Digressions&Impressions

The Aristotelian Causes in Hume

When by natural principles we [humans] are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle.---Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.2.3.5

Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume: 

But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):

1. a sense of common interest
2. felt in each person's breast;
3. It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
4. this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
5. the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
6. and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
7.  A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
8.  the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.

Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).

But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.

In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention.  And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.

If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.

That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.

The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)

The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."

To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved. 

This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.* 

The Great Endarkenment, Part I

Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281

There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.

Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations.  Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.

Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.

I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term).  The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.

Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).

As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is. 

Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account  of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+

Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming. 

As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.) 

That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.

I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future. 

Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked. 

 

 

The debts of Hume's account of Convention to Locke

It has been asserted by some, that justice arises from HUMAN CONVENTIONS, and proceeds from the voluntary choice, consent, or combination of mankind. If by convention be here meant a promise (which is the most usual sense of the word) nothing can be more absurd than this position. The observance of promises is itself one of the most considerable parts of justice; and we are not surely bound to keep our word, because we have given our word to keep it. But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

Thus two men pull the oars of a boat by common convention, for common interest, without any promise or contract: Thus gold and silver are made the measures of exchange; thus speech and words and language are fixed, by human convention and agreement. Whatever is advantageous to two or more persons, if all perform their part; but what loses all advantage, if only one perform, can arise from no other principle. There would otherwise be no motive for any one of them to enter into that scheme of conduct-David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Appendix 3.7-8 [italics/bold added to facilitate discussion.--ES]

Before I start: I would be amazed if my underlying claim in this post hasn't been noticed before. But while my search was certainly not at all exhaustive, I couldn't find it in the literature. So, I put it forward here tentatively with the invitation to be pointed to works that have treated it more at length and in scholarly fashion.

It is not uncommon to start discussions of convention with a nod to Hume, and especially the passage quoted in bold/italics. In addition, people often will mention the rowing boat example. (See, for example, this entry by Michael Riscorla in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which mentions Hume throughout.) In my accont, Hume's definition has seven (or eight) parts: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

Now notice that Hume's beloved two rowers example actually doesn't fit his definition all that well. It is by no means obvious that when two thieves row away from a heist that this rebounds to society's benefit (so (v) is absent). Nor is it obvious that cases of rowing really instantiate a general plan or a system of actions (iv). I don't deny that the example is an attractive one to show that promises are not necessary to create joint action even in the absence of good enforcement mechanism.

But I do want to suggest that Hume's definition is more naturally read as being about major social institutions (like language, money, and property (which he calls 'justice' here.) In larger context justice is the main subject, after all. And that lurking in Hume's discussion there are really two kinds of conventions: (a) large scale social institutions that exist over time, fit a wider social context, and have social utility (like language, money, property); (b) apparently spontaneous behavior that benefits those that directly participate in it and that can draw on, perhaps by re-inventing it each time anew, previously existing patterns of behavior (like rowing). I don't want to insist that there is a very sharp distinction here -- I usually don't bet against Hume (whatever the Bayesians might say) --, queuing may well be thought to be an instance of (a) or (b).

My reason for suggesting the distinction between (a) and (b) is that I want to convince you Locke actually presents a version of (a), and is plausibly Hume's inspiration. (That's the thing I suspect has been noticed before.) My claim is a bit counter-intuitive at first because it is pretty clear that Hume is criticizing the social contract tradition here (which he calls 'absurd'), and since Locke is a social contract theorist, one might naturally take him to be the target here. But the view he is criticizing is Hobbes'. 

After all, for Locke, property precedes the social contract. Now, from this it does not follow that Locke has a conventionalist account of the origin of property. He famously doesn't. His is, as is well known, a weird labor mixing account. I am not suggesting that Hume has modelled his account of convention (in the sense of (a)) on Locke's account on the origin of property. He is a serious critic of Locke's account of property (I have published on that here). Rather, I am suggesting Hume is modeling his account of convention on Locke's account of the origin of money. And notice that 'gold and silver' are 'the measures of exchange' is one of the conventions in the sense of (a) that Hume mentions here.

Okay, with that in place let's turn (recall) to the key passage that I have in mind in Locke, which is, in fact at the end of the account of property (which arguably is one of Hume's targets.

Sect. 50. But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.--John Locke Second Treatise of Government

Again, I am not suggesting Hume accepts Locke's account of money. I am interested in their underlying views about  convention. 

Notice, first, in the last sentence, that Locke contrasts the use of money with both promises ("compacts") as well as formal laws and positive constitutions. So, I claim Locke embraces (vi). Second, Locke insists that the practice is socially useful ("men have made practicable"). Even though it precedes the existence of what he calls 'society' (which is the effect of the social contract). So, Locke adopts (V). In fact, I think the underlying point here is that whether it is useful is something discovered over time ("found out.") And this keeps the convention in place for Locke.

In addition, Locke emphasizes that the convention can be entirely tacit. So, I think it's clear he insists on (vii), too. Fourth, the example of money is meant to illustrate what Hume calls a 'system of actions.' Money is an especially durable convention. For Locke it precedes society and shapes the development of society. So, I claim Locke is the source of (iv).

So, that leaves (i-iii). These are not wholly explicit and disambiguated in Locke. And in my view, Hume's distinctive contribution is to make these features of the nature of a convention explicit. For, in Locke (i-iii) are generally treated in terms of consent. And for Locke consent is the glue that makes human associations of all kinds of sorts possible (including ones that are not conventions at all). And if I were only to emphasize the similarities between Locke and Hume, I would suggest that this account of (tacit) consent anticipates Hume's (iii). But I also recognize that if one is thinking about consent in terms of some other institutions that Locke discusses (churches, political society) then consent pulls one away from seeing that he is also talking about Humean conventions.

So my proposal is this. Hume liked Locke's account of conventions, and saw how he could use it against Locke's account of property. (Amusingly, Smith likes Hume's account of conventions and uses it against Hume's account of property to make it in some sense more Lockean.) But what Hume noticed is that Locke misses a mechanism of how one would arrive at such tacit consent. And (i-ii) supply that mechanism.

And it is important to see that appealing to 'common interest' is Kosher in Locke's approach. Locke appeals to it at least twice (as an explanatory concept) in the Second Treatise see sect 82 & 216. In both cases Locke takes for granted that there is such a thing and that can be known by individuals (see especially 82). So, Hume's methodological individualism in (i-ii) is consistent with Locke's philosophy, but not exploited by Locke in his account of the nature of convention. 

 

 

On Freud, Rawls, Rose, the contrast between Analytic/Continental Philosophy, and Lewis-Kripke

Behind one half of Ferrante’s pen name, Elena, is a tale from Greek mythology. According to a relatively little-known version of the story, Zeus rapes and impregnates, not Leda the swan, but Nemesis, who turns herself into a goose to escape him. She then lays an egg, found by a shepherd and handed to Leda, who nurtures it and out of which Elena is born, who is then raised by Leda, in Ferrante’s suggestive formula, as ‘her daughter-non-daughter’.4 It must be one of the earliest stories of surrogacy, as well as offering a model of motherhood without vested interest because it has embraced a stranger.--Jacuqeline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, p. 146.

One important feature of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy is that analytical philosophy is when not outright hostile to Freud/Freudianism, in its indifference to it, purportedly untouched by it.* This is most evident in the brief spectacle of the late twentieth century flowering of analytical Marxism--these hard-nosed men (it was really a boys club), which self-consciously set itself against the mushy forms of Marxism found in Paris and Frankfurt (and elsewhere). What's conspicuous about their (the analytical marxist) work is not the elegance and wit of their writings, but their inability to make visible how oppression as a social phenomenon generates, through violence and lies/ideology, the deformation, material and psychic, at the heart of of everybody's lives.+ (Of course, one can state and argue this without Freudian theory, but often without fertility.)

I think I can explain what I have in mind: John Rawls (to be sure no analytical Marxist), who read more widely than most analytic philosophers, discusses Freud briefly several time in Theory of Justice in the context of the significance of moral education. For Rawls Freud is somebody who, first, offers cautionary warnings about taking moral sentiments at face value due to their being rooted in processes of "conflict and stress" (TJ, 459); second, he treats Freud as, we may say,  a Nietzschean, who offers a kind of error theory for the sense of justice (and, in so doing, mistakenly conflates envy and resentment). (Susan Moller Okin has also noticed the first passage. She treats it as evidence of Rawls's blindness to Freud's sexism.) Rawls treats the grounds of the "conflict and stress" as mere psychological process to be overcome in adulthood (with the help, surprisingly enough, of "sound principles" that is, political philosophy) and not as expressing the effects of (ahh) a badly functioning basic structure(s) of society.**  

I have come to think it's not Freudianism's dubious character as a science that accounts for analytic philosophy's hostility/indifference (or early analytic philosophy's flirtation with behaviorism), but rather something that G.A. Cohen mislabels as "acid Freudian skepticism:" that all given identities are at once (too) robust in their fixity and fragile in their vulnerability to fracturing. The effect of this acid is that identity becomes liquid. Such liquidity is played with in Derrida and embraced by Deleuze, and treated at arm's length in the analytic mainstream. For, while one may think that political philosophy and moral education are at the margin's of analytic philosophy's self-understanding -- despite the fact that (recall) the Strawson-Carnap debate pivots on it-- identity is central. I can't, of course, prove this point to you.

However, I think I can make it arresting. I hope you will forgive me if I use Kripke as a representative agent, as an exemplar. I want to return to Kripke's response to Lewis's counterpart theory. This response exhibits more than dispassionate philosophical disagreement. I reproduce most of the relevant footnote from Naming and Necessity:

Lewis's elegant paper also suffers from a purely formal difficulty: on his interpretation of quantified modality, the familiar law (y) ((x)A(x) ⊃ A(y) falls, if A(x) is allowed to contain modal operators. (For example, (∃y) ((x) ◊(x ≠y) is satisfiable but (∃y) ◊ (y ≠ y) is not.) Since Lewis's formal model follows rather naturally from his philosophical views on counterparts, and since the failure of universal instantiation for modal properties is intuitively bizarre, it seems to me that this failure constitutes an additional argument against the plausibility of his philosophical views. There are other, lesser, formal difficulties as well. I cannot elaborate here.

Strictly speaking, Lewis’s view is not a view of ‘transworld identification’. Rather, he thinks that similarities across possible worlds determine a counterpart relation which need be neither symmetric nor transitive. The counterpart of something in another possible world is never identical with the thing itself. Thus if we say ‘Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such), we are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a “counterpart”.’ Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world.
Thus, Lewis's view seems to me even more bizarre than the usual notions of transworld identification that it replaces. The important issues, however, are common to the two views: the supposition that other possible worlds are like other dimensions of a more inclusive universe, that they can be given only by purely qualitative descriptions, and that therefore either the identity relation or the counterpart relation must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.

Many have pointed out to me that the father of counterpart theory is probably Leibnitz. I will not go into such a historical question here. It would also be interesting to compare Lewis's views with the Wheeler-Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I suspect that this view of physics may suffer from philosophical problems analogous to Lewis's counterpart theory; it is certainly very similar in spirit.

Notice that Kripke repeatedly treats Lewis' position as bizarre. (It is quite amazing, actually, to see a formal difficulty itself be explicated in terms of what seems intuitively bizarre.) The one other time (right at the start) in Naming and Necessity where Kripke treats a view as bizarre is  the denial of the indiscernability of identicals. (Notably he treats the denial of it as on par as the denial of the 'law of contradiction.') My point here is not to claim that Kripke's critique of Lewis isn't well motivated or un-argued.++ Kripke is not cheating. And my present purpose is not to defend Lewis (although regular readers know I think counterpart theory grasps something fundamental about self-identity.)

Rather, I am marking that Kripke's hostility (the repeated bizarre) expresses something that goes beyond mere disagreement. As Freud notes in a very different context (dreams, etc.), treating something as bizarre is a mechanism by which we allow ourselves to ignore something important. It's to Kripke's credit that he explains why Lewis' position must be set aside. Kripke says that the most important point (of disagreement) is that for Lewis the identity relation, including self-identity, must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.*** Kripke's emphatic ''bizarre" betrays how he recoils from the (ahh) instability this generates. 

On Eileen O'Neill, The Scandal of Philosophy, and the Angel of History

Let me begin with the latter model, which I shall term the “pure history” model. According to this historiographical method, evaluations of philosophical arguments and projects, while crucial to philosophy, are irrelevant to the history of philosophy. Scholars who use this model, like the nineteenth-century historian of ancient philosophy Eduard Zeller, see the history of philosophy as a dispassionate chronicling of every move in the dialectic of philosophy. Of course, for all their attempts at writing the “pure history” of philosophy, even the followers of Zeller omitted the women, who were seen as significant contributors to the field in their own time. This suggests that the particular interests and blind spots of the historian, and of the era in which the historian lives, will come into play—come what may. But, of course, the real issue is not what the history of philosophy is like, come what may, but which methodology we ought to take as our ideal—even if this ideal is never achieved. Still, it is not entirely clear what the point would be of chronicling every position in the endless dialectic (per impossible), in accordance with this first method. For this model might be characterized, as Walter Benjamin noted, as one “which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness.” Eileen O'Neill (1997) Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History, pp. 39-40

It is uninformative to say that David Lewis was an excellent philosopher. After all he dominates our thinking. It is less often noticed that he was excellent at philosophical politics (in addition to his theoretical reflections on it, see the evidence that Graham Priests bequeathed to us). Within institutional life such politics are as inevitable as the Spinozistic necessity that governed Cavaillès' life and death. As the previous sentence suggests, perhaps too obliquely for some and too crassly for others, the connection between the philosophical politics within a profession and politics in the more ordinary sense can, while often obscured by inattention, be intense. 

To be able to write simultaneously with assurance about the history of philosophy, its philosophical politics, and their connection to politics is the sure sign of being in the presence of a philosophical magister or magistra. Magister/magistra is the latin for teacher, but its etymological origins is from 'more' or 'great.'' (To be a magister/magistra, then, is to overflow with philosophy.) There are different styles of doing so. For example, Lewis often disguised his learning and his chess-playing on multiple boards at once. 

The late Eileen O'Neill (recall here and here) is such a magistra. Her (1997) "Disappearing Ink" succeeds at all three tasks of rewriting the history of philosophy, its philosophical politics, and their connection to politics (even if the contents of the history of philosophy are served up as tempting morsels to be chewed over) without disguising her enormous learning. It is something of a scandal that the work's significance has been confined to those of us dedicated to rewriting the narrative of early modern women philosophers (recall also this post; and, especially, this one). For, at the heart of her argument is the politically explosive thought that rebirth of democracy in the fulcrum we call the French Revolution was a disaster for women philosophers. As she shows, in its long aftermath philosophy was re-institutionalized in universities and literally gendered male.*

It is explosive because the very period and political organization that prides itself on progress and emancipation, was de facto simultaneously an enormous silencing operation. To question progress is to invite hatred. O'Neill's point is not mere historical reconstruction; it was fully anticipated by Olympe de Gouges (recall), who lost her head by (recall) bravely warning against the unfolding disaster, and then was forgotten for several centuries. To put one of her points in familiar jargon, and so perhaps to domesticate it, there was a huge Kuhn loss for philosophy, when due to the ideal of philosophical progress, it became unable to see much of the richness of the preceding centuries as philosophy at all (and for democratic feminists to miss their less egalitarian, but platonic feminism, etc.).** It is most dispiriting to have to mark the conformist lack of curiosity about such matters by our own teachers and, for those with a semblance of democratic faith, to confront democracies' lack of generosity. 

It is no argument against the primarily aristocratic and mystical women (or both) that their philosophizing was made possible by an unjust political order and so -- sotte voce -- had their obliteration coming. One injustice does not get canceled out by the next one. 

In re-reading Disappearing Ink ahead of a memorial, my train of thought was interrupted by the presence of the quote from Walter Benjamin. His presence should not surprise because (recall) Benjamin has, not unlike O'Neill, a keen sense that official history tends to be history as told by the victor, that the narrative of progress creates the recurring astonishment that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible; and that the historian's task is, in part, to make alternative futures possible. 

The passage she quotes (in my quote above) is from Benjamin's diagnosis that many historicist historians suffer (without acknowledgment) from empathy with the victor; a future historicizing, philosophical historian of sympathy may well wish to trace the connections and Abkunft between Manne's himpathy and Benjamin's analysis.

In the passage quoted by O'Neill, Benjamin contrasts the reformed historical materialism he favors with those historians who through great acts of sympathy and attention to detail wish "to relive an era" without the pretense of knowing what follows.  O'Neill's contrast is with a heroic, almost Borgesian, historian who chronicles every position,  This kind of chronicle is, in fact, coming within greedy, technological reach thanks to cheap computer power and data mining.+ 

There is another explicit reference to Benjamin at the end of an important passage:

Influential historians, like Tiedemann and Tennemann, each rewrote the history of philosophy, raising up certain figures and quickly passing over others. And typically they constructed their histories so that they conveniently “led up to” their pet philosophical projects, be it “Lockean sensualism,” “Kantian idealism,” or some other view. Indeed, most of the great philosophers themselves included elements of Geistesgeschichte in their own philosophical works, as a method of tying their arguments to the philosophical past. Consider Descartes’s treatment of the Scholastics or Kant’s depiction of himself as the synthesis of what is true in Leibniz’s “noologism” (or, to transform the Greek into Latin, “rationalism”) and in Locke’s “empiricism.” Philosophers sometimes called for a new Geistesgeschichte to be written, as a justification for a newly emerging philosophical canon. The historian Victor Cousin, in his 1828 Paris lectures to a crowd of two thousand gentlemen, said:

Let us hope that France, . . . which has already produced Descartes, will enter in her turn upon . . . the history of philosophy. . . . Every great speculative movement contains in itself, and sooner or later produces necessarily, its history of philosophy, and even a history of philosophy which is conformed to it; for it is only under the point of view of our ideas that we represent to ourselves the ideas of others.

This passage is interesting in what it suggests about the role that gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism may have played in the actual constructions of modern histories of philosophy. But it may also lead us to wonder why we should not just abandon sweeping narratives that lead up to a particular set of contemporary interests. Critics have argued that it is misguided to turn to the philosophy of the past as a way of justifying one’s present philosophical concerns, since past philosophers cannot do a better job than we at solving our current problems. And they argue that it is a mistake to construct history with an eye to the present, since this simply distorts the history of philosophy. To borrow the beautiful image from Walter Benjamin, the Angel of History is propelled backward into the future, ever keeping its gaze on the past.

It is tempting, in the face of the self-serving grand narratives or even the more modest (albeit shameless) legitimation projects of our own time,++  to rewrite the history of philosophy in the service of a new, unknown victor. I plead guilty to having giving in to temptation at times. The much harder task -- one that O'Neill invites us to -- is to write and rewrite with a roving eye on philosophical politics (she calls it "internal dialectics") and politics, in such a way that philosophical possibilities are constantly revived and re-opened. In part this is strategy against being enlisted in, and facilitate, new forms of subordination; in part, this is doing justice to truth that is abundant, and overflowing.  

On Aristotle's Cave (on Plato's Cave via --- ahh, yes -- Cicero) and Design Arguments

Great was the saying of Aristotle: 'Suppose there were men who had lived always underground, in good and well-lighted dwellings, adorned with statues and pictures, and furnished with everything in which those who are thought happy abound. Suppose, however, that they had never gone above ground, but had learned by report and hearsay that there is a divine authority and power. Suppose that then, at some time, the jaws of the earth opened, and they were able to escape and make their way from those hidden dwellings into these regions which we inhabit. When they suddenly saw earth and seas and sky, when they learned the grandeur of clouds and the power of winds, when they saw the sun and learned his grandeur and beauty and the power shown in his filling the sky with light and making day; when, again, night darkened the lands and they saw the whole sky picked out and adorned with stars, and the varying lights of the moon as it waxes and wanes, and the risings and settings of all these bodies, and their courses settled and immutable to all eternity; when they saw those things, most certainly they would have judged both that there are gods and that these great works are the works of gods.' Thus far Aristotle.--Quoted from Ross's Works of Aristotle, quoting Cicero (who is quoting Aristotle), On the Nature of the Gods (2. 37. 95-96[see here for Cicero's latin].), pp. 85-6. [HT Eric Brown & Monte Johnson]

In the context of Balbus's articulation and further elucidation of what I have dubbed (recall) the 'Posidonian argument,' the passage attributed to Aristotle above is quoted. Bywater (1876; HT Eric Brown) offers compelling reasons to believe that this is a fragment of Aristotle's lost dialogue, "On Philosophy" (or can at least traced back to it; Bywater's essay is worth re-reading for more reasons). 

Some other time I want to reflect on how we can read this passage as a comment on Plato's famous Cave (especially striking that Aristotle's cave dwellers have pictures and statues). Here I'll focus primarily on the passage itself (and the use Cicero makes of it). The inhabitants of the cave have everything that is thought needed for happiness. I am unsure, if we need to read into this Aristotle's disagreement with what is thought. But I am going to assume that this makes no difference to Aristotle's general claim.

What may well make a difference is that happy cave people have heard about God's will and power (numen et vim deorum). This is worth noting for two reasons: first, more speculatively, it may indicate that Aristotle is toying with the idea that stories about the gods (we may say that's the original sense of 'theology') arises naturally in any human community.* Elsewhere Aristotle connects the θεολόγοι with the circle around Hesiod (see Metaphysics 1000a9).

But earlier, okay here's some Plato: Aristotle allows that others (Plato) think that such ('theological' θεολογήσαντας) reflection on the gods predates philosophy greatly and goes back to earliest times (Met. 1.983b). So, it's possible that the whole Aristotelian thought experiment is meant to reveal something about Plato's anthropology/philosophy (for the political significance of this recall this post on Republic 427; and this one on the city of pigs).

Second, one wonders to what degree the fact that the cave-dwellers already had views on god influenced their judgment about the perception of the phenomena. That is, intentionally or not, Aristotle's thought experiment raises the question of confirmation bias (or theory mediated perception). Of course, I can't prove this claim, but it is worth noting that at least one of the perceptions they have -- orbits of astronomical bodies settled and immutable to all eternity --is not the product of mere unmediated impressions. Let's allow that the former cave dwellers can discover in fairly short notice that the planetary motions are sufficiently regular. But that their orbits are eternally fixed requires something which cannot be founded in such experience, but requires cosmological and physical backgrounds commitments.

To be sure, I am not denying that even without the supposition that the orbits are eternally fixed, the inference from celestial regularity to a providential god may still be likely. In particular, Cicero's Aristotle, relies on the grandeur of nature (and we are extremely close to the sublime here; yes, that is supposedly anachronistic, but I am capturing the repetitive magnitudinem pulchritudinemque.) Even so, in the thought experiment, the celestial bodies are made co-extensive in existence with the eternal god(s). That is to say, if you are properly primed, then the fact that nature is grandly ordered generates the natural, even inevitable inference that it (the order) is god(s)'s workmanship.

So, the way I read the Aristotle passage it could be part of an unmasking error theory,+ but it need not be so. After all, there may well be independent arguments for the existence of gods and their magnificent workmanship. In fact, Cicero's Balbus uses the passage in this latter (non-unmasking) way. For according to Balbus once you have been exposed to philosophical arguments for the existence of god -- and the previous passage offers a wonderful argument against the epicureans that (i) from start of great disorder random motions can never produce the particular order we have, and (ii) if they could, why not also houses and palaces (so much easier than a whole universe)? -- order in nature is evidently due to rational design.** 

 

Philosophy of Science in The Nobel Prize (Economics) Lecture by Stigler

I propose on this occasion to address the same kinds of questions to an entirely different market: the market for new ideas in economic science. Most economists enter this market in new ideas, let me emphasize, in order to obtain ideas and methods for the applications they are making of economics to the thousand problems with which they are occupied: these economists are not the suppliers of new ideas but only demanders. Their problem is comparable to that of the automobile buyer: to find a reliable vehicle. Indeed, they usually end up by buying a used, and therefore tested, idea.--George Stigler (1982)  Nobel Lecture (Economics), Stockholm.

As regular readers know, the Nobel (Chicago-economist), George J. Stigler, had a lifelong interest in the philosophy, and sociology of science. I have remarked in the past that this interest was not entirely disinterested; it's clear that Stigler's work also aimed at influencing the discipline (for example, encouraging consensus-aiming practices that would allow one to ignore criticisms) and I have argued here that he was rather successful at doing so and so is worth paying attention to how philosophical ideas shape scientific practice.

Somewhat surprisingly and unusually Stigler chose to structure his prize lecture around his interest in the sociology/philosophy of economics. I call it unusual because he won the prize for his "seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation," and ordinarily the Nobel lecture is an elegant discussion of and introduction into the material that generated professional recognition often  accompanied with polite recognition of folk who did not get the prize, but paved the way to it. Stigler deviates from the precedent. It's not that he does not discuss these topics at all -- and one could argue that he is discussing the functioning of the markets in ideas -- , but they are all framed by his sociological interests in science. These interests are long-standing, and they were shaped not just by his teacher, Knight, but also his encounters with Merton (a colleague at Columbia) and Talcott Parsons (probably a colleague at Stanford), and his early readings of Kuhn. 

As an aside, Stigler was a world-class historian of economics, even long after that had become professionally non-fashionable. This lack of fashion was itself a consequence, in part, because he would (while echoing Kuhn) tell folk that a sign of scientific maturity was that disciplinary history became of little interest to the puzzle solving economists (thus providing justification for the elimination of history of economics from graduate curricula).

In fact, the previous paragraph is not really an aside. The Nobel lecture relies explicitly on [A] a distinction "between prescientific and scientific stages of a discipline." (This is quoted from the abstract.) It also relies (more implicitly) on a [B] distinction between those (the few) that supply "new ideas" -- akin to Kuhnian legislators --  and those ("most") that "demand" ideas to be applied to the determinate problems with which they are occupied (the Kuhnian worker-bees, or puzzle-solvers). (The quoted material is the second paragraph of the lecture.)

It turns out however that the few are, from Stigler's perspective, unusual characters, I quote the relevant paragraph before I comment:

Those economists who seek to engage in research on the new ideas of the science to refute or confirm or develop or displace them are in a sense both buyers and sellers of new ideas. They seek to develop new ideas and persuade the science to accept them, but they also are following clues and promises and explorations in the current or preceding ideas of the science. It is very costly to enter this market: it takes a good deal of time and thought to explore a new idea far enough to discover its promise or its lack of promise. The history of economics, and I assume of every science, is strewn with costly errors: of ideas, so to speak, that wouldn't run far or carry many passengers (530)

Kuhnian legislators have two roles: being [C] developers of new ideas and, unless they have disciples willing to do the work, [D] persuaders of others to accept them. [D] means there is a need for scientific entrepreneurs and the art of rhetoric in science. It turns out that [E] there are high barriers to entry to become a Kuhnian legislator both because (i) it requires a lot of effort and time to be on top of existing science and develop new ideas, as well as (ii) the risks involved of producing ideas that do not pan out. Some of the costs involved, are (iii) investments in prior social infrastructure of science ("the machinery of intellectual exchange-journals, learned societies, and conferences"(535)) that make a "large expenditure of time, intelligence, and research resources" possible (536). Notice that such ideas may well be true, but if there is no uptake (recall [D]) and so no "prestige, reputation, and income" (530) worth having, then this, too, will be treated as failure.*

Famously, Kuhn divides the immature and mature stage of science in terms of consensus or lack thereof. Stigler had used such a measure, too, in the past. But in the Nobel lecture he offers a different criterion: the pre-scientific stage "is characterized by absence of a set of interacting practitioners who are devoting a large part of their lives to the accumulation of knowledge, and hence it is characterized by the absence of cumulative progress." (530) There are really two claims here: [F] in the scientific stage a science is progressing. More important, [G] a science is characterized by the presence of practitioners who (i) recognize each other as fellow travelers/scientists, who (ii) are professionals (in the sense that science is their main occupation), and (iii) who form a communicative community. It's not always clear if he thinks whether [G] causes [F] or [G] is a symptom of [F.]

One interesting feature of the absence of progress and lack of a scientific community in the pre-scientific stage that Stigler notes is that descriptions of it often (a) "almost totally lack a time dimension." In pre-scientific stages it makes little difference in what order doctrines are discussed. An interesting feature of the presence of a scientific community is that (b) detected errors will be refuted, and "only the detected errors of unimportant economists are spared a prompt reputation." (531)

Another criterion he offers between the pre-scientific and scientific eras, is that in the pre-scientific era the problems of a would-be-science are shaped by the (often practical needs of the) environment. While Stigler does not deny that "new circumstances" (political and technological changes) can spur interest in some questions and even innovation, but at bottom his view is that "an empirical science such as economics is to provide general understanding of events in the real world, and ultimately all of its theories and techniques must be instrumental to that task. That is very different from saying, however, that it must be responsive to the contemporaneous conditions and problems of the society in which it is situated." That is, Stigler [H] denies what in earlier work he had called “environmental theory.” And, in fact, it is accompanied by a further claim  that [I] "A science requires for its very existence a set of fundamental and durable problems." (534) One may say that these problems are part of the identity conditions of the science and the ones that Kuhnian legislators help illuminate.+ But in the moment it's very difficult to distinguish between fruitful ideas and dead-ends. And this means [J] that all sciences will be subject to fashions that after the fact prove illusory in fruitfulness.

Because Stigler treats mature science as a fairly efficient communicative community, the [K] new ideas that will prove to be fruitful must in some sense be a natural and small enough, discrete extension from existing practices ("science also progresses through time without making large jumps" with an explicit nod to Darwin's Natura non facit saltus. ) This commitment follows quite naturally from the way demand in economics is conceived. For [L] any idea to have uptake it most (and Stigler credits his Chicago colleague,  Gary Becker) be deploy-able by applied practitioners (who have specific human capital) with little extra cost and more potential reward (and who are risk averse). It also follows that given the structure  of the market of economic ideas that there is a bias against novelty from the majority because their "capital would be reduced if [their] knowledge were made obsolete by the general acceptance of a new theory. Hence, established scholars should, in their own self-interest, attack new theories." (538) That is to say, [M] there is considerable status quo bias in any scientific discipline that also (and Stigler does not point this out) helps stabilize the boundaries and the identity conditions of the discipline.

In fact, [N] often novel ideas will be subject to controversy, although Stigler points to the uptake of his own work in the economics of information as an exception (there was little controversy). Stigler thinks this was due to the fact that "no established scientific theory was being challenged by this work." (539) So there are for Stigler [O] two kinds of new ideas: those that extend a theory or apply a known tool in a new area (relatively little controversy) and those that challenge existing practices. The latter can form the basis of a true challenge to the status quo [P], "it takes a theory to beat a theory." But Stigler admits that [Q] a true test is rare because it is rare that "a theory in economics has a well-defined domain of applicability." (542) Instead theories are tested indirectly for "fertility,"  by deploying them to "explore a variety of problems." Such [R] indirect tests take time and a theory can linger for a long time before it is ultimately discarded.

Stigler explicitly recognizes that there may be more other interesting factors. But we can treat [A]-[R] as the main factors of Stigler's public choice model of science. (He credits Downs, Buchanan, and Tullock, but seems to have been unaware of Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry, which (recall) anticipates many of his own views.

Because I have gone on too long for a blog post, I will not offer critical commentary today. I just note one final feature of Stigler's philosophy of science. For, Stigler, thus [Q] a science is characterized by fundamental Knightian uncertainty about its own development ("No one can describe the precise characteristics or content of a new piece of scientific work that will find ready and eager reception from the scientists of a period." (538))** This commitment to Knight's ideas is especially notable because he rejects the thought (which he explicitly associates with his teacher Knight) that the subjects studied by economists are mistake prone and do not grasp the effects of their policy choices (recall also my treatment of his Tanner lectures).

 

RIP: Stanley Cavell 1926-2018 (Guest Post by Abraham Stone)

[This is an invited guest post by Abe Stone (Santa Cruz, Philosophy)--ES]

I remember distinctly the moment I learned that David Lewis had died. It was during my years as a postdoctoral fellow, when I was more than a little isolated, and so it turned out to have been some time — months, maybe — since the event. I recall thinking: the world in which I thought I was living, during those months, turned out not to be the actual world, and so I turned out not to be the person I thought I was, but merely a counterpart of that person. And thus arose the half-formed thought (still only half-formed now, alas) that therein lay some insight into what is actually at stake in the conflict between counterpart theory and transworld identity.

There are very many different ways in which philosophical writing can be difficult. In Lewis’s case (as in Hume’s), the obscurity derives most of all from irony: philosophical theses are argued for, urgently, fluently, and with elaborate and ambitious systematicity, but there are only scattered and sometimes conflicting hints about whence the urgency derives. In Cavell’s case (as in Emerson’s, or Thoreau’s, or Wittgenstein’s) the difficulty lies largely in a different direction. There are a series of statements or short passages, each clear enough in itself, and some, at least, dealing with matters of obvious importance;[1] but the rule of the series, the reason one follows another in just this order, is thoroughly opaque. Hence Cavell’s death leaves me with different thoughts: about the continuation and breaking of series, about whether we can carry on, and whether we should.

Moreover, although I met Lewis only once, I was Cavell’s student for many years, and in fact he is the one person I regularly refer to (in talking to my students, for example) as “my teacher.” But I was not one of his closest students. Our relationship was always difficult, no doubt in large part because of my deafness to so much of what he heard. And what he heard that I did not was not limited to such minor items as poetry, jazz, opera, and what to me are just some mildly amusing and/or disquieting old movies. It often extended rather farther, to the words coming out of my own mouth: I might realize too late, after leaving the room, that he had been responding to what I, without knowing it, had literally said. And yet this was a good way to be his student, because, beyond the many listable insights, methods, approaches, even simple facts that I learned from him, the biggest lesson of all, and the one most central to his thought, was about the philosophically essential and impossible nature of that relationship between teacher and student. The teacher, so to speak, at some point, breaks off and says: now continue as I would; and what happens next, if it is not just complete failure, may well involve violence or the threat of violence, or flattery and slavish imitation, or treachery and betrayal, or (as in King Lear) all of those combined.[2]

Cavell’s death comes at a time when, though some think that Western philosophy has entered a golden age, others of us fear that it may have ended, that there is and will be no next member of the series after Cavell, after Lewis, after Derrida. But then, on the other hand: it also comes at a time when, having tried (but: fairly tried?) doing good, we find, strange as it may seem, that it does not agree with our Constitution. It comes, in other words, at a time when we may ask: why attempt to follow such teachers? Why not reject them and begin anew? The option of rejection — I mean, the option of rejecting our teachers, rejecting the whole tradition of philosophy from which we have emerged, rejecting America, rejecting Europe, rejecting Athens — seems eminently reasonable, more the voice of conscience than of inclination. This is hardly the first such time, of course, but it would be a poor exercise in induction to conclude that it won’t or shouldn’t be the last: that what Justinian or Descartes or Carnap tried and failed can’t and shouldn’t now finally be accomplished.

Cavell’s response to this, as I understand it, is that the apparent option of rejection is really an option of repression. I can’t say how essential it is that this be taken as a reception of Freud: Freud’s thought is yet another of the things important to Cavell which I feel unable to appreciate, or to which, perhaps, I am resistant. But it explains why Cavell, though he never followed Heidegger into, as he would put it, “the myth of having read everything,” also never followed Wittgenstein and Emerson into “the myth of having read nothing.” He worried constantly over the canonical figures of Western philosophy — not in a scholarly, originalist way, but beginning with them as he had received them, stare decisis (which meant, in some respects: beginning with a mere caricature of them). It explains, too, why lack of recognition, for himself or for his teachers, could so anger him: the story in which “American philosophy” means principally James and Dewey offended him, not as ignorant and inaccurate, but as a deliberate (though unconscious) suppression of Emerson and Thoreau. It explains his anger on one occasion when, responding to his description of the logical positivists as “self-stultifying,” I said that what he took as self-stultification is actually self-control. “How can you make that distinction after Freud?” was his reply. For me, the time now was (and is) after Avicenna, after Descartes, after Kant, certainly, after Nietzsche, maybe even after Wittgenstein, but not after Freud (or after Marx). That was an excuse (elaborative) that he would not accept. But then why isn’t this time also after Carnap (or after Neurath, or after Popper)? Cavell knew he could not, so to speak, point to a set of invisible, strong-as-logic (or even: strong-as-sociology) rails that would send me through one set of stops but not through the other. That he might say, in such a case, “Here my spade is turned,” was to him not a reassurance but a tragedy.

What time is now? What world is actual? The questions are almost the same, maybe, after all. Indexicals show most starkly the irruption of the pragmatic (and the transcendental?) into semantics. If what is salient to me is not, or not often enough, what is salient to you, we can’t speak to one another, even if we speak “the same language.” If a lion could speak, how could we understand it? A lion or other non-human animal — but how do we know which animals are humans? What about drills and children and idiots and Aristotelian or Derridean philosophers? If Locke associates the name “human,” in the phrase “human(e) understanding,” with a complex idea that includes whiteness and maleness (not to mention mechanism, traces of alchemy, Euclidean spatiality …), and if we understand him, must we not make the same association? (Locke, if I do understand him, would say that we must. “I know not, how Men [!], who have the same Idea, under different Names, or different Ideas under the same Name, can, in that case, talk with one another.”) What if our salient points of reference — the chessboard, the well-known beacons and headlands, the orbis magnus — turn out to be non-actual, or no longer actual, already dead? What if the rock on which we hoped to found a wall or a state (or a church), which we had hoped to reach at last by clearing up the ground, removing some of the rubbish (even if that should require a sort of moral bog hoe), turns out to be a myth? If the concepts origin and series (or: permanence, progression and reversion) are mythical, how can we continue any series? How can we fail to?

What I learned from Cavell — what we have all learned from him, if, as I think, the time now is after Cavell — is not solutions, but problems. We may not be able to continue. We may have no choice but to continue.

On Translators-Advocates as Philosophers

I would be unconvinced by an account of translating that passes too quickly over or fails altogether to notice its chance of learning. The chance it offers of becoming expert, becoming-critical, becoming-intimate, becoming a better -- or, if not a better (because are we really getting any better at reading and writing? Is it useful to think of these activities in terms of progress?) -- then certainly a different reader and writer. Translations as the chance -- a translation projects as a means of giving oneself the chance -- of being taught by the other's writing, where answers to the questions of how to be responsible for this writing, and whether or not you or I will be capable of taking responsibility for this writing are, again, in no way given in advance....It's rather to offer a view of translation as a site for learning through reading and writing, through testing and researching, through asking and arguing. Kate Briggs (2017) This Little Art, pp. 207-21o; emphases in original). [HT: Petra Van Brabandt]

One thing Elizabeth Anscombe, John McDowell, Jan Łukasiewicz, Martha Nussbaum, W.D. Ross, and Eleanore Stump have in common is that they produced major translations of complex, philosophical works.  (When I looked up Łukasiewicz I expected to find translations of logic texts, but I learned he produced a translation of Hume's Treatise.) I also believe they did so relatively early in their careers. That they translated is, with the exception, perhaps, of Ross, not a major part of their professional identity. But notable, nevertheless. The list of philosopher-translators is, of course, much longer; plenty of trained and professionally employed philosophers devote considerable attention of their scholarly life to producing editions of translations for use in the classroom and scholarship. But this activity is generally not the way we receive and award professional recognition or credit. This is true, I think, even in (at least some)* areas of the history of philosophy; the fact that, say, Curley, Ariew, Garber, Lennon, Berges (etc.) produce major translations is not the reason why the rest of us admire their work. If anything, if at a conference dinner, we praise the translation too much, we may well be suspected of having a low opinion of their philosophical and scholarly work. 

Last week I noted that absent a translator-advocate, some works of philosophy will always remain obscure outside the home language. I kind of presupposed that in philosophy, a translation alone is not sufficient to make a linguistically distant text available to readers. It will also require philosophical creativity to articulate the significance of such a work to an audience that may be unclear about the problematic and potentially bewildering conceptual framework, not to mention tacit commitments, of such a text. This requires considerable philosophical acuity on the part of  the translator-advocate** because one must understand not only the contemporary philosophical scene to some degree, but be able to learn another, potentially alien approach. That is to say, I tacitly assumed that translator-advocates are over-achieving philosophers, who are also skilled at philosophical politics (recall this post); they can survey multiple cultural traditions and then set in motion arbitrage among them.

Reading This Little Art, a sympathetic and enchanting guide to the art of translation and the meaning of life, made me realize that my assumptions  need some adjustment. (Briggs is a translator of works by Roland Barthes.) I hope to return to her important book some other time (including the question of responsibility--a theme I often digress about). Here I note that she calls attention to an important feature of translation that's also true of philosophical translation. One may think that translation is the skilled repetition of another's writings in a new language. One can hold on to this image of translation even when one grants the creativity and skill that is required for a philosophically sensitive translation (Google translate has not cracked that code yet). But while we tend to think of repetition as a kind of automatic, machine-like mirroring, in translation it is much more akin a copying of and thereby mastering of another's dance moves (as Briggs shows).

Briggs argues persuasively that the process of translation entails an enormous amount of learning prompted by the source text. Some of this learning may well take place before a translation begins, but a lot of is prompted by the text itself. Here it is important to recognize that what one learns is not just the views expressed in the text ("being taught by the other's writing"). But one also often needs to come to understand a far wider context. Reading Briggs brought me back to my own experience (now almost twenty five years ago) of translating Christiaan Huygens' (1688) report to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company On Finding Longitude at Sea with a Pendulum (and a series of letters connected to this report).+ Before I undertook that translation I had taken a number of courses on seventeenth century physics. So, while I was just a bachelor student, I was not a naive translator.

Even so, it's not just that I had to learn an earlier version of Dutch (my language), and become proficient in seventeenth century Dutch natural philosophy--few dictionaries and professional vocabularies had explanations of all the terms I encountered. (I learned that most work on seventeenth century Dutch is done by art historians, book and literary scholars.) I also had to learn about seventeenth century map-making, the actual practices of longitude finding, the rules governing life aboard an East India Company ship, the complex social relationships among Huygens (a Dutch patrician), Volder (a university professor), and Hudde (a Dutch patrician-politician and director of the Company). Along the way, I had to go to three different archives because I had to figure out what had happened to some of the characters and ships mentioned in the text I was translating. Some of this work generated my first scholarly publications (about seventeenth century sea-maps). En passant, I learned about Jesuit scientific expeditions (recall).

Now, the philosophically significant thing I learned was that the rejection of action at a distance was not merely motivated by metaphysical rejection (as Koyré argued and lots of folk have echoed thoughtlessly) or conflicting- paradigm-induced-intolerance, but Huygens had a decent empirical argument. (That argument turned out to be based on flawed data, but that was difficult to know at the time.) Along the way, I fleshed out the significance of my favorite walk-on philosopher (recall this post). But I also learned an enormous amount about what it was like to engage in the overlapping practices of natural philosophy, mixed mathematics, longitude finding, almanac writing, commercial map trade, map-making, and commercial sea-faring (a dangerous activity) at the time. (I also became something of an expert on Johannes Hudde and De Volder.) Much of this learning was utterly unanticipated, and yet it transformed my understanding of the period.

Briggs hints that the practice of translation can transform the practitioner ('a different reader and writer'). This is due not just to being engaged intensely over an extended period with the thoughts of another at an extreme level of detail. But we also have to be engaged with the significant details of the relevant bits of life-world that go into that author's text. Being a philosophical translator may transform us philosophically (see L.A. Paul). Perhaps, this is why, in our community, we prefer not to talk about the art of translation too much.

  

Epistemic Peers don't always get it (a problem for contextualists historians of philosophy); Dennett on Bennett

Rationality (1964), Jonathan Bennett’s first book, was published when he was thirty-four years old, and it exhibits the intensity of a young philosopher who is quite sure he sees a way to cut through a forest of dubious, ideology-ridden, squishy philosophy of mind and set a few things straight. Since the terrain he was scouting and clarifying was the same terrain that I was then embarking on, with similar ambitions, I read his book when it first came out through the dust and smoke of my own earliest efforts to conquer these topics. The result, I confess, was that I simultaneously misread, underestimated, and covertly absorbed much of what he was on about and then proceeded to reinvent some of his wheels in my own work without realizing it until years later...I was not the only explorer of this territory who chose to find other paths to Bennett’s destination, but here we all are, and a review of his book may consolidate the gains.--Daniel Dennett, (2016) Jonathan Bennett's Rationality in Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy [ed. E. Schliesser], 256.

Dennett graciously and generously admits here, with the benefit of a half century's worth of hindsight, that he did not fully grasp the content ("misread") and significance ("underestimated") of a work written by a contemporary who shared, in many ways, his intellectual outlook. Bennett went on to have a distinguished career, both as a philosophical historian and philosopher of language as well as as a metaphysician. At Syracuse he helped nourish and steer the revival of analytical metaphysics (less noticed because it does not fall easily in Kripke-Lewis centered narratives we tell ourselves). While this is not a tragic story of gross injustice, it's fair to say that Dennet's reaction to Rationality is not unique; the little book, while not ignored (it has about 250 citations in google.scholar) did not have a huge, recognized impact on the profession. (The impact of Dennett's own Content and Consciousness, which appeared half decade later, is a useful contrast.) This despite the fact that the book is written in accessible, lively language; it appeared in paperback in a then "unduly prestigious series of books" (Dennett, 257), and it avoids unexplained jargon. It also anticipates, as Dennett notes throughout his piece, quite a few insights later developed by others.

The failure of impact is especially notable because Bennett announces, as Dennett notes in his article, that he is doing something significant (and as Dennett notes, original): he describes the work as “extremely ambitious conceptual inquiry”? on p. 1 of Rationality. Before I get to the significance (and further characterization) of the phenomenon that this is an instance of, Dennett offers a few useful suggestions on the lack of impact. For example, the series in which Rationality appeared was associated with ordinary language philosophy, already in decline by the mid 1960s (258). (Dennett also indicts ordinary language philosophy for its comical lack of ambition--a judgment worth reconsidering some time.) By contrast, Bennett's kind of conceptual analysis was more ambitious (and Dennett recognizes that in a sense Bennett is trying to displace Kant's synthetic a priori.) Dennett notes in passing that, "Philosophers get largely ignored by Bennett, aside from brief passing acknowledgments of Kant, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Popper, but it is clear that he is deliberately avoiding tussles with a host of contemporary philosophers, indirectly criticizing their positions." (261) So one may suspect that other philosophers ignored Bennett because he ignored them and was, then, not in a position to get away with it.

One could read Dennett as implying (it's not his main point in context) that part of the problem for Bennett is not sociological, but philosophical:

Here I think the main strength of Bennett’s method is also its weakness. As a piece of conceptual analysis it is hard to fault the claim that conventionality presupposes reasons had by reasoners, but this blinds him to the prospect of an intermediate position which is not readily articulated without a helping of initially counterintuitive innovation— a “move” that I have only recently perfected (to my satisfaction): drawing a quite sharp distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things. There are reasons aplenty in nature (I call them free- floating rationales): trees do things for reasons, fungi do things for reasons...but they do not (usually) have reasons for doing these things. (262)

My interest here is not Dennett's philosophical point (important as it is! -- the distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things will be very useful in the (philosophy of) social science(s) because it will remove the stranglehold of methodological individualism and renew interest in a species of functional explanation). The point is rather that even if one grants that Bennett missed a step, everybody else did too.

There is, however, a more subtle version of the point in Dennett: "By not quite nailing the distinction between there being reasons and an agent’s having reasons, Bennett misses the intermediate cases that naturalism requires, in order to account for the gradual emergence of function by the march of evolution and by the development of the individual." (264) This suggests a more historical explanation of the lack of uptake for Bennett: he is not easily slotted into the rising wave of philosophical naturalism (associated with Quine and, of course, Dennett). There is something to this point; the non-naturalists that gained distinction (e.g., Nagel, Searle) situated themselves against it. That gave them a place as the opposition. Bennett is much harder to slot into simplifying narratives teachers tell their students. (He was not obscure in the period, because Dennet himself includes Bennett in his "Mid-Term Examination" included in the Intentional Stance, and in that piece Dennett had explicitly recognized the "parallel paths" (348) between himself and Bennett, and their lack of mutual citation (349, where Davidson is included.))

A central theme of Dennett's chapter is that he is not alone in having missed Bennett's point (even when they directly confronted each other's views in print), and he calls attention to the fact that Quine, Millikan, and the Pittsburgh school all did so, too. While there is some self-interest in not fully crediting another with one's own insights, it remains remarkable that such excellent peers missed the point. This is significant because both epistemologists and contextual historians of philosophy put great faith in the discern-ability of such peers. But the fact is, as is recognized in principle, but often not in practice, is that their judgment is fallible. The market in ideas is imperfect, after all. That is to say, sometimes not being a peer or an outsider or being later in time allows one to see with greater clarity (than previously) what is at stake than an active participant. It is an obvious point, but it is dis-allowed by those that privilege peers in epistemology and historical context in history (of philosophy). This is why (a) in epistemology we should also find a place to canvass non-peers, and (b) in history of philosophy make space for anachronism to ensure historical accuracy.

I encouraged Dennett to write about Bennett because I was curious what he would say. For, (a) I had noticed that Dennett (who is one of my undergraduate teachers) notes Rationality in passing in the Intentional Stance; I did so only after (b) I had been a course assistant in a class by Bill Wimsatt on "Philosophy of Mind and Science Fiction" in the mid-90s at Chicago. Wimsatt, a contemporary of Bennett and Dennett, trained at Pittsburgh (and represents the naturalistic wing also associated with the Churchlands), who is primarily known as a philosopher of biology. Wimsatt assigned Rationality and taught it with gusto to his undergraduates. Wimsatt also taught Dennett (in his philosophy of biology graduate seminar), but (to the best of my fragile memory) did not compare Bennett with Dennett.

Somebody eager to defend the judgments of peers may suggest that Wimsatt ought to count as a peer. I fully grant the point. But while it's true that Wimsatt grasped some of the significance of Rationality he did not (I think) really use Bennett in his own work and so his judgment is not reflected in the profession's conversation. This points the way toward a distinction between formal (public) and informal (private) peer judgments, but about that some other time.