenhauer book. Google books has the relevant passage HERE.]

illness inspired question about three valued logic

I've got a cold and am running a fever. Posting on the interwebs is contra-indicated by such a condition. Nonetheless, in my addled state I'm  haunted by the following.

Assuming Trivalence (that every meaningful assertion is determinately either true, false, or neither), how does neither iterate?

To say that "P is true" is neither true nor false (NTP) is equivalent to saying that P is neither true nor false (NP).

To say that "P is false" is neither true nor false (NFP) is also equivalent to saying that P is neither true nor false (if  P were false, then "P is false" would be true; if P were true, then "P is false" would be false; so P must be neither).

But what does it say about P to say that "P is neither true nor false" is neither true nor false (NNP)? I can't make sense of this, and I'm sure I'm goofing something up. Here's an argument that the notion of NNP is incoherent.

Assume that P is such that NNP holds. By trivalence P is true, false, or neither. Assume P is neither (NP). Then it is true that P is neither (TNP), but this contradicts NNP. So our assumption is wrong, and we know that from NNP it follows that P is not neither, which  by trivalence entails that P is either true or false.

But if P is either true or false then we know that P is not neither true nor false which contradicts the claim that NNP.

I'm pretty sure that here last step is probably wrong, because asserting that something is not the case is the assertion that it is not true, which is consistent with it being neither.

But this still doesn't help me make sense of what is being affirmed about a sentence when we assert that the claim that it is neither true nor false is itself neither true nor false. Is it just to assert that P is either true or false?

I realize the above could be the fever. I won't be embarrassed if someone points out an obvious flaw in the above reasoning. I would be relieved. Especially if the pointing out also explained just what is going on with NNP (in particular, what this tells us about P in three valued logics).

saving religion from neo-Kantianism

(1) In a recent thread on Leiterreports concerning the philosophical incompetence of Stanley Fish (someone on whom I've published (with Silcox) an article in The British Journal of Aesthetics). Blinn Combs made a really interesting point against my attempt to argue that the contents of religious beliefs (including second order beliefs about the nature and role of religious beliefs themselves) are not determined by a vote of people who claim to be believers, but rather in terms of deference to experts, which can be non-circularly specified (that is, specified without presupposing the truth of religious doctrine) in terms of knowledge of the various languages and relevant history. The point I'd been trying ot make is that most experts in this sense who profess religious belief are not fundamentalists/bigots and realize that there is no sense in which religious texts can be claimed to be inerrant. I don't think his response to my point works (I responded in the thread), but in making his argument Combs says something really interesting:

That said, there's a straightforward explanation for why more vulgar religious beliefs become replaced by a contemplative/mystical streak the more one knows about history--the contents of those (still linguaform)beliefs are often severely undermined by a critical view of that history--not to mention knowledge of the relevant languages and texts. A plausible way to protect the remnants of the original belief will then be simply to compartmentalize it in a way that makes it immune to critique, reconceptualizing it as metaphorical, or mystical, meditative, or "non-linguaform."

What's really interesting to me about this is that Combs' account of the role mysticism plays for intellectuals it is so similar to J.L. Austin's theory of the role sense data played among early analytic philosophers (in my wretched historical ignorance, for all I know, Hegel made the same critique) in Sense and Sensibilia. One realizes at some point during the Cartesian quest for certainty that there is not much to be had, so what one does is move inward, saying that we can't be certain about the fact that there is a table in front of us, but we can be certain that we are experiencing table sense data (again, for all I know, this is strongly analogous to Heidegger's critique of Husserlian "bracketing".).

However, once you render beliefs about something immune from all criticism in this way, you are taking the concepts about it out of the "space of reasons" and Wittgensteinian private language arguments show that your talk lacks content (the theoretical term for this from recent logic-oriented technical philosophy is "bullshit"). In the case of the thing Combs so accurately describes, "God" becomes Wittgenstein's notorious invisible, weightless beetle in the box that would disappear were the box to be opened.

(2) As becomes very clear in different ways from Lee Braver and Graham Priest's work, the Wittgensteinian critique of private languages, as well as the related Sellarsian critique of the "myth of the given," bear a very strong resemblance to the "affection problem" faced by transcendental idealism. The affection problem is the problem of being forced to say things about the noumenal realm (such as that it exists, or that it causes phenomena) in the statement of transcendental idealism that are strictly speaking prohibited from being sayable by transcendental idealism. Ironically (given the animosity of the latter for the former), Hegel and Schopenhauer had the most insightful things to say about what one might do when you honestly face this problem.

As Priest is aware, in the context of religious epistemology, the view that gets critiqued is negative theology, which treats God as the noumenon/content that we cannot talk about, but which nonetheless still talks about God.

But in thinking about these things, I realized that at least the cartoon version of Plantinga's new epistemology is simply the neo-Kantian reverse of intellectual's negative theology, instead of God being the unknowable noumena, he is somehow presupposed by the conceptual scheme that is organizing the phenomena of the believer. But the same thing is happening that Combs asserts with the intellectual mystic, being presupposed by the scheme is the way to protect religious belief from rational criticism. I don't know if this is Plantinga's actual view (I read the stuff fifteen years ago), but I have a distressing number of otherwise smart fundamentalist students who use Plantinga's views in this very way.

And I think one should respond to the Plantingian position with the Hegelian, Austininian, Wittgensteinian, Sellarsian point that the strategy is only successful to the extent that it robs the beliefs in question of meaningful content.

(3) The core error of post-modern negative theology and Plantinganianism (again, possibly to be distinguished from what Plantinga actually says) is accepting the hyper-Protestant idea that religious faith as a kind of belief (this ties to the Cartesian equation of knowledge with propositional certainty), as opposed to the activity of being faithful.

In no way is my love and devotion for my wife representable by a set of beliefs about her (nor by a set of statements listing my behaviors for that matter). Why should love for, and devotion to, incarnations such as Jesus, Krishna, or the Buddha or prophets like Muhammad be different?

Note that this is not Phillips style neo-Wittgensteinian, because I don't think that the cognitive content of religious beliefs is really spelled out in terms of such affective stances and behaviors. I don't want to "leave everything as it is." I'm very happy to put forward views that entail that most religious people, including Saint Paul, have lots of false first and second order religious beliefs.

(4) Psychologically, I find it harder to critique "first-order" religious beliefs for some reason. Maybe because one should sympathize with the fear (fear of being removed from one's community, fear of death, fear of being gay) that leads people to morally and metaphysically problematic first-order religious beliefs and practices. Maybe also because of the danger of becoming a condescending moral scold in a manner inconsistent with Christian love.

One of the stranger things that Saint Paul said (that Heidegger rightfully found philosophically interesting, perhaps in part because it involves informative circularity) is that one of the tests for being a Christian is the ability to recognize Antichrists as Antichrists. In this very respect Christopher Hitchens is a much better Christians than either the vast hoard of people who send money to the likes of Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell, or the minority of academics (for some reason over-represented in Philosophy Departments) who defend a version of Christianity that creates such monstrosities.

That is:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.'

The point isn't that people who succumb to human lizards like Robertson are going to hell, but rather that while succumbing to the conservative "Christian" resentment that Nietzsche persuasively argues is absolutely foreign to Christ but all too typical of Christianity we remove ourselves from being in a state of grace.

Again, this is not a matter of belief (though failure results in false moral beliefs), but a matter of being faithful, being open to grace in the way taught by Jesus and the prophets, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or aetheist (everyone should read and learn from Hitchens' excellent God is not Great). Islam and some branches of Hinduism are interesting here; the five pillars of Islam mostly concern practical behavior, as does the practice of yoga. Ideally, these are to open the faithful's heart in a way that leads to grace and community with all. This has nothing to do with belief, but is really more akin to a technology of the self (see discussion of Sloterdijk's new book HERE).

Of course, all faith traditions have their Pat Robertsons! But I'm responsible to and for those in mine.

Priest update

I now have natural deduction formulations of all three of the "logical" paradoxes (Russell's, Burali-Forti, Mirimanoff) from Priest's 1994 Mind paper HERE. Their derivations are all strongly analogous. One thing that's cool is that from what I can tell (my copy of Beyond the Limits of Thought came in the mail), what Priest calls "Kant's fifth antinomy" can be proven in the same manner as these three paradoxes. 

[I've also formatted a deduction of Russell's paradox with redundant premises to make the "semantic" paradoxes as structurally similar as possible. The three that do not involve diagonalization (Koenig's, Berry's, and Richard's) should be just grunt work and easy to get done within the week.

The Liar and Knower will be less trivial.]

I don't know yet how much machinery is necessary to formulate Priest's version of the "affection problem" for Kant. I'm going to do that right after formulating the fifth antinomy argument. This is absolutely essential as Braver shows how Hegel and Nietzsche should be thought of as following from different versions of the affection problem, and Meillassoux is interpreted by some (I've amazoned his book) as saying that the an overwhelming part of the continental tradition suffers from versions of the same problem. Formalizing all of this from within Priest's framework will paint the dialectical space beautifully.

One of the questions I have right now is what would prevent the Kantian from responding to Priest that since all such paradoxes are true (on Priest's account), the affection problem is not an argument against Kantianism!

This is a bigger problem for Priest. He wants to say that the structural similarity of self referential paradoxes suggests a common solution (the view that they are true contradictions), but at the same time he is selective about which such paradoxes he takes to be true contradictions and which ones he takes to fail to establish Transcendence or Closure. He's got to be able to say that there is some broad reason why the Liar Paradox (for example) is a case that should be accepted as validly leading to true contradictions, while the paradox of prime matter (as having no essence yet also essentially being the bearer of all properties) is one that should just be solved in terms of fiddling with the notion of prime matter (either as involving a loop in composition or an infinite downward regress in composition or as not considering all essences to be properties, being the bearer of all properties being an essence but not a property).

In the wikipedia article on Russell's paradox, the author(s) note that the Barber and related paradoxes are not really strictly analogous, because you can respond to the Barber paradox by saying that the set of entities in question is empty. But of course you can't do this with the Russell paradox. My intuition is that one can make clearer this distinction and then apply it to answer the above question. I desperately hope that something in that neighborhood works (for all I know, Priest addresses this issue, I just started the book).

My proximate goal is to rigorously compare Priest's Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida with Braver's treatment in A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Realism. As hinted at above, I hope to be able to show that just this combination is one of the appropriate preparations for a fruitful engagement with Speculative Realism (Meillasoux, Brassier, Bryant, Grant, and Harman).

[REMINDER: An on-line reading group for A Thing of This World starts on June 15th and will be hosted at Perverse Egalitarianism. Order your book today or be completely square.]

[Update on the update: Browsing towards the end of my copy tonight I see that Priest distinguishes the Barber paradox from genuine paradoxes by stating that in the case of genuine paradoxes the premisses must be at least prima facie true and arguably a priori. I'm still going to check it out by deriving it explictly alongside the Russell Paradox. If the wikipedia authors are correct, then something stronger can be said for this paradox at least, albeit perhaps not for the other a posteriorish paradoxes Priest mentions in the "Further reflections" section of the book. This is important to me not just because I'm wondering why the transcendental idealist can't just say "fine hae it your way, it's a true contradiction," but also because I'd like to think of the Paradox of the Stone in terms of this framework too. Obviously, it would be nice if there was some formal way to class it as a Barber type paradox (where you ought to just say the thing in question does not exist) or not. It would be weird if that came down to whether the claim that God exists is a priori, or maybe not so weird, since the claim that something is a priori is arguably just the claim that we really, really don't want to reject it. From this perspective all Priest is saying is that paradoxes where we don't want to give up the premisses are ones that lead to true contradictions. Meh.]

Why Graham Priest's work is essential to analytic and continental philosophers

The reason all contemporary philosophy is a series of footnotes to Kant is that his system remains the only one that provides a unified and prima facie satisfying answer to all of the deepest philosophical problems, those involving: a prioricity, necessity, the external world, normativity, and totality.

And all of these problems of course overlap in interesting ways. But contemporary analytic and continental philosophy has for the most part only addressed the the first four problems, even though the problems of totality comprise Kant's Dialectic and hence form a key part of his argument for transcendental idealism. Neglecting the problems of totality has led to some real weirdness. For example, the advances in understanding of necessity and a prioricity that comes out of the Kripkean revolution in modal logic and philosophy of language has led to a sense in which the metaphysical floodgates are again open.

But some of us are really uncomfortable with this, feeling that it is an unjustified return to medieval scholasticism. Against this scholasticism, you have people in the Dummettian and Heideggerian anti-realist traditions on the one hand who are still thinking through issues that descend from normativity and the external world (and this ends up reraising problems with necessity as well), and you have a new realist tradition that realizes that the post-Kripkean theft-over-honest yields an implausible form of realism, one subject to the very problems that led to transcendental idealism in the first place. McDowellians and the Speculative Realists should be seen as taking up this charge. The anti-realists and new realists that don't fit into the narrative of Kripkean triumphalism overlap precisely because McDowellians and Speculative Realists work through the Dummettian and Heideggerian corpus (as well as other neo-Kantian work) to try to get a version of realism that is not theft over honest toil.

New realists have got to have an honest confrontation with the Kantian problems of totality, and Priest's characterization of such problems in terms of varieties of Russell's Paradox is an essential step forward. Russellian paradoxical proofs have two moments: one of Transcendence where a set A is provably not a member of some set B, and one of Closure where A is provably a member of B (with Russell's paradox A and B are the same set; the problem concerns whether the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is itself a member of itself). This provides a rigorous model of precisely what always goes wrong with transcendental idealism, limiting what can be said or known (Closure) and having to surpass those limits (Transcendence) in order to state or think the initial limitation. From secondary work I gather that this is isomorophic to Meillassoux's critique of correlationism that is the Ur-Moment for the speculative realist revolt. So Priest has theorems that greatly support Meillassoux's first point.

 Moreover, from Priest's work (especially seen in the speculative realist perspective) it follows that all the work on the truth and related paradoxes has non-trivial implications for our basic view of reality. What might have seemed like a logical game ends up determining how we ought to characterize basic mind-world connections, and what right we have to take ourselves to be talking about a mind-independent world in the first place. So Kant is vindicated in this sense, solving the problems of totality is shown to be a necessary precondition for solving the problems of the external world. Second, we get much deeper insight into the philosophical tradition of thinking about totality and its limits. Beyond the Limits of Thought is a fascinating and deep guerrilla history of philosophy (and critique of this history) in terms of how different thinkers philosophers from Aristotle to Derrida cognize the limits of totality.

One of the things I'm really excited about doing over the next year and a half is reading Meillasoux, Brassier, Grant Hamilton, and Bryant in terms of Priest's guerilla history. I have to get Priest down first for developing my ideas about the paradox of the stone, but after that I'll be in a position to teach a class on speculative realism and do just this. I also want to hook up analytic thinking about the scheme-content distinction (through Friedman on the one hand, and MacDowell on the other) with speculative realism, but I think the connection between Priest and Meillassoux makes working through the connections concerning problems of totality something I need to do first. 

It's very rare in philosophy or in life to feel with some justification like you see a way forward. I think making explicit the connections between these seemingly disparate radical areas of analytic and continental philosophy is precisely what is needed right now.

natural deduction formulations of Priest's take on paradox

I've got two natural deduction versions of Priest's take on Russell's paradox in a doc file HERE. The first one uses the restricted Inclosure Schema and the second uses the full Inclosure Schema (so that one can craft derivations of the semantic paradoxes with structurally analogous proofs). I've also got a proof of Berry's paradox. 

I'm going to run through all the paradoxes of Priest's great 1994 Mind paper ("The Structure of the Paradoxes of Self Reference") and then use that as a resource to really closely read Beyond the Limits of Thought.

Better logicians than me (and all logicians proper are better logicians than me) almost always think it's silly to model arguments to this level of hyperspecification, but it serves me well. Sometimes you learn interesting things that everybody else has missed, and it also makes it easier for non-logicians (like myself) to follow what is going on. A couple of minor interesting points (concerning Emil Badici's criticism and also the slingshot argument) have already arisen which are noted in the document.

question about applying Priest's schema to God arguments

I just ordered another copy of Graham Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought. He's got a couple of pages on the ontological proof and the conceivability of God. I don't remember what he says though.

His Inclosure Schema clearly works to model the argument for the paradox of the stone. It should work for the ontological proof I think if you start by assuming there exists a (possibly empty) set of entities that are such that no entity is greater than those entities. Of course if you model it that way the conclusion might be not that such an entity exists but that we were wrong to think we could form a set of that sort! That is, we don't have a concept of that which no greater can be conceived after all. For all I know, this is what Priest concludes. I read his book way too hastily years ago. I'm going to read it really carefully this time around.

Neil Tennant in conversation once showed that if the ontological proof is valid then you can in parallel fashion prove that the empty set ("that than which no lesser can be conceived") does not exist. I don't think he published this though.

I'll do a post on it this week which actually explains how the Inclosure Schema models so many different paradoxes on Russell's paradox and which at least models the proof for the paradox of the stone, but if anyone knows of anyone who (pre-Priest) has connected up Russell's Paradox to either the paradox of the stone or the ontological argument, or who has (post-Priest) either explicitly applied Priest's scheme to them or (assuming Priest does this in the book) tries to refute him, please let me know.

another possibly hopeless idea (this one involving dialetheism) that may have been explored by others

This may be catastrophically simple-minded and lazy to boot, but I'm just not sure that dialetheism (the view that there are true contradictions) should be thought of as leading to logical revision. [Before reading any more, I realize that I'm way out of date on all of this, and that there is an extant literature surrounding "classical recapture" that is relevant and that I haven't addressed in what follows.]

The argument that dialetheism entails revising classical inference simply notes that in normal classical logic a contradiction entails everything (ex falso quodlibet, P, ~P |- Q). This is actually a really hard principle to give up because any logic that entails disjunctive syllogism entails ex falso quodlibet [Assume you've got a contradiction P and ~P. From P by disjunction introduction you've got (P v Q) and ~P. But then by disjunctive syllogism you can conclude Q. So from any P and ~P, any Q follows.] So if I want to say with Graham Priest that paradoxical sentences such as "I am not true" are both true and false, and I don't want to be committed to the truth of everything, I better adopt a paraconsistent logic that does not license ex falso quodlibet.

But couldn't a true contradiction work as a logical/pragmatic stop-sign? The thought would be that if you derive a contradiction within something assumed for further discharge such as negation introduction or disjunction elimination you go about your business and continue to use classical logic, but if you derive it outside of these contexts it tells you to stop using the logic.

This works really well for true contradictions that are generated outside of paradoxes involving self-reference (I don't know any other philosophers besides me, in my essay in The Law of Non-Contradiction, who have argued for such). Say that our only notion of ethical truth is truth-relative-to-a-moral-tradition such as in MacIntyre's historicist days (and that the T-Schema is valid for each relativized truth predicate). These traditions will each be independently plausible, but inconsistent with one another. Given the T schema you can generate contradictions from the traditions' joint inconsistency.

And people are pretty good at bouncing back and forth between different moral theories, combining them when it's safe. But sometimes we mess up and apply both in situations where they contradict one another (maybe think of Kantian and Millian ethics on whether a given lie is morally permissible). If the best we can do at the limit of reflective equilibrium is getting a set of good mutually inconsistent (but each internally consistent) theories (something I think holds for ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic theories generally), then a true contradiction is just a place where two of the theories at the limit of reflective equilibrium disagree.

But at least that kind of true contradiction should not lead you to abandon classical logic. In subvaluational "glut semantics" a sentence is supertrue in a model if there is at least one valuation in that model that makes it true. True contradictions happen when a sentence is made true on one valuation and false on another.

On the account of entailment where you say gamma entails alpha if and only if alpha is subtrue when all of gamma are you get a horrifically messy non-classical entailment relation (in Williamson's book on vagueness this is called "wide entailment," albeit there in respect to gap supervaluational semantics for vagueness, where a sentence is true in a model if it is true at *all* relevant interpretations). But such semantics also give you the option of just keeping classical entailment, gamma entails alpha if and only if there is no valuation (remember that models are sets of such valuations) that makes all of gamma true and alpha false. Williamson argues that this form of narrow entailment should not the relevant one for vagueness for the supervaluationist, but I remember finding his arguments here less than persuasive. One would need to examine them in this context.

But the model is compelling. Each one of the interpretations making up the glut semantics model is analogous to a correct theory in the limit of investigation after reflective equilibrium is considered. And narrow entailment can be understood as legitimizing classical logic as long as we in some sense stay within one of the correct theories in the limit of investigation after reflective equilibrium is considered. Since we're in the limit of investigation all a true contradiction tells you is that your bringing together of two of the theories into the same context has run into trouble. It just tells you not to do that in this context.

The big if is whether such a view can be argued to apply to self referential paradoxes. I'm not at all sure that it can. Consider the paradox of the stone. What would the analog to the two interpretations be? I'm going to look at Priest's brilliant 1994 Mind paper "The Structure of the Paradoxes of Self-Reference" (still brilliant even if one agrees with the conclusion of Badici's "The Liar Paradox and the Inclosure Schema," Australasian, 86, 2008) really carefully over the next two weeks and see if there is any hope at all for the idea true contradictions generated from paradoxes can be argued to be consistent with classical logic.

I'm not  that optimistic, because you'd have to say something like a new subvaluational interpretation is generated every time Priest's Transcendence is applied. To the extent that it might work, one could probably piggy back on extant attempted solutions to the paradoxes that involve indexing in various ways. But that literature is a mess and one of the primary benefits of dialetheism is that you were supposed to be able to circumvent it (albeit at the cost of a messy logic).

Idea I'm Pursuing

My big idea (which I'm sure must have occurred to others) is that many problems of reference just are linguistic analogs to the problem of the external world, and that Division 1 of Being and Time is structured to try to dissolve these problems. The big philosophy of language punch-line in Section 33 is “Statement is a pointing out which communicates and defines” (then you get some more stuff leading up to and including 44). Each of these three concepts (pointing out, predication, communication) is built up in earlier sections from non-linguistic modes. So 17 and 18 (on reference) provide the non-linguistic materials for characterizing pointing out, 25-27 (on the they) provide the non-linguistic materials for the characterization of communication, and 31-32 (on understanding and interpretation) provide the non-linguistic materials for the characterization of predication.

Making this work requires reading Being and Time along Harmanian lines though, in the first place because Heidegger's dissolution of the problem of the external world is thoroughly unconvincing unless you follow Harman and de-emphasize Dasein in your interpretation of the tool/broken-tool dichotomy.

The part of this that's cool is you can tie it to a lot of contemporary debates in analytic philosophy of language. The part that may not be cool is that a lot of Derrida may end up coming across as thoroughly retrograde, a linguistic Cartesian who can't get to reality and who has ignored the early Heidegger's way out of the prison.

All of this may go out the window once I've gotten a good grip on Braver's A Thing of This World, which has a very plausible interpretation of Heidegger leading up to Derrida. We're going to do an on-line reading group of it starting June 15th. I'll announce it in a seperate post soon.