Context - coming out of the New Critics
Caroline Porter - materialist, Marxist
Fish countered new criticism - facts in the text -- unquestioned - becomes radical
empirical moves are inappropriate
The Way in which language is used as a tool. Fish - helps us to understand how the utterance allows us to do different things, times, places. (similar to several others) Bakthin etc.
From class
When we think about sciences - relativism is "bad"
Clashing of discourse - especially now. Cultural work going on in moments even without community
Social and the anti-social - the way we create knowledge. Language - social work...whether or not someone can or cannot create language.
collaboration - literary
contradiction - science - productive "what is "productive" - relative term
Possibility:
Mediation that can happen in language -
University - sphere where you can say what you want - constraints
We object, then, to constructions that we can see through. So the United States of Shame...is problematic.
How do we construct or be consistent
Denying that something isn't an interpretation. Danger of assertions - this is not a scientific move.
retention - why dropping out. Issues of self performing.
Qualitative and quantitative - what are we constructing and why. Interrater reliability. What exactly does that tell us? Looking at what you REALLY have.
We are always dealing with mediation of the world through tools. Always stuck in realm in which "anything goes". Always acknowlege where we are. We do this in the humanities. Interpretation of data (which Fish introduces to us).
Do the same thing when we talk about science. Acknowledge where we are.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Against Method Feyerabend
From wikipedia:
Against Method is a 1975 book about the philosophy of science by Paul Feyerabend. It argues that science is an anarchic, not a monic, enterprise.[1] In the context of this work, the term anarchy refers to epistemological anarchy.
"
Epistemological anarchism is an epistemological theory advanced by Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. It holds that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious, and detrimental to science itself.[1]
The use of the term anarchism in the name reflected the methodological pluralism prescription of the theory; as the purported scientific method does not have a monopoly on truth or useful results. Feyerabend once famously said that because there is no fixed scientific method, it is best to have an "anything goes" attitude toward methodologies.[1] Feyerabend felt that science started as a liberating movement, but over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid, and therefore had become increasingly an ideology, and, despite its successes, science had started to attain some oppressive features, and it was not possible to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion, magic, or mythology. He felt the exclusive dominance of science as a means of directing society was authoritarian and ungrounded.[1] Promulgation of the theory earned Feyerabend the title of “the worst enemy of science” from his detractors.
Feyerabend divides his argument into an abstract critique followed by a number of historical case studies.[2]
The abstract critique is a reductio ad absurdum of methodological monism (the belief that a single methodology can produce scientific progress).[3] Feyerabend goes on to identify four features of methodological monism: the principle of falsification,[4] a demand for increased empirical content,[5] the forbidding of ad hoc hypotheses[6] and the consistency condition.[7] He then demonstrates that these features imply that science could not progress, hence an absurdity for proponents of the scientific method.
The historical case studies also act as a reductio.[8] Feyerabend takes the premise that Galileo's advancing of a heliocentric cosmology was an example of scientific progress. He then demonstrates that Galileo did not adhere to the conditions of methodological monism. Feyerabend also argues that, if Galileo had adhered to the conditions of methodological monism, then he could not have advanced a heliocentric cosmology. This implies that scientific progress would have been impaired by methodological monism. Again, an absurdity for proponents of the scientific method.[9]
Feyerabend summarises his reductios with the phrase "anything goes". This is his sarcastic imitation of "the terrified reaction of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history".
Text:
viii
science and other cultures can "stand on two feet"
Against Method is a 1975 book about the philosophy of science by Paul Feyerabend. It argues that science is an anarchic, not a monic, enterprise.[1] In the context of this work, the term anarchy refers to epistemological anarchy.
"
Epistemological anarchism is an epistemological theory advanced by Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. It holds that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious, and detrimental to science itself.[1]
The use of the term anarchism in the name reflected the methodological pluralism prescription of the theory; as the purported scientific method does not have a monopoly on truth or useful results. Feyerabend once famously said that because there is no fixed scientific method, it is best to have an "anything goes" attitude toward methodologies.[1] Feyerabend felt that science started as a liberating movement, but over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid, and therefore had become increasingly an ideology, and, despite its successes, science had started to attain some oppressive features, and it was not possible to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion, magic, or mythology. He felt the exclusive dominance of science as a means of directing society was authoritarian and ungrounded.[1] Promulgation of the theory earned Feyerabend the title of “the worst enemy of science” from his detractors.
Feyerabend divides his argument into an abstract critique followed by a number of historical case studies.[2]
The abstract critique is a reductio ad absurdum of methodological monism (the belief that a single methodology can produce scientific progress).[3] Feyerabend goes on to identify four features of methodological monism: the principle of falsification,[4] a demand for increased empirical content,[5] the forbidding of ad hoc hypotheses[6] and the consistency condition.[7] He then demonstrates that these features imply that science could not progress, hence an absurdity for proponents of the scientific method.
The historical case studies also act as a reductio.[8] Feyerabend takes the premise that Galileo's advancing of a heliocentric cosmology was an example of scientific progress. He then demonstrates that Galileo did not adhere to the conditions of methodological monism. Feyerabend also argues that, if Galileo had adhered to the conditions of methodological monism, then he could not have advanced a heliocentric cosmology. This implies that scientific progress would have been impaired by methodological monism. Again, an absurdity for proponents of the scientific method.[9]
Feyerabend summarises his reductios with the phrase "anything goes". This is his sarcastic imitation of "the terrified reaction of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history".
Text:
viii
science and other cultures can "stand on two feet"
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Fish - What Makes Interpretation Acceptable?
Shakespeare in the Bush
338
interpretive communities
no meaning"inherent" in the text
"There is simply the conviction that the facts exist in their own self-evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are. In the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the facts, because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view."
"what is at stake in a disagreement is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be. Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled"
339
issue with literary criticism
Raine - tyger is evil? silly.
Hirsch - holiness of the Tyger
340
" If Raine had not already decided that the answer to the poem's final question is "beyond all possible doubt, No," the cabbalistic texts, with their distinction between supreme and inferior deities, would never have suggested themselves to her as Blake's source. The rhetoric of critical argument, as it is usually conducted in our journals, depends upon a distinction between interpretations on the one hand and the textual and contextual facts that will either support or disconfirm them on the other; but as the example of Blake's "Tyger" shows, text, context, and interpretation all emerge together, as a consequence of a gesture (the declaration of belief) that is irreducibly interpretive."
Creation of facts
341
interpretive principles- "without a doubt"
Ahhahaha: ("It is quite evident that the critics are not trying to understand the poem at all. If they were, they would not attempt to answer its questions.")8 It is only a matter of time before the focus turns from the questions to their asker and to the possibility that the speaker of the poem is not Blake but a limited persona ("Surely the point ... is that Blake sees further or deeper than hispersona").4 It then becomes possible to assert that "we don't know who the speaker of 'The Tyger' is," and that therefore the poem "is a maze of questions in which the reader is forced to wander confusedly."~ In this reading the poem itself becomes rather "tigerish""
342
"The point is one that Wayne Booth makes when he asks, "Are we right to rule out at least some readings?"7 and then answers his own question with a resounding yes. It would be my answer too; but the real question is what gives us the right so to be right. A pluralist is committed to saying that there is som<::thing in the text which rules out some readings and allows others (even though no one reading can ever capture the text's "inexhaustible richness and complexity")"
Students I have worked with - image of a father
Again, I agree,but if, as I have argued, the text is' always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations. We seem to be at an impasse: on the one hand there would seem to be no basis for labeling an interpretation unacceptable, but on the other we do it all the time.
343
playing the game "things not done"...or done.
344
this is insane:
Twenty years ago one of the things that literary critics didn't do was talk aboyt;the reader, at least in a way that made his experience thefo~~s of the critical act. The prohibition on such talk was largely the result of Wimsatt's and Beardsley's famous essay "The Affective Fallacy," which argued that the variability of readers renders any investigation of their responses ad-hoc and relativistic: "The poem itself," the authors complained, "as an bbject of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear."9 So influential was this essay that it was possible for a reviewer to dismIss a book merely by finding in it evidence that the affective fallacy had been committed.
switched over 20 years:
"and its practitioners have behind them the full and authorizing weight of a fully articulated institutional apparatus. The "reader in literature" is regularly the subject of forums and workshops at the convention of the Modern Language Association; there is a reader newsletter which reports on the multitudinous labors of a reader industry; any list of currently active schools of literary criticism includes the school of "reader response," and two major university presses have published collections of essays designed both to display the variety of reader-centered criticism (the emergence of factions within a once interdicted activity is a sure sign of its having achieved the status of an orthodoxy) and to detail its history."
"The promotion of reader-response criticism to the category of things that are done (even if it is not being done by everyone) brings with it a whole new set of facts to which its practitioners can now refer."
345
"reversals of direction, traps, invitations to premature conclusions, textual gaps, delayed revelat.ions, temptations, all of which are related to a corresponding set of authors' intentions, of strategies designed to educate the reader or humiliate him or confound him or, in the more sophisticated versions of the mode, to make him enact in his responses the very Sll bject matter of the poem."
"As that structure emerges (under the pressure of interrogation) it takes the form of a "reading," and insofar as the procedures which produced it are recognized by the literary community as something that some of its members do, that reading will have the status of a competing interpretation. Of cOllrse it is still the case, as Booth insists, that we are "right to rule out at least some readings," but there is now one less reading or kind of reading that can be l'llled out, because there is now one more interpretive procedure that has
been accorded a place in the literary institution"'
Some look forward to new strategies that have not yet emerged
346
His second argument is that the unacceptability of the Eskimo reading is a function of the text, of what he calls its "sharable promptuary"
(p. 287), the public "store of structured language" (p. 287) that sets limits to the interpretations the words can accommodate. And that, I think, is wrong. The Eskimo reading is unacceptable because there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it, no way of "looking" or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are "ways") that would result in the emergence of obviously Eskiri:lO meanings. This does not mean, however, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it is not difficult to imagine the circumstances under which it would establish itself.
347
lenses of reading
A rose for emily
Pride and Prejudice
348
revisionist reading?
349
the canon changes - new from the old
but dependent on the old
350
Neither would there be any point in arguing that Blake's tiger is both good and evil if there were not already readings in which he was declared to be one or the other.
The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one.
352
This brief paragraph can serve as an illustration of almost everything
I have been saying. First of all, Booth self-consciously locates
and defines his position in a differential opposition to the
positions he would dislodge. He will not, he tells us, do what
any of his predecessors have done; he will do something else,
and indeed if it were not something else there would be no
reason for him to be doing it. The reason he gives for doing it
is that what his predecessors have done is misleading or beside
the point. The point is the location of the source of the sonnets'
value ("what about the sonnets has made them so highly valued")
and his contention (not stated but strongly implied) is
that those who have come before him have been looking in the
wrong places, in the historical identity of the sequence's characters,
in the possibility of recovering the biographical conditions
of composition, and in the determination of an authoritative
ordering and organization.
353
he declares, "intentionally give any interpretations of the sonnets I discuss. I mean to describe them, not to explain them." The irony is that even as Booth is declaring himself out of the game, he is performing one of its most familiar moves.
354
Nor could it be otherwise. Strictly speaking, getting "back-tothe-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production.
Interpretation is only game in town
338
interpretive communities
no meaning"inherent" in the text
"There is simply the conviction that the facts exist in their own self-evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are. In the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the facts, because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view."
"what is at stake in a disagreement is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be. Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled"
339
issue with literary criticism
Raine - tyger is evil? silly.
Hirsch - holiness of the Tyger
340
" If Raine had not already decided that the answer to the poem's final question is "beyond all possible doubt, No," the cabbalistic texts, with their distinction between supreme and inferior deities, would never have suggested themselves to her as Blake's source. The rhetoric of critical argument, as it is usually conducted in our journals, depends upon a distinction between interpretations on the one hand and the textual and contextual facts that will either support or disconfirm them on the other; but as the example of Blake's "Tyger" shows, text, context, and interpretation all emerge together, as a consequence of a gesture (the declaration of belief) that is irreducibly interpretive."
Creation of facts
341
interpretive principles- "without a doubt"
Ahhahaha: ("It is quite evident that the critics are not trying to understand the poem at all. If they were, they would not attempt to answer its questions.")8 It is only a matter of time before the focus turns from the questions to their asker and to the possibility that the speaker of the poem is not Blake but a limited persona ("Surely the point ... is that Blake sees further or deeper than hispersona").4 It then becomes possible to assert that "we don't know who the speaker of 'The Tyger' is," and that therefore the poem "is a maze of questions in which the reader is forced to wander confusedly."~ In this reading the poem itself becomes rather "tigerish""
342
"The point is one that Wayne Booth makes when he asks, "Are we right to rule out at least some readings?"7 and then answers his own question with a resounding yes. It would be my answer too; but the real question is what gives us the right so to be right. A pluralist is committed to saying that there is som<::thing in the text which rules out some readings and allows others (even though no one reading can ever capture the text's "inexhaustible richness and complexity")"
Students I have worked with - image of a father
Again, I agree,but if, as I have argued, the text is' always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations. We seem to be at an impasse: on the one hand there would seem to be no basis for labeling an interpretation unacceptable, but on the other we do it all the time.
343
playing the game "things not done"...or done.
344
this is insane:
Twenty years ago one of the things that literary critics didn't do was talk aboyt;the reader, at least in a way that made his experience thefo~~s of the critical act. The prohibition on such talk was largely the result of Wimsatt's and Beardsley's famous essay "The Affective Fallacy," which argued that the variability of readers renders any investigation of their responses ad-hoc and relativistic: "The poem itself," the authors complained, "as an bbject of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear."9 So influential was this essay that it was possible for a reviewer to dismIss a book merely by finding in it evidence that the affective fallacy had been committed.
switched over 20 years:
"and its practitioners have behind them the full and authorizing weight of a fully articulated institutional apparatus. The "reader in literature" is regularly the subject of forums and workshops at the convention of the Modern Language Association; there is a reader newsletter which reports on the multitudinous labors of a reader industry; any list of currently active schools of literary criticism includes the school of "reader response," and two major university presses have published collections of essays designed both to display the variety of reader-centered criticism (the emergence of factions within a once interdicted activity is a sure sign of its having achieved the status of an orthodoxy) and to detail its history."
"The promotion of reader-response criticism to the category of things that are done (even if it is not being done by everyone) brings with it a whole new set of facts to which its practitioners can now refer."
345
"reversals of direction, traps, invitations to premature conclusions, textual gaps, delayed revelat.ions, temptations, all of which are related to a corresponding set of authors' intentions, of strategies designed to educate the reader or humiliate him or confound him or, in the more sophisticated versions of the mode, to make him enact in his responses the very Sll bject matter of the poem."
"As that structure emerges (under the pressure of interrogation) it takes the form of a "reading," and insofar as the procedures which produced it are recognized by the literary community as something that some of its members do, that reading will have the status of a competing interpretation. Of cOllrse it is still the case, as Booth insists, that we are "right to rule out at least some readings," but there is now one less reading or kind of reading that can be l'llled out, because there is now one more interpretive procedure that has
been accorded a place in the literary institution"'
Some look forward to new strategies that have not yet emerged
346
His second argument is that the unacceptability of the Eskimo reading is a function of the text, of what he calls its "sharable promptuary"
(p. 287), the public "store of structured language" (p. 287) that sets limits to the interpretations the words can accommodate. And that, I think, is wrong. The Eskimo reading is unacceptable because there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it, no way of "looking" or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are "ways") that would result in the emergence of obviously Eskiri:lO meanings. This does not mean, however, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it is not difficult to imagine the circumstances under which it would establish itself.
347
lenses of reading
A rose for emily
Pride and Prejudice
348
revisionist reading?
349
the canon changes - new from the old
but dependent on the old
350
Neither would there be any point in arguing that Blake's tiger is both good and evil if there were not already readings in which he was declared to be one or the other.
The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one.
352
This brief paragraph can serve as an illustration of almost everything
I have been saying. First of all, Booth self-consciously locates
and defines his position in a differential opposition to the
positions he would dislodge. He will not, he tells us, do what
any of his predecessors have done; he will do something else,
and indeed if it were not something else there would be no
reason for him to be doing it. The reason he gives for doing it
is that what his predecessors have done is misleading or beside
the point. The point is the location of the source of the sonnets'
value ("what about the sonnets has made them so highly valued")
and his contention (not stated but strongly implied) is
that those who have come before him have been looking in the
wrong places, in the historical identity of the sequence's characters,
in the possibility of recovering the biographical conditions
of composition, and in the determination of an authoritative
ordering and organization.
353
he declares, "intentionally give any interpretations of the sonnets I discuss. I mean to describe them, not to explain them." The irony is that even as Booth is declaring himself out of the game, he is performing one of its most familiar moves.
354
Nor could it be otherwise. Strictly speaking, getting "back-tothe-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production.
Interpretation is only game in town
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
tibbets
71
For this writer, the salient issue
is the extent to which realist and constructivist elements are
mutually at work and interactive in the design and utilization of
RDs in scientic contexts.
between RD and RO and the
extent to which criteria of accuracy are socially contingent.
PRAXIS!
I fully concur with Barnes’ account of symbolic representations
c 9 § (wiring diagrams, maps, etc.) as analogous to techniques rather
than as merely objects of passive contemplation. Any account
which divorces RDs from the contexts of praxis that define and
concretely situate such devices clearly ignores a salient — perhaps
the salient — inuence on the construction and utility of RDs.
Regarding such contingencies of theory, interpretation and
apparatus on what we take to constitute reality and facticity,
Knorr-Cetina (1981 :33) seriously questions whether
the problem of facticity is to be located in the correspondence
between the [cognitive] products of science and the external
world The process of scientific enquiry ignored by objectivism
(its “context of discovery”) is itself the system of reference
which makes the objectication of reality possible
Thus, the problem of facticity is as much a problem of the
constitution of the world through the logic of scientific procedure
as it is one of explanation and validation.
Consequently, Knorr-Cetina rejects any neat separation between
the context of discovery and the context of explanation.
80
However, I do not
feel that the issue is resolved by such simplistic answers as, ‘Well,
it’s their approximation to reality that grounds their explanatory
and predictive utility!’ The problem here is the term ‘approximation.’
Once we seriously question the pictorial metaphor re.
the RD—RO relation, then have we said anything at all with such
locutions as, ‘approximation’ (correspondence) to reality?
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Rorty ch.8 Philosphy Without mirrors
Philosophy without epistemology
357
"More
generally, it is difficult to imagine that any activity would
be entitled to bear the name “philosophy” if i-t had nothing
to do with knowledge—if it were not in some sense a theory
of knowledge, or a method for getting knowledge, -. or at
least a hint as to where some supremely important kind of
knowledge might be found. The difcu-l-ty stems from a
notion shared by Platonists, Kantians, and positivists: that
man has an essence—namely, to discover essences.
Humans mirror, but based on their eyes
358
Gadamer
" “The hermeneutics developed here,” he says,
“is not . . . a methodology of the human sciences, but an
attempt to understand what the human -sciences truly are,
beyond their methodological self-consciousness, and what
connects them with the totality of our experience of the
world."2
"For my present purposes, the importance of Gadamer’s
book is that he manages to separate off one of the three
strands—the romantic notion of man as self-creative-—in the
philosophical notion of “spirit” from the other two strands
with which it became entangled. Gadamer (like Heidegger,
to whom some of his work is indebted) makes no concessions
either -to Cartesian dualism or to the notion of “transcendental
constitution” (in any sense which could be given
an idealistic interpretation)?
359
not about redescribing ourselves
He does this by substituting the
notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of
“knowledge” as the goal of thinking
language helps to shape us, our learning - becomes more important as we learn more.
Creation:
" Gadamer develops his
notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (the sort of
consciousness of the past which changes us) to characterize
an attitude interested not so much in what is out there in
the world, or in what happened in history, as in what we
can get out of nature and history for our own uses."
In this
attitude, getting the facts right (about atoms and the void,
or about the history of Europe) is merely propaedeutic to
nding a new and more interesting way of expressing ourselves,
and thus of coping with the world.
From the educational,
as opposed to the epistemological or the technological,
point of view, the way things are said is more
importan-t than the possession of truths.‘
360
edification
"The attempt to edify (ourselves or
others) may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making
connections between our own culture and some exotic culture
or historical period, or between our own discipline and
another discipline which seems to pursue incommensurable
aims in an incommensurable vocabulary. But it may instead
consist in the “poetic” activity of thinking up such new
aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by, so to
speak, the inverse of hermeneutics: the attempt to reinterpret
our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of
our new inventions.
pretty cool.
For edifying
discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out
of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in
becoming new beings.
If there
is a conflict, it is between the Platonic-Aristotelian view that
the only way to be edied is to know wha-t is out there (to
reect the facts .accurately—to realize our essence by knowing
essences) and the view that the quest for truth is just one
among many ways in which we might be edified
361
"It is
merely to say that it presents a temptation to self-deception
insofar as we think that, by knowing which descriptions
within a given set of normal discourses apply to us, we
thereby know ourselves. For Heidegger, Sartre, and Cadamer,
objective inquiry is perfectly possible and frequently
actual—the only thing to be said against it is that it provides
only some, among many, ways of describing ourselves, and
that some of these can hinder the process of edification.
This is self-deceptive not
simply because of the general absurdity of ultimate justication’s
reposing upon the unjustifiable, but because of the
more concrete absurdity of thinking that the vocabulary used
by present science, morality, or whatever has some privileged
attachment to reality which makes it more than just a further
set of descriptions.
362
The utility of the “existentialist"
view is that, by proclaiming that we have no essence, it permits
us to see the descriptions of ourselves we nd in one of
(or in the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften as on a par
with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets,
novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists,
and mystics. The former are not privileged representations
in virtue of the fact that (at the moment) there is more
consensus in the sciences than in the arts.
Gadamer begins Truth and Method
with a discussion of the role of the humanist tradition in
giving sense to the notion of Bildung as some-thing having
“no goals outside itself.”° To give sense to such a notion
we need a sense of the relativity of descriptive vocabularies
to periods, traditions, and historical accidents. This is what
the humanist tradition in education does, and what training
in the results of t-he natural sciences cannot do.
363
The natural sciences, by themselves,
leave us convinced that we know both what we are and
what we can be—not just how to predict and control our
behavior, but the limits of that behavior (and, in particular,
the limits of our significant speech).
" More broadly, it is the attempt to
prevent abnormal inquiry from being viewed as suspicious
solely because of its abnormality.
"This “existentialist” attempt to place objectivity, rationality,
and normal inquiry within the larger picture of our
need to be educated and edied is often countered by the
“positivist” attempt to distinguish learning facts from
acquiring values.
"But from the viewpoints of Gadamer,
Heidegger, and Sartre, the trouble with the fact-value
distinction is that it is contrived precisely to blur the fact
that alternative descriptions are possible in addition to
those offered by the results of normal inquiries."
fact-value distinction
"It sug- g
gests that once “all the facts are in” nothing remains except
“noncognitive” adoption of an attitude——-a choice which is
not rationally discussable.
set of true sentences?
" one set of true sentences to describe ourselves is already
to choose an attitude toward ourselves, whereas to use
another set of true sentences is to adopt a contrary attitude.
Only if we assume that there is a value-free vocabulary
which renders these sets of “factual” statements commensurable
can the positivist distinction -between facts and
values, beliefs and attitudes, look plausible. But t-he philosophical
ction that such a vocabulary is on the tips of our
tongues is, from an educational point of view, disastrous. It
forces us to pretend that we can split ourselves up into
"So Gadamer’s effort to get rid of the classic picture of
man-as-essentially-knower-of-essences is, among other things,
an effort ~to get rid of the distinction between fact and value,
and thus to let us think of “discovering the facts” as one
project of edication among others. This is why Gadamer devotes
so much time to breaking down the distinctions which
Kant made among cognition, morality, and aesthetic judgment."
There is no way, as far as I can see, in which to argue
the issue of whether to keep the Kantian “grid” in place or
set it aside. There is no “normal” philosophical discourse
which provides com-mon commens-urating ground for those
who see science and edica-tion as, respectively, “rational”
and “irrational,” and those who see the quest for objectivity
as one possibility among others to be taken account of in
wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein.
365
socialization
The hermeneutic point of view, from which the acquisition
of truth dwindles in importance, and is seen as a component
of education, is possible only if we once stood at
another point of view. Education has to start from acculturation.
So the search for objectivity and the self-conscious
awareness of the social practices in which objectivity
consists are necessary rst steps in becoming gebildet. We
must rst see ourselves as en-soi——as described by those statemen-
ts which are objectively true in -the judgment of our
peers-—before there is any point in seeing ourselves as poursoi.
Similarly, we cannot be educated without nding out a
lot about the descriptions of -the world offered by our
culture (e.g., by learning the results of the natural sciences). Later (I ii -perhaps, we may put less value on being in touch
with reality” but we can afford that only after having passed
through stages of implicit, and then explicit and self-conscious,
conformity 'to the norms of the discourses going on
around us.
even if we revolt, we still use "system"?Move against the system?
"The caution
u so \ _ .
2 amounts to saying that abnormal and existential dis
course is always parasitic upon normal discourse,"
366
hermeneutics is always parasitic upon the
possibility (and perhaps upon the actuality) of epistemology,
and that edicaition always employs materials provided
by the culture of the day. To attempt abnormal discourse
de novo, without being able Ito recognize our own abnormality,
is madness in the most literal and terrible sense.
existentialism is reactive
systematic and edifying philosophies
Successive philosophical revolutions
within this -mainstream have been produced by philosophers
excited by new cognitive feats—e.g., the rediscovery
of Aristotle, Galilean mechanics, the development of
self-conscious historiography in -the nineteenth century,
Darwinian biology, mathematical logic.
367
Build knowledge as a reaction from previous
The cynics!
"On -the periphery of the history of modern philosophy,
one nds gures who, without forming a “tradition,” resemble
each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s
essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard,
Santayana, Willia-m James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein,
the later Heidegger, are gures of this sort. They are often
accused of relativism or cynicism. They are often dubious
about progress, and especially aboult the latest claim that
such-and-such a discipline has at last -made the nature of
human knowledge so clear that reason will now spread
throughout the rest of human activity.
368
Calls these guys edifying
"They make fun of the classic picture
of man, the picture which contains systematic philosophy,
the search for universal commensuration in a nal
vocabulary. They hammer away at -the holistic point that
words take their meanings from other words rather than by
virtue of their representative character, and the corollary
that vocabularies acquire their privileges from the men who
use them rather -than from their transparency to the real.“
369
Different philosphers - revolutionary
"
370
The distinction between systematic and edifying philosophers
is not the -same as the distinction between normal
philosophers and revolutionary philosophers. The latter
distinction puts Husserl, Russell, the later Wittgenstein,
and the later Heidegger all on the same (“revolutionary”)
side of a line. For my purposes, what matters is a distinction
between -two kinds of revolutionary philosophers. On
the one hand, there are revolutionary pl'1ilOSOph€I‘S—-thOS6
who found new schools within which normal, professionalized
philosophy can be practiced—who see the incommensurability
of their new vocabulary with the old as a temporary
inconvenience, to be blamed on the shortcomings of
their predecessors and to be overcome by the institutionalization
of their own vocabulary. On the other hand, there are
great philosophers who dread the thought that their vocabulary
should ever be institutionalized, or that their writing
mightbe seen as commensurable with the tradition. Husserl
and Russell (like Descartes and Kant) are of the former sort.
371
views and subjcts
Both men suggest
we see people as saying things, better or worse things,
without seeing them as externalizing inner representations
of reality. But this is only their entering wedge, for then we
must cease to see ourselves as seeing this, without beginning
to see ourselves as seeing something else.
372
"We have to see the term
“corresponds -to how things are" as an automatic compli- l
ment paid to successful normal discourse rather than as a
relation to be studied and aspired -to throughout the rest of
discourse.
To see edifying
philosophers as conversational partners is an alternative to
seeing them as holding views on subjects of common concern.
One way of thinking of wisdom as something of which
the love is not the same as that of argument, and of which
the achievement does not consist in nding the correct vocabulary
for representing essence, is to ‘think of i-t as the
practical wisdom necessary to participate in a conversation.
373
I want now to enlarge this suggestion that edifying
philosophy aims at continuing a conversation rather than
at discovering truth, by making out of it a reply to the
familiar charge of “relativism” leveled at the subordination
of truth to edification.
"thus that the cultural role of the edifying
philosopher is to h€lip us avoid the self-deception which
comes from believing that we know ourselves by knowing a
set of objective facts. In the following sec-tion, I shall try to
make the converse point. There I shall be saying that the
wholehearted behaviorism, naturalism, and physicalism I
have been commending in earlier chapters help us avoid
the self-deception of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden,
metaphysically signicant nature which makes us “irreducibly”
different from inkwells or atoms.
374
Philosophers thus condemn -themselves to a Sisyphean
task, for no sooner has an account of a transcendental
term been perfected than it is labeled a “naturalistic
fallacy," a confusion between essence and accident." I think
we get a clue to the cause of this self-defeating obsession
from the fact that even philosophers who take the intuitive
impossibility of nding conditions "for “the one right thing
to do” as a reason for repudiating “objeotive values” are
loath to take the impossibility of nding individuating conditions
for the one true theory of the world as a reason for
denying “objective physical reality.
375
mediation
language
376
"which has set the problems of Western philosophy by
Sartre adds to our understanding of the visual imagery I
helping us see why this imagery is always trying to tran
scend itself. The notion of an unclouded Mirror of Nature
is the notion of a mirror which would be indistinguishable
from what was mirrored, and thus would not be a mirror at
all.
377
To abandon the notion
that philosophy must show all possible discourse naturally
converging to a consensus, just as normal inquiry does,
would be to abandon the hope of being anything more than
merely human. It would thus be to abandon the Platonic
notions of Truth and Reality and Goodness as entities
which may not be even dimly mirrored by present practices
and beliefs, and to settle back into the “relativism” which
assumes that our only useful n-otions of “true” and “real”
and “good” are extrapolations from those practices and
beliefs.
edifying philosophy - reactive
Edifying philosophy
is not only abnormal but reactive, having sense only as a
protest against attempts to close off conversation by proposals
for universal commensuration through the hypostatization
of some privileged set of descriptions. The danger
which edifying discourse tries to avert is that some give-n
vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think
of themselves, wi-ll deceive them into thinking that from
now on all discourse could be, or should "be, normal discourse.
The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, in
the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of
human beings. The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing
with Lessing’s choice of the innite striving for truth over
“all of Truth.”2
Strive for truth
378
" To see keeping a conversation going as a suicient aim of
philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the albility to sustain
a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of
new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to
describe accurately.
That is why “existentialism”—and, m-ore generally, edifying
philosophy—ca1n be only reactive, why it falls into selfdeception
whenever it tries to do more than send the
conversation off in new directions.
379
Much recent philosophy—under the aegis of “phenomenology”
or of “hermeneutics,” or both——has toyed with
this unfortunate idea. For example, Habermas and Apel
have suggested ways in which we might create a new sort of
transcendental standpoint, enabling us to do something like
what Kant tried to do, but without fal-ling into either scientism
or hist-oricism.
380
I have been insisting that we should not try to have a successor
subject to epistemology, but rather try to free our- l
selves from the notion that philosophy must center around
the discovery of a permanent framework for inquiry.
382
suspicious - transcendtalism
Normal scientic discourse ca-n always be seen in two different
ways-——as the successful search for objective truth, or
as one discourse among others, one among many projects
we engage in. The former point of view falls in with the
normal practice of normal science. There questions of
moral choice or of edication do not arise, since they have
already been preempted by the tacit and “self-condent”
commitment to the search for objective truth on the subject
383
ask such questions as “What is the point?” to “What moral is be drawn from our knowledge of how we, and the rest of nature, work?" or “What are we to do with ourselves now that we know the laws of our own behavior?"
So he created new forms of philosophical bad faith—substituti:ng ‘transcenden-tal” at- tempts to nd one’s true self for “metaphysical” attempts to nd a world elsewhere.
384
To put this claim in another way, which may help bring
out its connections with naturalis/m, I am saying that the
positivists were absolutely right in thinking it imperative to
extirpate metaphysics, when “metaphysics” means the attempt
-to give knowledge of what science cannot know. For
this is the attempt to nd a discourse which combines the
advantages of normality with those of abnormality--the intersubjective
security of objective -truth combined with the
edifying character of an unjustiable but unconditional
moral claim. The urge to set philosophy on the secure path
of a science is the urge to combine Plato’s project of moral
choice as ticking off the objective -truths abou-t a special sort
of object (the Idea of the Good) with the sort of intersubjective
and democratic agreement about objects found in
normal science."
in question. The latter point of view is one from which we
We must get the
visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of
our speech altogether." To do that we -have to understand
speech not only as not the externalizing of inner representations,
but as not a representation at all.
357
"More
generally, it is difficult to imagine that any activity would
be entitled to bear the name “philosophy” if i-t had nothing
to do with knowledge—if it were not in some sense a theory
of knowledge, or a method for getting knowledge, -. or at
least a hint as to where some supremely important kind of
knowledge might be found. The difcu-l-ty stems from a
notion shared by Platonists, Kantians, and positivists: that
man has an essence—namely, to discover essences.
Humans mirror, but based on their eyes
358
Gadamer
" “The hermeneutics developed here,” he says,
“is not . . . a methodology of the human sciences, but an
attempt to understand what the human -sciences truly are,
beyond their methodological self-consciousness, and what
connects them with the totality of our experience of the
world."2
"For my present purposes, the importance of Gadamer’s
book is that he manages to separate off one of the three
strands—the romantic notion of man as self-creative-—in the
philosophical notion of “spirit” from the other two strands
with which it became entangled. Gadamer (like Heidegger,
to whom some of his work is indebted) makes no concessions
either -to Cartesian dualism or to the notion of “transcendental
constitution” (in any sense which could be given
an idealistic interpretation)?
359
not about redescribing ourselves
He does this by substituting the
notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of
“knowledge” as the goal of thinking
language helps to shape us, our learning - becomes more important as we learn more.
Creation:
" Gadamer develops his
notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (the sort of
consciousness of the past which changes us) to characterize
an attitude interested not so much in what is out there in
the world, or in what happened in history, as in what we
can get out of nature and history for our own uses."
In this
attitude, getting the facts right (about atoms and the void,
or about the history of Europe) is merely propaedeutic to
nding a new and more interesting way of expressing ourselves,
and thus of coping with the world.
From the educational,
as opposed to the epistemological or the technological,
point of view, the way things are said is more
importan-t than the possession of truths.‘
360
edification
"The attempt to edify (ourselves or
others) may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making
connections between our own culture and some exotic culture
or historical period, or between our own discipline and
another discipline which seems to pursue incommensurable
aims in an incommensurable vocabulary. But it may instead
consist in the “poetic” activity of thinking up such new
aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by, so to
speak, the inverse of hermeneutics: the attempt to reinterpret
our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of
our new inventions.
pretty cool.
For edifying
discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out
of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in
becoming new beings.
If there
is a conflict, it is between the Platonic-Aristotelian view that
the only way to be edied is to know wha-t is out there (to
reect the facts .accurately—to realize our essence by knowing
essences) and the view that the quest for truth is just one
among many ways in which we might be edified
361
"It is
merely to say that it presents a temptation to self-deception
insofar as we think that, by knowing which descriptions
within a given set of normal discourses apply to us, we
thereby know ourselves. For Heidegger, Sartre, and Cadamer,
objective inquiry is perfectly possible and frequently
actual—the only thing to be said against it is that it provides
only some, among many, ways of describing ourselves, and
that some of these can hinder the process of edification.
This is self-deceptive not
simply because of the general absurdity of ultimate justication’s
reposing upon the unjustifiable, but because of the
more concrete absurdity of thinking that the vocabulary used
by present science, morality, or whatever has some privileged
attachment to reality which makes it more than just a further
set of descriptions.
362
The utility of the “existentialist"
view is that, by proclaiming that we have no essence, it permits
us to see the descriptions of ourselves we nd in one of
(or in the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften as on a par
with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets,
novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists,
and mystics. The former are not privileged representations
in virtue of the fact that (at the moment) there is more
consensus in the sciences than in the arts.
Gadamer begins Truth and Method
with a discussion of the role of the humanist tradition in
giving sense to the notion of Bildung as some-thing having
“no goals outside itself.”° To give sense to such a notion
we need a sense of the relativity of descriptive vocabularies
to periods, traditions, and historical accidents. This is what
the humanist tradition in education does, and what training
in the results of t-he natural sciences cannot do.
363
The natural sciences, by themselves,
leave us convinced that we know both what we are and
what we can be—not just how to predict and control our
behavior, but the limits of that behavior (and, in particular,
the limits of our significant speech).
" More broadly, it is the attempt to
prevent abnormal inquiry from being viewed as suspicious
solely because of its abnormality.
"This “existentialist” attempt to place objectivity, rationality,
and normal inquiry within the larger picture of our
need to be educated and edied is often countered by the
“positivist” attempt to distinguish learning facts from
acquiring values.
"But from the viewpoints of Gadamer,
Heidegger, and Sartre, the trouble with the fact-value
distinction is that it is contrived precisely to blur the fact
that alternative descriptions are possible in addition to
those offered by the results of normal inquiries."
fact-value distinction
"It sug- g
gests that once “all the facts are in” nothing remains except
“noncognitive” adoption of an attitude——-a choice which is
not rationally discussable.
set of true sentences?
" one set of true sentences to describe ourselves is already
to choose an attitude toward ourselves, whereas to use
another set of true sentences is to adopt a contrary attitude.
Only if we assume that there is a value-free vocabulary
which renders these sets of “factual” statements commensurable
can the positivist distinction -between facts and
values, beliefs and attitudes, look plausible. But t-he philosophical
ction that such a vocabulary is on the tips of our
tongues is, from an educational point of view, disastrous. It
forces us to pretend that we can split ourselves up into
"So Gadamer’s effort to get rid of the classic picture of
man-as-essentially-knower-of-essences is, among other things,
an effort ~to get rid of the distinction between fact and value,
and thus to let us think of “discovering the facts” as one
project of edication among others. This is why Gadamer devotes
so much time to breaking down the distinctions which
Kant made among cognition, morality, and aesthetic judgment."
There is no way, as far as I can see, in which to argue
the issue of whether to keep the Kantian “grid” in place or
set it aside. There is no “normal” philosophical discourse
which provides com-mon commens-urating ground for those
who see science and edica-tion as, respectively, “rational”
and “irrational,” and those who see the quest for objectivity
as one possibility among others to be taken account of in
wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein.
365
socialization
The hermeneutic point of view, from which the acquisition
of truth dwindles in importance, and is seen as a component
of education, is possible only if we once stood at
another point of view. Education has to start from acculturation.
So the search for objectivity and the self-conscious
awareness of the social practices in which objectivity
consists are necessary rst steps in becoming gebildet. We
must rst see ourselves as en-soi——as described by those statemen-
ts which are objectively true in -the judgment of our
peers-—before there is any point in seeing ourselves as poursoi.
Similarly, we cannot be educated without nding out a
lot about the descriptions of -the world offered by our
culture (e.g., by learning the results of the natural sciences). Later (I ii -perhaps, we may put less value on being in touch
with reality” but we can afford that only after having passed
through stages of implicit, and then explicit and self-conscious,
conformity 'to the norms of the discourses going on
around us.
even if we revolt, we still use "system"?Move against the system?
"The caution
u so \ _ .
2 amounts to saying that abnormal and existential dis
course is always parasitic upon normal discourse,"
366
hermeneutics is always parasitic upon the
possibility (and perhaps upon the actuality) of epistemology,
and that edicaition always employs materials provided
by the culture of the day. To attempt abnormal discourse
de novo, without being able Ito recognize our own abnormality,
is madness in the most literal and terrible sense.
existentialism is reactive
systematic and edifying philosophies
Successive philosophical revolutions
within this -mainstream have been produced by philosophers
excited by new cognitive feats—e.g., the rediscovery
of Aristotle, Galilean mechanics, the development of
self-conscious historiography in -the nineteenth century,
Darwinian biology, mathematical logic.
367
Build knowledge as a reaction from previous
The cynics!
"On -the periphery of the history of modern philosophy,
one nds gures who, without forming a “tradition,” resemble
each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s
essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard,
Santayana, Willia-m James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein,
the later Heidegger, are gures of this sort. They are often
accused of relativism or cynicism. They are often dubious
about progress, and especially aboult the latest claim that
such-and-such a discipline has at last -made the nature of
human knowledge so clear that reason will now spread
throughout the rest of human activity.
368
Calls these guys edifying
"They make fun of the classic picture
of man, the picture which contains systematic philosophy,
the search for universal commensuration in a nal
vocabulary. They hammer away at -the holistic point that
words take their meanings from other words rather than by
virtue of their representative character, and the corollary
that vocabularies acquire their privileges from the men who
use them rather -than from their transparency to the real.“
369
Different philosphers - revolutionary
"
370
The distinction between systematic and edifying philosophers
is not the -same as the distinction between normal
philosophers and revolutionary philosophers. The latter
distinction puts Husserl, Russell, the later Wittgenstein,
and the later Heidegger all on the same (“revolutionary”)
side of a line. For my purposes, what matters is a distinction
between -two kinds of revolutionary philosophers. On
the one hand, there are revolutionary pl'1ilOSOph€I‘S—-thOS6
who found new schools within which normal, professionalized
philosophy can be practiced—who see the incommensurability
of their new vocabulary with the old as a temporary
inconvenience, to be blamed on the shortcomings of
their predecessors and to be overcome by the institutionalization
of their own vocabulary. On the other hand, there are
great philosophers who dread the thought that their vocabulary
should ever be institutionalized, or that their writing
mightbe seen as commensurable with the tradition. Husserl
and Russell (like Descartes and Kant) are of the former sort.
371
views and subjcts
Both men suggest
we see people as saying things, better or worse things,
without seeing them as externalizing inner representations
of reality. But this is only their entering wedge, for then we
must cease to see ourselves as seeing this, without beginning
to see ourselves as seeing something else.
372
"We have to see the term
“corresponds -to how things are" as an automatic compli- l
ment paid to successful normal discourse rather than as a
relation to be studied and aspired -to throughout the rest of
discourse.
To see edifying
philosophers as conversational partners is an alternative to
seeing them as holding views on subjects of common concern.
One way of thinking of wisdom as something of which
the love is not the same as that of argument, and of which
the achievement does not consist in nding the correct vocabulary
for representing essence, is to ‘think of i-t as the
practical wisdom necessary to participate in a conversation.
373
I want now to enlarge this suggestion that edifying
philosophy aims at continuing a conversation rather than
at discovering truth, by making out of it a reply to the
familiar charge of “relativism” leveled at the subordination
of truth to edification.
"thus that the cultural role of the edifying
philosopher is to h€lip us avoid the self-deception which
comes from believing that we know ourselves by knowing a
set of objective facts. In the following sec-tion, I shall try to
make the converse point. There I shall be saying that the
wholehearted behaviorism, naturalism, and physicalism I
have been commending in earlier chapters help us avoid
the self-deception of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden,
metaphysically signicant nature which makes us “irreducibly”
different from inkwells or atoms.
374
Philosophers thus condemn -themselves to a Sisyphean
task, for no sooner has an account of a transcendental
term been perfected than it is labeled a “naturalistic
fallacy," a confusion between essence and accident." I think
we get a clue to the cause of this self-defeating obsession
from the fact that even philosophers who take the intuitive
impossibility of nding conditions "for “the one right thing
to do” as a reason for repudiating “objeotive values” are
loath to take the impossibility of nding individuating conditions
for the one true theory of the world as a reason for
denying “objective physical reality.
375
mediation
language
376
"which has set the problems of Western philosophy by
Sartre adds to our understanding of the visual imagery I
helping us see why this imagery is always trying to tran
scend itself. The notion of an unclouded Mirror of Nature
is the notion of a mirror which would be indistinguishable
from what was mirrored, and thus would not be a mirror at
all.
377
To abandon the notion
that philosophy must show all possible discourse naturally
converging to a consensus, just as normal inquiry does,
would be to abandon the hope of being anything more than
merely human. It would thus be to abandon the Platonic
notions of Truth and Reality and Goodness as entities
which may not be even dimly mirrored by present practices
and beliefs, and to settle back into the “relativism” which
assumes that our only useful n-otions of “true” and “real”
and “good” are extrapolations from those practices and
beliefs.
edifying philosophy - reactive
Edifying philosophy
is not only abnormal but reactive, having sense only as a
protest against attempts to close off conversation by proposals
for universal commensuration through the hypostatization
of some privileged set of descriptions. The danger
which edifying discourse tries to avert is that some give-n
vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think
of themselves, wi-ll deceive them into thinking that from
now on all discourse could be, or should "be, normal discourse.
The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, in
the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of
human beings. The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing
with Lessing’s choice of the innite striving for truth over
“all of Truth.”2
Strive for truth
378
" To see keeping a conversation going as a suicient aim of
philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the albility to sustain
a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of
new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to
describe accurately.
That is why “existentialism”—and, m-ore generally, edifying
philosophy—ca1n be only reactive, why it falls into selfdeception
whenever it tries to do more than send the
conversation off in new directions.
379
Much recent philosophy—under the aegis of “phenomenology”
or of “hermeneutics,” or both——has toyed with
this unfortunate idea. For example, Habermas and Apel
have suggested ways in which we might create a new sort of
transcendental standpoint, enabling us to do something like
what Kant tried to do, but without fal-ling into either scientism
or hist-oricism.
380
I have been insisting that we should not try to have a successor
subject to epistemology, but rather try to free our- l
selves from the notion that philosophy must center around
the discovery of a permanent framework for inquiry.
382
suspicious - transcendtalism
Normal scientic discourse ca-n always be seen in two different
ways-——as the successful search for objective truth, or
as one discourse among others, one among many projects
we engage in. The former point of view falls in with the
normal practice of normal science. There questions of
moral choice or of edication do not arise, since they have
already been preempted by the tacit and “self-condent”
commitment to the search for objective truth on the subject
383
ask such questions as “What is the point?” to “What moral is be drawn from our knowledge of how we, and the rest of nature, work?" or “What are we to do with ourselves now that we know the laws of our own behavior?"
So he created new forms of philosophical bad faith—substituti:ng ‘transcenden-tal” at- tempts to nd one’s true self for “metaphysical” attempts to nd a world elsewhere.
384
To put this claim in another way, which may help bring
out its connections with naturalis/m, I am saying that the
positivists were absolutely right in thinking it imperative to
extirpate metaphysics, when “metaphysics” means the attempt
-to give knowledge of what science cannot know. For
this is the attempt to nd a discourse which combines the
advantages of normality with those of abnormality--the intersubjective
security of objective -truth combined with the
edifying character of an unjustiable but unconditional
moral claim. The urge to set philosophy on the secure path
of a science is the urge to combine Plato’s project of moral
choice as ticking off the objective -truths abou-t a special sort
of object (the Idea of the Good) with the sort of intersubjective
and democratic agreement about objects found in
normal science."
in question. The latter point of view is one from which we
We must get the
visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of
our speech altogether." To do that we -have to understand
speech not only as not the externalizing of inner representations,
but as not a representation at all.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Rorty - frm epistemology to hermeneutics
From Wikipedia:
"Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation (Bernstein 1971), constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism."
"
Rorty's doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Potentiality", and his first book (as editor), The Linguistic Turn (1967), were firmly in the prevailing analytic mode, elaborating movements of the Linguistic turn. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism, particularly the writings of John Dewey. The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars caused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
Pragmatists generally hold that the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language which declares that meaning is a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not 'link up' with the world in a correspondence relation. Rorty wrote in his Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989):
On poetry
" Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life", (published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry magazine),[12] in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes, "I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.""
"
There were two senses of "foundationalism" criticized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the epistemological sense, Rorty criticized the attempt to justify knowledge claims by tracing them to a set of foundations (e.g., self-evident premises or noninferential sensations); more broadly, he criticized the claim of philosophy to function foundationally within a culture. The former argument draws on Sellars's critique of the idea that there is a "given" in sensory perception, in combination with Quine's critique of the distinction between analytic sentences (sentences which are true solely in virtue of what they mean) and synthetic sentences (sentences made true by the world). Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed, yet leaves enough of the tradition intact to proceed with its former aspirations. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged insight into the structure of belief and no privileged realm of truths of meaning, we have, instead, knowledge as those beliefs that pay their way. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating through normal and abnormal periods, between routine problem-solving and intellectual crises.
After eliminating foundationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature popularized and extended ideas of Wilfrid Sellars (the critique of the Myth of the given) and W. V. O. Quine (the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and others who advocate the Wittgensteinian doctrine of "dissolving" rather than solving philosophical problems."
Stanford:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
From: http://philosophymasters.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/from-epistemology-to-hermeneutics-philosophy-and-the-mirror-of-nature/
"
"I was not suggesting that Quine and Sellars enable us to
have a new, better, “behavioristic” sort of epistemology.
Rather, they show us how things look when we give up
the desire for confrontation and constraint. The demise of
foundational epistemology, however, is often felt to leave a
vacuum which needs to be lled. In chapters ve and six I
criticized various attempts to ll it. In this chapter I shall
be talking about hermeneutics, so I want to make clear at
the outset that I am not putting hermeneutics forward as
a “successor subject” to epistemology, as an activity which
lls the cultural vacancy once lled by epistemologically
centered philosophy. In the interpretation I shall be offering,
“hermeneutics” is not the name for a discipline, nor
for a method of achieving the sort of results which epistemology
failed to achieve, nor for a program of research.
On the contrary, hermeneutics is an expression of hope that
the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will
not be lled—that our culture should become one in which
the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer
felt.
316
By “commensurable” I mean able to be brought under
a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can
be reached on what would settle the issue on every point
where statements seem to conict} These rules tell us how
to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements
will be seen to be “noncognitive” or merely
verbal, or else merely temporary——capable of being resolved
by doing something further. What matters is that there
should be agreement about what would have to be done if a
resolution were to be achieved. In the meantime, the interlocutors
can agree to differ——being satised of each other’s rationality
the while. The dominating notion of epistemology
is that to be rational, to be fully human, -to do what we
ought, we need to be able to nd agreement with other human
beings. To construct an epistemology is to nd the
maximum amount of common ground with others. The
assumption that an epistemology can be constructed is the
assumption that such common ground exists.
being vs. becoming
being - history of thinking it lies within us
317
or in lanuguage
To suggest that there is no such common ground seems to endanger rationality. To question the need for com- mensuration seems the rst step toward a return to a war of all against all. Thus, for example, a common reaction to Kuhn or Feyerabend is that they are advocating the use of force rather than persuasion.
The holistic, antifoundationalist, pragmatist treatments of knowledge and meaning which we nd in Dewey, Witt- 3 genstein, Quihe, Sellars, and Davidson are almost equally offensive to many philosophers, precisely -because they aban don the quest for commensuration and thus are “relativist.
Holistic theories
seem to license everyone to construct his own little whole- his own little paradigm, his own little practice, his own little language-game—and then crawl into it.
"The fi rst is that of the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermedi- ary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclosed
practices. Disagreements between disciplines and discourses
are compromised or transcended in the course of the con- versation. (hermeneutics)
"The second role is that of the cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground—the Platonic phi- losopher-king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context (the Forms, the Mind, Language) (epistemology)
"Hermeneutics
sees the relations between various discourses as those of
strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes
no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers,
but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as
the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery
of antecedently existing common ground, but simply
hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement.
Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a
token of the existence of common ground which, perhaps
unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in a common rationality.
For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing
to refrain from epistemology—from thinking that there is
a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation
should be put—-and to be willing to pick up the
jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into
one’s own.
For epistemology, to be rational is to nd the
proper set of terms into which all the contributions should
be translated if agreement is to become possible. For epistemology,
conversation is implicit inquiry.
inquiry vs. common end
societas (s0cietas———persons whose paths through life have
fallen together, united by civility rather than by a common
goal, much less by a common ground) vs. universitas
319
hermeneutic circle -
There is not foundational knowledge - must know the parts and the whole
"We will not be able to isolate basic elements except on the basis of a prior knowledge of the whole fabric within which these elements occur. Thus we will not be able to substitute the notion of “accurate rep- resentation” (element-by-element) for that of successful ac- complishment of a practice. Our choice of elements will be dictated by our understanding of the practice, rather than the practice's being “legitimated” by a “rational recon- struction” out of elements. This holist line of argument says that we shall never be able to avoid the “hermeneutic cir- cle”—the fact that we cannot understand the parts of a strange culture, practice, theory, language, or whatever, un- less we know something about how the whole thing works, whereas we cannot get a grasp on how the whole works until we have some understanding of its parts."
"The notion of culture as a conversation rather than as a structure erected upon foundations ts well with this hermeneutical notion of knowledge, since getting into a conversation with strangers is, like acquiring a new virtue or skill by imitating models, a matter of ¢p6|/7701; rather than €1no"r,u.1]."
320
In past, epistemology - cognitive, hermeneutics, "subjective"
The pragmatic approach to knowledge suggested by epistemological
behaviorism will construe the line between discourses
which can be rendered commensurable and those
which cannot as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal”
discourse-—a distinction which generalizes Kuhn’s
distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science.
“Normal” science is the practice of -solving problems against
the background of a consensus about what counts as a good
explanation of the phenomena and about what it would
take for a problem to be solved. “Revolutionary” science is
the introduction of a new “paradigm” of explanation, and
thus of a new set of problems.
Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins
in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who
sets them aside. ’E1rwnj;i1; is -the product of normal discourse
—the sort of statement which can be agreed to be true by all
participants whom the other participants count as “rational.”
The product of abnormal discourse can be anything
from nonsense to intellectual revolution
321
The difference is purely one of familiarity. We will be epistemological where we understand perfectly well what is happening but want to codify it in order to extend, or strengthen, or teach, or “ground” it.
We must be hermeneutical where we do not understand what is happening but are honest enough to admit it, rather than being blatantly “Whiggish” about it.
sets limitations on epistemology:
"This means that we can get epistemological commensura- tion only where we already have agreed-upon practices of inquiry (or, more generally, of discourse)—as easily in “academic” art, “scholastic” philosophy, or “parliamentary” politics as in “normal” science. We can get it not because we have discovered something about “the nature of human 1 knowledge" but simply because when a practice has con- tinued long enough the conventions which make it possible —and which permit a consensus on how to divide it into parts—are relatively easy to isolate."
321
Kuhn - reconsiders:
Since the Enlightenment, and in particular since
Kant, the physical sciences had been viewed as a paradigm
of knowledge, to which the rest of culture had to measure
up. Kuhn’s lessons from the history of science suggested that
controversy within the physical sciences was rather more
like ordinary conversation (on the blameworthiness of an
action, the qualications of an ofceseeker, the value of a
poem, the desirability of legislation) than the Enlightenment
had suggested
322
"But Kuhn’s invocation
of such a maxim was disturbing to philosophers of
science who, working within the epistemological tradition,
were bound to think in terms of a neutral scheme (“observation
language,” “-bridge laws,” etc.) which would make
Aristotle and Newton, for example, commensurable. Such a
scheme could, they thought, be used "to render hermeneutical
guesswork unnecessary.
Kuhn made ppl nervous
323
It is one
thing to say that the “neutral observation language” in
which proponents of different theories can offer their evidence
is of little help in deciding between the theories. It is
another thing to say that there can be no such language
because the proponents “see different things” or “live in
different worlds.” Kuhn, unfortunately, made incidental
remarks of the latter sort, and philosophers pounced upon
them. Kuhn wished to oppose the traditional claim that
“what changes with ~a paradigm is only the scientist's interpretation
of observations that themselves are xed once and
for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual
apparatus.“
* what the issue with Kuhn is, according to Rorty:
says Kuhn should have discarded epistemological altogether!
325
Fascinating
"He thought we must also make sense of the claims that “when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the rst saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum" and that “pendulums were ‘brought into existence by something very like a paradigm-induced gestalt switch.” The unfortunate result of these remarks was to set the pendulum swinging between realism and idealism once again. In order to guard against the confusions of tra- ditional empiricism, we need make no more of the gestalt- switch in question than the fact that people became able to respond to sensory stimulations by remarks about pendu- lums, without having to make an intervening inference."
falls into idealism if not realisim:
"but he let his notion of what counted as a “philosophical paradigm” be set by the Kantian notion that the only substitute for a realistic account of successful mirroring was an idealistic account of the malleability of the mirrored world. We do indeed need to give up the notion of “data and interpreta- ' tion” with its suggestion that if we could get to the real data, unpolluted by our choice of language, we should be “grounding” rational choice"
"But we can get rid of this notion by being beh-aviorist in epistemology rather than by l being idealist. Hermeneutics does not need a new episte- mological paradigm,"
326
issues of creating paradigms - from Kuhn:
"In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory,
methods and standards together, usually in an inextricable
mixture. . . ."
327
points out those who misinterpreted Kuhn
then:
" The only real question which separates Kuhn from
his critics is whether the sort of “deliberative process” which
occurs concerning paradigm shifts in the sciences (the sort
of process which, as Kuhn shows in The Copernican Revolution,
can stretch out over a century) is different in kind
from the deliberative process which occurs concerning, for
example, the shift from the ancien régime to bourgeois
democracy, or from_the Augustans to the Romantics."
Issue of VALUES
328
"But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations
advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—-
the scriptural descriptions of the fabric of the
heavens-——were “illogical or unscienticP”12 This, perhaps,
is the point at which the bat-tle lines between Kuhn and his
critics can be drawn most sharply. Much of the seventeenth
century's notion of what it was to be a “philosopher,” and
much of the Enlightenment’s notion of what it was to be
“rational,” turns on Galileo's being absolutely right and the
church absolutely wrong. To suggest that there is room for
rational disagreement here—not simply for a black-andwhite
struggle between reason and superstition——is to endanger
the very notion of “philosophy.” For it endangers the
notion of nding “a method for nding truth” which takes
Galilean and Newtonian mechanics as paradigmatic."
329
what is a scientific value? what is an unscientific value?
" The crucial consideration
is whether we know how to draw a line between science
and theology such that getting the heavens right is a “scientic
l! value, and preserving the church, and the general
cultural structure of Europe, is an “unscientific” value.“
The argument that we do not centers around the claim that
the lines between disciplines, subject matters, parts of culture,
are themselves endangered by novel substantive suggestions."
evidence of Bellarmine - scripture
330
" Bellarmine’s contemporaries—-who mostly -thought Scripture
to be indeed the word of God—supposed to say to
Bellarmine? What they did say, among other -things, was
that adherence to Scripture could be disjoined from adherence
to various adventitious (e.g., Aristotelian and Ptolemaic)
notions which had been used to interpret Scripture.
(This was the sort of thing nineteenth-century liberal divines
were later to say in connection with Genesis and
Darwin.) Were all these arguments about howliberal one’s
scriptural hermeneutics might legitimately be beside the
point? They were attempts to limit, so to speak, the scope
of Scripture (and thus of the church)—the opposite reaction
to Bellarmine’s own attempt to limit the scope of
Copernicus"
Tough to talk this out!
"Obviously, the conclusion I wish to draw is that the
“grid” which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was not there t-o be appealed to in the early
seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial.
No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of
human knowledge, could have “discovered” it before it was
hammered out."
We are -the heirs of three hundred
years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing
sharply between science and religion, science and politics,
science and art, -science and philosophy, and so on.
331
" But to proclaim our loyalty to
these distinctions is n-ot to say that there are "objective"
and “rational” standards for adopting them. Galileo, so to
speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common
ground of the “grid” of relevance and irrelevance which
“modern philosophy” developed as a consequence of that
victory.
"We can just say that Galileo
was creating the notion of “scientic values” as he went
along, that it was a splendid thing that he did so, and that
the question of whether he was “rational” in doing so is out
of place.
332
"We
cannot determine relevance by focusing on subject matter
and saying, for example, “Don’t bother with what Scripture
said God did, just look at the planets and see what they do.”
Mere looking at the planets will be of no help in choosing
our model of Ithe heavens, any more than mere reading of
Scripture. In 1550 a certain set of considerations was relevant
to “rational” views on astronomy, and by 1750 a largely
different set of considerations was relevant."
Very interesting:
"This change in
what was thought relevant can be seen, by hindsight, as
drawing proper distinctions among what was really there in
the world (“discovering” that astronomy was an autonomous
sphere of scientic inquiry), or it can be seen as a shift
in cultural climate. It does not greatly matter which way
we see it, as long as we are clear that the change was not
brought -about by “rational argument” in some sense of
“rational” in which, for example, the changes lately brought
about in regard to society’s attitude toward slavery, abstract
art, homosexuals, or endangered species, would not count
as “rational.”
333
To sum up the line I am taking about Kuhn and his
critics: the controversy between them is about whether
science, as the discovery of what is really out there in the
world, differs in its patterns of argumentation from discourses
for which the notion of “correspondence to reality"
seems less apposite (e.g., politics and literary criticism).
Logical-empiricist philosophy of science, and the whole
epistemological tradition -since Descartes, has wanted to say
that the procedure for attaining accurate representations in
the Mirror of Nature differs in certain deep ways from the
333
procedure for attaining agreement about “practical” or
"aesthetic" matters. Kuhn gives us reason to say that there
is no deeper difference than that between what happens in
“normal” and in “abnormal” discourse. That distinction
cuts across the distinction between science and nonscience.
But the fact that the Enlightenment
ran together the ideal of Ithe autonomy of science
from theology and politics with the image of scientic
theory as Mirror of Nature is not a reason for preserving
this confusion. The grid of relevance and irrelevance which
we inherit almost intact from the eigh-teenth century will
be more attractive when it is no longer tied to this image.
Shopworn mirror-metaphors are of no help in keeping
intact the inheritance—both moral and scientic—of
Galileo.
"Kuhn’s cri-tics have helped perpetuate the dogma that
only where there is correspondence to reality is there the
possibility of rational agreement, in a special sense of
“rational” of which science is the paradigm.
Issues with "objective"
334
"The two are largely
coextensive, and for nonphilosophical purposes no trouble
arises from running them together. But if we begin to take
seriously questions like “In just what sense is Goodness out
there waiting to be represented accurately as a result of
rational argument on moral questions?” or
“In just what
sense were there physical features of reality capable of being
represented accurately only by differential equations, or
tensors, before people thought of so representing them?”"
Our natural inclination to return a
robust “In no sense" to the rst and an equally robust “In
the fullest possible and most straightforward sense” to the
second will be of no help in getting rid of these questions if
we still feel the need to justify answers to such questions by
constructing epistemological and metaphysical theories.
the cat is on the mat
" The latter discovery——a homely point
d’appui for the notions of “contact with reality,” “-truth as
correspondence” and “accuracy of representation”-—is the
standard against which the others are compared in poin-t of
objectivity."
335
"The epistemologist must worry about the
respects in which more interesting statements share the
objectivity possessed by that triumph of mirroring—the appropriate
utterance of “The cat is on the mat.” In the view
which follows from epistemological behaviorism, there is
no interesting way to discover whether, for example, there
is a Moral Law to be corresponded to. The fact that, for
example, “the moral standards entailed by the nature of
man” are more at home in Aristotle’s hylomorphic universe
than in Newton’s mechanistic one is not a reason for thinking
that there is or its not an “objeotive” Moral Law.
"I am recommending, we might, in an imaginary age in
which consensus in these areas was almost complete, view
morality, physics, and psychology as equally “objective.”
We might then relegate the more debatable areas of literary
criticism, chemistry, and sociology to -the realm of the “noncognitive,”
or “interpret them operationalistically,” or “reduce“
them to one or another “objective” discipline. The
application of such honorics as “objective” and “cognitive”
is never anything more than an expression of the presence
of, or -the hope for, agreement among inquirers."
"I think that the debate between Kuhn and his
critics is worth taking up yet again in the context of a
discussion of the “objective-subjective” distinction, simply
because the grip of this distinction is so very powerful, and
so charged with moral feeling.
"Once again, this moral feeling
is a consequence of the (entirely justied) notion that
the preservation of the values of the Enlightenment is our best hope"
336
So in this section I shall try once again to cut the
links which connect -these values with the image of the
Mirror of Nature.
This reply to the charge of “subjectivity” is useful as far
as i-t goes, but i-t does not reach the deeper fear behind the
charge. This is the fear that there really is no middle ground
between matters of -taste and matters capable of being settled
by a previously statable a-lgorithm. The philosopher
who sees no such middle ground is, I think, reasoning
roughly as follows:
1. All statements describe either internal states of human
beings (their Glassy Essence, the possibly clouded Mirror)
or states of external reality (nature).
2. We can -tell which statements are which "by seeing which
we know how to get universal agreement on.
3. So the possibili-ty of perpetual disagreement is an indication
that, no matter how rational debate may seem to
1'! Kuhn,
337
be, there is really nothing to debate about——since the
subject can only -be internal states.
Within traditional epistemology, this latter notion
has only rarely been seen for what it is: an admission that
our only usable notion of “objectivity” is “agreement”
rather than mirroring.
Even, for example, in Ayer’s refreshingly
frank remark that “we dene a rational belief as
one which is arrived at by the methods which we now
consider reliable,”18 the notion of “reliability” still functions
as a hint -that we can only be rational by corresponding
to the real. Not even his equally frank admission that all
the privileged representations in the world will nevertheless
permit a man to “sustain his convictions in the face of
apparently hostile evidence if he is prepared -to make the
necessary ad hoc assumptions” (p. 95) is enough to defeat
Ayer’s conviction that in separating the “empirical” from
the “emotive” and the “analytic” he is separating “truth
about the world” from something else.
(Ayers/ Plato) adds:
"
4. We are able to eliminate the possibility of perpetual,
undecidable rational disagreement only in those areas
where unquestioned links to external reality provide a
common ground for the disputants.
338
"leads to the conclusion that the absence of relevant
privileged representations shows that we have only “a matter
of taste." Kuhn is right in saying that this is a long way
from the ordinary notion of “taste,”"
"“Objectivity” in the rst sense was a property of theories
which, having been thoroughly discussed, are chosen by a
consensus of rational discussants. By contrast, a “subjective”
consideration is one which has been, or would be, or should
be, set aside by rational discu-ssants——one which is seen to be,
or should be seen to be, irrelevant to the subject matter of
the theory. To say that someone is bringing in “subjective”
considerations to a discussion where objectivity is wanted
is, roughly, to say that he is bringing in considerations
which the others think beside the point.
339
If he presses these
outré considerations, he is turning normal inquiry into
abnormal discourse——he is being either “kooky” (if he loses
his point) or “revolutionary” (if he gains it). For a consideration
to be subjective, in this sense, is simply for it to be
unfamiliar."
"In a more traditional sense of “subjective,” on the other
hand, “subjective” contrasts with “corresponding to what
is out there,” and thus means something like “a product
only of what is in here” (in the heart, or in the “confused”
portion of the mind which does not contain privileged representations
and thus does not accurately reect what is
out there)."
"In this sense “subjective” is associated with “emotional”
or “fantastical,” for our hearts and our imaginations
are idiosyncratic, while our intellects are, at their best,
identical mirrors of the self-same external objects. Here
we get a linkup with “matters of taste,” since the state
of our emotions at a given moment (of which our unconsidered
momentary reaction to a work of art is an example)
is indeed undebatable."
"
The
various ambiguities of “objective” and “subjeotive” illustrate
the way in which the confusion can develop. If it were
not for the traditional linkage of these distinctions, a historian
of inquiry who emphasized similarities between the
controversies of scientists and those of literary critics would
not have been construed as endangering our minds by upgrading
our hearts.
341
"“Why, if the change in moral consciousness in the West
since 1750 is merely . . . , has it been able to accomplish so
mu-ch for human freedom?” We can ll the rst blank with
“adherence to the following binding algorithm . . .” or
with “a succession of_ Kuhnian institutionalized disciplinary
matrices.” We can ll -the second with “the application
of secular thought to moral issues” or “the guilty conscience
of the bourgeoisie” or “changes in the emotional
constitution of those who control the levers of power,” or
with a lot of other phrases. In no case does anyone know
what might count as a good answer."
"What we need, rather than a solution to “the problem of
induction,” is the ability to -think about science in such a
way that its being a “value-based enterprise” occasions no
surprise."
342
"Here
we come round once again to -the bugbear of “idealism" and
the notion that the search for an algorithm goes hand in
hand with a “realistic” approach to science whereas a relaxation
into the merely hermeneutic method of the historian
sells the pass to ~the idealist.
"Whenever it is suggested that
the distinctions between theory and practice, fact and value,
method and conversation be relaxed, an attempt to make
the world “malleable ito human will” is suspected. This
produces, yet again, the positivist claim that we must either
make a clear distinction between the “noncognitive” and
the “cognitive,” or else “reduce” the former to the latter.
—seems to “spiritualize” nature by making it like history
or literature, something which men have made rather than
something they nd. It is the third option that Kuhn
seems, to some of his critics, to be suggesting.
He suggests Kuhn is beyond spiritualism - the conflation of rational
The muddle consists in suggesting
that Kuhn, by “reducing” the methods of scientists to those
of politicians, has “reduced” the “found” world of neutrons
to the “made” world of social relationships. Here again we
nd the notion that whatever cannot be discovered by a
machine programmed with the appropriate algorithm cannot
exist “objectively,” and thus must be somehow a “human
creation.”
BIG DEAL:
-book in the hope
of showing that the distinction between epistemology and
hermeneutics should not be thought of as paralleling a distinction
between what is “out there” and what we “make
up‘?!
343
Way idealism has been constructed:
Apel
"the metaphysics of the spirit and of the subject in 19thcentury
Idealism, which should be considered the foundations
of the Geisteswissenschaften (although the latter
certainly put more emphasis upon material research) are
taken by the later Wittgenstein as a “disease” of language
together with all other concepts of metaphysics in
Western philosophy.“"
The notion that the empirical self could be turned over to
the sciences of nature, but that the transcendental self,
which constitutes the phenomenal world and (perhaps)
functions as a moral agent, could not, has indeed done as
much as anything else to make the spirit-nature distinction
meaningful.
In this section I hope to show that
hermeneutics, as discourse about as-yet-incommensurable
discourses, has no particular connection with either
(a) the
“mind” side of Cartesian dualism,
(Cartesian dualism
Substance dualism is a type of dualism most famously defended by Descartes, which states that there are two fundamental kinds of substance: mental and material.[6] According to his philosophy, which is specifically called Cartesian dualism, the mental does not have extension in space, and the material cannot think. Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the famous mind–body problem. Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world.[1])
or
(b) the “constituting”
side of the Kantian distinction between the constituting and
structuring faculty of spontaneity and the passive faculty of
receptivity, or
"For Kant, spontaneity is one of the "two fundamental sources of the mind...[from which] our knowledge springs", the other being receptivity, the capacity of receiving representations. He defines spontaneity as "the power of knowing an object through these [given] representations" it is "spontaneity in the production of concepts". Intuition and concepts "constitute...the elements of all our knowledge", with spontaneity being the power to employ concepts, and receptivity that of receiving intuitions."
(c) the notion of a method for discovering
344
the truth of sentences which competes wi-th the normal
methods pursued in extra-philosophical disciplines. (Nonetheless,
I think that this limited and puried sense of “hermeneutics”
I am employing does link up with the use of the
term by such writers as Gadamer, Apel, and Habermas.
"The dread of “falling into idealism” which afflicts those
tempted by Kuhn to reject standard notions of philosophy
of science (and more generally of epistemology) is enhanced
by the thought that if the study of science's search for truth
about the physical universe is viewed hermeneutically it
will be viewed as the activity of spirit—the faculty which
makes——rather than as the application of the mirroring
faculties, those which nd what nature has already made.
This latent romantic-classic opposition which lurks in the
background of discussion of Kuhn is brought into the open
by Kuhn's unhappy use (deprecated in section 2 above) of
romantic phrases like “being presented with a new world,”
instead of the classic “using a new description for the
world.”"
"In the view I want to recommend, nothing deep
turns on the choice between these two phrases——between the
imagery of making and of nding. They thus resemble the
opposition between “objective” and “nonobjective,” or “cognitive”
and “noncognitive,” which I discussed in the previous
section. It is less paradoxical, however, to stick to the
classic notion of “better describing what was already there”
for physics."
345
We use physics, not poetry, to tell us about our world.
"Democritus's insight was that a story about the
smallest bits of things forms a good background for stories
about changes among things made of these bits. The acceptance
of this genre of world-story (eshed out successively
by Lucretius, Newton, and Bohr) may be denatory of
the West, but it is not a choice which could obtain, or which
requires, epistemological or metaphysical guarantees."
"To say that the study of the
history of science, like the study of the rest of history, must
be hermeneutical, and to deny (as I, but not Kuhn, would)
that there is something extra called “rational reconstruction”
which can legitimize curren-t scientic practice, is
still not to say that the atoms, wave packages, etc., discovered
by the physical scientists are creations of the human
spirit.
" Platonic dogmas mentioned in the previous section, to say
that physics is "objective" in some way in which politics or
poetry may not be. For the line between making and nding
has nothing to do with -the line between incommensurability
and commensurability.
346
I shall begin unraveling this threefold confusion -by taking
up the claim that hermeneutics is peculiarly suited to
“spirit” or to “the sciences of man,” whereas some other
method (that of the “objectivizing” and “positive” sciences)
is appropria-te to “nature.” If we draw the line between
epistemology and hermeneutics as I have been drawing
it—as a contrast between discourse about normal and
about abnormal discourse—then it seems clear that the
two do not compete, but rather help each other out.
Nothing
is so valuable for the hermeneutical inquirer into an
exotic culture as the discovery of an epistemology written
within that culture. Nothing is so valuable for the determination
of whether the possessors of that culture uttered
any interesting truths (by-—wha't elseP——the standards of
the normal discourse of our own time and place) than the
hermeneutical discovery of how to translate them without
making t-hem sound like fools.
347
it is merely that hermeneutics is only
needed in the case of incommensurable discourses, and that
people discourse whereas things do not. What makes the
difference is not discourse versus silence, but incommensurable
discourses versus commensurable discourses. As physicalists
correctly point out, once we can gure out how to
translate what is being said, there is no reason to think
that the explanation of why it is being said should differ
in kind (or proceed by different methods) from an explanation
of locomotion or digestion.
making and finding (distinctions inconmmensuarbility and commensurability)
The traditional quarrel about the “philosophy of the
social sciences” has proceeded generally as follows. One side
has said that "explanation" (subsumption under predictive
laws, roughly) presupposes, and cannot replace, “understanding.”
The other side has said that understanding
simply is the ability -to explain, that what their opponents
call “understanding” is merely the primitive stage of groping
around for some explanatory hypotheses.
348
Those who are suspicious of hermeneutics want to say that
the fact that some beings talk is no reason to think they
escape the great unied web of predictively powerful laws,
for these laws can predict what they will say as well as what
they will eat.
Those who defend hermeneutics say that t-he
question -of what they will say has two parts—what sounds
or inscriptions they make (which might become predictable
enough, perhaps through neurophysiology), and what these
mean, which is something quite different
"Translation into the language
of unied science is diicult, but the attempt to
translate does not involve different techniques of theoryconstruction
or theory-testing from the attempt to explain
dietary habits.
"In reply to this, defenders of hermeneutics should just say
that, as a matter of brute fact rather than of metaphysical
necessity, there is no such thing as the “language of unied
science.”
349
...
if unhelpful, observation language.) So
episte=mology—as the attempt to render all discourses commensurable
by translating them into a preferred set of terms
—-is unlikely to be a useful strategy. The reason is not that
“unied science” works only for one metaphysical realm
and not for another, but that the Whiggish assumption that
we have got such a language blocks the road of inquiry.
350
The problem is not that spirits are
inherently resistant to being predicted, but simply that
there is no reason to think (and much reason not to think)
that our own spirit has now got h-old of the best vocabulary
for formulating hypotheses which will explain and predict
all the other spirits (or, perhaps, the other bodies).
351
the third and most fundamental reason for the impossibility
of hard prediction is that man is a self-dening
animal. With changes in his self-denition go changes in
what man is, such that he has to be understood in different
terms. But the conceptual mutations in human history
can and frequently do produce conceptual webs
which are incommensurable, that is, where the terms
can't be dened in relation to a common stratum of expressions.
(p. 49)
Here Taylor reinstates the notion of man as a being who
changes from the inside by nding better (or, at least,
novel) ways of describing, predicting, and explaining himself.
Nonhuman beings, as mere étres-en-soi, do not get
changed from inside but are simply described, predicted,
and explained in a better vocabulary. This way of putting
it leads us back into the bad old metaphysical notion that
the universe is made up of two kinds of things.
352
" It mighlt be the case that all future human societies will
be (as a result, perhaps, of ubiquitous -technocratic totalitarianism)
humdrum variations on our own. But contemporary
science (which already seems so hopeless for explaining
acupuncture, the migration of butteries, and so on) may
soon come to seem as badly off as Aristotle's hylomorphism."
354
As long as the notion of
spirit as transcendental constitutor (in the Kantian sense)
was reinforced by the appeal of Cartesian dualism on the
one hand and by that of romanticism on the other, -the notion
of a presiding discipline called “epistemology” or
“transcendental philosophy”-—-reducible neither to Naturwissenschaft
(psychophysiology) nor to Geisteswissenschaft
(the sociology of l<nowledge)—-could survive unquestioned.
A further unfortunate legacy was the confusion of the need
for nonmechanical translation (and more generally for
imaginative concept-formation) with the “irreducibility of
the constituting transcendental ego.” T-his confusion kept
the idealism-realism issue alive long after it should have
been closed down, since the friends of hermeneutics thought
(as the quotation from Apel at the beginning of this section
illustrates) that something like idealism was the charter of
their activity, whereas its enemies assumed that anyone who
overtly practiced hermeneutics must be “antinaturalist,”
and must lack a proper sense of the brute exteriority of the
physical universe.
356
"Hermeneutics is not “another way of knowing"—“understanding”
as opposed to (predictive) “explanation.” It is
better seen as another way of coping. It would make for philosophical
clarity if we just gave the notion of “cognition”
to predictive science, and stopped worrying about “alternative
cognitive methods.” The word knowledge would not
seem worth ghting over were it not for the Kantian tradition
that to be a philosopher is to have a “theory of knowledge,”
and the Platonic tradition that action not based on
knowledge of the truth of propositions is “irrational.”
"Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation (Bernstein 1971), constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism."
"
Rorty's doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Potentiality", and his first book (as editor), The Linguistic Turn (1967), were firmly in the prevailing analytic mode, elaborating movements of the Linguistic turn. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism, particularly the writings of John Dewey. The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars caused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
Pragmatists generally hold that the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language which declares that meaning is a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not 'link up' with the world in a correspondence relation. Rorty wrote in his Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989):
"Truth cannot be out there -- cannot exist independently of the human mind -- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot.”(5)Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions — and have also led to him being apprehended as a postmodern/deconstructionist philosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (1991) and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other.
On poetry
" Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life", (published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry magazine),[12] in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes, "I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.""
"
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Main article: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology
depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or
"mirror") a mind-independent, external reality. If we give up this
metaphor, then the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology is misguided.
A foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent
in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some
beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all
knowledge.There were two senses of "foundationalism" criticized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the epistemological sense, Rorty criticized the attempt to justify knowledge claims by tracing them to a set of foundations (e.g., self-evident premises or noninferential sensations); more broadly, he criticized the claim of philosophy to function foundationally within a culture. The former argument draws on Sellars's critique of the idea that there is a "given" in sensory perception, in combination with Quine's critique of the distinction between analytic sentences (sentences which are true solely in virtue of what they mean) and synthetic sentences (sentences made true by the world). Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed, yet leaves enough of the tradition intact to proceed with its former aspirations. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged insight into the structure of belief and no privileged realm of truths of meaning, we have, instead, knowledge as those beliefs that pay their way. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating through normal and abnormal periods, between routine problem-solving and intellectual crises.
After eliminating foundationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature popularized and extended ideas of Wilfrid Sellars (the critique of the Myth of the given) and W. V. O. Quine (the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and others who advocate the Wittgensteinian doctrine of "dissolving" rather than solving philosophical problems."
Stanford:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
From: http://philosophymasters.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/from-epistemology-to-hermeneutics-philosophy-and-the-mirror-of-nature/
"
From Epistemology to Hermeneutics (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)
Hermeneutics is what follows from the demise of epistemology; it is
the ‘expression of hope’ that the space left by its demise will not be
filled and that our culture ‘should become one in which the demand for
constraint and confrontation is no longer felt’ (315). Whilst
epistemology proceeds on the assumption that all contributions in any
given discourse are commensurable, hermeneutics struggles against
commensurability. By commensurable, Rorty means ‘able to be brought
under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be
reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements
seem to conflict’ (316), in other words, the construction of an ideal
situation. Outstanding disagreements are characterised as
“noncognitive”, temporarily unsolved but ultimately to be resolved by
doing something further.
Thus, in epistemology, to be rational is to be able to find agreement with other human beings and ‘to construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others. The assumption that such an epistemology can be constructed is the assumption that such common ground exists’ (316). As such, the suggestion that there is no common ground seems to threaten rationality itself, a license for ‘everyone to construct his own little whole – his own little paradigm, his own little practice, his own little language-game – and then crawl into it’ (317). And if there are as many wholes as there are individuals, how are we to adjudicate in the war of all against all? To this question, philosophy steps up in two different guises, namely as the ‘informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses’ and ‘the cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground – the Platonic philospher-king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context’ (317).
The holist line of argument attracts the charge of circularity because is maintains that we are never able to avoid the “hermeneutic circle”, that is, we are never able to understand the parts of a foreign culture, practice, theory or language unless we know something about the whole, but we cannot grasp how the whole works until we understand something of its parts (319). Knowledge acquisition comes through conversation with other people, revisability is at its core, rather than a fit between a statement and some non-linguistic piece of reality. Coherentism, trust between conversational partners, is key to ensuring that the conversation is able to continue for if there is no consensus between what constitutes a true statement from the outset then each person will continue to simply search for what fits with their own structure of beliefs.
Rather than viewing disagreements – incommensurability – as evidence of the “noncognitive”, we would do better to follow epistemological behaviourism and construe the distinction as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse. “Normal” discourse is conducted within ‘an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it’ (320), whilst “abnormal” discourse occurs “when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside” (320). Thus, Rorty claims that the difference between epistemology and hermeneutics is one of ‘familiarity’ rather than a matter of difference between fact and value: ‘We will be epistemological where we understand perfectly well what is happening but want to codify it in order to extend, or strengthen, or teach, or “ground” it. We must be hermeneutical where we do not understand what is happening but are honest enough to admit it, rather than being blatantly “Whiggish” about it’ (321). We can get rid of the notion of “data and interpretation” by being behaviourist in epistemology rather than by being idealist for ‘hermeneutics does not need a new epistemological paradigm, any more than liberal political thought requires a new paradigm of sovereignty. Hermeneutics, rather, is what we get when we are no longer epistemological’ (325).
Rhetoric about the importance of the distinction between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science as philosophy and so on, ‘has formed the culture of Europe’ over the past three hundred years (331). Slavish adherence to ‘shopworn mirror-metaphors’ (333) does us no good in keeping alive the value of for instance Galileo’s scientific discoveries; this picture is the cause of our viewing notions like “rationality” as floating free from their educational or institutional contexts. Instead, ‘we can just say that Galileo was creating the notion of “scientific values” as he went along…the question of whether he was “rational” in doing so is out of place’ (331).
There are two meanings of objective at play in this traditional image, the first characterising the view which would be agreed upon as a result of argument ‘undeflected by irrelevant considerations’ and the second as representing the way that things really are. Plato sees the question of objectivity as: “in what sense is Goodness out there waiting to be represented accurately as a result of rational argument on moral questions”. The idealists and pragmatists see the question of objectivity as: “In just what sense were there physical features of reality capable of being represented accurately only by differential equations, or tensors, before people thought of so representing them”. The problem that metaphysics, as the attempt to find out what one can be objective about, comes up against is one of showing the similarities or otherwise of topics as disparate as morality, mathematics, and language. Moreover, it is unclear what would even count as a satisfactory argument within metaphysics.
Under hermeneutics, ‘the application of such honorific’s as “objective” and “cognitive” is never anything more than an expression of the presence of, or the hope for, agreement among inquirers’ (335). It is not another way of knowing, as understanding rather than explanation, but a way of coping. It enables us to give the notion of “cognitive” to predictive science and to stop worrying about the “noncognitive”. Finally, it makes the fight over the notion of knowledge itself seem quite quaint to the Kantian tradition of philosophy as a theory of knowledge and the Platonic tradition which sees action not based on knowledge of the truth of propositions as “irrational” (356).
315Thus, in epistemology, to be rational is to be able to find agreement with other human beings and ‘to construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others. The assumption that such an epistemology can be constructed is the assumption that such common ground exists’ (316). As such, the suggestion that there is no common ground seems to threaten rationality itself, a license for ‘everyone to construct his own little whole – his own little paradigm, his own little practice, his own little language-game – and then crawl into it’ (317). And if there are as many wholes as there are individuals, how are we to adjudicate in the war of all against all? To this question, philosophy steps up in two different guises, namely as the ‘informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses’ and ‘the cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground – the Platonic philospher-king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context’ (317).
The holist line of argument attracts the charge of circularity because is maintains that we are never able to avoid the “hermeneutic circle”, that is, we are never able to understand the parts of a foreign culture, practice, theory or language unless we know something about the whole, but we cannot grasp how the whole works until we understand something of its parts (319). Knowledge acquisition comes through conversation with other people, revisability is at its core, rather than a fit between a statement and some non-linguistic piece of reality. Coherentism, trust between conversational partners, is key to ensuring that the conversation is able to continue for if there is no consensus between what constitutes a true statement from the outset then each person will continue to simply search for what fits with their own structure of beliefs.
Rather than viewing disagreements – incommensurability – as evidence of the “noncognitive”, we would do better to follow epistemological behaviourism and construe the distinction as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse. “Normal” discourse is conducted within ‘an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it’ (320), whilst “abnormal” discourse occurs “when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside” (320). Thus, Rorty claims that the difference between epistemology and hermeneutics is one of ‘familiarity’ rather than a matter of difference between fact and value: ‘We will be epistemological where we understand perfectly well what is happening but want to codify it in order to extend, or strengthen, or teach, or “ground” it. We must be hermeneutical where we do not understand what is happening but are honest enough to admit it, rather than being blatantly “Whiggish” about it’ (321). We can get rid of the notion of “data and interpretation” by being behaviourist in epistemology rather than by being idealist for ‘hermeneutics does not need a new epistemological paradigm, any more than liberal political thought requires a new paradigm of sovereignty. Hermeneutics, rather, is what we get when we are no longer epistemological’ (325).
Rhetoric about the importance of the distinction between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science as philosophy and so on, ‘has formed the culture of Europe’ over the past three hundred years (331). Slavish adherence to ‘shopworn mirror-metaphors’ (333) does us no good in keeping alive the value of for instance Galileo’s scientific discoveries; this picture is the cause of our viewing notions like “rationality” as floating free from their educational or institutional contexts. Instead, ‘we can just say that Galileo was creating the notion of “scientific values” as he went along…the question of whether he was “rational” in doing so is out of place’ (331).
There are two meanings of objective at play in this traditional image, the first characterising the view which would be agreed upon as a result of argument ‘undeflected by irrelevant considerations’ and the second as representing the way that things really are. Plato sees the question of objectivity as: “in what sense is Goodness out there waiting to be represented accurately as a result of rational argument on moral questions”. The idealists and pragmatists see the question of objectivity as: “In just what sense were there physical features of reality capable of being represented accurately only by differential equations, or tensors, before people thought of so representing them”. The problem that metaphysics, as the attempt to find out what one can be objective about, comes up against is one of showing the similarities or otherwise of topics as disparate as morality, mathematics, and language. Moreover, it is unclear what would even count as a satisfactory argument within metaphysics.
Under hermeneutics, ‘the application of such honorific’s as “objective” and “cognitive” is never anything more than an expression of the presence of, or the hope for, agreement among inquirers’ (335). It is not another way of knowing, as understanding rather than explanation, but a way of coping. It enables us to give the notion of “cognitive” to predictive science and to stop worrying about the “noncognitive”. Finally, it makes the fight over the notion of knowledge itself seem quite quaint to the Kantian tradition of philosophy as a theory of knowledge and the Platonic tradition which sees action not based on knowledge of the truth of propositions as “irrational” (356).
"I was not suggesting that Quine and Sellars enable us to
have a new, better, “behavioristic” sort of epistemology.
Rather, they show us how things look when we give up
the desire for confrontation and constraint. The demise of
foundational epistemology, however, is often felt to leave a
vacuum which needs to be lled. In chapters ve and six I
criticized various attempts to ll it. In this chapter I shall
be talking about hermeneutics, so I want to make clear at
the outset that I am not putting hermeneutics forward as
a “successor subject” to epistemology, as an activity which
lls the cultural vacancy once lled by epistemologically
centered philosophy. In the interpretation I shall be offering,
“hermeneutics” is not the name for a discipline, nor
for a method of achieving the sort of results which epistemology
failed to achieve, nor for a program of research.
On the contrary, hermeneutics is an expression of hope that
the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will
not be lled—that our culture should become one in which
the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer
felt.
316
By “commensurable” I mean able to be brought under
a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can
be reached on what would settle the issue on every point
where statements seem to conict} These rules tell us how
to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements
will be seen to be “noncognitive” or merely
verbal, or else merely temporary——capable of being resolved
by doing something further. What matters is that there
should be agreement about what would have to be done if a
resolution were to be achieved. In the meantime, the interlocutors
can agree to differ——being satised of each other’s rationality
the while. The dominating notion of epistemology
is that to be rational, to be fully human, -to do what we
ought, we need to be able to nd agreement with other human
beings. To construct an epistemology is to nd the
maximum amount of common ground with others. The
assumption that an epistemology can be constructed is the
assumption that such common ground exists.
being vs. becoming
being - history of thinking it lies within us
317
or in lanuguage
To suggest that there is no such common ground seems to endanger rationality. To question the need for com- mensuration seems the rst step toward a return to a war of all against all. Thus, for example, a common reaction to Kuhn or Feyerabend is that they are advocating the use of force rather than persuasion.
The holistic, antifoundationalist, pragmatist treatments of knowledge and meaning which we nd in Dewey, Witt- 3 genstein, Quihe, Sellars, and Davidson are almost equally offensive to many philosophers, precisely -because they aban don the quest for commensuration and thus are “relativist.
Holistic theories
seem to license everyone to construct his own little whole- his own little paradigm, his own little practice, his own little language-game—and then crawl into it.
"The fi rst is that of the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermedi- ary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclosed
practices. Disagreements between disciplines and discourses
are compromised or transcended in the course of the con- versation. (hermeneutics)
"The second role is that of the cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground—the Platonic phi- losopher-king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context (the Forms, the Mind, Language) (epistemology)
"Hermeneutics
sees the relations between various discourses as those of
strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes
no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers,
but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as
the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery
of antecedently existing common ground, but simply
hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement.
Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a
token of the existence of common ground which, perhaps
unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in a common rationality.
For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing
to refrain from epistemology—from thinking that there is
a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation
should be put—-and to be willing to pick up the
jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into
one’s own.
For epistemology, to be rational is to nd the
proper set of terms into which all the contributions should
be translated if agreement is to become possible. For epistemology,
conversation is implicit inquiry.
inquiry vs. common end
societas (s0cietas———persons whose paths through life have
fallen together, united by civility rather than by a common
goal, much less by a common ground) vs. universitas
319
hermeneutic circle -
There is not foundational knowledge - must know the parts and the whole
"We will not be able to isolate basic elements except on the basis of a prior knowledge of the whole fabric within which these elements occur. Thus we will not be able to substitute the notion of “accurate rep- resentation” (element-by-element) for that of successful ac- complishment of a practice. Our choice of elements will be dictated by our understanding of the practice, rather than the practice's being “legitimated” by a “rational recon- struction” out of elements. This holist line of argument says that we shall never be able to avoid the “hermeneutic cir- cle”—the fact that we cannot understand the parts of a strange culture, practice, theory, language, or whatever, un- less we know something about how the whole thing works, whereas we cannot get a grasp on how the whole works until we have some understanding of its parts."
"The notion of culture as a conversation rather than as a structure erected upon foundations ts well with this hermeneutical notion of knowledge, since getting into a conversation with strangers is, like acquiring a new virtue or skill by imitating models, a matter of ¢p6|/7701; rather than €1no"r,u.1]."
320
In past, epistemology - cognitive, hermeneutics, "subjective"
The pragmatic approach to knowledge suggested by epistemological
behaviorism will construe the line between discourses
which can be rendered commensurable and those
which cannot as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal”
discourse-—a distinction which generalizes Kuhn’s
distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science.
“Normal” science is the practice of -solving problems against
the background of a consensus about what counts as a good
explanation of the phenomena and about what it would
take for a problem to be solved. “Revolutionary” science is
the introduction of a new “paradigm” of explanation, and
thus of a new set of problems.
Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins
in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who
sets them aside. ’E1rwnj;i1; is -the product of normal discourse
—the sort of statement which can be agreed to be true by all
participants whom the other participants count as “rational.”
The product of abnormal discourse can be anything
from nonsense to intellectual revolution
321
The difference is purely one of familiarity. We will be epistemological where we understand perfectly well what is happening but want to codify it in order to extend, or strengthen, or teach, or “ground” it.
We must be hermeneutical where we do not understand what is happening but are honest enough to admit it, rather than being blatantly “Whiggish” about it.
sets limitations on epistemology:
"This means that we can get epistemological commensura- tion only where we already have agreed-upon practices of inquiry (or, more generally, of discourse)—as easily in “academic” art, “scholastic” philosophy, or “parliamentary” politics as in “normal” science. We can get it not because we have discovered something about “the nature of human 1 knowledge" but simply because when a practice has con- tinued long enough the conventions which make it possible —and which permit a consensus on how to divide it into parts—are relatively easy to isolate."
321
Kuhn - reconsiders:
Since the Enlightenment, and in particular since
Kant, the physical sciences had been viewed as a paradigm
of knowledge, to which the rest of culture had to measure
up. Kuhn’s lessons from the history of science suggested that
controversy within the physical sciences was rather more
like ordinary conversation (on the blameworthiness of an
action, the qualications of an ofceseeker, the value of a
poem, the desirability of legislation) than the Enlightenment
had suggested
322
"But Kuhn’s invocation
of such a maxim was disturbing to philosophers of
science who, working within the epistemological tradition,
were bound to think in terms of a neutral scheme (“observation
language,” “-bridge laws,” etc.) which would make
Aristotle and Newton, for example, commensurable. Such a
scheme could, they thought, be used "to render hermeneutical
guesswork unnecessary.
Kuhn made ppl nervous
323
It is one
thing to say that the “neutral observation language” in
which proponents of different theories can offer their evidence
is of little help in deciding between the theories. It is
another thing to say that there can be no such language
because the proponents “see different things” or “live in
different worlds.” Kuhn, unfortunately, made incidental
remarks of the latter sort, and philosophers pounced upon
them. Kuhn wished to oppose the traditional claim that
“what changes with ~a paradigm is only the scientist's interpretation
of observations that themselves are xed once and
for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual
apparatus.“
* what the issue with Kuhn is, according to Rorty:
says Kuhn should have discarded epistemological altogether!
325
Fascinating
"He thought we must also make sense of the claims that “when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the rst saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum" and that “pendulums were ‘brought into existence by something very like a paradigm-induced gestalt switch.” The unfortunate result of these remarks was to set the pendulum swinging between realism and idealism once again. In order to guard against the confusions of tra- ditional empiricism, we need make no more of the gestalt- switch in question than the fact that people became able to respond to sensory stimulations by remarks about pendu- lums, without having to make an intervening inference."
falls into idealism if not realisim:
"but he let his notion of what counted as a “philosophical paradigm” be set by the Kantian notion that the only substitute for a realistic account of successful mirroring was an idealistic account of the malleability of the mirrored world. We do indeed need to give up the notion of “data and interpreta- ' tion” with its suggestion that if we could get to the real data, unpolluted by our choice of language, we should be “grounding” rational choice"
"But we can get rid of this notion by being beh-aviorist in epistemology rather than by l being idealist. Hermeneutics does not need a new episte- mological paradigm,"
326
issues of creating paradigms - from Kuhn:
"In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory,
methods and standards together, usually in an inextricable
mixture. . . ."
327
points out those who misinterpreted Kuhn
then:
" The only real question which separates Kuhn from
his critics is whether the sort of “deliberative process” which
occurs concerning paradigm shifts in the sciences (the sort
of process which, as Kuhn shows in The Copernican Revolution,
can stretch out over a century) is different in kind
from the deliberative process which occurs concerning, for
example, the shift from the ancien régime to bourgeois
democracy, or from_the Augustans to the Romantics."
Issue of VALUES
328
"But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations
advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—-
the scriptural descriptions of the fabric of the
heavens-——were “illogical or unscienticP”12 This, perhaps,
is the point at which the bat-tle lines between Kuhn and his
critics can be drawn most sharply. Much of the seventeenth
century's notion of what it was to be a “philosopher,” and
much of the Enlightenment’s notion of what it was to be
“rational,” turns on Galileo's being absolutely right and the
church absolutely wrong. To suggest that there is room for
rational disagreement here—not simply for a black-andwhite
struggle between reason and superstition——is to endanger
the very notion of “philosophy.” For it endangers the
notion of nding “a method for nding truth” which takes
Galilean and Newtonian mechanics as paradigmatic."
329
what is a scientific value? what is an unscientific value?
" The crucial consideration
is whether we know how to draw a line between science
and theology such that getting the heavens right is a “scientic
l! value, and preserving the church, and the general
cultural structure of Europe, is an “unscientific” value.“
The argument that we do not centers around the claim that
the lines between disciplines, subject matters, parts of culture,
are themselves endangered by novel substantive suggestions."
evidence of Bellarmine - scripture
330
" Bellarmine’s contemporaries—-who mostly -thought Scripture
to be indeed the word of God—supposed to say to
Bellarmine? What they did say, among other -things, was
that adherence to Scripture could be disjoined from adherence
to various adventitious (e.g., Aristotelian and Ptolemaic)
notions which had been used to interpret Scripture.
(This was the sort of thing nineteenth-century liberal divines
were later to say in connection with Genesis and
Darwin.) Were all these arguments about howliberal one’s
scriptural hermeneutics might legitimately be beside the
point? They were attempts to limit, so to speak, the scope
of Scripture (and thus of the church)—the opposite reaction
to Bellarmine’s own attempt to limit the scope of
Copernicus"
Tough to talk this out!
"Obviously, the conclusion I wish to draw is that the
“grid” which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was not there t-o be appealed to in the early
seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial.
No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of
human knowledge, could have “discovered” it before it was
hammered out."
We are -the heirs of three hundred
years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing
sharply between science and religion, science and politics,
science and art, -science and philosophy, and so on.
331
" But to proclaim our loyalty to
these distinctions is n-ot to say that there are "objective"
and “rational” standards for adopting them. Galileo, so to
speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common
ground of the “grid” of relevance and irrelevance which
“modern philosophy” developed as a consequence of that
victory.
"We can just say that Galileo
was creating the notion of “scientic values” as he went
along, that it was a splendid thing that he did so, and that
the question of whether he was “rational” in doing so is out
of place.
332
"We
cannot determine relevance by focusing on subject matter
and saying, for example, “Don’t bother with what Scripture
said God did, just look at the planets and see what they do.”
Mere looking at the planets will be of no help in choosing
our model of Ithe heavens, any more than mere reading of
Scripture. In 1550 a certain set of considerations was relevant
to “rational” views on astronomy, and by 1750 a largely
different set of considerations was relevant."
Very interesting:
"This change in
what was thought relevant can be seen, by hindsight, as
drawing proper distinctions among what was really there in
the world (“discovering” that astronomy was an autonomous
sphere of scientic inquiry), or it can be seen as a shift
in cultural climate. It does not greatly matter which way
we see it, as long as we are clear that the change was not
brought -about by “rational argument” in some sense of
“rational” in which, for example, the changes lately brought
about in regard to society’s attitude toward slavery, abstract
art, homosexuals, or endangered species, would not count
as “rational.”
333
To sum up the line I am taking about Kuhn and his
critics: the controversy between them is about whether
science, as the discovery of what is really out there in the
world, differs in its patterns of argumentation from discourses
for which the notion of “correspondence to reality"
seems less apposite (e.g., politics and literary criticism).
Logical-empiricist philosophy of science, and the whole
epistemological tradition -since Descartes, has wanted to say
that the procedure for attaining accurate representations in
the Mirror of Nature differs in certain deep ways from the
333
procedure for attaining agreement about “practical” or
"aesthetic" matters. Kuhn gives us reason to say that there
is no deeper difference than that between what happens in
“normal” and in “abnormal” discourse. That distinction
cuts across the distinction between science and nonscience.
But the fact that the Enlightenment
ran together the ideal of Ithe autonomy of science
from theology and politics with the image of scientic
theory as Mirror of Nature is not a reason for preserving
this confusion. The grid of relevance and irrelevance which
we inherit almost intact from the eigh-teenth century will
be more attractive when it is no longer tied to this image.
Shopworn mirror-metaphors are of no help in keeping
intact the inheritance—both moral and scientic—of
Galileo.
"Kuhn’s cri-tics have helped perpetuate the dogma that
only where there is correspondence to reality is there the
possibility of rational agreement, in a special sense of
“rational” of which science is the paradigm.
Issues with "objective"
334
"The two are largely
coextensive, and for nonphilosophical purposes no trouble
arises from running them together. But if we begin to take
seriously questions like “In just what sense is Goodness out
there waiting to be represented accurately as a result of
rational argument on moral questions?” or
“In just what
sense were there physical features of reality capable of being
represented accurately only by differential equations, or
tensors, before people thought of so representing them?”"
Our natural inclination to return a
robust “In no sense" to the rst and an equally robust “In
the fullest possible and most straightforward sense” to the
second will be of no help in getting rid of these questions if
we still feel the need to justify answers to such questions by
constructing epistemological and metaphysical theories.
the cat is on the mat
" The latter discovery——a homely point
d’appui for the notions of “contact with reality,” “-truth as
correspondence” and “accuracy of representation”-—is the
standard against which the others are compared in poin-t of
objectivity."
335
"The epistemologist must worry about the
respects in which more interesting statements share the
objectivity possessed by that triumph of mirroring—the appropriate
utterance of “The cat is on the mat.” In the view
which follows from epistemological behaviorism, there is
no interesting way to discover whether, for example, there
is a Moral Law to be corresponded to. The fact that, for
example, “the moral standards entailed by the nature of
man” are more at home in Aristotle’s hylomorphic universe
than in Newton’s mechanistic one is not a reason for thinking
that there is or its not an “objeotive” Moral Law.
"I am recommending, we might, in an imaginary age in
which consensus in these areas was almost complete, view
morality, physics, and psychology as equally “objective.”
We might then relegate the more debatable areas of literary
criticism, chemistry, and sociology to -the realm of the “noncognitive,”
or “interpret them operationalistically,” or “reduce“
them to one or another “objective” discipline. The
application of such honorics as “objective” and “cognitive”
is never anything more than an expression of the presence
of, or -the hope for, agreement among inquirers."
"I think that the debate between Kuhn and his
critics is worth taking up yet again in the context of a
discussion of the “objective-subjective” distinction, simply
because the grip of this distinction is so very powerful, and
so charged with moral feeling.
"Once again, this moral feeling
is a consequence of the (entirely justied) notion that
the preservation of the values of the Enlightenment is our best hope"
336
So in this section I shall try once again to cut the
links which connect -these values with the image of the
Mirror of Nature.
This reply to the charge of “subjectivity” is useful as far
as i-t goes, but i-t does not reach the deeper fear behind the
charge. This is the fear that there really is no middle ground
between matters of -taste and matters capable of being settled
by a previously statable a-lgorithm. The philosopher
who sees no such middle ground is, I think, reasoning
roughly as follows:
1. All statements describe either internal states of human
beings (their Glassy Essence, the possibly clouded Mirror)
or states of external reality (nature).
2. We can -tell which statements are which "by seeing which
we know how to get universal agreement on.
3. So the possibili-ty of perpetual disagreement is an indication
that, no matter how rational debate may seem to
1'! Kuhn,
337
be, there is really nothing to debate about——since the
subject can only -be internal states.
Within traditional epistemology, this latter notion
has only rarely been seen for what it is: an admission that
our only usable notion of “objectivity” is “agreement”
rather than mirroring.
Even, for example, in Ayer’s refreshingly
frank remark that “we dene a rational belief as
one which is arrived at by the methods which we now
consider reliable,”18 the notion of “reliability” still functions
as a hint -that we can only be rational by corresponding
to the real. Not even his equally frank admission that all
the privileged representations in the world will nevertheless
permit a man to “sustain his convictions in the face of
apparently hostile evidence if he is prepared -to make the
necessary ad hoc assumptions” (p. 95) is enough to defeat
Ayer’s conviction that in separating the “empirical” from
the “emotive” and the “analytic” he is separating “truth
about the world” from something else.
(Ayers/ Plato) adds:
"
4. We are able to eliminate the possibility of perpetual,
undecidable rational disagreement only in those areas
where unquestioned links to external reality provide a
common ground for the disputants.
338
"leads to the conclusion that the absence of relevant
privileged representations shows that we have only “a matter
of taste." Kuhn is right in saying that this is a long way
from the ordinary notion of “taste,”"
"“Objectivity” in the rst sense was a property of theories
which, having been thoroughly discussed, are chosen by a
consensus of rational discussants. By contrast, a “subjective”
consideration is one which has been, or would be, or should
be, set aside by rational discu-ssants——one which is seen to be,
or should be seen to be, irrelevant to the subject matter of
the theory. To say that someone is bringing in “subjective”
considerations to a discussion where objectivity is wanted
is, roughly, to say that he is bringing in considerations
which the others think beside the point.
339
If he presses these
outré considerations, he is turning normal inquiry into
abnormal discourse——he is being either “kooky” (if he loses
his point) or “revolutionary” (if he gains it). For a consideration
to be subjective, in this sense, is simply for it to be
unfamiliar."
"In a more traditional sense of “subjective,” on the other
hand, “subjective” contrasts with “corresponding to what
is out there,” and thus means something like “a product
only of what is in here” (in the heart, or in the “confused”
portion of the mind which does not contain privileged representations
and thus does not accurately reect what is
out there)."
"In this sense “subjective” is associated with “emotional”
or “fantastical,” for our hearts and our imaginations
are idiosyncratic, while our intellects are, at their best,
identical mirrors of the self-same external objects. Here
we get a linkup with “matters of taste,” since the state
of our emotions at a given moment (of which our unconsidered
momentary reaction to a work of art is an example)
is indeed undebatable."
"
The
various ambiguities of “objective” and “subjeotive” illustrate
the way in which the confusion can develop. If it were
not for the traditional linkage of these distinctions, a historian
of inquiry who emphasized similarities between the
controversies of scientists and those of literary critics would
not have been construed as endangering our minds by upgrading
our hearts.
341
"“Why, if the change in moral consciousness in the West
since 1750 is merely . . . , has it been able to accomplish so
mu-ch for human freedom?” We can ll the rst blank with
“adherence to the following binding algorithm . . .” or
with “a succession of_ Kuhnian institutionalized disciplinary
matrices.” We can ll -the second with “the application
of secular thought to moral issues” or “the guilty conscience
of the bourgeoisie” or “changes in the emotional
constitution of those who control the levers of power,” or
with a lot of other phrases. In no case does anyone know
what might count as a good answer."
"What we need, rather than a solution to “the problem of
induction,” is the ability to -think about science in such a
way that its being a “value-based enterprise” occasions no
surprise."
342
"Here
we come round once again to -the bugbear of “idealism" and
the notion that the search for an algorithm goes hand in
hand with a “realistic” approach to science whereas a relaxation
into the merely hermeneutic method of the historian
sells the pass to ~the idealist.
"Whenever it is suggested that
the distinctions between theory and practice, fact and value,
method and conversation be relaxed, an attempt to make
the world “malleable ito human will” is suspected. This
produces, yet again, the positivist claim that we must either
make a clear distinction between the “noncognitive” and
the “cognitive,” or else “reduce” the former to the latter.
—seems to “spiritualize” nature by making it like history
or literature, something which men have made rather than
something they nd. It is the third option that Kuhn
seems, to some of his critics, to be suggesting.
He suggests Kuhn is beyond spiritualism - the conflation of rational
The muddle consists in suggesting
that Kuhn, by “reducing” the methods of scientists to those
of politicians, has “reduced” the “found” world of neutrons
to the “made” world of social relationships. Here again we
nd the notion that whatever cannot be discovered by a
machine programmed with the appropriate algorithm cannot
exist “objectively,” and thus must be somehow a “human
creation.”
BIG DEAL:
-book in the hope
of showing that the distinction between epistemology and
hermeneutics should not be thought of as paralleling a distinction
between what is “out there” and what we “make
up‘?!
343
Way idealism has been constructed:
Apel
"the metaphysics of the spirit and of the subject in 19thcentury
Idealism, which should be considered the foundations
of the Geisteswissenschaften (although the latter
certainly put more emphasis upon material research) are
taken by the later Wittgenstein as a “disease” of language
together with all other concepts of metaphysics in
Western philosophy.“"
The notion that the empirical self could be turned over to
the sciences of nature, but that the transcendental self,
which constitutes the phenomenal world and (perhaps)
functions as a moral agent, could not, has indeed done as
much as anything else to make the spirit-nature distinction
meaningful.
In this section I hope to show that
hermeneutics, as discourse about as-yet-incommensurable
discourses, has no particular connection with either
(a) the
“mind” side of Cartesian dualism,
(Cartesian dualism
Substance dualism is a type of dualism most famously defended by Descartes, which states that there are two fundamental kinds of substance: mental and material.[6] According to his philosophy, which is specifically called Cartesian dualism, the mental does not have extension in space, and the material cannot think. Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the famous mind–body problem. Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world.[1])
or
(b) the “constituting”
side of the Kantian distinction between the constituting and
structuring faculty of spontaneity and the passive faculty of
receptivity, or
"For Kant, spontaneity is one of the "two fundamental sources of the mind...[from which] our knowledge springs", the other being receptivity, the capacity of receiving representations. He defines spontaneity as "the power of knowing an object through these [given] representations" it is "spontaneity in the production of concepts". Intuition and concepts "constitute...the elements of all our knowledge", with spontaneity being the power to employ concepts, and receptivity that of receiving intuitions."
(c) the notion of a method for discovering
344
the truth of sentences which competes wi-th the normal
methods pursued in extra-philosophical disciplines. (Nonetheless,
I think that this limited and puried sense of “hermeneutics”
I am employing does link up with the use of the
term by such writers as Gadamer, Apel, and Habermas.
"The dread of “falling into idealism” which afflicts those
tempted by Kuhn to reject standard notions of philosophy
of science (and more generally of epistemology) is enhanced
by the thought that if the study of science's search for truth
about the physical universe is viewed hermeneutically it
will be viewed as the activity of spirit—the faculty which
makes——rather than as the application of the mirroring
faculties, those which nd what nature has already made.
This latent romantic-classic opposition which lurks in the
background of discussion of Kuhn is brought into the open
by Kuhn's unhappy use (deprecated in section 2 above) of
romantic phrases like “being presented with a new world,”
instead of the classic “using a new description for the
world.”"
"In the view I want to recommend, nothing deep
turns on the choice between these two phrases——between the
imagery of making and of nding. They thus resemble the
opposition between “objective” and “nonobjective,” or “cognitive”
and “noncognitive,” which I discussed in the previous
section. It is less paradoxical, however, to stick to the
classic notion of “better describing what was already there”
for physics."
345
We use physics, not poetry, to tell us about our world.
"Democritus's insight was that a story about the
smallest bits of things forms a good background for stories
about changes among things made of these bits. The acceptance
of this genre of world-story (eshed out successively
by Lucretius, Newton, and Bohr) may be denatory of
the West, but it is not a choice which could obtain, or which
requires, epistemological or metaphysical guarantees."
"To say that the study of the
history of science, like the study of the rest of history, must
be hermeneutical, and to deny (as I, but not Kuhn, would)
that there is something extra called “rational reconstruction”
which can legitimize curren-t scientic practice, is
still not to say that the atoms, wave packages, etc., discovered
by the physical scientists are creations of the human
spirit.
" Platonic dogmas mentioned in the previous section, to say
that physics is "objective" in some way in which politics or
poetry may not be. For the line between making and nding
has nothing to do with -the line between incommensurability
and commensurability.
346
I shall begin unraveling this threefold confusion -by taking
up the claim that hermeneutics is peculiarly suited to
“spirit” or to “the sciences of man,” whereas some other
method (that of the “objectivizing” and “positive” sciences)
is appropria-te to “nature.” If we draw the line between
epistemology and hermeneutics as I have been drawing
it—as a contrast between discourse about normal and
about abnormal discourse—then it seems clear that the
two do not compete, but rather help each other out.
Nothing
is so valuable for the hermeneutical inquirer into an
exotic culture as the discovery of an epistemology written
within that culture. Nothing is so valuable for the determination
of whether the possessors of that culture uttered
any interesting truths (by-—wha't elseP——the standards of
the normal discourse of our own time and place) than the
hermeneutical discovery of how to translate them without
making t-hem sound like fools.
347
it is merely that hermeneutics is only
needed in the case of incommensurable discourses, and that
people discourse whereas things do not. What makes the
difference is not discourse versus silence, but incommensurable
discourses versus commensurable discourses. As physicalists
correctly point out, once we can gure out how to
translate what is being said, there is no reason to think
that the explanation of why it is being said should differ
in kind (or proceed by different methods) from an explanation
of locomotion or digestion.
making and finding (distinctions inconmmensuarbility and commensurability)
The traditional quarrel about the “philosophy of the
social sciences” has proceeded generally as follows. One side
has said that "explanation" (subsumption under predictive
laws, roughly) presupposes, and cannot replace, “understanding.”
The other side has said that understanding
simply is the ability -to explain, that what their opponents
call “understanding” is merely the primitive stage of groping
around for some explanatory hypotheses.
348
Those who are suspicious of hermeneutics want to say that
the fact that some beings talk is no reason to think they
escape the great unied web of predictively powerful laws,
for these laws can predict what they will say as well as what
they will eat.
Those who defend hermeneutics say that t-he
question -of what they will say has two parts—what sounds
or inscriptions they make (which might become predictable
enough, perhaps through neurophysiology), and what these
mean, which is something quite different
"Translation into the language
of unied science is diicult, but the attempt to
translate does not involve different techniques of theoryconstruction
or theory-testing from the attempt to explain
dietary habits.
"In reply to this, defenders of hermeneutics should just say
that, as a matter of brute fact rather than of metaphysical
necessity, there is no such thing as the “language of unied
science.”
349
...
if unhelpful, observation language.) So
episte=mology—as the attempt to render all discourses commensurable
by translating them into a preferred set of terms
—-is unlikely to be a useful strategy. The reason is not that
“unied science” works only for one metaphysical realm
and not for another, but that the Whiggish assumption that
we have got such a language blocks the road of inquiry.
350
The problem is not that spirits are
inherently resistant to being predicted, but simply that
there is no reason to think (and much reason not to think)
that our own spirit has now got h-old of the best vocabulary
for formulating hypotheses which will explain and predict
all the other spirits (or, perhaps, the other bodies).
351
the third and most fundamental reason for the impossibility
of hard prediction is that man is a self-dening
animal. With changes in his self-denition go changes in
what man is, such that he has to be understood in different
terms. But the conceptual mutations in human history
can and frequently do produce conceptual webs
which are incommensurable, that is, where the terms
can't be dened in relation to a common stratum of expressions.
(p. 49)
Here Taylor reinstates the notion of man as a being who
changes from the inside by nding better (or, at least,
novel) ways of describing, predicting, and explaining himself.
Nonhuman beings, as mere étres-en-soi, do not get
changed from inside but are simply described, predicted,
and explained in a better vocabulary. This way of putting
it leads us back into the bad old metaphysical notion that
the universe is made up of two kinds of things.
352
" It mighlt be the case that all future human societies will
be (as a result, perhaps, of ubiquitous -technocratic totalitarianism)
humdrum variations on our own. But contemporary
science (which already seems so hopeless for explaining
acupuncture, the migration of butteries, and so on) may
soon come to seem as badly off as Aristotle's hylomorphism."
354
As long as the notion of
spirit as transcendental constitutor (in the Kantian sense)
was reinforced by the appeal of Cartesian dualism on the
one hand and by that of romanticism on the other, -the notion
of a presiding discipline called “epistemology” or
“transcendental philosophy”-—-reducible neither to Naturwissenschaft
(psychophysiology) nor to Geisteswissenschaft
(the sociology of l<nowledge)—-could survive unquestioned.
A further unfortunate legacy was the confusion of the need
for nonmechanical translation (and more generally for
imaginative concept-formation) with the “irreducibility of
the constituting transcendental ego.” T-his confusion kept
the idealism-realism issue alive long after it should have
been closed down, since the friends of hermeneutics thought
(as the quotation from Apel at the beginning of this section
illustrates) that something like idealism was the charter of
their activity, whereas its enemies assumed that anyone who
overtly practiced hermeneutics must be “antinaturalist,”
and must lack a proper sense of the brute exteriority of the
physical universe.
356
"Hermeneutics is not “another way of knowing"—“understanding”
as opposed to (predictive) “explanation.” It is
better seen as another way of coping. It would make for philosophical
clarity if we just gave the notion of “cognition”
to predictive science, and stopped worrying about “alternative
cognitive methods.” The word knowledge would not
seem worth ghting over were it not for the Kantian tradition
that to be a philosopher is to have a “theory of knowledge,”
and the Platonic tradition that action not based on
knowledge of the truth of propositions is “irrational.”
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