Collected Papers: Volume 14 Studies in Epistemology 9783110332360, 9783110332292

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Nicholas Rescher Studies in Epistemology

NICHOLAS RESCHER COLLECTED PAPERS Volume XIV

Nicholas Rescher

Studies in Epistemology

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected] United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected]

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2006 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 10: 3-938793-23-6 ISBN 13: 978-3-938793-23-7 2006 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag

Studies in Epistemology Contents Preface Chapter 1: THE LIMITS OF COGNITIVE RELATIVISM

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Chapter 2: CONCEPTS AND CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES

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Chapter 3: PICTURE EPISTEMOLOGY

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Chapter 4: SPECIFICITY PRIORITIZATION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE PARTICULAR

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Chapter 5: ON THE WAYS AND VAGARIES OF FICTION

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Chapter 6: PRESUMPTION AND THE JUDGMENT OF ELITES

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Chapter 7: OVERSIMPLIFICATION

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Chapter 8: ON LEARNED IGNORANCE

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Chapter 9: COPING WITH COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS

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Chapter 10: ON IGNORANCE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE

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Index of Names

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PREFACE

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ver the past forty years I have carried on a series of investigations on epistemology which have been issued in some dozen books ranging from Hypothetical Reasoning (1964) to Epistemetrics (2006)—as well as numerous articles on particular issues and problems. Ten of these are gathered together in the present volume, and combine to provide a panoramic overview of the methods and results of my work in the field. I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her able help in putting this material into publishable form.

Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA August 2006

Chapter 1 THE LIMITS OF COGNITIVE RELATIVISM 1. COGNITIVE RELATIVISM

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elativism is the doctrine that people make their judgments and evaluations by standards and criteria that lack any rationally cogent justification because their standing and status lies solely and wholly in their acceptance by people. As the relativist sees it the norms of different schools of thought differ, and those different norms are entirely on a par with one another, being merely and wholly a matter of acknowledgment by the group. This relativistic position has two prime components: 1. Basis Diversity. Judgments of the sort at issue—be it the true, the good, the right, etc—are always made relative to a potentially variable basis: a norm, standard, criterion, or evaluative perspective regarding acceptability that change from one group to another. 2. Basis Egalitarianism. Any and every basis of normative appraisal— any and every such standard of assessment—is intrinsically as good (valid, appropriate) as any other. Relativism thus understood does not deny that those who have a particular commitment (who belong to a particular school or tendency of thought) do indeed have a standard of judgment of some sort. But it insists that this standard is nothing further than just another contingent characteristic of the cognitive position of that particular group. Such normative parochialism aside, there is no larger, group-transcending “position of impersonal rationality” on whose basis one particular standard of assertability could reasonably and appropriately be defended as inherently superior to any other. The cognitive relativist insists, in particular, that no actual or possible group of inquirers whatsoever is in a privileged epistemic position. Any single group’s decisions in this regard are final. There is no

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group-independent higher court of appeal, no actually cogent basis of conviction that has any real claim to validity. Over the last century, indifferentist relativism has gathered strength from various modern intellectual ventures. As the sciences of man developed in the 19th Century—especially in historical and sociological studies—the idea increasingly gained acceptance that every culture and every era has its own characteristic fabric of thought and belief, each appropriate to and cogent for its own particular context. Historicist thinkers from Wilhelm Dilthey onwards have lent the aid and comfort of their authority to cultural relativism. And the aftermath of Darwinian biology reinforced this tendency of thought in giving currency to the idea that our human view of reality is formatively dependent upon our characteristically human cognitive endowments—as opposed to those of the possible sorts of intelligent creatures. Not only are the data about the world that we can acquire something that comes to us by courtesy of the biological endowment of our senses, but the inferences we can draw from those data will be analogously dependent on the biological endowment of our minds. Various turn-of-the-century philosophers of otherwise very diverse doctrinal orientations—ranging from Nietzche and Vaihinger to Bergson and Samuel Alexander—all drew heavily on Darwinian inspirations to support a relativist perspectivism of one sort or another. Under such inspiration, William James wrote: Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these [actual ones] of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those we actually use.1

Different cultures and different intellectual traditions, to say nothing of different sorts of creatures, will, so it is contended, describe and explain their experience—their world as they conceive it—in terms of concepts and categories of understanding substantially different from ours are in principle every bit as good. On this basis, naturalistically inclined thinkers like William James and F. S. C. Schiller were also impelled to the support relativism. In this way, various areas of modern science and learning have provided aid and comfort for the partisans of cognitive relativism.

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2. A FOOTHOLD OF ONE’S OWN: THE PRIMACY OF OUR OWN STANDARDS OF RATIONALITY Despite its fashionable pervasiveness, however, cognitive relativism has serious and indeed gravely debilitating defects. And in the main, these inhere in its commitment to a basis egalitarianism, which, while daring and exciting—but also absurd. For, at this point we must turn relativism against itself by asking: “Indifferent to whom?” Certainly not to us! For, we have in place our own basis of rational judgment, and it speaks loud and clear on its own behalf. Nor yet by parity of reasoning is ours equally acceptable to them. Perhaps from the point of view of the universe all experiential perspectives are of equivalent merit; and perhaps they are equal before the World Spirit—or even God. But we ourselves cannot assume the prerogative of these mighty potencies. We humans can no more contemplate information with our minds without having a perspectival stance than we can contemplate material objects with our bodily eyes without having a perspectival stance. But, of course, we ourselves do in fact occupy a particular position, with particular kinds of concerns and particular practical and intellectual resources for dealing with them. For us, there indeed is, of course, a particular scheme that we can use in making such appraisals and adjudications, namely, our own—the one we actually accept. (Were we to trade it in for another, then of course that other one would automatically become ours.) The crucial question, however, is not “Are there indeed different norms and standards of rationality?”, for the answer here is an immediate and emphatic “yes”. Just as autres temps, autres moeurs, so also, other cultures, other standards. Rather, the salient question is: “Are we well advised—perhaps even rationally obligated—to see all those various alternative norms and standards as equally appropriate, equally correct?” Must we adopt a Principle of Basis Egalitarianism: “All of the various standards of judgment have equivalent justifications. Ours is on an equal footing with theirs in point of acceptability. It is a matter of indifference which basis we adopt—each one is every bit as good (or poor) as the next?” In approving positions we have, of course, no alternative to doing so from the perspective of our cognitive posture—our own cognitive position and point of view. (It wouldn’t be our point of view if we didn’t use it as such.) We cannot cogently maintain a posture of indifference. Each thinker, each school, is bound to take a strongly negative stand toward its

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competitors: belittling their concerns, deploring their standards, downgrading their ideals, disliking their presuppositions, scorning their contentions, and so on. Consider the thesis: Our justification for thinking what we think is exactly on a par with their justification for thinking what they think. And so we are not entitled to deem our position superior to theirs.

Despite its plausible appearance, this contention encounters deep difficulties. For, one must press the question: From just what “angle of consideration” is it that characterizations of “is exactly on a level with” are going to be made? Not from ours surely—for this, after all, is ours precisely because we deem it superior. And by parity of reasoning not from theirs either. (From God’s? Well … perhaps. But he of course is not a party to the discussion.) Cognitive or evaluative perspectives do not come to us ex nihilo. From the rational point of view such perspectives themselves require validation. And this process—with its focus on perspectival appropriateness—is itself something that is itself perspective presupposing. For, of course, we cannot assess the adequacy of a perspective in a vacuum, it must itself be supported from the position of a perspective of some sort. But in this world we are never totally bereft of such a basis: in the order of thought as in the world’s physical order we always have a position of some sort. By the time one gets to the point of being able to think at all, there is always a background of available experience against which to form one’s ideas. And just there is where one has to start. It is precisely because a certain position is appropriate from where we stand that makes this particular position of ours appropriate for us. The salient point is that we are entitled—indeed, rationally constrained—to see our own criteriological basis of rational judgment as rationally superior to the available alternatives. If we did not take this stance—if we did not deem our cognitive posture effectively optimal— then we could not sensibly see ourselves as rationally justified in adopting it. It would, ipso facto, fail to be our real position—contrary to hypothesis. 3. ALTERNATIVE MODES OF RATIONALITY? Émile Durkheim was no doubt right in insisting that “all that constitutes reason, its principles and categories, is made (by particular societies oper4

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ating) in the course of history.”2 But the fact that everyone’s standards and criteria of rational cognition are historically and culturally conditioned— our own of course included—certainly does not preclude their binding stringency for those to whom they appertain, ourselves emphatically included. In conducting our cognitive, practical, and evaluative affairs in this world—as in conducting our movements within it—we have no choice but to go on from where we are. It is the very fact that we take it to be binding on us that makes an accepted standard our standard. If we are rational, then our standards and criteria of rationality are ours precisely because we deem them to be (not necessarily the best possible, but at any rate) the best available to us. But are the beliefs of primitive, pre-scientific cultures indeed less rational than ours? A resounding negative was maintained in Peter Winch’s widely cited article on “Understanding a Primitive Society”,3 which maintains vividly that Azande beliefs about witchcraft and oracles cannot be rejected as rationally inappropriate despite their clear violation of the evidential canons of modern Western scientific culture. Winch maintains that the Azande can quite “rationally” see those occult beliefs to be justifiable in the own (deviant) way. But just here lies the problem. The answer you get depends on the question you ask. If we ask “Do they hold their beliefs rationally?” we, of course, mean “rationally on our understanding of the matter”. And the answer here is clearly “No”, because by hypothesis this sort of rationality does not figure in their thinking at all. The fact that they deem their beliefs somehow “justified” by some considerations or other is going to cut no ice in our deliberations. The issues that arise at this juncture go back to the quarrel between Evans-Pritchard and Lévy-Bruhl. In his book on Primitive Mentality,4 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl maintained that primitive people have a “pre-logical mentality”. Against this view, E. E. Evans-Pritchard5 argued that primitive people were perfectly “logical” all right, but simply used a logic different from ours. When, for example, the Nuer maintain that swamp light is identical with spirit, but deny that spirit is identical with swamp light, they are not being illogical, but simply have in view a logic of “identity” different from that of the identity claims in vogue in Western cultures. The obvious trouble with this sort of thing is that nothing apart from bafflement and confusion can result from translating Nuer talk into our identity language if indeed it is the case that what is at issue in their thought and discourse nowise answers to our identity conception. Instead of translating the claim at issue as “Swamp light is identical with Spirit” and then going on to explain

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that “is identical with” does not really mean what it says because the ground rules that govern this idea are not applicable, an anthropologist would do well to paraphrase (if need be) the claim at issue in such a way as to explain what is actually going on. The fact that the Nuer have different (and to us strange-seeming) beliefs about “spirits” no more means that they have a logic different from ours than the fact that they eat different (and to us strange-seeming) foods means that they have a digestive chemistry different from ours.6 Anthropologists do sometimes say that a certain society has a conception of rationality that is different from ours. But that is literally nonsense. Those others can no more have a conception of rationality that addresses an object different form ours, than they can have a conception of iron that addresses an object different from ours, or a conception of elephants that addresses objects different from ours. If they are to conceive of those particular things at all, then their conception must substantially accord with ours. Iron objects are by definition what we take them to be: “elephant” is our word and elephant our conception. If you are not talking about that, then you are not talking about elephants at all. You have simply “changed the subject”, and exited from the domain of the discussion. Similarly, if their conception is not close to a conception of what we call rationality, then it just is not a conception of rationality—it does not address the topic that we are discussing when we put the theme of rationality on the agenda. The issues at stake in our deliberations have to be the issues as we construe them. Of course, they may think that what we call pencils are chopsticks and use them as such. Or they may think books to be doorstops and use them as such. But, that does not mean that they conceive pencils or books differently from us, or that they have a different conception of pencils and books. “They take pencils to be something we do not (namely chopsticks),” is fine as a way of talking. But “They believe pencils to be chopsticks” is nonsense unless it is glossed as: “They believe these sorts of things called ‘pencils’ (in the language we use when speaking thereof) to be chopsticks.” And when this happens, then they do not conceive of pencils differently from ourselves, they just do not conceive of pencils at all. They simply do not have the (one and only) conception of pencils at all— namely, ours. In such cases, if they do not have our concept, then they just do not have the concept. And the story is exactly the same with rationality. There is no difficulty with the idea that “They implement and apply the conception of rationality

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differently from ourselves.” After all, we implement and apply the idea of a medication very differently from the ancient Greeks, using medications they never dreamt of. But the matter stands differently with the conception of a medication. This remains what it always has been: “a substance used as a remedy for an ailment.” When one ceases to operate with that conception, then (ex hypothesi) one is no longer dealing with medications at all. The discussion has moved on to other topics. To have “a different conception” of pencils or elephants or rational actions is simply not to have that conception at all. If they do not have our conception of scissors, they do not have a conception of scissors, full stop. For, when we ask about their dealings with scissors it is our own conception that defines the terms of reference. If we recognize agents as rational at all, then we can make sense of what they do! This is not because we are so talented and versatile, nor yet because the slogan “rationality is universal” gets it right. It is just because we could not say that they are rational (would not characterize the phenomena in this particular way) if we could not make good rational sense of what they do in the terms of reference at issue in our staking this claim. So, it is literally nonsense to say “The X’s have a different conception of rationality from the one we have.” For, if they do not have ours, they do not have any. It is, after all, rationality as we conceive of it that is at issue in this discussion of ours. Whatever analogue or functional equivalent there may be with which they are working, it just is not something that we, in our language, can call “a conception of rationality”. 4. THE PRIMACY OF OUR OWN POSITION The pivotal fact lies in a “questioner’s prerogative”. Since the question “What is their mode of rationality?” is ours, so is the “rationality” that is at stake here. Thus, on the crucial issues—”What is rationality all about?”, “What sorts of considerations characterize the rationality at issue?”, “What is appropriately at stake?”—it is our own position that is determinative. When the questions are ours, the concepts that figure in them are ours as well. At this stage of establishing the constitutive ground rules of appropriateness for rationality, it is our own position that is decisive. Consider the contention: Surely there are no historically and culturally invariant principles of rationality. People’s (altogether plausible) views about what is rational are bound to change with changes in place, time and circumstance.

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Yes and no. Of course, different people in different places and times conduct their “rational” affairs quite differently. But, at the level of basics, of first fundamentals, there is bound to be a uniformity. For, what all modes of “rationality” have in common is precisely this—that they all qualify as “modes of rationality” under our conception of the matter [the one at issue with the claims being discussed]. At this level of deliberation, “questioner’s prerogative” prevails, and our own conception of the matter becomes determinative. It is helpful to contemplate some analogies. There are many sorts of blades for knives. But, the fundamental principle that knives have blades at all does not depend on how people choose to make knives but on our conception of what a “knife” is. If the given objects, whatever they might be, do not have blades then they are not knives. It would, clearly, be the height of folly to go about in another culture asking people “Must knives have blades?” The answer is a foregone conclusion. A negative response would not counter-indicate the thesis at issue, but would simply betoken a failure to comprehend. And so, in discussions about “alternative modes of rationality” we do indeed have a “higher standpoint” available to us—namely our own. And this is rationally justified by the consideration that no real alternative is open to us—we have to go on from where we are. Accordingly, while one must recognize the reality of alternative cognitive methodologies, one certainly need not see them as equally valid with one’s own. “You have your standards and I have mine. There are alternatives.” But this fact leaves me unaffected. For, I myself have no real choice about it: I must judge matters by my own lights. (Even if I turn to you as a consultant, I must ultimately appraise the acceptability of your recommendations on my own terms.) Paradoxically, it is precisely the inevitable relativization of our questions and concerns and puzzlements to our terms of reference that makes those particular terms of reference absolute in our own discussions. Being framed in our terminology, it is our terminology, that is decisive for the questions that we raise and the inquiries that we conduct. If we ask if X is being rational in believing (or doing or evaluating) a certain thing, then the issue is clearly one of its being rational on the basis of the conception of rationality as we understand it. The governing absoluteness of our conception inheres in “questioner’s prerogative”—in the fact that the questions and issues we address in our deliberations about rationality are in fact our own and that, since the questions are ours, it is our conceptions that are determinative for what is at issue. In this regard, our commitment to our own

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cognitive position is (or should be) unalloyed. We ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so on the basis of the cognitive values we ourselves endorse. 5. DISCURSIVE EGOCENTRISM If we are going to be rational we must take—and have no choice but to take—the stance that our own standards (of truth, value, and choice) are the appropriate ones. Be it in employing or in evaluating them, we ourselves must see our own standards as definitive because just exactly this is what it is for them to be our own standards—their being our standards consists in our seeing them in this light. To say that we are not entitled to view our standards as definitive would be tantamount to our having no standards at all. And of course, someone who denies us this right—who says that we are not entitled to adopt those standards of ours—does no more than insist that it is by his standards (who else’s) inappropriate for us to have these standards, and thus is simply pitting his standards against ours. We have to see our standards in an absolutistic light—as the uniquely right appropriately valid ones—because exactly this is what is at issue in their being our standards of authentic truth, value or whatever. To insist that we should view them with indifference is to deny us the prospects of having any standards at all. Commitment at this level is simply unavoidable. Our cognitive or evaluative perspective would not be our perspective did we not deem it rationally superior to others. After all, we ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so in the light of the cognitive values we ourselves endorse. Rational is as rational does—it hinges on the norms, standards, and criteria that we ourselves can endorse as rationally appropriate on the basis of a well considered view as to what is appropriate for anybody. Admittedly, the rationally appropriate exploitation of their differential experiences is bound to point rational inquirers into different directions. But one can certainly combine a relativistic pluralism of possible alternatives with a monastically position regarding ideal rationality and a firm and reasoned commitment to the standards intrinsic to one’s own position. The stance espoused throughout the present discussion has quite emphatically been that of a perspectival rationalism (or contextualism). Such a preferentialist position combines a pluralistic acknowledgement of dis-

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tinct alternatives with a recognition that an individual’s choice among them is not rationally indifferent, but rather constrained by the probative indications of the experience that provides both the evidential basis and the evaluative criteria for effecting a rational choice. Anti-relativists often feel obliged to embark on a quixotic quest for “cognitive universals” at the level of substantive beliefs or cognitive procedures that all rational beings share in common. One can in principle contemplate two very different lines of approach here: (1) We find that certain types of creatures have somehow been predesignated as rational (by the World Spirit?), and we then inquire empirically (synthetically) into what it is that all of these predeterminedly rational beings have in common. Or again, (2) We make use of our conception of what rationality is to characterize certain types of creatures as rational, and then ask (analytically) what it is that all of them must have in common simply in virtue of qualifying under this conception of ours. Clearly, the second approach is the only practicable one; it makes no sense to try to implement the first, seeing that we simply have no way to get in touch with the World Spirit. However, when we proceed in this second way, the only commonalities we can get out are the ones that we put in. We must ask what features beings must possess in virtue of qualifying as the sort of creature that we ourselves are prepared to accept as answering to our conception of “rationality”. Clearly, this approach puts that conception of ours at the forefront as the determinative pivot-point. Recognizing that others see some matters differently from ourselves need not daunt us in attachment to our own views. It may give us “second thoughts”—may invite us to rethink—but it has no real bearing on the outcome of such reflections. There is, after all, no conflict of a variant experiential perspective leads others to see the true or the right differently from ourselves. Given that (ex hypothesi) we ourselves do indeed occupy our perspective, we are, of course, bound to see our truth as the truth—but we nevertheless can and do recognize that—and possibly even why—others see the matter in a different light. When social scientists say that alien cultures have a different “rationality” from ourselves what they generally mean (strictly speaking) is (1) that they have different objectives (for example, that we seek to control and change our environment to suit our purposes, while they tend to reconstitute their purposes to suit their environment—to endeavour to come into “harmony” with nature), and/or (2) that they use problem-solving techniques which are different from ours (for example, that we employ empiri-

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cal investigation, evidence, science, while they use divination, omens, or oracles). But, if they pursue different sorts of ends by different sorts of means they, perhaps, have a different thought style and a different intellectual ethos, but not a different rationality. The anthropologists’ talk of different rationality is simply an overly dramatic (and also misleading) way of making a valid point—namely, that they do their intellectual problemsolving business in a way different from ours. But, those different processes of theirs do not mean that they have a different rationality any more then those blow-guns of theirs mean that they have a different rifle. After all, it is our conception of rationality that fixes the “rules of the game” at issue in our discussions and deliberations about these matters. We have to play the rationality game by our ground rules because it is exactly those ground rules that define and determine what “the rationality game” is that is at issue on our deliberations. If we were not playing the game on this basis, it would not be the rationality game that we were engaged in—it would not be rationality that is the subject of our concern. It is the determinative role of our own rationality standards that makes them absolute for us. The situation of rationality is in this regard akin to that of communication. What communication is is the same everywhere and for everyone— inherent in the nature of the concept that is at issue. But, of course, it is only normal and natural that different people in different places and times would transact their communicative business very differently, since what is effective in one context may fail to be so in another. Similarly, what rationality is is one thing (and one uniform thing from person to person within the framework of a meaningful discussion of the topic); but what is rational is something else again—something that is by no means uniform from person to person but variable with situation and circumstance. To be sure, what makes our own conceptions authoritatively determinative in such matters is nothing special about us. Clearly, the Aristotelian cosmos is no longer with us—we are not the center of the world. But we certainly and inevitably are at the center of our thought world. Our inquiries have to be conducted within our frame of reference. We have to pose our questions in line with our ideas, to frame our perplexities by means of our concepts, to consider our issues in our terminology. If we ourselves are to classify someone as rational at all (and who else’s attribution is now at issue?) then we must deem him qualified under the aegis of rationality as we understand it. If we ask about someone “Is she tall?”, we are clearly asking about her height as we conceive it. What—if anything—she herself

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thinks about height is beside the point. And exactly the same situation holds with respect to rationality. A condition of “questioner’s prerogative” prevails—it is the person who puts the issue on the table who sets the frame of reference for determining what that issue involves—it is, after all, his question. With all these questions about rationality, it is of course “rationality” as we ourselves conceive of it that is operative. The topic being ours, it is we who set the terms of reference for what is at issue. At this point “epistemic relativism” comes to a stop. To qualify those of an alien culture as fully rational we must maintain both that they are conducting their inquiries intelligently by their own rules and also that in our sight these rules make good rational sense given their situation. It is ultimately “intelligent comportment” and “making sense” according to our standards of appraisal that makes what is at issue rationally invariant. The fact that we ourselves do (and must) apply our own idea of the matter is what makes for the universal element of rationality. What is universal about language use; namely, that to accredit another culture as rational at all is to accept it as being “rational” in our sense of the term— which may, to be sure, involve deciding whether their actions measure up to their standards. The absoluteness of (ideal) rationality is inherent in the very concept at issue. And so, while rationally appropriate knowledge claims and rationally appropriate actions and even criteria of appropriateness vary across times and cultures, the determinative principles of rationality do not. But, this interesting circumstance does not so much reflect a fact about different times and cultures as the fact that what counts as a “standard of rationality” at all is something that rests with us, because we are the arbiters of the conceptual make-up of an issue within the framework of our discussions of the matter. What sort of thing we ourselves understand by “rationality”, becomes determinative for our own discussions of the matter. And this uniform conception of “what rationality is” suffices to establish and render uniform those top-level, metacriteriological standards by whose means each of us can judge the rationality of another’s resolutions relative to that other’s own basis of appraisal. For, those “deeper principles” of reason are inherent in the very conception of what is at issue. If you “violate” certain sorts of rules then—for merely conceptual reasons—you simply are not engaged in the evidential enterprise at all. The most basic principles of knifehood or evidence or rationality are “culture dependent” only in the sense that some cultures may not pursue a particular project (the cutting project, the evidence project, the rationality project) at all. It is not that

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they can pursue it in a different way—that they have learned how to make knives without blades, to evidentiate without grounds, or make rational deliberations without subscription to the fundamental principles we take as definitive of what rationality is all about. Indifferentist relativism maintains that whenever different bases of judgment, different evidential/evaluative standpoints or perspectives exist, all of these are (at least roughly) equally acceptable, so that there is no rationally cogent basis for choosing one rather than another. It insists that such a choice must, if made at all, be based on extra-rational considerations—taste, custom, fashion, or the like. But rationality simply blocks the path to this destination in its demand that we attune our judgments to the structure of available experiences and its insistence that doing anything else would be irrational. Relativism thus has its limits. The implications of our own conception of rationality, truth, and inquiry are absolutely decisive for our deliberations. We ourselves must be the arbiters of tenability when the discussion at issue is one that we are conducting. And so, we cannot at once maintain our own rational commitments as such while yet ceasing to regard them as results at which all rational inquirers who proceed appropriately also ought to arrive given the same circumstances. In this sort of way, the claims of rationality are inherently universal and, if you will, absolute.7 Relativity ends where charity begins—at home. For, our discourse is governed by our conceptions which are absolute at any rate for us. It is care for the concepts involved which chastens the impetus to relativism with absolutistic constraints. “But is it not possible for someone to go out and get another normative standard?” It certainly is. But on what basis would one do this? You might force me to change standards. Or you can, perhaps, brainwash me. But you cannot rationally persuade me. For, rational persuasion at the normative level has to proceed in terms of norms that I accept and, by the norms I actually have, my present standards are bound to prevail, if I am rational in the first place.8 To be sure, this criteriological egocentrism can and should be tempered by the aforementioned posture of criteriological humility. The wisdom of hindsight and the school of bitter experience teaches us the chastening lesson that our cognitive standards—and the judgments we base on them—are by no means necessarily perfect. All the same, we have no real alternative to using our standards—to doing the very best we can with the means at our disposal. While we have to bear in mind the sobering thought that our

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best just may not be good enough, we are nevertheless bound to see the standards we have adopted in the pursuit of rationality as superior to the available alternatives and to regard ourselves as rationally entitled to do so here and now. (Future improvement “from within” can of course be envisioned.) To refrain from making this commitment is simply to opt out of the project of rationality altogether. In the pursuit of rationality we must, as with any other pursuit, begin from where we are. 6. THE ARBITRAMENT OF EXPERIENCE Of course, people’s experience differs. Different individuals, different eras, different societies all have different bodies of experience. This being so, then whether discordant thinkers are at issue is not their perspectival accommodation of their experience just as valid for them as ours is for us? No doubt, the answer here has to be affirmative. But it is an affirmative followed by an immediate: “What of it?” The fact that someone else in a different position might well proceed differently is simply irrelevant for us. We ourselves have to go on from where we are and proceed on the basis of our perspective. For us, a perspectival egalitarianism makes no sense. Indifferentism is ruled out by the fact that it is experience that is the determinative factor and for us, the experience at issue is our experience and cannot be someone else’s. After all, our normative orientations do not come to us ex nihilo but emerge from experience. And in this world we are never totally bereft of an experiential basis: in the order of thought as in the world’s physical order we always have a position of some sort. By the time one gets to the point of being able to think at all, there is always a background of available experience against which to form one’s ideas. And just there is where one has to start. It is precisely because a certain position is appropriate from where we stand that makes this particular position of ours appropriate for us. The posture that emerges from this way of approaching the issue is thus that of a contextualistic rationalism: Confronted with a pluralistic proliferation of alternative positions you have your acceptance-determination methodology, and I have mine. Yours leads you to endorse P; mine leads me to endorse not-P. Yours is just as valid for you (via your methodology of validating principles) as mine is for me. The situational differences of our contexts simply lead to different rational resolutions. And that’s the end of the matter.

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The fact that the cognitive venture at issue as a whole incorporates other positions does nothing to render a firm and fervent commitment to one’s own position somehow infeasible, let alone improper. “But isn’t such an experiential absolutism just relativism by another name—is it not itself just a relativism of a particular sort—an experiential relativism?” The answer lies in the consideration that whatever relativity there may be is a relativization to evidence, so that relativism’s characteristic element of indifference is lacking. (It is just this, after all, that distinguishes indifferentist relativism from a rationalistic contextualism.) But does not a contextualistic pluralism put everyone’s position on a par? Does it not underwrite the view that all the alternatives ultimately lie on the same level of acceptability? The question again is: Acceptable to whom? The discipline as a whole maintains a certain Olympian indifference—a noncommittal neutrality. However, this certainly does not mean that my position need be just as acceptable to you as to me. A sensible version of contextualistic pluralism will flatly refuse to put everyone’s position on a par—save from the unachievable Olympian point of view of the community at large which is, of course, by its very nature unavailable to any single individual. For each individual stands fully and decidedly committed to his own orientation on the basis of his or her own experience, so that there is no question of a relativistic indifferentism in acknowledging the pivotal role of a cognitive perspective. A pluralism of contextually underwritten cognitive positions does not lead to indifferentism precisely because a normative position is in the very nature of things something that a sensible person cannot view with indifference. It makes no sense to take the line that all normative perspectives are equally acceptable, because where experiential bases of judgment are at issue, the pattern of our own experience is—for us at any rate—altogether decisive. After all, rationality requires that we attune our beliefs and evaluations to the overall pattern of our experience. For us, our own experience is rationally compelling. We could not (rationally) deviate from its dictates—and it would really make no sense for us to want to do so. We can no more separate from the indications of our own experience than we could separate ourselves from our own shadows. Granted, people differently situated in different historical and cultural contexts are bound to think differently. But a chastened pluralism—namely a meta-level contextualism geared to different evaluative standards—can avoid relativism in taking the stance that, while other positions are indeed

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“available”, abstractly speaking, one’s own responsibly determined position is, for oneself, altogether appropriate and cogent. It takes the stance that our own position is justified—to be sure in terms of our own standards which, again, we hold for good reasons. But, of course those standards are “internal” to our position itself, and are not necessarily validatable from a different experiential vantage-point—a circumstance immaterial for us, since, by hypothesis, we just do not occupy this different vantage-point. Such a position accordingly leaves no room for indifferentism. It pivots on the idea of contextual appropriateness—appropriateness in the context that is delimited and defined by the specific circumstances of one’s situation. Recognizing that pluralism prevails—that other standards are used by others—we nevertheless (absolutistically) deem our own standards of rational cognition as appropriate for ourselves. Even when conceding the prospect of someone’s having another position, we cannot see it as available to ourselves. After all, the only standard of rational procedure that it makes any sense for us to use is the one we endorse. There is no point in my applying someone else’s criteria of value or worth or interest or appropriateness or whatever. I cannot appropriately use your standard if I do not share it. The standard we have got to use is just exactly the standard that we have got. And we have no way to evaluate standards save in our terms. Whose superstandard should we use? God’s? Since our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, he is no longer at hand to be asked. Somebody else’s? But if we do not subscribe to it, then how can we rationally adopt it; and if we do, then we have thereby made it ours! To qualify those of an alien culture as fully rational we must maintain both that they are conducting their inquiries intelligently by their own rules and also that in our sight these rules make good rational sense given their situation. It is ultimately “intelligent comportment” and “making sense” according to our standards of appraisal that makes what is at issue rationally invariant. The fact that we do (and must) apply our own idea of the matter is what makes for the universal element of rationality. What is universal about rationality is not something profound about sociology, but something rather trivial about language use; namely, that to accredit another culture as rational at all is to accept it as being “rational” in our sense of the term—which may, to be sure, involve deciding whether their actions measure up to their standards. The absoluteness of (ideal) rationality is inherent in the very concept at issue.

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7. ON PURSUING “THE TRUTH” Regrettably, many people have—under the influence of relativism— simply given up on the truth. The very idea of “the truth” is of small interest to various theorists nowadays. Heidegger, for one, regarded those socalled absolute truths as no more than “remnants of Christian theology in the problem-field of philosophy”.9 Of themselves, truth and falsity, correctness and incorrectness, adequacy and inadequacy, reason and unreason, sense and nonsense—approached as issues of logic, semantic theory, or epistemological explication—simply do not interest the hermeneuticist. He wants to know what role the ideas about these issues have in the sphere of authentic human experience; he does not ask about what these ideas mean but about what people do with them. Truth as such is something he is eager to abandon. And his is not alone. In stressing the pluralism of philosophizing, William James wrote: The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter—from a gifted friend who died too young—these words: “In everything, in science, art, morals, and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong.” How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of young! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question “What is the Truth?” is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural.10

Inspired by James, pragmatists are quite prepared to abandon concern for truth. But this reaction is gravely misguided. Epistemological pluralism has no ontological consequences for the nature of truth as such. The fact that “our truth”, the truth as we see it, is not necessarily that of others—that it is no more than the best estimate of the real truth that we ourselves are able to make—should not disillusion us in our inquiries and should not discourage us in “the pursuit of truth”. In inquiry as in other departments of human endeavor we are well advised simply to do the best we can. Realizing that there are no guarantees we have little sensible choice—pro tem at least—but to deem the best we can do as good enough. Recognizing that others see the matter differently in matters of inquiry need not daunt us in attachment to our own views of the matter. There is

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clearly no conflict between our commitment to the truth as we see it and a recognition that the adoption of a variant probative perspective leads others to see the truth differently. Given that we ourselves occupy our perspective, we are bound to see our truth as the truth. But we nevertheless can and do recognize that others see the matter in a different light. The circumstance that different people see something differently does not destroy or degrade the thing as such. All of our factual claims are made in a context of place and time, of cultural and observational states of the art. But their being provisional and contextual claims to truth does not metamorphose them into claims to conditional and contextual truth. The flaw of relativism is that it inflates the status of our truth-claims with their substance. The fact is, that relativism misconstrues the ominousness of unavailable consensus. For, after all, consensus as such is neither a means to nor an effect of people’s commitment to rational cogency. We have to come to terms with the epistemic realities, which include: •

the diversity in people’s experiences and cognitive situations

•

the variation of “available data”

•

an underdetermination of facts by data

•

the variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.)

•

the variation of cognitive methodology and the epistemic “state of the art”

Such factors make for a difference in the beliefs, judgments, and evaluations even of otherwise “perfectly rational” people. Short of a biological and situational cloning that equips every inquirer with exactly the same cognitive basis for the formation of opinion, it is clear that consensus is unrealizable. Rationality can be counted upon to lead to consensus only in situations of uniform experience—which are, obviously, also in general not realized. In the circumstances in which we labor in this world, consensuality is neither a requisite for nor a consequence of rationality in the conduct of inquiry. Nor is it a practicable goal.

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We have no choice but to pursue the truth by way of cultivating our truth; we have no direct access to truth unmediated by the epistemological resources of rational inquiry. And, given the ground rules of rational inquiry, this means that one’s view of the truth is bound to be linked to one’s cognitive situation. To say that this is not good enough and to give up on our truth—to declare petulantly that if we cannot have the absolute, capital-T Truth that of its very nature constrains everyone’s allegiance, then we will not accept anything at all—is automatically to get nothing and to abandon the pursuit of truth as such. It is foolishness to say that an orientation-bound position is not worth having in a domain where a position is only to be had on this basis. The only truth-claims worth stating are those which can be seen as rational on the standards that we ourselves endorse. 8. CONTEXTUALISTIC PLURALISM IS COMPATIBLE WITH COMMITMENT Even if we are pluralists and accept a wide variety of normative positions as being (abstractly speaking) available, still, if we have a doctrinal position at all—that is, if we are actually committed to solving our cognitive and evaluative problems—we have no serious alternative to seeing our own position as rationally superior. Faced with various possible answers to our questions, the sensible and appropriate course is clearly to figure out, as best one can, which one it is that deserves one’s endorsement. But, of course, there is—or should be—a good rational basis for effecting such a choice, namely normative perspective, whatever it be, that is based on the probative indications of our own experience. For there indeed is an objectifying impetus to avert our problem-resolutions from becoming a mere matter of indifferent choice based on arbitrary preferences. And throughout the sphere of rational inquiry this objectifying impetus lies in the appropriate utilization of the lessons of experience. Empiricism is our appropriate and optimal policy. We have to go on from where we are and proceed on the basis of our experiential endowment. For us, a perspectival egalitarianism makes no sense in making our decisions regarding theoretical, practical, or evaluative matters. But how, short of megalomania, can one take the stance that one’s own view of what is rational is right—that it ought to be binding on everyone? How can I maintain this agreement between my position and that of “all sensible people”? Not, surely, because I seek to impose my standard on them, but because I do—or should!—endeavour to take account of their

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standards in the course of shaping my own. Co-ordination is achieved not because I insist on their conforming to me, but because I have made every reasonable effort to make mine only that which (as best I can tell) ought to be everyone’s. The issue is one not of domineering but of submissive conformity. In the end, I can thus insist that they should use the same standard that I do because it is on this very basis of a commitment to commonality that I have made that standard my own in the first place. One’s commitment to one’s own rational standards is—or ought to be—produced not by megalomania but by humility. Neither on a cultural nor on a temporal comparison basis are we committed to the idea that the framework or our own thinking is an inherently superior. Nothing stands in the way of a realization that ours is not inherently the best conceptual scheme—a kind of ne plus ultra and that we can nevertheless stand rationally committed to it. Consider how cognitive progress happens. We can admit THAT the scientists of the future will have a better science, an ampler and more adequate understanding of the natural universe, and thus a better conceptual scheme—though, admittedly, we cannot anticipate just HOW this is to be so. We need not take the stance that our own conceptual scheme is somehow the last word. Our recognition that our scheme is imperfect, though correct and appropriate in the interests of realism, is, to be sure, of rather limited utility. A realization of the en gros deficiency of our conceptual machinery unhappily affords no help towards its emendation in matters of detail. A rational commitment to our position is just exactly a commitment to accepting its claims to be the proper basis for accepting its rulings as proper and appropriate. Acknowledging the presumptive suboptimality of our own conceptual scheme plays a most useful role. It affords a regulative conception that preempts any claim to dogmatic finality, even if not a constitutive one that puts substantively informative data at our disposal. The presumption that there are other and perhaps better conceptual schemes than ours is eminently salutary in blocking the path of the deplorably egocentric view that we ourselves somehow stand at the cognitive center of things, occupying that pivotal position about which all else revolves. And here—“internally” from our own point of orientation—we ourselves simply cannot consider other positions as genuinely on a par with our own in point of merit. An experiential pluralism of cognitive orientations is thus no impediment to doctrinal commitment. There is no reason why the mere existence of different views and positions should leave us immobilized like the ass of

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Buridan between the alternatives. Nor are we left with the gray emptiness of equilitarianism that looks to all sides with neutrality and uncommitted indifference. In situations of seriously conducted inquiry or evaluation, we cannot view disagreement in the light of a “mere divergence of opinion”. To acknowledge that other people hold views different form ours, and to concede the prospect that we may, even in the end, simply be unable to win them over by rational suasion, is emphatically not to accept an indifferentism to the effect that their views are just as valid or correct as ours are. To acquiesce is a situation where others think differently from oneself is neither to endorse their views not to abandon one’s own. In many departments of life—in matters of politics, philosophy, art, morality and so on—we certainly do not take the position that the correctness of our own views is somehow undermined and their tenability compromised by the circumstance that others do not share them. And there is no good reason why we should see matters all that differently in matters of inquiry or evaluation. A sensible pluralist will acknowledge not only that different people (groups or schools of thought) have different standards, but that they can do so appropriately given their differential emplacement in the cognitive scheme of things. But of course it does not follow from this that the pluralist need be disloyal to his own standards (any more than it follows from my acknowledging that your spouse to be appropriate for you constitutes on my part an act of disloyalty towards my own). 9. THE NEED FOR COMMITMENT It is, in the eyes of some, a disadvantage of pluralism that it supposedly undermines one’s commitment to one’s own position. But this is simply fallacious. There is no good reason why a recognition that others, circumstanced as they are, are rationally entitled in their circumstances to hold a position of variance with ours should be construed to mean that we, circumstanced as we are, need feel any rational obligation to abandon our position. Once we have done our rational best to substantiate our position, the mere existence of alternatives need give us no pause. Jean Paul Sartre deplored the attempt to secure rationally validated knowledge, which he saw as a way of avoiding responsibility for making something of oneself, for “choosing one’s own project”, seeing that the real truth is not something one can make up as one goes along but is something one regards as entitled to one’s recognition (to a subordination of sorts on one’s part). But this view turns the matter topsy-turvy. Not the

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pursuit of truth but its abandonment represents a failure of nerve and a crisis of confidence. The avoidance of responsibility lies in an indifferentism that sees merit everywhere and validity nowhere (or vice versa), thereby relieving us of any and all duty to investigate the issues in a serious, workmanlike way. Admittedly, there are cognitive bases different from ours—different sorts of standards altogether. But what does that mean for us? What are we to do about it? Several stances towards those various bases are in theory open to us: 1. accept none: reject ours 2. accept one: retain ours 3. accept several: conjoin others with ours 4. “rise above the conflict”: say “a plague on all your houses” and take the path of idealization invoking the “ideal observer”, the “wise man” of the Stoics, the “ideally rational agent” of the economists, or the like The first option is mere petulance—a matter of stalking off in “fox-andgrapes” fashion because we cannot have it all our own preferred way. The third option is infeasible: different bases do not combine, they make mutually incompatible demands, and in conjoining them we will not get something more comprehensive and complete—we will get a mess. The fourth alternative is utopian and unrealistic. We have no way to get there from here. Only the second step makes sense: to have the courage of our convictions and stand by our own guns. In evaluating contentions (of any sort) we have, of course, no alternative to doing so from the perspective of our cognitive values—our own cognitive point of view. (It wouldn’t be our point of view if we didn’t use it as such.) And given its natural emergence from our own point of view, our doctrinal position is, of course, going to emerge as optimal on its own telling. (That your position is going to emerge as optimal on your own orientation’s telling is, of course, going to come to me neither as news nor yet as something intimidating.) To obtain informative guidance from inquiry, it is not enough to contemplate cognitive standards—be it as historical actualities or as theoretical

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possibilities. We must actually commit ourselves to one. We can only get viable answers to substantive questions if we do our inquiring in the doctrinalist manner—only if we are willing to “stick our necks out” and take a position that endorses some answers and rejects others, to be sure, in a principled way that is in line with standards for whose due validation we have made appropriate provisions. A perspectivally grounded position is good enough for sensible individuals—precisely because that positiondeterminative perspective of ours is by hypothesis OUR perspective. But are we really entitled—rationally entitled—to our own standards? Assuming that we indeed have done what reason—as best we can understand it—demands for their substantiation (and this is a long story best reserved for another occasion), the answer is and has to be an emphatic yes. Inquirers should not and need not be intimidated by the fact of disagreement—it makes perfectly good sense for a person to do the best possible towards securing evidentiated beliefs and justifiable choices without undue worry about whether or not others disagree. There is nothing admirable in relativism’s inclination to noncommittal detachment with its concomitant reluctance to trust one’s personal judgment in matters of human significance. Relativism reflects a lamentable unpreparedness to take intellectual responsibility—to say: “I’ve investigated the matter as best I can, and this is the result at which I’ve arrived. Here I stand, I can do no other. If you wish to stand with me, then welcome to you; if not, then please show me how my position is untenable.” They represent recourse to an uncritical open-mindedness that comes down to empty-mindedness. In matters of rational inquiry, as in politics and religion, one does well to prefer someone who has views and sticks by them to those who reject the whole project or (equally wrongly) try to ride off in every direction at once.11

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 1 1

Pragmatism (New York, 1907), p. 171. The basic line of thought goes back to the ancient sceptics. Compare Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 54, 59-60, 97, et passim.

2

This view has become axiomatic for the entire “sociology of knowledge”.

3

Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), 307-24, 43p4. in Hollis and Lukes, op. cit.

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 1 4

Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (London, 1923; 1st pub. in Fr., Paris, 1921).

5

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azandi (Oxford, 1937); Nuer Religion (Oxford, 1956).

6

The relevant issues are interestingly treated in John Kekes’ book, A Justification of Rationality (Albany, NY, 1976), 137-49.

7

For an interesting critique of cognitive relativism that is akin in spirit though different in organization from that of the present section see Lenn E. Goodman “Six Dogmas of Relativism,” in Marcelo Descal (ed.), Cultural Relativism and Philosophy (London, 1991), pp. 77-102.

8

To be sure, someone could convince me that my understanding of the implications of my standards is incomplete and lead me to an internally motivated revision of my rational proceedings.

9

“Reste von christlicher Theologie innerhalb der philosophischen Problematik” (Martin Heidegger, Sein and Zeit [Leipzig, 1923], p. 230).

10

William James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” in Writings, p. 450.

11

This chapter was originally published under the same title in M. Krausz and P. Shustermann (eds.), Interpretation, Relativism, and the Metaphysics of Culture (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1999).

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Chapter 2 CONCEPTS AND CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES 1. INTRODUCTION

P

hilosophers have often said things to the effect that those whose experience of the world is substantially different from our own are bound to conceive it in very different terms. Sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists say much the same sort of thing, and philosophers of science have recently also come to talk in this way. According to Thomas Kuhn, for example, scientists who work within different scientific traditionsand thus operate with different descriptive and explanatory “paradigms”actually “live in different worlds”.1 Supporting considerations for this position have been advanced from very different points of view. Thus consider a Gedankenexperiment suggested by Georg Simmel in the last centurythat of approaching the problem of cognitive adequacy from the standpoint of an entirely different sort of cognitive being.2 Imagine intelligent and actively inquiring creatures (animals, say, or beings from outer space whose experiential modes are quite different from our own). Their senses are highly responsive to quite different physical parameters—relatively insensitive, say, to heat and light, but substantially sensitized to various electromagnetic phenomena. Such intelligent creatures, Simmel held, could plausibly be supposed to operate with: largely different framework of empirical concepts and categories— the events and objects of the world of their experience might be very different from those of our owntheir predicates, for example, might have altogether variant domains. In a similar vein, William James wrote: Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led re our using quite different modes from these [actual ones] of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us today, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those we actually use.3

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Different cultures and different intellectual traditions, to say nothing of different sorts of creatures, will, so it has been widely contended, describe and explain their experience—their world as they conceive it—in terms of concepts and categories of understanding substantially different from ours. They may, accordingly, be said to operate with different conceptual schemes: with different thought-devices used to “make sense” of experience—to characterize, describe, and explain the items that figure in the world as best one can form a view of it in terms of their features and kinds, their modes of interrelationship and interaction. The taxonomic and explanatory mechanisms by which their cognitive business is transacted may differ so radically that intellectual contact with them becomes difficult or impossible. Accordingly, we are told such things as, for example, that one cannot secure a grasp on the thought-world of an animistic society if one is unable or unwilling to enter into the conceptual framework characteristic of such an approach, adopting what the Germans would call their Denkmittelthe conceptual tools they employ in thought about the facts (or purported facts) of the world. Of late, however, some philosophers have begun to question this perspective. If the idea is conceived of in the standard way, as marking a potential contrast between distinct conceptual schemes—ours vs. theirs— then, so they argue, this whole notion of “alternative conceptual schemes” does not make sense, because the appropriate sort of alternativeness contrast cannot be developed.4 The present discussion will examine this position and its supporting arguments, and will endeavor to show that the rejection of the notion of conceptual schemes is not warranted. The conception of “alternative conceptual schemes” has its natural home primarily in four disciplinary settings: (l) in descriptive sociology to contrast, for example, kinship systems or other such mechanisms for the categorization and explanation of human affairs, (2) in intellectual history to contrast different perspectives of understanding of different Weltanschauungen, (3) in the history of the sciences to contrast, the diverse explanatory frameworks of, for example, Galenic and modern biochemical medicine, and (4) in philosophical epistemology to contrast fundamentally diverse approaches to descriptive or explanatory issues. In brushing aside the idea of “different conceptual schemes”, we also give short shrift to what those who invoke them to clarify such differences were getting at, incurring the risk of an impoverishment in our problem-horizons. There is, after all, something a bit eccentric about rejecting the idea of alternative conceptual schemes—something that smacks of the

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unrealism of one who closes one’s mind toward what other people are actually saying and doing. 2. THE TRANSLATION ARGUMENT One influential argument against the conception of alternate conceptual schemes is a line of reasoning, offered by Donald Davidson, that may be characterized as the Translation Argument.5 The first step of this argument is the relatively unproblematic association of conceptual schemes with languages. A “concept”, after all, is not a shadowy and problematic entity of some obscure sort. It is determined by the meanings of words and stands correlative with the communicative tasks we assign to them in the operations of language. The concept of a certain color or a certain species of flower is given in the complex of rules that govern the use of the pertinent terminology in the language(s) we use to discourse about them. Concepts, in sum, are linked to meanings and meaning is a functional conception correlative with the rules that govern the communicative employment of language. After all, for effective communication sender and receiver must not only exchange signals but must decode them the same way. They must “speak a common language” and be in conceptual communion with one another. This indicates a need for common concepts to convey information in communication. To speak of “concepts” is to do no more than indicate what is inherent in the meanings of words— the jobs that we assign to them as instruments of communication. The next step is to supplement this association of conceptual schemes with languages by adopting linguistic intertranslatability as a criterion for the identity of these associated conceptual schemes. To quote Davidson: We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme. The relation may be supposed to be this: if conceptual schemes differ, so do languages. But speakers of different languages may share a conceptual scheme provided there is a way of translating one language into the other. Studying the criteria of translation is therefore a way of focussing on criteria of identity for conceptual schemes. If conceptual schemes aren’t associated with languages in this way, the original problem is needlessly doubled …6

This leads to the useful and innocuous idea that a difference in language is a necessary, though, to be sure, not sufficient condition for a difference in conceptual scheme.

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A further step in the argument is the rather more controversial contention that one is entitled to call something a language only if one is prepared to claim that one can translate its (putative) “assertions” into one’s own language. It is argued that we can know that something is a conceptual scheme only if we can transpose its concepts and categories into those of our conceptual scheme. And then, of course, it is not really a radical alternative. Davidson defends this position as follows: [To make sense of the idea of alternative conceptual schemes] we wanted to make sense of there being a language we could not translate at all. Or, to put the point differently, we were looking for a criterion of languagehood that did not depend on, or entail, translatability into a familiar idiom. ... But whatever plurality we take experience to consist in—events like losing a button or stubbing a toe, having a sensation of warmth or hearing an oboe—we will have to individuate according to familiar principles. A language that organizes such entries must be a language very like our own.7

From here on, the argumentation is now straightforward: Intertranslatability establishes sameness of conceptual schemes; translatability into our lingo is the test criterion for something’s being a language, ergo there are no other, genuinely alternative conceptual schemes. The position is that the very idea of “alternative conceptual schemes” involves a contradiction in termsto establish that a conceptual scheme is present we must translate into our language, to establish alternativeness the translation must break down. And clearly one cannot have it both ways! The very idea of “alternative conceptual schemes” becomes unworkable. And so this whole notion, whose reason for being is, after all, to provide for a certain sort of contrast, comes apart at the seams. 3. IS TRANSLATABILITY NECESSARY? There is good reason, however, to think that the whole focus on actual translation is misguided. The key category in this area is surely not translation but interpretation. What counts for “their having a language” is not (necessarily) that we can literally translate what they say into our language but that we be able to interpret their sayings —to make some sort of intelligible sense of them through paraphrase, “explanation”, or the like. This, of course, is something we must do in our own language, but it certainly does not require the sort of delimited transposition we standardly characterize as “translation”a far looser sort of reinterpretative reconstruction

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will serve. And such “interpretation” may well involve a complex process of theory building, rather than being anything as cut-and-dry as what is generally understood by “translation”.8 How do we know that the sounds or movements or “writings” being made by those creatures represent the use of a language at all? The imputation of language-use is not the result of intellectual inspiration or insight; it is an item of theory building. The closer we can push toward translation the better. But translation is a desideratum not a sine qua non necessity. Interpretative reconstruction can serve perfectly well. Language-attribution like all empirical theorizing is a matter of theoretical triangulation from observational data. And such theoretical systematization of the data can render attributions of language-use an eminently reasonable proposition. We knew well from the factual context that cuneiform inscriptions represented writing well before we had decoded them. As any cryptanalyst knows, we can tell that a language is being used, and even a good deal about how it is being used, short of any ability to translate. To establish that a purportedly “alternative language” is a genuine language there is certainly no need to claim intertranslatability with our own language (be it total or partial). This requirement would be much too stringent. We need to be able to report intelligently and informatively about what they are saying—to interpret itbut not necessarily to translate into the verbal resources of our language. Paraphrase circumlocution, and all the other makeshifts of linguistic approximation can come into the picture. But translatability into our own language is certainly not the touchstone.9 Insistence on translatability into our language as test-criterion of the presence of a conceptual apparatus aborts any prospect of grasping how the differences between conceptual schemes actually work. For such schemes differ precisely where and just to the extent that the resources of paraphrase and circumlocution become necessary. “The congressman appealed to his constituents for understanding regarding his opposition to the economic policies of the administration.” Think of translating this into classical Latin! Or of so translating a treatise on quantum electrodynamics. And the same sort of thing holds when the tables are turned. Consider the reverse process of “translation” of a passage into English in the case of the Melanesian utterance whose nearest English equivalent (so we are told) runs as follows: We run front-wood ourselves; we paddle in place; we turn, we see behind their sea-arm Pilolu.10

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It is obvious at a glance that there is no real translation going on here, but only a pseudo “translation” that leaves various key terms virtually untoucheda mere start at explanation. There is and can be no genuine translation where the descriptive, taxonomic or explanatory mechanisms—the whole empirically laden paraphernalia of empirical reportage—are substantially different. But the lack of such a linkage to “our” language (whatever that may be) does not thereby establish the absence of alternativeness. For what is crucial here is the prospect of circumlocution and paraphrase, of explication and approximation—in short, of interpretation. And, of course, when one makes this shift from translation to interpretation, the scheme-countervailing contention “But where translatability obtains, there is no difference in the conceptual apparatus at issue” no longer obtains, since interpretability is clearly not incompatible with scheme-differentiation. In fact, the translatability argument against alternative conceptual schemes becomes trapped in a dilemma: If “translation” is construed literally and narrowly, then it indeed follows that language-intertranslatability is incompatible with scheme alternativeness, but it certainly does not hold then that only translation can establish the claim of another language to qualify as bearer of a conceptual scheme. If, on the other hand, “translation” is construed broadly (to include any sort of explanation or interpretation), then a demonstration of scheme-embodiment does indeed require such translatability, but this sort of “translation” no longer suffices to show that one selfsame conceptual scheme is at issue. (If merely “giving some idea of what is being talked about” is to be called for, then we could indeed “translate” a modern chemistry text into the Ionic of Thales and Anaximander.) Either way, the argument comes to grief. 4. THE FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCY CONSTRUCTION OF ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES An analogy may help clarify the issues. The intertranslation standard of “counting as a language” is akin to an exchange standard of “counting as money”. On such an approach, it is only natural to take our own money as a fixed basis of reference. What makes the Euro money—one would then hold—is just that it can be traded against ours at a certain “rate of exchange”. If something could not be so exchanged, then it just would not be money. This seems a plausible line, but it has serious deficiencies. Con-

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sider the Roman denarius. There is just no possibility of exchange rate across the centuries.11 As far as exchange rates go, modern dollars and cents and imperial Roman coinage are simply incommensurable units. But that surely does not preclude Roman “money” from qualifying as real money. What qualifies the Roman “coin” to count as a coin, a genuine unit of money, is its functional role—the way it was used. Various Roman coins are the functional equivalent (given the modus operandi of Roman life) of our nickels and dimes, and it is this which establishes their claims to be real coins that serve as real money. Coins are what they are because of how they work. A closely similar story holds for language use in the contexts of “talk” or “writing” or the like. What makes such processes into uses of a language is their function in communicative transactions in transmitting information, coordinating action, eliciting responses, and the like. Not translatability as such, but functional equivalency is the determinant of language use: the issue is one as much of sociology as of semantics. But consider the following counterargument: To assess the functional equivalency of their putative use of “language” with our unproblematic use of our own, we must know about their aims and purposes. To know this requires knowledge of their beliefs. But we now come up against the purported fact that “knowledge of beliefs comes only with the ability to interpret words.”12

But this objection does not stand. For it is clear that in suitable circumstance we can plausibly ascribe beliefs on the basis of data regarding nonverbal action and behavioror on the basis of interpretations of linguistic behavior that stops well short of a capacity to achieve translations. That someone holds certain sorts of beliefs can be a matter of plausible theorizing well short of any capacity to translate his putative communicative endeavors. The ascription of beliefs does not demand a prior decoding of communicative data, however greatly it may be facilitated thereby. Other languages accordingly qualify as such not necessarily because what they say is invariably something that we can say in our own terms, but because what they do—their communicative job or function in conveying information and coordinating behavior—is something we can understand as a linguistic process, something that can be made intelligible to us on sufficiently intimate analogy with our own language using processes. What is at issue is a matter of different ways of going at a common job. To

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make a go of the idea of functional equivalency, we must, of course, have some conception of the functions at issue: some insight into the relevant structure of purpose and teleology. To be sure, determining the goals of other sorts of beings is a complex matter. Perhaps some components of it are relatively simple; for example, matter having to do with preservation of the individual and the propagation of the species. But in general, the imputation of purposes calls for a substantial element of theory-building, of explanatory conjecture and of imputation, which is at work when we attribute language use to others. However, there is nothing anomalous about that. After all, much the same holds for the attribution of any talent, skill, or capacity, and indeed even for descriptive categorization (e.g., the claim that yonder tree is elm). The teleology of language is nothing mysterious and occult. Language is primarily a purposive instrument whose cardinal aims are the transmission of information for the sake of implementation in action. Language is geared to afford us the mechanisms of information storage and to provide for the exchange of information that facilitates the programmatically coherent pursuit of individual goals and the coordination of effort in the pursuit of common goals. On this account, then, it is the functional equivalency of the operations at issue that affords the needed principle of unification and renders diverse linguistic schemes as distinct instances of a common species. Functional equivalency is the collecting principle that makes them congeners. 5. ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES INVOKE VARIANT FACTUAL COMMITMENTS To understand what a conceptual scheme is, it is helpful to become clear as to what it does—how it works. A conceptual scheme is inherent in and coordinate with the modus operandi of concepts. And concepts are themselves laden with empirical and factual commitments, For at this time of day it seems plausible to adopt the no longer novel idea—argued by all the American Pragmatists against Kant—that all the categories of human thought are empirical and none a priori. Our taxonomic and explanatory mechanisms are themselves the products of inquiry13. The fundamental concepts in terms of which we shape our view of nature are a posteriori and not a priori. And schemes differ in just this regard—in undertaking different sorts of factual commitments.

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As such considerations indicate, our concepts are factually committali.e., theory-laden—and that language is not only a vehicle for making substantive commitments, but itself reflects such substantive commitments.14 A conceptual scheme comes to be correlative with and embedded in a substantive position as to how things work in the world. These factual commitments are crucial for an understanding of the conceptual scheme at issue. And so, as one moves to a non-Kantian (because empirical and a posteriori) conception of categories, one arrives at the familiar and widely agreed point that the concepts we deploy upon factual issues are themselves the products of our empirical inquiries and factual commitments, We form our conception of the sun in terms of reference very different from those of Aristotle, and that of a heart in terms of reference very different from those of Galen. Consider how many facts about his own sword were unknown to Caesar. He did not know that it contained carbon or that it conducted electricity: The very concept at issue (“carbon”, “electricityconduction”) were outside Caesar’s cognitive range. Key facts (or presumptive facts) about even the most familiar things—trees and animals were unknown 100 years ago. And this is so not just because of an ignorance of detail (as with a missing word in a crossword puzzle). Rather, the ignorance at issue arises because the very concepts at issue had not been formulated. It is not just that Caesar did not know what the half-life of californium is, but that he could not have understood this fact if someone had told it to him: it lay beyondor, to put it less prejudicially, outside—his conceptual grasp. Our categorical frameworks (descriptive and explanatory mechanisms) reflect our view of the facts. They are inseparably linked to our picture of the truth (or purported truth) of things and stand correlative to the cognitive “state of the art”. One way of motivating the idea of different conceptual schemes is thus to approach this issue from the angle of conceptual innovation, a process clearly bound up with scheme-differentiation in that the new is (ex hypothesi) something different from the old. Consider what happened in the wake of a shift from (e.g.) the worldview of contact-interaction theorists of the early seventeenth century to the electro-magnetic conception of matter in the post-Maxwellian era. The issue here is not just that of neophenomena but one of new ways of looking at old phenomena, of different modes of classification, description, explanation. Such innovation makes it possible to say things that could not be said before—and so also to do new things. We have here a broadening—or at any rate a displacement of the

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conceptual horizons and deal with things simply not dreamed of in the old conceptual dispensation. At bottom then, a conceptual scheme is always correlative with a Weltanschauunga view of how things work in the world. And the issue of historical development becomes involved at this juncture, seeing that such a fact committal scheme is clearly a product of temporal evolution. Our conceptions of things are a moving rather than a fixed target for analysis. Innovation—the availability of assertions in one scheme that are simply unavailable in the other—is one important key to their difference. One conceptual scheme will envisage assertions that have no even remote equivalents in the other framework. They lie beyond the reach of effective transport from one scheme to another exactly because they involve different factual commitments and presuppositions. It is not just that one says things differently in different schemes but that one says altogether different things.15 6. SCHEME-DIFFERENTIATION AND THE TRUTH-STATUS OF THESES Important consequences follow from this general line of approach to the idea of conceptual schemes. What is involved with diverse schemes is a different way of conceptualizing facts—or rather the purported facts—as to how matters stand in the world. Different conceptual schemes embody different theories, and not just different theories about “the same things” (so that divergence inevitably reflects disagreement as to the truth or falsity of propositions), but different theories about different things. To move from one conceptual scheme to another is in some way to change the subject. It is not a quarrel about the same old issues. If the conceptual scheme C′ is to be thought of as an alternative to (C along the lines we have in view, then one cannot think of C′ as merely involving a different assignment of truth-values to the (key) propositions of C. One must avoid any temptation to view different conceptual schemes as distributing truth-values differently across the same propositions. The factladenness of our concepts precludes this and prevents us from taking the difference of schemes to lie in a disagreement as to the truth-falsity classification of one selfsame body of theses or doctrines. The difference between conceptual schemes is not a matter of treating the same issues discordantly (distributing the truth-values T and F differ-

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ently over otherwise invariant propositions). The key contrast is that between saying something and saying nothing—not that between affirmation and counter-affirmation, but that between affirmation and silence. The difference between schemes does not lie in disagreement and conflict; it turns not on what they do say but in what they do not and cannot say at all, on matters that simply defy any attempt at actual translation from the one scheme into the other and that call for the evasive tactics of paraphrase, circumlocution, and “explanation”. Donald Davidson characterized the conceptual innovation involved in going over from one scheme to another as follows: We get a new out of an old scheme when the speakers of a language come to accept as true an important range of sentences they previously took to he false (and, of course, vice versa).16

But this does not get the matter quite right. If one is going to insist in this way on describing scheme-change in terms of a truth-value redistribution, then one will need a three-valued framework of truth-values, one that adds the neutral truth-value (I) of interdeterminacy or indefiniteness to the classical values of truth and falsity (T and F). For the issue of scheme innovation at bottom turns not on differences in determinate truth-values but on the having of no truth-value at all, because the item in question lies outside the boundaries of the conceptual horizon of a certain scheme. The crucial point is thus that differentiation of conceptual schemes does not lie in different allocations of the determinate truth-values T and F. It operates in regard to truth-indeterminacy and turns on the fact that some truth-determinations from the angle of one scheme are simply indeterminate from that of the other in that it has nothing whatsoever to say on the matter.17 A change of scheme is not a change of mind but a change of subject. (Shades of Feyerabend and conceptual incommensurabilityat any rate at the local level.) And the key schematic changes are those from a definite (classical) truth-status to I (i.e., from T or F to I) or those in the reverse direction (i.e., from I to T or F). In the former case, the schematic frame of reference of an old issue is rejected and it ceases to be meaningful; in the latter, a new schematic frame of reference is introduced and gives meaning to a previously inaccessible question. The “disagreement” of schemes does not turn on a varying truth-assignment to overlapping theses but on differences in conceivability (formulatability) of the thesesthe non-overlap of theses.

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Galenic and Pasteurian medicine, for example, in some respects simply change the subject so as no longer “to talk about the same things”, but rather to talk differentlyeach about things of which the other takes no cognizance at all. The difference in “conceptual scheme” of modern and Galenic medicine is not that modern physicians have a different theory of the operation of the four humors from their Galenic counterparts but that modern medicine has abandoned the four humors, and not that Galenic physicians say different things about bacteria and viruses but that they have nothing to say about them—that they lie entirely beyond their conceptual horizon. We are told that all talk of “fitting” or “facing” or “accounting for” the facts in our experience in the world “adds nothing intelligible to the simple concept of being true”.18 But when the idea of truth-indeterminacy enters upon the scene, the untenability of this position emerges. For it is clear that even a false thesis can present a greater part of the truth than can an indeterminate one. Thus if the real position is I AAAA AAAAB

II ABBBBB BBBB

It is clear that the falsehood “All the A’s there are lie in sector I” gives a far bettera more helpful or informative—statement of “the real truth” of this situation than the blankness of know-nothing silence manages to do. The most characteristic and significant sort of difference between one conceptual scheme and another thus does not lie in the sphere of disagreements or conflicts of the sort arising when the one theoretical framework holds something to be true that the other holds to be false. Rather, it arises when the one scheme is committed to something the other does not envisage at all—something that lies outside the conceptual horizons of the other. The typical case is that of the stance of Cicero’s thought-world with regard to questions of electricity and magnetism. The Romans of classical antiquity did not hold different views on these issues; they held no views at all regarding them. This whole set of relevant considerations simply lay outside their conceptual repertoire. They did not assign the assertions in question a different truth-status from the one we favor; they assigned them no truth-values at all because they lay outside the conceptual reach. It is not just that Caesar did not know what the half-life of californium is; it is that

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he could have understood it if the Recording Angel had whispered it into his ear. Certainly the upshot of the present defense of conceptual schemes is not just the truism that there are different languages, nor yet the truism that different cultures and eras have different theories about how things work in the world, important though these truisms are. Rather, the point is that in different cultural/linguistic settings one finds different conceptual mechanisms bound up with different world views in such a way as to make conceptual access difficult, complex, and perhaps even in some measure unattainable. Different conceptual schemes carry us into literally different realms of thought. They are not disjoint or incommensurate in the manner of geometric line segments where, after all, very much the same sort of thing is at issue. Rather, they go their separate ways in very much the same way that different subject matter specialties do—even when (as per the demographer, the designer, and the materials specialist) they address themselves to something that (to a detached bystander) appears to be the same thing. The central thesis of these deliberations is that the difference of different conceptual frameworks lies not so much in points of disagreement (that #1 says true where #2 says false) as in points of mutual incomprehension, in their lack of mutual contact. For it is not a matter of different schemes assigning a different determinate truth-status (T or F to schemeoverlapping theses); the key to scheme-differentiation lies in the nonoverlap of theses —the fact that what can be said by one is simply outside the range of the other. The difference between schemes is accordingly a matter of difference in orientation rather than one of disagreement in doctrine. It is less like that between the Christian heresies than like that between Christianity and Buddhism. The denizens of different schemes live in—to at least some extent—different “thought worlds”, as it were. What is at issue here is something relatively familiar in an era when the phenomena of cultural relativity are well known. (In earlier times, when education in the classics was in vogue, one knew at first hand the contrast between the thought-world of classical antiquity and that of one’s own day.) 7. COGNITIVE COPERNICANISM AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF COGNITIVE PROGRESS Given that different linguistic-conceptual schemes are possible along such lines as have been sketched (with conceptual disjointness superen-

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grafted upon functional equivalency), what can be said regarding the comparative status of our own scheme? Seeing that it provides us with the paradigmatic standard against which all else is measured—a consideration that establishes its epistemic priority—must we not concede to it a position of conceptual primacy as well? By no means! The present position does not entail the view that we ourselves constitute the center about which everything moves. On first thought, it might seem that we have to construe the idea of different conceptual schemes along such lines as the following: The descriptive practices of Scheme #1 differ from those of Scheme #2 in that Scheme #1 treats such and such an issue A-wise, whereas Scheme #2 treats it B-wise.

Such a view immediately advances our own language/conceptual scheme into a controlling position. For it is going to be necessary to use our machinery to do the crucial work of (l) specifying the issue in question and (2) describing the two different manners in which the schemes at issue treat this issue. It becomes a matter of transacting all the relevant comparisons and contrasts within the framework of our own conceptual scheme. Our own language/scheme becomes the pivot point around which all else revolves. But this just is not how the matter actually stands. Establishing that different things are at issue is not a matter of having to transpose everything into our own terms so as to establish that two schemes treat “the same thing” differently, but simply of noting that there are some issues that one scheme treats and the other does not. The comparison lies immediately between the schemes themselves, without the necessity of obtruding ours between them as a vehicle of mediation. The camel-descriptive terminology of Arabic vs. Chinese or the kinship-pattern taxonomy of Ball and Sardinia need not be contrasted through the mediation of English (i.e., this need not be so done per se, though, to be sure, it may have to be so done by us if we are sufficiently inept). Our commitment to a certain conceptual scheme does not commit us to its finality. In particular, our notion of “a real thing” is inherently such that the possibility of learning more about any thing will always have to be kept in mind as an open prospect. This “inexhaustibility” of the potential knowledge of things is implicit in the very concept of a “real thing” as it figures in our conceptual scheme. And in view of this, we must never lay claim to a cognitive monopoly or cognitive finality. It is a crucial fact about our 38

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about our epistemic stance toward the real world to recognize that every part and parcel of it contains compartments that lie beyond our present cognitive reach—at any “present'” whatever. The fact that we ourselves do not occupy the conceptual center of the universe about which all else revolves in the cognitive domain becomes especially clear in the context of historical development. For, in all due realism and humility, we need to adopt an epistemological Copernicanism, a view that rejects the egocentric claim that we ourselves occupy a pivotal position in the epistemic dispensation. We must recognize (e.g.) that there is nothing inherently sacrosanct about our own present cognitive posture vis-à-vis that of other historical junctures. There is no reason to think that our view of things—be it of individual things (the moon, the Great Wall of China) or of types thereof (the domestic cat, the common cold)—is any more definitive and final than that taken by our predecessors in the cognitive enterprise. We have little choice but to regard the view that current science captures the truth of things as a fiction that must be presumed to be contrary to fact. The original Copernical revolution made the point that there is nothing ontologically privileged about our own position in space. The doctrine now at issue effectively holds that there is nothing cognitively privileged about our own position in time. Given a sensible view of how we ourselves stand vis-à-vis the past, one must suppose a position of parity with respect to how we ourselves will stand vis-à-vis the future. This perspective suggests the humbling view that just as we think our predecessors of 100 years ago had a fundamentally inadequate grasp on the furniture the world, so our successors of 100 years hence will take the same view of our knowledge (or purported knowledge) of things. No primacy—and certainly no finalitycan automatically be claimed for our own conceptual posture, be it within the historical course of events or the geographic diversity of cultures. 8. THE MYTH OF A UBIQUITOUS, SCHEME-NEUTRAL INPUT It will clarify the nature of conceptual schemes to consider some misconceptions regarding them and to set aside some of the errors attributed to the partisans of conceptual schemes that they in fact are not or need not stand committed to. Objections to the idea of different conceptual schemes are sometimes predicated on the view that recognition of such schemes would commit one to the view that there is one selfsame underlying substratum—one ubiqui-

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tously present, uniform, cognitive raw stuff of pure experience, bare sense, elemental stimuli, or whateverwhich different conceptual schemes (languages) proceed to process differently. Let us accordingly begin with the following objection: To adopt the idea of conceptual schemes is to commit oneself to the notion of a scheme-neutral epistemic basis—an ur-text, as it were, of raw (conceptually “uncooked”) experience, sensation, or some such “given”—which different languages transpose into their own conceptual idiom. The concept presupposes the model of mediation through language and concepts of a “thought independent” givenness—an “an sich” world of pre-schematic represented schematized into representations by means of concepts and language. The partisans of conceptual schemes must think of language as a way of depicting or encoding extralinguistic reality—of transforming one determinate structure into another. But (so the objection continues) any reality we can conceive of—any reality we can say anything about—is already linguistically and conceptually mediated. The idea of a “thought-independent reality” that is prior to the mechanisms of conceptualizing thought—a reality that lies “behind the curtain” of schematic conceptualization—is thus a misleading myth. The real is simply “what we can really and truly say or think to be the case” and not an extraconceptual substratum represented in our thought by the mediation of languages and conceptual schemes. The idea of conceptual schemes accordingly stands committed to an incorrect and improper model that of a linguistic/conceptual processing of preschematic yet determinate experiential inputs.

The model of scheme-operation at issue here is objected to as producing a mistaken form/content dualism in projecting the picture of common, invariant, universal, preschematic input which different conceptual schemes process differently. Conceptual schemes, so it is held, are predicated on the Myth of a Ubiquitous, Scheme-Neutral Input. Donald Davidson, for example, sees the idea of a conceptual scheme as committed to the objectionable picture of an empirical substratum which “is in turn explained by reference to the facts, the world, experience, sensation, the totality of sensory stimuli, or something similar.”19 The objection at issue views the conception of a conceptual scheme as predicated on the model of a common, preexistent raw material input which is processed differently by different schemes,20 subject to the idea of a single, common reality which is represented differently from the different “point of view” of various conceptual schemes21 that themselves are so many distinct conventionalizations, each filtering reality through concepts in its own distinctive way, so that each filtering

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medium imposes its own characteristic imprint upon scheme neutral reality—the way the world really is.22 It is only too clear that this model of the schematization of a preschematic raw material is indeed objectionable.23 For it is always problematic to postulate the existence of something whose nature we cannot possibly describe. And there just is no way of specifying whatever “input” our cognitive processes may have apart from the content with which these processes themselves endow it. (As Kant saw, there is no positive descriptive information that can be offered regarding the Ding an sich that sensibility is thought to deliver up to the cognitive processing of our understanding.) Even if one were to grant in abstracto the existence of a preschematically given over and above the schematically graspable, there is nothing one can do with this conception—there is no way of implementing this distinction, of applying it to something or other. Our cognition of the real is a matter of a transaction in which the respective contributions of thought and reality just cannot be separated from one another.24 The decisive shortcoming of the idea of a preschematized “given” as an explanatory instrument of the theory of cognition is simply that ex hypothesi no one can possibly say what the given is—that it is inherently and necessarily beyond the reach of conceptualization. No intelligible content can be given to this idea. To invoke it is thus not to explain the obscure by the yet more obscure; it is to explain it by the impenetrable. As Richard Rorty has trenchantly put it, “the suggestion that our concepts shape neutral material no longer makes sense once there is nothing to serve as this material.”25 We must not become entranced by the metaphor of “seeing the same thing from different points of view” in a case where it is only too clear that there just is no earthly way of saying anything about “the same thing” that is purportedly at issue. If all “objects of thought” are constituted relative to conceptual schemes (which, after all, represents the role and mission of such schemes), then there cannotex hypothesibe a thought-accessible presystematic something for such schemes to schematize. Let all this be granted, as it should and must be. All the same, the presently envisaged use of these considerations as a point d’appui for an objection to conceptual schemes is emphatically improper and inappropriate. For this objection is based on the mistaken idea that the conception of diverse conceptual schemes rests on the presupposition of an incorrect and objectionable processing model according to which there is an invariant identifiable and thus describable raw material that is viewed differently from the perspective of different conceptual schemes. This is quite wrong. The idea

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of a preexisting “thought-independent” and scheme-invariant reality that is seen differently from different perceptual perspectives just is not a presupposition of the idea of different conceptual schemes. The quasi-Kantian model of a potentially differential schematic processing of a uniform preschematic epistemic raw material is nowise essential to the idea of different conceptual schemes. For the supporter of the idea of different conceptual schemes certainly need not espouse the thesis: (1) that there is a pre or sublinguistic cognitive substratum and that different languages afford us different ways of telling about IT (this preexisting substratum). Rather, he stands committed only to what results when the difficultygenerating words of this proposition are deleted, to yield the contention (2) that different languages afford us different ways of talking—of saying different sorts of things, rather than saying “the same things” differently or making different claims about “the same thing”. If one holds—as seems only properthat all individuation, all identification, and all description must proceed from the angle of a conceptual scheme, then it would clearly be inappropriate to say there is an identifiable something (reality, experience materia prima, the matrix of sensestimuli, or whatever) that is prior to and independent of any and all scheme-based conceptualization. On such an approach, the conception “scheme-independent reality” is not constitutive, not a substantive constituent of the worldin contrast with “mere appearance”but a purely regulative idea whose function is to block the pretensions of any one single scheme to a monopoly on correctness or finality. Accordingly, the objection at issue does not apply to the present language-coordinative approach to the idea of different conceptual schemes. The erroneous conception of an input of some common identifiable raw material is thus by no means an inherent and inevitable facet of the very idea of a conceptual scheme. As we have seen, in speaking of different conceptual schemes we need not say that different language communities “formulate the same materials (experience, sensation, or whatever) differently” but just that they employ different (though possibly related) sorts of formulations. For example, we can say that their describing practices differ without saying that they formulate different descriptions for the same

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thing. Accordingly, different conceptual schemes need not disagree about the same thing. To implement the notion that different conceptual schemes are at work, we emphatically do not need to say that Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein “are saying different things about the same thing” (in saying that the world is spherical in the one case and that space-time is a fourdimensional and finite but boundless manifold in the other case). It is enough to hold that different schemes say different things “on the same theme” (functionally identified) rather than talk differently about the same object (substantively identified). The correlation at issue can proceed through functional equivalency rather than equivalency of designation. The view that failure of translation affords concurrent evidence against the presence of a language founders on the fact that language use never exists in vacuo but always functions in a purposive context in which functional equivalency can fill the vacuum of conceptual inaccessibility. In sum, given a proper conception of what conceptual schemes are and how they actually work, one can abandon entirely the myth of a uniform, shared, preschematic input without giving up the idea of different conceptual schemes. 9. THE MYTH OF FORM-CONTENT SEPARABILITY Kant stressed that perception cannot be separated from conception— that in the domain of empirical fact, observation cannot be separated from descriptive characterization. Extending this line of thought, his latter-day Quinean successors stress that conception cannot be separated from judgment, that issues of meaning cannot be separated from issues of fact or purported fact, that “what we mean by words” in descriptive discourse and “what propositions we accept as true” are inseparably and inextricably commingled issues. There is an intimate, nay indissoluble, interlinkage between the meanings of one’s terms and the facts (or purported facts) one uses them to state: the meanings of words are shaped in terms of their user’s beliefs about the issues. Meanings (concepts) are thus factcorrelative: they are bearers and also the products of our factual beliefs. They are not only the tools of inquiry but the products of inquiry as well. In consequence of this interlinkage it follows that “one will not be able to draw a clear distinction between the foreigner’s using words different in meaning from any words in our language and the foreigner’s having many false beliefs.”26 Where concepts are concerned, there is no priority of form over content. One cannot take the view: concepts first, theses later. Instead,

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inquiry into meanings (word use) and into judgments (opinions) must be handled as one holus-bolus unit within the overall cognitive framework of which they are inseparable components. This general line of thought envisions paradigm situations of the following type. Consider the case of someone whom we take (at first blush) to say about dogs exactly what we would say about cats (that they meow rather than bark, that they generally chase mice but not mailmen, and so on). As this circumstance emerges more fully, we ourselves would (very rightly) begin to wonder if we have got it right in thinking that they are talking about dogs but have very bizarre ideas about them, rather than that we have got it wrong and that they are really talking about cats after all (but using a somewhat odd nomenclature). There is an inevitable tradeoff between the attribution of weird beliefs to others and the prospect of misunderstanding—of error in our construction of their assertions. For that they really mean to talk about DOGS is in fact a theory of ours (re a certain equivalency in translation or interpretation), and in framing such interpretative theories we are governed by the standard rule: adapt your interpretative hypotheses so as to maximize truth, to make as much as you can come out to be true. Interpretation is, after all, a matter of theory-building, and here the usual inductive principle of inference to the best answer applies, with “best” understood in terms of the overall smoothness of its dovetailings of our systematization. One thus cannot separate questions of the meaning of terms (how our concepts function in their linguistic setting) from questions of truth (views on how matters go in the world). It follows that one cannot handle meaning and truth sequentially. Meaning and truth (semantics and natural science) are inseparable and symbiotic in the factual domain. To grasp a language requires understanding the conceptual scheme, it implements and thus requires knowing (at least in rough outline) what sort of world view its users hold—their picture of the “laws of nature” (or some functional equivalent thereof). Now there is a deeply problematic and indeed erroneous way of conceiving of a conceptual scheme—viz., as separable from and somehow “underlying” the cognitive scheme of its exponents (their Weltanschauung)as dealing with the conceptual machinery of their thought quite independently of their material beliefs. Donald Davidson has put the matter as follows:

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[R]etaining the idea of language as embodying a conceptual scheme [means that] in place of the dualism of the analytic-synthetic we get the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content. I want to urge that this second dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible and defensible.27

On the view being criticized in this passage, the form-oriented issue of how people think—of the categorial and taxonomic framework of their discourse—is hermetically separated from the content-oriented issue of what they think, of the substantive materials of their beliefs. And this criticism is right-minded; the view it condemns is surely incorrect. But this incorrectness is nowise built into the idea of a conceptual scheme as such. There is—and this warrants emphasis—no need whatever to subscribe to this view and to construe the conception of a conceptual scheme as involving an irrevocable commitment to this rationalist notion of a neat form-content separability. There is no obstacle to construing conceptual schemes as part and parcel of a comprehensive belief-structure that is committed to the facts (or purported facts) about things over a relatively large domain of issues. It would seem that the animus of various recent writers against the idea of conceptual schemes is largely due to their construing the notion as committed to the Myth of a Ubiquitous Scheme-Neutral Input (as per the deliverances of Kant’s sensibility) and the Myth of Form-Content Separability (as per the schematizing labor of Kant’s understanding). But this perspective unjustly visits upon conceptual schemes a construction geared too closely to the Kantian processing-faculty model, a construction from which this resource can certainly be extricated and from which it is in fact free throughout most of its recent invocations. It is widely stressed nowadays that our conceptual schemes in the empirical domain are built upon Weltanschauungen, i.e., views on the facts or purported facts about the world; that empirical concepts are “theory permeated”, to use Karl Popper’s term; that they involve facts and are inconceivable without them. Our conceptual mechanisms evolve in a historical dialectic of feedback dialectic between cognitive projection on the one hand and experiential interaction with nature upon the other. They are globally a posteriori as products of past experience; they are only locally a priori in that we bring them to the context of current experience and never encounter situations with a conceptual tabula rasa. The idea that a conceptual scheme is altogether a priori and free from substantive commitments is thus clearly mistaken. But the conception of a

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conceptual scheme as such is patently strong enough to survive the abandonment of such mistaken conceptions. The fact that conceptual schemes can be misconceived is no reason for invalidating the very idea at issue. (Mistaken conceptions can be had of anything!)28 The notion of a conceptual scheme can survive the abandonment of such misconceptions which are based on an erroneous construction of how conceptual schemes work. 10. THE APPRAISAL OF CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES In what sense can it be said that distinct conceptual schemes are alternative to one another? If it cannot be maintained that they process the same material differently, how can they conflict? If their relationship is one of discontinuity and mutual incomprehension, how can they disagree? The answer is that, strictly speaking, they do not disagree. They do not involve the sort of logical conflict that arises when one body of commitments says one thing and another something else about the same item and the two statements are incompatible. But if conceptual schemes do not disagree, then why not simply conjoin them? Why not simply combine them adjunctively, espousing one alongside the others? Several things must be said (somewhat telegraphically) in reply: (1) We do in fact to some extent do this, superimposing the scheme of science and the scheme of every-day life, for example. Or, again, think of the scholar’s ability to move in the thought-worlds of different cultures or civilizations. (2) There are, however, weighty practical reasons why the extent to which we can do this is very limited: It is enormously demanding in learning and effort and attention. Just as very few people can master more than one language well enough to “pass for a native” in it, so only few can achieve a conceptual repertoire that makes them fully at home in significantly diverse conceptual frameworks. And one further consideration might be added: (3) In general, any fairly comprehensive conceptual scheme has an associated value-orientation in point of specifically cognitive values. It incorporates its own characteristic schedules of what sorts of things are important, interesting, significant, puzzling, worthy of attention, and so on. And this circumstance produces limiting restrictions. As these considerations suggest, conceptual schemes do not conflict in the manner of mutually contradictory bodies of assertions. Rather, they conflict in the manner of diverse instrumentalitiesthe manner in which we cannot make effective concurrent use of hammer and saw. It is this sort

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of practical incompatibility that is at issue with diverse conceptual schemes rather than the theoretical incompatibility of mutual contradiction. And a further important consideration yet remains. For—usually at any rate—the “alternatives” at issue with “alternative conceptual schemes” are such in the sense of being alternatives for somebody rather than in that of being alternatives for us. Given that we ourselves operate in the conceptual domain as we do, we ourselves could not adopt them, short, at any rate, of our undergoing the sort of conversion experience (intellectual conversion experience, to be sure) after which one tends to view oneself as no longer quite the same person. Given that we stand where we do, we simply “cannot get there from here”. In closing, it is germane to consider briefly the question of the appraisal and evaluation of the relative merits of alternative conceptual schemes. If the situation were simply that the difference between schemes resided in a different distribution of the determinate truth-values T and F over fundamentally the same range of contentions, then the assessment of relative merits would be a relatively simple process: we would simply ask ourselves which is right more of the time. And then, of course, we would have no alternative but to answer this question with reference to the truth commitments that emanate from our own conceptual scheme. Schemeassessment would have to be a matter of simply determining which scheme has a fuller grasp on the facts as we ourselves see them—of determining which, by our own lights, is right about more things and wrong about fewer. And, of necessity, it lies in the very nature of this process that our own scheme will always emerge victorious from such comparisons. But the actual situation is quite otherwise. Different schemes talk about things differentlyand do this not just in terms of disagreement about the same things but also in terms of mooting altogether different sorts of things (different sorts of facts or worlds). Regarding the meaning—content of their assertions, they are—or may be—simply out of touch with one another and stand in a condition of Feyerabendian incommensurability. Accordingly, comparison cannot be made on the basis of comparative correctness (embracing more truths and fewer falsehoods). Nor is comparison feasible on the basis of subject-matter coverage (being ampler, richer, fuller, and so on). For whose standards of what is a genuine enlargement and what is a pointless proliferation are going to be used here—which scheme can appropriately be used as the arbiter! Such considerations further indicate the inappropriateness of a content comparison approach to the issue of appraisal. They suggest—surely

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rightly—that comparative appraisal must be detached altogether from the sphere of semantical issues—truthfulness, subject-matter coverage, or any other such consideration relating to a comparison of meaning-content. For otherwise we would have little alternative but to advance our own scheme automatically into a position of standard of comparison and so run afoul of the strictures of a cognitive Copernicanism. But how can linguistic frameworks and their correlative conceptual schemes possibly be compared on a linguistically neutral, meaningabstractive basis? The answer here lies in recognizing that the appropriate basis of comparison is pragmatic efficacy. The traditional pragmatists have put the key point well. C. I. Lewis, for example, has written: [T]he point of the pragmatic theory is, I take it, the responsiveness of truth to human bent or need, and the fact that in some sense it is made by mind. From the point of view here presented, this is valid, because the interpretation of experience must always be in terms of categories and concepts which the mind itself determines. There may be alternative conceptual systems, giving rise to alternative descriptions of experience, which are equally objective and equally valid, if there be not some purely logical defect in these categorial conceptions. When this is so, choice will be determined, consciously or unconsciously, on pragmatic grounds. New facts may cause a shifting of such grounds. When historically such change of interpretation takes place we shall genuinely have new truth, whose newness represents the creative power of human thought and the ruling consideration of human purpose. ... [O]nce the categorial system, in terms of which it is to be interpreted, is fixed, and concepts have been assigned a denotation in terms of sensation and imagery, it is this given experience which determines the truths of nature. It is between these two, in the choice of conceptual system for application and in the assigning of sensuous denotation to the abstract concept, that there is a pragmatic element in truth and knowledge. In this middle ground of trial and error, of expanding experience and the continual shift and modification of conception in our effort to cope with it, the drama of human interpretation and the control of nature is forever being played.29

Just as scheme-eligibility (i.e., counting as a conceptual scheme) is a teleological matter of functional equivalency, so scheme merit (i.e., counting as a relatively goon conceptual scheme) is a matter of functional efficacy.30 The standard judgment is that of the question: Which scheme underwrites more efficient and effective intervention in the course of events so as to produce those desired results in matters of cognition and communication for whose sake languages and their conceptual schemes are instituted as

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human resources. (This, after all, is the raison d’être of our cognitive instrumentalities, language among them.) As pragmatists have always stressed (and some of the skeptics before them) languages and conceptual instrumentalities are instituted among people in the interests of effective action within our environing world. Successful praxis thus affords natural and semantically neutral arbiter of our conceptual mechanisms.31 Schemes may be disjoint or incommensurable on the side of issues of conceptual meaning content, but they do indeed enter into mutual relevancy on the side of praxis. Their comparative superiority or inferiority is not an issue of how much of the somehow schemeneutral truth they manage to capture (how close they come to grasping the content of God’s Mind); it is the practical issue of how effectively they enable us to find our way amid the shoals and narrows of a difficult world. (Here once again we have a token of the primacy of practical over theoretical reason.32) And in this regard the question of the merits of our own scheme is by no means an academic oneits victory in the comparison process is by no means a foregone conclusion. Nothing prevents us from denying that ours is inherently the best conceptual scheme and seeing it as a ne plus ultra. Consider how cognitive progress happens. We can admit THAT the scientists of the future will have a better science, an ampler and more adequate understanding of the natural universe, and thus a better conceptual scheme—but we cannot anticipate HOW. We can thus sensibly view our scheme as the best available to us without claiming for it any more absolute merit. We need not take the stance that our own conceptual scheme is somehow the last word. Nevertheless, our recognition that our scheme is imperfect, though correct and appropriate in the interests of realism, is of rather limited utility. For it does not of itself afford us any help in improving it. It is a regulative conception that preempts a claim to dogmatic finality, not a constitutive one that puts substantively informative data at our disposal. A realization of the en gros deficiency of our conceptual machinery unhappily affords no basis for its emendation in matters of detail.33

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2 1

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2 2

Georg Simmel, “Ueber eine Beziehung der Selektionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie,” Archiv fuer systematische Philosophie and Soziologie, vol. 1 (1895), pp. 34-45 (see pp. 40-41).

3

William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), p. 171.

4

See, for example: Barry Stroud, “Conventionalism and the Indeterminacy of Translation,” in D. Davison and J. Hintikka, eds. Words and Objections: Essays in the Work of W. V. Quine (Dordrecht, 1969); Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 69 (1972), pp. 649-65; and Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 47 (1973-74), pp. 5-20.

5

Donald Davidson, “Conceptual Scheme.”

6

Ibid., p. 6.

7

Ibid., pp. 14-15.

8

It seems plausible to hold that we are actually in possession of a paradigm example of two mutually non-intertranslatable languagesthe physicalistic and the mentalistic. It seems possible that we should be able somehow to interpret each in terms of the other, but certainly not that we should translate from one to the other.

9

Writers on the theory of rationality often stress chat whatever we can validly acknowledge as constituting a reason for “them” is something that would also have to count as a reason for us. (See, for example, Martin Hollis, “Limits of Irrationality” in B. R. Wilson, ed., Rationality [Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1970], pp. 214-20.) But this fact that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander where “the reasonable” is concerned can be construed in terms of functional equivalency considerations and does not hinge on considerations of linguistic modus operandi and translational equivalency. Hollis’s indispensable “bridgehead hypothesis” (“first that the native perceive more or less what he [the investigator] perceives and secondly that they say about it more or less what he would say”) clearly turns on functional rather than translational considerations (else why that “more or less”?), and in fact is—as he points out—an underlying presupposition essential to the substantiation of any translational hypotheses.

10

B. Malinowski, Supplementary Essay to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 4th (revised) ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1938), pp. 300-301. As Malinowski justly observes, “Instead of translating, of inserting simply an English word for a native one, we are faced by a long and not al-

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2

together simple process of describing wide fields of custom, of social psychology and of tribal organization which correspond to one term or another.” (Ibid., pp. 301-2.). Compare the discussion of these issues in John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1920). 11

We can of course exchange them for our money by buying them in shops. But that cannot be what makes them money. One can buy virtually anything in shops.

12

Davidson, “Conceptual Scheme,” pp. 18-19.

13

Thus John Dewey contemptuously complained that “rationalism assumes that the concepts of reason are so self-sufficient and so far above experience that they need and can service no confirmation in experiences.” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 97.)

14

See Chap. VI of the writer’s The Primacy of Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).

15

C. I. Lewis, in Mind and the World Order (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1929), pp. 268-69, put the point at issue in a way that cannot be improved upon: Categories and concepts do not literally change; they are simply given up and replaced by new ones. When disease entities give place to mere adjectival states of the organism induced by changed conditions such as bacteria, the old description of the phenomena of disease does not become false in any sense in which it was not always false. All objects are abstractions of one sort or another; a disease entity is found to be a relatively poor kind of abstraction for the understanding and control of the phenomena in question. But in terms of this abstraction any interpretation of experience which ever was correctly made will still remain true. Any contradiction between the old truth and the new is verbal only, because the old word “disease” has a new meaning. The old word is retained but the old concept is discarded as a poor intellectual instrument and replaced by a better one.

16

Donald Davidson, “Conceptual Scheme,” pp. 9-10.

17

The crucial point at issue is reminiscent of Leibniz’s contention that minds that cannot communicate live in different natural spheres and that “whoever asks whether another world or another space, can exist is asking to this extent whether there are minds that can communicate nothing to us.” (“On Existence, Dreams, and Space,” in Ivan Jagodinsky, ed., Leibnitiana elementa philosophiae arcanae de summa rerum [Kazan, 1913], p. 114.)

18

See Davidson, “Conceptual Scheme,” pp. 15-17, for the development of this line of thought.

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2 19

Ibid., p. 21.

20

The fundamental idea here goes back to Kant. For modern variations cf. C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, and H. H. Price, Perception (London: McBride, 1933).

21

This latter way of approaching the issue invites the very proper complaint that: “Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them.” (Davidson, “Conceptual Scheme,” p.6.)

22

Compare Nelson Goodman’s critique of this view in “The Way The World Is” in his Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1972), pp. 24-32.

23

One should perhaps be prepared to make an exception of “the world” or “the universe” or “the true facts” or “things at large” or “reality” or “existence” in this regard. Such ens et unum formulas present only a vacuous unifier: an inherently empty container into which we can put anything and everything. This is not a materia primaor indeed any kind of materialbut a mere placeholder. For an interesting discussion of relevant issues see Justus Buchler, “On the Concept of ‘The World’,” The Review of Metaphysics 31 (1978): 555-79.

24

See the writer’s Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).

25

Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” p. 650.

26

Ibid.

27

Donald Davidson, “Conceptual Schemes,” p. 11.

28

To be sure, someone might ask: Why then bother with this conceptual detour at all? Why not simply operate with the notion of different theoretical stances? What work does the idea of “different schemes” do for you that that of “different theories” does not? The answer here lies in the consideration that it is not the generic fact that theories are at issue, but the special facts as to the sorts of theories that are involved, which makes it appropriate and helpful to speak of “conceptual schemes” in this connection.

29

Lewis, Mind and the World Order, pp. 271-72.

30

Note that in this teleological connection our own conceptual scheme (or language) must once again enjoy a certain primacy. For when it comes to our understanding

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2

of the proper work, role, and function of conceptual schemes it is inevitable that our own scheme should afford us the paradigm by which we judge the issue in general. 31

It is, of course, possible that the appeal to praxis may prove indecisive-that for certain ranges of purpose the one scheme is superior and that for other purposes other schemes are superior. Indeed this seems to be true with respect to the schemes of natural science and of ordinary life, where evolution has equipped us with a highly effective organon for social interaction.

32

These themes are developed more fully in the writer’s The Primacy of Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973) and Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford, 1976).

33

This chapter is an expanded revision of the author’s “Conceptual Schemes” in Studies in Epistemology, ed. by P. A. French et. al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980; Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 5, pp. 323-45).

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Chapter 3 PICTURE EPISTEMOLOGY 1. INTRODUCTION: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF PORTRAITURE

I

n his celebrated Tractatus logico-philosophicus, the influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that while nothing could meaningfully be said about certain matters by linguistic means, some of the key features at issue might nevertheless be apprehended in a non-linguistic manner. However, to the detriment of this otherwise sensible idea Wittgenstein clothed it in an aura of mysticism. Had he instead cited in evidence symbolic communication in mathematics and science (via diagrams and mathematical equations) or pictographic modes of informationtransmission, the issue would have been rather more straightforward— albeit more prosaic as well.1 But, as it was, his influence impelled those philosophers who disliked obscurantism to the belief that what could not be said in language could not be communicated at all. They saw linguistic statements as our only means for transmitting informationand, in the case of philosophy, talk about talk (as Gilbert Ryle liked to say). Indeed in Britain the idea became prominent that meaningful communication was confined not just to discourse but to ordinary-language discourse. Regrettably, this approach to information and communication also called for ignoring both mathematicized science and pictographic art as ventures in rational communication, but in the fashionable logophilia of the day people apparently saw this as a price worth paying for doctrinal simplicity. And so it has come about that down to the present, philosophers not infrequently maintain that all communication is verbal, and even where they do not say this explicitly, their practice often suggests it. The present discussion seeks to argue that this is not the case. It will do this by focusing on one particularand particularly strikingexample, that of portraiture. “Do I have to draw you a picture?” Expressions of this sort serve to convey the message that statements need not be made by language but can be made in protographic rather than linguistic form. The theory of language does not begin to exhaust the theory of information transmission and man-

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agement. For portraits can convey information differently—by nontextual messages that are not easily transposed into words. 2. PORTRAITS From an epistemological point of view, portraits have many interesting aspects. To begin with, it is worth stressing the prominent and peculiar standing of the human face in the cognitive scheme of things. Recent physiology reveals that the brain has special and specialized mechanism for face recognition distinct from its resources for handling other sorts of objects. And from the psychological point of view there is virtually no single feature of our physical endowment that we humans regard as decisively characteristic of ourselves as individuals. (Fingerprints don’t come close!) Generally speaking a portrait is a depiction of a human being. Generally but perhaps not necessarily. In the 18th century it was not uncommon in Britain for an affluent landholder to have his prize pig or bull or racehorse painted by one of the itinerant artists who specialized in this sort of thing. But here the animal in being portrayed was in effect personified. (After all, it had a name and an address and a reputation.) In general pictures of animals are not portraits. John Singer Sergant painted idealized pictures of women; Audubon drew idealized pictures of birds and animals. The former are portraits; the latter not—any more than the idealized pictures of Varga. A portrait must have a subject who is in principle identifiable as such. A caricature is marginally a portrait, a work of pure imagination is not. Portraits must relate to actual individuals. There are pictures of Santa Clause but not portraits of him. And even with real people there must be an element of authentic depiction. Only real, existing subjects can be depicted in a portrait. An imaginative representation of (say Alexander the Great or the Apostle Peter is not a portrait; let alone such a painting of Mercury, the Greek messenger-god.) Thus not only must a portrait depict a real individual but it must be connected with this subject. A portrait must either be drawn from life or memory, or it must be the product of reproducing or synthesizing other portraits done in this manner. Photographs will do. Actual connection with the subject is an indispensable basis for portraiture. It is something that can be alternated and rendered indirect. But it cannot be completely dispensed with. The feature of deliberate representation is crucial to portraits. Suppose that an individual has his portrait painted. Along comes his identical twin. The

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picture may well be “the spitting image” of him. But it does not qualify as his portrait. A portrait can, of course, be made in many different media, pencil, crayons, paint, etc. It can be made with a camera or a scanner. At a stretch in the marble bust of a person or terra cotta figure or even a wood carving can be considered to be a portrait. But typically and ordinarily a portrait is a picture. A verbal “portrait” is only figuratively so. To count as a portrait a produce must offer a deliberate representation of its subject. Accordingly the picture of an individual on a security camera would not count. Again the picture of a fashion model on a catwalk does not count—it lacks the element of self-presentation: deliberation here focuses on the accoutrements (the clothes, the jewelry, the hairstyle, not the person). Truth in discourse is a matter of correspondence to fact; truth in depiction is a matter of correspondence with reality. The kinships here are far stronger than the differences and the concepts of truth are smoothly applicable in both cases. And this means that even as we can have descriptions that are failed or even false so also can we have portraits that are failed or even false. Portraits are human productions. As such, they have functions: they are created by their makers to serve some sort of purpose. These purposes lie in the artist’s objective. Is what is at issue a matter of testing a technique, a practice exercise, a production to please a friend the response to a commission by a client, or what? In this later case, the subject’s aims also come on the scene to ornament the staircase of an ancestral hall for the benefit of unknown heirs, to stir the memory of his beloved, to adorn the jacket of his book, to demarcate the coins or stamps of his reign, etc. No picture can of itself answer the question whether its subject was the person or his identical twinor from a look-alike. And certainly we can never tell from a painting itself whether it was made from life or from memory. There are many crucial facts about themselves that portraits do not wear on their sleeve. Portraits can mis-represent to the point of lying. Portraitsand pictures generally“make a statement”. In answering various questions a portrait can make a whole list of informative claims. And the fact that a picture can make a statement means that it can also make a false statementtell a lie. It can convey a mistaken impression.

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Propositions can certainly be inconsistent with one another when (as Aristotle noted) what they say conflicts regarding the same time and respect. Picturesand specifically portraitscan certainly do the same. Of course the young subject can be short and the old one tallno conflict there. Inconsistency will have to relate to a “permanent” feature. In this regard personality characteristics are in better shape than physical ones. Portraits that depict their subject at one selfsame age and stage as being kindly and harsh, or careworn and sprightly, respectively, would qualify as inconsistent. 3. ANSWERING QUESTIONS The prime question of portraiture is: What does the person look like? The camera has unquestionably made a great impact on portraiture. Before the era of cameras, portraits generally concentrated on showing their subjects look like, after the camera, they tended to concentrate on what they are like. Impressionism came to prominence. Visual detail went out the window as portraits often concentrated on conveying the essential and “characteristic” feature of their subject. The line between depiction and caricature became blurred as portraits increasingly attached less to the physical and more to the personality characteristics of their subject, seeking to convey not so much their material as their spiritual make-up. It is not that portraits ceased to convey information but that the range of information on which they focused was not altered. Simply being portrayed does not make a portrait. The criminal defendant or witness sketched by a courtroom artist is not subject to a portrait. Nor in the case of photography is a snapshot—though an ID photo might be considered marginal. A portrait made with its subject’s knowledge and consent pose a great many explicit decisions for its subject. The range of choices at issue will generally include: • stagesetting (“at his desk”, “on horseback”, “pruning the roses”) • outfitting (dress, “uniforms”) • accessories (jewelry, insignia of office or profession) • props (a book, a marshal’s baton)

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• posture (standing vs. sitting, etc.) • expression (serious, smiling, relaxed, etc.) • action (reading, writing, talking, etc.) Unlike a death mask a portrait does not just present a person’s looks: it is an assertion of social, intellectual, and professional position. Standardly, a portrait is a way of projecting a person’s claims to a particular sort of status and standing. And there is a tacit rule of sumptuary propriety in portraiture. A lawyer should not be depicted with the accoutrements of a general, not a statesman with the trappings of a physician. A portrait generally has a dual aspect as a collaborative venture to which two parties—the artist and the subject—make a crucial contribution, constituting a dialogue of sorts between them. The portrait is of the subject alright, but the artists always puts something of himself into a portrait. On the one side we have the question: Why would a subject have his/her portrait done? • as an attenuatism of mortality: to let ones descendant, successors, and aftermath know what one looked likeand remember oneselfor at least, more remotely, to some extent to control the way in which they do so. • as an assertion of authority or status by gracing the family home of one’s posterity or adorning the walls of a museum. • as a beau gesta gift, say to a friend or relationor even to oneself (Whistler’s mother). And when would an artist create a portrait? Again various possibilities arise: • to obtain earning (the commission) • to showcase one’s technical skill • to produce a gift (for a relative, friend, etc.)

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• to give vent to an interest There are some aspects of a portrait that do indeed generally admit to verbalization. How a portrait depicts its subject will answer a host of questions. I. Permanent features: • Sex and race • Social standing and status • Personality II. Long-term features: • Appearance [what did he look like as a child, as a young man, in his prime, etc.] • Profession/claim to fame [iconography] • Dress and accessorization [a dandy] • Tastes and affinities [a hunter] • Typical expression and mannerism [reflective] • Medical condition [hale and hearty] III. Short term features (as reflected in the Spanish distinction ser/estar) • Emotion (happy or sad or preoccupied) • Playfulness (making a face/occupied–preoccupied) • Smiles or frowns The time period and culture in which the subject lived is something a portrait conveysas well as the individual’s actual or ostensible spirit status.

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The iconography of headgear is a large subject in itself: the crown of the monarch, the mortar board of the academic, the riding cap of the horseman, all send their own message. All of those answers to questions that portraits provide give descriptive information. And of course this sort of information can in general be portrayed verbally. But portraits do more. Painters usually seek to portray not only what the person looked like, but alsoand rather more importantlyto convey that person’s role in the scheme of things: to make an explicative statement regarding that persons essence as an individual. Thus consider such observations as the following Even after making allowance for an artist’s desire to please, the dominant impression from [Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the scholar-scientist Thomas Young] is one of intelligence and determination, but also sensitivity and openness to the world.2

Such not infrequent commentaries make it all too clear that portraits can do more than answer questions about the physical description of their subjects. For what portraiture adds is a vivid view of the artist’s sense of what his subject looked like. And at this point, for better or for worse, an artist can editorialize a look that is typically good or evil, happy or unhappy, wise or foolish, serious or silly, etc. And so, beyond the informative dimension of a portrait as answering specific questions there is the broader, human dimension of imparting an element of permanence to a transient individuality. In real life, unlike the fictions of an earlier era, the villain does not wear his villainy in his face, nor the hero his heroism. What people look like certainly need not reflect what they are like. The face is, as it were, a mask behind which any number of personalities may dwell; it is not, or need not be, a mirror on which the soul is reflected. And so the producer of a commissioned portrait often comes to be torn between actually depicting the subject and pleasing him. Most subjects want to be depicted “looking their best”or even better. 5. PICTURES AND PREPOSITIONS All the same, then as some things that propositions can do but portraits not. For propositions, unlike portraits, can deny as well as affirm. A propo-

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sition can say: “We don’t know what his hair-color was, but it certainly wasn’t green.” A portrait cannot. Propositions cannot convey the fullness of portraiture. But there is also the reverse side. Nor can portraits generalize. No portrait can tell us what all portraits of a given subject will dolet alone all portraits whatsoever. Pictographic information is always specific. The step to generalization must be achieved by other means. In this regard, portraiture information is unavoidably limited. Nor can they modalize. No portrait can tell us what is necessary to or possible for its subject. The inevitable specificity of portrait information precludes its realization of the sort of theoretical absentees at issue with generalizations and modalizations. “But are these points not unfaithful to the paper’s own teaching about the communicative potential of pictures vis-à-vis language? After all, it is only too obvious that every single contention you are making is being made by means of language?” True but immaterial. It is the prominence of information in pictures rather than information about pictures that matters for present purposes. There is no question that in dealing with theoretical rather than simply factual issues the use of language is indispensable.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 3 1

In a clever recent paper, Philip Kitcher and Achille Varze give a convincing argument that what from the angle of verbal communication would constitute an unmanageable infinity of information is conveyed in a single map. See Philip Kitcher and Achille Varze, “One Picture is Worth an Infinity of Words,” Philosophy, vol. 75, (2000).

2

Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything [Thomas Young] (New York: Pi Press, 2005), p. 233.

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Chapter 4 SPECIFICITY PRIORITIZATION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE PARTICULAR 1. SPECIFICITY PRIORITIZATION

T

he story is told that Herbert Spencer said of Thomas Buckle (or was it the other way round?—as it could just as well have been) that his idea of a tragedy was a beautiful theory destroyed by a recalcitrant fact. A fundamental epistemic principle is at issue here, namely that when the limited particularity of fact and the broad generality of theory come into conflict in the case of otherwise plausible propositions, then it is the former that will prevail. Facts, as the proverb has it, are stubborn things: in case of a clash, facts must prevail over theories, observations over speculations, concrete instances over abstract generalities, limited laws over broader theories. With factual issues specificity predominates generality when other things are anything like equal. A far-reaching Principle of Specificity Precedence accordingly comes into view. In cases of conflict or contradiction in our information, the cognitive dissonance that needs to be removed is to be resolved in favor or the more particularly concrete, definite party to the conflict. The more general, the more cases included, and so the more open to error: generality is a source of vulnerability: and when clashes arise, particularity enjoys priority. We presume that specifics are in better probative condition than generalities because they are by nature easier to evidentiate, seeing that generalities encompass a multitude of specifics. Contrariwise, seemingly established generalities are easier to disestablish than specifics because a single counter-instance among many possibilities will disestablish a generality, whereas it takes something definite to disestablish a particularity. Accordingly, it transpires that ordinarily and in “normal” circumstances specificities are on safer ground and thereby enjoy probative precedence in situations of discord and inconsistency. When mere information is being distilled into coherent knowledge, specificity prioritization is the rule.

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2. SOME ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE Such a Principle of Specificity Precedence can be illustrated from many different points of view. As already noted, it is a standard feature of scientific practice, where when theory and observation clash, it is, in general, observation that prevails.1 The practice of monitoring hypothetical theorizing by means of experimentation is characteristic of the scientific process, and the Principle of Specificity Precedence is fundamental here. Throughout, whenever speculation clashes with the phenomena, a conjectured hypotheses with the data at our disposal, or a theory with observation then it is generally—and almost automatically—the former that is made to give way. Presumption, that is to say, stands on the side of specificity throughout the realm of factual inquiry. This circumstance obtains not only in clashes between observation with theory, but also in clashes between a lower level (less general or abstract) theory with one that is of a higher (more general and abstract) level. Here too the comparatively specific rival will prevail in situations of conflict. And the general principle prevails with the historical sciences every bit as much as from the sciences of nature. A single piece of new textual evidence or a single item of new archeological discovery can suffice to call a conflicting theory into question. Here too a penchant for specificity preference is very much in operation. Philosophy affords yet another illustration of specificity preference. The work of Thomas Reid (1710-96) and the philosophers of the Scottish school illustrates this in an especially vivid way. These thinkers reasoned as follows: Suppose that a conflict arises between some speculative fact of philosophical theorizing and certain more particular, down-to-earth, bits of everyday common sense. Then it of course will and must be those philosophical contentions that must give way. In this spirit Reid insisted that common sense must hold priority over the more speculative teaching of philosophy. Maintaining that most philosophers themselves have some sense of this he observes wryly that “it is pleasant to observe the fruitless pains which Bishop Berkeley took to show that his system … did not contradict the sentiment of the vulgar, but only those of the philosophers.”2 Reid firmly held that any clash between philosophy and common sense must be resolved in the latter’s favor. Should such a clash occur:

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The philosopher himself must yield … [because] such [common-sense] principle are older, and of more authority, than philosophy; she rests upon them as her basis, not they upon her. If she could overturn them she would become buried in their ruins, but all the engines of philosophical subtlety are too weak for this purpose.3

In any conflict between philosophy and everyday common sense beliefs it is the latter that must prevail. The down-to-earth lessons of ordinary experience must always prevail over any conflicting speculations of philosophical theorizing. At this point the Scottish common-sensists were emphatic. When conflicts arise, commonplace experience trumps philosophical speculation. And ever outside the orbit of common-sense philosophizing most metaphilosophical approaches have agreed with this specificity-favoring point of view. Yet another illustration of specificity preference comes (perhaps surprisingly) from pure mathematics. In deliberating about the relationship between mathematics proper and metamathematical theorizing about mathematical issues, the great German mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) also argued for specificity preference. If any conflict should arise between substantive mathematical findings and large-scale metamathematical theory, so he maintained, then it is automatically the latter that must yield way by abandonment or modification. Here too we are to favor concrete specificity over abstract generality: seeing that, across a wide range of mathematics, abstract metamathematical theories are comparatively more risky. Accordingly, we have what Arthur Fine calls “Hilbert’s Maxim”, namely the thesis that: Metatheoretic arguments [regarding a theory] must satisfy more stringent requirements [of acceptability] than those placed on the arguments used by the theory in question.4

And so the mathematical realm provides yet another illustration of specificity preference. Throughout our inquiry into the reality of things it appears that our pursuit of knowledge prioritizes specificity. Presumption, that is to say, stands on the side of comparative specificity and definiteness.

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3. THE QUESTION OF RATIONALE Is there a cogent rationale for this? Are there sound reasons of general principle why specificity should be advantaged? An affirmative answer is clearly in order here. The reasoning at issue runs somewhat as follows. Consider a conflict case of the sort that now concerns us. Here, in the presence of various other uncontested “innocent bystanders” (x), we are forced to a choice between a generality (g) and a specificity (s) because a situation of the following generic structure obtains: (g & x) → ~s or equivalently (s & x) → ~g It is clear, here that, with the unproblematic context x fixed in place, either s or g must be sacrificed owing to the conflict at issue. But since g, being general, encompasses a whole variety of other special cases—some of which might well also go wrong—we have, in effect, a forced choice occasioned by a clash between a many-case manifold and the fewer-case competitor. And since the extensiveness of the former affords a greater scope for error, the latter is bound to be the safer bet. As a rule, generalities are more vulnerable than specificities since when other things are anything like equal, it is clearly easier for error to gain entry into a larger than into a smaller manifold of claims. To be sure, it deserves to be noted that what is basically at issue with specificity preference is not a propositional truth-claim but a procedural principle of presumption. What is at issue is not a factual generalization to the effect that specificities inevitably prevail over generalities, but a precept of epistemic practice on the order of “Believe the testimony of your own eyes” or “Accept the claim for which the available evidence is stronger”. It is a matter of the procedural principle. And of course one can go wrong here: It is not true that what your eyes tell is always so or that the truth always lies on the side of the stronger evidential case in hand. All that we have—and all that is at issue—is that such methodological precepts of rational procedure indicate a process that will generally lead us aright. Though not infallible they are good guides to practice. Such a principle of practice reflects a matter of general adequacy rather than failproof correctness. And the justification at issue is thus one of functional efficacy—of serving the purposes of the practice at issue effectively. Here, as elsewhere,

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presumption is less a matter of demonstrating a universal truth than of validating a modus operandi on the basis of its general efficacy. 4. A CURIOUS INVERSION: THE CASE OF COUNTERFACTUALS It is, however, necessary to come to terms with the striking circumstance that there is an important family of cases where the more usual presumption of specificity prioritization is in fact inverted and the reverse process a generality prioritization obtains. This occurs when we are dealing not with matters of fact, but with fact-contradicting assumptions and hypotheses.5 By way of illustration consider the counterfactual conditional: If he had been born in 1999, then Julius Caesar would not have died in 44 BC but would be a mere infant in 2001. This arises in the context of the following issue-salient beliefs: (1) Julius Caesar was born in 100 BC. (2) Julius Caesar is long dead, having died at the age of 56 in 44 BC. (3) Julius Caesar was not born in 1999 AD. (4) Anyone born in 1999 AD will only be an infant by 2001. (5) People cannot die before they are born. And let us now introduce the supposition of not-(3) via the following: Assumption: Suppose that not-(3), that is, Julius Caesar was born in 1999 AD. In the face of this assumption we must, of course, follow its explicit instruction to dismiss (1) and (3). Thesis (4) is safe, inherent in the very definition of infancy. But even with these adjustments, inconsistency remains and confronts us with two distinct acceptance/rejection alternatives: (2), (4)/(1), (3), (5)

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(4), (5)/(1), (2), (3) In effect we are now constrained to a choice between the specific (2) on the one hand and the general (5) on the other. At this point, however, the “natural” resolution afforded by the Principle of Generality Precedence that holds in these purely hypothetical cases will prioritize the more general and instance-encompassing (5) over the case-specific (2), thereby eliminating that first alternative. With not-(1) fixed by hypothesis, the conclusion of the initial counterfactual then at once follows from (4) and (5). In effect, that counterfactual is the product of generality prioritization. The perplexity of an unnatural counterfactual along the lines of “If Julius Cesar had been born in 1999 AD then he would have been born again from the dead” would be averted. As this example illustrates, in deliberating with respect to factcontradicting assumptions generality precedence comes into play. And this betokens a larger lesson. In determining which beliefs should give way in the face of counterfactual assumptions do and should let informativeness be our guide, so that authentic generality is now in the driver’s seat.6 Rational procedure in speculative contexts becomes a matter of keeping our systemic grip on the manifold of relevant information as best we can. Again, consider another example: —If this rubber band were made of copper, what then? And this question arises in an epistemic context where the following beliefs are salient: Beliefs: (1) This band is made of rubber. (2) This band is not made of copper. (3) This band does not conduct electricity. (4) Things made of rubber do not conduct electricity. (5) Things made of copper do conduct electricity.

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Let it be that we are now instructed to accept the hypothesis Not-(2): This band is made of copper. Then the following two propositional sets are the hypothesis-compatible maximal consistent subsets of our specified belief-set B: {(3), (4)}

corresponding to the acceptance/rejection alternative (3), (4)/ (1), (2), (5)

{(4), (5)}

corresponding to the acceptance/rejection alternative (4), (5)/ (1), (2), (3)

The first alternative corresponds to the counterfactual —If this band were made of copper, then copper would not conduct electricity [since this band does not conduct electricity]. And the second alternative corresponds to the counterfactual —If this band were made of copper, then it would conduct electricity [since copper conducts electricity]. In effect we are driven to a choice between (3) and (5), that is, between a particular feature of this band and a general fact about copper things. And its greater generality qualifies (5) as being systemically more informative, and its prioritization is therefore appropriate. Accordingly, we will retain (4) and (5) along with not-(2), and therefore accept that second counterfactual as appropriate. And this exemplifies a general situation of generality preference in matters of counterfactual reasoning. 5. NATURAL VS. UNNATURAL COUNTERFACTUALS The distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” counterfactuals is, of course, crucial in the present context. To illustrate this, let us suppose that we know that all the coins in the till are made of copper. Then we can say without hesitation: If the coin I have in mind is in the till, then it is made of copper.

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But we certainly cannot say counterfactually If the coin I have in mind were in the till, then it would be made of copper. After all, I could perfectly well have a certain silver coin in mind, which would certainly not change its composition by being placed in the till. But just how is the difference between the two cases to be explained? Let C = {c1, c2, … , cn} be the set of coins in the till, where by hypothesis all of these ci are made of copper. And now consider the assumption: • Let x be one of the ci (that is, let it be some otherwise unspecified one of those coins presently in the till). Clearly this assumption, together with our given “All of the ci are made of copper,” will entail “x is made of copper” so that first conditional is validated. But in the second case we merely have the assumption • Let x be a coin in the till (through not necessarily one of those presently there). Now, of course, this hypotheses joined to “All of the coins presently in the till are made of copper” will obviously not yield that conclusion. Accordingly, the second counterfactual is in trouble, since the information available to serve as its enthymematic basis is insufficient to validate the requisite deduction. The two conditionals are different because they involve different assumptions of differing epistemic status, a difference subtly marked by use of the indicative in the first case and the subjunctive in the second. For in the former we are dealing merely with de facto arrangements, while in the latter case with a lawful generalization. And so generality prioritization speaks for the latter alternative. Lawfulness makes all the difference here. Again, consider the question “What if Booth had not murdered Lincoln?” And let us suppose that the salient beliefs here stand as follows: (1) Lincoln was murdered in April 1865.

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(2) Murder is deliberate killing so that Lincoln was murdered, it was by someone deliberately trying to kill him. (3) Booth murdered Lincoln. (4) Only Booth was deliberately trying to kill Lincoln in April 1865. Observe that (1), (2), (4) ├ (3). Now suppose that not-(3). Then we must abandon one of the trio: (1), (2), (4). Here (2) is a definitional truth. And (4) is a general fact, while (1) is but a matter of specific fact. So now the rule of precedence for matters of generality/informativeness marks (1) as the weakest link and we arrive at: —If Booth had not murdered Lincoln, Lincoln would not have been murdered in April 1865. In a similar vein, we have the problem of explaining how it is that the subjunctively articulated counterfactual —If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then nobody would have. seems perfectly acceptable, while the corresponding indicative conditional —If Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, then no one did. seems deeply problematic.7 And within the presently contemplated frame of reference the answer is straightforward. The background of accepted belief here is as follows: (1) Kennedy was shot. (2) Oswald shot Kennedy. (3) Oswald acted alone: No one apart from Oswald was trying to shoot Kennedy. Now suppose that (2) is replaced by its negation not-(2), i.e., that Oswald had not shot Kennedy. For the sake of consistency we are then required to abandon either (1) or (3).

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The informativeness-geared policy of presumption via generality precedence in matters of mere hypothesis now rules in favor of retaining (3), thus dropping (1) and arriving at the former of that pair of conditionals. The alternative but inappropriate step of dismissing (1), would, by contrast, issue in that second, decidedly implausible counterfactual. To be sure, this conditional could in theory be recast in a more complex form that would rescue it as it were: —If Oswald did not shoot Kennedy then no one did, so since Kennedy was shot, Oswald did it. In this revised version the conditional in effect constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that Oswald did not shoot Kennedy. But it is now clear that these conditionals address very different questions, namely the (1)-rejecting • What if Oswald had not shot Kennedy? and the (1)-retaining • Who shot Kennedy? respectively. The retention guidance of the different facilities serve to settle the issue. 6. THE KEY LESSON What is thus crucial with counterfactuals is the determination of precedence and priority in a consistency-restoring right-of-way allocation in cases of conflict. And here we proceed on the basis of the rule that: In counterfactual reasoning, the right-of-way priority among the issue-salient beliefs is determined in terms of their generality of import by way of informativeness in the systemic context at hand.

The situation can be summarized in the unifying slogan that in hypothetical situations the standard modus operandi of presumption prioritizes beliefs on the basis of systematicity preference. But this matter of right of way is now determined with reference to informativeness within the wider context of our knowledge. When we play fast and loose with the world’s facts we

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need the security of keeping its fundamentals in place. In particular, it is standard policy that in counterfactual contexts, propositions viewed as comparatively more informative in the systemic context at hand will take priority over those which are less so. While revisions by way of curtailment and abandonment in our family of relevant belief are unavoidable and inevitable in the face of belief-countervailing hypotheses, we want to give up as little as possible. And here the ruling principle is: “Break the chain of inconsistency at its weakest link in point of systemic informativeness.” In counterfactual contexts, generalities accordingly take precedence over specificities. Once we enter the realm of fact-contravening hypotheses those general theses and themes that we subordinate to specifics in factual matters now become our life preservers. We cling to them for dear life, as it were, and do all that is necessary to keep them in place. “Salvage as much information about the actual condition of things as you possibly can” is now our watchword. Accordingly, specifics and particularities will here yield way to generalizations and abstractions. And so in determining which beliefs are to give way in the face of counterfactual assumptions we do and should let informativeness be our guide. Keeping our systemic grip on the manifold of relevant information is the crux, and speaks clearly for generality-precedence here. 7. CONCLUSION The preceding line of thought reinforces a point for which the present author has argued for many years, namely that lawfulness (in the laws-ofnature sense of the term) and generality of range are pivotal features in the treatment of counterfactuals.8 Once we enter the realm of fact-contravening hypothesis and suppositions then those general truth and theories become our sheet-armor. We cling to them for dear life, as it were, and do all that is necessary to keep them in place. And so now, most universally, specifics and particularities yield way to generalizations and abstractions. The overall lesson then is clear. When a clash among seemingly acceptable propositions occurs in factual contexts, considerations of evidential plausibility lead us to adopt the stance of specificity-preference. But in counterfactual contexts where the economics of information conservation is paramount, our deliberations must pivot the generality preference at issue with systemic cogency. To be sure, in the case of a counterfactual supposition that is itself particular we may have to make a generalization give way to it. This arises

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standardly in the case of thought experiments contemplating outcomes that may defeat generalizations. Thus consider the following counterfactual relating to testing the generalization (g) that heavy objects (like rocks) fall to earth when released: —If this heavy rock had not fallen to earth when it was released at altitude yesterday, then generalization g would be false. Here we have the following beliefs to the facts of the situation: (1) That heavy rock was released at altitude yesterday. (2) That rock then fell to earth. (3) Heavy objects (like rocks) fall to earth when released at altitude (= generalization g). When now instructed to assume not-(2), the resulting inconsistency forces a choice between abandoning the specific (1) and the general (3). With automatic generality precedence one would be constrained to retain (3) and jettison (1). But that of course is not how things work in such a thought experiment. For now the particular thesis at issue, namely (1), is here immunized against rejection by the fact of its constituting part of the very hypothesis at issue. *** The lesson of these deliberations is clear. In matters of conflict within the factual domain, presumption lies on the side of specificity, while in the speculatively counterfactual domain it favors lawful generality. In the larger scheme of things, two diametrically opposed principles—specificity prioritization and generality prioritization—are in operation in our overall deliberations. But they obtain in very different sectors of the cognitive terrain—namely factual inquiry and counterfactual speculation. And, in both cases alike, it is the purposive nature of the enterprise that determines the appropriateness of the correlative prioritization principle. Here it is not form but matter that follows function. For the purposive manifold of the particular area of deliberation at issue is the determinative factor. With factual inquiry we aim at the security of

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our cognitive commitments and accordingly opt for specificity as the more reliable guide. By contrast, with counterfactual reasonings we look for the results of disbelieved hypotheses and strive to retain the maximum of information that survives the turmoil produced in our cognitive commitments by the impact of discordant assumptions. And here, as elsewhere, it is the difference in the aims and purposes of the enterprise at hand that accounts for the difference of the procedural process that is appropriate. HISTORICAL POSTSCRIPT The thesis that in specifically counterfactual situations a Principle of Generality Preference obtains was urged by the present author originally in a 1961 paper9 and developed more fully in his book, Hypothetical Reasoning (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1964). Subsequently, a series of empirical investigations by R. Revlis and his colleagues confirmed experimentally that in actual practice people do indeed proceed in this way.10 And among philosophers too the idea of prioritizing lawful generality has become widely accepted as a matter of empirical practice grounded in psychological inclinations.11 Such psychologism is, however, decidedly different from my own position, which sees the prioritization of lawful generality as a matter of functional efficacy in the light of the inherent objectives of counterfactual communication. At bottom the matter is not a psychological matter of preference or reluctance to change, but one of information-processing prioritization rooted in the function-oriented ground rules of linguistic practice. That people do in fact think in this way I regard as the result of rather than the ground for the validity of the principle. It does no more than to reflect the happy circumstance that in this particular area people generally proceed in a rationally appropriate way.12

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 4 1

To be sure, as Pierre Duhem insisted, a theory-observation clash will in general involve a plurality of participating theories, so that it will not be clear which particular theory will have to be jettisoned. See his The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, tr. by P. Wiener (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1982).

2

Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1785), VI iv, p. 570.

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 4 3

An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), I, v (ed. Wm. Hamilton, p. 102b; ed. Derek R. Brookes, p. 21.)

4

See Arthur Fine, “The Natural Ontological Attitude,” in Jarret Lephon (ed.), Scientific Realism (Berkeley and Los Angeles; University of California Press, 1984), pp. 83-107 (see esp. p. 85). The maxim is articulated in line with David Hilbert’s endeavor to demonstrate the consistency of set theory on a more concrete non-settheoretical basis.

5

On counterfactual conditionals and their problems see N. Rescher, Hypothetical Reasoning (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1964); David Lewis, Conditionals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); Ernest Sosa (ed.), Causation and Conditionals (London: Oxford University Press, 1975); Anthony Appiah, Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Frank Johnson (ed.), Conditionals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

6

In this context it is, however, important that the generalization at issue be seen as somehow lawful and as not a merely fortuitous and accidental aggregation of special cases, so that the factor of generality is present in name only.

7

This issue is addressed in E. W. Adams “Subjective and Indicative Conditionals,” Foundations of Language, vol. 6 (1970) pp. 39-94.

8

See the author’s “Belief-Contravening Suppositions,” The Philosophical Review, vol., 70 (1961), pp. 176-196, as well as Hypothetical Reasoning (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1964).

9

Nicholas Rescher, “Belief Contravening Suppositions,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 70 (1961), pp. 176-95.

10

R. Revlis and J. R. Hayes, “The Primacy of Generalities in Hypothetical Reasoning,” Cognitive Psychology, vol. 3 (1972), pp. 268-90. R. Revlis, S. G. Lipton, and J. R., Hayes, “The Importance of Universal Quantifiers in a Hypothetical Reasoning Task,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 10 (1971), pp. 86-91. See also M. D. Braine and D. P. O’Brian, “A Theory of If: A Lexical Entry, Reasoning Program and Pragmatic Principles,” Psychological Review, vol. 98, pp. 182-203. And see moreover N. O. Roese and J. M. Olsan, What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (Mahwwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), p. 4.

11

See David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); David Lewis, (1977); Roy A. Sorensen, Thought Experiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Peter Unger, “Toward a Psychology of Common Sense,” American Phi-

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 4

losophical Quarterly, vol. 19 (1982), pp. 117-129. Unger sees the matter as one of “the psychology of thought experimentation and insight into a psychological resistance to abandonment”. 12

This chapter was originally published under the same title in Gereon Wolters and Martin Carrier (eds.), Homo Sapiens und Homo Faber: Festschrift Mittelstrass (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), pp. 201-12.

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Chapter 5 ON THE WAYS AND VAGARIES OF FICTION 1. SETTING THE STAGE

I

n part three of his magisterial book on truth1 Lorenz Puntel discusses the conception of alternative possible worlds, and his analysis here issues in a sound judgment: Discussion about possible worlds as currently conducted seems to be characterized by a profound duality. On the one hand, problems are raised and treated and doctrines espoused that are characteristic of bold metaphysics in the traditional sense of the term. … On the other hand, most of the philosophers participating in this discussion seem for obscure reasons to set certain self-imposed limits for themselves. Most of them reach a point at which they either abruptly stop or else satisfy themselves with contentions whose status as well-founded claims can hardly be acknowledged.2

This is an eminently just appraisal of the situation. What possible world theory needs at this point is not bold metaphysics but ontological minimalism (not to say common sense). As far as we mere humans are concerned, the only possible worlds there are are those embodied in fictions: worlds imaginatively projected through supposition, assumption, or hypothesis. No one knows—or can know—of a possible world that is not realized through the mental artifice of envisioning a scenario of some sort. Neither I nor anyone else can offer an example of a possible world for which there is not a real-world author, a living, breathing producer who conjures up some possibility by a coup d’esprit. All of the possible worlds at our disposal are fictional constructs arising from the suppositional thought work of the living, breathing individuals who project them by way of imagination. Accordingly, the question of the ontology of possible worlds does not call for transcendental metaphysics but for a deflationary account that sees such worlds as thought-artifacts produced by and only available through the mental operations of real-world individuals by means of supposition, as-

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sumption, hypothesis, or the like. The “profound duality” of which Lorenz Puntel speaks should thus ideally be reduced to a prosaic unicity. These considerations set the stage for the present discussion, whose task is the presentation of a suitably deflationary account of possible worlds. It is our main aim here to show that those “nonexistent possible individuals and worlds” belong not so much to ontology, the theory of being, as to the theory of fiction. However, this rather abstract thesis is not our sole concern, for en route to this destination we also have occasion to look at various objects of interest by the wayside. 2. TWO REALMS Homo sapiens inhabits two realms. There is the realm of reality—the natural and artifactual settings in which we live and breathe. But there is also the realm of thought, the world of mental operations. This thought realm itself divides into two sectors. On the one side is the sphere of thought about reality—of science, philosophy, scholarship. On the other side there is the realm of conjecture and imagination, where the mind deliberately cuts loose from reality and produces a thought world of its own—a realm of fancy and make believe that deals not with real things but with imaginatively projected artifacts. This is the world of literature, and preeminently of fiction, where our thought quite deliberately leaves reality behind. Authentic fictions do not characterize reality, and do not even purport to do so. They are not about “the real world” but about a virtual reality that does not exist at all but only figures in the thoughts—the imaginations, if you will—of people. But fictions of course depend on reality for their realization as such: they must issue from some real “work of fiction”, some linguistically projected artifact that is produced by a real author—or group thereof. Yet what about fictions within fictions—fictional fictions, so to speak, that are supposed to be written by the fictional characters of works of fiction? For one thing, insofar as there are such things their author is clearly the author of that framework fiction itself—the circumstance that their supposed authors are someone else is just another aspect of what makes that work fictional. There are, strictly speaking, no fictional fictions; there are no fictions unless real people really make them up. That fiction produced by a fictional author is (insofar as realized) in fact the product of the actual

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actual author of the underlying work. Fictions cannot detach itself from actuality altogether to take on a life of their own. 3. WHAT IS FICTION? What are those various properties or characteristics that will characterize a work of fiction as such? The Oxford English Dictionary is skating on very thin ice in identifying fiction as “concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters”.3 And so it will be agents and not just humanoid characters that are at issue, and the concept of agents must here be construed more widely than that of people. People are specifically humans, members of Homo sapiens; agents, however, will include rational animals (as in Watership Down), alien beings from other planets, and even—conceivably—intelligent robots (as in various sorts of science fiction). In the end, it seems that what matters—and all that matters—is the capacity for rational agency. Moreover, exactly what happens when we attenuate the preceding formula’s insistence on the imaginary? What if real actions by imaginary agents are at issue? For example, consider a narrative that introduces an imagined attorney from eighteenth-century Williamsburg who gradually slides into doing all the things done by George Washington; ultimately Congress appoints him to lead the army, he crosses the Delaware to surprise the Hessians, commands at Yorktown, is elected as the first president, etc. One would, I think, have to suppose that this work remains fictional even though its events are almost entirely real. And what of imaginary actions by real people? Real persons, places, and events can of course figure in fictions; there are such things as imaginative reconstructions. What if we imagine an account, accurate to some point, in which George Washington at one stage begins systematically to do various fictional things that the real Washington did not do. Real things and real people can be treated fictionally—presented in ways that make up various episodes and actions. Historical novels—factually casual imaginative treatments of real people, episodes, and processes—are unquestionably fictions. The situation becomes even murkier when neither the characters nor the acts are imaginary. What if a story takes the Borges-like turn of the fancy that after Washington and Jefferson left the fourth session of the Continental Congress, Washington did some of the things that we now believe Jefferson historically did, and vice versa—that is, if they underwent a partial

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reversal of roles? Now neither the agents nor the acts are fictional. One would have to suppose that such a deliberate departure from fact would also carry one into the domain of fiction. All the same, the occurrence of such anomalies is something of an exception. For the most part—and certainly in the normal course of things— fictions deal in occurrences and agents that are made up and whose resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental. Must a work of fiction be written? Presumably not. The characters in the story Fahrenheit 451 memorized printed books, but they could perfectly well have learned them directly from an author’s dictation. Again, must fiction be presented in prose? Once more presumably not. Had Voltaire written Candide in verse or Johnson Rasselas, we would presumably be perfectly content to see these books characterized as fiction. (Those original medieval romances from which the French roman gets it use were written in verse for 200 years before prose gained the upper hand.) The point is discussible, but one thing that is clear is that a fiction must be presented by way of a verbal account. A fictional person or episode can certainly be depicted; think of Gustave Doré’s serial illustrations for Don Quijote, or again of a triptych. But such illustrations are not by themselves fictions. Fiction’s indispensable involvement with actual narration means that it is inherently limited to the use of language. (Films, of course, are something else again.) Another delicate issue is that of the element of substantiality that must figure in fiction. We can surely have a story that satisfies the requirement of being a narration about imaginary persons and imaginary events, but yet be too short to count as a work of fiction. Presumably one would not call the fables of Aesop or the parables of the New Testament fiction. A work of fiction must be more substantial than that! As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, dictionaries often equate fiction with the novel, and give the French and German roman as equivalents. The fiction section of the New York Times Book Review might as well be called Novels. It does indeed seem that a work of fiction also be substantial or of considerable length, so that a short story—though in all other regards perfectly fictional—almost fails to qualify as such. A fiction can be presented in a single paragraph but a work of fiction requires a more substantial development. And what about dramatic or cinematographic presentations? Clearly works of fiction can furnish the materials from which play and film scripts can be crafted. But such scripts generally fall short of the substantiality required for works of fiction as such.

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Certainly not every account that is deliberately at variance with fact automatically qualifies as fiction. Suppose the facts to be as follows: John Enders lived in Georgia in the nineteenth-century. He was a farmer. He was six feet tall and had brown hair. At age nineteen he married Mary Grissom.

Now consider the following account: John Enders did not live in Georgia in the nineteenth-century. He was not a farmer. He was not six feet tall and did not have brown hair. He did not marry Mary Grissom at age nineteen.

Brevity apart, what prevents this latter narrative from being a viable fiction is its total indefiniteness—the utter uninformativeness of its pure negativity. A fictional account must not only be at variance with reality, it also must provide for what is in some way or other the picture of an alternative reality. It cannot journey altogether on the via negativa. Then, too, a work of fiction must have a certain unity, a certain integrity and closure. A series of disjointed stories strung together like narrative beads on a rope—the Thousand and One Nights for example—would not qualify as a true work of fiction, a novel. Nor would a multivolume produced—again in Borges fashion—by a literary Methuselah who produces an otherwise fictional account of the doings of a group of imaginary characters in a multivolume story, stretching it until it outnumbers of all the works in the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale combined. So vast a fictional oeuvre hardly qualifies as a single work; whatever it is, it is not a novel. A work of fiction must have a substantial degree of comprehensiveness combined with a limitation of scope and integrity of treatment. On this basis of such considerations, it could appear that there are four salient features characteristic of fiction: 1. A verbal account presenting a narrative that prominently features the doings of imaginary agents and the imaginary occurrences or events that affect them. 2. Substantial length and comprehensiveness.

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3. Significant limitation of length and unified integrity of treatment as represented in an interconnectedness of events and episodes within a narrative space of moderate and manageable extent. 4. Constructive intent in relation to such matters as entertainment, instruction, or the like. Accordingly, it seems that the best we can do in finding a formulation to define fiction is to require that: A work of fiction is a product of the fantasy or imagination that presents a substantial but integrally coherent narrative account or story in which imaginary persons and/or imaginary actions or events play a prominent role, where the work undertakes its deliberate departures from fact for the sake of some constructive purpose such as instruction, diversion, entertainment, enlightenment, etc.

This seems to be about as much as one can do to specify just what a work of fiction is. But in any case, one thing seems clear: the boundary that separates fiction from nonfiction cannot be altogether simple and straightforward. 4. FICTION AND INTENT It is clear that a narrative or account can depart from the truth so as to enter into the realm of unreality in several ways: • inadvertently, by way of what we would ordinarily characterize as falling into error, • knowingly and deliberately with a malign intent by way of what we would ordinarily characterize as deceptions and lies, • knowingly and deliberately with a benign intent—to amuse, divert, instruct, stimulate (to thought or action), etc. The first two lie outside the range of the idea of fiction as it concerns us here. Note, in particular, that a mistaken account of something that inadvertently fails to present it as it is does not thereby become fictional. For example, say a number of people report an extraordinary happening of

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some sort (say a UFO sighting). An author who accepts these contentions at face value proceeds to write a history of the episode—talking to all those eye-witnesses and weaving their reports into a coherent account. But—let us suppose—these individuals are a mixture of blatant liars and selfdeceivers. That historical account is certainly not fact. But is it fiction? Does failed history constitute fiction? The answer is clearly negative. Failed attempts to represent the real are not fictions. Fiction is false to reality; it involves deliberate departures from the truth. It is a matter of make believe, of making things up. Within the frame of a fictional account an author will assert many things, at least some of which he must (if it is indeed a fiction that is at issue) believe to be false, strictly speaking. (Of course, not every assertion made within the frame of a fictional account need be [seen as] false; when a Sherlock Holmes story tells us that Paddington is a railway station from which trains leave for the west of England, this is clearly something Conan Doyle took to be true—as it indeed was and is.) But fiction’s intent is always in some way or other constructive. Knowledge is knowledge of reality, errors are errors about reality, but the things that are strictly speaking fictional have no involvement with reality at all. By their very nature they depart from it. A failed account of the real is not a fiction, and the reverse also holds. Fiction does not mis-describe the real. To be sure, a puzzle case would arise were a work of fiction to turn out fortuitously to be literally true as written thanks to its author’s mistaken beliefs. But this would not alter its status as a fiction, seeing that neither (by hypothesis) the author nor the reader took the account to be factual. Of course, fiction can make mistakes. First, it can—as already remarked—embody contradictions. Page 13 can put the protagonist’s birthplace in Toulon and page 145 locate it in Marseilles. Moreover, insofar as actual persons, places, or events figure in a fiction, it can manage to get it wrong, for example by dating the Battle of Gettysburg in June. Consider the following situation. Smith sees a series of films on a certain subject (e.g., Rambo I to XII). Mistakenly (and rather foolishly), he thinks these to be documentaries—that is, more or less accurate recreations of the actual doings of actual people. (In fact, of course, they are complete fantasies.) Now Smith sets out to write a history based on these “sources”. He strings together an account that compiles the data that comes his way in the most coherent, plausible, and systematic fashion he can. The whole thing, of course, is a tissue of imaginary unrealities. But can we say he has

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produced a work of fiction? Or does intent have to come into it? Clearly it must—at least to some extent. The fact is that intent—or, at any rate, purported intent—is a significant part of what makes a work fiction. Being an inventive product of the imagination is not enough. Think of the man who—having decided to become a spy for a foreign power—drops out of the usual course of his life at home for a year of training in an espionage school in the land of his newly adopted loyalty. He then returns home with an elaborate cover story—a fanciful “fiction” populated with all sorts of imaginary people and episodes. But this story—though filled with “fictional” material—is not a work of fiction in the accepted sense. Its author intends and expects his story to be accepted as fact. With a work of fiction, the issue of intent is crucial; presumably, its author intends that brainchild to be received as a strictly literary production. People who write fiction do not tell the truth, but they also do not set out to deceive their readers, seeing that, at least in the usual and standard cases, the aim of the enterprise is to instruct, divert, enlighten, or some such constructive goal. There exists, to be sure, one area of actual experience in which we deal with irreality—namely, dreams. Dream experience is real experience— albeit not experience of the real. The account we give of our dreams is just exactly that, namely, dream reportage. And this is emphatically not fiction. To be sure, dreams do, like any experience, deliver into our hands the stuff from which fictions can be constructed. But while dreams may involve an alternative reality, they nevertheless lack any intent regarding its presentation. This alone prevents their counting as fictions. For intent is not only important but even decisive. Think of the following Borges-reminiscent episode. Jones writes what he sees as a work of fiction—a narrative dealing with a month in the life of a contemporary Chinese family. But even as he writes, episode by episode, event by event, his story is in fact being actualized—unbeknownst to him, reality is enacting his scenario. From the first word to the final period, what he has produced is indistinguishable from a most painstakingly accurate history. Yet he nevertheless has not produced anything other than a fiction. To be sure, when both works are printed—the history and the fiction—one cannot tell which is which. The issue of fictionality can only be settled by tracing back along causal chains to an author and his or her intentions and purposes. There is no other, easier way.

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5. FICTION VERSUS FACT For rather different sorts of things must be distinguished: • the actually actual or real: what actually exists as it actually is • the putatively actual or supposedly real: what is (erroneously) thought to be real but in fact is not • the misperceived: what is (erroneously) thought to be unreal but in fact is not • the fictional: what is contemplated under the aegis of possibility but neither is real nor is thought to be so The overall situation stands as follows: SOMETHING THAT IN FACT IS real real

knowledge

errors of omission [illusion and delusion]

errors of commission [ignorance and unknowing]

fiction

IS THOUGHT OF AS BEING Unreal

unreal

Fiction thus arises naturally when we envision something that is unreal and is acknowledged as such. It does not represent knowledge about the real, nor does it involve some sort of error about reality: it is the product of the overt and in principle appropriate activity of the imagination. To deal appropriately with the distinction of fiction from fact one has to realize that when a message departs from fact, it can have this status from the standpoint of its sender or of its recipient, or of reality/actuality. But of course normally—ordinarily and in the usual course of things—the three go together. Only in the “normal” cases—where the parties concerned and the “facts” are in due alignment—can we speak of fiction with unqualified appropriateness. But in mixed cases the situation is murky and problematic. For accuracy we must here qualify our claims and employ appropriate

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circumlocutions: He thought he was reading fiction but what he was reading was in fact the truth; or: He was writing the truth as he saw it, but since he was badly informed his account was little more than a fiction; or: She was recounting the actual truth, but readers took her to be producing fiction. When the case is anomalous it has to be described correspondingly. And here all sorts of combinations are in theory possible with respect to: • how the author sees the text • how the author expects the reader to see the text • how the author thinks the reader believes the author to see the text • how the reader sees the text • how the reader thinks the author see the text • how the reader thinks the author expects readers to see the text Matters can obviously get rather complicated here. 6. FICTION AND TRUTH Fictions are (ex hypothesi) in some manner untrue. Truth is “agreement with fact” (adequatio ad rem), and, since fiction departs from fact, with genuine fictions there is no actual res—no genuine matter of fact—for them to agree with. Fiction proceeds subject to the understanding that the salient items at issue are not real or actual. When dealing with a discussion that is acknowledged as a fiction, the reader puts disbelief into suspension. Realizing the account to be false, a fiction’s consumer proceeds—pro tem—”as though” it were true. With fictions we suspend disbelief. In reading fiction we play along—we suppose pro tem that what is claimed is indeed so. But we do so tacitly. Explicit hypotheses, however elaborate, are not fictions. If someone says, “Assume (or suppose) that P and that Q and that R”, this individual is not producing a work of fiction. A counter-factual assumption (Suppose there were two cats on the table.) invites the recipient to accept an altered picture of reality—to alter, if only for the sake of discussion (or deliberation), one’s picture of what the world is like. A fiction does not do this. It

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does not ask you to alter your picture of the real; it simply invites you to join in the game, as it were, of contemplating a substantially different picture that is deliberately disconnected from reality. Fiction is not hypothesis or assumption. And it is not pretense (Let’s make believe that …). With fictional discourse one takes the stance: Don’t suppose or pretend it’s true. Forget all about truth. Put the whole issue of belief/disbelief into suspension. Just come along for the ride. Fact is indistinguishable from fiction at the purely verbal level.4 Every nonparadoxical statement implicitly purports its own truth, so that we can never tell from a statement itself whether it belongs to a work of fiction. We describe and discuss nonexistents in just the same way as existents. Contemplation alone cannot tell fact from fiction. If we lived in a Borgesreminiscent Logopolis—a library-city where verbally formulated materials were our only accessible reality—we could not tell fact from fiction in any decisive way. We could, to be sure, do statistics and consider what sorts of claims seem qualified as truths on the basis of being supported by a majority of sources. But this would be a very shaky proposition. Not only can majorities err, but it could easily happen that two-thirds of our sources support P, two-thirds support Q, and two-thirds support not-(P-and-Q). What we then have on our hands is clearly not truth but contradiction. Discourse alone underwrites no workable distinction between fact and fiction. An account that says it is real or that says it is fictional can also be in error. Fictional statements do not—cannot—wear their factuality on their sleeves. Nor do fictional statements display (rather than assert) their fictionality. The statement, “Der Hundt ist alt” (The dog is old), displays rather than asserts its status as being formulated in German. But when a statement is fictional, this is something it neither asserts nor displays. Its truth or its fictionality is something contextual—a fact that is wholly external to discourse itself. It is, in this regard, akin to a person’s legal ownership of some item of property. No matter how closely we examine the owning person and/or the owned item, this relationship is something we can never determine by a mere inspection of the items at issue, however extensive and elaborate. It lies not with the issue of what that person or item descriptively is, but in how they are situated in a far wider (social) context. And the case of fiction is analogous. As far as the discourse itself is concerned, a statement’s fictionality—like its truth or falsity—is altogether invisible: it is something that cannot be extracted from the statement itself and generally requires us to look beyond discourse as such.

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Are there “fictional truths”? To be sure, there will be truths about fictions. It is true of Cervantes’ Don Quijote that its protagonist hails from La Mancha, that he is a devoté of romances, etc. But all such “truths” as Don Quijote was born in La Mancha are story-relative truths. They are true in the story and thereby grounded in truths about it. But they are not truths pure and simple. What then of the “truth” of fictional statements? It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street, false that he lived on Bayswater Road. But of course if truth is “correspondence with reality”—naively construed— then both statements are alike false: there was no real Sherlock Holmes living in London at all. But within the fictional setting of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories there certainly was. There were many facts about those stories, and this is one of them. But the issue is only one of storyrelative fact. Here we can say, “It is true in the story that p”, or “It is true about the story that p holds in it”, but we cannot detach the truth claims from their story frame to say flat out, “It is true that p”, or “It is false that p”. It is not true flat out that there ever was an English detective living at 212B Baker Street: the truth at issue is strictly story relative. But it is not absolutely false that Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street, for in the story that’s just exactly what he did. Moreover, such story-relative truth is grounded in and derivative from real-world truth, namely, truth about what perfectly real stories say. Our fiction-internal truths, too, are thus matters of correspondence with fact—but the facts at issue are not facts about the world (directly) but rather facts about stories and what they maintain. Accordingly, some of the usual understandings of discourse go into suspension where fictions are concerned. Ordinarily we have the Tarski principle of truth redundancy: T(p) iff p. “The cat is on the mat” is (actually) true if and only if the cat is on the mat. But this principle only holds because of a communicative convention to the effect that our discourse is standardly about the real world. When the shift to story-relative truth is made, matters stand differently. Here T(p) iff p goes into suspension. It is emphatically not the case that Sherlock Holmes resides in Baker Street is true in the Conan Doyle stories if and only if a real Sherlock Holmes actually resides on Baker Street. Fiction creates trouble for theorists because fiction-internal truth is not correspondence with fact tout court, but rather pivots on an oblique, storymediated correspondence with fact. It is true that Don Quijote lived in La Mancha (and not in Catalunia). But this is so not because this thesis states a fact—in that Don Quijote’s life in la Mancha was somehow actual—but

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because Cervantes’ story has it that Don Quijote lived in La Mancha. The fact at issue is a fact about a real story rather than a fact about the world as such, directly and immediately. What is at issue with fictional truth accordingly needs to be explicated in rather different possible directions: • There are certainly truths about fictions—e.g., that their stagesetting is in such and such a place. • There are certainly truths within fictions—e.g., that Sherlock Holmes is domiciled on Baker Street. • There are fictions that are true to something or other: true to life, to the way sailors talk, to the spirit of an era, etc. • There are fictions that, by happenstance, turn out to be actually true. There are thus various complex ways of understanding the idea of truth in relation to fictions. But to say that an account is true directly and unqualifiedly is to say that it is not fiction. 7. FICTION AND REALITY While there is no reality to fictions as such, there certainly are fictions in reality. Like everything else, works of fiction have to exist in the real word in order to exist at all. Fictions have no actual reality in themselves; their only reality is the thought reality projected through the creativity of their authors and the receptivity of their readers. And of course, there are no fictional worlds as such—they are mere thought projections, mere mind products. (To be sure, those mental proceedings are real enough.) But where lies the boundary between fiction and reality? The salient difference becomes manifest in what we do about it. The text says: The cat is on the mat. You see this as factual and you readjust your world picture— and accordingly your actions. (You watch how you step on the mat; adjust where you go to summon the cat for its feeding; etc.) But if you were to see the statement as fictional you would do none of the above and go about things quite differently. Real cats are part of experiential reality. So when you think cat-on-the-mat behavior to be in order and find that proceeding on this basis turns out appropriately as per expectation, then you have good

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grounds for endorsing that claim as correct. And the better that things work out, the better the grounds for thinking: “That’s really the way it is.” The best way to monitor factuality lies in seeing what those putative fact actually do for us. Two things are at issue with respect to responses to a claim: how we respond to it in action, and how the world responds to the relevant state of affairs. And the difference between fact and fiction lies in how matters comport themselves at these two levels. On this basis, the proper procedure with respect to the fact/fiction distinction is to construe the whole issue in a pragmatic light. An important way in which fiction can differ from reality arises because unlike the real world, fictional worlds can be schematic. The hero’s father—so let it be—died in his fifties. Did he die at age fifty-one or fiftynine? Not even heaven knows. Nobody knows because there is no possible way for this to be known and no actual fact of the matter. And yet we have to concede that even in that fictional world people die at a definite age. But what that age is is not determinate or determinable. The fictional world does not make up its mind between these alternative possibilities. This is not a luxury that the real world enjoys. The real world cannot have it that both P and not-P; it must commit itself one way or the other. The luxury of leaving matters understood—a luxury that writers of fiction do and must enjoy—is one that the real world cannot afford. And so, there are facts regarding such worlds that are in principle impenetrable to mind. We can know of such a world that a man dies at a definite age even though what that age is remains undetermined, seeing that there is no one definite age at which it is true that he died.5 It is not just that we do not know the right answer to that question but that there is none. 8. ACCESS TO THE FICTIONAL REALM Fiction departs from fact. And the world is a realm of facts—only facts exist as such and only they are accessible to observational experience. Our sole access to the realm of fiction is through the mediation of mind. There is no other way to get there from here and no other way to be in touch. People cannot eat, misplace, or destroy fictional apples; they can only think (imagine, pretend, suppose) that they are eaten, misplaced, or destroyed. We fortunately do not live in Logopolis. The fact is that we are amphibians who dwell not only in the realm of thought and talk but also in the realm of actions and interactions within the environing world. And while

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there is much that is easily said, there is much less that is easily done. It is, accordingly, in the domain of praxis, of the actions and activities of intelligent agents, that the crucial difference between reality and fiction comes to make itself felt. At the writing desk, the theater, the movie house we sit inert. It is when we emerge once more into the open air and engage ourselves in life’s affairs that our sturdy sense of reality reasserts itself. Fictions are figments of the imagination. The claim “It is fictionally true (in the fiction F) that P” amounts to “It is actually true (in the real world) that there is the fiction F that has it (explicitly or implicitly) that P”. Fictional truths—the truths of fictional worlds—are obliquely actual truths, truths about the real fictions projected in the real world. Specifically, they are truths about the explicit or tacit commitment of fictional works. A fictional world has no independent ontological status of its own; such status as it has it derives from the real-world actualities of the fictional work at issue. Since fictions are thought-projected products of mind, then insofar as there are fictions there must be minds that think them up. The circumstance that fiction involves intent means that only real authors can produce real fiction. 9. FICTIONAL OBJECTS A mistaken object is not a fictional object. If I mistake the wind-induced creaking next door to be the footsteps of a burglar I am in a sense making up that burglar. But since there is nothing deliberate about this misimpression of mine, it is not a fiction that I am producing. Nor is a fictional burglar actually at issue, since there are no fictional objects apart from fictions. However, there need be no identifiable descriptive difference between: • a real burglar • a fictional burglar • a delusional burglar No specifically descriptive property that a real burglar has—is ineligible for ascription to fictional or delusional burglars. For, as philosophers since Kant have stressed, existence is not a descriptive property! And the con-

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verse is also true. The difference between the real and unreal does not lie in matters of description but rather in matters of condition. Only the factor of existence separates the two; there is no descriptive difference. The crucial point is that a fictional burglar or a delusional burglar has no ontological— that is, existential—status as such. Burglars who are fictional or delusional do not exist (in reality or elsewhere)—and do not “subsist” either in some thought-independent way. What there are are the burglar fictions and the burglar delusions of real flesh-and-blood people. The fountainhead of subsequent discussions of fictional objects or individuals is to be found in the dialogues of Plato. In the Sophist6 Plato espoused the Parmenidean view that all meaningful discourse (logos) must be about a being of some sort. Since winged horses and other nonexistent things can obviously be talked of meaningfully, a rigid adherence to this doctrine would suggest for them a mode of being intermediate between the actually existent and the utterly nonexistent, which could not even be talked about or thought of. Plato did not hesitate to draw this consequence, and his discussion of these matters has proved to be the precursor of all later treatments of the problem. Peter Abailard (d. 1142) developed a rather sophisticated teaching regarding nonexistents.7 He, too, was primarily concerned with the question of how utter nonexistents can figure as subjects of true propositions. But rather than establishing an ontology of nonexistents, he resolved this problem on strictly grammatical grounds. In the manner of the Stoics, Abailard maintained that what is in question here is not an ontological category of quasi things, but a purely linguistic resource. As regards utter nonexistents, Abailard agreed with Plato that such items fall outside the realm of discussible particulars. But this is something to be distinguished from fictive things (res ficta) that the mind conjures up imaginativity in thinking of things that are not actually perceived, which Abailard likened to mirror images, in that they somehow reflect actually existing things.8 René Descartes, too, had a brush with the conception of nonexistents. In book 3 of his Mediations he wrote: not relate them to anything else beyond themselves, they cannot properly speaking be false; for whether I imagine a goat Of my thoughts some are, so to speak, images of things, and to these alone is the term “idea” properly applied. … Now as to what concerns ideas, if we consider them only in themselves and do or a chimera, it is not less true that I imagine the one than the other. … But among these ideas, some appear to me to be innate, others adventitious [i.e., derived from experience], and others [fictitious, being] made

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up by myself … [for] it appears to me that sirens, hippographs, and the like, are formed out of my own mind.9

For Descartes, nonexistent objects are thus devoid of ontological standing in any sphere of actual existence. Their basis is purely conceptual. They are products of the mind’s power by artifice to fuse its given ideas— whether innate or adventitious—in novel combinations, thus utilizing (say) materials from the observation of perceived horses and perceived birds to construct the artificial idea of winged horses. These little sketches depict only the tip of the iceberg of philosophizing about fictional (nonexistent) individuals. The overall story is long and complicated.10 But these brief indications do something to indicate the sorts of deliberations involved on the philosophical side of the topic and to suggest the utility of a closer look at the issues that revolve around fictional objects. The term object or item is used in a very broad sense here, to include things, persons, places, events, and processes. And fictional objects are those which are explicitly such—the sorts of things that typically populate the stage of works of fiction. Such items do not exist as such. But works of fiction certainly do, and they can and generally do involve fictional objects in their discussions. These objects do not exist in the world but rather are at most and at best present in the minds of the beholders—i.e., the ideas of those who contemplate or consider them. The stage they occupy is not the real world, but rather the realm of thought. Real things—real objects, properties, events, and processes—are located within the real-world framework of space, time, and causality. To be sure, fictions can be supposed (thought, imagined, etc.) to be located there as well, but they do not actually have such a location and do not actually interact with real things. Nor do real things—minds—produce fictional objects as such. Minds only produce the ideas, conceptions, images, or pictures of such nonexistent things, and their status is that of thought things (entia rationis). Philosophers have preoccupied themselves with the ontology of the possible. Two crucial distinctions come on the scene here: The first is that between de re and de dicto possibility. De dicto possibility is propositional possibility that is projected through statements that look to states of affairs: the possibility that there is a fat man in the doorway, for example. De re possibility is the existential possibility of things or objects, for example, the putative red-headed fat man imagined to be now standing in that empty doorway. Different (albeit related) matters are at issue here, and they differ

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in their plausibility. It was certainly possible, even antecedently to Conan Doyle, that someone would have projected a story whose key character was named Sherlock Holmes, who lived at 221B, who had a friend named Dr. Watson, etc. But all these are possibilities de dicto. With respect to item-oriented, de re possibility, however, this is here notable by its absence. That possible individual Sherlock Holmes never did and never will exist in any shape, manner, or form. All that exists is a story in which a certain putative individual figures. The ontological status of Sherlock Holmes (such as it is) is merely story relative, and that story did not predate Conan Doyle. But are there not merely possible fictions—over and above the real ones? Yes and no. The yes holds for de dicto possibility: It is undoubtedly possible for someone to create a fiction additional to the actual ones. But the no holds for de re possibility: it is false to say that there is any such thing as a merely possible fiction. The only fictions there indeed can be are those that are actual as fictions. The second crucial distinction is between mere possibility and storyrelative actuality. Although Sherlock Holmes is a nonexistent figment of Conan Doyle’s imagination, he is an actual character in a real story. But that story-relative actuality does not transmute into a story-independent possible object that takes on a life of its own as such. There is not, cannot be, an independently subsisting possible individual identifiable with Sherlock Holmes—a possible Sherlock Holmes who subsists outside of the story frame and independently of the Conan Doyle fiction. Story characters have no shadowy quasi life of their own. Such nonexistent individuals do not exist or subsist or have any sort of being (however shadowy or attenuated) apart from their role as elements in a story. Our perfectly meaningful talk of possibilities does not here underwrite any sort of reification (however quasi) of possibles. Possibilia just aren’t; there are only actualia. By hypothesis, fictional objects are not part of reality. Our only access to the fictional realm is through the mediation of thought—through the imagination. Imagining and make believe are our only entryways into fiction’s domain. Fictional objects are (by hypothesis) unreal—they are merely somehow thought (imagined, dreamt up, etc.) to exist. (And merely possible thoughts themselves remain in the domain of thought, since thought about thought is still thought.) The long and short of it is that there are no fictional (unreal) things; there are only (real) people’s thoughts (ideas, beliefs, assertions) about such things that position their ontological locus standi on discourse alone.

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Fictional objects come in thought-projected contexts or settings, fiction frames so to speak, constituted by stories narratives, hypotheses, etc. And their status is contextual. In the context of the Sherlock Holmes stories as we have them, there is no Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. But of course if another suitable Conan Doyle story were to turn up in which our hero married, there would now indeed be a Mrs. Sherlock Holmes—albeit only in this altered fiction frame. The sensible (and realistic) position with respect to fictional objects is a nominalism of nonexistence. Such terms as the present king of France are only prima facie referential: they merely purport to refer, but fail to do so. We allow them to pass as referential unless and until circumstances dictate otherwise. There are no nonexistent objects. There are only the suppositional objects envisioned in putatively referential terms. Such objects do not exist or even (quasi)“exist”. All that exists are people’s ideas (thoughts, statements) about them. What we have here is a nominalism of nonexistence. And from the angle of such a nomination the whole idea of a somehow inexistent realm of nonexistent possible objects is a sham based on the idea that putatively referring expressions that just do not refer at all somehow critically refer to objects of a certain sort—viz. nonexistent possible objects. Even to talk in this way distorts a communicative courtesy (letting putatively referring expressions pass for innocent until proven guilty) into a basis for a leap into reification or quasi reificalism of some sort. 10. USEFUL FICTIONS (FUNCTIONAL QUASI-FICTIONAL OBJECTS) Consider such thought-projected items as the equator or the North Pole. Neither represents (nor is intended to represent) a real object of some sort. Nevertheless, they play an important role in our geographical narratives. In themselves they are fictions of sorts—objects of thought and discussion presented subject to the understanding that they are not part of the world’s actualities. Nevertheless, the quasi objects represented by such functional fictions are eminently useful—even for understanding realities. Such artificially constructed thought entities (Gedankendinge) feature prominently in the philosophy of Kant11 and figured in the Philosophy of As-If envisioned by the German neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger.12 The utility of such functional quasi-fictional objects lies in their capacity to provide us with eminently useful thought-tools both for inquiring into the real world and for the guidance of our affairs within it. As we sail on

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we are leaving the equator ever further behind so the days will grow increasingly short—is not only a truth but also one that is potentially helpful for understanding very real occurrences. And, more generally, hypotheses, suppositions, and such quasi fictions are eminently useful in science, in philosophy and in planning our affairs in everyday life. (Thought experiments are just one example.) Fictions are so useful, indeed, that it they did not exist we would have to make them up. And—come to think of it— that’s just exactly what we do. 11. FICTION AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SILENCE As the preceding section’s perspective suggests, our fiction-internal truths are also matters of correspondence with fact—but the facts at issue are not facts directly about the world as such, but rather facts about (real) stories and what they (really) say. (Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street, not on the Bayswater Road, because this is what those stories actually say.) But, in grounding the truth about fictional things in what it is that the stories at issue say about them, one must be careful not to go too far. In his article on fictional objects, Terence Parsons has it that fictional objects are that of which all and only the sentences of the stories are true.13 But this is deeply problematic. The Sherlock Holmes stories certainly do not tell us that Sherlock Holmes’s paternal grandfather was not a chimpanzee. And so if only the Holmes characterizing statements that are explicit in the stories are true, then this sentence would loose its claim to truth, expelling Holmes from the realm of ordinary humanity in a way that is clearly absurd. However, this situation is at once remedied by adopting the standard policy of communicative presumption that silence implies normalcy. Given that the Holmes stories are otherwise silent on the subject of grandfather Holmes, we are entitled to maintain that he, too, was an ordinary human being. For the context of telling us about things—be the setting one of real life or of fiction—the presumption is operative: If anything is out of the ordinary, the narrator would tell us about it. The presumption of normalcy (ordinariness) is particularly central in the context of fiction. The story tells us that the villain ate a grape but tells us nothing further about that grape. Was it unripe or fully matured, pitted or pittless, Concord or Catawba? The story does not say. But this certainly does not mean that what the villain ate was a strangely fuzzy grape— ontologically indeterminate in nature and thus of a type that we never encounter in the real world. The presumption of normalcy means that we

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have to take the line that it was a perfectly ordinary grape of some sort, one that is merely described incompletely, and not some existentially strange sort of grape about which our information is complete.14 12. WHO INVENTED THE IDEA OF FICTION? Even as people were speaking prose before the idea of prose had been invented as such, so they were writing fiction before anybody thought of this idea as such. But who did originally think of it? Who first presented the rest of us, not with a work of fiction, but with some explicit indication of the concept of fiction as we now understand it? This question is straightforward but not easy to answer. Etymological dictionaries are unfortunately of little help in resolving it because all of the words at issue (fiction, novel, roman) had other cognate uses long before their specific employment in regard to anything like our present object of concern. The origination of ideas often proves to be a hornets’ nest issue if only because the question of what is to count as “originating an idea” is so murky. People were producing and using farm implements and builder’s tools long before anyone thought of the matter in these categories. And when they needed a formula for ideas of this sort, they doubtless referred to them as tools of the sort we use in our work or the sort of things we store in the shed. The query “Who invented the idea of fiction?” is one of those simple-looking questions that ultimately involves so many ramifications and so many complexities that it becomes effectively impossible to give a practicable answer to it. What can be said with reasonable security (and the support of the Oxford English Dictionary) is that the term fiction in its presently relevant sense first came into common use in the first half of the nineteenthcentury. 13. IS IT TRUE THAT TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION? The saying has it that truth is stranger than fiction. Is this really correct? Unlike reality (presumably), fictions can de facto contain impossibility. They can have it on page 53 that something is so and on page 186 that it is not. Unlike reality (as it is generally supposed to be), fictions can contain contradictions. In this manner, at least, fiction is stranger than truth. But there are also other, rather different, aspects of the matter. The truth regarding any particular actual existent runs off into endlessly proliferating detail. No matter how much is told us, we can ask for yet

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more pertinent information and in principle expect a sensible and informative answer. It is a crucial facet of our epistemic stance toward the real world that there is always more to be known than what we now explicitly have. Every part and parcel of reality has features lying beyond our present cognitive reach—at any “present” whatsoever. But in this regard real things differ in an interesting and important way from their fictional counterparts. With fiction, the course of meaningful questioning soon comes to a stop. The world of fiction has informative limits in a way that the real world does not. Did Sancho Panza trim his mustache short? And just how much of it had turned gray? Seeing that Cervantes did not tell us, there is no way of securing an answer. Fiction has finite cognitive depth: the quest for detail comes to an end of the line. In clarifying the difference at issue it is useful to distinguish between two types of information about a thing, namely, what is generic and what is not, where generic information involves those features of the thing that it has in common with everything else of its kind or type.15 Now a key fact about fictional particulars is that they are of finite cognitive depth. There is only so much that we can say non-generically about Don Quijote: namely just as much as Cervantes told us. A point will always be reached with regard to them when one cannot say anything characteristically new about them—presenting nongeneric information that is not inferentially implicit in what has already been said. This finitude of cognitive depth means that the presentation of ampliatively novel nongeneric information must in the very nature of the case come to a stop where fictional things are at issue. With real things, on the other hand, there is no reason of principle why this process need ever terminate. Au contraire, we have every reason to presume real things to be cognitively inexhaustible. Fact is not only stranger than fiction, it is more complex. And the reason for this is straightforward. The human intellect’s capacity for complexity management is limited. Nature is vastly more complex than the human brain—if only because we ourselves are merely a minor constituent of nature itself. The states of affairs that our minds can envision are vastly fewer and simpler than those that nature can present. To give just one rather obvious example, we cannot even begin to conceive the facts and phenomena that will figure on the agenda of the science of the future. On a map of the United States, Chicago is but a dot. But when we go to a map of Illinois it begins to take on some substance, and on a map of Cook County it presents a substantial and characteristic shape. The line does not end there. We could, in theory, go on to map it block by block, house by house, room by

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room, dish by pitcher. And with increasing detail new and different features constantly emerge. Science is like that. Where does the process stop? Not with atoms, certainly—for the impenetrable and unchanging atoms of the ancient Greeks have become increasingly dematerialized and ethereal, composed of automatically smaller processes. As we increase the power of our particle accelerators, our view of the make-up of the physical world becomes not only ever different but also ever stranger. There is, as best we can tell, no limit to the world’s ever-increasing complexity that comes with our ever-increasing grasp of its detail. The realm of fact is endlessly complex. However, the cognitive depth of fiction is always finite: fiction—unlike reality—is the finite product of a finite mind. It presents a world whose constituent detail is the limited creation of a limited intellect. And unlike the real world, it is a realm bounded by the limits of existing thought and language. Because of this, one is bound to reach the end of its road with a finite number of steps. Reality just isn’t like that. It is like an unendingly layered onion; in theory, and presumably in practice as well, one can always peel off further layers of detail without ever reaching an end. Thus, reality has more complications, more unanticipatable twists and turns, than fiction ever could have. It can surprise us in ways more profound than fiction ever could. Reality is to fiction as chess is to tic-tac-toe. In sum, truth is stranger than fiction. But, of course, strangeness isn’t everything. 14. WHAT CAN FICTION TEACH US THAT REALITY CANNOT? The ancient Egyptians, the early Hebrews, the Mayas and Aztecs— among others—presumably lacked fiction. Just what did they forgo because of this? How grave a loss does a person/society/culture sustain when fiction is missing? In particular, is there any lesson about life that we cannot learn without fiction? A case of sorts can surely be made for saying that the loss is not a major one. As we have seen, there is much truth to the saying that truth is stranger than fiction. It is not easy to think of any lesson about human nature or about the conduct of life that cannot be learned as well—or almost as well—without the benefit of fiction. Even the staunchest devotee of fiction would perhaps find it difficult to meet the challenge of coming up with an example of some useful insight into the human condition that could not be acquired without the mediation of fiction. Does this consideration render fiction useless? Surely not.

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Reality may be infinitely complex but it is also totally unfocused. It does not involve a directing of attention. Nature presents many things together: It conjoins, but does not prioritize; its favored connective is and rather than and next; it has no point of view, but is all at once. Unlike the human eye or the human mind, reality as such has no organizing orientation. A medical treatise may proceed from head to toe, but nature itself is organizationally indifferent here. The manifold of the occurrences of the real world accordingly has three features that fiction abrogates: 1. It is unfocused: it is not like a stage with some things centered and others peripheral; it speaks in a monotone, without stress or emphasis; nothing is more central, more significant; things may differ in size or frequency but not in importance. 2. It is value neutral: nature and history are impartial; they do not take sides; they do not differentiate between the good guys and the bad, equipping the one with white hats and the other with black. 3. It is ateleological: its changes do not select with a view to some evaluatively significant objective. There is no overt purposive connection. The overall point is that in the realm of objective reality—of nature and of history—there is no preferential selection: not by importance, not by merit, not by purpose. Reality does not encompass emphases; the world it presents to us is an evaluatively unstructured agglomeration. It is amorphous to an extent that fiction neither can nor should be. In this regard, then, reality as such is quite different from human reality, reality as we human beings experience it. The dimension of meaning—of centrality, purposive order, and evaluative assessment—is something coordinate with mind. Focusing, prioritizing, and evaluating as interesting or important are all processes that minds alone can perform. Only minds can provide an orienting point of view in terms of a structure of significance, value, and purposive connection. The reality of our experience is focused—the human mind, like the human eye, attends to things in a way that is directed, structured, and ordered (first things first). Unlike reality as such, minds have a point of view. Even as our visual field has a center, so does our attentive field: we tend to focus on things one at a time subject to

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a changeable center of attention and focus of interest. In this regard human language—with its sequential now this, now that—epitomizes the sequentially focused flow of human thought. And meaningful discourse must— unlike reality—manifest a sense of relevancy. Accordingly, the linear flow of narrative fiction with its one-thing-at-atime focus of attention—and its natural tendency to give more attention to what is of interest or importance, so that more means more significant—is singularly well suited to portraying a specifically human reality. Narrative may not afford an optimal instrument for depicting reality as nature encompasses it, but it is well attuned to the portrayal of reality as we experience it. And so, notwithstanding fiction’s departures from reality, there remains its effectiveness in providing insight—its service as an instrumentality for gaining a grasp on life as we experience it. The world of fiction— unlike that of natural reality—is not axiologically neutral: it can present us with a through and through humanistic domain, teaching us lessons for the conduct of human life in a way that other more factually oriented disciplines cannot. (Note that we can only learn from history insofar as it is made to emulate fiction as a vehicle for conveying morals.) Fiction gives insight into a human world of experientiable reality in the way that a more authentic depiction of objective reality in, say, mathematical physics never actually can. Its being somehow “poorer” than reality is thus an advantage to the world of fiction. It enables us to achieve a clarity of focus on issues of value and morality that the veiled complexities of life and the notorious opacity of the hearts and minds of our fellows render near impossible to achieve in the domain of the real. In this light, an important—and particularly useful—thing about fiction is that it confronts us with a way of looking at the world that is different from our own personal one. It offers us yet another perspective on things. This largely serves to explain why we cannot easily imagine an author reading her own novel with real interest. It is not just that she already knows what happens next—if mere suspense were the crux, then people would never enjoy rereading a novel, which is just not so. No, the explanation lies in that it cannot carry her out of her own way of seeing things— cannot broaden the range of her experiences by opening a window on a different range of experience and a variant vista on the conduct of life. In this regard, the reading of biography is the closest approximation to fiction (albeit one that always involves the clutter of superfluous detail—exactly because it deals with reality).

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Even as fact can be diverting (why else would people be so attached to gossip?), so fiction can have utilitarian value. It can, in fact, serve many purposes. Fictions can amuse, instruct, stimulate, warn, propagandize, and even radicalize (think of George Orwell’s 1984). Moreover, fiction is not just an exercise in but also a testing ground for the imagination. As childhood experience amply indicates, role playing, thought experimentation, and all the other imaginative processes of thought are too important and too fertile a human resource to be sacrificed without loss. Homo sapiens is an amphibian who lives in the realm of reality and in the realm of possibility as well. And none of our resources is a more efficient and effective entryway into this realm than is fiction. Its loss would accordingly produce a diminution that would afflict our very nature. And there is, of course, another less utilitarian aspect of the matter. No doubt, a culture could exist and thrive despite the loss of a major art form such as music or sculpture or poetry or fiction. But it would undoubtedly sustain a major loss thereby; an impoverishment of the imagination and the stunting of a significant sector of the creative spirit.16

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 5 1

Lorenz B. Puntel, Grundlagen einer Theorie der Wahrheit (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1990).

2

Puntel, Grundlagen einer Theorie der Wahrheit, p. 265.

3

Fiction (sense 4): “The species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters. Now usually prose novels and stories collectively” (Oxford English Dictionary).

4

C. S. Peirce rightly observed that “the real world cannot be distinguished from the fictitious world by any description” (Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, vol. 2 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931]) 2.337.

5

The equivalence between T(∃x)fx and (∃x)Tfx presumably holds when T is realworld truth, but certainly fails if T is story-relative truth.

6

See especially 236 E ff. “It is also plain, that in speaking of something (ti) we speak of being (ontos), for to speak of an abstract something naked and isolated from all being is impossible” (Plato, Sophist, 237 D, tr. Jowett). Cf. also the discussion in the Theaetetus, 189 A.

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 5 7

Abailard’s theory is described in detail in Martin M. Tweedale, “Abailard and NonThings,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 5 (1967): pp. 329-42. My brief remarks here are based on this instructive paper.

8

Many other medievals discussed problems in this general area. Particular importance attaches to the quaestio of Siger of Brabant: utrum haec sit vera: Homo est animal nullo homine existente? See P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’Averroisme latin au XIIe siècle, pt. 2 (Fribourg [Suisse]: Librairie de l’Université, 1899), pp. 65-70. For further interesting details see Albert Zimmerman, “Eine anonyme Quaestio: Utrum haec sit vera: Homo est animal nullo homine existente,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 49 (1967): pp. 183-200.

9

The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), pp. 159-60. For further interesting details see Anthony Kenny, Descartes (New York: Random House, 1968), especially chap. 7.

10

For a somewhat fuller account of the history see the author’s “The Concept of Nonexistent Possibles?” in his Essays in Philosophical Analysis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969).

11

See the author’s “Kant on the Limits of Philosophy,” Kantstudien, vol. 90 (2000), pp. 283-328.

12

See Hans Vaihinger, Philosophie des Als-Ob, trans. C. K. Ogden (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1923). Vaihinger characterized these fictional factors as “half fictions” or “semi-fictions”, distinguishing them from full-blooded fictions such as perfect gasses or homo oeconomicus. For Vaihinger, the former merely conflict with reality while the latter embody actual self-contradictions.

13

See Terence Parsons, “A Prolegomenon to Meinongian Semantics,” The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): pp. 551-60, and also “A Meinongian Analysis of Fictional Objects,” Grazer Philosophische Studien, vol. 1 (1974), pp. 73-86.

14

There are, of course, many other aspects to this issue which do not matter for present purposes.

15

Compare pages 72-73 above.

16

This chapter was originally published under the same title in C. Perez and D. Greimann (eds.), Wahrheit-Sein-Struktur (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2000), pp. 17497.

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Chapter 6 PRESUMPTION AND THE JUDGMENT OF ELITES 1. DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS: ELITES AND SECONDORDER ELITES

E

lites arise whenever there is a group within whose membership there is some feature of more or less. They consist of those group members that exhibit this feature significantly more than the general run. To symbolize this we shall employ the elite constituted by the subgroup of those G members that exhibit the feature F to a greater than ordinary extent. However, the special focus on the present discussion will be upon reflexive groups—those amongst whose membership certain intra-group relations obtain, so that some of them can stand in relation R to others. With such a group there will (or can) be 1. The active elite consisting of those G-members that R a more than ordinarily larger number of others. 2. The passive elite consisting of those G-members that are Rd by a more than ordinarily larger number of others.

Moreover, with such reflexive groups there will be second-order elites, as for example the people most trusted (or resented) among those who are themselves most trusted (or resented). Subject to the aforementioned symbolic connection, this second-order elite may be designated by . Let the reflexive group G consist of A, B, C, plus a couple of others (say D, E). We can now contemplate a relation tabulation to indicate who Rs whom as per Display 1.

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Display 1 A HYPOTHETICAL RELATION (R) A

B

C

A

√

B

√

C

√

[D, E]

√

[D E] G = {A, B, C, D, E} Thus A Rs C alone, as does B, while C Rs both A and B. Such a tabulation can obviously also be viewed inversely to identify items that are Rd by A or B or C etc. (We suppose too that there are a couple of further items beyond ABC, but that the tabular entries are always blank there. Then with the particular relation R at issue with this tabulation the elite will consist of C alone because it is the only item Rd by more than ordinarily many members of G and the same is true of . But what about the second-order elite . Are there any items that are Rd by a more than ordinary number of = {C} members. So there will here be just two of them, namely A and B. Various instructive lessons follow. In particular, a second-order elite can be thus something decidedly different from ordinary elites. Specifically, 1. need not be a subset of 2. need not be smaller than For now consider the R-relation of Display 2.

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Display 2 A HYPOTHETICAL RELATION A

B

D

E

A

√

√

B

√

√

C

√

√

D

√

√

E

√

√

C

Here we have the elite = {A, B} seeing that C, D, E all R both A and B. On the other hand = = {D, E} which shares no member with = {A, B}. All in all, then, second-order elites are something quite different from ordinary first-order elites. 2. SECOND-ORDER EVALUATIVE ELITES Within reflexive groups, elites will be either positive or negative depending on the positivity or negativity of the defining relationship at issue. Some examples are given in Display 3. As this indicates, what is at issue with second order elites comes to the set of those who are the most Rd by those who themselves are the most Rd. Some examples of evaluative second order elites: • the papers the most referenced by the papers that are themselves the most referenced • the people the most respected by the people who are themselves the most respected

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Display 3 SOME EVALUATIVE ELITE-ESTABLISHING FEATURES POSITIVE • admired (people) • cited (articles) • discussed (themes or topics) • trusted (people) • useful (processes) NEGATIVE • despised (people) NEUTRAL • attached to others (pieces of metal)

• the people most discussed by people who are themselves the most discussed. • the people deemed experts (i.e., as being among the most knowledgeable) by people deemed experts • the people paid the most by the people who are themselves paid the most • the processes the most used within the processes that are themselves the most used

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• the film reviewers most highly rated by the most highly rated film reviewers. Most of the above exemplify positive second-order elites with the qualifying criterion for the generative base as something that is to be assessed positively. There are, however, also negative reflexive elites, as for example, the persons most despised by the persons who are themselves the most despised. Further examples of negative generative bases are: the most hated, feared, distrusted, envied. 3. THE PRINCIPLE OF NORMATIVITY AND ITS JUSTIFICATION The cardinal thesis of the present deliberations is the contention that normativity comes into operation with positive second-order elites. We thus arrive at the thesis: (T) with positive elites factuality can engender normativity in that being Rd to a greater extent than the ordinary generally seems to establish being justifiedly Rd. With evaluatively positive elites the move to second order elites is valuation justifying in that the valuation at issue is now not just claimed but rather is such that its ascription now comes to be validated. We thus have it that: • among people, those esteemed by the most esteemed are indeed estimable • among articles, those cited by the most-cited are important (citationworthy) • those people deemed expert by those deemed expert deserve to be seen as experts Accordingly, the thesis at issue claims that the status being conceded is deserved, that those so classified are rightly so classified. What is at issue is a Principle of Elite Authentication to the effect that the correlative endorsements of evaluatively positive elites can be considered as appropriate.

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To reemphasize: normativity here supervenes on factuality. So in this perspective thesis T thus has the striking feature of effecting a transit • from subjectivity to objectivity • from factuality to normativity But how can this be? What is the justificatory rationale of this boundarycrossing thesis T? What is it that makes those more than ordinary admired (respected, praised, etc.) among those who themselves are so viewed to a more than ordinary extent entitled ones to be seen as admirable, respect-deserving, praiseworthy, and so on. Seemingly this is not a merely empirical report on how things go in the world. Nor is such a linkage between perception and value a conceptual one (as J. S. Mill problematically envisioned between being desired and desirability). Something rather different is going on. What is at operative here is to all appearances a plausible working hypothesis—a standing presumption projected against a variety of supportive experience and grounded in a pivotal need to effect evaluations in matters of the sort at issue. For the reality of it is that the sort of support afforded by thesis T will often be the best sort of support that we are going to be able to get. In the final analysis it is a matter of practicalistic faute de mieux: The reality of it is that our best-available pathway to people’s being qualified in judgmental matters proceeds through a consensuality in being regarded as such. What better evidence could we demand in practice for establishing someone’s credentials as an authentic expert that being so acknowledge to a more than ordinary extent by those themselves so regarded more than ordinary extent? But of course what is at issue here is not an established fact but a plausible presumption. And so in matters of this sort we once again see at work the by now familiar principle that presumption serves the needs of praxis.1 4. EXPERTISE The theory of elites is particularly relevant to epistemology because of the rate of the cognitive elites defined by those who know more than most (i.e., are abler respondents) among those who are informed about some issue. For through the aforementioned Principle of Elite Authentication the experts—those deemed most knowledgeable by the most knowledgeable—

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are thereby validated. Expertise is thus subject to a presumption of rationality. If and when you require advice—be it medial or legal or whatever— you are rationally well advised to seek it from those whom the most knowledgeable themselves deem most knowledgeable.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 6 1

This chapter was originally published in ProtoSociology, vol. 18 (2006). The author’s book Presumption (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005) affords further detail on relevant issues.

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Chapter 7 OVERSIMPLIFICATION 1. OVERSIMPLIFICATION

T

o save time, effort, or breath we often deliberately simplify matters, realizing full well that some aspect or feature of reality is being omitted from view. But this does not worry us because we have good and sufficient reason to believe that the overlooked item—whatever it is—simply does not matter for the purposes at issue. However, this sort of thing is usually mere simplification and not oversimplification. When oversimplification occurs, then it transpires, more or less by definition, that we are carrying matters too far with simplification—that what is being lost sight of is something that does indeed matter because simplification has been carried to a point where it makes a damaging difference and involves a real loss. When we calculate with 3.14 for pi or treat the earth as a sphere we not only simplify matters but presumably oversimplify them. Oversimplification always involves errors of omission. It occurs whenever someone leaves out of account features of an item that bear upon a correct understanding of its nature. For example, to say that Rome declined because its elite was enervated by lead poisoning from the pipes of its water supply oversimplifies the issue by fixing on one single—and actually minor—causal factor to the exclusion of many others. It is inevitable for oversimple thought about anything to be incomplete, because just this is exactly what oversimplification is—the omission of significant detail through a failure to take note of various factors that are germane to the matters at hand, thereby resulting in a failure to understand the reality of things. Whenever we unwittingly oversimplify matters we have a blindspot where some significantly issue-relevant facet of reality is concealed from our view. Oversimplification occurs when simplification is carried to an extent that is counterproductive in relation to the aims of the enterprise at hand through the omission of issue-pertinent detail. In this regard it seems both plausible and useful to grade relevancy on a scale from 0 to 10 somewhat in line with the following array of adjectives:

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• crucially (10) • importantly/majorily (8) • significantly/substantially (6) • minimally/marginally (4) • irrelevantly/immaterially (2) • wholly beside the point (0)

And so with over-simplification the omissions at issue fall into the upper half of the preceding spectrum. On the other hand, at the bottom of the scale, simplification is not overdone. In managing our domestic budget we can saw off the pennies, or in the case of the federal budget the millions. Oversimplification leads to error not just in matters of belief but in matters of action as well. For here oversimplification can readily engender inefficiency. Consider, for example, a road map where I has been oversimplifies to II: I A

II B

A

B

Clearly such an oversimplification is going to invite a loss in terms of transit efficiency and thereby engender an incorrect and misleading view of procedural optimalities. To be sure, in practice the line between beneficial simplification and harmful over-simplification is frequently not easy to draw. Often as not it can only be discerned with the wisdom of retrospective hindsight. For whether that loss of detail has negative consequences and repercussions is generally not clear until after a good many returns are in. And of course it is going to be highly context dependent. For the neglect of certain details can matter crucially in one context and yet be irrelevant in another. It seems not so much an oversimplification as a truism to say “a dollar bill is just that—a dollar bill; it matters not whether crisp or crumpled.” And that’s true enough where paying the cashier is concerned. But in dealing with the over-sensitive parking pay-machine that insists upon new, smooth bills, the status of that bill may make a big difference. Why do we ever oversimplify? Why don’t we simply take those ignored complications into account? The answer is that in the circumstances

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we simply do not know how to do so. The situation is akin to that of the Paradox of the Preface. Recall that here the author writes: I want to thank X., Y, and Z for their help with the material in the book. I apologize to the reader for the remaining errors, which are entirely mine.

One is, of course, tempted to object: “You silly author! Why apologize for those errors? Why not simply correct them?” But alas the reader just does not know how. That there are errors he realizes; what they are he does not. And the situation with oversimplification is much the same. All too often we realize that we oversimplify, what we do not know is where we oversimplify. This is, in general, something that we can discern only within the wisdom of hindsight. Oversimplification can enter upon the scene throughout the entire range of information management—be it in inquiry (information development) or inference (information exploitation) or communication (information transmission)—often with decidedly unhappy results. When J. L. Austin remarked that “it is an occupational discourse of philosophers to oversimplify—if indeed it is not their occupation”1 he made an observation that holds not just for the philosopher but the scientist as well. 2. OVERSIMPLIFICATION AND INCORRECTNESS: OMISSION LEADS TO COMMISSION Oversimplification involves loss. The student who never progresses from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to the works of the bard of Avon himself pays a price not just in detail of information but in the comprehension of significance. And the student who substitutes the Cliff’s Notes version for the work itself suffers a comparable impoverishment. To oversimplify a work of literature is to miss much of its very point. Whenever we oversimplify matters by neglecting potentially relevant detail we succumb to the flaw of superficiality. Our understanding of matters then lack depth and thereby compromises its cogency. But this is not the worst of it. One of the salient aspects of oversimplification lies in the fundamental epistemological fact that errors of omission will generally carry errors of commission in their wake: that ignorance can and often will plunge us into actual mistakes. Oversimplification is, at bottom, nothing but a neglect (or ignorance) of detail. Its beginnings and origination lies in errors of omission. But that is not by any means the end of the matter. For when something is described 117

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in an oversimplified manner the implicit claim is that what is being said is a faithful characterization of the item being described. And this means that the characterization at issue is not just incomplete but actually false. For errors of omission in characterizing the modus operandi of things automatically induce errors of commission. The implicit claim carried by simplification is that the omitted detail just does not matter, and what characterizes OVER-simplification as such is exactly the fact that it does matter. To all intents and purposes, then, oversimplification is falsification. Thus assume a Realty that is a random mix of x, y, a, b, as per: xaaybxxab... And suppose that we oversimplify by not distinguishing between x and y, and the same between a and b, so Z = x-or-y and C = a-or-b. We then have ZCCZCZZCC... This leads to such clearly false conclusion as: “The 1st and 4th places are identically occupied.” In oversimplifying we slide into falsification. Is oversimplification thereby lying? No! And for good reason. Lying is falsification with the intent to deceive. Falsity is here the aim of the enterprise. But oversimplification is falsification with the intent to convey truth. Falsity is here merely collateral damage. And there is a further crucial difference. The liar affirms what he believes to the false: to lie is to affirm a recognized falsehood. In oversimplification we do indeed commit to falsehoods: but we do not realize what they are. The oversimplifier is agnostic about the falsity of which he commits. Lying in consequence is ethically reprehensible, while oversimplification is in general ethically venial. Whenever there is a blank in our knowledge, the natural and indeed the sensible thing to do is to fill it in in the most direct standard, plausible way. We assume that the person we bump into in the street speaks English and say “oops, sorry”—even though this may well prove to be altogether unavailing. We regard the waiter in the restaurant as ours even where it is the brother who bears a family resemblance. We follow the most straightforward and familiar routes up to the point where a DETOUR sign appears. We willingly and deliberately adopt the policy of risking oversimplifica-

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tion by allowing simplification to lead us in error because we realize it does so less frequently than the available alternatives. 3. NEED MORE OVERSIMPLIFICATION MEAN MORE ERROR? Consider the hopeful idea that: The less the extent of oversimplification the more probable the correctness of our judgments becomes. However, this is in fact quite false. Let it be that the reality of it is as per:

We could “simplify” this as per:

And we could carry simplification yet further by going on to:

However only this further, additional oversimplification will point us to the (actual) situation reflected in the truth that both branches are exactly alike. A less oversimplified model of the situation can very possibly lead our judgment away in key regards. Not only is it the case that mere oversimplification can lead us from truth to falsity. But—as the preceding example shows—it is also true (and no doubt to some extent regrettable) that in various circumstances further, additional oversimplification can lead from falsity back to truth But how is it that oversimplification is so important a factor on the larger scheme of things?

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4. WHY OVERSIMPLIFICATION? SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY One of the most fundamental and far-reaching facts about natural science as we have it is that it oversimplifies our understanding of reality. But why does oversimplification occur in science. Why is it effectively inevitable here? The reality of it is that in scientific theorizing we proceed along the lines of least resistance, seeking to economize our cognitive effort by using the most direct workable means to our ends. Whenever possible, we analogize the present case to other similar ones, because the introduction of new patterns complicates our cognitive repertoire. And we use the least cumbersome viable formulations because they are easier to remember and more convenient to use. The other-things-equal preference of simpler solutions over more complex ones is sensible enough. Simpler solutions are less cumbersome to store, easier to take hold of, and less difficult to work with cognitive rationality combines the commonsensical precept, “Try the simplest thing first,” with a principle of burden of proof: “Maintain your cognitive commitments until there is good reason to abandon them.” And so oversimplification of the real is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry. It roots in the very nature of the venture as a project human inquiry as a matter of rational economy in the exploiting data to ground our inferences and conjectures regarding Reality. Empirical science is a matter of drawing universal conclusion (“theories” they are usually called) from the perceived facts of observation and experiment. But observation and experimentation is ongoingly enhanced by technological advance in the devices used to monitor and manipulate nature. And our theories must be minimalistic: they must fit the existing data tightly. And so the web of theory that is woven about a given manifold of data will not—and effectively cannot—be adequate to the situation that obtains subsequently, after our body of information has become enhanced. It is—inevitably—oversimple. This means that as our data are amplified through new observations and experiments the previously prevailing theories will almost invariably become destabilized. Those old theories oversimplified matters: new conditions call for new measures, new data for more complex theories. It lies in the rational economy of sensible inquiry that the history of science is an ongoing litany of oversimple old theories giving way to more sophisticated new ones that

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correct their oversimplification of the old. There is no fact about the history of science that is established more decidedly than this: that new technology (be it material or conceptual) puts new data at our disposal and that new data manifest the oversimplification of earlier theories. The ancient Greeks had four elements; in the nineteenth century Mendeleev had some sixty; by the 1900’s this had gone to eighty, and nowadays we have a vast series of elemental stability states. Aristotle’s cosmos had only spheres; Ptolemy’s added epicycles; ours has a virtually endless proliferation of complex orbits that only supercomputers can approximate. Greek science was contained on a single shelf of books; that of the Newtonian age required a roomful; ours requires vast storage structures filled not only with books and journals but with photographs, tapes, floppy disks, and so on. Of the quantities currently recognized as the fundamental constants of physics, only one was contemplated in Newton’s physics: the universal gravitational constant. A second was added in the nineteenth century, Avogadro’s constant. The remaining six are all creatures of twentieth century physics: the speed of light (the velocity of electromagnetic radiation in free space), the elementary charge, the rest mass of the electron, the rest mass of the proton, Planck’s constant, and Boltzmann’s constant.2 The taxonomy of physics provides a further illustration. In the 11th (1911) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, physics is described as a discipline composed of 9 constituent branches (e.g., “Acoustics” or “Electricity and Magnetism”) which were themselves partitioned into 20 further specialties (e.g., “Thermo-electricity: of “Celestial Mechanics”). The 15th (1974) version of the Britannica divides physics into 12 branches whose subfields are—seemingly—too numerous for listing. (However the 14th 1960’s edition carried a special article entitled “Physics, Articles on “ which surveyed more than 130 special topics in the field.) When the National Science Foundation launched its inventory of physical specialties with the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel in 1954, it divided physics into 12 areas with 90 specialties. By 1970 these figures had increased to 16 and 210, respectively. And the process continues unabated to the point where people are increasingly reluctant to embark on this classifying project at all. The fact of it is that scientific progress is a matter of complexification because over-simple theories invariably prove untenable in a complex world. The natural dialectic of scientific inquiry ongoingly impels us into ever deeper levels of sophistication.3

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An inherent impetus towards greater complexity pervades the entire realm of human creative effort. We find it in art; we find it in technology; and we certainly find it in the cognitive domain as well.4 And so we have no alternative to deeming science-as-we-have-it to afford an oversimplified model of reality. And in consequence we have no real alternative to becoming enmeshed in the same shortcomings that beset oversimplification in general. 5. COGNITIVE MYOPIA—MODES OF OVERSIMPLIFICATION: CONFUSION AND CONFLATION AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES To this point we have addressed the questions of the what, where, and why of oversimplification. But now consider the question of what follows from it, and specifically: What are the implications of the fact that the science we have in hand oversimplifies the reality of things? Let us begin by going back to basics. It happens that confusion and conflation are two prime modes of oversimplification. The key ideas at issue here are to be understood as follows: 1. X confuses items x and y within the question-manifold Q iff in answering the questions within this manifold X fails to distinguish between x and y. 2. X conflates items x and y within the question-manifold Q iff in answering the question within the manifold X sees both x and y as one selfsame z. It is clear on this basis that cognitive myopia can take two forms: • Mild version: this involves an occasional confusion between two distinct sorts of items. (As for example when there is an occasional mix-up in construing h as k, or conversely.) • Strong version: this involves a systemic conflation (As for example when both h and k appear simply as a fuzzy and indistinguishable blurred complex). For the sake of illustration consider someone whose visual myopia is such that he has is incompetent with regard to telling 5 and 6 apart. As a

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result of such an inability to distinguish 5 from 6 the individual may well through conflation and failure to distinguish: envision 56 as ÁÁ. Or again, the individual may through confusion and failure to discern: envision 56 as 65. Such modes forms of cognitive myopia have very different ramifications for our grasp of the world’s lawful comportment. Suppose that we are in reality dealing with the perfectly regular series R: 6 5 6 5 6 5 6 5 6 5 . . . but due to the occasional confusion of a mild cognitive myopia we may then actually “see” this (be it by way of observation or conceptualization) as M: 6 5 5 5 6 5 5 5 6 5 . . . But observe that our inability to distinguish has here effectively transmuted a lawful regularity into a random disorder. It is then clear (via “Mill’s Methods of Agreement and Difference”) that there is no causal correlation between R and M. The supposition of (mild) myopia thus induces a drastic disconnection between the two levels of consideration at issue, with the lawful order of R giving way to lawlessness in regard to its model M. Thus even so crude an example suffices to show that lawful order can unravel and be destroyed by the confusion engendered by an occasional inability to discern differences. And this relatively rudimentary observation has far-reaching implications. In specific, it means that if even if the world is possessed of a highly lawful order, this feature of reality may well fail to be captured in even a mildly myopic representation of it.

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6. MORE EXAMPLES Consider an example, if you do not distinguish a from A then you will be wanted between a to and from Aa. In consequence if the former produces an effect different from the latter, you can obtain no explanation for it. The difference in effect now looks to be a matter of pure chance. And so, given myopia, the world-view presented in our world-modeling may well be no more than loosely coupled to the underlying reality of things, thanks to the oversimplification that is almost inevitably involved. Again let the actually real situation be: FFG

FG

FG

FFG

Suppose however, that your limited, oversimplifying perspective only permits looking at only two adjacent compartments. You would then have at our disposal the following two views of the situation: FFFGG

FFFGG FFFGG

FFFGG

A conjectural reconstitution of the four-comparment situation will then, likely as not, lead you to conjecture the simplest, most uniform resolution of the issue, and thereby to arrive at the following model of the reality at hand: FFF

GG

GG

FFF

Here your conjectural reasoning will lead to some correct results as “Uniformity along diagonals” as well as the erroneous “All compartments are

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homogeneous.” Cognitive myopia need not be informatively harmful; but it certainly can be. Again, suppose a system consisting of three types of objects A, B, and C, with an initial state of two items of type A and one each of types B and C. And let it be that this system develops through successive stages or phases that see these types of objects formed according to the following three rules • A→B • B→C • C→A The result in point of their classification will then be as per the following perfectly regular series: (1)

(2)

(3)

A

2

1

1

B

1

2

1

C

1

1

2

(4)

→

cyclic repetition of

But now suppose that owing to oversimplification that A’s and B’s are not distinguished but seen as one uniform types, A*. We then have

A*

(1)

(2)

(3)

3

3

2

(4) cyclic repetition

C

1

1

2

Now every third period one-third of the earlier A* (one can’t say which) will mysteriously migrate to the C’s, with half of the C’s (again, no saying which) switching to A* in the succeeding period. What is in actuality a simple and deterministic situation is transmuted through oversimplification

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into an indeterministic mysterium whose modus operandi is ruled by stochastic variation. 7. OVERALL LESSONS Confusion and conflation can cause us to loose sight of laws. But the reverse can happen as well. Thus let is be that the reality that confronts us has the random structure: 655666555655665... But let it also be that in representing this reality in our observations and/or conceptualization our vision of the matter is so myopic that we cannot readily distinguish between 5 and 6: both simply look like a blurring (5or-6) to us. Then the above chaotic series is representatively transmitted into the elegant uniformity of the series (5-or-6)(5-or-6)(5-or-6)(5-or-6) . . . In this situation where reality is in fact random and discordant, its representation in our cognitive field of vision is the quintessence of lawful elegance. And so under the conditions at issue we will have it that a world whose physical comportment is in certain respect random and lawless may well be seen by its cognitively myopic observers as having a phenomenology that is deterministically lawful. As these considerations indicate, oversimplification can readily distort our view of the lawful structure of the world. It can either lead to a nomic deficit that reflects the loss of various actual laws or to a nomic surfeit the gives the illusion of loss when there are none. By its very nature as a process of cognitive omission, oversimplification conceals certain actual regularities from our view. And moreover, insofar as it makes matters appear more uniform than they actually are, it is virtually bound to lead to spurious regularities. The point is that there are not only the optical illusions of bodily vision but also the analogous cognitive illusions that afflict our efforts to grasp the ways of the world. Our oversimplified models of reality can distort our view of its modes of operation in ways that not only block various lawful

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regularities from our view but which can also lead to the acceptance of spurious regularities. 8. THE MORAL OF THE STORY While the oversimplification at issue with conflation and confusion differ significantly, they both conspire to raise the prospect of a significant decoupling between the order of reality (R) and our cognitive modelling (M) of it of it—between the lawful order of nature (N) and its representation in the law-manifold encapsulated in the science of the day (S). We would, ideally, love to have it that reality and our view of it are duly aligned, so that M = R and S = N. But in view of the effectively inevitable presence of cognitive myopia we can neither claim nor expect this. As such deliberations indicate, oversimplification has significant consequences, and we have little alternative but to accept that science as we actually have it affords us with an oversimplified model of Reality. And in consequence we have little alternative but to accept that what holds for oversimplification in general will apply in this particular case as well. Overall, then one must adopt a fallibilism which accept that our science is involved not merely with errors of omission but with errors of commission as well—that nature’s lawful modus operandi is not adequately and accurately depicted through the resources of science as we have it. We have to be fallibilistic and modest about it. We do and must expect that the natural science of the day—any day—will be not only incomplete in its characterization of reality, but will in some respects be incorrect as well. Given that what is involved with oversimplification is a matter of errors not just of omission but almost inevitably of commission as well, we cannot warrantedly see the relationship of M to R to be a matter of approximation but had best confine our claims to the language of estimation. For science doubtless affords our best-available estimates regarding the ways of the world, nevertheless as regards the actual truth about Reality, we cannot but accept that neither does science give us the whole of it nor even does it give us nothing but. Here, as elsewhere, the prospect of error—alike of omission and commission—is uneliminable for finite intelligences who operate under conditions of imperfect information. * * *

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The cognitive intractability of things is accordingly something about which, in principle, we cannot delude ourselves, since such delusion would vindicate rather than deny a reality of facts independent of ourselves. As long as we are fallibilists we must be realistic as well. It is the very limitation of our knowledge of thingsour recognition that reality extends beyond the horizons of what we can possibly know about itthat perhaps best betokens the mind-transcendence of the real. The very inadequacy of our knowledge militates towards philosophical realism because it clearly betokens that there is of a reality out there that lies beyond the inadequate gropings of mind. * * * Admittedly, any general claim about a complex and many-sided issue— and our knowledge of nature’s ways certainly qualifies here—is pretty well bound to oversimplify matters. And the present treatment of oversimplification is itself at once a consequence and an illustration of this circumstance. APPENDIX Observe that, as a consequence of oversimplification, even an elegant physical order (φ) may well be reflected confusedly at the cognitive/psychological level (ψ)—and in such a way that its representation involves a substantially random and disordered phenomenology at the cognitive/psychological level in the realm of thought. With cognitive myopia our modality of reality may well become estranged from the actualities. And given that rational agents with themselves act within nature on the basis of their understanding of things it will transpire that even in an otherwise lawful and deterministic world this order will break down once imperfectly intelligent agents evolve and cognitive myopia deconstructs the worlds lawful order. Thus let it be in specific that such an agent is programmed to respond according to the rule of behavior (be it internally or externally mandated): Wherever you see a 5, do A but otherwise do not.

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But now reconsider our prior hypothetical example of 5-6 confusion. We will then have it that the agent will produce the following behavior sequence A--AAA-A---... Given this situation, our myopic agent has thus inserted into physical reality an essentially random sequence that transmutes an otherwise lawful and deterministic world into one that is (in at least one respect) lawless and random—even at the level of its physical comportment. Myopic perception at the level of appearance has introduced a randomness-productive disconnection between the actual physical phenomenology and the realm of psychic operations.5 NOTES FOR CHAPTER 8 1

Quoted in G. E. L. Owen, Aristotle: Logic Science and Dialectic (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 218.

2

See B. W. Petley, The Fundamental Physical Constants and the Frontiers of Measurement (Bristol and Boston: Hilger, 1985).

3

On the structure of dialectical reasoning see the author’s Dialectics (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), and for the analogous role of such reasoning in philosophy see The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).

4

An interesting illustration of the extent to which lessons in the school of bitter experience have accustomed us to expect complexity is provided by the contrast between the pairs: rudimentary/nuanced; unsophisticated/sophisticated; plain/ elaborate; simple/intricate. Note that in each case the second, complexity-reflective alternative has a distinctly more positive (or less negative) connotation than its opposite counterpart.

5

This chapter is to be published under the same title in Epistemolgica in 2007.

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Chapter 8 ON LEARNED IGNORANCE 1. INTRODUCTION

A

uthentic knowledge of the detailed truth of things is by nature something of an idealization: it is what emerges only from appropriate inquiry appropriately conducted. As such, there is nothing relative about it: the real truth is the same for one as for another; what is true for X is true for Y (unlike what people think to be true). But this world of ours is such that we unfortunately do not operate in ideal circumstances. After all, our circumstances differ in point of experience and evidence. And so what we do get—and all that we in fact can get—are our best estimates of the truth. And here as in other contexts estimation can be off the mark. How, then, can we escape from the relativism of a conflicting mass of individual opinions? Must we not abandon “the pursuit of truth” as no more than a quest for the unattainable? The answer here lies in going back to basics. Rationality requires that in pursuing our goals we should do the best that we can with the resources at our disposal. And this is the case in inquiry also, since in pursuing the truth, too, we must do the best we can. Rationality insists that we do no less. But it also acknowledges that we can do no more. To be sure, the question looms: Is the best we can do actually good enough? Does doing our best guarantee reaching the goal in matters of question resolution! The answer here is: clearly not. In inquiry, as elsewhere, we often fall short. There are no guarantees in the pursuit of truth. Seldom does the science of the day endorse the science of an earlier generation fully and unqualifiedly. This is a fact of life that we have to take in stride. But it affords no reason whatever for abstaining from doing the best that we can. By hypothesis no more advantageous prospect lies before us. Yet if we acknowledge our cognitive fallibilism, then what entitles us to stake those cognitive claims that we make—to accept all those contentions that we actually endorse? To see what is at issue here, we do best by noting that those truth-claims of ours are just exactly that: our best estimates of the truth. And it lies in the very nature of rational estimates as such that we

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are entitled to cast them in the role of the items that they are estimates of. They would not be our best estimates if they were not entitled to be viewed as appropriate operational surrogates for the estimation-targets at issue. There is nothing specifically relative about “my truth”—it would not be what it is if I did not take it to be the truth. Of course we can go wrong in matters of truth estimation. Here, as elsewhere in this imperfect world, there are no categorical guarantees. But while guarantees are lacking, there are two powerfully assuring considerations. The first is that if any extensive success at goal attainment in cognitive contexts is realizable at all, then this is the way to achieve it. The second is that in so proceeding we manage—as best be can tell—to proceed successfully in matters of goal attainment: that this is the best prospect that we have. And so the crucial point is that in doing the best one can one proceeds appropriately through doing the most that anyone—ourselves included—can reasonably ask of us. (Ultra posse nemo obligatur, as the Roman jurisconsults had it.) The fact that we can never resolve all of our questions means that we must come to terms with the unavoidability of ignorance. Just how serious a liability does this constitute? Although ignorance lies at the core of the present discussion, it is not an exercise in radical scepticism. We do not here take the pessimistic line of a cognitive negativism to the effect that knowledge about the world—and indeed every rational well-founded beliefs about it—is unachievable. On the contrary, the present approach is one of cautious optimism, arguing that while reliable information is often not as easy to achieve as people incline to think, the cognitive enterprise can successfully come to terms with this fact. Evolutionary considerations afford us good reason to think that we live in a “user friendly” world where we do not need to be right about things for our opinion-guided action to be successful. And indeed even in cognitive matters we can—strange to say—manage to extract truth from error. Let us see how this comes to be. 2. THE VAGARIES OF VAGUENESS One fundamental feature of inquiry is represented by the following observation: THESIS 1: Insofar as our thinking is vague, truth is accessible even in the face of error.

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Consider the situation where you correctly accept P-or-Q. But—so let it be supposed—the truth of this disjunction roots entirely in that of P while Q is quite false. However, you accept P-or-Q only because you are convinced of the truth of Q; it so happens that P is something you actually disbelieve. Yet despite your error, your belief is entirely true.1 Consider a concrete instance. You believe that Smith bought some furniture because he bought a table. However it was, in fact, a chair that he bought, something you would flatly reject. Nevertheless your belief that he bought some furniture is unquestionably correct. The error in which you are involved, although real, is not so grave as to destabilize the truth of your belief. This example illustrates a more far-reaching point. THESIS 2: There is in general an inverse relationship between the precision or definiteness of a judgment and its security: detail and probability stand in a competing relationship. Increased confidence in the correctness of our estimates can always be purchased at the price of decreased accuracy. We estimate the height of the tree at around 25 feet. We are quite sure that the tree is 25±5 feet high. We are virtually certain that its height is 25±10 feet. But we can be completely and absolutely sure that its height is between 1 inch and 100 yards. Of this we can be “completely sure” in the sense that we are “absolutely certain”, “certain beyond the shadow of a doubt”, “as certain as we can be of anything in the world”, “so sure that we would be willing to stake our life on it”, and the like. For any sort of estimate whatsoever there is always a characteristic trade-off relationship between the evidential security of the estimate, on the one hand (as determinable on the basis of its probability or degree of acceptability), and on the other hand its contentual definitiveness (exactness, detail, precision, etc.). A situation of the sort depicted by the curve of Display 1 obtains with the result that a complementarity relationship of sorts obtains here as between definiteness and security.2

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Display 1 THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN SECURITY AND DEFINITENESS IN ESTIMATION

increasing definiteness

increasing security

Note: Given suitable ways of measuring security (s) and definitiveness (d), the curve at issue can be supposed to be the equilateral hyperbola: s x d = constant. And this state of affairs has far-reaching consequences. It means, in particular, that no secure statement about reality can say exactly how matters stand universally always and everywhere. To capture the truth of things by means of language we must proceed by way of “warranted approximation”. In general we can be sure of how things “usually” are and how they “roughly” are, but not how they always and exactly are. The moral of this story is that, insofar as our ignorance of relevant matters leads us to be vague in our judgments, we may well manage to enhance the likelihood of being right. The fact of the matter is that we have: THESIS 3: By constraining us to make vaguer judgments, ignorance enhances our access to correct information (albeit at the cost of less detail and precision). Thus if I have forgotten that Seattle is in Washington State then if “forced to guess” I might well erroneously locate it in Oregon. Neverthe-

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less, my vague judgment that “Seattle is located in the Northwestern US” is quite correct. This state of affairs means that when the truth of our claims is critical we generally “play it safe” and make our commitments less definite and detailed. Consider, for example, so simple and colloquial a statement as: “The servant declared that he could no longer do his master’s bidding.” This statement is pervaded by a magisterial vagueness. It conveys very little about what went on in the exchange between servant and master. We are told virtually nothing about what either of them actually said. What the object of their discussion was, what form of words they used, the manner of their discourse (did the master order or request, was the servant speaking from rueful incapacity or from belligerent defiance) all these are questions we cannot begin to answer. Even the relationship at issue, whether owner/slave or employer/employee is left in total obscurity. In sum, there is a vast range of indeterminacy here—a great multitude of very different scenarios would fit perfectly well to the description of events which that individual statement puts before us. And this vagueness clearly provides a protective shell to guard that statement against a charge of falsity. Irrespective of how matters might actually stand within a vast range of alternative circumstances and conditions, the statement remains secure, its truth unaffected by which possibility is realized. And in practical matters, in particular, such rough guidance is often altogether enough. We need not know just exactly how much rain there will be to make it sensible for us to take an umbrella. 3. COGNITIVE RISK In view of the preceding consideration we also have: THESIS 4: In practice our beliefs are generally are overdetermined by the evidence. In order to be sure, we generally “overdesign” our beliefs in matters that are important to us by keeping them comparatively indefinite. Engineers standardly overdesign their productions. They build the bridge to bear more weight than will conceivably ever be placed upon it; they build the dam to withstand far more pressure than the reservoir is expected to exert. Analogously, our beliefs—especially in matters of importance—are generally such that the relevant evidence at our disposal would

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in fact support something far stronger. Whenever error avoidance is a significant issue, our beliefs are usually so “overdesigned” that the evidence actually at our disposal would in fact support weightier and more contentladen claims. All the same, it is clear that risk avoidance in matters of belief stands coordinate with skepticism. The skeptic’s line is: Run no risk of error; take no chances with falsehood; accept nothing that does not come with totally ironclad guarantees. And the proviso here is largely academic, seeing that little if anything in this world comes with ironclad guarantees—certainly nothing by way of interesting knowledge. It must, however, be recognized that in general two fundamentally different kinds of misfortunes are possible in cognitive situations where risks are run and chances taken: 1. Omission errors: We reject something which, as it turns out, we should have accepted. We decline to take the chance, we avoid running the risk at issue, but things turn out favorably after all, so that we lose out on the gamble. 2. Commission errors: We accept something which, as it turns out, we should have rejected. We do take the chance and run the risk at issue, but things go wrong, so that we lose the gamble. If we are risk seekers, we will incur few misfortunes of the first kind, but, things being what they are, many of the second kind well befall us. On the other hand, if we are risk avoiders, we shall suffer few misfortunes on the second kind, but shall inevitably incur many of the first. The overall situation has the general structure depicted in Display 2. Clearly, the reasonable thing to do is to adopt a policy that minimizes misfortunes overall. And this means that a rigid policy of avoiding all errors of a given type (be it omission or commission) will, in general, fail to be rationally optimal. Both approaches engender too many misfortunes for comfort. The sensible and prudent thing is to adopt the middle-of-the-road policy of risk calculation, striving as best we can to balance the positive risks of outright loss against the negative ones of lost opportunity. The rule of reason calls for sensible management and a prudent calculation of risks; it standardly enjoins upon us the Aristotelian golden mean between the extreme of risk avoidance and risk seeking.

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Display 2 THE COST OF RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACHES

misfortunes of kind 1

0

misfortunes of kind 2

100 50 error-of-commission tolerance

Risk avoiders

Cautious calculators

Risk seekers

Turning now to the specifically cognitive case, it may be observed that the skeptic succeeds splendidly in averting misfortunes of the second kind. He make no errors of commission; by accepting nothing, he accepts nothing false. But, of course, he loses out on the opportunity to obtain any sort of information. He avoids falsity at the price of ignorance. The skeptic thus errs on the side of safety, even as the syncretist errs on that of gullibility. The sensible course is clearly that of a prudent calculation of risks. As William James stressed, the only sensible attitude is one of: “Certainly the cognitive enterprise has its risks, but we must be prepared to run them.” Ultimately, we face a question of trade-offs. Are we prepared to run a greater risk of mistakes to secure the potential benefit of an enlarged understanding? In the end, the matter is one of priorities—of safety as against information and of an epistemological risk aversion as against the impetus to understanding. The ultimate issue is one of values and priorities, weighing the negativity of ignorance and incomprehension against the risk of mistakes and misinformation. Safety engineering in inquiry is like safety engineering in life. There must be proper balance between costs and benefits.

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All the same there is only so much that we can do by way of controlling cognitive mishaps. We live in a world without easy options—and without guarantees. 4. FULLER INFORMATION DOES NOT ASSURE SAFETY No matter how amply confirmed, a generalization can be destroyed by an unexpected encounter with an inconveniently nonconforming fact. A single blank swan refutes the thesis that “all swans are white”. Nevertheless, one of the deepest ironies of the epistemic realm is represented by: THESIS 5: It would be an error to think that a conclusion based on fuller information is necessarily an improvement, presenting us with a result that cannot be false if its “inferior” predecessor was already true. If the contention at issue were true, then as more information is added, an outcome’s probability would increasingly move in the same direction, and could not oscillate between increases and decreases. But this is clearly not so. Consider the following example, based on the question: “What will John do to occupy himself on the trip?” Suppose we require an answer to this question. But suppose further that the following data becomes successively available: (1) He loves doing crosswords. (2) He loves reading mysteries even more. (3) He didn’t take any books along. It is clear that we are led to and fro. Initially (at stage (1) of information access) we incline to the answer that he will be working crosswords. At the next stage, when item (2) arrives we change our mind and incline to the answer that he will be reading. At stage (3) we abandon this idea and go back to our initial view. And of course a subsequent stage, say one where we have (4) One of this fellow passengers lends him a book.

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can nevertheless reverse the situation and return matters to step (2). And who knows what step (5) will bring? The crucial point is that additional information need not serve to settle matters by bringing us closer to the truth. Consider a somewhat more general example. Suppose a sequence of concentric circles each of which has half the radius of its predecessor. (To save space, the diagram is not drawn to scale: each successive ring is supposed to be vastly smaller in relation to its including predecessor.) (1) (2) (3) (4)

Now suppose that in actual fact the situation is as follows: • Within circle (1) we have it that “Most A’s are B’s” because the larger part of this circle that lies outside (2) is heavily populated with A’s that are B’s. • Within circle (2) we have it that “Most A’s are not B’s” because the larger part of the circle that lies outside (3) is heavily populated with A’s that are not B’s. • Within circle (3) we have it that “Most A’s are B’s” because the larger part of this circle that lies outside (4) is heavily populated with A’s that are B’s. • And so on in successive alternation. Now suppose that we are informed (1) that we are dealing with an A which lies inside of circle (1). Then of course we would conclude that it is likely that this A is a B. But thereupon we are informed—additionally—that our A lies in circle (2). Then we well of course conclude, analogously, that it is not a B. But now suppose that we are informed additionally that our A lies in circle (3). Then of course the situation is restored to that of the outset and we will conclude that our A is likely to be a B. This sort of example suffices to demolish the idea that a conclusion based on fuller knowledge is thereby the more likely to be correct. Throughout the realm of inductive or plausible reasoning, F & G can always point to a conclusion at odds with that indicated by F alone: the cir-

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cumstance that fact F renders X highly probable is wholly compatible with the existence of another fact G of such a sort that F & G renders X highly improbable. And yet what G undermines here can always be restored by some yet further additional fact. Such situations are called non-monotonic because additional knowledge always has the potential of constraining a change of mind—rather than merely providing additional substantiation for a fixed result—we have no assurance that further information produces “a closer approximation to the truth”. Conclusions based on additional information may in some sense be comparatively “better” or “securer” but they need certainly not be “truer” or “more accurate”. (There are no degrees here, true is true.) 5. IGNORANCE CAN HAVE ITS COMPENSATIONS One of the further ironies or our epistemic situation lies in the following consideration: THESIS 6: In many cases we may actually be better off by proceeding in ignorance—even in cognitive matters of belief formation. Consider the following situation: A•

•

B

C

•

x

•D

x

You need to move from A to D. And you know nothing about what will happen if you turn left at B. But suppose further that you know (quite correctly) that there actually is a possible way to get through to D if you turn right at B. But this is all that you know about this alternative—and, specifically, you have no information about the situation at C, which in fact is a function where several alternative roads back off into disaster (x). In the circumstances you will (and should) conclude that you are more likely to succeed by turning right at B. Yet while this conclusion is sensible in the circumstances it is quite incorrect. By opting for this alternative of a right turn at B you have a 2/3 probability of disaster and 1/3 probability of success. On the other hand, if you had lacked that item of knowledge regarding a right turn at B and had to proceed rationally in the absence of this datum—that is, by random selection—you would have reversed matters to a

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2/3 probability of success and a 1/3 probability of disaster. You are clearly better off—both epistemically and practically—lacking that (perfectly authentic) item of knowledge regarding the situation at B. For it actually reduces rather than enhances your chances of arriving at a correct resolution. When we are seeking for the true answers to questions or for the appropriate resolution of choices the information or items of knowledge can of course prove to be irrelevant; so much is clear—and trivial. But what is equally clear and far less trivial is that, as we have seen, altogether true information can prove to be counterproductive and misleading. Additional information can serve to skew yet further an already biased picture. It can—all too easily—point perfectly sensible and rational people to the wrong conclusion even when proceeding by perfectly sensible and rational courses of inference. Accordingly, there are bound to be many sorts of situations in which people are better off without various items of knowledge—better off in ignorance, so to speak. Given the way in which evidence works, and given that the evidence we have is our only cognitive accessory to reality, it can transpire that authentic knowledge of truth can actually give us a very mistaken picture of reality. Truth is supposed to be “correspondence with reality” but the fact is that the truth can be misleading. This is brought out vividly in John Godfry Saxe’s poem about “The Blind Men and the Elephant” which tells the story of certain blind sages, those Six men of Indostan, To learning much inclined, Who went to see the elephant, (Though all of them were blind).

One sage touched the elephant’s “broad and sturdy side” and declared the beast to be “very like a wall”. The second, who had felt its tusk, announced the elephant to resemble a spear. The third, who took the elephant’s squirming trunk in his hands, compared it to a snake; while the fourth, who put his arm around the elephant’s knee, was sure that the animal resembled a tree. A flapping ear convinced another that the elephant had the form of a fan; while the sixth blind man thought that is had the form of a rope, since he had taken hold of the tail. And so these men of Indostan, Disputed loud and long; Each in his own opinion

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Exceeding stiff and strong: Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong.

None of those blind sages was altogether in error, it is just that the truth at their disposal was partial in a way that gave them a biased and misleading picture of reality. It is not that they did not know truth, but rather that an altogether plausible inference from the truth they knew propelled them into error. And such misleading is a prospect whenever the information at our disposal is incomplete, which is to say virtually always. Conclusions based on incomplete information—and how often is it that our information is actually complete?—are always vulnerable, always in a condition where things can go wrong. And merely increasing information need not mend matters, seeing that “bigger” generally stops well short of “complete”. In a world of almost inevitably incomplete information we unavoidably face the prospect that the further information we have managed to obtain simply leads us further down the primrose path towards an erroneous conclusion. There is a natural tendency—among intellectuals in particular—to think of knowledge as an invariably good thing. Ironically, however, the awkward fact that additional knowledge can be counterproductive and misleading is something that one just cannot ignore.3 In this imperfect world, we are not in general in a position to proceed in our operations from the absolute best as such, but only from the visible best that is at our disposal—”the best available (or discernible) reason”. We have to content ourselves with doing “the apparently best thing”—the best that we can manage in the prevailing circumstances. But the fact remains that what is rationally optimal need not be correct. Things can all too easily go wrong here. The problem about doing the rational thing—doing that which we sensibly suppose to be supported by the best reasons—is that we realize full well that our information, inevitably being incomplete, may well point us in the wrong direction. We can never secure advance guarantees that what we don’t know makes no difference. 6. THE COGNITIVE LIFE OFFERS NO GUARANTEES: IT IS A MATTER OF CALCULATED RISKS In facing this “predicament of reason”—that reason itself may well guide us amiss—the problem arises: Why should we act on the most prom-

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ising visible alternative when visibility is restricted to the limited horizons of our own potentially inadequate vantage-point? The fact is that like the drowning man, we clutch at the best available prospect. We recognize full well that even the most rationally laid scheme can misfire. Reality is not always and inevitably on the side of the strongest arguments. Reason affords no guarantee of success, but only the reassurance of having made the best rational bet—of having done as well as one could in the circumstances of the case. After all, this imperfect sublunary dispensation, probability is, as Bishop Butler said, “the guide of life”. The rational person is, by definition, someone who uses intelligence to maximize the probability—that is, the responsibly formed subjective probability—that matters will eventuate favorably for the promotion of his real interests. It is just this that makes following the path of rationality the rational course. Rationality calls for adopting the overall best (visible) alternative—the best that is, in practice, available to us in the circumstances. Unfortunately, however, this is still not quite the end of it. For the problem remains: Just exactly what are the probabilities with which we are operating? Of course, we intend them to be objective, real-world likelihoods; this is what we would ideally like to have. But, in fact, of course, they are no more than our considered estimates of such likelihoods as best we can shape them in the light of the available information. And this means that we are once again in the presence of rational resolutions effected on the basis of the available data. We are here confronted with an instant, local replay of the global problem that is being addressed. Striving to escape the predicament of reason, it mocks us by leaping ahead to bar our way. For we here confront once more the familiar and vexing issue of the actual optimality of apparent optima. And there is nothing we can do to escape this awkward circumstance—we simply have to take it in our stride. The fact of the matter is that we cannot prove that rationality pays—that acting rationally in the particular case at hand will actually pay off—nor can we even claim with unalloyed assurance that it will probably do so (with real likelihood rather than subjective probability at issue). We can only say that, as best we can judge the matter, it represents the most promising course at our disposal. To reemphasize: We have no guarantees. There is, however, one consoling thought here. Granted, our knowledge is always conditioned by ignorance: the questions we can answer are surrounded by ones that we cannot. But often this just does not matter as much as one might think. Often—and indeed even generally—the sort of information we can get is good enough for the practical purposes that con-

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front us. Where this is not so we would not be here thanks to evolution to be able to tell the tale. 7. THE RATIONALE OF RATIONALITY So just where does this leave us? Actually it leaves us without any real choice—without any viable alternative. For there is nothing that we can reasonably do save to follow the guidance of reason. But is this not to appoint reason as judge and jury in its own case? Yes—it actually is. But we would not—or should not!—want it any other way. For if we want any sort of guidance as to what to do, it is clearly rational guidance—guidance based on good reasons—that we do (and should) want. Still this is not quite the end of the matter. Of course, reason is selfrecommending. The most rational course before us is to rely on reason. That goes without saying. But one further important thing can be said. For it is not just reason that speaks for reason, but experience as well. For experience teaches that in these cognitive matters reason is our best available guide. In the end we thus return full circle to the point offered in passing at the outset, that evolutionary considerations endorse our being reasonably confident that we live in a world where the guidance of reason serves us rational beings well. Of course in doing so we run the risk of error, but rational caution being what it is, will do so on the whole in a way that keeps the odds on our side. After all, if rational comportment did not by and large pay off in terms of successful results then we would not be here as the (frequently) rational beings that we are. If rationality were not generally productive rather than counterproductive then the selective pressures of evolutionary survival would not have seen the emergence of rational creatures upon nature’s stage. Of course, one may somehow prefer not to be rational. With belief, I may prefer congeniality to truth. With action, I may prefer convenience to optimality. With value, I may prefer the pleasingly base to the more austere better. On all sides, I may willfully opt for “what I simply like”, rather than for that which is normatively appropriate. But if I do this, I lose sight of the actual ends of the cognitive, practical, and evaluative enterprises, to the detriment of my real (as opposed to apparent) interests. It lies in the nature of things that reason is on the side of rationality. Admittedly, she offers us no guarantees. Yet, if we abandon reason there is nowhere better that we can (rationally) turn.4 So in the end, reason and pragmatism enter into a symbiotic cooperation.

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And so, what makes the present discussion an exercise in contemplating learned ignorance is its recognition that, notwithstanding the very real advantages that it can bring, in the final analysis ignorance is not a good thing. The dictum that “Ignorance is bliss” does not get it right.5

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 8 1

Examples of this sort indicate why philosophers are unwilling to identify knowledge with true belief.

2

This circumstance did not elude Neils Bohr himself, the father of complementarity theory in physics: In later years Bohr emphasized the importance of complementarity for matters far removed from physics. There is a story that Bohr was once asked in German what is the quality that is complementary to truth (Wahrheit). After some thought he answered clarity (Klarheit). (Stephen Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory [New York: Pantheon Books, 1992], p. 74 footnote 10.)

3

The present deliberations have a deep kinship with the doctrines of Nicholas of Cusa. His classic De docta ignorantia pioneered the idea that knowledge can—and to some extent must—take root in ignorance. And his doctrine of “coincidence of opposites” also comes into the picture. However “coincidence” must here be understood not as total agreement (sameness) but in the sense of coming together, of being in contact or touch. It isn’t the same thing to travel clockwise or counterclockwise in a circle, but eventually you’ll reach the same point. Knowledge and ignorance are different things but in many cases one of them can be achieved through the mediation of its opposite.

4

This line of thought is developed from another point of departure in the author’s Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

5

This chapter was originally published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 237 (1999), pp. 479-93.

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Chapter 9 COPING WITH COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS 1. STAGE-SETTING FOR THE PROBLEM: ISSUE RESOLUTION HINGES ON AVAILABLE INFORMATION

K

nowledge development is an inherently dynamical venture; the theories and theses at which we arrive at one state-of-the-art of rational inquiry will—and because of technological progress must—differ from those of another. And the wishes and preferences of scientists notwithstanding, the world-picture that they deliver into our hands grows increasingly complex over time. The history of science is a story of the everrenewed realization that things were not so simple as they previously seemed. What does this increasing complexity of our understanding of the world’s ways portend? The answer to this question has some rather ominous consequences—both for matters of belief and for matters of practice as well. Rational action encounters serious challenges in a complex world. For in such a world the information at the disposal of limited beings is bound to be incomplete, and in situations of imperfect information their very rationality can lead rational agents into difficulty. This becomes apparent with even the most simple of problem-solving situations. For consider such cases as the following: Case 1: Informational gap-filling DATA: A manuscript note contains the (partly illegible) passage: “He sent her a l-tter …” QUESTION: How is that gap in that incomplete word “l-tter” to be filled in?

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Case 2: Probabilistic reasoning DATA: 1. X is a mechanical engineer. 2. 90 per cent of mechanical engineers are male. QUESTION: How probable is it that X is male? Case 3: Inductive inference DATA: A sequence starts 1, 10, 100. QUESTION: What are we to expect at the 10th place? Case 4: Prudential decision DATA: 1. It is starting to rain. 2. Yonder large tree affords the only shelter in the large, flat meadow that we are crossing. QUESTION: Where should we go? Case 5: Expert intervention DATA: 1. X suffers from asthma. 2. Antihistamines are the most effective available medicament for (most cases of) asthma. PROBLEM: What course of action should we recommend to X? In each case, we face a perfectly possible and clearly delineated situation of choice. And in each instance the “rationally appropriate resolution” seems rather obvious and straightforward. But now consider what happens

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when some additional, supplementary information is added. Let us assume that in these five cases we acquire some further information: Case 1: The passage continues: “to transport her wounded brother.” Case 2: We are also informed that X gave birth to a bouncing baby boy last week. Case 3: We are further told that the sequence continues 1, 10, 100, 1, 10, 100, for the next six entries. Case 4: We are given the supplemental datum that there is also much lightning and thunder. Case 5: We are also informed that X is highly allergic to antihistamines. Clearly, one and the same phenomenon recurs throughout. As already foreshadowed in the preceding chapter, informatively more amply grounded choices may or may not be better, but they will frequently be different. In any and every domain, the rational resolution of problems highly context-sensitive to the information in hand in such a way that what is a patently sensible and appropriate resolution in a given data-situation can cease to be so in the light of additional information—information that does not abrogate or correct our prior data, but simply augments it. Often as not, additional ramifications complicate matters by destabilizing seemingly obvious resolutions in such situations of non-monotonic reasoning. For exactly what qualifies as the most rational resolution of a particular problem of belief, action, or evaluation is bound to depend upon the precise content of our data about the circumstances. And this dependency so functions that a “mere addition” to our information can radically transform the situation as regards optimality. For, as those preceding examples indicate, a mere amplification of the known circumstances may well indicate the appropriateness of doing something totally incompatible with that initial optimum. The fact is that the rationally appropriate resolution of a problem on the basis of one body of evidence or experience can always become undone

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when that body of evidence or experience is not actually revised but merely enlarged. It is just here that complexity makes for difficulties. For when we operate in complex situations, we are constantly involved in learning new facts about them—facts which can all too easily upset the applecart of our previous ideas. We thus confront the situation generated by the confluence of two considerations: that the rationality of a problem-resolution is “information-sensitive”, and that amidst the complexities of the real world our information is always incomplete and open to supplementation. It is clear that the rationally appropriate approach in any situation of problem solving—be it cognitive or practical—is to strive for the best resolution achievable in the light of the available data. Rationality enjoins us to adopt the optimal option: having surveyed the range of alternatives, the appropriate thing to do is to resolve the choice between them in what is, all considered, the overall most favorable way. To be sure, what is “favorable” will differ in some ways from context to context. But the fact remains that rationality is a matter of optimization relative to constraints—of doing the best one can in the prevailing circumstances. Yet in complex settings, circumstances are bound to change in the light of fuller understanding. And it is a trite fact—which nevertheless has enormously far-reaching implications—that the deployment of intelligence or incomplete information may well yield inadequate solutions. In cognitive and practical contexts alike, even the most rational of problem-solutions can misfire in situations of incomplete information. For in all rational deliberation the conclusion is and must be a function of the premisses. The prevailing state of our information will—and should— decisively affect the determination of what is the best thing to do or to think. And in consequence any changes in or additions to the available information can—and should—affect our issue-resolutions. The history of the empirical sciences affords a familiar illustration. Beliefs in the luminiferous aether, the conservation of matter, and the like, were all sensible and rational in their day. Achieving a substantial enlargement of the data base on which we erect the structures of our theorizing has generally produced those changes of mind characterized as “scientific revolutions”. As significantly enhanced experimental information

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comes to hand, people are led to resolve their problems of optimal question-resolution in radically different ways. 2. IDEAL VS. PRACTICAL RATIONALITY: THE PREDICAMENT OF REASON Rationality demands that we should think and act on the basis of the best-available confirmation. But in this domain of information acquisition, future changes are presently unforeseeable. Present knowledge does not— cannot—speak for future knowledge.1 We have no rationally superior alternative but to act on the basis of what our conscientious cognitive efforts can here and now provide, recognizing that our available information in highly complex matters is generally less than adequate—let alone complete. The Predicament of Reason residing in the irresolvable tension between the demands of rationality and its practical possibilities comes to view in the following aporetic situation: (1) As agents who pretend to rationality, we ought to act as fully rational agents do, namely to do what is in fact the rationally optimal thing. (2) In actual practice, we can do no more and no better than to opt for what appears to be the best option in the circumstances. (3) It cannot reasonably and rationally be asked of us to do more than the very best that is possible in the circumstances. (4) What appears to be the best option in various circumstances may not actually be the best option. Since these theses create a conflict, a compromise must be effected and at least one of them must be sacrificed. Now since (2) and (4) represent unavoidable “facts of life”, (1) and (3) are the plausible candidates here. Yet neither the rationality-abandonment of (1)-rejection nor the unrealistic perfectionism of (3)-rejection are attractive options. And the resulting situation is a thoroughly uncomfortable one—whence the characterization of a

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predicament. For in the informatively problematic setting of a complex world, reason faces the need for acknowledging that it must call on us to do that which, for aught we know, may in the end prove totally inappropriate. Rational action in this world has to proceed in the face of the sobering recognition that while we doubtless should do the best we can in the circumstances, this may nevertheless eventuate as quite the wrong thing. It is the course of reason to aim at the absolutely best, but nevertheless to settle for the best that is realistically available in the existing circumstances. (After all, it would be unreasonable, nay irrational, to ask for more.) But the predicament lies in our clear recognition of the inherent tension between these two commitments—the fact that while the ideal ends of rationality are achieved only under the ideal conditions of global totality, nevertheless the actual practice of rationality must inevitably be conducted at the level of local and imperfect conditions. We can never rest complacently confident that in following reason’s directions we may not in fact be frustrating the very purposes for whose sake we are calling upon the guidance of reason. We have to recognize the “fact of life” that it is rationally advisable to do the best we can, while nevertheless realizing all the while that it may prove to be inappropriate. Reason calls on us to act on the basis of the best information that our conscientious efforts can here and now provide— notwithstanding the recognition that they may not in the end prove to be sufficient. “But the problem is created by mere ignorance.” True enough! But true in a way that provides no comfort. Imperfect information is an inevitable fact of life. A “rationality” that could not be implemented in these circumstances would be totally pointless. Were rationality to hinge on complete information, it would thereby manifest its irrelevance for our concerns. There is nothing “mere” about ignorance regarding how matters actually stand in this complex world of ours. If we had “complete information”, and in particular if we knew how our future efforts would eventuate—how matters will actually turn out when we decide one way of another—then rational decision-making and planning would of course become something very different from what they are. But all we can ever actually manage to do is to be rational in the circumstances as best we can determine them to be. If rationality were only possi-

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ble in the light of complete information it would perforce become totally irrelevant for us. It lies in the inevitable nature of things that we must exercise our rationality amidst conditions of imperfect information. A mode of “rationality” capable of implementation only in ideal circumstances is pointless; in this world, the real world, there is no work for it to do. We have to be realistic in our understanding of rationality—recognizing that we must practice this virtue in real rather than ideal circumstances. In fact, to ask more of rationality would not itself be rational. A conception of rationality that asks no more of us than doing the best we possibly can is the only one that makes sense—anything else would be ipso facto irrelevant. Clearly, if rationality is to be something that one can actually implement, then it has to be possible for its demands to be met in sub-ideal conditions—specifically including conditions of incomplete information as we (inevitably) confront them. We standardly operate on the presumption that the available information is adequate to permit the appropriate resolution of the problems we face. (After all, we have no option but to do the best we can with the means in hand.) But all too frequently this presumption turns out ultimately falsified. Yet twentieth-century medicine is naturally not deficient for failing to apply twenty-first-century remedies. Rationality, like politics, is an art of the possible—a matter of doing the best that is achieved in the overall circumstances in which the agent functions—cognitive circumstances included. Our best-available judgments—not only as to the actualities of things but also as regards their plausibilities and probabilities—will always be conditional judgments formed in the context and against the background of the then-available information as best we can determine it. And in this sphere future changes are presently unforeseeable. It will not do to react to this state of affairs by saying: “Delay decision until your experience is perfected and your information altogether complete.” To postpone a decision until then is tantamount to preventing its ever being made. A rationality we cannot deploy here and now, amidst the realities of an imperfect world, is altogether useless. Still, the situation that we face is an ironic one. Categorical (unconditional) rational appropriateness always hinges on the total circumstances, involving the entirety of relevant information, be it present and absent. But obviously this second factor of “absent information” poses difficulties. In

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this world, our circumstances are inevitably sub-ideal, our information unavoidably incomplete. The inconvenient fact is that here, as elsewhere, we simply cannot determine that nothing outside our cognitive reach has a certain character or tendency—that this is more than we can ever actually manage. This sort of situation obtains throughout all areas of rational deliberation: cognitive, prudential, evaluative—right across the board. Even our optimally evidentiated beliefs are not necessarily true; even our optimally well-advised actions are not necessarily successful; even our optimally crafted appraisals are not necessarily correct. The reality of limitation meets us in every direction. We are comparatively simple creatures living in a comparatively complex world. And for this reason we occupy a position in which a good deal of skepticism is warranted. Not that we do not know anything—or indeed a great many things—but in a complex world our knowledge is bound to be of a changing, dynamic, progressive character, so that our presently available knowledge is imperfect—at any and every present. Evolution has equipped us with an intellect adequate to fare satisfactorily (though certainly not perfectly) with the environment as we find it—sufficiently to cope effectively in the statistical average with the situations relating to our well being as regards survival and reproduction. All the same, our knowledge is bound to be frequently inadequate to the situation that actually confronts us. And the problems of praxis that result are formidable, since we know full well on general principles that the actions we deem appropriate on the basis of even the most careful exploration of incomplete information can readily turn out to be entirely ineffective and inappropriate. Rationality is undoubtedly the best resource that we have, but there is no failproof assurance that in the conditions of incomplete information that obtain in a complex world its guidance will prove good enough. And yet while rationality is an imperfect resource, there is nowhere else where we can—rationally—go. Virtually by definition, the rationally appropriate resolution will, in the circumstances, afford our best choice in point of rational appropriateness. There thus stands before us the profound lesson of the biblical story of the Fall of Man, that in this complex world of ours there are simply no guarantees—not even for a life conducted on principles of reason. It is this sobering situation—doubtless unwelcome, but inevitable—that betokens

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the Predicament of Reason: the circumstance that rationality—our very best available guide in both practical and theoretical matters—requires us to do “what seems best” in the full and clear recognition that, in a world whose complexities often prove to be too much for us, this may well fail to be, in actuality, anything like the best thing to do.2

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 9 1

On this theme see the author’s Predicting the Future (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1997).

2

This chapter was originally published under the same title in Philosophical Exchange, No. 28 (from 1997-98), pp. 33-38.

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Chapter 10 ON IGNORANCE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 1. CONCRETE VS. GENERIC KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE

O

ne of the most critical but yet problematic areas of inquiry relates to knowledge regarding our own cognitive shortcomings. It is next to impossible to get a clear fix on our own ignorance, because in order to know that there is a certain fact that we do not know, we would have to know the item at issue to be a fact, and just this is, by hypothesis, something we do not know.1 And it is even difficult to obtain a taxonomy of ignorance. For the realm of ignorance is every bit as vast, complex, and many-faceted as that of knowledge itself. Whatever someone can know that they can also be ignorant aboutarguably exempting with a handful of Cartesian exceptions such as the fact that knowers are pretty much bound ex officio to realize that they themselves exist and can think. In this connection it is instructive to note some relatively simple but nevertheless far-reaching considerations regarding the project of rational inquiry and the limits of knowledge. Let Kxp as usual abbreviate “x knows that p”. And now note the contrast between the contentions: “x knows that something has the property F ”: Kx(∃u)Fu and “x knows of something that it has the property F ”: (∃u)KxFu The variant placement of the quantifier means that there is a crucial different here, since in the second case, unlike the first, the knower in question is in a position specifically to identify the item at issue. Here in this second case our knower not merely knows generally and indefinitely that something has F, but knows concretely and specifically what it is that has F. The two cognitive situations are clearly very different. To know that some-

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one is currently in the Library of Congress is one thing and to know who is there is quite another. And this has wider ramifications. For the reality of it is that there is a world of difference between saying “I don’t know whether p is a fact” and saying “p is a fact that I don’t know”. The former comes down to maintaining: I neither know that p nor that not-p. No problem there. However, the second statement, to the effect that p is a fact that one doesn’t know to be so, comes down to maintaining both that p is true and that I do not know this. Such a claim is clearly self-contradictory.2 And correspondingly we must recognize that there is a crucial difference between the indefinite “I know that there is some fact that I do not know” and the specific “Such and such is a fact of which I know that I do not know it”. The first is unproblematic but the second not, seeing that to know of something that it is a fact I must know it as such so that what is at issue is effectively a contradiction in terms. I can know about my ignorance only sub ratione generalitatis at the level of indefiniteness, but I cannot know it in concrete detail. I can meaningfully hold that two and two’s being four is a claim (or a purported fact) that I do not know to be the case, but cannot meaningfully maintain that two and two’s being four is an actual fact that I do not know to be the case. To maintain a fact as fact is to assert knowledge of it: in maintaining p as a fact one claims to know that p. And so it lies in the nature of things that my ignorance about facts is something regarding which one can have only generic and not concrete knowledge. One can know that that one does not know various truths, but I am not in a position to identify any of the specific truths I do not know. In sum, I can have general but not specific knowledge about my ignorance, although my knowledge about your ignorance is unproblematic in this regard.3 2. ISSUES OF TEMPORALIZED KNOWLEDGE Are there specifiable substantive questions about the world’s contingent facts that are comparably undecidable? Are there also factual rather than merely formal insolubiliaquestions with respect to matters of fact that are not answerable thanks not merely to some fortuitous lack of information but for deeper and more fundamental reasons? Let us consider whyand howthe answer to this question is affirmative.

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The philosophical theologians of the middle ages, who loved puzzles, were wont to exercise their ingenuity regarding the question: If he is omniscient, does God know what is happening now? And they inclined to answer this question with the response: yes and no. Clearly an unrestrictedly omniscient God will know everything that happens in the world. And this means that he knows whatever is happening concurrently with the calendar’s reading 13, 2001 January and the clock’s reading 3:15 PM. But this is B-series knowledge in McTaggert’s terminologyknowledge of events in the manner of before/concurrent/after. However, as a being who does not occupy a place within the manifold of space and timewho, being extramundane, lacks the world-internal perspective requires for indexicals like here and nowGod cannot operate with the correlative concepts and so in that sense, the sense natural to us as mundane world-emplaced creatures who occupy a spatio-temporally qualified position in the world’s scheme of things, God does not know what is going on now. He does not have temporal knowledge in the English philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart’s Aseries mode of matters in the range of past/present/future. In this regard (as in many others) God is quite unlike ourselves. We finite world-emplaced beings who exist within space-time can ask and answer questions about temporal matters from a time-internal perspective. And this has significant implications for us because our knowledgeunlike God’sis something that both has to arise within and be concerned about the temporal domain in the manner of the time-interval perspective of A-series temporality. It is, in fact, here that the root source of our cognitive imperfection lies. This temporal and developmental aspect of knowledge has portentous ramifications. For one thing, it means that we are evidentially incapacitated in comparison with other knowers. Thus consider the yes-or-no question: “When next you yourself (Jones) answer a questions, will you do so in the negative?” Whichever way poor Jones replies, he is plunged into error. The best he can do is to plead incapacity and respond CAN’T SAY. And yet the question is not meaningless. For of course, third parties are differently circumstanced. Another knowerone different from Jones himselfcan answer the question by saying “No, Jones won’t do so”, and manage to be entirely correct. But this is something that Jones cannot coherently say on his own account. And so one thing that follows here is that not only are finite knowers not absolutely omniscient, they are not comparatively omniscient ei-

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therin the sense of being able to answer correctly every question that another knower can also answer. Moreover, the temporal aspect of the knowledge of finite beings means that our knowledge is developmental in nature: that it admits of learning and of discoveries: that there are things (facts) that we do not and cannot know at one temporal juncture that we can and do manage to get to know at another. Knowledge does not come to us from on high, perfected and completed like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. It is the product of a process of inquiry unfolding over timea process from which the possibilities of error of omission and commission can never be excluded. And this means that problems are bound to arise as our thought contemplates the future. 3. KANT’S PRINCIPLE OF QUESTION EXFOLIATION New knowledge that emerges from the progress of science can bear very differently on the matter of questions. Specifically, we can discover: 1. New (that is, different) answers to old questions. 2. New questions. 3. The inappropriateness or illegitimacy of old questions. With (1) we learn that the wrong answer has been given to an old question: We uncover an error of commission in our previous question-answering endeavors. With (2) we discover that there are certain questions which have not heretofore been posed at all: We uncover an error of omission in our former question-asking endeavors. Finally, with (3) we find that one has asked the wrong question altogether: We uncover an error of commission in our former question-asking endeavors, which are now seen to rest on incorrect presuppositions (and are thus generally bound up with type (1) discoveries.) Three rather different sorts of cognitive progress are thus involved here—different from one another and from the traditional view of cognitive progress in terms of a straightforward “accretion of further knowledge”. The coming to be and passing away of questions is a phenomenon that can be mooted on this basis. A question arises at the time t if it then can meaningfully be posed because all its presuppositions are then taken to be

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true. And a question dissolves at t if one or another of its previously accepted presuppositions is no longer accepted. Any state of science will remove certain questions from the agenda and dismiss them as inappropriate. Newtonian dynamics dismissed the question: “What cause is operative to keep a body in movement (with a uniform velocity in a straight line) once an impressed force has set it into motion?” Modern quantum theory does not allow us to ask: “What caused this atom on californium to disintegrate after exactly 32.53 days, rather than, say, a day or two later?” Scientific questions should thus be regarded as arising in an historical setting. They arise at some juncture and not at others; they can be born and then die away. A change of mind about the appropriate answer to some question will unravel the entire fabric of questions that presupposed this earlier answer. For if we change our mind regarding the correct answer to one member of a chain of questions, then the whole of a subsequent course of questioning may well collapse. If we abandon the luminiferous aether as a vehicle for electromagnetic radiation, then we lose at one stroke the whole host of questions about its composition, structure, mode of operation, origin, and so on. Epistemic change over time thus relates not only to what is “known” but also to what can be asked. The accession of “new knowledge” opens up new questions. And when the epistemic status of a presupposition changes from acceptance to abandonment or rejection, we witness the disappearance of various old ones through dissolution. Questions regarding the modus operandi of phlogiston, the behavior of caloric fluid, the structure of the luminiferous aether, and the character of faster-than-light transmissions are all questions that have become lost to modern science because they involve presuppositions that have been abandoned. And this leads once more to the theme of fallibilism. A body of knowledge may well answer a question only provisionally, in a tone of voice so tentative or indecisive as to indicate that further information is actually needed to enable us to settle the matter with confidence. But even if it does firmly and unqualifiedly support a certain resolution, this circumstance can never be viewed as absolutely final. What is seen as the correct answer to a question at one stage of the cognitive venture, may, of course, cease to be so regarded at another, later stage.4 Given that a particular state of science S sees a certain answer as appropriate to a question Q, we can never preclude the prospect that some superior successor to S will eventually come

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about and that is will then transpire that some different answer—one that is actually inconsistent with the earlier one. The second of these modes of erotetic discovery is particularly significant. The phenomenon of the ever-continuing “birth” of new questions was first emphasized by Immanuel Kant, who saw the development of natural science in terms of a continually evolving cycle of questions and answers, where, “every answer given on principles of experience begets a fresh question, which likewise requires its answer and thereby clearly shows the insufficiency of all scientific modes of explanation to satisfy reason.”5 This claim suggests the following Principle of Question Propagation—Kant’s Principle, as we shall call it: “The answering of our factual (scientific) questions always paves the way to further as yet unanswered questions.” 4. COGNITIVE INCAPACITY What we have here is, in effect, a sort of Cognitive Heracliteanism. Heraclitus said that the world is ever changing that we cannot step into the same river twice. And epistemic counterpart: the world of knowledge is ever changing. In the course of cognitive progress we do notcannotconfront the same question agenda twice. Thus one way in which the question-resolving capacity of our knowledge can be limited is by way of the mode of the situation described in the following thesis: Weak-Limitation (The Permanence of Unsolved Questions). There are always, at every temporal stage,6 questions to which no answer is in hand. At every juncture of cognitive history there exist then-unanswerable questions for whose resolution then-current science is inadequate (yet which may well be answerable at some later state).

Now if Immanuel Kant was right, and every state of knowledge generates further new and yet unanswered questions, then we will clearly never reach a position where all questions are resolved. Thus given Kant’s Principle of Question Propagation, such a condition weak limitation inexorably characterizes our knowledge seeing that of the permanence of unsolved questions is at once assured. However, while Kant’s principle assures us that new questions will emerge from the answers we presently give to our questions it provides no detailed information about what these questions will benor about when they will arise. Accordingly, we realize at the level of nonspecific general-

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ity that various questions will arise tomorrow that we cannot as yet identify today. But since one cannot possibly identify the question that will arise tomorrow, it follows that one cannot possibly say whether all of the questions that will arise belong to the family of those for which one can provide satisfactorily answer. But now consider the proposition: (P) A new question that I cannot answer within one year will arise tomorrow. This thesissomewhat reminiscent of a halting problem in computation theoryis clearly a proposition whose truth I am unable to determine one way or the other. Accordingly the question “Is (P) true or not?” is to all intents and purposes an undecidable question: is as firm a fact as can be that I am unable to determine the truth-status of (P) one way or the other. We therefore now have before us a specific, exampleviz. “Is (P) true?”that instances a concrete and perfectly meaningful question I cannot answer. But, of course, all this only bears on the issue of what I myself can or cannot do and does not address that of what can or cannot be done within the unbounded community of inquirers at largenow or ever. To address this issue we must dig deeper. 5. INSULUBILIA THEN AND NOW A medieval insolubilium was represented by a question that cannot be answered satisfactorily one way or another because every possible answer is unavailable on grounds of a logical insufficiency of inherent coherence. Such an insolubilium poses a paradox. By contrast, a modern insolubilium poses a puzzle. It is represented by a question that cannot be answered satisfactorily one way or anther because every possible answer is unavailable on grounds of an evidential insufficiency of accessible information. An example of the former (medieval) sort of logical insolubilium is posed by the self-referential statement: “This sentence is false.” Is this statement true or not? Whatever answer we give, be it yes or no, we are in deep trouble either way.7 But what about factual insolubilia of the modern typeinformatively unanswerable questions? Consider some possible examples of this phenomenon. In 1880 the German physiologist, philosopher, and historian of science Emil du Bois-

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Raymond published a widely discussed lecture of The Seven Riddles of the Universe (Die sieben Welträtsel),8 in which he maintained that some of the most fundamental problems regarding the workings of the world were irresolvable. Reymond was a rigorous mechanist. On his view, nonmechanical modes of inquiry cannot produce adequate results, and the limit of our secure knowledge of the world is confined to the range where purely mechanical principles can be applied. As for all else, we not only do not have but cannot in principle obtain reliable knowledge. Under the banner of the slogan ignoramus et ignorabimus (“we do not know and shall never know”), Reymond maintained a skeptically agnostic position with respect to basic issues in physics (the nature of matter and of force, and the ultimate source of motion) and psychology (the origin of sensation and of consciousness). These issues are simply insolubilia which transcend man’s scientific capabilities. Certain fundamental biological problems he regarded as unsolved, but perhaps in principle soluble (though very difficult): the origin of life, the adaptiveness of organisms, and the development of language and reason. And as regards the seventh riddlethe problem of freedom of the willhe was undecided. The position of du Bois-Reymond was swiftly and sharply contested by the zoologist Ernest Haeckel in a book Die Welträtsel published in 1889,9 which soon attained a great popularity. Far from being intractable or even insolubleso Haeckel maintainedthe riddles of du Bois-Reymond had all virtually been solved. Dismissing the problem of free-will as a pseudoproblemsince free will “is a pure dogma [which] rests on mere illusion and in reality does not exist at all”Haeckel turned with relish to the remaining riddles. Problems of the origin of life, of sensation, and of consciousness Haeckel regarded as solvedor solvableby appeal to the theory of evolution. Questions of the nature of matter and force, he regarded as solved by modern physics except for one residue: the problem (perhaps less scientific than metaphysical) of the ultimate origin of matter and its laws. This “problem of substance” was the only remaining riddle recognized by Haeckel, and it was not really a problem of science: in discovering the “fundamental law of the conservation of matter and force” science had done pretty much what it could do with respect to this problemthe rest that remained was metaphysics with which the scientist had no proper concern. Haeckel summarized his position as follows: The number of world-riddles has been continually diminishing in the course of the nineteenth century through the aforesaid progress of a true knowledge

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of nature. Only one comprehensive riddle of the universe now remainsthe problem of substance. … [But now] we have the great, comprehensive “law of substance”, the fundamental law of the constancy of matter and force. The fact that substance is everywhere subject to eternal movement and transformation gives it the character also of the universal law of evolution. As this supreme law has been firmly established, and all others are subordinate to it, we arrive at a conviction of the universal unity of nature and the eternal validity of its laws. From the gloomy problem of substance we have evolved the clear law of substance.10

The basic structure of Haeckel’s teaching is clear: science is rapidly nearing a state where all the big problems have been solved. What remains unresolved is not so much a scientific as a metaphysical problem. In science itself, the big battle is virtually at an end, and the work that remains to be done is pretty much a matter of mopping-up operations. But is this rather optimistic position tenable? Can we really dismiss the prospect of factual insolubilia? Let us explore this issue more closely. 6. COGNITIVE LIMITS The situation as regards the knowledge of facts is akin to that of the counting of integers—specifically in the following regards:11 1. The manifold of integers is inexhaustible. We can never come to grips with all of them as particular individuals. Nevertheless— 2. Further progress is always possible: we can always go beyond whatever point we have so far managed to reach. In principle we can always go beyond what has been attained. Nevertheless— 3. Moving forward gets ever more cumbersome. In moving onwards we must be ever more prolix and make use of ever more elaborate symbol complexes. Greater demands in time, effort, and resources are inevitable here. Accordingly— 4. In actual practice there will be only so much that we can effectively manage to do. The possibilities that obtain in principle can never be fully realized in practice. However—

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5. Such limitations nowise hamper the prospects of establishing various correct generalizations about the manifold of integers in its abstract entirety. A substantially parallel situation characterizes the cognitive condition of all finite intelligences whose cognitive operations have to proceed by a symbolic process that functions by language. Inductive inquiry, like counting, never achieves completeness. There is always more to be done: In both cases alike we can always do better by doing more. But we can never do it all. But what is one to make of the numerical disparity between facts and truths, between what is knowable in theory and what we finite intelligences can actually manage to know? Just what does this portend? It means that our knowledge of fact is incomplete—and inevitably so!— because we finite intelligences lack the means for its comprehensive characterization. Reality in all its blooming buzzing complexity is too rich for faithful representation by the recursive and enumerable resources of our language. We do and must recognize the limitations of our cognition, acknowledging that we cannot justifiably equate reality with what can explicitly be known by us through the resources of language. And what transpires here for the circumstantial situation of our sort of mind also obtains for any other sort of finite mind as well. Any physically realizable sort of cognizing being can articulate—and thus can know—only a part or aspect of the real. Does it mean that those unknown facts are unknowable, hidden among n impenetrable darkness? The answer is neither Yes nor No. It all depends upon exactly how one is to construe this possibilistic matter of “knowability” within the range of finite knowers. Using Kxf to abbreviate “the individual x knows the fact f”, there will clearly be two rather different ways in which the existence of an inherently unknowable fact can be claimed, namely (∃f)

(∀x)~Kxf or equivalently ~(∀f)◊(∃x)Kxf

and (∃f)(∀x)~Kxf or equivalently ~◊(∀f)(∃x)Kxf12

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The first of these logically entails the second. And this second is in the circumstances inevitable, there being more facts than finite humans ever will or can know. Moreover, the first, stronger contention is plausible in view of the untenability of its negation because with regard to finite knowers (∀f)◊(∃x)Kxf is incompatible with the consideration that the totality of fact is itself a fact. But of course even though there are—or may well be—unknowable facts (in the indicated sense of this term), they can never be identified as such, seeing that to identify a fact as such, namely as a fact, is effectively to claim knowledge of it. It is, accordingly, in principle impossible for us ever to give an example of one. 7. COGNITIVE FINITUDE First the good news. Generalizations can of course refer to everything. Bishop Butler’s “Everything is what it is and not another thing” holds with unrestricted universality. And fortunately, a case-by-case determination is not generally needed to validate generalizations. We can establish claims about groups larger than we can ever hope to inventory. Recourse to arbitrary instances, the process of indirect proof by reductio ad absurdum, and induction (mathematical and scientific) all afford procedures for achieving generality beyond the range of an exhaustive case-by-case check. But will this always be so? Or are there also general truths whose determination would require the exhaustive surveying of all specific instances of a totality too large for our range of vision? At this point our cognitive finitude becomes a crucial consideration. The difference between a finite and an infinite knower is of fundamental importance and requires closer elucidation. For an “infinite knower” need not and should not be construed as an omniscient knowerone from whom nothing knowable is concealed (and so who knows, for example, who will be elected U.S. President in the year 2200). Rather, what is at issue is a knower who can manage to know in individualized detail an infinite number of independent facts. Such a knower might, for example, be able to answer such a question as: “Will the decimal expansion of π at some point have a million 1’s?” (And of course the circumstance that an infinite knower can know some infinite set of independent facts does not mean that he can know every such set.)

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Finite knowers can, of course, know universal truths. After all, we must acknowledge the prospect of inductive knowledge of general laws, we will have it that a knower can unproblematically know—for example—that “All dogs eat meat”.13 But what finite knowers cannot manage is to know this sort of thing in detail rather than at the level of generality. They cannot know specifically of each and every u in that potentially infinite range that Fu obtains—that is, while they can know collectively that all individuals have F, they cannot know distributively of every individual that it has F. Finite knowers can certainly know (via the U.S. Constitution) that every President is over the age of 35. But of course one has this knowledge without knowing of every President (including those one never heard of, let alone the yet unborn) that each individual one of them is over the age of 35something one cannot do without knowing who they individually are. 8. SURD FACTS AND UNKNOWABILIY One cannot provide concrete examples of specific facts that are unknowable for finite knowers in view of the aforementioned circumstance that a claim to factuality automatically carries a claim to knowledge in its wake. However while we cannot know what is such a fact one can certainly establish that there are such things. Given any collection of items there are two importantly different kinds of general properties: Those that all members of the collection DO have in common, and those that all member of the collection MUST have in common. The latter are the necessity-geared general features of the collection, the former its contingency geared features. Thus that all prime numbers greater than 2 are odd is a necessity-geared feature of these primes. Or consider the set of all post-Washington US presidents. That all of them are native born and that all of them are over 35 years of age is a necessitygeared feature of the collection in view of our Constitution’s stipulations. However, that all were the favored candidates of a political party will (if indeed true) be a contingently geared feature of the collection that is nowise necessitated by it constituting characterization. Now the crucial consideration for present purposes is that the necessary features of a collection must inhere in (and be derivable from) the generalities that govern the collection at issue as a matter of principle. But its contingent features will be surd in that they cannot be established on the basis of general principles. When and if they actually hold, this can only be ascertained through a case-by-case check of the entire membership of the

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collection. And this means that finite knowers can never decisively establish a surd/contingent general feature of an infinite collection. Whenever a generality holds for a collection on a merely contingent basis, this is something that we finite intelligences can never determine with categorical assurance. The determination of such kind-pervasively surd would thus require an item-by-item check, which is ex hypothesi impracticable for us. Whenever a situation of this kind actually obtains—which for aught we know to the contrary is often the case—then we can never manage to ascertain all the facts regarding an unsurveyable totality! Confirmed knowledge of the matter is beyond our reach here. The best and most that we can ever do here is to employ inductive or plausible or probabilistic reasoning in a way that leaves the issue beclouded with a shadow of doubt. Consider an illustration. The New York Times is an English-language newspaper. And as such, it is a necessary feature of the Times that throughout the history of its publication, mostly English words appear on its front page. This circumstance is inherent in the general principle (the “laws”) of the matter. With these general principles in hand we can settle the issue of front-page vocabulary. With such law-constrained facts—let us call them nomic—we certainly do not need to carry out a case-by-case check through every issue; and knowledge reacts on the general principles of the situation. And on a nomic property of something is a necessary feature for its kind: one that everything of its type not only does but must exhibit as a member of that particular “natural kind”. However, it must also be presumed to be a fact that as long as the paper exists, every issue of the New York Times will be such that the word THE occurs more than ten times on its front page. This is almost certainly a fact. But to determine that it is actually so, a case-by-case check becomes unavoidable. Such a fact—one whose determination cannot be settled by general principles (laws) but whose ascertainment requires a case-by-case check—is generally characterized as surd. And such a property of something is contingent: it cannot be accounted for on the basis of the general principles at issue. Consider now a set of objects of a certain sort S that is infinite or interminably open-ended (lions, say, or sunrises at Acapulco). And let P be a surd/contingent property of some S-item X which, while in principle applicable to S-members, is nevertheless unique to X—that is, is such that no other S-member actually has P. But now note that this uniqueness could only be determined on a case-by-case check across the whole range of S. That X is unique within S in point of P-possession is (by hypothesis) a truth

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which no finite intelligence could ascertain, seeing that an item-by-item canvas of an infinite/indefinite range is beyond its capacity. Such truths illustrate the prospect of truths beyond the cognitive grasp of finite knowers. Of course, “unknowably true” is a vagrant predicate—one that has no determinate address in that it admits of no identifiable instance. Instantiating this sort of thing can only be done at the level of schematic generality and not that of concrete instantiation. But we can convince ourselves—for good reason—that there indeed are such things even though it is in principle impracticable to provide examples of them. To begin with there is the prospect of what might be called the weak limitation inherent in the circumstance that there are certain issues on its agenda that science cannot resolve now. However, this condition of weak limitation is perfectly compatible with the circumstance that every question raisable at this stage will eventually be answered at such future juncture. And so, a contrasting way in which the question-resolving capacity of our knowledge may be limited can envisage the following, more drastic situation: Strong-Limitation (The Existence of Insolubilia). There will (as of some juncture) be then-posable questions which will never obtain answer, meaningful questions whose resolution lies beyond the reach of science altogether— questions that will remain ever unsolved on the cognitive agenda.

Such strong limitation envisions the existence of immortal questions— insolubilia that admit of no resolution within any cognitive corpus we are able to bring to realization. However, for there to be insolubilia it is certainly not necessary that anything be said about the current availability of the insoluble question. The prospect of its actual identification at this or indeed any other particular prespecified historical juncture is wholly untouched. Even a position which holds that there indeed are insolubilia certainly need not regard them as being identifiable at the present state-of-the-art of scientific development. One can accordingly also move beyond the two preceding theses to the yet stronger principle of Hyperlimitation (The Existence of IDENTIFIABLE insolubilia). Our presentday cognitive agenda includes certain here-and-now specifiable and scientifically meaningful questions whose resolution lies beyond the reach of science altogether.

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Awkwardly, however, a claim to identify insolubilia by pinpointing here and now issues that future inquiry will never resolve can readily go awry. Charles S. Peirce has put the key point trenchantly: For my part, I cannot admit the proposition of Kant—that there are certain impassable bounds to human knowledge. … The history of science affords illustrations enough of the folly of saying that this, that, or the other can never be found out. Auguste Comte said that it was clearly impossible for man ever to learn anything of the chemical constitution of the fixed stars, but before his book had reached its readers the discovery which he had announced as impossible had been made. Legendre said of a certain proposition in the theory of numbers that, while it appeared to be true, it was most likely beyond the powers of the human mind to prove it; yet the next writer on the subject gave six independent demonstrations of the theorem.14

To identify an insoluble problem, we would have to show that a certain inherently appropriate question is such that its resolution lies beyond every (possible or imaginable) state of future science. This task is clearly a rather tall order. Its realization is clearly difficult. But not in principle impossible. Observe, to begin with, that even if we agree with Peirce that science is en route to a completion we may well alwaysat any given timeremain at a remove from ultimacy. For as long as the body of knowledge continues to grow there will still remain scope for the possibility of insolubilia. Even an asymptotically completeable science can accommodate a fixed region of unresolvability, as long as the scope of that science itself is growing. That is, even if the fraction of unresolved questions converges asymptotically to zero, the number of unresolved questions may be ever-growing in the context of an expanding science. For consider 1000

10,000

10k

Fraction of unresolved questions 1/2

1/4

1/8

(1/2) k-1

No. of unresolved questions

250

1250

10k(1/2)k-1

No. of questions on the agenda

100

50

These figures indicate that there is room for insolubilia even within a science ever-improving so as to approach asymptotic completeness. And this points towards a prospect that is well worth exploring.

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9. IDENTIFYING INSOLUBILIA To elucidate the prospect of identifying scientific insolubilia, let us resume the theme of the progressive nature of knowledge, and continue the earlier considerations of second-order questions about future knowledge. Specifically, let us focus even more closely upon the historicity of knowledge development. It lies in the very nature of the situation that the detailed nature of our ignorance is—for us at least—hidden away in an impenetrable fog of obscurity. The limits of one’s information set unavoidable limits to one’s predictive capacities. In particular, we cannot foresee what we cannot conceive. Our questionslet alone answerscannot outreach the limited horizons of our concepts. Having never contemplated electronic computing machines as such, the ancient Romans could also venture no predictions about their impact on the social and economic life of the 21st century. Clever though he unquestionably was, Aristotle could not have pondered the issues of quantum electrodynamics. The scientific questions of the future areat least in partbound to be conceptually inaccessible to the inquirers of the present. The question of just how the cognitive agenda of some future date will be constituted is clearly irresolvable for us now. Not only can we not anticipate future discoveries now, we cannot even prediscern the questions that will arise as time moves on and cognitive progress with it.15 We are cognitively myopic with respect to future knowledge. It is in principle infeasible for us to say now what questions will figure in the erotetic agenda of the future, let alone what answers they will engender. But, of course, all of these are, by hypothesis, issues that will resolve themselves in the fullness of time. We have not as yet identified an insolubilia that can never be satisfactorily resolved. To address this question, consider, however, the thesis: (T) It will always be the case that there will come a time when all of the everresolved questions then on the agenda will be resolved within 100 years.

And now let Q* be the question: “Is T true or not?” It is clear that to answer this question Q* one way or the other we would need to have cognitive mastery over the question agenda of all future times. And, as emphasized above, just this is something that we cannot manage to achieve. By their very nature as such, the discoveries of the future are unavailable at

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present. Thus Q* illustrates the sort of case we are looking for: it affords an example of a specific and perfectly meaningful question that we are in effect always and ever unable to resolve convincinglyirrespective of what the date on the calendar happens to read. And we can move even further in this direction. For, after all, scientific inquiry is a venture in innovation. Present science can never speak decisively for future science, and present science cannot predict the specific discoveries of future inquiry. Accordingly, claims about what someone will achieve over alland thus just where it will be going in the long runare beyond the reach of attainable knowledge at this or any other particular stage of the scientific “state of the art”. And on this basis the thesis “There are non-decidable questions that science will never resolveeven were it to continue ad indefinitum”the Insolubilia Thesis as we may call itis something whose truth-status can never be settled in a decisive way. And since this is so we have it that this question itself is self-instantiating: it is a question regarding an aspect of reality (of which of course science itself is a part) that scientific inquiry will neverat any specific state of the artbe in a position to settle decisively. It should be noted that this issue cannot be settled by supposing a mad scientists who explodes the superbomb that blows the earth to smithereens and extinguishes all organic life as we know it. For the prospect cannot be precluded that intelligent life will evolve elsewhere. And even if we contemplate the prospect of a “big crunch” that is a reverse “big bang” and implodes our universe into an end, the project can never be precluded that at the other end of the big crunch, so to speak, another era of cosmic development awaits. Of course, someone may possibly be minded to complain as follows: You are not giving me what I want. For let us distinguish between a baselevel question in which no (essential) inference to questions and question agendas is made and a meta-level question in which there is an uneliminable reference to questions and question agendas. What I want is an examplea definitively specified instanceof an insolubilium at the base-level of substantive questions about the real world.

To such a complainer one can respond as follows: In its own way, your complaint is well taken; and indeed it seems to be pretty much in the spirit of Peirce’s telling observation just quoted above. But it is

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worthwhile to look in a somewhat different light at this very question that you have just raised, viz. “Are there any base-level factual insolubilia.” The reality of it is that it is somewhat beyond difficult and impossible to imagine that this is an issue that could be settled convincingly one way or the other in any state of actually available information. And so this question itself is a pretty good candidate for an insolubiliumthough, to be sure, not at the base level.

Clearly that complaint cannot accomplish its intended mission. 10. RELATING KNOWLEDGE TO IGNORANCE While there indeed are scientific insolubiliaand we can actually identify some of themthe fact remains that detailed knowledge about the extent of our ignorance is unavailable to us. For what is at stake with this issue of extent is the ratio of the manifold of what one does know to the manifold of that what one does not. And it is impossible in the nature of things for me to get a clear fix on the latter. For the actual situation is not that of a crossword puzzleor of geographic explorationwhere the size of the terra incognita can be somehow measured in advance of securing the details that are going to be filled in. We can form no sensible estimate of the imponderable domain of what can be known but is not. To be sure, we can manage to compare what one person or group knows with what some other person or group knows. But mapping the realm of what is knowable as such is something that inevitably reaches beyond our powers. And for this reason any questions about the cognitive completeness of our present knowledge is and will remain inexorably unresolvable. There are, of course, finite fields of knowledge. There is only so much you can know about the content of Boston’s 1995 telephone directory, namely the totality of what is in its pages. But that is only the case because here “what can be known” and “what is known” actually coincide. But this sort of thing is the case only in very special circumstances and never with respect to areas of natural science such as medicine or physics that deal with the products of nature at a level of generic generality. Yet although ignorance lies at the core of the present discussion, it is no exercise in radical skepticism. It does not propose to take the pessimistic line of a cognitive negativism to the effect that knowledge about the world is unavailable to us. Instead, what is being contemplated here is (1) that despite whatever we may come to know there are some matters on which we are destined to remain ignorant, and (2) that among the things that we can 174

ON IGNORANCE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE

get to know about are various facts about the nature and extent of our own ignorance. That our knowledge is sufficient for our immediate purposesspecifically by enabling us to answer the questions we then and there have before usis something that is in principle readily determinable. But that it is theoretically adequate to answer not just our present questions but those that will grow out of them the future is something we can never manage to establish. For it is clear that the sensible management of ignorance is something that requires us to operate in the realm of practical considerations exactly because the knowledge required for theoretical adequacy on this subject isby hypothesisnot at our disposal. We have no cogently rational alternative to proceed, here as elsewhere, subject to the basic pragmatic principle of having to accept the best that we can do as good enough. And so we return to the point made at the very outset: the ironic, though in some ways fortunate fact is that one of the things about which we are most decidedly ignorant is the detailed nature of our ignorance itself. We simply cannot make a reliable assessment of the extent of our ignorance. Overall, however, the situation is not as bleak as it may seem. For even though the thought and knowledge of finite beings is destined to be ever finite, it nevertheless has no fixed and determinate limits. Return to our analogy. As is counting integers, there is a limit beyond which we never will get. But there is no limit beyond which we never can get. For the circumstance that there is always room for linguistic variation—for new symbols, new combinations, new ideas, new truths and new knowledge— creates a potential for pushing our thought ever further. While the thought of finite beings is destined ever to be finite, it nevertheless has no fixed and determinable limits. The line of thought operative in these deliberations was already mooted by Kant: [I]n natural philosophy, human reason admits of limits (“excluding limits”, Schranken) but not of boundaries (“terminating limits”, Grenzen), namely, it admits that something indeed lies without it, at which it can never arrive, but not that it will at any point find completion in its internal progress. … [T]he possibility of new discoveries is infinite: and the same is the case with the discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws by continued experience and its rational combination …16

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And here Kant was right—even on the Leibnizian principles considered at the outset of this discussion. The cognitive range of finite beings is indeed limited. But it is also boundless because it is not limited in a way that blocks the prospect of cognitive access to ever new and continually different facts thereby affording an ever ampler and ever more adequate account of reality.17 Some writers analogize the cognitive exploration of the realm of fact to the geographic exploration of the earth. But this analogy is profoundly misleading. For the earth has a finite and measurable surface, and so even when some part of it is unexplored terra incognita its magnitude and limits can be assessed in advance. Nothing of the kind obtains in the cognitive domain. The ratio and relationship of known truth to knowable fact is subject to no fixed and determinable proportion. Geographic exploration can expect eventual completeness, cognitive exploration cannot. There are no boundaries—no determinate limits—to the manifold of discoverable fact. 11. POSTSCRIPT: A COGNITIVELY INDETERMINATE UNIVERSE One further consequence of these deliberations warrants being noted by way of postscript, as it were. It is that our cognitive imperfection means that the universe itself is unpredictable. For a world in which it transpires that the future knowledge and thereby the future thoughts of intelligent beings are predictively intractable as a matter of fundamental principle will thereby be one in which the correlative physical phenomena are unpredictable as well. As long as intelligent agents continue to exist within it a world isand is bound to be unpredictable as well. For since mind and its operations are themselves an integral component of nature, a mental unpredictability cannot but constitute a form of natural or physical unpredictability as well. The extinction of intelligent agents would be required for its elimination. Put in a nutshell, the position of affairs is this. Since all of the doingsactual and potentialof intelligent agents are themselves part or aspect of the constitution of the universe, then insofar as our cognitive doings are inherently impredictable, so also will this be the case with the correlative aspects of physical nature itself. To be sure, if our cognitive efforts stood outside nature, things might be different in this regard, since physical predictability might then be combined with it absence on the “merely epistemic” mental side. But this, of course, is a prospect that is implausible in the extreme.18

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ON IGNORANCE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 10 1

The thesis “I know that p is a known fact that I don’t know” comes to: Ki[(∃x)Kxp & ~ Kip]) (here i = oneself) This thesis entails my knowing both (∃x)Kxp and ~Kip. But the former circumstance entails Kip, and this engenders a contradiction.

2

In maintaining (i.e., claiming to know) p & ~Kip we claim: Ki(p & ~Kip) But since Kx(p & q) → (Kxp & Kxq) obtains, we obtain both Kip and Ki(~Kip). But the latter of these entails ~Kip. And so a manifest contradiction results.

3

Accordingly there is no problem about “to is a (particular) truth you don’t know”, although I could not then go on to claim modestly that “You know everything that I do.” For the contentions ~Kyto and (∀t)(Kit → Kyt) combine to yield ~Kito which conflicts with the claim Kito that I stake in characterizing to as a truth.

4

The progress of science offers innumerable illustrations of this phenomenon, as does the process of individual maturation: “After three or thereabouts, the child begins asking himself and those around him questions, of which the most frequently noticed are the “why” questions. By studying what the child asks “why” about one can begin to see what kind of answers or solutions the child expects to receive. … A first general observations is that the child’s whys bear witness to an intermediate precausality between the efficient cause and the final cause. Specifically, these questions seek reasons for phenomena which we see as fortuitous but which in the child arouse a need for a finalist explanations. “Why are there two Mount Salèves, a big one and a little one?” asked a six year-old boy. To which many of his contemporaries, when asked the same question, replied, “One for big trips and another for small trips” (Jean Piaget and B. Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child, trans. by H. Weaver [New York: Basic Books, 1969], pp. 109-110).

5

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic (1783), sect. 57; Akad., p. 352.

6

Or perhaps alternatively: always after a certain time—at every stage subsequent to a certain juncture.

7

Socrates dicens, se ispum dicere falsum, nihil dicit. (Prantl, Geschichte der Logik in Abendlande [Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1955], Vol. IV, p. 139 n569.) It became a com-

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NOTES FOR CHAPTER 10

monly endorsed doctrine in late medieval times that paradoxical statements are not preset propositions and for this reason cannot be classed as true or false. (See E. J. Ashworth, Language and Logic in the post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht: Reidel, Yale University Press, 1974), p. 115 for later endorsements of this approach.) Thus later writers dismissed insolubles as not being propositions at all, but “imperfect assertions” (orationes imperfectae). (See E. J. Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), p. 116.) 8

This work was published together with a famous prior (1872) lecture On the Limits of Scientific Knowledge as Ueber Die Grenzen des Naturerkennens: Die Sieben WelträtselZwei Vorträge (11th ed., Leipzig, 1916). The earlier lecture has appeared in English tr. “The Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature,” Popular Scientific Monthly, vol. 5 (1874), pp. 17-32. For Reymond cf. Ernest Cassirer, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical and Systematic Studies of the Problems of Causality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), Part 1.

9

Bonn, 1889. Tr. by J. McCabe as The Riddle of the Universeat the Close of the Nineteenth Century (New York and London, 1901). On Haeckel see the article by Rollo Handy in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. by Paul Edwards), vol. III (New York, 1967).

10

Haeckel, op. cit., pp. 365-66.

11

We here take “counting” to be a matter of indicating integers by name—e.g., as “thirteen” or “13”—rather than descriptively, as per “the first prime after eleven”.

12

The difference between these two theses is illustrated by the game of Musical Chairs. Here it is necessary that someone remains unseated; but there is no (specific) individual who necessarily remains unseated.

13

To be sure, the prospect of inductively secured knowledge of laws is a philosophically controversial issue. But this is not the place to pursue it. For the author’s view of the matter see his Induction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.)

14

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. by C. Hartshorne et. al., Vol. VI (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), sect. 6.556.

15

Of course these questions already existwhat lies in the future is not their existence but their presence on the agenda of active concern.

16

Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, sect. 57. Compare the following passage from Charles Sanders Peirce: “For my part, I cannot admit the proposition of

178

ON IGNORANCE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 10

Kant—that there are certain impassable bound to human knowledge. … The history of science affords illustrations enough of the folly of saying that this, that, or the other can never be found out. Auguste Comte said that it was clearly impossible for man ever to learn anything of the chemical constitution of the fixed stars, but before his book had reached its readers the discovery which he had announced as impossible had been made. Legendre said of a certain proposition in the theory of numbers that, while it appeared to be true, it was most likely beyond the powers of the human mind to prove it; yet the next writer on the subject gave six independent demonstrations of the theorem.” (Collected Papers, [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-58, 2nd ed.], vol. VI, sect. 6.556.) 17

This discussion has profited from the constructive comments of several Pittsburgh colleagues, including Jason Dickinson, Mickey Perloff, and Laura Ruetsche.

18

Some of this chapter’s themes are also treated in the author’s Limits of Science, 2nd edition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). And see also Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

179

NAME INDEX Abailard, Peter, 94, 105n7 Adams, E. W., 76n7 Aesop, 82 Alexander the Great, 56 Alexander, Samuel, 2 Appiah, Anthony, 76n5 Aristotle, 43, 58, 121, 172 Ashworth, E. J., 178n7 Austin, J. L., 117 Avogadro, Armadeo, 121 Bergson, Henri, 2 Berkeley, George, 64 Bohr, Neils, 145n2 du Bois-Raymond, Emil, 163-64 Boltzmann, 121 Braine, M. D., 76n10 Buchler, Justus, 52n23 Buckle, Thomas, 63 Butler, Joseph, 143, 167 Caesar, Julius, 33, 36 Cassirer, Ernest, 178n8 Cervantes Miguel de, 90-91, 100 Cicero, 36 Comte, Auguste, 171, 179n16 Davidson, Donald, 27-28, 35, 40, 44, 50-52 Descartes, René, 94-95 Dewey, John, 51n10, 51n13 Dickinson, Jason, 179n17 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 2 Doré, Gustav, 82 Doyle, Conan, 85, 90, 96-97 Duhem, Pierre, 75n1 Durkheim, Émile, 4

Nicholas Rescher • Collected Papers XIV

Einstein, Albert, 43 Evans-Prichard, Edward, 5 Feyerabend, Paul, 35 Fine, Arthur, 65, 76n4 Goodman, Lenn E., 24n7 Goodman, Nelson, 52n22 Haeckel, Ernest, 164-65, 178n9-10 Handy, Rollo, 178n9 Hayes, J. R., 76n10 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 24n9 Heraclitus, 162 Hilbert, David, 65, 76n4 Hollis, Martin, 23n3, 50n9 Inhelder, Bärbel, 177n4 James, William, 2, 17, 24n10, 25, 50n3, 137 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 82 Kant, Immanuel, 32, 41, 43, 45, 51n20, 52n20, 93, 97, 162, 171, 175-76, 177n5, 178n16 Kekes, John, 24n6 Kenny, Anthony, 105n9 Kitcher, Philip, 62n1 Kuhn, Thomas, 25, 49n1 Lamb, Charles, 117 Legendre, A. M., 171, 179n16 Leibniz, G. W., 51n17 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 5, 24n4 Lewis, C. I., 48, 51n15, 52n20, 52n29 Lewis, David, 76n5, 76n11 Lipton, S. G., 76n10 Lukes, Steven, 23n3 Malinowski, B., 50n10

182

NAME INDEX

Mandonnet, Pierre, 105n8 McTaggart, J. M. E., 159 Mendeleev, B. K., 121 Mill, J. S., 112 Newton, Isaac, 43, 121 Nicholas of Cusa, 145n3 Nietzche, Friedrich, 2 O’Brian, D. P., 76n10 Ogden, C. K., 50n10 Olsan, J. M., 76n10 Orwell, George, 104 Owen, G. E., 129n1 Parsons, Terence, 98, 105n13 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 104n4, 171, 173, 178n14, 178n16 Perloff, Mickey, 179n17 Peter, the Apostle, 56 Petley, B. W., 129n2 Piaget, Jean, 177n4 Planck, Max, 121 Plato, 94, 104n6 Popper, Karl, 45 Pritchard, H. A. 5 Ptolemy, 121 Puntel, Lorenz B., 79, 104n1-2 Reid, Thomas, 64 Rescher, Nicholas, 76n5, 76n9 Revlis, R., 75, 76n10 Richards, I A., 50n10 Robinson, Andrew, 62n2 Roese, N. O., 76n10 Rorty, Richard, 41, 50n4, 52n25 Ruetsche, Laura, 179n17 Ryle, Gilbert, 55 Saxe, John Godfry, 141

183

Nicholas Rescher • Collected Papers XIV

Schiller, F. S. C., 2 Sergant, John Singer, 56 Sextus Epiricus, 23n1 Siger of Brabant, 105n8 Simmel, Georg, 25, 50n2 Sorensen, Roy A., 76n11 Spencer, Herbert, 63 Stroud, Barry, 5-0n4 Tweedale, Martin M., 105n7 Unger, Peter, 76n11 Vaihinger, Hans, 2, 97, 105n12 Varze, Achille, 62n1 Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 82 Weinberg, Stephen, 145n2 Williamson, Timothy, 179n18 Winch, Peter, 5, 23n3 Zimmerman, Albert, 105n8

184

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