Digressions&Impressions

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Transforming Philosophy By Diversifying Its Traditions

A very similar transformation actually occurred in Western philosophy not too long ago. When a major European university began to teach the ideas of a particular noncanonical thinker, mainstream philosophers on the faculty objected that the new philosophy was not part of “our tradition,” and that it was watering down the curriculum in the name of a misguided fad. Because the new philosophy was inconsistent with many widely held positions, some philosophers resorted to a flaccid relativism, arguing that there were “two truths” on these matters. This sort of approach only convinced the mainstream philosophers that the new philosophy was nonsense. However, a brilliant philosopher argued that the best way to discover the truth is through a pluralistic dialogue with all the major world philosophies. This philosophical genius was Thomas Aquinas. In the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and others encouraged students and colleagues (who had previously only learned a form of Platonized Christianity) to expand the canon and learn not just from the philosophy of the pagan Aristotle (only recently rediscovered in Western Europe), but also from Jewish and Muslim thinkers. The result was to reinvigorate and deepen the Western philosophical tradition.... The case of Aquinas and the rediscovery of Aristotle is just one of many examples that illustrate that the Western philosophical canon is not, and never was, a closed system. Philosophy only becomes richer and approximates the truth more closely as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.--Bryan W. Van Norden (2017) Taking Back Philosophy: a Multicultural Manifesto, 18

The widespread turn to meta-philosophy, even discussion of the merits of progress, if any, in philosophy are simultaneously signs of self-confidence -- as Montaigne, Pascal, and Margaret Cavendish show it takes a certain courage to question oneself -- and a sense of malaise, not always fully justified, induced by a sense of exhaustion of approaches that have had their trial. And this turn to meta-philosophy occurs after vanquishing -- a word I don't use lightly --, its parochial rivals, and benefitting from soft association with imperial power, analytic philosophy strides the world as a global hegemon increasingly being taught in colleges, often branded with American and European names, around the world.  

While there is a strain of argument in Van Norden's Taking Back Philosophy preoccupied with the distribution of jobs in 'ranked' departments (e.g., 2; 5; 25-26; 31-34 162; see also Garfield's foreword, p. xii; xx) and the scarce resource of  time in the curriculum (e.g., xviii-xix; 8, 36, 103, 115), his more important argument is that philosophy would benefit from what is known as 'diversifying' its canon. And the paragraph quoted above is supposed to offer an instance of such fruits. 

Before I get to that, it is worth noting three features about contemporary analytic philosophy: first, analytic philosophy has exceedingly few substantive dogmas. I don't mean this only as the bad joke that Quine and Davidson jointly could only count to three (and with Socrates we may ask where is the fourth?). But rather in the more serious sense that analytic philosophy always has been like a sponge drawing in ideas and techniques from the sciences and logic, and even rival schools, and, like a high energy shape-shifter, has had an open-ended capacity to reinvent itself. This is why most critiques of analytic philosophy lodged by its rivals often seem so comically off-base within a short amount of time.*   

Second, because analytic philosophy's self-identity is constantly re-invented over time, it has no felt requirement for a fixed canon of texts to give it identity.** So, for example, Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was welcomed as a "book" which "contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods." Most of the authors of these classics are still familiar names, - "Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, [C.I.] Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, [Ernest] Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reichenbach (2)" - , but it is to be doubted that most of the articles themselves, or what they argue for, play much of a role in contemporary undergraduate or graduate education (outside those that cater to specialists in history of analytic). I bet a few names are completely unfamiliar.  One can play a similar game with Rorty's more recent (and larger) Linguistic Turn. To be a classic within analytic philosophy is to risk oblivion quickly from the perspective of eternity. 

As an aside, the author of  the review from Philosophy of Science just quoted, Russell L. Ackoff, became one of the founders of operations research and systems thinking in management science. Even the limited biography of Wikipedia suggests wonderful avenues of research for sociologists of analytic philosophy.

Third, analytic philosophy is, despite inhabiting extremely steep prestige and economic hierarchies, and having become a (near) mono-linguistic culture, still a dispersed discipline with many local nodes doing their own thing. And while a shift to standardizing text-book education may change the dispersed nature, for now analytic philosophy evolves -- despite our natural tendency to be guided by the Williamsons', Chalmers', Siders', Pauls' (etc.) -- in virtue of countless many relatively independent, contingent curricular and refereeing decisions. And while, with Condorcet's jury theorem in the back of the mind, such a structure may offer confidence that we're somewhat truth-apt, it also means that the content of the destination of such a dispersed philosophical 'market' in ideas may be intrinsically uncertain. This means there is also space for local arbitrage opportunities, including (as Justin Smith has remarked) richly supported non-university think-tanks funded by (self-proclaimed) Libertarian billionaires. 

Okay, let's grant Van Norden his main claim that a philosophical tradition can be reinvigorated by a kind of systematic exposure to another tradition or, as in the thirteenth century example, a diversity of traditions. It doesn't follow, as he tacitly recognizes, that it will always do so. Some novelties, regardless of their sources, are fads and claims to ancient wisdom may, upon inspection, be banality. In that respect, it is striking that the thirteenth century transformation involved purportedly incompatible, even contradictory traditions. The contradiction could only be resolved by the genius of a synthesizing mind who created a kind of aufhebung. 

My criticism is not that Van Norden seems to presuppose civilizational intellectual traditions with a true essence here (he denies that the page before, see the quote below); nor is that Van Norden seems to have replicated a basically neo-Hegelian-Romantic scheme of progress and (so the worry goes) imposed it on the historical 'data'. But rather that if the mere fact of contradiction is not a reliable means toward distinguishing fad from source of renewal, the episode seems to teach that one can never know that some innovation isn't fad (given our canons of rigor).  

So, I do like Van Norden's other exemplar better, which is closer to our current situation:

There are also clear historical examples of intellectual traditions accepting and being broadened by alien systems of thought. When Buddhism was brought to China by missionaries from India in the first century ce, there already existed a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition, including Confucianism and Daoism (each of which had a variety of competing interpretations). Buddhism was a completely alien system of thought that challenged many of the fundamental ethical and metaphysical assumptions of the classic Chinese thinkers. However, Chinese philosophers studied Buddhist works, translated them into their own language, learned a new technical vocabulary, and engaged with Buddhist arguments. As a result, the Chinese intellectual tradition was permanently deepened. Even if one refuses to bestow the label of “philosophy” upon any of these systems of thought, the fact that Confucianism and Daoism were able to adapt to and incorporate Buddhist ideas dispels the illusion that intellectual traditions have an unchanging essence that makes them hermetically sealed (17)

What this example reveals is that intellectual traditions can be internally heterogeneous and still sufficiently distinct from each other such that internally heterogeneous alternatives may seem, at first, 'completely alien.' And that members of a resourceful home tradition can bring themselves, despite the barriers of entry [language, technical vocabulary, techniques, argument styles, etc.], to study such an alternative system of thought. I am sure that Van Norden could name these intrepid philosophical explorers/abitreurs that created intellectual trading zones among Confucianism & Daoism and Buddhism at various sites. But these these under-laborers are not named, and the local turmoil that surrounded them effaced, even if (despite presumably some unnamed Kuhn-losses) their fruits are "permanent." 

So, one way to think of attempts at diversifying analytic philosophy, and its relationship(s) to a 'canon', is to generate the conditions of such self-transformation of the tradition without -- pace Condorcet -- any guarantee of success, but with the expectation that the unknown destinations may well give us rewarding sights, even, as I learned from Eileen O'Neill, a better, but painful, political and intellectual self-understanding, and, as collective transformative experiences, unexpected views on the truth.

Seneca's Letter 46: On Living in an Age of Lies

1. I received the book of yours which you promised me. I opened it hastily with the idea of glancing over it at leisure; for I meant only to taste the volume. But by its own charm the book coaxed me into traversing it more at length. You may understand from this fact how eloquent it was; for it seemed to be written in the smooth style, and yet did not resemble your handiwork or mine, but at first sight might have been ascribed to Titus Livius or to Epicurus. Moreover, I was so impressed and carried along by its charm that I finished it without any postponement. The sunlight called to me, hunger warned, and clouds were lowering; but I absorbed the book from beginning to end.

2. I was not merely pleased; I rejoiced. So full of wit and spirit it was! I should have added "what force [quid impetus!]," had the book contained moments of repose, or had it risen to energy only at intervals. But I found that there was no burst of force, but an even flow, a style that was vigorous and chaste. Nevertheless I noticed from time to time your sweetness, and here and there that mildness of yours. Your style is lofty and noble; I want you to keep to this manner and this direction. Your subject also contributed something; for this reason you should choose productive topics, which will lay hold of the mind and arouse it.

3. I shall discuss the book more fully after a second perusal; meantime, my judgment is somewhat unsettled, just as if I had heard it read aloud, and had not read it myself. You must allow me to examine it also. You need not be afraid; you shall hear the truth. Lucky fellow, to offer a man no opportunity to tell you lies at such long range! Unless perhaps, even now, when excuses for lying are taken away, custom serves as an excuse for our telling each other lies!--Letter 46, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).

We learn in the first sentence of this letter that Lucilius is not merely aspiring to wisdom, but also an author. It invites us, thus, to reflect on the transaction between Seneca and Lucilius, and the interest of the latter in Seneca.

In this brief letter, Seneca seems to distinguish among three kinds of reading-styles: (i) tasting a book, which is brief and impressionistic; (ii) immersive reading, which is hurried yet thorough; and (iii) regurgitative reading, which involves re-reading a book. (Seneca compares (ii) with hearing a text.) To over-read a bit: according to Seneca only regurgitative reading -- this reminded me of Nietzsche -- can generate a truth, or at least a truth that can be heard (verum audies).

The last sentence of the epistle alerts us to the larger socio-political context of the exchange. Seneca implies that they live in a duplicitous public culture where the habit of lying is deeply entrenched.* Whether Seneca thinks this is merely a function of Nero's particular rule or the collapse of the republic or politics as such is left obscure. 

Strikingly, Seneca explicitly presents himself as a regurgitative reader who will articulate truth, eventually. But the implicature is, I think, that to hear the truths he will say certain virtues (of the would be audience) must be present: patience, a willingness to re-read and examine carefully, and a certain free-spiritedness [freely reinterpreting, Non est quod verearis]. That is to say, in a letter to a proud author, Seneca is telling us how to be an attentive reader of (his) works. 

Seneca has already made clear that he is writing for posterity (recall Letter 21; Letter 29). But not the first time I note that the beneficiaries of his writings are supposed to be alert to the fact that he expects us to understand that his writings conceal his message from some certain kinds of readers. I mention this not to remind the reader of Seneca's interest in the art of esotericism. Rather, and in particular, he invites us to reflect on how our culture and, thus, our habitual dispositions distort our receptivity toward truth.  

 

On Philosophy Being Political

The elimination of conscious fraud is seldom mentioned in formal discussions of the reasons for repetition in science. The quasi-mythological view that scientists are uniformly of higher moral standards than ordinary mortals is maintained, and subconscious bias is usually depended upon to explain the importance of independent repetition. To repeat, scientists are not much better than other men, and there certainly are at least a few among them who would fake experiments if there was something to be gained therefrom. The induced researcher has something to gain if he can get away with such a fraud. His income depends largely on the reputation he can develop, and this, in turn, depends on his “discoveries.” It is obviously easier to produce an important and exciting article if one simply invents the facts reported than if one is confined to reality. This being so, the prevention of fraud depends on a detection apparatus. Part of the detection apparatus involves repetition (Tullock The organization of inquiry [1966] 2005: 124).

Tullock considers economics, as we have seen, to be a discipline in which the possibility of concealment is greater than in what he calls science. Now, we consider what differential auditing possibilities do to Polanyi’s argument that scientific opinion is uniform. Long before Polanyi the uniformity of opinion had been viewed as a necessary condition for scientific status....

[In his 1962 “Republic of Science”] Polanyi asked what scientists believe and proposed that everyone believes the same thing. How could this be? With the division of labor, scientists in one specialization have no competence in another so why the unanimity? Polanyi appealed to an overlapping neighborhood of competence by which all problems in science is connected....All Polanyi needs is transparency.
Characterizing Polanyi’s argument as a special case of Longfield’s argument shows that we can use one principle to analyze the intra-community connections. This will be enormously helpful because the machinery which has been set in motion for one community can be applied to the other. Thus, [Adam] Smith himself discussed how monopolies form and create inequality within the labor market. A group keeping others out can enrich themselves. If we can move the argument across communities, what does monopolization look like among experts? We are using “experts” because following Tullock, we do not know whether they are “scientists” until we know something about the institutional structure in which they function.
Tullock, when he rehearses Polanyi’s argument, silently provides the missing step and thus fails to impress his delightful cleverness on the reader. To make the overlapping competence argument work, there must be data audits, results must be checked. He says this over and over again. This distinguishes economics and science. As Tullock writes, economics allows concealment. Therefore economics allows factions and it doesn’t have the Polanyi efficiency properties. Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy (2012) "Tullock on motivated inquiry: expert-induced uncertainty disguised as risk," Public Choice, 171-3

The quoted paragraphs is from a paper, even research program, methodological analytic egalitarianism, that (as regular readers know) has long influenced me. I was inspired to go back to it by Liam Kofi Bright's recent, interesting argument that "all philosophy is political is a trivial consequence of the more interesting fact that all inquiry is...united." [HT Dailynous] Drawing on Neurath, Bright argues this unity is a regulative or normative ideal, "it is an achievement to be won, not a fact to be granted." Neurath's argument is also a bit self-interested because within the division of scientific labor, it gives philosophers, a new kind of philosopher, a special role, of (linguistic/conceptual) orchestration. (See here; I link to this piece because Neurath is especially clear about the anti-totalitarian political significance of the program.) Uncharacterstically, Bright does not quite mention this, but the general gist is clear from his presentation:

The unity of science consists in the fact that we may potentially bring the results, methods, and fruits of inquiry in one field to bear on all others, providing we take the time to formulate our claims in a way that can be mutually understood, and are sufficiently clear in stating logical or evidential relations. The unity of science is thus a kind of consequence of the attitude of seeking to be clear and assist one another.*

If it is remembered that 'We' here is 'we [new] philosophers' Bright's position is echt Neurathian. If the 'we' here is all of of us engaged in science, Bright has subtly added a set of virtues some epistemic some social to the practice of all science. Notice, and Bright is very good on this, that even if one rejects some such normative unity program, the attitude is useful because "we cannot ever rule out the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." Bright gives some cute historical examples. I would just add that anybody who is engaged in debates in contemporary climate science will be struck how many different,and different kinds of sciences are brought to bear on each other all the time. So far so good.

Now, here's my observation, if we think of different sciences also as reflecting different interests, then we should not automatically assume that when two sciences are brought in communication/trade with each other they will automatically agree. As Max Weber pointed out, pluralism is a consequence of the division of labor and differentiated interests. It is, thus, to be expected that when two sciences or sub-fields within a discipline/science are made to communicate some disagreement is to be expected. (Obviously, it does not follow there will always be disagreement or even most of the time.) The claim in this paragraph is strengthened, perhaps a trivial consequence, of the idea that not all sciences rely solely on epistemic commitments (see Heather Douglas' now classic book). 

Of course, if we think of the ways in which sciences are brought to bear on each other, it is quite possible to come to agreement either by creating a third new science (which may well has its task of figuring out the discrepancies between the two sciences) or by transformation of one of the sciences (in dialogue with each other). [If you think not all disciplines are science, then follow Peart/Levy and substitute expert-disciplines where necessary!] This sounds abstract, but actually happens quite a bit in the history of science. 

I put the Tullock in, in part, to show that Tullock anticipates the debates over the replication crisis (in some bits of the academy) by several decades. And that is I want to strengthen Bright's argument (in his spirit, see here) by suggesting that even if one is doubtful of the desirability or feasibility of general unity of science that he (and I, with slightly different sensibility) embraces, there are additional reasons to embrace the idea of leaving room to keeping open, '"the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." It reduces the incentives and possibilities for fraud and rents for members of autonomous disciplines. As we have seen, that is not just a hypothetical possibility.

But, and here I close, the idea of intellectual even disciplinary autonomy is very much part of the DNA of philosophy, perhaps uniquely so (with exception of 'pure' math) [recall this old post on Williamson]. To be an intellectual self-legislator, to have autonomous/foundational or self-sufficient reason, is an ideal that is a permanent temptation for philosophers (in ways not so for other disciplines within the division of intellectual labor)--go read Descartes, or even Kant. I think it is some such ideal that makes some philosophers also uneasy about the very idea of (what I call) a philosophical politics within philosophy or in its relationships with other disciplines. The Neurathian offers orchestration (and its modern successors) as a consolation prize to them (if orchestration seems like the wrong way to go, then see the program of synthetic philosophy!)

Of course, the would be autonomous philosopher can refuse to allow his philosophy to be scrutinized by outsiders. (Just as not all offers to trade are accepted.) The risk of such hermeticisms, of thinking philosophy pure and untainted by politics, is, in fact, to make philosophy a hiding place for charlatans and cultists.  It is amusing to see my own ilk, analytic philosophers embracing that risk.

 

 

On Jason Stanley and Jacob Levy on Liberalism and Truth

Clinton’s campaign made a devastating error by failing to recognize the appeal of illiberalism. The strategy of their ad campaign, which featured lengthy snippets of the president-elect at his most illiberal, presupposed a general commitment to liberal democratic values. It is in any case a familiar point from George Lakoff’s 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant, that one should not repeat the opposition’s rhetorical frames even if it is to condemn them. Instead, one should provide an alternative positive vision, in this case of liberal democratic values. Anything else is campaign money spent on advertising for the opposition.

...

From a perspective that regards tradition, identity, or religion as the chief sources of value, liberal democracy is an existential threat to what gives meaning to human life. If liberal democracy’s disturbances of the social order bring no obvious benefit, materially or spiritually, to those to whom the losses have been most deeply felt, we can hardly expect universal support for its values.--Jason Stanley "On the Question of the Stability of Democracy."

Unlike most responses to the Trump victory, Jason Stanley's essay confronts the uncomfortable fact that a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, which was supposed to inaugurate a liberal era, liberal values (rule of law, open society, free trade, free movement of peoples, mutual tolerance, etc.) are rejected by large portions of the population in the liberal heartland (Stateside and in various bits of Europe). Unlike most commentators, Stanley does not treat the rejectionists as fools or as irrational nor as fundamentally immoral. He recognizes, that the forms of illiberalism that are, as it were, homegrown, are the product of liberal society. Indeed, Liberalism disrupts and undermines many sources of value -- I would just add to his list: a sense of place, community, and social order --, and this loss generates rejection of liberalism.

Stanley, thus, opens up discussion of the central tension within liberalism: the rule of law reduces all kinds of uncertainty and it is morally grounded, in part, in the reasonable expectations this stability generates. (It is also grounded in norms of equality and impartiality.) But these expectations, in turn, are undermined by the permanent flux found in liberal society (due to trade, technological disruption, and eased transportation); liberal society undermines all kinds of expectations. Liberalism is, in fact, especially noxious to expectations that take forms of hierarchy for granted. The problem is, thus, not the "lack of obvious benefit, materially or spiritually," -- for many of the enemies of liberalism benefit materially from it -- but the permanent (and justified) fear of violation of  expectations (about, say, one's place in social hierarchy or one's judgment of other people's worth).

After all, it is not those that do not benefit at all from the status quo that turn to authoritarianism. But rather those that fear further disruptions to their privileges and advantages.  It is pretty clear that on the whole, Trump's supporters were not the poorest or most vulnerable in society, for example, but those that have reasons to fear further change. Liberalism finds it difficult to address such fears -- because to do so it would have to be different than it is -- and resorts to high minded moralism instead. 

Of course, in practice, whatever the merits of liberal ideals, these are regularly compromised by the intervention of politics which advances some interests over others. In practice, of course, the liberal political order favors one interest or another: bailouts, subsidies, affirmative action, hand-outs, tax-breaks, social security, etc. With a few exceptions, every government program favors one group or another. The problem is not that the political process is messy and favors the well organized (and wealthy). Rather, the problem is that the liberal responses to the reality of the wheeling and dealing of ordinary politics tend to sound like especially noxious species of hypocrisy, which is, alas, the ruling sin of modern life. Obamacare is (whatever its merits) complicity in crony capitalism, but to reject it is immoral.* It is, thus, no surprise that (as Stanley notes, starting with Carl Schmitt) critics of liberalism constantly return to examples of liberal hypocrisy alongside liberal high minded rhetoric, which often de-legitimizes opponents ("deplorables").

So, for those that think that crony capitalism and group politics just are the way the world works, and fear further change, authoritarian closure of ordinary politics is (recall) an attractive option. As Stanley notes (and as I remarked during the campaign), constantly pointing out the illiberal features of Trump and his supporters just reinforces the attachment to these illiberal values and the authoritarians that defend them of their supporters.

I want to give a fresh example of how the purported defense of liberal values can back-fire. I will do so by criticizing an essay by somebody I admire greatly, Jacob T. Levy; this essay is popular among my friends and it is apparently published in the spirit of revitalizing liberalism (a theme that runs through my own reflections on these matters). I quote at length before I comment:

Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”

Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them.

But in totalitarian and authoritarian politics, there seems to be something special about the lie, partly because so much of politics is about speech (and especially public speech) in the first place. Based on the evidence of his presidential campaign, I think Donald Trump understands this instinctively, and he relished the power to make his subordinates repeat his clearly outlandish lies in public. Every Sunday he provided fresh absurdities that Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway repeated on the talk shows. They didn’t persuade anyone who were strategically important to persuade; the audience for Meet the Press isn’t low-information, undecided, working-class voters, and the kinds of people who did watch those shows knew the claims were false. But making his surrogates repeat the lies compromised them; that tied them to him. And it degraded them, and made clear where power lay.--Jacob Levy  "Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics" @Niskanencenter.org

By using the phrase 'totalitarian and authoritarian politics,' Levy distracts from the cardinal feature about the facts he presents: the submission to Trump is given willingly without resort to force or even the threat of force. Rather, it is the lure of power and favor that is, as it were, the lever which President-elect Trump exploits here. To criticize Levy here, is not to deny that I agree with much of the the final paragraph. Trump is degrading and compromising his subordinates by letting them repeat the outlandish and absurd. This binds them to him, makes them complicit in his future rule, and exhibits his would-be-powers for friends and foes alike. Presumably, Trump thinks doing so will allow him to rule with their loyalty and obedience and, thus, sets up the conditions for would-be-totalitarian-and-authoritarian politics, if he so wishes.

By invoking outrage over the lie, Levy ignores the fact that when others degrade and subordinate themselves willingly to a bully the proper response to their predicament is something akin to pity or concern. To do so would be to recognize in their servility the roots of our shared humanity. To put my polemical point tersely: a liberalism worth reviving is not, in the first instance, founded on truth (recall), but, primarily, on mutual recognition of shared humanity, even vulnerability which is the starting point for an alternative vision of society.

Levy closes his piece with the claim that "insisting on the difference between truth and lies is itself a part of the defense of freedom." This may well be so under totalitarianism--with him, I trust the moral compass of Orwell, Havel and Arendt. (Recall also my piece on Koyré written before Trump's victory.) But it is worth reminding ourselves, before we are swept away altogether, that we are not yet under totalitarian rule and that the defense of freedom requires a different rhetoric.

For, in a a liberal society, you have every right to utter and believe falsehoods except in the court of law (and in universities). (Some other falsehoods are also prohibited: e.g. slander, etc.) To say this is not to advocate public lying or to advocate deception. It is not to condone other people's lies (but it is to suggest that doubling down on fact-checking is a mistake). Rather, it is to recognize one of the essential differences between a totalitarian and free society: a free society does not require, does not even aspire to the rule of truth. If anything, if truth could rule then politics would not be necessary,+ which is precisely the dangerous fantasy peddled by some totalitarians.

 

 

 

Mind the Gap! (On the alarming neglect of ordinary language philosophy)

While it has been fashionable for several decades to ignore Sartre's work... .--Alan Schrift in this review.

This 'conceptual cartographical' approach (a description I prefer to 'ordinary language') has all but disappeared in Europe. More alarming, as Laugier points out, it was hardly ever visible in America.--Julia Tanney in this review.

These two NDPR reviews both lament gaps. Schrift's lament criticizes the book under review and a more general philosophical attitude. I am inclined to think that if Sartre's work is really being ignored for several decades now, we should stop calling it a 'fashion' and more a 'firm trend.' That, of course, is a matter of taste on one's preferred time-scale--cf. the famous joke by Zhou Enlai about the French Revolution, which, it turns out, was not a joke but a misunderstanding. Such trends can start as fashionable jokes, of course. The naturalist in me wondered, however, has Sartre really become passé? Judging by google Ngrams, Schrift's lament is premature: Sartre mentions in scholarship are in extremely genteel decline. What has happened, is that he has been overtaken by other luminaries, including parvenus like Derrida and Foucault (see this Ngram) A decline in relative status can feel like a reversal in fashion.

Tanney's review is in agreement with the book reviewed. It is possible that 'ordinary language' was not very popular Stateside; having said that I am pretty sure that Austin's Sense and Sensibilia was taught in my undergraduate epistemology class taught by Jody Azzouni (early 1990s) at the top-ranked MA program, and when I arrived at The University of Chicago (mid 1990s) one could take multiple graduate courses taught by folk sympathetic to Wittgenstein or Austin's American followers (e.g., Cavell). Of course, as regular readers know, I later realized that my education also facilitated a certain ignorance in some of the main trends in recent professional philosophy.  But as it turns out, bookish interest in Wittgenstein is growing (undoubtedly facilitated by the re-presentation by Kripke and the uptake of Wittgenstein in other Humanities disciplines). This even turns out to be true of J.L. Austin (at very low levels) and, shockingly, ordinary language philosophy. Obviously NGrams are coarse instruments and, for all I know, they are lagging indicators tracking -- to use Schrift's technical term -- past fashion.

Leaving aside data, let me know get to to the reason for writing this post which is my attempt to work out why it is thought 'alarming' that a 'conceptual cartographical' approach did not make the American headlines (and, thereby, become 'visible')? This is not quite clear from the review. That there are "neglected insights" lodged in a tradition is not uncommon; time and attention are scarce (even in the land of opportunity), after all. Only if one is a true believer in the efficient markets in ideas will all insights worth having been assimilated. (I hasten to add that at that moment one may as well abolish the history of philosophy as a professional philosophical enterprise!) But perhaps it is a professional deformation (I have been working in the Weberian state for a while now), I tend to see in neglected insights opportunities (to write a paper, a blog post, to propose a grant project, etc.). Of course, it would be alarming if in virtue of a neglected insight humanity were suffering (needlessly). It may even thought -- switching from the world-historical to the parochial -- to be alarming if philosophical culture were debased in virtue of the systematic neglect of certain philosophical options. There is a hint of this latter thought in the sense that ordinary language philosophy somehow has missed out on its "rightful place" in the "current debate." That is, it ought to be fashionable, but it is not.

In reading and re-reading the review I came to discern what may be the cause of "alarm." This, it turns out, is not the deflationary anti-Platonizing account of meaning (one I happen to share) that is the focus of the start of the review, but a particular conception of language (discussed at the end of  the review). I quote Tanney's review:

[Language] derives, as Austin maintains, from 'the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. (Austin, Philosophical Papers; cited in Laugier, 66).'

 

Language should be construed, not as a body of statements or words, but as the [inherited--ES] place of agreement on what we should say when. [Emphasis in original--ES]

This conception of language has a history (in the prudent Scottish Enlightenment) with a certain political resonance.  The conception of language is opposed to seeing language as an immediate gift from the divine as much as it is opposed to the constructivist idea that language can be made (say, by stipulation). It is one of the core ideas behind the political tradition that embraces good judgment ("acumen") of cautious wisdom against mystical insight or revolutionary fervor as much as the technocratic, scientistic expert that merely measures. It's the common law tradition against the Napoleonic code (not to mention people's tribunals). In other words, it's the philosophy of language that is proper to (slow) spontaneous order or natural law, embraced with a hungry ardor by Viennese exiles (not just Wittgenstein, but also Hayek and, I think, Popper).* (Despite Austin's manly talk of 'men' it presumably makes space for women's experience, too.)

Here, language is understood as a set of agreed norms that we submit to because it is inherited.  It turns out, then, that so understood ordinary language philosophy shares with much of twentieth century philosophy an obsession with consensus. But rather than trusting the experts, the consensus is inherited in a way that is taken to be immune from political revolt not the least because it is normative and thus immune to empirical challenge. A dictator or a revolutionary tribunal can try to control language, but it would be self-defeating to aim at abolishing it! (Who would praise the new order if we were condemned to silence?)

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this model of language is true. Is it alarming that it is (relatively) neglected? Do Americans, especially, or their philosophers, need to recover this understanding of language, which, we are told helps us see that language is 'part of experience' and that 'the speaking of a language is part of an activity or a form of life'?

The alarmist language is not in accord with the doctrine proposed. Even if the doctrine were entirely forgotten, if it is true then it is the case that language keeps on being the repository of experience and acumen of many generations, it keeps on providing the norms that constitute activities even forms of life. Thus understood, language will take care of itself, unattended by any philosophy, providing the normative ground of (a part of) lived experience. That is to say, the talk of 'alarm' betrays an anxiety not in accord with the doctrine espoused, but rather, I conjecture, with a despair that a certain form of belonging, a permanent agreement (and the quiet stewardship required of it), is not found among the cacophony exhibited today. 

Elster's Criticism of Foucault (and Conceptual art)

It is puzzling and thought-provoking that certain paradoxical instruction appear both on the road to wisdom and as the agency of madness.--Elster, Sour Grapes (66)

Conceptual art may impress as a freak of nature can, or a woman preaching according to Dr. Johnson.--Elster, Sour Grapes (82)

There are some vocal philosophy professors that express contempt for English literature professors (hereafter: ELPs). I have never understood this contempt (and not just because my interest in philosophy was nurtured by a wonderful Miltonist--Michael Fixler [recall]).  Perhaps it's envy because ELPs get to read much better prose on an average work-day. More likely it's professional philosophers's abhorrence of multiplicity of meaning (which we understand as equivocation) (PPAMOM) which makes too many of us recoil from the ELPs's craft.  Anyway, I am always astounded by ELPs's ability to discern meaningful structural features in a text, and especially the telling trope or set of metaphors that help disclose a text's significance or conceptual commitments. One good trick that I apply in my own scholarship I learned from ELPs: it is important to pay attention to the minor seeming discordant words/concepts/paragraphs/chapters that do not seem necessary to the main argument in a text. This is especially useful in influential works that have already accumulated commentary/scholarship. (It's also a survival trick: all the low-hanging scholarly fruit tends to picked already.)

Elster's (1983) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality is deservedly a recent classic.* (As I write this it has over 2000 citations.) It is very much a cold-war product and it brilliantly exploits evidence of behavior from differing institutional contexts (culturally and temporally apart) : Imperial Rome (by way of Veyne's Le Pain et le Cirque) and Soviet Russia (by way of Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, which I have ordered). Its main claim is that "preferences underlying a choice may be shaped by the [given] constraints" (vii). The book elegantly weaves conceptual analysis, decision theory, and political theory; it subtly draws on literature, social psychology, and history in ways that are far too uncommon within analytical philosophy. At its best it reminds me of its great historical contemporary, Dennett's Elbow Room (recall). It also represents an important episode in the history of philosophical Marxism: Elster embraces "methodological individualism" in order to combat the "stagnant state" of "Marxist theory." (142) Elster also non-subtly rejects the marriage of Marxism and Freudianism that was (is?) common. In fact, its rejection of Freudian unconscious as a "theoretical entity" ("a highly desirable goal" (152)) is so dogmatic that Elster ties himself in knots over the phenomenon of self-deception, which he takes to be incoherent (despite "massive clinical, fictional and everyday experience attesting to the reality of the phenomenon." (149)) This aim also helps him produce some of his best insights on wishful thinking.

The discordant section in Sour Grapes is Elster's long paragraph on art with its jeremiad against conceptual art. Now in part because of PPAMOM and a moralizing impulse, most philosophers look foolish when we talk about art or novels. Elster, by contrast, makes very good use of novels to illustrate many of his best points. Yet, as the second epigraph to this post reveals, when it comes to conceptual art Elster recycles, in passing, Johnson's misogyny--the most embarrassing moment in the book.+ Elster's theory of artistic creation "involves maximazation under constraints, and that good works of art are local maxima of whatever it is that artists are maximizing." (78) For, an artist's activity "can be understood only on the assumption that there is something which they are trying to maximize, by 'getting it right' (78; emphasis added--ES). Perhaps this is true of Leibniz's Divine Artist (and on some readings Goethe), but it is peculiar understanding of much other art (although I grant that it gives Elster a means toward explaining the nature of a 'minor masterpiece' (81)). Given his theory it is no surprise that Elster has no conceptual room for conceptual art.

Elster's official theory of rejecting conceptual art is, however, instructive: it "certainly violates the principle that the aesthetic value of the work of art should not depend on the time at which is offered to the public." (82; emphasis added) This is a manifestly silly claim because it cannot even begin to do justice to the difference in aesthetic value between an original (prior in time) and a copy (subsequently),--a difference which even the most metaphysically robust account of aesthetic value ought to embrace. As Hume notes, knowledge of the context of production and the intended ways of experiencing a work of art, contributes to aesthetic appreciation and is a condition for the possibility of aesthetic value (Of the Standard Taste).

What can account for the oddity of Elster's position? The problem is that his account of aesthetic value is (subtly) modelled on a certain semantics (which is appropriate for eternal nature of truth in, say, mathematics). And it turns out that commitments similar to this semantics operate in the background in his very polemical remarks of Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Elster (pp. 104ff) dislikes a number of things about Foucault's approach: first, he cannot stand Foucault's rhetoric and "eloquence" (including the use of rhetorical questions, the cascade of verbs, etc.); second he dislikes (without explanation) privileging the question Cui bono? (that is "to whose benefit?"--It is ironic to see a Marxist reject such privilege.) More important, he treats Foucault as offering a consequence-explanation. In fact, Elster treats Foucault (and Bourdieu) as offering especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent. Now, indeed, on a certain conception of social science such oversights may well be devestating. (To be sure, Elster refuses even to interpret Foucault more charitably as sketching the constraints/outlines of an explanation that can subsequent guide a seach for mechanism (etc.) by lesser, worker-bee social scientists. In fact, Foucault offers many how-possible mechanisms throughout his book, so Elster is cherry-picking his evidence.)  

But even Elster explicitly notes that in the passage he focuses on, Foucault does not state a consequence-explanation (or says he wishes to offer one). It is more sensible (and charitable) to interpret Foucault as primarily offering an analysis of the (possible) meaning of certain (historically contingent, but) enduring social phenomena in terms of their functions and benefits (that is also compatible with the explanation-sketch that can guide further research). After all, one key (transcendental) claim that Foucault makes about punishment (prison, etc.) is that it is taxonomic--it makes a certain form of knowledge possible. 

Now, while Elster is not really attentive to the transcendental (in the Kantian sense) dimension of Foucault, he, too, recognizes that Foucault is interested in meaning (106).  Yet, because the "search for meaning" (on Elster's account) "dispenses with mechanisms" it "fails dishonourably." Now, it's true that if Foucault were exclusively in the business of offering causal explanations then indeed the absence of mechanism would be pretty serious charge. But, Elster rejects the search for meaning (both in terms of finding of creating meaning); he thinks it is a moral and intellectual fallacy (101ff). It is sort of clear why Elster thinks that a lack of interest in a mechanism is an intellectual fallacy. Why he thinks it is a moral fallacy is less obvious, although he seems to think it (and the embrace of social by-products more generally) instantiates a "misplaced or self-defeating form of instrumental rationality. It is the fallacy of striving, seeking and searching for the things that recede before the hand that reaches out for them. In many cases it takes the form of trying to get something for nothing." (107)** 

In fact, while Elster has quite a bit to say about the moral problems with by-products, we are never really told what's wrong with either the search for meaning as such (so without the aim of offering explanation) or viewing social analysis as an expression or the creation of meaning. That is, if we understand Foucault as understanding himself as part of the world he describes and, in fact, aiming to destabilize it, in part, with the narratives he offers there is nothing mysterious about what's going on. Elster repeatedly insists not just that Foucault's practice and the search for meaning is immoral but also that is dangerous (44). But unless one embraces a very strong status quo bias or has very high risk aversion, that immorality and danger can only be established if we are willing to evaluate Foucault's aims and means on their (foreseeable, consequentialist?) merits (case by case, as it were). 

That is to say, if one is in the grip of a certain positivist understanding of social science and a kind of verificationist theory of meaning, a search for and the creation of meaning is very misguided. It is also misguided if one has a semantics in which social facts are univocal truthmakers of (social) meaning simply waiting out there to be discovered. But if we overcome PPAMOM we can learn from ELPs that often social meaning is, in part, constituted and reconstituted by our utterances and other practices.

That is to say, if we want to understand, say, ideology (including our own) -- one of Elster's main aims, and presumably one of the sources of his book's popularity --, we can't just rely on the reality/fiction distinction alongside a set of psychological mechanisms, we also have to make ourselves feel (by way of sympathetic imagination) the significance of a certain set of commitments and, while this should not be opposed to truth it is, in a way, orthogonal to truth.++ After all, even true statements of present social reality can be instances of ideology ((recall) because of status quo bias or unwillingness to question existing background institutions and norms). 

On Being Silent on Gaza

[A]s meaningless as asking which points in Ohio are starting points.--Quine "Two Dogmas" (1961).

I’m what you get when you cross Quine with Ryle and add some cognitive science.--Daniel C. Dennett.

I am writing in order to disrupt any possibility that the horrible conflation of Zionism and Judaism become further entrenched this week. And I am writing to draw attention to the uncontroversial fact that whatever the merits and legitimacy of the State of Israel and its military actions may be, it does not speak or act in the name of the Jewish religion or in the name of the Jewish people...

Today is the eve of the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the greatest calamity in the history of Judaism and the beginning of our long and bitter exile. The holy rabbis of the century that saw the rise of Israeli nationalism as a response to this exile have taught me that I will sanctify God's name if I declare publicly the Jewish belief that the Zionist mission is a struggle against God's very will.--Prof. Curtis Franks, "An open letter on Israel and Gaza from Notre Dame philosopher Curtis Franks," Leiter reports.

The fabric of sentences that constitute the "lore" of Quine's fathers "is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention." Quine could not locate "quite black threads in it, or any white ones." Sometimes we do not have Quine's or Dennett's luxury in picking our (surrogate) fathers;+ in the lore of my family there wear dark, black hats tracing back matrimonially (and with a few genealogical gaps) to the Ropschitzer Rebbe. Given the possible puns on Ropschitz, I did not share this with my school friends; we can't all be a Prinz or a Gendler.* Of course, I could spin a story about myself as, say, Dennett's student (which is true), but it wouldn't fit with the work I do, so I have tried out others.

In professional philosophy, we tend to be separated by two degrees or less, but I have to admit I was unfamiliar with Curtis Franks. His website helpfully informs me that he "is the direct patrilineal descendent of Isaac Franks (b. 1772 in the Royal Province of South Carolina)." Not quite the Mayflower, or Newport, but certainly yiches, too. Franks is a logician, I learn, so undoubtedly careful with words. I was made curious because in his open letter, he cites a pacifist passage of the Chofetz Chaim al Hatorah approvingly with its author called "saintly."** It's been a while since I have heard "the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem" described as the "greatest calamity in the history of Judaism." (That's compatible, of course, with greater calamities --either the expulsion from Iberia or (in the one awkward locution of Franks's letter) "the most famous genocide attempt in all of hisstory" -- befalling Jews qua Jews.)

Of course, not in my lifetime would I have ever imagined to see the most important professional philosophy blog (and Brian Leiter is not exactly known as a friend of religion) give prominent space to ideas that I associate with Satmar and other ("Hungarian") Hasidic Anti-Zionists to whom I was sometimes introduced by my (non Hungarian/non-Satmar) grandparents during my childhood visits to Forest Hills. (To be clear Franks's Jewish authorities are neither necessarily Satmar or Hungarian.)

Yesterday Ingrid Robeyns asked me why I keep quiet about Gaza (etc.). She knows that recently I defended (in Dutch) the need for philosophy in the public sphere (while acknowledging that such philosophy is often a very different genre from what we professionals would ordinarily take seriously). Even so, because philosophers rarely have a comparative advantage when discussing newsy events, and we are not trained pundits (although some practice punditry),++ I think restraint on newsy events is advisable. Moreover, training in professional ethics, political philosophy, and meta-ethics does not, I fear, involve training in good moral-political judgment (and there is considerable evidence -- for those that wish to see it -- that becoming a professional philosopher corrupts one's moral reflexes as Ruth Chang has eloquently taught us and Eric Schwitzgebel documented.) The great danger of philosophical skill -- one not emphasized enough in our training -- is that when coupled with public utterances it becomes no better than extremely refined, lawyerly technique in the service of any end (but without the legal framework/rules), that is, propaganda, even war-time propaganda.

On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.

On Fortune

For it is our Stoic fashion to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great words, although, heaven knows, they are true. [Omittamus haec magna verba, sed, di boni, vera]--Seneca, Letter 13.

Seneca signals that he is capable of switching between two linguistic registers. The truth (Stoa) with great words.  And another, more loquacious -- it's a relatively long letter at 993 words -- milder register, which is proper for dealing with psychic turmoil [torquent]. The milder form is proper for the council that Seneca dispenses to his (somewhat recalcitrant) pupil. But Seneca does not say if he will always signal the switch between the two registers.

Now, Seneca does not explain the epistemic status of the un-great register. It's clearly a more worthy register than the axiological framework that governs the values established in the market,  (recall Letter 1; Letter 2) and politics (letter 3), that is, uncertain popular opinion. But the un-great register is fit to describe the consequences, which arise "from uncertainty...delivered over to guesswork and the irresponsible license of a frightened mind," and to offer many practical remedies against it, including the outlines of a rational decision theory in the face of great epistemic uncertainty.  But, oddly enough, Seneca does not claim that the un-great register with its practical advice is itself true or the truth.